Posts by Chris Totten

Report into MP bugging: MP was bugged, no laws broken

I don't get it

Sorry for being an ignorant Yank. But I don't understand where the uproar is. Here in the states if you visit someone in prison/jail/etc, you will be recorded, no ifs or buts about it. Client-Lawyer privilege is another matter and they have non-monitored rooms for that. BUT, the lawyer in question actually has to tell the cops he is there for a privileged meeting. This policy pre-dates the whole terrorist scare bit on the premise that prison inmates don't have any rights (at least while in prison)... I imagine somewhere there is a similar policy/legal precedent in the UK. I don't see how the visitor being an MP should somehow change the rules.

Chris Pine steps into Kirk's shoes

Missing the obvious

Seems like a few seemingly knowledgeable folks are missing the obvious problem.

Uhura and Sulu were both Lieutenants, Chekov was an Ensign. None of which would be at the Academy at the same as Kirk, Scotty or Bones who would all be 10+ years into their careers at the start of the series.

Even given the 60's-ish sexism of the show, there is no reason to believe Uhura would stay a Lieutenant for over 10 years while others are promoted around her then get promoted for The Motion Picture (Lt. Commander) and Star Trek II (Commander) within the next few years (timeline wise).

Now, given the false premise of the movie, I doubt there is any way to possibly make a halfway decent Trek movie out of it. The others (including Nemesis) were at least consistent. (Even Enterprise is consistent within the ST Universe even if it rewrites/fills in some of the history). Taking character that are widely different in age and station and making them suddenly equals at the Academy is beyond "rewriting" or "filling in". It seems Greg Berman is in need of something to do.

Warez land man 30 months in prison

They lost

Back when DVDs were first coming out and the MPAA was freaking out about possible copyright infringement, an hacker was quoted as saying "For every one of you there are 16 million of us. Who do you think is gonna win?"

In the same article, a software developer was quoted as telling the MPAA "Get over it."

It would seem they didn't listen...

MS tweaks Vista with minor updates

Patches

Those patches have caused me a great amount of grief over the last 2 days. While I realize the VNC is not officially compatible with Vista, it does work in user-mode. Due to firewall restrictions at work, I need to use port 3389 which is the RDC port. Since only Business and Ultimate versions of Vista allow remote connections (and I am not going to go pay to upgrade just for that) I was using it to remote into my system from work. Suddenly after patching, I can no longer access port 3389 on my system. VNC will connect on any other port, just not 3389. Nowhere is there anything in any documentation stating that MS was gonna close that port nor is there any place I can re-enable it. Remove the patches, works fine. There is no reason to have undocumented "features" like this, and that is the reason I don't like Vista. Too many things to control/degrade my hardware done by MS in the name of security or performance, none of which actually work.