Posts by Ken Hagan 8168 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007
Perhaps you missed the judge's take on the matter:
"It is one thing to cause a stolen computer to report its IP address or its geographical location in an effort to track it down,” Rice wrote. “It is something entirely different to violate federal wiretapping laws by intercepting the electronic communications of the person using the stolen laptop.”
The anti-theft software should confine itself to figuring out where the laptop is. The judge clearly feels that "two feet south of a beaver" isn't useful in this regard.
The first ten amendments were issued together and I've never seen it suggested that anything should be read into the order. I was thinking of the fourth item on the list, which clearly prohibits fishing expeditions. (Behavioural advertising is a perfect example of a fishing expedition because the information collected is useless at the time it is collected and only becomes useful when it is compared with other data that was previously believed to be unrelated.)
I'll grant that in this example it is only the state that is constrained, but that's an implementation artefect. It is presumed that most misdemeanours can be constrained by ordinary laws, possibly after the first offence that persuades people that it shouldn't be allowed, but mis-demeanours by agents of the law itself have to be pro-actively obstructed. Good minimalist design therefore results in a "constitution" that says very little about ordinary people.
A poor argument. You can advertise without cookies. What you can't do is target those ads based on knowledge of the recipient's browsing history. Worse (for you), *no* advertiser could target their ads in this way until (in historical terms) very recently, so you are never going to persuade me that ads need cookies.
Does that spoil your business model? Sorry about that. Perhaps you should get a new business model that doesn't offend society's long established ideas about privacy. (And when I say "long-established", I'm remembering that those idiots who framed the US constitution reckoned it was important enough to retrofit "privacy" as their very first bug-fix.)
"Free speech campaigners said that amendments to the draft Defamation Bill should include "concrete proposals to stop legal threats against internet hosts bringing down entire websites," a spokesman for the Libel Reform Campaign said, according to the BBC."
Perhaps I'm missing something. (My first language is English rather than legalese, so it is perfectly possible.) But presumably it is already the case that no web-site is stupid enough to edit someone else's remarks and then present them as though they were original. That requires much more effort and judgement than the safe alternatives of either publishing as-is or refusing to publish at all.
If we now add a "conduit" defence in the new law then it will be common knowledge in legal circles that all such cases are groundless and therefore anyone bringing one is knowingly wasting the court's time and deserves to bear all costs and be marked down as a vexatious litigant for good measure.
Even if that isn't enough to stop some idiots, they'll only be able to do it once.
(Icon: I Am Not A Lawyer, but this is the closest icon I could find.)
My impression was that they didn't manage to "fly" it at all, and that was the problem. It sounds like the "flight-path" in question (the one that was planned to intersect with the ocean) was more of a trajectory, in the ballistic sense. And that's much less impressive.
"some other site that has crawled"
Or, indeed, might crawl at some arbitrary point in future and might republish in summary or in translated form. Clearly Google's core algorithms need to be updated to include some form of AI so that this information remains excluded forever.
Or you could just honour robots.txt and ignore anyone who doesn't bother to use it.
Absolutely bubblemungus. This is a company that doesn't pay dividends and which nearly every pundit agrees is driven by one, terminally ill, man. Their "cash pile" is impressive, but still only about a fifth of this valuation. Perhaps the valuation is coming from those clever folks who thought you could use CDOs to make bad mortgage debt disappear.
Exercise for the reader: what happens when a stock market bubble bursts in the middle of the recession caused by the previous bubble bursting?
"For a long time..."
"The problem lasted for ~5 months and got to the point I gave up on the iPlayer."
Umm, the tone of your post suggests that you believe this problem was eventually fixed. That must be a different iPlayer from the one I'm using here, then. Perhaps they only fixed the Windows version.
Even once you add in the cost of consumables, the price for (black and white) printing on conventional paper is measured in pennies per sheet. So this stuff had better cost less than a fiver for an A4-sized sheet.
Oh, and what happens after 260 pages that makes it unusable? Is it a case of gradual degradation in quality that becomes unacceptable somewhere between 200 and 300 pages? If so, it will have to be even cheaper still, coz a pad of paper maintains maximum print quality right up to the last sheet.
It certainly does, and for proof you need look no further than the extensive prior art mentioned by earlier commentards.
Do El Reg commentards count as "skilled in the art"? Are these pages admissible as evidence? Certainly if I were the judge, this one case alone would be sufficient to mark the plaintiffs down as malicious litigants. No-one with even half a clue about operating systems could bring this case to court without feeling morally soiled.
So, having determined that it is "obviously" better for everybody's apps to run on Google's CPU, they are now laboriously trying to re-implement the Windows API on HTML. Today's contribution appears to be some kind of registry where applications can be marked as "handling" particular content types and other apps can let the user pick from the available handlers.
Meanwhile, over the road, Microsoft have just finished re-implementing the entire Windows API on .NET, only to discover that no-one is really interested because running everything on an emulated architecture is *so* last decade compared with running everything on a VM in a random data centre.
Meanwhile, round the corner, the WINE people have nearly finished re-implementing the entire Windows API on Linux, only to discover that actually the documented API isn't the set of goalposts they should have been aiming at and so consequently only half the apps work.
Meanwhile meanwhile, anyone who actually wants to get stuff done is running the original Windows API on the original native hardware and wondering why the industry hasn't done anything innovative in the last decade or more.
"I know what ACLs and role based permissions and real limited accounts are, Win 7 does not."
Apparently you don't, since Win7 (and all its NT predecessors) has full support for these things. It takes about two minutes to set up, mind, and good luck getting any games to work in anything other than "pants down, bent over" mode, but that's hardly Windows' fault.
If games vendors did Linux versions, they require that you run as root. (Google Earth 5 had that property on my Kubuntu box until I switched off some sort of atmospheric effect. Performance was abysmally slow and the recommended workaround was to sudo the app.)
(Btw: where's that "Google sucks" icon? This one'll have to do.)
"Ofcom's report effectively kicked web-blocking into the long grass – and showed the power of a quango to make and break laws. "
Er, no it doesn't. It demonstrates that very occasionally ministers are willing to listen to the advice of people who they appointed, and then exercise the power of ministers to make or break laws, which itself only exists where parliament has seen fit to delegate it to them.
But to have Ofcom raise a technically literate objection AND for the ministers to bother to listen is surely unprecedented, so I'm not surprised you were thrown off base.
If you *want* to produce pages that attack the end-user's browser, you don't wait for a program generator run by someone else to have a bad day. You create your own pages using hand-crafted code.
Moving away from flash means that end-users are no longer subject to weaknesses in Adobe's rendering of flash documents. They are instead only subject to the weaknesses in their browser's rendering of HTML5 documents. Such weaknesses exist, but we have a choice of browsers and nearly all of them fix problems faster than Adobe.
"I expect that creating such web animations in a text editor and Gimp will be a much more secure alternative"
I don't follow your reasoning here. The creation tools presumably run locally and merely generate data files that you add by other means to your web-site. You can make this process as secure as you like, since the PC that generates the files needn't have a network connection.
"Also, while generally given as a lesser point, the 1st Amendment is primarily designed to protect political speech;"
Umm, I can't see how this could be anything *other* than political speech. Something like furry dice could be decoration or an indication of support for some sports team. But bollocks? Can that really be anything except an attempt to get up the noses of moral conservatives?
Free markets are only efficient when both buyer and seller are knowledgeable about the market.
The other side are using every trick in the book to maximise their returns, so unless the civil service retains *some* in-house IT specialists and gives them real power during the planning and tendering stages, the taxpayer is going to lose out. Similar arguments could, of course, be made for the need to retain legal and even sales or marketing expertise within the civil service. You need to recognise the dirty tricks and weasel wording.
There's also an implicit assumption that both buyer and seller *want* the best value. Perhaps *senior* civil servants should feel a bit more heat when a few billion goes down the plughole.
Yes, indeedy. I find the general reactions to this case curious. It seems that we're now so used to copyright being "essentially forever" that when confronted by an instance of "no longer in copyright" we can't quite believe that it's true.
I expect one reason why Lucas fought this case is that one could probably argue that other props from the original film are now similarly out of copyright. Is a light-sabre functional or sculptural?
"until we tackle the problems of unregulated greed driven banking, then this problem is not going to solved and will probably reoccur. The regan/thatcher light touch free market policies have failed, just as communism has failed,"
If we'd taken the light touch approach, the greedy bankers would have gone bust. Instead, we took the "massive state intervention" approach, plonking a multi-trillion dollar debt on our grandchildren in order to bail out the bastards and pretend the system was working.
For added irony, the UK PM who screwed the next two generations of working classes in order to bail out the plutocrats called himself a socialist and fancied himself as a bit of a economics whizz.
Well, not if you bail them out they don't.
However, you could let the bank fail, letting the central bank collect the repayments on outstanding debts and guarantee the savings of existing investors. That preserves the pensions and life savings of the man in the street but doesn't preserve the massive salaries of the bankers who failed.
Even within the financial sector, the majority of players *didn't* overstretch themselves. They choose the path of lower returns because they knew the risks and didn't want the pain. We've now penalised *them* by bailing out the idiots. They will learn from this. The next crash will be worse.
A mathematician would have no such problems with the phrase. Ever closer union simply prohibits reversals. It appears to prohibit standstill, but if you allow infinitessimal progress then this can be made indistinguishable from standstill, so that's OK. (And since any contract can be renegotiated with the consent of both parties, it isn't even a long-term commitment.)
No. My problem with the phrase "ever closer union" is that I know full well what the authors *intended* by it -- ambiguity. They intended to slip it in on the understanding that it was a harmless form of words, and then after everyone had signed up to it they would turn round and tell us that it meant something of consequence.
The fact that all EU treaties are drafted in multiple languages merely simplifies this process of deception. They ought to be drafted in just one language (French, to prove that the choice doesn't matter) and written sufficiently clearly that everyone else feels "safe" signing them.
Does it have to be generic, or can operators "skin it" with their favourite eye candy? (Obviously this feature would be added to the software as part of the localisation support, and as such it would be culturally sensitive and wholly politically correct, not just a way of tarting up the passenger list.)
There's a moon of Jupiter that is kept nice and toasty by gravitational flexing, but my understanding was that the Earth relies on the large amount of radioactive nasties decaying away in its core and it was Lord Kelvin's ignorance of that phenomenon that led him to his rather low estimate for the age of the Earth.
So yeah, renewable in the same sense that nukes are renewable (i.e., not fossil carbon).
It's not a philosophical battle. It's an economic one. It is, however, "classic" since the results have been in for some decades now.
The prime exponent of what you call the Raymond Chen approach is in fact IBM's mainframe division, which will still happily load object code (source lost several decades ago) from the 1960s (when addressing was 24-bit) into processes running on their z-Series.
Between them, IBM and Microsoft have proven beyond reasonable doubt that you make more money by selling upgrades that don't break the customer's existing application base. The reason is perfectly simple. Nearly everyone has spent more on their apps than on their OS and hardware combined.
To take an earlier commenter's example: if I'd spent good money on CS4, I'd be a bit miffed to discover that I lose functionality when I upgrade the OS. I may not know who to blame, but I'd be miffed.
A case of confused priorities there. Your face is presumably already in the public domain but presumably your bank account details aren't.
And here was me thinking there was a constitutional right to privacy on the left bank of the pond. I wonder how this judge would have decided on a case of CCTV in a public swimming pool changing room. I mean, customers aren't buying the swimming pool, merely renting the use of it, so why shouldn't the owner keep tabs on what they are doing?
I want to believe this, but if we learned anything from the netbook debacle it was that small cheap computers are only economically viable (for the hardware vendors) if there is a version of desktop Windows to run on them (for the mass market) that doesn't completely suck on that hardware.
Windows 7 certainly sucks on low-end x86 hardware, but I'll be generous and reserve judgement until the ARM build of Windows 8 actually makes an appearance.
I'm not sure about that. To a particle physicist, climate science probably looks like a many-body problem.
"Many" in this context means "larger than two" and such problems are "Hard" in the sense of "starts with being fundamentally insoluble and goes exponentially downhill from there". I rather suspect that such people would inject a much-needed dose of rigour and caution into the whole debate, so I'd welcome their input, but I wouldn't expect them to come up with better theories.
And quite right too.
Actually, since the microscope predates just about all medical knowledge bar Galen (and that's not saying much) I'm not sure there was much of a theory, but even if there was I have no problem with it getting a rough ride before there was any evidence to back it up. But maybe that's just me because...
I have no problem with changing my mind in the light of new evidence and I have no problem with saying "I don't know." when confronted by something I don't understand. However, I have noticed that some people feel obliged to invent an answer in such cases and really object to changing their mind when evidence eventually turns up.
I think the latter is the recognised phenomenon of confirmation bias. As far as I know, however, the former isn't a recognised psychological trait. (If anyone knows better, I'd be interested to know.) My gut feeling is that the two are correlated, but I've no hard data so I'd better be good and say "I don't know."!
"A program a few months ago had a religious tyke saying that as it's called the theory of evolution so as it's only a theory therefore isn't true. It's why I now always refer to it as the law of evolution ;)"
I'd say you're half right. Evolution is not a theory. However, it isn't a proven law either. It's an observed fact. Stuff changes. Things living now are just different from things living a hundred million years ago. The "speculative" part is the theory of natural selection, which provides an explanation for how those changes might happen. Darwin and Wallace developed the theory to explained the by-then-already-accepted fact of evolution, as observed in the fossil record.
Given what we now know about genetics (with credit due to Mendel at the end of the 19thC and Crick and Watson in the middle of the 20thC) it just isn't very speculative anymore. It's hard to see how you could fail to get natural selection in a world where genes are constantly and selectively weeded out of the population. But in the middle of the 19thC, Darwin and Wallace were effectively saying that such mechanisms would eventually be found and *that* was quite a bold hypothesis.
But as I said, you are right to bother about terminology. If more people spoke about the "Theory of Natural Selection" and the "Observed Fact of Evolution" then spectators might take issue with the terminology and learn something. (Two things, actually.)
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