Posts by JonP 229 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Apr 2008
...most of these would make REALLY bad films. The bits that make these books special (and i'll admit to only having read maybe 60% of them ) just wouldn't translate to the 'big screen'.... saying that i think Altered Carbon would (and the sequels) so it got my vote despite the fact it's not one of the better books on the list...
Paris - gotta be an obvious casting for Hari Seldon!
... and Nokia are quite good at that.
The other side of all this is that Microsoft NEED to get a decent mobile device out there - the current trend seems to be towards mobile computing and they could do worse than Nokia for hardware.
This could be like you say, a long slow suicide - but equally it could be the thing that makes them both.
Probably the first thing an aggrieved suspect (which probably makes up most of the people these guys go after) does is make a complaint - "help help i'm being oppressed/beaten/setup by fascists/racists" etc. And doubtless they all have to be recorded these days regardless of how unfounded they might be. So maybe it is all legit.
It should be noted that i am writing this of my own free will, and am not being coerced in anyway at all. (sorry, how do you spell that? c-o-e-r-c-e-d? OK got it)
As mentioned in the article, it wasn't this that cause the crisis.
"How the bankers "make" the money is by doing it thousands of times a second so it all buids up and this would stop this." WHY do you want to stop this?!?!? OK the whole banking system is a big farce built on imaginary money, but this bit actually "works".
"The banks by doing this are taking the money out of our economy i.e. us and giving us nothing in return." - well no. The bank makes a profit - their staff get paid, their shareholders get a dividend, and the bank has money to invest in new business etc.
For now all *I'd* do (& IANAB) is fix the system so that the last crisis can't happen again (or can easily be mitigated) and then step back and think before doing anything else. Knee-jerk reactions/laws/regulations never really work. & Yeah i know it's how the current (UK) government operates but hey...
one of the limitiations of binary based electronics is how fast you can switch between "1" & "0" voltage levels and still accurately tell what you had (against noise). I imagine any gain from using ternary bits would be lost in speed, plus the associated logic would need to be more complex - almost getting towards old analogue electronics!
still, nice to see the Chinese trying to develop new stuff.
"If you need a secure method, surely you would have a more secured centralised SQL server for the police force to access confidential data from?" -
you don't mean like a "database"?! I have reservations about the amount of information the state maybe keeping on me in various databases, but i always assumed (somewhere in the back of my mind) that they were actual *databases*, only accessible by certain people that had been vetted and trained to use them. Not some poxy spreadsheet that gets cc'd to all and sundry.
damage confidence in the police?! - damage confidence in the whole damned system more like...
I think the titanium guy might have a valid point - as long as the apps correctly use the Apple APIs, they'll probably be OK. This is probably what the new SDK clause was really about - his argument sounds plausible/sensible anyway.
In any case how would apple be able to tell an app was written using a translator (barring any headers it might add) and not straight in Objective C or C++ etc? (OK, if the app doesn't use the APIs i suppose that might give it away...)
Yeah i remember that Portillo documentary - as i recall they tried different gasses (on pigs?) and found some gasses (nitrogen etc) although effective caused the pigs to become stressed due to suffocating (i.e. it would be inhumane). I think they settled on argon? But as you said the pro-death penalty guy said it was too easy - but that might have just been an extreme opinion for the sake of 'good TV'.
Yeah, we should all use passwords instead(!) <ahem>
4 digits is OK for a PIN - it's not like you can stand at the ATM/checkout and try and brute force it.
an 'easy' way round this problem is to make customers give their cards to the cashier who then inserts the card into the reader. The customer then enters the PIN on a separate keypad and the card is returned at the end of the transaction.
let's face it there's never going to be a secure way of doing this. However at least now banks (should!!) now have to admit that chip & PIN is not secure as they made out and take some of the liability themeselves.
I agree the internet is currently a 'better place' since Google arrived, but you must be a little concerned at the dominance/influence they have. In the end they're just another company. You know, like Microsoft. Big companies need to be periodically attacked to 'keep them honest', if the attack is baseless it'll be ignored, if not then maybe things can be improved.
And lets face it having a motto "Don't be evil" is just asking for it really!
' "geoengineering"- artificially modifying the climate - must be considered as a countermeasure to global warming...'
yeah, given the reasons for global warming seem change every other week how would anyone actually know for certain how to "geoengineer" anything - they could potentially (read: probably) make things 'worse' (relative to this weeks version of the apocalypse). It seems there's still far too much uncertainty to take any positive action.
Just (coincidentally) installed Debian 5.0.0 Lenny (really only because there was that Reg article about it recently and it stuck in my mind) on an old-ish (P4) laptop - never used Linux before (a bit of Unix way-back), so i thought i'd give it a try.
and bugger me sideways if it wasn't disgustingly easy. On top of that it managed to install a dual-boot (using GRUB - iircc) with windows XP (that was already installed) and it all seems to work fine with minimal effort (OK I skim read the install manual one lunchtime) Not really had much of a play yet, but am quite impressed so far...
just to be pedantic - the civil war was pretty much the government against the king (Charles I) who was busy taxing the arse out of the country so he could go to war, rather than the british people against the government - they/we just got dragged in as cannon fodder ...
anyway this whole thing sounds like the government trying to justify ID cards, most people realise all the talk of ID being used to combat terrorism is BS. After that they're just very expensive cards with pictures on.
not really - the kill switch is an indiscriminate write action to (remotely) disable a handset (or SIM). This seems to be more like a read action to see what's on the phone, analysis of what applications are installed on the phone, followed (potentially) by another command to initiate deletion of specific applications from your phone.
Also, extrapolating wildly, if google can execute remote commands on your phone then presumably so could anyone else...
You're right, but all the games companies have to do is convince a judge that it would be 'actual profit', and then cite that a number of people downloaded it as evidence. Saying that the downloaders wouldn't have bought it and so wouldn't have contributed to 'actual profit' is supposition - how do you prove it?
Let's face it if they took any positive action to remove the infection they'd likely end up doing it to some government department's computer and "cause" >$5000 worth of damage etc. ... and even if this is unlikely there'll be someone in that 25,000 who objects and decides to cause trouble ...
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