Posts by Stripes the Dalmatian

Intel's €80bn European chip plant investment plan not bound for UK because Brexit

Re: What a surprise @Geez Money

Yep, it's starting to look like the EU doesn't need us more than we need them. Sadly, a lot of the idiots who voted for Brexit firmly believe (now) that they voted for something they had never heard of in 2016.

Re: What a surprise

It's worth remembering that there is a good reason why nobody foresaw NI being a post-Brexit problem - nobody was offering us a Brexit that didn't guarantee full access to the Single Market.

Hard Brexit is the biggest bait-and-switch fraud in history.

UK.gov wants mobile makers to declare death dates for their new devices from launch

Re: A bit of sympathy for the Devil here.

Perhaps more Linux phones and fewer Android phones would make the world a better place?

Re: Default Passwords

Why not just make the IMEI number the default password? They'd all be unique and nobody would stick to the default.

Now that half of Nominet's board has been ejected, what happens next? Let us walk you through the possibilities

Re: And further down the line - #DissolveTheUnion

Am I the only person who *sometimes* thinks there should be a special institution for storing people who downvote facts?

Australian government fights Facebook news ban by threatening 0.01% of Zuck's ad revenue

Re: Just goes to show how out of touch our politicians are

"Ultimately though, the bread and butter of it is that FB are profiting (directly or otherwise) from displaying locally generated news content, at the cost of depriving the sources of that content of revenue."

How does driving more traffic to newspaper sites (by giving them free advertising!) deprive them of revenue? Surely that increases the value of their own advertising?

It's difficult to see why Facebook should pay a tax for effectively subsidising Australian companies.

Also, there isn't much 'content' in a snippet, it mostly just disambiguates the headline which allows visitors to read stories they want to see rather than having their time wasted on ones they don't.

Tech ambitions said to lie at heart of Britain’s bonkers crash-and-burn Brexit plan

Re: chances of a deal with the EU are beginning to ebb away

There was solid majority against any sort of Brexit for most of the four years after 2016's non-binding, inconclusive, and corrupted referendum.

Strangely, our wonderful independent media (and spineless government mouthpiece, the BBC) failed to keep mentioning that every time some pompous twat insisted on claiming that Brexit was 'the will of the people'.

Facebook accused of trying to bypass GDPR, slurp domain owners' personal Whois info via an obscure process

Facebook putting pressure on somebody to help them do something unlawful (under GDPR) by threatening to sue feels like it ought to be an offence in its own right.

BoJo looks to jumpstart UK economy with £6k taxpayer-funded incentive for Brits to buy electric cars – report

State aid to a foreign power with MY money?

So, we're giving up on UK standards in food quality, protecting the environment, and animal welfare. Do we have to give the US our money as well as our sovereignty?

Accept certain inalienable truths: Prices will rise, politicians will philander... And US voting machines will be physically insecure

Re: Why is this so hard?

A fundamental requirement for a secret ballot is that nobody can prove who they voted for. That defeats coercion and bribery.

Also, why pay for a machine that prints ballot papers when voters will fill them in for nothing?

iOS 13 leaks suggest Apple is finally about to unleash the iPad as a computer for grownups

So, having re-invented the netbook, when are they going to actually patent it?

We fought through the crowds to try Oculus's new VR goggles so you don't have to bother (and frankly, you shouldn't)

Perhaps I'm being naive...

...but, once you are involved in doing something, is VR really more immersive than just using an ordinary screen?

Maybe immersiveness is more to do with what psychologists call flow experience.

To maintain that state, you need to see past the technology you are using. My impression of VR is that it's nowhere near fluid and transparent enough to avoid drawing attention itself and 'breaking the spell' by introducing distractions.

Mobile network Three UK's customer details exposed in homepage blunder

Only four out of three 3 customers complained? That's nearly 100%, at least!

Attention all British .eu owners: Buy dotcom domains and prepare to sue, says UK govt

Re: Wow, it's almost...

@The Original Steve

Useful tip: when you find yourself arguing that 'binding' and 'non binding' are the same thing, look up Cognitive Dissonance on Wikipedia.

Dutch boyband hopes to reverse Brexit through the power of music

Re: Slightly wrong.

By 'referendum', you mean the non-binding opinion poll that is two and a half years out of date? The one that gave no clear mandate for anything?

Seems like a weak excuse for sacrificing the sovereignty and economic future of the UK. Particularly since it doen't even represent the views of the British people in 2018.

Reverse Ferret! Forget what we told you – the iPad isn't really for work

Re: Someones noticed at last.

Bring back netbooks!

Grubby, tortuous, full of malware and deceit: Just call it Lionel because the internet is MESSY

Re: Misguided Idealism

The internet originates from the US government's interest in creating a communications system which could reliably survive a major nuclear war.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Baran

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Davies

Latest F-35 flight tests finish – and US stops accepting new jets

Re: Billions for an "aircraft carrier"....

"the US government dictates to the UK where supposedly British-owned aircraft will have their engines overhauled: Turkey, that well-known bastion of democratic stability"

Taking back control, innit?

Prosecute driverless car devs for software snafus, say Brit cyclists

Re: Hmm

"played chicken there once too often"

I think that's called 'playing hedgehog'.

'There has never been a right to absolute privacy' – US Deputy AG slams 'warrant-proof' crypto

If...

...you're not already interested in the persons at either end of the encrypted communication, why do you want to decrypt the message? If you are interested, why not capture the message before it's encrypted or after the recipient has decrypted it?

VPN logs helped unmask alleged 'net stalker, say feds

Re: PureVPN has some explaining to do

"We do NOT keep any logs that can identify or help in monitoring a user’s activity."

But, being unable to identify the culprit from the log data is not the same as being unable to identify the relevant log data for a known culprit.

Sci-Fi titan Jerry Pournelle passes,
aged 84

"Some of us have a distinct antipathy to Lysenkoism"

You just don't, though - that's the problem!

Openreach pegs full fibre overhaul anywhere between £3bn and £6bn

It sounds a bit like the water industry to me. We are all told we must pay higher bills to pay for investment, but, so far, we don't seem to be getting the share certificates representing our investment.

UK government's war on e-cigs is over

Re: Jesus, NO!

@ John Brown (no body)

Is anybody claiming a 'right' to insist that you must eat tomatoes?

Don't tell me what to breathe, and I won't tell you what to eat!

Re: Jesus, NO!

@Richard81

So it doesn't contain any actual smoke?

Nobody said or implied that it did.

It does contain a known carcinogen and various irritants.

I am amused by the self-righteousness and victim mentality of people who think that being too weak to give up smoking excuses being selfish.

PS: I found that the best method was to stop buying cigarettes!

Re: Jesus, NO!

@Richard 81

If passive smoking can harm people, how is vaping not going to do? I find the vapour from these machines extremely irritating, much more so than actual tobacco smoke.

In a few years we may find out what the effect of super-heating a mixture of nicotine plus cheap synthetic flavourings is.

Academics 'funded by Google' tend not to mention it in their work

I've seen...

Microsoft attempt to 'manufacture a synthetic "grassroots" legitimacy for a policy issue' (against Google, as it happens) and now Oracle is coming over all self-righteous! It's a dog against dog battle among these companies, but some dogs are uglier than others...

Google hit with record antitrust fine of €2.4bn by Europe

Where does this leave Microsoft?

MS Office achieved a dominant position in its field because:

1) Microsoft used its inside knowledge of its own operating systems to give Office a performance advantage over competitors, and

2) Microsoft leveraged its monopoly of the OS market to exploit that advantage.

Microsoft still gets away with charging inflated prices for its software because of the advantage it gained from using its monopoly to stifle competitors.

I'm sure that affects thousands of times more people than could care about not using specific shopping comparison sites (because, let's face it, historically all shopping comparison sites were useless crap that nobody visited more than once.)

Tech can do a lot, Prime Minister, but it can't save the NHS

Re: The long-term cost no one talks about..

Retrospective legislation to unpick PFIs and deal with the scum profiting from them would get my vote (and perhaps millions of others?) That would be a rare example of good populism.

FCC revised net neutrality rules reveal cable company control of process

Pai-per-view

This is what regulatory capture looks like.

It's a question worth asking: Why is the FCC boss being such a jerk?

Re: Bigger Government is never the answer

Without regulation a free market is about as likely to persist as a vacuum at sea level.

Stanford Uni's intro to CompSci course adopts JavaScript, bins Java

Javascript: the obvious choice...

...because closures and prototype based inheritance are just what you need in an introductory programming course.

Subpostmasters prepare to fight Post Office over wrongful theft and false accounting accusations

Re: Words

It's amazing how many people think that 'liking the idea of refuting' something is the same thing as 'actually refuting' it.