* Posts by John Lilburne

1026 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Dec 2009

Help! What does 'personal conduct unrelated to operations or financials' mean?

John Lilburne

It could be anything unrelated to work could cause embarrassment to the company. A joke made in poor taste, sexual infidelity, doing a George Michael, ...

Spotify mulls Swift change of policy – we can stream Taylor, but we'll charge

John Lilburne

Re: One day the millenials will ...

Oh I don't expect you to find something and stick to it, I know you will. That won't stop you listening to new stuff, just that the 'new stuff' won't quite be as often. I put new stuff in quotes because by and large recommendations from streaming services aren't particularly good. They recommend thing similar to what you are currently listening too. Different artist same genre which once you think about it is rather boring.

John Lilburne

Re: One day the millenials will ...

I can't help you with your penchant for buying shite, as I've not bought shite in several decades. Perhaps, as you are prone to buying shite, some URL and a subscription fee is sufficient for you. However, years after you've settled down on your favourite music, favourite bands, and favourite tracks, you'll still be paying $10 a month to listen to them.

As for sharing "new stuff you've found" you can do that without spotify, and "access to pretty much everything" isn't particular good, it means that unless you are disciplined in what you listen to you are at best channel flipping spending no time to savour or fully appreciate the 'new thing' you are listening to.

John Lilburne

One day the millenials will ...

... wake up and realize they are being screwed. Why would you pour $10 a month down the drain month after month year after year with nothing to show for it in the end? Not only that but spend a bunch loiad of other cash in data charges for streaming the stuff?

Google Ventures ventures away from European investments

John Lilburne

A major gain for search profiling

"Life science and health remain our most active areas of investment."

Search for cancer treatments and we know you are probably a) bad insurance risk, b) desperate enough to click on woo treatment therapies.

14 strikes and you’re out. Or not. Emails reveal how Cox lost Safe Harbor

John Lilburne

Re: The judge could be totally wrong!

OTOH they have emails between Cox managers and support staff where the staff is saying 'this guy has admitted to us he's pirating, we've asked him to stop a dozen times in the last six months" and the manager saying "he pays us $400 a month keep him on the books".

Google fends off EFF's claims kids probed by Chromebook software

John Lilburne

How many times have Google ...

... been discovered lying their ass off?

Music publisher BMG vs US cable giant Cox: Here's why it matters

John Lilburne

Re: Points

They were recording seeders of 1000s of files. Someone that is seeding 1000 files only need to get triggerer once every 1 day to mount up 54K 60 days.If they are seeding 7000 files they only need to be triggered once a week., etc. The issue here is that people seed 1000s upon 1000s of files so the numbers mount up quickly as do the potential loses.

UK will pay EU £180m in fines due to botched CAP IT system – NAO

John Lilburne

Re: The same old sh1t eh?

A client specifying their own system is like a lawyer representing himself in court.

John Lilburne

Re: The same old sh1t eh?

System specification and design is a central part of Software Engineering otherwise your simply coding.

John Lilburne

Re: The same old sh1t eh?

"Paying this on behalf of DEFRA."

No we are paying it on behalf of piss poor software engineers that can't specify or deliver the systems they're contracted to for.

Google snoops on kids via Chromebooks, claims EFF in FTC filing

John Lilburne

Good move by the EFF reporting to the FTC ...

... as the FTC is stack full of Google appointees so nothing will come of it, and the EFF gets to claim that they are fearless in biting the hand that feeds it.

Google launches virtual plastic pal who's fun to be with

John Lilburne

Does it allow optional ...

... disabling of Google snoopage?

Google takedown requests mushroom as copyright holders play whack-a-mole

John Lilburne

Re: That's a hell of a lot of requests, but how many of them are legitimate URLs?

Torrentfreak are a bunch of bullshitters. About 97% are legitimate and fresh, the bulk of the rest are URLs that have already been reported.

Rdio's collapse another nail in the coffin of the 'digital economy'

John Lilburne

Re: WTF?

I'm a huge fan of music released from the ECM label. In over 30 years and some 300 CDs I've not bought one that I hate or even regretted buying. This week I had 4 delivered. None of this stuff is on any of the streaming sites most was removed from spotify in 2010. It doesn't seem to have affected the artists or the label.

George Osborne fires starting gun on £20m coding comp wheeze

John Lilburne

World problems solved

10 PRINT "TORIES EAT SHIT AND DIE"

20 GOTO 10

Cops use terror powers to lift BBC man's laptop after ISIS interview

John Lilburne

Re: So what?

"What that means is that the only people giving interviews are those "in authority" and only their side of any story is reported."

This is what already happens. You have journalist either interview 'dissident' in darkened room, and disguised voice, or its some hairy tattoo'd dork, wearing a Tshirt with last months pizza and coffee stains. They then cut to some well dressed fellow in a bright smart office, with a row of hardback books behind him, dissing everything that previous oink said.

EU urged to ignore net neutrality delusions, choose science instead

John Lilburne

Re: Someone is ill-informed - and it may be me

No I don't use netflix nor iPlayer.

John Lilburne

Re: Someone is ill-informed - and it may be me

To hell with that. I have no use for skype so why should my email be slowed down because some one is using skype? I don't give a fuck about someone's juddering skype connection.

Facebook's UK wing paid just £4k in corporation tax last year

John Lilburne

So how many commenter use FB accounts?

and why are you there?

US Treasury: How did ISIS get your trucks? Toyota: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

John Lilburne

Re: Not really sure it takes Sherlock Holmes.

Have they checked the whereabouts of Mark Thatcher these days?

Google .supplies .cheap web .properties with 90 top-level .domains to .world via .partners

John Lilburne

Can we have a list of the 90 TLDs so that we know to avoid any website using them. If its Google related we know it is databases are going to be mined and scrambled over by the Google ad networks, the NSA and GCHQ regardless of the website owner. It won;t be as if we can avoid it by rejecting DoubleClick and Google Analytic trackers, it will be right there on the Google servers.

Russia vows to shame big biz that advertises on pirate sites, and save the internet

John Lilburne

Jon Taplin was highlighting this back in 2013.

http://www.annenberglab.com/projects/ad-piracy-report-0

Adblock farms out acceptable ad policy to independent reviewer

John Lilburne

Unacceptable -> has something to do with Google.

Acceptable -> Does it pass through the ghostery blockers, the adblock blocker, and the deleteme blocker.

Has the UK Uber crackdown begun? TfL opens consultation on private car biz

John Lilburne

Technology changes society. Get used to it.

Technology that fucks people over needs to be thwacked with a 10lb lump hammer until said technology is a mass of shards on the ground.

Uber is just a mini cab firm with a modernized interface.

In which case it should be subject to the regulations as is everyone else. We wouldn't allow unregulated cabs just because they were voice controlled: BRAKE, TURN RIGHT, .... Or some touch screen device.

'Disruptive Innovation'? Take this theory and stuff it: MIT Profs

John Lilburne

This new ivory tower business buzz word BS sounds much the same.

Back in the 80s our factory manager was holding a joint management/union meeting, and was telling us about developments at a sister site a couple of miles away:

[

They've had Management Consultants in ... they've spent £100,000 on this and the upshot is that they have taken the name tags of their doors saying Dr. Jeykll or Mr Hyde and every one is now calling them Jim or Joe. I know what to call them "Bunch of fucking stupid cunts" that's what they are.

]

You want a 6% Google Tax? Get lost, German copyright bods told

John Lilburne

Re: cry me a river....

There is some 3000 miles of Atlantic Ocean between Europe and the United States, suggest that Google stay on their side of it.

VW’s case of NOxious emissions: a tale of SMOKE and MIRRORS?

John Lilburne

Re: Gaming the system

Most likely it will turn out that one Agile developer mocked up some code for a test, and another Agilator reused it for production. There is probably a comment in the code "TODO: Remove this code".

Ad-blocking super-weapon axed by maker for being TOO effective

John Lilburne

Re: nuance

I want all adverts gone. Especially those from Google. I'll make an exception here or there but I want them gone. Also if I have made an exception if I start getting crap then the site goes back into the blacklist.

No exceptions.

Why the 'Dancing Baby' copyright case is just hi-tech victim shaming

John Lilburne

Re: "The process is the punishment"

Why would any one in their right mind post a video onto YT? OK I did bac k in 2007 when I posted a cat video just to see what the process was. But do it again? Naw! I got about all the enjoyment you can get from the activity that one time.

UK lords aim probe into Silicon Valley oligarchs

John Lilburne

Even in the UK the House of Lords is a joke

Actually no! For 20 years from the mid 80s to mid 00s they were the only effective opposition to the Government. Some of the most vile proposals of the Thatcher, and Major governments were defeated in the Lords. Blair and his crew didn't get ID cards and their most obnoxious snooping bills through due to opposition in the Lords. Now you might ask how it is that a unelected bunch of geriatrics have more spine than the run-of-the-mill parliamentarian, but that is another matter.

Wikipedia’s biggest scandal: Industrial-scale blackmail

John Lilburne

Re: I gave up on Wikipedia a while ago...

What evidence do you have that the WMF vets anyone? The administrators there aren't vetted, those with advanced powers checkusers, bureaucrats, members of arbcom are required to send ID to the WMF who having determined that the person is +18 promptly shred the evidence. It has been known for kids to send fake ID.

Oh no Wikiwon't: Russians plan own version of 'distorted' Wikiland

John Lilburne

Re: much of the information on Wikipedia is “distorted”...

Newsflash - most of wikipedia's content is distorted.

Hey, folks. Meet the economics 'genius' behind Jeremy Corbyn

John Lilburne

Re: Corbyn is barking, but ...

Haven't we all had enough already of bowdlerized versions of some Ferengi economic philosophy courtesy of Worstall?

'Sunspots drive climate change' theory is result of ancient error

John Lilburne

Re: Deniers?

[

The problem that many of us "skeptics" (not deniers) have is not that the climate is changing but the reason WHY it is changing and the gospel of what must be done.

]

What you are maintaining is the equivalent of saying "that if a building is on fire because of an electrical fire, then adding a bit of petrol to the flames will do no harm". Seems to me that regardless of the root cause (the science most likely has it right, but no matter) adding to the problem isn't a particularly smart way of proceeding.

Android faces SECOND patching crisis, on the same scale as Stagefright

John Lilburne

*cough* *cough*

If you have any smart phone you have already agreed to being hacked, monitored, and otherwise fucked over.

Flash deserves to live, says Cisco security man

John Lilburne

No doubt most of the negatives ...

... about flash (I don't care one way or the other) will be from those running pwned Android systems, or closed Apple systems that screw up ever upgrade they push out.

All systems are riddled with security holes you just don't know it.

Google to French data cops: Dot-com RTBF? Baiser ma DERRIERE

John Lilburne

Re: old search results

Should you really be Googling up code? Most likely what you'll get is some cargo cult thing.

Sue us for Safari ad tracking? You'll be lucky, peons, cackles Google

John Lilburne

German regulator has it right

"For that matter Facebook cannot again argue that only Irish Data Protection law would be applicable ... anyone who stands on our pitch also has to play our game," he said.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/07/28/us-facebook-germany-pseudonyms-idUSKCN0Q21U620150728

OK so that is facebook, but the same should apply to Google here too.

Bloke cuffed for blowing low-flying camera drone to bits with shotgun

John Lilburne

Re: I sort of agree

Just paint Google on the side of it and you'll be good to go.

Slashdot, SourceForge looking for new owners after parent dumps them on the web's doorstep

John Lilburne

Re: About time

"Don't know who's going to buy something that can't be monetised though, especially now they've been damaged by cack handed attempts to do so."

But you get a whole load of slashdot trolls thrown in free.

Google bows to inevitable, stops forcing Google+ logins on YouTubers

John Lilburne

Re: Google

It's shit for search too, and its email is mostly a spam portal.

Amazon threatens UK with James Blunt, muscles into music streaming

John Lilburne

None of these services cooperate

Most of my 1200+ LPs, Tapes, and CDs have been digitized. For my pain I use iTunes as the main hub of the collection and feed plays into last.fm neither of which can agree what album or track names should be, neither of which agree on the artist names. Example if you rip a CD in iTunes it sometimes identifies the album, artist, and tracks. But then it can't find the artwork until you change the name of the CD or artist, after which it can no longer identify it in the iTunes store. Additionally last.fm won't recognise the CD/track you are playing until you change it to some other variant. Throw autorip downloads from Amazon into the mix and you have yet another variation where iTunes doesn't understand the album and last.fm doesn't understand the track names.

Then we can add in the 100 or so albums that no one has heard of, cos they were obscure blues, jazz, or folk stuff from the 50s-70s.

No I don't want any of this streaming stuff its nothing but pain.

Ad rivals whimper: Hey Commish, we've 'ad it up to here with ad giant Google

John Lilburne

Re: Lifeblood of the Internet

Actually advertising is only there because back in the mid 1990s payment processors weren't in place and there was no way to get subscription income. The internet has suffered ever since.

Google dumps ISP email support. Virgin Media takes ball, stomps home

John Lilburne

Re: ISP email!

Would I use gmail - nope too much snoopage. A yahoo account for yahoo groups, a hotmail account for trolling MS, hell I even have an grandfathered netscape.net addy for USENET trolling. Oh and a handful of other yahoo accounts for nefarious purposes. But a Google account never.

There is certainly a gotcha with an ISP email address. I have a demon account with unlimited email addresses but I'm currently migrating to use one of my own domains which similarly has unlimited addresses.

Apple Watch is such a flop it's the world's top-selling wearable

John Lilburne

Re: Who actually wears a watch anymore? And why?

Not me. I used to be obsessive about the time. Constantly glancing at it every minute or so, for no good reason at all. Then one day in 1982 I was using the stopwatch function to time some film development and drop the thing into a bowl of photographic fixer. It never worked after that, and I never replaced it.

Knowing the time at any instant can never make you early for an appointment you either are or your not. It depends on when you started out. Other than appointments you rarely need accurate time. 30 minutes either way is good enough. We have become slaves to some clockwork cycles, that isn't how humans should be living, and it causes stress.

Besides everything around you has a time function, the camera, the DT computer, your mp3 player, the oven, the fridge, the video player, the car dashboard has at least two, the GPS ...

UK.gov makes total pig's ear of attempt to legalise home CD ripping

John Lilburne

I think you've missed the point. The complainants aren't the big corporations but the composers, songwriters, and the session musicians. IE its the little guys that are out of pocket. In general the big corporations are too concerned about a bit of copying (they'd like it not to happen but hey). The problems of copying mainly affects the small producer.

John Lilburne

Cary Sherman of the RIAA said "We've have had no problem with people format shifting music that they've legally bought for many years now" and that was said about 5 years ago.

Reddit scrubs up: Child abuse? Gone. Drugs? Cool. RACISM? FINE

John Lilburne

IOW crusty parts of cesspit to be skimmed, rest of cesspit to remain. Trebles all round.

Reddit CEO U-turn: Site no longer a bastion of free speech – and stop posting so much hate

John Lilburne

You really don't understand this do you. "Free speech" means that you can say stuff and not get sanctioned by government for it. It doesn't mean that you get to write your message on my garden wall, or to yell it from my living room window.

What amuses me about these whiners is that they bitch about government being overreaching and then want every web property to be a branch of government, complaining "censorship" whenever some says "take your shit, and piss off somewhere else".