Posts by Nick Kew 1974 posts • joined 16 Jan 2007
It's all about choice.
There are matters in which privacy is important. There are others in which it isn't, and we'd sacrifice it for convenience or other rewards without a second thought. People perfectly rationally make different choices in different situations.
Here's one where I had occasion to curse excessive and unnecessary privacy.
A historical perspective: much of the Enlightenment happened in the revolutionary social hotbed of Europe's coffee houses, where people would meet and ideas were developed. The powers-that-be at the time felt threatened, and tried to ban the dangerous new drug at the centre of it.
Nothing new in the idiocy of today's rulers.
The intelligence agencies usually prevent such attacks successfully. Recent figures suggest a rate of something over one attack a fortnight. So what's changed?
If the intelligence agencies had been nobbled, for example by a botched information system upgrade (which no individual would know about, as they work on a need-to-know basis), it might indeed explain two such attacks in quick succession.
With a bit of luck, Thursday will bring an end to the motivation for nobbling them.
I think... I may have technically Godwinned this thread. Apologies.
No. For several reasons.
Most fundamentally, Godwin is invoked by derogatory remarks directed at someone you are arguing with. Your reference is directed at someone or something outside the thread.
If what you're attacking is itself a strawman or misrepresentation[1], then it becomes a non-sequiter, and makes a negative contribution to debate. But that's not the same as Godwin's law.
[1] I don't think it is that, but I'm not going to check so I can say for certain.
Shouldn't all education in the UK be 100% secular with no religious connection?
In an ideal world, maybe. But to try and enforce any such thing would be oppressive, and oppression is precisely what religion (and not least religious extremism) thrives on.
Twenty years ago, religion was basically harmless in the UK (except NI). The C of E, not having faced any real oppression or threat for centuries, had become toothless and more-or-less benign (as it still is, compared to most of the alternatives).
Then came Blair, who played with it (and of course with our constitution) like a small boy with his toys, and unleashed Us-and-Them. How long will it take to tame Blair's terror? Well, for a historical parallel, how long was it from the era of real Catholic threat - the Armada, the Gunpowder Plot - to the Northern Ireland peace agreement?
Today's terrorism is exactly as widely predicted in, for example, the protests against Blair's invasion of Iraq. The mess we've made in Libya and Syria since then all adds to it.
But it may be as nothing to what we're storing up, with generations brought up in "Faith Schools" to think in terms of Us-and-Them as a way of life. Educational segregation worked so well in Northern Ireland, we'd better bring it to the mainland, and we can all hate each other with real conviction.
I seem to recall similar backlash against Gutenberg.
Wow! Respect, oh venerable one!
I don't suppose your recollection goes back as far as the destruction of the library at Alexandria? Who was stirring public fear and hatred for education and learning back then, and did it look much like today?
I've seen a fair bit of conflict - some of it gratuitously unpleasant - in my decades in open source. But it's a drop in the ocean compared to some other communities, both on-line and real-world.
Surveys can be a particular hotbed. That's not just because the respondents are a sample who self-select precisely because they have axes to grind and see a survey as somewhere to vent[1], but also because surveys have Agendas (such as "diversity"), and those tend to be divisive.
[1] fx: waves at fellow-commentards.
When I first used Linux, I set it up with olvwm, and just used the commandline in the little console window to launch GUI applications. Mostly plain ol' xterms (and variants on that theme) for working in, but also a web browser and other such modern gizmos.
I'd still work like that if I hadn't got fed up with the number of hoops they make us jump through today.
I remember my second '90s SGI workstation[1] particularly fondly. But that was down to the superb quality of the hardware: a monitor that was a pleasure to use (now long-surpassed by others, particularly Mac), and a fantastic keyboard that still stands out as the best I've encountered in my life.
There was no pleasure to the software. Well, it was a functioning UNIX system on which one could build all the usual apps, but no more than that, and it was certainly buggier than Sun kit of the same era. I don't even recollect the desktop environment, except in that it was the first to be configured with a GUI login screen rather than a CLI login followed by some invocation like "xinit" or "startx".
[1] @work, of course. Way beyond my personal budget.
I've seen suggestions of a lightning strike,
Might've been me, in the last El Reg commentfest on the subject.
but that could be someone confusing Saturday's cock up with Sunday's thunderstorm.
You mean, my comment posted here on Saturday referenced Sunday's alleged storm?
More likely having observed the very big and long-lasting thunderstorms we had around the wee hours of Friday night / Saturday morning. Caused me to power down more electricals than I've done any time in my four-and-a-bit years since moving here. All my computing/networking gear, including UPS protection. Even the dishwasher, which had been due to run overnight.
After last night's big thunderstorms, it seems plausible power to the datacentre was indeed hit. Or that a power surge damaged something, which might be reported as "power failure" if the details were considered far too confusing for the readers.
Perhaps they had redundancy against one system being knocked out, but ended up instead with two systems each apparently still working but irreconcilably at odds with each other?
Note. Both house of Parliament have to approve it. Since it requires critical thinking skills (not something you see a lot of in politicians) to realize what errant BS.
Just possible in Their Lordships' house. But the most likely place to find it is in the EU Parliament, perhaps due in some measure to the much lesser importance of party politics.
I think the remark about Erdogan refers to the botched "coup" last year. Which was very convenient for him
Yes, I realise that's a strong parallel. And history gives us many more such: we still have some residual effects from the 1605 plot, in that for example the monarch can't marry a Catholic (and Northern Ireland bears more serious scars).
Where the parallel ends is in the timing. As far as I know, the Turkish coup could have happened a year earlier or later and still served Erdogan's agenda equally well. Insofar as it served an existing agenda, as opposed to creating a new agenda, which is a question for historians.
You can never eliminate all risks. IIRC the statistically most dangerous place is your home.
Well of course. Most people die when they're too weak or ill to leave home. Though hospitals and hospices are of course much more dangerous. Makes a very convenient bit of spin for those who want to play down road deaths.
It's the inevitable outcome of a society so de-risked that many kiddies can't be allowed out on the roads because of the danger posed by someone obviously more important than them.
For the first time in my life, I am voting Labour
Speaking as someone who in my youth was an enthusiastic supporter of Thatcher, I may very well be with you there. Though I shall look at the full list of candidates before a final decision.
It's almost as if they've done an Erdogan
I think that comparison is unduly harsh on Erdogan. He had an actual referendum about giving himself more powers, whereas only a select few in Maidenhead get to vote for or against our Leader. And above all, with Syria and Iraq on his borders, Erdogan has very real and major problems to deal with.
Having made public devlarations of suspending election campaigning in the shadow of this tragedy, they actually leverage the very event to further their political agenda.
They did that most effectively by raising the terrorist threat level, and noisily bringing troops into the security theatre. Now the world's attention has moved on from the chaos and confusion of the manifesto and rapid U-turns, and onto the tried-and-tested recipe of looking strong and stable in the face of a threat.
In fact the timing of the Manchester incident was extraordinarily lucky for them, just as the non-campaign was looking a bit less of a pushover. One might almost wonder if a hidden hand had sent 007 off on a wild goose chase looking for Russian influence while Inspector Clouseau headed protection at home.
I'm a very bad Go player. That is to say, I know the rules, and have the rudimentary insight that comes with a mathematical mind, but have never put in serious effort to the game.
Twenty years ago, in an era when Deep Blue had already thrashed Kasparov at Chess, I could still easily beat a leading AI at Go. It was considered an immeasurably harder problem than Chess.
And now they've cracked it!
A 0.5% stamp duty (as we have in Blighty) would do the job on trades whose margin is less than that. Well, if loopholes weren't there. That's on the entire transaction cost, regardless of profit or loss. Shares held in my pension still make a profit, 'cos margins over the years dwarf such costs.
Though in principle I like the idea of a graduated stamp duty: a stamp duty tapering from zero on shares held longer-term (say, 3+ years) up to maybe 10% on those bought and sold within a day.
Still more important, revoke any PGP (or other crypto) keys for which you were carrying a private key.
That's why my laptops get only a less-important PGP private key to use when travelling. Not one by which the world knows me, and which it would cause grief to revoke.
If you have Windows platform expertise that the dev team lack, perhaps you should be joining the team yourself?
Or else if you and they don't get along well enough for that, fork a windows-version and endeavour to build your own community in a supportive environment such as github?
Come on, el Reg, can we please have at least a pointer to some history of GPL verdicts? A link would be fine: for instance, https://wiki.fsfe.org/Migrated/GPL%20Enforcement%20Cases (listing cases going back to 2001). Or even reports like this from 2004 at El Reg itself.
I'm typing this on a HP laptop (running Linux, so without this particular keylogger). The battery, screen and audio are crap compared to an Apple costing five or six times as much, but otherwise it's great. I've had several macbooks, and none has reached the age of this cheapo HP without some serious hardware failure.
I'm with sipgate. They're annoying when they change things so as to break my configuration (like, the number that shows up on caller id), but I wouldn't call it abusing customers. What's the story?
I get a few nuisance calls, though a drop in the ocean compared to what I get on the mobile.
People who cycle or walk aren't carrying tonnes of taxable goods[1]. Conventional borders can be crossed on foot away from the roads: I've done quite a few myself in the Alps between Italy, Switzerland, Austria and Germany[2].
[1] Though they could still be carrying enough in high-value goods to get rich. Jewels, drugs, etc. That is, if the markets either side of a border were to diverge.
[1] Not France. Holidays are for relaxing, and it's a whole lot less relaxing when I don't speak the local language.
I thought it looked interesting when they bought MIPS. Breathe life back into it? Perhaps even create something more like a real competitor to ARM and x86? Alas, 'twas but a dream.
I imagine the competition authorities would be unhappy if Intel or Softbank tried to bid for MIPS. Might anyone else take an interest? Like IBM, Oracle, Google, ... or private equity? From memory, the patent portfolio was bought out by a consortium including ARM, so any patent threat should be minimal.
... to get the story into El Reg, and to get commentards talking.
I expect most of us here are precisely those commentards who have worked in FORTRAN at some point in our careers. In my case it was back in the '80s and I haven't revisited since.
There's a lot of software around for which a 10x speed increase for little effort is entirely realistic, even unambitious. Not that I'm going to be tempted to this one: my memories of working with FORTRAN codebases range from nightmare to, at best, neutral.
rpcbind
I recollect using RPC in an application I once wrote. It gave me for free an architecture that decoupled client and server, so my users could run a utility on their own desktop that would order something from the server.
This was before the WWW. And before Linux. It was not before X11 had brought us the networked desktop, but it was still the era when X11 was so painfully slow that few used it, and among those who did, running unexpected things on random colleagues' desktops was a jolly prank.
By the time we got the Web in the mid-90s, security advice was clear. RPC services should be firmly firewalled off from anything facing the outside world. With discs reaching gigabyte sizes, the need for widespread NFS was rapidly receding, and RPC relegated to a greybeard niche.
Can probably be interpreted for other systems including windows too, if you have the expertise to read-across:
Baidu has a pretty decent track record as Good Guys in open source software (inasmuch as one can generalise about any company that big). The language barrier reduces their visibility to Reg readers, but I've found them extremely helpful in reaching out across it when I had occasion to work with a project where they were lead developers. This looks like another application of that principle of openness.
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