Posts by MrAnonCoward43 33 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Feb 2018
I'll reiterate, it's running perfectly fine to me.
See the old Android as similar thing to turning on a computer to write a really long email rather than typing it on your phone. I don't need any of the mentioned stuff on my phone that I carry with me at most times. Hence I'm running perfectly fine. I check it at most 3 or 4 times a week. Sometimes not in a fortnight.
Just mentioned the banking apps / whatsapp as things to consider if anyone wanted to follow suit. And I could happily install a whatsapp apk on Sailfish too as far as I know but have no interest to check it beyond a couple of times a week and have Whatsapp running on my daily phone.
For example Tide, they require you to use an Android or iOS app, it was chosen because at the time of searching it was one of the only free business bank accounts I could spot, ie without annoying monthly fees, only transaction fees, to be used for a business which is largely dormant at present but one that I hope to resurrect at some point in the near future.
I barely need to check this account anyway just an example that others who require to use Tide (and there are many similar options now) daily they'd struggle with Sailfish at the moment.
A bit off topic really so sorry about that! Happy for the mobile space to be opened up to more players than Google and Apple so I welcome the EU requirements in this instance, if it makes any sort of difference.
Another Sailfish fan which is working perfectly for me on my Xperia X, looking forward to the forthcoming v3. Glad to have left the Google / Android world behind, the battery life on my phone now is significantly better now it's not permanently on speed dial to G HQ.
I currently have two Android apps; Brave + Threema, both installed using apks from their respective websites. Occasionally I look at my old Android device for Whatsapp group messages. With version Sailifish 3 I'm hoping it will be easy enough to block pretty much all access for an app like Whatsapp and open when I want to - that will negate the need to use my old phone for that.
I really don't miss Android, I use brave for almost everything I would have used an app for before and I'm not one to want constnat push notifications telling me I have a new email or someone has posted something on Twitter or a goal has been scored etc
The only thing I think I miss is banking apps, from banks that insist that the only way to login is via a mobile device - again this is kept on an old Android so not the end of the world there.
Note, there are a few things that Sailfish need to do, for example last week I wanted a new Calendar (Work) in my Calendar beyond the default Personal / Birthday - this required me to write an sqlite insert via the built in terminal, laughable really but probably something that'll be updated in the near future and that's the first time I've needed to do something like that.
Should Amazon be forced to be broken up? Does it hold a monopoly in too many markets like you say for BT? Is it Capitalism to force that break up? Are there degrees of Capitalism or is it one form rules all?
Claiming that someone who advocates taxes being paid where they are due and workers paid a fair wage so they can legitimately support themselves and their family and then equating that person to cheering for the the digging up of Stalin in a triumphant return is ludicrous. How about some people think Capitalism is quite probably the best system but also think that it can also support a welfare state, can also pay the majority more at the expense of the currently rapacious few, can be not so detrimental to the environment and can not be solely run on greed.
Take a breath, put your Friedman textbook down and your Pinochet poster in the bin. Oh wait you're not a fan of Pinochet?
I have developed a strong dislike for Amazon like lots of people and in the large part have completely reduced my spending there (10 years ago I loved the company), my prime has been cancelled and most new books, general house stuff, cds and dvds now come from elsewhere - what difference it will make I don't know, apart from my wallet having to pay more but at least I can hope that more of my spending money will be recycled in the economy and not for a space ship for Bezos.
However, I really struggle to find a better location to get some things; where I live there a few second hand bookshops but I can pretty much guarantee none will have books that I'm after most of the time. Amazon is still the king for second hand book l istings even if 99% of the time they are for small sellers in the UK. I know there are a number of alternatives websites but the ones I've seen have been terrible and have nowhere near the same number of books available or a truly terrible website for buying things - perhaps someone knows better options?
And the other thing seems to be general computer / electrical goods, recently I was looking for a 400gb micro sd card for my music player - I couldn't find any alternative other than Amazon or Ebay. Even PC World had a blog post about the 400gb card with an affiliate link out to Amazon.
Can't figure out if the up vote for this is an official vote from me for Supreme King Bezos or a vote for a 'Not in any world would I want that greedy, tax dodging, wage slave owner to be supreme emperor'.. gave you an arrow up either way - take that Jeff!
At least we can all smile that the king of the world is called JEFF!
bit.ly does too, just add a plus symbol (+) on the end of any bit.ly link and you can see the full redirect url, the meta info for the redirect page and the stats for the number of clicks. Makes for interesting viewing when seeing how many people click on some dubious links on Twitter etc.
They've probably buried deep into the forthcoming terms + conditions that if you swipe in a particular manner that you knowingly confirm to having all your data from you, all your family, friends and colleagues from now until eternity hoovered up by the big Google data Dyson.
At least it's encouraging to dig up some old posts and see how we've advanced as a society - https://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2011/03/03/google_microsoft_geotag/
2011
"This is getting silly
How much longer do you think it will be before they realise that the patent system is messed up, the e.d. court of Texas has shown sufficient bias that one wonders if there is any actual justice served there, and that patent trolls serve no useful purpose."
Oh.
Its rules and laws and systems are designed for lawyers and judges to make an endless obscene amount of money for doing essentially nothing as cases get batted back and forth.
Can chuck lobbyists and politicians 'on the right side' in a similar bottomless money pit mix too. Lobbying for and against rules that just get tweaked for the corporate brigade constantly over the years.
I fear the day the ever coming shift of the UK towards its powerful 'ally' especially post Brexit nears completion, we will be US light in a few years I'm sure - so many signs we're close already. Then how long before we drop the Diet tag after that I wouldn't be able to guess but probably not long.
Perhaps the thing that gets me the most is I could never bring myself to even entertain being part of that corrupt system and most people I know I'm sure are the same - it makes me wonder where this stream of seemingly moral free individuals stem from.
"You don't need to be super wealthy as an individual or company to use offshore vehicles to reduce taxes - my local coffee shop does it."
More the shame and not a world to be encoruaged, we will forever disagree. They probably ask their staff to setup companies to pay them too. All legal of course as you will proudly say.
Fair I missed your £2k limit point, had assumed you'd got the lowest earnings rate way out or were making a random example on the personal allowance.
Of course, I understand Evade / Avoid, I'm just not accepting of something that should be illegal, often becomes illegal proudly declared "AH folks, it's only some avoiding, not evading, all ok here and no we don't really owe any tax because technically.....". Again, we will forever disagree. Bring forth the all powerful regulators
p.s Congrats on the tax career and the title of being the #1 Reg tax guru! Hurrah for knowledge with a dash of arrogance.
Ha ha, you're making laughably unfair comparisons. £2k tax free earnings so that the poorest paid can attempt to afford to survive or a multi billion profit making company that pays millions to tax avoiding (evading, you say tomato I say legally evading) experts to hide, offset, transfer to make believe shell companies in havens such as those that the UK in particular allow to exist that are only available to to the super wealthy companies / individuals and scratch the backs of your derided legislators (which yes, would be great if they were uncorruptible and had a back bone). Certainly immoral to me.
To join you in a comparison, it's like letting one cyclist use a seat on his bike and then turning a blind eye letting another cyclist use his seat but also jack up on every yet to become illegal drug / substance / tue and say its valid and not immoral. That comparison has no bearing on the rest of a nation however and doesn't require millions of others to shoulder the burden of the drugged up cyclist who is out there celebrating his wins with gallons of champagne and yachts.
Lastly, whether you're happy with the fact that said author never worked for HMRC, PwC or Deloitte and thus should never make any comment on anything related to tax then that's your personal limitation I would say. Why are you discussing it? Or are you in fact an expert in taxation??
"And nothing inherently immoral." - have to pull you up on this one, lots of us think it's immoral. Hoovering up large profits in a country without paying tax with your near to the bone 'avoding' tactics which when rumbled often become illegal. It's a big scam and a huge reason that the 'little folk' like me and presumably you have to foot the brunt of the bill to keep our country's infrastructure up and running and on the flip side of course our MPs with enough money for expenses to claim etc etc.
Here's the best one I've ever seen / heard: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/2263208.stm
"The Inland Revenue has confirmed that it sold its estate of more than 600 buildings to a company based in a tax haven, and admits it wrongly announced the properties were sold to a UK firm."
HMRC folks, doing it's bit for tax 'avoidance' too..
More needs to be made of this, can't believe it only got the ripple of attention it did. This harvesting of data needs so much more regulation and oversight. The morals of some people amazes me, I love how Google and Facebook both lead with whiter than white, help the world, angles:
"The information was used to develop and refine an alert, diagnosis and detection system that can spot when patients are at risk of developing acute kidney injury."
and
"The social network effectively asked top US hospitals to share anonymized patient data, such as illnesses and prescriptions, for a research project to help medics pinpoint people needing extra care or treatment."
These paragons of virtual virtue.
Or you could setup Subsonic on your NAS / Mac Mini / whatever, pretty easy to do even for non techies I would imagine. Can then also use CloudFlare to get it working over https for free.
http://www.subsonic.org - Not the best client interface but it works really well for me and you can use FLAC files if you wanted. The Android app has offline storage too.
Agree about the Google comments, this is Firefox jumping on the Facebook bashing. I hate Facebook as much as the next data-pilfered man who has never signed up but what about all the other tracking, if Mozilla wants to do this then they should have one to block Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Google Retargetting, Add This, Twitter Share etc etc. We know none of the Google stuff will be blocked by Firefox.
Having never signed up to Facebook but having used Whatsapp I am pained to imagine all that Facebook has stored against me, as has proved it's not hard for them to link things on names, numbers and then throw in some facial recognition.
However, I'm sure the data Facebook has on me pales into insignificance from what Google has hoovered up over the years prior to me blocking google analytics and from the years of using an Android phone until I jumped ship.
I remember reading once that Ale as pointed out above didn't have any hops historically and was only added at the request of some clergymen to stop the overly amorous potency of the herby brew prior to the soporific hops being added:
"One factor is that hops create a sedentary spirit in the imbiber. Amongst those knowledgeable about herbs, hops tea is well known as a catalyst for dreams, and creates drowsiness for the beer drinker. Hops is also an anaphradesiacal herb - meaning that it lessens sexual desire." - http://www.homebrewing.com/articles/gruit/
There's actually a great little brewery in Ghent, Belgium - Gruut - that brews hop free beers that are very tasty, worth a visit for any beer fans - http://www.gruut.be/en
Completely agree with this, wasn't Obama's campaign lauded for it's digital genius? http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/magazine/the-obama-campaigns-digital-masterminds-cash-in.html - Remember those Digital Masterminds!
If Trump employs the same tactics it's somehow entirely undermining the American democratic regime. Facebook should have been hammered during the previous regime for their privacy gobbling up, who knows what they're doing with Whatsapp. Good work the EU with GDPR, you may not be perfect but at least you're not spineless.
Trump is odious but first we were told the Russians were completely to blame, now it's like Cambridge Analytica can sway the whole election single handedly - it's farcical again. Shame more news outlets and journalists aren't calling this out.
The American public has been exposed to propaganda since the 19th century, it's an industry making billions per year, since the early days of periodicals and newspapers to the far more elaborate present with TV, radio and websites thrown in for good measure - they are undoubtedly the kings. Combine that with a political system that offers only two nearly identical options and then throw in some corporate lobbying and you have a political control over a population that is incredible. To argue that Russian trolls can bring that all down is pretty absurd.
Trump is a disaster but wasn't the spend on 'Russian' Facebook ads determined to be in the tens of thousands? How much do the two political parties spend on their direct propaganda? Hundreds of million dollars isn't it? Personally I saw far more pro Hillary and anti-Trump 'propaganda' in the main outlets, how is that type of propaganda acceptable? The average American is being screwed over by the country's Neo-Liberal policies, the Trump victory in my eyes was entirely down to that - some desperate and also some angry Americans saw Trump as a break from what they've been subjected to for decades. The sad fact for me is that the angry Americans were also often very racist, where does this racism stem from? Russian propaganda? Or more likely the American mainstream news outlet 'propaganda' and American society and politcal system itself - the prison statistics should make every American sick.
It's not just the US, let's look at Brexit, it's also farcical to blame it on 'Russian influence' as I've repeatedly heard in the last half year - even more so when I've heard Sputnik and RT being blamed. I'd love to know the numbers who voted for Brexit and the number of those who had even heard of RT or Sputnik at the time of the referrendum. The Anti-EU agenda has been pushed by the newspapers in this country since the days I did a paper round (back in the later 90s). I remember so many front page articles about how "The EU want to ban our pints", "They want to ban our Pork Pies" etc etc, then in the last decade the increasing push about the migrant invasion "Christmas decorations will be banned in schools" etc etc. I can believe some fears about migration issues, it's understandable, in poorer parts of the country the effect of migration can be very damaging and means lower pay, less housing available, less jobs, for richer areas it means cheaper cleaners and workers and none of them can afford to live nearby so there's no tensions, very simplistic but it's very true to a point. But migration to the UK is also understandable, it's a rich country with many great things going for it, it's no suprise, especially from countries that we've helped cause their destruction via our proxy wars. However, the exaggeration in the press is beyond extreme (Online, TV + Newspapers), The Sun, The People, The Mail, The Express etc, and the broadsheets aren't exempt; The Telegraph, The Times, all of them really and not to mention the BBC (how much air time did UKIP get in the last 15 years???) - there's the reasons and 'propaganda' for the Brexit vote.
The "let's blame a few 'Russian ads' and 'trolls'", gives us a good new hate and demon figure, an old friend in that regard. Al Qaeda are gone, ISIS has found to have so many links to the CIA, hmmm, what now, I know "THE RUSKIES ARE COMING FOR YOUR CHILDREN!!!"
On a slightly lighter note, the irony of the US blaming another state of helping to influence an election or the democratic process is very entertaining, the James Woolsey / Laura Ingraham interview being the perfect encapsualtion of it. One of the easiest propaganda techniques is to blame others for what you do yourself - top job!
I think the numbers, although ridiculously high and wasteful, it's still much less than the energy wasted from devices in standby - can't find the exact link mentioning that but here's one about that standby waste:
https://www.thestar.com/business/personal_finance/2014/07/02/your_electronic_devices_are_energy_hogs_energy_agency.html
Without the actual article I was looking for there were a few about Bitcoin mining consuming more than Ireland does in a year: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/27/bitcoin-mining-consumes-electricity-ireland
I would guess 80% energy usage of Canada is a tad biggerr than Ireland's use.
Perhaps the standby issue needs as much attention - both are wasting far too much of the world's energy.
I guess there's absolutely nothing stopping websites from selling ad space on their websites directly and managing them internally, missing out on the ad networks and all the privacy invasive cross tracking and jars full of cookies tracking all number of things that people are increasingly fed up with. Not to mention the slow downs and resource hogging with the current script after script after script.
Granted it won't be as powerful as far as targetting is concerned but there's no reason it can't easily monitor click throughs against impressions and whereever the links go off to can easily check their performance also.
Seems a better solution to me, back to basics and missing out any number of middle men in the ad networks. Granted a lot of potential job losses there but who will be sad about the death of some of those marketing companies..
In Bitcoin's case, its value is its scarcity which is the value of Gold and arguably the false value of Diamonds. Its value is also its use to easily transfer from one individual or corporation to another whilst being securable. It has nothing to do with the cost spent mining, that's the other way round, if a Bitcoin was valued at $10 (if we need to always go back and think in $ which is probably America's greatest success), the amount people will be willing to spend mining would be drastically reduced.
I guess you can't make electronic circuits, eat or live in dollars (other currencies are available) and since they aren't backed by Gold any more then what is it that you are keeping in your bank, wallet or spending?
What is the cost of mining minerals such as gold or extracting oil? Or even the cost to create an iPhone or Android phone? Or the computers that we all love, let alone powering the racks and racks of cloud servers. The arguments used against mining bitcoin are ignored for practically every other thing in our society.
And how fungible are precious metals across the globe? Can you easily make payments on a huge number of websites for anything you wish to buy with either Gold, Silver, Oil, a few cars or a House? Any argument for classing Bitcoin as currency should be straightforward if viewed with no prejudices and ignoring its astronomic rise in value.
Granted there are a lot of crypto coins (almost all?) that are ponzi schemes but I don't believe in any way that Bitcoin is. It's a very cleverly thought out solution to create a hardened digital currency and has actually scaled impressively well to date with teething problems that you'll be naive to suggest hasn't also occurred with Swift or aany other 'official' non cash based method.
If you have any idea just how the s*** show of our banking system created the crash of 2008 and are continuing to create a debt bubble of epic proportions today, with consequences potentially worse than anything we saw before and how the regualtors were powerless to do anything then and as powerless now even after 2008. I think an interest in a decentralized currency like Bitcoin and SOME of the off shoots are in the best interest of much of the population.
Add to that the scary precedence of India's push for a cashless society and it becomes even more important in my eyes.
Genuine question, what are we to do about future chips and computers? Accept the software slow downs and then future price rises with 'meltdown proof' future releases? Accept that all these chips are still all on the market unchanged and being sold at normal prices to the largely unsuspecting public? Accept that probably none of the legal cases will result in success for anyone but Intel at a great cost to many. I was planning a new purchase but with all the Management Engine stuff and now Meltdown / Spectre and with Crypto mining ramping prices up, I have no idea when I will actually buy one.
How much has Meltdown and Spectre diverted all attention from ME and PSP and their potential links and usage by NSA and friends?? Tin foil hat squarely on, is this perfect for them? Is this also a great time to use Meltdown + Spectre to create a new version of ME in another undetected guise without the currently released ways to semi-debilitate ME.
Tin foil hat back off, what can we do anyway. And yep probably all a bit of ludicrous conspiracy-ising, it's a real shame there isn't more competition now it's been made so clear how a connected pc / mac can be remotely controlled with practically no way to stop it. I don't know enough about it all and from almost everything I've read on the matter not many other people do either.
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