Posts by Apocalypse Later 415 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Oct 2008
This is a convoluted way of saying that the windscreen has a chip or crack so placed as to interfere with the driver's vision. Sometimes you need to replace the windscreen to pass, but there are methods of injecting a fluid into minor faults that sets and restores the visibility. A service that repairs these chips is currently being advertised on television in the UK.
The legal system would cover the example you give. Someone taking anything from your garden (gnome, mower, pile of cash) would be stealing. You can even be guilty of theft for finding a pile of cash or other valuable on the public roadway, if you don't turn it in to the police and wait for the owner to claim it (after a given time, it becomes yours).
As for the cops giving a hoot, it was ever so.
You wouldn't be able to run an army or police force on that basis. Would you consider the same policy for car manufacturers?
As a gun user, I carry ten million pounds worth of public liability insurance. I get it free with my membership of The Sportsman's Association, which itself costs only 40 pounds a year. The reason so much coverage is so cheap it that they almost never have to pay a claim.
Somewhere I have a cd that came with a motherboard that has a short video on it telling you how to mount the board in a box. In it the nice asian lady points out that the board has six holes in it and tells you to put a screw in each hole. Except that she can't pronounce the letter "L", which comes out as an "R".
We do get extra channels in the UK, though many of them rely almost entirely on material that has already been broadcast on the main channels, or are time shifted copies of the main channels. However, the picture quality is better than analogue. There are also some channels reproduced from cable or satellite providers.
As for a marketing exercise, it isn't needed. Analogue is being turned off, as is also happening in the USA. What we get for that is more bandwidth on the airwaves for mobile phones and so on. You want mobile phone service, right?
If this really takes over, those of us who cannot even get a basic 2Mbit broadband service will once again start losing what we can get, as current delivery services are allowed to wither and web providers assume everyone has even more bandwidth available. Even now I have to surf with flash turned off by default or wait ages for every page. I used to surf with images disabled, but you simply can't navigate anymore if you do that.
I hope the new toy doesn't cause freesat to be smothered in its crib, or slowly starved. Freesat is currently the best broadcast delivery system for visual quality (no technical advance will help program quality) and I would hope to see more rather than fewer content providers in coming years. And yes it is free, once you install Gran in a spare bedroom to get a free TV license. Best of all, the TV plague of sport, sport and more sport has been almost cured by isolating much of it on Sky.
Infrastructure first please (beats on deaf ear with inflated pig's bladder).
Gary's dead? How did I miss this?
For those who don't know, legend has it that Bill Gates was the second person IBM called when they wanted an operating system for their new personal computer, and Gary Kildall missed out (and saddled us all with Microsoft) because he was out flying his airplane or something. Apparently it is more complicated (and mysterious) than that though, according to this account:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_43/b3905109_mz063.htm
...to the content producers, persuading them that their content can be protected by clever DRM when they know full well that it can't. Anything to get the content into the catalogue, and when the DRM is inevitably broken, A, A et al just throw up their hands and cry "Hackers!"
Seems to me the content providers are fools, the middlemen are knaves, and only the hackers have honour, though in a petty-theft kind of way.
...Hollywood can encrypt their video to a standard that even the intended viewer is unable to see it, but the Pentagon is unable to apply even the simplest encryption to stop the Taliban intercepting video streams from US surveillance drones on their laptops out in the bush. Perhaps the generals should tell the RIAA that surveillance videos are copyright?
...who claimed that these drones were invulnerable to hacking due to their top-flight military standard encryption last time they were discussed in here? Of course the military is still saying that the command and control links are safe from meddling, but do we believe them?
I clearly remember when modem transmission speeds over telephone lines were considered to be limited by physics to about 2400 baud, based on the amount of data one could encode into an audio frequency of around 3 to 4 kilocycles per second, the maximum phone lines were designed to handle. Nevertheless, ways were discovered to increase this to 56,000 bps (using phase shifting I believe), even before new digital techniques were found to deliver megabits per second over the same wires (our current landline broadband). That required new equipment at the exchanges and between exchanges, but the wire between the exchange and the subscriber is often the same decades-old copper.
Indeed, going digital freed up a lot of spectrum. Now the FCC wants to use that spectrum for something other than TV, but the TV companies still own it. To make sure they don't fill it with more TV or something else, the FCC have to get it back and assign it to the use they believe is most important. In a democratic, capitalist economy, the right way to do that is to buy it back from the owners. In a socialist tyranny, the authorities would of course just seize it.
Hey, I just re-wrote the story you just read!
I have a useful video guide to installing a motherboard that came on a CD with said m'board, in which a lovely Asian girl tells one that there are "six whores" and to "put a screw in each whore". Much more informative than the usual incomprehensible japlish printed instruction sheets.
Mindless vandalism hasn't decreased on the few subjects I monitor. Why only today I had to restore a full stop that got dropped during a back-and-forth between several editors over a presumably questionable reference.
Perhaps the number of neophytes that don't realize how easily their contributions can be reverted is dropping, now that most of the world has tried inserting "John Doe is a dickhead" and seen it removed withing seconds. Good. But there are more born every minute.
Those oh-so-clever malware people screw it up again. If you're changing a password with a worm, why pick one that must be at the top of any list of popular passwords that a cracker would discover in minutes? It isn't like you are going to have to type it in all the time. Simple mistake that allows iPhone users to fix the altered password even if they have already been successfully compromised, courtesy of the first researcher who has a go at it.
It is an almost exclusively liberal mistake to criticize candidates for being less than intellectual. The vast majority of voters don't identify themselves as being particularly smart either, having been told so in school. I know people in this country who quite happily say they are not smart. Some of them make more money than me.
Call her a dumb redneck and half the rural states will just say "She's our girl!" They like what she has to say, and the fact that the stuck up city people say she's dumb just makes it better.
She was clearly talking about the effect on the campaign staff and strategy, internally, not the effect on the electorate. So I think her point may well be valid. McCain's people didn't know how to handle her in the first place, and mis-used an asset. Would they have done better with yet another career male politician? I doubt it, but the "campaign" would have run more to script.
The big difference between Palin and Bush, apart from Bush senior, is that Palin is more articulate. As with Bush, many of the solecisms attributed to her are spurious, including some TV footage of her being satirized by Tina Fey on Saturday Night Live that people attribute to Palin herself, either ignorantly or deliberately. Take her seriously. The Democrats do, hence the rage.
All of the draconian laws removing basic rights are claimed to be directed at terrorists, drug dealers, or pedophiles, but all of them end up being used against people who are accused of ordinary, often trivial, offences, such as the fishermen who have had their boats and homes seized as "proceeds of crime" because they exceeded their cod quotas slightly. We lost our "beyond reasonable doubt" protection when majority verdicts were introduced in jury trials. This was meant to stop jury nobbling by the IRA, but has been used ever since in any trial where the jury is slow to come to a verdict. We lost the right to silence so that terrorists could be more easily prosecuted, but we ALL lost it. It goes on and on. The government has found that they can use the panic of the baying mob to justify any oppressive measure.
Actually, there was some kind of change to their mail system well before the current failure. They used to accept outgoing mail from free email accounts, even by smtp from people logged on elsewhere, but that stopped a month or two ago. Now I can only get to my account on webmail, not that I ever do. I was using it purely for mail relay. There were problems with that too, as many other ISPs (Comcast especially) would block all UK2 mail for spamming. Probably why they tightened up access to their relay.
as far as I'm concerned. I use the stop button a lot, anyone with limited download speed or bandwidth limits probably does, and we don't want the page to go blank and start loading again. I don't want to relearn the flipping browser every month or so either. Short term memory full, stop the data.
Maybe it's different in the USA, but part of copyright law in Europe (The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (1886)) is the right to reputation:
"The Convention also protects moral rights, giving the author of a work the right to claim authorship of the work and the right to object to any mutilation or deformation or other modification or derogatory action to the work which would be prejudicial to the author’s honour or reputation."
It seems to me that a parody that represents itself as the actual work of the parodied party would overstep this aspect of the law. The more convincingly it does so, the more would infringe.
I am not a lawyer. This is not advice. You have not been charged.
...someone published a letter from Al Gore, confessing that he has known all along that global warming is a myth, but knew he could make money out of it. He's sorry the whole thing got blown out of proportion, and promises to give ten percent of his carbon trading gains to the oil companies.
Would the liberals think this was an hilarious parody or an evil deception? It's only free speech if it advances their agenda.
On one level this is just another instance of the unreliability of the internet as a source of fact. Eventually, the internet will be used for nothing but entertainment, streaming movies and TV shows, themselves created largely by CGI.
I look forward to the "parody" defense being applied to the spoofing of online banking sites.
In Britain, contracts with consumers cannot be enforced if they are "unreasonable" (the law on business contracts is different). I expect most and maybe all of Microsoft's EULA (and similar conditions by other suppliers) is rendered sheer bluster by our consumer legislation, as far as individual users are concerned.
I am not a lawyer. This is not advice. You have not been charged for my musings.
In fact, real hippies from the sixties are now older and wiser than many, and despite a predilection for believing in unlikely stories (banana skin dope anyone?) are likely to have become experienced sceptics through observation of many mass-hysteria fashion causes through the years. Or is it just me?
The big money will be in the subsequent contract, for a method of getting government agencies to actually use the encryption once it is developed. Of course that will prove to be an intractable problem and the project will end in failure, but someone will still make a lot of money.
"Some of the addresses on this list were old and fake, but at least some were genuine, the BBC reports."
What do they mean by "old"? An account that is active but has been in existence for a longish time? That is just an email account. I have a couple of those. If they mean an abandoned account, how do you steal the login with a phishing site? Who logs in to an abandoned account on a phishing site if they no longer log in on the legitimate site?
And what constitutes a "fake" email account? One that uses an alias, like john1234?
This is simply speculation by some journalist with no clue.
Socialism not required. Pretty much everyone in the US has access to electricity and the telephone, which was brought about without state ownership of the companies providing the services. Government incentives may well have a place, but that does not need to reach the level of government ownership or control.
In Britain, we had actual socialism in the telephone service and abandoned it. This was a good thing, although British Telecom still displays some of the faults of a monopoly state supplier, as it hasn't been properly broken up in the way that the commercial giant AT&T was in the USA.
The government can add funding or tax incentives for social purposes without taking control. They do it all the time, even in capitalist countries, This route is probably less efficient than leaving capitalism alone. In Britain, we over-regulate, so that service providers fear that any investment they make will be negated by new rules after the fact. Why put money into infrastructure when the bureaucrats are poised to snatch your evil profits from you as soon as it is finished?
I think it was, Guy Kewney wrote about a press conference the British Microcomputer Federation (BMF) had called to announce that they were changing their name to the "British Microcomputer Federation, UK". When Guy himself stood up and pointed out the way the new acronym was likely to be pronounced, the conference was hurriedly ended and the name change never came to pass.
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