Posts by John H Woods
955 posts • joined Wednesday 14th November 2007 11:44 GMT
No context ...
... no meaning. For instance, when compared to the previous generation, it is much more likely that someone in this age group knows that they have a terminal condition - or one, such as alzheimers, that could ruin their children's lives. Compared to the previous generation, they didn't have the bizarrely life-affirming experience of surviving the war. Or maybe, as suggested by Joe K, they don't fear going to hell - just living through it.
It's your phone ...
... when the contract ends. That's why I upvoted velv.
On a related note...
... I was in a cafe once where a woman was breastfeeding. I overheard some people tutting and muttering, and shortly afterwards they called over a waitress. They loudly whispered their complaint and the waitress said "I am sure the manager will be able to assist". The manager came out and sympathetically listened to their wibble - I was just about to add my $0.02 when he signalled to the waitress - who whipped away their half-eaten meals - and asked them to leave: 'I'm afraid I don't allow offensive behaviour in my cafe, please don't come back'. The rest of us cheered!
Talking of SONY Niche Products ...
... I bought a GPS add-on for my PSP. Very nice it was too. SONY are still selling these - but without any indication that they never have, and apparently never will, update the maps.
Consumers v. Corporations
When we exercise our market freedoms, we are guilty of shopping at the 'grey market'. When corporation offshore much of their production and/or services - they are being efficient. I normally reject the term 'grey market' because of exactly this - there's nothing grey about it at all, just that the corporations don't want you to enjoy the freedoms that they do.
Posted in Taxman rejects 'lie detector' tech
May I be one of hundreds ...
... to point out that there is already an almost 100% foolproof way of determining whether a politician is lying ... ?
if it's got four legs and isn't a chair
google title if necessary
Why not
What's wrong with the number 3.101? or
3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286208998628034825342117067982148086513282306647093844609550582231725359408128481117450284102701938521105559644622948954930381964428810975665933446128475648233786783165271201909145648566923460348610454326648213393607260249141273724587006606315588174881520920962829254091715364367892590360011330530548820466521384146951941511609?
homonyms?
Yes. Crusader Hills is a homonym.
Erm, excuse me ...
... half say they aren't making as much money as they expected, and half say they are, with half of those making more than they expected? A few more datapoints with a better quantification of 'less' and 'more' and we'd probably have a bloody normal distribution.
The figures appear to show, contrary to what is claimed, that the Android market is almost exactly as profitable - however much that is - as most developers expected it to be.
In other news, nearly half of the entries in our local village fair underestimated the weight of the cow, showing that people have difficulties understanding just how big a cow is.
I'm going to stop typing now and go to bed before I give into the CAPS LOCK KEY ...
Those figures are deliberately distorted...
When they talk about non-sex crimes, they quote the ratio of convictions to charges. When they talk about sex crimes, they quote the ration of convictions to allegations. If it were 'scored' like burglary, the rape conviction rate would be nearly 60% not 6%. And, ironically, the widespread quoting of the 6% figure probably discourages legitimate complaints, as women believe they won't get justice - and it may even encourage certain kinds of men to think they can get away with it.
So PACK IT IN. Thanks.
Answer: 1
I made a complaint to the ASA about an advert - I think it was also BT - that seemed to suggest that with the ISPs software it was safe to let children browse unsupervised. I believe mine was the only complaint and they still investigated. The whole process was amazingly clear and transparent. These people really are one of the best consumer protection organisations.
We need better measurements:
The difference between 20Mb/s and 4Mb/s is, in the majority of domestic situations, only relevant for large downloads or multiple users (e.g. family members) on the same connection.
How about a meaningful measurement? Video channels would be a good measure - a video channel being, say, the delivery of std def video with less than 5 stutters per hour, or 5 seconds total stutter per hour. Then I could order '3 video channel' internet for my family. Any period when a connection is not capable of '1 channel' could reasonably be considered not to be broadband at all, just some sort of low speed, high jitter, always on connection. For instance, my ISP - SKY - struggles to keep a single 256Kbps radio channel going --- it is almost as bad as DAB between 16:00 and 20:00.
You are correct ...
... in believing that it is incorrect to say 'data is tangible'. However, data ARE tangible.
Blighty leads the way ...
Everyone wants a coalition now!
Confusion ...
The thing the banana fruits grow on is, technically, a herbacious plant rather than a tree. Is this what you were thinking of?
I'm not mocking your religious beliefs ....
... but it's amazing how many 'upright citizens' seem to be so glib about the possibility of a convicted offender being sexually assaulted in prison - you present it almost as if you consider it part and parcel of the punishment, as if it were officially sanctioned.
From simple induction, I conclude that the rest of your beliefs and opinions are likely to be, shall we say, uninformative.
There's nothing wrong with wanting to ....
.... it's feeling that you can just help yourself which is frankly perverse.
ASA will respond to a single complaint...
... none of their deliberation usually takes into account how many people complained, just how justified the complaints are.
They've missed some...
Has a smartphone - easy anonymous browsing - terrorist
Has an ancient payg phone - easy anonynmous calls - terrorist
Has children - good cover for being a terrorist
Childless - obviously a terrorist
Has a heavily encrypted wifi network - terrorist
Has no encryption on wifi network - terrorist
Goes to the mosque - terrorist
Goes to the church - good cover for being a terrorist
Pretends not to have a religion - terrorist
Basically - is not one of us, where 'us' starts off as 'white' and then narrows all the way down to 'member of ACPO' as things progress.
Posted in Nothing succeeds like XSS
Why can't scripts be signed?
We've all got a store of trusted certificates ... so surely some of the most crucial xss (e.g. verified by visa) could be signed? Or maybe we could have a list of secure hashes of scripts that we think can be trusted? The latter could work with a collaborative approach - so NS could build up white, black and grey lists of script hashes.
Just thinking out loud - before downvoting please remember my wife's horse kicked me in the head :-)
Don't think this is new ...
... in fact it's the Internet that helps us find out that these things are false.
My ol' dad, who was a sociable type, knew people who had every different kind of expertise under the sun. He observed that anyone remotely knowledgeable about subject X would tell you that most of what was written about X in the press was completely false. As this seemed to be true for a very large set of X, he concluded that most of what was written in the press was completely false.
In the old days when stupid stuff like this was printed, it was much less easy to challenge it.
Posted in Beeb deploys ISS as unit of measurement
Errm...
"The ever-expanding fistfull of worthless shrapnel in my pocket that's making me limp?"
All that loose change causes erectile dysfunction?
Malamanteau!
http://xkcd.com/739/
A one second web search will tell you the answer :-)
... first result in my Google search is http://www.trickcyclists.co.uk "Trickcyclists.co.uk is a free resource for psychiatry trainees who are studying for their membership of the Royal College of Psychiatrists."
Although it does seem to be very much British slang ...
What did you mean ...
... by 'heads off' ?
British English is Homeopathic, remember!
a bit of a low-level windows expert = 'an absolute genius'
I had to explain this to a Portuguese friend whose spoken English was perfect but who was nevertheless prone to giving away his non-native origins by saying things like 'Those Mercedes soft-tops are fantastically expensive'. What he should have said, of course is '... a little steep' or 'a tad pricey'. Oh and not waved his hands about quite so much, either!
Attention all commentards!
Stop with the 'I guess I can't tell her I'm an astronaut' crap already. It is quite legal in the UK to tell any lies you want to get a girl into bed - EXCEPT to pretend that the act is not sexual. It's not that hard to understand is it?
Example:
Legal: 'I'll teach you how to use Ubuntu if you sleep with me'
Illegal: 'This is how you start Ubuntu'
Let's not have any more BS about whether mentally ill / gullible girls 'deserve it' or not or whether there is any doubt about what you can say to get your end away.
You didn't think it was necessary ...
... to do any research before making that post? Truecrypt is volume encryption, not file encryption - it produces a file which can be mounted as a volume,
Say you create a TC volume of 20GB. It is 20GB when created, and remains 20GB as you fill it up. If you create an inner container, the volume is still 20GB. Empty space in a TC volume is encrypted. There's no way - short of cryptanalysis - of determining whether the 'empty space' in a TrueCrypt volume is empty or whether it holds an inner volume.
The best an attacker can do, unless they can break the encryption, is to consider a 25% full drive suspiciously empty, or the files within suspiciously innocent. Or torture the keyholder until they are sure. The way we are going I'm not sure the latter is necessarily ruled out.
I don't see why, for the volumes of cases cited, it wasn't possible to trojan their PCs and catch them in the act. Or install bugs in their PCs, or houses, to either capture the offending material, or the passwords to the containers. If an offence is not serious enough to merit such an approach, I don't think it's serious enough to qualify for RIPA measures over refusal to decrypt.
That's why it's now Emmerdale Farm^H^H^H^H
3276 = FARM (T9)
Posted in The Register comment guidelines 2010
Try *TO* rein in your pedantry
... only joking, of course :-)
Posted in Daily Mail promotes 'the new Betamax'
You might drive up and down ...
... but main roads are pretty well served. Try driving anywhere off a main road in, say, warwickshire, and your radio will go quiet.
Posted in Labour clings to the good old days
Agreed ...
... and if you are looking for resolutions to technical problems a quick search usually drags up ancient pages whose solutions have long been superceded. Ubuntu forums, I'm looking at you ---
Posted in eBay whacked with giant patent suit
Prize ...
... subtlest attempt to call the moderatrix 'honey'
.. wow ... i remember that ...
... it was before you could google the answers!
Agreed ...
... and why *IS* series link still missing?
I thought they also detected ...
... beta radiation?
Tawkon ...
... I'm not up on particle physics, but is this the one that carries the sucker wave? Or does it mediate the reality distortion field?
Posted in Scroogle's future in doubt
Understood ...
... there doesn't seem to be a way to make these more lightweight interfaces return a whole block of 100 results at once. The size of 100 'obama' results is nearly 130KB and the links are about 94KB - so about 25% froth (see icon).
So you're looking at 40GB/day in and probably at least 30GB/day out at those sorts of volumes. That's a lot of bandwidth to be runing pro-bono.
Great to hear back from you here though, I think I speak for quite a few people in thanking you for making Scroogle available (again, see icon) - it was great while it lasted.
... John
PS: I can't speak for perl, python or php - but I would have thought any decent language could cope with the proxy work - Smalltalk certainly could :-) - it's always going to be the bandwidth that's a problem - the HTML isn't as easy to parse as it should be - but it certainly isn't hard.
Steve Jobs ...
... the new Gerald Ratner
Suggestion
Instead of a hard limit at a round number of dollars or pounds, why not use a probabilistic algorithm so that transfers under a specified amount are less likely to be reported but there is no widely known amount that is guaranteed to be under the radar?
Posted in Scroogle's future in doubt
google scrapers - just don't say who you are ...
You can send a plain old HTTP GET to www.google.co.uk and get about 36KB of HTML back - *IF* you don't bother sending a user agent string (that's why you get a 403 Forbidden if you try to use wget).
Lose the ~15KB before the <ol> tag that starts the list and the ~12KB that follows the </ol> which finishes it.
That leaves you with 10KB containing your 10 line items from the original results page. Easy enough to parse, but I'm not sure you even need to - you can just pass it all back as a piece of fairly clean html.
...JHW
I used a bit of Smalltalk (what else?) to test it. Sorry I don't have time to set up a webserver to demo it, I'm a bit pressed for time this w/e.
query := 'el+reg'.
rStream := (HttpClient get: 'http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=',query) value byteSource contents readStream.
rStream upToAll: '<ol>' asByteArray. "discard"
result := rStream upToAll: '</ol>' asByteArray.
Another vote for Hugin
This is amazing - a super piece of software with a lot of options than can still be used in a minute. All I have to do is put my camera on burst mode, and walk in a circle. Then it stitches them together - beautifully. Great for making skydAomes - this one took 10 seconds to photograph, and less than 10 minutes to process it into a 360 panorama: http://i762.photobucket.com/albums/xx263/jhwoods/skydome/BD2_crop_2.jpg.
JHW
(Suggestion - the Ubuntu articles are welcome - but maybe you should consider an 'eyecandy' one - people are usually blown away when they see my GUI - and it's only a few simple steps to create something fantastic - rotating desktop cube with skydome, transition effects, widgets and a nice dock)
Deception to get sex...
... is perfectly legal in the UK *unless* the sexual act is presented as a non-sexual act. So, it is not sexual assault if you get it by pretending to be a millionaire rock star - or even by offering to pay and then doing a runner. But it *is* sexual assualt if you pretend that the act has no sexual purpose - like medical treatment - as in this case.
A UK doctor therefore commits an offence if he inserts something during the course of an examination that is actually for his sexual gratification - but not if he gets consent by claiming to be a top plastic surgeon who is going to give his conquest a free tummy tuck.
So advice for geeks: "I'll fix your computer and give you free support for a year" is perfectly ok, even if you don't follow through; whereas "THIS will fix your computer" is a crime. HTH.
Hey ...
... I never realised there was rollover text. Thanks!
Posted in Fake IBM playboy pleads guilty
log10 error
That's got to be £36 per day. Or I'm in the wrong job. Or my wife's not telling me something.
are you somehow ...
... married to *my* wife?
Received 2 mins after match by text ...
The England Team went to visit an orphanage in South Africa this morning. "It's so good to put a smile on the faces of people with no hope, constantly struggling and facing the impossible" - said Jamal Omboto, aged 6.
Patents don't last forever* ...
... why should copyrights? Artistic work is more useful than scientific, technical and industrial work? I don't think so.
* forever = ages
