Re: So how long...

If I believed in conspiracy theory and shills I'd wonder just hw much big advertising is paying, whenever copyright and creators rights are mentioned, people to post about what a wonderful favour big advertising is doing creators by ripping off their content for free...

Since when has the WWF been a group of Extremists?

Its quite a new development for WWF I think, but I haven't been paying attention. But it happens to a lot of these sorts of organisations. The really keen people tend to be the ones on the end of the bell curve, and they end up running things because they're the ones who put most commitment in.

Provided you share their world view the logic that "its more important to campaign to stop things going wrong than to act to fix things that have gone wrong" is impeccable. However by and large they still get the money in from people who think they are still shelling out to fix things, and don't share the world view, and that to my mind is somewhat dishonest.

See also...

- RSPCA

- RSPB

- National trust (less far along)

- OXFAM

add others to taste and personal bias....

Re: Had to break suddenly just the other day

Using break for brake appears to be a 19thC usage. If you look at, say, 19thC railway accident reports they use the ea spelling.

Re: Darwin rules

That's all very well, but its rather hard on the innocent driver who has to go through life with the image of the gene pool no-contributor bouncing off their vehicle...

Re: recycle

I dunno, "up there" is an awfully big place isn't it? What's the area (never mind volume" of say the geosynchronous orbit space compared to the area of the planet? Can't be bothered to so the sums, but I suspect its a great deal of, well, space to go hunting the junk in. Bigger project than roaming the streets with the nag crying "any old iron"...

Signatures/ It doesn't fix the basic problem..

Banks haven't checked signatures in decades. It must be thirty years ago that a kid came into our shop with the cheque from his father to buy a new motorcycle (so reasonably serious money). We didn''t ask for a card: what point. Instead we insisted on waiting for it to clear, which it did . Two months later teh aggrieved father came to see us. The kid had stolen the cheque (messy divorce going on). The signature the kid had put on the card bore not the slightest resemblance to the father's but the bank had cleared it anyway.

But isn't that just an arrgument

against the essential dumbness of having a pair of mains transformers in every damn little unit? You wouldn't do that with a blade, so WTF do we do it with servers. To me an optional replacement for the PSU in the server units that's just a simple minimal distrubition board which takes a feed from a a triply redundant single PSU in each rack.

Re: Unfortunately, the UK courts are now in a bind

Ultimately the end can justify the means. Look at how many Germans we killed to stop Hitler. In real life its a question of least worst on balance. Turn it around... Can the means justify the ends?

Re: Ughh... Still shudder when I recall those days

I dunno, do you really understand the advantages of writing good readable source until you have spent a day trying to decipher something truly horrible? You can write decent structured code in Basic., its just that the temptation is not to, and like a number of temptations, if you give intoit you or someone else may suffer horribly in the future. Good lesson for life there really...

Re: Unfortunately, the UK courts are now in a bind

unlawfully or illegally obtained evidence... is yet evidence. If the evidence exists why shouldn't it be used. The law isn't supposed to be a competition between users, its supposed to find out the truth. If illegally obtained evidence helps to find out the truth that's fine by me. Would it be OK if an innocent man went to gaol because illegally obtained evidence that proved his innocence was refused?

On the other hand the person who broke the law to get the evidence in question should still face the law.

Re: <-- See Icon

It occurs to me that they might have a large database of less than anonymous people that they are monitoring through more sophisticated means they don't wish to make public, and they just wait until one of them makes a mistake like this to grab them with some evidence they are happy to make public in the law courts.

@just good at refining??

In many ways that's the difficult bit. As exemplified by how far the personal computer industry (small capitals,as a whole) still has to go in achieving devices that are friendly and reliable for anyone to use. It depresses me how poor the products of the industry I work in still are...

Re: Wide of the mark?

Its often easier to rip off the dishonest than the honest - witness the good old scam of pretending fake goods are stolen and that's why the price is so low.

mediocre sequels/not the same as being terrible

Arguably isn't that worse? A terrible film per se just disappears into the depths of the subconscious unless something stirs it up. But a dreadful sequel (or remake) to a much loved original isn't just bad in itself, it also detracts from the memeory of the original, polluting what was otherwise a valued experience...

Re: Sorry ...

Got to be said the Poms are a fine example there - get the North Sea Oil and gas out of the ocean as fast as you can, spend all the money on votes (Social Security) and then wonder why the economy is completely ****** when the oil starts running out...

Re: Assuming the accuracy of the 'facts' mentioned

After all if the source of the money is suitably disguised Greenpeace might not even be aware its CIA money... The Russians managed the same trick often enough in cold war days, you'd like to think the CIA would be equally capable...

@occupants of the Channel islands being rich enough

If you look beyond the fat cat incomers at the ordinary working people then no, they are not especially well off. Rather the reverse. And no doubt a good number of jobs will be disappearing with the warehouses, and last time I was involved with the Islands jobs were not that plentiful. So its easy to figure why the States wanted to encourage new jobs on the Islansds, especially low value jobs for the locals. Whether the jobs did go to the locals or to dubious immigrant labour mght be another matter of course, I have no idea.

Re: Just as well I don't use Online Banking

The reason why I don't use on line banking is that I read the terms and conditions and thought "stuff that". Almost all the responsibility to prove fraud has been offloaded to the customer. Eeasier to wander down to the bank occasionally and, incidentally, have one more person in a local job and paying a share of my council tax.

> Just putting up a sign saying "do not enter" is not security

Well, yes it is. Because it deliniates the point at which you become one of the bad guys. Anyone who goes past that sign has crossed the line at which they become of concern to the security infrastructure. Of course in almost all cases a greater level of security is required, but ultimately you almost certainly can't keep a bad guy with sufficient resources* out, so its a question of achieving an appropriate balance. Anyone who believes in absolute security is rather charmingly naive.

-----------------------

*

"You and whose army?"

"My army. This one, with the guns, and tanks, and helicopters, and missiles, and nuclear submarines"

"Oh, that army. In that case I can't stop you from gaining physical access to the server."

Re: Re: Re: Re: I sort of agree, but... @Jason

No, of course an unlocked door isn't an open invitation. An Open invitation is where there's a bloody great sign saying "please come in". The only way an open wifi would be an open invitation would be if it said so in the damn network name.

Some of you people really badly need to go to ethics classes...

Re: @JimC

To me that could be rephrased as "if you can't make the situation better then do something that makes it worse rather than do nothing at all"

the anonymous thing of "if you don't do what we want we will make things so unpleasant for you that, well, you'd just better do what we want" is of course not in any way new. You could regard it as a kind of digital force-feeding of castor oil... perhaps a branch could take action against network rail and get them to make the trains run on time?

[cue downvotes. However if you're not getting a healthy number of downvotes you're merely submitting to groupthink]