Posts by John H Woods
955 posts • joined Wednesday 14th November 2007 11:44 GMT
Re: Yawn.
98% of the population. FFS it is MOBILE TECHNOLOGY. They should be forced to say what % of geographical area it covers, or what % of the road network. The number of people who can use it whilst in their house or their office is surely completely irrelevant.
Let's do better
I'm sure a few of us old-timer Reg readers can come up with something actually based on the Enigma machine itself - shall we see if we can give it a try? The obvious template would be something like Mastermind (the board game, not the quiz show) where you try to refine your guess of the settings of the code wheels by receiving incomplete feedback about how close you were with the previous guess.
Re: typical for android
"... people who need the help and attention that Scope can give them"
Would you care to say what this means? Second thoughts, don't bother.
Re: MMC
'Must be able to refrain from making sexually suggestive remarks and/or advances.'
Surely it's easy enough to start disciplinary proceedings against employees who cannot show their colleagues this simple courtesy?
Solution
Text: 'are you free for a call' and call if the answer comes back 'yes'
@MondoMan
MondoMan, just wanted to thank you for taking the time to make your comment, thank you very much.
Re: Whitehall has also allocated £1.5m for new research into suicide prevention.....
"Our country is trully shagged, and will continue to be so until our priorities realign with the people not the companies who employ our retired or fired politicians."
THIS
Re: 18+
As a parent, I absolutely endorse your statement: my kids, my responsibility.
Re: UK Judge
DS1, I absolutely agree, hence my point above.
Absolute #1 priority in dealing with crime is to protect the innocent. Where that is best served by trying to rehabilitate criminals rather than focussing primarily on punishing them, we have to hold our noses, swallow hard, and do that --- however much we want revenge.
Re: Aussie Judges talk sense
Amazingly in the Brave==Good case, something said by the judge, arguably shorn of important context, was echoed loudly in all British media, nearly all of whom apparently forgot to say what the sentence was, deliberately or otherwise giving the (wrong) impression that the guy got off without punishment.
Now, we can debate whether the sentence was appropriate, or even whether the judge should have included those particular words in his judgment, but the fact that the case was reported both widely AND incompletely, seems to indicate that the majority of the media are more concerned with whipping up a response than conveying information.
Re: Netherlands
Manalo, thanks for the citation. Now that I have read it, however, I believe that it is not relevant to this discussion as, according to the article you cite, the reason the search was denied is that there was insufficient evidence as to the precise location.
This could easily be because the item is located somewhere where imprecision in GPS indicates multiple suspect dwellings. I'm certainly not happy to have my house raided because my neighbour is suspected of having stolen goods, and I'm sure he feels the same way.
In the case described in the article, the iPAD was clearly identified by the owner as being in a *particular* property. It seems to me that both the positive decision in this case and the negative decision in the Dutch case are therefore sensible judicial responses to the circumstances.
Re: Netherlands
Before we get too deep into theorizing about the Netherlands decision, I think I'm going to call 'citation required'.
Googling for 'gps tracking search warrant refused' and similar terms with the quoted phrase "too drastic a measure"' turns up the OPs message as the top result but I can't see anything that looks like the story he's talking about anywhere in the first few pages.
Re: I doubt a thief was that smart.
+1 for Vagabondo. As they say, give a man a gun, and he can rob a bank; give a man a bank, and he can rob the world.
Whilst we're doing pie-in-the-sky ....
... how about energy recovery systems?
Catch incoming aircraft in huge spring-loaded, ratcheted catapult, providing must of the energy required to launch the next one.
If we are going to have a massive push towards better connectivity...
... there should be at least some emphasis on wireless and mobile provision. Surely this is where much of the future of internet connectivity lies?
> Gas 2.2p, Nuclear 2.3p, Coal 2.5p, Onshore wind 5.4p, Offshore wind 7.2p
> With those figures in mind I say lets get fracking.
I say let's get building nukes. And I consider myself a 'green'.
Posted in Ten digital radios to suit all budgets
Anecdotal, I know, but for a while I had a car that had a DAB radio in it. I got slightly better coverage (in rural Warwickshire), and what sounded to me like much better quality, by plugging in my '3' Android and using TuneIn radio (or Jango, or iPlayer).
I just can't see how the poor quality and apparently poor coverage of DAB can continue to be justified, especially given the continued complaints about portable DAB equipment is consuming batteries at a huge rate. I'm certainly never going to buy one.
Human narrator
>> 'as you read, your book is narrated to you'
It's better than using synthetic speech, I suppose, as that turns 'reading' 50 Shades of Grey into getting an inordinately lengthy obscene phone from Professor Stephen Hawking.
Re: Maple Syrup?
You have never tasted real maple syrup.
As a committed antitheist, I am perfectly aware that the only weakness with my view that there is absolutely no divine being is that this stuff comes out of frickin trees!
Re: BBC Sport
Yes indeed. I've often thought that instead of threatening us with detector vans, fines and prison times, all the BBC has to do to get everyone to willingly cough up the licence fee is to devote one night a month to the kind of programming we'd get if they didn't have it.
Re: Watching "live" by PAYG
"I also suspect that the very last thing the BBC wants is to have their income linked to ratings."
I think you'll find that most people who support the concept of a public service broadcaster would rather it stuck to its remit (to inform, educate and entertain - probably in that order) than chase ratings.
There is a 100% effective filter ...
... or near enough. The kids call it 'POS' - Parent over Shoulder. The solution they are talking about is also called 'POS' by anyone with 0.01 clue-rating, but it stands for something else.
Re: If.
If Jimbo Wales is against it, then I'm for it.
I hear he quite likes breathing. Do feel free to stop imitating him in this regard any time you wish.
You snoop on everything...
... we encrypt everything.
I can see this bill being self defeating. People like me, who remember both the cold war and the reasons for it, are not going to accept living in the surveillance society that we risked a nuclear Armageddon to avoid.
When you finally break the >kilobit encryption on my communications, you will find it is just email to my friends complaining about my job, my wife's horse, and the weather. When you break it on my laptop, all you will find is bank statements and correspondence. And you will wish in vain for the return to the world where you could focus your attention on the strongly encrypted stuff as the likely location of interesting material.
Posted in Toothbrush fixes ISS’ stuck bolt
Resourcefulness
It's this kind of resourcefulness that makes me think we should just bloody well get on and go to Mars and cope as best we can when we get there. It's the history of human evolution and migration - go somewhere and try to survive.
Re: Backdoors have a reason
Service button -- you should have patented that :-)
Re: Hmmmmm
@AC - water=power unless you collect it from rainfall.
Re: ...for those running as root
"Do you have any idea how many Ubuntu users I catch runnign as root? It gives me a sad."
Even a few is surprising - on a default Ubuntu install, you can't login or su root.
Re: @john Woods. Obligation to arrest.
@Ian Michael Gumby
Ian, you reply to my message with a list of things with which I do not necessarily disagree - but I can only assume that it is implicit in your reply that you think other countries *would* think it unreasonable for us to tell the Swedes that it is now pretty much between them and Ecuador.
The Swedes want him, Ecuador has him. OK, we want him for the crime of bail-jumping, but that is surely secondary to Sweden's wanting him on sexual offence charges, or the US wanting him for espionage (if indeed they do).
We have legislation that allows us to enter an Embassy (by suddenly making it a former Embassy) but we could argue we created that legislation for a very specific purpose, and that, unless JA shoots somebody from inside the building, circumstances are now very different.
Of course it can be argued that he should never have been given bail, but that milk is now spilt. What if he had run off to France? Would it be our responsibility to go get him from there, or would it become France's problem? I fully realise that the Ecuador embassy is still UK soil, but I am hypothesizing a situation where it becomes principally the problem of other countries and I want to see at which point, if any, you will agree with me.
So, yet again, I ask which countries do you think would object to us telling the Swedes that it is now between them and Ecuador? And how reasonable would those objections be? Once more I should emphasize that I don't care how much of a tosser JA is, or how serious the alleged offences are. What I want is a discussion about which countries would think, "hold on, you have special circumstances legislation to enter an Embassy, why don't you use them" rather than "OK, we understand you are respecting the Vienna convention, we'll have to deal with it ourselves".
If we can say it is somebody else's problem, we simultaneously deny JA media attention; free up our police; and refrain from doing anything that other countries could (mis)interpret as hostile. The downside is just that people might say, "wow the UK is more relaxed about bail jumping than we thought" I honestly can't see any bigger downside than that - can you enlighten me?
Posted in Ten 15in notebooks for under 400 quid
For 400, I'd expect to buy computers for 2 kids, you could buy two Lenovo R400s for example. I have always found the Lenovo's extremely tough, as well - probably the first consideration if the kids in question are very much of the Y-chromosome variety.
Camera shy?
If I point a camera at either my daughter or wife, both of whom I consider to be reasonably easy on the eye, they will immediately look away and protest. My sons, like normal teenage boys, look uncomfortable and stilted. My niece, who is a traffic-stopping beauty, will always insist she is not correctly dressed or correctly made up and therefore will avoid the camera at all costs.
As someone who could be kindly described as 'no oil painting' I don't really care, but then the problem is the other way round - who wants to look at me when I'm talking?
I think the fundamental problem with video calling is psychological, not technological. Watch people talking to each other - they hardly ever look at each other for the entire duration of the conversation - something which video calling almost forces you to do. For instance, in a company meeting, the thing people want to see is the screen of the presenter, not the presenter themselves.
Next time you are on the phone, imagine you (and quite possibly your surroundings) are on camera for the duration of the call. It soon becomes clear that however good video calling gets, it will only be really suitable for certain contexts - lovers, grandparents and far-away grandkids, and special occaisions.
Anyone who really wants to video call can already do it now. I very much doubt that making it easier or more seamless will have anything more than a marginal effect on its uptake.
Re: Obligation to arrest.
My question is who would think it unreasonable for Sweden, in that hypothetical situation, to claim they had tried everything they were obliged to try. Therefore the answer that the case officer would think "what an arrogant little twat" is not really an answer to the question I posed, however accurate it may be as a statement.
I think even if the fugitive were a convicted war criminal, many countries would, when that fugitive entered a foreign embassy and was given refuge, be happy to tell the country that issued the EAW that there was nothing further they could do, and that the issuing country should now take it up with the country to whom the embassy belongs.
Not only would that free up our police and save us money, but it would deprive Assange of the 'oxygen of publicity' as it is unlikely our parochial media would give much of a toss regarding a dispute between Ecuador and Sweden. I can't see that our (UK) reputation would be damaged much by saying this is no longer our problem.
Re: Red herring design
http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/how-wings-really-work/
Don't you need...
... fifty thousand 64MB sticks?
Downvoter is ...
... Barry Kripke
Obligation to arrest.
Let's say a British Citizen in Sweden is required for questioning. We send them an EAW, and they detain the suspect. Unfortunately, during extradition proceedings, suspect seeks immunity in Stockholm within the embassy of some South American country.
Question. Is this still Sweden's problem? I suspect they would claim that they had tried everything they were obliged to try, and it was now out of their hands and between Britain and that other Country. Would anybody think that was unreasonable?
Re: a rise, by any other name
Can't see what's wrong with +ve and -ve just because you don't like them. In fact I reckon pos. and neg. are ambiguous, so I would avoid them.
The problem is ALWAYS the PEOPLE.
And not just the insufficiently expert technical people -- but the management who think that those insufficiently expert technical people are good value for money; that training and testing are unnecessary costs; and that all of the more expensive technicians are simply a waste of money.
Experienced Java devs can create very good Java. In fact experienced devs can, given a reasonable amount of time to get up to speed, create decent OO code in any OO language. I should imagine at least some of the reason for the continued vulnerability of the JVM is a continuing emphasis on "cost containment" on the teams responsible.
Re: France
"Implicitly the speed in urban areas and road works is 50kph, no signs needed, every one knows."
Same rule in the UK: If you can see street lighting, and you cannot see contraindication signs, the speed limit is 30mph.
Re: While we're at it ...
Sorry if I got this wrong - couldn't get it to run on Nexus 7 and googling suggested that only older versions of Android worked.
99% agree
... it was hardly in the public interest to unmask Nightjack - on the contrary, it was in the public interest for him to be able to carry on blogging.
I have to disagree 1% because of the Bubba comment. I realise it's a joke but I think we need to distance ourselves from the idea that we give people custodial sentences in the expectation (let alone hope) that they will be bullied or even sexually assaulted by other inmates. That's a tad uncivilized IMHO.
Who thinks ...
... we should have sent will.i.am in person?
While we're at it ...
Sky GO - available on compatible Android Devices. Sounds like you might need an up-to-date device?
You'd be completely wrong - if you have a version of Android less than a couple of years old, you can forget it.
Posted in UK ISPs crippled by undersea cable snap
Re: Don't worry it's just a recursive error.
You guys probably know this already, but I have just discovered what happens if you google 'recursion'
Re: Salad
Point of order. More than 2 tbps of salad makes one's parmo a vegetarian one.
