Posts by Maty

The talk sounds great...

let's see what the delivery is like.

not getting it

Every wireless-enabled computer I have ever used reports to me what networks are in range and whether they are secured or not. I'm assuming that the routers recorded by Google were broadcasting their SSIDs, and broadcasting by definition means you will be heard.

Again, if you use an open, unencrypted wifi system, then you are broadcasting information to anyone who is listening. It's like having a conversation with the windows open, and then complaining that people in the street can hear you.(My netbook originally had a distressing preference for logging into the open network two houses away.)

Not sure what Google was recording this information, and agree it is creepy, but it's nothing but collating information which is not only freely available, but actively pushed on to listening computers.

yes, but ...

There's a proverb that every country gets the government - and by extension the police force - it deserves. Not always true, but in the UK the people voted in the government that passed these laws, and came remarkably close to endorsing that government in the recent election.

So when the democratic will of the people is that they want to live in something fast approaching a police state/surveillance society, that's what the people get. Fact is, until the public in general come to understand that giving up their rights does not make them safer, it will keep happening.

(For the protection of our children, obviously)

but of course ...

As we and our families go through these screens, none of the airport staff will be keeping up a running commentary on any physical defects - or attributes - they see.

No sir, they will all be too busy stopping terrorists.

Or is having to parade your 16-year-old daughter's body in front of this sniggering gang part of the price of going on a foreign holiday?

The juror was right ...

Any organization that puts all its eggs into one basket like that is indeed run by a bunch of incompetents. What if the guy had a heart attack or got run over by a bus?

My last organization had an IT handover process (which we called a 'digital will') whereby you had to have a file (locked in a fireproof safe) detailing who was to do what if you should unexpectedly become unavailable, and how each person should obtain the necessary permissions.

(And like a good sysadmin I also made sure I had my own backdoor installed, should I need to intervene directly after I left the organization ...)

It's a consumer-side problem

Spam will be around as long as there are idiots who respond to it. And while the world will never want for idiots, the numbers of the simply naive or inexperienced are diminishing daily as people generally become more internet savvy. Also spam filters are getting better (I hardly ever see spam in my gmail inbox these days).

So while spam will never go away, I suspect the effort-to-reward ratio is increasing. Even MS is making it harder for computers to be pwned into botnets in the first place.

(I'm optimistic today - it must be spring)

What did they sign?

Surely the school board made these kids - or their parents - sign something before handing over the comp. Even if just a receipt.

So did the Terms of Service say something like 'In signing this I acknowledge that authorized officials may, at their discretion, activate features or intercept communications on this device.'

If so it may go a long way towards getting the school off the hook. Not that this would make its actions any less contemptible or inexcusable.

Seriously

If going for an out-and-out flying car is too ambitious, how about an APC with 'hop' capability? Driving in an operational area (apart from diversions such as IEDs) often means detouring 150km because a bridge is out, or driving parallel to where you want to go because of a drainage ditch or wall in the way.

Make something that can hop a standard humvee 100m forward, and/or 100m up (or any combination thereof) and you'll become the patron saint of soldiers in low-intensity wars everywhere.

Clarification needed

'They will change the guidance to give people on the DNA database who have been wrongly accused of a minor crime an automatic right to have their DNA withdrawn.'

And if you are wrongly accused of a major crime? Does the automatic right to have your DNA withdrawn already exist, or do you stay on the record?

yup

There's nowt wrong with XP. It's a very stable OS (takes about a decade of fiddling with it for MS to achieve that), and it doesn't have to regularly report to its owner (MS) what the person who has installed it is doing.

It also helps that after a decade or so I too know the OS pretty intimately, and can generally persuade it to do things my way. What bugs me about later windows version is that they are dumbed-down for dummies and nanny users who don't need it.

If I had to, I'd switch to Ubuntu if my games would still run.

Don't allow people to enjoy themselves

Labour are the new Puritans.

Over the last decade they have banned a range of activities from fox-hunting to viewing 'extreme porn'. However you might feel about individual things they have banned, the trend is evident and remorseless.

its not about pornography

It's about government taking control of the internet. The fact that there is such a large and dynamic development doing things for human productivity without government oversight cannot be allowed to continue.

It must be regulated, licensed and taxed. We need a Ministry of internet affairs, and users should buy their IP numbers from the government as they get car number plates today. Then there should be an annual tax on internet users to pay for the effort of keeping netizens safe from porn and terrorism, which should be raised by at least ten percent a year over inflation.

This was always going to happen, but it was nice for a while whilst it didn't. The filters are step one. The rest is coming.

Naturally ...

All the tecchy cyber-savvy types here, are absolutely, 100% certain none of the computers they run have been botted. Not a single trojan or rootkit in the lot. Definitely not.

yeah ...sure?

Where's the A?

Every time the climate debate, er, heats up, people throw pollution, lifestyles and SUVs into the debate. And there seems to be an assumption that if it can be proven the climate is warming up - that has become more iffy recently - then humans are to blame. But

Global Warming != Anthropocentric Global Warming (It might be the sun. Has anyone correlated temperature rises on Earth with surface temperatures on the moon and Mars?)

The current argument runs 'the earth is heating up, cut carbon emissions'. Given that Dr Jones & co have made rather a hash of the first assumption, I'm not looking for definitive proof any time soon that humans in general and carbon in particular are responsible.

lad's mags?

In the interest of research, I popped over to the Cosmopolitan website to see this month's magazine offerings.

The Cosmo bachelor search, sexy beauty secrets and bedroom blog are well featured. Sex position of the week is apparently 'Magic mountain' which er ... bangs on about 'the mischievous thrill of doing it doggy style'. With pic, for those ladies unable to grasp the concept.

This is of course about modern women becoming confident with their own sexuality. Nothing like that revolting porn consumed by human animals with testicles.

So ...

In the USA according to

http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/facts_for_features_special_editions/004772.html

150 million hotdogs are consumed in the USA on the fourth of July, let alone the total over the year. Even assuming just one in ten hotdogs are eaten by kids, the consumption to choking ratio should be getting the product a design safety award.

actually ...

It's worth noting that if we take the arguments of the Argentinians seriously, we have a pretty good claim to France. (Assuming we want it ...)

anti-intellectual

Odd, isn't it? The politically correct word to describe negroid people today is 'black'. (Though 'brown' is more accurate.) The Latin for 'black' is 'niger' (literally: black, dark, swarthy') , and this is where the dreaded N-word comes from.

So it's correct to call a race by the English word, but political dynamite to use the Latin. Perhaps it's the mis-spelling that makes it so offensive?

Publishers are not the RIAA

Starting with a disclaimer - I'm a writer, and I rather enjoy eating and having a roof over my head, so I'm watching this whole ebook thing closely.

I know that publishers have their backs to the wall financially at the moment, and that amazon has played its part in this. (Have you noticed a decline in the number of High Street booksellers recently?) At present ebooks are not that much cheaper to produce than paperbacks, because distribution is only a fraction of the overall cost of a book. (Professional books take a lot of producing, which is why I'm very happy with a contract that gives the author 10% of the retail price.)

The saving for not distributing a book is currently cancelled out by the cost of changing a book to ePub format, so its not like anyone is making a bundle. Once ebooks become more widespread this cost will go down, but at present very few ebooks sell more than a couple of hundred copies.

So if amazon gets its way, and bulldozes prices down, amazon is going to sell more books, but in the same way that supermarkets sell books. The range of books and the quality of books and the number of authors and publishers is going to drop sharply, because amazon *won't let* publishers ask for a viable price for some books.

I can't imagine a £9.99 Biochemistry textbook, but I can imagine a £9.99 Biochmeistry Textboke, complete with breakfast cereal and viagra advertisements on every second page.

so ...

There's one good reason for using MS office, and that's so you can make extraordinarily complex documents.

There's one bad reason for using MS office, and that's so that you can be compatible with the other people who use MS office.

If producing specialized documents is why people use MS office, it should be as rare as math software or 3d modelling programs, not something stuck on every second computer. So most people use MS office because most people use MS office. It's a con.

So, help break the cycle. Unless you really, really have to, don't accept anything sent to you in .docx or .doc.

Send it back, Sir or Madam, send it back and ask the sender to let you have it in a reasonable format.

geez ...

What's got into you?

People are interested in the Woz because he's an interesting character - is that hard to understand? And you come across like the whiny creep in the back of the class who can't understand why some other guy is so popular.

Rik - and I'm speaking as one 'Polack' to another - give it a rest.

Did the US Attourney general

...say anything about his own country's activities being in violation of world trade rules on internet gambling? The US is big on international law - when it suits.

and so ...?

Australia missed the Medieval era and is trying to make up for it now.

okay, what am I missing?

If Google is selling these ads through its adsense/adwords programme, then they only get paid when someone clicks on an ad. And why would you click on an ad for a site when you are already there? Maybe Google is not worried because this is a non-issue.

WhenU are scummy though.

average consumer?

If Mr & Mrs Average Consumer are anything like Mr & Mrs Average Voter, they won't passively hand control of their data over to 'them' - they will be the ones actively driving the process.

It protects them from pedophiles and terrorists, you see...

prior art

The pontificate was one of an ancient school of priests in pre-Christian Rome. Whilst hijacking other items (including the Saturnalia, which became Christmas) the Pope claimed for himself the office of Pontifex Maximus, the head priest. The Christian Pontiff did not take charge of the Vestal Virgins, a perk which originally went with the job.

Nevertheless, the term 'pontiff' was in use long before anyone had ever thought of being Catholic. but then I guess people were using windows long before they became a trademarked operating system.

just checking ...

So 4,700 arrests for every 137,000,000 checks? So either air travellers are a remarkably law-abiding bunch, or there's ways to get round the system. Either way, it looks like another example of the govt wasting money it does not have.

Good news

Too long IT companies have been posting totally unreasonable terms, and then blandly adding - 'as far as these are legally enforceable'.

Can Norway - or any other sane country - have a go at EULAs next?

Just one question ...

How bad was the tantrum? Since Daddy admits that the child has emotional issues, this looks like more than your average 10-year-old wobbly. If there was a chance of the kid actually harming herself - e.g. by banging her head violently on something - then she needed to be restrained.

Not sure that a tazer would be my restraint of choice, but I can see why the cop would be reluctant to lay hands on the girl - I see an earlier poster is already talking about child abuse.

A plague on all your houses ...

Apple, linux fanbois ... some of us don't want your operating systems. Lovely as they are, they won't play as many games as well as a PC can. Win7 - phooey! DRM'ed crap.

Until someone gives me a reason to change, its XP pro all the way.

good for some

I'm an academic, and read a lot of journals in my work. Since these days journals sit on the web, I download them as .pdfs. There are a few hundred that I was able to move to the e-reader and can now peruse in comfort away from the computer. I can also scribble notes on them.

And as it can also handle rtf, I can load student essays on to it and read them more conveniently. I'm reviewing a pre-publication book for a colleague, and again its a lot better than doing this on-comp.

I've yet to try reading an actual book, but I think for that, I actually prefer the old printed paper version.

And as an aside, can we leave off the old 'saving the trees' crap? Most of our paper comes from managed European forests, and European forests have grown over the past decades - because we use paper. Stop using paper, and that land will be put to other uses.