Posts by david wilson 1300 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007
What possible use is a trebuchet as a defensive weapon?
Do you wait around outside your house 24/7 in case someone decides to burgle it, and then get people to stand still on a well-marked target spot while you fire it at them?.
This story sounds rather more like someone with an ailing business trying to get some free pubicity.
What would the situation be if the other party was in government?
Presumably there'd still be basically the same media appetite for 'blame porn/videogame' stories, there'd still be the same media appetite for 'huge amount of sex trafficing' stories, so at least some of the benefits of implementing bans would be there, in terms of potential approval of an underinformed or misinformed public.
>>"what are you on about , most herion user's that are killed by herion overdoses die because it is to pure and not contaiminated , know what your talking about before you post crap."
People die of overdoses not because drugs are pure, but because drugs are *unexpectedly* pure - they're used to watered-down stuff, and can OD if they get anything decent and don't try it out for strength before taking their regular dose.
One of the points about clean drugs is not only that they're not full of Christ-know-what, but that they are of predictable strength, and therefore much harder to OD on unless someone mis-measures them.
It's even *harder* to overdose if someone is getting a daily prescription (to avoid the chance of them selling anything), and harder still if they take their daily dose in a centre under supervision.
>>"Oh and sure legal drugs are all fine nobody every dies of sleeping pil overdose's..ah that is right 75% of people who die from drug overdoses in this country are from legal drugs, check national the office of statistics."
I think you're deliberately conflating accidental overdoses and suicides, which are, of course, completely different things.
>>"addicts had lifestyle before drugs and that is what lead them to drugs, not drugs leading them to a lifestyle...unless your rich or middle class."
So, they were serial shoplifters, burglars, and prostitutes making a decent income that they *didn't* spend on drugs, and then decided to blow it all and start a smack habit?
It would seem that from the account you give, your friends were unbelievably unlucky.
If smoking cannabis was generally anywhere near *that* dangerous, dealers would rapidly be running out of customers, and we'd have rather more than the distorted "It's 10x stronger than it was 10 years ago" arguments coming up every 10 years when it comes to discussions over the the classification.
>>"Can't believe people here are suggesting heroin should be on the NHS - why the F**K should I pay for junkies to get out of their minds on the tax that I have to pay? Just because they get themselves hooked, I see no reason why we should pay for it."
We're already paying pretty dearly for *not* doing it.
It costs very little to provide clean heroin. How much do you think it costs the NHS to deal with the problems that come from illegal use?
Even ignoring the reduction in crime, and the possibility of people being more useful members of society, if it's cheaper for me to have someone getting a maintenance dose of clean heroin than to have them injecting all kinds of crap, I don't count the possibility they might actually be happier on the clean heroin as a reason for not doing it.
>>"Because "dealers" are nefarious never-do-wells that, once the economic basis on which they primarily subsist has been removed, are bound to re-skill to more dangerous illegal activities."
Surely, the lowest-level dealers are often dealing substantially to fund their own use, and if that use became much cheaper, they'd have less need to engage in illegal activities.
Moving higher up the pyramid, there are people who currently do make significant money by moving high-value goods around at relatively low risk.
If there was something else they could do that had anything like the same reward/risk payoff, why wouldn't someone already be filling that niche?
It's fairly hard for large numbers of people to move into prostitution, unless the demand can somehow be increased.
Likewise, is there really a great unsatisfied demand for weapons out there? If anything, if a chuck of the illegal economy had the rug pulled from underneath it, you'd think that the demand for arms might actually fall.
In the longer term, if the drugs-based entry route into crime for many youngsters wasn't there, might we not end up with rather fewer ne'er-do-wells?
Seems like it's probably rather easier for someone to start off gradually by doing a little bit of dealing or a little couriering around on a bike than by doing a little bit of mugging or burglary.
In any case, the resources currently used in chasing up drug crime could be redirected elsewhere, so even if some people did move into other illegal activities, there's the potential for using the now-free resources against them.
The only two cases that *immediately* spring to mind of people being prosecuted are where people killed escaping burglars (shot in the back, chased and stabbed in the street), and ended up being found guilty by a jury.
In practice, you have to have *some* kind of concept of acceptable and excessive force, if only to stop cases of people being beaten or killed more in revenge than in self-defence.
>>"Injure a burglar or mugger and it's far more likely that you, rather than the robber, will end up in the dock.."
And your supporting statistics for that claim would be...?
Wherever people are in the world, it's pretty likely that in a mugging, police will only show up when it's over, unless a mugger is dumb enough to pick a target who's standing in front of a policeman.
If a mugger is armed, isn't it rather more likely that they'll have their weapon closer to hand than a victim would?
Since it's not the kind of story that tends to travels over here, how often is it in the US that someone carrying a gun for protection does use it to foil a mugging?
The comment was about people defending their spouse, not about people intervening generally in altercations between third parties.
When it comes to situations where a bystander doesn't know the people involved, especially if they didn't witness the start of the trouble, it's often a much trickier decision to pile in and try to stop things, especially for people with no experience in stopping fights.
>>"If someone's busy beating my wife to a pulp, I am absolutely not going to let her die first and then patiently wait for a court to render their verdict 3 or 4 years later."
But nor would people generally opposed to retribution, or in favour of weapon control - most people would just pile in with whatever they had.
Even where concealed weapon carrying *is* allowed, a great many people who could carry a weapon don't carry one, and that isn't because they don't love their other halves any less than you might do.
The problem with hypothetical scenarios is that they're often trivially easy to invent, but they don't actually shed much light on an issue, unless they help us think about things that aren't obvious.
Anecdotes are tricky enough, but hypotheticals can end up being like exaggerated anecdotes about things that didn't actually happen.
>>""In our Q1 2009 report on cybercrime, for example, we revealed that one single rogueware network are raking in $10,800 a day, or $39.42 million a year," it said. "If you extrapolate those figures across the many thousands of cybercrime operations that exist on the Internet at any given time, the results easily reach a trillion dollars."
Isn't that rather like saying:
"We found some instances of food poisoning result in death. Even though we know full well that it's bollocks reasoning and a bogus result, since most people get food poisoning eventually, it must be the world's greatest killer.
Not only *that*, but $10,800 a day is only £3.9m a year anyway.
When it comes to fly-tipping, dog-fouling, etc, what is actually being done under the auspices of RIPA?
It's hard to see that much would need to be done or *could* be done apart from identifying the people responsible.
It's not obviously more an invasion of someone's privacy to take a a video of them doing something in public, or for someone to follow them and see where they live than to have an official or copper go straight up to them and demand they identify themselves.
Given the nature of some people, it may be rather safer for officials not to confront them directly, unless they're mob-handed.
For those who'd argue that it's the thin end of a wedge leading to 100% surveillance, someone could argue with equal sense that making it illegal to find out who's breaking a minor law in public is a thin end of a wedge leading to a total lack of law enforcement.
Of course, many thin end of the wedge arguments are bollocks, since they assume people are unable to realise when things have gone too far.
If people *are* able to work out what laws they do and don't want enforcing, then things will get damped down if/when they do go to far.
If people *aren't* able to work out what laws they want enforcing, then people saying RIPA has gone too far seem likely to be wasting their time anyway.
Now, I'm sure that if things *did* get to the point where most people thought powers were being over-used, and cared enough to generate a political backlash which rolled things back, the thin-end-of-the-wedge types would be the first to jump up and say "Told you so!", despite the fact that the situation would indicate that the population in general was able to correct things even if they'd ignored the doom-mongers..
>>"Give them these powers and suddenly, look, every tom, dick and harry down at the council is suddenly able to order surveillance on anyone they suspect of looking at them funny."
But it plainly isn't every Tom, Dick, or Harry, since the bulk of the authorisations still come from senior management (whatever that means), and it seems fairly likely that most of the rest come from people just under them.
Anyone ordering surveillance not only has to find the money for it from somewhere, but pretty obviously has to say what it's *for*, if only for the reason that the people doing it wouldn't know what they should be doing if they didn't know what the reason for the surveillance was.
Someone can't just say "Dig up some dirt on David Hicks - I don't like the look of him!" without a serious risk that the person they tell will go straight off to blow the whistle, even if only to protect themselves.
So far, the argument seems to be that powers are sometimes used for things that some people see as trivial, not that investigations are being done for malicious reasons, otherwise, those investigations would be the *first* things that people drew attention to.
I dare say the paranoid might worry about what we're not being told about malicious investigations being done secretly, but they could worry about that whether or not there was any legislation about when powers could be legally used.
Unfortunately, the paranoid aren't much use as an early warning system for potential problems, any more than a smoke alarm which never stops shrieking is a useful safety device.
If anything, what actually happens is that people just get used to the noise, and ignore all alarms.
Surely, the cat-and-mouse act was regarding people who had actually been convicted of offences, to avoid them dying in prison, and was an alternative to force-feeding
Not that it actually seemed to be much of a solution, except maybe in the short term.
As far as RIPA surveillance is concerned, surely it's not *that* relevant who authorises it? Whatever 'senior management grade' means, if the person doing the authorising isn't involved with the details of a particular case, they're basically just going to be rubber-stamping things based on recommendations from someone more junior who does know the details.
At least if the person doing authorisation does know the details, they're at least potentially easier to hold to account., assuming anyone ever reviews the use of the powers.
It's hard to see how good or bad a 9% success rate is, without knowing the details, and knowing what kind of success rate could be expected even in the very best circumstances.
>>"It does bother me that there's an assumption that if you don't have religion, you must have something that occupies that role in your life, and it must be of equal size and shape..."
Quite.
And one side to that is that it's pretty clear that a great many supposed believers don't have that much of a hole that religion is filling either.
There are people who call themselves believers if pushed, but their token belief doesn't really extend much further than liking to think there might be a heaven when they're dead, and maybe saying a little prayer if they find themselves in deep shit, yet instantly forgetting that if things turn out OK.
Even though most have stopped going, there are still people who attend a church because their other half pushes them to do, it or their parents make them, they go through all the motions, and always have done, yet they don't really have significantly more belief than the token believers. If *they* had a hole, religion should clearly be filling it.
Yet despite that, the evangelistic believers will use themselves as a model of everyone else, and assume that everyone must have a god[s]-shaped hole just as large as their own, and that people are somehow defective if that hole isn't being filled by the right god.
I suppose there's always the excuse that the token believers "Just haven't been touched by [deity] yet!", but that would rather suggest a pretty bone-idle deity, which isn't much interested even in many people who are ripe for the touching, and which is happy for them to have their deity-sized hole left unfilled.
>>"The Ancient Greeks would have been horrified and would probably want to know why the hell anyone would want to abdicate their responsibilities like this. But then they weren't British so they probably couldn't relate to the idea that life is easier if you've got someone else to blame for your problems."
It *is* rather easier having ancient Greek-style democracy in a small city state than a decent-sized country.
Maybe even easier if you don't let your slaves or women vote.
Practically speaking, *if* biometrics in a given ID system can make it very hard for someone to have two identities, that could lead to that ID system being more trustworthy *even when compared to a non-biometric system which required precisely the same initial documentation*.
Someone who has never been on the system could try to get on in place of someone else who has never been on it, but once a person was on as themselves, it could be tricky for them to try and impersonate anyone else, since there's the potential for the system to recognise matching biometrics and ring alarm bells.
Pretty much everyone is already leaving a trail wherever they go, which any future government with totalitarian leanings could easily tap into even in the absence of ID cards.
Whether they think various kinds of information are worth bothering with is another matter.
I can see a government being interested in what people are saying, who they're talking to, what websites they're looking at, but those don't seem to be the kinds of things that ID cards would much facilitate the tracking of.
Thinking of the things an ID card might make it easy to track - travel/shopping habits, bank accounts, etc, lots of people in private organisations already have access to that information about me, and I imagine various government bodies could get access to it if they wanted to (if I was of any interest to them).
Though I wouldn't necessarily want that information openly published, it's not exactly secret.
I can see people being against the expense of ID cards, even if miracles happen and they don't go massively overbudget and fail to work properly.
However, on the *civil liberties* side of things, it seems strange to see people making a big thing about ID cards when most people carry mobiles, a great many use email for much of their communication, and over the next decade or two, financial transactions seem likely to be increasingly traceable as even small transactions will be done electronically more often.
Whether TPTB have the official right to look at such data in bulk, rather than for specific reasons, the paranoid among us should presumably be assuming that that data *will* be being looked at, and that future governments could easily and gradually change the rules for what they can look at, under the cover of crime/terrorist detection.
I'm trying to think which things I currently do might even *conceivably* require production of an ID card if/when cards arrive, and whether any of those things wouldn't *already* be traceable by existing means, never mind future ones.
It seems a fairly short list so far.
>>"Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results."
Assuming the claims of manipulation are correct, unless he was actually saying
"I know SOMEof these people have manipulating data, *AND* I don't know of ANYONE who hasn't"
then he's effectively saying:
"Some people are manipulating data and some aren't"
In which case it would make more sense to ask
"Who is manipulating data (and to what extent) and who isn't?"
rather than take the claim of manipulation as an excuse to ignore any or all undesired results, as some people may be tempted to do.
Can Microsoft stop someone buying legitimate MS software in country X on holiday, installing it on their laptop and then bringing the laptop back here?
Are there any places where software price differences could pay for the trip, or even a good fraction of it?
They're obviously editing the website.
Yesterday evening, it said
"SSC's "Charge on the RunTM" onboard charging system allows for 10 minute full battery recharges on a 220 outlet."
Now it says
"SSC's "Charge on the RunTM" onboard charging system allows for 10 minute full battery recharges on a 220V service."
So I guess it probably did say "standard 110V outlet" when Alun Taylor wrote the original article
I wonder when they'll change it to "industrial 3-phase outlet - slower domestic chargers also available"?
The 'A123' and similar 'safe lithium' cells can be recharged very quickly, somewhere in the region of 10-15 minutes, assuming you can get the power into them.
The issues with recharging a car in 10 minutes include not only having a good connection to the mains supply for the building where the car is charged, but also having a feasibly thin cable going to the car.
I assume no-one's thinking of a plug-in home charger using ultracapacitors to charge up slowly from the mains and then release all the power in 10 minutes (to avoid needing a powerful mains connection). Since the energy density of supercapacitors (Wh/kg) is many times lower than batteries, the charger would have to be many times heavier+larger than the car's battery pack.
In any case, what's the big deal with having a 10 minute charger working off a conventional outlet? Who actually needs that?
If there were recharging stations which were the equivalent of petrol (gas) stations, they could easily have large connections to the power grid.
On the other hand, a home charger is typically going to be used overnight, particularly as it would make a great deal of sense to charge vehicles overnight if possible, when electricity is typically cheaper due to lower demand.
To be fair, I'm not sure that Asperger's really counts as a mental disability when it comes to breaking into computers, or doing computer work in general.
For a lot of people, it's primarily a social disability, not affecting focus or intellect, so if someone with Asperger's breaks into a machine, that's no worse a reflection on the security than if someone without Asperger's.
That said, it does seem like the security of these machines was pretty shit and badly managed, and of all the people who break into machines (apart from people employed by the owner to test security), a loner obsessively looking for information that doesn't exist is probably rather better than someone just doing it for the challenge or to brag about it, and *far* better than someone looking to cause damage or extract confidential information.
It seems typically the case that people who should have kept machines secure will try to cover their backside by bigging-up the skill/persistence/etc of the intruder, but that's something that people should bear in mind before poking around in other people's machines
Recently we had a minor power spike.
Everything in the house survived perfectly intact, apart from my Belkin UPS, and the monitor plugged into the 'surge protected' socket on it.
For some extra fun, the nice sliding panel that allows the lead-acid battery to be easily removed for recycling appears to be either solidly glued shut, or a fake panel, and given the lack of any obvious other way of opening the box, it seems I'll have to do it some kind of violence to get the box open before I can even throw the PoS away.
>>"I remember [...] when a chap was dragged from his mini in Kengsinton High Strret by armed police and almost had a bullet put in his head. This was also a case of mistaken identity, I believe he was mistaken for an IRA member."
Actually, I think he (Stephen something or other?) was mistaken for someone who'd non-fatally shot a police officer, with the identification seemingly being based effectively on the model and colour of car. IIRC, he was shot through the car window after [allegedly] making some 'suspicious move', obviously not having read the manual on how to act non-suspiciously in every possible circumstance, so it was clearly all the victim's fault, as usual.
Fortunately, he survived, but he very nearly didn't.
>>"No,. Over here they would have been shot and the police commissioner would have failed to resign"
I thought here that generally things less suspicious than 'videogame gunfire' are considered just cause for being shot by the police (at least, in London) - things like getting on a tube train in Brixton, carrying a table leg in Camden, or driving a yellow Mini while entirely unarmed in Kensington.
Of course, in the last two cases, the victims were obviously to blame for [allegedly] looking like they might be *thinking* of making threatening moves with the guns they didn't have.
Excluding armed siege situations, where even the Met probably has enough time to be confident that there really is at least some kind of actual threat, when was the last time a criminal was *correctly* shot in London?
Even if the attackers in Mumbai *used* phones, would what they did have been impossible, or even significantly harder, without communication?
They may have used mobiles to some extent, but presumably they had also worked out in advance a reasonable plan of who was to attack what, and in what order. Terrorists holed up in a hotel shooting people didn''t *need* mobile comms to stay where they were and carry on shooting people.
Even if some perfect system of blocking communications was developed, I don't see how it would stop a similarly-motivated group of people doing basically the same thing again, and as successfully.
In any case, the authorities wouldn't know there were any coordinated attacks happening until some time after they had started, so communication after brief initial attacks would still be possible whatever system was implemented for emergency control of mobile phones.
Though it's easy to understand why the guy is pissed off (as are many people when other relationships fail), there isn't much information about exactly why the marriage broke down, just that it was in trouble before the surgery, let alone before the wife met the therapist.
Given that lack of information, it's also rather hard to square the knee-jerk image of the caring guy who *gives* a kidney to his wife with the knee-jerk image of the strange person who'd waste his time trying to bill her for it later, when all he was likely to gain was ridicule.
One wonders about the quality of legal advice he's geting.
There seem to be all kinds of things that could make the transplant/marriage situation tricky, even if the marriage hadn't already been in trouble.
Might it just be a bit weird living with your donor, especially if they were a surgeon?
Is the kind of person who'd issue a bill later the kind of person who might possibly just not let someone forget they were using 'his' kidney?
Even if that thought never entered the donor's head, is it not possible that even quite innocent enquiries into the wife's health might appear as annoying reminders when things aren't going well?
The idea of giving a kidney to save someone's life I quite understand, but giving one even partly to help save a marriage does rather seem like there was some kind of payback expected, if only in gratitude, which is hard to square with the idea of 'donation'.
>>"is this a guess? because if you have never used BT to download a flim/music/game then how would you know the quaility is a good enough substitute?"
I'd be really interested in how a *game* could be compressed to a lower-quality version and still work., short of chopping out data for later levels which people would just download a little later, if they got that far in the game.
It's possible all the sharers are weird people, all dedicated to sharing music that's sample-quality only, but given the difference in size between files which are of annoyingly bad quality and those good enough for many/most people not to bother buying an original, that doesn't seem that likely, and if it were actually the case, I guess I'd have heard about it somewhere.
Sure, *some* people might think anything less than the pure uncompressed original isn't good enough for their golden ears, but I doubt such people are in the majority of filesharers.
>>"1) The limits aren't clear"
I assume that's because what the practical limits are depends on what the spread of users is doing - if most 'unlimited' users are relatively light users, it's easy to carry a few heavy users, but as the customer base or habits change, what can be coped with also changes, even if infrastructure stays the same.
>>"2) The packages are, unsurprisingly, designed to provide maximum revenue for the ISP rather than convenience for the customer. Such as one ISP that has an 8.50UKP differential between packages with a 25GB usage delta, but otherwise charges each extra GB at 1.50UKP..."
Well, I'd guess that factored into their calculations is a hope (maybe based on experience) that an average '25GB' user only uses a fraction of their bandwidth, whereas someone paying for extra bandwidth clearly *is* using it.
I suppose there is some self-sustaining logic in there, since that relatively large per-GB price might end up pushing quite a few intermediate users from a 'light' package to a heavier one, and all those people could be using a fairly small fraction of the heavy package limit.
A package with a fixed basic charge and then all traffic charged at a realistic price per MB would be interesting, and possibly fairer, but I'm not sure what the takeup would be. I suspect that many people prefer a fixed monthly bill, with possible occasional extras if they nudge over a limit now and again, even if a fully traffic-related package might be cheaper.
Psychologically, it might even be easier to sell a model where people paid a fixed charge, and were then given a small rebate for bandwidth they *didn't* use than one where they paid for what they used, even if the total paid was exactly the same.
>>"3) The ISPs actively advertise their packages as unlimited and able to download plenty of media"
I suppose they are pretending to themselves that that's all going to be itunes and iplayer and videotelephony with ex-pat Granny, as well as selling the idea to people that there's all this wonderful stuff out there, and they should get themselves an unlimited package even if (especially if?) they're unlikely to be making that much use out of it.
The average consumer (who may well *not* realise that unlimited actually has limits) could easily be the same person who wouldn't know what to decide if given a choice of 2/5/10/25GB/month, so they play safe by going for the 'best' package, and in the process help to subsidise the people who try and make most use out of an 'unlimited' deal.
It's kind of ironic that if Ofcom actually did grow a pair and stop people selling unlimited deals, it may be that many users would be forced to work out how much they actually use, and might drift towards suitable smaller packages, leaving the larger ones less subsidised than at present.
>>"An undefined fair use policy does no-one any favours. It wouldn't be entirely unreasonable to put a statement out such as 'we would recommend you try to avoid transferring more than 75GB' because that at least provides a ballpark figure, but most of the time users don't even get that."
I suppose the problem is that any explicit limit might look to some people like a target, and it takes away some flexibility from the ISP - from *their* point of view, undefined unlimited might look like a better option at the moment. Set your guide limit a little low, and you might lose a potential customer to someone with a higher one - too high and some people might expect you to stick with that indefinitely.
If you're going to have a limit, it seems better to have a hard one than a 'guide' one - that way people could be confident they're not going to get hassle for using it up.
That said, it would be interesting would be to see what amount of usage has caused people to be warned or booted off from various 'unlimited' services at various times.
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