Posts by Stuart Gepp 56 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Aug 2008
That is actually the official New Jersey State Trooper uniform except he's taken off his hat. It is very similar to the Gestapo one except they have a really wide yellow stripe down the outside seam on the trousers and a sever lack of iron crosses.
Some of them behave like they're in the gestapo too, but the two I know personally are decent folks trying to a difficult job with morons in senior management positions - very similar to many IT positions.
Don't assume the person killed was the rightful owner of the phone. The politicians over here (especially in Bloomberg's NY) will spin anything. e.g. Bloomberg's anti gun propagander machine even listed Tamerlan Tsarnaev as a victim of gun crime! He was the Boston Bomber shot by police trying ot escape. Some victim.
It could be the bad guy was trying to steal the phone as part of some other crime and was killed for his efforts. A vague reference by a politician should be taken with a pinch of salt.
What happens when Mummy is 14 years old herself?
The whole thing is yet another stupid example of how the politicians need to protect everyone from an evil thing to justify their own existence.
Hardship and bad things happening are what builds people into independent, functioning adults. If you wrap a child in cotton wool and protect them from every evil influence all you get at the end is a fully grown child who cannot deal with anything bad. Guess what! the world is full of bad things and you have to cope every day with something you'd prefer not to. You cannot know in advance what it will be. If you don't know how to cope you won't.
These companies don't spontaneously leap into existance and start dialling on behalf of some politician. Assuming that there is some collaboration between the politician and the company breaking the law doesn't it become a conspiracy to break the law. The penalty should extend to all the parties involved.
He had 1 rifle (AR15 type, not an AK), 1 shotgun and two pistols which he had hidden outside the fire exit and retrieved them after entering the theatre by the front door. He also had body armour and helmet in his stash.
Protecting the front door with any kind of scanner would not have been any help at all in this case unless someone can come up with an insanity and malicious intent detector.
Bad things happen and not all of them can be prevented unless we all spend our entire lives literally in cocoons.
For some reason our governments think we want them to protect us from everything and fail to realise that it is impossible.
As far as individual, concealed carry is concerned, if there were a half dozen citizens with pistols who returned fire they may or may not have succeeded in stopping the bad guy but there is a high probability that *they* would have been responsible for some of the innocent people shot. A packed movie theatre is not a good place to shoot and miss but missing is easily done shooting under extreme duress in the dark. There are numerous accounts of trained police officers finding that the nice tight centre-mass group that they can reproduce at the range over and over again does not happen when they are in a real life-or-death situation. Can you imagine trying to differentiate between the following:
1. A bad guy you have never seen before who is shooting an innocent you have never seen before.
2. An armed civilian you have never seen before shooting a bad guy you have never seen before.
3. A bad guy you have never seen before returning fire at an armed civilian you have never seen before.
Number 1 is easy, but only if you can see that the innocent has no weapon. 2 and 3 are indistinguishable when they suddenly appear in front of you.
People will bang on and on about how to avoid this in future. Some will advocate banning all firearms from the public (and the counter argument will be that only outlaws will have guns and there will nothing you can do to protect yourself) and others will argue that every responsible adult should carry a firearm every day (with the counter argument that you are making all the undetected insane people carry too). There will be innumerable arguments in between these extremes.
Firearms cannot be uninvented. If the guns used in this case had been illegal, would the victims be any less badly hurt? Remember, when the UK banned self loading rifles – that was in response to the Michael Ryan shooting spree in Hungerford in 1987 – he used a pistol for most of his victims. About a decade later, Thomas Hamilton went nuts in a Dunblane school with some pistols so the government banned pistols. Within a year of the pistol ban Jill Dando (a BBC TV presenter) was shot dead with a rifle banned a decade earlier. Jill Dando still suffered the same whether the rifle used was legal or not.
If you are going to disregard the law prohibiting trying to kill people you are quite unlikely to be overly concerned with the prohibition of the method you choose.
There will be arguments for mercy because the man was insane. I cannot fathom anyone not insane unilaterally deciding to shoot 71 people he or she does not know.
At the end of the day this gunman is responsible for his actions. Do not blame the people who sold him the guns. Do not blame anybody else that has guns. Do not blame the governments who have led the public to believe that all bad things can be stopped by greater and greater restrictions on freedoms.
Unfortunately, <insert deity of your choice> is also in on the act.
There's this thing you can do with another player which seems like an awful lot of fun and you feel compelled to do it. However, 9 months later the bill arrives and by then its too late.
If you find it hard not to hand out access to your credit card, you have almost no hope of resisting this urge.
...I was watching episode 2 of the first series of Yes Minister last night and Bernard was explaining to Hacker that he could simply transfer all correspondence from his inbox to his outbox without needing to read any of it. The civil servants would then generate standard responses such as "we're considering the matter" or if they were feeling especially generous "we're actively considering the matter".
He went on to explain the former meant "we've lost the file" and the latter meant "we've lost the file but we're looking for it"
That was an amazingly insightful script written over 30 years ago.
"Upon receipt of the notice from the rights-holder"
There is no mention of checking the voracity for the claim by the "rights-holder" that copyright material had been abused. How was the infomation discovered and under what authority did the "Rights-holder" collect this information?
I thought there were privacy, wiretap and perhaps other laws to prevent this without the courts being involved. If the courts are already involved who needs a new quango to send letters out to people?
Does it really make any difference?
The only effect of voting is to change the person the lobbyists have to contribute to. Most of them have hedged anyway and have contributed to both sides.
The days when your representative actually paid any attention to the people in their constituency have long gone.
"It doesn't matter who you vote for, the government always gets in"
The Supreme Court ruled ages ago that sales tax did not have to be collected by the retailer for out of State buyers (it was about mail order back then but it has been decided that the same rules apply if the order is placed via the internet instead of snail mail). It did not rule that the tax was not due. The buyer is required to declare these things on their State tax return and pay the sales tax to their home state then. At least this is how it is in New Jersey.
It seems the issue is that the State tax collectors can't be bothered to collect the tax and enforce their own laws and want Amazon to do it for them. What makes it worse is people supposedly knowledgable in finance like Tom Keene and Ken Prewitt on Bloomberg Radio keep saying internet retailers have a price advantage because their products are tax free. WRONG! The tax is due in the State where the items are bought, not where they are sold.
/^v.+b$/i
Murray: Here comes the Honda. This car is absolutely unique!
Hunt: Except for the one directly behind it
Number plates still come in pairs, right?
PS Yes I know the front one has a white background and the rear one is yellow, but it still reminded me of dear old Murray.
The unlocked front door/car door analogies miss the point.
Google did not enter anybody's private property to obtain the slurped data. They were in a public placeand got what they could. If the householder had secured the signals they were emitting Google would have got less.
Similarly, if Google had their cameras at normal head height in the street and took a picture through your window of you changing your underwear you may object but you were carrying out your shreddy-swap in plain sight.
You *could* have have closed the curtains but you didn't. Joe Bloggs *could* have configured WPA2 but he didn't.
It has already been ruled that if it can be seen by 'normal' viewing from a public place it can be photographed/recorded. Why should wireless transmissions be treated differently from photons?
Dear, oh dear.
It looks like the lid was left off the acronyms box again and someone is waving one around to try to gain credibility.
The routing protocol used has almost nothing to do with WAN latency. There are many choices, each with their advantages and disadvantages.
The fact is though, that there is a direct relationship between the distance between two points and the minimum latency for data transmission between them. It happens to be pretty close to the speed of light.
That would only give you the minimum, however. In practice the actual time taken will be increased because very few circuits follow a straight line path between two points.
O2: "Our online shop saw a 150% increase in online traffic in the first two hours."
- wow - that's almost.. half their regular users again.
If you're going to be a pedant, at least do it right. A 150% increase is your normal traffic plus 1.5 times your normal traffic which is 2.5 times your normal traffic.
Teh soudn the speakers make is caused by your phone TRANSMITTING an acknowledgement of the signal it was send from the cell tower. The cell tower sends the signal in all directions at once and is picked up by all the cell phones on the frequency. Only the one it is addressed to does anything with it - e.g. acknowledge it.
This new submarine thing is one way only. The sub does not transmit a response and is therefore not subject to detection just because it received a signal. The key thing you are spectacularly failing to understand is that the submarine pager is one way only. Cell phones are two-way.
BTW, don't even think of trying to make another pathetic analogy with TV detectors.
Why doesn't the OS lock the account being attacked after 3 wrong passwords or at least suspend it for a while. If the attack continues against the same account extend the time of the suspension or lock it out.
If the same address is hitting lots of accounts (or non existent accounts) block it.
The big question is why does Linux need add-on packages to do any of this? It has been built in to VMS for years.
The penguin has been chosen as a mark of my cynicism.
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