The other story here is that in response some whiny bitch of a Labour MP said she was shocked that a government worker would dare make a suggestion that we try and protect our privacy and anonymity because anyone doing so is obviously a cyber bully and has something to hide.
Which reminds me once again why I don't know if it's worth even voting next election because it's a choice between spoilt milionaires who were born with a silver spoon yet still want more and seem to spend more time legislating about what furry animals they can kill next rather than doing much of actual value, and fascists that want to control every aspect of our lives and pay us enough benefits to bankrupt the country if we can't be arsed to work.
Honestly, for once a government official speaks sense, and still it gets turned into party political bollocks trying to take a swipe at them over it.
This guy, whoever he is, for PM. He's made the most sense of any government worker I've ever seen.
Where do you draw the line? Austin is about 4 times the size of Iceland, does that mean Austin itself is too big and should become an independent nation separate from the rest of Texas itself?
Is Iceland an example of good local governance considering it basically went bankrupt?
What about the various cults places like Texas have that have tried to install their own extremely local governance systems only to end in tragedy and complete failure, was that succesful?
If what you say is true then how is it that the most succesful countries on Earth tend to be pretty big. How did the British empire last over 400 years when it was so large when other smaller states have fallen in much less time?
You say the principle of local governance has been reinforced as being superior over time, I think you have a very ignorant view of history if you geninely believe that. Spread of governance doesn't seem to matter, only quality. In fact, the US makes a good example for why you are wrong - if you split American into 50 separate countries, then rather than having the most succesful country in the world, you'd have one country that's about the same size as Italy (California) but smaller than France, Germany, etc., you'd have a few smaller states again and then you'd have about 40 3rd world nations. How exactly would that be better, even with local governance? Why do you think China, India, and Brazil are seeing such astronomical rises economically when they're all such large countries?
That'd be ideal, but if Texas doesn't repeal it in time the only sane thing to do is to either ignore it, recognising that it conflicts with higher level federal, or international law, or to simply declare that there's no guarantee that US elections are actually free and fair hence removing the option for the US to critcise countries like Iran, Venezuela, Russia etc. when they have apparently dodgy elections because the US would then have placed itself in the same category as them in this respect.
If Texas doesn't repeal the law, then simply ignoring it is honestly the best option for America, and everyone else and if a few Texans want to throw a hissy fit over it then let them, but that's better than the US losing what remaining international credibility it has.
"By treaty, the CSCE can observe the election to the extent permitted by law. By law, observers cannot maintain a presence within 100 feet of a polling place."
I don't know if you're being obnoxious for the sake of it or not, but that's not the law it refers to. It refers to the treaty law itself which defines what the observers can and can't do, not a lower level law specified by a bunch of little upstarts that think they have more power than they do.
That's fine if you like being in the same category as Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and everywhere else the US has whinged about not having verifiably free and fair elections.
"In all the stats that matter iOS is still hammering Android."
What are the stats that matter currently?
The reason I ask is that Apple fanboys change their mind on this each time Android surpasses Apple in yet another stat, so I'm just wondering what the "stats that matter" are this week?
Honestly, it's the no true scotsman fallacy, but still, I'm intrigued to hear what they are this week.
Motorola didn't make a loss on any of it's Android phones, all of Motorola's losses were down to the costs of separating Motorola into two if you look at the financial reports.
Easy, you just be as broad as possible and hope that some day you can apply it to some infringement claim by making up a load of nonsense as to why it's the same.
This is why I'm going to patent "A thing to do stuff" and win the patent wars.
"There are plus and minus with America's first past the post system. What I like about it is that I get a clear chocie between 2 moderate people. I don't have to worry what type of deals they will cut to get into a political coalition - I have less to worry about political hacks cutting inside deals. I am voting for an individual."
This is the same FUD argument that was used in the UK, but the problem is it's exactly that - FUD.
By voting for an individual, particularly under first past the post, you're basically saying the largest minority gets an effective 100% of that power pool. So if you have 3 candidates, one gets 35%, another gets 33%, and another 32% then the one getting 35% wins effective 100% of that power meaning he can push his agenda without any kind of care or concern for what the 65% of people who didn't vote for him want. This is exactly the problem we have in the UK with our First Past the Post system and the problem scales from both the individual MP to the whole government. Meaning the whole government can get in with sometimes as little as 30% of popular support and yet gain 100% of power in the face of the 70% of the population who didn't want them.
Proportional representation means that the individual representative has to work to try and ensure they follow a set of policies that is good enough for at least half of their electorate forcing them to be much more representative of the electorate. At a government level this may well mean coalitions, but that ultimately means those backroom deals you talk about are moderating principles that ensure laws are past that at least somewhat please half the population, rather than serve minorities and often self-interests.
In the UK for example we got our first coalition in a long time and whilst it's not been particularly rosy it's been far more moderate than a purely Conservative government would've been - for example whilst the Lib Dems allowed tuition fee increases to go through, they were only £9,000 whilst the Conservatives wanted £12,000 fees. Similarly the NHS changes whilst not pleasant are still much more moderate than a purely Tory government wanted. In other words, the coalition has had a moderating influence and it's the same elsewhere where there is proportional representation.
You only have to look at Canada to see the problem - when they had a minority Conservative government things weren't great, but now Harper has a majority the country has gone massively downhill in no time at all in terms of the quality of it's law making, with the wingnuts crawling out the woodworking and recommending/passing some really awful bills.
Reed-Solomon is fairly commonplace, I think it's even what's used in the Compact Disc standard for example, it's been a very succesful algorithm.
I've not read the paper but from what I've gathered from the summary and comments here it sounds like they've basically just invented a more efficient error correction/detection algorithm in terms of bits corrected vs. data sent and that this has simply become possible because of an increase in processing power to handle the likely more complex algorithm involved.
In other words, it sounds like a natural evolution of coding theory that takes advantage of the increases in computing power we've seen since the likes of Reed-Solomon came along as a fairly common method of handling error detection and correction rather than something that manages to genuinely find extra usable bandwidth out of nowhere - I don't think it's doing that, I think it's probably just trading processor cycles for more usable bandwidth, which makes sense given an increased abundance of processing cycles available cheaply for such tasks.
Still, maybe I'm wrong, if I get chance I'll have a look through the paper at some point and find out either way I guess.
"1. - You don't have to be competitive if you have managed to obtain a monopoly... "
Er, try and keep up with the conversation. You've just instigated a circular argument. The point was that these monopolies were obtained precisely by outcompeting the competition. Intel just produces better chips than AMD, there's no ifs, no buts, they're just too far ahead of AMD, and it's not to do with being a monopoly because they're not yet, it's simply that they've done a better job than AMD.
Microsoft was the same, the only reason it got a monopoly in the first place was by just producing a product more people wanted. Linux was too young as to be irrelevant at the time, and everything else (OS/2 lol) was second rate.
"2 - You obviously don't remember the days when Netscape was the best browser out there."
That's because it was never true. Netscape was a truly second rate browser compared to IE. People were using IE over Netscape not because of bundling, but because IE was just that much nicer to use. Even the basics like Netscape's UI was fucking horrible (http://www.supportcave.com/images/netscape4.bmp vs. http://www.favbrowser.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/internetexplorer4.png for example), and that's before you get into the technical fails of actually browsing with it.
I just did a random search, and found this old article for example, look at the comments, look at people's sentiment towards Netscape in reply to a neutral story about it:
This isn't to say Netscape didn't have it's fans, particularly in the anti-MS crowd (read: Stallman's crowd), but IE was just so much more user-friendly to the general public, and that's ultimately what mattered.
As far back as 2002 I had a Nokia 7650, and I could install and run Doom on it absolutely fine. It had a colour screen, camera, etc. It's limited memory was the biggest pain, but given that it took a whole 5 years for the iPhone to come along and even then didn't have half these features I think in hindsight it was a pretty impressive device.
Even now I think a lot of their Windows smartphones look quite nice, and the hardware feels quite nice, and the cameras etc. are still pretty awesome. I just don't want a Windows phone.
It really is literally just nothing more than the OS they're using that's holding them back from being a multi-billion dollar profit company.
Are you talking about Swedish examples? If so then this very case is an example in itself- Svartholm isn't wanted in the US. Though if you want an actual factual article about how solitary is endemic in the Swedish justice system, you may want to start here:
If you're talking about British examples then even Abu Hamza wasn't kept in solitary in the UK, and Richard O'Dwyer is even being allowed to walk free and finish his degree until extradition goes ahead (if it does).
So I'm not really sure what your point is, or did you not actually have one?
I still actually to this day like a lot of Nokia hardware.
If they released an Android phone with no extra shit, just plain old vanilla Android on their hardware I'd buy it, and I suspect many other old Nokia fans would.
They could easily eat a healthy chunk of both Samsung and Apple's marketshare if they did this. It's so obvious, I just don't get why they fail to carry it out. Even if they didn't manage to regain the top spot, one thing is for sure, and that's that they'd certainly be in a much healthier position than they are now. They have the hardware to distinguish themselves in the Android market, so talk of fears just being another Android player is idiotic, especially when even just being another Android player is still a thousand times more profitable than being a Windows Phone non-entity.
"Remember "smartphones" before the iPhone? It took years for any company to remotely match what the iPhone had when it LAUNCHED.*"
* In America, where the cellphone market was so backwards it was easy to achieve. Elsewhere in the world we had devices like the N95 which way outsold the original iPhone and had features like apps, MMS, GPS, and so forth many years before the iPhone did.
The only thing Amanda Knox learnt is that with enough money you can buy your way out of jail in Italy just as well as other people can buy your way in.
Whether she's guilty or not is something that was never really determined to any great extent, because on one side you had a prosecution that was trying every trick in the book to make sure she went to jail over it, and on the other you had a massive American lobbying campaign with many millions of dollars poured into the idea that she was innocent.
There's still a hell of a lot of questions about her actions, but there's still a hell of a lot of questions about the prosecution.
One thing is for sure and that's that justice didn't happen in the Amanda Knox case. If she was guilty she got away with it, if she was innocent then her name has certainly not been cleared in the minds of many millions of people. In the US the lobbying campaign has her painted as a victim, but across much of Europe where the press was much more impartial because of an equal distaste of both the Italian and American actions in the case there still seems a pretty strong belief she's guilty.
The Italians and Americans have extreme opposing views on it because of the massively influential media campaigns, elsewhere people are far from convinced there was any just resolution either way.
"Like I posted before, thanks for your 'input'. I'm as sane as anyone else is"
Look, that's precisely the problem with disorders like this, you wouldn't know that, you'd have no idea.
So just take this advice, okay, you're fine, or you believe you are or whatever, the point is you wouldn't know if you weren't.
So go to the doctors regardless, and just say people are questioning your sanity, there's no harm if you're right the doctor will tell you you're fine and you can carry on as is and everyone questioning your sanity here will be proven wrong. But if you do have problems that you don't realise you have then the doctor will be able to help break the cycle of denial about whether you have a problem and you'll be able to realise all along that you had issues.
What's the harm? Just do it, it's best to be sure.
Honestly if it's been "hard hacked" though I'm not entirely sure what the fuck you even mean by that, then it's time to chuck it in the bin.
You're asking for security on a device which you also claim is effectively under someone elses control at a much lower level than you have access.
If you carry on using the device and anything you say is true then you deserve everything you get. In other words, you're the problem, you're putting yourself in a situation where you are using a compromised device.
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No, Texas should ignore it's laws if they are overruled by higher laws, which they are.
"What if it made them feel good to have guys in white pointy hats standing outside the doors "observing" ?"
What are you on about? That sounds like a Texas thing.
Yes, bad ones.
The other story here is that in response some whiny bitch of a Labour MP said she was shocked that a government worker would dare make a suggestion that we try and protect our privacy and anonymity because anyone doing so is obviously a cyber bully and has something to hide.
Which reminds me once again why I don't know if it's worth even voting next election because it's a choice between spoilt milionaires who were born with a silver spoon yet still want more and seem to spend more time legislating about what furry animals they can kill next rather than doing much of actual value, and fascists that want to control every aspect of our lives and pay us enough benefits to bankrupt the country if we can't be arsed to work.
Honestly, for once a government official speaks sense, and still it gets turned into party political bollocks trying to take a swipe at them over it.
This guy, whoever he is, for PM. He's made the most sense of any government worker I've ever seen.
Where do you draw the line? Austin is about 4 times the size of Iceland, does that mean Austin itself is too big and should become an independent nation separate from the rest of Texas itself?
Is Iceland an example of good local governance considering it basically went bankrupt?
What about the various cults places like Texas have that have tried to install their own extremely local governance systems only to end in tragedy and complete failure, was that succesful?
If what you say is true then how is it that the most succesful countries on Earth tend to be pretty big. How did the British empire last over 400 years when it was so large when other smaller states have fallen in much less time?
You say the principle of local governance has been reinforced as being superior over time, I think you have a very ignorant view of history if you geninely believe that. Spread of governance doesn't seem to matter, only quality. In fact, the US makes a good example for why you are wrong - if you split American into 50 separate countries, then rather than having the most succesful country in the world, you'd have one country that's about the same size as Italy (California) but smaller than France, Germany, etc., you'd have a few smaller states again and then you'd have about 40 3rd world nations. How exactly would that be better, even with local governance? Why do you think China, India, and Brazil are seeing such astronomical rises economically when they're all such large countries?
That'd be ideal, but if Texas doesn't repeal it in time the only sane thing to do is to either ignore it, recognising that it conflicts with higher level federal, or international law, or to simply declare that there's no guarantee that US elections are actually free and fair hence removing the option for the US to critcise countries like Iran, Venezuela, Russia etc. when they have apparently dodgy elections because the US would then have placed itself in the same category as them in this respect.
If Texas doesn't repeal the law, then simply ignoring it is honestly the best option for America, and everyone else and if a few Texans want to throw a hissy fit over it then let them, but that's better than the US losing what remaining international credibility it has.
"By treaty, the CSCE can observe the election to the extent permitted by law. By law, observers cannot maintain a presence within 100 feet of a polling place."
I don't know if you're being obnoxious for the sake of it or not, but that's not the law it refers to. It refers to the treaty law itself which defines what the observers can and can't do, not a lower level law specified by a bunch of little upstarts that think they have more power than they do.
That's fine if you like being in the same category as Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and everywhere else the US has whinged about not having verifiably free and fair elections.
Have you thought about a career as a presenter on a shopping channel?
"In all the stats that matter iOS is still hammering Android."
What are the stats that matter currently?
The reason I ask is that Apple fanboys change their mind on this each time Android surpasses Apple in yet another stat, so I'm just wondering what the "stats that matter" are this week?
Honestly, it's the no true scotsman fallacy, but still, I'm intrigued to hear what they are this week.
Motorola didn't make a loss on any of it's Android phones, all of Motorola's losses were down to the costs of separating Motorola into two if you look at the financial reports.
Easy, you just be as broad as possible and hope that some day you can apply it to some infringement claim by making up a load of nonsense as to why it's the same.
This is why I'm going to patent "A thing to do stuff" and win the patent wars.
"There are plus and minus with America's first past the post system. What I like about it is that I get a clear chocie between 2 moderate people. I don't have to worry what type of deals they will cut to get into a political coalition - I have less to worry about political hacks cutting inside deals. I am voting for an individual."
This is the same FUD argument that was used in the UK, but the problem is it's exactly that - FUD.
By voting for an individual, particularly under first past the post, you're basically saying the largest minority gets an effective 100% of that power pool. So if you have 3 candidates, one gets 35%, another gets 33%, and another 32% then the one getting 35% wins effective 100% of that power meaning he can push his agenda without any kind of care or concern for what the 65% of people who didn't vote for him want. This is exactly the problem we have in the UK with our First Past the Post system and the problem scales from both the individual MP to the whole government. Meaning the whole government can get in with sometimes as little as 30% of popular support and yet gain 100% of power in the face of the 70% of the population who didn't want them.
Proportional representation means that the individual representative has to work to try and ensure they follow a set of policies that is good enough for at least half of their electorate forcing them to be much more representative of the electorate. At a government level this may well mean coalitions, but that ultimately means those backroom deals you talk about are moderating principles that ensure laws are past that at least somewhat please half the population, rather than serve minorities and often self-interests.
In the UK for example we got our first coalition in a long time and whilst it's not been particularly rosy it's been far more moderate than a purely Conservative government would've been - for example whilst the Lib Dems allowed tuition fee increases to go through, they were only £9,000 whilst the Conservatives wanted £12,000 fees. Similarly the NHS changes whilst not pleasant are still much more moderate than a purely Tory government wanted. In other words, the coalition has had a moderating influence and it's the same elsewhere where there is proportional representation.
You only have to look at Canada to see the problem - when they had a minority Conservative government things weren't great, but now Harper has a majority the country has gone massively downhill in no time at all in terms of the quality of it's law making, with the wingnuts crawling out the woodworking and recommending/passing some really awful bills.
Reed-Solomon is fairly commonplace, I think it's even what's used in the Compact Disc standard for example, it's been a very succesful algorithm.
I've not read the paper but from what I've gathered from the summary and comments here it sounds like they've basically just invented a more efficient error correction/detection algorithm in terms of bits corrected vs. data sent and that this has simply become possible because of an increase in processing power to handle the likely more complex algorithm involved.
In other words, it sounds like a natural evolution of coding theory that takes advantage of the increases in computing power we've seen since the likes of Reed-Solomon came along as a fairly common method of handling error detection and correction rather than something that manages to genuinely find extra usable bandwidth out of nowhere - I don't think it's doing that, I think it's probably just trading processor cycles for more usable bandwidth, which makes sense given an increased abundance of processing cycles available cheaply for such tasks.
Still, maybe I'm wrong, if I get chance I'll have a look through the paper at some point and find out either way I guess.
"1. - You don't have to be competitive if you have managed to obtain a monopoly... "
Er, try and keep up with the conversation. You've just instigated a circular argument. The point was that these monopolies were obtained precisely by outcompeting the competition. Intel just produces better chips than AMD, there's no ifs, no buts, they're just too far ahead of AMD, and it's not to do with being a monopoly because they're not yet, it's simply that they've done a better job than AMD.
Microsoft was the same, the only reason it got a monopoly in the first place was by just producing a product more people wanted. Linux was too young as to be irrelevant at the time, and everything else (OS/2 lol) was second rate.
"2 - You obviously don't remember the days when Netscape was the best browser out there."
That's because it was never true. Netscape was a truly second rate browser compared to IE. People were using IE over Netscape not because of bundling, but because IE was just that much nicer to use. Even the basics like Netscape's UI was fucking horrible (http://www.supportcave.com/images/netscape4.bmp vs. http://www.favbrowser.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/internetexplorer4.png for example), and that's before you get into the technical fails of actually browsing with it.
I just did a random search, and found this old article for example, look at the comments, look at people's sentiment towards Netscape in reply to a neutral story about it:
http://www.geek.com/articles/news/navigator-475-out-now-20000821/
This isn't to say Netscape didn't have it's fans, particularly in the anti-MS crowd (read: Stallman's crowd), but IE was just so much more user-friendly to the general public, and that's ultimately what mattered.
Even their smartphones used to be good though.
As far back as 2002 I had a Nokia 7650, and I could install and run Doom on it absolutely fine. It had a colour screen, camera, etc. It's limited memory was the biggest pain, but given that it took a whole 5 years for the iPhone to come along and even then didn't have half these features I think in hindsight it was a pretty impressive device.
Even now I think a lot of their Windows smartphones look quite nice, and the hardware feels quite nice, and the cameras etc. are still pretty awesome. I just don't want a Windows phone.
It really is literally just nothing more than the OS they're using that's holding them back from being a multi-billion dollar profit company.
Are you talking about Swedish examples? If so then this very case is an example in itself- Svartholm isn't wanted in the US. Though if you want an actual factual article about how solitary is endemic in the Swedish justice system, you may want to start here:
https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/publications/Abstract.aspx?id=201907
If you're talking about British examples then even Abu Hamza wasn't kept in solitary in the UK, and Richard O'Dwyer is even being allowed to walk free and finish his degree until extradition goes ahead (if it does).
So I'm not really sure what your point is, or did you not actually have one?
I still actually to this day like a lot of Nokia hardware.
If they released an Android phone with no extra shit, just plain old vanilla Android on their hardware I'd buy it, and I suspect many other old Nokia fans would.
They could easily eat a healthy chunk of both Samsung and Apple's marketshare if they did this. It's so obvious, I just don't get why they fail to carry it out. Even if they didn't manage to regain the top spot, one thing is for sure, and that's that they'd certainly be in a much healthier position than they are now. They have the hardware to distinguish themselves in the Android market, so talk of fears just being another Android player is idiotic, especially when even just being another Android player is still a thousand times more profitable than being a Windows Phone non-entity.
To be fair I think this is just the Swedish way.
Before Assange was granted bail the Swedes wanted him locked up in solitary until he could be extradited too.
Thankfully we're a little less backwards than they are in this respect at least.
"Remember "smartphones" before the iPhone? It took years for any company to remotely match what the iPhone had when it LAUNCHED.*"
* In America, where the cellphone market was so backwards it was easy to achieve. Elsewhere in the world we had devices like the N95 which way outsold the original iPhone and had features like apps, MMS, GPS, and so forth many years before the iPhone did.
Still, nice try.
The only thing Amanda Knox learnt is that with enough money you can buy your way out of jail in Italy just as well as other people can buy your way in.
Whether she's guilty or not is something that was never really determined to any great extent, because on one side you had a prosecution that was trying every trick in the book to make sure she went to jail over it, and on the other you had a massive American lobbying campaign with many millions of dollars poured into the idea that she was innocent.
There's still a hell of a lot of questions about her actions, but there's still a hell of a lot of questions about the prosecution.
One thing is for sure and that's that justice didn't happen in the Amanda Knox case. If she was guilty she got away with it, if she was innocent then her name has certainly not been cleared in the minds of many millions of people. In the US the lobbying campaign has her painted as a victim, but across much of Europe where the press was much more impartial because of an equal distaste of both the Italian and American actions in the case there still seems a pretty strong belief she's guilty.
The Italians and Americans have extreme opposing views on it because of the massively influential media campaigns, elsewhere people are far from convinced there was any just resolution either way.
"Like I posted before, thanks for your 'input'. I'm as sane as anyone else is"
Look, that's precisely the problem with disorders like this, you wouldn't know that, you'd have no idea.
So just take this advice, okay, you're fine, or you believe you are or whatever, the point is you wouldn't know if you weren't.
So go to the doctors regardless, and just say people are questioning your sanity, there's no harm if you're right the doctor will tell you you're fine and you can carry on as is and everyone questioning your sanity here will be proven wrong. But if you do have problems that you don't realise you have then the doctor will be able to help break the cycle of denial about whether you have a problem and you'll be able to realise all along that you had issues.
What's the harm? Just do it, it's best to be sure.
Then get one, trade your compromised device in and buy one with the cash you gain from doing so.
He's so old school he has a neck-beard AND wears sandals.
Honestly if it's been "hard hacked" though I'm not entirely sure what the fuck you even mean by that, then it's time to chuck it in the bin.
You're asking for security on a device which you also claim is effectively under someone elses control at a much lower level than you have access.
If you carry on using the device and anything you say is true then you deserve everything you get. In other words, you're the problem, you're putting yourself in a situation where you are using a compromised device.
Sorry but it sounds like you're a paranoid schizophrenic or similar, and you need a doctor, not a technical site.