* Posts by Ken Hagan

8137 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007

Marc Andreessen: Edward Snowden is a 'textbook traitor'

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: What a prat.

"His data release is an illegal act that benefits foreign entities"

How are you measuring that legality and that benefit?

On the first point,concealing knowledge of a major (constitutional) crime is presumably itself an offence, so he was damned if he did and damned if he didn't. Call it a score-draw.

On the second point, if the US government responds by reining in the military and intelligence communities so that the rest of the US (its people and businesses) are trusted by foreigners once again, the net benefit to his country will have been enormous. (Failure of the US government to do this would of course be illegal and of benefit to foreign entities.)

In other news, China continues its campaign to exclude all recent versions of Windows from the Chinese market and therefore provide a billion customers for anyone who isn't Microsoft. Beijing is being slightly opportunistic and rather less slightly hypocritical and self-serving here, but the current climate is such that many other countries (like the other three in the BRIC group) might well be interested in following suit.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: get over it!

"There are ways to blow the whistle on this sort of thing which leave the guilty some way to save face"

Er, to coin a phrase ... "Serioulsy, you believe that?".

The scale of the operation revealed by Snowden is not one or two rogue operatives. It implies that *lots* of people were aware of it and signing off massive expenditure to support it, including those at the very top. One can probably assume that Obama (and Bush before him) don't ask probing questions and so didn't know, but by the same token, there's no point in telling them because they'll believe whatever the NSA chiefs say. So you are trying to blow the whistle on an organisation with billions of dollars at its disposal and no effective legal oversight. The court of public opinion is probably the only place you'll get a hearing and foreign governments are probably your only hope of protection whilst that court is making up its mind.

Those who don't like "blanket revelations" should perhaps reconsider the wisdom of "blanket surveillance".

Redmond is patching Windows 8 but NOT Windows 7, say security bods

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Headmaster

Re: It's just what changed from the 7 SDK to the 8 SDK.

"I did a count of NEW and DELETE statements, and there are less DELETEs than NEWs"

Well I'd refuse to pay his fee simply on grammatical grounds.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Premature announcement

So these people have found differences but not (yet) actual vulnerabilities. Wouldn't it just be a tad more convincing if they'd used their new tool and pursued some of these differences all the way to a genuine vulnerability? As it stands, they are open to the rebuff that the differences aren't significant.

Proving their point would have delayed the announcement by what ... days, months, years, forever? Inquiring minds want to know. (Well, this one does, at least.)

AMD tops processor evolution with new mobile Kaveri chippery

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: IPC increases are nice if they pan out

IPC is a brick wall. The increases won't pan out. The rest of the article makes AMD's latest offering sound quite interesting, but the remarks about IPC suggest that their CTO is a bit of a noob.

For the hardware, the doubling period for IPC is measured in decades. This "big increase" was only 20% and we know that you get performance benefits like that if you double the size of the cache, something that process improvements continue to deliver every 2-3 years despite the naysayers telling us that Moore's Law has ended.

For the software, we know that Intel bet the farm on EPIC and after 15 years of flogging the horse their compiler gurus eventually conceded that they *still* don't know how to get an IPC of more than 2 or 3 out of any conventional language, and probably never will. (Academics could have told them that back in the early 90s, of course, because the problem had been studied to death in the 70s and 80s in the context of data-flow languages and auto-parallelisation.)

In summary, even if you could boost your hardware's IPC by a factor of two or more, which you can't, you wouldn't ever have any software that could exploit it.

Apple: We'll tailor Swift to be a fast new programming language

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Leaky

I can see that automatic reference counting is a problem unless you also allow for explicit weak references. That was known back when Lisp was young and there's a "creation myth" about it in the Jargon File. I would reckon it "embarrassing" to introduce a new language in 2014 with this flaw.

I don't see how you make the jump from there to the "nightmares" of C++. But then, I don't have any problem with memory management in C++, because I use the facilities of the language to handle it all automatically. Perhaps you were thinking of C.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: No need to be so special, Apple

"Don't know, but in China, this happened under Mao when the West was the Enemy, and before IT arrived there."

Back in 1949, I don't think the West was the enemy. Japan and the Nationalists were the enemy. Marxism was openly acknowledged as a European idea, which is why Mao spoke of "socialism with Chinese characteristics". Mao was also friendly with Soviet Russia, which *we* might not think of as a western nation but the Chinese certainly do.

Consequently, 1949 saw the adoption of the Gregorian calendar and the creation of "simplified Chinese" (as distinct from the "traditional Chinese" still used elsewhere). These were presented as good ideas from the West at a time in history when it was still possible to give credit where it was due.

Myspace: Where are you going? We still have all your HUMILIATING PICS

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"Because the recruiters and employers take a look at this crap these days and"

But do you *want* to work for a company whose HR department is staffed by people like that? Getting employed should be as much about you picking the company as them picking you, and if you can filter out all the Catberts simply by photoshopping an interesting childhood onto FarcePuke then that sounds like a bloody good idea.

Yes, kids should be made aware that employers use Google, but unless those employers want to cut themselves off from 95% of the workforce, they'll have to get used to the fact that their staff have a private life and a history outside work.

US bloke raises $250k to build robo-masturbation device

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Blow your damn cock off

Or you could follow the link at the foot of the article: "A buyer's guide to endpoint protection platforms".

Google's driverless car: It'll just block our roads. It's the worst

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: The Disabled, Sitting at Home

"So for example - I've got a program writing a hexdump of received packets on one xterm, debug output on another xterm and actual program operation in a GUI window. Please explain how a blind person is going to operate in that enviroment?"

They aren't. You've clearly chosen your tools to suit the relatively high bandwidth that you can channel through your eyes. I don't believe you are reading, far less memorising, those hex dumps. Much more likely is that you're skimming them for something that catches your eye. Fine, but don't imagine that's the only way to develop software and certainly don't imagine that it is the most effective way for a blind person to do it.

I'm guessing, but I would expect a blind person to spend a lot more time thinking about what they *expect* to see, and writing tools to parse the incoming stream to pick out deviations from that. For certain kinds of software development, such people may in fact be *more* effective than the average programmer, simply because the average programmer's approach of "try it and see" is so far from optimal for certain classes of problem.

'Failure is not an option... Never give up.' Not in Silicon Valley, mate

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"The SEAL commander's admonitions were appropriate to people wanting to fight to the death"

But not to people wanting to win a war. You need to learn from your mistakes and try something different. Other top tips include "don't go bankrupt" and "keep your staff on your side".

New 'Windows-8.1-with-Bing': How's it different from Windows 8.1?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"Windows 8.1 with Bing is simply the normal Windows 8.1 edition with Bing set as default, so to OEMs they won't be able to customise it with a different search engine (and other options) as they may have done before."

So the price difference is Microsoft's estimate of how much OEMs are willing to pay to avoid being associated with Bing? Awesome!

Poll: Climate change now more divisive than abortion, gun control

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"more divisive"

Got an El Reg unit for divisiveness? (No? Might I suggest the "jar", as in Marmite?)

The abortion debate has people killing other people in support of their viewpoint. To my knowledge, no-one has yet been slain for their position on global warming.

Still using e-mail? Marketers say you're part of DARK SOCIAL

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Makes Complete Sense. I Think...

"advertising sales absolutely are not presented as a blind gamble"

Aren't they? I thought there was an exemption from "truth in advertising" laws for cases where the claim was so ridiculous that no reasonable person could take it as anything other than a joke.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: How much would you pay to Like my stuff?

"If a tool that stopped all tracking/advertising was mass adopted and so online ad revenue dried up; how much would a search on Google cost?"

I don't know. How much *did* it cost when Google started out and was just doing advertising rather than tracking?

Your "tracking/advertising" is not a thing. It is two things. Many people are tolerant of one and intolerant of the other.

Also, would the advertising revenue really dry up? It is impossible to measure the effectiveness of online advertising campaigns and I suspect that most providers exploit that to the hilt. If Google just punted total bollocks stats to all their customers, how many would actually notice? Given the increasingly widespread adoption of "Do Not Track" and the long-established "sizable minority" who run AdBlock or its friends, perhaps this has already happened and the answer was "no-one".

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Telephone Tracking

"You can even reissue them to a new visitor the moment one gets used."

And therein lies the marketing-speak, because most will never be used and so you have to "expire" them at some point, so you have to trade off the number of numbers you are willing to juggle against the likelihood that someone writes down your number and then carries on searching for your rivals and by the time they get round to calling you the number has been dished out to several other people.

The technique only works if you have a small number of customers who are nevertheless able to sustain a fairly large or excessively profitable business that can afford to run a PBX just to support a glorified form of caller ID.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Telephone Tracking

There's a deleted post you might have been replying to there, but just in case you were replying to me...

I didn't say *you* made this crap up. I merely suggested that whoever did was exaggerating.

I stand by my claim that there are a limited number of telephone numbers available (certainly for the sort of costs we might be considering here) and that this number is smaller than the number of visitors to a reasonably popular web site (as might be owned by the sort of person willing to shell out for thousands of pheone numbers).

You google search appears to point at a couple of distinct offerings. In the one case, someone is offering to assign distinct phone numbers to different web pages (not visitors). That's orders of magnitude more scalable and probably feasible. In another case, someone is offering to assign a unique number to each visitor and it is obvious that this requires either a massive expenditure on phone numbers, or only works for a very small number of visitors, or is a "creative" use of the word unique. Given that marketing is involved, my vote goes for the last of these.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: "Dark" , "Off the grid" , "Underbelly"

Well "dark" is the new black. You can be sure that if they spoke of "Black Social" in negative terms then they'd live to regret it, but "Dark Social" sounds like some exciting new form of cosmological glue.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Telephone Tracking

"What happens is the number you get served is linked to your browsing session. So when you call that number they know which web visitor you were and all the information that goes along with it."

Colour me skeptical, but I don't think there are enough telephone numbers to make that scheme really work.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: They missed one or two things....

"They can't monetize or target those of us who have gathered round the water cooler or pub table and talk cars, clothing, music, food, etc. "

Ah, but they soon will be able to. Your next (* or the one after ... it's only a matter of time) mobile phone contract will have smallprint to allow the operator to leave your device in listening mode all the time. The sound will be converted to text where possible and tagged with your phone number. (Actual speaker identification will come later, once technology improves still further. For now, it is just "you or one of your friends".) All that semi-anonymous speech gets poured into a big data mine run by the phone company, gets correlated with the speech sent by other phones, and sold to brand owners who want to know what "people" are saying about their latest gizmo.

Or you can pay extra for a contract that doesn't include that option. But most people won't and you won't be able to trust that the person you are standing next to isn't one of the sheep. And because it's all automated and semi-anonymous, it doesn't count as snooping. (The NSA said so.)

Windows XP fixes flaws for free if you turn PCs into CASH REGISTERS

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Careful with that Acronym, Eugene

"something rather different these days"

These days? It always has done. I was using it in the "modern" sense for years before encountering a very respectable gentleman on Usenet using it in the "point of sale" sense. Quite a double-take, I can tell you. It was like grandpa suddenly swearing to the vicar.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: There is NO tablet ... that can come close to competing with my high-end laptop

"Voice recognition is an obvious one. This common use case is ..."

Have you got stats to support the view that voice recognition is "common"? It has been around for a decade or more and never caught on. It has always been my understanding that sound (either from the PC or the user) is such an utterly dreadful thing to encourage in the average working (and, frankly, home) environment, that it never will catch on. The only use-case that I'm aware of with any kind of market share is talking to your phone. That works because phones are things you talk to anyway (*) and because they are such poxy little things that they can't support a proper UI. Neither consideration translates to the wider PC/tablet market.

(* And even there, "Honey, I'm on the train..." is considered anti-social.)

Google's SPDY blamed for slowing HTTP 2.0 development

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Good

Historically, internet protocols have tended to follow the "two interoperable implementations" rule before being adopted as standards, which is the reverse of what you've just advocated. Design is nice, but very few people can anticipate every detail of how a network protocol will respond on all kinds of real-world network.

Shockwave shocker: Plugin includes un-patched version of Flash

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: HTML5

It exists, but don't hold your breath. As long as a substantial minority of your users are running prehistoric versions of IE there is a dis-incentive to create new web-sites that depend on HTML5, and of course there are always reasons not to re-implement an existing site that "still works".

I expect genuinely new sites to be planning to use HTML5 now, since (despite Microsoft's U-turn this week) it is clear that it is only a matter of time before the number of unpatched and well-known holes in IE8 start having a Darwinian effect. (I'm sure careful people will manage to keep XP systems running for years behind corporate firewalls, but I'm equally sure they won't be allowing IE8 onto the public web.)

I don't expect any existing site to switch over to HTML5 sooner than their normal maintenance cycle would demand. For some, perhaps many, sites there is no such maintenance and these will carry on using Flash until their owners go bust (because no-one visits them anymore) and stop paying the hosting bills.

Redmond promises IE8 patch is in the pipeline

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Microsoft is getting really schizophrenic lately

Nah, the lesson is that the "XP is dead" party was so good that MS have only just sobered up and remembered that they have to keep the patches rolling for Server 2003.

Google: 'EVERYTHING at Google runs in a container'

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Back to the Future?

"Containerisation means each container can operate in its own filesystem, meaning you can have entirely different userspaces on top of the same kernel."

Interestingly, 64-bit Windows does virtualise the filesystem (and registry) for 32-bit processes, but doesn't make the facility available to end-users to create their own. It also virtualises various other parts of the object namespace through its session objects. Obviously "faking it" and "hiding it" are the essential functions of any OS (and always have been) so we shouldn't be surprised to find that the mechanisms are already there and affordable. I wonder if we'll see this amazing new feature in Server 2015, or whatever the next new release is.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Oo Exciting..

It is a different category, in terms of what gets virtualised, but it might be the same category in terms of the problems that it solves. A server farm running zillions of VM with the same OS in each VM is probably just providing zillions of isolated places to run applications that require that OS. Containers are a more efficient way to provide the same isolation.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Back to the Future?

Quite a big step up from a Windows Job object, then.

Google tells indie labels to take its YouTube deal or face OBLIVION

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Whilst indie labels clearly benefit from the free hosting service, Google presumably also benefit from being able to say that *they* aren't making any editorial decisions about what gets published on their site.

That may not be an argument that stands up in court, but it certainly stands up in the court of public opinion. Squeezing the little guy isn't something you can do from the moral high-ground.

EBAY... You keep using that word 'ENCRYPTION' – it does not mean what you think it means

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Unhappy

Re: @AC

"The other option I suggested was to force a password change at next sign on after the hashing algorithm change, but this was considered customer-hostile too."

Whereas getting hacked isn't customer-hostile, I suppose.

Yeah, your story has the ring of truth.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Open source reviews

In fairness, some of those OpenSSL bugs *had* been spotted and were entered into the Bugzilla database. The reason they weren't fixed was because the development team wasn't open enough.

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Headmaster

Re: Ah, encryption and hashing

It is ironic if someone mis-uses a word whilst pulling someone else up for mis-using a word. However, it is probably *more* ironic if the word is "ironic".

Ken Hagan Gold badge

In the hands of tech-illiterate PR hacks, "proprietary" doesn't mean anything. It's just a word they insert into press releases because they think it sounds impressive. I'd be surprised if eBay's IT staff have done anything "proprietary" rather than simply switch on the options that came with their system. (Let's hope they actually did the latter.)

China to become world's No 1 economy. And we still can't see why

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Another reason

Crikey! More than a page of comments and still no-one has pointed out that Chinese industry doesn't have to clean up after itself and doesn't have to pay a living wage to its workforce. That double-whammy makes it easy for them to undercut any civilised nation. They don't have to undercut by much to put the competition out of business.

I doubt Western consumers will ever care how their shinies are made (at least, care in sufficient numbers to matter) but sooner or later the Chinese will hit the same problem as every other tiger economy: the workforce will decide that they've had enough and would now like to enjoy a standard of living commensurate with their countries economic status.

Redmond slow to fix IE 8 zero day, says 'harden up' while U wait

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Good!

"Are you browsing the web for any site from a server? 8-O"

We don't know. Just because one is using Server 2003, doesn't mean the machine is an important "server". Indeed, anyone who still thinks there is a difference between a server OS and a client OS, apart from the application software workload, needs to stop drinking the cool-aid. Using the word "server" to mean "valuable" or "powerful" is like using the word "proprietary" to mean "better". It's what the marketeers want you to believe, but surely everyone reading this site knows better?

Rival BT sics ad watchdog on EE: ASA growls at 'most reliable broadband' claim

Ken Hagan Gold badge

It may be true that most consumers are complete idiots, but the ASA should not accept that as a defence. If you make a statement that is false, it remains false no matter how many stupid people you get to read it. If I stand up in court and make a false statement and then say "Well, no-one else in the court knew any better..." I'd expect the judge to take a dim view.

If the ASA is to have any purpose whatsoever, they have to base their judgements on what is objectively true, not what some twat down the local pub thinks after a few drinks.

EE boffin: 5G will be the LAST WORD in mobe tech – literally

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: The future...

I'm sure this boffin chappie is well aware of the IBM quote, which makes his willingness to go public with an apparently equally short-sighted remark all the more interesting and newsworthy.

Don't snap SELFIES at the polls – it may screw up voting, says official

Ken Hagan Gold badge

@Valeyard

I imagine the law is the same in NI as in the rest of the UK, but it is clear from your testimony and my experience that this works out differently in practice.

I don't think I've ever lived in an area where there wasn't someone collecting the numbers. I know what they are doing and what they aren't allowed to do. I've never been asked about my vote and I have even had one tell me that they can't take my number until after I vote (which I didn't know at the time).

Since I generally welcome people getting involved in the democratic process and live in a place where the mere act of voting is both optional and risk-free, I don't mind the parties knowing that I turned up. Mind you, these days I *know* half the candidates personally anyway, so I probably wouldn't actually need to give my number.

Microsoft walks into a bar. China screams: 'Eww is that Windows 8? GET OUT OF HERE'

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Coming up next: Chinese XP.

So several Chinese companies are lining up to provide "support" for XP (doubtless benefitting from the fact that the Chinese government can provide them with the source code)? No doubt they'll be keen to offer this service to overseas customers as well. I can see it now. Install this "Chinasoft Update" ActiveX control and use it like you used to use Microsoft Update. Your Chinese friends will then supply you with monthly updates to your trusted computing base.

Sadly, I can imagine lots of people signing up to that.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Sounds perfectly reasonable to me. If MS try to stop people buying legit copies of Win7, it will increase the numbers buying pirate copies of Win7.

Welcome to Heathrow Terminal, er, Samsung Galaxy S5

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: World's Worst Terminal?

"Samsung must have rocks in their corporate heads."

Well, keep banging the rocks together then...

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"Named after would suggest it was some sort of monument in their memory - named for means they plonked down the money and we did it for them."

Makes sense (like gotten matching forgotten, and doubtless many other examples) but I've never heard anyone on my side of the pond use "named for".

Peak thumb drive is coming in 2016

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"The report doesn't say why thumb drive sales are likely to dip"

Maybe everyone's got one? OK, perhaps several, rather than one, but they last for ages and work just fine so there's no need to buy a new one every six months.

Europe's shock Google privacy ruling: The end of history? Don't be daft

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"By all means, contend all you want, but it IS censorship. Whether it's done by some dictators "blue pencil" office or by a court makes no difference. "

By all means lean on your strict dictionary reading all you want, but no normal speaker of English would use the word censorship to describe a court, for example, protecting a vulnerable witness against potential lethal defendants. The word has very negative overtones and so I hope your dictionary quotation is incomplete. When a court balances the rights of various parties in accordance with ages-old practice (as I was suggesting in my original post) it just isn't what the man in the street calls censorship.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"...PRECISELY the definition of censorship"

Not in my dictionary. As pointed out, courts will consider other rights, such as the right to make a true statement. "It's true" is an absolute defence in libel cases and always has been, so I'd expect courts to give it quite a lot of weight in cases involving other aspects of free speech. However, against that, there is an equally long-standing principle that convictions are "spent" some years after the event and you are entitled to live the rest of your life without being dogged by them. I'd expect weight to be given to that, too.

So if it is true, I'd expect Google (and others) to be pretty free to repeat it and index it for a few years whether or not it shows you in a good light, and be less free to do so over longer periods. Do you have evidence that this isn't how courts are currently operating?

Boffins run iOS apps on Android hardware

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: But the Other Way Around

"Samsung won't care about Yankees claiming ownership of idea space."

Not least because hardware manufacturers don't need to care about software that *they* aren't selling and that customers install post-purchase.

NO, Microsoft hasn't given up on .Net, and YES it's all about cloud

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Dear Sirs

"One of the early promises of .NET was an end to "dependency hell"."

That was the clearest possible indication that the early promises were worthless.

Dependency hell is caused by people releasing new versions of old libraries that have different behaviour from the old ones. Shock news: you can do that in *any* language or platform. Indeed, it would hardly be a platform worth using if you couldn't produce a version 2 that fixed the bugs of version 1. Dependency hell is therefore caused by a lack of testing and discipline by practitioners, not a lack of appropriate technology. Anyone trying to sell you a solution to a behavioural problem is selling snake oil.

Meanwhile, unseen (and probably unused) by most, Microsoft have actually rolled out a thoroughly-horrible-but-functional solution to dependency hell, through the medium of activation contexts and manifests. Nothing particularly to do with .NET, though. They are supported for both native and managed code.

BEAK DRONE: 1080p HD Wi-Fi quad-copter by Parrot takes to skies

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Battery and payload capacity

These are, of course, linked and subject to the same constraints that late Victorian inventors struggled with. Flight is just hard work. Birds are really impressive. Actually, *battery-powered* copters are fairly impressive, too.

Oracle vs Google redux: Appeals court says APIs CAN TOO be copyrighted

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Jerks

Even if the source isn't a duplicate, the optimising compiler will often generate the same object code if it is any good. If you like, it is a search engine. You describe what you want the code to do and it goes away and finds the most efficient implementation, which may of course be the same as it found for someone else's source code. An optimising compiler's specific function is copyright infringement.

Unless of course you can offer one of the following in defence:

I don't write object code -- it was the machine wot did it.

From the compiler's viewpoint, the duplication is a mathematical requirement.

From the end-user's viewpoint, the duplication is an accident.

From a statistical viewpoint, the duplication across the whole code base is insignificant.

IANAL, so I've no idea whether any of the above would stand up. Actually, the evidence of these high-profile spats is that even if I *were* a lawyer, I still wouldn't have any idea. These massive companies with huge legal budgets still seem to blunder into court with no idea about who's going to win. A scientist might take that as experimental evidence that the legal system is unpredictable even to experts in cases where the evidence is not in dispute and therefore the system is not fit for purpose.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Probably the death knell of the "industry"

"If you bothered to look at the APIs in question you'd have noticed they were plainly copied."

And if you bothered to read up on the case you'd have noticed that this wasn't in dispute. Google were quite clear that they'd implemented the Java APIs. It was their view that these APIs constituted a non-copyrightable specification and as long as they produced a clean-room implementation they were entitled to copy the spec.

But 9 lines? Really? Out of however many thousand?Given that the function *has* to perform the same task and presumably *ought* to do so with the minimum of overhead? And given that Oracle's lawyers clearly had hundreds of such functions to *choose* from, hunting around until they found one that happened to alight on a particularly similar source form? Sorry, lawyers, but if 9 lines is all you can come up with then *that's* evidence of a deliberate and careful attempt to *avoid* copying. You've just proved the other guy's case.