Posts by Ru

Why on earth did he choose one of those?

i mean, its a particularly stupid design of weapon, unwieldy and unbalanced. Surely there are non-retarded fictional weapons he could have chosen?

I for one

Would welcome our censorious overlords consigning 'I for one...' quotes to the outer darkness where 'mobe' was cast out.

Curious notion of "competing"

Why is it that everyone seems to paint linux as a single unified entity that is endlessly struggling against windows, and doomed to failure? It seems to me that it is doing pretty well on everything except the "average computer user's" desktop where they have come to expect windows and won't settle for anything else. Any new OS will be in the same position... it doesn't matter that its creator think it is going to be better than windows: the market simply will not care, because it is not windows.

Now, any other system competing with the iPhone... that's a totally different matter. It combines some very nice hardware engineering with a very slick UI. You can't beat that without some serious, skilled hardware and UI engineers, but if you do have access to those sorts of people, the underlying OS is utterly irrelevant so long as it does its job. The GPhone looks like a nasty plasticy prototype running partially finished beta-like software. How on earth did anyone ever expect it to fight the iPhone?

Re: hacks

Most of the damage will probably be caused by CSS with hacks to hide things from IE. IE7 stopped falling for many of these hacks, whilst not necessarily fixing all the bugs that required people to use them in the first place with IE6.

So this isn't really anything new, or surprising. There seems to be a curious unwillingness to use 'conditional comments', a feature supported only by IE which would allow you to modify the HTML or include different CSS when a page is loaded in IE. It made solving IE/everyone else incompatibilities pretty trivial to the point where it is now easier for me to handle IE bugs than it is to fix rendering differences between, say, firefox and safari.

UGC is often just noise

One of the things I most often find myself trying to find is a comparison between products A and B, to see which one is probably going to be a better buy for me.

Most consumers won't have, say, two different SLRs from different brands and be able to give an objective opinion on them. Instead, most of the reviews for A will say 'This thing is awesome! A symbol of the second coming! 10/10 ***** and most of the reviews for B will say 'This is sooo much better than A. It is brilliant in all the ways that A is not, 10/10, *****'' along with a smattering of disappointed punters who will bitch about some minor problem that befell them, and award 1/10.

So asking most people to rate something is pointless. Unless a product is genuinely awful, all you'll get is a bunch of knee-jerk reactions, worthless anecdotes and fanboy tribalism.

Moreover, the popularity of customer reviews, combined with the vast number of execrable price comparison websites that choke google's search results make searching for product reviews largely futile. Everyone seems to be hoping for a slice of the amazing omniscient and most importantly *free* UGC pie, and what everyone seems to be getting is a thousand pages of 'Be the first to review this product'...

Three gorges a bit of an ecological mess? You aint seen nothin yet

I wonder whether the ecological cost of the inevitable environmental catastrophe these sorts of projects will cause exceed the cost of cleaning up a bunch of nuclear power stations.

I'd be willing to bet that the nuke option will turn out better.

Re: Old Tired Myth

Uh, read the article. To quote: "This isn't because the cosmic rays are affecting the atmosphere". Using cosmic ray measurements to gather information about the state of the atmosphere is quite different to claiming that they affect it in serious ways.

Enough with the unrelated knee-jerk debunkings.

Oh, and that weatherlawyer thing is impressively incoherent.

RETIARUS

is the finest acronym the reg has yet suggested. Contrived yet appropriate; you've put the professionals to shame with that one. Outstanding!

"Victory for civil-liberties advocates"? I don't think so.

The appeals court ruled simply that domains are not gambling devices. The rights of Kentucky to dictate to the internet are not mentioned; only their rights to seizure. There is nothing to stop this same situation occurring again in the future with the domains seized under a different law.

Has asecondary benefit for the paranoid...

Being apparently made out of thermite, there's a good chance it'll burn up nicely.

"is not PC gone mad"

Mad is an unkind and derogatory term. A more appropriate phrase might be "PC approximating the logic of a individual with mental health issues."

(fingers crossed that a bajillion readers haven't already pointed this out)

Re: Mob mentality

Intelligence is not the same as wisdom, as any nurd kno.

Sightseeing?

For that much cash, I'd hope for a passenger compartment that was purpose built to give me a big field of view. Why are the seats facing forward? Why don't the windows go down to floor level? Why is the floor opaque?

I can understand all these things in a plane or bus, but not in a zeppelin.

Re: I vote for more of the "Peapod" variety

Why on earth would you do that? It looks daft, to put it politely. It seems many designers have issues with making small cars that don't look like golf carts, and that isn't something to be encouraged.

@Nuclear Power? Yes please :D

Given the history of hydro power projects mangling ecosystems, I for one suspect that a tidal barrage will cause far too much damage to be worth the power it returns.

I am however quite in favour of nuclear power. Too bad we ran our own nuclear power industry into the ground, and now have to buy the knowhow from the french. Physics and engineering graduates? we've heard of em.

@William, re Typical responses

So every single web page must comply with the law in every single country on the planet?

Are you totally out of your mind?

Who is going to be able to afford to run their content past a lawyer in every jurisdiction on earth? Who is going to be able to manage huge IP blacklists that must be ever changing depending on the whims of every lawmaker in every goverment?

Or should this only apply to US laws?

I guess since ICANN can be wielded like an international banhammer, you can do whatever the hell you like and it is perfectly okay? It is just fine to impose your culture and your legalties across the globe without impunity? Don't even try to justify this tyranny to anyone outside of your borders.

So, lap belts

The number of injuries suffered by people without lap belts might be interesting, but I rather suspect that the worst injuries would be caused by people out of their seats, such as the cabin crew.

So... examples?

Given that nothing mentioned in the article is actually a useful educational resource, is web 2.0 just being used as some sort of magic fairy dust to be sprinkled on mediocre web-based resources to suddenly make them wonderful? Anyone are to give an example of these wonderful new javascript-enhanced websites that will revolutionise education?

The whole thing seems totally devoid of content. Pointing to a bunch of educationally worthless social networks as an example of how great web 2.0 is seems baffling, even beyond BECTAs usual borderline competent, several-years-behind ramblings.

"performance is too low to work with office documents or other applications"

The mind boggles, really.

What sort of hardcore 'office applications' require such an excess of processing power that an intel atom can't provide? Sure, there's always going to be power-hungry apps that you might want on your workstation (compilation, place and route, image processing... a few things that spring to mind), but 'editting a word document' or 'editting a spreadsheet' should not even being to approach the same power requirements.

Quite frankly, I blame everyone. The people who've worked on MS office since v6, and anyone who has anything to do with acrobat for a start.

Re: 100 small asteroids spread out over thousands of miles seems more survivable than 1 big one.

Look up what a MIRV is.

"It just couldn't happen, we hear you say. At least not in the UK."

Hahahahaha.

It can, and no doubt it will, citing the French project as a precedent and proof of concept, even if it gets shot down in flames and is hated by everyone.

"heat-pumping ocean-cooled data centres"

Human thermal output is inconsequential compared to slar thermal input. Global warming isn't about us warming up the planet directly, it is about us insulating it letting the sun heat it up more than usual.

Allegedly, etc.

@Gordon Fecyk

So its okay to have a bunch of gaping security holes in such an important network, because they might not be exploited?

We aren't talking about a few web pages here. This is their internal network, the one that work actually gets done on. The fact that it is in such a terrible state speaks of a fundamental sloppiness in systems administration and IT management that simply should not be there in any organisation, let alone an arm of government.

So someone wants to sell them stuff? Big deal. Clearly someone needs to clean up there, and they evidently can't do it themselves.

"The gap between a script kiddie and a hacker just got a little smaller."

No it did not. It never will. Skiddies abilities might get nastier as time goes on, but if they don't have a handily prepackaged attack that still works, they're screwed, and have to wait for the next release.

> "Regardless, I shall be sleeping soundly tonight in the knowledge that my address space + stack randomised, hardened with mudflaps Gentoo servers will not be compomised by any attack aimed at less dynamic operating systems. Source-based distros FTW!"

Coming from an OpenBSD point of view, I wouldn't agree at all that being source-based is a security benefit at all. Cunning tricks at the compiler level help catch coding mistakes, but it needs a thorough code audit to actually find all the flaws, some of which will be serious enough that no amount of voodoo will stop you getting rooted.

Ultimately, all desktop OSes have the same weakness... given an idiot with root level access, no security scheme in the world is going to help you.

I for one am glad

That lazy, overpaid, incompentent government employed developers are no more, and instead we have highly skilled commercial ones who must charge less and work harder and produce a better result thanks to the highly competetive nature of the market.

Re: I think 9 < 10 is still true

So, by your cunning reasoning, you demonstrate that the 44th Mersenne prime, which has less than 10 million digits, doesn't qualify for the prize. Well done. The prizegivers obviously thought so to, otherwise they'd have awarded the prize already.

The 45th prime is going to be bigger than the 44th. The 44th was 650,000 digits longer than the 43rd. This does vaguely suggest that the 45th will have over 10 million digits.

Do pay attention.

Re: We go inside until the sound is gone, and we're safe.

Unless of course you've just parked your little saucer on the roof of a building to get a nice viewpoint, and turned off the engine so as to a) be stealthy and b) save fuel.

Assuming you can still pan and tilt any cameras it might have on it, you just have to wait til Achmed pops his head out again, and arrange some suitably excessive artillery fire to disourage him.

Of course, you could try to take it out whilst it is still airborne, but you'd better hope it didn't catch a glimpse of you before you take it down...

Re: It's shameful

>Gordo et cie: stupid but well-meaning. Objective: creation of a socialist worker's paradise.

Eh? Are you talking about Brown here? He's neither stupid, or particularly well meaning anymore. There's precious little socialism in his body either, or his predecessor's, and hasn't been an appropriate word to apply to any of the UK government's actions for a good twenty years. They're all about big business and banking and pocket-lining.

Re: MBTA to Destroy the Students Lives ... Forever

That sounds like an awesome plan! A bunch of motivated, accomplished hackers who suddenly have a grudge and nothing to lose! I'm sure MBTA's security problems will just quietly fade into the background.

Re: So what's the problem?

In two 'words':

OMG pedos!

"obesity in the UK is now a greater threat than terrorism"

So until recently this was not the case?

No need?

He left his work laptop, full of valuable data, unsecured in a car whist on holiday. Is that someone else's fault too?

Re: In before the fanboys

>Come on, guys, I'm waiting for it--how will running Linux/OS X/*BSD utterly prevent this vulnerability?

Okay, you told me :-( I feel like such an idiot now... all those operating systems had the same flaw as the commercial ones. I clearly should have just paid up for a proper non-open-source system with the same vulnerability, er...

Anyway, at least I'm not running OSX.

Also, I could very well be wrong on this one, but I imagine that OpenBSD was significantly more resilient to this sort of attack (if not necessarily immune) due to its far better use of randomness throughout the system

Lets hope it is just for information sharing purposes...

Because what I really, really don't want is a way for my car's brakes to be applied in response to a radio signal. Securing that sort of thing is going to be something of a challenge, and I have little faith that it would be done properly. So some little scrote with a laptop and a transmitter can cause brakes to slam on at amusing moments, or some slightly larger scrote might suddenly find carjacking can be done anywhere, not just at a junction...

Re: Suggestion: He picks his method of demise. His choice is binding as not being "cruel".

In his position, I'd choose 'old age'.

Or possibly, 'cake'

Re: Hmm, sounds like the cell.

Only it will have a graphics core instead of little vector processing things. So you might be able to use it in a cell like way (depending on what sort of access you can get to the graphics core) but you couldn't use a cell like a fusion chip, cos the cell doesn't have a graphics core on it.

So if you actually meant 'its like a cell because its a processor' or 'its not really very much like a cell' then, yes. I agree.

Re: Bet he never has an open wi-fi network again...

Because secure wireless really are unhackable?

Sure, in this case the people who did send it probably just wandered around til they found somewhere suitable. But there's nothing to stop them cracking an inadequately secured neywork, and then you're going to have to spend some time explaining yourself to the police and judiciary, trying to convince them that evil hackers did it. And we can all guess how tech-savvy they're likely to be.

Re: Your poor Scrabble example

"In your scrabble image the OG and KY are not valid words, at least according to the TWL scrabble dictionary."

If not challenged, they can stay. This, at least, avoids some of the pitfalls of atrocious dictionaries (like yahoo's literati, for example) and keeps the game at the level of the players ;-)

But then, standard are slipping these days. Some people accept anything on the SOWPODS which is terribly liberal in what it accepts, colloquialisms and foreign words be damned. I remember seeing a little scrabulous note one day that mentioned that their highest scoring opening word was 'muzjik' or some such idiocy.

Argh. It's almost enough to make one FOTW.

Again with the 'invulnerable mirrorred target' ideas

It is difficult enough in ideal circumstances to bend and reflect a powerful laser beam... and all the hard work in teh boeing is being done *before* the beam is focussed to actual killing intensities. Mirrors in the way are going to burn up. Worse case scenario is that you get sparkley transient reflections from the target (as it burns up) which will send a small proportion of the power, poorly focussed, back through the atmosphere to the laser source. Which won't notice, though the pilots might if they're not wearing protective goggles.

Maybe if you could mount some kind of adaptive optics on the missile, made from super-heat resistant mirror facets that could collect all the laser energy and then focus it back at the origin you might have a chance. Unlikely though, and such a thing would be fragile, expensive, and single use. And it would ruin the missile's aerodynamics. And you'd need a bigger missile to carry it.

Etc etc.

Mirrors are not going to save you from the death rays.

Re: Uh, HOW DUMB would you have to be to mix "Scrabble(tm)" with Scrabulous?

Maybe I could make an operating system that looks and feels vaguely similar to that produced by a certain redmond company. I'll call it 'Bindows'. I mean, how dumb would you have to be to confuse that with someone else's product?

Duh.

You can't just steal and copy someone else's product and rename it. Just because you're not abusing their trademark doesn't mean you're in the clear.

Re: Classic fallacy

>AFAIK it's illegal to do this - there are no exceptions in the law that make doing this legal

Reverse engineering is illegal? Not even slightly. Here's a few examples: Samba, Wine, other linux/windows compatibility projects. They've been going for years.

The worst case is that you violate a product's EULA which specifically says 'don't reverse engineer me'. But even that won't hold up in jurisdictions which allow reverse engineering to let you make a product compatible with a different product. And being an apple employee and part of their dev team means you won't have to agree to any EULAs, because you're hardly an end user, are you? DOn't be silly.

Still went ahead with scheduled power cycling?

>prosecutors said during a hearing Wednesday that Terry Childs intentionally rigged >the network to fail during maintenance or any time it experience a power failure.

>Childs's decision two days ago to cough up the passwords during a jail-house visit

>by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom came only after a scheduled power outage

>on July 19 failed to trigger the meltdown

So they went ahead with a scheduled power cycle, even though they were under the impression that it would seriously foul up their network?

Hmm.

So either they hoped it would happen, to give them more ammunition for their case , or they were too stupid to work out the consequences of what they were doing, or they're lying.

"Tough on the causes of play"

I fear this might be a terribly accurate summary.

Funnily enough, playing seems to come naturally to children. Maybe they're just doing it in the wrong way? Maybe its that most of the things that were most fun are now considered far too unsafe as the country rushes headlong into paedogeddon.

Requiring everyone who has seen, heard of, or made a child pass a criminal record check is a step in the right direction. Maybe tagging and tracking children so they don't wander into potentially dangerous environments (these include "outside" and "near adults, especially men") might help matters more?

Hmm

I've suddenly had an interesting business idea. What with the UK government's enthusiasm with all things corporate, and the fact that it is comfortable with letting commercial entities handle very sensitive data, why don't people like Phorm pitch this to the government as a surveillance facility first, and arrange a nice PFI scheme whereby they get to use 'excess' spying capacity to target adverts?

I've no doubt the government would lap it up.

If only you'd use

Lynx, then you wouldn't have any chance of being infected

Um, the point of sports bras

Is to inhibit motion. If jigglage still occurs, then the sports bra isn't doing its job properly, surely?

One which actually allows jiggle, even if it is dampening the motion by using to drive some sort of generator, isn't going to be as comfortable as one that does not.

@Dave N

Its unfortunate that people in bikins don't expect to be photographed, but when you're out on a public beach, where exactly is your expectation of privacy? No, it isn't very nice, but is it actually illegal? No expectation of privacy means no invasion of privacy

Release forms? Well, if the photographer isn't going to start making money from the image, release forms are hardly necessary. That's verging on a grey area of the law as well, but you don't have a legal right not to be photographed. That's more like a Soviet style 'taking photos of the People without their consent' law, which we don't have, yet. Photographers are quite within their rights to take candid photographs.

I do not like people who take the sort of pictures that you are complaining about, and I would not do it myself. But I absolutely refuse to roll over and support some kind of 'Won't somebody please think of the boobies?' law that prevents me using my camera in public.

And as for no need for telephoto lenses, well thankyou for deciding what sort of photographs everyone should be allowed to take. I do surfing and windsurfing photography from time to time, and this pretty much requires me to be on a beach, with a big lens. Thankyou for deciding I am a pervert or a terrorist, and happily allowing our government to treat me as such.

Comic sans?

Bleah. Is nowhere safe from this insipid typeface?