Posts by fifi 114 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2008
"This is a simple case of eager lawyer willing to throw a piece of C__P legal suit at a wall and see if it sticks."
Can you blame him? She's got 'mug' written all over her. I'll bet he's got her to invest in his law firm too, selling the fact that they've just taken on a high-profile case involving facebook.
If the parent is paying for, or subsidising the car and/or phone then it's relatively simple to enforce. "If you want that car and/or phone, then it's on my terms including this tech AND 'find my iphone' must remain enabled. If you're found texting while driving, you will lose both"
It's about boundaries.
"There isn't a person in the world who does any *REAL* work that can get by with nothing but a phone or ipad"
I often do and I'm a DBA.
I can 'get by' It certainly wouldn't be my first choice, but I can do everything on an iPad that I can do on my laptop, including various flavours of VPN, ssh clients, RDP and access google docs.
Could be a combination of mis-placed naivety and numbers.
Not taking precautions with regards to security leaves you more vulnerable, certainly, but there's so many of them that the chances of it happening specifically to them is so low they never encounter it and consider it a non-issue.
That doesn't mean there isn't a large number of young people who ARE affected by their lack of security but as long as the rest are thinking "It's never happened to me, what's the problem" then their attitudes won't change.
" If you REALLY had 200+ friends, how do you have time to post on a website?
I am proud of my low friend number on Facebook, consisting only of people I know in person"
I have almost 300 facebook friends, all of whom I know in person. Not all of them are local enough to me that I see them all regularly but it's a good way to keep in touch.
You need to get out more and meet some more people ;)
Doesn't really surprise me, the level of technical ability (or lack thereof) of many people I encounter scares me. Don't forget that by even reading el Reg, you'll probably going to be years ahead of the average in terms of technical ability.
(explosion icon as that's what some people seem to expect if they press the wrong key)
Until range and charge time is addressed, I think petrol powered vehicles will always have a place, even if it's as a second car for longer trips.
More should be spent investing in standard form-factor power cells that can be swapped out like the BetterPlace system, which would allow an electric vehicle to be refuelled in only a minute or two. If that was the case, range would be less of an issue.
The people they will pick up from using the publically available apps to assist in the DDOS are very much the "low hanging fruit" to use a bullsh*t cliche.
The people behind the act are the ones that probably didn't do that much hands-on DDOSing and will likely not be caught...
Yes, the backdoor enables "a person to execute command with the privileges of the user running the ircd", but that's the rub. It only has the same power as that user.
It does show that linux isn't immune, but it also shows that when it IS affected, the damage is limited to the compromised component, it's not a systemwide takeover.
Also, it should be emphasised that it was only the source code that was affected. None of the binary packages have the backdoor.
I agree with you there.
On one diesel car I had, the pulley came off the alternator so the battery wasn't charging. I still drove several hundred miles, went climbing and camping for the weekend and drove home no problem. (I did buy a spare battery en route just in case)
My last diesel car, however, didn't even manage 40 miles when a pulley wheel delaminated and the belt came off. All the electronics drained the battery in 30 minutes.
This technology isn't getting the coverage it deserves.
One of the biggest barriers to the Electric vehicle market is range. While you might well get 200 miles out of a batter, as long as it takes hours to charge, it's not going to be a viable alternative to petrol or Diesel. With this swappable battery technology, the range question is no longer a serious issue.
It would be a good tool for me, where I want to communicate, collaborate and chat to colleagues that I never, or very rarely see face to face. But, it's just too slow and flaky to be usable yet. Search doesn't always work. Can take hours, if not days, for a wave to appear in a new folder when it's been moved, adding new members to an existing wave means they sometimes can't see the historic content... the list goes on.
I know it's in preview, but a lot of these are pretty fundamental problems, and unless some changes start to show, it's not going to go anywhere.
This info is, essentially, worthless other than for some pub chatter.
If a car fails on ANY of the following:
Tyres, Lighting where a bulb has blown, road wheels, driver view, a corroded exhaust on a vehicle more than 5 years old, signalling where a bulb has gone, reg plates, suspension on older cars.
Then how can it be a reflection of the car's reliability?
I could have a nearly new Toyota which would fail with bald tyres, a worn wiper, and a few blown bulbs, none of which are an indication of a vehicle's reliability, or pass with a 1964 AC Cobra, which has a 50% failure rate according to this report, because the driver has taken the care to ensure the vehicle is roadworthy.
Statistics fail
Some complain that Apple's approval process is overly strict, and it does seem a somewhat slow and tedious process from time to time.
However, we need to remember that those of us reading El Reg are those who, I'd hope, have some semblance of technical knowhow, and I think readers forget the general inept, ill-informed and generally gullible nature of the average user. I think the Android Marketplace will probably be locked down, but not to it's detriment despite the wailing and gnashing of teeth from the geek community. For Android to succeed as a consumer OS on consumer handsets, it has to, to borrow and appleism, 1: just work and 2: gain the trust of it's userbase. Without those, it will fail in the massmarket and be relegated to the realms of geeks and gadgets.
You can't have it both ways. You either want it to become a popular and mainstream success, or remain a near-infinitly flexible platform that -you- can tweak without the interference of BigBrother determining what apps you can and can't install.
Yes, you can fork the code. Drizzle, MariaDB and Percona are all working on this. However, you can't fork a brand, and at the enterprise level, and in the board-room, it's the MySQL name that they're paying for support on.
Also, AIUI, the documentation isn't GPL'd, and as such, can't be "forked" in the same way the code can. Unless someone is willing to reverse engineer all the functionality and document it as such, then the documentation isn't going to leave Oracle's hands, at least not without, I'd expect, a hefty licence fee.
...and I forgot to mention this, but while Monty and David were, indeed, the founders and certainly had a say in the running of MySQL, they weren't to my knowledge, majority shareholders, and even if they had been dead set against the sale of MySQL to Sun, their votes alone wouldn't have stopped it.
So no, I don't think they've sold out. Certainly some things could have been done better, but hindsight is a wonderful thing.
I've been toying with the glove design myself. I use my iPhone for music and sat-nav in the car, and the only thing preventing me from using it on my motorcycle is that I can't operate it with gloves on. Equally, you can't easily remove a glove while riding.
I think, however, that some sort of "finger tip" that you can apply to your own gloves would be a better bet.
I still think easily swappable power cells is the way forward here. By all means improve charging options, and work on the technology, but I doubt any charging technology will be as quick as swapping a flat cell out for one that's fully charged.
Work on a standardised form-factor, develop testing, storage and charging rigs that can be deployed at service stations, and suddenly the limited range of electric vehicles becomes far less of an obstacle.
We use cable for data only.
A BT copper line is "made abvailable" but we don't use it, nor pay line rental on it to anyone.
We use VOIP over the cable for our geographic home phone number.
From this, and section 3.3 and 3.6, it would seem that we need to pay the tax twice, once for the cable internet, and once for the BT line that's redundant. I wonder if we can request BT to remove the line from the local junction box.
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