Posts by P. Lee

Re: @YetAnotherLocksmith ... It makes sense, but...

>He started shooting at the police so no, they couldn't take the chance to wait him out.

Why not? They had a bomb handy to blow him up but nothing slightly less lethal? Has no-one developed a weapon system where you can calibrate the range and hit someone in body armour hard enough to knock them down without killing them?

Perhaps getting to the point where we are bombing criminals is an indicator that someone's been watching too much robocop? It might have been effective this time, but what happens next time, when the gunman knows high might be on the bad end of a bombing run? Does he start carrying sticks of dynamite to lob at the robots... or the police hiding around the corner?

At least the prospect of a trial where he can "say his piece" has the chance of calming the situation rather than forcing him to go down all guns blazing.

Re: And of course the funny thing is...

>Each and every one of us - even members of parliament - is the descendent of a long line of ancestors, each and every one of whom chose to follow an interest in sex instead of denying it.

Pro-sex and pro-porn are not the same thing. Had those ancestors spent their time watching sex instead of having it, "we would not be."

There is also a tendency for porn to spoil relationships which would otherwise involve sex. There are plenty of good reasons for this. Firstly, if you spend lots of time with someone more attractive, younger and better endowed than your partner, the likelihood one of you is going to be dis-satisfied. It doesn't even have to be "lots of time." In most relationships involving sex there is usually an expectation of exclusivity. The person on screen might only be pretending to like their partner, but if you choose to deliberately increase your (very real) arousal level with someone who doesn't even know you exist, instead of your partner, it indicates something about how you regard sex with your partner.

There are problems with impulse control. Delayed gratification isn't only something that's useful in financial planning!

There's something really rather sad about taking something which is wonderful bonding activity for two and turning it into an activity for a lonely one. Perhaps if the porn was turned off, and the company of real people (rather than MMOs or facebook) was worked on or some books which enhance cognitive processes were read, things might be better. Perhaps the attitudes and expectations expressed in porn mislead viewers as to what relationships are all about. Viewers may not expect sex when they walk through the door, but making sex "the main thing" between men and women might not be a winning attitude to acquire.

I'm not saying these exact issues are always in play, or the uk.gov is right in what they are doing, but its best not to see stupid government policy and conclude that the opposite is actually a good thing. Its one thing to give people the freedom to do something stupid, its another to endorse it as "good." We give far too much credence to the law as defining what is good and we expend far too much legislative effort in making sure that the law only allows what is "good." That just leads to sledgehammer-nut (ouch!) situations, taking the law where it should not go and increasing legal intolerance for diversity.

Re: HAHAHA

>I'd say it was written by Tay, but there's no mention of a final solution.

Hahaha!

The first rule of Windows 10 Club...

Re: it is spelt

>Cardassian

You've missed the point - that's someone's IP and there might be legal battles if you try to flog a line of toy spaceships.

"Keep control of your IP." Thus saith the Oracle. /IT angle

Re: Bollocks

>[The PM] does not have any of the powers required to prepare that notice so it is legally binding.

Is that relevant?

The question is whether the rest of the EU decides article 50 has been invoked and from their point of view, a simple statement is sufficient. Assuming they think its been done, it happens automatically. I don't see how what the UK courts think is relevant or what they could do - impose their will on the French and the Germans? What would they do? Interfere with internal UK affairs? I think we just had a referendum about that.

Re: Dodgy is as Dodgy does..

I can't believe your comment is so far down the forum.

I thought it was immediatly obvious: tax goes in, party funds come out.

Re: Surely she could have come up with a better example for Apple

>It's all about subscriptions inside the app and payments. This applies to all apps on the App Store.

I think that's the point of the article isn't it? The platform forces everyone to play by Apple's rules which favour (surprise!) Apple.

This isn't a problem in a competitive industry, but Warren's point is that consolidation means that it isn't a competitive industry any more and what would otherwise be a legitimate position is not acceptable in a monopoly (or duopoly) environment.

Think of it like "indirect discrimination." e.g. All policemen must be at least 5'10'' The rule applies to everyone equally, is born of good intentions (a strong physical street presence), and doesn't explicitly forbid women from joining up, but it is structured in such a way that effectively bars them from service and brings imbalance to the force.

None of this is news to most of us, but the network lock-in effect we have built in IT today is unprecedented and is not something the market appears to correct. Big Tech has saturated its market and cloud/rental is its solution to continued profits. This strategy should be questioned as it kills competition in new ways we haven't had to deal with before.

Re: The current plan does not matter

>The best plan I have is for 350 MPs to ignore the current party politics and vote a motion that explicitly forbids the Government from invoking Article 50.

The "Leave Campaign" was always a fringe thing in terms of party politics - the vast majority of the mainstream politicians didn't want it. Those that did want it were Boris (buffoon with no eye on the top job in the Tory party), May (mostly hated), Gove (mostly hated). Farage - UKIPs *only* MP. Hardly a compelling team of winners.

Despite that, most of the electorate did want it, however. What you are suggesting is that politicians ignore the the explicitly declared will of the people, because they (or perhaps you) know better.

Perhaps the fact that UKIP only had one MP despite over half the turnout voting "leave" is an indication of just how strongly the political elite have manipulated the system so that it serves only their purposes. How could all the major parties be so out of touch with the electorate, unless they have an effective way to insulate themselves from them? Perhaps if the parties allowed more "loyal opposition" they might have been able to see where the people are and negotiate for an EU more in line with what people are willing to accept, rather than pressing ahead with their own agendas.

The parties are supposed to represent the people. They've stopped doing that and when one small chink in the armour was spotted, the electorate took a wedge and jammed it in hard. It isn't just Westminster either. If MEPs represented the people and created an EU the people wanted, we wouldn't be in this situation.

Meanwhile Project Fear continues apace. Why try to bury bad news when you can blame it on Brexit? Of course we can't blame "the people" so we'll blame "party politics," "the politicians" or "the campaign." While its true that revolutions are generally ugly, even Obama is lining up Brexit as the cause of worldwide economic disaster. I guess there will be no let-up, with all bad things blamed on it. Obama, Vodaphone and everyone else... all their problems will not stem from years of financial mismanagement, mountains of debt and poor judgment, nope, its because England didn't want to play nice with France. Your racism has doomed us all! How dare you not let other countries write your laws!

There doesn't need to be a conspiracy to cause this situation, I suspect that its merely that politicians and much of society are so focused and dedicated to winning their arguments, that they cannot hear or admit any alternative explanations or plans to the ones they wish to put forward. How can you keep a grip on reality when "what is effective" trumps "what is true"?

My view on the "cheap labour" issue is a little different. Those who want to go for the cheapest things will do so, be it to eastern Europe or India and their products will reflect that quality. More significantly, how did our economy get so out of sync with the rest of the world? If it was due to EU protectionism was that ever a sustainable position or would it require ever more subsidy to maintain? If we go it alone, should we replace EU protectionism with UK protectionism or will that damage us in the long term? Would reducing household debt be a more effective way to raise the standard of living than to prevent some wage competition?

Re: Within the next 18 months there will be a massive Android infection

>Why buy a new phone, when firmware flashing is enough?

Indeed, why is there no during-boot button combination which drops you into a really simple rom which gives you the option of deleting the disk volume and starting from scratch or downloading from either a fixed or user-specified URL

Ah yes, they would be the urge manufacturers have to get you to buy a new phone rather than upgrade your existing one. That's the root of the problem with not being able to do clean installs. Its a vendor problem. It would be so easy to do a fresh install, sign into your store and pick which apps you'd like to re-install and which ones you think might be dodgy.

Re: On the plus side...

So many contradictory statements, no arguments, no evidence... no meaning.

>Duty Free for anyone travelling between the UK and the EU...

or they might just do the sensible things and say, "carry on as before," pretty much as is the response in every single area.

Hello Bong? I've got your nephew Ryan here. He says he works for you.

Re: From the 27

>Germans strongly back EU membership, oppose referendum - poll

So you're saying the Germans are so strongly in favour of EU membership that they oppose being asked if they are in favour of the EU membership?

Perhaps their leaders have more sense than Cameron had, then to *actually* ask people what they wanted.

>>"New .NET Core workloads can now be easily moved from a Windows Server environment to Red Hat Enterprise Linux"

>God knows why anyone would want to though.

Licensing.

MS knows that its licenses costs scare off cloud-provider-services who have no desire to track licenses on deployments or cramp their instance spin-ups.

MS also knows that if all the cloud devs ditch them, they'll be left with very little at the server end.

But the sentiment is correct. You really wouldn't do this. If you're MS-based product isn't going to make you money on an MS-hosted platform, you need to re-think your plans.

Re: CHange

>War, war war.

Unlike the rest of the world, of course.

Re: Be careful...

+1

It isn't about traffic prioritisation, its about service provider prioritisation.

Net Neut is an anti-corruption, pro-competition play.

Just to show how this works out with zero-rating, my wife signed up to Presto (free trial for one month) unaware that its a foxtel service, zero rated on Telstra (her phone) but not via our ADSL link (Westnet).

I've had to cancel it as she used 3/5 of our monthly allowance in a week.

The service ran more smoothly over tethered phone link than it did over the ADSL. So if I'm a new VoD startup, how do I compete with Foxtel's cosy arrangement with Telstra?

Re: brexit government?

>"The most obvious outcome of this referendum is some dithering followed by another referendum."

Indeed, the powers that be did not get the answer they wanted so they'll keep asking until they get the result they want.

See "Ireland."

It isn't a resounding mandate from the whole country to leave. But it is a larger mandate than the one to stay. Suggesting that "people didn't really mean it so we can ignore it" shows utter contempt for democracy. This is a far clearer expression of views on this precise subject than any general election platform. Far clearer a mandate than, for example, the use of fox-hunting as a pretense to make the Lords more compliant with the Executive.

Who exactly in the EU is funding our science? Would that be the Greeks or the Spanish, the Danish or Dutch? The Germans or the Poles perhaps? Where is this money coming from? Maybe the French are funding our science.

Another question is "Why is the EU funding our science?" If we aren't a net beneficiary or the EU has a no impact on our income, why are they holding the purse strings for science? Does it improve trade? Is it required for the organisation of a single market, the free movement of goods, services and people? Or is it just a power grab so the EU institution gets some PR for "giving funding to science?"

While the downturn in economics always leads to unpleasant racist politics, I suspect most people who voted "leave" don't dislike Europe or Europeans, what they dislike is the institution of the European Union which is about as "white middle-aged male" as you can get, and its the usual supporters of "white middle-aged-male" institutions who have had enough. Having said that, you can be sure that if Westminster does ignore or seek to revise the referendum results, you're going to see a major swing away from the middle of politics and its going to get ugly.

Cameron has turned out to be a coward. You don't ask people what they want, and when they don't choose what you want, refuse to follow through. "Would you like Coke or Pepsi? Ah, you didn't choose Coke (I like Coke), maybe the next waiter can help you. No, no-one else can serve you until I go off shift, but I'm going to stay here for a bit." Even if the waiter is going off-shift and the drink won't arrive for a while and is delivered by someone else, we do expect the order to be placed. Cameron forgets he was elected to serve us, not get huffy when he doesn't get his way.

As far as the economy is concerned, its already shot. There is recession coming all over the world due to the debt the neo-Keynesians have racked up. All that "government debt" that's piling up despite several governments mouthing of the word "austerity" actually belongs to the people. We are the ones who will have to pay it off. Our standard of living will plummet as inflation climbs. I suspect that as in the 80's the UK will take the hit first, but we'll also come out of it first. If we manage to pay off our debt in ten years, I'd be pleased with that result.

Actually, the Lords (despite apparent disconnectedness from the real world) have historically done a pretty good job of holding the executive to account.

Sadly, too good a job. The government screamed "constitutional crisis" over the best way to kill farm pests and Labour used that like WMD in Iraq - it was a lie that allowed them to push their agenda over the line to the point where it couldn't be undone. The Lords was "reformed" to make its members more beholden to the executive so now it reflects the executive's agenda and is thus even more pointless (though so much more "representative") than before. Whatever you think about fox-hunting, (and no, I don't support it) it was a naked power grab by the executive to shut down those who had consistently caused trouble for it by undoing government legislative spin.

Do you think the current Met Commissioner would make a statement like this? Of course not - its more than his job's worth. It seems that in today's society, no-one can stand to have anyone disagree with them. There is no arguing of a case, no hint of "you're right, we got that bit wrong so we'll update our policy," there isn't even, "the downside to what we're doing is a,b,c, but the benefits are x,y,z which I believe are worth it," only the incessant sound-bites and slogans attempting to drown out all voices of opposition. Failing that, we'll undermine them, regardless of whether they have anything useful to add to the conversation.

Winning and being seen to be winning, rather than doing the right thing seems to be the objective.

Re: Numerology?

>I live in the real world.

and in the real world we never do funny things in a business context... such as identifying java files with the bytes CAFEBABE or name our new pager "less" because "less is more"? Did WWI really end at the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month by accident or was there some symmetry to the time that was appealing?

These companies didn't get where they are by relying on superstition. Why shouldn't they have a little fun and a sense of humour?

Re: "Don't do business in China" - Carl Icahn

> the general trend is to shut down foreign presence in China. Get the message???

... as if the West doesn't do the same. We are more subtle with it and we done it for so long there is little need for additional legal protections.

We call them, "industries of particular national importance" and we don't outright ban imports (that would be "in restraint of trade") we use tax money to subsidise our local industry so it can undercut them furriners.

That's how we end up with corn mountains in the US, wine and milk lakes in the EU. It leads to the ungodly sight of food either being destroyed while much of the world is starving or the food being dumped on the world market - tax money from the rich nations destroying the markets and livelihoods of the poor around the world who might otherwise make a living growing crops.

The US corn over-production is what drives the HFCS market leading to really cheap sugar which makes its way into so much food, resulting in ill-health.

Does anyone (apart from Apple) really have a problem with what the Chinese are doing? Isn't "making decisions that the market wouldn't make" the role of government? Having seen Apple's attacks on Samsung, they might come to the conclusion that Apple manipulate the legal and patent system to increase their super-normal profits and it is therefore quite legitimate to rebalance the playing field to help with local industry develop.

Or it might just be corruption. Which is bad, and our governments would never take money from lobbyists which may influence their decisions, would they?

Re: That linked article is nonsense

>For what it's worth I agree that Islamacists would be much less of a problem without the illegal meddling of powerful states (including the Saudis) in the affairs of third world countries.

For what its worth, they aren't really a problem anyway.

Spectacular though it is, the damage they cause is so minuscule that it isn't worth worrying about. I wish my own government would stop trying to do things to keep me safe - they are the ones causing the damage. Compare terrorist deaths with car accidents, "normal" murders and suicides - each of them are far more significant... but less politically useful to those in power in the West.

The correct response is to look after those affected and work to turn your enemies into friends.

Re: The obligatory question

Where is my OS redesign?

How many of the binaries on my system does Word need access to? Why does the installer (rather than Word) not designate a data scratch area for each application instance and why doesn't the OS check with me if the application wants to read/write outside of this area?

Applications should not have free-run of user-space data. Any programs not installed officially should get severely sandboxed. Data can be copied in but not out. This is the OS responsibility, not Norton's nor VMware's. Or how about having properly installed applications register their mime types? The OS then checks the mime types of files being accessed outside of the application-allocated area and kills access to non-relevant files outside of the app's designated data area. Pwnd word can't crypto locker excel files. Flash in a browser gets flv files in its cache area- big whoop.

I get that this is different from using things like sort, grep and wc, but those are kicked off from shell. Who gives shell access to a browser or spreadsheet? If software installation has a security manifest, you should be able to add either containers with different rights, or add a filtered, virtualised FS to the application installation.

How about an auto versioning FS (hello vms) with purging only by elevated privilege. It helps crypto locker be less profitable.

OS vendors need to get their act together, especially those with high exposure.

Kill the value in pwning applications and the attacks go away.

I might even pay for that kind of thing.

Re: So 93% FTTP is the right build mix

That depends on the application.

If everyone in your family wants to connect / stream 4k home movies over 5G, then FTTP sounds like a great plan.

How about if I want to (shock horror) set up my own website for my home business or even just run a home-based remote desktop at a reasonable speed?

Think what opportunities open up for ISPs to provide cloud services before all that traffic hits their transit links.

These infrastructure projects are about getting things right for the next 10-20 years. Look at the last 10-20 and see what kind of increases you need to plan for. It isn't even just about the speed. Whatever speed you want to run at, fibre is going to do it, and you will have to roll it out at some point anyway.

Re: That is all well and good but...

And it does appear to be a whitelist per site, not per plugin-type.

So, do you trust flash from the BBC but would like to avoid drive-bys from tpb.ru? Not a problem.

Re: Hmmm. What to do.

Surely the point is that the larger the democracy, the less responsive it is to the people and the more prone to corruption it is, with a single leverage point and vast influence.

Dealing with lots of smaller nations makes it much harder to pull off a fait accompli, more likely that someone will throw a patent out and that may lead to the patent being over-turned, even where it has already been granted.

That's before we go anywhere near the point that the EU is not a sovereign country and there is no particular reason to have one law. If we mess up our patent system, at least we don't have to try to convince the whole of Europe that we need to fix it - we can do it ourselves, and we can do so more easily on our own than if we have to drag the the rest of the EU with us.

You may like the patent laws, but what happens when you've given sovereignty away and you have to deal with French-style labour laws? "Ever closer union," remember? Unfortunately, democracy scales badly. We don't have it for its own sake, we have it to allow self-determination, but law is mostly about quashing differences. The more differences you have with the fewer differences in laws, the more quashing is taking place.

When people feel persistently thwarted they do things like electing Donald Trump, or Le Pen, or support Robespierre.

Re: So it's boring and mainstream?

>Can we go back to actual problems now?

Such as, "Where can I find an OS which doesn't require vendors' cloud services?"

Re: ren virus.csv virus.exe

Real hardcore hackers get their victim to use their own magnet, needle and steady hand... to remove their own building's hardcore.

Re: Yes, you don't

Banks using a cloud without geographical redundancy?

Hmmm

Re: More Baron Frankensteins-

>Fewer robber barons!

I suspect that is the point.

It isn't the increased efficiency that is objected to, it is the massive centralisation and consolidation which is being accompanied by new and innovative ways to bleed the customer, including taking features away to increase lock-in (MS VM translator) or to add them back later as an "upgrade" (Galaxy S7), finding ways of totally removing the financial benefits of improvements in hardware by hiking the software license costs (per core); vendors deliberately killing their own software industry to allow them to hawk their products "as a service" or to tie them to hardware which mysteriously has a totally fictitious end-of-life not driven by support costs, but by the need to make the customer purchase the whole thing again - rental by another name.

I like FLOSS - its the only "vendor" not deliberately making things worse for the customer.

Re: That's yet another point caused by needless complexity

>So you want Google to wall up their garden with higher walls than Apple?

I think what might be desirable to el reg's audience are FLOSS repos for android.

You can keep your trivia apps, I just want vlc or mplayer, amarok firefox, kmail etc on a phone.

I trust those guys more than I trust google.

Alternatively a system of shims between apps and resources: a GPS fuzzer/usage verifier, a camera/mic use verifier, a contact data filter.

Re: What is this article trying to say?

"Break fast, fix quickly" is not something the business sponsors involved with systems running cobol want to hear.

Agile might be fine for new things which don't have to work, but when your software supports a product which has moved from the innovation to exploitation phase of business usage, its time to protect the investment.

Too much innovation, not enough exploitation -> never turn a profit from your work

Too much exploitation, not enough innovation -> be overtaken by innovators

The trick is to keep the balance.

/credit -> TED