Posts by I Am Spartacus
67 posts • joined Thursday 17th May 2012 12:12 GMT
Re: Can't someone make the reverse?
Oh dear, I can't get in to my house because the wifi is down.
Fantastic idea.
Re: Only 35% in taxes ?
Are we supposed to be sorry for you that you don't know the tax code well enough to avoid paying too much or should we just laugh?
Use too much Leccy? We will turn you off
"Utilities want to deploy smart meters because the technology will automate meter reading, as well as creating tools to make it easier to control supply at times of high demand."
The phrase " easier to control supply at times of high demand" worries me. I read this as meaning that if the demand exceeds the supply, some customers will be turned off for a period to alleviate the demand. You can see it now: Its 2014, World Cup is on, its half time in a crunch match that England need to win. The country gets up and turns on the kettle. The network surges, the power companies can't cope and scream HELP! And a large number of people are turned off to reduce the power. It's only for an hour. But when the juice comes back, we are left with a smug looking Gary Linekar saying "Wow, what a game, who new that England could play like that. See you next match."
Yeah, that should keep everyone fine about why we invested in wind turbines rather than a couple nuclear stations..
Re: Er...
Not quite, 71.6% thought it would result in an unchanged or higher bill
Re: Where does this go?
Where can we find out more ....
@AC - you could always try Google. try "XBOX 720 ALWAYS ON". It's just a hint, you understand.
Is this man for real
“I hope you can appreciate that a full inquiry into a project of this scale is likely to take some time and that it would not be proper for me to comment further at this stage.”
So, lets see. We have a report, but you can't see it. I have now made a decision, but we need a second inquiry to show that his decision was justified. You couldn't make this up.
And they wonder why people call them wooden tops?
Re: If TPB dies
Easy to measure. How did DVD sales increase when the major UK ISP's blocked TBP?
Ugh? Whats that, they didnt? Oh, so that worked then.
Re: I don't even use TPB...
Add to that
#5 When a DVD I buy doesn't spend 5 minutes telling me that copying DVDs is theft (its not is a copyright infringement), then 2 minutes telling me that I can't play this on an oil rig, and the 15 minutes of trailers for pointless films I don't want. I JUST WANT TO WATCH THE FRICKIN FILM - OK?
Re: So the moral of the story
I know, my first thought was "What? People still click on links in dodgy emails? Huh!"
Next they will be confused as to why their pc starts running really slow and why their apps keep failing. Then they come to us and ask can we rebuild their PC. I always say yes and hand them back a PC with Linux on it (along with a demand for a crate of decent claret, well we all have our price) with all the settings nailed down and they have only a user password. Sorted.
Re: Of the things I'd like to see in the next...
You mean people don't all use command lines?
Wow. Did the world move on whilst I was learning VMS?
Re: Hmm...
I so share this view!
Re: I'll stick with my Mac
One of the things I missed when I gave up Mac's and started making money was BBEdit. But thank you for reminding me of my loss.
Gosh, people get to leave el Reg
Who would have thunk it?
Good luck in the future. And thanks for the amusing head strap lines.
Re: New Balls Please
Oh, I don;t know. We haven't seen a picture of the girl. She could have been an Anne Widecomb lookalike. May be this was the excuse he needed. Or maybe he was just hooked on Match.Com.
What? No Velocity check?
Way back in the early 90's I was involved in a card system. One of the first things we did then was implement a check to stop multiple repeated transactions, and to check the card velocity.
Velocity is simple. Note where the card is first used as a lat/long (this assumes that all banks know where their card machines are), when the card is next used compute the distance, and the time it took to travel and hence compute the velocity. If the velocity is too great, block the card and get the customer to call in. To be honest, we did have another way of finding the location, but surely this is just so fundamental that the banks must have this.
20 years later, it seems Bank of Muscat have not learnt this lesson.
Do no Evil
Hey Google. Remember this? No, did't think so.
Perhaps you can change it to "Do no evil, unless we loose money because people don't like adverts and try to block them".
Do we believe this?
That they scammed a student out of $95K?
Its false - no student has that sort of money.
Re: ofcom and bt has probably always known who and where from
I agree. Interconnect billing is a huge part of any telco's system. If you can't identify originating callers number no telco in the world would forward the call to the called number. They would simply loose too much money.
If the calling number was spoofed, then the calling telco would be seriously out of profit themselves, because then they could not bill for the call.
I used to work in Telco's some years back and this was true then. I am having drinks with a couple of friends who still do work for Telco's tomorrow and I will ask them.
Lets fight back
Totally agree.
I worked in Telcos. The fact that the calling number is not displayed is not down to the fact that it is not known. It is, to the Telco. The call setup sends a flag saying that the number should not be displayed.
This whole fiasco from overseas calls that say "Unknown" or "Foreign" on the handset can be overcome at a stroke. Pass a UK law saying that the overseas number will ALWAYS be shown, in full, regardless of the flag.
Lets see how long these calls carry one once people find that they can call a claims management company who will act for free and prosecute the cold callers, and share any compensation they can extract. All we need now is such companies to exists and tell us .....
.... oh.
Shock Horror
Human with sense of humour found masquerading as Civil Servant.
Then you're reading the wrong articles.
el reg - the limbo dance of journalistic capabilities.
Re: Wrong assumption
You right - You have a wrong assumption.
The yacht belongs to who ever is the registered owner. Its not a difficult concept.
Sure as eggs are omelettes in progress, the designer has no claim or lien on the boat.
Frankly, I am highly surprised that the Dutch court even entertain the notion of arresting the vessel. This is a last chance saloon type action and as the plaintiff you have to produce some pretty heavy and water tight argument to make it stick. Like a contract, an invoice, a latter of protest for non-payment of said invoice.
Rocking up in Den Haag, saying that this dead geezer owes me 3M, but I got nothing to prove it, should have got him thrown out on his ear.
Re: Ah damn...
Quite so.
I rode a Moulton mini for years until some scrote jumped on the pedal and tore the thread from the stem the pedal attached to. It was never the same.
Great bike
Posted in Google defames Reg columnist Verity Stob
Profitable????
The link to the O'Really article states that El Reg is not only scurrilous (this we knew, it's why we are here) but is also PROFITABLE!
Who would have thunk it.
Posted in BOFH: The Great Patch Mismatch
Halon inspires striptease
Richard's rocket fuel story reminded me of something that happened in about 83/84. The then new halon fire suppression system was in two electrical loops, some under the floor, some in the ceiling void. Fairly standard layout for a big data shop (mainframes filled the rooms then - it really was big iron).
The system tests itself by having a trickle charge run through the electrical loop. This way it detects a break in the wiring. When you need to fire the halon, the deal is this: The siren goes and everyone heads to the exits; the halon is locked and can't go off until the shift supervisor has counted everyone out, locked the door, and activated the fire system. Simples.
Unless the control box has a hissy fit and decides to blow a fuse. Seems that in this case it assumes there is a fire, that the door is locked, and blows the circuit.
Pity the poor bod who was sat on a roll about chair in the bridge, under a large ceiling tile, when the globe above it fired. He got knocked off his chair and broke his arm.
Double pity the young female tape operator who was walking over an air grating when the globe under that went off. She had her dress ripped off by the blast and got out wearing only bra and knickers with an attitude to kill at 50'.
Cue another sense of humour failure!
No, that's the Gurdiad
See title
Re: Lucky?
Lets see, distance of Earth from Sun, 150 Million Km Therefore the surface area of the sphere around the earths orbit is, hmm 4.PI.R^2 = 2.8 x 10^17 sq Km. Radius of the earth is 6400 Km, so the area of the earth is the area of a circle of this radius, so PI.r^2 = 1.3 x 10^7 sq Km.
So the ratio of these gives us the probability that a random solar flare will hit earth. or approx 2 x 10^9, or 1 in 2 Billion.
Sod the clock - whats this profit
WHAT - A public train service makes a profit??
And it runs on time, and never seems to have the wrong sort of snow?
COME ON NETWORK SOUTHEAST - Get your act together, and find out how!!!!
Amazing how useless "Whaling Research" is
"Scientists are unsure why a whale like this hasn't been spotted before."
Especially with Japan still hunting (sorry, researching) whales, killing loads of them in the name of "science". Just shows that this "research" is totally useless and therefore should be stopped.
Try tomorrow.
The website, http://spotthestation.nasa.gov/ seems to have slash dotted (sorry, el reg'ed) just at present.
Mine's the one with the page of TLE's in the pocket.
Posted in FaceTime now on patent troll list
Iconic mess
Report on FaceTime being under patent threat. Use FaceBook icon for story.
"Time? Book? Ohh,. it's an IT newsboard, no one will notice".
Come on Reg, you can do better than this.
This is not a service
This is a perfect example where reality moves a lot faster than legislation and its interpretation. Reading a book in electronic form is so much better for the industry (It is much harder to share with a friend), is better for the environment (not cutting down trees), is greener (I don't have to drive to my local book store, neither does the sales assistant), etc etc.
So what does the "we must be green and save the planet" government do? Add VAT to the electronic version whilst keeping the dead-tree version tax free.
How many ways can you spell EPIC FAIL.
I would say that this government and the HMRC specifically could not organise a piss up in a brewery, but clearly that is what they must have done to come up so many daft, stupid ideas in such a short time.
Mine's the one with spoiled ballot paper in the pocket
THANK YOU Mr Shutlleworth
Thank you for putting the Amazon search in to 12.10. Oh and thank you for the fantastic update process. No, seriously, thank you very deeply. This was a fantastic idea.
Based on the fact that I didn't really want the Amazon feature and its creeping commercialisation of Ubuntu, I put a copy of Lubuntu on a pen drive to test. It seemed ok, but was I really ready to move away?
Well, this morning I decided to upgrade my 12.04 version to 12.10. It failed. It failed quite spectacularly and left me with "Grub load error - file not found... Grub> " Oh dear. No help. No commands to enter. Oh, and now no way to get to the Internet and check. Yes, you need to load a browser for that and that means loading an OS.
Oh well, in for a penny, lets install LUbuntu.
Oh, my. This is nice. It clean. No clutter. Fast. And it works the way I really want it to. It supports both my screens properly (Unity NEVER did that). This is what I want my computer to look like.
So, thank you once again. If you hadn't have put the Amazon thingy in to Unity and recreated Microsofts Active Desktop I would not have tried LUbuntu.
Ubuntu - NSFW
Well, thats the end of Ubuntu in the work place, isn't it. Here I am just thinking of getting some more business people in, so I start looking at the job spec's I wrote previously for BA's, SA's etc.. So, open the dash, start typing and get as far as A N A L (yst) and woooda. What the hell was that????
Sorry, Compliance; sorry young lady who works near me and can see my screen....
So, Shuttleworth, good idea? No, I didn't think so.
Don't try this on Amazon. Truly, it's NSFW. Don't believe me? Well, it was your job!
Correct - This is NOT a US case
The O'Dwyer case sets yet another dangerous precedent. Regardless of whether O'Dwyer is guilty of copyright infringement, everything he did was outside the US. He used non-US servers, and controlled them from the UK. There is existing civil legislation that the companies or quangos who believe that they have had their products infringed by his site can take legal action in the UK.
But by doing so, they accept that this is under UK law. That means it is a civil action. The burden of proof rest with them. As he did not store or forward any actual content, only links to content, and as he had a note on the sites front page that accessing the content he linked to may be illegal in your jurisdiction, he has some defence.
It is not my argument whether he is guilty or innocent. My position is that as he is a UK Citizen, living in the UK, with servers housed outside the US, he should be tried in the UK.
The extradition laws are there to ensure the repatriation of citizens who have broken the law of their home country back to their own country to face justice there. It is not there for sending your citizens to a foreign country to face justice there, when you have not actually committed a crime within that country. That is called rendition.
What we are seeing is an American justice system that is attempting to impose itself on foreign nationals living in their who country. The implications of this is that we are all now subject to US law, and the courts are interpreting this as superseding UK law.
Re: In the UK under UK law
Quite right.
"Extradition is the official process whereby one nation or state surrenders a suspected or convicted criminal to another nation or state. Between nation states, extradition is regulated by treaties. Where extradition is compelled by laws, such as among sub-national jurisdictions, the concept may be known more generally as rendition."
I would add that extradition should ONLY be to the state where the person is a citizen.
So, if you are in the US (regardless of citizenship) and you transgress US law, you can be prosecuted in the US.
If you are in the US and you transgress UK law, and are a UK citizen, you can be extradited to the UK, regardless of where the crime was committed.
But if you are in the UK, are a UK citizen, and you transgress US law, you can not be extradited to the US. You could, conceivably, be rentioned to the US.
Extend this ruling to O'Dwyer
At last, someone has seen sense about McKinnon, but for all the wrong reason. OK, so he has Apergers, but that is not the real issue. The real issue is that he may have committed something that is a crime in the US, but did it from the UK. The words of the US representatives and media have shown he could not have got a fair trail - he would have been guilty the moment his feet hit US soil.
If the US wants to prosecute him, they should do it in the UK, under UK law. That is where he was when the alleged crime was committed.
Now lets extend this argument to Richard O'Dwyer. He has index torrent files. Not a problem, you can easily use Google's index to get this information. He just put what was effectively a google search in to a focused web page. He indexed files not held in the US, on a server not held in the US, and offered it to people who did not necessarily come from the US.
And in doing so upset some media companies in the US. If they have a beef with this then they should take their CIVIL case to the UK courts. They are free to do so. It is arguable that he may have broken no UK law. But in order t test this he should be tried in the UK by a UK court under UK law.
The US have redefined Extradition. It was always meant to get your citizens back to your country to try them for crimes committed in your country. This redefinition is dangerous. We are seeing now just how dangerous.
Christopher Tappin knows this only too well, having been caught in a sting operation. The two US people stung both copped to a plea bargain sentence and got under 2 years. Because Tappin opposed extradition he has been faced with dying in a US jail because it looks like he has been tried and sentenced before he even got to the US. And all because this unbalanced extradition law does not permit a UK court to see the evidence.
Now that Mrs May has shown she has a bigger pair that the Prime Minister and all the UK courts, let her go the whole distance and repeal this unfair and unbalanced act.
BRITISH JUSTICE FOR BRITISH CITIZENS.
Flame icon .... well work it out.
Brilliant
SPB strikes again. This is a classic.
Much better than the real thing.
Re: DEFRA needs better spin
Love it.
Pity you post as AC though
Equivalence
I see that the website NFSN wants to publish the private addresses of DeFRA employees and civil servants. However, it does not want to publish the names and addresses of those behind the site, nor those behind the campaign. Note that the injunction they publish is redacted through out. Sort of "We can out you but you can't out us". Says it all really.
So, they have, or seem to have, broken computer misuse laws over this side of the pond, and does this not now come under our all encompassing anti terror legislation (am I allowed to say that?) then why don't we seek to have them extradited to the UK to face charges over here? After all, US of A seems to think it has a right to do just that to upstanding British people.
As for the badgers, to be honest, I could care less but I would have to exert myself.
Mines the one with "Using badger pelts for fun and profit" in the pocket.
Company accounts
The company told the Evening Standard, which was first to report Facebook's latest UK accounts, that the "information does not necessarily present a full account of overall global financial performance so it would be a mistake to draw any conclusions from these filings."
REALLY? SO these accounts, filed at company house, should not be used to draw conclusions about the fiscal performance???
And this is a very good reason
why we don't want, no we REALLY don't want, smart meters
I agree
If you shop on Amazon then this saves a couple of key clicks if you don't have a browser open. Like that's going to happen.
What upsets me is that I get Ubuntu from a UK distributor. It's a UK based development team. I am in the UK. ... .... I want this to go to Amazon.co.uk
Re: OS?
Operating System is NOT equivalent to task scheduler. See any number of Real Time operating systems that very clearly do not do task switching on timeslices or IO demand, but instead yield control to a different task. These are not trivial. If they were, people like WindRiver would give away their code and not sell it to NASA JPL for a large fee.
This looks like a great course to get people interested in building something from scratch that runs on the raw processor.
How to solve the Assange problem
It is very easy. Assange has broken UK law (he skipped his bail). That is an offence that could carry a prison sentence. But why bother? why waste the money?
He is effectively under house arrest now. He can't go out of the embassy because he will be arrested. Just wind the police presence down to two bobbies, one at the back and one at the front to arrest him if he puts a foot outside. Otherwise, let the Ecuadorian s feed and house him.
See, he becomes Schroedinger's Assange: he is free and not free at the same time. Everyone wins.
Mines the one with Quantum Jail Principles in the pocket.
Re: Why C
Well, as they are running on the Wind River VxWorks RTOS, it could be that the choice of <insert your favourite language here> is not supported. I have not programmed in VXWorks, but looking at the design spec's for Curiosity, I would imagine that getting as close to the hardware interface as possible is a requirement. Would <insert your favourite language here> support real time control of the the devices?
Also, JPL programs in C as a language of choice. I have worked with them (briefly) and although I was not working in C, it quickly became apparent that all their examples and code base was in C. Well, actually, some of the examples were in (shudder) FORTRAN.
Mine's the one with the card deck and manual hole punch in the pocket.
This is a hilarious thread
First we have the no shit Sherlock moment from a group of University researchers.
And then these comments. As a cat owner, I understand all the stories of what was brought back. They way they are told had me laughing so loud over lunch some colleague though I had gone mad.
Well done everyone - damn fine effort..
Thank you!
How the hell did they get the Smart car up those step?
that is all
Re: Nothing to see here...Except for Lawyers
We've got seven hundred thousand
Attorneys at law
Nobody can tell me what we need them all for
We should throw them in chains
Chastise and rebuke them
If that doesn't work
We should take them out and nuke them
Blow a lawyer to pieces
It's the obvious way
Don't wait for a thesis
Do it today
Take him to the court
Of your final appeal
When you're fresh out of lawyers
You don't know how good it's gonna feel.
Al Stewart - License to Steal
Guess he didn't like his lawyer!
