Posts by PassiveSmoking

Take off, nuke 'em from orbit: Kill patent trolls NOW, says FTC bigwig

The most obvious thing they could do right now is make it an offence to threaten the customers of an alleged patent infringer with lawsuits. That kind of behaviour is simply unacceptable. You should not need to factor in the risk of potentially getting sued for patent infringement into your decision whether or not to buy a god damned photocopier.

Blame Silicon Valley for the NSA's data slurp... and what to do about it

Re: The law is not the answer

How can somebody who writes such cynical claptrap be so naive? Even if you technically have legal recourse against the DM for publishing your photos and/or making scurrilous accusations against you, by the time the legal system has ground into action the damage has already been done.

Suppose the DM publishes your photograph in an article about suspected paedophiles, naturally you're outraged and take them to court. As they have no proof to back up their claims and because they violated your privacy unfairly you prevail in court and possibly win a juicy payout that more or less covers your court costs.

However, the damage done to your reputation is permanent. The news article will still exist somewhere, and it will still insinuate in writing that you're a paedophile with your photo attached. While the paper will probably also be forced to publish a retraction and an apology, they never exactly go out of their way to call much attention to them. You'll get some tiny correction printed in tiny print in the hopes nobody notices it, and nobody probably will.

Meanwhile, the thought implanted in the public mind will linger in some corners and you'll probably never escape it. There's no legal way (or indeed physical way that I'm aware of) to erase the population's memory.

Drug dealer demands jail to escape 'unbearable' missus after NYE row

Re: A Clash of Personalities

Team Rocket blast off at the speed of light.

Surrender now or prepare to fight.

British Second World War codebreaker Alan Turing receives Royal pardon

Pardon

I think the conviction should stand.

Hear me out here! It's not because I think gay people should be punished for being gay. I have two reasons for thinking it should stand.

1) As others have pointed out, once you start pardoning people who were punished by an unjust lawwhere do you stop? Thousands of people were persicuted under the same laws, do they all get pardons now? Or are you only entitled to one if your supporters kick up a fuss? It's got to be everyone or no-one, anything else is just empty gestures.

2) It smacks of revisionist history. Turing was a great man who we owe our relative freedom to, and for those of us who work in IT our livlihoods. He wa also treated unbelieveably shoddily and punished unfairly by an unjust law. Both those facts should be remembered, but pardoning him now feels awfully like an attempt to sweep the abuse he suffered at the hands of the law under the carpet. Instead of saying "It's okay, we overturned his conviction so we can pretend it didn't happen" we should be saying "Here's an example of how even the most remarkable people to whom we owe so much can be destroyed by blinkered bigoted arbitary hatred".

I can understand why people would campaign for this, but I can't help but feel they're misguided.

Feminist Software Foundation gets grumpy with GitHub … or does it?

Or COBOL, the language Grace Hopper invented, for that matter?

BTW, compilers were also invented by Grace Hopper, or at least she was responsible for some of the earliest practical ones.

Spinning rust and tape are DEAD. The future's flash, cache and cloud

Bull

When I started my higher education some 20 years ago they were predicting the death of tape.

Tape is cheap, plentiful and for offline backups there's nothing that can really beat it.

I fully expect they'll be predicting the death of tape on the day I pick up my gold watch.

TransLattice gobbles StormDB upstart for Postgres threesome

Database as a service?

Aren't databases already services anyway?

Or do you have to put -aaS on the end of everything these days to make it trendy and marketable

KissMyaaS

Bill Gates: Yes, Ctrl-Alt-Del salute was a MISTAKE

Didn't see the funny side

Of course he didn't, it's an immutable fact that the man has no sense of humour. If you don't believe me, just watch those stupid Seinfeld ads.

Or any clip where he's the butt of somebody's joke.

'Beat the lie detectors' trainer sentenced to 8 months in jail

success rate?

It's not a 1% success rate, it's a 1% hit rate. How many of the 1% were actually truthful and how many of the 99% who passed were liars?

This is one of the reasons why polygraphs are so insidious, they dress up random noise in the garb of seemingly respectible statistics

'Silent' staff stood by as £100m BBC IT project tanked – DG

This is far from a problem exclusive to the BBC. It's a sad fact that management is happier hearing optimistic lies than unpleasant truths, and will more consistently reward their underlings for the former, whereas the latter can in extreme cases find themselves looking for a new job. It's known as the SNAFU principle.

Nobody wants to be a whistle blower for exactly that reason. The saddest case was the management clusterfuck at NASA/Nordon Thiokol that led to the Challenger disaster.

http://dictionary.die.net/snafu%20principle

Japan's unwanted IT workers dumped in 'forcing-out rooms'

"flexibly restructure their human resources"

Let me fix that for you. "Get rid of people who haven't done anything wrong"

Larry Ellison: Google is ABSOLUTELY EVIL, but NSA is ESSENTIAL

You didn't even make Java Larry, you picked it off the bones of Sun

Google Glassholes to be BANNED from UK roads

Re: Phones

In Shangri-La, maybe. Meanwhile in the real world he'll probably get 3 points on his license and a fine.

Seriously.

A man was recently convicted of killing a cyclist due to his negligent driving. He got community service. What's more it wasn't even the first cyclist he'd killed with his shitty driving. And they'll probably hand his license back sooner or later to see if third time's a charm. I'm betting it wont be.

http://road.cc/content/news/82424-community-service-careless-driver-convicted-killing-second-cyclist-25-years

E-shopkeepers stabbed with SQL needles 'twice' as much as other sites

Bobby Tables

This kind of exploit is sickeningly easy to avoid, yet crops with depressing regularity.

PHP, for example, has several mechanisms to avoid SQL injection (use of the DBMS parameterized/prepared statement mechanisms, input validation and filtering), yet the amount of times I see people asking questions on Stack Overflow where the've obviously followed a tutorial from the PHP 4 days and written stuff like the following just makes me want to quit web development and take up mushroom farming instead.

mysql_query ('INSERT INTO TABLE (column) VALUES (' . $_GET ['field'] . ')');

Doesn't anyone read XKCD?

http://xkcd.com/327/

WAR ON PORN: UK flicks switch on 'I am a pervert' web filters

Simulated rape

We can't watch that any more?

Quick! We need to ban everything that has such filth in it!

So I guess we need to burl every copy of Game Of Thrones we can get our hands on. And Clockwork Orange, Last Tango In Paris, Blade Runner...

PM writes ISPs' web filter ads for them - and it must say 'default on'

Fairly obvious what the plan is.

1) Force the ISPs to say their filters are "always on"

2) Wait for complaints from little Timmy's mum when she catches him looking at MILFS Gone Wild

3) Sic the ASA on them

4) Internet censorship by the back door

5) ???

6) PROFIT!

UK sitting on top of at least 50 years of shale gas – report

If you think this is going to knock so much as a penny of your gas bill then you're a bigger idiot than I gave you credit for.

In fact, expect your bills to go up as the gas companies "need to make temporary readjustments to your contribution so we can fund the next generation of sustainable, reliable energy and give you the best possible service in the long run" and fleece us to pay for the infrastructure investment.

None of the money that potentially comes in from this is going to filter down to consumers, and that's assuming that the most optimistic projections are true about there being 50 years of gas that's economically viable to extract down there. According to the earlier comment from our Polish friend that's far from a given.

Re: HS2

What benefit? HS2 goes nowhere near Manchester.

Ex-inmate at Chinese prison: We made airline headsets

If you feel sorry for a child rapist and murderer then all I can say is you have a very skewed sense of empathy.

Sounds like the perfect place to send Brady and Philpot.

Spaniards deploy self-propelled ROBOT BALLS

I am beneath... enemy scrotum.

Someone had to say it.

Scientists investigate 'dark lightning' threat to aircraft passengers

The real question is, will it give you super powers? It'd be awesome to have a cool cape and be able to shoot gamma rays from my hands.

Whitehall grants copyright pirates safe haven until 2015

Maybe the government just have more important crap to deal with and don't want to enact a law that could only be a vote loser.

Or maybe they've seen that France are pretty much in the process of abandoning similar legislation on the grounds that it never worked anyway.

Wonder substance pulses QUADRILLION lasers per second

Re: Is there anything Graphene can't do?

I think they're working on graphene-based processors, so the Crysis one might happen.

Is the next-gen console war already One?

Harvey Eagles? What a freaking awesome name!

Way more exciting than XBox One at any rate.

Woolwich beheading sparks call to REVIVE UK Snoopers' Charter

According to the (admittedly unreliable tabloid) press, the perpitrator of the atrocity in London was already known to the intelligence agencies. They just didn't take the threat he represented seriously enough.

Aside from being morally bankrupt and the legitimate concerns over powers introduced to fight terrorism being used to hound people who post explicit fanfiction or make racist jokes on Twitter, data mining pretty much everybody's communications would just generate a vast amount of "white noise" which could only make potential threats even harder to detect.

And at the end of the day, there's no amount of snooping that could really protect you from random violent acts perpitrated by a psycho with a meat cleaver under his jacket. But such events are so rare anyway that there's little sense worrying about it.

COLD FUSION is BACK with 'anomalous heat' claim

Were it that easy

I'm sorry, but if fusion was that easy, human beings probably would have discovered it before the nuclear physics had been unearthed. The Victorian age would have been powered by nickel instead of coal.

London Olympics site to become digital mega-hub

Technodrome

I hope its security systems are built with keeping ninja turtles out in mind. Shredder and Krang have some very specific security requirements after all.

On the hunt for a new ampere

Yardstick?

Yards have been deprecated. Don't you mean metre stick?

Surprise! Republican bill adds politics to science funding

War on science

I don't know about anyone else, but I for one am getting sick and tired on the war on science being waged by the antiintellectual and religious zealots.

In the UK an advisory panel gave the government fact-based advice on drug policy. Instead of listening, they basically sacked the adviaory panel.

There's ever more pressure on schools to give "equal time to alternative theories on human origin" in science classes (ie force science teachers to fill children's heads with religious propaganda).

In a world where people have walked on another planet and where you can talk to someone in Australia as if they were in the next room this is just utterly increadible to me (in the original meaning of the word, there is no credibility to it).

Scientists have always relied on the idea that the facts are indesputible and will eventually win out against any political or religiously motivited stupidity. I don't think that's really the case. Science needs to start pushing back against this tide of dogma and stupidity.

Malware and domain-squatters target Boston Marathon bombing

Re: God is kind of a dick

I'm all for free speech.

I'm also all for calling out people for being hate-filled little shits.

One doesn't preclude the other. Quite the opposite in fact. If you have the right to claim God hates $demographic because of $event then I hate the right to say you're a nobend for saying that.

God is kind of a dick

If everything Westboro say about him is true then he needs to grow the fuck up.

Rocket boffinry in pictures: Gulp the Devil's venom and light a match

No mention of SpaceShipOne?

Didn't SpaceShipOne use some fuel based on burning rubber with Nitrus Oxide? I'd have thought that would get a mention, as it was a pretty novel power plant.

China's Beidou satnav will open to mobe-makers

Four systems

Everyone keeps forgetting GLONASS, which is active and already supported in a few popular handsets (I know iPhone 5s support it, and I'd imagine Samsung would include support in their top end Galaxy phones).

Virgin Media keeps mum as punters fume at crippled web access

Perhaps the Virgin tech goons should post a question on Stack Overflow about fixing this... wait.

Barrall, beam me up: 'Private cloud' biz builds Transporter device

Do a Barrall roll!

Someone had to say it

Huge rock-hard marble erection shocks Japanese kiddies

Re: Never mind Hentai

Never mind the bukkake?

I don't think that's going to work as an album title.

Don't be anal,

Don't be silly,

Show us David's

Marble willy.

Tennessee bloke quits job over satanic wage slip

If an integer can make you crap your pants and quit your job then I question your mental stability.

Microsoft: Old Internet Explorer is terrible and 'we want to help'

Customers?

Is "Customer" the right word to describe a user of IE6? I'd say "victim" is a better fit.

Apple to stop European shipments of Mac Pro on March 1?

Re: Mac Pro case

Yes, you are being glib.

Java open-source frameworks 'pose risk' to biz - report

headline

Java 'pose risk' to biz - report

There, fixed it for you.

We trust computers to fly jets... why not trust them with our petabytes?

Re: We trust computers to fly jets

The computer's easier to drag out of the airport bar and might not have overdosed on prescription amphetamines.

Wikipedia doesn't need your money - so why does it keep pestering you?

Re: Out of that entire article

[[Original Research]]

N. Joseph Woodland, inventor of the barcode, dies at 91

Oh yes, the good old days when patents used to be about protecting inventions instead of stating the bloody obvious in such a vague way as to make it possible to sue as many people as possible.

Sad to see we've lost a proper inventor.

Trolls and their ilk now file majority of patent suits

Stick a fork in the patent system

It's done.

Troll sues Apple for daring to plug headphones into iPhone

I think I just had an aneurysm out of sheer stupidity. There's blood and brain tissue all over my keyboard now.

Can the rest of the world just start ignoring US patents? They're obviously of no worth other than as toilet paper anyway.

Real sci-fi space ships coming at last? NASA tests nuclear engine

So what makes this better than an RTG? Its not like there's a lack of experience with making those things work for a long time, after all the Voyagers are powered by them and I believe Curiosity is packing an RTG too.

Apple bans 'memory' games from iOS App Store

I'm going to trademark the word "the".

Watchdog halts Toyota Grand Theft Auto-esque advert

Given that some guy has just been sentenced to a paltry 8 years for driving without a licence or insurance, whilst under the influence of alcohol, the wrong way up a motorway, and causing a crash in which some innocent bystander was killed, I was under the impression that dangerous driving wasn't considered to be such a big deal in this country anyway.

Is it just things that are cool that can't be tolerated?