Posts by PT

Re: To our continental friends -

>Cameron is the UK's Bush!

If Cameron is the UK's Bush - and he seems out of touch enough - then Blair was the UK's Cheney. Cameron is ineffectual, but Blair was evil. Never forget the atrocities visited on the British way of life by the Blair government in the name of "security" (don't forget to hold your head up when you leave your house so the security cameras can get a good facial recognition). How anyone could consider voting for either of these parties is beyond me. By the way, who is this man "Clegg" I hear about every few months? Is he something to do with the government? If so, he must be Johnson's Hubert Humphrey.

Given the unattractive choices in the next election, Screaming Lord Sutch would have had his best chance ever. Too bad he checked out too early.

Re: WTF

Sooner or later, the last of these copyright maximalists will die, and then we can move on.

Re: is Betelgeuse close enough that a supernova there would be an extinction event here

Bad Astronomy

Fixed it for you.

(open tag)a href="http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/06/01/is-betelgeuse-about-to-blow/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"(close tag)Bad Astronomy(open tag)/a(close tag)

Re: Mike

No, the Katrina guy was the other Mike, Michael "heck of a job Brownie" Brown. Michael Chertoff was the guy in charge of the Department of Homeland Security, who left public service to set up lobbying group Chertoff Associates in order to continue, er, servicing the public.

If I recall correctly, the naked scanner project resulted from that incident where some halfwit with underpants full of fake explosive, but no passport or boarding pass, was assisted onto a US-bound plane by what appeared to witnesses to be an official with authority over the flight security personnel. Hmmm. Strange that we never found out who he was.

"Call, write or email your representatives..."

These "representatives" of which you speak sound interesting. Unfortunately, I haven't got one - they gave me a "lawmaker". I'm sure he represents someone, perhaps the people with names starting with "Americans For ..." something that paid for all his campaign ads, except the one paid for by the US Chamber of Commerce.

Re: I've heard of this before

There was a Doonesbury strip about this a few years ago.Zig outsourced his job to India, and to avoid getting caught he had the offsite engineer deliberately screw up every few weeks.

http://forums.techguy.org/attachments/43060d1099857513/db041107.gif

Re: Every one already?

True, it is not EVERY light. Local governments have enough budget problems already, and can't afford to put out a lot of capital now to save money later. This problem has been ingeniously tackled by the lighting manufacturers, though, who (in my city at least) upgraded many incandescent traffic lights to LED at their own expense in exchange for several years' worth of the money saved on the electricity bill.

Re: that reminds me...

If you had any sense, you wouldn't keep the backup on your premises, encrypted or not. Standard Plod behaviour these days for all crimes from traffic tickets up is to seize everything electronic in the house, including your cell phone, and hold onto it for weeks. I'm sure in most cases they never even turn it on, they just want to cause you the maximum inconvenience. Whatever, a backup drive is no use to you if you don't have a computer to run it on. You need a full running backup computer off site in a place they don't know about.

"..it is only a matter of time before you're accepting disclaimers before starting the car."

That day is already here. My wife's car requires that you click to agree to its software terms and conditions before any electronics beyond the basic speedo and gauges will work, and then another disclaimer that you won't use the GPS navigator while you're driving(!). Then the radio won't work unless you agree to IT'S terms and conditions ... hold the wheel and watch the road for me a minute while I read this ... ah, it says I agree not to use it while I'm driving.

Strangely enough, the vehicle makes no mention of Google.

Re: The Big Lie - We Can't Find Skilled Americans

For a definitive answer as to why we need more immigrant techies, let us review the immortal words of Alan Greenspan. Quoting from his memoirs, as excerpted in Newsweek, he wrote:

"As awesomely productive as market capitalism has proved to be, its Achilles' heel is a growing perception that its rewards, increasingly skewed to the skilled, are not distributed justly. ... we need to address increasing income equality now. ... by opening our borders to large numbers of highly skilled immigrant workers, we would ... provide a new source of competition for higher earning employees, thus driving down their wages."

Re: @Steve Evans

For those without a Tesla coil, one second in the microwave is equally effective on RFID chips.

Re: It's in the first line

"Without the blessing and goodwill of the people (and I mean the populace, not the legislative) laws are ineffective and will be extensively broken."

Indeed, the difficulty of getting civil servants to do some work will seem insignificant against the difficulty of getting a jury to convict under the proposed laws.

Re: They could vastly reduce piracy very quickly

B). Buy multiple subscriptions to cable and satellite providers to get the shows I want? Stuffed full of bloody adverts, TV logos and previews of other shows whilst I'm trying to watch a different show?

While I live, my household will never pay a subscription to watch TV with commercials. I swore a solemn oath when that asshat TV exec complained that skipping commercials on his (already paid for by subscription) cable channel was "stealing".

Re: Stop whinging about absurd patents and, in particular, Apple's many examples !

Does he still block them? He's so predictable, I don't even bother to read him any more, let alone try to comment.

Nobody cares about the Pu-238. The important thing is, does the Rover have 18 inch subwoofers and a 10,000 watt amplifier. Without which it would fail. Rap product, natch.

Re: creating content..

dmaidlow, I believe you may have got it! Why else would I find this line in a local NZ news item -

"The Crown is seeking for all images and CCTV footage from the raids to be suppressed. "

(http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/7429534/Kim-Dotcom-takes-the-stand-over-raids)

Surely this can't be the Crown's idea, since if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. It must be that they don't want any unauthorized footage from the movie being pirated on teh interwebs.

Re: Back to the actual topic at hand

There's also the little detail that the bill was proposed by Joe Lieberman, and with anything coming from that dissembling bag of wind you have to ignore the patriotic-sounding headlines and read the small print. As far as cyber-terrorism is concerned, this bill is just so much security theater - the real substance is about legalizing and facilitating domestic surveillance of US citizens.

@Kevin 6

You summed it up perfectly. What's worse, even salaried people in the US discover their employer will only allow them a week or so paid time, and after that they're up shit creek if it's a long trial. They sit there day after day watching five, sometimes ten or more, lawyers billing hundreds of dollars an hour cross-examine expert witnesses being paid $25,000 a day; with untold thousands already spent on jury consultants and strategists, while barely picking up enough money to pay for lunch, parking and gas. A (salaried) friend of mine nearly lost his home because of a trial that dragged on for weeks, while another, a contractor, got sentenced to 120 hours of community service when he explained he was on a deadline and asked to be excused. I'll accept it as a "patriotic duty" when the judges and lawyers agree to do it for free as well.

For those needing to avoid service in criminal cases, the magic words are "jury nullification". Speak then to a fellow prospective juror where the prosecution can overhear. It's trickier in a civil suit, but "tort reform" works in a lot of cases.

Re: "Well, it's 15 years old, so Hotmail could totally procreate."

"Where are you that fifteen year olds can "do it"?"

In the southern USA, probably. Most redneck states let under-16s get married if a judge rubber-stamps the license.

Re: Here's some more advice...

I have a number of 3rd party applications that work just fine in XP but have problems in W7. I need hardly point out that my chosen solution does not involve upgrading the applications. It may come to that in the long run, but then again, in the long run we are all dead.

I have, in fact, just last week completed a new application in VB6. I tried to do it in .NET first, but couldn't make it work reliably with serial ports. The VB6 version is equally happy in XP, Vista and W7.

Re: Ummmmm, yeahhhhh.......

"Android is an utter fail in the tablet space."

I'm going to have to disagree with that. You do know, I suppose, that the Kindle Fire and Nook are Android tablets?

Re: Re. Mystery Location

The water tower at upper left suggests somewhere with no hills nearby, so perhaps east coast.

Consider this a ping. Comments Andrew disagrees with just never appear.