Posts by Dodgy Geezer

...Surely some of the politicians have phones and IoTat devices?...

What do you think politicians have unpaid intern for? You don't think they get their hands dirty lifting anything apart from glasses at expensive restaurants....?

Illegal or not, the BBC overtly advertise posts with 'Whites need not apply' notices. They claim that diversity rules allow them to do this,,,,

Re: 9th largest air force in the world at the time

...All well and good - except they apparently nailed the console set up and dialogue so well, the AF had a conniption, thought they'd been spying...

That would be Kubrick's well-known mania for accuracy. It came to the fore in 2001 - the spacecraft were all created after extensive consultations with NASA engineers, and the early humanoids after extensive consultation with paleolithic anthropologists at the Smithsonian (with primate behavioural specialists from the New York Zoo).

Re: Telcos?

...GCHQ has a policy of not writing anything down if it can be avoided...

ALL the intelligence services have a policy of producing as little documentation as possible. This is because of their history - WW2 and then Cold War. During WW2, for instance, the SOE were famous for telling people as little as possible about what they were doing. And at that time there were very good reasons for limiting information distribution. Lots of people would get killed if the information got out, because you were in a total war....

This background and tradition is completely at odds with peacetime work - the rule of law, and the principles of justice which require examination of evidence in an open court. While the Police don't seem to be very good at this, they at least have the requirement for open evidence collection as a fundamental requirement for their work.

You might wonder why we still maintain an arm of the executive which operates secretly and ignores the law, given that we are no longer fighting a war for the continued existence of the country. You would be right to so wonder...

Re: Electronics Today International (ETI)

Proops are still around....

Re: Again?

You don't have to be THAT old to have heard about the same argument with people worrying about TV sets in the home.

I'm sure that when Cimema took off in the 1930s the same argument was applied - as it probably was with the Gramophone and the Pianola.

They invented writing in the Middle East around BC3k. I seem to recall Socrates (much later) saying that he would never write any of his arguments down in a book, because then his students would start to lose their faculty for memory....

Re: Oh my fucking gawd/ess ...

...and so will most of the topsoil.....

Re: "Salts in Molten Salt Solar thermal, especially sodium fluoride are nearly as dangerous"

..."Salts in Molten Salt Solar thermal, especially sodium fluoride are nearly as dangerous"

That's the stuff you sprinkle on your food....

Er... I think that the point the OP was trying to make was that MOLTEN corrosive materials are highly dangerous. And they are.

Chemically it may be what I put on my food, but even when I add salt to curry it doesn't get THAT hot....

Re: Getting tired of this "blame the messenger" campaign...

I would love to hear from someone who voted this down. Why on earth?

Re: Remnant of the 1980s

...Both were major players in the non-digital field but utterly failed to translate this into digital equivalents despite them having a major brand that would have carried a lot of weight in doing so....

This is perfectly normal. It HAS to happen.

Think of the Kodak Board-Room when the issue of Digital comes up...

Junior 'Ideas-man': "I think we should invest more in this digital lark. It's the coming thing..."

Head of Chemicals and Processing: "Well, you can't have anything from my budget. We're pared to the bone as it is..."

Head of Films: "We're currently No.1 in the world for film. If I lose any budget we'll slip to No.3..."

Head of Paper: "If you invest in digital our entire business model is at risk. And I employ 2.5m people world-wide..."

Chairman: " Ok - put it on hold..."

Re: Hmmmm

Lots of places where the Russians have their own ideas. They don't believe in Climate Change, for one...

Re: Cryptocurrency

Here you're not describing a 'Ponzi scheme', which is a scam whereby an investment is issued with very attractive claimed returns. These returns do not exist in reality, but are funded by the money from the initial investors, who pile it to buying the instrument because the returns smm so good. While the investment base is expanding the pretence can be kept going - eventually, of course, it falls over....

What you have actually described is a 'Pump and Dump' scheme. VERY common for imvestment scams. And the idea has been going a long time - read this from the age of early railway investments... http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/rrsources/glen6.pdf

Re: Ever try to hit a driver in a vehicle on the move?

Why? Are you by some chance not American?

...So if government X decides not to buy products from company Y, is that unconstitutional?...

Governments are a bit special - they run off taxpayer's money, so they have a duty to be fair.

However, they also have a duty to support the country that they run, so if they determine that a particular firm would be bad for the country in some way they should refuse to trade with it. Cruicially, they should have evidence for that - and it's probably no good enough to say that 'We politicians are trying to scare the country into war with Russia, and so a knee-jerk reaction against anything Russian is a good political move..."

Re: re: You can't manufacture sovernity by manufacturing islands

...There was a 200NM exclusion zone during the Falklands Conflict, but that was to let anyone who might have an interest in watching how a NATO task group goes about conducting a war (know) that the UK wouldn't be carrying out ID checks beyond, it's not ours kill it....

Actually, it was primarily about warning Argentine forces to keep their distance. Note that the Argentines were also specifically told that the UK reserved the right to attack Argentine units OUTSIDE the 200 mile zone if in the opinion of the Royal Navy these constituted an operational threat - and indeed we did attack the General Belgrano just outside the 200 mile zone, because it was part of a pincer movement being planned with the Veinticinco de Mayo to attack the Task Force*.

* We knew this because GCHQ was breaking their codes and reading their orders. But of course we couldn't admit to this during the war, which would have caused the Argentines to change their communication processes. The net result was that anti-war activists claim to this day that the Belgrano was never a threat, and was sunk by a war-hungry unprovoked British attack...

Re: @veti

I've never heard of that new smear...when did you make it up?

Re: Is spreading

As the downvotes indicate, this is something you're not allowed to say. Or think...

Re: Bad bargaining

Not exactly. It is usually a Civil Offence. It is a breach of Civil Law, so it is certainly against the law, but it is not usually a crime.

If you use an image belonging to someone else this will be a breach of the law unless you can show that you fall into an exempt usage category (hugely dependent on jurisdiction). Academic use is often exempt. Note, however, that civil actions are prosecuted by individuals, so an image owner may still decide to sue you, using involvement in the judicial system as the punishment (it can be very expensive).

Copyright law is there for commercial protection.Penalties are therefore based on the profit you have made, or the profit the counterparty has lost, as a result of your actions. For use in a school assignment this would probably be non-existent, even if you were found to have breached the law. This is why copyright holders argue that music and film 'pirates' have cost their company vast millions - if they had not, the penalty would be laughably small.

Re: This is nonsense

Actually, we DO, in quite a few meaningful senses...

...You know IP addresses are (mistakenly) regarded as PII right? Yes, even dynamic ones. You cannot rely on common sense with this stuff....

If you do not understand a subject, the appropriate thing to do is to educate yourself, not display your ignorance.

'Personal' data, as defined in data protection legislation, is data by which you can uniquely identify a person. That data can be ANYTHING so long as the identification process can operate, either with the actual data alone or with any extra data which you can reasonably be expected to have.

So, if a company issues differently coloured jumpers to its staff, and holds a list of the jumpers issued against staff IDs, the jumper colour becomes controlled data for the purposes of data protection legislation...

...We humans are not as evolved as we need to be......

Er.. no. Persons who lean to the left aren't as intelligent as they need to be...