Posts by Pascal Monett 18232 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
No it wouldn't. If legal counsel protection was extended to accountants, then all the instances of "cooking the books" would become cast-iron procedures and there would be no way to uncover such shenanigans.
Lawyers can lie, but they're generally known to get criminals off the hook by legal means, not illegal ones.
Accountants, on the other hand, can be responsible for the worst economic crisis of our time. No legal professional privilege for them, ever.
Might I detect the next excuse for preemptive invasion politics ?
"They have cyberweapons of mass destruction, Mr President !"
"Invade, General. Invade."
Pff. I recall clearly having read not long ago something about boffins publishing a paper in which they go about disproving the FUD concerning cyber attacks and "bringing down the power grid". It seems that it's a lot more difficult than just sending the proper hack sequence from a botnet.
Of course, this study was for the UK, if I'm not mistaken.
In the USA, it's an entirely different ball game. A country who's most sensitive military servers can get broken into by an autist with a phone is obviously a country that needs to be on the alert for actual hackers with evil intent.
Oh, and firewalls do actually work, Mr Ex-Presidential Advisor. You just have to know how to configure one - which is obviously a major issue in US government circles.
Even in France, where I live, performance is rather frequently lacking. I have a good line, rated at up to 20 mbps. At any time of day, I get 8 mbps minimum. I have a full contract, TV, phone and Internet access, no capping (as was remarked earlier).
Internet access is by far the most reliable. I frequently have the same IP for weeks at a time (it only changes when the line goes down or I turn off the box).
The phone is a bit more dodgy. Sometimes I hear of people who phoned me but I never got the call. Other times I want to phone someone and I get an incomprehensible "this number does not exist" error. Try again and it works. The number is recorded in the phone, so it's not a typing error.
Of the lot, TV is actually the worst performer. It regularly stutters, there is frame drop, sometimes the connection is entirely lost for a few seconds. When it works, it works fine, but it fails so often that when we can watch a whole show without any issue it's more of a surprise than anything else.
In such conditions, Internet TV has been relegated to the backup solution when satellite reception quality is too dodgy. And if it starts acting up at that point, well it's either pop in a DVD or go read a book.
Frankly, I feel that the Internet is not the best medium for this kind of usage. Either that, or there's serious need of improving backbone bandwidth capacity, even in France.
I shudder to think of the situation in the UK. I really don't see how they can offer Internet TV with any hope of reliability from all the capping and bandwidth issues I read here and there.
But Internet access itself ? Fine and dandy.
Then again, I'm fluent in both French and English, so the Web is vast for me.
But scammers don't cost anybody money - and by anybody I mean nobody important, just the plebs.
There's no money in going after scum that skims off the plebs, that's what the government does anyway. And these scammers don't even dent the governments' share since getting had by a scammer is not tax-deductible.
So no, nobody is going to spend good money going after scammers. Not for the money.
One day, we might get ISPs waking up to the fact that their customers are getting fed up by the email bombardment, and, for quality issues and service considerations, they just might think to filter a bit and block scam mails that they can detect.
But it'll have to become an important quality issue for an ISP, forcing them to use it as a commercial argument for better service to attract more customers before we, the plebs, see any change.
I'm sure you'd have appreciated the view if it fell in your area, hmm ?
By the way, the asteroid that caused the Tunguska event didn't make it to Earth surface either, but it sure made a lot of trees unhappy. I'm pretty sure people in New York or Tokyo wouldn't much like it to happen to them.
Except when the IPCC includes data that has not yet been certified and bases some conclusions on that data, which then turns out to be flat-out wrong.
Come on, if there is one thing that ClimateGate has taught us it is that big money is indeed involved and some unscrupulous scientists can fudge the numbers to fit the conclusion.
The data is the data. If it does not fit the conclusion, then the conclusion is wrong. That is science. But of course, that supposes that the data is properly and rigorously evaluated in the first place, without bias or preconceptions of any kind.
And as far as all this global warming hoopla is concerned, there is no such thing as absence of preconception anymore. Global warming is now indeed a religion, with deniers as the excommunicated. Each party hangs on desperately to its own side of the argument and refuses to listen to anything that might be a valid counter-argument.
In this situation, it will be extremely difficult to continue to do proper science and actually answer the question of whether or not global warming is indeed happening and what we can do about it (never mind if it is our fault or not).
And that's a shame because I am convinced that we do actually need an answer.
I totally agree with you since I did stats back at Uni. That said, LeBlanc is most probably not a moron, he's just doing what everyone would expect him to do, which is try and put out the fire before it starts. I mean come on, would you really expect a negative survey result _without_ some form of damage control ?
Which may not only be ridiculous in form, but useless in fact. So, double fail for him.
Do you really think the survey was a Yes/No affair ?
Might there have been a bit of Not Sure, Yeah, Maybe and so on ?
Imagine that the question Do you think Ballmer's doing a good job" could have been answered by the following choices :
a) Positively Yes
b) Yeah, why not ?
c) Uh, maybe
d) Not really, mate
e) No way
In this case, the negative answers are the choices d and e, but c is not a positive answer - it's a neutral one.
There's a good chance that it is NOT 50/50.
What on Earth ?? They're just analysts, right ? It's not like HP makes them sign NDAs for getting the latest PR announcement, so why can they not tick the bastard off ? Does the quality of their analysis depend on whether or not they get a free lunch with the guy ?
Seriously, I don't get it. Once upon a time we used to hear that "it's lonely at the top", because once you got there you had no friends and everyone was nipping at you heels, trying to bring you down.
Nowadays I get the feeling that when you're on top, as long as you don't stumble you're pandered to, lavished with positive attention and covered in rosy comments. Of course, as soon as you have a problem, you get to see that, like in a vampire film, those lovely smiles suddenly turn to wicked, tooth-filled grins and those same people start biting you to pieces, but still.
What hypocrisy.
The only thing that is really hindering this kind of pie-in-the-sky dream is the battery. Projecting light may not be all that expensive, electrically speaking, but the kind of holographic display in the picture looks quite energy-intensive to me.
In any case, it'll certainly put an increased load on an already severely limited power supply. Apparently, average talk time is around 4 hours now (source : http://www.infosyncworld.com/news/n/8069.html), with a few exceptions.
4 hours and all you do is talk. Radio is about the cheapest electrical application there is. You need very little power to send and receive. Set up a phone with holographic display and keyboard and you're upping the energy requirement by at least an order of magnitude.
So that means what ? Today's batteries would last 4 minutes ?
I don't know, and maybe nobody does, but I am sure of one thing : battery life needs to be dramatically extended before anything like this can give a day's worth of usefulness to the average user.
Connected to the cloud. That's even a worse idea than GSM phones. Not only Big Brother will know where you are, but he'll also know what you're looking at.
I'd be scared if I thought it would be possible. Fortunately, I don't. In ten years time I'm sure wireless coverage will be better, but it won't allow you to have PC-anywhere 100mbps connections.
I would, however, be very interested in an enhanced binocular. I'd like to see what they come up with for enhancing it. Because, unless you have military applications, the most important thing in binoculars is the optics. And we all know that software zooming just loses precision on a portion of what you can see.
The EULA can be changed by a one-sided decision, and courts are still going to pretend that it is a binding contract ?
Bollocks.
I don't care if it is in the user's favor. A binding contract is one that cannot be changed without consent from both parties.
This just proves that the EULA is a farce.
When our national weather service had not yet "upgraded" its system, the weather reports were, as I remember them, accurate enough to actually plan upon. In other words, if they said this week-end was going to see rain, you didn't plan a trip to the beach and, more often than not, they were right and you had no regrets. Well, sometimes you did, but more often you didn't.
Then they upgraded their system, and spanned their prediction time to 5 days, inserting a "confidence ratio" while they did it. It soon became obvious that, although they had more than doubled the computing capacity, they had also more than doubled the error margin.
Now, unless there are clear skies over half of Europe, we have trouble knowing whether or not it will rain tomorrow. Forget about a 5-day forecast - they haven't made one that actually panned out.
So what I'm asking is this : given the dismal failure France has already recorded in improving on its computing capacity, what steps are being taken to ensure that all this improved granularity isn't going to end up going the same way ?
Comodo used to be a great personal firewall, and free.
But now they have gone the pay route, whilst still maintaining a free version for personal use.
The last time I saw that happen was with an anti-virus, and it ended badly since the company managed to patch so many warnings and popups into their dang little code that it became almost unusable.
I obviously fear Comodo will go the same route, since every single piece of security software I have ever seen go from free to paying has always ended up making the same mistakes on the free side - i.e. trying to force people to pay, often quite ungraciously.
Let's also do away with frontpage and netmeeting, two of the most useless pieces of software that can possibly grace a default install. And I wouldn't mind getting rid of movie maker either.
Why can Microsoft not allow those things to be a choice ? What on God's green Earth made them decide : "okay, we're going to make the netmeeting directory a functional Windows requirement" ?
You will notice that those companies are generally small and the management of those small companies is a one-man affair, so management is directly in contact with the customers and the market.
If you think about it, when your livelihood is directly dependent on whether or not that customer who just left is going to come back, yes, you will behave in a civilized manner. And you'll most likely do anything you can afford to to make that customer want to come back.
Such rules of behavior do not apply to big companies, the ones that hire CEOs and lawyers. Those companies are soulless and committed to "maximizing shareholder value", which they do by screwing everyone they possibly can - including their own customers, up to a point.
There is no need to go about enforcing humanity on small companies - those that are not in tune with their customers die because the customers don't come back.
Big companies can put up with unhappy customers much easier than small companies, which has a tendency of making CEOs of those big corporations think that they can get away with any dick move they want. Unfortunately, they are most often right, because I have yet to see a major company fold because their customer base didn't appreciate some immoral decision.
Exactly what I expected. It is 2 minutes and 2 seconds long, and the first minute and 13 seconds have absolutely nothing to do with the new interface.
In other words, more than half of this video that is supposed to show the new interface does anything but that. So half the video is useless.
Which happens to confirm what I think of Twitter.
In some cases, a single complaint is enough to spark a change in policy - especially on the Internet. What I would like to understand is why a company can be aware that its user base is counted in tens or hundreds of thousands, yet one complaint sends its marketing department in a tizzy.
It would seem to me that a bit of objectivity is in order. If your user base is estimated at 200,000 then one complaint is insignificant. Actually, I would think that 2% of unhappy users is par for the course, meaning 4,000 complaints should be necessary before even starting to worry.
And of course, I mean 4,000 separate complaints, written differently from different IP addresses and posted at different times - stuffing Internet boxes is so easy these days.
First : I have no doubt that there are very intelligent people who are indeed capable of pinpointing an operational issue in the functioning of the Internet. As such, given that these people know what they are talking about, there is bound to be a certain amount of problems that can arise in our daily use of this increasingly-indispensable tool.
Second : Given the amount of money generated by the Internet in all of its commercial activity and interests, I have no doubt either that this issue will be solved in one way or another without impacting my browser in any way.
Third : this is already not the first time an Internet meltdown has been forecast and, gosh, it's still there isn't it ?
Conclusion : this is not an issue for us normal people - alert condition martini dry, thank you for your attention.
Gosh, go to a 3rd-world madly industrializing country and complain about poverty. Well done. Left your sparkling, air-conditioned commercial malls and got culture shock, did you ?
Say, have you ever been to Los Angeles ? You know, in California ? Because there are two distinct sides to that city as well, and there certainly is a pocket of obscene wealth over there.
Mote in the others eye and all that.
I find this technology very interesting. I also happen to have an inordinate amount of interest in underground and ill-defined areas that stay out of sunlight.
Therefor, I fully expect that there be a wave of mapping endeavors that create accurate maps of such locations as :
- the Paris underground
- the Egyptian pyramids and famous tombs
- the Maginot line
- every major subway system on all continents
- all major public buildings (such as famous museums)
Once the mapping is done, the data should be integrated into an online exploratory website which allows people to "surf" through the various mazes and "see" what they would if they on-site with proper lighting.
Of course, I realize that there are stupid current conditions like terrorist alerts that will probably ban such mapping attempts in the name of security, but hey, I said it was a wishlist.
Thank you, Apple, for finally saying in public that you are thin-skinned and vindictive. Now it's official.
Personally, I think that Apple would never have published anything concerning app rules if there hadn't been people trashing its behavior in the press. And that goes for a lot of other companies as well, probably most of them since very few companies have the balls to acknowledge an issue if they are not legally forced to do so (and sometimes, even if).
Of course, fart apps are not exactly what I would consider needed in any way, and I heartily agree with getting rid of them.
Unfortunately, the rule specifically says that Apple can remove apps from the store if there are many others that do the same thing. Fart apps fall under this rule, but any useful app that comes in multiple flavors can also fall under the rule.
It's a case of over-defining a rule which can then be applied to any number of arbitrary situations. You have an app that is competing (doing the same thing) as an Apple-sponsored app ? Poof, they can retire yours because there's already one doing it. Obviously, they're not to retire their own app, now are they ?
I don't like fart apps one bit, but this rule is not a good way to get rid of them.
I don't think there is any good way to get rid of them either, because maybe they actually need to be there. People made them, people downloaded them and people are using them, so why decide to remove them ? Because they are tasteless ?
I find many things tasteless. That does not give me the right to destroy them - much as might sometimes wish to.
No it is not. The argument is whether or not the police have the right to bully people out of their rightful property under a flimsy pretext.
Every time I have heard about UK police taking people's cameras away (and this is far from being a first), it has always been in the same kind of circulmstances, i.e. the cop comes to the camera holder and states a spurious law reference before making a grab for the camera. I have _never_ heard that any cop just asked politely before citing specific law articles.
As such, Mr. Cloke, you can pussyfoot around the real issue as much as you like, but as long as you do so you are doing nothing more than aiding and abetting unlawful seizure against innocent citizens.
Some people are quick to draw parallels with certain fascist regimes when faced with such behavior, and I can hardly blame them.
Beg your pardon ? Ever heard of Visa ?
I have never had - and never will have - a PayPal account, and I manage to buy stuff on the Internet all the time.
Of course, I can't buy where they only accept PayPal, but if that's the case well tough for them, I take my money elsewhere.
In the country that relentlessly describes competition as the prime benefit of the market, arbitrarily deciding that only one app can be allowed to do one thing is just begging for a lawsuit to lose.
The App Store is still under the jurisdiction of the law and Apple has no right to keep several file explorers, different MP3 players or whatnot to have a go.
I strongly suspect that this particular clause will be removed quickly, either voluntarily or by force.
Not that I care anyway, I'm not a customer, but this clause seems clearly illegal to me.
Maybe, just maybe, those who are suspicious about their battery could open the case and check its number or something, then refer to an official web site listing the numbers of valid batteries that are on the market.
If not found in said list, people could then go and get a replacement battery.
But such an operation requires two things : a company with the guts to actually recognize a major potential problem (and torching a car is NOT covered by the EULA in my opinion) and do something about it, and a user base that is actually capable of critical thought.
Oh, silly me, we're talking Apple here. What was I thinking ?
So we have a possible vulnerability of a brand new, still lab-only technology, that requires a rather heavy financial outlay for materials, a degree in physics to exploit, and physical access to the receiver's end link. Once again the age-old rule of security comes to mind : if the enemy gets physical access, there is no security.
Given that this quantum crypto thingy is not going to be of any use outside high-level government, military and intelligence circles, I doubt that the impact of this "find" will be any greater than a change in procedure for the implementation technicians.
An EULA is nothing but a long-winded legalese-speak version of "we're not liable for anything fuck off".
An EULA is certainly not an AGREEMENT - there is no record of what I agreed to and there is no fixed version of a EULA for me to sign and for the publisher to sign.
No signature = no agreement.
On top of that, because of piracy and the rabid knee-jerk reaction to it, I cannot bring back a game or application that I bought and opened because stores all over say that, once opened, they do not accept returns. So I pay good money to get screwed if anything at all goes wrong.
I really fail to see how this totally illegal mafia-style racket came into being defended by courts.
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