Posts by nyelvmark

Lord Lucan

...disappeared in 1974.

Not the point!

The great thing about Foxit is that it's immune to malware - for the same reason that Apples were until recently. Hardly anybody uses them, so they get ignored by malware writers. Foxit almost certainly has massive vulnerabilites, but "security through obscurity" does work, to some extent. Adobe Reader has to cope with a new exploit about once a month. I've never heard of any malware targeting Foxit - yet. Whilst I'm sure that the authors of Foxit would like like it to grab 50% of Adobe Reader's market, as a user I would be happiest if I had the only copy.

Re: Dactyloscopy

It's a new word to me, too, but an etymological analysis suggests that it means "fingerprinting".

It's been a "well-known fact" for about 100 years that fingerprints are unique and can be used to positively identify someone.

It's a less well-known fact that modern computer technology throws doubt upon this. Of course, in an Agatha Christie-type scenario where only one of ten people can have have commited the crime, fingerprints can be conclusive. Unfortunately, most real criminal investigations are not so tidily constrained - the police (in the absence of any other evidence) need to compare the fingerprints they find at the crime scene to those of everyone in the world to be absolutely sure they have the true culprit.

This is where technology comes in. Of course, we don't have fingerprints for everyone in the world, but we do have millions, and we now have the technology to compare them.

When was the last time you heard of fingerprint evidence being sufficient to convict someone?

@David Wilson

>>maybe the National Blood Service could try an experiment to see if donation times are shorter with more stimulating staff.

Sperm banks could try the same experiment.

Oh, yes please.

A car that automatically tells the police whenever you exceed the speed limit? Wouldn't that be a terrible invasion of the inalienable human rights of selfish, reckless, moronic, antisocial petrolheads? I should fucking-well hope so.

Sadly, it would simply spawn a new industry of speed-spoofing hacks. Also, I can't see the likes of Ferrari voluntarily incorporating this technology into their products anytime soon.

Paradox or tautology?

I see your point, but I think it's a paradox because of the word "become":

Behaving illegally is against the law - this is a tautology because "illegal" means the same as against the law.

Behaving illegally will become against the law - this is a paradox because it suggests that behaving illegally is not yet against the law.

We have no basement.

That's why it's so cheap.

If people stuck to writing efficient code...

What do you mean, "efficient code"? HTML? CSS? Javascript? All irelevant in terms of page load time. It's the binary data (images/videos/Java/Flash) which causes the problems. Text is very easy to compress. HTML, CSS and Javascript even easier (because it's easier to predict what they contain). Compressing stuff which is already compressed, like jpeg images or mpeg video, wastes CPU cycles and often results in negative compression (the output file is larger than the input file).

The worst problem I've seen was a homepage which contained a few paragraphs about the author, and a picture of him. The image size was constrained by the layout to little more than thumbnail, but the source of the image was a 10MB bitmap, which the browser had to download and then render into the <img> block, throwing away 97% of the information downloaded. I fixed this by by converting the 10 MB BMP into a 50 kB JPG. You won't be surprised to hear that the client objected, saying he couldn't see any difference...

Helium [...] is perfectly natural.

Ha! Perfectly natural, you say! But I notice that you carefully avoid answering my question: "Are there any known treatments for Helium exposure"?

What, exactly, did I get downvoted for?

Perhaps for citing The Guardian as an authority?

"This is part of a larger body of research that provides a detailed context for understanding the climate changes that we are seeing and experiencing today."

If you can't see that this is not an objective scientific introduction (it assumes its conclusion before presenting any evidence), then you should stick to reading George Monbiot and his "The science is in" fingers-in-their-ears fanbois.

Everyone you speak to is happy to agree that the weather today is worse than it was when they were younger. But don't you think that this a subjective phenomenon, analogous to "Kids these days don't speak proper English"? I do. I see nothing in the work of Mann, Bradley, Jones et al to convince me that their long-term climate models are any better than the laughably unreliable short-term models used by meteorologists (go check 5 different sources for a weather forecast for your area tomorrow). They have been accused of cherry-picking data, of using demonstrably invalid statistical techniques, of refusing to release their raw data or methodological source code for other scientists to check their methods, of producing intentionally misleading presentations of their data (the "hockey stick" graph being the most celebrated example), and of attempting to subvert the peer-review process. None of these allegations have been satisfactorily refuted, in my view.

The IPCC's last report has a section attempting to explain how a doubling of the level of CO2, a trace gas in the atmosphere, could lead to the massive increase in global warming allegedly measured, given that the known properties of CO2 could not lead to this. The section explains that there must be unknown "feedback mechanisms" in which an increase in CO2 leads to an increase in some more significant greenhouse gas (maybe methane, but "most probably" water vapour) and urges world governments (unsurprisingly) to invest heavily in research which will identify these unknown mechanisms.

If you're a programmer, and you have several hours to spare, you can gain considerable insight into the reliability of Phil Jones' Climate Research Unit data by reading the leaked "Harry Read Me" text file (easy to find).

Sorry to piss on your parade.

great for concepting

This is good news. The next time I see something that needs concepting, I shall most certainly order an iPad.

Why?

>>Why is it that when one person or company becomes the leader in there market then they become "evil"

We all wish we knew. Even Bashar al-Assad was probably a cute kid once.

Maybe not muppets

I think you miss the point, Fuzzy. The LOIC is a protest tool. Using it through an anonymous proxy (or better, a long chain of such proxies) is certainly possible, but that would be indistinguishable from a DDOS attack organised by an individual using a botnet. It would be analogous to taking part in a protest march in disguise. Of course, there may be muppets who've used it thinking that nobody would know it was them, but I think that's just because they're muppets - not because they've been deceived by the evil mastermind who, as we all know, is really behind Anonymous. I'm not sure who that is, but I have my suspicions about the Dalai Lama.