Posts by Spanners 1617 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Sep 2009
At some point in the future, if we get there, Snowden will will be seen as a patriot, defender of democracy and the US constitution.
The unknowable part is just what we will have to put up with first.
Think of the children because if it isn't fixed by the time today's children reach adulthood, it will be a matter of study for archaeologists.
The word "reform" in dictionary.com is firstly defined as "the improvement or amendment of what is wrong, corrupt, unsatisfactory, etc"
It does not say words like break, injure, damage ruin or destroy even though that is what most government 'reforms' are meant to do.
Their phones are cheaper than ever. This is good for the consumer. I just bought a P30 "lite". It means that US spooks will find it harder to spy on me. In case Chinese ones fancy doing so, I will not call any government types or have national defence plans on it!
All that Huawei stuff was an attempt at trade protectionism. It has sweet FA to do with security. I would be much unhappier if the CIA, NSA and other crooks found it too easy to connect into my phone, read it and sell the results to other US corporations.
That sentence indicates that someone has not been paying attention.
The only reason behind the US' dislike of Huawei is that they are not under the control of the US. There are no US companies profiting and, more importantly, there is no possibility of them quietly giving access to US spooks and corporations to the insides.
It has between very little and absolutely no relevance to security. The security claim is to give SCROTUS something to pretend when the WTO accuses him of protectionism.
This can never happen. All these assertions were part of "project fear".
And the good news is that the NHS will be getting £35 million more per week as of tomorrow.
Be careful, making assertions like that will have people believing that were comprehensively lied to by brexit politicians for their personal profits/
.
The US "problem" with Huawei and other vendors has got little to do with 5G security.
It has a lot more to do with the fact that US spooks may not be able to compromise them.
It has even more to do with the restrictive trade practices that SCROTUS wants to implement. He has been made aware of just how far the US is behind China, particularly Huawei. He wants to use security as a way of getting round WTO rules about protectionism and tariffs. He hopes that we are gullible on this because of the "really amazing" trading deals he can give us. Perhaps if we cooperated, it might convince others that there really is a security angle.
Does he really think that moving to a different US company, even one as good as Cisco, will stop his data being guddled through?
You have a choice. You can either be monitored by US spooks and that will be then passed to US corporations or you can use Chinese stuff and possibly get monitored by their spooks but they are unlikely to sell it to US corporates to cover their costs.
most electricity is (still) generated by fire (burning gas/coal/oil)
I have an APP on my phone that tells me what is currently making mt electricity. (Grid Carbon Intensity)
GAS - 38.8%
Coal - 4%
Oil - 0%
That comes to 42.8% so it isn't most.
There is an item called Biomass on the list but that is 6.6% so it is still not a majority. I assume that Biomass is burning something anyway.
At other times the figures have been much better.
Conclusion: Burning stuff for electricity is a lot more than it should be but it's getting better.
Given the tendency towards *no* ports
I hadn't noticed many phones that do that. There are a lot more phones that do wireless charging as well as traditional wired charging but this inefficient method is no more environmentally friendly than anything else from Apple and others.
Certainly Apple has let it be known that **they** are interested in a portless phone - or at least allowed rumours to get out. 10% of smartphone sales is not an industry movement.
Is this really a thing?
A question like that raises the possibility that you may never have seen a normal "user".
1. Try and push the cable into the device.
2. If it does not go in, push harder. Repeat several times.
3. Without removing the cable, rotate through 540°.
4. Plug other end of cable into charger/pc/telephone socket
5. repeat 2 and 3
6. Examine shredded cable plug
7. Call IT informing them that you are putting in a complaint about yet another substandard cable
There is something comparable for unplugging cables too
When Trump talks about the state of their national security, and ours, he has a different meaning.
He is talking about the security of the profit line of corporaions belonging to his rich donors and friends. He has no more concern over the security of the USA than Boris has about the continued existence of the UK.
It's a lot harder to keep secrets nowadays.
Example, a couple of years ago, someone at work complained that some courtroom parasites were stopping him from knowing the name of the footballer who had a super injunction out. It took me under a minute to find the information. It is no longer possible for "them" to hide stuff from me if it is known elsewhere. It may be unwise of me to rebroadcast it though.
...emails possibly subject to FOIA requests should be printed out, on paper...
I was told that if you all have is a printout of an email, the only thing it proves is that you have a printer.
Just look at a printout of an email. How long would it take you to run that up with a word processor?
I understand that it is common in the USA for ones politics to drift to the right as one "grows up".
I have had the opposite experiance. After an expensive education (not as expensive as Boris' though), where I was happy to see Mrs Thatcher elected less than a year after I left school, I have drifted to the left as I became better aquainted with the real world as well as people not as fortunate as myself..
Is it that US youth has the opposite experience? Do they get a poor education that does tell them about the less fortunate whereupon they forget everything?
...moderate leader...
Why does theLlabour party need one of those? It has never hurt the Conservatives to have a far from moderate one. In fact, since the 1980's, the more moderate the leader, the less they like to remember them.
I know that England has a standardized measuring cup, because I've used them.
I have scales and I have a glass measuring jug. The scales are set to grammes. I think the jug has pints on one side but I use the other one that shows ML and parts of a litre.
If there are measuring cups in the house, SWMBO hides them from me.
If I come across a US recipe I want to try, I either use mental arithmetic to convert to metric or I ask Google to tell me. I'm too young to fully understand most imperial measures. I won't be 60 for another 3 weeks!
I am too young to understand Imperial measurements.
At less than a month short of 60, so am I. I can do the sums to work out what someone from the USA actually means then they say that the temperature outside is "over 100 degrees" - subtract 32 and divide by 1.8 to get about 37.78 actual degrees. I can multiply miles by 1.6 to get a rough conversion to distance and if someone wants to talk about flooding you get litres if you multiply their unit (Acre Foot) by 14.8 million!
There is a difference between being good at sums and actually "understanding" units that are pretty unchanged since the time of Shakespere.
Anyway, about degrees. "Who else remembers being taught that "one Rad subtends 1 metre at a distance of 1 kilometre". How many of those to a degree?
A non-US company bribes someone in another non-US country and the USA feels that, as the world police, they are entitled to investigate and/or extract money.
Many US companies got to where they are by dodgy deals (the F104 and MS Windows for example). Now that they are at the top of the tree, the ladder must be pulled up in case other countries demonstrate that they are short on principles too.
...is Twitter not derived from twit?
I had always felt that if you trace back the origins..
Twiddle
Twaddle
YMMV but there are some really interesting people out there and some of them tweet things very worth reading but there is also a stupendous amount of dross on Twitter. The trick is to only look at the interesting stuff. That's why I am not much troubled by advertising. I have this special device that stops me seeing adverts - it's called a brain...
I like to think that STEM students can be educated about the effects of non-ionising radiation and about the inverse square law.
I imagine the UoL has political science students who will "know" that radio waves are radioactivity, will make you glow in the dark, ruin your Feng Shui and thereby kill you.
Their legal students will want to see court cases in action.
Their engineering students may want to take it to bits to see how it works.
Do they have an OTC there? I knew people, when I was in one somewhere else, who would have loved to demolish things like that.
Journalism students can learn how to misrepresent whatever is going on.
Anyone doing IT can have fun poking their way the security systems and get free 5G.
At work, for this sort of investigation, I use a cable tracker - a "tone tester" but not the one used for tuning your guitar!
You probably need to fit a plug up one end of the wire although I have a little device with crocodile clips.
You plug the "transmitter" part into that and the other part can follow that particular cable along until you see where the other end is. Ours makes the same noise as the thing Dr McCoy in Start Trek used.
Perhaps you know someone who works in IT support who can lend you one.
I like the idea of such a campaign but I can see a couple of problems.
1. Different ads and types of ads annoy different people.
2. Lawyers will get involved if we link to the offending adverts.
3. We will not know which advert we are talking about if we don't and lawyers might still see a way of making money by messing it up.
I was busily making sure that the Y2K bug did not affect my employer.
It was successful. If the work had not been done they, like many others, would have faced a mess worthy of these pages.
As it was successful, we get comments in the press describing it as a load of nonsense because little happened. Little happened because people were fixing where possible and replacing where it wasn't.
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