Posts by TheColinous

Scotland's BIG question: Will independence cost me my broadband?

Re: Fag packet maths

There are so many taxes, fees, and such that aren't counted toward the Scots contribution. I mean, take things like oil company licenses. That most likely goes to the north sea account rather than the Scottish account, and therefore don't show up in the book-keeping as having been contributed by Scottish assets.

Where is VAT counted for the Tesco and ASDA shops? In England or Scotland? What about BBC license fees? What about all the other little charges and fees and taxes. Fag packet tax? Beer and wine tax?

The only thing one can know for sure is what comes down the pipe from Westminster after the Barnett formula has been applied. And, you have to give it to the SNP, after the dreadful mess Labour made of the Scottish parliament (the building!) and with their tribal belief that Scottish voters always belonged to them and nobody else, the SNP has done a pretty good job of balancing the books up there.

Sure, like any political party they're going to inflate their own positives and hide away their own negatives. But there's a reason why SNP got a majority in a system designed to avoid majorities.

Re: Realism

Yeah, in a time when Eu energy supplies are fuzzy due to the conflict in Ukraine, the EU is going to punt out 1/3 of the EUs own energy stock, and the Spanish are going to torpedo its own fishing industry by makng them personan non-grata in Scottish waters.

Nope, that's not likely to happen.

I say, living in the Home counties, "Go Scotland, show us how it's done. Show us an alternative to the rotting, stinking neoliberal carcass that's Westminster. The English will then follow soon enough, or borrow Guilloutines from French museums."

'Blow it up': Plods pop round for chat with Commonwealth Games tweeter

Well, Police Scotland is an entirely Scottish thing, and now that they, unlike the English plod, are armed and ready we can have some stories abotu SWAT teams breaking down tweeter's doors.

Alex Salmond will look smug and portly and claim "this is making SCOTLAND better!"

Google to feed machines with evidence of human physical weaknesses – and that's a good thing

The computer says no

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOdjCb4LwQY

Putin: Crack Tor for me and I'll make you a MILLIONAIRE

Why make trillions when you can make... Billions?

I am surprised that nobody has made a reference to Dr Evil yet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vohNUTTx3A

Cheer up, Nokia fans. It can start making mobes again in 18 months

Re: Microsoft bought Nokia because ...

It doesn't. It only gets to lease the patents. Nokia still owns them. There was some fears that Nokia would become a gargantuan patent troll because it has patents in everything - from cell phone towers to switches to the hand-held devices.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/03/us-nokia-microsoft-patents-idUSBRE9820ZZ20130903

Will the next US-EU trade pact prevent Brussels acting against US tech giants?

Aw, poor Anglosphere.

Its inability to study other foreign languages like German or French or Italian makes it so dependent on an English-speaking press run by people who are unable to study other foreign languages like German or French or Italian.

So, you'll have a situation where a newspaper like The Guardin or The Telegraph will quote the New York Times about information about sentiments within the EU, which Britain is a member or, instead of Der Spiegel or Handelsblatt or Le Figaro or La Stampa.

IF the anglospher weren't so incapable of learning foreign languages, it would have noticed that the political situation that stopped things like ACTA and which brought rulings like the one against Google have grown stronger, not weaker after Snowden.

So, when Angela Merkel or Francois Holland or Renzi comes with the TAFTA treaty to their parliaments, it's not going to pass. And while Guardian and Telegraph will cover Nigel Farage's involuntary flatulence in great detail to find out how Things Are Done in Europe, they'll miss that the EP is likely to vote against this.

UK.gov's data grab and stab law imminent as Drip drips through House of Lords

This country is so fucked. I don’t know whether to laugh with schadenfreude or cry in despair. Really.

And these pompous asses in our parliament and lords will tomorrow, or next week, or next months stand there and chastise some third world country clawing themselves toward democracy. We have it, but those idiots have just given it away. These geriatric fools whose closest experience with technology is to have their man do the sums on a calculator.

I am really hoping that the Scots vote Yes. It’s the only thing that will crash the rotten, corrupt shambles to pieces in a way that doesn’t include borrowing Guilloutines from France’s museums.

YES: Scotland declares independence ... from the dot co dot uk empire

Re: "If Scotland get independance, I'll be the first one to move there."

This. I live in Surrey, about one hour from Waterloo, and I hope the Scots vote to leave because it may - I say may - bring the whole rotten edifice down around Cameron's ears. If Scotland votes yes, that will encourage Plaid Cymru too, so they'll be next in line.

Westminster is rotten to the core, and someone ought to take it out back and shoot it dead like the shambling zombie it is. Scotland leaving is the best chance for that ever happening.

New leaked 'Windows 8 screenshot': The Start Menu strikes back

I dared post a neutral or positive opinion on Win 8. That's not on. I need to drink the hate, or be purged from existence. :D

Actually, I'm mainly a Debian 7 user. I only run Windows to play games, so I have my desktop with a dual boot Win8 and Debian.

I run Gnome 3 on Debian and Windows 8. In some ways, Gnome 3 and Windows 8 are more alike than not. Particularly with the idea that the common icons are off on a separate screen, and not on the desktop.

Christ, can they make up their minds? I don't want the bloody start menu back on the box I've got Win 8.1 on. The start screen is a fantastical improvement on the start menu because you can organise it. For the first time since I got a computer, I have a clean windows desktop without a lot of icons on it. Because they are all grouped and ready on the start screen now.

German government orders local CIA station chief to pack his bags

I read this elsewhere, and it said that if the Germans wanted to make a public things for internal consumption they would have sent some low level people packing. They would have made a point, and then expected everyone to believe that the matter was dealt with.

However, this person is the liaison person in all the public and secret co-operation projects between the Germans and the US. So, sending him home throws a spanner in the works of all levels of co-operation - not least the intelligence sharing. So, yeah, the Germans aren’t screwing around.

Maybe that’s something Cameron should think about after the less than stellar performance during the EU summit in Ypres earlier.

UK's emergency data slurp: IT giants panicked over 'legal uncertainty'

The best thing that could happen to England, Wales and NI would be if Scotland voted yes to independence in September. That could bring the whole corrupt edifice crashing down, and maybe we could build a democracy which actually works instead of the rotten shambolic thing we have now. On the other hand, the Westminster elites could also just throw in the towel and stop the cynical theatre.

Snowden leaks latest: NSA, FBI g-men spied on Muslim-American chiefs

Last's month's reveal of 800 babies of unwed mothers in Tuam in Ireland says that we should put every single Christian everywhere under constant surveillance.

But of course, that is "isolated groups and individuals, and we can't tar EVERY christian with the same brush!" Muslims are different. Just because we say so. No matter how atheist or secular they are, they must be watched. They are secret jihadists.

Do I need the sarcasm tag?

Amazon woos dispute-stung Hachette scribes with 100% ROYALTIES

That is always the case on tech sites who side with anyone who eases their ability to consume art and culture without at the same time ensuring that the people who create what they want to consume get a fair deal.

That doesn't prevent them from trying to don the mantle of champion for poor oppressed artists, musicians and authors. They are here to liberate us. They are here to save us from ourselves, because obviously we've never given much thought to how we earn a living. We're always slaves to circumstance and dictats from unscupulous tyrants. :)

As a wannabe author, I extend my middle finger in the direction of Amazon. I'm with Hachette on this, as are most authors.

We don't want to be our own publishers. There's a reason wannabe-authors like me go to publishers. We're terrible at marketing, art, social interaction. Give us the chance to sit in our rooms with our computers and imaginary friends and turn those into stories.

If we have to do marketing, we'll like stand up on a stage and stammer about passive voice, gerunds, split infinitives and whether we should show or tell. Not very exciting for anyone but the authors, who can get into religious wars about the Oxford-comma or whether we can use 'they' as a singular pronoun.

What's your game, Google? Giant collared by UK civil lib minister on 'right to be forgotten'

Well, yes, you can always count on this government to ask "How high?" when a rich multinational tells it to jump. Yes. I have some hope that the referral of the Irish High Court will savage Facebook's data mining business model, in view of the cases we have seen so far from ECJ in this. I don't doubt that if this government is allowed to sit after next year, or for that matter the next Labour government if it comes to that, will ride out to the defence of Facebook.

Wireless-controlled contraception implant is coming, says MIT

So, after a night out at the pubs with the lads, you're supposed to start to worry about pgp keys through a boffin designed console interfaces when you want a bit of nookie with the partner? Right... I can see that it will be a hit.

Use Tor or 'extremist' Tails Linux? Congrats, you're on an NSA list

Yeah, it's more useful with 'll' than 'ls -l'.

'll' gives you the hidden files as well.

That terminal obsession says it all.

apt-get or yum. It's a secret code.

And who writes 'dir' as 'll' anyway?

I always knew us Linux users were a suspicious lot.

When PR backfires: Google 'forgets' BBC TV man's banker blog post

But this was never about freedom of expression. I really wish the yank commentators who are up in arms about censorship woul read the bloody ruling.

1 - There is a law in Spain that says something. It's been on the books for years, if not decades.

2 Spanish man goes to court to use the said old Spanish law

3 Google gets upset and fights a legal campaign which says "we're not affected by laws in spain because we're in the US"

4 ECJ says, "In your dreams, google. If you make money here, you're expected to follow our laws"

5 Google now uses tricks and feints to make this into a freedom of speech thing, when they never raised this during the court case. They campaigned that they were not subject to European laws.

MIT and CERN's secure webmail plan stumped by PayPal freeze

Re: there are plenty of better and cheaper competitors

The problem is, even if something like the Swedish Payson somehow grew into an EU equivalent of PayPal, the credit card VISA, Mastercard etc companies are still American.

This is a bit rich in ironies.

Pierre Omidyar founded Ebay and First Look media who holds the NSA files.

Ebay owns PayPal

PayPal acts like this against an entity created to partways counter the dangers described in the NSA files.

So, will PayPal stop payments to Pierre Omidyar who funds the publications of the NSA files?

Remaining Snowden docs will be released to avert 'unspecified US war' – ‪Cryptome‬

Earlier WikiLeaks got into a spat with Greenwald over not naming a country in one of the NSA-stories, and threatened that they would publish these files.

Could this be about that?

I wonder where WikiLeaks got the files if that's the case. I think Snowden decided to go to journalists after the cack-handed way the Iraq- and diplomatic files were handled.

Google adds 'data protection' WARNING to Euro search results

UK does have some quite vicious contempt of court penalties... :)

One amazing reason why NASA boffins are celebrating Curiosity's 687th day on Mars

Martians: Yankee go home!

The yanks need to rename their letter agencies post-haste. Or I better start to read more properly. I think we can all agree to blame the yanks.

I zoomed into this post wondering what on Earth NSA had to do with Curiosity. Then I thought about the poor martians.

http://static.lolyard.com/lol/yankee-go-home.jpg

You are ALL Americans now: Europeans offered same rights as US folks in data slurp leaks

The problem is, of course, that Americans have no privacy rights as such. As we saw in the ECJ v Google ruling, Americans don't value privacy much if it goes against their freedom of speech customs. So, any EU citizen who tries to use this fig-leaf will quickly find that they get nowhere.