Forgot your password?

Comment: Re:Unfair comparison (Score 1) 174

by Nursie (#41629665) Attached to: 19,000 Emails Against and 0 In Favor of UK Draft Communications Bill

Surely there's enough blame to go around?

We can and should blame the MPs for doing unethical things, bringing in bad laws and generally behaving like arseholes.

We can also blame the public for being complacent and not voting for AVC or whatever it was. In fact this latter blame apportioning appeals to me a lot because I left the country for several years, and when I came back I found out that the great unwashed had voted to continue being ignored. Morons!

Comment: Re:Unfair comparison (Score 5, Interesting) 174

by Nursie (#41629163) Attached to: 19,000 Emails Against and 0 In Favor of UK Draft Communications Bill

Always the way.

The last big one I remember was ID cards, which was also very skewed, but at the last minute the government decided that any results collected from the internet were unrepresentative and to be ignored.

It's almost as if your opinion doesn't count if collected electronically, because it's too easy or something. Never mind that it brings down the barriers and allows people to participate just that little bit more in democracy, no citizen, you didn't try hard enough so even though we heard you we feel safe ignoring you.

And they are safe, frankly. We never vote the bastards out because of this stuff.

Comment: Re:To everyone who doesn't understand... (Score 1) 558

by Nursie (#41548203) Attached to: Advertisers Blast Microsoft Over IE Default Privacy Settings

I agree it's a nice idea, this middle path where everyone wins. But I strongly disagree that people should have to opt out of anything, and I also don't believe for one second that advertisers will respect it even if it is left to the user. Since when are marketers even the slightest bit trustworthy?

The only way default-off is anything like an honest option, rather than a dishonest way of saying there's an option but leaving most people in the dark, would be to have the browser ask. Probably when it's installed or updated to a release that can do DNT. A full page explaining the issue clearly and concisely and letting the user choose. Not just slipping in a config option quietly.

And even then it would be a total failure because marketing scum would ignore it.

Comment: Re:To everyone who doesn't understand... (Score 2) 558

by Nursie (#41547635) Attached to: Advertisers Blast Microsoft Over IE Default Privacy Settings

If a significant number of people turn it on, it will be ignored. This is wheter MS does it or the users do it themselves.

Of course we all know that users won't change the default because they may as well be cattle, but still...

I see the whole thing as a waste of time. Nobody wants to be tracked. A polite request is not oing to fix anything. Technological and legislative measures are needed.

Comment: Re:They should be happy. (Score 2) 186

by Nursie (#41543033) Attached to: MPAA Boss Admits SOPA and PIPA Are Dead, Not Coming Back

Those single vehicle collisions are probably drunk people.

The war on drugs causes -
1. Money to be funnelled to cartels
2. Devloping countries to be in permanent states of civil war
3. Users' lives to be wrecked for a crime that harms only them
4. Users to die from impurites, unknown substances and unknown strengths
5. Billions of dollars that could go toward actual harm reduction to be spent on militarising the police
6. People with no relation to the drug war to get shot by those police
7. A myriad of other negative effects

'keep your head down, don't take the piss' is a great way to perpetuate injustice and murder. Just because it's not happning in your back yard doesn't mean much.

I'm not saying legalise everything with no restrictions, but there's got to be a better way than the way we're doing it now.

Comment: Re:iSuppli ignores recent history (Score 1) 513

by Nursie (#41540999) Attached to: Why Ultrabooks Are Falling Well Short of Intel's Targets

Maybe you're right, maybe the people that wanted a netbook already have one. I agree that they've just sorta stagnated since then. I partially blame windows for som of the market failure, they weren't really powerful enough for that. ASUS in particular failed hard at Linux too, the Xandros mine came with was horribly broken.

I've replaced nearly all the replaceable parts in the 901 too - more RAM (1->2GB), changed the webcam (ran it as a hackintosh for a short while, the original webcam in the linux model was not supported), larger SSD (16->64G), different network card, new keyboard... It's definitely past its prime though, compared to anything even slightly modern it really crawls. Can't even quite do HD video decoding, and the battery life is nothing special now. Maybe its replacement will be an ASUS transformer.

Comment: Re:iSuppli ignores recent history (Score 1) 513

by Nursie (#41532749) Attached to: Why Ultrabooks Are Falling Well Short of Intel's Targets

Could it be that a race to the bottom, cutting corners to reduce costs, ISN'T what people want? What happened with Netbooks again?

Except isn't this article saying that they're too expensve and not selling?

And what happened to netbooks is that they got more expensive and the specs stayed the same for multiple years. The manufacturers started adding bells and whistles and pushed the price up into the region of low end (but much more capable) laptops. Maybe they would have been a bigger success if they had focussed on budget. Also willing to concede that tablets ate their market.

(Typed on my eee901... )

Comment: Re:That's fine (Score 2) 362

by Nursie (#41510049) Attached to: Think Tank's Website Rejects Browser Do-Not-Track Requests

DNT was a way to tell people not to track you. It's not only the ads that do that, but js plugins, analytics, even social networking buttons and graphics.

Not acceptable.

IMHO now this has failex we need a new set of ABP rules that block facebook and google (etc) resources from loading when not on their domains.

This is an unauthorized cybernetic announcement.