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Comment Re:Alll's Well that ended well. (Score 1) 420

20% of my bandwidth is made available to anyone who wants to use it through an open wireless connection. I do this because it doesn't cost me any extra money, and at the time I installed the equipment there were no free access hotspots in our area.

I think I'd be pissed though if some unconnected third party started charging people to access it, which is effectively what Inner Fence has done - found a way to make money from a third party's free service.

Comment Re:Good reason to get shut (Score 1) 922

I don't regard it as immoral, just making the point that our wealth does affect/impact the poverty of the world's poorer peoples. While I agree with this

To think that keeping the poor poor is in the best interests of the rich is to succumb to extremely short-term thinking

it is unfortunately true that short term thinking is more the norm than we realise. For companies the important thing is year on year dividend to shareholders, while long term plans have to be made to ensure this happens, focus is short term - next year's AGM

I cite DSG because they are just a retailer, so their business model depends on a relatively large gap between the wages of the manufacturing country and that of the end customer

Anyway, as for (im)morality, I wasn't making that judgement, merely make the point to the previous poster that to suggest that the wealthy's affluence, and what they do to maintain it, doesn't in turn directly affect the affluence of the poor is nonsense

Comment Re:Good reason to get shut (Score 1) 922

It's disproportionate and ineffective.

Not only that, it's criminal. Or at least the Nuremburg war crime tribunals would have us believe so, since the charges of atrocities against civilians in occupied France cited many instances of the Nazi's destroying whole streets or villages in response to the actions of one "terrorist", apparently this was a "crime against humanity"

But c'mon, be realistic, nothing is going to change over there as long as the US is incapable of levelling any kind of criticism under any circumstance. It's an unfortunate truth that if the Israeli army command got up one morning and decided it was going to put every Arab child under 12 through a garden waste shredder alive and broadcast it on national TV then the US administration would still be silent. We've watched TV pictures of them shooting at an unarmed child on a rooftop, seen them machine gun a BBC cameraman at point blank range live on CNN, watched them bomb the UN, rake hospitals with machine gun fire and said/done nothing.

You are looking for some kind of morality, some universal right/wrong philosophy that governs the actions of the Western military powers, and there just isn't one. Currently the decision has been made for whichever reason you care to believe that whatever they want to do they can get on with it, and until the White House changes its mind nothing will change.

If you want to change the world, begin with something you can realistically impact - Iraq, Afghanistan, 3rd World debt.................

Comment Re:Good reason to get shut (Score 1) 922

Your wealth does not cause my poverty.

Actually, that a little over-simplistic, and fails to take into account the impact wealth has on those who surround you. In many cases our wealth is the direct cause of their poverty, insomuch as the actions we have taken to secure the continuance of our wealth have removed their opportunity to develop and progress to our level

Poverty outside the Western hemisphere is vital in maintaining our wealth. If everyone on the planet had the same standard of living, and wages, as the average American, the cost of the raw materials we import would cripple us.

How, for instance, could companies like DSG - the UK's largest electrical goods retailer, make a profit without cheap far Eastern labour, and it's only cheap because they're poor.

Comment Re:what (Score 1) 1032

You plug the entry points the vermin are using. For some reason they dislike the feel of the stuff and shy away from it.

It's effective when you're running cables in closed ducts, but in my experience you'll be plugging entry points forever, and always be a dozen or so holes behind the rats.

Cut off the food supply, spend more on extermination, these are the only long term effective solutions

Comment Re:Why? (Score 1, Informative) 154

The key to ANPR success in the UK, and why it would be much more difficult to achieve in the US, is contrast.

The typeface, size, letter spacing, text and background colours are rigidly defined in law. Front only black on white is permitted, rear only black on yellow.

OCR is so much easier when you don't have to read purple text on a blue background, or yellow text on a white one

Comment Re:Why? (Score 1, Informative) 154

You can buy blank cards with mag strips on the back for making key cards for mag strip operated door locks.

There's a jig available for the Epson printer CD caddy for doing the credit card sized mini-cd. I use an R200, and the jig hold the CD by its edge, doesn't use the hole in the middle, so doesn't matter of there isn't one

You'd be surprised just how convincing the output from this combination can be.

If you need one with a chip embedded, for visual effect, then there are may suppliers of printable smart cards out there. I got some lovely unprinted Atmega 163's off eBay for playing around with cable TV - they worked a treat for this purpose too.

Comment Re:So true....Not "all Korea" (Score 0) 386

LMAO

That would be the America where everyone of every race and origin is treated with love and acceptance, where there has never been any kind of discrimination of any kind, and where migrant workers are loved like long lost brothers and sisters. That would be the America populated by people who know about the world beyond its borders, which doesn't have "World" series' for all kind of sports that exist only within its own borders, that doesn't imprison people without trial, that doesn't torture prisoners of war, that obeys the Geneva conventions, that doesn't have the highest per capita murder rate in the Western world, the highest incidence of narcotic abuse in the Western world, and the highest per capita prison population in the world.

Do please tell me where this America is, me & my Korean and Arab friends would like to visit for a vacation.

Comment Re:The ribbon (Score 0) 367

I couldn't agree more

The ribbon is such a bug bear to users here that I routinely remove Office 2007 from new PC's bought with it bundled and replace it with 2003. Users hate it, they feel they haven't got the time at work to be learning a new user interface when they could (and should) be just doing the work

Cool, hip and trendiness have no place in business, and especially not in a time of global recession where we need above all to be maximising productivity. What we need is a sensible Microsoft producing evolving series' of software in a predictable and incredibly boring manner. I want each new version of Office to be the same, but better. If it's completely different from the user's perspective, as Office 2007 is, then it's really not Office any more, it's something else, and if I wanted something else, I wouldn't have been using Office all these years.

Comment Re:Googles playbook (Score 0) 367

Isn't this trust issue the core reason why, despite the hype, the cloud concept is unlikely to succeed?

We're a UK company, with big US competitors, much bigger than us, and as the recession bites I can envisage trade and industry departments of all countries wondering what use they could make of anti-terror legislation to gather information which would help their own domestic companies. It's no great leap of the imagination to see a situation where my bids and costings for my primary customers leave Google's servers and end up in the hands of my US competitors.

It's not just a US problem, but primarily the cloud will be controlled by US companies such as Google, and for those of us outside the US that has to be a worry, or at the very least inject a note of caution.

I suppose all good sysadmins have a degree of paranoia, but the cloud is all about trust, and I just can't see why anyone would.

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