Posts by Loyal Commenter 5761 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jul 2010
Since they obviously aren't using the technical meaning of the word 'power', one has to wonder what meaning they are attributing to the word. Does it emit the most Orgone energy? The most 'powerful' crystal healing field? Has it been treated with the most homoeopathically diluted 'wi-fi'? Or maybe they are suggesting that their routers are sexually powerful, and make the strongest lovers?
It's only a rootkit if it uses an exploit to gain privilege escalation. More likely is that Microsoft have issued a certificate to the developers that allows them to sign the code so that the OS knows that it can run with raised privileges. Note - raised privileges, not root privileges. I think even MS are long beyond the days of running as either root or not root, with nothing in between.
I read the article as meaning that some third-party anti-cheating code is broken by changes to the OS. Presumably because it is doing something naughty, like calling undocumented methods that are liable to change, etc.
Because anti-cheating software has to pick up things that alter the way a game behaves while it runs, that software presumably has to be able to see all running processes, and therefore run with elevated priveliges - i.e. pretend to be part of the OS. I suspect that this is the root of the problem.
He's suing them for £1.something, not £1.something plus costs.
From what I understand, he is bringing this as a test case, not as a way to make money (he's plenty rich enough already), but as a way to set precedent (one of the two ways laws are made in this country, the other being through primary legislation). I would honestly be surprised if black cabbies weren't supporting him in this, as it's obviously in their interests. It doesn't follow, however, that their interests are his reason for bringing the case. Two people can want the same thing for different reasons.
And for thos people here who are implying that the is nothing more than a lawyer of the ambulance-chsing variety, I'll point out that you don't get to be a QC by chasing ambulances.
The thing is that if this were to be successful, it isn't Uber who pays the VAT, in the end. It's us consumers.
All Uber would do - if forced - is add 20% on top of the bill and pass the money onto the taxman.
So I guess what this case is about removing the 20% advantage Uber has over VAT registered taxi companies.
That 20% advantage I think is exactly the point of his case. Uber should be able to compete with traditional cabbies on an equal footing. The fact that they are orgasnised and have payment and booking infrastructure should mean that they are perfectly capable of doing this, whilst also paying tax into the treasury.
It's not a case of the end user paying that 20% into the treasury, it's a case of them not paying that 20% into Uber's coffers.
Hell, how to make ANFO or thermite is on Wikipedia.
I'm not sure anyone with even a cursory knwoledge of chemistry needs to look up thermite on wikipedia. It has only two ingredients. Presumably kitchen scales and spoons will be categorised as terrorist tools, since they can be used to mix it?
It was the CPC464 (pictured). It was a generally good piece of hardware, although with some questionable design decisions made in the name of cost-cutting, such as the 7-bit bus for the printer port which meant that you couldn't natively print anything in the top half of the character set (the high bit just got dropped by the hardware, you could set it in software to your herart's content). Some enterprising individuals cobbled together a hardware/software hack so that the port would be sent the low seven bits, and then the eight bit, and the hardware would glue them back together.
Ah, having just googled it, this was the bad-boy I had...
Amstrad Machine Language for the Absolute Beginner. It had a nice section on twos-complement that many modern programmers could do with reading. The section that got the most dog-eared was the appendix at the back with the instruction tables.
...although I seem to recall the cover of the edition I had being pink, and google tells me otherwise. Bearing in mind I was 11 or 12 at the time, my memory may be not as accurate as I would like to think.
My parents were too mean to buy a compiler for the Amstrad I had at the time, so I had to hand-compile my code, which, without fail, always crashed the first time. An early lesson in saving your work first.
If I remember rightly, LD A was 0x21 and RET was 0xC9.
well, yes and no. it all depends on the size distribution of the material being accreted, and whether it happens symmetrically. For instance, if all the material accreting onto a body was the size of dust grains, and was uniformly distributed, you might expect the result to be a spherical body even if it was well under the mass for gravity to do the job, for example if you had a body moving through a large, dense dust cloud (such as in a planetary ring system). On the other hand, if you have a relatively sparsely populated field of material, where the size varied from microscopic upwards, in a Poisson distribution, you might expect accretion to happen as a serious of collisions between bodies of varying sizes, resulting in a much more random shape. The observations suggest that in the outer solar system at least, the mode of formation is much more the latter.
To be fair to the plod, I didn't see anything in the article that suggested that they weren't willing to investigate the crime. After all, they went to see the guy in his premises to talk to him about it. That's more than you get if they don't have the resources to make an invetigation.
From their perspective, I think they were the ones trying to avoid entrapment, presumably because this guy had made some baseless, or unverified complaints in the past. The cop in question, however, was pretty stupid in not informing the complainant that he would be filming him before going into his premises, or asking him if he would agree to being recorded, particularly since he already knew the guy was the sort of person likley to make a complaint against the police - which, lo and behold! He did. A bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy there.
The police have to treat everyone fairly and equally. There are only a few circumstances where they can act otherwise, even with someone they are arresting (for example, if a suspect violently resists arrest). They dropped the ball on this one, and are being slapped for it accordingly. Pretty dumb on their part really.
I'm inclined to agree. On the whole, body-cams are a good thing; they keep the police honest, and they provide crucial evidence (or counter evidence) that keeps the costs down in the court system - for example, if a complainant claims the police beat him up during arrest, but the body-cam shows that actually the complainant was attacking the police.
On the other hand, if recording in someone's home where that person is not a suspect (i.e. the police don't have a good reason to enter in the normal course of their duties, such as a warrant to arrest someone, or prevent the commission of a crime), the bare minimum should be to inform the person that they are recording and/or request their permission.
It's a bit of a tricky one though. I'm of the opinion that when worn, the cameras should be on at all times, and the officer wearing the camera should have no way of turning it off, or, crucially, accessing the footage. Anything they record should only then actually be accessible if it is known to contain something relevant, or the officer is the subject of a complaint. This is to protect both the public, and the police. Storage is cheap, and securely archiving it shouldn't be any sort of technical challenge. Of course, this case demonstraes that perhaps it is not so black-and-white.
Perhaps the ability to turn the camera off, with associated GPS logging would be a reaonable compromise, with the officer having to log a reason for doing so. What you don't want is the situation akin to the cop show trope where the officer removes their shoulder numbers before going into the cell to beat up the suspect. "Sorry sir, my camera isn't working, now where's my truncheon?"
You have to be able to guard against crooked cops, but on the whole, the vast majority are honest, and a fair number of people they have to interact with are not.
I see you have nicely demonstrated a total lack of understanding there of how international trade works.
there is very little that the UK imports from the EU that it cannot get cheaper and better from countries outside the EU via trade agreements negotiated through the EU that will cease when we leave
FTFY
There were two notes fields, one for the customer to view, and one for the technicians.
Never ever assume that anything you write won't make it back to the customer. The software our support desk uses has a 'private notes' field. Our staff have been told in no uncertain terms not to put anything in there you wouldn't want the cutomser to see.
"Why", you ask? ther are any number of ways those notes can "go wild" - from a copy/paste mistake, to a customer visiting the office.
The one that got me a number of years ago was the way that an email chain, which starts of as being very "internal" to an organisation, can get replied to and forwarded until it hits some numpty in the sales department who then just CC's in the customer contact without trimming the email first...
My partner's elderly stepfather tried that one on me. He quickly became very quiet when I explained to him that, as a seasoned software developer who happened to be around before the turn of the millennium, I had first-hand experience of why what he was saying was bollocks. He then tried to claim it was Thatcher who took us into the EU (then EEC), before I politely pointed out that we joined some six years before she was elected. I don't blame him for having these ideas, they've been drip-fed into people by the right-wing media and weasels like Farage, Johnson Gove, Rees-Mogg et al.
Interestingly, of the three people who I personally know who voted to leave the EU, he and one other have now changed their minds. The remaining one lived on sick benefit for 20 years for a purported back injury that mysteriously didn't manifest itself when riding motorbikes, and is known for having such "clever" ideas such as not paying for electricity and getting a diesel generator instead (you can draw your own conclusions about the honesty and intelligence profile of this individual). I know this isn't a statistically significant sample of leavers, but I can't help but think it's probably representative.
How is it democratic to keep us in an institution we are obviously against being a part of?
I clearly live in a universe where the word 'obviously' has a different meaning to yours.
So void the original 70's vote some remainers keep referencing as the EU and so we leave.
I assume you are referencing the 1975 advisory referendum where people voted to remain. Void that all you like; the result of that was to take no action, so instead... take no action?
We also have 2 general elections, 1 to have a referendum to change our relationship with the EU because we aint happy (else why change?) and 1 to confirm we want to leave the EU.
Well lets see, the Conservative manifesto in the 2015 election contained quite a lot more than 'we will hold a referendum', so to any sensible observer, the people 'obviously' didn't vote just on that one issue. May's 2016 election resulted in... a hung parliament and no mandate for the thing she went into the election to get, so effectively the opposite to the result you claim (the only 'leave' party lost its majority, even against someone as 'unelectable' as Corbyn). Lets not forget all the manifesto promises she made but has conveniently broken since either. I count seven, so far... https://govtracker.co.uk/
The only major party offering remain was almost wiped out.
...and not because hey were offering remain, but because of the disastrous coalition government with the Tories, which proved that they were not to be trusted.
If you just want non-binding advice you hold an opinion poll, not a referendum.
If you hold a non-binding referendum (and exclude specific groups from it), is is an opinion poll. Just because Cameron promised that his government would implement the result (and then promptly quit) doesn't make it binding, it just means he made an unconsitutional promise (it directly condradicted the enabling bill that MPs voted for) which he then ran away from.
Legally, and consitutionally, the non-binding referndum has exactly as much weight as an opinion poll. i.e. none.
For a government to hold a referendum and then ignore the result would be political suicide
Show me on the diagram the universe where the current government hasn't already comitted political suicide? They're not going to go down in history as a paragon of good governance you know.
How democratic s it to implement an advisory vote as if it were binding?
An advisory vote that purposefully excluded those who would be adversely affected by one outcome (UK nationals living in the EU > 15 years), where one side has been found to have profoundly cheated in numerous ways, and has been fined accordingly. An advisory vote, where the promises made were based on multiple mutually-exclusive lies? An advisory vote, where once the veil has been pulled from the peoples' eyes, they are told, "tough, you voted for the lies, and you can't have anopther say".
Pretty damn undemocratic, I'd say.
I'm in two minds about a second referendum though. Refrerenda are pretty bad as far as democratic choices go, just like any opinion poll, as they reduce complex inssues to a simple question. Far better would be to withdraw A50, implement a proper system of PR, and then have a general election, with one party being clear that theri manifesto is to leave the EU (with an agreed plan of how to do so in advance). Then if it really IS the democratic will of the people to leave the EU, they'll get voted in, and it'll happen.
Bristol, like every city in the world, has loads of space to accommodate a modern transport solution, just not at ground level.
I totally agree. There are many times I have travelled to other European cities of a similar size to Bristol, which seem to have working, cheap and efficient metro systems (for example, Barcelona, Porto, Naples) .
Of course, the difference there is that someone has been willing to spend the money on the transport system (which our austerity-obsessed government is not going to do). However, you only have to look at the troubles that some of these places have had (Naples in particular) to be forewarned of what can go wrong.
Porto is an interesting example. A city which has many things in common with Bristol - it's an old city, so has the issues with digging archaeology up that you get in an old city. It's hilly (moreso even than Bristol), so has the issues of deep stations, and surface sections of track. It also has half the population of Bristol. If a metro system can work there, why the hell can't it be done here? Any of the problems I can think of that Bristol may have are bigger problems there.
In my experience, the limiting factor to how 'flexi' your working day can be is the need to interact with your co-workers. Skype meetings and such are fine for those who can work from home, but if you start at 6am and finish at 2, and your colleage starts at 11am and finishes at 7, that leaves only a few hours in the midde of the day when interaction can happen, and if you actually need to have a meeting, or $deity forbid, several meetings in a day, for those things that you can't send an email about and deal with the next day, the window for interaction gets filled up quickly. In practice, this means that "start between 6am and 11am" quickly becomes "start between 8 and 10", then "start between 8:30 and 9:30", and you're back to rush-hour congestion again.
In my mind, the solution here is a compromise between some flexible working, with reasonable core hours in which people can have meetings, and as much working from home as is practically possible. Face-to-face meetings are sometimes unavoidable, but these days with fast broadband internet in most (non-rural) places where people actually live, video-conferencing is suitable for most needs. Of course, it depends on the nature of the work you do. If you're an order-picker in a warehouse (and your job hasn't yet been taken by a robot), you're not going to get to do a lot of working from home.
I read that as the advertisers being allowed to target individuals, but not on those criteria. It doesn't say they're not letting the advertisers have that information (in fact it's implying that they do), which they can then use for any other purpose, such as profiling people into groups that they then target. Presumably, such groups could contain a single individual (although they're more likely to contain a number of individuals that the advertisers have deemed to have equivalent tastes / beliefs / whatever).
Never underestimate exactly how much of a bunch of slippery bastards marketeers are. In my experience, most of them bear all the hallmarks of high-functioning psychopaths.
Francky I am in two minds which is more damaging to society, deliberately killing people with cancer or permanently screwing up democracy via the social media cesspit.
It's not social media that is the problem per se, it's the adverts that SM providers sling to their users, often disguised as legitimate content (FB I'm looking at you), and of a political nature, which are closely targeted to be shown only to the people they are most likley to affect. It's the slow drip-drip of poison into people's ears that leds to them believing things that are not true, but not realising why they believe them. This sort of advert is much more effective than the "you just bought a vacuum cleaner, here are ads for more vacuum cleaners" type.
The simple solution would be to ban all targeted advertising. There would be no need to collect all that profiling data, hence no danger of potentially leaking protected information.
On the other hand, Rolls Royce never sold a single car on its technical specs.
I'm pretty sure the technical abilities of the early Rolls Royce cars were their main selling point.
From the WIkipedia page...
In spite of his preference for three- or four-cylinder cars, Rolls was impressed with the Royce 10, and in a subsequent agreement on 23 December 1904 agreed to take all the cars Royce could make. There would be four models:
a 10 hp (7.5 kW), two-cylinder model selling at £395 (£40,000 in 2014),
a 15 hp (11 kW) three-cylinder at £500 (£50,000 in 2014),
a 20 hp (15 kW) four-cylinder at £650 (£60,000 in 2014),
a 30 hp (22 kW) six-cylinder model priced at £890 (£90,000 in 2014)
So: 4 choices, each at a different price point, based on their technical specs.
After I raised an official complaint I was contacted by a police representative who said it was staffing and priority issues
Well, that is what happens when the government cuts the police budget by 40%. Don't blame the police for the fact that, like all public bodies under the government's ideological austerity drive, have been cut to the bone.
I wonder what the lead-time for this sort of case is, and how many more are in the pipeline?
It's pretty clear to anyone who is familiar with the main points of GDPR that one of the "big boys" was going to fall foul of it sooner or later. Google was always a likely candidate since their business model is basically data collection.
This saddens me. We don't all write bs JavaScript.
I'm not saying you do. I'm saying that if you have a site, let's call it xyz.com, if that site has scripts running from it's own domain, and some obvious related domains (say, xyz.cdn.com, xyzcontent.co.uk, or whatever), those are fine. If I pop down the noscript menu, and I see you're also trying to run scripts from 30 other domains such as creeptyadtracker.com, google analytics, facebook, bobsmarketresearch.co.uk et al I'm going to move along and probably never visit your site again.
If I have to unblock some likely looking domains, reload the site, unblock some more, reload, and so on before the content even loads, then this shows that either the site is poorly designed (pulling in scripts from all sorts of places, which in turn try to pull in other scripts when run means you have no real control over their content), or, more likley, deliberately written in such as way so to make people give up and click "allow-all". To do so is a conscious design choice from the site's developer, and is done in their interests, and against mine. It's also a fair indicator that the marketeers are in control of the site, and it'll have little in the way of genuine content anyway.
It's a good question, but in my case, moot. It;s one of those hard-block ones for NoScript, along with doubleclick et al. I mean, why does an ad-slinger need to run scripts in my browser? If they said, "here, run this exe", we'd all be telling them to fuck off without a second thought.
Of course... most websites are getting wise and are limiting access to content when you use a tool like No Script which will also block ads.
When I come a cross a web site that won't work with noscript enabled, the first thing I do is look to see what domains are being blocked. A handy guide is that if there are more than a handful that you need to unblock (such as the site's own domain and maybe a cdn or two) to get the site to function, then the site is not there for your benefit, but exists solely to push advertising crap into your face. At this point, I go elsewhere.
Most often, the worse perpetrators seem to be 'news' websites from tabloids and local rags. I take it as an indicator that the site in question is not a reliable news source (i.e. clickbait), and if I'm actually interested in the story in question, I look elsewhere. It's always best to try and find the primary sources anyway.
Isn't this supposed to mean that after four generations, there's no genetic code from the fourth grandparent left?
No.
If you lose 25% of parental DNA over 1 generation, that leaves 75%. You have 2 parents, so halve that to 37.5%
Over 5 generations (4th grandparent)
37.5% x 37.5% x 37.5% x 37.5% x 37.5% = 0.75%
That might seem like a low number, but consider that you have 32 4th-grandparents.
And, drum roll please, if these tests worked, they should still give the same answer for any person whose parents are the same.
Actually this is not true. You inherit half of your genes from one parent, and half from the other. Which genes you get from which parent is entirely random, so if they are looking for a specific genetic marker that one parent has, you have a 50% chance of inheriting it. Siblings will inherit different genes to each other, although statistically, if you are looking at enough markers, you would expect to get results that are very close.
My suspicion is that these tests are not looking at the whole genome, but sections of it. They will have catalogued variations in several specific sections of DNA, but aren't looking at exactly the same sections in each test they do. This would account for the variation in results. For example, one test may look at several fragments, lets call them A B C D E F. One run picks up A B D and F, the next gets B C D and E. The results are therefore going to vary.
However, as they get more and more samples, the statistical confidences will get better, and the overall ancestry results derived from analysing different framgents are likley to converge.
Just for fun:
1) Light actually has perpendicular oscillating electrical and magnetic fields.
2) My sandwich must be a chicken sandwich because other sandwiches contain chicken. (Hasty generalisation logical fallacy)
3) Light (photons) can also come from synchrotron radiation, where a charged particle loses energy in a magnetic field and emits it as a photon. The energy for the photon comes from the charged particle's energetic state relative to the field it sits within. I'm sure there are other sources from which photons can come.
4) You previous three logical steps are false, so no. You can't conclude this.
5) Particle + anti-particle -> any combination of particles that conserves the charge/spin total. This may be a photon, but in many cases neutrinos are also produced to conserve quantum parity.
6) Nope. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_particle
7) Well, I guess we'd better tell the strong and weak forces, and gravity to fuck off then.
8) I bought some lights from Ikea. they definitely had mass.
9) Joking aside, it's worth noting that although photons are massless, the have momentum. Because they have no mass, they cannot travel slower than c. Conversely, particles with mass cannot travel at c, because relativity indicates that their mass would approach infinity as they approach c. I can assure you that relativity has been tested a lot more thoroughly than your ramblings, including experiments with atomic clocks to show time dilation in space, gravitational lensing, and all sorts of other craziness.
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