Posts by Graham Dawson

Americans stand against UN internet-tax plan

Re: Yes lets kill the BBC

Except that argument isn't valid any more. The BBC produces nothing that isn't either matched or beaten by other broadcasters world-wide. In fact most of the BBC's content is produced by external production companies - it makes very little in-house, most of which is useless tat, and most of what it broadcasts is produced with an eye on foreign markets, which is why the BBC has such long idents. They're filling the time that would be taken with adverts. Even its vaunted nature documentaries and big-name dramas are produced by third-parties and aimed at the international market first and foremost.

The license fee is only used to pay over the odds for slebs and wannabe opinion-makers, and the layers and layers of managers that infest broadcasting house. It is a regressive anachronism that forces people to pay for a service they don't even use.

If Microsoft extracted a tax for every computer that was sold you would be up in arms but when another greedy, overbearing corporation with delusions of superiority does it you're just fine with it.

OH WAIT!

Average selling price of tablets drops 21% in three months

Re: Boy's Toys

I call my tf101 a toy. But then I call my main computer a box and my graphics tablet a cat bed, so... yeah.

I don't get the whole problem with grown men having "toys". To assume that adults can never have anything to enjoy is a very childish way to view the world. To be an adult means knowing when you can let go and simply enjoy life - and play with your toys.

Windows 8: Not even Microsoft thinks businesses will use it

Re: When does thing launch again?

You’ve got to be kidding me. I’ve been further even more decided to use even go need to do look more as anyone can. Can you really be far even as decided half as much to use go wish for that? My guess is that when one really been far even as decided once to use even go want, it is then that he has really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like. It’s just common sense.

O2, Be Broadband axe Pirate Bay access

Re: oh noooooo

It isn't their money being wasted and they get paid for the time spent. No incentive to be smart about it.

We'll pull the plug on info-leak smart meters, warns UK.gov

Re: Case hasn't been made

Oh yes it has. The case is simple: "Shut up or we'll raise your bills and taxes again."

And then they do it anyway.

Dual-screen, detachable and Windows 8 star at Computex

And still no word on the UK release of the padfone. Come on, Asus, hurry up!

Techies beg world to join the 1% on IPv6 launch day

They get millions of IP addresses each, I'm stuck sharing with hundreds of other people on a rotating basis because there aren't enough left to go around. I am the 99%.

... right?

Oh. Never mind then.

Earth bathed in high-energy radiation from colossal mystery blast

Re: I wonder what they saw that they interpreted as a "red crucifix"

A "red crucifix" and "wonderful serpents" are both very good descriptions of highly active Aurora Borealis, which form all sorts of marvellous shapes. If they're strong enough you'll begin to see coherent plasma formations taking on the form of pillars, crosses, humanoid figures, chalices and all sorts of fancy things. Serpents, which were traditionally sinuous, flying creatures and not necessarily snakes, would be fairly run of the mill.

A large CME impacting earth would generate very strong, very southerly aurora.

Additional evidence: the magnetic north pole was much closer to Europe in the 700s and 800s AD (it's moved quite a bit since then) which means that aurora would be more southerly in Europe to begin with, which would explain the serpents - bright glowing, snaking shapes in the sky would be seen as serpents and the flying, dragon-like "worm" and might even have been related back to the norse mythology of Jormungand.

So the question becomes, was that CME powerful enough to generate more coherent shapes? If it were at the level of the Carrington Event (look it up) then it could well have been responsible for both the sky sightings and the C14 increase.

Flexible Willow glass displays thin and curvy gadget future

"Add slimness".

Are they going to simplificate and add more lightness too?

yeesh. :)

My part in the GREATEST IPO SUCCESS of ALL TIME

Re: It's Verity Stob

You mean placing it in Bootnotes, the way it was written, the location of his VC company and the obviously implausible content of the article itself wasn't enough for you?

Firm applies for .sucks domain

If this goes through, who's going to register really.sucks and sell subdomains?

This whole tld thing is starting to sound like usenet... how long before we see the domain will.wheaton.really.really.sucks? (this is an example, I actually think Will Wheaton is a pretty cool guy).

SpaceX signs deal to put its giant rocket to good use

Re: Large loads to GEO

A space-station or three up there would be fantastic.

Re: Vandenberg?

Well, it's possible to do a 270-something degree plane change and get your satellite orbiting in the right direction before you boost it up, it just takes a lot of fuel, like I said.

Bubba is disappointed that he can't make an enormous bbq out of that rocket stage.

Re: Vandenberg?

You can launch to GEO from vandenberg, it just requires a lot more fuel for all changes you'll be making to your orbital plane before you get there. If fuel were no object then you could launch to geo from the north pole, and I'm sure they'll start doing that once they've invented a Fuel Tank of Holding.

I need to multitask, but Windows 8's Metro won't let me

Re: "Er, Microsoft? Multi = more than 2"

I thought it was one two many lots.

Final countdown for NASA's NuSTAR X-ray black hole telescope

Italy has a space agency?

Agriboffins' site downed by DDoS after GM protest

Is it just me, or are Anon becoming the al qaida of "hacking" these days? For every new ddos or password pile leak in the news, you get some nefarioius new group who claims or is rumoured to be linked to them. It's getting silly.

People-powered Olympic shopping mall: A sign of utter tech illiteracy

Re: Crichton

Does it involve night arrows?

Passwords are for AES-holes

Re: I don't hate my users

Given the way you post here it wouldn't surprise me if you frog-marched them all into a small concrete room and screamed at them for an hour about your new security policy before sending them off to the daily waterboarding session.

@Ken Hagan Re: If that's so, then why

I didn't see your post before, the righteous fury was clouding my eyes. :)

You're right, I guess I was probably overstating the password thing. Claiming X is the single biggest vector is a silly thing to do and I'll try not to do it in future. It's still an issue though, not just in office environments, but anywhere people use complex and hard to memorise passwords.

Re: If that's so, then why

If by saying I wasn't up to the job you mean I wasn't complete up my own arse then, yes, you're right. I lacked sufficient rectocranial insertion to survive the world of software development.

No, I wrote good code. It works, does its job and is secure. I was not the best but I was good. I left because a) people like you kept telling me how to do things despite their claimed solutions being obviously stupid and broken and b) I get better money making holes in peoples walls and filling them with copper, with the added bonus of setting my own hours and not having to deal with (a) at all.

My assertions are no more beardless than yours: you may believe that your complete knowledge of your own experience makes your claims superior to my own but that simply demonstrates further your apparent inability to understand that other people disagree with you for reasons other than being stupid lusers and XKCD fans. In fact you may be surprised to learn that there are people who have had far more experience of this than you. You're arguing with some of them right now and making yourself look like an arrogant cock in the process.

Re: If that's so, then why

"you mean you guys actually let random people on the Internet sit there and beat on your login prompts with brute-force attempts?"

Well if anyone had actually said that you might have a point.

Again you're assuming you know everything.

Re: If that's so, then why

So we reach the crux of it, which is that you just don't like anything that refers to XKCD and your'e so determined to hate everything related to Randall Munroe's "opus" that you reject, out of hand, eminently sensible and workable solutions to the whole password problem with the same elitist bullshitting attitude you always seem to have on these forums.

Now here's the affix: I don't work in anything directly related to IT these days. I got out of it, in part, because of people like you throwing your not inconsiderable weight around every chance you got, insulting everyone who wasn't uyou as "luser" waste of space morons who obviously have to be nannied through everything - even when it wasn't true. In fact especially when it wasn't true. You are an arrogant little blowhard who has a little bit of power over his domain (oh ho ho) and refuses to accept that maybe, just maybe you might be wrong sometimes.

What's the biggest single security hole passwords have these days? People writing them down. Why do they write them down? Because they can't remember them. What do we want people to do with their passwords? Remember them and not write them down. On that score alone the regular language phrase is superior to the cryptic nonsense string of characters. People are able to remember phrases because they are semantic. They contain meaning, and meaning is the glue that makes memory stick.

And in terms of entropy it's a winner again. An 8 character password is easier to brute-force than a 32 character one no matter what characters it's made up from. There is no difference between the strings abababab and nGl04$sh when you are brute-forcing and if you have access to hash tables there's no amount of security that can keep you out over even a short period.

So it comes back to blocking that one major hole: the user. Your solution ensures that there will always be a human-readable copy of some large portion of your userbase's passwords available on handy little pieces of paper. The regular language solution provides a way to close that hole.

So as far as I can tell the only reason you have for rejecting it is that you didn't come up with the idea and Monroe did. Which says plenty about you and little about the idea itself.

Re: In fact it is not

Okay, so how do they enter their strong password made up of numbers and letters and a limit set of non-alphanumeric characters in a field with masked input without typos?

Steve Jobs' death clears way for vibrating Apple tool

Re: Deja vu from recent Reg headlines

Or parodying people who say Jobs was in the way.

Or both.

Crazy Texans dunk servers in DEEP FRYERS

Mineral oil has a flash point of 170°C and a boiling point of, I think, 310°C. It will burn, but by the time it starts burning the rest of your data centre is already so far gone that a regular air-cooled system would have been reduced to twisted metal and ash. In fact it may well preserve your hardware against fire and subsequent water damage.

Possibly.

Review: Raspberry Pi

Re: Desktop performance is not surprising

Thanks!

Re: Desktop performance is not surprising

What tablet would this be? Sounds like an ideal candidate for a project I've been pondering.

IP law probe MPs hunt for smoking gun, find plenty of smoke

Re: Deja Vu

You're mixing up positive and negative rights. Negative rights are rights that exist regardless of regulation (and are usually curtailed by it). They are everything that require no other person to be deprived in order to exist, such as the right to own property (the actual ownership of property is a separate issue) and the right to free speech. Nobody has to be prevented from speaking to allow me to speak, for instance. They require no action to exist and require a negative action - an action against them - to be curtailed.

Positive rights require one party to be deprived in some way in order for another party to enjoy a "right" such as the right to not be offended that is the essence of all hate speech legislation, or the right to force others to provide access to their property regardless of their opinion about what you want to do with it. Those rights must be created by regulation, otherwise they wouldn't exist - they require "positive action" to exist in the first place.

Re: Would be a different story if copyright/IPO had been respected.

Quite right. Unfortunately, all the re-writes proposed to date seem to respect only the bank accounts of the big distributor-middlemen and what might be termed professional rights-holders, organisations that create no wealth and serve only to redistribute what already exists.

Smoke-belching flash drive self-destructs on command

Re: Remember this is not intended for Joe Bloggs users.

@AC

I don't know about UK procedures but I'm given to understand that the US armed forces employ a three-part procedure to destroy their data. First they format the drives, then they cut the drives into pieces with an industrial cutter, then they pile them up with a few cases of thermite and throw a match. You know, just in case.

Txt-speak is a sign of humanity 4 U

Re: As a recent member of this "yoof"...

No, but they may have 200+ friends and acquaintances. Notice there was no specification of how many of the 200 fell into each category.

Facebook's Eduardo Saverin: I'm not a tax-dodger

Re: Insult to middle class Americans?

On the other hand, what gives the US government the right to tax people who have specifically renounced US citizenship? They would be taxing foreign nationals at that point, something that most countries consider to be a bit beyond the pale.

They're trying to tax him on income that he hasn't earned yet. If he earns that income after renouncing his citizenship they have no right to tax it, just as he has no right to avail himself of the facilities the US government provides to its citizens. Quid pro quo and all that.

Council fined £70k after burglars nick vulnerable kids' files

Re: Barnet Council

It works because the people at the top, who should be making sure that these "mistakes" don't happen through appropriate leadership and management, are completely isolated from any consequences. If the people at the top - particularly the chief execs - feel the pain caused by the inefficiencies and lack of competence of their employees they will make damn sure that they start doing their job properly.

Re: Barnet Council

These "punishments" won't have any effect until they start docking the wages of councillors and Chief Execs to pay them.

Steve Jobs' death clears way for rumoured 4in 'iPhone 5' screen

Re: Big screens

My brother (sa hi david!) has a note. I mentioned the idea that it might look silly to answer such a large phone and he sort of stared at me for a bit, like he didn't quite understand what I had said, then said something like "who gives a crap?" And I can see his point: if you buy a phone purely based on how you think it will affect other people's perceptions of you then perhaps you are not making the most rational of decisions to begin with.

Having said that, I am quite keen on getting the padfone just so I can answer calls with that stylus. I want to see how people react to me talking to a pen.

Rational? Me? :D

Pints under attack as Lord Howe demands metric-only UK

Re: Yeah, Date/Time Units Are A Buttfuck

Well oka, strictly speaking, there were 10 months in the so-called Romunal calendar, but that had been replaced by a 12 month lunar calendar centuries before Julius Caesar came along. And he didn't "want" the month named after him. It was named after him as an honour bestowed by the Roman state, likewise Augustus.

In addition the pre-julian Roman calendar occasionally had 13 months to line things up when the months got too far out of line with the actual lunar phase, and there were days added to the beginning or end of months when they needed to. Not counting the occasional changing of the length of a year to make sure a ruler was put out of office early or kept on longer than he should have been...

Re: Yeah, Date/Time Units Are A Buttfuck

@AC That is so very, very wrong. There were always 12 months. Augustus and Julius renamed months, they didn't create brand new ones.

Re: Shame!

French cockney rhyming slang must be an interesting thing to hear...

Re: From the Dead Sheep Dept

And the difference with Labour is...?

Re: Napoleon and his metric system conquered Europe,

Don't give up on fingers! I can count to 32 on one hand.

Actually they do have a "mystical rightness", depending on how you define these things. The foot has maintained a consistent length for thousands of years, all the way back to the ancient Greece and Egypt and it seems that it can actually be derived with two sticks and the night sky to a surprising degree of accuracy.

Re: Shame!

You realise that the rule about the split infinitive is a continental import, yes? It was invented when French-educated scholarly types (Actually this isn't strictly fair as the French they spoke was actually London French and very different from Paris French) attempted to forcibly apply Latin rules of grammar to English. This raises a conflict with one particular point of Latin; that being it is entirely inflected. The infinitive is a single grammatical unit, whilst English, like many other non-inflected languages, forms the infinitive with an additional particle or auxiliary word, such as "to".

It is "impossible" (for a given value of imbloodypossible) to split the infinitive in inflected languages as that would require splitting a word. Applying this rule to a non-inflected language with weak word-order-meaning and flexible sentence structure makes little sense and can create very awkward sentences if the writer chooses to pointlessly apply it without considering whether there is a reason to do so.

Re: Point 57 of a litre please.

Aye, but with metric, a half of shandy would last the whole night...

Google compressed-filth legal battle with smut site ended in US

Re: Typical Daily Mail reader reaction to this story below...

Won't someone PLEASE think of the children!

No, no not like that! Stop it!

Stuck in a dull conference? You need Verity's survival guide

I'd suggest the solution to "room for little me" is to take a women's coat and bag, place it on the seat so it's hanging against the ground and conceal a glass of wine on the floor next to it. When the whale arrives he's almost guaranteed to kick over the glass all over the coat, or knock it over when shifting the thing, and you can scream bloody murder at how he's ruined your friend or significant other's brand new accessories.

Theoretically anyway. If anyone could test this for me I'd be most appreciative.

UK milk wastage = 20,000 cars = actually completely unimportant

Re: So...

If you want to eat more cows you're going to the wrong place there, matey.

Cameron's F-35 U-turn: BAE Systems still calls the shots at No 10

Re: It's all so depressing...

It does if that 1960s technology has proven capable of the role asked of it.

Intelligence a genetic mistake

Re: Mutation

Certainly is, especially in humans for some reason. We have so many duplicates of genes it's not even funny.

Java jury finds Google guilty of infringement: Now what?

Re: Pandora's box??

Okay john 112 - who owns English?