Posts by Ken Hagan 8168 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007
"...I've not seen anyone argue it's moral or fair."
OK, I'll bite. The loopholes exist because at some point Parliament decided that the system would be *fairer* if an exemption was permitted in specific cases. We call those loopholes. Creating them required more effort than just having a flat rate. They would not exist if MPs didn't think they were fair.
"Many organisations ban removable writeable media unless the need is justified."
They may claim to, but these days even a mobile phone could easily be a removable writable medium. Now, I'm sure there are some organisations out there who realise this and ban personal phones in some parts of the workplace, but I doubt there are "many".
Seems unlikely. I've heard a lot of bad things said about the x86 and its successors, but Turing incompleteness isn't one of them. I suppose if this was /quite/ a few years ago then they might have been complaining about the lack of an NX bit, either in AMD's offerings or (equally importantly, if you are trying to flog an OS) Intel's offerings. But that hole was plugged about a decade ago.
Do you recall (or can you say) roughly what sort of instructions they had in mind?
"version 43 would not be deleted, until you had accumulated too many versions of the same file."
That rather depended on your sysadmin. A friend of mind found she was working with a BOFH who had PURGE as a scripted nightly (*) task, just to keep the disc lean you understand.
(* OK, I don't think it actually survived to run a second night, but that was the original intention.)
"You want "anonymous" data? Convert each phone number to a one-way hash key. "
Wouldn't work in this case. The number of possible *messages* (phone numbers) in this case is small enough that you could brute force yourself a set of tables to reverse the hash.
...or time to consider whether those "self-professed adherents" actually adhere to what they profess. *I* don't doubt my worldview, and watching the US flush itself down the toilet is merely another data point to show that the Founding Fathers got it right. There really isn't anything special about Americans. The special thing was the set of rules they lived under. Once that was gone, they went down the same plughole as every other former Top Nation.
http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2013/06/07/hold_the_death_of_conspiracy_theory_for_conspiracy_science/#c_1853775
Nope. It looks like you can click on the "Posted Saturday 8th June 2013 17:36 GMT" text and that creates (and goes to) a permalink to the particular reply.
"That's a good argument and I applaud it ... but are you so certain the your spooks aren't doing the same thing?"
Dunno about Canadian spooks, but the GCHQ story suggests that the UK and US are simply using each other's spooks to get around local laws against spying on your own folks. If we all follow Trevor's advice we'd probably end up with many more such bilateral understandings, but probably not much more privacy. The real problem, and I think Trevor's article makes the point perfectly well, is that even the best constitution in human history isn't worth a hill of beans unless you actually enforce it.
"I think being a policeman attracts people who are just as bad as the criminals most of the time."
I think you've got that backwards. Being a criminal makes becoming a policeman attractive. Society just has to ensure that there are checks and balances within the police force to spot people who have joined in order to be bent.
Followed the link. Found nothing beyond a pre-processor that only lets you use smart pointers. Good luck interfacing with existing libraries and good luck trying to persuade someone who already *is* using smart pointers to insert a little-known and barely supported preprocessor into their tool chain for zero benefit.
"Nobody is claiming that any of these snooping measures would have prevented those events, ..."
Aren't they? Boris Johnson said at the weekend that it was too soon to say whether they'd have been stopped but we should have the measures anyway. Now Boris is supposedly a smart guy and perfectly able to follow a line of reasoning, so for him to advocate having the measures anyway makes no sense in this context unless you take him to mean that they might well have stopped it, and the first half is then just cowardly wiggle room.
As the days pass, it becomes clearer that there is no email or internet trail that might have allowed us to prevent this. On the contrary, it looks like good old-fashioned detective work had already brought at least one of the perpetrators to the attention of MI5, to the extent that they had spoken to him so often that he felt harassed. You can't *be* more on MI5's radar than that, but still he "slipped through" because people like that are just unpredictable. As a society, we need to face up to that. 100% security is not possible.
"If you work in technology, you are responsible for putting people out of work. That is our job."
No need to buy into the Luddite analysis. One could equally make the case that we are responsible for keeping people in work, by raising their productivity to the point where it can finance the salary that pays the bills charged by the rest of society. There are more people "in work" these days than at any point in human history.
"Second hand cannot directly benefit the game industry, it has nothing to do with it except taking the money that should have been poured into said industry."
Which is the better deal for you: £10 for a game you can re-sell later for £5, or £8 for a game you can't? And if the person making the second-hand purchase is willing to pay £5 but not £8, the game industry is only going to sell one copy, so it is better to sell it for £10 rather than £8.
"The conventional pronunciation of a sequence "gi" at the beginning of a word is as if it is "ji", although "git" is one of a number of exceptions."
Whilst I appreciate the method to your madness, I'm not sure that the exceptions don't out-number the rule-followers in this case.
Giant, giraffe, giblets, gym, ...
Gift, give, gimbal, gimp, gibbon, ...
And pause for a moment to consider a related dispute. The giga- prefix comes from a Greek word with a hard 'g' which in English is 'giant', with a soft 'g'.
I think we just have to go with established practice on this one, so it is hard cheese to this guy and hard 'G's to the rest of us.
There's even more. Well actually, there wasn't. They didn't have enough for a fourth bomb until November of the same year. The US was briefly a nuclear power, then a non-nuclear power.
Mind you, even if this had been public knowledge, only a fool would have called their bluff, since three months down the line you'd be toast. Actually, given the subsequent spy scandals, it is quite probable that the Russians *did* know, and weren't fools. Nukes, eh? Gotta love 'em. The only known mechanism for persuading even the most beligerent politicians and generals to get a clue.
My reading of the article is that pirates are unaffected and it is only those who paid good money for the content who are now screwed.
What the "content" industry needs is unbreakable DRM. Unfortunately, their business model is based on delivering a signal to the display that a human being can watch. The signal must be unprotected at that point for a human being to be able to watch it. It follows that all the tools needed to crack your DRM have to be contained in the box that you mass produce and sell to any anonymous punter who has the cash.
So, in the absence of unbreakable DRM, what the industry needs is to rely on the general honesty of the majority, charge a reasonable price for the product, and stop penalising those who choose to pay.
I'll dispute it (though not your implication that English is an illogical pile of toss).
Gardening is a on-going process (of taking care of something). The need is continual and the actions required on any different day are not the same. So you can stop gardening, have a sleep, and start again, but it is still gardening both because you are doing something different and because the objective never ceased.
Downloading, on the other hand, is a completable action and when you do it again the next day it is exactly the same repeatable action.
Also, from a stylistic viewpoint, the word "re-gardening" makes you want to sigh or weep with despair, rather like having to re-download something because of a broken business model.
"The company you contracted with is gone, and they took your cash with them."
Perhaps I mis-read the article, but it sounded to me like the company was bought by Sky. Presumably the law takes the view that Sky bought all the contractual obligations as well as the assets. Last I heard, Sky were still trading.
"An ActiveX component is just a native DLL or EXE. It can literally do anything it likes, OS security permitting"
That's quite a big if, since one of the functions of any half-decent OS is precisely to sandbox user-level processes with "address space, heap, stack and file storage space separate from other apps or the OS" that you mention earlier on. ActiveX got its deservedly dismal reputation because Microsoft did not do this, so you ended up with arbitrary code from untrusted sources running with all the (usually administrative) privileges of the logged-on user.
In the case of railways, a really big infrastructure project that has the added advantage of being one that you can stop and restart as cash-flow permits, would be to replace all of the existing 19th century lines and signalling with something from the 21st century. You'd increase capacity everywhere you did this (because signalling is a limitation almost everywhere), you'd presumably electrify the whole network (so it could run on carbon-free electricity if you'd bothered to build the generating capacity), and you wouldn't upset any Nimbys.
"No windows tax makes it cheap."
Does it? I thought the cost of an OEM Windows licence was so low that it was similar to the markup you might have to add to a non-Windows machine make up for the lower sales volume. I can't think of any convincing evidence I've seen in the last 20 years that suggests machines without Windows are cheaper than machines with.
I imagine that would breach the treaty on putting weapons into space. That was, what, 1970 or so and survived a couple of decades of Cold War. Treaties on chemical and biological weapons also survived over the same period. When you are dealing with countries, rather than isolated nutcases, there is *some* recognition that there are lines neither side wants to cross.
Most curious. Why would even the most hardened nerd want a console on a phone when they could just SSH in from a nearby (or even not so nearby) machine with a proper keyboard and screen? (Come to think of it, why aren't *all* poxy small devices maintainable using a nearby machine with a person-sized interface?)
Agreed about the time factor. I assume that those who set exams reckon that as long as they can write down the specimen answers from the marking scheme in the time available, the time is long enough and students who need longer to write their own answers deserve to be penalised. I wonder, though, if it wouldn't be a better test of academic achievement if students were given twice as long, so that everyone had enough to time write down their best answers.
I'd also point out that I can produce a reasonable diagram or map with a pencil and paper in about a tenth of the time it takes to persuade some wretched drawing package to do it. In the sciences or humanities, that's quite important. In maths, too, I can scribble working far faster (and better laid out) than I can with the (otherwise beautiful) software methods. This proposal only works for exams that are just essay writing.
Also agreed about BYOD. Great way to give an advantage to better off students who can bring their own devices rather than use the rubbish ones provided for free, Also, the "best" students can prepare their device the night before with lots of stuff that doesn't show up on a cursory scan but is magically enabled during the period of the exam itself as long as the right fingerprints are present.
"Another thing - as a comer from another country, I find it rather ridiculous that bills issued by utility companies can be used to do things like open bank account in one's name."
I'm not sure what coming from another country has to do with it. Plenty of UK-born folks don't understand this point either, but ... the bank doesn't care who you are or whether that is your real name. What it cares about is being able to identify you when you come back the next day to withdraw some cash. Utility bills indicate that other organisations facing the same problem have found these particular credentials and address details to be sufficient. The systems works, costs next to nothing, and annoys the control freaks at the Home Office. What's not to like?
"I think I saw that documentary, too, donkeys years ago."
I don't know about the documentary, but you've remembered the experiment and, yes, this is fairly old stuff. I found out about it from Martin Gardner's "Ambidextrous Universe", which was itself first published before my time. I think he was the one who introduced the Ozma problem of talking to anti-aliens.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP_violation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ambidextrous_Universe
W8sp1 is not unexpected. The appearance of a straight-to-desktop option and the return of a Start menu, however, would be two things that Microsoft (well, ok, Sinofsky) swore blind would never happen. If the rumours are true, these two things are unexpected.
But I suppose you can still argue that they are not "anything new". :)
A better conspiracy theory is that someone high up knew that the only way to get Sinofsky out (of) there was to give him unlimited rope. Microsoft's behaviour these last ten years makes sense as a largely hidden but bloody war of corporate politics amongst executives who have been gifted with a monopoly so secure that it doesn't matter what they release.
"Funny how all those people using that argument against the Ribbon have never found out that you can minimize it to show only tab names and still work with it - since when you mouse over a tab name the Ribbon shows that tabs' content."
Not funny at all. We had to wait several years before Microsoft's usability experts realised that such a thing might be a good idea. Give it a few more years and perhaps they'll realise that they could replace all the graphics with purely textual command descriptions. Then, as the sun begins to swell into a red giant, they might have the inspired idea of using an underlined character within the text to indicate the keyboard shortcut for each command.
...it actually only came into this world in 2009 and will (as a "component") enjoy the support lifecycle of the parent OS at the time of release.
On the other hand, MS may well argue that IE9 is the version of this "component" in the most recent service pack for Vista or 7. Their long-standing policy is not to support older SPs after a couple of years of the new one being available, so presumably IE8 is already out of support on those platforms. That would leave just XP (which is famously dead next Spring) or XP Pro Embedded (which lives on until Dec:2016).
"Will it ever go commercial? I don't think so, it will always be hugely expensive."
Its not just expensive, it *more* expensive ... when compared to a fully featured suite for conducting meetings over the internet or building a transcontinental rail link that can carry people in comfort rather than cubic-close-packed. The long-term future of mass transit by air is already doubtful.
"Under what passes for our constitution it is generally held that no Parliament can bind its successors"
I think you are being rather over-cautious here.
Under the prevailing laws of Nature, it is an indisputable fact that no institution can bind its successors, no matter what any rule book might say. As evidence, I cite *every* country that has ever overthrown a previous regime or gained independence from a colonial master.
I suppose the contrast is being drawn with normal contracts, which can generally outlive the individuals who signed up to them as long as the institution they were part of continues to exist within the same legal system. There, however, it is the containing legal system that binds the successors, not the original players. The differences are so obvious that I'm surprised the "Parliament can't bind its successors" idea is treated with so much respect.
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