When I bought a glossy screen, I wasn't happy that matte was no longer available,
but now I definitely find the glossy one easier to read at in a lit environment
and I'm glad to have it.

Sure, there are mild reflections. All screens have reflections.
But the matte one is grey-to-white from the ambient light, no deep blacks. There's much less contrast.
No visible contrast at all if there's a bright window behind me.

The features I need to handle a screen full of text are:

        - Contrast
        - Minimum glare.

With the two screens I have, I found there's way more glare on the matte one than the glossy one, even though
the glossy one's glare is more specular.
That means in bright light, I can move my head to see things on the glossy screen, whereas on the matte screen
I can't see anything even if I move my head.

For people who want to read in bright light, you should be looking for its *transflective* behaviour.

You won't see that in the shop, you have to take it outside.
The LCD's maximum brightness, and therefore contrast, is puny compared with reflected sunlight,
so it's basically invisible. The transflectivity reflects sunlight pixel by pixel.

My (glossy) laptop is barely visible in medium sunlight. But, surprisingly, in brighter sunlight I can read detailed text
clearly because the pixels switch between non-mirror and mirror reflecting the sunlight. Same with my phone.
My (old, matte) laptop is completely invisible at any level of sunlight.

It could simply be that my glossy screen is newer though.
I haven't had the chance to try both surfaces with the same underlying LCD.

Tivo's EPG is vastly better than Sky+, which is amazing considering how old Tivo is compared with Sky+.

For example, Sky+'s EPG lets you search for a program by its first letter only (!)... then you have to spend 10 minutes paging (very slowly too) through the list to find the program you are looking for. It has a "series link" feature, but it forgets about a series you are following if there's a break, or if you miss an episode that could be recorded from a different or sister channel. So after a break in a series, you usually miss an episode or two before you realise it's started up again. And it only knows about the next 24 hours of programming, so you have to check every single day, can't schedule ahead.

Whereas Tivo pretty much make sense. If you subscribe to a show, it'll search all the channels continuously for that show, all the time, until you unsubscribe. You can see what it's planning weeks in advance. You can go away on a trip and arrange all your recordings for when you get back. You can search for shows by their name - you don't have to know the "genre".

Basically Tivo is usable by itself and has a good, common sense interface, which for the most part just works, whereas Sky+ pretty much requires you to use a separate PC browsing the net to actually find programs, find when they are on etc. and then enter the data.

I haven't seen the other PVRs in the UK to compare.

Not very wealthy, if you do it open source style and get a lot of people to join you and trade in blocs large enough to cover the cost of high speed trading access.

Instead of developing secret algorithms, develop the best you can (together) out in the open.

Collaborate. Build systems that let people try out their algorithmic ideas and other inputs, and (very importantly) other people see the outcome of those trials in real-time and react by copying, piggyback, avoiding, modifying.... so that the flock will tend towards those methods which seem to be consistently working best, as confirmed by actual money made/lost, not merely "analysts" peddling opinions and prices which give very little information.

You won't be able to outcompete anyone just by having a better algorithm, for long. Nobody involved will be able to beat each other by much, for long, nor beat those outside the open-algorithm system.

But if you have enough smart people and between you find a method for producing good algorithms, and you are trading in large enough numbers to get the necessary high speed trading access, there may still be profit to be made despite not having any secret advantage.

That's because the stock trading economy need not be a zero-sum game, because it does (potentially) provide some value to the overall economy (however small... ;-) due simply to the information it inputs, in the form of investment decisions directing money to where it is useful at making more "real" money in the overall real economy.

It might even be good for the real economy, who knows.

Well it's an idea anyway ;-)

Starting from home.cisco.com, I went to the Linksys support page, searched for ipv6, and got three mundane hits.

Support is minimal, but there is something as indicated here:

http://homecommunity.cisco.com/t5/Cable-and-DSL/IPv6-mentioned-in-AG310-release-notes-but-can-t-find-it/m-p/258373?comm_cc=HSus&comm_lang=en#M7927

Re: IPv6 mentioned in AG310 release notes, but can't find it?

05-07-2009 11:03 PM

I found the setting in the end. It wasn't on the security tab at all, it was on the setup tab under basic setup.

If anyone else is interested in getting 6to4 going on their router, this is what you do:

1. Go to Setup -> Basic Setup
2. Scroll down to IPv6 tunnel, near the bottom just before the time/NTP stuff
3. Set Tunnel Mode to "to relay server"
4. Into Remote/Server address, type 192.88.99.1 (for the local anycast 6to4 gateway, if you have a specific one you want to use, enter that instead)
5. Tick "enable now"
6. Save and wait for the modem to reboot

After rebooting, the modem assigned me an IPv6 address. For some reason I can't ping or traceroute IPv6 hosts, but I can access them in my browser (eg. ipv6.google.com).

It's interesting there is no *direct* IPv6 support, but you can run IPv6 on the internal network and the router will tunnel it for you.

In an age where it's difficult to be sure if you have committed a crime or not, why wouldn't you prefer to keep your personal music, photo, software, art, and inspired revolutionary poetry collection private?

Remember we're talking about a country that has convicted someone as a terrorist for the act of writing poetry.

Are you sure *your* hard drive doesn't contain any incriminating poetry or other writings?

What about your dodgy downloads of TV programs? What about those get-iplayer downloads that you aren't officially allowed to have? That VM image with Windows or MacOSX installed in it? The police probably don't care, but do you feel 100% confident that those copyright infringments will be ignored?

Personally I have no idea if the 1.3 million files in my home directory contain anything incriminating.
It's beyond my ability to remember what all of them are.

I'd rather not encourage the police to sift through them looking for something if they had a vendetta.

I'd happily give up my passphrase if I thought it would actually help them solve a murder or something (or for that matter to get me off the hook for one - then I'm confident they wouldn't care about the lesser things),
but that is quite different from them snooping around "looking for child porn".

After all, I have no idea what constitutes illegal porn in the eyes of the police.

Especially a 19 year old needs to be aware that people can be convicted and put on the sex offenders register - with severe long-term social and career consequences - if they have pictures of themselves, and pictures with their consenting partner of similar age. He may not remember if he does or not.

Heck, even intimate *text* emails / IMs could potentially be construed as pornographic or "grooming" if he's been chatting with someone similar to his own age.

Chance are nothing would come up (assuming he doesn't have anything meeting the police's threshold of concern), but I think it's understandable if he does not have confidence in the system.

No, it makes you a criminal if you use foo.bin as your key to encrypt your data and then refuse to produce foo.bin on demand.

If you just scrambled your disk contents with random bits, that wouldn't be a crime, but, as with all non-crimes, if the court doesn't believe you beyond reasonable doubt, then you'll be wrongly found guilty.

The crucial thing in that case will be if the court has reason to believe your disk isn't full of random bits, beyond reasonable doubt.

If your machine boots up and asks for your passphrase to decrypt /dev/mapper/encrypted-home, when you claim that partition is genuinely just random bits, your aren't likely to be believed - even if it's true.

So don't do that. If you really are write random bits to a partition that triggers a passphrase prompt when booting, at least disable the prompt first or do whatever else is needed to stop it looking like an encrypted partition.

Filling a partition with random bits is good practice before using it as an encrypted store, and good practice if you are about to dispose of the hardware, so this isn't a completely fallacious situation.

If you're an IT professional, then by all means learn about and understand IPv6.

But it's a net loss investing in the routers and firewalls to make your servers have externally visible IPv6 ports and so on, if *everyone* you connect to does not use IPv6. That is just adding potential security holes, because unused entry points are easily forgotten when other people are auditing/managing firewalls.

Personally I can have IPv6 connectivty any time I want. Both on my personal machines, and the internet-facing servers that I manage.

I have configured IPv6 at times. But then decided to take all of the IPv6 interfaces back down again.

They were administrative overhead, gaining me nothing but a little satisfaction, and to be honest
they weren't entirely easy to look after - at the server locations, they added substantially to firewall and policy-routing table maintenance.

Why maintain them? Nobody I connect to or do business with uses IPv6 *at all*.

I've never yet seen IPv6 used except to play with it. Not even on 3G - my fairly up to date smartphone (a Nokia N900) shows me the mobile interface is IPv4 only - and that was true for all the phones before it.

When even just *one* person I deal with asks me if I can do IPv6, or offers a service that I need on IPv6, then I'll bring them back up quickly and accept the administrative needs. So far, it hasn't happened.

There are a *lot* of old router models out there. Many people are using 5-10 year old equipment at home, because there's no reason to replace it - old home routers are faster than the cable/ADSL still, and 802.11B is still good enough wi-fi if you're only using it to browse web sites.

Even if it was made law, vendors couldn't possibly provide software updates to all of those routers - free or paid.

In many cases the people who worked on the router don't work at the company any more, the schematics are lost, the source code is lost, and the chances of finding the source code and known-good toolchains even just to replicate the last shipped firmware are slim. It's totally impractical.

On the other hand, adding IPv6 support for all *new* routers is quite reasonable, and could have been mandated - or agreed within the industry - any time in the last 10 years to get us ready. But it wasn't.

You don't know how many people suffered and died as a side-effect of the identity theft and messages purporting to be from friends, and neither does anyone else - it is practically impossible to evaluate. But in such large numbers of people affected, there will surely be some effect. So the comparison is meaningless.

Nor do you know the economic damages caused by reactions to the spam. It certainly does cause lost time and money - lots of it.
Shouldn't the cost it causes be reflected in the fine?

If I travelled the world and stole just $1 from every individual, but nobody died, do you think I should be fined only a small amount, because it wasn't as nasty as medical experimentation? Even though I stole more than $6bn altogether?

Slashdot and Facebook cause lost time and money too (in some ways; there are also difficult to measure economic benefits). We don't fine everything that sucks people's time - only when there is an associated criminal act - which there was in this particular spamming case.

If the accounting is sane, any tax break should just cancel out whatever tax they would have to pay on it.
I.e. no overall benefit to Facebook.
But who knows, the accounting might not be sane :-)

I wrote an OS kernel in assembly in 1989. I couldn't afford a C compiler, and didn't have an internet connection so hadn't heard of GNU and things like that.

Actually most of the commercial home computer kernels in the 1980s were written in assembly. Think AmigaOS and CP/M.

You missed the point.

Using the GP's scheme, you can produce any data you want, by supplying a "key" which happens to be the same size as your drive and is the XOR of your drive's encrypted image, and the data you wish to make it apparently reveal.

I agree that you probably won't have access to the encrypted image and probably won't have a backup of it (with the exact same encryption).

At first that appears to make the GP's principle of preparing the "reveal kittens" fake key in advance make sense.

But to do that, you have to continuously update your fake key in it's secret location each time you write to your encrypted disk, which is no less effort than simply copying all writes elsewhere - except it gives a slight hint of plausible deniability in that there are two different things, and each serves as a "reveal kittens" fake key for the other.

XOR is too simple of course, but there will be other schemes which bear greater resemblance to real encryption and have the same properties.

It's not convincing, because you can generate that fake key with any kind of encrypted storage after the police have imaged your encrypted drive.

After they ask for a key, you fetch kitten pictures from the internet, and xor that with the drive image they have copied, and give them the result. They apply it using your suggested decryption algorithm - xor - and kitten pictures appear.

But it's too easy: anyone can do that, no matter what encryption scheme they've been using prior to the police raid, provided the person still has a copy of their encrypted drive.

So the police won't be convinced.

Actually sham acupuncture is used by some conventional Western-style doctors.... They can train in it over a single weekend, and some of them do remove the woo-factor.

Those who dispense with the Chinese theories say the needles block pain carrying nerves or stimulate release of hormones... but they don't really know any better than the Chinese what's going on. It's just a more acceptable explanation.

It's blindingly obvious you didn't read the links to controlled clinical studies showing efficacy in my other reply on this thread, here.

what it means for a treatment to "work"

No, I am not confused. I simply disagree with you. In the extreme, a mere placebo can save a life. I name that working; you do not. There is no point arguing further.

Another commenter put it very well: Real honesty would involve telling patients not only which treatments are more effective than placebo, but how effective they are absolutely.

But that's a side point, because there are controlled, clinical studies showing acupuncture to be more effective than placebo for some things. Feel free to disagree, or to argue that the studies are of poor quality, or not what they say they are, but don't make yourself look ignorant by denying that they exist at all.

actually effect the course of a disease or are better at relieving symptoms. In other words, using the scientific method to separate the real from the imaginary

I'm quite familiar with the scientific method, thank you. I will readily agree with any proposition that the methodology used to study this area is often of low quality and difficult to take seriously.