Posts by Pascal Monett 19078 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
People accessing BBC content are only people who pay their license fee. As such, where they watch it from is neither here nor there.
You can't tell me that companies can evade tax by setting up their HQ in a tax-friendly country, then tell me that the BBC can't stream to its paying customers abroad because of local licensing issues.
Either it is the location of the company that counts, or it is the country where the activity is taking place.
Sort this nonsense out forthwith.
Unless they are not snowballs but actual pits, and the sunlight is coming from the left, which would explain why all pits are shaded on the left side and have a brightness on the right.
Plus there's the fact that NASA scientists are talking about pits. I tend to give them a bit of credence on interpreting interstellar pictures.
In other words, the Public is not able to handle the issue and must be protected from it.
Doing so is not going to help the situation, it will only keep it under wraps. That is how you get rabid conspiracy theorists.
Let them splash their hate on their websites. Educate your people properly and teach them the values of civilization and democracy. Maybe even teach them to think critically (ah, I know, anathema for a proper gubbermint official).
That is the only way people will recognize barbary when it is visible.
But yeah, that's probably the long run. Maybe even for after the next election. So it'll never happen.
So voice calls are (badly) handled with an outdated model for accounting purposes.
In Luxembourg (where I work), I have a company phone with a 15GB data plan. Any call to any Luxembourg number is free. I have the option of declaring a favorite country (fyi : in Luxembourg, border workers are ten times the amount of national workers). Obviously, living in France, I declared that as my favorite country. Calls made to French numbers are thus free as well. I do pay a small amount for international SMS.
Basically, the only thing I see making money for my telco is the monthly allowance (and, at €40, it's not so much compared to what I've seen elsewhere), and the international calls I have to make from time to time (other than France). Oh, and premium numbers, obviously.
Seems it is possible for a telco to make a living without scrounging every last cent from its customers after all.
The following motion has been proposed by Rick Andrews of Symantec and
endorsed by Bruce Morton of Entrust, Jody Cloutier of Microsoft, and Kirk
Hall of Trend Micro.
Symantec, Microsot and Trend Micro. I expected Microsoft to be in the list, and am not very surprised by Symantec. As for Trend Micro, well they have to get their name in the limelight somehow, I guess.
All in all, the usual suspects in favor of status quo, even if it means less security for the consumer.
One API the Youmi developers couldn't get past is Apple's block on reading a device's serial number, so to create a unique identifier for the data they were gathering, the SDK slurped numbers from peripherals like the battery system and used those as the index.
So, you lock down reading the phone's serial number, but you solder in batteries with a unique ID and leave that available.
Brilliant reasoning there. Way to apply the logic all the way to the end. And what a wonderful example of actually checking the stuff you say you check. This absolutely cannot be proof that you use your rules arbitrarily to shut down apps that bother you rather than checking all apps thoroughly and binning all that do not adhere to the rules.
Nope. No lax security here. Oh wait . .
Maybe, but it is also within reach of a US judge and the NSA via National Security Letter.
But hey, don't take that to mean that Indians (and everone else) won't be using the facilities. The public doesn't know the first thing about security, and companies haven't been bitten hard enough yet to care.
Contrary to the title of this article, I read the PDF expecting to find thinly-veiled threats of fire and brimstone.
Instead, I found a very civil letter outlining the beliefs of the senators and the expectation that ICANN will adhere to them.
That's all very nice, but when you write such a letter to the chair of an organisation that can be officially told to accept community governance and reply that it would be a bad idea because he thinks so, then I doubt anything in this letter will have a snowflake's chance in Hell to do any better.
I think that a right flogging in the middle of Times Square is the only thing that could concievably bring some sense to the entire ICANN board.
And they will keep on wondering until the situation gets bad enough that they have to lower their bonuses.
At that point, Something Must Be Done, and that will be the point where this outsourcing malarky will finally fall through the floor.
With a bit of luck, someone might point out to them that The Cloud is on a similar track, albeit for different reasons (mainly security), and let them take their time for the light to turn on.
That may actually be a good thing. Might be able to lock all the traffic at the router's firewall then.
In any case, I have already decided a few years back that I will not participate in IoT. Never will my fridge be connected to the Web, and I will always avoid using my phone to pilote anything in my house.
Good old hardware switches is where it's at. Makes you move that lardass.
Now get off my lawn !
Got fed up with the absolutely crap downloader, unbelievably medieval update (mis)management, and the last straw was EA Games banning me from installing a game I PAID FOR under the pretext that the key was invalid. But when you buy on their site, there is no key.
I might log back and change my password though. I think I'll set it to EAGamesSucksBigHairyDonkeyBalls or somesuch.
Productivity demands that we junk everything comfortable, everything safe, everything stable, set our faces to the wind, and explore the unknown.
And while you're off exploring, how do you manage revenue ? You know, that thing that pays you at the end of the month ? Or do you think that your salary just magically appears and nobody has to process anything about it ?
No ? You're aware that a back office is managing things so you can get a paycheck every now and then ? Good. So how long are you going to agree to go without pay in order to "explore the unknown" ?
What a load of bull.
Why do you not think that is possible ? A properly specced and managed server can chug along for years without any problem. I've seen a few myself. I can vouch for one mail cluster that has not missed a minute in the past four years.
Apparently some do. The added "benefit" appears to be getting rid of local IT.
Like all fads, this one has room to grow before it fades away. In the end of all the hoopla, I think we'll find ourselves with a more robust Internet, and a more balanced view of things. There are things that can go to the Cloud, undoubtedly, and there are definitely some things that should never be put in the Cloud.
So companies will end up with some stuff locally, some stuff on the Cloud, and a clear idea of why what goes where. And Cloud suppliers will become more resiliant and reliable as well (learning from past mistakes, etc).
It's all for the better, actually. But now it's a load of PR bull in a lot of cases.
I seriously doubt China will bend over and let itself get hoovered by Uncle Sam like the EU did.
As far as surveillance is concerned, the NSA has nothing to teach them, and if their attitude toward Google and Facebook is anything to go by, the US government will be treading lightly when it comes to negociating data exchange with them.
Besides, the US has no big stick to bring to the Chinese negociation table, unlike Europe where Uncle Sam basically expects the drinks to be a gratuity on the tab.
Obviously not.
This is not something to sign up to. This is just a flowery exercise in international PR in order to create yet another rod to bash over the head of the unruly uncivilized barbarians when "proper" armies from "civilized" countries have overrun everything and taken all decision-making people as prisoners of war.
Of course, as usual, anything the US of NSA does will not be subject to any sanctions by this new treaty, even when in flagrant violation of its terms.
About to turn into a $67 billion bonfire.
Since Y2K company acquisitions have gone crazy, and practically none of them have been successful (ie made big bucks for the acquirer).
I applaud the balls it took to decide to throw away that amount of money. It'll burn brightly, and might just be seen from the Moon.
I really would like articles to stop referring to small companies growing "exponentially". Of course, if you start with 10 and get 20 more the year after, your growth in percentage is immense.
But come on, you're starting from nothing. Let's not use hyperbole until it is warranted, okay ? The growth of this small company is not exponential, it is simply allowing them to transit from next to nothing to next to something. That's not so impressive, now is it ?
Even by the guy's own words : they have 50,000 customers, they want 100 million. So they have 0.0005% of their target market. There is nothing exponential in that slice of market share.
Come back with the big words when they have gone from 10% to 15% of the market. Then we can start talking "exponential".
One break-in, one damning email sent from that server and we'll see how fast it gets shut down by public opinion and how quickly the law will be amended to ensure that only government servers under government authority are allowed to be used by government officials.
I don't care how technically competent he may be. His job is to govern a country, not an email server. Unless he has people managing that server, which he will have to explain budgetarily, that server is a risk.
But hey, have fun while it lasts. After all, what's the worst that can happen ? It's not like all the blackhats of the world know about it now, right ?
Oh, wait . .
All this cloud malarky has finally come to the real point : getting rid of local IT support. This is why notions like security and confidentiality take the back seat.
The IT peons have always been the red-headed stepchildren of the company. Never enough budget to do things right, never enough personnel to bear the load, and always being given higher and higher goals to fulfill.
Now the besuited CEOs are finally going to get rid of them and everything will be just hunky-dory. Except there won't be anyone to call when their new shiny can't connect to the network. Hmm, I wonder what they'll decide then ?
Oh well, just like call centers, things will go this way until the pendulum reaches pinnacle and starts swinging back. Just like servers, really. We went from mainframes to local PC and now we're going back to mainframes, except they're called "cloud" now.
I'd really like to know that as well.
I think it's like in a dysfunctional family. Everybody knows the weird uncle is a child rapist, but everybody keeps trying to talk to him. This will continue until the community globally decides they have had enough, and walks away on their own to do something else.
And frankly, it's not like it's difficult to set up an administration.
Well that's the first time I've heard of good news on this subject.
As if an administrative body could implode the functionality of all those tens of thousands of routers.
Hey ICANN : BRING IT ON !
You can be replaced. The routers won't notice, I promise.
Nice to know. Good news.
Um, just one thing : who's going to control that ?
Because right now there are a lot of people in high places with the habit of passing data by the petabyte without even blinking.
I don't think they're going to change their habit any time soon when everything that is passed along is done for "National Paranoia" and under the radar.
But one can always hope. . .
Yes, it was a hardware launch. Yes, MS was there with a Lumia, holding it carefully.
That's a bit like Elon Musk holding a big reveal conference about his latest Tesla model and all anybody can see is a poster of it.
At a hardware show, you're supposed to demonstrate the hardware, not just show a piece of it.
Great idea really, give them time to get hooked on something, develop their business and get revenue, then come back and claim royalties.
Okay, so it's not a bad idea per se, but more than 4% of sales ? That's more than the current interest rate for someone else doing the work. I don't know what the royalty rate generally is, so maybe they're being eminently reasonable.
What of the companies that don't survive three years and fold ? Do they still have to pay the $3,000 minimum ?
Thanks to the threatening actions of one, I now consider all makers to be suspect and will not be buying any security camera at all until you guys come forward with objectively-assessed proof that your equipment is secure.
Given that one of them doesn't even know what to do, I won't hold my breath.
Given that 99.9% of all malware exists because of Javascript, I'm on board with that.
But kill HTML ? Where's the technical justification for that ? HTML doesn't make page loads longer, HTML loads in a jiffy.
No, the things that make pages load slowly is always the additional cruft from anywhere but the site you're loading. Meaning, of course, ads.
And Google is not going to kill its revenue stream.
So this is just another useless announcement for everyone but Google.
You want fast-loading pages ? Block ads. Problem solved.
This "software-defined" tech only works if there are multiple batteries.
I can see that working for cars. I'm sure there are lots of places to slot in a battery in a car, and the amount of space will likely define what tech can be used, so the system does need to be able to work with various battery types.
But frankly, I'm not convinced with wearables, and even less with computing in general. Extending a watches battery life ? Great. Instead of buying a battery every year, I'll buy it every other year. Big deal. And if I have to lug around anything with enough juice to power my laptop for six hours more, well it'll be another battery anyway, so what use is the software ? Smartphones have the same problem in worse : they're a lot lighter. Any additional battery worth a damn is going to weigh them down and make them awkward to use.
Oh well, we'll just have to wait 25 years and find out what they actually did with it.
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