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User: oobayly

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Comments · 1,328

  1. Re:Geolock Porn on Leaked Document Shows Europe Would Fight UK Plans To Block Porn · · Score: 1

    I would have thought sticky would be a more apt adjective. Each to their own I suppose.

  2. Re:And so preventable on A Beautiful Mind Mathematician John F. Nash Jr. Dies · · Score: 1

    What is the rationale behind "seatbelt laws are wrong"? I suppose I've grown up with seatbelt laws so I don't think about them, other than the fact that they're not there to protect just you, they're also there to protect the people you're sharing the car with.

  3. Re:And so preventable on A Beautiful Mind Mathematician John F. Nash Jr. Dies · · Score: 1

    In the UK, most (if not all) coaches have seatbelts. The announcement on my local service into London is "this coach has seatbelts and it's a legal requirement to wear one" - and I do, because I've seen what happens when one of those coaches crashes on the motorway.

  4. Re:And so preventable on A Beautiful Mind Mathematician John F. Nash Jr. Dies · · Score: 1

    The idea being, I suppose, that the seats ahead of you keep you from being ejected through the windshield.

    Which is pretty flawed - the seats may well stop you flying through the windscreen, but it quite likely there's some poor bastard in that seat who's going to get clobbered. In the UK they used to have a road safety advert that went along the lines of

    Like most victims - July knew her killer - it was her son, who wasn't wearing his seatbelt...

  5. Re:And so preventable on A Beautiful Mind Mathematician John F. Nash Jr. Dies · · Score: 1

    I think it's an age thing too. When I was growing (admittedly this is about 25 years ago) up there was an old lady that used to walk into town. We often gave her a lift and she would pull the seat belt across her, and hold it but not plug it in. I don't know anyone in my age group (or my parents' age group) that don't wear seatbelts - but then they've been mandatory in any countries I've lived in.

  6. Re:I guess that if a Mathematician... on A Beautiful Mind Mathematician John F. Nash Jr. Dies · · Score: 1

    Hey, I didn't see you all over there...

  7. Re:To be more precise, Amazon will collect on taxe on Amazon Decides To Start Paying Tax In the UK · · Score: 1

    I wasn't actually disagreeing with you - it was just an opportunity to share an anecdote about a complete muppet I once knew. Yes, taxes are definitely an expense.

  8. Re:Funny, that spin... on What AI Experts Think About the Existential Risk of AI · · Score: 1

    Absolutely, I *don't* trust Al Gore on climate science. You know who I do trust - climate scientists who've had their work peer reviewed. It's got nothing to do with jealousy and loathing, it's got everything to do with not trusting everything somebody says simply because they're absolutely outstanding in a separate field.

  9. Re: EVEN ***MORE*** BULLSHIT on Al-Qaeda's Job Application Form Revealed · · Score: 1

    Yeah, I think the AC was getting confused with the people who thought that light a fire under gas bottles would cause explosions - some of them were doctors. Ironic that the more educated ones were more inept. I saw it more as a sad indictment of British education - they'd all been schooled over here but didn't understand basic science.

  10. Re:To be more precise, Amazon will collect on taxe on Amazon Decides To Start Paying Tax In the UK · · Score: 1

    Of course, you can take the whole "taxes are another expense" too far. I know somebody who tried putting his previous VAT return into his purchase ledger - effectively trying to claim the VAT back on the VAT he paid out to HMRC. It wasn't done on purpose - he was just an idiot.

  11. Re: Williams WASP X-Jet on The Hoverboard Flies Closer To Reality · · Score: 3, Funny

    In 40 years people have also got a lot heavier.

  12. Re:NSA on NSA Planned To Hijack Google App Store To Hack Smartphones · · Score: 1

    No, they're both evil - the difference [IMO] opinion is that Wall Street does their evil in public and doesn't pretend that it's for your own good.

  13. Re:Unintended consequences on NSA Planned To Hijack Google App Store To Hack Smartphones · · Score: 2

    Moving Dropbox data to the Republic of Ireland makes it more legal for the NSA to access the data - they're definitely not accessing US citizen's data - not that I imagine it makes much of a difference.

    The difference it does make is that it's harder for the TLAs to get warrants to access the data - they now have to go via a foreign government's legal system, rather than the US rubber stamp system. The Irish government *appears* to have been less than accommodating - as show in the Microsoft email case:

    The US government has claimed a US warrant is sufficient to get emails even when stored in another country, while Microsoft has resisted, arguing the US warrant power does not reach that far. The case has made business rivals into temporary allies and forced Ireland's Minister for Foreign Affairs and Data Protection to ask the European Commission to formally support Microsoft.

    The Faulty Logic at the Heart of Microsoft Ireland Email Dispute

    That, and the fact that Dropbox probably have to pay a shitload less tax now.

  14. Meanwhile Sky Go still uses silverlight on YouTube Live Streams Now Support HTML5 Playback and 60fps Video · · Score: 1

    I had a guy in our office asking why his Sky Go account wasn't working in Chrome - apparently they've no plans in ditching silverlight even though MS discontinued development three years ago - and since NPAPI has been disabled in Chrome (and will be removed in September). It also broke another colleague's Java cribbage game.

    So, Google can do 60fps HD using HTML5 video and Sky need still need silverlight. I'm guessing it's a DRM issue, but if Netflix can do it then you'd have to imagine that News International can too.

  15. Re: stable on Linux 4.0 Has a File-System Corruption Problem, RAID Users Warned · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It's not. However it isn't beyond a reasonable expectation that a dodgy touchpad driver shouldn't be able to kill an OS.

  16. Re: Here's the thing on Apple, A123 To Settle Lawsuit Over Poached Battery Engineers · · Score: 1

    But they got the second most senior employee.

  17. Re:sue for backpay / ot pay for the hours that whe on Worker Fired For Disabling GPS App That Tracked Her 24 Hours a Day · · Score: 1

    I'm not sure where ARS got that from - I couldn't see anywhere in the filing that specified ownership of the phone, and any references were to their phones or her phone.

  18. Re:It not very hard on How Spotify Can Become Profitable · · Score: 2

    Maybe it's a UK thing, but I can sign up a new account without a facebook account.

  19. Re:Real enterprise has not gone to SSD on Enterprise SSDs, Powered Off, Potentially Lose Data In a Week · · Score: 1

    Which is why you don't keep your data centre in the basement, in fact nothing of importance should be kept in the basement. Sandy and Fukushima are prime examples of that.

    On this site there was a report after Sandy from a guy who literally had his team carry fuel up flights of stairs to the generators - the data centre and the generators were out of harms way, but the fuel was in the basement, along with the pumps. I'm guessing that storing fuel half way up a building is frowned upon. I don't know the feasibility of having the pumps beside the generators - it'd be a bitch to prime them, but in theory once the generator is running it doesn't matter if your fuel bunker is 6ft under water.

  20. Re:Keep all your doors unlocked too on James Comey: the Man Who Wants To Outlaw Encryption · · Score: 4, Funny

    Are you suggesting that chastity belts should remain unlocked?

  21. Re:Waste of Time on James Comey: the Man Who Wants To Outlaw Encryption · · Score: 1

    What have languages got to do with it? Languages are just like standards the GP mentioned (Unicode, ASCII, etc) - you need to understand the language to read the message, just like you need to understand how ASCII encoding works. Using a [non made-up] language means that you are designing the message to be read by anyone who receives the content - just because they may need to do some work to understand it doesn't make it encryption.

    And yes, I'm aware that the US used Navajo radio operators during WW2, and that it worked. However, it would have taken just one Japanese linguist who had studied native American languages to have recognised Navajo (not necessarily understand it, but use it as a crib). Which is why the US didn't use this method in Europe - because of German linguists and anthropologists efforts to understand the languages (the method was used during WW1). It's also the reason why the US used *actual* encryption devices.

  22. Re:Yep, they were... on Keurig Stock Drops, Says It Was Wrong About DRM Coffee Pods · · Score: 5, Funny

    Or accountant, or lawyer. Bonus for those who fucked their accountant and got their prostitute to do their tax return.

  23. Re:Don't mess with Texas on Two Gunman Killed Outside "Draw the Prophet" Event In Texas · · Score: 4, Informative

    Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire have the most white populations, and their gun-related homicide rates are 0.3, 0.8 and 0.4 per 100,000 respectively. That's between 1.5 and 4 times the gun related homicide rate in the Netherlands. And that's the Netherlands as a whole, not a conveniently cherry picked stat that I've allowed for the US. I couldn't find a racial breakdown for Dutch murder rates either, not that it makes a difference.

    I've had to use gun-related murder stats as I couldn't find comparable numbers for gun related violence.

  24. Re: Venus is the hottest planet on Messenger's Mercury Trip Ends With a Bang, and Silence · · Score: 1

    Rely? I know people who would have read that article (on a site like the BBC), but don't know what the speed of sound is. They would however know it's somewhere between a commercial aircraft's speed and a fighter plane. So "10 times the speed of sound" is better than "3400 m/s".

    Saying that, using the speed of sound can annoy me because if it's a high altitude thing, is it 10 times the local speed of sound or STP speed - at -40 there a 10% difference.

  25. Re: So... relevance? on Comcast Brings Fiber To City That It Sued 7 Years Ago To Stop Fiber Rollout · · Score: 1

    Exactly this. BT (I'm in the UK) hadn't given a shit about improving the infrastructure on our business park for the last 10 years. Then along comes a privately (funded by a bloke in The City) who is installing 100Mb/s fibre to homes, mainly to rural areas. More expensive than BT, but so what, it was 50 times fate.

    We also got a leaflet about their business services - 1Gb/s (including 4hr on-site), was about half the price of our 100Mb/s leased line. Granted it doesn't have a 100% SLA.

    Suddenly BT send around or local business manager, are doing site surveys, looking into putting a couple of 1GB/s pipes in. They only put in investment when the monopoly rug is about to be pulled from under their feet.

    The landlord doesn't help either. He didn't want a company digging up his precious tarmac (he gave ownership of his conducting to BT a decade ago for some reason and they don't share), not realising that better internet connectivity is a lifeline of modern businesses.