Posts by Wayland Sothcott

@amanfromMars

I find your marshon perspective helpful in this case. I was speaking to someone today who sees the same things as me but comes to a different answer. He sees the human rights act as a friend to the terrorists and stopping the government doing it's job. But he still sees the government failing in it's job and attacking the wrong people. I see the human rights act as helping protect us from a government that is going wrong. Clearly he has more faith in the way the government can use it's powers for good than I do.

I don't mind Microsoft developing standards...

actually I do mind. They are not really 'standards'. Just a way of taking over control. Windows may be one of the biggest computer success stories because it's a standard, but the Internet and the Web are far bigger and they are open standards. Silverlight might be another Windows success but it won't be another HTML type success.

If SVG is an open standard that can do Flash and Silverlight type things then that's what we should be using.

Global Warming causes Climate Change

You can already see the effects of Global Warming because it causes Climate Change which can be either warmer or cooler depending on if it gets warmer or cooler. In effect the carbon tax is working when things stay the same.

Remember Y2K. I single handedly fixed the whole Y2K problem and what thanks do I get? "Oh there was no problem". No you dummies, that's because I fixed it now give me my $100 billion.

Most people are new to the Internet

Due to the rapid and continuing growth in the number of Internet users most people have not been using the Internet very long. They are unacustomed to it's 'wild west' ways. They think it's like TV and that it's all safe and regulated. They have heard of viruses and spys and are only too willing to take advice about the dangers and how to protect themselves. However they are so gullible that they will take advice that pops up on their computer screen. They think the adverts on a website are endorsed by the site owners when in fact they could be on the same subject as the site but total opposite of what the site is about.

WISP people like the high end

Get on a couple of towers and you have a 20km link at 100Mbits if you can afford the gear.

Well duh?!

Ofcourse you use your monopoly to force people to buy your greatest product.

I have set up quite a few Vista computers now as well as Apple and Linux. I would say that XP just works, as does Linux and Apple. The only one causing problems is Vista. I struggle with it's WiFi capability. I struggle with users installing some silly bonus disk supplied by Microsoft that makes it run really slow.

I cannot see what advantage Vista offers over XP, it all seems to be disadvantages. I know that once they make important programs that can't run on XP then Vista will have an advantage based on XP's contrived disadvantage.

Currently the only way you can get people to switch to such a pointless (from the users perspective) product is to do it for them. Vista is crap but not worth my time and money to switch my users to XP. I just sell them more RAM and they never know the difference. Honestly most don't care what OS is running and those that complain usually don't know it's because they hate Vista (what's vista?).

Will they share the spectrum map

When Ofcom scan the UK on our behalf then they should make the data available. I can understand that commercial companies may have this data and can't be expected to share it. However if Ofcom are doing it on our behalf I think it's wrong for them to sell it commerially.

Why do I think they will do this? Well I was working with the Ministry of Agreculture, Food and Fisheries at one time. They were publishing a CD-ROM with data about crop storage and I was helping with putting it onto CD. They said they would have to charge £15 per CD to cover costs. I said why not put it up as a website then it costs people nothing and probably cost you only a few quid per month.

They rejected that because they were trying to make money. No one bought their CD so they made no money. And no one saw the data which had cost quite a lot to compile. A little bit more money spent could have put the data to good use for the people of the UK.

These government agencies forget who they work for.

By the way, Radio pirates say they have guns. The police won't help them protect their business so they have to do so themselves. On the whole they use the spectrum sensibly but there will always be people who deliberately interfere with others radio signals.

Carrot and Stick

Notice how the carrot is that the merchant is less liable for loss since that's accepted by the bank if you use this. So it's the merchants who push this on the buyers, very smart. The stick is that buyers will have their card blocked if they refuse. At the same time it does not really cut down on fraud, just introduces a new weakness. This can mean that there are a lot of calls to have cards unblocked and new passwords issued. And the phishing site mimic of the varification screen.

Partly Political Broadcast

It's only partly propaganda in that the first serious could have come out badly. Somehow the makers seemed to know what the Home Office was looking for without them even asking. Ofcom won't find a problem. There won't be a memo that says "could you cut out the bits where the PCSO look bad and keep in the bits that make them look good"

It's used to dupe us and it's paid for out of our own money. Well DUH! Ofcourse it is, that's what government does.

They are switching to PCSO's because they are cheaper. This means you also get people who want to be police even if the money is not good and they are not up to being real police. People say plastic police don't have enough power, expect that to change soon, and it won't be a good thing. Like Lollipop ladies all sorts of people will pop up in flouresant jackets, knighted with slightly more power than your average person. Like a first aid course there will be a 'Community Assistance Officer' course where road sweepers can raise their profile for the good of their community. Neighbourhood watch are getting special powers to nick people for speeding, Parish Councils are recieving speed gun licences. All of these things are going to need positive spin on TV.

We are becoming a nation of jumped up plastic police.

Sir Bonar Neville Kingdom

Sir Bonar is very knowledgable on the governments ID policy. The problem is that the policy is so farcical that it reflects badly on Sir Bonar. Government secrets from now on are to be carried in a bright yellow breifcase and there will be a serious repremand if someone loses one.

You really should listen to the podcast.

Skype is not ours

Skype belongs to a company who don't publish how it works. So you don't really know if it has wire tap access points built in.

Anything going through your sound card could be tapped at the point that it's just audio.

consumables

Electricity is a comodity but by changing the shape of the plug and requiring odd voltages they can make it a specilist product and charge more. The charger market is similar to the ink cartridge market. Ink being a liquid will fit into any shaped container. That's why they don't put a screw cap on the ink cartridge because then it would be too easy to refill. By making it a special shape they can take something inherantly compatible like ink and make it incompatible.

The 3rd party makers of these items are simply trying to undo these incompatibilitys and make a profit.

The consumer would be much better off if ink was sold in bottles and there were say three power plugs, 5V, 12V and 24V, the latter being high power. Mini USB for 5V, 2.1mm for 12V and a fatter one for 24V. It would then be up to the device to do any further regulation.

Employee parking now a hocky pitch

Just mark out the carpark as a hocky pitch but let people park on it.

Death to LIfe Insurance

If you take the risk and doubt out of insurace then it's not insurance it's fixed. You would not bet on something if you knew the outcome would not be in your favour.

I think if the insurance companies correctly adjust your premium according to acurate predictions of your risk then you may comclude that if they will insure you then don't bother and if they won't insure you then you need it. They will have to be very careful how they handle this imormation because without any risk why would someone bother with insurance.

I suspect that having your DNA sequence on a memory stick won't be as valuable as people are hoping. Trying to determine what it all means will take years.

Medication

If he was paranoid then he was able to imagine all sorts of threats that he had little proof of. This type of mind would work well to tackle malcious software attacks.

The problem with his medication was probably that it messed with his abilities. SSRI's are given so you don't care, not so you feel happy. Most people care too much about life to kill themselves, people on SSRI's don't care so killing themselves is no big deal. I don't know how long it takes to come off SSRI's.

It's a real shame.

Math, I tried an iPhone..

..and found it instantly usable.

I was setting it up so the customer could surf the web with WiFi.

It was abundantly clear that this phone was easy to use. That buttons and keys are cumbersom. The graphics power is used to seamlessly scale webpages and everthing more around naturally.

Yes the WiFi could have worked better, but then I was using a crap router. The lack of 3G was an obvious omision, but then they don't have 3G in California so that's understandable that they forgot. The other problem was the O2 contract.

Read the forums

Plenty of El reg members in the forums. You can tell by the writing styles. And also they admit it here http://www.mylifemyid.org/node/293

No positive comments for National ID, except spin questions from the Ops. They are very creepy in a H.A.L sort of way. "Dave, I sense you uncomfortable with National ID" This was noted by one of the posters.

Pete Comley http://www.virtualsurveys.com/about/team/research/biographies/, I sense you feel your National ID properganda website is backfiring badly. May I suggest you claim that the site has been infiltrated by Register readers who are also probably over 25 years?

Horns of a dilemma

The difference between Street View and Closed Circuit TV is that anyone can see the photos google take of a public place but in CCTV only the owners of the CCTV get to see.

It is a public place so what you can see is what you can photograph.

When in public we do what is acceptable in public so there should be no problem with a photograph of it.

However a photograph has a power beyond that of what one person can see. A photograph or video is a record which can be viewed by millions of people who weren't on the street at the time. It can also be looked at live or historically by machine and in ways not yet invented.

Simple phototography and TV has radically changed in a way which changes our lives. A camera is now a far more powerful tool than ever before. Googles street photography will be a powerful tool that will be used for good and evil just as google maps and google earth are.

Just be glad of the techology in your own hands.

@Can anyone spot the missing link ...

Jimbo,

I think you may be under the pleasent illusion that this mess we call labour governance is just incompetance and bad luck.

What has happened here is that a problem is being used to push through GM, not to solve the problem but to get GM through. The PM knows the problem cannot be solved by GM, but he needs a reason to promote GM and to look like he is doing something. There is a lot of GM food that we can't bring into Europe, allow GM and then we can have GM soya. Everyone here has better suggestions except perhaps for the people who want a drastic population reduction. Those people seem to me to be on the PM's side.

There is a food crisis brewing. Food now costs more, the weather has caused a lot of problems.

Make way for carbon tax€

Yeah, reduce state tax, increase EU tax. Then the EU can become more powerfull. Anyway VAT is a tax on the consumer.

Solar panels 60 watts

For reasonable money you can by 60 watt solar cells. With a suitable switchmode charging circuit they will kick 5 amps into a 12 volt battery. Yes you need reasonably bright sunlight to make it happen. I have used one of these with lead acid battery system for months and it will keep a 500mA load runing constantly day and night.

I would think that any car would save fuel if fitted with one of these.

The Prius is a good platform for new automotive technologies. Those electric motors will get better, so will the batterys and you have a car you can use. People will take the electric motors and batterys and build an all electric car, or maybe one with a very small petrol motor.

This business about the parts coming from all over the world, well DUH, don't parts always do that? If I want the best LCD screen I go to Korea, best batteries Belgum? I dunno, they come from where they come from.

@Highlander and the 10k Word Document

I think there is still a place for a medium to put a Word document on. Floppies which were 1.44MB now look small in capacity and cluncky. However CDs are too physically large and are also easy to damage.

The USB stick although universal are a bit costly. What we lack is a small cheap flash universal flash storage. We have dozens of candidates, all those camera memory cards. It would be nice to have a memory card that cost 25p that could hold say 32MB. But oh no, everything has to cost £15 and to keep the price there they just keep increasing the capacity.

So we will be recieving 10k word documents on 400GB disks just as we today recieve 10k word documents on 700MB CDs