Posts by Christoph

Not a burden?

"Hockey said most online sellers are already collecting consumption tax in their home markets, so asking them to do the same for export sales shouldn't be seen as a nasty compliance burden."

Online companies will have to comply with every detail of every tax in every country. And keep up to date with all changes. And this is not a burden? Maybe not for the likes of Amazon, but for anyone smaller it's a huge problem. And they already know about this - tiny kitchen table businesses now have to comply with all the different EU VAT regs, or go via a centralised shop which is nearly as bad.

Is this lock at least as usable as a physical lock if the power (or data connection?) goes?

Is this lock at least as resistant to hacking as the best physical locks?

I strongly suspect that the answer to both is likely to be 'No'.

Three Pillars

They've just thoroughly trashed all Three Pillars for small businesses selling digital goods, with the new VAT regulations. And now they're thinking about planning to discuss ways to fix that? Someone running a micro-business from their kitchen table can't wait while they all meet up to chat about it over champagne!

"Writing software for something that doesn't exist. Uh, what?"

Nothing new. The first ever program was written by Ada Lovelace for a machine that still doesn't exist.

"with a warrant, of course"

ROFL!

How long would that last? Perhaps a few months, before they 1> start doing it anyway and 2> Start agitating for it to be legal "or you're aiding terrorists and paedophiles!!!"

And none of them consider that there are places outside the USA. How the hell are US tech companies supposed to sell stuff abroad which is specifically known to be backdoored by the US government?

Unwarranted search and seizure

Search maybe. The provision on seizure is dead. The US police can rob anyone of money and valuables at whim, and the victim must then jump through myriad bureaucratic hoops to try to prove that it wasn't drug money.

Non ex transverso sed deorsum

Google got so big because its search algorithms were much better than those of its competitors.

It has to keep tweaking those algorithms because people keep trying to game the system to get their ranking higher.

If those algorithms are made public they would be handing the crown jewels of their company to their competitors, and telling everybody how to tweak their web pages to distort the search results.

I presume that the web sites of all french political parties give clear links to the web sites of their rivals?

"cashiers using the POS system to browse malicious websites or open phishing emails"

Why does a POS system need to have a browser installed? Or any software not directly related to running the system?

How does this affect micro-businesses?

Tiny one-person on-line businesses have already been hammered by the new VAT regulations.

Some of them have been forced to avoid having to comply with ridiculously onerous regulations by giving up all sales to the EU outside their own country.

Are they now to be obliged to sell all over the EU, and therefore be subject to the new regulations? Most of them simply cannot do this - it's not difficult, it's flat-out impossible.

Is this the first time this has happened, or just the first time it's been noticed?

I've seen worse

There was a desktop search program called 'Personal Librarian' that 'encrypted' its files with a Caesar cypher.

Try here for the video.

What are the failure modes?

The more densely you store energy the nastier it is when it escapes, regardless of the technology. But it's even nastier if it escapes fast.

A lithium battery in your pocket can catch fire, and dump its energy in a few minutes.

A supercapacitor in your pocket can go FA-ZAPP!

So what will be enough power?

OK, where will they stop?

Suppose we give them yet more powers that they demand. Will that finally satisfy them?

Or will they be back yet again the next day demanding even more powers because <latest scare story!!!!!!!!>

They have proved over and over again that they will never be satisfied. They will always want more power.

And what has it got us in return? Are we more protected? Are we safer? Have they got any real evidence and not more of the ludicrously blown up 'Terror Threat Foiled!' stories?

Way back in the 60s you could walk down the street without a plod being able to stop and search you because he was feeling bored. Then they got the new powers because OMG Drug Dealers! So now we have a much worse drug problem, less civil liberties, and lots of young and minority people who hate the police because they can't walk down a public road without being stopped and having to prove their innocence.

Will the police stand up in public and tell us, clearly and specifically, AT WHAT POINT WILL THEY STOP?

MD5 is not the right hash to use for passwords. It's designed to be quick. For passwords you should use a slower hash that increases the cost of breaking it.

I can see one possible downside. If you can't tell at a glance which women are booth babes, will that make salesdroids even more likely to assume that any female attendee is a booth babe and ignore them?

.ping?

And the gTLD .ring has been bought by a company based in Mordor.

Capricious?

Huge amounts of detailed discussion and comments from huge numbers of people, giving clear reasons why it's a good idea, and they describe the decision as 'capricious'?

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

We know our system is secure because nobody points out any faults.

If anyone does point out any faults, we sue them.

See? Nobody points out any faults.

What could possibly go wrong?

Reminds me of the story of a machine at a certain Establishment in Berkshire that was programmed to run Space Invaders.

It printed out a screen in ASCII (or EBCDIC?) characters, waited for user input of Left, Right or Fire, then printed the next screen.

As immortalised in Dave Langford's "The Leaky Establishment" - but taken from an actual event.

Stop sniggering at the back there.

And start guffawing.

There's even a song about it.

Balloon animals anyone? Can they tie it into a Little Green Man?

"Interestingly, he agreed that the structure of the web addresses was probably back-to-front and may have been better if the top-level domain - like dot-com - came at the start rather than the end of a URL"

Which is the way that the UK network did work until they had to change round to match the way the USA did it when the networks merged.

It makes far more sense, but what can you do when you have to work with people who even have their dates inside out?

You don't need to live to be 500

If they can just get a few extra years of life, in that time the technology will get better and you can get a few more years. Long before you reach age 500, it will be possible to live for much longer than 500 years. Just keep going.

And one reason - if we can get lifespans up to a few thousand years, the galaxy is ours. We can cope with the time taken for interstellar journeys.