Re: The sign big-notes BASIC
Truth is, as bad as many programmers made BASIC, they made 'C' and C++ far, far worse.
62 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jul 2016
BASIC, upgraded with structure and no line numbers, and 8-bit integer arrays to match the 'C' language access to memory, is still the best programming language. Because it has the technical capability, and because it's readable in English. Anyone who thinks otherwise is likely one of the poseurs who've sat in my lunchrooms pontificating on "new" programming tech while producing crap code for the latest snail-pace DBMS.
Enigma had a non-randomness flaw, and was broken after a fortnight or so. But these "new" schemes are doomed to password failure right away, by "Forcing users to choose non-random passwords" -- i.e., "You cannot choose your characters at random, you must select mixed case and numeric and etc. etc." Is anyone listening? No, of course not. Back to your phone and sexting or whatnot. You're all doomed by gross ignorance.
We didn't learn the lesson of history. Enigma had a non-randomness, remember? And now with idiots in IS demanding "at least one upper and lower case" and a numeric and a punctuation etc., you're forced to use a non-random password. Don't be as stupid as they are - wake up to weak passwords passed to you as "strong" - they're NOT.
I asked my mother what it was like during Prohibition, and she said it was wonderful. The people who pursued alcohol still got what they wanted, but they were separated from the people who wanted to live without bars and such on every corner.
Think for a moment - what if porn were still available for those who were willing to pay for access, but were unavailable to children all over the Internet? That's the mark of a "good" society.
Y'all are being lied to. Remember Enigma? How it would not allow the same character typed to be entered into the message? That was not pure random, and so Enigma was cracked, broken. Now, these same clowns are telling you that you can select from the set of uppercase, lowercase, numeric, and punctuation characters, but NOT randomly. NO - they demand that you MIX your case and MUST add a numeric and sometimes a punctuation character. While that sounds comforting, it's not allowing you to select YOUR choices at random, and so your passwords can be easily cracked. Read about Adi Shamir's discoveries on this and other code-breaking.
Our needs are all data, and our wants are to run endless experiments with that data. Your privacy will be respected insofar as your ID and account numbers, but unfortunately if you've created a pattern of behavior that can reveal some of your secrets from the public data (i.e. everything but the ID and acct. nos.), then you will be notified of additional protections offered for a fee. Our power is growing exponentially, and we will soon harness the Sun.
It is interesting to see so much disinformation and trolling regarding Trump, on a U.K. site. But then again, many U.S. residents started reading El Reg before it became a tabloid site, and they haven't gotten unhooked as yet. It's especially interesting to see where the trolls report Trump as the exact opposite of what he says, what his platforms and programs are, the friends he keeps, and his track record in business. Beware, innocent readers, of the vast array of nonsense posted here.
Too bad you missed the lessons on robotic disinformation. Professional trolls make 10 guys look like 10 thousand with the modern digital tools at their disposal. Get over it, and watch actual Trump videos for the in-person truth. Not the CNN-edited videos BTW.
"...I say this as a former Marine..." -- Trump, who said 'I' only 3 times and 'we' 45 times. That's what he said. And he got General Mattis through the meat grinder into the Sec. of Defense position. That's how a president is supposed to be, unlike Obama who said 'I' 79 times and 'we' a lot less. And I doubt that Trump will invite Communist fronts like BLM into the White House.
Kristol, Feith, Perle, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney - all Neocons who called for 9/11 four years in advance in the PNAC document, and thanks to their "lucky" stars they were able to murder 3000 people at Ground Zero, then subvert the Bill of Rights on their way to murdering a few million folks in the Middle East. PNAC and Neocons are a death-wish for the world, and Kristol sits at the top.
All of those lies you regurgitated have been properly deconstructed in media that you don't read. Like all trolls, you have no facts - you just spew the hate rhetoric that you accuse Trump of. If you had one fact, you'd state it. Trump is a common person who mixes with boxers, football players, construction workers, wrestlers, entertainers, etc. The Clintons, when they're not raping people on the Lolita Express or taking tens of millions of dollars from Saudi Arabia (who also malign women and gays), mix only with the non-deplorable elites.
If you and your CNN-reading ilk weren't so woefully ignorant and brainwashed (those of you who aren't trolls of course), you could take a breath of fresh air and realize that the people just seized power from the worst vermin in the world. Maybe in the next 4 years, the U.S. will stop the Neocon bombing and overthrow of all those Middle East nations, and they can get back to running their own countries.
I'm amazed every day at the extreme ignorance I see in places like this, coming from trolls and self-anointed critics of the little people, who in their attitude of superiority propound the most illogical and vacuous ideas. And BTW, if you do reside in the U.S., you may be lucky enough to end up in a reeducation camp someday, where you can be detoxified of the utter crap that CNN et al have been spoon-feeding you for years.
It's really amusing to read the tearful comments by all of the losers in the race to Make America Great Again. The naysayers have been trying to disenfranchise the *people* of America with their heaps of disinformation posing as *citizens* when in fact they're mostly paid trolls. So in case none of the real citizens of the U.S., who still believe in law and the Constitution speak up here, there you are. We won, and we the people now rule. Get used to it.
Trust one who knows - the kind of people who torture (i.e. "experiment on") animals are exactly the same people who fill those jobs at secret prisons and 'Black Sites'. From a good source, these miscreants cut the vocal cords first, so their victims can't scream out in pain. Yup, that's what they really do.
Zuck the Cuck? Noooooooo. Carly Fiorina, the previous politico-fascist to try it got shot down when people remembered her HP days. When Zuck the Cuck threatened to fire the person who wrote All Lives Matter on the employee *open, free* message board, we knew right then that something was really rotten at the core of Facebook.
I could do the job, but then it's so incredibly boring I'd end up just trading insults with every online idiot. Now, get me onto a juicy subforum such as Pizzagate, where I have to defend the ill intentions of pedo-lovers as pure innocence - that requires serious skills. That's where the action is. Conversely, the news room at CNN or BBC isn't bad as a part-time job.
"But totally unbreakable encryption will make life easy for terrorists and child pornographers and who knows what!"
Not by a long shot. The existence of an encrypted text by a not-yet-trusted entity raises a red flag, and from there a decision is made whether it's worth pursuing or not. If yes, a sophisticated monitoring goes into effect that gets the data before encryption.
1) If our government can read my stuff, so can the Chinese.
2) If I use a self-erasing program that encrypts data so that either of two keys decrypts it - one key decrypts to the secret text and the other to "Mary had a little lamb" etc. - then someone is going to have to be really, extremely smart to break the code. Question is, given that the average schmo wouldn't be clever enough to do this on his own, and even the average crook/spammer would struggle with it, how are the feds going to locate and break up servers who provide such clever services?
Apple is far worse than a few nagging complaints listed here. When I went to the store complaining about the forced iOS updates occurring almost daily on my iPad and iPhone, about 1/2 gb each (I delete them, after they're download by Apple silently), I was abused by the Genius Bar guy, so I complained to the manager. The store manager looked at my situation where I have every possible update turned off, he looked at my documented experience, and he not only corrected the Genius guy, he printed me a session log that said I was right.
Onto the corporation: I called Apple Support, and I got a supervisor who was even more abusive. She said "We don't force downloads, period." - I said that I have the proof, and a session log from the store manager confirming it. She repeated herself, and so did I. At that point she raised her voice and said "You're wrong, and if you keep insisting otherwise, I will hang up." And hang up she did. Just before hanging up I asked for her boss, and she said "I'm the boss - there's no one above me - goodbye."
So not only are the corporate people abusive, they are disconnected from reality, at least as far as their responsibilities are concerned. In January 1984 Apple aired the conformity '1984' Orwell-inspired commercial for the new Mac, and then they proceeded to become the jackbooted company themselves.
"....members of the Electoral College, which meets on December 19 to vote and confirm Trump into office, have asked for an intelligence briefing on the matter before they vote...."
Talk about fake news! The Reg needs to screen this propaganda first. There IS NO meeting where "members of the Electoral College" can ask for such information.
What a crock of BS. All of the controls were in for Clinton. The media, nearly all corporations, the president, etc. And she still couldn't win in spite of the current Democrat administration controlling the machines, even here in the "red" states. Her absurd 63-31 percent "win" in California, for people like myself who lived there for 26 years, is prima facie evidence of gross fraud. The Democrats lost, and if they can't accept that, we the winners are going to make sure they do accept it - the easy way or the hard way.