Like it or not we have problems living on what the planet can supply us with. So we either reduce our population or take less per head of what is sustainable. The arithmetic is quite simple. Unfortunately many people stick their heads in the sand and think that we can have both, it is rather like the Greeks thinking that they can continue to avoid austerity while also not paying taxes and staying in the Euro.
Remember boys and girls that globalisation is for the big companies to take advantage of, not for the rest of us. It is, apparently, OK for the big boys to buy where things are cheap and then sell at different prices according to what the market can bear and so maximise their profits. They don't like it one little bit if we buy where it is cheap.
It is claimed that there is competition in broadcasting of things like football matches as no one company can have all of them -- but you still end up where one company will have the exclusive rights to an individual match. That is not competition -- if you want to watch the match you have to go to whoever has the rights and they can charge what they want.
Competition will only happen if the rights to every match must be available** to at least two broadcasters; then the football fan will be able to choose and presumably go for the cheaper. This will result in real competition and downward price pressure.
Until we have that: sports broadcasting competition will be a sham.
**available does not mean that the rights have to be taken up. There will be competition for the interesting matches, not all are 'interesting'.
Given that some MPs see *very* sensitive stuff we have to assume that this will end up on the ipads. Apple knows who the owner of these ipads are and thus the USA government also does. Since Apple seems to have total control over these things we have to assume that the USA government is not going to be able to resist the temptation to see what is on these machines and, perhaps, even 'borrow' the odd document or few.
Question: would the NSA let Obama have one of these unless it had a special build that had been crawled over by their top security people ?
I had not realised that spying had become so easy!
For plenty of people that question is a complete non starter, it implies that they have had at least 2 jobs ... what about the lazy arses who have never bothered to work ? Ditto cars - unless you count the ones that they have nicked, or even know who their father is.
I suppose that they do need to provide a list of questions, most people would not be able to come up with things themselves - although it would be nice for those who are more able.
Intel needs to have some low power stuff since ARM is starting to move into the server market. Power/cooling are starting to become very important in data centers.
Ensure that the Post Office check that they are not delivering any copies of Playboy/... unless the householder has signed a we-want-smut agreement. Then fix TVs to not show saucy material broadcast after the watershed.
Just because computers are involved there seems to be this cloud cuckoo notion that any controls are possible and should be put in place.
Or is it that now that the boys at MI5 will get to see what we are looking at they don't want them getting ideas and wasting time & government bandwidth when they should be spying on us ?
is because of the 3rd party apps. Most of these have only ever run on Intel compatible CPUs. The ISVs are going to have great fun getting them to work on a different architecture. It isn't that hard if you know what you are doing and have the discipline -- but I suspect that if you have never had to do it before then things may be surprising.
OK, you may also want to use MS Office, but OpenOffice is a credible alternative that is good enough for most people's needs.
I note that one of the 6 areas where it will be used is ''New material and energy creation''. If they can do that then the physicists would be *really* interested. All that they know how to do at the moment is to convert one form of energy into another form. If these guys would be able to bust the conservation laws and create new energy - that would be great!
2) SZC need to protect their property else risk losing control of it.
The obvious solution is for the pub to pay SZC a nominal fee to continue to use the name. £100 would seem about right. Everyone can then get on with their lives.
"Twitter does not moderate posts/tweets so should be covered... theregister does moderate posts so would not be covered?"
The Register (these days) moderates post-facto -- most posts go straight up. If el-reg receives a complaint it then has to make a judgement and remove the item if it is illegal. That judgement is the tricky bit - how do the moderators know that the complaint is valid and not just someone trying to bury an inconvenient truth by hoodwinking them. Moderators will probably act on the cautious side to protect The Register from legal action.
I agree with your main argument. The main problem is that people do not distinguish between planned and forced reboots. I like to reboot customer machines when a new kernel is installed, this takes a few minutes and is done when is convenient.
The machine at which I am typing is 10 years old, but runs an up to date kernel. I leave it on 24x7 andhave had few hardware problems over the years, just: CPU fans and hard disks.
The idea is to bring the issue to the attention of the great majority who have not heard what is happening or who have vaguely heard but not bothered to find out what SOPA is. El Reg readers are very likely to know what the fuss is all about - so there is little point is darkening El Reg.
However a large banner, in sympathy, would not go amiss.
just grow up and stop fighting. This sort of tit for tat reminds me of 4 year olds who are arguing over a broken biscuit - they just need their heads banging together. I am not interested who started the squabble - I want to know who will stop it.
Most of this I am happy with and accept as being on the right track. However the regulations apply to persistent and session cookies (page 4 of their guidance pdf). This has evidentially been written by some arts muppet who does not have the first clue as to how a real web site is written.
Each page refresh to a web server starts afresh, completely unrelated to any previous page served up. This is not how a user sees it: they think of it as a conversation - a session. This sort of session cookie is used to tie the page hits from a user together so that they are related. The session cookie is ONLY returned to the domain that set it, expires when the browser is closed and, generally, is not recognised by the server if unused for 1/2 hour or so.
There is also little distinction on the purpose of a cookie. A request for a larger font size is considered the same as one that record the user's name, the privacy implications of these two are worlds apart.
Much too great an emphasis on the wording of a poorly drafted law rather than what the intention is.
The ICO's own web site:
They make great show of how to do it, but when I agreed to it storing that cookie on my machine and I found:
* 2 cookies from www.ico.gov.uk
- session cookie
- ICOCookiesAccepted - permanent cookie that expires in 2 years.
* 5 cookies from ico.gov.uk ---- which is a cross site cookie -- a site that I did not agree to.
cookies that vary from being session to permanent which expire varying from 1 hour to 2 years.
HP appears to be hoping that hoards of FLOSS programmers will materialise out of thin air and rescue its operating system .... make it the huge success that it could not realise.
This might very well happen. Something great and used by many, this achieved by the many hands working on it who import FLOSS code from elsewhere. What will also happen in that webOS has its best bits taken and used in other FLOSS environments.
It all depends on how useful people see it compared to other platforms out there, eg Android, and what license HP puts on its components.
If it is announced as found I trust that el reg will not cover it in a light and frivolous manner but in a style that reflect the true gravity of the discovery.
I can see the value of a debugging application that had a copy of all keystrokes before they were given to the foreground application. The real question is what happens with that data ?
* Everything uploaded to somewhere occasionally. That would be very bad. Get all my ''secret data'' eg: passwords, bank account info, etc.
* If an application crashes and I am asked if I want to submit debug data. Kind of OK if 'no' really means NO except that it would also send secret data and most people would not think of saying no if they have entered secret data into the crashed app. Also: will it send just keystrokes for the failed app or everything that it has ?
* Data thrown away when an app terminates, the phone restarted, ...
* Who gets to see this uploaded data ? Developers, marketeers, google, CIA ?
* Where does this data go ? I would expect a lot of even non secret data to contain personal information (ref: data protection act). Exporting it out of the EU could be illegal.
I find it a good combination of words. On the few occasions that I need to use MS Windows I find it so user hostile and hard to use (being used to *nix - MS Windows does not work as I expect). So a couple of paracetamol at the end of it seems like a good combination.
When will these companies start becoming honest again - compete by selling a better product rather than employing more of that parasitic profession - solicitors ?
The chances are that some malware found its way onto a PC used by one of the maintainance engineers and the attack was launched from there. This would have been deemed 'safe' by any firewall.
This is as much a MS Windows problem as a SCADA problem.
If he does not like iTunes then he can always remove his material from the catalogue. Will that improve his income ?
If he does not like the 30% iTunes take he can try to negotiate a better deal and when they won't budge stop selling through iTunes.
I assume that Mr Townshend also approves of Paul McCartney's efforts to help starving old rock stars by increasing the copyright term to 70 years -- thus hindering new artists from reusing some of the old material into something new and exciting -- better to allow those who already have than allow the new who have not a chance.
If he is lacking in income maybe he ought to publish something new, that people will want to buy, rather than relying on regurgitating ancient stuff -- I would like to receive royalties for code that I wrote in my youth!
I am no apple lover, but stopping like this is not the way.
I never cease to be astounded what people will say because they hope to extract cash from someone. Not unlike the bloke with an asian accent who phoned me this morning saying that he had detected a security problem on my Windows computer (news to me - since I run only Linux) ... and accused me of being a poor liar when I repeatedly asked for his 'phone number so that I could call him for future assistance.
''Schubert's computer came with Open Office, a word processing software package that is compatible with Microsoft Word. She says she wasn't aware it was compatible.''
By the looks of things she did not try, if she had she would have found that it worked.
I suspect that the problem was her secondary school -- too many school teachers only know how to use MS Windows (I do use the word ''know'' lightly, many teachers who I have met don't know much) and teach pupils how to press buttons to get things done. They do not teach understanding and insight, which is what they should be doing. This is partly a result of the very successful MS marketing to make teachers believe that anything other than MS is strange and incomprehensible - except for a Mac and even they are a little odd - best left alone.
This is quite right, but not new, just a new way of putting it. Most people are apathetic and if they don't like things just moan and expect someone else to do something. This is why I applaud the people at St Paul's - at least they are trying to do something about what they perceive as wrong.
I am still waiting to hear what these supposed patents are. The only one that I have heard about is to do with FAT file systems .... but what about the rest ?
"a good Trojan can still trick the user into installing it."
Only if the user was logged in as root while reading email/whatever.
Just because something is ''possible'' does not say much about how likely it is to happen, for that you need to look at the other links in the chain that make it possible. We are fortunate that these links are much tougher on Unix based systems than they ever have been on MS Windows.
Register
375 posts • joined Tuesday 29th May 2007 08:50 GMT
Page:
I read the bit about sucking inches
and thought that you were talking about Paris again ... but then remembered that that was a previous project.
992 times
What is it ?
a) 992 times that they know about ?
b) 992 times that they are willing to admit ?
c) 992 times with no possibility of any more ?
I strongly suspect (a) with a bit of (b).
There are too many of us
Like it or not we have problems living on what the planet can supply us with. So we either reduce our population or take less per head of what is sustainable. The arithmetic is quite simple. Unfortunately many people stick their heads in the sand and think that we can have both, it is rather like the Greeks thinking that they can continue to avoid austerity while also not paying taxes and staying in the Euro.
Spend 5 minutes here:
http://populationmatters.org/
Globalisation
Remember boys and girls that globalisation is for the big companies to take advantage of, not for the rest of us. It is, apparently, OK for the big boys to buy where things are cheap and then sell at different prices according to what the market can bear and so maximise their profits. They don't like it one little bit if we buy where it is cheap.
The use of GEOIP is much the same.
Competition on sports broadcasting
It is claimed that there is competition in broadcasting of things like football matches as no one company can have all of them -- but you still end up where one company will have the exclusive rights to an individual match. That is not competition -- if you want to watch the match you have to go to whoever has the rights and they can charge what they want.
Competition will only happen if the rights to every match must be available** to at least two broadcasters; then the football fan will be able to choose and presumably go for the cheaper. This will result in real competition and downward price pressure.
Until we have that: sports broadcasting competition will be a sham.
**available does not mean that the rights have to be taken up. There will be competition for the interesting matches, not all are 'interesting'.
Security - can we trust them ?
Given that some MPs see *very* sensitive stuff we have to assume that this will end up on the ipads. Apple knows who the owner of these ipads are and thus the USA government also does. Since Apple seems to have total control over these things we have to assume that the USA government is not going to be able to resist the temptation to see what is on these machines and, perhaps, even 'borrow' the odd document or few.
Question: would the NSA let Obama have one of these unless it had a special build that had been crawled over by their top security people ?
I had not realised that spying had become so easy!
New Olympic Sport ?
Maybe that ought to be a new event: Who can crack the web site and get themselves a free ticket to the upcoming sports days.
Re: Close approach of the moon?
''I'll just take my hat off, then.''
What ? To replace it with a tin foil one to protect yourself from the moon's rays ?
Least favourite job
For plenty of people that question is a complete non starter, it implies that they have had at least 2 jobs ... what about the lazy arses who have never bothered to work ? Ditto cars - unless you count the ones that they have nicked, or even know who their father is.
I suppose that they do need to provide a list of questions, most people would not be able to come up with things themselves - although it would be nice for those who are more able.
Bet on Apple stock price
So, has George Colony shorted Apple stock ? If not -then how sure is he of what he says ?
Try to compete with ARM
Intel needs to have some low power stuff since ARM is starting to move into the server market. Power/cooling are starting to become very important in data centers.
Is it hackable ?
See title
while they are at it ...
Ensure that the Post Office check that they are not delivering any copies of Playboy/... unless the householder has signed a we-want-smut agreement. Then fix TVs to not show saucy material broadcast after the watershed.
Just because computers are involved there seems to be this cloud cuckoo notion that any controls are possible and should be put in place.
Or is it that now that the boys at MI5 will get to see what we are looking at they don't want them getting ideas and wasting time & government bandwidth when they should be spying on us ?
The reason to use MS Windows ...
is because of the 3rd party apps. Most of these have only ever run on Intel compatible CPUs. The ISVs are going to have great fun getting them to work on a different architecture. It isn't that hard if you know what you are doing and have the discipline -- but I suspect that if you have never had to do it before then things may be surprising.
OK, you may also want to use MS Office, but OpenOffice is a credible alternative that is good enough for most people's needs.
Energy creation!!
I note that one of the 6 areas where it will be used is ''New material and energy creation''. If they can do that then the physicists would be *really* interested. All that they know how to do at the moment is to convert one form of energy into another form. If these guys would be able to bust the conservation laws and create new energy - that would be great!
Obvious solution
1) The pub is not really doing SZC any harm.
2) SZC need to protect their property else risk losing control of it.
The obvious solution is for the pub to pay SZC a nominal fee to continue to use the name. £100 would seem about right. Everyone can then get on with their lives.
Dr Strangelove would be disappointed
we have the technology but don't use it as he would have wished!
Raspberry Jammed
Come on El Reg, you are slipping -- that should have been the headline!
Re: The E-Commerce Regulations
"Twitter does not moderate posts/tweets so should be covered... theregister does moderate posts so would not be covered?"
The Register (these days) moderates post-facto -- most posts go straight up. If el-reg receives a complaint it then has to make a judgement and remove the item if it is illegal. That judgement is the tricky bit - how do the moderators know that the complaint is valid and not just someone trying to bury an inconvenient truth by hoodwinking them. Moderators will probably act on the cautious side to protect The Register from legal action.
Questions
* What data will be shared with the USA ?
+ Name, address, ... what else ?
+ Trips to/from the USA or trips elsewhere as well ?
* What the USA can do with the data is restricted ... how can we be sure that they won't use it for other things and keep it for longer than agreed ?
Re: You carry your birth date around with you?
Like many people I carry my driver's license around with me (the plastic card one). So I am one of the 99%.
iChildish
iNfantile
Breaking it
What this new web site will do is to break links that other web sites have to directgov - they keep on doing this, it is a pain.
Re: Cookies
'closing this signals your acceptance to cookies'
You only see that if you have javascript enabled. No JS no popup.
Run different web browsers
Next
Re: "Google's results are all Google URLs that redirect."
I have noticed that they sometimes are and sometimes are not. I'm not sure what it depends on. I surf with javascript turned off by default.
@ShelLuser
I agree with your main argument. The main problem is that people do not distinguish between planned and forced reboots. I like to reboot customer machines when a new kernel is installed, this takes a few minutes and is done when is convenient.
The machine at which I am typing is 10 years old, but runs an up to date kernel. I leave it on 24x7 andhave had few hardware problems over the years, just: CPU fans and hard disks.
How is that measured ?
If it is by analysis of your server logs, OK - but if by counts from doubleclick.net then you don't count me -- firefox noscript blocks that.
2038
""You'll enjoy 2038 then.""
You are confusing method with implementation. The Unix problem can (will) be solved by moving to 64 bit integers.
(At Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 2038 GMT Unix time as a 32 bit number wraps round)
El Reg darkening
''I hope El Reg will also be going dark''
The idea is to bring the issue to the attention of the great majority who have not heard what is happening or who have vaguely heard but not bothered to find out what SOPA is. El Reg readers are very likely to know what the fuss is all about - so there is little point is darkening El Reg.
However a large banner, in sympathy, would not go amiss.
Pictures please ...
or we won't believe that it happened :-)Idiots
John Postel must be spinning in his grave :-(Please children ...
just grow up and stop fighting. This sort of tit for tat reminds me of 4 year olds who are arguing over a broken biscuit - they just need their heads banging together. I am not interested who started the squabble - I want to know who will stop it.
Also
http://solicitorsfromhell2.com
http://www.legaljackass.co.uk/index.php
Wrong business BT
Please concentrate on providing us with a top class telephone service rather than make money through the use of lawyers.
session cookies
Most of this I am happy with and accept as being on the right track. However the regulations apply to persistent and session cookies (page 4 of their guidance pdf). This has evidentially been written by some arts muppet who does not have the first clue as to how a real web site is written.
Each page refresh to a web server starts afresh, completely unrelated to any previous page served up. This is not how a user sees it: they think of it as a conversation - a session. This sort of session cookie is used to tie the page hits from a user together so that they are related. The session cookie is ONLY returned to the domain that set it, expires when the browser is closed and, generally, is not recognised by the server if unused for 1/2 hour or so.
There is also little distinction on the purpose of a cookie. A request for a larger font size is considered the same as one that record the user's name, the privacy implications of these two are worlds apart.
Much too great an emphasis on the wording of a poorly drafted law rather than what the intention is.
The ICO's own web site:
They make great show of how to do it, but when I agreed to it storing that cookie on my machine and I found:
* 2 cookies from www.ico.gov.uk
- session cookie
- ICOCookiesAccepted - permanent cookie that expires in 2 years.
* 5 cookies from ico.gov.uk ---- which is a cross site cookie -- a site that I did not agree to.
cookies that vary from being session to permanent which expire varying from 1 hour to 2 years.
Open Source is not magic pixie dust
HP appears to be hoping that hoards of FLOSS programmers will materialise out of thin air and rescue its operating system .... make it the huge success that it could not realise.
This might very well happen. Something great and used by many, this achieved by the many hands working on it who import FLOSS code from elsewhere. What will also happen in that webOS has its best bits taken and used in other FLOSS environments.
It all depends on how useful people see it compared to other platforms out there, eg Android, and what license HP puts on its components.
Eventual announcement
If it is announced as found I trust that el reg will not cover it in a light and frivolous manner but in a style that reflect the true gravity of the discovery.
Transmission not shown
Thank you - I was going to say just that.
I can see the value of a debugging application that had a copy of all keystrokes before they were given to the foreground application. The real question is what happens with that data ?
* Everything uploaded to somewhere occasionally. That would be very bad. Get all my ''secret data'' eg: passwords, bank account info, etc.
* If an application crashes and I am asked if I want to submit debug data. Kind of OK if 'no' really means NO except that it would also send secret data and most people would not think of saying no if they have entered secret data into the crashed app. Also: will it send just keystrokes for the failed app or everything that it has ?
* Data thrown away when an app terminates, the phone restarted, ...
* Who gets to see this uploaded data ? Developers, marketeers, google, CIA ?
* Where does this data go ? I would expect a lot of even non secret data to contain personal information (ref: data protection act). Exporting it out of the EU could be illegal.
We need much more information.
Re: "Windows" + "Tablets" = combination of words
I find it a good combination of words. On the few occasions that I need to use MS Windows I find it so user hostile and hard to use (being used to *nix - MS Windows does not work as I expect). So a couple of paracetamol at the end of it seems like a good combination.
f**king trolls
When will these companies start becoming honest again - compete by selling a better product rather than employing more of that parasitic profession - solicitors ?
Firewall is not the whole solution
The chances are that some malware found its way onto a PC used by one of the maintainance engineers and the attack was launched from there. This would have been deemed 'safe' by any firewall.
This is as much a MS Windows problem as a SCADA problem.
Stop stropping
If he does not like iTunes then he can always remove his material from the catalogue. Will that improve his income ?
If he does not like the 30% iTunes take he can try to negotiate a better deal and when they won't budge stop selling through iTunes.
I assume that Mr Townshend also approves of Paul McCartney's efforts to help starving old rock stars by increasing the copyright term to 70 years -- thus hindering new artists from reusing some of the old material into something new and exciting -- better to allow those who already have than allow the new who have not a chance.
If he is lacking in income maybe he ought to publish something new, that people will want to buy, rather than relying on regurgitating ancient stuff -- I would like to receive royalties for code that I wrote in my youth!
I am no apple lover, but stopping like this is not the way.
What has Gutierrez been smoking ... ?
I want some!
I never cease to be astounded what people will say because they hope to extract cash from someone. Not unlike the bloke with an asian accent who phoned me this morning saying that he had detected a security problem on my Windows computer (news to me - since I run only Linux) ... and accused me of being a poor liar when I repeatedly asked for his 'phone number so that I could call him for future assistance.
Lives ruined - rubbish!
''Schubert's computer came with Open Office, a word processing software package that is compatible with Microsoft Word. She says she wasn't aware it was compatible.''
By the looks of things she did not try, if she had she would have found that it worked.
I suspect that the problem was her secondary school -- too many school teachers only know how to use MS Windows (I do use the word ''know'' lightly, many teachers who I have met don't know much) and teach pupils how to press buttons to get things done. They do not teach understanding and insight, which is what they should be doing. This is partly a result of the very successful MS marketing to make teachers believe that anything other than MS is strange and incomprehensible - except for a Mac and even they are a little odd - best left alone.
Also called: sheeple
This is quite right, but not new, just a new way of putting it. Most people are apathetic and if they don't like things just moan and expect someone else to do something. This is why I applaud the people at St Paul's - at least they are trying to do something about what they perceive as wrong.
Re: colours
I suspect that the case will be coloured blue - to match the colour frequently seen on the screen :-)
A gesture for Apple ...
In response to that I have a gesture for Apple:
http://sunheadlines.blogspot.com/2008/11/classics-up-yours-delors.html
234 silences
I am still waiting to hear what these supposed patents are. The only one that I have heard about is to do with FAT file systems .... but what about the rest ?
Would work on Linux ?
"a good Trojan can still trick the user into installing it."
Only if the user was logged in as root while reading email/whatever.
Just because something is ''possible'' does not say much about how likely it is to happen, for that you need to look at the other links in the chain that make it possible. We are fortunate that these links are much tougher on Unix based systems than they ever have been on MS Windows.
Page: