Posts by Gaz Davidson 34 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Sep 2007
Better than this, just mandate a cookie policy being listed on a privacy page and force people to support the x-do-not-track header. Anything else is already covered by the Data Protection Act.
Now every site in the UK is going to have these annoying popup bars and companies will just move their e-commerce elsewhere.
No, you can't do that. If you controlled 100% of the hashing power then you still wouldn't be able to generate invalid blocks, that is, blocks that contain transactions that weren't signed by private key of the address where they reside.
If you owned the vast majority of the network's hashing power then you could perform double spend attacks by starting at block A, processing some fraudulent transaction in block B, chaining blocks C to G on the end to make it look trustworthy (most people accept after 6 blocks; an hour). Then you go back to block A and create a forked B,C,D,E,F,G,H chain that denies the transaction ever existed. The proof-of-work method would show your new fork as being the longest and therefore the most trustworthy, thus you can spend the coins a second time.
Bonus points for anyone who can calculate how many bots you'd need to perform a double-spend attack like this with a 95% success rate. I'm guessing it's a lot!
Unlike Facebook who actually takes complete ownership of all data you pump into their system, this supports XFN and RSS and politely links back to the original posts. It moves the status of a social network from data owning monopoly to data whoring aggregator, which IMO is far better.
So Google can now tie my email account to my blog posts, tweets and YouTube videos, nothing new there. They know who my friends are, nothing new there either. Where we once had privacy by obscurity we now have none, but we gain a rich social layer to the public Internet which was not there before and will continue growing not just at Google HQ but throughout the semantic web.
I'd be quite happy for my profile here to have an XFN link back to my blog, so I can share this, and other interesting topics like it with my contacts without purposely spamming them.
When you learn to use a piece of software your brain grows into its inverse, the end result is that you can't use that part of your brain without paying the license holders. If you learn to use some complicated piece of software illegally, then you're essentially handing your brain over rather than getting something for free. Choose open source for the sake of your own long-term freedom.
IMO society shouldn't even grant copyrights to binaries, they will be woth nothing when the copyright finally expires. If it isn't published with source code then it shouldn't be protected by copyright law.
Everyone, get on OpenStreetMap.org now, click the edit tab and attach a postcode tag to your road. Then go to freethepostcode.org and add your postcode to that map too.
Finally, if you own a business directory made by users, please get in touch with me. I'd like to extract those postcodes and inject them into OSM for the good of future generations.
gaz at bitplane dot net
Does anyone here own a significant database of businesses, such as a business directory, which was created by users?
If so, if you could somehow give me access to your addresses (no business name or house number, just street name to postal code), I'll import this data into OpenStreetMap.org by matching the road names and tagging them with the correct postal code, then use the waypoint data to get the average GPS locations of the postal codes too, possibly even importing that back into Free The Postcode! (if they accept the CC license)
Your business will be cited as a source in OpenStreetMap's database, if that provides some incentive. Even if it's only a small database, it could be used as a proof of concept for a free import process.
If we all work together, we can free those postcodes. If you think you can help then please get in touch, you can contact me gaz at bitplane dot net.
Even the VC Express editions without a resource compiler or profiler urinate all over Xcode from a great height.
It is buggy, often needing a restart to update settings. It has a terrible GUI, taking a scroll and two clicks to see the reason why your build just failed, the icon metaphors are all broken, not something you'd expect from apple; it's as ugly a monster as Borland Builder. It has a naff editor which doesn't recognise preprocessor macros and sticks Mac line endings all over the place, wrecking your diffs. The debugger GUI is terrible, the documentation is fragmented, code completion is lacking and frustrating, the project tree is unintuitive. Its only saving grace is the multi-level, searchable settings dialog.
I agree with Charlie, it's on par with VC6 or Dev-C++, it's a decade behind VC9 or Eclipse, and a long way behind CodeBlocks.
I cringed every time the media call this unauthorized access phone hacking or tapping, stop this nonsense forthwith.
Logging in to someone's account with their password is not hacking. It's not breaking and entering if you have a key, it's trespass.
Listening to someone's messages is not phone tapping. Watching your home made porno isn't the same as secretly taping you having sex.
"...with many codecs available on the internet the correct licences aren't being paid at all and that is why they are free? Is this right?"
Yes it is. If the people who own the copyright on those codecs want them to be free, then it is. Last time I checked, software algorithms were explicitly not patentable under UK law.
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