
*sea level
Did you mean sea level?
1639 publicly visible posts • joined 27 May 2007
"And I'm not sure the position is much better on the Russian side - it's a long way to Yakutsk (~2,000 miles)."
Yakutsk is already on the Amur-Yakutsk Mainline, connecting the Trans-Siberian Railway (from Moscow) with Magadan, on the Okhotsk Sea.
As the route at Tynda is not so far from the Chinese border, I guess the Chinese might be interested in the rail link for sending freight, eastwards and westwards.
I've just bought a Viewsonic Viewpad 10s for just over 200 Euros. It is directly equivalent with tablets sold under several different brands and can be flashed with ROMs from popular forums. I chose the version without 3G and GPS, as I don't need these features but it comes with HDMI out, a 10" capacitive screen and a 16GB microSD card included. They didn't include the USB male-male cable that is needed for flashing though.
"What they cannot do is intercept data between the BB and the server."
...and the servers for India might not actually be in India - they could be in the UK, for example. That would mean that the UK authorities could intercept Indian BB traffic but the Indian authorities could not. This could also be true for several countries in continental Europe and the Middle East.
When a new road is proposed somewhere quiet, it is not uncommon for locals to object to the anticipated noise and pollution - which seems fair enough if it will negatively impact their lives and the value of their properties. If you choose go to live somewhere where there is already some noise, pollution or similar annoyance, that's a different matter.
The assumption of many seems to be that, as wind turbines are "green", there cannot be any problems with them.
"Let's put to one side the issue of whether unlimited should mean unlimited."
No, let's not put that aside, as it is at the heart of the issue. If any ISP wants to market something as "unlimited", then it should be as described, unlimited. There may be many perfectly good reasons why ISPs need to set limits but they should be honest about it.
A similar issue arose over "lifetime warranty" some years ago, where some manufacturers, having used the promise of a lifetime warranty in their marketing, retrospectively decided that a "lifetime warranty" was only valid for few years - until a court told them otherwise.
It is perfectly reasonable to have various constraints and limitations when selling goods and services but it is fraudulent to lie about or conceal those constraints and limitations in order to sucker people into a purchase.
"I suppose that it would involve another piece of card, and a bit of glue."
Punch cards tended to jam if you stuck anything on them. However, splicing paper tape was quite common. I can remember using a device which we called a "micro VAX" - this thing held two ends of paper tape in place while you spliced them together. It came with a little tool with which to manually punch through holes in fresh tape covering a spliced joint.
Well, yes - it has changed. Parcel business is shared with several competitors and the letters business has been in decline for many years, with the increasing use of email and other forms of communication. The Post Office is as much a bank as it is a post office.
Lucas did not lose 20 000 000 USD because someone else sold some helmets and made up to 30 000 GBP, so the damages claimed and awarded in the US were fictional. In other parts of the world, claimants have to prove the levels of damages which they claim, not simply pluck large numbers from thin air. That is the issue with US justice in this case.
Lucas's substantial wealth is relevant in that, by pursuing an individual over such a small sum, he looks like a vindictive bully.
"...using the molds and materials Lucas owns the exclusive intellectual property rights to"
Ainsworth owns the intellectual property rights as it was he that designed and built the original helmets, using his own materials - apparently, this is more important than being rich, having expensive lawyers and well-known friends.
As I understand it, the use of traffic shaping devices that may use deep packet inspection to identify traffic classes is perceived quite differently from straightforward packet capture as the former does not imply storage of data for later analysis (by people).
Deep Packet Inspection. There are traffic shaping devices which look into packet payload data to identify the type of traffic e.g. Bittorrent using a port associated with http traffic (in order to get through a firewall restriction) can be identified by looking for certain details in the payload data. This can then be used to place all P2P traffic in a separate class from 'real' browser traffic.
Have I got this right?
When there was a big, Ofcom wouldn't investigate it.
Now the bid has been dropped, Ofcom will investigate something that is not going to happen (at the same time that News International detectives AKA the police are covering the same ground when checking how many bribes they took).
If car equipped with such a device hits a pedestrian, who is going to be held responsible? The driver or Toyota or the pedestrian? What if the car swerves to avoid a pedestrian but hits a motorcyclist?
Quite apart from the legal aspects, I don't think it is a good idea to give people more opportunities to evade responsibility for their own decisions/actions.
"...to help prevent an instance where an international passenger swaps tickets with a domestic passenger in the department lounge."
There should be separate departure lounges for national and international flights or you will also have the problem of people being handed other forms of ID (e.g. a residency permit for an EU country) when they are only in the departure lounge with a Transit Visa.
Anecdotally, I was on a flight from Kiev to Frankfurt which was stopped by immigration officials in a quiet part of Frankfurt Airport, instead of a the planned gate. The immigration officials then started checking passports and visas on the aircraft and promptly found a whole load of people without the correct documentation. I guess they had received a tip off.
"...Gazprom, has used its gas exports as a political weapon: most recently turning off the tap to the Ukraine..."
Ukraine had not paid for some gas they had already been supplied (over 1bn US$, AFAIR) and failed to agree a new contract with Gazprom. As they had warned, Gazprom stopped supplying gas to Ukraine when the contract ran out. Ukraine then stole gas being piped through Ukraine intended for other countries.
When finished, the Nord Stream pipeline should avoid future supply problems in intermediary countries (much to the annoyance of Poland and Estonia, who had both hoped to interject themselves into gas supplies to Western Europe). Similar pipeline developments in Southern Europe should provide further diversity in gas supplies.
"In other words, Nokia's bargain basement models, sold to emerging markets and typically making use of very old technology, make it more money than its premium "flagship" models which boast its "state of the art" features."
Surely everyone knew that Nokia is the global market leader in cellular telephones (almost a third of the global market) and that smartphone manufacturers each have only about a tenth of Nokia's market share? Smartphones may be very sexy but most users just want to be able to make calls and send texts - especially in developing countries (e.g. China, Philippines) where most people only have a mobile phone and no landline. That's why this Elop guy, obsessing about Microsoft OS, is taking Nokia to an early grave.
It is a scary story. I did not hear any mention of him being given access to legal advice. If he had such advice, he might have been told that he no longer had an absolute right to silence and that RIPA trumped his EU rights.
Perhaps the US administration may use this case in their ongoing efforts to extradite Gary McKinnon.
"Russians are very proud that [Gagarin] was Russian, but if you look at it more philosophically – he was a delegate from the whole world to space."
I'm not sure that was how he was/is perceived in the USA. It was not that long ago that US officials were talking about cosmonauts only eating their own food, only using their own toilet and not being allowed to use US exercise equipment in the ISS.
"The basic fact is that gender has no link to driving skill whatsoever and is merely a handy money making stat for insurance companies."
The statistics for accident claims show that, on average, women have more accidents than men but their accidents tend to be low speed, few or no injuries and low cost. Men on the other hand, whilst having fewer accidents than women are the main culprits when it comes to multiple vehicle, high speed and extortionately expensive accidents. It doesn't really matter whether it is down to driving skill, spatial awareness, over confidence or different journey types - insurance companies only care about the cost of claims.
"It is easy to imagine situations where it is impossible to grant freedoms enshrined by law in one country and simultaneously protect rights guaranteed by law in another country,...."
Conventionally, multinationals obey the local laws in each country in which they operate, for their activities within that country's jurisdiction. Walmart sells guns in their stores in the USA but not in Europe. Supermarkets in the UK sell things like ibuprofen and cold remedies but their counterparts in Germany cannot.
The difference in this case is that US legislation appears to overstretch itself to include the activities of Microsoft (and others) well outside of US jurisdiction. By the same thinking, a court in Saudi Arabia might prosecute an multinational online book retailer for selling bibles in the USA and Europe.
Perhaps the EU agreed to this arrangement with the USA to favour cloud providers entirely based in Europe...
"I thought the story was that the iPad came first but then they shrunk it to a phone as there wasn't a market for tablets."
Everyone seems to have forgotten that MS dominated this field only a few years back with PDAs (such as those from HP, manufactured by HTC, Mio, etc) and the XDA/MDA phones. Aside from web browsers and media players there were apps for navigation, VoIP, games and even VPN clients.
These now live on as PNAs - some with WinCE but many with a Linux OS.
Then there were older products like the SIMpad from Siemens. Running WinCE, the SIMpad would allow users to browse the Internet, view MS Office documents, etc. using a large touch-sensitive screen. These never caught on until Apple re-invented the idea with the iPad.
I'm just impressed that Apple has convinced so many people that the iPhone and iPad are so novel and now own the field, just as they did with MP3 players and the iPod.
For me, one of the most useful features offered by Tesco's online grocery store is remembering the things I buy regularly (I guess other stores offer something similar). It saves a lot of time to be able to pick from a selection of my favourite items/brands and then look for few special items afterwards.
Personally, I prefer shopping from home, with a sensible sized screen and where I can check in the fridge and cupboards to see if we are running out of anything. All the same, it is fairly clever giving people the feel of normal shopping and offering it to them while they are waiting about for a train with nothing better to do.
"...the device would still need to be able to run privileged code"
All the clever stuff is run on the device itself - on the target system, it only needs to use standard applications to which the user would normally have access - but it would need to "know" the OS and what applications are available.
The objective here is not to modify the system in any way, it is to steal information from the user and his/her organisation. All that is needed is to use a standard application to upload interesting files to some site on the Internet - maybe using a minimised browser window to upload files to a hacker's account on Google Docs (using ssl), for example.
"But few of the 1,000 smartphone users surveyed in the Retrevo "Pulse" study seem to care."
Of the smartphone owners I know, about half are colleagues in IT. The majority of the other half have a smartphone only because they were offered one as part of a contract upgrade and use their phones to make calls, send/receive texts and maybe, take photos. These folk neither know nor care about NFC payment.
This is already going on in British embassies and consulates around the world. Passport renewals and visa applications are handled by one of two companies: Worldbridge or VFS Global. Employees of these foreign companies will collect and process the application forms and photos of British citizens renewing their passports. The situation is similar for UK visa applicants, except that their fingerprints are also taken.
When my wife applied for a visa at the British consulate in Düsseldorf last year, we did not come into contact with any British staff, only local Worldbridge employees. Even the person conducting my wife's visa interview was German and complained that my wife spoke English and not German - in the British Consulate! I assume my wife's details (and my details that were on her UK visa application) are now stored in some database in the USA.
If everyone had defective memory, then I guess they would all have forgotten about the various problems a few years ago with data lost by people using online disk/backup companies which went bankrupt. Any online storage, whether cloudy or not, relies on the company operating the service to remain in business and to maintain the service. If they get bored with it and move onto the next big thing, those who chose to keep control of their own data may have the last laugh.