* Posts by breakfast

1556 publicly visible posts • joined 24 May 2007

Palin's email snooper sent to prison

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I was thinking that

She just seemed like a joke to me as well, another crazy introverted right-wing extremist in a country already packed to the gills with religious nutbars.

But last weekend got me thinking and then got me reading. Take a look at the way the Tea Party are working, the rhetoric and methods they use. Use 1930s Germany as your core point of reference. I'm not going to tell anyone what to think about that, just look at the way the organisation operates and the things they say, then draw your own conclusions.

If they're a joke it's not a funny one, not at all.

But at least she draws attention to it I guess by referencing blood libel.

Limping MySpace to offload half of workforce

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Not just you

I still find the interface confusing, but then I have set my default language to "English ( pirate )" and that does have a somewhat baffling lexicon on occasion.

Assange 'threatened to sue' Grauniad over leak of WikiLeak

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Stop

Kind of

I think technically in the case of The Guardian, the newspaper is releasing the information for financial loss.

Newspapers don't make any money really, almost all of them - certainly all the serious ones - have to be subsidised by someone.

MOSSAD SPY VULTURE seized in Saudi Arabia

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Be reasonable

In fairness, they did release said piece of hi-tech spying equipment into space from somewhere in Spain, so it's not surprising it had got a little off course by this point.

Presence of a Playmobil secret agent should confirm the theory.

US bumblebees in 'alarming' decline

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Being contrary

I'm not science and consequently probably wrong, but I got the sense that there were more bumblebees around last year than there had been in a the previous few summers. I was concerned that I barely saw a honey-bee all summer, but bumblebees seemed unusually abundant.

Enormous 1km ice-cube machine fashioned at South Pole

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Coat

Good work NSF.

Given this features the work of the NSF, should it not have the NSF-Work warning?

Senior Guardian hacks turn on Assange

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FAIL

Spot the odd one out

One of those things is not like the others.

Clue: It's the one that isn't really creepy.

Assange lawyers fume over leaked rape case docs

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Indeed

Presumably the evidence would have stuck the pages together.

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No help needed

Nobody needs to help Assange look bad, with his "hope the Sorting Hat puts me in Slytherin" demeanour and egotistical harping, he has always - since long before any of this came out - come across as a creepy guy.

Regardless of whether this is a set-up, he could have done a lot better by Wikileaks ( and made less of a target of himself ) if he had not spent so much time over the last five years going "Me me ME! Look at me everyone! Who is the face of Wikileaks? It's me! Julian Assange! I'm the man! Check me out! I'm so secret and stealthy and so much cleverer than everyone! And did I mention Wikileaks? That is basically ME!"

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Absolutely

Damn right- those leaks were their Christmas holiday- no need to do any real reporting, just wait for the next big bunch of leaks to go out and hey presto: News!

Car immobilisers easily circumvented by crafty carjackers

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Old school sometimes better

This is why I like my code I have to type in by hand. Not immensely secure, but not connected to anything by any kind of radio or IR signal, just a number that I have to remember.

Of course, the real security here is having a car so old it has a keypad immobiliser. Nobody will get much joy from riding in that...

Catfish: A fanfare for Facebook fakery

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Alert

What?

Someone is still using Myspace?

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WTF?

Good point

It's a good point- snogging someone in a club whilst tanked up on lager is certainly a more reliable foundation for a relationship than communicating in writing for an extensive period before you meet in person.

Seems to me internet dating is as good a way of meeting people as any. Although the internet doesn't actually serve us socially as well as we would like to believe, because actually we do prefer real-world face to face type contact, for that purpose in particular it's pretty useful.

Gawker tech boss admits site security was crap

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WTF?

But...

Surely mitigating potential SQL injections is a basic behind the scenes task on the part of developers- surely it's our job to make sure we're only ever using paramterised queries and never trusting any user data to be sane? Unless they were mandating urls with complete SQL queries in them, how is this a problem for a developer?

Top secret payload fired into orbit aboard private rocket

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Top Secret!

Top Secret may be one of the best films ever made. Five points to Gryffindor for mr Musk's

Flame throwing Apache flees Oracle's Java group

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WTF?

The crusade continues

Oracle continue in their endeavours to kill Java. Given that was a big part of what they gained from Sun I'm a little confused as to why they feel this will benefit them, but it is unambiguously their aim. Anyone know why?

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

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WTF?

There is politics in every name....

What, even Godalming?

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Joke

Inundated kingdoms

Doggerland was actually less of a low-lying, fertile basin, more an enormous but very secluded car park.

PayPal banned WikiLeaks after US gov intervention

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It's only been through the press...

As the diplomatic papers have only been distributed through the press I can't see why Wikileaks would be in any respect liable regardless.

Judge puts Assange behind bars ahead of extradition hearing

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Also...

Did they get the killers of those journalists in Iraq that the US military shot, the ones whose murder we only know about thanks to Wikileaks?

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Alien

It's probably too late to say this...

Regardless of the rights or otherwise of Wikileaks, Assange has always come across as a somewhat creepy guy. He's seemed that way from the first few interviews with him I've read and I think he'll still seem that way long after this court case has been resolved, however that works out.

Gov decides not to have scientific advice on drugs any more

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Grenade

Come on scientists

Well if the government aren't going to listen to science when making laws, surely the scientists can get their act together and switch off gravity in protest.

Herts cops 'ate the evidence' at scene of crime, court told

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This week of all weeks...

Sometimes a policeman has to think of the people who inspired him to take up his job and ask "What would Sergeant Frank Drebin do in this situation?"

WTF is... up with e-book pricing?

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WTF?

What the publishers want and what I wouldn't mind

It seems to me that the publishers really don't want us to own anything aside from the reading apparatus, they would like to see the idea of "owning" a "copy" of a book totally vanish. That's not going to happen but if I had an ebook reader I wouldn't mind being able to loan a book for, say, 20p per week, being able to mark it finished and having it removed from my reader after a while. This would facilitate casual reading, impulse buying and given that there are very many books that I will only ever read once, still work out cheaper than buying physical books.

Or it would if I didn't spend so much time in the second hand bookstore anyway. Not many ebooks there, I notice.

No hiding place - facial biometrics will ID you, RSN

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Hats

I can see a "resistance chic" look coming in a few years down the line, stuff that hides you from biometrics, at first preferred by people who want to look ( or be ) dodgy and later passing into widespread use because it's edgy and everyone's a little uneasy about where all this stuff is leading...

How to make boots on Mars affordable - One way trips

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Happy

Phobos hospital not that great either

The hospital on Phobos isn't so bad, but you don't want to get stuck in the UAC facility there.

MAD Students Union bars 'racist' ZOMBIE PHYSICISTS

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But...

Surely a shambles would indicate good quality Zombing?

Apache threatens Oracle with Java exit

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The objective is clear...

So Oracle are clearly determined to kill Java. Everything they've done with it since they bought Sun makes that very clear.

What I don't understand is why they want to do that. How do they benefit from destroying the language?

HP pockets half of all Scottish development cash

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So that is

1447 jobs for £14.8 million comes in at a little over 10k per job. So that must cover a sizeable chunk of those people's salaries, or most of their office running costs at any rate. I realise that's kind of a simplification, but I bet you could build some awesome startups with those kinds of subsidy.

OOo contributors make a dash for LibreOffice

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Odd question

Well if the Snoreacle OOo engineering team rejects most external contributions and most of the external contributors have just left to start a new fork, surely that means that this is very likely to bring significant changes to the codebase? About as significant as one could get.

eBay Meg bitchslapped by Governor Moonbeam

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The problem with democracy

It looks from here as though the problem California has is so much democracy they end up paralysing themselves. It may be democratic to ask the public about every single budgetary decision, but it seems like the public are very reluctant to make any tough choices or work in the long term. Admittedly, politicians don't have the knack of that last one either. Really brings home the whole "least worst option" aspect of democratic governance.

Nice to see the Billionaires Tea Party have done well though- a great day for the average American billionaire in the street.

Fans roast Microsoft for Silverlight demotion

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And yet...

How far along would HTML5 in IE be if they had dedicated all their development resource to that instead of Silverlight? What a waste of everyone's time and effort to achieve nothing aside from wasting more of other people's time and effort. How irritating.

Oracle goes in hard on Google Java suit

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SCO didn't own Linux

The thing is that unlike SCO with Linux, Oracle genuinely do own Java, so I think they have a lot more chance to destroy it properly.

I have no idea why they would want to destroy it, but it appears they do and having bought the IP when they bought Sun I guess that is their right.

I guess it's time was coming anyway.

Is there a Blue Cheetah in your future?

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An automated coding tool, you say?

Every year or so, someone comes out with a tool to automate the majority of coding tasks and make the lives of all developers quicker and easier, or maybe to phase them out altogether.

I'm sure this technology will be just as effective to that end as all the others have been.

Osborne details painful cuts for UK

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Paris Hilton

That money we used to have...

We are going to get that money we loaned to the banks back, aren't we?

And, as we own them, we're going to move them out of the tax havens they are based in so they can pay fair taxes on their earnings, aren't we?

After all, we do own them.

Duke Nukem Forever demo'd on video

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Terminator

This looks amazing!

A first person shooter in which you can run down corridors, smash crates and travel in elevators?

I can't believe anybody had the originality to think this far outside the box.

Penguin in the picture: top video editors for Linux fans

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Worst. Distro. Ever

Whenever I read a post like this, I can only hear it in the voice of the Comic Bookstore Guy.

Buyer's Guide: 15in Notebooks

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WTF?

Resolution

1366 x 768 is not a "decent" resolution. It is a totally useless resolution for almost everything aside from watching widescreen video and maybe some gaming. With most textual content, it leaves you with a huge amount of empty space and a shedload of scrolling to do if you want to read much. If you can use all the space for text it's going to make for some uncomfortably long lines. Writing an essay it saves more time if you can refer back to something three lines ago without having to scroll the document up and down relentlessly.

I have no idea why it is so hard to get a notebook now that has an old style taller/narrower screen but the consequence is that in order to make the computer any use for reading or writing text you need a 17" screen now which means the computer in question is very far from being a notebook and is more of an encyclopedia.

Is US prudishness ruining the internet?

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WTF?

You don't make tea with salt water, you idiots.

The Tea Party are interesting because they claim to be a "grassroots" conservative group but they're actually financed by a few extreme right wing billionaires with a personal beef against Obama that has little to do with race and a lot to do with profits and environmental deregulation. A search for the New Yorker article on the Koch brothers will find some interesting stuff about this.

The american enigma is summed up for me by the fact that everything I hear about the place politically is totally screwed up and americans collectively appear to have a bull-in-the-china-shop attitude to everything in the world and yet I have consistently been charmed by the friendliness, politeness and just general niceness of the Americans I have met in person. Perhaps more than anywhere else in the world there is this huge dissonance between individuals and the whole society. Maybe it's just that a more diverse society has a lower lowest common denominator, but it's pretty odd.

Paris Hilton tweets armed intruder drama

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Go

Nearly

It was actually from his slightly better known second novel "Carriagespotting."

Assange denies 'sexual assault' allegations

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Weird though...

If this was something to do with spooks ( and it certainly doesn't seem like a legit claim at this point, so someone with an agenda seems to be involved ) why on earth would they do it so obviously and so badly? This is playground stuff.

Either this is a deliberately clumsy distraction or conspiracy theorists everywhere really need to re-evaluate their beliefs about the abilities of the international intelligence community.

Opera: Firefox tab sets? We've had 'em for years

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That slow thing

I've used Opera as my main browser for the last six or seven years and it's reliably been excellent but lately I have found it to be getting a little slower relative to its rivals.

In particular it seems to have developed the irritating habit of not bothering to load half the images in a page- if it can't load one image it seems to give up on all the others as well. That's increasingly making it less viable as a browser for me. I'm really hoping they take a step back and realise that being fast, light and reliable was what made Opera the best browser for so long.

Shuttleworth spears Natty Narwhal for Ubuntu 11.04

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Like Manchester you've got strange ways

When I started reading this I was momentarily baffled because I had managed to confuse Mark Shuttleworth of Ubuntu, with musician, songwriter and all round legend John Shuttleworth. I'm not sure what he would make of a Natty Narwhal I don't know. Probably he's written a song about one already, some to think of it.

Oracle sues Google over Java in Android

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Yes

Actually it is very wrong of you because if both sides lose that means that the lawyers win.

A strange game. The only winning move is not to play

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Antiquated approach to the modern world

I don't think sofware patenting is theoretically bad, but it should have no relationship to mechanical patents. A software patent should be it's own thing, very restricted and of a term that makes sense in the IT world- maybe 18 months, perhaps extendable to 3 years if the idea is exploited by the patentee within the initial period.

ICO warns coalition on benefits snooping plan

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Also infuriating

How many of the companies evading tax or hiding out in tax havens are banks that the taxpayer actually owns?

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Grenade

Small fry...

I notice they are planning to go to great lengths to tackle benefits cheats. I hope the Condems will be as fiercely relentless in their pursuit of tax evaders.

Facebook bug spills name and pic for all 500 million users

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Unhappy

Holy cow!

This is pretty scary for me- I've done everything to keep my identity secret in the email address I use for facebook. Now anyone who wants to will be able to figure out my name, if they only know my email address "firstname@firstnamesurname.com".

Attack reads smudges to retrieve Android password patterns

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FAIL

Greasy droidonauts

I noticed this pretty much as soon as I took to using my 'droid phone- it really is pretty obvious what the pattern is if you just hold the phone at an angle to the light because you tend to leave a trail of grease across the screen.

I guess the ideal solution would be to always carry a spare screen protector, apply it before using the phone and then take it off and destroy it immediately after signing in. I'm surprised everyone isn't doing this already. Admittedly it would get through a lot of screen protectors and be deeply inconvenient, but we all have to make compromises for security.

Want cheap international calls? Pay foocall for the privilege

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the conversation might go

"So what do you have to offer Android users?"

"Fook all"

"Excellent, so your service will work with my Android phone?"

"Nay lad."

"But you said you could offer us foo call."

"Aye."

"So your service will work with my Android phone?"

and so on...