Posts by Guy Fawkes

It's worse than that...

The three major credit reporting agencies *sell* the data they collect. Experian has in the past even run their own spam-for-hire operation. And if an enterprising ID thief has sufficient resources, they can buy large blocks of consumer names, addresses, and social security information - it has been done.

And there is almost no legal protection against these parasites in the USA. The law requires the CRAs to remove derogatory information automatically after a certain period of time, and to place an annotation from the consumer on disputed debts, but unless you have the financial resources of Bill Gates (so that yo ucan take the CRAs to court), there's no enforcement; and a phony "creditor" can renew derogatory information simply by "selling the debt" to another branch of the same company, under a different corporate name, so the only way to really get the info removed is to pay the blackmailer.

I'd be enormously happy if LifeLock and Experian drove each other, and the other 2 CRAs, out of business.

@ Fraser

"how many OSes automatically connect to any WiFi access point that they can? My XP laptop certainly doesn't, I would regard this as a massive security flaw if it did."

Either you are a liar, or you have specifically configured your XP laptop to *not* connect to any signal it can. The default configuration of Windows XP (at least as recently as Service Pack 2) is to connect to any signal it sees - whether that be an AP, or an ad-hoc (aka "per-to-peer") network. And that's why any time you see "free Public Wi-Fi" you should suspect a "man-in-the-middle" attack, but I digress...

It *is* a massive security flaw. But it's also Microsoft Windows. The Windows design philosophy is to build a system that can be used by idiots (and sure enough, it *is* used by idiots).

Open to interpretation?

"Microsoft will publish most of its major protocol data and license the protocols at a reasonable fee."

In the past, when talking about monies coming into the Corporate coffers (as opposed to those flowing out), Microsoft has always defined "reasonable fee" as "easily afforded by a national budget. Like that of Kuwait, Dubai, or Switzerland, for example"

@ bob_blah

"Judge White has been pilloried for doing what he, and every other judge presiding in common law jurisdictions, do every day."

And he should be pilloried for it. It's his *job* to make judgments based on arguments presented. Failing (or refusing) to hear the arguments of one side in a dispute makes it impossible to make an impartial judgment.

Judges who simply rubber-stamp the orders drafted by the plaintiff ought to be deported to France.

@ Neil Hoskins

"Assumption: that viable electric guns are developed that can put stuff into space at escape velocity ..."

It can be done with the technology we have now. Getting someone to pay for the railgun up Mount Everest is the real roadblock.

"Question: with current/predicted technology, does a fission power station produce enough power to heat up my shower, and have enough left over to get rid of its waste at the aforementioned escape velocity?"

A single fission plant to power the railgun (and probably every electricity consumer in Tibet as well) would be able to manage all of the waste from all of the plants needed to convert every single fossil-fuel power plant on the planet. It would also give us the capability of putting large unmanned objects into high orbit without burning any chemical fuel.

Another such launcher in the Andes could expand our capacity enough to make Lunar holidays affordable.

Of course, the nation that controls such a launcher would also have the capacity to put asteroidal bodies *down* anywhere on Earth, without an subsequent nuclear fallout to contaminate places beyond the target zone, so there are certain political issues to worry about, also.

@ Jamie

Thanks!