Posts by Alan Brown

Re: Massive facepalm

See my other posting. The RSPCA is a 'de facto' investigator and regulator of animal abuse issues in England at the very least, if not 'de jure'

Re: Size matters. @Martin 47

"I quite like Win7 but enormous and unusable on my older kit."

No worse than XP Sp3 in my experience - it got slimmed down mightily from Vista in order to fit onto Netbooks (and simultaneously torpedoed the good ship "upgrade your PC every 18 months to cope with bloatware")

Re: Left hand, meet right hand @shawnfromnh

"Linux today is faster to install to install than XP"

The main objection I meet is "But But BUT it won't run MS Office"

"And a good thing too", is my response.

Any amount of telling people that you can read and save MS office format MOSTLY(*) goes straight over their head (mainly because they're clutchng at straws for objections).

(*)MOSTLY: because powerpoint handling on any of the MS office alternatives is still atrocious. Fix that and you'd kill virtually all remaining objections to linux on the office desktop.

Re: Now i've installed Mint xfce

"Well the ONLY thing that really messes it up is disconnecting NFS mounted drives, that DOES send the whole system into a total guru meditation as the file browser tries to make sense of things."

You need to learn about "umount -l"

Re: TOR?

"Also this sets a scary precedent when any old claimant can get a website blocked with a SEVERE lack of any kind of technical understanding."

This has been the case for a long time. In some cases the plantiffs know full well that they're spouting bullshit and relying on pulling the wool over the judge's eyes.

Virtually all civil litigation is about who's got deeper pockets first and who's right/wrong second.

Re: Blocking isn't easy

"How do you think they are apply traffic shaping ?"

In most cases, anything that's not a "well known service" port is getting whacked.

That doesn't take DPI - and in the cases where DPI is used if they don't recognise the content then it gets whacked anyway.

Re: Basic tort law ?

You may be correct about the details of the contracts, however GETTING them to cough up what's in their filters is virtually impossible.

"I can also easily imagine that this is quite possibly going to cost the FAPL quite a few pennies in out of court libel settlements, too."

What's put forward in court can't be used as the basis of a libel claim.

What's said OUTSIDE of the court by FAPL is fair game though.

Re: And the Premier League would rather it continued

Does the UK allow for class action suits?

If so, this could get rather interesting - with the plaintiffs being the damaged parties and FAPL being the defendant

Re: Ha ha ha

Any company with offices in the USA is obliged under the PATRIOT act to hand over data no matter where it is in the world.

Very nice, Centurion. You even managed to stay stony-faced.

Re: Say what you want about the EU...

Uh huh.

The EU and UK have "at will" employment. They just dress it all up as "contracting" to keep everyone happy.

People who work on BT lines for Openreach, who are not salaried BT staff should take note.

Re: Yeah, good luck.

"Getting them out of their cars is like getting them to give up their guns — they just won't do it."

So build the slightly larger one which takes 3 cars and passengers.

The most annoying thing about public transport (or flying) is having to arrange wheels at the other end anwyay.

Make it large enough to hold 18-wheelers and you have a ready market, freighters and truckers will happily piggyback if it's cheaper and faster.

Comms isn't as hard as you think

Thanks to skeleton slot antennas. They're widely usedon aircraft and have zero surface profile.

"As soon as you take away judicial oversight of interception, you pave the way for 1984, where the thought police are abound.."

Given the state of much critical US infrastructure (eg, bridges), and bureaucracy for its own sake, the scenario which springs to mind is more like Brazil than 1984.

"This can, depending on application, also be considered a considerable advantage!"

Yup - and interference to/from neighbours on 2.4GHz can be migitated by dialling the tx power downward, but noone will ever think of that unless nudged (It's something that equipment should do by itself, like cellular and tetra systems do)

Re: Not passing through walls is the major advantage of 5GHz

WiFi doesn't pass through (solid or foil backed) walls.

It does pass easily through doorways, wood (most doors), plasterboard, and windows, and it's more easily refracted as it does so, which is why you see so many neighbours. (MIMO helps a LOT with interference issues)

Like A Known Coward, I don't see 5GHz through brick walls on the same floor (the red colour is iron oxide....), however it passes easily through the floor and ceiling.

When studying microwave propagation 25 years ago, I never dreamed that I'd be applying those principles to calculate how useable a signal would be within 30 metres of the source - or how much intereference is tolerable from neighbouring sources.

The 2.45GHz band is hopelessly overcrowded, yet there's still a lot of equipment being sold which doesn't do 5GHz (most of it is regarded as "enterprise" rather than "consumer") and it doesn't help that there are holes and restrictions on 5GHz use outdoors (only about 40% of 5GHz channels are legal to use in Europe and half of those are heavily restricted in case they interfere with weather and airport radar).

Opening up all channels for indoor use and CLEARLY documenting outdoor restrictions would go a long way towards making things easier (There are a bunch of illegal external 5GHz installations close to me, within 15km of Gatwick and RIGHT on the western approach path)

Re: can't wait to see the litigation start

It shouldn't be any surprise that the man who started pushing this madness while the chair of ICANN is an Intellectual Property lawyer and left ICANN to go work for a registrar.

Re: Best 'pay attention when driving advert' should be....

" Best 'pay attention when driving advert' should be....

Shot from a GoPro or similar 50/60hz recording to give it that home-video feel.

Same basic scenario each time - driver in town/on motorway/wheverer."

New Zealand ran a bunch of adverts like this in the 1980s-early 90s. They were sickening and quite effective.

By the end of the 1990s they were running hitech adverts featuring matrix style slo-mo swoops - and those had almost no impact whatsoever.

Re: Master Craftsman

"They don't get to choose the subject matter either. "

Although they did in this case.

Carriers have a vested interest in their customers remaining customers. A dead or jailed one stops payments.

Re: A very moving video that all drivers should see

"Most of us would be looking for revenge,"

In the USA, most certainly. That's why the american justice system is fixated on retribution rather than reconciliation.

Re: special privileges

She could try raising complaints under section 127 of the telecommunications act - and if they're ignored a letter to the local chief constable asking for the exact reasons they're being ignored often works wonders.

Re: @Iglethal - Kinda pointless if you live in a safe constituency, though.

"When you only get to put one X on a piece of paper, there is insufficient granularity to determine what the people *really* want (and, of course, that's the way the two big political parties like it...)"

Indeed. New Zealand only went to German-style MMP from Westminster-style FPP because the public demand for a referendum was so high they couldn't ignore it - and the government + opposition + media + industrialists did everything they could to obstruct it, including offering 5 oher PR systems and pushing the hell out of them whilst ignoring MMP or calling it the work of the devil.

The results after 20 years is that it works better than FPP, but coalition partners can be a real bitch to deal with.

20 years on, after a second referendum on whether to keep or change mmp (which overwhemingly endorsed MMP plus a couple of tweaks to prevent list MPs crossing the floor or breaking away as independents whilst keeping their seats and thereby becoming kingmakers), the government + opposition + media + industrialists decreed that the results while interesting were not binding.

It's worth bearing in mind Heinlein's theory that it's best to have the govt and opposition all warring amogst themselves, so that the rest of the world can get on with things - and that the most dangerous time is when a govt has enough majority at all levels to ram everything through that it wants to do.