If Singh loses this then that would be a surprise, but it would also be based on the current interpretation and application of the law. He wont be hung out to dry (Eady's bewildering decision notwithstanding).
It's been known in cases like this in the past for the award to the plaintiffs to be nominal - a couple of pennies. I would hope that if he does lose, the judges take exactly that approach.
Frankly the BCA are acting like a bunch of charlatan's trying to abuse the law to silence legitimate protest and I hope they lose and get hit with punitive costs as a result.
Anybody that's any good relishes a good fight. My favourite online experiences have often involved a balanced fight, where it's my skill against someone else's, no equipment/link/class advantages at play.
Losing a fight like that gives you incentive to get better, go back and win.
Losing a fight where you're heavily outnumbered, outgeared or inherently disadvantaged due to game design (hello Warhammer) gives you incentive to find a different game.
Winning a fight where you have overwhelming advantage is just boring.
Wanting a fair fight isn't being a fool, it's enjoying the gaming experience. It's enjoying the challenge. Hell, I'll go up against superior numbers if I have a chance of getting at least one of them, for the challenge and the enjoyment of trying.
If I see two people having a fair fight, if there's nothing strategic at stake then I'll often happily sit by and watch them finish it off.
Sure, people camp, they use aimbots in FPS games, they gank, and they act like 14 year olds. It's unfortunate, but online games don't generally ban 14 year olds.
There are legitimate uses for this technology and capability. It's quite possible that it was implemented for a benign purpose and subsequently misused.
It's also very possible for to set something like this up without no IT help at all. Some teachers have been known to use a computer all by themselves (allegedly).
Even if IT assistance was requested/provided and the stated requirement was "spying on children at home" it's possible that the IT person was forced to sign an NDA, threatened with losing their job, or maybe even thought it was a good thing to be doing.
Why should the school administration be the only people without a clue?
Other methods? If this happened to my kid, and a lawsuit was not an option, my "other method" would probably involve firearms. You obtained pictures of my kid in his own home, possibly in various states of undress? Watch your back.
Nice, resort to violence. Nothing like a lynch mob to exact justice - so much better than a legal system after all.
It's a fucking photo. It's not as though they bulldozed your kitchen wall in, tied up your wife, stripped your daughter naked and raped her three at once. I could understand a violent response to that. But you're talking about fucking photographs, that the person being photographed didn't even know were being taken.
Clearly there is legal recourse, and I think prison sentences are proportionate and appropriate. They're also "another method" that doesn't bankrupt the district the people suing live in.
Top of the line phones aren't excessively more than your $300. Sure, the Nokia n900 is $520 not $300 but it's the absolute top-end of phone hardware these days and anything more than a few months old is much cheaper than that.
At the other end of the scale, Amazon.co.uk is selling a perfectly capable Nokia mobile phone for under $40 and that includes some free airtime.
I think there truly is competition in the mobile telephony market; that Apple overcharge for their hardware is just a reason to buy from their competitors instead.
I'd like an iPhone, but I no longer think an expensive phone is practical.
I don't insure my phone - never yet lost one, never broken one by dropping it (had one survive such a drop), never dropped one in a toilet and only ever had one break on me.
Even that one survived for months after the unfortunate accident with the chocolate trifle, so I'm not sure I can even blame that.
It means that I'm out £450 if I do lose (theft or carelessness) or break my phone, but I'm happy to take that risk - the rate at which it happens is far less than the insurance cost anyway.
If I find myself unable to afford to replace a phone then so be it.
Gadget insurance is idiotic. The only people who carry it either (a) can't take care of their shit, or (b) intend to defraud the insurer. Because of this the premium/deductable schedule is such that you only win if you file a claim every three months - at which point the insurance company decides you're trying to defraud them and your denied coverage - and you lose any way.
Depends on the gadget. I have my watch specifically insured, because frankly it's bloody expensive and I work in a city with a high crime rate.
Similarly my laptop is a named item on my home insurance.
What I don't have is an extended warranty. That's not insurance, that's a rip-off:)
Are we supposed to assume that Apple customers are more honest than average folk and therefore express surprise that they, of all people, would commit fraud?
No, we are supposed to assume that Apple customers are no more dishonest than the general population, and therefore be surprised that they are in fact relatively speaking a bunch of fraudulent lying criminals.
It's all relative, the number of claims in total isn't necessarily high, but 40% fraudulent claims is very high. The implication from the article is that this is significantly higher than the industry norms for mobile phones.
It's the very best type of insanity. The most insane part is the learning curve - I hope you like killing dwarves, because it's going to happen in many nasty ways before you achieve any kind of stability...:)
My 19" CRT runs 1600x1200 very readably (and has done for almost a decade).
My 17" laptop runs 1920x1200 very readably and I am continually bemused that desktop monitors just aren't as good. I don't want a 24" monitor, I want a sensibly sized one..
My arse will fit in the seat fine, but my knees are always touching the seat in front and the people either side get to share my shoulders.
I'm not American, and I'm not unhealthy. Seats on aircraft are designed for children and women and frankly it costs the airlines money because I just don't want to fly.
So I don't.
It's perfectly fair that I pay for more space than a woman? Only when I get the same level of comfort per pound spent.
SWIFT messages contain destination bank account details. Anybody monitoring those messages can thus see any funds being transferred to specific bank accounts over the SWIFT network.
Although SWIFT itself isn't a clearing house, it's used by CHAPS, by TIPAnet, by others (I can't remember if SEPA use it) as a transport mechanism. Between those uses and foreign payments, SWIFT messages definitely contain person-to-person payment transactions.
Sure, they also contain company to company transactions, settlement transactions between clearing banks and clearing houses, and other payments, but that's like saying that all bittorrent traffic is legal because some of it is for Linux distros.
However, re-reading your initial message, I think I'm now in agreement with you. SWIFT wont track individuals as a customer, it's merely a transport mechanism over which some transactions will occur.
In that context, BACS is actually little different; the counterparty positions for BACS are at the financial institution or 'very large corporation' level, not at individual levels. But the counterparty positions can be derived within SWIFT if you're analysing all of the messages anyway (albeit by interpreting all of the payment requests, reversals, rejections and other traffic, which across the whole of SWIFT would require enough hardware to make me jealous).
Ok, so you pick one of the simplest tasks a GUI can aid with, ignore the overhead of opening a file browser, finding the source directory, finding the destination directory and selecting the files to copy, then suggest that this example means CLIs are worse than GUIs?
How about choosing the best tool for the job. A GUI is better at some things (drawing diagrams is something I almost exclusively do in GUI tools) and a CLI is better at some things (text file manipulation, and I don't mean a simple copy).
Lets say you wanted to rename the files as you copied them. A quick swish of your wrist can do that too?
Was this bank service, like, handling the transactions that finance world terror groups and insuring their privacy?
I'm sorry, I don't see why that excuses a foreign Government monitoring the financial transactions of people, companies and financial institutions in my country.
erm. That's like saying that BACS is a messaging service between financial institutions, exclusively.
Sure, SWIFT is used for bank to bank payments, but it's also used for customer to customer payments.
That most individuals don't transfer funds large enough to justify the expense of SWIFT messages don't mean that they can't - I've done it myself before now (not for a particularly high value transfer, just one that I didn't want to go through multi-day clearing cycles on).
At the 'tax avoidance' or 'terrorist activity' level, and for inter-country cash transfers, SWIFT is definitely a mechanism that would be used by individuals, and so it's very understandable that someone trying to monitor the flow of funds would want to know what's passing over it.
I'm also delighted that the EU have said that the US can't monitor the use of SWIFT in Europe. Obviously various EU countries will have their own intelligence services doing nefarious things but (in theory) they're subject to EU law.
Net impact on security is minimal, because of that domestic coverage. Anything found by an EU security service can be shared with the US, and if the US want to find the destination of a specific transfer they can ask an EU agency to help them (which generally they'll do, but under the auspices of EU law, which means they wont trawl the transactions of every EU citizen, including the ones that aren't acting illegally).
Their inability to address basic security aside, Microsoft know an awful lot about writing software.
You produce something as complex as Windows 7, retaining backwards compatibility with tens of thousands of hardware devices (that can be put together in millions of ways to make PCs that all work slightly differently) while running millions of software programmes, integrating with networks from home LANs right up to the corporate networks of the largest corporations on the planet, while providing an improved user experience, increased simplicity, better performance and all of the features it contains.
I'll happily give MS a lot of shit for their marketing practices, for the design flaws in their software and for their security issues, but their software development skills? Very few organisations on the planet can produce so much software that works in such challenging environments.
Slashdot Mirror
If Singh loses this then that would be a surprise, but it would also be based on the current interpretation and application of the law. He wont be hung out to dry (Eady's bewildering decision notwithstanding).
It's been known in cases like this in the past for the award to the plaintiffs to be nominal - a couple of pennies. I would hope that if he does lose, the judges take exactly that approach.
Frankly the BCA are acting like a bunch of charlatan's trying to abuse the law to silence legitimate protest and I hope they lose and get hit with punitive costs as a result.
Indeed.
"You motherfucker!"
"Yeah, but it was your mother. She was a lousy lay though"
Anybody that's any good relishes a good fight. My favourite online experiences have often involved a balanced fight, where it's my skill against someone else's, no equipment/link/class advantages at play.
Losing a fight like that gives you incentive to get better, go back and win.
Losing a fight where you're heavily outnumbered, outgeared or inherently disadvantaged due to game design (hello Warhammer) gives you incentive to find a different game.
Winning a fight where you have overwhelming advantage is just boring.
Wanting a fair fight isn't being a fool, it's enjoying the gaming experience. It's enjoying the challenge. Hell, I'll go up against superior numbers if I have a chance of getting at least one of them, for the challenge and the enjoyment of trying.
If I see two people having a fair fight, if there's nothing strategic at stake then I'll often happily sit by and watch them finish it off.
Sure, people camp, they use aimbots in FPS games, they gank, and they act like 14 year olds. It's unfortunate, but online games don't generally ban 14 year olds.
There are legitimate uses for this technology and capability. It's quite possible that it was implemented for a benign purpose and subsequently misused.
It's also very possible for to set something like this up without no IT help at all. Some teachers have been known to use a computer all by themselves (allegedly).
Even if IT assistance was requested/provided and the stated requirement was "spying on children at home" it's possible that the IT person was forced to sign an NDA, threatened with losing their job, or maybe even thought it was a good thing to be doing.
Why should the school administration be the only people without a clue?
Other methods? If this happened to my kid, and a lawsuit was not an option, my "other method" would probably involve firearms. You obtained pictures of my kid in his own home, possibly in various states of undress? Watch your back.
Nice, resort to violence. Nothing like a lynch mob to exact justice - so much better than a legal system after all.
It's a fucking photo. It's not as though they bulldozed your kitchen wall in, tied up your wife, stripped your daughter naked and raped her three at once. I could understand a violent response to that. But you're talking about fucking photographs, that the person being photographed didn't even know were being taken.
Clearly there is legal recourse, and I think prison sentences are proportionate and appropriate. They're also "another method" that doesn't bankrupt the district the people suing live in.
Top of the line phones aren't excessively more than your $300. Sure, the Nokia n900 is $520 not $300 but it's the absolute top-end of phone hardware these days and anything more than a few months old is much cheaper than that.
At the other end of the scale, Amazon.co.uk is selling a perfectly capable Nokia mobile phone for under $40 and that includes some free airtime.
I think there truly is competition in the mobile telephony market; that Apple overcharge for their hardware is just a reason to buy from their competitors instead.
I'd like an iPhone, but I no longer think an expensive phone is practical.
I don't insure my phone - never yet lost one, never broken one by dropping it (had one survive such a drop), never dropped one in a toilet and only ever had one break on me.
Even that one survived for months after the unfortunate accident with the chocolate trifle, so I'm not sure I can even blame that.
It means that I'm out £450 if I do lose (theft or carelessness) or break my phone, but I'm happy to take that risk - the rate at which it happens is far less than the insurance cost anyway.
If I find myself unable to afford to replace a phone then so be it.
Gadget insurance is idiotic. The only people who carry it either (a) can't take care of their shit, or (b) intend to defraud the insurer. Because of this the premium/deductable schedule is such that you only win if you file a claim every three months - at which point the insurance company decides you're trying to defraud them and your denied coverage - and you lose any way.
Depends on the gadget. I have my watch specifically insured, because frankly it's bloody expensive and I work in a city with a high crime rate.
Similarly my laptop is a named item on my home insurance.
What I don't have is an extended warranty. That's not insurance, that's a rip-off :)
Are we supposed to assume that Apple customers are more honest than average folk and therefore express surprise that they, of all people, would commit fraud?
No, we are supposed to assume that Apple customers are no more dishonest than the general population, and therefore be surprised that they are in fact relatively speaking a bunch of fraudulent lying criminals.
It's all relative, the number of claims in total isn't necessarily high, but 40% fraudulent claims is very high. The implication from the article is that this is significantly higher than the industry norms for mobile phones.
It's the very best type of insanity. The most insane part is the learning curve - I hope you like killing dwarves, because it's going to happen in many nasty ways before you achieve any kind of stability... :)
My 19" CRT runs 1600x1200 very readably (and has done for almost a decade).
My 17" laptop runs 1920x1200 very readably and I am continually bemused that desktop monitors just aren't as good. I don't want a 24" monitor, I want a sensibly sized one..
This is what elbows are for. You'd be amazed how much smaller some people become after the eighth 'Sorry, was that you?'
there is no good reason for being other than you shovel in more than you burn up.
You're describing the mechanics there, not the reason.
The reasons can be manyfold, complicated and often medical in nature.
Be glad you don't have them.
but every once in a while I get some asshole who not only reclines it, but slams it back, right on my knees.
I find pushing it back upright, perhaps with the occasional irritated punch, always works.
Maybe it's the look on my face whenever anybody actually turns around to complain..
My arse will fit in the seat fine, but my knees are always touching the seat in front and the people either side get to share my shoulders.
I'm not American, and I'm not unhealthy. Seats on aircraft are designed for children and women and frankly it costs the airlines money because I just don't want to fly.
So I don't.
It's perfectly fair that I pay for more space than a woman? Only when I get the same level of comfort per pound spent.
Anything that marginalises PETA is a good thing.
I hate those cunts.
Eat meat, wear leather and can someone please buy me a fur hat?
Come to Russia and all is possible.
SWIFT messages contain destination bank account details. Anybody monitoring those messages can thus see any funds being transferred to specific bank accounts over the SWIFT network.
Although SWIFT itself isn't a clearing house, it's used by CHAPS, by TIPAnet, by others (I can't remember if SEPA use it) as a transport mechanism. Between those uses and foreign payments, SWIFT messages definitely contain person-to-person payment transactions.
Sure, they also contain company to company transactions, settlement transactions between clearing banks and clearing houses, and other payments, but that's like saying that all bittorrent traffic is legal because some of it is for Linux distros.
However, re-reading your initial message, I think I'm now in agreement with you. SWIFT wont track individuals as a customer, it's merely a transport mechanism over which some transactions will occur.
In that context, BACS is actually little different; the counterparty positions for BACS are at the financial institution or 'very large corporation' level, not at individual levels. But the counterparty positions can be derived within SWIFT if you're analysing all of the messages anyway (albeit by interpreting all of the payment requests, reversals, rejections and other traffic, which across the whole of SWIFT would require enough hardware to make me jealous).
Heh, I know. Especially with a distributed network (e.g. retail estates that still need PC support).
Ok, so you pick one of the simplest tasks a GUI can aid with, ignore the overhead of opening a file browser, finding the source directory, finding the destination directory and selecting the files to copy, then suggest that this example means CLIs are worse than GUIs?
How about choosing the best tool for the job. A GUI is better at some things (drawing diagrams is something I almost exclusively do in GUI tools) and a CLI is better at some things (text file manipulation, and I don't mean a simple copy).
Lets say you wanted to rename the files as you copied them. A quick swish of your wrist can do that too?
Was this bank service, like, handling the transactions that finance world terror groups and insuring their privacy?
I'm sorry, I don't see why that excuses a foreign Government monitoring the financial transactions of people, companies and financial institutions in my country.
Doh. I was naively assuming that was just incompetence. Now you've triggered my innate cynicism.
erm. That's like saying that BACS is a messaging service between financial institutions, exclusively.
Sure, SWIFT is used for bank to bank payments, but it's also used for customer to customer payments.
That most individuals don't transfer funds large enough to justify the expense of SWIFT messages don't mean that they can't - I've done it myself before now (not for a particularly high value transfer, just one that I didn't want to go through multi-day clearing cycles on).
At the 'tax avoidance' or 'terrorist activity' level, and for inter-country cash transfers, SWIFT is definitely a mechanism that would be used by individuals, and so it's very understandable that someone trying to monitor the flow of funds would want to know what's passing over it.
I'm also delighted that the EU have said that the US can't monitor the use of SWIFT in Europe. Obviously various EU countries will have their own intelligence services doing nefarious things but (in theory) they're subject to EU law.
Net impact on security is minimal, because of that domestic coverage. Anything found by an EU security service can be shared with the US, and if the US want to find the destination of a specific transfer they can ask an EU agency to help them (which generally they'll do, but under the auspices of EU law, which means they wont trawl the transactions of every EU citizen, including the ones that aren't acting illegally).
Odd. I thought people that loved cars avoided BMW and Mercedes. They buy an Alfa Romeo, or a Caterham.
Which still works in your analogy. Apple is indeed the Mercedes-Benz of computer; overpriced and bought by twats.
Meanwhile the people that love computers build their own.
Their inability to address basic security aside, Microsoft know an awful lot about writing software.
You produce something as complex as Windows 7, retaining backwards compatibility with tens of thousands of hardware devices (that can be put together in millions of ways to make PCs that all work slightly differently) while running millions of software programmes, integrating with networks from home LANs right up to the corporate networks of the largest corporations on the planet, while providing an improved user experience, increased simplicity, better performance and all of the features it contains.
I'll happily give MS a lot of shit for their marketing practices, for the design flaws in their software and for their security issues, but their software development skills? Very few organisations on the planet can produce so much software that works in such challenging environments.