You are assuming that the people who want all this power are the elected members of government.
There is a massive machine full of unelected bureaucrats in the UK. These people advise ministers heavily in terms of policy decisions and are usually the people who are tasked with carrying out those decisions once they've been made.
I really would consider it at least 50% likely that the insanity isn't the politicians, it's the civil servants.
That's also my understanding, however I imagine you'd have to prove - at least on the balance of probabilities - that your reputation had been damaged.
Faces are basically unrecognisable, and if by some miracle you are recognisable, you'd probably get a nice payout from the ensuing lawsuit.
This is the UK. Punitive damages are almost unheard of. Generally speaking, all you can do when you sue someone is force them to put you back in the same position you were before.
There are exceptions to this (physical injury is the obvious one), but I'm not sure this would be one.
If I was a local sheriff or whatever the British equivalent is, I would wonder over to Heathrow and hang out in the viewing room.
No you wouldn't. The viewing room will be the other side of security, and only authorised people will be allowed in there in the first place. Unless you're explicitly employed to deal with airport security, you won't be an authorised person.
The fake-degree guy got fired from his job not for performing badly but for having a fake degree. What does this say about people who have a real degree that they didn't notice a difference in performance or at the very least that it took so long to find out?
Maybe they got their degree from an equally respectable institution?
IMV, if it's possible to kill the engine on a car that has become a demon possessed mechanical monster, driving it to the dealership is f*cking stupid.
So basically every truck that we've bought or ran for over ten years has had an electronic throttle pedal, and there have been zero problems, except occasionally the TPS itself needs replaced (like every million miles or so). In this case it looks like Toyota fucked up, but that doesn't mean using electronic controls is a bad way to go, because clearly lots of things seem to be able to implement them properly, including airplanes.
Indeed, and the thing is the last paragraph of the article tacitly admits this. However, it's obviously written by someone who's trying to say "OMG electronically controlled cars bad!!!111oneoneone" because the headline and the first few paragraphs are all very heavily slanted against the idea of electronically controlled vehicles.
But there's a chicken and egg problem there. It's an enormous investment and without the manufacturers getting together and agreeing on a standard form factor for the batteries AND a significant number of cars, not going to happen.
I'd need to hire a car for that specific journey, seeing as there isn't a flight. (This is the UK, most internal flights cover distances more like 300-400 miles).
Ironically, while the electric car would be most useful within cities in the UK (where pollution is likely to be at its worst), this is also where the electric car is least practical. Lots of people don't have off-street parking, let alone a garage, so you could never charge the damn thing.
Then you need to factor in the fact that you can charge an electric car at home. How many trips does a tank of petrol give you? A week's worth of typical driving? Then if your electric car has only half of the range but can be charged overnight then it's competitive.
While I seldom make trips which are so long I have to refuel partway through the trip, I'd be making such trips a lot more often with a car that has a 150 mile range rather than a 350 mile range.
And herein lies the rub - refuelling partway through the trip takes a few minutes with a petrol-engined vehicle. It takes hours with an electric vehicle.
(I can only think of one regular trip which I'm likely to make which may pose a problem - the 130 mile trip to visit my mum. Problem is, she has no off-street parking so I couldn't charge the car when I get there).
Why not just stash your farm of slow php systems behind some heavy duty caching appliance(s)?
Something like aicache might fit the bill.
When your application is with each iteration generating more content dynamically than it was before (and you want to continue down that route), the benefit of caching starts to drop quite quickly.
It was the Home Office that gave the reply some people don't like, even if it is probably true.
Only on a technicality.
Technically, at this moment in time there are precisely no publicly known exploits for a fully patched up to date copy of IE, a fully patched up to date copy of Firefox or a fully patched up to date copy of Opera.
The fact that history has shown us that exploits for IE tend to show up more frequently, are often nastier than exploits for Firefox or Opera and are almost never dealt with in an out-of-cycle patch (and so will be exploitable for that much longer) is neither here nor there. This is absolutely typical of any UK government department (and probably the same in many Western countries) - when you're asked a question which you don't necessarily like, interpret it in a fashion which allows you to give an answer which you do like.
Admitting that IE may be more dangerous isn't in and of itself a huge problem but it may well invite a lot more questions like "How many internal government systems only work with IE?" - and I bet you anything you like the answer is not "Zero".
But cloning a chip should be very difficult without destroying the card and having long term access to the card. Even then it should be very difficult. Are there any demonstrated examples of criminals cloning credit card chips (or extracting the private cryptographic key)?
I did look a bit further after posting.
It would seem that the chips aren't cloned in their entirety - however it is possible to create a fake card which is good enough to fool some machines in some circumstances.
There may be be proof of concept demonstrations done by researchers, particularly on satellite cards, but has it been found in the wild for credit cards? And has it been verified, not just a crooked card holder falsely claiming his card was stolen?
Of course cloning the magstripe shouldn't do any good without the chip.
There are some instances of magswipe readers being attached to cash machines. The data isn't much good in the UK (it identifies that the card has a chip, and most if not all UK cash machines read the chip) but it is enough to create a fake card with just the magnetic strip and using it in a country where chipped cards are unknkown.
Are some locations accepting cards with only a magstripe and pin and non-functioning chips?
Not possible unless you're the bank - the magstripe doesn't contain the PIN. The verification process is "card reader asks the chip if the PIN supplied is OK. Chip says either yes or no". Incidentally, this is a weak spot - build a chip which always says "yes" and suddenly you don't need the cardholders' PIN.
While these chip and pin systems might tend to shift liability to the card holder, the reduction in the number of frauds might nevertheless make it cheaper for the card holder anyway.
Banks have not reduced their charges as a result of this system - indeed, most personal UK bank accounts are free of charge anyway. Where you get charged is if you have a business bank account or if you exceed your overdraft limit - and if you exceed your overdraft limit, boy do you get charged.
The American system of giving every merchant and his employees all the information needed to max out your credit card account, seems almost insane. Chip and pin and or a push system of payment like paypal, makes a lot more sense to me.
Better, yes. However, the banks are (or at least were originally) taking the line that it's 100% cast-iron foolproof, which is obviously balls.
You can't clone a chip, period. The devices which read them are tamper resistant and tamper evident. It's not been cracked yet. It's been done really well - unsurprisingly, because the stakes are so high.
Ah, but if you sold it as "the good stuff" and never referred to it as an actual drug, you'd probably have a way out......if you can afford a good lawyer.
Ha! Take that long standing respectable media. Funny, I'd bet they'd be better off without a website at all.
No kidding. The summary itself tells you that - they spent $4 million and they've earned $9,000 in about three months. By my reckoning with the current expansion rate they can expect to have 1,000 users some time around the year 2017. But 1,000 users is only $60,000 in subscriptions per year, at which rate you're looking at making the investment back in the year 2076.
Let me get this straight - whoever figured this out has a mobile phone which has an issue with the firmware which can cause it to crash horribly when making an emergency call.
A firmware update which fixes this issue is available.
And they would rather screw around with the version number the phone reports to the network to avoid having to carry out this upgrade than just do it? I hope to Christ they never have to call the emergency services.
My guess is the OP meant the ceiling salary for programmers is around £35K.
I'd say that's a little pessimistic - you might make a bit more if you're really good with lots of experience and you're in a very specialist area. AFAICT, to go much beyond that you've basically got two choices:
City of London. The financial institutions there pay a small fortune (but will probably sack you the first time you close a bug report in error).
Management.
It's a fair salary - unless you're incredibly bad with money you won't have to worry about paying the bills at the end of the month. But it's far from untold riches.
Though how on Earth one is supposed to buy a house I'm not sure because average UK house prices have multiplied by a factor of 4 or 5 over the course of the last 15 years and the recession hasn't dented them by more than about 10-15%.
Slashdot Mirror
You are assuming that the people who want all this power are the elected members of government.
There is a massive machine full of unelected bureaucrats in the UK. These people advise ministers heavily in terms of policy decisions and are usually the people who are tasked with carrying out those decisions once they've been made.
I really would consider it at least 50% likely that the insanity isn't the politicians, it's the civil servants.
That's also my understanding, however I imagine you'd have to prove - at least on the balance of probabilities - that your reputation had been damaged.
Faces are basically unrecognisable, and if by some miracle you are recognisable, you'd probably get a nice payout from the ensuing lawsuit.
This is the UK. Punitive damages are almost unheard of. Generally speaking, all you can do when you sue someone is force them to put you back in the same position you were before.
There are exceptions to this (physical injury is the obvious one), but I'm not sure this would be one.
Disclaimer: IANAL.
If I was a local sheriff or whatever the British equivalent is, I would wonder over to Heathrow and hang out in the viewing room.
No you wouldn't. The viewing room will be the other side of security, and only authorised people will be allowed in there in the first place. Unless you're explicitly employed to deal with airport security, you won't be an authorised person.
Oh hai. Dis r Concordia College. You can haz degree!
The fake-degree guy got fired from his job not for performing badly but for having a fake degree. What does this say about people who have a real degree that they didn't notice a difference in performance or at the very least that it took so long to find out?
Maybe they got their degree from an equally respectable institution?
Same is true in the UK. IME automatic gearboxes are far more common in the US.
IMV, if it's possible to kill the engine on a car that has become a demon possessed mechanical monster, driving it to the dealership is f*cking stupid.
So basically every truck that we've bought or ran for over ten years has had an electronic throttle pedal, and there have been zero problems, except occasionally the TPS itself needs replaced (like every million miles or so). In this case it looks like Toyota fucked up, but that doesn't mean using electronic controls is a bad way to go, because clearly lots of things seem to be able to implement them properly, including airplanes.
Indeed, and the thing is the last paragraph of the article tacitly admits this. However, it's obviously written by someone who's trying to say "OMG electronically controlled cars bad!!!111oneoneone" because the headline and the first few paragraphs are all very heavily slanted against the idea of electronically controlled vehicles.
Indeed, and a robotic solution to this has already been devised:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHHvjsFm_88
But there's a chicken and egg problem there. It's an enormous investment and without the manufacturers getting together and agreeing on a standard form factor for the batteries AND a significant number of cars, not going to happen.
Not the point.
I'd need to hire a car for that specific journey, seeing as there isn't a flight. (This is the UK, most internal flights cover distances more like 300-400 miles).
Ironically, while the electric car would be most useful within cities in the UK (where pollution is likely to be at its worst), this is also where the electric car is least practical. Lots of people don't have off-street parking, let alone a garage, so you could never charge the damn thing.
Then you need to factor in the fact that you can charge an electric car at home. How many trips does a tank of petrol give you? A week's worth of typical driving? Then if your electric car has only half of the range but can be charged overnight then it's competitive.
While I seldom make trips which are so long I have to refuel partway through the trip, I'd be making such trips a lot more often with a car that has a 150 mile range rather than a 350 mile range.
And herein lies the rub - refuelling partway through the trip takes a few minutes with a petrol-engined vehicle. It takes hours with an electric vehicle.
(I can only think of one regular trip which I'm likely to make which may pose a problem - the 130 mile trip to visit my mum. Problem is, she has no off-street parking so I couldn't charge the car when I get there).
Why not just stash your farm of slow php systems behind some heavy duty caching appliance(s)?
Something like aicache might fit the bill.
When your application is with each iteration generating more content dynamically than it was before (and you want to continue down that route), the benefit of caching starts to drop quite quickly.
It was the Home Office that gave the reply some people don't like, even if it is probably true.
Only on a technicality.
Technically, at this moment in time there are precisely no publicly known exploits for a fully patched up to date copy of IE, a fully patched up to date copy of Firefox or a fully patched up to date copy of Opera.
The fact that history has shown us that exploits for IE tend to show up more frequently, are often nastier than exploits for Firefox or Opera and are almost never dealt with in an out-of-cycle patch (and so will be exploitable for that much longer) is neither here nor there. This is absolutely typical of any UK government department (and probably the same in many Western countries) - when you're asked a question which you don't necessarily like, interpret it in a fashion which allows you to give an answer which you do like.
Admitting that IE may be more dangerous isn't in and of itself a huge problem but it may well invite a lot more questions like "How many internal government systems only work with IE?" - and I bet you anything you like the answer is not "Zero".
But cloning a chip should be very difficult without destroying the card and having long term access to the card. Even then it should be very difficult. Are there any demonstrated examples of criminals cloning credit card chips (or extracting the private cryptographic key)?
I did look a bit further after posting.
It would seem that the chips aren't cloned in their entirety - however it is possible to create a fake card which is good enough to fool some machines in some circumstances.
There may be be proof of concept demonstrations done by researchers, particularly on satellite cards, but has it been found in the wild for credit cards? And has it been verified, not just a crooked card holder falsely claiming his card was stolen?
Of course cloning the magstripe shouldn't do any good without the chip.
There are some instances of magswipe readers being attached to cash machines. The data isn't much good in the UK (it identifies that the card has a chip, and most if not all UK cash machines read the chip) but it is enough to create a fake card with just the magnetic strip and using it in a country where chipped cards are unknkown.
Are some locations accepting cards with only a magstripe and pin and non-functioning chips?
Not possible unless you're the bank - the magstripe doesn't contain the PIN. The verification process is "card reader asks the chip if the PIN supplied is OK. Chip says either yes or no". Incidentally, this is a weak spot - build a chip which always says "yes" and suddenly you don't need the cardholders' PIN.
While these chip and pin systems might tend to shift liability to the card holder, the reduction in the number of frauds might nevertheless make it cheaper for the card holder anyway.
Banks have not reduced their charges as a result of this system - indeed, most personal UK bank accounts are free of charge anyway. Where you get charged is if you have a business bank account or if you exceed your overdraft limit - and if you exceed your overdraft limit, boy do you get charged.
The American system of giving every merchant and his employees all the information needed to max out your credit card account, seems almost insane. Chip and pin and or a push system of payment like paypal, makes a lot more sense to me.
Better, yes. However, the banks are (or at least were originally) taking the line that it's 100% cast-iron foolproof, which is obviously balls.
You can't clone a chip, period. The devices which read them are tamper resistant and tamper evident. It's not been cracked yet. It's been done really well - unsurprisingly, because the stakes are so high.
Really?
You'd better tell the people whose chip cards have been cloned.
Its not a magnetic stripe. In Europe they have actual chips embedded in the cards like RFID.
The UK cards have the stripe as well, though apparently this isn't necessarily true in mainland Europe.
The iPad is not a general-purpose computing device.
Only because its locked down. Remember that. Only because its locked down.
By that argument you could say the same thing about virtually any device that contains a CPU and allows you to interact with it.
Hell, you could say that about most PVRs.
Ah, but if you sold it as "the good stuff" and never referred to it as an actual drug, you'd probably have a way out......if you can afford a good lawyer.
You do that, and let us all know how you get on.
Happens from time to time. It was part of a cartoon sketch show which was intended to drum up publicity.
Another one (though I doubt you'd find it on Youtube) which definitely did cause hysterics was the Brass Eye paedophile special:
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/brass-eye/4od#2929844
Where Apple spent it's money last year:
Operating expenses:
Research and development
1,333,000,000
Selling, general and administrative
4,149,000,000
Notice that they spent about three times as much convincing you to buy stuff as they did designing it...
I would point out that Steve Jobs can afford to wipe his arse with $100 bills. Can you wipe your arse with $100 bills?
Ha! Take that long standing respectable media. Funny, I'd bet they'd be better off without a website at all.
No kidding. The summary itself tells you that - they spent $4 million and they've earned $9,000 in about three months. By my reckoning with the current expansion rate they can expect to have 1,000 users some time around the year 2017. But 1,000 users is only $60,000 in subscriptions per year, at which rate you're looking at making the investment back in the year 2076.
(Still, jail seems kind of disproportionate. Scientology has engaged in worse online censorship-fraud without even being fined.)
Scientology has enormous amounts of money to ensure this remains the case.
Let me get this straight - whoever figured this out has a mobile phone which has an issue with the firmware which can cause it to crash horribly when making an emergency call.
A firmware update which fixes this issue is available.
And they would rather screw around with the version number the phone reports to the network to avoid having to carry out this upgrade than just do it? I hope to Christ they never have to call the emergency services.
My guess is the OP meant the ceiling salary for programmers is around £35K.
I'd say that's a little pessimistic - you might make a bit more if you're really good with lots of experience and you're in a very specialist area. AFAICT, to go much beyond that you've basically got two choices:
It's a fair salary - unless you're incredibly bad with money you won't have to worry about paying the bills at the end of the month. But it's far from untold riches.
Though how on Earth one is supposed to buy a house I'm not sure because average UK house prices have multiplied by a factor of 4 or 5 over the course of the last 15 years and the recession hasn't dented them by more than about 10-15%.