Posts by DropBear 4735 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2013
@Alistair: I do sympathise with that situation, being the owner admittedly complicates things. That said (and re:phone / Google) there's rather a lot of difference between "knowable, for certain categories of privileged people, with non-negligible effort" and "practically public domain", the original remark that prompted my reply...
Just mention casually, accompanied with a charming smile, that they're the only ones who got that specific version* of your email address so if they happened to leak it, you'll definitely know it was them...
* this obviously won't work with john.doe@... - you'd need something like 1234.john.doe@... (and them not figuring out they can just send mail to the base address)
WRONG. The companies have all the "negotiating" power of a bunny rabbit "negotiating" what's for dinner when invited over to the big bad wolf. At most they could tweak the specific timeline - the destination remains unchanged, and The Powers That Be will not stop pushing until they can read everything they want at any time (which is simply everything all the time). How exactly they will go about it in a technical sense is irrelevant, therefore so is any "negotiating power" attributed to the tech sector. The rabbit stew is non-negotiable, everything else is irrelevant.
That's just the thing - there's no more reliable way to get Authority to chain you up until you can't even wiggle your pinky, regardless how inconvenient that makes everything for everyone, than telling it that it can't do something. Red flag, bull, china shop to ex-china shop...
...meanwhile game after game after game gets developed basically out in the open (usually following a crowd-funding campaign) from concept sketches all the way to playable alphas and betas and a string of "in-dev" (GOG) or "early access" (Steam) releases - some ending up more successful and famous than others, but apparently none of them experiencing any horrible consequences. Frankly, this whole "supa-sekrit high-pressure hype boiler" approach stinks.
"Such charming naïveté..."
Indeed. Actually, I propose we should just admit what voting really is, and make it openly about voting AGAINST the candidate(s) you hate most. It's what we already do anyway but it would sure give me a heck of an extra incentive to vote to know it fully gets interpreted as intended. Especially if there would be the option to vote against every single one of them, which currently you can only do by fouling your vote, completely losing the message to be sent in the process.
I'm surprised there weren't any noises on El Reg about the recently restarted, astonishingly aggressive begging campaign - the main banner literally covered more than half of my browser window, and I had to block _at least_ three different "delayed pop-up that 'on load' script blockers don't catch" / "backup pop-up instead of the main one when that gets blocked anyway" / "pop-in from the side when that gets blocked too" nasties.
In spite of all that I'm proud to say I managed to not read any of them, and I vow to keep blocking them on sight - with a smile - until all the "important" folks have left and all the money goes to two techies propping up the servers.
You're clearly not treating this appropriately seriously. What we need to do is build a Dyson-sphere that is incidentally strong enough* to bounce any would-be illegal immigrants. Uh, sorry, space rock. It's ok, we'll still be able to launch outer space probes through it - we'll just build a hatch into it somewhere. No, of course it's NOT a back door! Spheres don't have a "back" side!
* maybe we should build it with a moat. With sharks and lasers. What? Look, there are some tiny animals that don't die in space, I saw it on TV - if they can do it, so can the sharks, they'll just have make an effort and breathe harder!
BOLLOCKS. If I choose to publish an app that overlays a Santa Claus at the top of the Eiffel Tower whenever you point your phone at it, guess what, I don't need your permission to do that, and you don't get to impose any rules / taxes / whatever your black little heart desires on me. NONE. You're welcome to arrest and/or lock away anybody crazy enough to try to climb the tower to touch Santa, but that's not my problem and you can't make it so.
Which is not to say I can't see the irrelevant busybodies emit stern dictats excommunicating all of the above (oh, of course I can) I'm just saying I recognize NONE OF IT as legitimate, and am willing to do exactly just enough to keep myself out of trouble, not thinking twice about taking the first loophole I can find (then the next one if you close the first). It's - not - your - call.
"they haven't got an airlock design yet"
Oh, just use direct drive-through airlock (at slow speed, natch) by placing stations ten meters below the main tube, with water* in the connecting sections - the "Stargate" cool factor alone would be off the charts...
* there's nothing preventing you from installing appropriate drains in he stations, so if the vacuum holding up the water fails it all just drains away instead of drowning everyone in the station
"Appropriate" response is wholly determined by what your true goal is concerning the offender. There are four possibilities depending on what you want to achieve:
- Scaring anyone else away from doing the same - well then he must clearly be hanged, quartered and burned at the stake (and his entire family exterminated, including any puppies / kittens / goldfish involved). Apply the same to any neighbours in an arbitrary radius at your discretion, for failing to notice and rat him out sooner. I just hope you don't have a delicate stomach, and didn't plan on using the word "justice" much.
- Punishing him for the consequences of his actions - exactly the same case as above, with the exact same caveat. You're clearly a vindictive bastard and embracing it - you deserve kudos for how well in touch you are with your inner Vlad the Impaler.
- Punishing him for his actions - well now, not to take it lightly but you should think of something seriously inconvenient that will nevertheless be no more than an unpleasant memory and a lesson learned the hard way a year from now.
- (Hopefully) preventing him from doing the same again, by making him understand what he did was wrong, while making every effort not to push him away out of, but to claim him back into society - awww now you gone and done it Sunshine... I got no idea how to go about that, no matter how much I'd prefer this one. Which, incidentally, totally does not mean I think we should stop even trying - but it might take more effort than slavishly applying a set of terse rules whichever way it best serves our sadistic and power-crazed tendencies of glorified apes that we are.
"We are going to DM you more info"
Hmmm, what could that be...? "Distress Messaging" maybe? It would certainly be appropriate... Or maybe they're sending it by Dungeon Master? A paladin with an envelope shows up accompanied by two elves...? Wait... maybe... they send it by a latex-clad gorgeous Domme...!
Exactly. And there might not be (much of) a surcharge for being indebted to the bank for a month or two, but the diligence required to make SURE you never stray into the "high fee" regime (you might not even be able to avoid it if it's something unexpected) just isn't worth the effort.
At least when you're spending money you actually have, you only need to consider the standard fees - which are actually zero around here for purchases (right now my bank is even waiving all account maintenance fees as long as some money keeps entering and leaving the account regularly) and if anything happens, it comes out of my modest savings buffer instead of the bank's extortionate-rate "credit". Needless to say, that's exactly what banks are hoping to rope you into, endlessly advertising the advantages of being able to "afford" whatever you want, _today_...
The latter is a detail of hard-to-overstate importance in a region like this where most people live "from hand to mouth" and can have great trouble getting out of debt once they get into it (to illustrate, the only banking service more popular than credits around here are... credit refinancing and consolidation).
I'm having extreme difficulties trying to imagine a scenario in which rescue workers within 17 metres of a person in distress are having major difficulties locating it. Sure, more precision is always a good thing, I just don't see it making much difference in that case (let alone for any aircraft - I don't think any of them is expected to fly within 17m of any treetops...) and frankly I'm kinda tired that (in my experience) no matter what one switches on or off, typical consumer GPS just never seems to get more precise than "somewhere within 5-10m" in practice.
There's nothing inexpensive or simple about storing truly non-writeable backups of infinite depth. Solutions that the real-world home user might actually use (such as an external hard disk) can be encrypted retroactively even if the user is smart enough to keep more than a single latest version of everything...
Never underestimate the propensity of stupid people to retaliate furiously for making them lose face, even in private - ie. by killing the messenger, in this case. As sad as the "not my problem" stance is, it's still the healthiest unless you have grounds to make additional assumptions about them welcoming assistance.
No idea, maybe it's something similar to that other concept of "it costs money to work"...
"As an Assyrian I find that offensive."
You can get offended as much as you want - is there currently an existing entity going by the name "Assyrian Empire"? No*? Well, there you go. It's not a reference to what may once have been, it's a reference to "there isn't one now". Nobody is exempt from that, it's just a question of when exactly...
* Sorry, "I/we insist sticking the name on something everybody else is calling something else" does not count.
I'm not sure short-term predictions regarding reasonably mature tech are necessarily wildly inaccurate - cars really aren't that different than 10-20 years ago, they just have more sensor and control loops going on, mostly. Planes, trains or microwave ovens haven't changed at all. What IS certainly weapons-grade folly though is taking some exciting recent development and extrapolating its initial steeply rising performance curve* to mean we'll all live on Mars in 10-20 years, as that sort of starry-eyed prediction tends to imply...
* which makes this sort of AI prediction even sadder, considering all the Viagra in the world wouldn't suffice to make the current AI development curve look exciting...
" A consumer-grade chip has about a 10-12 year lifespan"
So if I dig out my ZX that I haven't used in two decades* (or maybe my dad's first Casio which is probably about twice as old) and they power up without a hitch will you eat your words or insinuate I'm using milspec HW...? I'm not proposing that silicon lasts forever mind you, only that it tends to last so long that it typically doesn't observably degrade over a human lifespan (or at least as long as we still care to power it up even as a curiosity).
* Don't go there. I've got a single-chip DIY LED clock from the eighties that ran non-stop ever since - still going fine...
I'm sure most of your fears could in some form be applied to the horrifying prospect of millions of "thickos" owning and nilly-willy operating ton-sized metal boxes on wheels (concentrated in urban centres, no less!). It would surely be pandemonium, and the end of Human Civilisation if we'd allow that!
I'm pretty sure we had no hope in hell of ever getting cars today with all the professional panic bods weighing in on all the certainly-disastrous consequences (never mind bikes - a fast, heavy lump of metal that can't even stay upright on its own?!? Outrage! Have we all gone MAD?!?)
Sure, people do end up getting killed in car accidents but that doesn't make sane people want to ban them - I'm sure there would be a trade-off with flying stuff too, but you know what let's not go full retard on a "moving at speeds in excess of 50mph is immediately lethal" level...
He has probably been briefed, at some higher-than-top-secret-no-such-priority strictly confidential level by some mook of one of the usual-TLA-suspects that the lizard people started using entangled laptop screens as trans-dimensional teleportation gateways and plan to sling a thimbleful of anti-matter on board of a plane one of these days, so their mole must be prevented from accessing his laptop in-flight. At any rate they seem positively terrified under the weight of some Great Secret that is Their Burden To Know but cannot share. For our own good. Lest the baddies get tipped off to do whatever it is they're already planning to do. Or about us knowing about them planning to do it, which they obviously have no way to have any clue about. Shhh! They mustn't find out that we're onto them!
"So, what do you do when you end up with two conflicting but simultaneous panics."
What do you mean? That's the only kind of panic worth bothering with! Now you can pick and choose which contradicting measure you want to apply at your whim, insisting it's the more important one. It's the Swedish buffet of bureaucracy, there's a rule just waiting to be enforced for your every need!
"Most probable forms of anti-satellite aggression would result in a huge amount of high velocity space debris. Unless the US have also got a space debris road sweeper, putting up a new GPS satellite fleet won't last that long."
Betcha you never looked up what's where up there. For instance, GPS satellites are not in LEO by any definition I've heard of - actually, they're two-thirds of the way to full geostationary, which itself is amazeballs far. Yes, even very small stuff flying around would indeed be mighty inconvenient but people reliably fail to realize how mind-bogglingly huge Space is - I'd wager they'd manage to find some other orbit band that debris from the original sats could not possibly intersect (not to mention that there's a world of difference between being hit by something in the same orbit as you from the opposite direction than from the same as you're going). Everything being in the same orbit as everything else and only a few miles away is only true in Hollywoodland - "Gravity" Is Not A Documentary you know.
What I'd like to know instead is what use it would be to be able to replace a blown-up sat once or twice, considering any enemy who managed to shoot it down once can likely do it again and again _way_ cheaper than you can replace it. Are there massive stockpiles of replacement sats somewhere...?
Should we perhaps redefine every other colour as "high-temperature black"? Except pink, of course, which isn't a real colour, therefore it's still a real colour and not "hot black". Dang it, where are all the graphic artist friends I don't have when you need them, to annoy them by claiming all they know how to work with is a variety of shades of black...
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