Posts by Steven Roper

Religious people need to be dug at, as long as their fairy-tale mythologies continue to be used as an excuse to dictate what everyone else is and is not allowed to watch, read, listen to, eat, drink, learn, teach, say or wear.

Very well put, Trevor, and I couldn't agree more. For a long time now, I myself operate on the principle that if I am outside my house, I am on at least one camera somewhere. And as I've pointed out elsewhere, it's not so much the cameras as the person-recognition software (such as face-, voice- or gait- recognition) and the metadata it creates that is a far more serious threat.

However, I would feel a lot more comfortable knowing that such technology is accessible to all rather than a privileged few who will inevitably abuse it. I'd feel a lot happier if every CCTV camera was a webcam instead of just a police camera, for example.

I know this sounds at odds with my previous statement, but bear with me here. If the technology is accessible to all, it levels the playing field. Corrupt police would not be able to "mysteriously lose" CCTV footage that shows them in compromising situations. Stalkers and sociopaths would themselves become equally subject to being tracked and monitored. The long-term recording of all this information means that if anyone takes me to court for something, or tries to otherwise harm or ruin my life, I could also backtrack them and discover their motives in response. Public access to this level of surveillance would enforce transparency and accountability for everyone, high and low alike.

This is why such openness and accessibility would be absolute anathema to those in power. The power and allure of surveillance is its ability to watch without being watched in turn. I suspect that a lot of privacy legislation and privacy issues are being publicised and driven by these people precisely to prevent the equalisation of power that public access to surveillance technology represents. The elites want themselves and their police cronies to be able to monitor everyone but not to be monitored themselves.

So if we are to have mass surveillance and it is unavoidable, I'd far rather it was turned equally on everybody and accessible to anybody, instead of just a few privileged powermongers who will inevitably use it to turn our world into a police-state hellhole.

Re: Just wondering

Good idea. I might experiment with that checksumming photos technique and see what I come up with.

I'll hold your post up as prior art should some innovation-stifling patent troll try to patent this. Would you be generous enough to put your idea into the public domain for all to use? If I invent something worth marketing I'll slip some of the proceeds your way!

Re: it sux if...

<sarcasm>Well, generally to get any kind of internet access you do in fact need to sign up with an ISP, aka Internet Service Provider. I'm assuming you already have an account with an ISP or similar carrier in order to be able to post your comment. </sarcasm>

Given that the protocol behind this is W3C approved, I'd say it's pretty much odds-on that it'll work directly over your internet connection. You'll likely need the IP address of the person you wish to call, and there will be a protocol to specify when linking it (similar to the tel: protocol I'd say), but that would be the extent of it. I can't see why you'd need any additional "services" to implement that, any more than you'd need an additional service to use IRC or FTP.

Re: Hmmm on balance

It's certainly credible that Snowden may be having paranoid delusions or be on an ego trip, but intelligence agencies have been discrediting opponents and crying wolf for so long that it's impossible to believe anything they say any more.

Just like the old Aesop's fable I learned as a small child, when you lie all the time as a matter of course, eventually nobody will ever believe a word you say. The three-letter agencies have dug their own graves on this one.

Re: Feminists: they are idiots and to blame!

@Hollerith: Thank you for proving my point about feminists being in denial about human nature. You fail to take into account that even though feminism and its related critical-theory forms of political correctness have been in force in schools now for over 30 years, boys still choose for the most part to play with cars and girls still choose for the most part to play with dolls. Three generations of children now have had the principles of feminism dinned into them from day dot and it hasn't affected their play choices. That's because ten thousand generations of evolution have predisposed each gender for the roles it has been adapted by its environment to carry out. That is as incontestable a fact as the law of gravity, no matter how sanctimoniously you and your kind rant and rave and jump up and down about it.

As to my quoting memes, proving an argument and illustrating a point are two different literary techniques with different purposes. Unlike you, I am not constrained to expressing myself solely within the dictates of critical theory.

Exactly what I was going to say.

"Ipod has detected multiple listeners. Tap here to authorize additional payment of 1 dollar per song within 10 seconds otherwise the second earphone will be muted."

Corporate greed knows no bounds.

Or allowing bastards like Murdoch to monopolise certain popular TV shows so he can force those who want to watch them to pay for top-dollar premium channels that cost the earth just so they can watch one show.

There's one near me, and he's doing very well despite there being a shopping centre with both a Coles and a Foodland within a kilometre of him. Although I do most of my weekly shopping online, I get my fruit and veg from the greengrocer because 1) he's often cheaper than the supermarkets, 2) his produce is a lot fresher and better quality than the supermarkets, 3) if I buy fresh produce online I usually get given whatever crap the onsite shoppers reject, so 4) I can pick out the particular fruit and veggies I want at the greengrocer.

Anyone who shops online and has ordered fruit and veg this way will soon discover that it's not a good way to get fresh produce. Which is why the greengrocer near me is always full of customers.

I hope you're right Rik, I really do, and that your kids can find a way to sort the future out for everyone.

I do have other valid reasons for my choices, although this isn't the place to go into them. But suffice to say, the line between despair and realism is a very fine one, as is the line between cowardice and pragmatism.

@David 138 Re: Even better idea

"All of the XP machines need replacing anyway."

Do they still work OK? Are they still doing the job your company bought them to do? If they're not failing or packing up, and they can still handle the workload, then why spend money changing them for the mere sake of change?

I assume your company isn't in business to make Microsoft money, your company would be in business to make your shareholders money. That means maximising profit and minimising cost. Throwing money away on replacing perfectly serviceable equipment is not minimising cost.

Of course Microsoft are in business to make money for their shareholders too, but the difference is your company likely isn't implementing a dishonest and deliberately flawed business model with an artificially-imposed end-of-life to drive business. If your company is like mine, it probably implements the more ethical business model of providing service contracts to maintain its existing product base for as long as customers want the products.

Now Microsoft could implement a service contract model - for example, where if you want updates you pay them a fiver a month per machine and they continue maintaining your OS with no other requirements. If they did this for everyone who wanted to stay on XP they could make plenty just doing that. If you don't pay then you don't get updates (but your system should continue working as is without impedance) and you take your risks on the chin.

But instead of offering honest service contracts, what Microsoft have got going is a "pay us something like 200 grand a year plus you have to prove you have a migration process in place" policy. That's tantamount to them reaching into your business and telling you how to run it, and charging you a bloody house's worth per year for the privilege to punish you for it. In my book, that's unethical and immoral, and it damn well should be illegal.

Re: Tech that we want (but they never seem to give us)

Never mind laptop screens, I want a bloody desktop monitor capable of more than the bog-stock 1920 x 1080 they've been stuck at for the past decade. Even the 1920 x 1200 ones are getting hard to find and the few that still exist cost the bloody earth. Meanwhile phone and tablet screens are pointlessly increasing resolutions to levels where a scanning electron microscope is required to see a single pixel, while desktop monitors remain as nothing more than ordinary HD TV sets.

Where's my goddamn 4096 x 2560 desktop monitor!

Re: Perhaps...

...Or 30-second sound bites...

Re: The Nancy Chamber of Commerce and Tourism should have paid his fine ...

Why would they do that? That way they incur the cost of his fine and have to pay him for the footage.

Instead, they can now confiscate his footage as the proceeds of criminal activity, therefore he forfeits all rights to it. The government gets to use his footage for nothing, they can even charge the Nancy Chamber of Commerce for the use of it and pocket the profits themselves, AND he has to pay them for the act of obtaining it.

That's how the world works these days. The benefits of copyright and ownership of things are only for our lords and masters, not for the likes of you and me.

Re: never mind the enterprise

You won't be allowed to have them. You must store your data in "the cloud" like a good little consumer-robot, where it can be monitored and controlled for your own good, and where you can be constantly milked for money in order to keep access to it, and where your usage can be "monetized", and where it can be "revised" if it is copyrighted, too contentious or politically incorrect.

3-4 TB is the biggest you'll ever be allowed to have, and chances are those won't be available as consumer models for long. Already I've noticed that my local computer shop doesn't stock anything over 2 TB any more; if you want bigger you have to order it in - at a premium, of course. But all their new PC's now come with Windows 8 - and cloud storage by default.

You will comply. You won't be given the choice.

@Eddy Ito Re: As if...

Thanks for that Eddy, your explanation does clear it up for me. In fact, it almost seems obvious in hindsight when you think about it: "As if I could care less! (Yeah, right!)" When considered from the sarcastic context with the "As if" prepended to it, it suddenly makes sense.

Re: Alien Resurrection. 3 was not too bad

"...generation of british character actors prior to all those currently appearing in GOT"

You do know that the guy who played Dr. Clemens in Alien 3 (Charles Dance) is now better known as Tywin Lannister, right?

Re: ALL THESE WORLDS

Why wasn't this the first post? Come on commentards, you're slacking off here!

Re: A warning, not an incentive

"And especially careful about handing over any intellectual property to the body running the competition."

Intellectual property issues are the reason I refuse to donate to medical-research "charities." It seems wrong to me, that a treatment researched with money people have donated out of altruism, should be restricted by patents held by some greed-driven pharmaceutical corporation and thus be unavailable to the poor.

This is why my stock response to medical (e.g. cancer, dementia etc) research collectors and callers is this: "Sure. I'll give you a thousand dollars right now, if your organisation can give me a legally binding written guarantee that any cure or treatment resulting from your research will be released openly and never be encumbered by patents or intellectual-property claims by any pharmaceutical entity." So far, I haven't had to make good on that deal even once.

Re: The trouble with 'touch' on the desktop...

Touch screens and mouse control are different interfaces that allow different tasks to be performed, and both have validity. Each have their own advantages and disadvantages depending on the intended use-case scenario.

I don't get this "touch is new and mouse is old so touch must replace mouse everywhere" mentality. There's a reason we use handlebars on motorcycles and steering wheels in cars, and not the other way around.

For example, I do a lot of 3D modelling and graphic work as a hobby (and sometimes for work) A couple of years ago I got a Samsung Slate with Windows 7 and installed Blender (3D modelling software) on it. Since the Slate treats touch as a mouse event it was possible to use it thus, but trying to build 3D models in Blender using touch is an exercise in rage and frustration that would drive even Ghandi batshit crazy. Likewise trying to use Gimp or Photoshop with a touch interface. It's like trying to drive a car with a joystick. Forget. It.

Then there's typing up documentation and code for work. You need a keyboard. Not a picture of a keyboard on a screen. You need buttons that move, that are far enough part that my fat fingers don't end up tapping out shit like "SWKECT namw, addtess, phone FROM users WJERE joindate > 20130701".

Mouse gives you precision that touch simply cannot match. Of course you can use a touch pen (the Slate even came with one), but while drawing in Photoshop is nice with a pen, 3D modelling is a different story. Some things just need to be done with a mouse and keyboard.

Re: At last

"The Micro was slightly before my time, and I never saw one in Australia anyway"

They were here for a while. We had BBC Micros at my high school in Adelaide in 1983/84, although I don't know how much longer they were there after that since I finished school in '84. Those were the days - IT security meant nothing more than there was a lock on the classroom door, and the old *PASSLOOK was the epitome of hacking. Oh the fun we had breaking into the girls' accounts and leaving little love letters and promises to alter their Computer Studies grades up if they'd just accompany us to the school disco!

Re: Australia doesn't need a Snowden.....

Not to mention their analysts', programmers' and app designers' sterling track record when it comes to Ausgov and IT security...