Re: So if some tinpot country decided
"Bubba's porridge?"
Now who's playing rape apologist?
Posts by A J Stiles
2669 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Apr 2006
Page:
UK: 'We're legally bound to arrest Mr Assange'
Why Java would still stink even if it weren't security swiss cheese
Thursday 30th August 2012 16:21 GMT
Re: Too much time writing boilerplate getter/setter code…
Rule number one of Object Orientated programming: You NEVER expose the internals of an object. Rather, you provide explicit methods to retrieve them and alter them. That way, it does not matter if -- or rather, when -- you subsequently alter the design of the object fundamentally, as long as your methods continue to behave the same way as they always did.
Sure, in Perl, you could do
$customer->{_contact_count} += 1; # leading underscore indicates private property
and it would work; but for the time it would take you to write some extra methods, you could better write
$customer->set_contact_count($customer->get_contact_count + 1);
or even, if you're going to write an awful lot of stuff things like this,
$customer->update_contact_count(+1); # unary + used to improve readability.
And when you re-design the object a few years down the line, eliminating the _contact_count internal property altogether because you don't need it, the code still works.
If you find yourself writing and rewriting the same "getting and setting" code over and over again, you're doing your inheritance wrong.
'iPhone 5' released by Chinese Apple copycat
UK kids' charity lobbies hard for 'opt-in' web smut access
Councils launch eight spying ops on Brits A DAY using RIPA
Wednesday 22nd August 2012 14:00 GMT 
Meh
There aren't actually very many terrorists around. There are, however, a larger minority -- still a minority, but more of them than terrorists -- of selfish, antisocial people creating bother for everyone else.
When someone fly-tips rubbish, it creates a cost for the council, who have to clear it away. When someone lets their dog foul the pavements, it has a non-zero cost for anyone who just treads in it, and it will cost the NHS money if somebody gets sick from it. When someone puts their recyclables in the landfill bin, it costs the council twice over: they don't get the money for it from the recycling merchant, and they even have to pay to bury it. (And that's before stopping to consider what happens if a whole lorryload gets contaminated).
If people who make other people's lives a nuisance are being brought to justice, I'm really not sure I have a problem with this.
UK.gov's minimum booze price dream demolished
Wednesday 22nd August 2012 12:42 GMT
Food Tax
"Or are we going to start seeing how much obesity costs the NHS and put minimum prices on Mc'Donalds, KFC and Burger King. Of course when people stop eating out they'll target the supermarkets again with minimum prices on your favourite cook at home junk food." -- I think you've nailed it.
Once the drinking "problem" is "solved", then they'll be looking for something else. And taxing food would be the absolute holy grail, because everybody has to eat. It will begin as a tax on the unhealthiest foods, which almost nobody will object to (not least because objectors will be shouted down as tantamount to condoning child murder). Once such a tax is established, it will then gradually creep in scope, budget by budget ("we're going to start taxing potatoes, because they can be made into chips"); until eventually you won't be able to buy an oil-free, salt-free, egg-free, vinegar-free, taste-free organic rocket salad without paying tax on it.
Ten Androids for under 100 quid
WikiLeaks' secrets weren't, says former MI5 chief
Google loads Moto Mobility cannon, fires patent shells at Apple
McIntyre: Climate policy crippled by pointless feel-good gestures
Monday 20th August 2012 12:21 GMT
Re: "cheaper-than-coal low-carbon energy"
Oil is already starting to get expensive, pretty much of its own accord; and coal is going to do the same thing sooner or later. Renewables are generally getting cheaper, or at least, not getting more expensive at the same rate as fossil fuels.
Of course, there might be a tiny problem with simply waiting for things to fix themselves .....
Assange calls for help from … Quakers?
Monday 20th August 2012 10:10 GMT
Re: I don't understand
"He cannot be extradited from any signatory country to the ECHR to any country where capital punishment is a possibility." -- well, that's half-right. He cannot be legally extradited to any hanging country.
But if he was illegally extradited, he would not be the first or the last .....
Question: Why haven't the US authorities tried to pick him up in the UK? Our government is even more likely than the Swedes to bend over for the Americans.
Flash Player to vanish from Android store on Wednesday
Thursday 16th August 2012 07:56 GMT
Hmm
And this, people, is *precisely* what you get when you become over-reliant on proprietary technology, and you forget that someone, somewhere has -- and always had -- the power simply to pick up their ball and go home, leaving you in the lurch.
It would be great if Adobe just Open-Sourced Flash Player (after all, they give away the binary for nothing; and there is no shortage of people who would be keen to put in the effort to get the Source working on various platforms), but I am not holding my breath for that.
Kidney-for-iPad fanboi sues after illness strikes
Patent troll Intellectual Ventures is more like a HYDRA
Chinese man's six-ton balls save lives
Deadly pussies kill more often than owners think
Saturday 11th August 2012 07:19 GMT
Re: Re:performing a useful function
Problem is, the decline in bird populations isn't due to cats.
If anything, it's probably due to better home insulation; in Winter, we're keeping more heat in, leaving less for the birdies. What a dilemma for the tree-huggers! Save energy, harm wildlife!
Anyway, this doesn't really affect my main point. If cold is the problem for birds, then the easiest birds for cats to kill will be the nesh ones; shivering and hopping from one foot to the other, rubbing their wings to try and keep warm, complaining in bird language how freezing they are ..... Cats don't mind a tasty cold meat snack. The birds left to pass on their genes, pass on the gene for cold-tolerance, and so it goes on.
Thursday 9th August 2012 11:24 GMT 
Another press release from DOBO .....
the Department Of the Bleeding Obvious.
The Egyptians were the first to domesticate cats. Once they began farming, and producing more food than they could eat at once, they built grain stores along the banks of the Nile; which, in turn, attracted mice, rats and other assorted creatures, much to the consternation of the Egyptians -- fortuitously for whom, the ready supply of mobile protein, in its own turn, attracted wild cats. Impressed by the way the cats had appeared from nowhere, and their ability to sit very still for hours on end before pouncing on a mouse before the mouse knew what was happening, the Egyptians began worshipping them as Gods.
Also, cats killing garden birds are actually performing a useful function. The ones caught by the cats are the weakest. They probably were going to die sooner or later anyway; at least this way, they don't deprive the others of scarce food.
NASA’s new lander CRASHES AND BURNS
Snap suggests Apple out to 'screw' hardware hackers
Thursday 9th August 2012 09:59 GMT
Time for a new law
As part of a wider directive on field-maintainability of consumer electronic goods, I would require that manufacturers using non-standard screw heads must either supply a compatible screwdriver with the appliance, or else make such a tool generally available for mail order at a fair price.
Now Curiosity rover beams back 3D snaps of Mars
Office for ARM will lack features, report claims
Wednesday 8th August 2012 17:05 GMT
Re: ROTFL
I agree whole-heartedly about turning the "in-app scripting engine" model inside-out.
LibreOffice 4 should be rewritten from the ground up, in a scripting language for which at least one Open Source interpreter implementation exists. The document would then just be an object, as understood by that language; menu items would correspond to methods of document, paragraph or character objects. The main program would consist of little more than class declarations and an idle loop.
Wednesday 8th August 2012 11:23 GMT 
For sale: One pair of boots. Slight bullet damage.
..... and meanwhile, LibreOffice (for GNU/Linux, iOS and Android) will have the full feature set. Sure, it's incompatible with VBA (which has its own macro language) but -- and it's a big but -- LibreOffice comes with a gold-plated guarantee that its macro language will never, ever go away.
Android app DRM quietly disabled due to bug
Mobile phone health rules need update, warns US watchdog
Wednesday 8th August 2012 14:51 GMT 
Not again
They keep searching for evidence of a link between mobile phones and ill health.
They consistently fail to find one.
Then they ask for more money, so they can search harder for evidence of a link between mobile phones and ill health.
Just how long is this whole cycle going to go on, before anybody realises that there probably isn't any such link to be found?
Foldable NFC keyboard could tempt Android users
Wednesday 8th August 2012 12:21 GMT 
Battery problem
"Now for the major draw back. According to Elecom, the device will feature a built-in battery that apparently cannot be removed or charged. It will last for 18 months if used for eight hours per day, but after that, the user is forced to buy a replacement keyboard."
This is quite likely to run afoul of EU law on waste electronic equipment.
Of course, it's also quite likely to run afoul of a scalpel wielded by a suitably creative-minded person.
Bill Gates, Harry Evans and the smearing of a computer legend
Copyright bot boots NASA rover vid off YouTube
Tuesday 7th August 2012 13:11 GMT
NASA
Surely with NASA being part of the US Government, everything they produce is automatically in the Public Domain by definition?
I agree fully that maliciously making a false claim of copyright infringement needs to be made an offence in its own right, and not punished any less harshly than actual copyright infringement .
Valve: Games run FASTER on Linux than Windows
Friday 3rd August 2012 07:57 GMT
Re: 2500 Apps in their app store
Now, that would actually be a very sensible way of doing it. You can insert the CD, and boot up into a known software environment. No other apps running; a known kernel version; known library versions, and everything. The truly paranoid can even unplug their HDDs altogether and save state and data to a USB drive, secure in the knowledge that software over which they have no control isn't doing anything behind their backs.
Also, the presence of proprietary games (100% optional software, lest we forget) out there may encourage development of more Open Source games.
The Dragon 32 is 30
Chip and PIN keypads 'easily fooled' with counterfeit cards
Friday 27th July 2012 16:04 GMT
Re: @A J Stiles Levels of card fraud are at their lowest since 2000.
"One of the reasons chip & PIN was brought in in the first place was because merchants simply weren't bothering to check signatures. There were tests done, people paying for things and signing "mickey mouse" and other daft names in clearly different handwriting to the signature on the card, and the majority went unchecked."
So ..... merchants who weren't doing their jobs properly, ended up paying? Oh no! The horror of it all!
Look, you have the till rolls that tell you which checkout operator mis-processed the transaction. So if you end up having to pay some poor sod back, you know exactly whose wages to stop it out of. And if it makes the difference between them having dinner on the table or not, then they might check the signature more carefully next time.
Friday 27th July 2012 11:06 GMT
Re: Levels of card fraud are at their lowest since 2000.
"they may have your pin but they still do not have your authorisation" -- that is not the way the banks see it. What better disincentive against you fraudulently claiming to have been robbed of your card somewhere out of sight of CCTV and forced to reveal your PIN, than having to pay for it yourself?
"Chip & Pin is inherently more secure than signature (seriously how hard is it to fake a signature)"
You have that the wrong way round. Faking a signature is not hard -- if you have time to practise, and you can take your time writing it.
Faking a signature in a manner which convinces the person watching you sign your name that you have been doing it for years, on the other hand, is very hard indeed. Especially given the time window for learning to reproduce it convincingly (basically, just as long as it takes the cardholder to notice the card is not where it should be. Say an hour or two).
Then there are any number of non-intrusive ways of obtaining PINs (Most people cover up their fingers over the keys with their other hand, while leaving their tendons in clear view. And how many PIN pads randomise the key layout before each keystroke?) Two people working as a team (one getting PINs and the other getting cards) could easily accrue a decent enough amount a day.
Friday 27th July 2012 10:41 GMT
Levels of card fraud are at their lowest since 2000.
Back in the days of signatures, the onus was on the merchant to verify that the cardholder's signature matched the sample on the card. With Chip and PIN, every PIN-backed transaction is deemed non-fraudulent by definition; the onus is on the cardholder to keep the PIN secret. Disclosing the PIN to a third party, even at the point of a knife, is authorising them to perform a transaction.
Why one storage admin fears Justin Bieber
Microsoft unfurls patent lasso, snares Linux servers
Wednesday 25th July 2012 16:17 GMT
Should have called Microsoft's bluff
If they weren't going to issue an Arkell vs. Pressdram letter, then they should have called Microsoft's bluff and gone all the way to court. At least then, Microsoft will be obliged to reveal, in public, exactly what patents they are supposed to have infringed -- on pain of the case collapsing. Then, we can simply get on with challenging their validity and/or working around them.
George Osborne accused of derailing UK.gov's green dream
Wednesday 25th July 2012 12:41 GMT
Oh Dear
Although subsidies on renewable energy are obvious, fossil fuels are to all intents and purposes invisibly subsidised. They are going to run out eventually. It's a bit like living off an inheritance, and drawing out more money each year than the interest it's earning.
How we've traditionally dealt with dwindling fuel supplies is by (1) siding with the USA, whose energy policy basically comes down to "find who's still got some oil left, invade them and nick it" (and then wonder why people want to bring down our aircraft); and (2) importing more electricity from overseas; but that isn't going to last either. The cross-channel HVDC cables are running close to capacity, and the cancellation of Germany's nuclear programme is going to mean there will be even less spare juice to go around the Continent.
When fossil fuels do run out (and it's probably within the lifetime someone who's alive today), the UK won't be ready. People are going to die. We've known about this for a long time; but it's always been further in future than the next election, hence nobody ever bothered about it.
CentOS penguins maul Oracle's Linux migration pitch
Saturday 21st July 2012 08:26 GMT
Binary Compatibility
Those words alone should ring an alarm bell.
Linux was never designed with binary compatibility in mind. If a necessary improvement to the kernel or a library broke an app, tough: you recompiled the app, and it worked again. And yes, 15 or 20 years ago when Linux was young, you did actually have to do that, sometimes. Of course, as it has matured, the pace of change has slowed down and the scale of each change is less severe. That's just classical exponential decay.
The only reason you would ever need binary compatibility across releases, was if you didn't have the Source Code handy to recompile.
Binary compatibility is never for your benefit. The line "You don't have to compile it yourself" is a red herring; the process only needs to be done once, is quick (on modern kit) compared to the time you will spend running the program afterwards, and anyway can be automated. Binary compatibility is always for the benefit of those who would deny you access to the Source Code.
BIG BOOBS banished from Linux kernel
Friday 20th July 2012 10:27 GMT
Re: Shame on you too.
Yes. If a material fact (which would have given a person reason not to consent to sexual intercourse, had they known it) was misrepresented, then consent was obtained under false pretences. That makes it rape.
However, why risk it? Just wear a condom anyway, pill or no pill.
Hubble spots ancient spiral galaxy that SHOULD NOT EXIST
Dell readies Linux Ultrabook for autumn release
Expert: EU Microsoft competition fine could reach $7bn
Thursday 19th July 2012 10:54 GMT
Re: What a ridiculous situation
"I cannot think how I have been disadvantaged through Microsofts position?"
That's kind of the point. In the absence of competition, things stagnate. Had there been real competition in the Personal Computer Operating Systems arena, there would have been genuine innovations spurred on by precisely that competition as each supplier sought to differentiate themselves from their rivals. Since these did not happen, we will never know what they might have been like.
Thursday 19th July 2012 10:41 GMT
Re: And again...
When they get into a situation where they are misusing a dominant position in one arena to gain an unfair advantage in another arena.
Microsoft (possibly) forced computer manufacturers into supplying Microsoft OSes with their machines by offering discounts to manufacturers who pledged not to offer alternatives. This gave them a dominant position in Personal Computer Operating systems. Unfortunately, any evidence that might have actually proved this had already gone walkies by the time anyone thought of bringing the case to court.
Next, Microsoft bundled a (poorly-written and non-standards-compliant) web browser with their operating systems, and made it difficult for suppliers of alternative (read: superior) web browsers. They would not have been able to do this, had it not been for their existing position of dominance in another arena.
And that last sentence is what this here decision is all about. We have laws intended specifically to prevent a single supplier from eliminating all competition and taking over an entire marketplace.
Raspberry Pi rolls out speed surge Raspbian OS
Wednesday 18th July 2012 13:19 GMT
Re: Daft question
No. "Freedom" here means you are free to choose whether or not to pay extra for stuff you may or may not need. What were you expecting, for crying out loud?
I already have a stash of various sizes of SD cards, a few USB keyboards, more Internet cables than I know what to do with (plus, in case I run out, a pair of RJ45 crimpers that also do the RJ11/12 plugs used internationally in telecomms -- bought so I could interface to a TDM422 telephony card when I was experimenting with Asterisk) and I can borrow the HDMI cable from my DVD recorder (I'll just have to live with the old SCART connection for awhile; the set only has two HDMI inputs and the recorder is only low-definition anyway) and two micro-USB cables (one supplied with my Kobo E-Reader, and one supplied with my phone). I also have two mains-to-5V USB PSUs -- one from the phone, and one which was a Christmas present along with the Kobo. Nonetheless, I ordered a wall wart for the Raspberry Pi anyway.
Have you ever considered that you just might not be the target market for the Raspberry Pi?
Behold: First look at Office 2013, with screenshots
Wednesday 18th July 2012 12:18 GMT
Re: Blah blah blah
"will Outlook 2013 finally have decent IMAP support" -- It's very doubtful.
Outlook is crippled on purpose, precisely so that you are forced to use an Exchange server. After all, if it supported actual standards, you could just use something like Exim and Dovecot to build your backend, and wouldn't therefore be forced to buy Exchange.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
