Posts by Nick Kew 2841 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jan 2007
That's precisely the big risk the Democrats run. Put up an unelectable candidate, and let Trump back in as a lesser of evils.
I don't know enough about Warren to say if she might be that candidate. But it sounded like a bad omen when Bloomberg said he wouldn't stand because he thought he was too moderate/centrist to secure the Democratic nomination in the current climate. If that's even remotely true, it suggests a real risk of their putting forward, if not a Corbyn then his US counterpart.
No wind turbines in my line of sight anywhere in my regular stomping grounds. Unless you count the toy one mounted on a remote house in a Dartmoor valley, or the pair of toy ones just by the national maritime museum in Plymouth.
On the other hand, the TV mast at Princetown blights views for many miles around. Mostly at night, when its lights are much more conspicuous than by day.
What is sadly impossible to get away from is urban sprawl. Can't escape that even at the heart of the moors.
The target zones of military artillery ranges, to name a silly example.
The military aren't out there all the time. When they're not playing, and the red flags aren't flying, those training areas are good for walking, and sometimes more.
There are also plenty of upland areas where people only ever traverse a few fairly narrow paths, there being next to no reason to go tramping about on trackless upland moorland.
I guess you've never been a lover of the Great Outdoors? Some of us go out there precisely to get away from the beaten track, though sadly that's not really possible in Blighty.
But I have no expectation of a phone signal when up on the moors. If I do get one, it's a bonus.
Your article pic put me in mind of Peake's Titus Alone, published in 1959. The era of the Cold War thriller, and spies from Le Carré to Bond.
That's not so far-fetched. I was born not so very much later than that, and grew up with all that literature[1]. Consequently I never thought I could rely on privacy: a hidden microphone or camera could be anywhere.
But I guess a bit of paranoia must be normal. To other generations, it might have been God or other such supernatural beings watching them.
[1] OK, I never read Fleming, and I didn't come to Le Carré until later. But moving from Biggles to the likes of Alistair MacLean and Desmond Bagley was plenty of action thriller to give a young lad the idea that someone could be watching. And then there was Orwell making it explicit and being taught at school ...
In the rare event that a director, despite my asking them not to, does agree to a user retaining their laptop as part of exit negotiations it still has to come to IT to be wiped back to the operating system.
Ugh. A BOFH of pointlessness.
If it's company data you're worried about, the departing employee or contractor could very well have a copy - and will do if they have the slightest intention of misusing them.
Otherwise ... I'd wipe it a lot more thoroughly than that before handing it to your IT. "rm" is wholly inadequate to sensitive stuff like private keys. And with a journaling filesystem, even shredding (or zeroing) a file before rm won't do the job.
Anyone in charge of a dangerous weapon - like a vehicle - needs to pay due care and attention, and not assume they can be heard. That's actually perfectly reasonable: as a cyclist I always have to be aware that pedestrians may not hear me coming!
That pedestrian who isn't wearing anything in the ears nor looking down at something might be profoundly deaf. The difference between silence and noise is useless to them. For a driver to rely on sound is discrimination at a potentially-lethal level!
To the rest of us, noise is just an unwelcome nuisance.
Back in the 1980s, when modern cryptography was emerging, Shamir (at the Weizmann Institute in Israel) published a paper the US government considered sensitive and should be secret. So they ordered him to withdraw it and recall all copies. Evidently they took the view that "when it really matters, we have jurisdiction", and noone tried to resist. Though of course, by the time this happened, the paper had reached the desks of researchers around the world.
I think it was Scientific American where I first read of this, and encountered the concept of the ZKP. About 1985-ish.
It's society's obsessions that wants to classify sexuality, and then make all kinds of meaningless claims like lifestyle choices, moral equivalence.
Plato's Symposium makes more sense to me: he shows many kinds of love, all valid, but he doesn't try to claim an equivalence, nor deterministic categorisation of peoples preferences. Though Alcibiades' speech, where he clearly regards it as an adolescent lad's right to be mentored by an older man, wouldn't go down well today.
What can you tell from a person's face? Evidently something, but the nature of that something is probably too controversial to be meaningfully researched.
OK, I'll bite.
Arrested in Las Vegas, living in California. Why is he to be tried in Wisconsin?
And might he be released in return for Blighty accepting US food standards once we've ditched the EU, which is of course their red line for that trade deal (and the exact thing that would make a NI border necessary - the EU need a check on smuggling Monsanto's latest by the megaton). Or is Blighty just too insignificant?
Why the **** should I want video? A screen that doesn't support it could frequently save me the trouble of using a browser back button. And I could be less aggressive with the ad blocker! Colours I can take or leave. And immediate screen updating when, for example, typing is nice but far from essential: I'm still fine with a line-oriented editor.
It sounds like you would be better served with a mobile device that runs longer on battery and a keyboard.
Yeah, I'm being unrealistic. Expecting a laptop to be a mobile device, such as I might take with me when away from home? Oh dear.
A laptop that won't last the day without power is unfit for purpose. We need more imagination: for example, last time I made it to FOSDEM (probably last time ever) I took a Nokia with mini-keyboard that seemed better-suited to the venue than a regular laptop.
The laptop I've wanted for many years has low power consumption ARM processor, solid state storage, and - the big one - e-ink screen. Other solutions might involve Reg favourite technologies such as pee-power, enabling the journalist to claim extra drinks as necessary expenses.
It's more than just that.
If they just wanted to sell, they'd sell at a market price. And in some cases, take flak for overcharging. Maybe lose fans and depress the market price by being seen to be (even more) obscenely greedy.
And of course, if an event organiser sells at market price, they have to declare income at market price. Pay tax on it, and reward cannon-fodder investors who backed the event.
So much easier to sell at a nominal price and outsource the market price to "touts". Cut out those pesky investors and taxman, and deflect the blame.
Do you have reason to suppose Vodafone have any intention of that?
What I see is Vodafone grasping new opportunities. They are, for example, Amazon's partner providing free-to-the-user connectivity for Kindle users - a departure from the business model of charging users. The new business model has low margins, so they need volume!
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