Posts by Gav 682 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Apr 2007
So... having all these sites tagged and easy to locate through google, SourceForge has now told everyone how to access them. They don't say they fixed the file permissions, so until the owners of the sites do anything they are effectively wide-open to anyone.
Perhaps not a good idea. Hmm?
"To those who ask "why should they", the answer is simple: it would save time and cost less money"
I don't think you follow how the law works. This special shortcut, saving time and money in this case, would become a precedent that could be used to challenge all future extraditions. Pretty soon anyone charged with any crime at all in Sweden could flee to the UK, and then demand that a condition of their return is that they are not allowed to be charged for anything else that they may, or may not have, done in the past.
No legal system is going to grant that privilege to anyone.
"No, that should be a punishment reserved for Child mollesters and rapists..."
Did your mother never teach that two wrongs don't make a right?
Rape is a horrible crime. Rape as a implicit punishment included with jail time is inhuman, has no place in any civilised society and makes everyone involved accomplices. Barely better than the criminal themselves. Is that the person you want to be?
I don't follow "Bubba"'s involvement in this. He's not mentioned in any legislation or penal system I know of, so I'm unclear how prosecuting him could ever ensure he shares a cell with Assange.
You're not saying he *deserves* institutionalised rape, I hope? That would be illegal, and you claim to be very concerned about laws and justice.
It's not rocket science people. If you do not want people to take a copy of your website content then do not put it on a publicly accessible website. It's how browsers work. They have caches, they take copies.
Copyright has nothing to do with it, as no-where is it said that the British Library will be re-publishing your website. It has a copy. It will let others see that copy, just like it already does for millions of books.
"I charged you a tax for using my washing machine regardless of whether you used it or not? Sound fair? Sounds ludicrous?"
Sounds fine. You get charged for schools whether you use them or not. The police, whether you use them or not. The NHS, whether you use it or not. The RAF, whether you use it or not. You have no choice. You are paying for a service that everyone benefits from being there, whether you use it directly or not.
Without the BBC the entire broadcasting media in the UK would be run by commercial companies for profit, dominated by the multi-national behemoth that is Sky. Do you really have no idea how bad that would be?
Puerile TV, like "Strictly Come Dancing", has always been on BBC TV. Unfortunately a great many people who pay their TV licence *like* puerile TV, and they have as much a right to get programmes made for them as anyone else. If you don't like them, don't watch them. There's plenty other BBC output you've paid for that you could be watching.
The BBC is not perfect, and the way it is funded is not perfect, but it is streets ahead of the alternatives.
"Strictly Come Dancing" - I don't mind the dancing, which can be moderately entertaining, it's the aeons of banal chat that surrounds it that makes me want to slit my wrists.
Sure a script-kiddy could have done this: badly and in such a way that it would have failed to work on half the targeted boxes, or broken them, or made its presence obvious. And they'd also have it all traceable back to their bedroom.
Doing it so no-one noticed, over such a long period. Well it's maybe not brilliance, but evidence of an excellent professional who really knew what they were doing. Ethically however.... dodgy ground indeed.
This error is second only in my list of annoyances to the polar opposite of people who say things like; "Me and <friend's name> went to the pub."
Take out the "and <friend's name> and you're left with "Me went to the pub." They sound like a self-centred 4 year old, in which case they shouldn't be getting served at the pub.
Just because I'm a Grammar Nazi doesn't mean I'm not right.
Not a split infinitive, but the "seriously" is misplaced in such a way that it confuses what was meant. . As quoted the one who should at least read a book on grammar, should do so "seriously". However, what was meant is that the person urging them to read a book is being serious. i.e.
"seriously, at least read a book on grammar"
"Helpless twits will find a way to be helpless regardless of what OS they run."
And there you have the root of the problem. Too many Linux forums and the like are filled with people who respond, when faced with a problem with Linux;
* The problem is not the OS. The problem is you. You are an idiot.
* I am not going to answer the question because it would be a waste of my time. I am instead going to explain why you are wrong to ask it in the first place. You are an idiot.
Fact is that Linux has been available on desktops for years, for free. People love free stuff. Yet still very few use it. Why is that? If your answer to this is "People are idiots" then you aren't clear on what a desktop OS is suppose to do; i.e. be used by people. If people can't/won't use the OS then the problem is the OS. People aren't going to change any.
"I have a 4 year old using a Linux desktop for a year now ... blah... blah..."
I love it when people totally miss the point about criticism of Linux. Sure, you have your entire family using and loving Linux. But that's because you install it, you maintain it, you upgrade it, you fix it when it goes wrong. You are an IT geek happy to spend your time doing this. I am very happy for you all. But it can't be emphasised enough; ***the rest of the world is not like this***.
Miguel is just saying what occurs to many people who give Linux a shot; he's got better things to spend his time on. I came to the same conclusion. I can, but don't chose to, spend hours fixing things when my audio drivers refuse to work, yet again. I could, but don't want to, spend hours trawling through Linux forums finding the one person on the planet who is using the same version of the same distro with the same hardware as me. Only to discover that they too have got nowhere configuring the damn things to work together. I choose not to spend hours trying to follow laughable "user" documentation written by a Linux coder for other Linux coders. My interests are in using a computer, not in compiling OS kernels.
So I fully understand Miguel de Icaza when he decides that he'll use something that just works.
The English language Wikipedia currently consists of 4,175,200 articles. Just how big was your sample size that you based your conclusion on?
When you say "unorthodox facts", you mean, of course, unverifiable stuff that no source can be found for, other than some anonymous guy on the internet who edited Wikipedia. Of course that'd be "expunge".
And even if we could see it coming, what would we do? The article suggest we'd "put our affairs in order", I more expect that our affairs would go it quite the opposite direction.
What isn't explained here is why he is so confident it won't happen for billions of years. What's stopping it happen now?
The difference with this "Think Of The Children" argument is that no-one seems to care about the grown ups. What if an adult doesn't want stalked by a "friend of a friend"? What if an adult has friends who also have "friends" they don't know and/or don't trust? Tough luck, if you are over 16 Facebook reckons you're not deserving privacy.
Think it's time to become a child on Facebook, not to be a creepy molester, but because it's the only way to have Facebook limit how they use your information. I quite fancy being born in the 21st century.
Also consider that he claims it had happened before, almost exactly the same, and nothing wrong had been found and nothing modified on the car.
If I had been taken on a trouser-filling 200km/h ride by my car, and then been told to go back out in it because nothing was wrong, I would be taking the bus, train, walking, anything rather than getting back in that demon vehicle.
I wouldn't go as far as killing them, but you do make a good point. Where's the £3 million? There's no mention of it being seized, so it looks like these two have made £1.5 million each at a cost of 4 years in prison. Probably out in 3, from a cushy low security prison. Some would say that's a good deal.
Lock them up until they hand over every penny.
The responses to this idea in this forum are ample evidence why multi-national companies love, just looove, the current set up. They play one country off against the other, and have them all running scared of taking any unilateral action in taxing them.
France comes up with an interesting idea of how these global money-sucking vampires might be taxed like the rest of us, and all the mugs are more concerned about how bad an idea it is, and how it may benefit their country to the detriment of France. All rather than look at the bigger picture. They actually think they're getting one over on the foolish French, when it's the multi-national companies that are laughing all the way to the bank at the lot of us.
... except where it suits them.
It's a right-wing personality trait the world over to over-confidence in subjective personal experience as a indication of universal "natural" law. If anyone disputes that personal experience as being universal, then clearly they are wrong, probably deceitfully so. This personality also finds it difficult to believe that the rest of us are equipped with just as much intelligence, morals and self-control as them.
So if their personal experience is to find video games violent, then heaven knows what that must be doing to those weak-willed amongst us! Should any study indicate this as a possibility (and I, personally, can't say it's beyond impossible) then I'm sure the results will be embraced of proof of what they always knew anyway.
Should the study suggest there is no link, it will of course be indication that it was conducted by idiots who have vested interests in ignoring what everyone knows as common sense. The cancer in our society goes as deep as we always suspected and starts with Obama!
Either way the right wing believes what it chooses to believe.
"We" are "they". The UK is part of the EU. The UK has just as much a hand in its legislation as any other member (Euro excepted). So the idea that the EU has been holding the UK back on striding forward to solve this problem is mistaken. In fact, given the current political make up of both governing bodies, it's a bit of a joke to suggest the UK would have done this ages ago if it hadn't been for the EU.
Congratulations Patrick, you have passed the threshold into being an old fart who complains about modern music, how no-one writes a decent tune any more, and its all just noise.
Don't feel bad about it. You join a long established company of fellow old farts, established around 1911. Thousands join it everyday, usually when they have forgetten how 20 years ago they used to laugh at old farts who complained about modern music.
BTW, there are plenty of good artists from today in the spotlight and appearing mega-arenas in your town. You just haven't heard of them because... well, see above for my previous point.
Amateur artist draws pictures that are, by own admission, widely speculative and purposely exaggerate what little facts are known. This is science news how?
I mean, they're pretty. But so are many computer generated images in films and the like. And no-one treats them as science.
And "course" is, of course, spelt with an s.
Yes please keep using witticisms like "Windoze" and "M$". It makes filtering out the dumb comments not worth reading so much easier. Same goes for "Linsux", although you see that much less. And "CrApple". Use of any of these keywords immediately voids anything else you have to say.
"why gravity can't tell the top and bottom to start moving at the same time"
It doesn't even have to do this at the same time. Gravity is telling all of it *all* the time to start moving. It's just that until the top is released there is nothing counteracting that.
What the slinky is doing is probably no different from what a solid iron rod would do, it's just that the spring tension stored in the iron rod, and the time the bottom of it would spend "hanging" is infinitesimally small in comparison.
I'm not a physicists. I may not have a clue what I'm talking about. But it makes sense to me.
"The center of mass still drops down according to our old pal Newton."
QFT.
The slinky is both falling and contracting at the same time. It has two forces acting on it; gravity and the tension within the spring. The speed it contracts up at the bottom end exactly equals the speed the centre of slinky mass is dropping down. Hence the far end does not move until the centre of mass reaches it.
The force *up* stored within the spring is exactly that obtain from gravity when the spring is first stretched out. So it is no surprise that it precisely balances the gravity force *down* when the spring is dropped. At least for the time it lasts and the spring is fully contracted.
If someone was to stretch the spring out further at the bottom end, and let go at the same time as it was dropped, the force up would be greater for a while, and we would see the bottom end *rise* at first. No-one would think this unusual. So why all this nonsense when the forces are balanced?
All this talk about "messages" and "waves" over complicates what is quite simple. And I'm not a physicist.
Well no wonder little attention is paid to this story, if this pathetic attempt of a reportage is anything to go buy. Big news; our screwing up of the environment is threatening our own fertility. El Reg's take on it; Hur, hur, it's a French study so let's pretend it's only likely to affect them and wheel out the "humorous" stereotypes and clichés.
Why does The Register's normal respect for scientific research turn into immature sniggering when it comes to foreigners and anything medically involving men's bits?
"perceived" improvement being the important difference. The more organisations like Google insist of sucking data off me that is none of their business, the more I will oblige them with crap data. The skill is in making the data plausible enough for it not to attract attention, or be worth ferreting out.
So all Google are doing here is making sure what decent data they have is bulked up with garbage, and they'll never be able to separate the two.
You do get the impression that you're only hearing one side of each story, but that's ok.
We had a PS/2 with OS/2. We didn't buy it, god no. We won it in a competition from IBM on the understanding that we would write code for it. Problem was that it ran like a complete dog when booting OS/2. It was without doubt the most powerful computer we had, but was so bad at managing to cope with OS/2's overheads it was amusing. We used to fall about laughing as it struggled to update the screen if you made any sudden moves with the mouse. (You had to be there.) It may have been more robust than Windows, it may have been better designed, but it was impossible to use.
The OS/2 documentation that came from it was certainly comprehensive, but impossible to find anything in the sheer mass of it. And half the time it didn't actually tell you what you needed to know. I find no difficulty in believing it was written by a bureaucratic committee to a standard no-one wanted.
I installed Windows 2 on it and never used OS/2 again. I can still picture the row of manuals where they gathered dust on the shelf above my desk.
Many people like to think/pretend otherwise, but the internet is part of the real world. The real world is legislated by governments, most of whom are elected (to varying degrees) by the people.
So it's the Australian people who are objecting about .antivirus and .book , and I'm fine with that. I'm more concerned that no-one else did.
If governments didn't take an interest in this sort of thing they would rightly be criticised for ignoring a vital part of modern life.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
