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Comment Re:De Facto Political Prisoner (Score 3, Informative) 191

Because, as I'm sure you're aware, Mr. Assange is not on British soil.

He is on British soil. Britain, like most (all?) countries in the world, doesn't consider embassy buildings to be the soil of the embassy's sending country.

For countries that have their embassy in the UK, them asserting that the embassy is their own soil doesn't have any effect. Sweden still needs to deport Assange from the UK as that is where he is as far as the UK is concerned. The Swedes could start extradition proceedings with Ecuador if they wanted but the UK would arrest him when he left the embassy and the extradition from Equador would have no effect. The UK doesn't need to extradite him from Equador either. They just need Equador to give him up to UK authorities.

The slightly more interesting case might be a UK embassy on the soil of a country who does say that embassies are the soil of the sending country. Because there are probably a few cases where it could matter - e.g. accident insurance that applies only in the UK - i.e. not for travel. If you fell and broke your leg in a UK embassy somewhere else in the world could you claim? The UK courts would probably say no even if the foreign country said "actually that building is in the UK".

Comment Re:So - the fact that others are doing it makes it (Score 1) 312

As long as a company is obeying the law and not hurting anyone, they are legally and morally in the right.

I would argue that in a vertically integrated company, charging "costs" to parent companies over and above what an open market would bear might be legal but isn't morally right.

The problem for the law is how to determine what these open market costs should be. When a patent is licenced to a (true) independent company it would (presumably) be a fair cost for internal use too at the same price. But when a patent isn't available for licence?

Perhaps that's what the law could do - IP (or other internal costs that cannot be priced on the open market) must be made available to all at the same price being billed internally. If others take them up at that price then it's a fair price, otherwise the price is deemed to be zero for internal costs/profit movement.

Comment Re:Tabs vs Spaces (Score 1) 428

YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG!!!

Undoubtedly. By default I use spaces always. In my book, tabs are for tabulating. You set your tab stops. Input your data with tab separators and have it format correctly - a la latex.

Ironically, were I to want to use a mixture of tabs and spaces, I'd use spaces for indent and tabs for alignment - for example a single tabstop at column 55 would make sense for comments along the RH side of the code.

Comment Re:Tabs vs Spaces (Score 2) 428

If you avoid spaces and use only tabs, OTOH, the code formatting will look correct on any editor with any tab setting.

So how many tabs should you use here so that it lines up with the commands below?

cat *.c
cat -n *.c
grep int *.c

struct S {
[tab]int [tab][tab][tab][tab] x;[tab][tab]/* x coord */
[tab]int [tab][tab][tab][tab] y;[tab][tab]/* y coord */
[tab]unsigned long long [tab] hash; [tab] /* hash of object stored at x,y */
};

Comment Re:Do it like Linux (Score 1) 516

I don't use windows much at all. However, any of those beyond the win95 I couldn't use at all because they're out of focus. (Perhaps this can be turned off?)

The win7 one in particular is so painful for me to look at that even in a few seconds my eyes start feeling uncomfortable and I can feel the strain of trying to correct the focus.

Comment Re:Greek Myths (Score 1) 253

Ironically, Greece had a balanced budget in 2014. Germany did not. Yes, this is true if you compare apples to oranges.

Greece had a small budget surplus if you exclude debt repayments and one off payments such as bank bailouts. Overall it's budget deficit was around 13% (which meant that Greece was no longer in last place with Slovenia something around 15%)

18 European countries kept their deficit within the 3% threshold. Luxembourg posted a small surplus while Germany[1] was balanced.

https://euobserver.com/news/12...

To Greece's credit, balancing the budget excluding debt repayments and one off items was achieved around a year ahead of the agreed austerity plan.

[1] To reconcile this with your claim I can only assume that Germany was very slightly negative. Small enough that most people call it balanced.

Comment Re:well (Score 5, Informative) 418

There is no error correction on audio CD.

Yes there is. It uses a dual interleave Reed-Solomon code together with 8-14 modulation and three joining bits.

192 data bits are encoded in 588 bits on the CD.

Those 588 bits comprise:
24 bits sync word plus 3 merge bits. (27 bits)
33 EFM words of data of 14 bits plus 3 merge bits per word (561 bits)

The 33 bytes of data are:
24 bytes of audio (12x16 bit samples)
8 bytes of parity.
1 byte (8 bits) of subcode information.

The merge bits allow the min/max separation of 1s to be maintained between EFM codewords and also allow the data to be DC free

Comment Re:SIP Replacement? (Score 1) 282

why would providers go from IPv4 to IPv6 when soon there will be a shortage of numbers

They'll drag their feet but, eventually, there will be services that people want to use that are only available via IPv6 and then there will be little choice. (Although they'll try to proxy[1] popular IPv6 sites first)

[1] fake 10.x.x.x dns records that they serve to their customers and then forward the traffic over IPv6

Comment Re:Jurors (Score 5, Interesting) 303

It's very hard to explain "this shit" to people when there's someone else equally knowledgeable as you determined to explain why your explanation is wrong.

Asymmetric encryption. Do you explain P vs NP, why NP-Complete is almost certainly not in P but the problems that asymmetric encryption are built on aren't known to be either NP-Complete or P.

NP is a decision problem - but encryption isn't a yes/no problem. How can problems that only have yes/no answers be used to encrypt?

Muddy the water some more - PRIMES is in P. Do you really want to have to explain the difference between constructive and existential proofs while someone is interrupting every time you say anything that isn't 100% accurate.

You've only got to look at the climate change "debate" to see this effect in force. Climate scientists are playing a game of whack-a-mole and the general public cannot tell which side to believe. There are always questions and doubts that can be raised - the mark of a good scientist is asking the questions for which the answer is interesting. The mark of a good defense attorney is raising questions for which cast doubt on the reliability of the witness. The role of the judge is to make sure that the questions that the lawyer asks is relevant to the case - and that's where it gets hard when you've got two experts in their field debating something and one (or both) has an agenda.

Comment Re:It's just wrong (Score 1) 335

When you already have a defined program (and machine in this case) in front of you for review, then you can determine whether or not it will halt

except when you cant

For any computer program with a finite number of states (finite memory) you can determine whether it halts by running it long enough that it must be looping.

For a computer with 16384 states (An 8 state turing machine with an 8 position binary tape. 8 states * 8 positions * 2^8 values that can be on the tape) you can tell if any arbitrary program terminates by running it for 16385 steps. Any program that doesn't terminate in 16385 steps will run forever.

Comment Re:quick question (Score 1) 212

Web Browsers DID used to accept self-signed certificates (and certificates signed without a known CA - or cert-chain.) People just clicked through and accepted them willy-nilly. That was a poor security model.

The poor security model was browsers asking for confirmation for self signed certificates.

What browsers should have done is:

self signed certificates or unknown CA - how the "unencrypted web" works today.
No encryption at all - popup "are you sure you want to connect"
Signed certificate - tick (check) mark (instead of padlock) to show that the site is verified.

Now that browers are hiding the "http/https" bit from most people anyway it makes even less sense to treat self signed certificates as less safe/require more warning than a normal http connection.

Comment Re:symbols, caps, numbers (Score 1) 549

They ask for e.g. first, third and fifth characters of a password that must be between eight and twelve alphanumeric characters, and the dropdowns to make the selection are lower case only.

This means they're storing the password unhashed, at best locally encrypted but decrypted to check the user login.

While I suspect that this is true, I don't think it has to be true.

Initialization:
Step 1 - user choses password.

Step 2 - generate hash in normal way and store it.

Step 3 - generate error correcting check digits such that the password can be recovered from any three characters in known positions. (any three characters in known positions must be both necessary and sufficient - designing such an ECC is left as an exercise)

Step 4 - store the check digits but throw away the password.

Login:
Step 1 - user enters three characters

Step 2 - error correct the password
e.g. __p_pp__+CCCCC -> PPpPppPP

Step 3 - hash the corrected password and test against stored hash.

Obviously this isn't very secure - it's susceptible to a brute force attack that only requires guessing (any) three digits correctly once an attacker has gained access to the hash and the check digits.

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