Posts by Phil O'Sophical 7402 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Oct 2011
t's high time DCMS realised that fast broadband is as necessary a basic utility as the postal service, electricity, water, etc.
Bollocks. Why should everyone pay higher taxes just so you can surf HD porn? Anyone who wants high speed can get it, at a price. If the price is too high then you clearly don't need it (which is what defines a neccessity).
If he hadn't been so careless as to start up Tor, immediately send the threats and then shut Tor down again, they wouldn't have had grounds to suspect him.
Which demonstrates the major weakness in any secure network - the users. Look at the stories about the Bletchley Park work, almost every break they got came from someone doing something careless because they didn't understand how cryptographic systems work. The same will be true of any supposedly-secure internet scheme, the majority of the people who use it will just assume it's secure because it says so, and will have no clue that the way in which they use it will break that security. Any such general-purpose setup is efectively broken before it gets going for anything but the most trivial level of protection.
It was a hung parliament, in case you missed that.
What has that do do with anything? There are still 650 elected MPs in Westminster. Just because there wasn't a majority belonging to one party doesn't change the legitimacy of the elected parliament, nor your opportunity to elect someone else next time.
a man was convicted for owning a book of photographs
And you're the one complaining about government propaganda?!
I presume you're referring to "The age of innocence"? Of the two well-known recent convictions where it featured, one was overturned and the judge criticized the CPS for bringing it, and the other was of a man who had almost 20,000 child photos in addition to the book.
As Marvin said, this is just more theatre, like airport security. There's an election coming up, and politicians (that *we* elected, in case you missed that) are Doing Something to get the Mumsnet vote. They really don't care if it works or not, as long as something is seen to be done, and they get votes.
Society's public attitudes to porn go in cycles, look at the Lady Chatterly's Lover trial, or the banning of Wilde's Salome. Banned because a vocal minority got offended, unbanned after a larger group complained, now generating a "Meh!" attitude for most people. To suggest that mandating some pointless and easily bypassed user-selectable filtering is going to lead us all to wake up in N. Korea next year is even more detestable propaganda than the "think of the children" paranoia that infests mumsnet & co.
the prize will go to the company that comes up with the most efficient solution to the problem.
In France most mail-order/internet companies offer cheaper shipping charges if you have your parcel delivered to a local collection point, usually a newsagents or corner shop in a nearby village or town. It's easier and cheaper for the shipper to do one multi-parcel delivery to the shop, and for most people who are passing through the town it's no great hardship to call in to collect a parcel when they get the SMS to tell them it's waiting.
the cost of broadcasting a 128kbit/s MP2 stream is 16 times higher than broadcasting the same material via FM
I'd love to see the explanation for that. There doesn't seem to be a logical technical reason, since multiple stations share one transmitter and 128kbit/s MP2 CODECs aren't exactly expensive these days. Just profiteering by Arqiva? Isn't that what Ofcom are supposed to stop (yes,I know, there are many things Ofcom is supposed to do)?
They're not in a position of unfettered power. The whole system is constructed as a set of checks and balances, and interestingly enough the only abuses of that system seem to come from the elected ones, like Bliar, helped by his elected buddy Bush. Maybe you need to brush up on how the British constitution is designed to work?
I really wanted to see the Schuko electrical plug and socket system allowed as an alternative in the UK
To a certain degree it is, there is no legal requirement to use BS 1363 outlets when wiring a building providing the wiring meets EU safety standards.
Of course, there is a legal requirement that all appliances sold in the UK must be fitted with BS1363 plugs, so wiring your house with Schuko sockets and appropriate radial circuits wouldn't be a good idea. Some businesses do have such wiring, in addition to UK-standard ring mains, to accommodate european equipment.
About as much chance as Canute had, I'd say.
But Canute wasn't trying to hold back the sea, he was demonstrating to his sycophantic followers that even a King had to bow down before the force of God.
I'm not sure Cameron is expecting the same results, but he will discover that even Westminster can't defy the all-powerful god of pr0n.
Read the comments in the thread at: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=914690#c0
Already, FF simply refuses to run any Java app unless the very latest version of the plugin is installed, and I often don't have the time to drop everything and upgrade Java (which also requires a browser restart, losing all open work).
Now it's going to question me about every Java app I try, with no way to say "Just always run Java, stop asking"?
If I didn't want to run Java , I would uninstall the fucking plugin, I am angry because my computer is a tool, not my Mummy. I tell IT what I want to do, not the other way around.
This will be so fscking annoying. We use Java apps internally on our corporate network, and Firefox is the mandated browser. This "mozilla knows best" nannying of "we've disabled this plugin for your own good" gets my goat. Every time I'm 30 seconds late installing the latest patch/upgrade everything stops working until I bring my system up to whatever level Mozilla thinks it should be at.
Listen guys IT'S MY FUCKING COMPUTER AND I WILL DECIDE WHAT RUNS ON IT. Now take your plugin blocker crap and BUTT OUT. If I didn't want the plugin I wouldn't have installed it in the first place.
How long until they start hitting AdBlock, etc., since "our suppliers need you to watch the nice ads to pay for their services".
but bottled water *IS* tap-water.
Only in the USA. In most, if not all, European countries bottled water is almost always spring water. There are a few companies selling the Dasani/Deja Blue type of purified tap water in bottles, but it is very much the exception.
Coke didn't realise that when they introduced Dasani in the UK a few years back. Not only were they ridiculed in the press for selling tap water at 3000x the price Thames Water charged for the same stuff, but a batch was found to contain higher-than-permitted levels of a carcinogen, leading one tabloid to run the headline "Coke withdraws cancer water"
Yesterday, I watched a woman reverse her car into a space in a half-empty supermarket car park. She opened the driver's door to see out behind her, slowly reversed into the space, then switched off and went to do her shopping. The car was left at an angle of about 70° with 2/3 of it in the space, and the other 1/3 in the access lane beside it. She stopped about 3 feet away frim the car behind.
I seriously think she could have parked it just as well if she'd simply closed her eyes and waited for the crunch. I parked as far away from her as I could.
Consumers had 3 years of the option to replace XP with Win7.
True, but replacement was exactly it, wipe the system, reinstall, and pay Microsoft a substantial fee for the privilege. Previous "upgrades" were the same, of course, but there was clearly a good reason to move from 95->98->XP. For most people there is no good reason to move beyond XP, it's tolerably stable (I haven't had a BSOD in years, in fact I have them more often on my W7 laptop), and has more than adequate functionality and performance for general use.
If I could move to W7 by a true in-place upgrade, for a reasonable price, I probably would. As it stands, I'll probably not do that until I'm ready to buy a new PC, and I don't see any immediate need for that.
I think the real problem is no-one actually cared enough to go see it.
Or maybe just didn't understand the title? I saw adverts for a film called "John Carter" and only noticed them because I remembered reading the books as a teenager and wondered "is it that John Carter?" For people who'd never heard of the books the title was plain daft, they could at least have tagged "of Mars" on the end.
China is not in the EEC (not EU, different things)! I know craaaazzeeeeee. So local products, even decent ones, may not actually carry it.
Whether China is in the EEA (not EEC) or not is irrelevant. CE marking is not an indication that a product is made in the EEA, but that it can be legally sold in the EEA. It is not mandatory for all products, but is mandatory for many categories, and "low voltage" is one of them. All such chargers must carry a CE mark if they are sold in the EEA, and importers/distributors must verify the presence of both the CE marking and the necessary supporting documentation.
properly CE-marked unofficial chargers
A CE marking means nothing. There is no formal 3rd-party test bureau, manufacturers self-certify and put the CE mark on by themselves. Any maker of dangerous, counterfeit, rubbish can do the same. Some even claim that on their products "CE" means something like "Compatible Europe" or some such nonsense.
The only protection for those who don't want to pay the inflated prices charged for official spares is to use some common sense,. and pay a reasonable price from a known high-street name. A 99p bargain from eBay will give you exactly what you pay for
that's not covered by the law which explicitly refers to SMS texting.
Which is a perfect demonstration of why having thousands of specifically targeted microlaws is a dumb idea. One basic law covering "driving without due care and attention" is all that is required, with the courts able to decide what "due care" means. That's what they are there for, after all, to interpret the law.
all we need to do is check that testing against the database......
Sounds nice in theory, but we live in a world where even industries as cost-insensitive as the US military still get sold fake or remanufactured chips from supposedly trustworthy and inspected suppliers, because somewhere along the way there's someone who fakes the documentation. Maybe those 11 plants will correctly label their ores, but who's to know if some middleman doesn't cook the figures? And, of course, how long will it take a black-market, illegal, polluting,12th supplier to appear operating inside one of the conflict zones, shipping their product out through a corrupt middleman who relabels it as good? FFS we can't even keep horsemeat out of our lasagna.
Creating a system that relies on testing only 11 suppliers means that there are only 11 systems that the crooks have to break into. Testing 100,000 makes it a lot harder, and of course that will cost money.
What's the alternative? Invade the conflict zone and confiscate the mines?
And it's really not at all difficult to insert spaces so that a phone number looks like it does in the phone book or printed on letterheads.
You think so? What's the correct spacing for a French phone number? A UK one? Swiss?
Website forms should obey Postel's instructions from the very early RFCs. Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send.
