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User: Hal_Porter

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  1. Re:Americas bitter hatred on How Pirates Of The Caribbean Hijacked America's Metric System (npr.org) · · Score: 0

    It required some pretty heavy handed stuff in the UK, namely recognizing the supremacy of EU law over UK law

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

    So long as this country remains a member of the European Union then the laws of this country are subject to the doctrine of the primacy of community law... The passing of the [European Communities Act] 1972 meant that European legislation became part of our legislation.... This country... has joined this European club and by so doing has agreed to be bound by the rules and regulations of the club..."

    Also ministers can legislate by decree

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

    Some statutory instruments are made under provisions of Acts which allow the instrument to change the parent Act itself, or to change other primary legislation. These provisions, allowing primary legislation to be amended by secondary legislation, are known as Henry VIII clauses, because an early example of such a power was conferred on King Henry VIII by the Statute of Proclamations 1539. The Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Select Committee of the House of Lords issued a report concerning the use and drafting of such clauses, an issue its chairman remarked "goes right to the heart of the key constitutional question of the limits of executive power". Such clauses have often proved highly controversial - for instance, that in the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 which prompted the aforementioned report, and the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act 2006.

    Lord Judge spoke strongly against such clauses whilst he was Lord Chief Justice:

    You can be sure that when these Henry VIII clauses are introduced they will always be said to be necessary. William Pitt warned us how to treat such a plea with disdain. "Necessity is the justification for every infringement of human liberty: it is the argument of tyrants, the creed of slaves."

    Like I say Europe level government with the power to enforce this sort of thing on nations has too much power. I think you could make the same argument that the US Federal government shouldn't have that power either.

    Luckily the UK is leaving the EU and likely moving to something like the free trade agreement arrangement with it like the one Canada has. So it would need to comply with EU labelling rules for exports to the EU, just like it complies with US labelling rules when it exports there. However it hopefully won't prosecute people for not following EU rules when they sell things in the UK.

    This is why people like Johnson and Gove are concerned about 'divergence', unlike crypto Remoaners like Hammond

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...

  2. Re:Cheapskate world leaders on Italian Clothing Company Defeats Apple, Wins the Right To Use Steve Jobs' Name (macrumors.com) · · Score: 1

    Jacob Rees-Moggie plush toy cat. speaks truths * about the world to your children.

    * Truths require a Wifi connection with access to moggie.reesmogg.com

  3. Maybe there's a confounding factor, like for example Windows 10 users need to visit the government more because they're more likely to be living off GOVERNMENT CHEESE.

  4. Re:Also, make lots of friends on People Who Know How the News Is Made Resist Conspiratorial Thinking (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    Also you can probably wreck that hippie fuck at squash.

  5. US Trident II missiles do all their targeting in coordinates of new groats per old hogshead per mile per fortnight squared. This ensures that only US personnel can program them.

  6. Windows 10 LGBT is superficially very slick but it goes mental if you refuse to bake it a wedding cake. Also no arrangement of bathrooms is acceptable to it.

    And when you're trying to fill in your TPS reports it keeps bothering you with gross details of its sex life. And then complains to your boss that you're a bigot when you tell it to fuck off.

  7. Re:Americas bitter hatred on How Pirates Of The Caribbean Hijacked America's Metric System (npr.org) · · Score: 1

    Why don't you go and guillotine some more starving poor people, Jacobin scum? I'll stay here with my quarter pounder and a pint of ale.

  8. 1 billion bytes in metric is 1.414213562373095 TebiHogsheads in Imperial.

  9. Re:100 percent green energy by 2025 on UK Enjoyed 'Greenest Year For Electricity Ever' in 2017 (bbc.com) · · Score: 1

    Taiwan is switching to Wind and Solar, like everyone else.

    No it's not. Renewables and nukes have stayed flat and fossil fuel usage has increased enormously. Getting rid of nukes will just result in more fossil fuel usage

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

  10. Looks like the Verge is playing defence on Apple Apologizes For iPhone Slowdown Drama, Will Offer $29 Battery Replacements (theverge.com) · · Score: 1

    for Apple a bit like BGR did

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

  11. Re:Americas bitter hatred on How Pirates Of The Caribbean Hijacked America's Metric System (npr.org) · · Score: 1, Informative

    Well look on the bright side. A government powerful enough to force people to use metric is powerful enough to do a lot of really awful stuff

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

    The French Republican Calendar (French: calendrier républicain franÃais), also commonly called the French Revolutionary Calendar (calendrier révolutionnaire franÃais), was a calendar created and implemented during the French Revolution, and used by the French government for about 12 years from late 1793 to 1805

    What was going on during those 12 years? Well they started very badly indeed

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

    And only ended when Napoleon made himself First Consul

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

    Be happy you're still free to use non metric measurements. It's a sign that the US war of independence didn't end up like the French revolution.

  12. Best summary of how journalism works on People Who Know How the News Is Made Resist Conspiratorial Thinking (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    Is this

    " My [disgust] for modern journalism is huge. [Almost] everything they do are hit pieces or playing defense for the side with money.ï "

    Another one I liked was a Cold War era Russian remarking cynically "We know how to read Pravda. Do you know how to read the New York Times?". I.e. Pravda was a pack of lies but once you knew how to dissect it you could get some useful information. The US is effectively two one party states superimposed on each other. The Democrat media says only positive things about Democrats and only negative things about Republicans. And the Republican media does the opposite. The problem is people assume that what they read in the media has something to do with truth rather than, like Pravda, being designed to push a narrative helpful to the party which owns the paper. Or the tech company which gives the paper free shit.

  13. Re:This is why we need net neutrality on Piracy Notices Can Mess With Your Thermostat, ISP Warns (torrentfreak.com) · · Score: 1

    Well from the ISP's perspective there are two problems. One is the MPAA/RIAA or some front organisation connecting to the tracker, getting a list of ISPs and complaining. In that case they need to send out a warning letter.

    The other is if P2P traffic is consuming all their bandwidth. In that case they'd use deep packet inspection and throttle all torrents regardless of legality.

    Though, interestingly, the FCC ruled that illegal before the 2015 Net Neutrality ruling

    https://www.cnet.com/news/fcc-...

    Then again Pai said throttling bittorrent is OK and that it's basically up to consumers and the media to expose bad behaviour

    https://arstechnica.com/tech-p...

    I.e. throttling for network management purposes is OK, but anti competitive throttling is not. However consumers, not the government, should decide that.

  14. Re:I love the GPD pocket on The Year in Crowdfunded PCs: Who Succeeded? Who Failed? (zdnet.com) · · Score: 1

    Well you can still get these

    https://www.newegg.com/Product...

    Problem is look at the CPU

    https://ark.intel.com/products...

    A Cherry Trail Atom at 1.44 to 1.92 Ghz is going to be a bit underpowered even if all you want to do is run Chrome.

    Honestly I wouldn't buy anything with less than an i5 M - I don't even like the U series Core i5s. Of course that means that you're probably looking at a 13 inch machine.

  15. Softbank own ARM Holdings too on SoftBank Acquires Big Stake In Uber In a Major Victory For Both Companies (recode.net) · · Score: 1

    $32 Billion to own ARM? Not a bad deal at all.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/s...

  16. Re: No PCs are in this article on The Year in Crowdfunded PCs: Who Succeeded? Who Failed? (zdnet.com) · · Score: 1

    And a couple decades ago it didn't mean laptops or "notebook" computers as they were commonly known either. It also was a term that Apple fanboys attempted to avoid because of its ubiquity with Intel/compatible computers running MS-DOS and Windows.

    Leading to the joke

    Q) Now that Apple use Intel processors what's the difference between a Mac and a PC?
    A) About $300!

    The difference is more now of course, because you can only buy your RAM and SSD from Apple at purchase time. Yeah, I think I'll be replacing my 2012 Macbook Pro with a Wintel machine, probably from Asus, when it finally dies.

  17. Re:How do you know? on Postcard From Pyongyang: The Airport Now Has Wi-Fi, Sort of (apnews.com) · · Score: 2

    While the poster (the one who talks about "blowing out the TCP connection stack," whatever the fuck that means) has the social skills of a rabid ferret,

    Lulz

    Normally I would chalk fears like this up to paranoia...but this is the lounge for international travelers in North Korea's only international airport. I mean, honestly...if I could think of a single place that's most likely a site where travelers would be attacked, this is it. It's practically a line out of a comedy, it's so over-the-top as a description of a risky situation. Can we really say that North Korea...NORTH KOREA...has set up a WiFi network specifically for visiting foreigners just out of the goodness of their heart?

    Honestly when it comes to hoovering up data on an industrial scale, you can't really beat the US. I noticed my Samsung Galaxy S5 which was ancient started getting frequent 'security updates' when I was in NYC. Maybe I'm paranoid but I always assumed the NSA had sent national security letters to Google, Samsung, the carriers, etc to make sure their latest SmurfKit was running on it.

    http://www.zdnet.com/article/m...

    The S5 started to run a lot slower and hotter and I ended up buying a LG V20 rather than trying a firmware reset and a new battery. So those damn smurfs finally caused my elderly phone to die. Still, it's actually kind of endearing to be honest. The US and UK working together on cutting edge SIGINT, Bletchley Park style, in a way that some commie shithole like NK or even China can only dream of.

  18. Re:100 percent green energy by 2025 on UK Enjoyed 'Greenest Year For Electricity Ever' in 2017 (bbc.com) · · Score: 1

    U wot m8? You're 'aving a fucking giraffe!

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

    Total power generation in 2013 was 213.4 TWh, which comes from coal (38.4%), natural gas (31.1%), nuclear (18.8%), solar and wind (4.5%), co-generation (3.4%), oil (2.3%) and pumped-storage hydro (1.5%). In 2012, Taipower purchased 7,652.1 MW of electricity from Taiwan's current nine IPP.[9] Taiwan has seen an annual growth of 4.4% in terms of electricity generation in 1992â"2012.

    In terms of price to produce electricity, the average generation cost of electricity in Taiwan was US$7.0 cent/kWh, which consists of US$1.9 cent/kWh for nuclear, US$5.8 cent/kWh for coal and US$11.25 cent/kWh for natural gas.[10]

    Taipower operates three types of power plant based on the generation characteristics, which are peaking power plant, load following power plant and base load power plant.[11]

    In 2012, the base load power source constituted for 42.4% of the total power generation in Taiwan, below the expected level of 55-65%. Over the past decade, the capacity of peak load energy sources was between 10.3-14.8%, slightly lower than the expected 10-15% value.[9]

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

    They're phasing out nuclear too, much to my dismay. All that will do is make Taiwan more vulnerable to a blockade of fossil fuel imports by the massive fascist dictatorship over the water openly plotting an Anschluss. More nuke plants is what Taiwan needs, not fewer. A few more solar cells wouldn't hurt either.

  19. Re:I love the GPD pocket on The Year in Crowdfunded PCs: Who Succeeded? Who Failed? (zdnet.com) · · Score: 1

    What you want is a netbook. They were $3-400 machines with an Intel Atom. E.g. I had one of these with 2GB ram for a couple of years. The problem is that Chrome bloated to the point that it run like crap on an Atom and Windows slows down too for reasons that are a bit unclear.

    Of course people like Asus decided to stop promoting netbooks. That's not the same as stopping making them. E.g.

    https://www.newegg.com/Product...

    $229 machine with an Intel Celeron N3350, 4GB Ram and 64GB of eMMC. The only difference between that the original netbooks is that you've got a slightly less bad screen. 11.6" 1366*768 instead of 10" 1024*600. It's Windows 10 S but you can upgrade to normal Windows. I bet it'd run Linux too.

  20. Re: Unacceptable on Postcard From Pyongyang: The Airport Now Has Wi-Fi, Sort of (apnews.com) · · Score: 2

    The interesting thing about hacking is that you can have a few smart and determined people in a building with a 56K modem and some old computers and they can still do it. You don't need much infrastructure.

    The US's enemies - Iran, China, Russia and North Korea, etc don't really have a shortage of smart people. North Korea has almost no infrastructure, but that doesn't matter for asymmetric things like hacking. In fact if you lived in North Korea, hacking enemies of the state is basically the nearest you can get to entrepreneurship - you'd get a decent apartment, extra rations and protection from the bureaucracy.

    E.g. if you read about how well people like Sakharov lived before they were dissidents

    https://www.hoover.org/researc...

    His embrace of human rights did not come through a sudden conversion. Scrupulously honest, and almost naÃve in his understanding of politics and power, he came to it in stages. Let me give you a brief chronology of the metamorphosis.

    First came his concern about the radioactive fallout from atmospheric testing. But in those years, in the 1950s, the concerns were still new, and raising them was possible within the scientific and political elite. These were issues Sakharov could take up directly with Nikita Khrushchev, even though he was at times rebuffed and put in his place for meddling in politics.

    Then came the Academy of Science elections in 1964 at which Sakharov openly spoke out against accepting an ally of the pseudo-scientist Trofim Lysenko. The Academy of Science, in fact, was probably the closest to a democratic institution in the Soviet state, where full members could still vote to reject a candidate pushed by the Kremlin.

    So far, Sakharov's activities were still within the bounds of permissible debate for someone of his standing in the elite. Yet as Sakharov noted in his Memoirs, the academy vote, like the struggle against atmospheric testing, marked another step on the way to becoming active in civic affairs.

    The turning point for Sakharov, as for the entire dissident movement, came in the mid-1960s. These were years in which Sakharov signed a petition against the rehabilitation of Stalin, followed by a letter against the enactment of the law against defaming the Soviet state, which became the basis for the prosecution of many dissidents, followed by a decision to join in a demonstration on Pushkin Square on Constitution Day.

    Then came his first letter, this one to Leonid Brezhnev, in support of a dissident, and then his involvement in the movement to save Lake Baikal.

    What is amazing to realize now is that in those years, Sakharov had such high rank that he could pick up a special phone and directly call the KGB chief, Yuri Andropov, as he did in 1967 to seek the release of the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel.

    These phones, known as vertushka, connected members of the top nomenklatura [chief officials]-I managed to steal one from the Kremlin during the chaos of 1991, and I learned then that the name, vertushka, which means "dial," comes from the fact that the elite network was the first to use dial phones.

    If you're in a hellish totalitarian state helping the powers that be gives you a lot of privilege - not just a nice apartment and elite rations but you're get a vertushka phone you can call the head of the secret police on for a chat.

    And, like I say, places like Russia don't a shortage of smart people. Like this chap

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

    Also most Western consumer stuff - iOS, Android, Windows, macOS - is full of vulnerabilities.

  21. Re:Unacceptable on Postcard From Pyongyang: The Airport Now Has Wi-Fi, Sort of (apnews.com) · · Score: 1

    autism kroners

    This is awesome.

  22. Re:How do you know? on Postcard From Pyongyang: The Airport Now Has Wi-Fi, Sort of (apnews.com) · · Score: 1

    Honeypot just means you spy on the data. It's not going to "blows out the TCP connection stack and downloads whatever it likes onto your device".

    And actually a honeypot would be very easy to set up. Make sure people have to log in with a local phone number like the Chinese do, and then you can work back from an IP to a phone number. If you force all mobile providers to get an ID you can track that back to a person.

    So now you've got a system where you can see people do on the internet. For maximum Orwellianness I'd allow access to sites that are normally blocked and just see who tries to visit them.

    Hell why not man in the middle SSL sites so facebook.com goes to facebook.nk. Facebook.nk would log times, IP, text, basically everything.

    Most devices will complain about the certificate not matching, but then most people will probably click to connect anyway. Of course a competent government would send an national security letter that forces facebook to sign the MITM site, in which case browsers will connect without complaining.

    The downside to MITM'ing sites of course is that someone will eventually notice. Then again I bet if the NSA does this sort of thing the MITM site is probably colocated with an indistinguishable from the servers it is MITMing.

    UNLIMITED POWER!

    However if you're China or North Korea hopefully things are not set up so you can force a local company to issue a certificate that lets you MITM a US site.

  23. Re:May I suggest we add a few things? on The WHO May Recognize Excessive Video Gaming As Mental Health Disorder (cbsnews.com) · · Score: 1

    No, I'm just saying we're just as much addicts on here as the normies on Facebook and filthy degenerates on Reddit.

  24. Re:May I suggest we add a few things? on The WHO May Recognize Excessive Video Gaming As Mental Health Disorder (cbsnews.com) · · Score: 1

    He says, on the 15th time he's checked Slashdot for new stories to troll that day.

  25. Re:The WHO recognizes excessive gaming disorder on The WHO May Recognize Excessive Video Gaming As Mental Health Disorder (cbsnews.com) · · Score: 1

    People try to put them d-down (Talkin' 'bout their generation)