* Posts by Loyal Commenter

5761 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jul 2010

That's Numberwang! Google Cloud staffer breaks record for most accurate Pi calculation

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more accurate, because 22/7 (3.142857...) is a little closer to pi (3.141592...) than 3.14 is.

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22/7 is the (marginally more accurate) international pi day

What do sexy selfies, search warrants, tax files have in common? They've all been found on resold USB sticks

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Re: Photorec

I usually use recuva to retrieve data from something with a corrupted filesystem.

A 'fast-format' only removes the file tables, so the data is still there. A far as I am aware, this works just as well on SSDs / flash memory as it does on spinning rust.

A full format (writing the same value to every byte on the device) is relatively slow, and should in theory remove all traces of data on SSDs / flash drives. However, it doesn't work quite as well with hard disks. Because physically overwriting the data on a physical disk doesn't write in exactly the same physical position, you can get 'margins' along the side of the tracks where the old values are retained, or echoes, where for instance if the new value for a bit is '1', it may actually be '1.01' if the previous value was also a '1' - the disk controller will read this as a 1, but other techniques may read it as '1, previously 1', etc. Whilst it takes expensive forensic equipment to recover data from these, I believe such a thing is practically possible.

Proper erasure therefore involves overwriting the previous data multiple times, with random bytes, and if you want to be 100% sure, then permanently overwriting it with drill and bucket of bleach.

Carphone Warehouse fined £29m for mis-selling mobile insurance to punters who didn't need it

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Re: Apparently

You can get one of those metal ball things that bounces around inside and dislodges the limescale. Of course, after a while, what you end up with is a solid ball of reinforced calcite, but replacing that is cleaper than replacing the kettle.

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Car hire guys always try to upsell you on the insurance - the hire policy will have a huge excess on damage, often requiring a pre-authorisation on a credit card if you don't take their (expensive) accident insurance, often enarly as expensive as the hire itself. They really don't like it if you show them the policy documents for the car-hire excess insurance you've taken out for a fiver.

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Re: Apparently

Like for example a £15 Coverplan on a £20 toaster. If a £20 toaster breaks, you don't think about whether or not you have an insurance policy you can claim on, you throw it in the bin and get a new one.

Not to mention that the plan almost certainly is a "3 year plan" - i.e. the 2 years statutory period you'd get anyway plus one year's actual insurance.

I don't know about you, but the toaster I have was bought in 1995 and still works fine, nearly a quarter of a century later - I dread to thnk how many multiples of its original price (probably around £10) it would have cost me to insure it for that period of time.

Pretty much all insuracne is a bet against bad luck, and with all betting, in the long run the house always wins. It only make sense to insure something if you can't afford to replace it, and would be genuinely stuck without it, or if having third-party insurance is a statutory requirement, as with a car.

2 weeks till Brexit and Defra, at the very least, looks set to be caught with its IT pants down

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Re: Ha

So, your get-out for "on the scale fo those told by the leave campaign" is:

"Since the remain campaign was the government all of their abuses are much more grave as they were also in charge of running the referendum"

Since none of the things you list was an actual lie told by the official campaign, you can't use that get-out clause. None of the supposed things you have come up with are anywhere near the scale of teh lies systematically pushed by the leave campaign over weeks and months. If throwaway comments that I've never even heard before, by foreign politicians not involved in the referendum campaign are the best examples of lies "told by the remain campaign" that you can come up with, then you have proved my original point.

The EU army thing IS total bollocks, so Clegg saying as much wasn't actually a lie. Lying about whether someone was lying doesn't really help your argument.

As for 'back of the queue' with US trade negotiations; they hold all the cards in such negotiations. Unless you are all for chlorinated chicken, hormone and antibiotic fed beef, and high fructose corn syrup in all your food, the things we will have to accept to even do a trade deal with the US are unacceptable. The fact that they may now wish to 'negotiate' doesn't mean we can actually get a deal that doesn't result in us being very much the minor partner in any such deal. If you want to buddy up with Trump, be my guest, but it certainly isn't in the interests of the country.

I'd also like to point out that Cameron had no authority to promsie that the government would enact the result of the referendum. Legally, the enabling bill stated that it was advisory and did not bind the government to action. Claiming otherwsie was a lie, even when printed on the infamous leaflet (which, BTW was not pro-remain). Cameron told lots of lies whilst in office, he was a terrible PM, but you can't associate this particular lie with the campaign to remain in the EU - he wasn't acting as a spokesperson for that campaign when he told that lie (which was a sop to leavers in any event), he was acting as PM.

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Re: Ha

Funny, I remember the negotiations being handed over to a quit campaigner on the first day. In case you've forgotten, the same individual was the one who was going on about "the easiest deal in history". He turned up to negotiate without so much as a pen, let alone even the semblance of a plan, a spent a fair old amount of time achieving nothing whatsoever before being replaced with another quitter, who also achieved nothing. I lost track after that, are we on the fourth one, or fifth?

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Re: " I did look. You have convinced me you..never provided evidence to support your opinions."

Don't forget PPE degrees - politics and economics (which is essentially politics with a bit of maths thrown in); degrees in formalised opinions without any solid facts behind them. But they come from Oxford, so must be just as good as a science degree from Oxford.

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Re: @codejunky

Yes you do have a long post history. I read the first page of 60. Lots of opinions. No evidence to support them.

You won't find anything else, whenever asked to provide actual facts to back up his opinions, his response is always, "I have done so before", and yet he is always unable to give a single example of having done so. The closes he gets to 'evidence' is linking to articles about what Patrick Minford says on obscure right-wing websites you've never heard of (or the Telegraph, which is pretty much the same but not obscure). Of course, the argument that someone else shares your opinion is no argument at all, esepcially without any actual facts to back it up. He'll attempt to discredit anyone who points out the myriad flaws in the things he says, but never ever come up with any facts to support his position.

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Re: Ha

The problem is both official campaigns were badly behaved and both sides believe the other was fooled.

I keep hearing leavers parrotting this, "both sides told lies" rubbish, and I'm calling you out on it.

Please give me five examples of lies told by the remain campaign, on the scale of those told by the leave campaign (e.g. the "£350M a week" lie on the side of the bus, or the "exact same benefits" lie, or the "easiest deal in history" lie.)

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Re: Ha

Not to mention the "OH MY GOD I JUST READ THE LISBON TREATY" bollocks that has been popping up everywhere on Facebook, posted by thowaway accounts, that claims a treaty that came into force in 2009 is coming into force in 2020 and will take away our veto, force us to join an EU army, force the Euro on us, etc. etc., all of which is absolutely demonstrably untrue.

Someone is still pushing the lies very hard indeed, and it's not remainers. Most likely, it's a state actor. I'll let you decide which one, товарищ.

Cui bono, et al...

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Re: Ha

Well, yes. Such is a referendum.

To be brutally honest, it's the fault of those who deliberately told the emotive lies, and those who funnelled millions of untraceable pounds through tax havens to fund the propagation of those lies, for the pretty obvious purposes of their own financial advancement.

You can't blame people for being fooled by attractive lies. The most intelligent amongst us can be fooled occasionally.

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Re: @codejunky

There are a number of benefits I have discussed many times.

There is a lot of waffle you've spouted a number of times, which has either been thoroughly debunked, or shown to be illusory. I've yet to see a solid example of a benefit of brexit, backed up with actual evidence, from you, or from anyone else for that matter.

Since you're so confident that you have demonstrated this 'a number of times', please be so kind as to provide some links to those posts.

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Re: Ha

Which part are you not clear about? That the remain gov wants to remain?

If the government wanted to remain:

1) They would not have invoked A50.

2) It would not have been necessary to bring a case to court to ensure that parliament had a say before they invoke A50.

3) They would have unilaterally revoked A50 as soon as it became clear that it was possible to do so.

If you believe that May was ever a remainer, consider the fat that a long time before the whole brexit shitstorm, she was banging on about getting out of the ECHR (because she doesn't like those pesky hu8mans having rights). The only way this would be possible would be to leave the EU, as being a signatory to the ECHR is a precondition to being an EU member.

You might think the current government are remainers, I think it's safe to say that the evidence does not point that way, and pretty much everyone else does not agree with you.

The only people responsible for the mess we are in at the moment are those reposnbile for the enactment of Article 50. Those people, and those that led them to that point, are the ones to blame. Not remainers, not the EU, not the vast majority of scientists, economists, business leaders, EU citizens, etc. etc.

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Re: No Cheese for you...

Nope.

This explains why

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Re: Ha

Yes dearie, I did read your comment. You basically implied that the government are trying to thwart brexit. The same government that is responsible for brexit in the first place. Nice doublethink there Orwell.

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Oddly enough, it was from Arya Stark's brother. Well, the brother of the actress who plays her (Maisie Williams) anyway.

If that raises more questions than it answers, so be it.

I believe the reason it was never criminalised was because of things that happen at sea...

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so is eating human flesh at the moment

You might think so, but it's only the obtaining of that flesh that is (usually) illegal. There is actually no law against cannibalism in the UK.

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Facepalm

Re: Ha

Oh look, heres @Codejunky to tell us all how swimmingly well Brexit is going, and how his One True Brexit™ is the only One True Brexit™ and everyone who voted out did so for the same reasons as him, and how it is Everyone Else's Fault™ that his flying unicorn won't start.

Yawn.

Uber driver drove sleeping woman miles away from home to 'up the fare'. Now he's facing years in the clink for kidnapping, fraud

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Re: And he would have gotten away with it too

I can't say I disagree with you, but the flip side to this is that nominally, all Uber trips are logged electronically, whereas getting in a taxi in the town centre when you're pissed as a fart has no audit trail whatsoever. It occurs to me that the best of all worlds would involve mandatory centralised real-time tracking (via GPS) of all taxis, and better regulation of private hire vehicles (which is what Uber basically is) so that the information they hold on journeys is readily available to law enforcement and licensing agencies.

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Re: And he would have gotten away with it too

You'd be surprised at how little some of those checks are here in the UK, whichy vary according to location. There's also the distinction between taxis and private hire vehicles, with often lesser checks for the latter, and done by local authorities which don't communicate with each other. Ther are plenty of recoded cases of someone being refused a private hire license in one town, due to failed checks, so getting one in the next town over. you're also never going to filter out those with no prior convictions. Take pretty much any serial killer as an example of why not yet being convicted of anything doesn't mean you're safe to drive a taxi...

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Re: Wire fraud

Then please tell me why advertisers are NOT locked up for 'wire fraud'????

Money.

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If you happen to have watched last night's episode of "24 hours in police custody," you'll have seen a perfect example of why someone being a vetted and licensed taxi, or private hire, driver doesn't protect people to any greater degree. At the end of the program, the creep in question (a taxi driver who had raped a 15 year-old child, and a young woman) got a 22 year custodial sentence.

I think that maybe Uber's vetting process is no better or worse than that of licensed drivers. After all, the best it will ever manage is filtering drivers who have not (yet) been convicted of anything. The real root of the problem is twofold; passengers implicitly trust the stranger driving them around because of deference to authority, and we live in a culture where peope turn a blind eye to rape, sexual assualt, and other forms of violence. You can't do much about the former, but you can improve the situation of the latter with education.

Boffins discover new dust clouds in the Solar System, Mercury has a surprisingly filthy ring

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Re: Make Pluto great again

Look again at the picture in the article. You can clearly see that the immediate neighbourhood around the planets (to several diameters) is cleared. I'm not sure what the exact definition of 'neghbourhood' is in these terms, but I'm pretty sure they all make the grade.

I appreciate that the picture is illustrative and clearly not to scale, but the reasonable implication here is that the dust rings orbit the sun at the same rate as the planets (any slower, and they would fall towards the sun, and faster, they would move away), so the bits that are not close to the planets never will be.

Biker sues Google Fiber: I broke my leg, borked my ankle in trench dug to lay ad giant's pipe

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Re: Bork

Balk, meaning to obstruct, (and spelt balk) is not the same word as bork meaning broke, which is an internet thing.

To be fair, balk, meaning to obstruct is also not the same word as bork, meaning to obstruct.

Again, a little research would inform you that the word has two meanings. Your familiarity with one or the other probably depends on who and where you are, and on context.

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Re: Bork

Interestingly, the original meaning of the word (in the mid 20th century) did mean to obstruct, after an American Judge by the name of Bork.

With the advent of modern computing, it arose as a homonym, "borked", meaning "broken" (presumably from a mis-spelling of either "broken", or (comedically) "broked". The latter use has superseded the former, especially amongst those with a background in technology, rather than US politics.

Personally, I've only ever known its use to mean broken.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bork

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Re: 5mph!

He was on a hog, so if he turned at anything over 5 mph, he'd have left his exhaust in the road.

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Re: 5mph!

I am on a low-speed curve on an unsure surface I keep my foot either just resting very lightly on the very tip of the peg with no weight on, or off the peg, dangling about a foot or so above the road - ready to push the bike upright if there's a sudden loss of grip.

I'm pretty sure you'd fail your test for that when doing the turn in the road. Having your feet dangling would be seen as not being in control of the vehicle. Somewhat counter-intuitively, sitting bolt upright with your feet on the pegs gives you much better control at low speed, because you use the muscles in your sides for fine balance adjustments.

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Re: Re:Breaking a leg on a motorbike is expected.

There are old bikers, and bold bikers, but no old, bold bikers...

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Re: Re:Breaking a leg on a motorbike is expected.

This is why proper bike boots have armour in them that covers the ankle joint. Ankle injuries are common with bikers because of the idiots you see riding bikes (or more commonly scooters) in entirely inappropriate footware, such as trainers, or even sandals, combined with the fact that 200kg of bike has a fair chance of ending up on top of your leg if it goes over. Decent boots aren't even that expensive.

The same goes for proper bike jacket and trousers. It turns out that a denim jacket doesn't stand up too well when you're going down a road on your back at 40 mph, and the bit that ends up scraping along the tarmac is your ribs, spine and shoulder blades.

Don't even get me started on the lack of helmet laws in America. Drop a watermelon from 6 feet for an illustration of why...

Packet switching pickle prompts potential pecuniary problems

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Re: Goonhilly?

Don't be silly, everyone knows that Vogon ships hang in the air in much the same way that bricks don't.

TalkTalk kept my email account active for 8 years after I left – now it's spamming my mates

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Re: Indefensible

OK, I found a legal obligation to keep a record of a contract, such as supply of a service like telecommunications, made in the UK.

The relevant words there are "record of a contract." That's likley to include the fact that the contract exists, and the required indentifying information for the signee (i.e. name, and possibly address). GDPR is also going to limit the uses you can access, and use, that information to those specified in the legal requirement to hold that information in the first place. I'm pretty sure theta wouldn't include using it to verify someone's identity because you have continued to hold other information about them that they (reasonably) want expunged - i.e. an email account.

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Re: Indefensible

Plus there would almost certainly be a clause in the orignal agreement that you wouldn't be using their services for such purposes - i.e. in a medical setting, or for control of things like power stations, traffic control systems, etc. etc.

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Re: Indefensible

Down-vote me all you like; names and addresses are clearly personally identifying information (PID) under GDPR. If you hold it, you have to have both a reason for doing it, and consent (except for where the retention is statutory and does not require consent).

If someone is no longer your customer, you have no rights to their PID, except for such purposes as you are legally required to hold it. If that's inconvenent for you, I'd suggest it's your business model at fault, because it probably involves contacting people out of the blue in an unsolicited manner, or selling those details on so somebody else can.

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Re: Indefensible

see nothing wrong with holding onto a name and a service address for a former customer once that relationship has ended.

Unfortunately for you, GDPR is quite explicit in that if you have no legitimate business need to do so, with informed consent from the person involved, then you cannot do this.

There are reasonable exceptions in GDPR for situations where legislation requires the retention of data (e.g. for accounting records which must eb retained for a certain length of time), and for law enforcement. Keeping the name and address of a former customer doesn't fall under these.

SPOILER alert, literally: Intel CPUs afflicted with simple data-spewing spec-exec vulnerability

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Re: It's interesting...

Logical falacy alert! "I've been shown that my front door lock can be picked. Therefore I don't bother locking my front door now."

If it were trivially easy to simultaneously attempt to pick all the locks in the world in a short timescale, and your lock was pickable, then there really would be no difference. If there is an attack vector, and it can be found and exploited at zero cost to the attacker, you will be attacked.

When 2FA means sweet FA privacy: Facebook admits it slurps mobe numbers for more than just profile security

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Re: Possibly Microsoft too

Now who did the vendor get my number from?

Paypal?

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Re: Sounds like a case for GDPR

GDPR is still written into British law, even if the country doesn't come to its senses in time, so the ICO can still decide to pursue the case after March 29th.

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Re: Sounds like a case for GDPR

Yup, mobile phone numebrs are pretty obviously PID, and therefore protected under GDPR.

They must onyl be collected if there is a legitiamte use for them (in this case for account recovery) and not be used for any other purpose. The data controller (FB in this case) must also gain explicit consent for their use, for each purpose it intends to use them for, which it clearly has not done in this case.

Time to see which EU country's regulator has the teeth...

Three-quarters of crucial border IT systems at risk of failure? Bah, it's not like Brexit is *looks at watch* err... next month

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Re: What possible delay?

No one is going to suffer. This is the twenty first century and the UK is the worlds 5th or 6th largest economy.

That's okay then. You go and tell those workers in the car building industry that their jobs are safe after all!

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Re: What possible delay?

If you want to leave the EU, just send me £500 pounds a week and you can keep what you have now, with no rebate, and done less efficiently, to a lower standard that you were getting under the EU.

FWIW, it's closer to £100 a year that an individual pays towards the EU to support such things as nuclear, medicines, aviation, safety etc. regulators, access to a proper human rights court, visa-free travel, cost-free mobile roaming, amongst many other things, all of which benefit from economies of scale.

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Re: What possible delay?

If the people working in the industry think the EU is bad for them, they're probably correct.

Or, just possbily, what is bad for the fishing industry is dredging all the fish out of the sea, which is what EU quotas are designed to prevent. So that short-sighted greedy individuals can't catch all the fish today and fuck anyone who comes after them. "It's them unelected byoooorocrats tellin us what to do innit!"

See also - Northwest Atlantic cod collapse.

BT 'UK's most powerful Wi-Fi'? Why, fie, for shame! – ads watchdog

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Re: It's 2019

Unenforceable contract terms are unenforceable...

in other words, anything that tries to take away your statutory rights via small print in a contract is nothing more than a waste of ink.

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Re: It's 2019

YMMV; my 'up-to 100MB' with Virgin gives around 105MB every time I've bothered to speed-test it. Better than the appalling ADSL offering I used to get from Talk Talk that used to drop down to sub 2MB for prolonged periods for no apparent reason, and customer service that consists of having to argue with someone in India for 20 minutes before they concede that they have wrongly billed you for £50 to fix a problem at the frikkin' exchange...

I think the real problem is that all major telco / broadband providers seem to have appalling customer service. I wouldn't touch BT again after the Phorm debacle, and ditto Talk Talk for their open-door policy towards customer data. Sky can piss off as long as any of their money goes in Rupert Murdoch's pockets. Others (such as Vodafone) are just BT resellers with the added advantage of buck-passing when you need a problem fixed...

I say, that sucks! Crooks are harnessing hoovers to clean out parking meters in Chelsea

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...contactless, of course, assumes that they're going to be charging you less than £30...

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"It is a trend we need to stop and motorists going cashless is one way we can help tackle this."

If the parking machines in K&C are anything like the ones I've tried to use without cash, then you'll be stuck callng an automated number going through a crappy menu system before having to punch in your 12 digit card number, expiry date and CVC on your phone's keypad while still trying to hear what the automated voice is saying, in the rain, to pay £5 for parking, plus the extra 50p 'convenience fee' they scam out of you on top, then run to wherever you're trying to be because you've spent 20 minutes doing something that should have taken 20 seconds if you'd had the right change handy, whilst at the same time havng to remember to text your registration number in the correct format to some random number so you don't come back to a ticket.

I'm not sure why they can't just make the bloody things have working card readers on them, or $deity forbid, be contactless.

Slow Ring Windows 10 fragged by anti-cheat software in the games you're playing at work, says Insiders supremo

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Re: Root kit

Me thinks that you doth giveith our dear friends at Redmond just a tad too much credit in this regurad.

For instance, if you are writing device drivers, you have to digitally sign them so that Windows will allow them to run with the require privileges:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/dashboard/get-a-code-signing-certificate

Code signing isn't exactly a new idea, for example, it has been built into .NET for a number of years.

This is to say nothing about the virtue, or otherwise, of Microsoft's business practices (past and present), but structurally, I think their code is pretty solid.

Insane homeowners association tries to fine resident for dick-shaped outline car left in snow

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Re: Power unchecked

You ask the people, they tell you, and it's then your job to deliver on that, whatever you think of the result.

there, FTFY.

In a non-binding referendum, what you have is an opinion poll that nobody is bound to do anything at all with. What the major political parties have chosen to do is run with the result, with no legal compunction to do so (only political expedience*). This is why we have ourselves in a situation where the High Court has said that although the referendum was fraudulent, it can't strike it down, as there is nothing to actually strike down in a legal sense, but at the same time, we have a PM who keeps insisting it is some sort of mandate, which is only true in a very narrow political sense.

*Although Cameron said the government would implement the result of the referendum, he was exceeding his authority when he said this. Not only can a PM not bind the decisions any future government, the enabling bill explicitly stated that the result did not have to be implemented. This is why the poll was allowed to exclude, for instance, British citizens living in the EU, and EU citizens who would otherwise be allowed to vote in elections here.

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Re: That's neat

Yeah man, that's like, totally grody.