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Comment Re:Title (Score 1) 161

Yes, okay, I can see the point about noun vs. verb. I'm not sure that non-title capitalization would have helped, but now that you mention it, it is kind of a silly tradition.

I suppose this could have been cleared up by adding the word 'that', e.g. "Bolivia Demands that Assange Apologize". It's an assumed word in this particular context. Another option might have been "Bolivia Demands Apology from Assange" or some such. Really, though, this is semantics more than grammar.

Comment Re:Dumbasses. (Score 1) 441

Evidence of what you say: Around 1989 or so, the (conservative) Heritage Foundation proposes a mechanism for providing health care. A little over a decade later, (Republican) Mitt Romney successfully implements it in his home state while sitting as Governor. A few years later, (Democrat) Barrack Obama goes to implement it at a national level, and the Republican response is to do a 180, and try 54 times to shoot it down, cripple it, or otherwise turn it into a clusterfuck because they can't just let a Democrat succeed at anything.

Comment Re:C64 had a cassette drive (Score 1) 74

Actually, that was the point where you should hit Shift+Run/Stop, which would abort the tape load you might have inadvertently started.

Second thing to try was Run/Stop+Restore (and you had to hit Restore hard because it was designed to prevent accidental closure), to warm-reset the machine.

Then you restart.

. . . Unless, that is, you had one of the defective machines (there were, admittedly, a hell of a lot of them -- I went through 6 before I found one that worked worth a damn), the first step above should have gotten you out of that.

Comment Re:In UK you can go to prison for encryption (Score 2) 116

You need to use a deniable encryption system for this, then. Rubberhose comes immediately to mind, but it is no longer maintained.

Essentially, what it does is enable you to store several file systems in the same disk volume, which will have had its contents randomized in the formatting process. What blocks of the disk are used for each file system is not known until the key is provided. For that matter -- and this is the deniable part -- what file systems even exist is not knowable without having all of the keys.

So, they ask for a key, you give them one. They ask you for "the rest of the keys" you give them a few more, but there is no way to prove, one way or the other, that all of the keys have or have not been provided.

Comment Re:Poor persuasion (Score 3, Insightful) 489

Personally, I'd really rather have a competitive marketplace, where I could take it into my own hands and say, "If you won't provide me what I need, I will go to your competitors." In the current environment, they will just say, "What competitors?"

Since we don't have a competitive marketplace, we get regulation instead. This upsets some people. I am not one of them.

Comment Re:Double tassel ... (Score 3, Insightful) 216

And then they become very different things understood by different people in completely different ways.

Here's a perfect example:

a = a * 2

Now, getting past the substitute of * for X as an indicator of a multiplication operation, most CS-types will interpret this as a command to double the value of a while a math-type would instead view this as a statement of fact (within the scope of the problem) and infer from this (probably without even thinking about it) that a is zero because no other value satisfies the formula.

When I started playing with computers at an age of nine or ten, (this would have been an Apple ][ back in 1980), my Mom saw me key in a statement that said A = A + 1 and immediately objected, insisting that you could not do that . . . and she isn't even good at math.

So yes, I agree, it is a related, but different, kind of thinking, and should be a separate subject.

Comment Re:VPN? (Score 1) 124

You could do what I have done. I am in the US, and this costs me about USD 8-9 per month on average, and I don't know what hoops you may have to jump through, but this should work in theory:

Sigh up for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and get yourself an EC2 instance. Use the AMI for OpenVPN-AS. Configure it to use TCP/443, which will make your traffic look like any other HTTPS traffic.

On the billing details, (again, this is USD, not AUD), I spent about $100 to get a three-year reservation on a t1.micro instance to run this, which includes a permanent public IP address (they call that an Elastic IP). I then get billed for about $6/month (the 8-9 figure has the $100 amortized over three years), but keep in mind that this also includes some S3 usage on my part, so in practice, it could (and probably will) be less.

Also, the first year of one server, assuming it is a t1.micro running Linux with under 10 GB of disk, is free.

I use this to keep my traffic away from the prying eyes and through the nanny-proxy of the public WiFi that I use.

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