Posts by Number6

Re: Competition

BT used to be a monopoly and it was hard for others to gain access because of what they had to do to build infrastructure to compete with that monopoly. Now they're not the biggest telco in the UK but they still control the fixed line infrastructure. Even that isn't strictly a monopoly in many places because VM offer phone service and decent speed broadband to compete, and by all accounts do so fairly well.

The US is similar to how it was in the UK in many places, there's a single incumbent supplier and you're stuck with their offering. Capitalism breaks down if you've got a monopoly supplier and a high barrier to entry, not least because the monopoly can always undercut new entrants who need to recoup their start-up costs. So if you want competition you have to help it with a bit of regulation. If you've got the newcomers complaining that it's not tough enough, and the incumbent complaining that it's too harsh, then you've probably pitched it about right :-)

Ah! A downvote! I guess there's a BMW driver amongst the commentards...

Re: @JoeT

But where do they live while the park is being developed?

Don't be too sure about that, it's quite possible that someone else misheard and has corrupted a perfectly innocent expression with something more juicy because he didn't want to embarrass himself by asking for a repeat.

Re: All your eyes are belong to us

I value my system security. All I'd get from an ad server who contaminated my machine is a "sorry", I very much doubt if they'd pay compensation for the cost (time and money) for fixing the problem. Ads should be small (seeing as they eat up my bandwidth), not involve flash, pop-ups or use of a scripting language. That would cut down on a lot of the malware attack surface. They should also not interfere with the page rendering process - having a page not load because it's waiting for a tardy ad server to cough up is not going to present a product in a good light.

On second thoughts, I'll continue with the script and ad blockers because I don't trust any random third party to protect my system so a good first line of defence is not to let them have access.

Re: Never mind the facial-recognition patent issue...

Who knows? Perhaps they paid Randall Munroe to draw their sketches for the application (unlikely, I agree).

Re: 'Cheap' in terms of food, now means selling your privacy too.

In fairness to Curry's I believe it is legislated that a seller must get your address when you buy a TV so that the TV licencing mob can hound you.

They are obligated to get an address from you. You are under no obligation to give them your correct address and they are under no obligation to verify it.

Re: CRT Monitors...

I discovered that my Amstrad PC1640, by the time I'd talked the boss into letting me buy an NEC V30 CPU for it, and a long session reworking the disk interleave, outperformed the IBM AT used by the higher-ups. The V30 microcode seemed to be as efficient as the 80286, and far superior to the 8086, and the AT was running at 6MHz (I think) compared to 8MHz for the V30.

Re: Clarfication

I thought the legal obligation on the company was to maximise shareholder value. If you're the sole director, shareholder and employee then there is no conflict of interest if the scheme provides you, as the shareholder, with the most money.

Re: No more terrorism.

The irony is that the Franklin quote is used out of context. It's such a good soundbite though, but in its original context it was about taxation and the elected government giving up powers. Google has quite a few articles on the matter.

Re: Sounds like an ideal candidate

Not just a 1Mbit connection but random packet loss too. Nothing like a bit of unexpected lag to screw things up.

Re: Bah!

Probably San Francisco - have you ever tried parking there?

Re: Totally unrealistic

Of course, that's the downside of a camera, the cops will have to learn how to delete images.

Re: Old trick that

Many years ago they had problems with the local amateur repeater and the 433MHz car systems. Despite the repeater being up on the roof, the car receivers were crappy enough to be jammed by it. There have been tales of MoD Mould repeaters, also in that band, causing similar issues.

I have no idea which idiot decided that 433MHz, a very popular amateur band, was a good place to put poorly-designed consumer electronics, but I hope their name is high on the list to be put against the wall when the revolution comes.

Re: grey area? line crossed?

You just need a good lawyer. The compromised machine already had permission to access the server, else how could it upload the credentials. There was nothing in writing restricting it to write-only access so one assumes they could use the same machine to read from the server too.

Re: H&S Certification

Isn't a half-decent memory all you ever need to pass an exam? Either you've memorised all the questions and answers or you've memorised enough of the subject matter to know what you're doing.

Re: what about a line that says

They might need an extra line occasionally:

"Last month your metadata was also viewed by three hackers who successfully gained access to the server"

Even if it's harmless, it highlights the danger of collecting information without proper care.

Re: It's still true.....

That just proves the corollary to free speech - you can say what you like but it has consequences. With freedom comes responsibility.

Re: Hang on a sec...

If you can come up with an IP address assigned to the UK then you can watch BBC iPlayer for free wherever you are in the world. This is what VPNs can do for you.

Conversely, if you're sat in the UK office of a company with multinational presence that uses internal VPNs, it is possible that the IP address you present to the BBC is assigned to another country and you're stuck with the bbc.com international site (with its adverts) and problems accessing iPlayer.

I've experienced both situations.

Re: VbV

when you're in the back of cab that is red-lining the engine and blowing every stoplight...

In some places that's normal behaviour for a taxi.

Re: @Dana W

That's where you can look at it fro a different angle. Affordable healthcare can be seen as investing in the workforce, just as you pay to have your car serviced and it keeps running longer and is less likely to break down when you need it most. I appreciate that this is not a perfect analogy because it's easy to scrap a problem car, whereas the law frowns on doing that to a person.

I wonder how popular a voluntary national insurance fund for unemployment benefits would be? If you pay in, you can claim from the fund if you're laid off, if you choose to opt out, you're on your own. It's a bit like donating to charity if you don't expect to be unemployed, with the side benefit that if something bad does happen, you get rewarded for all those donations.

Re: I suspect

A matter of minutes for a rocket at full blast.