Posts by Jonathan Richards 1
270 posts • joined Wednesday 10th June 2009 17:08 GMT
Re: Idiot
Hawaii?
Re: Why not use a helicopter?
@NumptyScrub, who wrote:
>A "proper" zero reference would need to be from the centre of the planet
And then climbing Mount Everest wouldn't be the supreme achievement anyway, because on that measure Chimborazo is the planet's highest peak. I refer the honourable gentleman to my post of 2010-10-30.
gothamist web hog
Jeez, that Gothamist site you linked to wanted to run Javascript from FIFTEEN different sites, and pull in data from TWENTY. And it isn't even the ultimate source of the cicada mapper, which is at http://project.wnyc.org/cicadas/
Re: Obligatory: the IT angle?
Thanks for that link, it's an excellent read; here's a further excerpt to bring us back to biting the hand that feeds IT:
<quote, apropos rocket motor performance calculations>
All the compilations of thermodynamic data are on punch cards, now, versatile programs, which can handle a dozen or so elements, are on tape, and things are a lot simpler than they were.
... there is one disconcerting thing about working with a computer—it's likely to talk back to you. You make some tiny mistake in your FORTRAN language — putting a letter in the wrong column, say, or omitting a comma — and the 360 comes to a screeching halt and prints out rude remarks, like "ILLEGAL FORMAT," or "UNKNOWN PROBLEM," or, if the man who wrote the program was really feeling nasty that morning, "WHAT'S THE MATTER STUPID? CAN'T YOU READ?" Everyone who uses a computer frequently has had, from time to time, a mad desire to attack the precocious abacus with an axe.
</quote>
Plus ça change, eh?
I don't think the chemistry is beyond anyone who has half a chance of remembering some O-level inorganic chemistry, by the way, unless you're actually thinking of *using* the information to prepare some rocket fuel. In that case, you're mad!
Posted in Jimmy Wales: 'I'm Wikipedia's monarch'
Surname failure
> ... Jimbo Wales popping in to explain how the UK's Royal Family aren't the only Wales' to wear a crown
Ermmm... There are no members of the UK's royal family properly surnamed "Wales", and certainly none such that wear a crown. The Queen is/has the only crowned head, and her surname is Windsor, a surname for the monarch being a novelty introduced in 1917. Prince Harry is styled "Captain Wales" in his military career, but <a href="http://www.royal.gov.uk/ThecurrentRoyalFamily/TheRoyalFamilyname/Overview.aspx>the official line</a> makes it clear that all the Queen's children have the surname Mountbatten-Windsor, for the rare occasions when they need one.
previous ice age?
> What melted the previous ice age?
Please clarify which Ice Age you are talking about . We are currently in an interglacial period of the *current* ice age, i.e. an age during which part of the planet is covered in ice. When the planet emerges from it, there will be no permanent polar icecaps and sea levels will be many tens of metres higher than they are currently. Since we are adapted to the current climate and sea levels, in terms of agriculture and settlement patterns, this will mean considerable disruption for any Earth-based human civilizations which might have made it that far.
Posted in Top tools for junior Linux admins
Where are all my files? <whimper>
For the time when you hit return on
Do Not Do This@Anytime home$ rm -rf *
and then shriek "Oh, good gracious me, what a silly billy" (or words to that effect) there's <a href="http://carlo17.home.xs4all.nl/howto/undelete_ext3.html>ext3grep</a>.
You are still deep in a world of pain and toil, but all is not lost. I did this a couple of years ago (I thought I was in a subdirectory, was in fact in my home directory) and eventually I lost hardly anything, although rm had been running for about five seconds before I reached the shriek stage. Now I have ext3grep installed on a live USB stick, but I do lots of backups...
<boffin icon, because you're not giving this job to a noob>
As opposed to ... wars
Bzzzt. Logical error: false dichotomy at line 1.
Nobody said that was an either-or. How do you suggest that the military spending of the planet should be diverted towards colonizing space? I look forward to an argument which will convince both the US Congress and North Korea.
Weapons in spaaaace
Yeah, once all the Death Star giggles are out of the way, an objective look at any such frikkin' laser will reveal it to be indisinguishable from a weapons system, which is banned from space by treaty. Unless humanity can come up with a governance structure for it that everyone trusts, then it isn't going to happen. Any one sovereign nation having control would be unacceptable, any of the current national blocs, ditto. The United Nations? That would just play into the hands of the conspiracy theorists who believe that the purpose of the UN is to disarm them.
in re Spatulifier
I just searched for that word on google.co.uk, and got two links where the word is used 'genuinely', and one to a report of a Googlewhack.
No prize will be awarded in this instance, I suspect.
Re: Precision?
Is "includung T-mobile" a comment on the sh!tty nature of the coverage?
More seriously, we could crowdsource the locations of the sodding EE masts. I have an app called Llama installed on my Android phone the purpose of which is to automate actions depending on where it finds itself in relation to cell towers, which it uniquely identifies, with the time it came within range. If enough people correlated their GPS positions with picking up/dropping certain cells we could locate the damn things well enough, I guess. Oh, wait, wasn't it something like this that got Aubrey, Berry and Campbell into hot water?
...self-styled "security researchers"
This is the danger: the security research software tools are all out there, and available to people who have any minimal interest and maybe even less than minimal competence to operate them. Sure, pointing a penetration test suite at some network may produce interesting results, but that doesn't make you a "security researcher", any more than rushing around in camo firing an assault rifle would make you a "soldier". In both cases, there's professionalism involved. This young man was working his way towards that, seemingly, when he made an error of judgement. I don't see that his career should be terminated just because Dawson College itself no longer wishes to teach him.
Global routes
> The Dreamliner's never-before-seen range is [going to] change how the global routes are put together
I don't believe that the absolute aircraft range is the limiting factor in how global routes are put together. There's the passengers' tolerance for being cooped up in a flying tube for more than 11 or 12 hours at a stretch, there's the issue of feeding, watering, entertaining and mucking out the said passengers, and staff/aircrew matters. If you're going to have very long flight times, your passenger density would have to be reduced to mitigate any or all of those.
Then there's demand. Even if one could fly from London Heathrow to Auckland directly, there might not be sufficient demand for that service, whereas stopping en route, as NZ002 does at Los Angeles, means that you can exploit the demand for LHR-LAX and LAX-AKL with the same aircraft.
Re: Never
> statistically less likely to fail
[citation needed]
Web of trust
It's all very well to say that (were I actually to HAVE a Facebook account), I could search for, oh, I dunno, say a new tablet computer and weight the results by the ones that FB friends and FBFs of FBFs etc. "Like". I can see how that would be a fun and geeky sort of thing to work out, if you've got terabytes of linked Likes.
However, it's much more likely that I'm going to think of an Actual Friend who kno more than 0 about tablets, and I'm going to give him or her a call and say "What do you think of the new Applung Nexoid 19.3, eh?".
I don't necessarily trust the judgement of every one of my friends, and certainly not equally across all of them with respect to any particular issue. That social graph is going to need its edges weighting carefully if the search results are going to be anything but dross.
Missing DNA
> most males are missing a huge chunk of DNA making them more prone to genetic disease anyway...
Erm... no, I don't think so. A male inherits one X chromosome from his mother and a (smaller) Y chromosome from his father. If anything, it's females who are missing a chunk of DNA, since they miss out on Dad's Y chromosome, and get an X from their paternal grandmother.
The gender-related gene complexes for female characteristics may not be *expressed* in the male phenotype, but they're still there, otherwise males wouldn't be able to father daughters.
Urggh
If you're passing cookies, you probably need medical attention, and promptly.
Re: If the point is for people to NOTICE the ruling this does not comply. Under the fold.
What is this "resolution" of which you speak?
===========
$ lynx www.apple.co.uk
# Apple (United Kingdom)
#home RSS index
* Apple
* Store
* Mac
* iPod
* iPhone
* iPad
* iTunes
* Support
Search ____________________
iPad mini. Every inch an iPad.
* Watch the keynote
* Watch the video
* iPad with Retina display. Just as stunning. Twice as fast.
* The new iMac.
* MacBook Pro with 13-inch Retina display.
* iPhone 5. The biggest thing to happen to iPhone since iPhone.
Shop at the Apple Online Store, call 0800 048 0408, visit an Apple Retail Store or find a reseller.
* Site Map
* Hot News
* RSS Feeds
* Media Info
* Environment
* Job Opportunities
* Contact Us
Copyright © 2012 Apple Inc. All rights reserved.
* Terms of Use
* Privacy Policy
* Use of Cookies
United Kingdom Choose your country or region
On 25 October 2012, Apple Inc. published a statement on its UK website in relation to Samsung's Galaxy tablet
computers. That statement was inaccurate and did not comply with the order of the Court of Appeal of England and
Wales. The correct statement is at Samsung/Apple UK judgement
===========
There it is, right on the first screen.
N/A
If you collect no personal information, compliance is easy: please use this draft.
THIS APP COLLECTS NO PERSONALLY IDENTIFIABLE INFORMATION.
Job done.
Anticlimax
Oh. I thought you were going to tell us that the music store was then trying to sell you a syphon flush. That would have been so much better.
Keypad
Get that freaky hexadecimal keypad on the centre (oh, alright then, center) console. It's laid out not like a numeric keypad but like a telephone dial pad, but then has hex digits A - F in the two rows *above* 0-9.
A B C
D E F
1 2 3
4 5 6
7 8 9
--0--
Oh, well, I suppose none of the astronauts had to touch-type enter any object code in-flight. We hope...
Quote> It does seem like he posted it on his own page.
It's not about where it ends up... it's how it got there.
The Communications Act 2003 regulates communications networks in the UK. The guy committed an offence by sending the message over a public electronic communications network. The offence was committed at the moment he clicked on 'Submit', and he would have been equally guilty even if he had been putting it into entirely private storage. In that event, though, he would have been much less likely to have been detected. Actually publishing your offending material just makes it easy for the courts.
Offensive telecoms
This has been the case since God was in short trousers. Under the same legislation (Communications Act 2003) it's a criminal offence in the UK to use indecent or obscene language even in a person-to-person telephone call.
"A person is guilty of an offence if he—
(a) sends by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character; or
(b) causes any such message or matter to be so sent."
Source [legislation.gov.uk]
Credibility?
No, absolutely no credibility. That one sentence should have given it away: every fule kno that data are plural.
Re: What to do with it?
Take it to wherever Her Majesty would like it put: "Over there will be fine. Mind the corgis".
No, really, the Receiver of Wrecks must be informed. Whales, porpoises and sturgeon are Royal Fish and when taken in the waters around the UK or when stranded become the property of the Crown, or of the Lord of the Manor, e.g. the Duke of Cornwall if the stranding is on the duchy coast.
Re: So why doesn't the ICO go after the big names ignoring TPS?
I believe companies who can convincingly maintain that they have a 'business relationship' with you can ignore the TPS. I haven't looked this up, nor do I know how tenuous the business relationship can be. "You answered the door to one of our chaps with a clipboard in 2002"-sort-of-tenuous, probably.
Re: Hoorah!
> rather than fining public bodies of much needed cash
Do you think that public bodies should be immune from the Information Commissioner's attentions, then? (Think carefully; I pretty much guarantee that the majority of your personal information is held by public bodies rather than private ones). Or perhaps there should be a different approach to punishing disregard for the rules if a public body is at fault? Suggestions welcome, but they must be compliant with the human rights accords.
Re: Why ... when it has unintended consequences
As we have seen, registering and using a .com domain puts you within reach of the US Justice system with respect to materials you serve up with it. You may, or may not, like this 'feature'...
I cannot believe that I am the first to say...
...chimpanzees are NOT MONKEYS. Jeez, you'd have thought that the Librarian would have got through to everyone by now.
Re: As opposed to....
Actually, I think Capt. Cook sailed in His Majesty's Bark Endeavour. So much worse than his Byte, don'cha know.
Re: email
But email addresses reside in the contacts list which was available to the exploit, if I read TFA correctly. Just the addresses of the people that CEOs communicate with in the course of business could facilitate a spear phishing attack, no?
The advice is good, if a bit elliptical: keep your confidential work communications safely on a confidential work communications network.
Re: Safer idea?
Well, you'd probably need a water supply from, oh, I don't know, say a well, to supply your high-pressure pump, wouldn't you?
Posted in I spy: Drug drops and foxy couples
1950's bakelite model
I've still got mine, together with the set of 1958 Brussels World Fair discs that came with it. And, no, you can't have it.
Re: Airstrip two - multilingualism
TeeCee wrote:
> As far as I can make out, producing everything in umpty-something languages
> is something unique to British bureaucracy.
Not at all. At NATO (OTAN) everything important is always produced in both official languages (English and French), as is also the case in Canada, I believe. OK, two is clearly less than umpty-something. But the British bureaucracy doesn't produce *everything* in many languages, just the things that need to be so produced.
Re: An attorney consulting on software? Wtf??
You haven't been paying attention to document standards issues, have you? Andy Updegrove knows more about the whole O(O)XML/ODF/doc(x) ball of chalk than any four or five of the commenters in this thread added together, me included.
In the spirit of sharing, have a look at this interview [groklaw.net] from 2008.
Re: more info please
Jeez, mate!
El Reg wrote in TFA: More details and a technical description of the problem are available in a blog post here.
That's a clue for you to move your mouse cursor to the pretty blue underlined word 'here' and click the left mouse button. Or the right button if you've got it set up for left-handers. If you're reading with lynx, ignore the mouse. Use cursor keys to move the cursor before the word 'here', and press Enter. That should set you on the path!
Re: "peddling"
Good point, aggressively made... But then, proofreading was never high on El Reg's agenda.
Now, will ALL comment[er|tard]s PLEASE stop writing [would | could | might] of <past participle> when those past tenses are formed with have.
Thank you.
Re: Is there a lawyer in the house?
Q0: Is there a lawyer in the house?
A0: Possibly. I Are Not One.
A1: re 140 char copyright infringements: I suppose it could - the ECJ judgement seems to indicate that they care more about the appropriation of people's efforts in selecting and arranging expressions than about absolute volumes. From my non-lawyer and (I believe) commonsense point of view, I can't see how substantial protectable effort can be put into selecting and arranging up to 140 characters.
A2: re onanistic cricketers: TFA did mention that idle abuse wasn't actionable. He's a big bloke, though, and owns some heavy bats, so you might want to make sure that your Reg account doesn't get hacked...
Re: In the future, people can't count
Early first millenium?
That would have been earlier than 500AD, then, roughly twelve or thirteen hundred years before the USPTO would be conjured into being. The second millenium began when the first one ended, in 1001AD, and we're now eleven [1] years into the third millenium.
[1] Yes, yes, I know that the departed Ms Bee forbade anyone to say here that the third millenium began on 1 January 2001, but it is nonetheless true.
Re: Ban Hidden Patents
AC said: Not allowing a competitor to work around your patents by not disclosing what they are should be an offence in itself.
Maybe not an offence, but a defence for the competitor if the patent holder later tries to assert the patent in litigation. This would restore some of the value to the State of having a patent system at all, viz. that it is intended to drive the progress of technology. Some of that progress must consist of ingenious, different and quite possibly better ways of doing something. If you don't even know what patent you're supposed to be working around, that can't possibly happen.
Knowhere
I thought that might be a hidden gem, but actually it's a hidden turd. At a first glance, it comes across as a site for sk8tr boyz to vent their teenage angst, and moan about their localities without being informative or helpful. I shan't be giving it a second glance.
First client: SCO
...prolly.
Really, it appears that Zeidman has forgotten, or perhaps never knew, how software was developed back then. Big chunks of stuff were written directly in assembler, without there ever being a higher-level language source code. Space was tight. Carrying screeds of comments (i.e. human readable text within the object code) forward would only have happened if exact *copying* had taken place, and nobody ever alleged that, as far as I know.
Using a debugger to 'explore the internals' of the operating system you're cloning isn't a clean room implementation of the API, though.
Re: Grow up and recognise twitter isn't private!!!
> Posting something on a public forum on the internet is not the same as screaming it out in a public place, no matter how many similar "people" like yourself keep trying to compare the two.
For legal purposes, they are pretty much the same. When you scream stuff out in a public space, people within earshot are perhaps better able to understand your degree of seriousness and intentions than when you post something on the internet, which (a) has no tone of voice and (b) has a practically unlimited audience. I don't think you'll find many lawyers who would draw a distinction between public speech, printed publication and posting online. They're all public.
PS. You put "people" in quotes, there. Dehumanising your debating opponent is puerile and counterproductive.
Re: Grow up and recognise twitter isn't private!!!
My thought exactly. From TFA: "...a series of tweets to ... Sarah Tonner". No, clearly not. A series of messages published to the world, and in the offending message clearly not addressed to her but to the airport. "You've got a week and a bit ...".
Bitching about the airport in incendiary terms in private would be one thing, but publishing it was shortsighted, and Twitter messages are definitely published.
...but they shouldn't be
> They are state-granted monopolies in the space of ideas.
Ah, but patents are meant to be protection for inventions, explicitly NOT for ideas. If you have an idea, the correct way to make money from it is to build a better technological item with it, which you can then patent and license and/or build it yourself. You should not, in any current patent regime, be able to get a patent on a mere idea.
Re: No need even for your own server
> not sure if there's anything out there which does this
Check out piwigo.
It was offered as a plugin service on my web host, and does a lot of the things you mentioned. Works for me.
Re: "Share with no-one" == just don't upload to FB.
> you might want to look at it yourself or show it to people face-to-face
Set up a website of your own, then. Hosting + domain name registration is simple, cheap and you have total control over your own data and who gets access to what. It seems simpler than all this worry and angst over whether social network sites' privacy settings do what they say they do.
