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User: DamonHD

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  1. Re:How much is an AG these days? on Plan To Run Anti-Google Smear Campaign Revealed In MPAA Emails · · Score: 1

    ... maybe he'd suggest politicians be subject to greater financial transparency, and maybe be banned for a certain time from taking jobs in certain industries whose legislation they worked on as a politician.

    This is how it's meant to work in the UK, but the body responsible for vetting jobs once leaving office seems never to say "no", and that's according to at least Private Eye and some private conversations!

    Rgds

    Damon

  2. Re:Deliberate mismanagement on Bank's IT Failure Loses 600,000 Payments · · Score: 1

    Simply not true.

    I worked there as a contractor during that period. It was fairly grim, but don't ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence for example. It was also a better outcome than for my previous client, Lehman Brothers, in that it wasn't dropped on the floor for no particularly good reason, throwing away even more value and confidence.

    Please don't quote conspiracy theories in the absence of any actual facts.

    It is true that reducing the global markets operation is stated policy, but that is about reducing risk and making RBS more viable, not to "run [it] into the ground".

    Rgds

    Damon

  3. Re:Cool just because SPACE? on First ISS-To-Earth 'Handshake' Demonstrates Space-to-Ground Remote Control · · Score: 1

    Add "on a computer" and patent it?

    Rgds

    Damon

  4. Re:Seriously? on Crowdfunded, Solar-powered Spacecraft Goes Silent · · Score: 1

    DAMON MA I!

  5. Re:Easily fixed on Feds Bust a Dark-Web Counterfeit Coupon Kingpin · · Score: 2

    All defeated if the customer pays in cash, and intends to offload the mechanise for cash ASAP.

    Rgds

    Damon

  6. Re:32MB? on Google Developing 'Brillo' OS For Internet of Things · · Score: 1

    I'm more used to working with 1*k* of RAM and 32*k* of code for a sensor node.

    32MB? Goodness. I used to run a Sun workstation as a firewall on 4MB!

    Rgds

    Damon

  7. Re: Markets, not people on The Economic Consequences of Self-Driving Trucks · · Score: 1

    Goodness.

    So that stuff that goes on as part of everyday politics in northern Europe, eg London, is "communism or fascism with corruption, violence, and death aplenty" is it?

    Rgds

    Damon

  8. No on Ask Slashdot: What's On Your Keychain? · · Score: 1

    I have no keychain. I carry one bare physical key.

  9. IoT Launchpad Security Project on Beware the Ticking Internet of Things Security Time Bomb · · Score: 1

    Hi

    We're working on a project (in public) to try to help secure out-of-the-box links from low-power cheap sensor nodes to the concentrator (or equivalent) in IoT networks.

    Eg see:

    http://www.earth.org.uk/note-o...
    and
    http://lists.opentrv.org.uk/pi...

    to pick a couple of related items.

    Anyone who'd like to help us get this right with solutions open source, please do contact us eg via @OpenTRV on Twitter or email.

    Rgds

    Damon

  10. Re:NYT doesn't report news but does try to create on The Medical Bill Mystery · · Score: 1

    And not to drag this out longer than necessary, the problem is not "government" itself, but the details of how it works in each place.

    Rgds

    Damon

    PS. In any case, thank you for the civil discussion!

  11. Re:NYT doesn't report news but does try to create on The Medical Bill Mystery · · Score: 1

    My point is only that I would not be 'free' to take sensible entrepreneurial risks in the "land of the free" whereas I am under the NHS which is frequently derided from that side of the pond as some sort of socialist (itself a swear word) nightmare.

    I'm railing against the "all government intervention" is bad school of thought/kneejerk. The NHS is not perfect by any means, but it happens to work much better and cheaper than the US model from where I'm standing.

    LIFE IS NOT BINARY! (Not so catchy to chant in marches though. B^>)

    Neither do I think that unending government intervention is a good thing. I am somewhat to the right of centre in UK politics (and just voted, tactically, an hour ago, in our general election).

    Rgds

    Damon

  12. Re:NYT doesn't report news but does try to create on The Medical Bill Mystery · · Score: 1

    No, it's:

    1) The uncapped costs that might bankrupt me and of which I would have little visibility or control.

    2) The whole 'pre-existing condition' mess as I understand it that nukes mobility.

    Particularly the second would have been a problem for me whereas the NHS fixes me anyway.

    Rgds

    Damon

  13. Re:NYT doesn't report news but does try to create on The Medical Bill Mystery · · Score: 1

    There are various bands of dental treatment charges, but they are not uncapped so far as I know. Haven't needed that much fun.

    Glasses, varies. My last eye test was completely free as I was referred by a doctor. I do pay for classes, but if you want to go economy it's pretty cheap and you can probably have glasses prescribed. I'm pretty much in the budget category even variofocals.

    In neither case could I be bankrupted by unlimited uncontrolled charges.

    Rgds

    Damon

  14. Re:NYT doesn't report news but does try to create on The Medical Bill Mystery · · Score: 1

    Except, over here in downtrodden communist UK (keep an eye on tomorrow's election for us to become ultra-communist under a Tory/SNP/DUP alliance (joke)) guess how much of this rubbish I have to deal with?

    1) An occasional fixed reasonable prescription charge, free for my kids.

    2) Dentist fees, typically about £20/$30 each six month check-up, for a "scale and polish". Again, free for my kids.

    Yeah, it's terrible over here.

    As I have often pointed out, I would not be on my 3rd significant start-up if I'd been tried to my first random employer because of a health plan, given one or two exciting health blips over time.

    Government is never ever good, ever. Unless it builds Interstates.

    Rgds

    Damon

  15. Re:At the same time on Single Verizon IP Address Used For Hundreds of Windows 7 Activations · · Score: 1

    GEM? Our bug-fix library on top of GEM was bigger than GEM itself.

    Not saying that DOS/Windows was anything other than unnecessarily crap and buggy for a long time... (And it'll still take another decade for me to fully trust Microsoft to write 'reliable' rather than meretricious code...)

    Rgds

    Damon

  16. Re:Some random CEO passed away? Oh noes! on SurveyMonkey's CEO Dies While Vacationing With Wife Sheryl Sandberg · · Score: 3

    Someone like many of us, and/or with a life many of us would aspire to, of an age similar to the likely median here (indeed I am a newly-minted 47-year old tech CEO, though not in his league nor in the Valley), white collar, dies suddenly.

    It's shocking.

    And though most deaths in the news can be dismissed as "would never happen to me because $HUGE_DIFFERENCE", this is less easy to dismiss, even if it turns out ultimately to be just bad luck.

    Don't be so airily heartless: this is some genuine human interest for nerds, even if maybe no huge shakes in the big scheme of things.

    Rgds

    Damon

  17. Re:I call bullshit on anything from Forbes on New Javascript Attack Lets Websites Spy On the CPU's Cache · · Score: 1

    Look elsewhere in this story: I've posted a 2013 paper where using this type of attack it appears that very nearly 100% of your secret key bits can be recovered as you do a single encryption in another process.

    Note: not just revealing that I did an encryption, but what the bits of the key were that did it.

    *That* seems bad enough to need serious thought (or refutation) ASAP.

    Rgds

    Damon

  18. Re:Not very useful. on New Javascript Attack Lets Websites Spy On the CPU's Cache · · Score: 3, Informative

    Such as this?

    https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/4...

    "We demonstrate the efficacy of the FLUSH+RELOAD
    attack by using it to extract the private encryption keys
    from a victim program running GnuPG 1.4.13. We tested
    the attack both between two unrelated processes in a sin-
    gle operating system and between processes running in
    separate virtual machines. On average, the attack is able
    to recover 96.7% of the bits of the secret key by observ-
    ing a single signature or decryption round"

    Rgds

    Damon

  19. Re:I call bullshit on anything from Forbes on New Javascript Attack Lets Websites Spy On the CPU's Cache · · Score: 1

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...

    [citation provided]

    I know someone who can do that right now for appliances, probably previously unseen.

    Thus with a big enough incentive (such as getting access to your bank account) the danger is real.

    Rgds

    Damon

  20. Re:"Surge Pricing" on How Uber Surge Pricing Really Works · · Score: 1

    Interesting, thank you.

    Given that I no longer see differential pricing in any of my own retail bills, and given remarks from BT execs some time ago that they'd like the differentials to go away, I assumed that they'd gone at wholesale level too.

    What ratios are there in the wholesale pricing, eg is it still anything like 4:1 between the highest and lowest by time of day?

    Rgds

    Damon

  21. Re:"Surge Pricing" on How Uber Surge Pricing Really Works · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's called 'scarcity pricing' if you want to keep emotion out of it.

    Sometimes it's needed to help prevent a service being overwhelmed: our phone calls used to cost 4x more 9am to 1pm than 6pm to 8am because our phone service (government run) had limited available bandwidth. Now that is no longer an issue (largely c/o fibre optics) there is no pricing surcharge for the daytime peak. Nor even for national vs local calls in the UK. It was a premium charge or lots of failed calls, including for those who really had no alternative to using the morning business slot.

    Rgds

    Damon

  22. Re:laugh on How Uber Surge Pricing Really Works · · Score: 1

    HFT *is* constrained by the physical world, eg the speed of light. Been there, helped with the networking for that.

    As to relative levels of thuggery between HFT and Uber... I've never used Uber, so I can't say.

    Rgds

    Damon

  23. Re:It was inevitible on Microsoft Engineer: Open Source Windows Is 'Definitely Possible' · · Score: 1

    Both probably untrue.

    Rgds

    Damon

  24. Re:Too much! on Graphene Light Bulbs Coming To Stores Soon · · Score: 1

    60W GLS incandescent bulb left on for a year costs ~£60 in UK prices or £20 if used 8h/d, which is > $22.

    That's why we should stop using them.

    Rgds

    Damon

  25. Re:Waste is heat! on Measuring How Much "Standby Mode" Electricity For Game Consoles Will Cost You · · Score: 1

    Yes it is, because you are wasting lots of extra exergy, ie you could be getting the heat you need with far less electricity, leaving the rest for someone else or allowing less upstream resource (nuclear fuel, water, transmission infrastructure) to be consumed for the same outcome.

    Rgds

    Damon