Posts by Pen-y-gors 3782 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Oct 2010
Slightlly off topic perhaps, but there is much talk of how we can be outside the full single market, and negotiate a trade agreement like loads of other countrees. Out of curiosity I recently read some of these treaties, with Albania, Azerbaijan, Chile and the recent Canada one. Boy are they fun! The Canadian one is 1600 pages. (Yes, I know I should get a life, but I believe it's helpful to actually know the facts rather than listen to Farage/Johnson/Davies/Gove etc.)
And all the treaties spend a lot of pages talking about common standards and regulations etc. i.e. if we are outside the EU and want to trade with them, it's on their terms and we'd have to ensure that all those irritating EU regulations will still have to apply, but of course we don't get to influence them any more, other than 'take the lot or forget it'.
The Great Repeal Bill could be a couple of paragraphs.
Glad to see the judges supporting the sovereignty of Parliament. After all, before now we've chopped off a King's head to emphasise the point. I trust that we won't need to chop off any other heads before this whole Brexit farce is resolved (although God knows there are plenty of worthy candidates...)
@localzak
It could also have been avoided if the referendum bill had recognised that major constitutional changes require a clear and definite mandate for change, not a majority of 1. It should either require a two-thirds majority (common throughtout the world to change constitutions) and/or a clear majority (55%) of the electorate (not just voters) supporting a change to the status quo.
We've had similar conditions on past referenda in the UK.
are sensible (fat chance) then they will vote to allow Article 50 to be triggered, so that negotiations can start, BUT they will also require parliamentary approval for the negotiating position AND a second referendum on whether to accept the negotiated package or to cancel the Article 50 process.
To be honest, I don't see why St theresa doesn't just go down that route anyway. It means she responds to the advice of the peepul, but doesn't treat it as a once-and-for-all, no going back suicide note.
Exactly. Parliament can change its mind, why can't 'the peepul' have the same opportunity? Parliament often votes one way and then later votes another way. Once Parliament voted to do terrible things to gentlemen who liked to meet other gentlemen in public toilets. Later they voted to allow the same gentlemen to get married. Opinions change.
and next off, the Mirai code gets updated with the nematode code, so that it locks the administrator out, so only a factory reset will work - taking us back to the old admin/admin password.
What a jolly clever idea. What could possibly go wrong etc...Won't someone think of the children?
Friends on holiday camping in France during a thunderstorm subsequently had the wonderful opportunity to explain to the farmer 'my water-carrier has been struck by lightning'.
And thinking of wondderful phrase-book phrases, I have a German phrase book from the 1960s that has the useful phrase, under 'Travelling by Air', "Will you please open the window".
The problems of 'translation' always reminds me of a story about a councillor in a very English-speaking area of North-East Wales, during a debate about using more Welsh in Council publications. Apparantly he stood up and sounded off about how Welsh was a dead and pointless language because, 'after all, how can you have any respect for a language that doesn't even have a word for "spaghetti"'.
The impression I get is that it's not a problem of dodgy sites. All sorts of 'respectable' sites seem to get hit, often either through malware 3rd party ads (Marks and Sparks?), or hacking of Wordpress (and other) sites (Jamie Oliver?).
At least one report has suggested that 'dodgy' (read 'smutty') sites are often actually safer - they have a serious vested interest in keeping you happy so you'll come back and give them more money.
@Michael Thibault
Anyway, what I'm wondering is: how bad, or absurd, does IoT get?
I think we can be confident that we have a long way to go yet on the bad and absurd scale.
But on the bright side, they won't last for ever (see recent report on 50% drop in sales of iWatches), then we can crawl out of our caves, blink in the sunlight, and take our rightful places as rulers of a newly-analogue world.
@Neil Barnes
thermostats
With winter coming, I tried to switch the heating on. No joy. Thermostat was correctly set - but the batteries had gone flat! (admittedly after about six years, show me a Li-Ion that can do that!) - I think I need something even lower-tech - light up the wood-burner?
@Triggerfish
I'm thinking if your technical you will be going crude in the future, y'know locks with real keys, dumb fridges, kettles whose only switch is on and off etc.
You mean like I do now? I'm already suspicious with remote locking on the car, and don't get me started on pay-by-bonk...
The edge connectors idea, or even at the ISP or an 'exchange' point in between...
1) Most IoThingies really only need access to a very limited number of IP addresses - they don't need to have a web browser. They need to 'phone home', check for software updates, maybe contact Tesco if they're a fridge, hit Netflix and Amazon if they're a TV, and that should be about it - perhaps a dozen or two addresses (obviously there will be exceptions.)
2) Given the above, could an ISP identify which IPs are being used by IoThingies, and do some sort of filtering - they are allowed to access a fixed set of IP addresses and that's it (bit like parental filters, but with a whitelist rather than a blacklist.)
Just a thought, please feel free to tear it to shreds.
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
Alternatively, when things aren't going well, just change the name.
FTTP is now 'full fibre'
Windscale is now Sellafield
Radiation is now 'Magic dust'
{Thanks to old Friends of the Earth T-shirt)
I musn't be too negative though - hopefully I'll join the 2% in a couple of months.
"Our universities are funded by fee-paying foreign students, it would be insane to stop that flow
Which is exactly what T May proposes to do. What does that say about her mental state and fitness to govern anything bigger than the sandpit at the local asylum?
Does anyone have two qualified doctors a straight-jacket to hand?
"Keep having referendums until one gets the right result?"
Well, duh, obviously! That's the proper democratic way. Ideally we should have a keep-the-nasty-foreigners-out referendum every six months, and negotiations stop and start depending on the latest result. That way the politicians can tell their lies, everyone can say that things were better when we had blue passports, but we'll never get round to actually changing anything, which is what this whole insane exercise is all about.
Google 2FA offers a selection of methods - I tend to use the app that generates the 6-digit code, but they will send SMS, possibly a voice call(?) and even let you generaate a set of one-time codes to keep somewhere safe. Of course if you're away from home you may not have access to the pre-allocated codes which are sitting in your desk drawer!
But of course some of the other factors are job satisfaction and how you feel about your employers and their business.
Would you go and do an interesting job helping to make bombs for export to Saudi Arabia even if they paid you five times your present salary? I wouldn't.
In general it's good to have people working for the public sector who actually believe in what they are doing (yes, even collecting tax can actually be a good thing), and who see their job as a form of public service. So long as they are competent those are the people we want, the ones happy to do a good and worthwhile job for a sufficient salary, rather than just chase the cash so they can buy ever more expensive trinkets.
Ah, happy memories!
Scene: St Andrews University Observatory
Time: sometime in the late seventies
Several students using an early form of electronics (a photometer) attached to a telescope to measure the light from a star. Much head scratching when we noticed irregular drops in the readings of variable duration. Talk to lecturer. No idea. Eventually worked it out - someone had been standing on the cable connecting the detector to the box of tricks. This confirmed our hypothesis that electricity is really just like water - block the pipe and it stops flowing. In fact, after even more head scratching we worked out that the cable was co-ax, and the resistance of co-ax varies according to shape. Circular it's at a minimum, squash it with a pair of size 9s and it become oval and the resistance increases. If we'd thought further I'm sure we could have developed a really useful consumer gadget that used that property, and we'd all have got very rich.
Sod reducing power consumption, if we're going to get the one major feature still missing from smartphones i.e. a megawatt laser (or 'phaser') then we need some seriously good battery technology. Okay, a built-in tazer would be a start, and would use a bit less power, but we should be aiming for phone batteries rated in thousands of mega Amp/hours not milli A/h.
Come on boffins, let's see some real innovation.
Get this working properly and no more need to faff around trying to find vulnerable Thingies. Just hack the update server and you can zap the firmware of meeeeelions of devices in one go.
Progress is a wonderful thing...
(And don't say it won't be pos-sible to hack the update server. If we've all learned one thing in recent years, it's that NOTHING can't be eventually hacked if you try hard enough)
I am getting seriously pissed off will all this Brexit shit.
Why does everyone keep saying that the will of the people is final?
If you meet a drunken friend staggering out of the pub, who's in tears because he's heard his partner has been seeing some Polish guy, and says 'I wish I was dead', do you
a) try and console him, see if there's any truth in the story (you know there isn't, the Polish guy is a caterer and she's planning a surprise engagement party), and help him home, give him a lot of water to drink and a bucket, and put him to bed.
or b) say, well, I can't go against his clearly expressed wishes, and give him a length of rope and point out a convenient tree or cliff top, and/or buy him a one-way ticket to Switzerland.
Theresa May would clearly choose (b)
The British people were lied to throughout the campaign, by both sides, but particularly by Gove, Johnson and friends. They were not able to make an informed decision. As the weeks go by we can see exactly how bad a disaster any form of Brexit will be for the UK. Time for our politicians (scum that they are on the whole) to get some backbone and say the whole thing is a total balls up and go back to square one. Look to see what the problems REALLY are (and there are problems, listen to the 'experts'), and then see how to address them individually or together without sending the UK economy back to the middle ages.
@Rich 11
And, lets not forget, the UK sells a lot in the EU, therefore the collapse of the UE will be great for the value of the pound
And of course we IMPORT a lot of the raw materials to make the things we export (fuel?) so our prices will go back up again, and then the workers will be demanding hefty pay rises so they can still afford to buy fags (imported), 60" TVs (imported), designer trainers (imported) and to go on foreign holidays twice a year. And lo, we're uncompetitive again...Just like the Brexiters predicted (hang on, maybe I got that the wrong way round)
I appreciate this hack (if genuine) relies on short-range wireless. But just think when we get the next generation of IoT pacemakers - DDoS could come to mean Deadly Denial of Service.
"Hey Charlie, why are you twitching like that?"
"Sorry, just trying to knock Amazon off-line again"
What is needed is redundancy, no single point of failure (at least on a large scale - someone taking down a single phone poll or cell mast is different) But the Uxbridge 'exchange' should have multiple connections, going in different directions, possibly even a nicrowave backup connection. Of course this costs serious money, and the customers have to decide how much they're willing to pay to prevent a 1 in 10000 chance of losing connection for a week.
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