Posts by John Brown (no body)

Re: Why can't they solve this problem?

"Or hey, build the prison as a Faraday cage, with the microcells inside if guards need to use their cell phones within the prison."

I've done some work inside high security prisons in the UK (the sort who contain inmates you might have heard of in the news). No mobile phones allowed at all. Prison staff also hand over everything not required for the job and go through the same metal detectors/x-ray units on the way in and out that everyone else goes through. Are US prisons not operated like this too?

Re: What a Complete Prat!

"Most overrated man in the universe, except possibly for Liz Truss."

Liz Truss is a man? That may explain a few things. Does her husband know?

Re: 365

There will be others who are saying "Excellent"....in Monty Burns voice?

Theranos Mk2?

Re: I think we're reaching a point...

"Surely that is a much bigger target?"

Unless you can find a way to access the home addresses of employees of the target company, then WFH might make it harder to target a specific company. But with lots of people working from home, finding a random juicy target becomes a lot easier. Most people seem to use WiFi at home, and even if they do use a wired connection at times, they almost certainly have WiFi access switched on on their ISP provided router with full access to the internal home network. A bit of security by obscurity for anyone with a "not on the ball" IT department.

Re: Let us not forget our friends in the gig economy

Those people are already tracked. The app on the phone that dispatches the tasks[*] will already be tracking their every move.

[*] not jobs. That might imply they are employees. They are piece-workers. "Gig economy" is just a new "cool" name for something most people thought was abolished years ago because of the shit pay level equivalent it gives.

Re: @Fleming: Control The Fire, Reduce Technology Flow

"This is clearly insane and must be stopped. We must not deliver any more petrol for this prospective fire, free trade ideologies be damned.

Delivery of Material, Education, Technology Services to China must be strictly controlled and strictly limited, or we will see a hot war between us and China. Let's get our priorities right."

It's way too late for that now. China bootstrapped years ago. They play the long game. That's why they appeared to switch to a form of capitalism for a while, and in some ways, still are. But the "heavy hand of control from the top" and central planning is still and always has been, there. "Capitalist" business leaders who "go native" and step over the line very quickly get stomped on. As for education, they have world class universities. Some of the very best will still go abroad to the likes of MIT, Cambridge, Oxford, Stanford etc. Peking University is just outside the top 10 universities in the world. Most of their best students study in China. It's mainly those who didn't get into the top Chinese universities who then travel to Europe, UK, USA etc.

They may be behind in some fields, but are ahead or on par in other fields. Anything they are behind in, they can throw money and resources at like no other country can. Trying to stop them is like Canute ordering the tide to stop coming in, ie a demonstration that it's not possible. Sanctions, at best, can only slow them down a bit.

Re: Showing my age too

By the time CD players came to the masses, the difference was huge for most buyers. Even a bottom end CD player was orders of magnitude better than the a bottom end record player like a BSR or Dansette or some no-name "music centre" they were replacing.

Re: Elon says

I think he's doing that to himself. Have you seen the "handles" on Tesla cars? They don't really have handles as such on some of the models and those that do have been re-invented to be something other than a door handle. So yeah, I don't think he's got a handle on it :-)

"Heh. I endured it on a A2000 with 1MB of Ram and a stock 68000 CPU. Impulse Imagine on a coverdisk of Amiga Format."

Same here, but the GUI based stuff never really attracted me. Like the heinous, vulgar and misguided ST user (spit!) below, I used PoV from the command line originally on an A1200, eventually upgrading it with an 030 accelerator +FPU which helped a lot. With some scripting, I was able to render animations and even got asked to make the title anims for a couple of PD CD collections. By then, I was after every bit of speed I could get, so used PARNET to network to an A500+ with the A1200 and used a lock file to tell each Amiga which frame was being rendered so when one finished a frame it would start on the one after the other Amiga was rendering. It still took at least a week to render the 50 or so frames at the final required quality though. IIRC, the A500 did about 1 frame for every 8 or so the A1200 did, but like I said, any speed increase was worth it back then :-)

Even nowadays, I still do computational intensive stuff at the command line on FreeBSD so there's no "wasted" CPU cycles on a GUI. Do my video editing in a GUI where necessary, outputting an edit list, then do the final spilt/join/re-encode at the command line. PoVRay is still around. That's next weekend already spoken for now and since my Amiga HDD has been imaged for FS-UAE, I should still have files on it somewhere. I wonder how long at anim will take to render on a modern fast PC :-)

"Mind you, Mrs AC sometimes comments that I seem to lavish more attention on the cat and dog than I do on her :-("

The cat is understandable, they can be so much more demanding than a wife. The dog, not so much.

Re: The union demands seem quite reasonable

I also think that "and pay rises at either five percent annually or 2.5 percent more than the rate of inflation, whichever is higher." is a tad unreasonable since that sounds like an "in perpetuity" demand to me. Or are they currently so poorly paid they desperately need annual above inflation pay rises just to get a decent wage?

Some of the demands strike me as being disposable, ie it's the start of negotiations and you always ask for more than you expect so you can negotiate down to what you really want and both sides can say they "won".

Re: So much for privacy

Really? That's like saying everyone arrested should be subject to a full body cavity search just in case someone may be hiding drugs up their jacksie. "We" don't need to know anything about them, whether they be customers or creditors, until after the procedure and then only if any of them are subject to more legal scrutiny, not all of them. It's certainly not "vital" that all those innocent peoples details should be made public just because there might be some wrong'uns amongst them that interested amateur detectives want to investigate.

They made the Githib repo private immediately, then it took a couple of days to go through said repo to find out what was actually in it. They found the key..

Re: re: a main stream banking/financial organisation

"That really depends on what they'd actually try to enforce. I'm pretty sure the meaning they intended - no conmen, scammers, or purveyors of woo - is just fine. If it were used for other purposes it wouldn't fly."

Even conmen, scammers and purveyors of woo have rights. Such as the right to a fair trial. If PayPal have evidence of illegal activities, the most they can do is report it to the authorities and allow the judicial system to take it's course, PayPal are not a court of justice and can't impose "fines". They can close any accounts the suspects may have, but they cannot withhold access to their funds without a court order or under instructions from the Police who may already be or want to investigate without letting the suspects know.

Re: It’s annoying…

Considering "the west" have been banging on about already being "at [cyber] war" for quite some time, we don't seem to here very often about "unattributed" attacks on Russian, Chinese, Iranian or North Korean sites. Are "the west" simply "playing by the rules" and carefully exfiltrating data rather than doing like for like DDoSs against their public facing systems? Or is just that it's not news here when their sites get knocked offline?

Re: Here we go again

It does show the power of marketing though. Apples crash detection was all over the news media as the new iPhone was launched, even before the latest news of the false positives on roller coasters etc. And yet I have no memories of crash detection being a big selling point in the media when it was introduced on the Pixel (or any other phone that may have it).

Apple release new device - hugely newsworthy (do the media all use Apple gear?)

Samsung release new device - moderately newsworthy (The media have heard of Samsung, but don't use their kit much)

Google release new device - <tumbleweeds>, media response, Google make phones? Who new?

Re: Does anyone really need to know how I walk?

"Some people with joint issues are affected by an unusual gait. Analyzing the pressure patterns of the feet would make it easier."

True, and there may even be a small amount of medical grant money put towards this. But the REAL money will come from the likes of Nike looking to develop the perfect running shoe and a new range of outrageously expensive trainers.

Re: Jurisdiction?

"Has the company paid up yet? I'm guessing that the contract of employment stated the legal jurisdiction was a state within the USA, and that to get them to pay he'd have to sue them in their home state, not his home state."

It seems that office was their only point of presence in the EU (UK no longer counts of course), so if they choose to ignore the ruling, there's not a lot the EU can do about. I suppose they could put an arrest warrant out on the entire C-level in case they ever visit or transit through the EU. They may have to go the long way across the Pacific when visiting their Indian offices and be careful to not transit an EU hub such as Schipol or Frankfurt when visiting their UK office.

Re: Privacy Shield 2.0?

Just so long as they don't produce a "personal" version just for...Me :-)

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Spoiler

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Privacy Shield Me

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Re: Ugh small cables are small...

"Made the mistake of using my fingers to hold it tightly in place - but the scorched skin eventually healed ok."

Anyone who has never made that mistake has never held a soldering iron :-)