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User: kyz

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  1. Re:The BBC isn't state sponsored media? I must be on State Media Rushing Into Coverage Void Left By Dying Newspapers · · Score: 4, Informative

    It seems like you have a perspective problem. If you're used to only having self-funded or advertising-funded media, then all "state-funded" media must be the same. But they're not.

    The BBC collects its license fee itself. If you don't feel like funding the BBC, don't buy a TV. RT is funded centrally from tax money. Russian income tax pays for it whether you have a TV or not.

    The Russian government owns RT. The British government does not own the BBC. At best, they own the decision about which private corporation has the right to be the national broadcaster and could take that away from the BBC.

    The Russian government decides at all levels who runs RT, as it owns it. The UK government only gets to decide the BBC's director general and its charter; much like shareholders in a private company, the UK government is an outsider with a stake in the BBC, rather than the operator.

    The Russian government likely tells RT what to say. The BBC frequently says things the the UK government doesn't want broadcast and has to take the BBC to court because it has no control over what the BBC says beyond "we might recommend to the independent review body that they cut your funding in 2016".

    If the BBC was located in Russia and acted the way it does in Britain, the Russian government would have closed it down and murdered its chief executive by now.

    The BBC's equivalent to RT is a small part of the BBC called the World Service - this is not the same as BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the BBC. The World Service has always been funded directly by the state, from taxes, but from 2014 onwards the BBC has to pay for it by itself.

  2. Re:Wow on UK Plan Would Use CCTV To Stop Uninsured Drivers From Refueling · · Score: 1

    You can get an MOT without insurance.

    But you can't get a tax disc (= permission to drive or park on public roads) without both a valid MOT and valid insurance.

  3. Re:ground effects lighting on UK Plan Would Use CCTV To Stop Uninsured Drivers From Refueling · · Score: 1

    It doesn't really matter, because most petrol stations allow you to fill up an approved container like a jerrycan (except when there's anarchy in the UK). Just fill one of those up, you don't need a car, never mind a number plate.

  4. Re:Javascript on links... on Google Switching to SSL By Default For Logged-In Users · · Score: 1

    Or you could install this Greasemonkey script which brings back the cached and similar links in google search

  5. Re:Erosion of the Commons on Illegal To Take a Photo In a Shopping Center? · · Score: 1

    Being on your property versus not being on your property - this is your only bargaining chip.

    If the public wants to remain on your property, then they can submit to your conditions, otherwise they simply have to walk away.

    You can't create an outstanding liability that attaches to them even if they reject the conditions, so you can't force people to forfeit something just because they were on your land. (However, if they damage something while trespassing, you can take them to (civil) court to force them to pay for repairs. The court will decide if your claims are reasonable.)

  6. Re:Erosion of the Commons on Illegal To Take a Photo In a Shopping Center? · · Score: 1

    No, what's being bargained is that you are giving permission for the public to be on your property if they follow your conditions.

    If they don't, they simply lack your permission to be on your property, they are not liable to pay you £1000.

    In England/Wales, they are committing trespass, and you may use reasonable force to remove them from your property.

  7. Re:Curious on China Cracks Down On Fake Apple Stores · · Score: 1

    Most of these stores are authorised Apple resellers.

    Apple actually own and run all the Apple Stores, so an Apple Store won't appear in your city unless Apple decide to open one. It's not possible to "pay up for the logo rights" - Apple will never ask someone to open an Apple Store, they will open the Apple Store themselves. But only if they want to.

  8. Re:Can't delete things on the internet on Mug-Shot Industry Digs Up Your Past, Charges You To Bury It · · Score: 1

    You have to visit the site at least once, by clicking on the search result. Then Google is satisfied you're blocking the page because you went to it and didn't like what you saw.

    You've probably been able to block bad sites before (like expertsexchange.com) because Google knows you've clicked on their results before.

  9. Re:Unlikely on James Murdoch's Defense Crumbles · · Score: 3, Informative

    I don't think Murdoch's company was the only one to use phone hacking.

    Many papers did, through arms-length dealing with private detectives.

    The UK government caught some detectives stealing private information, and published which newspapers were buying it Read page 11 of this report.

    The top three newspaper companies buying illegal information were Trinity Mirror (1679 times), Daily Mail and General Trust (1387 times), then News International (only 256 times).

    It's not the quantity of hacking, but who got hacked. The public didn't really care about celebrities being hacked, but went apeshit when they heard a little girl got hacked.

  10. Re:Seventh code answer... on Queen Elizabeth Sets a Code-Breaking Challenge · · Score: 1

    Wow, you're good at this. Next task: can you decode this one?

  11. Re:End-to-end on Vodafone Femtocells Rooted, Secret Keys Exposed · · Score: 1

    Cell networks have the same need for time-critical end-to-end delivery as fixed line networks, and thus have a very similar architecture. They don't look anything like IP networks.

    Cell sites place calls on behalf of the mobile, and talk with other cell sites to handover calls in progress as the mobile passes through. They have to be trusted to do that.

    GSM encryption works on the basis that the company who issued the SIM card also knows the secret keys inside the SIM card. That way, both ends can synchronise encryption/decryption, even if packets are lost and not re-transmitted. Public-key encryption almost invariably uses a block cipher that can't do that. What use is that to a phone network?

  12. Re:old news on Vodafone Femtocells Rooted, Secret Keys Exposed · · Score: 2

    http://thcorg.blogspot.com/2011/07/vodafone-hacked-root-password-published.html

    "What we have seen is that Vodafone fixed the way THC gained administrator access to the femto.

    This of course does not fix the core of the problem: The femto transfers key material from the core network right down to the femto."

  13. Re:But why? on News Corp. Subsidiary Under Fire For Hacking Dead Girl's Voicemail · · Score: 1

    Boycott the paper! But I don't suppose the readership will.

    If it matters to them, they will.

    In 1989, in Liverpool, a crowd crush killed 96 people and injured over 700. Murdoch's The Sun headline the next day insulted the dead with appalling lies.

    The Sun used to sell about 212,000 copies a day in Liverpool (population 500,000), it now sells about 12,000. 200,000 less newspapers per day, every weekday, for the past 22 years: 1.1 billion copies boycotted. That's what I call a boycott!

    In 2008, a TV show tried to give away copies of The Sun in Liverpool, nobody would accept one. So they set them on fire instead.

  14. Re:You need to move to texas on 40GB of Data That Costs the Same As a House · · Score: 1

    Land is cheap when you steal it.

  15. Re:Whoa on Life As a Bug Hunter · · Score: 1

    Firefox doesn't use that much RAM under normal conditions.

    Yes it does. Mozilla know this and have an entire team of people addressing Firefox 4 memory usage issues. They're looking at 18 P1 bugs, 84 total.

    My Firefox is has 1.3GB mapped, but is only using 300MB right now (according to the very useful about:memory)... that's a serious fragmentation problem, because as far as my operating system is concerned, that's a 1.3GB program, not a 300MB program.

  16. Re:They're right on Microsoft Brands WebGL a 'Harmful' Technology · · Score: 2

    it makes more sense to just link in the quake engine and support a "quake" tag

    Yesterday's news, my good man - haven't you heard of Quake Live? Serve up the .pak with MIME type "application/x-id-quakelive" and Bob's your uncle!

  17. Re:Longer Answer: on Could the US Phase Out Nuclear Power? · · Score: 2

    Indeed. Remember how well it went for the Germans the last time they tried to phase something out....

  18. Re:BSD is safer than public domain on FSF On How To Choose a License · · Score: 1

    Here in the US it is not out of the question to be sued for your public domain program.

    If you have some concerns above and beyond freedom, such as being sued over the code, then why would you settle for a BSD license, when you could use the Apache 2.0 license which requires contributors to give patent indemnifications?

    Would you honestly prefer that a patent troll gave you some BSD licensed code to put in your project, then sued you over it?

  19. Re:This Is Ridiculous on FSF On How To Choose a License · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Why would they?

    If you want "true freedom", put your software in the public domain.

    If you want BSD levels of freedom, the Apache license is better.

  20. Re:Another drive by hit piece on The Encroachment of Fact-Free Science · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is not even a thinly disguised attack piece. Yet another "if you don't subscribe to the current global warming facts you are an idiot" . As in, there is no room for debate, it has been decided, any contrary view is automatically wrong. Any discussion which does not state full agreement is wrong. Any facts not in the approved list are wrong.

    I don't like the article either, it casts aspersions and doesn't say much. However, I don't like your comment either.

    If you don't subscribe to the current facts, then you are an idiot.

    Global warming is happening. We have hard evidence that the global average surface temperature of the earth has risen between 0.4 and 0.8 degrees C in the past 100 years, and that the majority of this increase can be attributed to human activity.

    This has been under sustained scrutiny for years, and while there have been plenty of improvements in the accuracy, nobody has provided credible evidence that the contrary is true; that AST is not increasing, or that its not primarily attributable to human activity.

    You are free to debate what we should do about it, you're free to model what you think the localised effects of global AST increase will be, you're free to critique the methodology used for data collection, you're even free to throw out the "conclusions" section of any paper and come up with your own conclusions based on the same facts. You're just not free to make up your own "facts".

  21. Re:Light on details on Google x86 Native Browser Client Maybe Not So Crazy After All · · Score: 1

    How well does the validation engine cope with code that's deliberately obfuscated?

    Very well. It rejects it outright.

    Disassemble the binary blob. Reject it if you see any instructions you don't allow or don't know how to handle. Reject if it jumps into the middle of any other instructions, or outside its area. Reject if it tries to modify the segment registers. Reject if you find unreachable code.

    I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it's very unlikely that you'll be able to break out of the sandbox. The most likely vector of attack is a carefully formatted IPC message between the sandbox and the browser to exploit a bug in the browser, or get the browser to unwittingly inject code into the sandbox, because the sandboxed code is verified that it can't do that itself.

  22. Re:Ambivlance on HBGary Federal Hacked By Anonymous · · Score: 5, Informative

    And the company Anonymous is going after probably helps stop real security threats that most of us would agree merit stopping; not just Cablegate-related stuff.

    To help you out: HBGary is still running. HBGary Federal is a new spin-off company started in December 2009 to try and sell "cybersecurity" products to the Feds.

    If they were cybersecurity experts, ones that were worth paying for with your tax dollars, then Anonymous would not have been able to pwn their website, twitter accounts, email, ....

    According to some of those recently pwned emails, the spokesperson Aaron Barr admitted to his own staff that he was deliberately provoking Anonymous, because he knew that the press was interested in anything to do with Anonymous and they'd get good publicity and possibly sales.

    The money quote from Aaron's company email: But it's not about them... it's about our audience having the right impression of our capability and the competency of our research. Anonymous will do what every they can to discredit that. and they have the mic to speak because they are on Al Jazeera, ABC, CNN, etc. I am going to keep up the debate because I think it's good business, but I will be smart about my public responses.

    Does that help you swing one way or the other?

  23. Re:Maybe I'm missing something? on Netgear CEO Says Jobs's Ego Will Bite Apple · · Score: 4, Informative

    However, developers are still subject to the rules of the Android store.

    They are not. Tick "Settings -> Applications -> Allow installation of non-Market applications" on your Android phone and install the app directly from the developer's website.

    The day you can do that on an iPhone is the day it stops being a closed platform.

    The phone manufacturers are carriers still have the final say on which features of the OS are actually shipped intact

    There are hundreds of Android phone models. Not all phones have or need the same features. If you don't like one phone's feature set, choose a different one.

    Find me an iPhone manufacturer that isn't Apple.

    If I find Motorola's restrictions on a DROID 2 onerous, I could just buy Google's Nexus S instead. They're both Android phones and they'll both run the same apps.

    Find me an iPhone that's sold without Apple's restrictions.

  24. Re:So physical music is dead? on How Long Before Apps Overtake Physical Video Game Content Sales? · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Downloads don't revolutionize music consumption in the way the cassette did

    Are you kidding?

    Cassettes allowed portable playback - great. But digital downloads just made impulse buying possible. You can buy anywhere, anytime. It's not convenient to buy from a physical music store unless you're already in one.

  25. Re:So physical music is dead? on How Long Before Apps Overtake Physical Video Game Content Sales? · · Score: 1

    Physical music sales don't know they're already dead.

    Check out this graph of music sales by format, 1973-2008. You can clearly see that each format grew, peaked, then was pushed to death by some new format. Cassettes killed vinyl. CDs killed cassettes. Digital downloads, provided they don't suddenly drop (and there's no indication that they will) are going to utterly kill CDs in the next few years. Since 1999, music publishers have made less and less money from CD sales.

    Sure, you'll still be able to buy CDs - even in reasonably sized shops like HMV. There are any number of vintage vinyl shops trading today. But it's not where most of the money in selling music will be; the billions. That will be digital downloads.