Posts by Richard IV

Write haiku, win home server

And this isn't going to make me sign up to Twitter either

_Samba / Competition_

Five, sev'n, five, three lines:

A simple standard to keep

But we rewrote the rules.

_Bushido_

Loyalty unto death:

Is Windows Home Server

like a samurai?

How the Dunning-Kruger effect will stop techies buying houses

Aren't there 3 ways?

Attracting large numbers of savers counts as capital backing too.

Mind you, those in charge have scuppered that one too by lowering base rates to near zero.

Thinking of anarchists:

Proudhon was quite an influence on the Cooperative and Building Society movements. His attempts to create a people's bank in France failed due to lack of saving capital.

Silvio Gesell proposed a scrip system around the turn of the 20th Century that would remove privilege and banking entirely while maintaining a vibrant economy based on merit and hard work. The sole implementation of his ideas, in Wörgl, Austria during the great depression, was pretty successful until it was shut down by the national bank. Funny how Keynes gets shedloads of mentions these days as his methods are wheeled back out, while one of his primary influences is rarely mentioned...

Government rejects call to secure snoop data

Only a slight paraphrase...

To child: "Have you tidied your room?"

Child: "Yes, mum."

To world: "We do not believe it is proper for parents to preside over tidying when they would then have to inspect and judge the effectiveness of that tidying. But we are convinced that a better tidying regime is required, including the development of specific advice for children, and are working with others to develop it....

...It would be impractical to require all rooms in the house to be tidied. However, it is perfectly reasonable for members of the family to want reassurance that all appropriate steps are taken to protect the furniture. All family members have in place a variety of measures, including physical measures, the naughty step, and grounding, to ensure that a basic level of hygiene is maintained."

The other child: "Muuuuum, there's a dead body in Kevin's room...!"

Mine's under the body, could you just lift him up a bit so I can get at it?

Travel agents accused of shilling for ID cards

Re: Ach, grow up you lot

"the present combination of TV-licences, gas bills and council tax notices, all circularly dependent ID-confirmations that started from a single video rental card or coffee-shop-card. "

How do you think they are going to get the "clean" data that'll be in the ID database?

"It's excruciating"

Yes, and if the government get their way, it'll be excruciating plus fingerprints. It's the centralisation of and potential mischief with the data that I am against, along with the "we solemnly swear not to" that's _not_ in the legislation itself which to me is an open door to abuse, wilful or otherwise.

Bloody typical of ABTA though, not like them to sell things that are only half built and not anywhere near as good as advertised...

Whitehall plans 'White Noise' phone network collapse

White noise indeed

"We'd be reduced to carrier pigeons and semaphore if we didn't have some form of communications"

Carrier pigeons and semaphore ARE forms of communication *sigh* Is there some village that has a Royal crest on its signpost: "Suppliers of spokespeople to Her Majesty's Government"? Thickythixton-by-the-Marsh perhaps?

MPs give offender system drubbing in scathing report

@Citizen Kaned

My theory is that EDS and the like only get work because their name tells government officials how to spell it.

I'd extend that premise and challenge anyone to name a large organisation that is now primarily known by its initials yet has not had massive screwups and/or dysfunctional management.

Scots slam Germans for 'tight-arsed' slur

Dare one?

Of course one does.

Clearly the Scottish Parliament and Edinburgh tram service are evidence of Scots not being tightarses. Merely evidence of them being a bunch of ginger haggis-munching sporran-wearing alcoholic cholesterol-ridden heroin-overdosing Anglo-subsidised money wasters.

Which stereotypes do the Scots prefer? I would suggest that stinginess and orange freckliness were the least of their worries.

[Disclaimer: it is not funny when your flatmates decide to watch Braveheart 3 times back to back. Consider this revenge... mine's the one with Employee of the month: Robert Campbell on the nametag]

Turkish filters block Reg commentards

Re: filter logic

Yup, looks like it.

Why only chicken breast? Is +(-turkey, breast) an affront to national pride? We need to be told.

[Everywhere I've worked at with filtering has mysteriously found dictionary and thesaurus sites blocked after *someone* did searches for naughty words]

NZ town cans rabbit-chucking contest

In other news

I, for one, look forward to variations on the theme:

On leather: "If someone skinned, tanned and wore your grandmother after she died you wouldn't like it."

Demanding an apology from the FA for past crimes: "If someone took your grandmother's bladder out and kicked it around for fun after she died you wouldn't like it."

On non-vegetarians: "If someone ate your grandmother after she died you wouldn't like it."

On Damian Hirst: "If someone cut your grandmother in half and pickled her after she died you wouldn't like it."

Not quite getting the parallel with grandmothers: "Grandmothers are pests* killing them is not fun, it's a necessity."

* the feral grandmother population is currently unknown.

Magpies hold funerals for fallen feathered friends

@Muscleguy

I'm not suggesting our emotions are in a different class - simply that we should be very wary before assuming that behaviours are close analogues of displays of human emotions and vice versa. Humans themselves aren't exactly consistent when it comes to grieving (or a lot of other emotions), so it's surely cultural-level special pleading to assume that because it looks like your version of grief it therefore must be grief.

That's why I like the gay necro duck article besides my delight in the macabre. No theories as to why the duck did what it did, it simply notes the observed behaviour, and why it is notable.

You don't have to draw conclusions - it's OK to await further evidence.

Bad biology?

<< Bekoff dismissed the idea that such observations were merely cases of anthropomorphism, and defended: "It's bad biology to argue against the existence of animal emotions." >>

He obviously doesn't know what anthropomorphism means. Criticism on such grounds isn't arguing against the existence of animal emotions; rather, it's arguing against the existence of human emotions in animals.

Using phrases like "the only obvious conclusion" and "no reason not to believe" smacks of bad science to me. A couple of seconds thought on the disabled elephant led me to a slightly different but no less obvious conclusion - even disabled, an angry elephant is still a quite formidable opponent against predators so the herd made a decision that it was better off with than without. This isn't "caring" for an individual elephant, it's a simple value judgement that fits in well with herd mentality.

I hate this kind of biology with totally off the wall yet pseudo human interest conclusions like these. It's not so much the behavioural observation that I object to but the anthropic layer that seems to be added purely for media satiation.

Right, I'm off to read the not exactly media friendly and conclusionless ignoble winning duck story again to cheer myself up: http://moeliker.wordpress.com/the-duck/

UK telly in coke blizzard shock

Ooh, time for fun with statistics

I want to see some sort of analogue to the Consumer Prices Index being the Retail Prices Index without mortgages: the Media Prices Index could be the Meejuh Prices Index without the coke. On such indices, one suspects that the former rises rather slowly while the latter reaches new highs every year...

Spotify scores over £1m a month from subs

Whoop de do.

So Spotify costs nearly 3 times as much to run as it gets in revenue. Way to go on sustainablility in the Web 2.0 era...

Hotmail phish exposes most common passwords

Pnemonics

@Sir Runcible:

Sadly yes. And you missed a 0 :p

Knight: Oh, a tundred! Sever one!

Tundred: Oh!

Knight: Sever two!

Princess: Free!

Latex markup source with spaces stripped out tends to generate rather nice passwords as do memorable locations as latitude/longitude, or think of a word and use the keys 1 place diagonally up from it - hello becomes y3oo9.

Seemingly along with many others, what really annoys me is not so much the variety of password schemes, it's the forbidden characters from the "I don't know how properly to sanitise inputs" school of programming that mean you have to come up with alternatives to compensate - it's those ones I tend to forget. *sigh*

Tories will let voters 'rewrite' legislation online

Sweet mother of...

Transparency, my arse!

This will just end up providing lobbying organisations with another means of hiding their activities under the veil of "the public".

I guess that I come under the Luddite banner in saying that we already have plenty of ways of asserting our views to be ignored. The main problem is, it seems to me, knowing what legislation is proposed in the first place. It doesn't matter how well the public consultation works if it's only a small cross section of the public that know about it...

Facebook turns users into web translation engine

In crowds there's a high chance of finding idiots

They've been burnt by this before. Nice to see them not learning from mistakes...

http://virtuelvis.com/archives/2008/08/facebooks-norwegian-tos

Nation's parents prepare to be vetted

Timely!

Just yesterday I was saying to a friend that the problem with the CRB checks is that HM.gov have explicitly excluded parents and family friends from the list, the first people you'd be checking if the project was genuinely aimed at preventing child abuse (and, for the record, actually stood a chance of having the stated effect, which it doesn't). However, even the politicians realised that that might be a step too far. Seems like Ofsted have found a way of plugging the gap.

Should be interesting when they notice that 100% of child abuse cases involve children :-o

Twitter gets $100m injection

Disgraceful!

I for one am clinging to the delicious future moment when Twitter changes its logo to read Twitter from C**ts and all the Twitterati start moaning about how C**ts are ruining what used to be a perfectly crap service.

Ammo rationing at Wal-Mart as panic buying sweeps US

Cunning plan...

Unloaded guns don't kill people (unless you're an expert at pistol whipping). Tax the possession of ammo :]

Facebook enables apps to peek at mail

Facebook shmacebook

For most of their users, they could replace "I have read and agree to the Terms and Conditions" with "Yes, I am an idiot and I don't care if some scammer trawls my inbox" and only the few with brains would notice. It's a good thing that at least those with brains would start a group against it or suchlike.

Facebook is like living in a police state but not minding the odd beating.

Student loans company says 'we're not overloaded'

Thank god I avoided the SLC

Being part of the last year without tuition fees hath its privileges.

Back when I was a student there was a big hoo-ha about how the directors of the SLC were spending rather a lot of money on un-Student Loany things, namely whiskey and going to the rugby and cricket, so I decided not to deal with them if at all possible.

It always amazes me how often the SLC (or its subsidiaries) not doing it's job properly story crops up seeing as their parameters of operation are pretty well defined: busy time is August/September, expect up to half of the number of A level students that year to require your services; test your service response assuming that this will happen.

Yet, every time the story crops up, the SLC response is deny, deny, admit, but that there was an unexpected level of demand. It's not as though this is a new service and you woefully underestimated what "a lot of demand" meant as with something like the census website - you can ring up the Office of National Statistics or similar, ask them how many A Level students there are, divide that by 2 and add a few for luck, and there's a ballpark figure for demand levels that is on the generous side.

SA pigeon outpaces broadband

Re: I think you're missing the point here..

It's a good job Winston wasn't carrying more than 5Gb of data then - otherwise he'd have had to be shot.

Suddenly visualising Telkom in the Corporal Punishment episode of Blackadder goes Forth...

Catch the pigeon

Muttley, doooooooo something!

Shuckin-fechen-blatently-obvious-that-4gig-is-gonna-take-more-than-an-hour-even-at-8Mbps

Bletchley Park to restore 112-byte* '50s Brit nuke computer

Admirable restraint?

Not one gag about Britain's replacement for Trident. Shame on you!

How much of the EU's data will the UK lose?

Nice to know

That HM.gov doesn't push any genuine responsibility in the direction of their chosen contractors, thus maintaining all the exemptions with regards to liability that HM.gov reserves for itself.

I for one hope that the project will be forced to change its name to STARKERS.

Mozilla: Web's future rests with millions outside IT

Seat-belt moment indeed

The seatbelt moment was more a case of people and governments seeing people walking away from accidents that should have, but didn't, kill them because of seatbelts; and legislation being requested and enacted on safety grounds.

There isn't really a direct parallel with the web except when key real-world infrastructure like hospitals and power get affected. People tend to care when they feel their lives or their pockets are at risk if Something isn't done. At present there's too small a risk to either.

For the most part (RoTM notwithstanding), home computers don't cause a huge threat to life, so unless there's a big threat to pockets it is going to be really hard to get users to care.

The legal attacks on filesharers may not have resulted in great reductions in sharing, but they did alter behaviour (if only to move towards more secure p2p networks). If a similar bundle of sticks could be found to alter behaviour with regards botnets etc, then people might start caring and changing their behaviour.

UK population to abandon Midlands

re: Maths??

The percentages shouldn't add up to 100%.

Not many people live in the South West so a few thousand extra folk who think pasties have carrots in makes a big difference.

10000 + 1000 = 10% rise

100000 + 1000 = 1% rise

easy!

Shock jock blames Britain for hack attack

He shouldn't get so het up.

We seem to be using his country as a penal colony for hackers at the minute :o

Feds uncover 'bust out' scam that cost banks $80m

@Jimmy Floyd

It was more than a $25k loan...

" Although the check was returned for insufficient funds, the fraudulent payment caused Citibank to temporarily increase her credit line. The total financial loss to the bank was calculated at $69,940.94."

That would be a case of counting your chickens before you've got any eggs. It's even more stupid than the old magic banknote printing press scam - there's at least some genuine money involved it that case.

Microsoft's web Office: No love for Chrome, Opera

As one of the two Opera users

I wish we could just get away from the whole "we support Browser X" argument. Really it should be "we've tested that it works properly in these browsers, but we won't stop you trying it in yours if it's not on the list".

So long as MS don't actively prevent users from using whatever browser then there isn't really a problem. One can only hope they're now sufficiently grownup to take that attitude. Gareth Howell's response seems to indicate that they're at least past the sullen teen phase.

(Although it would be quite wonderful if attempts at access using IE6 were greeted with something appropriately disparaging)

UK space programme suffers serious setback

Big Truckle in Little England

nuff said, coat fetched.

Average UK broadband just over half advertised speed

It's not "up to" that's the problem

It's that there's no "from" at the bottom end. It reminds me of the tactic adopted by BT way back in the dial up days of only guaranteeing 22 kbps or so so that they could give customers an "extra" line by splitting the existing one while still meeting their connectivity obligations.

Most people are sensible enough to (eventually) realise that the top quoted speed is dependent on a following wind and their packets running downhill. What is needed is some way of formulating the rules so that ISPs are made to quote what one's normal speed range will be for (say) 90% of the time. And not to have the speed range look like a random guess: 0-8Mbps is not acceptable - 4-5Mbps probably is.

Consistency of connection speed is a lot more important than the maximum - the sooner the ISPs lose the weasel tactic of drastically reducing speeds in busy times because they've sold more bandwidth than they actually have, the better. Some reduction is to be expected but some of them have been taking the piss for years.

Electropulse weapon fear spreads to UK politicos

@The most dangerous thing

That would be Tomorrow Never Dies. This, however, is the plot to Goldeneye.

Chucking them in a Faraday cage and dropping it in the ocean's too good for them.

I am inveencible!

ISP redesign unites the web in nausea

Wot, no comic sans or background midi tune?

I don't think I've seen so much magenta since porn sites abandoned it in the late 90s.

The site mightn't support IE 6 but I suspect it works with Netscape 2.

Looks like the SSL thing is a haven't put the certificates on all the cluster issue. Professional, I didn't know you could cluster C64s!

Would you leave your child alone with a cabinet minister?

What really titses me off

Is the way the arsehole they pushed forward for the Today interview this morning said that they are only trying to strike the right balance. That is as maybe, but they are seriously failing to strike the right balance.

In the case of Philip Pullman his argument was along the lines that because Pullman is a well known children's author he will be trusted by children and could therefore have his wicked way with them. Using this logic, Pullman is a menace if he even appears within visual range of a child. This would also explain why government ministers don't need checking - nobody trusts them...

The whole idea stinks to high heaven and what is worse, abrogates all responsibility to a database check. Kids are most at risk from people they see on a regular basis - families, neighbours - but the government seems to think that it's the previously convicted (usually not for any child related crime), who are stalking the country with raging hard-ons.

Home Office gets another ad agency for ID cards

What kind of promotions?

Identity Cards: Buy one, get one free!

Too thick to boil an egg? Buy 'em preboiled

The latest variant of the old Linda Smith gag

"Tuna flakes: for people too stupid to use a fork"

Blears sackee nothing to do with TheyWorkForYou

One has to wonder

If calling Blears a disgrace was against the civil service code, would she have been sacked for expressing the opposite sentiment?

"It is terrible the manner in which you have been excoriated for something that wasn't against the rules. You have been a brilliant MP and Minister. Why aren't you still in the Cabinet?"

Didn't think so! Unless she'd then be caught out by the code against blatent lying and/or sarcasm...

Gay animals going at it like rabbits

^Citation needed

The infamous igNobel prize winning duck: http://www.nmr.nl/nmr/binary/retrieveFile?instanceid=16&itemid=2574

UK.gov to create central cybersecurity agency

Czars

Hopefully, they're called Czars because when things go spectacularly wrong, they and their families will be rounded up and shot.

I for one hope that it will be called the Office for Sysadministrative Affairs.

Cartoon lion urges Lancs kids to dob in terrorist classmates

Good grief

Who'd have thought all these years later that Trev & Simon's Saturday morning "Stay In Your Homes!" sketches featuring government agents thinking nigh on everything was dangerous would become so close to the truth?

You've got to be so phenomenally careful when simplifying things for kids. It's still a family joke about my being convinced that smoking turned people's lungs into jam jars due to an illustrative model where said containers held cotton woolinto which fag smoke was drawn by a vacuum pump. And that an 80's iteration of the stranger danger campaign had me paranoid in crowds for several months.

Of course the thing that's never mentioned with the stranger danger campaigns is that the VAST majority of people involved in doing nasty things to kids are not strangers.