Posts by Tony W

Maybe having a big price hike wasn't such a good idea

when their prices are already at the top end of the market.

Nuance

The Internet does allow very fragmented groups of people to get together and reinforce each other's views. But demagogues and dictators got elected before the internet. What they did have was the backing of forces with money and power, which will use the Internet just as they do other media. You don't need to invoke the Internet even to explain the Brexit vote, when there were years of misleading propaganda from several popular mainstream newspapers.

But advocating killing people because they belong to a particular group is not just part of ordinary discussion and debate, and I would be happy to see that stopped. Can that be done without losing the freedom of discussion that is essential If society is to develop? That debate is part of a long continuing conflict between freedom and stability that has gone on at least since the arrival of the printing press.

So you can't bring any confidential info into UK

... so it appears, whether commercial, legal or personal. At least, you can't bring it through the border post. Luckily there seem to be ways to get the info into the country without actually taking it through immigration, otherwise a lot of business would stop. Why even bring a laptop, you can buy one when in the UK, wipe it and install OS of your choice. Or if you're really paranoid (or if they are really out to get you), build a PC from parts.

Antivirus?

I assume most or all of the infected PCs were running some form of anti-malware, at least MS Security Essentials. Do these things do anything useful?

Permission system is not much use as anti-malware

If the user has installed an apparently useful app, then they will probably also give it permissions. So having to click to give a permission is probably no safeguard at all to the average user.

The fundamental problem is installing the malware, not giving it the permissions. Many legitimate apps need permissions that would be very dangerous if the app were malware (starting with virtually all of Google's own apps.) This permission would seem reasonable for any app that gives "important" notifications, so most people would just grant it.

Having said that, of course Google was still wrong to deliberately bypass their own permissions system, specifically in order to allow an app to behave very intrusively. And more wrong to withhold the remedy from most existing users.

Someone you know still uses them

I have read that the NHS is a huge user of fax machines.

Self-serving organisation

Pretty much tautology.

Rules are for other people

I see this belief in action on the roads every day, and I've no doubt it's common at the top of all organisations including governments. Those at the top probably got there by ignoring some rules anyway. Clinton will rightly never be allowed to forget this, but any further penalty is probably disproportionate.

Would this be detected on check?

As others have pointed out, quite a lot of legitimate sw produces unknown publisher warning. I scan all exe and zip downloads before running though. I also use Scotty that detects changes to startup programs. Am I just getting a false sense of security by doing this?

Is there a technical issue here?

There are plenty of places to argue about the referendum and its result. I've done my share but I'm not going to do it here. I'd just like to know how petition signatures are checked for validity. Are names and postcodes checked against the electoral register?

Several things

Amazon can apparently withdraw an ebook that you thought you'd bought so the technology doesn't seem to be much of a problem.

But what I find odd is that most books I want to read aren't available as ebooks. When CDs arrived, record companies soon put their back catalogues on the new medium, so we now have a wonderful choice of recorded music. Publishers have huge back catalogues of books that they own the rights of, and are recent enough to be stored in digital form. But they'll only sell an expensive paper copy. I'd buy a lot more books if they were cheaper ebooks. And not only because of cost, I don't want to take heavy books on holiday.

What will it do to the other companies selling digital OS maps?

The OS own version will always be up to date. But if you buy digital OS maps from, say, Anquet, you get only the current version - even if it's about to be superseded. (Sometimes companies might allow you to update within a few weeks of purchase but they won't promise to do it.)

The resellers have maps that you download so they can be 100% offline, but at current prices that's not enough to save them. Unless they can agree with the OS to move to a competitive subscription model, they're surely doomed. And why would the OS compete with itself by doing that?

By the way, people writing about motorways and dual carriageways miss the point. There are plenty of road maps, but the OS maps come into their own when you get out of the car.

Hardly one click

The future of the BBC is probably of interest to a lot of UK residents, but from the questions, this consultation seemed to be aimed mainly at media professionals. I don't think any of the many questions had one-click options, they all required properly thought out text answers that addressed the issues. I, and friends and family that I alerted to the consultation, spent at least half an hour each thinking about our responses - which we did completely independently. We're not pleased that our homework has been binned.

If 38 Degrees allowed multiple responses, they are at fault - but not the only ones, because as far as I remember, their page merely redirected users to the government one. And the fact that such a high proportion of answers came via one source really shows how badly the consultation was written and publicised. Maybe the government was hoping to sneak it through largely unnoticed. If so, then 38 Degrees has at least made this a bit less likely.

"Appropriate" has legal force

As technology is constantly changing, it is right that the law should not require a specific technical process. After all, just requiring encryption wouldn't be much use, that could mean ROT13. If the measures they took didn't work, but measures taken by other companies in the same industry would have worked, it would be easy to argue that what they did wasn't appropriate.

Air

An intensity of 120 dB is equivalent to one watt per square metre. 130 dB would be 10 W/m^2. There would be inefficiency in converting this sound to a continuous air flow (assuming this works at all - it's not clear from the diagram). The air would then have to be collected and sent to a windmill, with further losses, and the windmill would probably have low efficiency in such a low power air flow. Then as Mark85 pointed out, planes don't take off continuously, and even if they did, they wouldn't pass the "generator" continuously. So, if you're lucky, maybe a few watts from a big array. There is no way that this device will give a useful output, let alone repay the energy and cost that it would take to make it.

Maintenance?

I'd like to buy a printer that can be maintained. Like, cleaning the pickup roller and replacing it when worn out without disassembling the printer down to almost the last nut and bolt. I was disillusioned with HP when I found that on my "professional" A3 printer, the waste ink tank was full but couldn't be emptied and cleaned without breaking plastic parts. This is environmentally criminal as well as pissing off the customer.

And braces

Maybe the aircraft's own lithium batteries could be put inside one of these bags?

Too much auto?

I wonder how many of these calls are from people who rely on the auto power-off function? I find it hard to imagine how you could dial by accident if the phone is off and you have any sort of lock set.

Thanks Vodafone!

I changed from the default browser as soon as I received my phone, because Vodafone had populated its bookmarks with a whole page of their own choices that could not be deleted. Security by annoyance?

Is it only me

who would like someone to explain why the Chinese like keypads when they don't use an alphabet?

Will no-one think of the ads?

Fixed permissions are needed so devs can make money from ads which is fair enough. But the only permission they need for this is Internet access, so there doesn't seem to be a good reason why other permissions shouldn't be controlled by the user.

Apart from that, surely no app in the stupidly named play store should be able to make itself ununinstallable?

the cost of making TV has fallen by less than the rate of inflation

My head hurt when I read this. I think you mean "risen".

Many times zero equals

And the result of a web petition or poll is worth what it usually is. Amazing that anyone takes any notice of them.

Religion

Getting higher quality sound than the common herd is a sort of religion with some people. You will no more convince them that their chosen route to heaven isn't valid than you will convince religious fundamentalists of the same thing.

Maybe that's because music can have a direct line to the emotions, but, like sex, the effects aren't under conscious control. So people need a way to get in the right frame of mind. Concentrating on the finer points of sound quality forces you to pay attention to the actual sounds, and avoids distracting thoughts. And a feeling of inner satisfaction at being able to hear subtleties that escape most people probably helps as well.

The exact means doesn't matter so long as it achieves the desired result. In the mid 1950s a friend of my father's explained to me how listening to Chopin on his acoustic gramophone was a far superior experience to the new LPs. Perhaps it was the slower wow of the newer medium that bothered him. But I think it's more likely that, having invested money and emotion in a superior wind-up gramophone, music on an ordinary LP record player just didn't turn him on.

Gaana

apparently.

Recognise the limits of people

If you're driving, the law requires you to pay continuous attention to the road and traffic. But it's been well known for many years that human beings are incapable of closely monitoring, e.g. a radar screen, for long periods, without occasional distraction that will cause them to miss something they should have noticed. How many drivers can put their hands up and say they have never noticed something later than they should have done? Sensible people drive in such a way as to make allowance for occasional distractions, but even this doesn't totally deal with the problem. So self driving cars are the best way to deal with a vehicle's interaction with other moving traffic.

Real problem, sensible solution.

Leaving stoves on is a real problem. And as with many other problems that IoT is invoked to solve, that's probably the wrong answer. How about a motion sensor? Or even a rethink of stoves? You can't set a microwave oven to run with no time limit so why shouldn't stoves be the same?

Evidence

The vehicles will presumably be well instrumented, so there should be video evidence all round plus records of speed, braking and so so on. It should be a lot easier to find the cause of an accident when an automated vehicles is involved, than it is usually.

An app for that

There are Android apps that will turn WiFi off and on depending on what cell tower you're connected to, so you don't have to remember to turn it off when you leave home. I installed one to save battery and control attempts to connect to open networks. Takes a couple of seconds to override when I want to. Don't know about iPhone.

Wrong answer

First, the security solution already exists. I don't think I've ever seen a gas oven that didn't turn off the gas if it wasn't alight, and it would now be illegal to sell one.

Second, money would be better spent improving appliances' basic functions, but most people won't pay the extra. With most irons, the soleplate is unevenly heated and the temperature swing as the thermostat cuts in and out is too wide. Human minds are flexible enough to cope, but automation would probably play safe so the temperature would be lower and clothes wouldn't be well ironed. People would switch to manual and wonder why they'd paid for connectivity.

Anyway this is not the future I was expecting. Having a robot to set the controls of the iron so I can do the ironing seems a sadly limited ambition.

A plague

I use Word and also have to deal with LibreOffice documents. Both drive me to distraction on occasion but LibreOffice more often. At least Word doesn't insert page breaks and lots of new paragraphs within footnotes when saving to .doc (as needed for Amazon to convert to Kindle.) Word occasionally puts footnotes on the wrong page in a complex document - but then oddly enough, so does LibreOffice.

I am much in favour of creative writing being done in plain text but it's necessary to identify formats such as quoted blocks and subheadings so they can be preserved in subsequent formatting. Not always so easy, and in a long book I'd prefer to avoid doing it by hand.

An odd one worth remembering

Power socket with live-neutral reversed. Everything plugged in works perfectly. Equipment with earth-neutral reversed. Works OK (apparently) when plugged into normal socket. Put the two together: stops working. Luckily - because the metal cased unit was touching another that was properly wired. Muggins called out at 2 am. By the time I arrived everyone else had gone home. I moved the unit to get to the mains plug (so then it wasn't touching the adjacent unit) and replaced the fuse.

A narrow escape I've never forgotten. I could so easily have had my hands across the mains, which since the substation was in the building would have been a good 250 volts.

Moral: don't ignore the possibility of two separate faults, not very dangerous individually, being lethally combined. In this case both errors were made by professionals who should have known a great deal better.

Misleading conclusions

This study has been comprehensively debunked. See

understandinguncertainty.org/misleading-conclusions-alcohol-protection-study