Posts by Ken Hagan

Re: German Law

You've forgotten about the European Arrest Warrant.

@DROP TABLE

Your first two paragraphs are fine. You want to watch the third. Most of us don't need to have been around at the time to "remember" what they did. Such "memories" are not short, and IMHO neither should they be.

But yeah, banning this stuff just makes everyone behave like thwarted teenagers.

Re: the German history curriculum

"Believe me - Nazism is about half of the whole history curriculum in school here. Hell, our national holiday is a day of showing Nazi documentaries on TV and depressive speeches about our heavy historical burden."

Given the average youth's reaction to being told "you must not do that, ever" I'd say that was a courageous decision on the part of the curriculum planners.

I'm also curious to know exactly how that works. Do you tell the truth and traumatize the little children, or do you tone it all down and thereby leave them wondering what all the fuss is about?

all illegal in Germany

I believe this point was made at the time, but the lawyers were too stupid to understand.

Fortunately, I'm sure there are now plenty of people outside Germany now applying such tools to this company's software, and plenty of clued up Germans now looking for alternatives to a piece of software that, even if not already exploited, probably only has a week or so to go before it becomes an unacceptable liability on any sane person's system.

Re: Actually...

"the global financial crisis has fairly crushingly proved the point"

...that if you intervene in a market economy and stop the losers from being eliminated, by bunging billions at them, then you end up with a horrible mess.

Re: Hello?

Without the high-energy agriculture and the high-energy transport network and the high-energy "rest of the economy", you most certainly *are* talking about a return to peasant living.

You may be able to point at a handful of "two plasmas" domestic users, but energy consumption in all these other areas represents the majority of *your* lifestyle's energy cost and they are nothing like as wasteful, since they are commercial operations and already complain about the cost of energy. Making energy much more expensive, as the OP suggested, would be very bad for "the economy" in the short term and consequently bad for the people it supports (i.e., you) in the long term.

(untitled)

"No need for death camps (why does every muppet Daily Fail reader think that's what it entails??), "

Probably because the majority of Fail readers are over 50.

If you want to lower the population by non-Draconian means, it will take a long time. China had a one child per family policy for donkeys and saw bog-all drop in population over that period.

Now couple that with the fact that over the same period any humane development policy would see 6/7 of the existing population come up to the same standard of living as the lucky bastards reading this article. Putting these two facts together, it is clear to me that global energy consumption will *have* to be significantly larger in 2100 than they are now, because happily we just aren't sadistic enough to contemplate the alternative.

Technologically, this isn't a problem, even with CO2 emission constraints. The problem is that too many people still fondly hope that the extra energy simply won't be needed, so they don't need to think Hard thoughts about how they'll provide it.

Re: what part of unsustainable don't you understand

It sounds like you want a true steady state, so I'll suggest you google "heat death of the universe".

Meanwhile, for the rest of us, there's no actual need for a steady state. As Douglas Adams once pointed out, the universe is Really Big. Sustainable growth is perfectly possible.

And my luddite objection to living like a peasant is basically that there are too many of us to do so. Whilst you're googling, look up world population levels at various points in history. We're all quite familiar with exponential growth, but the dominant pattern throughout history has been a plateau, policed by Malthusian checks, as the prevailing technology limited the available energy budget per capita.

For a "peasant" (pre-industrial?) lifestyle, we're current over-staffed by quite a few billion. On what timescale would you like to dispose of this surplus? If you forcibly sterilise the entire population of the world, you can probably complete the "adjustment" within a century without resorting to genocide. (Of course, you'll have to keep a few people fertile so that you still have youngsters to breed in 2111, but I don't suppose there will be any political problems in deciding who gets spared the snip. Oh no.)

PV works?

The world is not short of vulture capitalists looking for a guaranteed return on their money. However, where I live, PV only "works" because of a whacking great feed-in tarriff, enjoyed by people who can afford the installation costs and paid for in higher electricity prices by those who can't.

Re: There is no silver bullet

"if we cut energy consumption by 50% then a mixture of technologies become viable."

That's going to need a *lot* of silver bullets. You could use them to force the existing population to accept a 50% reduction in living standards, or you could use them to force a 50% population reduction. Either way, don't expect history to be kind to you.

Fortunately, you are talking total bollocks. Almost any non-fossil-fuel-based technology would, if adopted on a large enough scale, result in a massive reduction in greenhouse emissions. Since even the good folks of the IPCC are still talking in terms of decades rather than years, the switchover wouldn't even need to be costly. You just replace fossil-fueled infrastructure with non-fossil-fueled versions at end-of-life.

It wouldn't need to be a centrally planned or legislated policy either. A tax on raw carbon (coal, oil, gas) would be easy to police and collect, since these fuels are needed on such a vast scale that no-one could possibly "smuggle" them, and there are only a limited number of sites world-wide where significant quantities are actually extracted. Start the tax really low and set a schedule of increases so that by 2050 it is simply uneconomic to extract coal, oil or gas if your intention is simply to burn it.

All this could be done now, at the stroke of a pen, without any technological breakthroughs. It requires only that today's politicians make promises (that future politicians will maintain the tax escalator) that they themselves won't have to keep.

The only problem is the one identified in the article. There are people out there who *want* the sky to be falling.

the hostname part

"An interesting variation that I have heard here is the helpful offer to replace it with an underscore, which their system will accept. Always gives me a good laugh that one."

Be thankful you weren't asked to subtract the second half from the first half.

unnecessary validation

Don't get me started ... oh, too late...

When my sister-in-law got married, she was told that she could legally use any name she liked, and several if she so chose, as long as her intentions weren't fraudulent, so in the UK at least, name validation is pointless to the point of being wrong.

Addresses, I believe, have a preferred form as far as the UK post office is concerned, although I'm pretty sure you couldn't even write a grammar for it, let alone a regular expression.

And before we go, can I just mention that asking a user to divide their name into "title", "forename" and "surname" is almost always an indication that you intend to separate the parts and stick them back together in the wrong order next time to talk to the customer.

Sorry. I'll go and sit down in a darkened room now.

Re: sponsors abound

"Presumably this was an ad for rackspace"

They need a new marketing department, then. I know all publicity is good publicity but they can surely do better than an article that says "we're crap".

Re: Ordnance Survey

The MAC address on a wifi router is no more "personal" than the house number on my front door, and exists for a similar purpose. If your eyes could see the wavelengths concerned, identifying your house by MAC address would be no more intrusive than using the colour of your roof or the presence of an unusual tree in the front garden. Characteristics such as these have been used for centuries when giving directions to passers-by and *that* (rather than hacking into your network) is the stated and fairly obvious purpose of collecting this data and allowing Android phones to use it.

I note that this comment thread *still* hasn't established a credible mechanism for remotely discovering someone's wifi MAC address, so I really do mean "passers-by". In order to use this "freely available" information, you need to be close enough that you could find it yourself by listening.

So why are Google collecting it at all? Well, although *you* can just read the names on the street signs and the house numbers, your phone can't.

@Stoneshop

Last time I went hill-walking in anger, I used a map that had houses marked on it. Not infrequently, I would find myself estimating my position using those houses. I'm pretty sure the Ordnance Survey didn't ask the property owners for permission to list them on the map. As far as I can see, the only difference is that houses show up in the 4-700 nanometer band and wifi shows up at longer wavelengths.

Do you camouflage your house to stop people using it for navigation?

Hey, Steve...

The IP address of the *wifi* port on my router is almost the same. Perhaps we're neighbours?

Another title

"Is it OK for me to make and sell recordings of any radio or TV broadcasts that I pick up by "simply listening"?"

As long as you have the permission of any relevant copyright holders, I don't see why not. I don't think the *broadcaster* can do anything about it.

Returning to the wireless access point, the "existence" broadcasts have no copyrightable content and their intended purpose is to be heard by any receiver within range, so I don't think there are any legal problems here either.

Once the data has been stored by Google and collated with some identifying information, it might be subject to the Data Protection Act. But that's only a wild guess. IANAL.

"caught collating this data"

Er, what data? His site is clearly capable of collecting wifi MAC addresses, though we've no evidence that he doesn't just drop them on the floor once he's served up the map. He could also be collecting IP addresses, just like every other site on the planet, but we've no evidence that he is doing that either. He's definitely *not* collecting personal or geographic info, beyond what can be inferred by any other site, since his site does not ask for any.

Sometimes I wonder just what privacy horrors we are missing, whilst we fret over non-events like this one.

Re: your MAC address, your location and you IP address.

I didn't provide my location, and (almost certainly thanks to an El Reg article a year or two back) I happen to know that my wifi is already mapped on someone's war-driving site, so I'm not terribly concerned about the privacy implications.

Come to think of it, I'm not too sure I care anyway. Whilst *my* location is quite variable, my *router's* location hasn't changed for quite a few years now and has separate MAC addresses for the ADSL (internet-visible) and wifi (war-driving visible) ports, so it's hard to see quite what the privacy implications are.

The bottom 64 bits of their IPv6 address...

...will be the MAC address of the ADSL port on their router, not the Wifi port, so I think the point stands. Wireless MAC addresses are really only visible within the range of the device.

Also, I'm not sure whether the bottom 64 bits really are *usually* the MAC address. Firstly, this is a known privacy issue and various RFCs have addressed it. Secondly, the written (text) form of an IPv6 address provides net admins with a real incentive to use some other method, so that they get a large block of zeroes in the middle of the address.