Posts by Old Handle

Re: Would you actually, really get in one?

I would, but only if it's equipped with a manual override.

Re: "Fearbeared"

Yes congrats on coining a new word. I googled it and got only two hits: this article and a forum post where someone had misspelled another user's name, Fearbeard.

Re: "Of a suburban Los Angeles."

There are at least three Los Angeleses just in California. Los Angeles City, Los Angeles County and Los Angeles metropolitan area, each containing the former. There are Los Angeleses in other states and countries as well. I'm not quite sure how to judge which of these are suburban though.

Re: Oh, moon of Alabama

I think that version is fairly popular everywhere.

Don't forget most teachers are women.

Re: For the love of all that's precious!

I have enough familiarity with Skype to know about the random contacts from "women", although I'm not a regular user. But this article says "Someone posing as a woman called Cathy Wong befriended each of the victims on Facebook before asking them to Skype her."

Re: Hm

According to one list I saw, 4 out of 9 have US IP addresses. So to get a majority (either to hijack it or take it offline) the US would need cooperation from at least one other country. Not that such a thing is unheard of by any means.

Re: jail time

Ban the entire corporation from doing any type of business for the same length of time a natural person would have gone to jail.

Re: Self Assessment is the problem

I'm really starting to think that having each transaction digitally signed by the payer is the only system that makes sense. Yeah, like bitcoin. But it could still be done with centralized authorities (i.e. banks).

Re: Numbers.

It probably doesn't hurt google, but at least we're not helping them take over the world.

Re: Bluetooth and planes...

Don't think so. Different airlines may have their own rules, but regardless it's not going to hurt the plane and they're not going to notice if you don't.

It's semantics, but I don't know if I could really agree the first sentence. As I understand it, gravity is the only thing holding it in place. I mean, it bounced and came back down. That sounds like a landing to me. But I do of course agree that the situation is precarious. Doing anything rash could easily make it "jump" and even if it didn't achieve escape velocity (estimated to be 1 m/s) it might not be so lucky to land mostly right-side-up next time.

Re: Not much of a deal was it?

Presumably they were threatening him with a dozen more charges for a total of 7854 years or something of the sort. That's that's their usual tactic.

Re: So, (from down here in the antipodes)

Only by default. But from what I understand (I'm not in the UK either) some companies, especially mobile providers, are determined to make opting out as inconvenient and annoying as possible.

Re: Serious question

It does seem strangely at odds with the real name policy (although they claim they've relaxed that as well). But I guess one use case is that you post under your real name, but need to protect your location. Alternatively, Tor can also be used to bypass censorship, so people in countries where Facebook is banned might possibly find it useful.

Re: I thought April 1st came early

All they're doing is scanning public tweets. I don't see how it could be illegal. It's just creepy as heck.