Posts by Nick Kew

Re: Criminals, number spoofing

Never mind criminals, what about pranksters? Kids? When one ten-year-old boasts of having done it to his parents, how long before the whole class have figured it out?

Re: Tony Blair inspires me

What exactly is 'a decentralised ID system'?

PGP.

Next question?

Re: German ID cards

I recollect an incident in Italy, back in (I think) 1994. After a long, hot drive, I had checked in to a hotel on the shores of Lago Maggiore. It being a hot evening, I went down to the lake, and out for a long swim. When I got back, the police were looking for me: apparently I'd been reported as a suspected suicide! They asked for my identity document, and explained that my failure to carry it was technically illegal.

Fortunately they were sufficiently non-jobsworth to accept the sense of not carrying my passport while out for a swim!

Re: "trying to come up with new forms of ID card"

So many things in normal life demand such identity. Try signing up with a quack, or obtaining any financial product from a bank account to a pension, without one.

Cryptographic identity could[1] be an improvement. The power to assert your own identity, but not without at least enough consent to enter a PIN or password.

[1] Depending on implementation. My implementation would empower the owner of the identity and noone else.

Re: Yeuch...

Your hatred of Thatcher shows through the silly mischaracterisation of the man who started the process of squandering her legacy.

I dreamed of the lovely keypunch ladies as I sat waiting for the next flurry of line noise to appear on the teletype.

The teletype of course accessing an antiquated mainframe down a phone line dominated by line noise. Just the one parity bit is wholly inadequate.

Re: Iran is quite sunny

Also a large population. I have no data to back this, but I expect solar provides a growing but modest part of their energy.

As for cheaper, that depends on externalities, including US sanctions nonsense that's sure to be hampering the growth of that solar energy.

You organise your life around usage patterns that work. Just as with "Economy 7" you schedule certain things - like running the dishwasher - for overnight. I lived with that tariff for something over two years, and it's no great hardship. I think it was entirely practical (though possibly also historic): if you have a more limited grid than perhaps the typical commentard is accustomed to, then having a decent chunk of your users capped like that helps with managing demand peaks.

If it doesn't work for you, just use the next tariff up.

I've encountered a variant on that: cheap tariffs with capped usage. From memory, the cheapest tariff would not allow you to draw more than 3KW, which works fine if you don't do anything intensive (like an electric cooker or shower) and schedule middling-load things to avoid running all at once.

Re: "maybe the bleeding stops after a minute or two"

Twentysomething minutes? If you're talking anticoagulents, you're severely underselling them!

Always dispose of sensitive material securely.

The fires of Mount Doom.

Re: Wonderful, have one of these...

Humans were there first. For example, the Flying Dutchman lived on with his dead crew long enough to become legend. That was Satan's curse, of course.

Nuances like that could arise from the translation. After all, we have a long tradition of translations completely changing the meaning of a story: for instance, many of the core Bible narratives.

In this instance, of course we can't know. The timing looks suspiciously like hitting back at recent stories, though as far as I recollect the current crop haven't been directed at Russia but instead cast China and Iran as their villains. Maybe they suspect a new Russian-spying story could be next?

Re: 5G cannot penetrate trees and that, as a result...?

You may have a point. Is that why Granny Weatherwax's broomstick never responded to the dwarves' attempts to fix it?

Re: Why another case in the USA ?

There are reasons to be cynical about the US process. But lack of action from the UK out-to-lunch office isn't one of them.

Simpler than that

Correlation might be considered inevitable. If a place has serious racial tensions - for whatever reason - that will generate both more racist tweets and more racist crimes than a place where everyone lives in perfect harmony.

Doesn't mean it's the same people. Just the same underlying tensions.

And if if there's no border, because the UK is still in the EU, what's different?

So long as we're in the EU, food in Northern Ireland meets EU food safety (and production) standards. So no great problem if some of it gets smuggled. What Ireland and the rest of the EU and friends don't want is a smuggling operation limited only by the capacity of transport links from Belfast to Dublin once Blighty has chained itself to US standards - as we must do if we're to get that fantastic trade deal (which is not a Trump-ism; it was The Big Red Line for Obama and Bush, too).

Isn't that 5 years the same ballpark as Autonomy's Hussain?

Autonomy is interesting 'cos it's a soap opera. This case is rather interesting in its own right: seems it wasn't about regular greed, but over-enthusiasm for a real project. Somewhere on a scale between Campaigner and Terrorist, but not your average fraudster.