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User: tengwar

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  1. Re:Hope for Hurd yet? on After 22 Years, 386BSD Gets An Update (386bsd.org) · · Score: 1

    Still going, and you can get a Debian distro. They've got rid of that 2 Gb limit on disk (originally it was linked to the addressable RAM), but it's still 32 bit and things like USB don't seem to be there yet. Most people seem to be running it in emulation rather than on the metal..

  2. Re:Space Patrol Unsatisfactory on What Star Trek Owes To Robert Heinlein · · Score: 1

    We have several security measures, so it is not possible to make a good forgery. However a significant proportion of our £1 coins are conspicuous forgeries and still circulate, so a forgery doesn't need to be good to be viable. I'm pretty sure that starch-free paper with the same handling feel would be enough to pass muster for many purposes, if you could get a photocopier to work with them.

  3. Re:Space Patrol Unsatisfactory on What Star Trek Owes To Robert Heinlein · · Score: 1

    We already have high resolution colour photocopiers, but there is no great problem with them being used to duplicate paper currency, partly because of the EURion constellation printed on the originals. This does rely on the manufacture of the photocopiers being "trusted".

  4. Re:Yeah 22 seconds? on New Video Shows Shot Down Drone Hovered For Only 22 Seconds · · Score: 1

    And that terminal velocity is very low for shotgun pellets. You can calculate it (I assume you have physics textbooks handy?), or you can take my word for it as I've been under a light shower of falling pellets - which bounced off like very light rain.

  5. Re:Tabtop momentum building on Is ARM Ever Coming To the Desktop? · · Score: 2

    Interesting - thought we'd got past this stage. Still, I found myself working on some K&R C a couple of nights ago.

  6. Re:Tabtop momentum building on Is ARM Ever Coming To the Desktop? · · Score: 2

    Could you give a bit more detail on the difficulties? This seems a bit surprising.

  7. Re:Like all One-Size-Fits-All approaches.. on Ask Slashdot: Does SSL Validation Matter? · · Score: 1
    Again: I am unaware of any auditing requirements. What auditing do you believe takes place, who is placing the requirements, and what is your source for this information?

    In respect of dual signature, the key word is "green" - this would be appropriate for validated domains such as banks, not necessarily for all hosts.

    An advantage of a WoT model is that it is possible to give partial trust to different signers, and set a policy to trust a site once there are enough partially trusted supporters for it. This means that the system need not be fragile to a lapse in a single signer. At base though, you can have something exactly equivalent to the current single-signer model by issuing the root public certificates for the current CAs with the operating system.

  8. Re:Like all One-Size-Fits-All approaches.. on Ask Slashdot: Does SSL Validation Matter? · · Score: 1
    As far as I know, it is not true to say that CAs are audited, and in fact there are well-known problems with CAs signing stuff that they shouldn't.

    An advantage of the web of trust model is that you can incorporate CAs as parties that you trust (exactly as for the current model), but you can also require multiple signatures, which as far as I know is not possible with the current model. You might, for instance, require that two of the current CAs have signed a certificate before it lights up as "green" in a browser URL bar.

  9. Why is googlecode used? on Mozilla BrowserID: Decentralized, Federated Login · · Score: 1

    I use NoScript. The demo site requires code from googlecode.com to be permitted. While the Javascript provided by Google may be innocuous, I would personally not make this assumption. I don't think that it would be possible for it to get the private key, but I would suspect that it would do datamining which would reveal the email addresses in use.

  10. Re:"not air conditioning the gym from 9pm-3am" on Two More Google Software Dogs Go To Heaven · · Score: 1

    No, there is no such point of diminishing returns. If you know a little calculus, you can prove this to yourself.

  11. Re:It's not up to the end users anyway on IPv6-only Hosting Won't Make Sense For Years · · Score: 1

    DHCPv6 still exists, and is useful for some purposes. It can do more than hand out IP addresses.

  12. Re:I guess the Vatican doesn't want on Vatican Bans IOS Confession App · · Score: 1

    First of all, you're forgetting where the Bible even comes from [catholicapologetics.info]. The Bible is not the sole rule of faith, was never intended to be...

    The church existed before the New Testament was written - yes. However that does not mean that the Roman church was responsible for its production, or the that the various writers agreed with the emerging traditions of Rome. The gospel of Matthew, for instance, appears to have been written by and for Jewish Christians, and in ch 15 (part of the Sermon on the Mount) clearly states that all of the existing Law still applies to Christians - a view diametrically opposed to that of Paul (Peter appears to have swithered on this question, according to Acts).

  13. Re:In other words on Online-Only Currency BitCoin Reaches Dollar Parity · · Score: 0

    No, the difference is that the economy of the US depends on continual borrowing, both for funding, and to control some aspects of the economy by setting the interest rate. If the US printed too much currency, existing bonds (loans) would become devalued, which would make it much more expensive to take out new loans, which is done several times per year. Hence no US govt would want to print its way out of trouble.

  14. Re:Why the fuck does a PIN pad get the bank detail on UK Banks Attempt To Censor Academic Publication · · Score: 1

    That's not how a GSM SIM works (I am working on a couple of SIM products). Firstly, most of them don't have crypto coprocessors. Secondly, the PIN (or PIN2) doesn't wake anything up. Entering the PIN is required to get access to some of the files on the SIM, so it's more like entering a password the first time you use sudo. However there have been proposals for SIM toolkit financial applications which would work roughly as you describe.

  15. Re:E-mail address? on Problems With Truncation On the Common Application · · Score: 1

    SMS was not invented to be email, and came in when fax was more common than email. In fact it was invented for engineers rolling out mobile phone infrastructure so that they could communicated before voice was fully up and working. It's bodged in to a signalling protocol, which is why there is a 160 byte limit - that's all that would fit into the frame, and for the original application it wasn't worth putting in concatenation. Then it was used as one-way notification from the network to the handset, primarily to tell you that you had voicemail. Eventually send-capable phones became available. I bought a Nokia 2110 to be able to send SMS - one of the earliest adopters. Now get off my lawn, kids!

  16. Calm down, nothing to see here. on Look Forward To Per-Service, Per-Page Fees · · Score: 1

    I've worked for a large mobile telco for more than ten years. "Content based charging" has been discussed for all of that time, usually by new people coming in to the business. I don't think it's ever going to happen in the way described here. What we do have is zero-rated "on-net" content - that means that if you go to our internal web sites, it doesn't come out of your bundle (monthly allocation of data). That's reasonable, because you don't want to be charged for going to your account management page.

    In general we just want to sell you a bundle of data, and we aren't too worried about what you do with it. There are some exceptions - for instance for VoIP traffic, if possible (and it usually isn't) we try to give a low-latency traffic profile. Video streaming is sometimes throttled for the very good reason that there is only so much bandwidth on the air side, and we need to be able to give other customers on the same cell reasonable service. Sorry guys, but this is more the laws of physics than The Man trying to screw you.

    Yes, there are ways that we want to take advantage of our position as a phone company, but this isn't a zero sum game. We have things like micro-charging and secure identification that we are trying to build products on (or more commonly get third parties to build products on) - but this isn't going to work unless we can persuade you that you want to buy those products.

  17. Re:nukes do not work that way on Five Times the US Almost Nuked Itself · · Score: 1

    No, there was a UK weapon called Green Grass which was a bit hairy. It was a 4-500kT atomic bomb (i.e. not a hydrogen bomb). Due to its construction and the difficulty of arming and disarming it in flight, there was substantial concern that it was unsafe.

  18. Re:Somehow I dont think its a loss of religious fa on Internet Dismantling the State Church In Finland · · Score: 1

    Probably, although I suspect that it also reflects people who left the church years or decades ago in practical terms.

    One thing I find amusing about endless American discussions about the separation of church and state is that for many Christians, this is one of our important beliefs. I live in England (specifically England, don't confuse with the UK). We have a state church, the Church of England. Until the 60's farmers had to pay tax (tithes) to the C of E, even if they belonged to non-conformist churches - i.e. those churches which reject a link between church and state. From 1661 until 1828 non-confirmists were barred from holding public office, and were only permitted to take university degrees in 1871.

    We don't believe in state support: it's a Faustian bargain. If church and state are linked, the state will control the church, at least to some extent.

  19. Re:This Can't Be on Inertial Mass Separate From Gravitational Mass? · · Score: 1

    It's got to be Bergenholm.

  20. Re:X is the new Y on C Programming Language Back At Number 1 · · Score: 1

    Bah, you kids can get off my lawn!
    Back in the days of CP/M, we had to write Z80 code with an 8080 assembler, which meant that a good part of the time we had to hand-assemble code, and splice it in with DB statements because the assembler didn't understand the opcodes.
    After that, K&R C was a blessed relief - and I don't mean this modern namby-pamby ANSI C with function prototypes and argument type checking.

  21. We see different colours on Could Colorblindness Cure Be Morally Wrong? · · Score: 2, Interesting

    There's a huge assumption in the phrase "colour blindness". Most languages call it Daltonism, after the discoverer, which makes sense because most of us can see colours, just not quite the same ones you do. For most of us blue and yellow are seen the same as an ISO standard human. Green is more interesting. I see several colours which I've had to learn to group together as "green", since they don't have much in common to me. Yellow-green is obvious, but I also see blue-green (not turquoise - different colour) and red-green. Those infernal bi-coloured LEDs show red-green. Blue-green is the colour of a "go" traffic light green in my country (UK) and in most countries I've visited. Twenty years ago I would still see the odd old red-green traffic "go" light, but they seem to have been replaced as a matter of policy. The difference between a blue-green "go" and a red "stop" is huge for me: no chance of confusion. An amber (I think it's called yellow in the USA) traffic light is much closer to red, and I have to use the position to distinguish them.
    Size of the colour patch also matters: I can distinguish finer gradations in colour if the patch is larger. Luminance differences also help. This is part of the reason why specific mains wiring colours in the UK (and I think the EU) were chosen: for most colour-blind people, there is no risk of confusion.
    Would I get it changed? Possibly, but it would be a risk trade-off like laser eye surgery for my myopia, with a much more restricted up-side. It would be useful for getting the right white balance for my photography, but not as much of an advantage for that as you might expect.
    Much more important, lower risk, and easier is to make sure that you use the right colours for user interfaces - road signs, software etc. - or provide some sort of word-around. Let me give an example: I have to prepare a weekly Powerpoint 2003 slide summarising the state of my projects. There are two places where I have to colour something red/amber/green. One is a cell in a table, and the other is a filled circle. Unfortunately there are different dialogs for editing these colours: one contains two rectangles - the first containing recently used colours, and the second a wider palette. The other dialog contains a hexagonal palette. It doesn't matter hugely exactly which amber or green I use, but I'd like it consistent across the slide. This two-dialog arrangement means that I can't use the position of a colour in a palette to get a consistent selection.
    Since come what may, you will always be dealing with people with uncorrected vision even if an upgrade is available, it's worth taking a few minutes to get this right when you are doing design work. It doesn't need to compromise the experience of anyone with standard sight, any more than a blue-green traffic light bothers them.

  22. Re:Warning - war story ahead on Myths About Code Comments · · Score: 1

    And all of them were on the lines of "i9", "s9" - always a 9 for some reason. And yes, they re-used them for different purposes. Actually that made a small amount of sense, since it was loosely based on an older HP86 BASIC program, and re-using variable storage saved memory. However since the HP86 supported structured programming (now there's a phrase that takes me back!) there was no need for all the globals.

  23. Re:"Midlertidig" means temporary on Myths About Code Comments · · Score: 1

    Nope, it was a commercial product. And GP is correct - it wasn't used as a swap or other temporary.

  24. Re:Warning - war story ahead on Myths About Code Comments · · Score: 1

    No! Don't tell me! My life since then has been a spiritual search for the essence of "midlertidig" and its relationship to dexotrobing. An answer would be as objectionable as the experience of a zen monk finding that "one hand clapping" refers only to the self-congratulation of a pair programmer.

  25. Re:Warning - war story ahead on Myths About Code Comments · · Score: 1

    Ah. Well, of course I could tell you, but how much do you want to know the answer? [rubs thumb against fingers]