Posts by Warm Braw

Re: Complacency!

I've spent the last three years watching my entire government de-evolve

The 737 MAX was certified a mere 2 months after Trump's inauguration. I'm afraid your government has been de-evolving for significantly longer than three years: everyone was deliberately looking the other way until an overweight buffoon with flyaway hair realised their lack of attention offered a route to personal power. If it's any comfort, it's not the only country in which this scenario has played out and it's not as if we in the UK weren't warned.

Re: Good News!

Correction: principal problem. Although, maybe both...

Re: "we are saying they will not be fixed"

Because (most) local authorities no longer have money to engage in protracted legal disputes and Capita has a strong incentive to take any dispute as far as it will go.

Re: Why on earth

Haven't we all had that I appear to gave glued my face to the fridge and need to alert the authorities moment?

Re: Air Cover?

By what, I'm sure, is entirely a matter of coincidence, Boris has made it clear he wants more people in prison. Having a couple of over-sized and under-used hulks available to moor on the Thames might help him deliver on his promises, in the unlikely event of that being his intention.

Do Not Track

You don't need a flag to record absence of consent. Unless I've positively acknowledged a request to share information (and that acknowledgment might be stored in a cookie, for example) noone has any business processing my personal information at all. I'm rather tired of websites that are constantly asking me for granular permission to share data with several hundred unknown 3rd parties on every visit because I delete all their unwanted cookies afterwards. Meaningful consent does not include an obligation to store a record of your lack of your own consent on your own computer for the benefit of the advertiser. No cookie, no consent. Simple.

Re: DIY

For the people who are willing and able to hack around, get_iplayer is a better bet while it continues to work and until Boris abolishes the licence fee - and at least you can keep what you watch in anticipation of that eventuality. The iPlayer alternatives for Kodi and the like are sub-functional, to put it kindly.

Regrettably, none of the alternatives is terribly attractive unless you are a hacker. Most Android TV boxes are awful, Apple TV is a ridiculous price if you just want to run a few streaming apps and I can't bear even to look at the default Amazon interface that screams "buy this, moron" at you constantly. You can lobotomise the Fire Stick with a replacement launcher and access to the Google Play store at which point it is more acceptable, but it's not something many will be prepared to do.

This isn't the first time the BBC has dropped products - I have a Sony Blu-Ray player that was abanoned about 6 months after I bought it. The BBC also don't seem to offer any actual support for iPlayer - it didn't work on a TV I had which was supposedly compatible, but they just referred me back to the manufacturer who denied any responsibility too. After several weeks of pestering, the BBC finally admitted they knew exactly what I needed to do to rectify the problem but they clearly hadn'tt wanted to set a precedent by actually telling me. Compare that with the care taken over the years to ensure that all those new TV features like colour, teletext and stereo sound were compatible with all the existing TV sets out there. Everyone advertises and sells products on the back of these "features", so how come it's not anyone's responsibility to make them work?

Re: Should please some around here

Not sure what's strange about not wanting to throw a device away just because the battery is dead, but I regret to tell you that according to HMD/Nokia the battery is NOT removable.

I have unexpectedly found that I quite like the convenience of being able to use my phone to pay for low-value things, rather than carry around a separate card, so the lack of NFC is an issue: I'd rather they'd ditched the redundant charger and cable. Fix those and, apart from being far too large (as practically all phones are these days), it would be pretty much all I would need in a phone.

What do modern phones do that could need more?

Compete on the basis of meaningless specs. It's what happen when "mid-range" has been redefined as £360 (by the time you add VAT, but before you add the foreigner surcharge).

Re: OK snowflake

I would add that those of us who've been "tech-savvy" since the days of toggling in bootloaders on front panels can generally remember when "tech" was something you owned, not something that owned you. I don't want to spend the rest of my days encumbered with continuous subscription fees to access music, films and books and particularly not to be able to turn the bloody lights on and off.

Re: Frog

it's easy to "manage" cables

I put my wallmount on top of a wooden panel (around 300mm-450mm wide tall enough to extend upwards beyond TV - for aesthetics - and downwards far enough to reach AV cabinet) and put some spacers between that and the wall. Panel conceals wires, choose finish to suit your decor.

Re: he was told there was "no security problem"

the problem could be in the app rather than back end

Sorry, if you can see other people's details, it's a problem in the back end. If the app has access to data it shouldn't, anyone can write an app that has access to the same data.

I was around at the conference where ISOC was launched. It was cast as a grassroots organisation in response to the growing concerns at the time that control of the Internet, which had been hitherto in the hands largely of engineers, was being ceded to business and governments. It wasn't really a credible pitch at the time: the figureheads may have been worthy, but not exactly obvious populists. I think my membership lasted one year: it seemed to me that it was more about legitimising the existing hierarchy than any genuine attempt to democratise participation.

This latest event does not surprise me in the least.

Re: Clip 'could damage perceptions of our impartiality',

The BBC's problem is that it tries too hard to be "impartial".

If you watch news on ITV, you'll find the presenters are significantly more scathing and dismissive of party politics and politicians. As are reporters on Channel 4 news (also produced by ITN). The BBC feels it needs to represent all sides of the argument - however fatuous they might be, so it ends up giving credulity to otherwise specious arguments.

It's interesting that ITV News is seldom challenged. There's a reason for that: ITV, as a whole, is seen as being salt-of-the-earth proletarian, whereas the BBC and Channel 4 are perceived as outposts of liberal elitism (and of course public corporations). There's no political mileage to be made in attacking ITV, even though its editorial line is very little different to that of Channel 4.

The BBC needs to be less timid, and might as well be, because the conservative elite will try to close it down regardless.

Re: Ok...ok...

non ethnic male

That would be a unique achievement.

Re: That's some printer there

Its worth visiting the Komori website to see just how big that printer is

Especially before committing to take delivery.

Re: compatibility

There is a form of address allocation that uses legacy addresses, but it isn't "compatible" in any meaningful sense: it doesn't help an IPv4 host communicate with an IPv6 host that can't have a 32-bit address because none are left.

The issue here isn't the scrutiny that the legitimate drivers got - it's largely the same for taxi and private hire drivers. What has happened here is that a legitimate driver has been impersonated by someone who does not possess a PHV licence.

PHV drivers are supposed to wear a badge with their photo and identity on it, but Uber appears to have allowed drivers to change their in-app photograph to that of a different person, making it appear to the passenger that the driver is legitimate.

I would imagine that a certain amount of impersonation is not uncommon (it's more economic to recoup the cost of leasing a vehicle and insuring it if it's generating revenue over 24 hours), but Uber's system seems to have facilitated it.

The TSB started out as a set of independent mutual organisations that provided savings account for people who would not otherwise have any sort of banking service.

There was active encouragement from the government to amalgamate and provide additional services, such as loans, to challenge the market dominance of the traditional banks (in the same way that building societies were encourage to demutualise) and the TSB was ultimately turned into a commercial organisation and sold off.

Surprise, surprise, turn a dull but worthy organisation into a clone of an existing financial institution and it starts to behave exactly like the kind of financial institution it was supposed to challenge. Roll on to the financial crisis and the government was forced to buy back the bank it had previously been desperate to sell off.

Re: We used to use paper for communication

That something goes out without any check to world + dog

That's only because the law currently permits that with no comeback on the "publisher". Social media obviously couldn't exist in its present form without that permission, but there's no a priori reason it must exist in its present form.

There's no real technical obstacle to restricting the exchange of unedited content to small groups - which would actually cover most of the casual use of, say, Facebook - and preventing communication with a wider group unless an identified individual is prepared to take legal responsibility for it either as the author or as a moderator/editor.

Now I can fully understand that the social media outlets don't want the hassle and expense of having to confirm the identity of their more vociferous users, but in the end it may be cheaper than having to seek out objectionable material after the event: they could even charge for the privilege, but I suspect they would be reluctant to test the actual value of their "service". None of these large social media operations has an intrinsic right to exist - if there's no economic way for them to operate that is also socially responsible, then they'll have to find something else to do.

Re: They could sell meetup.com

Instead of ruining it by trying to monetise it

It's not likely to be worth very much if they can't monetise it. The world's most credulous investors own it already - though I suppose it's not entirely impossible that their collective elbows will be bidding against their collective arses to buy it twice.

Not to mention that I've yet to find a bluetooth audio solution that doesn't have appreciable latency, regardless of what it might claim on the box.

The building regulations now require the soil pipes to be inside the house, so new builds tend to have enclosed routes from the ground floor into the roof space which are remarkable convenient for getting cables from one part of the building to another. And you can get baluns to run almost anything over Cat 5/6 these days.

Re: Grrr....

This is already illegal and the companies doing it presumably know that and are happy to continue until such time as there's an effective prosecution, hoping they'll have found another loophole by then. The only effective response to that would be to make the individuals liable rather than the companies.

don't Halfords employ anyone with a GCSE in a STEM subject

Have you ever been to Halfords?

At a time when politicians of every hue are competing to spend more money on education, there does seem to be a fundamental question as to why the money we already spend seems to have so little effect. No-one, regardless of their GCSE subjects, should be so proudly ignorant.

Re: Not that big of a loss

Anyone who flies with Ryanair?

On my last flight, I got to the airport and past the first boarding pass check with my phone, but the battery died just before boarding. Always pays to have a backup and a sheet of paper doesn't make much impact on your hand luggage allowance.

The shortcuts are even signposted in our local IKEA.

I also recommend walking in the opposite direction to the arrows on the floor. If you haven't penetrated too far into the Stygian wilderness, you may escape more quickly. And even if you don't it's worth it to see the faces of the grazing consumer herd startled by your transgressive anarchy.

Re: "Twitter [...] have broken GDPR rules"

Doesn't matter what you think about Banks

Given that his reaction to the behaviour of his own firm misusing the details of around 1 million people was "So what?", I think it rather does matter.

He really doesn't see why these regulations should get in the way of his making money while simultaneously wanting them to protect him personally. It's the very definition of "one law for the rich".

Re: A side-effect

Also, in a country the size of the US, wouldn't satellite be a better option for delivering rural broadband?

Re: Want one

too expensive at half the price

The conundrum about folding phones is that you could get half the phone for considerably less than half the price.