Posts by A J Stiles 2669 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Apr 2006
Suppose for a second that we had been offered a choice between first-past-the-post, AV, STV, Party List, Condorcet, IRV, punch-up in a pub car park (it's still fairer than FPTP) and maybe a few other methods.
Since the new voting system most probably would have been chosen by a first-past-the-post ballot, we most probably would have ended up with FPTP anyway -- even if more people had voted for something else.
I made this argument during the AV debate. Basically, we *don't* actually elect our representatives, because human nature is to vote on minor issues on which the population is roughly evenly split and ignore major issues on which there is broad agreement. A candidate with an unpopular position on a major issue but who makes no pronouncement on a minor issue can get elected by default.
Example:
Candidate A supports beheading cute, fluffy kittens.
Candidate B opposes beheading kittens and supports serving beer in litres instead of pints.
Candidate C opposes beheading kittens and also opposes serving beer in litres.
The following Thursday, candidates B and C each score 33% of the vote. Candidate A scores 34% of the vote and wins. And cute, fluffy kittens end up beheaded, even though most people voted against that.
As long as it uses different operators for different operations, I'll be happy.
If it's another language that tries to use "+" both to concatenate strings and add numbers, and/or tries to use the same comparison operators to compare strings and numbers, then it's doomed to failure.
The level of demand for energy has a general upward trend. Occasional introduction of more energy-efficient appliances means there are slight (or not-so-slight) downticks, but increasing energy efficiency is like reducing journey times: eventually you reach the shortest possible distance, or 100% of the energy supplied is doing something useful, and there is no more to be saved.
The cost of renewable energy is going to go down to a minimum according to economies of scale; then according to diminishing returns it will remain pretty much steady, or at least only rise more slowly than the cost of non-renewable energy.
The cost of non-renewable energy is going to go up and up and up -- until eventually, it runs out altogether. At that point, we're stuck with whatever renewable energy generating capacity we have -- and if that's less than 100% of our needs, then we're shafted.
The thing about *all* non-renewable energy generation is that, since the non-renewable fuels are pretty much by definition not being replaced as fast as they are being consumed, this is tantamount to an invisible subsidy. Oil, gas, coal and even uranium *will* run out one day; after which, renewable energy is all there is ever going to be.
Now, we basically have two choices as to what to do about that situation. Either we wait for it to happen and suddenly transition the whole of society to a pre-Industrial Revolution lifestyle (no motor vehicles, no Internet, no electricity, no indoor plumbing, no modern medicine, no 50th birthdays); or we get started with preparing *now*, so that we don't have to do all that.
A *lot* of non-renewable energy will have to be expended, on a one-time basis, to kick-start a renewables-based infrastructure. If we can get onto 100% renewables *before* the non-renewables run out altogether, then we won. At any rate, the longer we leave it, the less of our 21st century lifestyle we are going to be able to keep.
The USA might well be content to sit back and do nothing. They also believe the Earth to be 6000 years old, and that all living things were created in their present form by a magic sky fairy.
As long as it's less than the amount of potential energy stored in chemical bonds in the tree, the energy cost of planting, harvesting and transporting a tree could be obtained from renewable sources.
On the other hand, if it costs more energy to plant, harvest and transport a tree than you eventually obtain from it, then you simply stop growing trees and use the fuel saved by not doing forestry management instead of trees.
A heat pump moves heat from one place to another. Ideally, it moves rather more joules of heat than the amount of electricity fed to it and discharges the inevitable waste heat at the hot end. By heating your home with heat from the ground or air outside, as opposed to heat produced by gas or electricity, there is a net reduction in energy consumption.
This does mean, of course, that "outside" gets colder.
If some lazy, selfish waste of oxygen is putting recyclables in their "residual waste" bin, then the local council not only aren't getting the money that they would have raised by selling them to a recycling merchant, but also they have to pay to bury them in landfill. Meaning, honest people's council tax goes up.
"the net effect to consumers is that we have to pay a lot more for the same things" -- Yes, I said that.
"at least when we chose to make a stand we get to feel all warm and fuzzy inside, rather than all bitter and twisted because some fat, rich politician has told us we have to do it" -- Not half as bitter and twisted as we are all going to feel when -- not if -- workers in the Third World start demanding better conditions, or pollution there actually starts interfering with production.
The inevitable price rise can be managed by gradually increasing taxes on unsustainably-produced goods (and investing the money in sustainable, local industry) until they match the price of sustainably-produced goods.
Or, we can wait until there really is no alternative; in which case, price rises will be the least of our worries. This is a timebomb we are sitting on.
Only governments can fix this, by banning the import of anything manufactured under conditions which would not be acceptable in the *destination* country.
There are laws against polluting the British countryside, and British workers have certain rights in respect of working hours, protective equipment, fair wages and so forth. Anytime an employer is caught in breach of the regulations, they are quite rightly hauled over the coals.
We need new laws holding manufacturers of goods in foreign countries to exactly the same standards as manufacturers at home. Anything else would be tantamount to saying it's OK to treat Chinese workers that way, but not British workers.
And yes, I am aware this will lead to price rises. We've been addicted to cheap stuff for too long, and this situation is unsustainable. At least if we act first, there is a chance that the whole situation can be managed (and maybe we can even rebuild our own manufacturing industry, when the rest of the world is forced to compete fairly); as opposed to the disaster that will occur if we just wait for the Chinese to start demanding their rights, which is inevitable.
It is actually legal to remove your seat belt while carrying out a manoeuvre that involves reversing. But in this case, you only need first and reverse gears.
Trouble is, reverse on a Ford is as far away from first as it could possibly be; so simply restricting the movement of the gear lever isn't an option here.
Because the parts in their present condition are WEEE. If HP *don't* assemble them into finished goods, they'll have to pay somebody to get rid of them. At least if they do one last production run, they'll be able to offset some of the costs, the disposal becomes somebody else's problem -- and the hit they're taking is probably less than what a recycling merchant is going to charge.
Also, there are cunning stunts you can pull with regard to taxes and losses.
That's not how it works.
You pay cash for a top-up voucher with a number on it. The vendor doesn't even need to see your phone, let alone know the number. Then you call the top-up hotline and enter the number on the voucher. The most anybody knows is which shop sold the voucher, and there's no saying you were even the same person who bought it.
No scrap of a paper trail, and that's the way it should be. A less-benign future government could seriously abuse the information that doing it this way obliterates.
"[W]hy [has] no company has jumped onto mythtv to offer a decent home media box that's marketed to a wide audience[?]"
Because there's s*d-all money to be made in it, is why not. All the important software except the video drivers is GPLed, so the only way you can earn is by putting a markup on the hardware. Which people will then just buy cheaper, from wherever you're buying it from.
Grid references in NI are based on the Irish map grid, which has a different origin from the UK one, and Irish Grid North is in a slightly different direction from British Grid North.
If you fail to take this into account, then Ireland will appear approximately 170km. East and 130km. South of its true location -- where parts of NI would overlap with parts of Merseyside, Cheshire and North Wales -- and twisted off its axis by a degree or so.
Freax (as it was first known) was intended as a proof-of-concept that microkernels, despite being tremendously fashionable with people who get hard-ons for abstraction and structure but break into a cold sweat at the thought of actual hardware even existing, were less efficient than monolithic kernels.
In case it needs explaining again: You put fences where as little as possible has to go through them, not just where they look pretty.
Device drivers need to be located entirely in kernel space, so that nothing in user space can compromise the sanity-checking they have to do for the sake of your hardware. As a bonus, you can do your sanity-checking on the "idealised" side of the driver where it's the same for all devices, aot the "real" side where it's different for each device.
You could argue that a cryptographically-signed binary is a derivative work and therefore the Source Code needed to reproduce it exactly includes the signing key. GPL3 is just a bit more explicit on the point.
Imagine if the police told you that you had the right to a phone call, then did something that rendered you temporarily deaf and dumb specifically in order to prevent you from exercising it.
No, there's only one "problem" with the GPL: it obliges you to release the Source Code to your modified versions, so that other people can benefit from your work in the same way as you benefitted from other people's work.
Anyone who dislikes the GPL wants to do the one thing it doesn't allow, the one thing it was designed specifically to prevent.
Well, that's what Sky Plus is for. Select desired station, pause it, do something else for as long as the total duration of all the advert breaks minus however long you might want to spend on live pause, then come back and hit play. When adverts come on, just fast-forward through them. By the time you catch up with broadcast, it will be the end of the programme.
I'd make those who advocate polluting the BBC with adverts watch Sky on a non-recording box, but it's probably against some human rights law regarding cruel and unusual punishments.
Use a touchscreen, or a keyboard with individual miniature displays in each key; allowing the key layout to be remapped at random. Just knowing which *keys* were pressed does not then tell you what *numbers* were entered.
The original idea was to thwart shoulder-surfing of PIN entry machines in stores (even if you cover the whole keyboard with your hand, your tendons give away which keys you're pressing) but it would also quite nicely defeat thermal imaging of a conventional keyboard after use.
For patent purposes, this constitutes a declaration of Prior Art.
Simple fact: "Content" is horrendously overpriced for what it is, and the balance of power has shifted so as not to favour the distributors and producers. The industry, in trying to extract payment for every instance of media consumption, are in their own way just as guilty of freeloading as the "freetards". (How many plumbers expect to get paid every time you flush your toilet? No, they do the work, you pay them once and they go away. And they don't complain even if you let other people bizz in your toilet.) Everyone in the industry has had it too easy, for too long, they've got used to it and they don't like that it is coming to an end.
Just because something was hard work, doesn't somehow automatically entitle you to make money out of it. It was the same for a few people who used to make money importing rare shellfish from the Middle East to make purple dye, before William Henry Perkin spoiled it all by inventing artificial mauve.
The *only* way to ensure people aren't getting your content without paying for it, is not to create it in the first place. You create, you get ripped off. That's the way it is now -- the tables have turned. Artists have got to eat, but there's nothing stopping them from having proper jobs.
If you want to open a business to the public, you have to open it to *all* the public or *none* of the public. That's how the rules work. Because the simple fact is, "free market" wanking notwithstanding, civilisation is about protecting the weak from the worst excesses of the strong.
The glibertarian line -- that everyone is free just to start their own, alternative business which, by virtue of its non-exclusionary nature, will end up being more successful than Google -- turns out in practice to be bollocks.
Business owners are by definition in a position where they have the upper hand over their customers -- and it is in everyone's interests that they do not abuse that unequal relationship by capriciously excluding entire sectors of society.
Try opening a whites-only hotel and see how long you last -- even if you place a stack of brochures for inexpensive surgical skin colour reassignment in an area not subject to the colour bar.
I know just how he feels.
I live my life in the common gender -- it's about what's between my ears, not what's between my legs -- and I have enough trouble persuading people that the correct form of address for me does not include any of "Mr", "Mrs", "Miss" or "Ms", but is just simply "A J Stiles". I can't afford a higher degree, and I am too intellectually honest to seek ordination as a priest.
"some restrictions cannot be worked around" -- that should never, ever happen. A patent is supposed to cover *one* means to an end. If a patent covers an end in itself, it is invalid, and needs to be challenged.
What we desperately need is an IP bonfire -- a mass invalidation of patents and an extension to the Fair Dealing provisions of copyright law.
That would require people to learn stuff and understand it properly.
As opposed to just blindly copying stuff from elsewhere on the Internet, without making any attempt to understand what it does.
Ever seen a page that wasn't designed using Dreamweaver, but with MM_ prefixes on the JavaScript functions that do the image rollovers and stuff? Exactly.
Ah, yes, Window Maker. One seriously underrated desktop environment. Has the exceptionally cool feature that it isn't even *trying* to pretend to be like Windows, so it might even be easier for n00bs to get to grips with.
The Clip (stop shuddering, it's *nothing* like Microsoft's one) and the Dock are great. Install the GTK2 libraries (and the bindings to your favourite scripting language of course), and you can even run GNOME applications.
Someone needs to pick that up and work on it a bit; my C++ isn't there yet, unfortunately
This cropped up in Gavin and Stacey. It was the episode where Pam was with a bunch of Essex locals protesting against the erection of a new mobile phone mast, and complaining because she couldn't get a decent signal. May have been series 2 episode 6, but I haven't got my DVDs to hand.
The reason there are more asthmatics about today is simple: Salbutamol.
Not so long ago, an asthma attack could have been fatal. Nowadays, a few quick puffs of an inhaler can get you breathing (no qualifying adverb required) again. So the genes responsible for asthma can propagate. Salbutamol was invented about 2 human generations ago. You do the maths .....
Mine's the one with the Ventolin in the pocket.
"Actually you do not know that, did they even try?" -- No. But you don't need to try jumping off a cliff to know it hurts. When you've watched other people jumping off things, you can build up a pattern. There's a clear historical pattern of shooting messengers when the news is inexpedient.
"That Anon broke into the site does not mean it was open for all to see, not everyone has the technical knowledge to get that far." -- and you don't know that, either. The point is, they managed to get into the site. That means someone else could have got in, and they might have *actually* harmed someone.
This is still a failing on the part of the police. If they hadn't been so lax as to store information they probably didn't need to store behind insecure passwords on a public network, *nobody* would have been able to access it.
And if anybody ever wants to commit a spot of ID theft, there's really no need to go breaking into secure servers. All you need do is type "curriculum vitae.doc" into Google, and pick somebody you want to be.
In the meantime, be grateful that *all* they did was publish the data. At least now a big fuss has been made, the authorities have no choice but to be on top of it now if anything happens to anyone. Someone really nasty could just have sat under the radar, taking out victims one by one.
Any lives that have been "put at risk by this attack" were *already* at risk, as long as passwords were stored unencrypted. Someone could have been going through the database quietly, picking people off one by one, and remained undetected for a long time.
I am quite sure that if AntiSec had pointed out to the Missouri Sheriff's Association that they were using such an insecure system, the response would *not* have been "Oh, thank you for pointing out our abject failing, we'll fix that as soon as possible. Here, have a medal!"
Sometimes, the best way to attract attention is to make a noise that is just too loud to ignore.
I think the best outcome from this would be a law against storing paswords in cleartext. Yes, it makes life difficult for people who forget their passwords. Well, then, they should learn to remember them! And yes, it makes life difficult for the drag-and-drool brigade. But they should employ real IT technicians. And if that's too expensive, well, then, tough titty! We all managed just fine without computers before .....
"Internet browsers - barely any difference between them. How different could they possibly be?"
Well, it depends. You'd expect that when you do a String.split, the results would be the same in all browsers; so something like "88 ACACIA AVENUE|ANYTOWN|COUNTYSHIRE|WX123YZ", returned by a script from an AJAX call, would give the same result in all browsers. And indeed it does: an array with 4 elements; "88 ACACIA AVENUE", "ANYTOWN", "COUNTYSHIRE" and "WX123YZ".
Something like "120 HIGH STREET|BIGCITY||PQ12RS" (with the county field intentionally left blank) returns a 4-element array "120 HIGH STREET", "BIGCITY", "", "PQ12RS" in *most* browsers. Guess which browser's JavaScript implementation returns a *3*-element array "120 HIGH STREET", "BIGCITY", "PQ12RS" ?
This kind of exclusivity deal should be made very illegal.
Just because one broadcaster is showing the event, they absolutely should not be allowed to lock out other broadcasters from showing it.
Let the market decide. Anything else is just blatant anti-competitive, rent-seeking behaviour, and directly harms the consumer.
Unfortunately, it's mathematically impossible to keep something secret that ultimately has to be machine-readable, if it's packaged with the reading device. That is a limitation of the universe, not a limitation of present technology, and nothing anyone can invent is going to change it.
Look, just accept it: there's really no way you can conceal how your fancy hardware does what it does. The decryption key is right there. If someone is really determined enough, they *will* find a way in. If this is what Fred in the Shed can do, what are your competitors capable of?
Just because something was hard work, **does** **not** **mean** that you have an automatic right to make loads of money off it. The market will decide what it's worth.
The best way to thwart copying is by spending your efforts on making the best product around and selling it at a reasonable price, so nobody will see a *need* to copy it.
The idea of the one-time pad is that you change the cipher for *each* *letter* of the original message as you go, so every "e" in the plaintext can potentially be encrypted as a *different* letter in the ciphertext.
Putting spaces between words is just a schoolboy error -- either your contact at the far end will be able to work out where the spaces should be, if they have decrypted the message correctly, or you encrypt spaces.
I'll believe it when I see a working decompiler.
When considered purely in terms of abstract mathematics, decompilation -- taking a binary executable and producing some source code which would compile to the same binary -- is pretty much isomorphic with face recognition.
If Church and Turing are correct, you don't even have to decompile to the same language as originally used. Imagine two programmers on opposite sides of the world being able to collaborate on a project, without even a programming language in common!
My own aggressive advertisement blocking system works by having a "poisoned" nameserver, which deliberately returns wrong addresses for known advertising and tracking servers. This legitimate use relies on me being able falsely to claim authority for the domains I am misrepresenting.
Insistence on DNSSEC probably will make this harder.
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