Posts by Matt Newton 51 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jan 2009
I got this the other day browsing a torrent site. Hadn't clicked anything, suddenly my monitors all got covered in this warning - pic of a friendly police man with his arms folded and all this text about laws I'd violated including terrorism, violent or sadistic websites and child porn... but if, IF, I was to pay $99 to Nottinghamshire Police and super super promised not to do it again, it'd be viewed as a "caution" and it'd be ok.
What first alerted me to the fact it might be suspicious was that they were asking in dollars. That and the obvious :D
But yeah - I've seen it and that was on Chrome / Win 7.
Reboot fixed it. Scratched that torrent site off my bookmarks.
Well, for one, if I report there's someone who's left their car door open on the non emergency line, and the next day the car was stolen, I'd fully expect them to connect the dots and say "oh hey, yeah, we got a report about that last night".
Or if I reported someone breaking in to a house who fit a certain profile and then they catch someone 2 weeks later breaking into another house who was wearing the same clothes / eye patch / tatoos etc, again I'd expect them to say "oh hay, so and so reported this guy last week, let's look at the evidence and see if we can charge them for that crime as well".
wtf?
Erm... so like... yeah? When I've called the emergency services (maybe 3-4 times in the last 5 years) they've always asked for my details (police, this is) and they say it's so they can keep it on file in case they need to follow up on anything etc.
I don't understand this "news" story. I'm usually one of the first to be ITS NINETEEN EIGHTY FOUR RIGHT NOW but this article seems to be trying to create some kind of controversy where none would exist.
Of course they keep the details. I'd fully expect them to. I'd be surprised if they didn't and would be confused as to why not.
jesus christ.
It's not possible at altitude. Cabin doors are designed so you need to pull them inwards first, then slide sideways / out. It's not like a car door.
At high altitudes, the pressure outside the aircraft is much, much lower than inside the craft (where it's approximately "normal" pressure). Trying to pull the door in against that pressure is like trying to pull up a toilet plunger that's been firmly stuck to a surface.
Except orders of magnitudes harder - a single human (or even a small group) wouldn't be able to open the door - the handle would snap off first.
That said, I of course would not want to "test" this maths, even if it is theoretically impossible.
Helicoptor because... no planes.
http://pastpapers.org/GCSE/ict/1_2Jun07.pdf
Look at that.
5a is a good one. I bet the signed document answer is actually "fax" as the "correct" answer, although e-mail would be better due embedded digitial signatures.
Interesting choice of wording, I asked one of the dumbfucks at work, just out of fun, "if you wanted a face to face conversation with someone would you A) fax them, B) use video conferencing or C) e-mail them?".
They replied, quite unexpectedly I might add, "Neither. If I wanted a face to face conversation with them, I'd walk up to them and talk to them".
Made me lol.
What shit exam / qualification.
LOL.
I've not had one in 3 years. Private Sector by the way, and the way it's going, we wont be getting one this year either.
Fuck off with your "oh im only getting 0.5%". That's still more than a lot of people.
I've worked in the public sector as well, in the past; housing department. Complete waste of time, they could have removed the staff and replaced them with the deaf receptionist (yes, the receptionist was deaf, because of some quota or something no doubt... yes, the woman who answered the phone was DEAF) and no one would notice.
but that's what the review is looking at -where it's gone wrong, how and why. Jesus, give them a chance, they've only been in power a month, they've got a LOT of clearing up to do after Labour.
No government will ever be be perfect but thank your lucky stars this one is actually investigating issues like this and destroying the NIR and ID cards. It's certainly a step in the right direction. How about instead of complaining, write to Theresa May and express your gratitude for what she's doing - encourage them!
The initial release wasn't fantastic but I think it was truer to the original Alien than Aliens was. Alien3 was a horror film, back where Alien was, rather than the action we got in Aliens and Alien Resurrection.
The DVD directors cut release of Alien 3 has some of the scenes changed and the plot does make a lot more sense. If you can get over the whole Newt / Hicks deaths at the beginning, it's a good film; well directed and well acted. I see Alien 3 as the last of the true alien films, before they went a bit strange.
Seriously, if you've not watched it since 1992, go download / rent the directors cut, it's a good film.
'Unfortunately I got stuck on the Earth for rather longer than I indended',
said Ford. 'I came for a week and got stuck for fifteen years.'
'But how did you get there in the first place then?'
'Easy, I got a lift with a teaser.'
'A teaser?'
'Yeah.'
'Er, what is...'
'A teaser? Teasers are usually rich kids with nothing to do. They cruise around
looking for planets which haven't made interstellar contact yet and buzz them.'
'Buzz them?' Arthur began to feel that Ford was enjoying making life difficult
for him.
'Yeah,' said Ford, 'they buzz them. They find some isolated spot with very few
people around, then land right by some poor unsuspecting soul whom no one's ever
going to believe and them strut up and down in front of him wearing silly antennae
on their head and making beep beep noises. Rather childish really.
"It's an honest mistake, and you can't prevent everything with technology or no work gets done."
But you CAN prevent stuff like THIS happening without affecting how people work.
Simply having a password over the excel file, whilst not great, would be better than nothing.
The file itself should be encrypted - at the very least flagged up when some low level person exports over 10 thousand entries from the database.
None of this will prevent work being done or slow down what they're doing - but it CAN be prevented VERY EASILY.
After Battlestar Galactica finsihed its run, I really wanted to get the soundtrack to season 4. So I looked around for months after it finished airing to find it would come out on a specific date - January last year IIRC.
When the date came, I searched on Amazon and found it - I could pre-order it - it was $16.99. $16.99, i thought? That can't be right - I live in the UK. Oops, I'm on .com instead of .co.uk. Silly me!
So I went to amazon .co.uk and searched for it. Sure enough, it was there - albeit with a release date 1 month later and the price was £27.99.
Nearly 3 times the price (once currency conversion was taken in to consideration plus the conversion fee of course), and released a month late?
So I went to .com again and tried to order it from the US. But I wasn't allowed to because "this content is not available in your region" and gave me a helpful link back to the UK websites.
So I downloaded it for free v0v
I was quite willing and prepared to buy the damn music with real money - money that'd go to the studios - that's why I was on amazon to begin with.
But then I thought fuck you, when I thought about it.
If they hadn't tried to fuck me over with the pricing and the wait, they'd have got some money, but now they don't, and I have the music.
They do this to themselves.
These parents over the nation (mostly daily mail readers, of course) have been screaming for more security and THINK OF THE CHILDREN.
Well, now you got it. And you don't like it. And (being childless and not a babysitter) I sit and laugh at them.
Oh, I'm not on about the average parent who doesn't want kiddy fiddlers having jobs in schools - that's perfectly sensible - but the people actually campaigning for all of this, the databases, the vetting, CRB checks etc - well, ... you got what you asked for. Let me guess - you want that with /other/ people but not when it inconveniences you, eh?
We ordered a plastic Mylar strip for one of our scanners at work - this thing is about ... 20cm long, 2cm wide and about as thick as a piece of cardboard.
It came in it's plastic wrapper, itself inside some heavy-duty fibre-board to stop it bending, THAT was inside a box which itself was inside a box filled with shredded paper and packaging materials.
So really, for something that weighs about 2 grams, and could be fitted in an envelope (maybe with some cardboard inside to help prevent bending), we ended up with a 2 foot by 2 foot by 2 foot box stuffed with crap.
Oh, it was from HP :)
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