Posts by Doctor Syntax 42407 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"Googles slightly shady front-end is not really the same as GNU/Linux."
OTOH after Microsoft's UI adventures of the last few years if you were to take a Win 7 user and show them KDE, W8 & W910 they might be hard pushed to say which was & wasn't Windows.
I think the solution will be a Win 7 machine* which may well be dual-boot by the start of term. Unless they extend the free upgrade "due to demand" it'll just miss that by the time I give it to her. If the school has a bulk licence agreement for any form of Office they can provide that, otherwise - or also - it'll be LO.
*According to Laptops Direct website they still have W7 stock. As soon as I finish this cuppa I'll drive over there and see.
'Its a damn shame they will never know what UNIX or POSIX really was. Only a "modern" hairball pretending.'
It's only a short step from Linux to a real Unix. BSD is still there. I wonder what SCO could have become if they'd tried. (For those whose horizon doesn't extend beyond the litigation, SCO, under its original management, was a very capable Unix system on Intel processors. It took a very long time for Linux distros to catch up with them. They might not have been able to compete on free-as-in-beer but if they'd cut prices to be affordable they could have competed on quality.)
"I'm less bothered by the existence of the telemetry than I am by how shady MS implemented them."
You should be bothered by more than the implementation; the implementation can be changed at will by an update you can't block. The real problem is the open-ended nature of the T&Cs which, at least last time I looked, let them gather your log-in credentials and transactions without limits, not just your creds & transactions with MS.
This gives me a problem this weekend. I have a granddaughter with an upcoming birthday about to move to secondary school where she will need access to a computer which should be able to run MS Office (I'm not convinced they'd know the difference if she turned in work from LO in MS formats). We're thinking of getting her a laptop. So do I get her a Win 7 version, still available new if Laptops Direct website is to be believed, which will be EOL before she finishes school or something that will own her as much as she owns it?
"it will refund customers"
So it hasn't yet? If it was the plan to do that then it would have been sensible to have made the offer when the shutdown was announced, not when it had the FTC on its case.
At least Revolv was bought by a company that has the resources to make refunds. What happens to a company that just goes bust because of cash-flow problems or because the owners have taken out all the funds as dividends and done a runner?
The FTC and consumer protection world-wide need to lay down some rules:
If a device is based on connectivity to a central hub it must fail-safe if the connectivity fails temporarily and there should be a software escrow arrangement whereby up-to-date copies of the hub and device software are available if the company goes out of business or just shuts down the hub.
Companies should not make infeasible offers. If an ISP or the like offers uncapped data then they should be able to sustain every customer using their full bandwidth all day every day. Continuing to run an essential central server shouldn't depend for finance on continuing sales of new product - that's effectively a Ponzi scheme. And unlimited storage is a complete non-starter.
"Glad to see I'm not the only commentard from the occupied six counties."
It's as well to remember that if there hadn't been partition the consequence would undoubtedly have been a war of secession. I've often wondered whether that might have been the more stable long-term outcome but it would certainly have been bloody. I don't know enough about modern Irish history (as far as I'm concerned modern is anything later than, say, Early Iron Age) to work out whether this would have replaced the Irish civil war or whether it would have resulted in a 3-way war as it would have been in a similar time-frame.
"the Irish government was offering to help the FBI get a warrant through the Irish courts."
Were they? My impression was that they simply said that that's what the proper route should have been. It would have depended on there having been an adequate case to get a warrant. When a government offers to help get a case through the courts it's on very dangerous ground.
"How badly does the US Gov. want access to the data?"
Not badly enough to have gone through the proper legal route in the first place. That's the one where they prepare a case and present it to an Irish court to get an Irish warrant that can't be refused by an Irish business operating on Irish soil. Or could it have been that they never had enough of a case to present in the firs place?
"Not sure whether by Brits who want to invade again"
One of those downvotes was from someone who spent many years there during the IRA/UVF campaigns and has seen the consequences at close quarters. That's "seen" as in having helped dig up the occasional murder victim or help identify very badly burned remains (Google La Mon for details).
Some of us know very well what a land war is like in Ireland. It's not the land that gets hurt.
"For example, if you are running the IT infrastructure in a university, you'll probably have access to a lot of manpower (in the form of students and researchers)… in this case it's probable that your TCO won't be affected by the cost of Sysadmins"
In that case you might be paying for more Sysadmins to defend it all from the students and researchers.
Mine's an old white one with ferric chloride stains that won't come out.
Amend the the message to "You are about to send $NUMBER people each other's email addresses. Many of them won't want to have their address given away like this. Some of them will object very seriously and may sue your company. At the very least you will look stupid. You may get fired. Do you want to have your comany sued, look stupid and maybe lose your job?"
Yes.
' If I am paying for a certain amount I should be entitled to continue paying for that amount at the "contracted" rate.'
A couple of problems with that. First, if it's free then you're not paying and it's doubtful whether there's a contract at all. Secondly, remember the old saying: if it's free it's worth every penny you paid for it.
"We should remove it and replace it with a second elected house."
The Commons will never approve of that. As things stand they can claim a legitimacy over the Lords that being elected brings. They're not going to give that up.
For the rest of us the advantage of the HoL is that because its members don't have to depend on the party machines to keep their membership they can ignore party lines if they think those are wrong.
I think the HoL needs some ex officio members other than the bishops. Say the presidents or equivalent of the Royal Society and the chartered institutes, maybe a few University VCs etc. If they have several acknowledged experts in a field explain why a proposal is bollocks they'd have to listen (assuming Gove doesn't get booted upstairs, of course).
"our politicians had already signed us up to it without a democratic mandate."
Nevertheless we were then asked for a mandate to continue and gave it.
"The 1975 referendum did not affirm that the UK public wanted to give away their national sovereignty etc"
You know as well as I do that the nature of a referendum question is that it wraps all the individual negotiating points into a single question and:
"The same applies to every European treaty signed since that takes more power away from member countries and hands that power to the EEC/EU/United States of Europe."
I completely agree with you. I think every EEC/EU country should have held a referendum to enable its government to ratify all the succeeding countries. I also think the referenda should have required a substantive majority, say 2/3rds, to change the status quo, just as I think this recent referendum should have required it. Such a requirement would have caused the negotiators to have come up with much different treaties if they wanted to get them though. In fact we may still have had the EEC in place.
You should realise that my position isn't what you think it is. I think there's a great deal wrong with the EU but that walking away is just plain nuts on economic grounds. I don't think that the great economic opportunities that the leavers are hoping for are there.
If we try to retain the foreign investment that's here because of our EU membership we'll have to retain all the other aspects of the EU that you don't like but with one difference - we won't be part of the decision-making process so this much-vaunted regaining of "control" or "sovereignty" won't just be a chimera, it'll be the opposite of what you claim. In this respect the Leavers have scored a massive own goal.
The globalist option is going to involve trying to negotiate our own trade treaties with existing players. Again, our degree of control is severely limited. You have to ask what they're wanting and whether it's going to be to our advantage. The likes of India are going to be looking for even more off-shoring. As for the US - look at their recent "partnership" negotiations; they're clearly commercial colonisation acts intended to put US corporations in much the same situation as the East India Company once occupied in India. Any "deal" we get there is going to be a lot worse than what was being negotiated with the EU.
We've simply cut off our own economic nose to spite the EU's political face.
"This begs the question of why our politicians ever signed us up to Europe against the will of the people"
It clearly does.
'"Begging the question" is a form of logical fallacy in which a statement or claim is assumed to be true without evidence other than the statement or claim itself. When one begs the question, the initial assumption of a statement is treated as already proven without any logic to show why the statement is true in the first place.' ( http://begthequestion.info/ )
Your statement that joining was against the the will of the people falls foul of http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/june/6/newsid_2499000/2499297.stm
"From our previous exchanges I thought you would know by now I absolutely voted leave."
Indeed. Maybe you didn't read my last post on a previous exchange - what with one thing and another I got round to it pretty late. If you had you'd realise that I'm not an outstanding fan of the EU, it's just that I think the idea that we can just walk out to be an economic nonsense. At least we're not in the Euro.
"By the time we are out it will be another GE and the people can choose the direction of the country."
Our ability to choose the direction will be restricted. What if the choice at that point would have been to remain - as it might well be if all those businesses here for an EU base have started to migrate? That choice would be gone. If the choice is a trade treaty with the EU then it will be on the EU's terms. The choice of being an imperial power is long gone. The choice of being a major world power hasn't existed for the last 60 years, post Suez.
"Those of us who remember what the UK was like before we entered the EEC ...Deciding for ourselves the direction our country is to go in."
I certainly remember those times. A good many people who want to go back to them seem to think we were still a great imperial power. We weren't. Our ability to decide effectively was pretty well finished when Eden declined to show two fingers to the US in '56.
"Hopefully now we have a new PM she will actually lay out a plan and get on with it."
I take it you were a Leaver. Don't you have any suggestions as to what a good plan would be? Other than hoping that the existing incumbents would be able to think of something which, AFAICS must have been one of the Leavers' plans; the other being "magic happens".
"Similarly Privacy-Shield is not really there to protect privacy - it's there to try and provide some kind of control over our personal data."
No it isn't. It isn't even there to look as if they're trying to protect data. At best they're trying to look as if they're trying to protect data. And as we all know they don't even look as if they're trying to look as if they're trying to protect data.
HTH
"you know what I said about not everyone getting it ?"
When dealing with the DWP never attribute to craftiness that which can be attributed to stupidity. A former colleague in a project where we dealt with them summed them up: "not the sharpest knives in the box".
"QR code is unsafe, and like URL shorteners a great way to lead to malware."
AIUI this system reverses the normal QR situation. The customer, via the phone, presents the QR code to the store. The customer is not at risk of a malicious code and, if the till software is in any way sane, it's not going to interpret the code as a URL. If the code doesn't make sense within the requirements of the payment system it's just going to decline the transaction.
What's not clear in all this is how the system guards against fake codes. I take it there must be some dynamic element in generating the code.
