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Comment: Re:My answer (Score 1) 525

by awol (#43327435) Attached to: Fighting TSA Harassment of Disabled Travelers

regarding your experience with immigration controls, my theory is that the more strict the immigration check point the easier it is to exist in that country illegally. For example, Switzerland, you can't rent a video without the right government papers; and at these checkpoints, they look at your passport and if it looks like it might be one, they let you in. Whereas in the uk or usa, once you're in you could live there forever, so very suspicious checkpoints there. as for the guns and body armor, well that's the Americans for you :-)

Comment: Re:Bit** please (Score 1) 255

by awol (#43258033) Attached to: Adobe To Australians: Fly To US For Cheaper Software

Whilst I accept that the car thing is true. One needs to be careful about just how "the same" these cars actually are. I discovered that there are often some very subtle difference between exactly the same model of car in two different markets. Not just equipment levels, but engineered elements as well. The one example that sticks in my mind was a Mazda 2 or Corolla or something where there was an entire cross member at the rear of the chassis (to the extent that there is even a chassis in these cars) that was just not included in the cars exported into some market. this had implications for their "safety rating" and the cost of repair for 0kph accidents where the cross member would protect the rest of the chassis from requiring repair in such impacts. So the line price of the car was 5% less but a tiny bingle was many times more expensive to repair. Likewise airbags etc are very rapidly dropped out of cars to hit a target price in a given market

Comment: Re:The funding model for I.T. is completely wrong (Score 1) 960

by awol (#38183944) Attached to: Why Everyone Hates the IT Department

Yeah, this is a great idea because we all know how a company mandated monopoly supplier has such a great track record of providing cost effective services!!!

The real reason I Hated our IT people was that when I asked for something to help me meet my clients needs. I would be told "can't be done". Half a day of my own research later and I would posit a solution that was acceptable. That's not my fucking job it's theirs. And then they charge me criminal amounts of money for their "services". Morons!

Comment: Re:Whitelisting, not blacklisting damnit... (Score 2) 101

by awol (#34904416) Attached to: EC Tests Show Windows Vista Is Above Average &mdash; At Blocking Content


I don't want my kids to be afraid to surf anywhere, but by the same token, I want to know where they are going, but then again I can imagine that there are things they might want to research that they don't want me to know about. So my regime at the moment is... everything will be logged through the access proxy installed at our home. Except for periods of time where they can go and look at anything they want, but during these times, they must be supervised by an adult that we trust, of which we know enough that are sufficiently broad minded that I know there is nothing they couldn't go surfing for if they wanted to.

In particular I am thinking sites about sexuality, drugs, medical issues or other controversial topics that theor parents could never understand.... :-)

If this goes well, they will be allowed to surf unsupervised and unlogged as they get older.

Some problems do not require technical solutions, or rather do not require gatekeepers but perhaps better chaperones.

Comment: It all depends on the law (Score 1) 1219

by awol (#34729132) Attached to: 'No Refusal' DUI Checkpoints Coming To Florida?

Here the offence for driving whilst influenced by alcohol has been revised to be "Prescribed Concentration of Alcohol" which in the jurisdiction is 0.05 for normal drivers, 0.0 for provisionally licenced drivers (recently licenced ones) and variously for other categories of drivers like Taxis and Trucks.

As a result the offence is not a subjective one about onces capacities to drive but rather just the amount of alcohol in your blood.

As a consequence, the application of "Random Breath Tests" or RBT is a fundamental part of driving. The police require no warrant to randomly sample the driving populace for testing their breath for the presence of alcohol. A result in excess of the PCA means a test at a more accurate machine and subsequently a blood test if a driver refuses the breath test.

As a driver, my privacy is not invaded, I am not "targeted by the state" but rather a part of the duties attached to my _licence_ to operate a motor vehicle is the requirement to drive with less than the PCA in my blood. End of story.

You USA folk need to get clear on the distinction between rights and duties, one cannot have one without the other.


UK Gov't Wants To Block Internet Porn By Default 642

Posted by timothy
from the get-naked-for-the-cctv-instead dept.

Comment: Re:iPhone didn't have cut-and-paste either.. (Score 1, Insightful) 319

by awol (#32634446) Attached to: Windows Phone 7 Lacks Copy-and-Paste

My cynical side says that it's because neither want you to be able to "extract" content from the things you use your phone for and rather than design the feature thoroughly to encompass uncopyable elements they just went for the zero case.

To be fair, man problems in software come down to the zero, one or many case in terms of design and in the case of copy and paste, I can imagine that the full implementation of what they want copy to be is very complicated. Simpler just to make it always impossible to copy rather than to decide when it is right and wrong.

It's this kind of thing that just shits me about digital restricitons.

Comment: Re:If only. (Score 1) 468

by awol (#32490238) Attached to: The Men Who Stare At Airline Passengers, Coming To the UK

Have all the other passengers on the plane vet each passenger. All the passengers get into the departure lounge, each gets a handset/chair with a red/green button as each passenger is called, all other passengers are entitled to vote red or green. If you get a majority of red you ain't on the plane. Sorry.

Comment: Re:What's the x-bar (Score 1) 111

by awol (#32490196) Attached to: World Cup Forecasting Challenge For Quants

Naah, the correct punishment is for the offender to be offered the oppurtunity to repent their acting or else the offending team is actually allowed to hurt them as much as they are acting. I reckon diving would be out of the game in a minute. Particularly if teams started picking a "specialty" player who was say 2 metres tall and 125kg with a side line in debt collecting.

Comment: Associative Arrays indexed by a Freakin' Image (Score 1) 154

by awol (#30860132) Attached to: MIT Offers Picture-Centric Programming To the Masses With Sikuli




I have a couple of itches of my own that I reckon I could scratch with this, for example I have a macbook that I sometimes attach to an external display. Sometimes the external is on the left of my laptop, sometimes the right, sometimes directly above it would be cool to have a script that allowed me to just click an icon to arrange the displays appropriately. Sikuli is close. I am about to go off and see if that will work.

I mean they have associative arrays indexed by a freaking picture. That is simply, well, paradigm shifting. I am less concerned about the actual efficacy of Sikuli than I am about the ability to hook applications together through their GUI. I am thinking about something like "GUI pipes" which is something I have been thinking about for some time. Mark III of this stuff could be amazing.

I honestly think this project is potentially awesome, in the olden days, before the net was quite so pervasive we used to talk about using the RussTerm, which was basically getting our guy on the ground in a foreigh country (Russell) to type stuff on the machine he was looking at whilst we talked him through it over the phone, mostly because we could not automate the stuff we wanted to do. This would address many of the use cases for which similar requirements might exist today. That's just one idea that occurs off the top of my head.

Many posters have noted that much of this functionality exists already in tools like; AutoIt, AutoHotKey, some numpty even mentioned sendkeys in VB. But these people have missed the point, until now its all been very "Goto X,Y -> Click" not "find(Thing).click()". Even things like WinRunner or RationalTest seem, in my experience to be far to rigid to be useful. I can see how I would have used this tool to do much good work for our software back when I was demoing, devloping and testing stuff.

That it is wrapped in a nice scripting language as well just makes it even better.

I'm off to see how good it actually is....
