* Posts by The Indomitable Gall

1657 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

Facebook suspends personal data-sharing feature

The Indomitable Gall

FFS...

"However, because many users often click through permission dialogue boxes without paying attention,"

Now now, John, we're all intelligent people here, and you know the problem is much more insidious than that.

The problem is that you have no choice as to what information you share with the app, just share and use or don't share and don't use.

The Facebook interface gives you a very brief summary of what information will be shared, but it doesn't make the app developers justify the data gathering.

Facebook holds its hands up and claims its between user and app developer, but they allow people to write silly little games and then demand whatever information they like in exchange, without ever properly informing the user what they're up to.

The problem is NOT that users don't read the small print, the problem is Facebook.

Susan Boyle joins Lads from Lagos

The Indomitable Gall

Why...?

Why do Microsoft have a US flag in their UK award centre.

OK, maybe it's cos they're an American company.

But then why do they have a sign up saying "Michigan Lottery"...?

Nine per cent of gamer kids are 'addicted'

The Indomitable Gall

Compulsion, certainly.

I get the same compulsion to sit in front of the internet as I used to get to shove tapes in my old C64 as a kid. Is it "just" a compulsion or an addiction? What's the difference?

California's green-leccy price system will stifle plug-in cars

The Indomitable Gall

DCMA takedown notification...

"there's no need to suffer the "range anxiety" which bedevils battery-only drivers"

Isn't "range anxiety" a trademark of somebody or other now?

DUP website translated into Irish by mischievous hacktivist

The Indomitable Gall

And by the same token...

can I just point out, that "English" is not actually any kind of a language as far as I can tell......it just means you speak French corrupted Dutch really REALLY badly and pronounce everything like a chav!

Good for the goose....

The Indomitable Gall

Re:yes and no

@Paul 135

" The same goes for the "Irish language" (based on the Connaught dialect might I add) . Would probably cause less trouble if they just called it "Irish Gaelic". (or just gaelic as its essentially the same as Scots Gaelic, the latter of which is nearly as close to the old Gaelic dialect in Ulster). "

Well that's an overstatement if ever I heard one.

Gaelic (aka Scottish Gaelic) and Irish are about as different as Spanish and Portuguese or Spanish and Italian.

Within both Gaelic and Irish there is a range of dialects, and yes, Ulster Irish is quite similar to Islay Gaelic, but there are some major fundamental differences that come into play when you hit the sea. At best you could call Islay Gaelic a transitional dialect -- not one thing or the other -- but most people agree that it's Gaelic, not Irish, and not merely on grounds of geography or politics, but in terms of grammar.

Spain grovels to penguins over 'Linux' anti-terror plot

The Indomitable Gall

Learn YOUR history

John Sanders:

" ETA never killed for democracy nor anybody's rights, they killed because they believe in their mythical country that was invaded by the Spaniards. An invasion that of course only happened in their imaginations. "

ETA did originally kill for democracy. Unfortunately, direct action of this kind ends up attracting the wrong kind of person. The internal politicking in the film "El Lobo" isn't too far from the truth, by all accounts.

OK, so Navarre wasn't invaded by Spain -- it was allied by marriage -- but the historical Basque nation is far from a "mythical" country.

You cannot disarm the power of groups like ETA by labelling them with the broad brush term "terrorist". Certainly they *are* terrorists, but that's only part of it.

Whether you are a supporter of Basque independence or not, you have to take into account the very real issues of self-image and collective identity that ETA draws its support from. If you deny the Basque identity, you push people who hold that identity towards those that do recognise it.

Respecting people's personally identity is the only way to undermine secessionist terrorism.

Personally, I say the same thing about both the Basque Country and Scotland. Give us a referendum, then we'll all have to live with the results and stop arguing about what they would be. In both cases, I'm in favour of independence, but in both cases, I believe that's a minority view and that the vote would come out as "no". So just ask us, please....

Sony sues PlayStation 3 'hackers'

The Indomitable Gall

Nonsense.

"i can see how about 0.0001% of people who own a ps3 might be interested in linux on it but we all know the vast majority of hacking is purely to run copyritten games, meaning loss of income for sony. in the end we will all end up paying for that."

A) 0.0001% or otherwise is irrelevant. They're Sony's customers.

B) The vast majority of hacking may be to run pirated games. I don't believe it is, but that's irrelevant. The most important hacking always comes from homebrew and/or Linux fans. They break the system to do what they want -- the warez junkies come in as a second phase, picking up what the homebrewers did and extending it. It's always a minor step, just as GeoHot took fail0verflow's hack and modified it to do more than originally intended.

Many people saw the original OtherOS option as a very shrewd move by Sony -- they gave the homebrewers and the Linux crowd an "easy in", which meant they had no reason to break open the OS or firmware.

And it worked pretty well -- without the assistance of the homebrew crowd, the dedicated pirates were on their own and didn't get very far.

With OtherOS still in place, the fail0verflow guys would never have gone to the effort of breaking the encryption.

Microsoft disputes Apple's 'App Store' trademark

The Indomitable Gall

Yes, they coined the term, but...

"App store" was an Apple coinage, but it was coined in a generic way.

As others have already stated, "app" and "store" were both generic terms. More importantly, the pattern <something> store is a very common generic pattern.

MS's main argument is that showing a generic word into a generic pattern gives a generic result.

Imagine someone invented a hoverboard (like in Back to the Future 2). What term would you use to describe a place that sells them? "hoverboard store" (US) or "hoverboard shop" (UK). You wouldn't expect the first place that sells hoverboards to get that as a trademark, would you?

That merely leads to goldrushes, not genuine innovation or creativity.

The Indomitable Gall

I believe...

I've been told that the UK uses the same criteria for genericity with foreign words as English ones in trademarks.

Which leads me to want to start up a consultancy containing the word "aon" in its title. I mean, seriously, do Aon really think that they can trademark a name that is nothing more than "one"?

Researcher cracks Wi-Fi passwords with Amazon cloud

The Indomitable Gall

Very much worth a story.

"Not worth a story in my opinion. It is well-known that one needs an effective keyspace of 2^80 or more (symmetric ciphers) today."

Among those in the know yes. But wider education is required.

The useful angle in this story is that it puts an easily understood metric on security: lucre.

Try giving your average Joe a simple explanation of how weak his wifi security is. Go on, try it. Not easy, is it? Then tell him that it costs less than a fiver to crack. That's a very powerful demonstration, and should get him to listen to your description of how to generate a good key.

Apple refuses frozen iPhone repair

The Indomitable Gall

/metoo

I reckon they'll get bitten by the watchdog for this one....

When one oligopoly screws another

The Indomitable Gall

Fridges...?

"Of all of these products, the only ones to require significant localization are the refrigerator and vacuum cleaner, which need to be built with a 240V supply to suit Australia (and, of course, other markets that use 240V)."

Vacuums, fine, but aren't American fridges wired into the same 240V appliance ring mains as their cookers, washing machines etc?

Mum arrested for seducing teen on Xbox Live

The Indomitable Gall

Nobody said it wasn't...

...but nobody said it *was*, and I think that's his point. While the charges of "molestation" are frequently mentioned in cases like this, the tag "paedo" doesn't tend to stick. But then this isn't the NoTW, so it's not a label that the Reg throws about anyway.

The New Linux: OpenStack aims for the heavens

The Indomitable Gall

But don't you understand?!?

If I've given my work for free, everyone else must too!

Yes, if I code for free it is my personal choice. BUT EVERYONE MUST MAKE THE SAME PERSONAL CHOICE. I DEMAND IT!!!!

</sarcasm>

What the GPL junkies don't get is that it IS personal choice, and some people have different priorities.

The GPL is good because it allows coders to demand "quid pro quo", so they give and they get. Personal choice.

Even freer licenses are also good because the allow coders to say that they don't need quid pro quo -- if they are confident that they're getting enough out of the code for their own benefit, they don't need any quid pro quo.

NASA is acting in public benefit, so they don't care about "sharks" -- they're doing what they've always done with their research (cold war secrecy excepted) and making it available to others. It's a public research group, and that's how these things work.

Rackspace is a storage/hosting provider, and to them, the main goal of the software is to get people to use more storage and bandwidth. Widespread availability of the platform facilitates this.

So, yes, both parties CHOSE to go for a "very free" license, because it is in their interests.

I find it interesting that random internet commentards think they know Rackspace and NASA's business better than Rackspace and NASA. How many degrees do these commentards have? Less than the minimum CV for employment at NASA, I'd guess.

Intel: Microsoft's ARM-on-Windows deal no threat

The Indomitable Gall

Multiprocessing...

OK, so everyone's talking about multicores, right? How about an asymmetrical multicore? An ARM core runs the operating system, office suite, web browser et al, and legacy apps run on an x86 on the side.

As the x86 is a "hot" chip, it could be powered down when on battery and not required, much like the current tranche of laptops with two graphics chipsets. If the OS isn't on it, there's no problem, surely?

This is how I always envisioned the endgame for x86, but everyone said asymmetrical multiprocessing was too complicated to schedule, but now that GPUs are now fully-fledged computers in their own right rather than highly limited coprocessors, we're working in an asymmetrical environment already. The problem is already solved.

The Indomitable Gall

Well of course they'll consider multicore.

I think it's fairly obvious the reason ARM chips don't come in umpteen-core varieties is simply that the current target market (phones, embedded systems) don't need them. Windows on ARM will make a market for more powerful processors.

But I do ask myself why MS is doing this.

Presumably they're aiming for the tablet market, and netbooks, if they get a second wind.

But part of me worries that they're aiming for the embedded market -- remember the Windows 95 cash machines that were down as much as they were up? That could be your next TV....

If you open source an old market, are you doomed to fail?

The Indomitable Gall

A restatement of the woeful inadequacy of OSS gaming.

Isn't everything in that article just saying that the problems of open-source gaming are applicable to all open source?

IE. You guys may be good at cloning existing software, but as most of you don't have a clue how to come up with anything new, only like 3 of you will ever amount to a hill of beans?

Nazis 'became obsessed' with piss-taking Finnish dog

The Indomitable Gall

An open letter to the Coen Brothers

Dear Joel and Ethan,

This story will very soon be a film. Please make sure that you two write and direct it. You are the only people who could do justice to the farcical nature of it.

Kindle lets users lend e-books to mates via email

The Indomitable Gall

Think of it this way...

Libraries have had an effect on book sales, true, but their effect has been limited.

Basically, buying books is massively more convenient, so it's generally worth the extra money.

Libraries are inconvenient not just because of the short loan period, but also because:

* You not only have to go to collect the book, you have to go to give it back. You can collect at your convenience, but you have a hard deadline for returning. Inconvenient.

* Bookshops store loads of copies of popular books. Libraries only have a few. Inconvenient.

* Fines for late returns put people off using libraries. Self-disabling electronic loans save people like me from forgetting to bring the book back and incurring fines.

Electronic book loans drastically increase the utility value of library loans, which damages the comparative value of buying.

Becks offloads Posh Porsche on eBay

The Indomitable Gall

mmmiiiiiiiilllllllllliiiiion?

It's just passed the million mark.

When the auction ends, we will be able to identify the one man in the world who is both richer and thicker than St David of Wembley.

The Indomitable Gall

Humbug.

Isn't there some old saying along the lines of "to those that have, great gifts shall be given"?

So one of the richest men in sport can make a profit on a car, whereas anyone else who might actually notice the cost gets to watch their wheels depreciate.

Richness is its own reward.

Video games go off quicker than tomatoes

The Indomitable Gall

What I want to know....

What I want to know is how the buy-back price compares to the wholesale price -- that's the real value indicator.

MOSSAD SPY VULTURE seized in Saudi Arabia

The Indomitable Gall

New angle?

Sorry, all 360 degrees have been spoken for.

But then again, there's always imaginary numbers.

So how about 90i degrees? I call it the "firm-belief-that-you're-right angle". This explains not only the Arab-Israeli conflict, but also the LibDem/Tory coalition; the war in Afghanistan; the Daily Mail....

Doctor Who to marry Doctor Who's daughter

The Indomitable Gall

Who said anything about celibacy/abstinence?

They said that they "*CAN'T* wait" until they're married. That means they're *not* abstaining. Keep up!

The Indomitable Gall

Which means that...

So let me get this straight: the fifth doctor begat the clone of his tenth incarnation.

But if a clone's a clone, then they are genetically identical, so the fifth doctor must have had relations with someone genetically identical. So far, none of the doctor's regenerations have been female, making the only candidate for mother... the clone herself.

So at some point in the future (or past) there will be (or will have been) a mammoth case where The Doctor divorced The Doctorclone for infidelitous relationship with... The Doctor.

In any divorce, it's the kids that suffer, which in this case is also the wife. I bet she was so desperate for therapy that she will have been inventing the whole profession in a few centuries ago.

Double-clicking patent takes on world

The Indomitable Gall

Fairly valid point....

All the aforementioned double-clicks are previous-status-agnostic, aren't they? IE it doesn't matter whether it's an already-selected component or not, hence non-infringing....

Enormous 1km ice-cube machine fashioned at South Pole

The Indomitable Gall
Coat

An ice cube...?

Really, I'm stunned.

In among all that random ice, someone's hidden a massive ice-cube!

Genius! It's like hiding a house in a pile of bricks!

The Indomitable Gall

Pictures? We want video.

Pics are great, but I want to see that thing move....

Microsoft says no to Kinect sex game

The Indomitable Gall

Recognising fingers....

The original prototypes had on-board bones processing, and the bones model didn't recognise fingers.

The bones processing was taken out (ostensibly as a cost saving, but more likely cos they knew the device was going to be hackable, and they'd effectively be giving cheap motion capture to ever cartoon and video-game studio in the world) so these guys must be making their own bones from the video feed. The original bones model didn't follow fingers because of size and processing speed, but in this game the hand appears to be held closer to the camera than usual, and the software is only tracking the hand, so it's not having to do any more work than the basic bones model used in the dance sim, for example.

Hacker warning over internet-connected HDTVs

The Indomitable Gall

Potentially perfect zombies...

How many people ever turn off their TVs? You switch off your PC, and many people switch off games consoles, but how often do you actually physically remove power from your telly?

You don't. You point a box at it and press a red button. So you're relying on software to switch it off. And if the software is hacked, then it can keep DDoSing websites, cracking captchas or whatever it is that the cool botnets are doing this year.

Man caught w*nking over Alan Sugar's autobiography

The Indomitable Gall

Anonymous source?

You might want to redact your quotes better...

""It was very bizarre behaviour and our security guys got a hold of him before too many people saw what he was doing.""

Yes, "our security guys". Your anonymous source was... the librarian.

World of Warcraft bot ban ticks off world of critics

The Indomitable Gall

WRT your analogy

This bot isn't just capable of breaking the rules, it's incapable of doing anything *but* break the rules. It's analogous to a car that only operates above the speed limit.

Yes, your analogy is valid against the general wording of the DCMA, but not in practice in this specific case.

The Indomitable Gall

Is it really that simple?

Remember that this bot actually completes quests, so it has to have some pretty deep hooks into either the code or the quest data. If that code and quest data is protected by any encryption (which it surely is) then the bot has to break that encryption -- the "countermeasures" mentioned in the DCMA are employed and letter of the law is breached.

The Indomitable Gall

Are you crazy?

The guy made $3.5 million -- THREE AND A HALF MILLION DOLLARS -- from this software. This is a business, not a revolutionary stand. The guy would have to be mad -- that's the goose that laid the golden egg.

Electric forcefield space sailing-ship tech gets EU funding

The Indomitable Gall

Not quite.

This only works in a resistive medium. Without an atmosphere, sea or ground friction to slow down the side that isn't receiving the force, the whole mass of the ship would be accelerated equally.

US Navy achieves '100 mile' hypersonic railgun test shot

The Indomitable Gall

At mach 7...

At mach 7, a projectile could be over the horizon within a minute. A plane at cruising altitude directly overhead would have less than 4 seconds to evade, and a pilot would need to be looking towards the gun to see the bullet.

Your countermeasure relies on detecting an EM pulse several miles away, which means it's going to be too sensitive, and would be triggerable by much smaller devices nearby. In fact, enemy interceptors could be armed with a decoy EM generator to activate enemy countermeasures during dogfighting, throwing the pilot off-line and unable to get a missile lock.

PARIS concocts commemorative cocktail

The Indomitable Gall

Mile high club solo

After all, if you recall, the pilot was blid by the time he descended....

Lost ancient civilisation's ruins lie beneath Gulf, says boffin

The Indomitable Gall

Gilgamesh?

Odd that there's no mention of the epic of Gilgamesh here....

How to kill your computer

The Indomitable Gall

Re: "Note to self, only replace fuses with the correct values." → #

"I doubt a 2amp fuse would have saved you - something was very wrong. Fuses are just not that sensitive anyway"

Now stop and think about what you've said. He had to replace the fuse. Why? Because the original fuse had blown. Yes, the original fuse Had Blown. It HAD BLOWN. It's quite likely that any replacement 2A fuse would also blow. If you don't understand why...

Gov pays Greens to lobby it, says report

The Indomitable Gall

Milton Freidman misses the point

The current monetarist system, ironically enough, relies on this increasing public spend. And also ironically enough, the justification for this can be found in the Old Testament of the capitalist Bible, Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations.

As Smith pointed out, our labour is more valuable when we can specialise on a single task. The more tasks we have to carry out, the less efficient we are as workers. A civil service that manages our public infrastructure takes administrative burden off the individuals and centralises it, so it fulfills Smith's criteria for specialisation of labour.

And then consider healthcare and schooling. In a competitive market there would be oversupply in areas that constituted a "good market" and undersupply elsewhere. That's inefficient.

And of course all those little things like dustbin collection, street sweeping and all that.... Right now we're hearing lots of people say "when I was a lad, everyone cleared the snow from outside their own houses, now everyone's moaning about the council not doing it." OK, in the snow example they seem to expect miracles, but in the case of dustbin collection, we need that. In the old days you threw your own rubbish onto the cart. That meant being in the street when the cart was going down it. Ask people to do that and you kill the modern labour force, because shift patterns would be impossible.

The Indomitable Gall

Funny....

"Before the TPA came along there was nobody - literally nobody - prepared to talk about value for money in the public sector or the need to cut public spending."

I distinctly remember the Channel 4 news interviewing people from the LSE, the Adam Smith Institute and various US and UK academic institutions on a perceived need to cut public spending.

Must've been the mushrooms.

The Indomitable Gall

Erroneous headline capitalisation...

I reckon you need to change "Greens" to "greens", cos "Greens" with a capital is by convention the Green Party. If the government was funding a political party, that would be a massive scandal, but that's not what you mean, is it...?

Diary of a Not-spot: One man's heroic struggle for broadband

The Indomitable Gall

So, what...?

Do you really reckon all home workers should live in cities? Kind of defeats the point of not going into the office, doesn't it?

Xbox modder prosecution dropped like white-hot potato

The Indomitable Gall

The market only exists because of distortion

We are rich because others are poor.

If a loaf of bread in China was the same price as a loaf of bread in London, Chinese factory workers wouldn't be cheap labour.

The price of bread in a country is based on local conditions.

The problem with intellectually property is it has zero unit cost, and we therefore think of it as being of universally unchanging value.

Region-locking allows them to sell to all markets at a price that matches local market conditions.

If all DVDs cost £20 the world over, most of the world wouldn't be able to afford DVDs. If all DVDs cost the same price the world over as they currently do in Kinshasa, Hollywood would be unable to recoup the cost of filming their dross.

Much as I hate it, blocking parallel imports of digital works is the best solution for the current global economic model.

US politician: 'homosexual agenda' behind TSA groin grope

The Indomitable Gall

The grain of truth...

The guy's flipped, BUT there is a grain of truth hidden in his ranting.

We have same-sex pat downs precisely because of an assumption of heterosexuality, making the patdown unambiguously non-sexual. But now that society has accepted that this assumption is nonsense and that homosexuality is normal, we cannot assume that a same-sex patdown has no sexual connotations.

So surely it's time for an end to the same-sex patdown?

Speak geek: The world of made-up language

The Indomitable Gall

Not "made up", "evolved"

Most languages evolved over time, and have internal conflicts in consistency and logic. A constructed language is generally logically consistent, and lacking in some of the odder quirks of spelling that bedevil languages like English and French.

Constructed languages are extremely different from natural languages, even those that try to mimic natural language.

The Indomitable Gall

Meanwhile, in English...

We have a few interesting words.

We "fire" guns, even though we don't use a flaming torch to light a fuse any more.

When we get behind the wheel of a car, we lead a herd of livestock to market ("drive").

Emission of television and radio programmes is described as scattering seed ("broadcasting").

And of course "skiing" "skating" "gliding" "sliding" "sledging" "sledding" and "skidding" were probably originally all the same word.

Those govt cuts - slasher horror or history-changing brilliance?

The Indomitable Gall

The issue with council houses

The issue with council houses is that there aren't any -- they were all sold.

This is precisely the reason housing benefit is out of control -- the governement is "contractually obligated" to make sure kids aren't sleeping rough, and the commercial landlords have milked that for all they can get, ratcheting up rents continually as the market has passed the costs to the public purse. That's basic supply and demand, and it's infuriating that it's continually swept under the carpet.

The social rents going up to 80% is part of the same system -- a 50% rent isn't just subsidy in terms of "opportunity cost", it's again a skew in the market, because a 50% rent is so much more affordable that people can afford houses of higher value than otherwise. The value of that 50% increases to absorb the funds available, and it the 50% value increases, the 100% value increases -- market averages rise yet again.

The government needs to own property in order to supply the social housing need without affecting the market. I am predisposed to saying this (I'm mostly socialist in outlook), but the economics support it even in terms of free-market capitalism. All social housing within the market is interference in the market, but social housing is a necessity for humane, civilised society. The only answer is to make social housing external and additional to the private market.

Royal Wedding: Prince Charles is a ZX81, Wills is an iPad

The Indomitable Gall

AAARRRGHH ROYALS!!

I am cancelling my subscription.