Mid 90's. Spent a lovely weekend below the waterline on a frigate updating the ship's maintenance system with a new data picture of its systems. All went wonderfully well and I walked ashore late afternoon on Sunday and flew back to my home city. Fast forward to 4pm Monday and we get a call from the ship at sea saying the maintenance system no longer functioned: get your butt out here and unf*ck it. So, in the car, 3 hours drive to where the ship anchored for the night, RHIB ride out to the ship, up the rope ladder, about 10PM... fix it, you have until 6AM or you are sailing with us (for a week). That, my friends, is great motivation to work fast. To cap it off, there was a small fuel leak in the space outside the computer room: wonderful aroma to deal with. Tried to work out the obscure linkage between existing maintenance jobs and the system description that was causing the issue. Ultimately had to roll the database back to the pre-update state. Off the ship at 6 along with many bags of oil-soaked rags used on the fuel leak. Ship lost a few days of data and a day at sea: captain not happy... and we had to do the whole exercise again later.
Tape for data, $100, Airfare and and accommodation, $600, warship all at sea, priceless.
Not entirely my doing (what is these days) but I was the man that delivered the fun. No names, no pack drill over this.
If your hotel was inside the Aurelian Wall then there is a flat EUR48 fare from Rome Fiumicino regardless of time. For destinations outside the Aurelian Wall the fare is metered. I hope you weren't additionally fleeced by a trustworthy licenced taxi driver turning on the meter for these fixed fare trips in peak traffic: the timed fare works out much better for them.
No, the claim is, "has been illegally viewed more than 60 million times." (Emphasis mine) No mention of geographic scope, but the figure is utterly unsupportable anyway. Even if they knew precisely how many allegedly infringing copies had been made (they don't) there is no way of knowing how many times a movie has been viewed. It could be anything from zero to 60 million views with anything from one to one gajillion allegedly infringing copies in existence.
The Voltage Pictures VP of Royalties was interviewed on the radio as I drove home today. He said that Voltage is doing this because a small producer they cannot cannot cross-subsidise from other parts of the business to cover the losses due to infringing copies of their movies (His argument was clearly based on the assumption that every infringing copy is a lost sale). The big players can afford to do this and see the negative press as more costly than the potential increase in revenue. He refused to be drawn on what they would be demanding from the alleged infringers. There were also some poor choices of words, assumption of guilt, and sense that they are the law.
Read (http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/hack/stories/s4212674.htm) or listen (http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/triplej/hack/daily/hack_wed_2015_4_8.mp3) to the show.
I am sure that the plaintiff in this case would dearly love to engage in "speculative invoicing" and to do that they need somewhere to send a legal threat with a nice "make it go away for only $2000" clause. The judge has at least considered this, so the plaintiff must pass any correspondence destined for the parties revealed here through the court. That should at least control the extraction of money by threat of legal action with no intent to proceed to actual litigation. My guess is that the plaintiff will try to ID one or two endpoints that look like a business/individual with reasonable sized pockets and try to set a precedent with them.
This decision, and the recent data retention law that ensures these records exist for fishing expeditions, have essentially ensured that VPN providers will do well out of Aussies.
No you are not reading that wrong. Journalists sources have (had) protection in courts under the Evidence Act for a long time, and the definition of journalist was quite broad. The early versions of this bill subverted that protection completely, but a watered down protection of journalists sources was added to secure the major opposition party's support. They deliberately narrowed the scope of "Journalist" to limit the number of warrants that might need to be sought.
The law tightens the definition of "Journalist" over that in the existing Evidence Act so that this is impractical.
Evidence Act
Journalist means a person who is engaged and active in the publication of news and who may be given information by an informant in the expectation that the information may be published in a news medium.
This law:
(i) a person who is working in a professional capacity as a journalist; or
(ii) an employer of such a person;
If you are not being paid to be a journalist or paying someone to be a journalist then you are not a journalist, and warrants are not required, under this law. A subtle and deliberate difference.
Makes it reliably available for litigation by big media over copyright infringement and removes the ability of ISP to defend customer privacy with inconvenient legal actions or by simply not holding the information. Hosting privacy protecting proxy/VPN services has essentially be outlawed on Australian soil... or will be as the holes in this legislation become evident and the scope creep continues.
Makes it reliably available for abuse by political parties: want to know who leaked the embarrassing x? Simple warrantless search with no oversight.
Late 1980s: I used magnetic core memory attached to the AQS-901 acoustic processing system once fitted to Royal Australian Air Force P3 Orion maritime patrol aircraft. Also had the joy of paper tape and magnetic tape.
A current bathymetric survey progress map is here. The earlier underwater search area was around the Zenith Plateau region. Elsewhere on that site are routine updates, although they are getting less frequent of late.
They told the US where they could put their nuclear powered and/or armed vessels in 1984 and have stuck to it. That's is NZ's one bout of teenage rebellion. Now they have "grown up."
I also listen via my ISP's mirror of the Double J stream. Unfortunately that stream does not carry useful metadata (song titles etc.) that VLC can pick up so when I occasionally want those I need the web site. I will not lose sleep over the loss of the site though.
A radio station I listen to recently rebranded. Their "improved" web site does not deliver content without the WebTrends tracking code being allowed through NoScript/Ghostery. I seems to do do some magic callback foo to achieve this. This behaviour seems to rapidly expanding on the site; I found a page today that required NetCensus tracking as well. Curiously I get more content if I block JS altogether (although not fully functional). http://doublej.net.au/
The UK/ca/AU/nz Prime Ministers are effectively elected dictators
Bwah ha ha ha ha! You clearly have not been paying attention to Australian politics since 2007. The "dictator" was toppled several times by revolt from within and ended up running a minority Government until the election in Sep 2013. A "dictator" dependent on the support of minor parties to govern is hardly the description of one with unrestricted control. The current "dictator" is having trouble quelling the open discontent from within his own coalition in several policy areas and cannot get important policy initiatives through the parliament. Unfettered power? I don't think so.
Your vet will typically use high dose pentobarbital or sodium thiopental in euthanasia of cats and dogs. Pentobarbital is the drug that the Danish manufacturer is withholding from the US penal system because they use it in executions. Sodium thiopental is no longer manufactured in the US and cannot legally be exported from the EU for use in executions.
'The Yankee Nuclear Power Station in Rowe, Massachusetts, took 15 years to decommission—or five times longer than was needed to build it.
Of course it takes longer to decommission than to build. When it was built all the materials were essentially safe, non-toxic materials where handling is easy, well-understood, and well supported by standard systems, factories and the like. When it is torn down much of the material is unsafe or toxic to some degree, some is extremely unsafe and toxic, and all of it must be dealt with in situ using systems that are not commonly used elsewhere. Handling toxic material safely takes more time than handling safe materials. The extended time leads naturally to extended cost. As wise people have observed, time is money.
Slashdot Mirror
To quote Stephen Fry, "It is complete loose stool water. It is arse-gravy of the worst kind."
Half-hour zones are passé. My personal favourite is Nepal Standard Time at UTC+05:45. Mr Kim, needs to try harder to look different.
Quotas are an Australian "feature" also. Likely also a New Zealand thing.
Orwell's "memory hole" at work?
Mid 90's. Spent a lovely weekend below the waterline on a frigate updating the ship's maintenance system with a new data picture of its systems. All went wonderfully well and I walked ashore late afternoon on Sunday and flew back to my home city. Fast forward to 4pm Monday and we get a call from the ship at sea saying the maintenance system no longer functioned: get your butt out here and unf*ck it. So, in the car, 3 hours drive to where the ship anchored for the night, RHIB ride out to the ship, up the rope ladder, about 10PM... fix it, you have until 6AM or you are sailing with us (for a week). That, my friends, is great motivation to work fast. To cap it off, there was a small fuel leak in the space outside the computer room: wonderful aroma to deal with. Tried to work out the obscure linkage between existing maintenance jobs and the system description that was causing the issue. Ultimately had to roll the database back to the pre-update state. Off the ship at 6 along with many bags of oil-soaked rags used on the fuel leak. Ship lost a few days of data and a day at sea: captain not happy... and we had to do the whole exercise again later.
Tape for data, $100, Airfare and and accommodation, $600, warship all at sea, priceless.
Not entirely my doing (what is these days) but I was the man that delivered the fun. No names, no pack drill over this.
If your hotel was inside the Aurelian Wall then there is a flat EUR48 fare from Rome Fiumicino regardless of time. For destinations outside the Aurelian Wall the fare is metered. I hope you weren't additionally fleeced by a trustworthy licenced taxi driver turning on the meter for these fixed fare trips in peak traffic: the timed fare works out much better for them.
No, the claim is, "has been illegally viewed more than 60 million times." (Emphasis mine) No mention of geographic scope, but the figure is utterly unsupportable anyway. Even if they knew precisely how many allegedly infringing copies had been made (they don't) there is no way of knowing how many times a movie has been viewed. It could be anything from zero to 60 million views with anything from one to one gajillion allegedly infringing copies in existence.
Like this asshat example: Near miss with rc plane and virgin jet at perth airport
The Voltage Pictures VP of Royalties was interviewed on the radio as I drove home today. He said that Voltage is doing this because a small producer they cannot cannot cross-subsidise from other parts of the business to cover the losses due to infringing copies of their movies (His argument was clearly based on the assumption that every infringing copy is a lost sale). The big players can afford to do this and see the negative press as more costly than the potential increase in revenue. He refused to be drawn on what they would be demanding from the alleged infringers. There were also some poor choices of words, assumption of guilt, and sense that they are the law.
Read (http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/hack/stories/s4212674.htm) or listen (http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/triplej/hack/daily/hack_wed_2015_4_8.mp3) to the show.
I am sure that the plaintiff in this case would dearly love to engage in "speculative invoicing" and to do that they need somewhere to send a legal threat with a nice "make it go away for only $2000" clause. The judge has at least considered this, so the plaintiff must pass any correspondence destined for the parties revealed here through the court. That should at least control the extraction of money by threat of legal action with no intent to proceed to actual litigation. My guess is that the plaintiff will try to ID one or two endpoints that look like a business/individual with reasonable sized pockets and try to set a precedent with them.
This decision, and the recent data retention law that ensures these records exist for fishing expeditions, have essentially ensured that VPN providers will do well out of Aussies.
Both have become endangered species of late, and our government is treating them with same dismissive attitude it uses for other endangered species.
No you are not reading that wrong. Journalists sources have (had) protection in courts under the Evidence Act for a long time, and the definition of journalist was quite broad. The early versions of this bill subverted that protection completely, but a watered down protection of journalists sources was added to secure the major opposition party's support. They deliberately narrowed the scope of "Journalist" to limit the number of warrants that might need to be sought.
The law tightens the definition of "Journalist" over that in the existing Evidence Act so that this is impractical.
Evidence Act
Journalist means a person who is engaged and active in the publication of news and who may be given information by an informant in the expectation that the information may be published in a news medium.
This law:
(i) a person who is working in a professional capacity as a journalist; or (ii) an employer of such a person;
If you are not being paid to be a journalist or paying someone to be a journalist then you are not a journalist, and warrants are not required, under this law. A subtle and deliberate difference.
Making the ISP keep it too:
Colossus was built to deal with the higher value, lower volume and more difficult Lorenz SZ40/42 electronic teletype machine ciphers known as "Tunny".
Late 1980s: I used magnetic core memory attached to the AQS-901 acoustic processing system once fitted to Royal Australian Air Force P3 Orion maritime patrol aircraft. Also had the joy of paper tape and magnetic tape.
A current bathymetric survey progress map is here. The earlier underwater search area was around the Zenith Plateau region. Elsewhere on that site are routine updates, although they are getting less frequent of late.
They told the US where they could put their nuclear powered and/or armed vessels in 1984 and have stuck to it. That's is NZ's one bout of teenage rebellion. Now they have "grown up."
I also listen via my ISP's mirror of the Double J stream. Unfortunately that stream does not carry useful metadata (song titles etc.) that VLC can pick up so when I occasionally want those I need the web site. I will not lose sleep over the loss of the site though.
A radio station I listen to recently rebranded. Their "improved" web site does not deliver content without the WebTrends tracking code being allowed through NoScript/Ghostery. I seems to do do some magic callback foo to achieve this. This behaviour seems to rapidly expanding on the site; I found a page today that required NetCensus tracking as well. Curiously I get more content if I block JS altogether (although not fully functional). http://doublej.net.au/
The UK/ca/AU/nz Prime Ministers are effectively elected dictators
Bwah ha ha ha ha! You clearly have not been paying attention to Australian politics since 2007. The "dictator" was toppled several times by revolt from within and ended up running a minority Government until the election in Sep 2013. A "dictator" dependent on the support of minor parties to govern is hardly the description of one with unrestricted control. The current "dictator" is having trouble quelling the open discontent from within his own coalition in several policy areas and cannot get important policy initiatives through the parliament. Unfettered power? I don't think so.
http://www.ted.com/talks/lawre...
Your vet will typically use high dose pentobarbital or sodium thiopental in euthanasia of cats and dogs. Pentobarbital is the drug that the Danish manufacturer is withholding from the US penal system because they use it in executions. Sodium thiopental is no longer manufactured in the US and cannot legally be exported from the EU for use in executions.
'The Yankee Nuclear Power Station in Rowe, Massachusetts, took 15 years to decommission—or five times longer than was needed to build it.
Of course it takes longer to decommission than to build. When it was built all the materials were essentially safe, non-toxic materials where handling is easy, well-understood, and well supported by standard systems, factories and the like. When it is torn down much of the material is unsafe or toxic to some degree, some is extremely unsafe and toxic, and all of it must be dealt with in situ using systems that are not commonly used elsewhere. Handling toxic material safely takes more time than handling safe materials. The extended time leads naturally to extended cost. As wise people have observed, time is money.
Of all the things this country could (should) be ashamed of you chose that? +10 Imagination Failure