Posts by lglethal

Re: Politicians' names

Well did Willy Willys Win?

Re: I've been fired ...

"My Epson PX-8 had zero porn on it."

Zero Porn? Is that what were calling ASCII porn these days? Nothing like a bit of the old Zeroes and Ones, eh?

Try reading an actual article about the douchebag with the hotel reviews. He left months of fake reviews including that the staff were slave labour, all over an incident that when he stayed there he was asked to pay a corkage fee for bringing his own bottle of wine to the restaurant. In the end after kicking up a fuss and being rude, he didnt even pay the corkage fee.

So he tried to destroy a business's reputation, all because someone asked him to pay a corkage fee (standard practice in most restaurants). What an utter douchebag. He would have deserved to go to jail for it. As it was, he got let off with a warning after he apologised and promised not to do it again.

Thailand has insane Lese Majeste laws, which are incredibly wrong and are often misused. But dont try and conflate the two topics because it just makes you look like an idiot.

If you ever happen to meet someone who throws away Lego (rather than giving it away as next years presents or passing it on to various kids/cousins/neighbours kids/etc.) then by all means give them a good whacking for adding to humanity's plastic waste.

But Lego is one of the few bits of plastic that I've never heard of people throwing away. Maybe the occasional piece that gets broken, but even then I certainly remember having more then a few broken bits in my Lego box back in the day... So if people dont throw it away, it cant be counted as waste right?

Re: Zuckerberg

Really? I see a striking reseblance to Saint Jobs of Apple. But I guess her Reality Distortion Field wasnt up to the correct standard.

Plus she forgot to have an actual genius designer in the background to create the product she was selling. Rookie mistake...

Re: Rich people's money

Actually you're both right.

Earnings based fines have been shown to be far more ethical, and have the same deterrent effect on the rich and the poor (Sweden for one has an earnings based speeding fines meaning a rich person caught speeding pays a significantly higher monetary fine than a poor person commiting the same speeding offense, but both people losing a weeks pay hurts (almost) equally, and has a similar deterrent.

However, the punishment applied should absolutely be proportional to the crime committed.

Re: You mean "faux outrage"?

How about the government not steal a photo off instagram, but actually hire a photographer to create an original. That would put money in the pockets of a photographer, a model, a venue owner, and probably a few other local people as well.

Nope, just steal a photo off the internet and send that money into some managers pocket instead.

Thats where the real rage should be...

Re: Reg, you mentioned the UK....

Actually Nominet is (nominally and only really in a legal sense) a non-profit organisation. It acts very clearly as a for-profit organisation, but has somehow managed to hold on to its non-profit status.

So it could very clearly bid for this, although the lack of transparency and communication would probably rule it out...

Security through obsolescence?

@AC

I get what your saying, but i think your missing a couple of points -

1) the economic disparity in china - a large proportion of rural Chinese people do not have computers, smart phones, etc. So removing all physical currency would not be possible until everyone is at a level to have the method of making use of the digital currency.

Additionally, a large proportion of rural Chinese do not actually have access to bank accounts, so again how do you make them able to use the digital currency? The divide between rural and urban China is truly staggering at times.

2) There will always be loopholes. The communist party functions by being a well greased machine, If every transaction is traceable, then the greasing would have to stop and those at the top would lose out. Therefore, loopholes will exist to allow the greasing, and where there are loopholes, there are places criminals can exploit.

3) There are plenty of other ways to pass value other than cash - An example I am aware of is that when a Chinese organisation (or people) want to move large quantities of money overseas, they buy a bunch of (very) expensive jewellery, fly overseas with it (with the wife wearing it of course so that it's not obvious that its the equivalent of cash), and then sell it at the destination into local currency. Often the exchange prices of the jewellery is organised in advance, so they can choose their own exchange rate. That's just one way of moving around money outside of controls.

To bring this back into an internal China way, the criminals could buy gold or jewellery with stolen crypto, take it, melt it down into a new form, and then resell it. Provided they werent caught at the point of purchase, the money earned would be almost the same as that stolen, and would again be completely untraceable. So there are certainly ways around it.

Perhaps if the Chinese could wipe out the problems of 1) and 2) above, then they could potentially make a close to fraud free system, but they're not going to be able to flick a switch and there be no more cash to use, and in a dual system (cash and crypto), fraud will be rampant.

And Point 3) above will not go away, even with a full crypto system. No matter how ubiquitous surveillance and controls are, a street kid being paid a 5er (or bought dinner to avoid a trace in a full crypto system) to knock out street cameras near the sales point, would allow underworld figures to do their transactions of stolen crypto without any problems. A fully protected system is impossible, it just becomes a question of how high you want to make the bar for the criminals to jump.

Re: Nine Laypeople

"Who is Dan Leno ?" asked the Judge."

Is that Jay Leno's brother?

Re: spreadsheets!

A spreadsheet is only needed for numbers bigger than the User has fingers and toes.

So 28 items absolutely needs a spreadsheet!

Re: Oh dear,

An old colleague in an engineering office used to have a great poster up on his wall

"Consulting - If you're not part of the Solution, there's money to be made prolonging the Problem."

Seems appropriate...

Re: A larger planet means more gravity

Wait are you suggesting that King Kong is bigger than a Brontosaurus???

Almost certainly, and their insurer is probably insured for it as well, and theirs, and theirs, and so on.

It's Insurance Companies all the way down...

Re: Carbon neutral but still not climate change neutral

This is not correct because there is far more water vapour than CO2 in the atmosphere. The overall effect is a stronger greenhouse contribution.

Actually it is correct. On an emissions basis (which is what we were talking about) 1g of CO2 is 30x more problematic than 1g of Water Vapour. Thats why our raising of the CO2 in the atmosphere by a few ppm is having such a large effect. Yes the overall effect of Water Vapour is more because there is substantially more of it, but the vast majority of water vapour is produced naturally.

But lets say this another way, if every man made polluting source of CO2 production was changed overnight to produce water vapour instead, the affect would be that climate change would be 30 times less devestating than it currently is. The maths would need to be done, but I'd willing to bet that if that was the case, we would no longer be causing a noticable temperature rise.

It's supposed to be an immediate dismissal from the Marketplace to offer bribes to remove Reviews (just like its supposed to be for fake reviews).

I've had success reporting fake reviews, but I've never been offered cash for removing a review, so cant comment there. But probably, this is a case of if you got in contact with the right people things would have happened, but often (as with any big organisation) finding the right people is like pulling hens teeth!

Oh well at least you tried. :)

Re: You had one job...

Im still amazed that Über didnt have a dead mans switch in the car (like with Train/Tube drivers) to make sure that the "driver" was paying attention had their hands on the wheel, etc.

It shows either a staggering level of overconfidence in their systems or a staggering level of disregard for the wider public. Considering we're talking about Über, I'll let you decide which one of those it likely was...

Yeah but by removing those things now, we can come back in a few years with brand new premium models which include things like headphone jacks, sd card slots and radios. That's what we call innovation!!!

--- The view from marketing in every big phone manufacturer...

Re: I agree with every word

Thats why you have copies (known as Backups). So that even if those things are stolen by the thief, you still have them.

As for the ransom revealing, well thats basically the same as being blackmailed. And if you pay a blackmailer, they will milk you regularly and often. They might say they will destroy the evidence once you pay, but you're relying on the word of a blackmailer. Sure they might destory the evidence after you paid, but oh look here's another secret they found down the back of the sofa, you need to pay for that to be destroyed to. And the next one. And the next one. etc...

Pay a blackmailer once, and you'll be paying forever...

Re: And if you have any doubt

I just tested with my email address and it does say when the breach was at least discovered. So if you're password was changed more recently then the latest email breach, you are probably safe.

I say Probably, because haveibeenpwned only know about the breaches that have been discovered after all... ;)

Funnily enough, my email address ended up in the breach for the game EVONY. I've never heard of the game, let alone played it so buggered if I know how that happened, but it just goes to show that your email will turn up everywhere on the internet, even in places you never would have expected...

Re: why do you think it's not possible to do any of that with a PC?

So to summarise, because PC streaming to the TV doesnt work with the current setup at your house, it doesnt work at all.

Alright then.... Good to know.

Re: Bad decision

I didnt actually see it completely spelled out in the article, but does anyone know if this Epic's decision to pull the Apple login? Or did Apple pull the login away from Epic?

Re: The judge

As a rule No. But what the Judge can do is, say "Right I've had enough of you're shit. You can stay in your cell and the adults in the room can discuss this without you.".

It sounds like the Judge is close to that point already....

Re: Proxy down??

Yes, on 1st march 2020, apparently...

Maybe Microsoft needs to do this more often! If someone is using a 123Reg address to send a tonne of spam, blocking them might force 123Reg to clean up and control their systems to prevent spam being sent in the first place. If Microsoft did this for more Spam senders hosts then maybe we'd end up with a cleaner internet.

Get Microsoft and Google together (woo thats an axis of evil, no doubt), but the power of those 2 making it a habit to block an entire email host when there services are being used to send spam would very quickly force email hosts to clean up their acts.

One can dream...

Re: in the most expensive Trump Hotel reservations

Sorry, but it wont ever happen. The best you can hope for is that Trump gets presented with enough evidence of his previous wrong doing, and be told that he will go quietly into the background like most other former presidents, and will keep his mouth shut on politics from then on in. Oh and that someone takes away his Twitter access...

Something tells me though even then, he wont be able to keep his mouth shut...

Re: How is the USPTO supposed to do that?

Every other nation does it so i fail to see the problem. The EPO definitely does it, as I can attest to from when they came back on one of my ideas with an obscure chinese patent (tangetially related to my patent application but not actually using the same tech), and required me to modify my patent application enough to prove originality or it would be rejected. Getting a patent with the EPO costs a lot and takes a lot of time (about 2 years), but the system works, if you have a patent from them, people know its very likely to be valid.

The USPTO should have the people able to do a quick word search from a patent application review previous patents with those keywords and determine if there is prior art. They dont do that. They rubber stamp the application through. It's at the point where a patent from the USPTO is basically considered unsound from the beginning, and able to be challanged without too much effort.

It costs time and money to get a patent application granted anywhere else in the world. And it should, because what you're asking for is the right to have sole claim over an idea to monetise as you wish for the next 20+ years. That should not be something that should be easy to obtain. Not if we dont want innovation strangled in red tape and unjust lawsuits...

Re: Scotland

"Think Cape Canaveral with cattle grids."

So more Cape Carne-veral then...

I'll get my coat... No need to push...