Posts by Nick Kew 2841 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jan 2007
Please stop it.
The headline kind-of makes a false equivalence between tracking individuals (faces) and number plates. As if vehicles deserved the same rights as people!
The article text makes it clear it's about training, which is (hopefully) more sensible and proportionate on the subject. But you might miss that if you haven't contemplated your car's very own "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness".
I have a new phone (1 week old) following a minor accident with the old one. Both Android, but I have yet to RTFM for the new one and tell it how to behave. It's openly tracking me: during the time I've had it, it's asked me to rate supermarkets and pubs I've been to, and would doubtless have asked about a (superb) concert if I hadn't been a spoilsport and left it at home that evening.
Sarcasm?
'Murica and Blighty both have songs whose authors were being bitterly sarcastic about them, yet they sing with straight faces and patriotic fervour.
US: Guthrie's "this land is your land".
UK: Blake's "Jerusalem" (in Parry's bombastic setting).
Remind me, who "gets" sarcasm?
Unless you buy literally from the farmer, that could become less easy. 'Merkin negotiators are going to want to prevent any unfair restraint of trade. Which means that for example if a US importer saw a labeling scheme (let's call it "Red Tractor") as prejudicial to their product, they could sue and expect to win.
That is, if a trade deal happens. Latest talk is of piecemeal deals: if those exclude agribusiness it could just possibly be a realistic prospect (and potentially even remain compatible with keeping that Irish border open - it's smuggling of US food&agri-stuff that the EU absolutely needs to guard against before rather than after deaths in Dublin and further afield are traced to smuggled hormoneburgers). But can Trump defy agribusiness and do any deal that excludes them (or holds them to higher standards)? Neither Obama nor Bush could, which is why we don't already have a huge US-EU trade deal.
Shooting someone? The late Mr Menezes springs to mind here in Blighty, and don't the 'merkins do that kind of thing rather more often than us?
As for less-drastic stopping someone and giving them a hard time based on false positives coming from fleshbags without any help from technology, it's happened to me at least twice[1] in twenty years since I returned to Blighty. And I'm white, with grey beard.
[1] Two definite and scary occasions, plus a couple more much briefer encounters in which it wasn't clear whether they had misidentified me or just stopped me randomly.
Good for USA? That's down to arse-licking in our corridors of power. If they think it's permanent, perhaps they should look how Blair's engineering of Scottish devolution to benefit Labour turned out after a few years.
Good for Russia? Only insofar as it weakens a willy-waving anti-Russian power. It would be nice to think that future governments (in both Blighty and Russia) might behave more sensibly.
Good for China? How exactly? China wants profitable trade above all else, and a weakened trading partner is bad for that.
That's a lot of downvotes for talking sense ...
Ecosia's complaints as reported make sense. But Google's response to being bashed by officialdom makes sense too. What is perverse here is that a bunch of spammers (like kelkoo) were able to enlist the support of the EU and get Google punished for what was, in the first instance, Doing the Right Thing by working hard to combat search engine spam. Since the whole motivation was perverse, it was bound to have perverse consequences.
Now if they'd gone after Google for the embrace-and-extinguish of Usenet and Dejanews, they'd have my full support.
It's also a matter of design.
If you want users to beware of an unverified certificate, you display a warning. Perhaps for example display the padlock icon with a red questionmark over it, and a more detailed explanation to pop up if the user clicks it.
Surely the issue here is that users are routinely told to look for the padlock, not for the owner's name alongside it. Displaying silly warnings over non-https sites just makes it worse, by telling users that the browser is indeed checking for them, and incorrectly placing unverified certs on the 'secure' side of that check.
I had a stay a few years ago. The inefficiency was staggering, not to mention Kafkaesque. They kept me four days blocking a bed, when I'd much rather have gone home and would've been perfectly prepared to come back in the morning and sit around all day waiting for a slot for the various tests they were doing. Not because I like sitting around, but because it would be less bad than being detained there and tying up a precious bed.
The problems are multifaceted: demographic and political being just two faces. I'd say both of those are probably eclipsed by lawyers (and fear-of-lawyers), by the media (traditional and social) raising expectations, and above all by NHS culture and management.
(p.s. I'm not one of your downvoters. I expect I'll get a few of my own).
Thanks for the reminder of the minor horrors of office life.
Back in the days when my work was on VAX, a radical innovation came when the company acquired a Sun workstation that didn't need to sit in the highly-controlled environment of the computer room. I didn't get to work on it, but I did get to sit in the line of fire of its cooling fan. Nasty.
Of course. Googling is just today's RTFM, with the huge advantage that TFM hasn't gone permanently missing as it routinely used to do.
Now consider the quality of many FMs - not least those for the most sophisticated and expensive packages - and the information on Google (when filtered through the basic techiedom of a Reg reader) is b***** brilliant by comparison.
So how far does that date back? Tom Sharpe was wickedly funny on the subject of exploding crap gases back in about 1980-ish (The Wilt Alternative).
Methinks El Reg is becoming obsessed. Dabbsy has a longstanding tradition of giving us crap, but just a few days ago the BOFH was on the subject, and now this story!
Have you read spycatcher? Or are you rubbishing it from ignorance?
History has given us a few spooks who write really well. John Le Carré being an outstanding example from our own lifetimes and whose published works are about spies.
I wonder if Snowden (a) has the gift of writing well, or (b) has a good ghost writer, or (c) is about to disappoint us. Hmmm ... spook, ghost ...
Ah, those were the days.
There was even one occasion when I had no phone line at all and went to find a 'phone box. Got the kind of menus that can be infuriating, but these ones made sense, and ended with them promising a next-day fix - which they duly delivered.
That was when I lived in an area of decent ADSL. Before moving to an area without it but with Virgin cable, in blissful ignorance of the nightmare to come.
True end-to-end encryption is physically impossible without brains
I think you just redefined end-to-end.
Now if you'd just pointed out the risk of malware on a user's 'puter, you'd be right. But this Newspeak seems to me just to confuse the issue. Your end isn't final either in a world where spyware might read the human mind (even if that world is still SF).
We need a Europe of good neighbours, co-operating together. for what we agree is the common good. Not a dysfunctional family with Daddy telling us what's good for us.
Agreed. Which is why its madness for the dysfunctional family to turn its back on the community.
The more people try and centralize control under themselves, the more resistance there will be.
I think that's the essence of the UK trouble. Our governments of both colours - and their civil service - have hugely centralised power and control in Westminster and Whitehall. Monoglot Brits see that as 'normal' and project similar centralising tendencies on a strawman 'Brussels'.
Yet that kind of centralisation is totally alien to most of our European neighbours. It would never occur to a German or Italian that so much power over his/her region be concentrated in Berlin or Rome (let alone Brussels) as the UK government takes for London. Hence our neighbours can't understand the British mindset that sees Brussels as some big superstate: in reality, EU bureaucracy is an order of magnitude smaller than Sir Humphrey's Whitehall empire.
I see no such button. Nor the buttons you describe as flanking it.
I have no recollection of getting rid of them in my browser settings, but I guess I must have done. Perhaps it was a side-effect of getting rid of animations, which are the kind of ad that I absolutely refuse to allow on my screen?
Hmm, come to think of it, I do recollect finding such irrelevant buttons annoying based on the sheer number of sites where the wretched things appear. Maybe I did explicitly block them?
Can you get her indicted for Treason?
I'd say it's dodgy but not criminal to make gazillions betting against Blighty (as George Soros did in 1992). But to do it from within parliament - even government - smells of treason to me. Ben Leadsom's hedge fund should be barred from betting against Blighty on grounds of insider trading - though he isn't personally an insider, his wife obviously is. It's her who has a serious conflict of interest, and should be prosecuted for treason.
Of course she's not the only one ...
I think that last story put in an appearance here on El Reg. But ICBW.
I've threatened it myself when told off for wearing shorts to $work. It's a shame it didn't become perfectly normal for men to wear skirts or dresses in parallel with women asserting their right to wear trousers.
Science labs were great too with lashings of dangerous chemicals.
It was during my schooldays they banned benzene.
The school's chemistry department still had stocks of it, and our chemistry teacher wasn't going to let some ban get in the way of his classes using it.
Also used lots of asbestos back then ... could be bought in the shops for a few pence.
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