Posts by Oh Homer

Re: The $500 car

Your hyperbolic example fails to explain that the automotive industry nonetheless makes billions in profits that are not passed back to the workforce that produced them.

The fact that the break-even point is higher than $500 doesn't magically alter the fact that the margin is nonetheless not zero, but billions, and therefore the price bears no correlation to the actual cost, and clearly neither does it bear any correlation to the token wages paid to those who actually created those profits.

Capitalism is intrinsically an act of theft, justified by the supposed "voluntary contract" of a workforce surplus in which the employers have all the bargaining power, and the circular justification of presumed "ownership" of the means of production, each successive example of which is paid for with the spoils of the previous theft.

Re: "shout fire"

What sort of property is "shouting fire"?

If the right to own property were predicated upon the likelihood that merely owning something unavoidably causes harm, then all property would have to be abolished, since even a plastic spoon can be used to kill people.

In fact you don't need any physical device merely to cause harm, you can just do it with your bare hands.

Should we cut off everyone's hands too? While we're at it, we may as well cut out everyone's tongue, given that entire nations have been known to be subject to genocide using nothing more than propaganda.

You can play that futile "risk reduction" game that treats all humanity like children or criminals, for the sake of a handful of idiots or real criminals, but the outcome will not change. People will just find new and inventive ways of being stupid and/or criminals, and meanwhile the rest of us are forced to live like serfs, supposedly "for our own good".

Sorry, but no.

Re: Can't you find a different forum?

I believe El Reg started it by posting a highly inflammatory political piece in the first place, so it's only right and proper that they should allow a counterpoint.

Although I suspect you already knew that, but it's simply that this particular counterpoint offended your right-wing sensibilities, and it had nothing to do with the lack of tech. relevance, which you could easily have found by clicking anywhere off the page.

As to the topic at hand, yes absolutely there must be a basic income, for all the same reasons as why we needed a Welfare State in the first place: In a word, compassion, a virtue that's sadly being kicked to death by the increasingly right-wing tendencies of the society we live in.

"Too Much Money!"

I'm just trying to understand what motivates people to cry foul at entities funded by voluntary donations, which supposedly make "too much money", whilst remaining remarkably unconcerned by a world filled with corporations that engage in blatant profiteering.

Where is this mythical beast whose prices (or voluntary donations) bear any correlation whatsoever to its actual costs?

Bankrupt, most likely.

I believe your startling discovery is called "capitalism", or as realists would call it, a common and inescapable fact of life.

The "socialism" jibe is funny, though. Wikipedia is motivated by academic principles, not political ones. Right wingers always seem to have difficulty making that distinction.

However, just like everyone else in the capitalist world, it also needs money, and just like everyone else it doesn't place any arbitrary limitations on how much. Why should it? Jimmy Wales is waving a book, not a Red Flag. The difference is this book is completely free to read, unless you actually volunteer to donate money (or your time, by way of voluntarily contributing articles).

I must have missed something here, or perhaps you're working from an entirely new definition of "voluntary" that I'm unaware of.

This is a very different proposition to demanding payment as an absolute condition for access to goods and services, then manipulating the price to "as much as the market can bear", regardless of actual costs.

Wikipedia doesn't "demand" anything in particular from you. It doesn't set a price, overinflated or otherwise. Access is unconditionally free. If you want to donate then you can, and it doesn't impose an arbitrary limitation on that either.

Again, why should it?

Moreover, why should you care what other people do with their money?

So Wikipedia makes a lot of money?

Good.

I'd rather it was going to Wikipedia than Fox News.

"made it seem like we didn’t care"

LOL!

Re: Considering that list

"Why did the USPTO ever allow 'Winter is Coming' to become a trademark?"

Because HBO is better at greasing palms than Reddit.

Undermining the right to property

I realise that something faulty is better off in the bin, and that having the vendor/manufacturer willingly replace it for you is an equestrian gift you probably shouldn't subject to oral examination, but...

just the idea that the vendor can remotely terminate your legally purchased property on a whim, potentially without your knowledge or consent, is something I find profoundly chilling. It undermines the very concept of property ownership.

Sadly that's all too common in this "IP" regime. You bought it, but you don't really "own" it, as such. To me this seems like a sort of corporate communism. It's a way of removing the freedom of private ownership whilst pretending you still have that freedom, by blurring the lines between what constitutes "property" and what must be controlled by the "state", where the "state" in question comprises unelected private corporations.

I don't think I'm overstating the significance of this. If your phone is fair game then potentially so is your home, your car or anything else, especially in this IoT era.

That's why, whenever I buy something with its umbilical chord still attached to the company that supposedly "sold" it to me, I sever that chord post-haste, usually by wiping the offending "IP" in question and installing something I can control.

Up until now I think most people considered that sort of "modding" to be purely a niche interest for geeks, but post-Snowden a lot of formerly "geek" paradigms are pushing into the mainstream consciousness. However, the NSA is only one of many threats to our civil liberties, and I'd suggest it's probably not the biggest, given the sort of power wielded by Big Money interests.

HBO: Interdimensional Time Travellers

Apparently HBO travelled back to 1925 and asked Mary Alice Jones to grant them the exclusive rights to the title "Winter is Coming".

Although I think they may need to go back and ask Mary to do a bit of time travelling herself, so she can go back to 1862, and ask Richard Coe for the rights in the first place.

"IP" is a farce.

Re: Here is some rounded corner prior art

I'll see your 1980s camping mirror, and raise you an Egyptian sarcophagus.

But actually you don't need to go that far to discover the true origins of Apple's "invention. Just look at pretty much any flatscreen display since they were first sold, circa 1997, at least a decade before Apple "invented" rounded rectangles.

"Robbing The Commons"

Well, certainly that may be how this fictional story characterises it, however that's a rather disingenuous jab at the principle of open access to knowledge, since real world movements that advocate such freedom (e.g. the Free Software Foundation) are quite clearly talking about that which is published, not that which is private.

Anything which is not published has no bearing on The Commons, since it was never public knowledge to begin with, and you can't really claim to be limited by a lack of access to something you don't even know exists (even if such information might actually turn out to be useful).

The true essence of open access to knowledge is (literally) academic. It's about collaboration, scientific progress and education, not freeloading, spying and spamvertising.

Naturally the monopolistic "IP" fraternity may see things differently, since their objective is greed, not progress.

"Britains uniquely singled out"

I think you mean Britons.

Britains is a toy company.

Re: Dad (@Charles 9)

I'm just following the natural progression of countermeasures available to me at any given time.

The prospect of those countermeasures being blocked and/or criminalised in the future is a bridge I will have to cross, if and when that happens, but I have no power to prevent that eventuality, and currently there are no other alternatives*, so I'm compelled to use what's available.

It does in fact seem very likely that VPN will either be blocked/restricted by technical measures in the future, or criminalised, or both, given the increasingly oppressive regime we live under. Strictly speaking, VPN and everything else that uses encryption is already criminalised under RIPA - legislation that dispenses with habeas corpus and the presumption of innocence, and compels you to reveal passwords or face imprisonment, without the need for evidence of any further wrongdoing. But again, this is currently the only option* available, "illegal" or otherwise.

As for the "monkey wrench" (a.k.a. "rubber hose") vulnerability, again if your regime is so oppressive that you're subject to government kidnapping "extraordinary rendition" and torture "enhanced interrogation", then all bets are off, the question of technical measures becomes moot, and your only reasonable option* is to leave.

* (One possible solution is plausible deniability, but current implementations are difficult and somewhat flawed.)

The fact of any effective countermeasure being difficult or unpopular is also moot, given that it's your only option. It's also worth bearing in mind that there's a direct correlation between the popularity of such countermeasures and the degree of oppression. Eventually even the least technically adept in an oppressive regime will be conditioned into accepting complex countermeasures as a necessary evil. History teaches us how even ordinary folk adapt to the harsh conditions of oppression.

The one saving grace is that, if all else fails, you can always escape to a freer society. The question of what to do in the event that no such society exists any more only has two possible answers: revolution or slavery.

Re: So who's to blame?

Possibly both, but certainly the router.

If the Chromecast is breaking protocol, then the HomeHub should fail gracefully.

If the Chromecast is correctly following protocol, then the HomeHub is failing to handle it correctly.

Either way the router shares at least half the blame.

Re: "there's still some dangerous stuff you can do"

Is there something more dangerous you can do from a busybox shell on the boot partition, than a full Linux system on a thumbdrive?

My point is that this "vulnerability" is not new, it has absolutely nothing to do with escaping the init script, and it certainly doesn't warrant a CVE report, unless the reporter is claiming to have only just discovered that unencrypted filesystems are (shock!) vulnerable to direct access, where the init shell is only one point of access, and not even the most useful, from a hacker's perspective.

Re: "When the time comes" (a.k.a. The Year of the Linux Desktop)

@TheVogon: "But it can stay irrelevant to most people."

And that is of zero interest, relevance or consequence to those who actually use it.

Re: monetizing the service to generate revenues

I find it amusing when socially oblivious beancounters try to monopolise culture that they really don't understand or care about.

Of course it ceases to be amusing once they fail, taking a little peice of our culture with them to the grave.

Vine worked, culturally if not economically, because it was what the users wanted. They made it, organically and as a natural expression of their culture. It was one of those seemingly trivail and peurile creative outlets, that in hindsight we will eventually claim was important, in a sense that the profit-oriented mindset is institutionally incapable of grasping: It's the little things that make life worth living, not only irrespective of financial gain, but usually in direct contradiction to it.

Attempting to be the gatekeeper to something like that is frankly rather sinister, and was always doomed to failure. Those people are still there, they will always be there, and they will always need a creative outlet makes no economic sense, but will always be culturally essential.

Re: @OhHomer

Mechanical adding machines?

You were lucky.

I had to swim twenty miles uphill through a frozen lake to get to school every day, then spent sixteen hours chiselling my classwork onto stone tablets, and all I had to do my sums with was a banana leaf and a handful of gravel.

But you try and tell the young people today that...

Re: Why oh why would you use Ubuntu

Meh, the only OS worth using is Emacs.

All I need now is a decent text editor.

[Boom, boom!]

In other news, purely out of morbid curiosity, I just tried a 90 day evaluation copy of Win10, although for some bizarre reason Microsoft touts it as an evaluation of a browser that just so happens to come bundled with an OS.

The Vole mindset is odd, putting it mildly, but at least they're not shy about their priorities. Oh Lordy, it's like the 90s all over again.

It looks ... boxy, and plain, and strangely old fashioned.

The OS, that is, including the browser, not the 90s. In comparison to Win10 the 90s were positively futuristic. Then again, I hear that Apple has patented rounded rectangles, so maybe Vole is stuck with 90s aesthetics for good reason.

I don't like it, in fact about the best thing I can say about it is that it didn't crash (yet). Again, I mean Win10, not the 90s. The crash of the 90s was a whole nother matter, albeit this "Cloud" hysteria is uncannily reminiscent of the Dot Com Bubble.

It's also a bit slow, but then I'd be shocked to discover anything by Microsoft that wasn't. It also didn't get infected with malware within the first 60 seconds of use, which is another first in my long and painful experience of Windows thus far, albeit an experience with huge gaps in it (nothing since XP, basically), although it more than compensates for this lack of malware with vast bucketloads of "desktop spam", all generated by Microsoft.

Seriously, it's more like a digital billboard than an OS.

If the debacle of Microsoft's spyware didn't put you off, or the fact that they used frankly illegal tactics to sneak Win10 onto meeelions of PCs (bricking most of them in the process), then surely the uncomfortable sensation of prostituting your PC to Microsoft's "Live" division will be the coup de grâce that ultimately kills whatever little enthusiasm you might have left for the platform, assuming you ever really had any to begin with.

Well, it did for me, anyway. So there.

As for Ubuntu, Fedora and basically anything that isn't Gentoo ... have another bucketload of "meh".

Re: Security and freedom are not fungible

Apparently the American government disagrees.

I'm merely noting that America has been transformed into a police state in the name of "security", thus depriving Americans of the very freedoms that this "security" purports to be defending.

On the other hand, the very concept of "freedom" is largely delusional. If you have laws, you don't have freedom. More fundamentally, and even in the complete absence of laws, you can in principle never actually have freedom, because you never have freedom from consequences.