Re: designed
... 'evolved' works just as well in his argument.
861 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Aug 2012
@I.P. & S.R. (and smokers/vapers in general).
I totally agree with Orlowski's article and your comments, this is a truly terrible piece of legislation and it is terrible both in its misguided intentions and in the reasons for its coming into being.
I would be happy to help man the barricades with you - just don't expect me to agree with smoking / vaping in public spaces (or whatever the legal term is).
The second hand gaseous product of eating a lot of beans is also biologically insignificant but nevertheless very annoying. I expect that strangers will not be completely oblivious of their effect on others.
For fuck's sake just stop smoking in any form you bunch of self centred, neurotic, poseurs.
Not anonymous, just totally unimpressed by smokers.
I've got two stone age cutting implements (both found by chance at the edges of ploughed fields), one is a knapped but not ground knife the other is half of a beautifully smooth, ground axehead. Both are still sharp. They may not cut wood as well as a £17.99 B&Q axe but they sure have lasted longer.
So far they haven't been able to force me to buy anything though and, tedious though it is, there are reasonably effective remedies for unwanted advertising.
(Sorry El Reg - can you tell me how to accept your adverts anonymously - no cookies, no tracking, no targeting - otherwise the annoyance outweighs the benefits).
Serious answer - it doesn't matter, the problem is that Microsoft has consistently used Windows as a revenue generator, putting out new versions whenever they needed a fresh dollop of unimaginable wealth, not when they thought they needed to upgrade the platform for technical reasons.
Their intentions for Win 10 are still purely financial, the technical aspects are, for them, irrelevant. For a user, on the other hand, it is only the technical (functional) characteristics of an OS that matter leading to a very uneasy relationship with the Vendor, which has now snapped in my (insignificantly small) case.
Fast forward a few (thousand) generations and:
"across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.”
Fine, resist away and you will be tagged as someone hiding something. I don't suppose that would cause you any problems and I don't suppose the security people would do anything unless you managed to accumulate some other tags, US no-fly list, regularly seen parking outside the Ruritanian embassy or whatever criteria they have for being suspicious.
The point is that the security services keep saying that they are looking for the "unknown unknowns" hence the dragnet and hence their craving for full access to everything. If they can't have that (and I sincerely hope they don't) then they will have to make do with the next best thing, which seems to be looking at everything anyway in the hope that they will be able to get at least something from it.
If I understood correctly the extracts of Hannigan's speech he is asking for crypto software which falls over if you don't follow a strict procedure, or some such 'human" cause of failure. So you can have your secure crypto but if you ever forget to put in a new password for each message it can be cracked. That way your average crim can have the best crypto but GCHQ can read the plaintext..
On another note, after analysing Hannington's comments I can see why a Classics background might be useful in his job - it must require great linguistic skills to appear to say X in such simple english but actually mean Y.
Big Brother has an overwhelming need to continue watching you, and you, and you ...
The phrase you are quoting is "feeling like they are genuinely free" which needs an awful lot of twisting to extract "feeling like they are in America", so back off a bit.
And while you are at it - where is your example of the best freedom to be had on the planet. For myself, I would suggest Monaco - but only if you are very, very rich.
This 'Post Office' mind game has gone too far.
Before cheap, powerful computers and storage were invented it was uneconomical to spy on everyone unless the authorities had good reason to mistrust everyone. Now it is affordable and any bureaucracy will adopt useful equipment and practices if it fits into the budget. The problem is not the bureaucracies it is the law.
The FBI needs to know where the law stands. We need to have the laws that suit us.
Certainly it's a big cliff but it is by no means sure that the FBI is actually pushing us over the cliff - see the article for good reasons for that idea.
Of all the three letter agencies involved in the encryption problem the FBI is the one best suited to taking the problem to court. I can't imagine that the CIA, NSA etc would be stopped by a court ruling if National Security was at stake, but the FBI, (I imagine), would feel bound by a final court ruling. And this problem does need a definitive legal response because how else can you convince a Congressman (or worse, a New Jersey property developer) what is allowed and what is not allowed in the US.
There is an solution to the payment problem, Google (or whatever it calls itself now) runs Google pay, Apple runs Apple pay and MS runs Windows pay - if these organisations made a commitment to providing a non-data slurping, secure service, and stood by it, they ought to be able to make it work.
Hmm - tricky problem.
"The single core of RPi 1's makes it unsuitable to run as a FAST desktop..." FTFY.
The RPi 1 works fine for me if I'm not in a hurry, but then I can remember preparing a paper tape for an overnight run on a shared computer followed by de-bugging and a wait for the next overnight run. Anything is faster than that.
You can't stop a country from having spooks, they seem to be a necessity. We now have a court ruling that they are allowed to spy on the citizens of this country (nothing new there). It seems that the politically responsible Cabinet Minister is also administratively responsible and has some levers to pull if the spooks get uppity. So, it's the same old system, dusted down, judicially audited and essentially relying on the Code of the Woosters and Jeeves the Civil Servant to save us from anarchy, dictatorship or other extremes.
Yes, it all looks like a storm in a teacup except for one thing - he really did fear being bundled off to America if he went to Sweden. He feared this and he had many good reasons to fear this. That was why Ecuador offered him asylum, that was why he claimed asylum.
Personally I think he wouldn't have been shipped to the States but I have absolutely no idea if that is just optimism; in any case I can't blame him for running into the embassy. Again personally, I don't think his situation will get any better so he should just face the music and get arrested by the nearest constable.
As you say, GPS receivers work with multiple satellites and it seems, from the "several other satellites affected" report, that GPS satellites talk amongst themselves or to a ground station.
Anyone designing a GPS system (whether the satellite end or the receiver end) would consider the case where data from at least one satellite or ground station was in error. We are talking military on the satellite side, and high precision timing (for one use of GPS) on the receiver side so it is not a slap happy crowd of lazy engineers and programmers that produced these systems.
OK GPS is complex and a truly unforeseen or very low probability event might have just happened but, to me, it looks odd.
How many functioning GPS satellites are there up there and how long would a non-functioning GPS satellite hang around over the Midlands ?
Methinks either something is very wrong with peoples timekeeping equipment or someone has not explained what exactly happened. There's a story there somewhere.
Have you ever seen the curvature of the horizon? I never have been able to convince myself that I had, and ever since the arrival of the fish-eye lens I have seriously doubted the validity of such observations.
Ships coming and going over the horizon is easy to observe.
The Académie Française is charged with maintaining a dictionary of the French language. This is an authoritative definition of the French language and so must be considered prescriptive. Not even the august members of the Académie Française themselves take the idea very seriously.
Has anyone done some calculations on how many people would be needed to maintain an acceptable level of civilization so that, for example, clothing* could be replaced, strange infectious diseases could be treated, dropped mobile phones could be repaired/replaced, trans-new-world transport could be built and run, new generations could be educated and scientific /engineering progress maintained etc etc.
It seems to me that the numbers of people required for a successful autonomous colony would be impracticable, and that those left behind on Earth would be a bit reluctant to finance continuous re-supply missions.
*For example, stone age clothing was very low tech, today's clothing requires advanced agriculture, synthetic materials, specialized machinery, efficient transportation and (I think) specialized retail industries.
We need warp drive and replicator technology before even thinking of space colonization.
If even readers of The Register can be thrown by the DC reference what hope does a security service have of being up to date with all the "argot" of a worldwide group of nasties ? How do you monitor a language you don't know ?
My only knowledge of security and police service procedures comes from TV and Cinema, but simply watching the comings and goings at a suspect address seems to be a very common practice. If the suspicions are confirmed then the other means are called in - such as the rooting of suspects' computers etc. It does seem to be a fairly effective data sifting method.
... or why not just tax company profits at source? That way Governments can get the money that they want without getting involved with complicated paperwork with a lot of bemused citizens.
If a government doesn't tax company profits at source the money will vanish and you will find , if you look really really hard, that a lot of it is no longer within the jurisdiction of the government, who will then get the money they want from the bemused citizens.
The "tax the people" system works really well for some and not at all well for a lot of bemused citizens.
That particular bit of Orwell just seems to be defining terms rather than some sort of rallying cry; a bit like "for a perfectly spherical raindrop" or something. Real life has to deal with real conditions, and in the case of GCHQ 'dictatorship' and 'power' are not in the pure form but more a sort of establishment consensus for getting things done in a reasonably effective way. Hence the very public expressions of surprise at any suggestion of wrongdoing and the unabashed advocacy for more of the same.
The problem lies in the huge discrepancy between the size of the establishment and the size of the population and the very limited power of the law in this area. Democracy it ain't.