Posts by Michael 282 publicly visible posts • joined 4 May 2007
I can never understand why so many people out there expect the OS to conform to the demands of the application. Isn't it the application vendor's job to make their application compatible with an OS they want it to run on?? What I'm wondering is why the devs for Java didn't update their software, as I'm almost certain they received an advance copy of Leopard for that very reason.
...to be all too sympathetic when stuff like this happens. This woman went to meet someone she had never met before, and at least presumably did not opt to do so in a public place. That's like parking your Mercedes overnight in Harlem with the doors unlocked. Yeah, I feel bad that your car got stolen, but at the same time, you're an idiot.
Likewise with the chick from North Texas that got killed while giving some guy a ride. Hello?! Chick. Alone. Gives a random, unknown guy a ride. Are you retarded???
Yes, it's a sad thing that we can't really trust each other any more, but it's not by any means a NEW thing. There's being a victim, and then there's being so incredibly stupid that you're practically ASKING to get killed.
And as for why it's newsworthy -- it's the first documented account of Craigslist being used to lure someone into this spot, Craigslist is an internet site, internet sites are part of the realm of IT, and this is an IT publication. What sad is that someone has to spell that out for the luddites.
I was thinking about this the other day, and as long as the wording was done correctly, you could do something like this completely legally.
Have a whole site with information about the fires, etc. Death toll, acres burned, etc. Then you have a page that invites people to donate to those in need and put in a little notice that "those in need" does not necessarily refer to fire victims. Then funnel all the cash from those people still silly enough to donate money to you, right into your bank account. Hey, you're in need....of a new TV.
As long as you didn't claim to be collecting donations FOR THE FIRE VICTIMS, it seems to me you could do something like this quite legally.
Yeah, I'm a sick bastard. I know.
"What is it about your own lives that is so horrible that you need to hate a 70+ year old Canadian actor so much?"
I fear you've answered you own question there...
You see, the real tragedy of Canada is that while they could have had British culture, French cooking and American technology, they instead got American culture, British cooking, and French technology.
The problem with Hydrogen is that it's not at all an efficient fuel source -- and actually, it's not even a proper "source" of power. It's more a storage medium, and a poor one at that.
So your car burns hydrogen, and hydrogen is harvested by electrolyzing water.
Electrolyzing water to get any substantial volume of hydrogen requires a lot of...well...electricity. Electricity that's generated predominantly (in the US) by burning coal and oil. Hmmm... Not so green anymore, is it?
The same goes for electric cars and the so-called plug-in hybrids. Such things increase the load on the electrical grid, which is fed mostly by coal and oil.
Until the methods of electricity generation are cleaned up, using electric vehicles (from the grid) only serves to shift the source of the emissions from the tailpipe to the smokestack.
Nuclear power is the way to go, but the environmentalists would rather boycott nuclear, and drive their electric cars powered by Coal. Yay hypocrisy!
Really, this is one case where having black boxes in cars would be nice. As long as there were no transmitters on it, of course -- we don't need the state tracking us. It should only be used after the fact.
I know the same rules of beyond reasonable doubt don't apply to speeding tickets, but it seems to me that an officer could lie about the speed readout just as easily as I could. There is no hard proof that the gun said what the officer wrote down. So why do we assume that police officers' word is more trustworthy than ours?? They have as much incentive to lie (quotas, etc) as we do (not getting cited), and with all the stories of cops that drive drunk and beat their spouses, should they REALLY be up on a pedestal beyond reproach??
"...eBay as the company offering the auction services should ensure that everything is above board, just in the same way if you went to a shop and went wow that Rolex is cheap bought it and found out its fake you would expect to get your money back..."
This analogy isn't terribly accurate, as eBay isn't the entity that sold the item.
If you used an IRC channel to allow people to bid for your item, would it make any sense at all to hold the IRC server responsible if you scammed the buyer??
Should I be able to hold the government responsible for my traffic accident, as it was they who paved the road thus giving my car and someone else's the opportunity to collide??
Earlier this week, most Reg readers were perturbed that the tv-links guy was hauled off, being as he's just the middleman, providing the means, and was not the actual purveyor of goods. Now you want to point the finger at eBay??
Furthermore, if I agree to host a tupperware party in my home, for my friend who sells the stuff, you buy stuff from them, but they never deliver, is it MY responsibility??
How many other examples do I need, to show how completely stupid it is to blame eBay for the shady actions of some of its users??
"Unless I'm missing somthing (I admit I havent looked at the paper this morning) the UK is not part of the USA, so therefor the Twin Towers and the Moon landing were news form "The outside world" as you put it."
But not JFK's assassination, apparently, but I digress.
Do you *really* only have one sentence's worth of memory up there in your noggin? Context, buddy. Context.
To put the two sentences together, with minor editing:
"The final top 10 has a decidedly Anglo-American feel...The outside world (as in 'not anglo-american) is represented by just one historic event"
Honestly...
It's illegal to shoot someone unless it's self defense.
People still do it.
If you ban all guns, what makes you think people will give up theirs?
I wrote a piece in 2002 or 2003 arguing that gun control only serves to tip the scales further in favor of criminals. To grossly summarize, a criminal is less likely than your average, law-abiding citizen to be dissuaded by legislation prohibiting the possession of firearms. As a result, the likeliehood that a criminal's target is armed would drop, which means it's easier (and therefore more desirable) for them to successfully commit crime.
Even more simply:
You can ban them, but whackjobs will still get them. If a whackjob with a gun comes into a college classroom, I'd prefer the classroom be filled with armed students, rather than unarmed victims.
@D Morehouse:
"assinine" is not a word. The word you're looking for is "asinine". And the airspace over a country is understood to belong to that country. If Canada doesn't like it, they're free to route their flights over their own airspace. By all rights, the USAF could shoot them down for violating airspace.
@Graham Dawson:
Hillary... *shudder*
My greatest political fear is that the US will be so determined to not elect a Republican, that they'll elect Hillary. The thought very nearly makes me sick to my stomach. I'd rather have Barack "I have yet to have a solid position on anything" Obama than Hillary "I have a solid position, but next week I'll change my mind about it" Clinton. Course, I'd rather have Colin Powell, but he won't run.
@Nick H:
It's true -- I'd love to have the US completely go isolationist. Let the rest of the world solve their own problems.
Oh, and by the way (rest of the world, I'm looking at you), that means no more AIDS money for Africa, no more food for famine stricken countries, no more defense of Iceland (to insert random useless trivia), and you can fend for yourself against the ever more daunting Russia, and the looming China, and all their shiny collective nukes.
You see, it's very easy for the rest of the world to talk smack whilst standing behind your big brother. But what happens when he doesn't have your back anymore? You get your ass whooped by the big kid next door, that's what. Have fun with that.
"Obviously 15-year-olds shouldn’t be having sex, but then again, they shouldn’t be drinking either."
It isn't illegal to drink when you're 15 (or younger), it's just illegal to purchase the alcohol yourself.
The article didn't say it was illegal for a 15-year-old to drink. They said that 15-year-olds shouldn't drink.
Can != Should
Legal != Should do it
Illegal != Shouldn't do it
Thus ends today's lesson on why you shouldn't imply things that aren't said.
This lawsuit is just silly. Though I sympathize with those people that want a different OS, or want Windows with no other fluff added on, the fact that this wasn't thrown out of court is a disgrace. The machine was almost certainly clearly advertised/labelled as coming with Windows on it. If you don't want Windows, don't buy it.
What's more is that unbundling the machine from the OS will actually INCREASE the overall cost to the average consumer. PC manufacturers buy their OSes in bulk at a severely discounted rate. So they take the per unit cost of the OS off their retail price of the machine, then the consumer goes and spends several times the discount to buy the OS at retail. Yes there are other options apart from Windows, but when windows is what the vast majority of people know and are comfortable with, it's silly to penalize everyone for the sake of a very small minority.
Now alternatively, manufacturers could offer more OSes that they would preload, but then production costs increase, not to mention the second you open the linux box, you're going to have people whining about which distribution is better, and why don't they offer all seventy-billion flavors of BSD.
The majority want windows. So give the majority windows. It's that simple, it makes good business sense, and it's flatly idiotic that you can lose a lawsuit for giving someone exactly what you told them they were buying, merely because they didn't want it all.
"So for now my statement stands; It's the lack, today, that's the killer... There's no (standard) vehicle that's capable of accelerating so fast that you'd bruise your brain to the inside of your skull."
For one, no one died in this story, so today...there IS no killer, and you're just being dramatic.
Secondly, the reference made is to the sudden acceleration a pedestrian would experience upon being run into by a vehicle travelling in excess of 170 mph.
You got in such a rush to defend yourself that you failed to realize that you are not in fact the only person that knows anything. That's a blunder right up there will an Asian Land-war.
Stop. Think. Then post.
To those whining that El Reg needs to research DEFCON more, take another look at the sentence in the article:
"The ThreatCon scale - whose moniker mimics the defense readiness condition (DEFCON) system used by the military - runs from one (all calm on the Western Front) to four (meltdown)."
FIrst of all, the hyphens indicate a seperate but related thought. The uninterrupted thought would read "The ThreatCon scale runs from one (all calm on the Western Front) to four (meltdown)." which is a completely accurate statement.
Secondly, the seperate but related thought says ThreatCon's "moniker mimics the defense readiness condition (DEFCON) system used by the military". The definition of moniker is "a person's name, esp. a nickname or alias." (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/moniker) So El Reg has pointed out the similarity of the name "ThreatCon" to the name "DEFCON". No similarity to the structure of the coding system is implied.
So to translate the sentence into something you'll understand, for those of you with pitiful language skills, "The ThreatCon scale runs from one (all calm on the Western Front) to four (meltdown). It also sounds sort of like DEFCON. Durrrrr."
Thus ends today's lesson. Tomorrow, we'll work on colors and shapes.
Context, people. Context.
Eugene Goodrich said:
So, a containment vessel around a nuclear reactor? Like the one that should have been built there at the same time the reactor was, so that if the reactor were to leak its magic smoke, there'd be a chance to contain it?
In response, Andrew said:
Would not the large explosion / heat kinda wreck any pre built containment before it could be of any use?
Neither of them are referring to the current structure being built over Chernobyl, but rather the feasibility (or lack thereof) of building a containment superstructure over existing power stations, as a preventive measure.
"So surely it’s the effect of the Earth slowing down over 118 years producing less gravitational pull"
1) The gross gravitational pull between two objects is a function of the mass of the two objects and the square of the distance between them. Rotation doesn't enter into it.
2) Rotation matters in net gravitational pull, in that if the distance between the two objects is zero (i.e. you're on the planet), then the centrifugal force mitigates the gravitational force somewhat. The greater the speed of rotation, the more extreme the centrifugal force, and hence, the greater extent to which gravity is mitigated.
So if the earth is slowing down, and it has any measurable effect, the reference weight would become HEAVIER, not lighter.
RE: "The idea that someone could file and be awarded a patent for something you have been doing/providing commercially for years yet have not filed for a patent on is borderline criminal. The argument that the person should have filed a patent is ridiculous, if someone wants to provide a new product without requiring everyone else to ask them before providing the same product, then so what. We should have no responsibility to document and file our production/trade methods with the federal government."
If someone files a patent for something you have been doing/providing commercially for years, the application will be denied on the existence of prior art.
You shouldn't and in fact do not actually have any resposibility to document and file your production/trade methods with the federal government. It's when you want protection that you must. For example, inherent copyright is attained whenever you create something, but to effectively enforce it, it's in your best interest to register it with the government. It's the same principle here. You don't HAVE to register, but if you want the rotection that "I did it first" provides, a third party has to know about it. You can do what you like, but if you don't tell anyone about it, you have no right to yell at someone else for doing it too. Hence the PTO.
<i>They work at NASA. Why are astronomers on the Federal payroll?</i>
Um...because NASA is a federally funded government agency???
<i>The point is they shouldn't be forced to give such detailed information to such untrustworthy people.</i>
If they're so untrustworthy, would these scientists really want to WORK for them? There's a bit of a flaw in your reasoning, methinks...
<i>Our founding fathers would NEVER have accepted this. I applaud them for refusing. In my history book they are going to be heroes on the same level as Rosa Parks.</i>
Unfortunately, your history book doesn't pay their mortgage.
<i>It's sad how much things have changed in American society where citizens will bend over backwards for those in power. If everyone is too afraid to stand up for their rights, they will gladly continue stripping them away.</i>
I agree with this fundamentally, but it's pretty obvious that when you work for the government, with classified projects, that you're going to need security clearance, and that means a background check. If they don't like the conditions of their continued employment, they have every right to seek employment elsewhere.
Of course you still need your passport! How else are they to know you're a legal EU resident and not some kind of yank *gasp*??? You should always expect to be asked to prove citizenship when crossing international borders. The EU agreement means you don't need to get a visa.
"I wouldn't be the least surprised, the US thinks the world turns around them and everyone should do things "the American way""
Having a GDP of over 10 trillion USD will do that... And who exactly are you referring to, when you say "the US"?? The US government? The US population?? All 300 million of us??? Wow, you're not ignorant at all...
"(Oh, and they took an entire continent's name as their country's "name" but that is another gripe for another day)."
Oh, and by the way, the name of the country is "United States of America". It's everyone else that tends to just say "America". You have my full permission to refer to "America" as "the US", thereby removing your completely asinine objection.
Are you really so bored, and do you really have such little other material that you feel like your only recourse is to try to ignorantly make fun of 300 million other people whom you've never met? Pitiful...
...that the kid lies, and the guy gets nailed for it. I mean, yeah, the guy should have been more careful, but really, where's the stiff punishment for her? Honestly, if someone claims to be of age, then someone who has sex with them ought to not be shafted for it. Clearly the minor was consenting -- so really, it's an issue where the minor and the government disagree on the issue of at what point a person can and should be able to legally consent. In essence, the girl broke the law first, by consenting when the law says she cannot legally do so. THROW HER ARSE IN JAIL!!
Yes, this guy is scum for watching kiddie porn on purpose. However, the issue here is that by writing the opinion in this manner, the court has set a precendent that says "if you're operating your computer at the time that kiddie porn comes up on the screen (and thereby into your cache, then you're a kiddie porn watching scumbag, and we're going to put you away"
Now, I can't tell you how many times I've had family members searching for song lyrics or some other innocuous thing online, suddenly and mistakenly end up at a porn site. By the same reasoning the court used here, those people would all be just as gulty. Never mind the implications of having some kind of malware on your machine that constantly pops up porn site ads. The point is that this court ruling casts a very wide net that a lot of innocent people could be caught in.
"WGA's goal is not to punish the people who purchase these programs; they, of all people are the most victimized,"
"What? How am I, a paid-for Windows user, victimized when someone else pirates Windows? In what bizarro world does that make sense? "
"The idea is that if you've unknowingly bought a pirated copy from a crooked merchant, you have been ripped-off."
The funny thing is that if you buy a pirated copy, it's actually MS getting ripped off. WGA is MS's way of shifting that rip-off to the consumer.
@Raheim Sherbedgia
One distinction. No one is forcing open source programmers to write code.
@Arclight
"If I buy a copy of Vista, pull some code from it, and then re-use it in my own software, its not breach of copyright, but breach of contract?"
No, because Microsoft does not grant you the right to copy. The license in question says "you can do A, but if you do, you must also do B" MS says "you can not do A".
So it's Dell's fault for not sending a letter out, that may or may not have gotten there?? And it's NOT the consumers responsibility to check their battery when they hear about battery recalls?? Really??
I can see where you're coming from, but honestly, NOT checking your battery in this case is like leaving your Mercedes unlocked on a street corner in Harlem. Yeah, I feel bad that your car got stolen, but at the same time, you're a freaking moron.
Because, quite simply, they're a business, and they want to make money. Once you've worked with the access speed of a SSD, when it dies, you're not going to go back to a magnetic drive, you're going to buy another SSD. It's not quite planned obsolescence in the truest sense of the term, but it's close, and from a business standpoint, it's brilliant.
A blimp the size of a basketball court would be 94 feet long, and in this case, would fly in excess of 10,000 feet of altitude.
Boeing's planned 747-8 will be 251 feet long (2.6 times longer), and commercial jetliners typically cruise between 28,000 and 35,000 feet (as much as 2.8-3.4 times higher).
I don't know about anyone else, but when a jetliner is at cruising altitude, the only ways I can usually spot one is by the contrail it sometimes leaves, or the sound of it's engines. The "visual signature" between the blimp and a jetliner should be roughly comparable, but without loud engines or a contrail, I think it's fair to say that the blimp would be "very hard to notice at night" as the article suggests.
Now having said that, the 80,000 cu. ft. version may be a different story...
Using someone else's unsecured WiFi without their permission is like walking by someone's yard and enjoring the view of their beautiful garden. If you place something in public view, you cannot reasonably expect them to NOT look at it. If you don't want your neighbors looking at your garden, build a fence around it.
If you don't want you neighbors using your insecure WiFi, secure it, or stop beaming it into public space.
In order for me to be trespassing on my neighbor's wireless, while I'm in my own house, the assumption is that the wireless signal belongs to him, regardless of where it is. If that is the case, then I want to file a trespassing complaint, for my neighbor projecting his wireless signal into my house. Such a case would certainly highlight how ridiculous these things are.
"James, the internet is part of the infrastructure you say we elected our elected representatives to maintain."
Here's the thing though. Who "owns" the internet? To what extent can/should a government regulate it?
Should a law regulating the internet apply to German citizens in Germany? In which case, what about Germans abroad, and foreigners in Germany?
How about all people in Germany? In which case, can I legally step across the border into France and then do whatever I wanted to do before?
How about All Germans -- home or abroad? In which case, does the government retain the right to govern its citizens that are not resident within the country, and how would the government enforce such laws when the "perpetrator" is elsewhere?
How about servers in Germany? In which case, if my web hosting service is based on Germany, am I prohibited from testing my own website?
Or what about data transmissions going through Germany? In which case, can a Brit, testing a server in France, which happened to take a route across German data lines, be charged with a crime? And again, how could the government enforce this?
The main reason governments shouldn't try to govern the internet, is becasue the internet doesn't belong to them. That and the fact that most governments are so painfully ignorant to modern technology that you could probably get them to pass a law banning air if you told them it was for internet security.
@ Anon:
"The outcome that I expect? Microsoft will be given permission to proceed with this device, which will perform exactly as the "defective" device did, and that the US government will use it as a further lever to remove all analogue TV from the spectrum."
Duh? That's already on the slate. By Feb 2009, analogue TV in the US is already supposed to be completely phased out. Learn to read, mmkay?
@ The Article:
Let me fix that quote for you...
"Microsoft is playing Russian Roulette with America's access to interference free TV reception. OH NOES!!! They'll have to go outside!!!"
@Anon:
"No they don't have that right, it's a violation of 2004/38/EC to ignore her French residence permit. You can't both gain the benefits from being in the EU and at the same time block that benefits to other EU countries."
This is akin to saying "I have to go to work." No one HAS to go work, but they prefer getting a paycheck to skipping, so they go. I have the right to skip work, and they have the right to fire me if I do so. In the same way, the sovereign nation of the UK has the right to control entrance into itself, and conversely, the EU has the right to do something about it, in theory.
Is it possible that being a legal resident is not itself sufficient to be granted visa-less travel? I ask becasue in the US, you can be a legal resident (work visa, student visa, spouse of citizen, etc), but have neither Citizenship or Resident Alien status, in which case, you'd still need a Visa to enter Canada, whereas US Citizens and Resident Aliens do not.
It's quite possible that the Filipino wife retained her citizenship from the Philipines, in which case, she'd have a Filipino passport, which would presumably need a visa for entrance into the UK. Living in a country legally (which is all the gentleman mentioned -- he never said anything about permits or citizenship) does not necessarily grant you the same rights as being a citizen of that country.
A sovereign nation has the right to allow or deny access to it based upon whatever they want. That's kind of what sovereign means. If the UK wants to annoy you because your wife is Filipino, that may be a not-very-nice thing to do, but they're a sovereign nation and have every right to do it. Quite frankly, they don't HAVE to justify it to you.
"That's a fairly lame argument. A knife is a very general tool, it has lots of applications from dressmaking to food preparation, but not all tools are like that. A nuclear bomb for example isn't general, it exists solely to kill millions of people, there's no other reason to have one. That's why there are so many people who object to nuclear bombs."
This is also a fairly lame argument, as it assumes that killing millions of people is inherently "bad". Suppose the millions of people are all carriers of a nasty strain of a virus. If these people are allowed to live, they will likely wipe out all human life. In this instance, it could be argued that killing those millions of people, perhaps with a nuclear bomb, is actually a "good" thing.
Furthermore, though nuclear weapons were designed to kill, there are plenty of reasons to have them. Many scholars believe the only reason the Western world and the USSR didn't get into an all out war, was that they knew they'd both be annihilated. It's the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction. If the West didn't have nukes, while the USSR did, we'd all be speaking Russian right now. Or we'd just be dead.
"This software only exists to speed up the process of finding exploits, which is why one of the people quoted in the article objects to its existence."
Perhaps by running said tool on a product before its release, to find exploits sooner. You see, security experts will be able to find the exploits sooner as well, thereby giving the opportunity to plug security holes sooner. It's a zero sum game. All it does is narrow the timetable for both sides.
"Of course security researchers could use it to keep up with the "black hats", but that's the same sort of arms race excuse that was trotted out during the cold war to justify ever more vast arsenals of nuclear weapons. "We've got to have what they have".
And again, it's that very same principle that may very well have kept us all alive.
"The easier it is to find exploits, the more work developers will have to do to plug all the gaps in their security, and ultimately not all of them will do that."
So take issue with the vendor, not the tool maker. If Black & Decker makes a new tool that will make building houses more efficient, thereby reducing cost, but your homebuilder chooses not to use it. Do you blame Black & Decker, or do you blame your homebuilder?
Ahh, the glory of indefinite terms like "could", "might" and "may".
*cue infomercial music*
You could make over $6,000 a week working part-time from home!!
You could also make diddly.
*cue the price is right loser music*
If you say merely that "It COULD be that the overall effect of this tool is to increase computer crime, not decrease it" (emphasis mine), then you are simultaneously acknowledging that it COULD be that the overall effect of this tool is to decrease computer crime.
"It's tracking head movement, not eye movement. It won't be able to tell which portion of the screen you're looking at - just where your head is in relation to the screen. They're two entirely different things, and serve two entirely different functions."
From the article:
"The Taiwanese researchers have also claimed they are already working on improvements to the system by replacing the camera with an infra-red sensor that tracks a user’s eye movements instead"
Read first. Comment later.
@Matt:
"I thought Florida was lost because they decided not to count the votes, in which case more votes that weren't counted wouldn't make much difference!"
Actually, as another commenter posted, GWB would have won anyway, and for the record, it was because they didn't want to count the ballots for the THIRD time. The supreme court ruled that a candidate could request a recount, but could not dictate the METHOD of recount. Gore had requested a recount, which Florida did. Then he wanted a recount BY HAND. The supreme court ruled that Florida had met their obligations already.
@Markie Dussard:
In my opinion, if you don't vote, you lose your right to complain about the state of affairs. Try doing something about it for a change.
@Chris Bradshaw:
When it comes to how the USA elects our president, I agree the system is flawed. The house of representatives, for the most part, is quite proportional. One district is more liberal, so they elect a democrat to represent them. Another is more conservative, so they elect a republican. My state (Washington) has seventeen electoral districts, so we send 17 representatives to the national capital. Some of them are conservatives. Some are liberals.
The senate, however, is two seats per state, period. This is intended to protect states with fewer residents from getting trampled by the larger states, as they would if we only had the House.
I would like to see a revision of election law to make proportional voting in the electoral college more accepted. Currently, most states are winner take all for their electoral votes -- so if Gore gets one more vote than Bush in california, Gore gets all 54 electoral votes. Kind of sucks, IMO. I still like the electoral college, as it does protect the smaller states from being ignored completely in presidential campaigns, but making proportional electoral voting more mainstream would be a good way to make it more representative of the people, at least on a state-by-state level.
"...it's just that when you have an article on a UK news site talking about the price of phone line-rental going up and this putting people off buying DSL - most readers would assume that you are talking about BT."
As the saying goes, "assumption is the mother of all f*ckups."
"I know that you buy these articles in and do little more than skim them for profanity, but can't you start the article with "News from Eire:" or similar?
I was confused until the last couple of paragraphs when it became clear this was a foreign news story."
And I thought Americans were self-centered. You sound like a jingoist -- "If it's not news from my homeland, I don't want to know about it!!" Classy.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
