[Ed P]

+1 for JCD’s response. Works fine for me too. I also set it up from TBird.

[Ed P]

Not really Bob. There are some simple steps that can be taken such as using a Sandbox  (Sandboxie?) or Linux VM for all your browsing/emails. Ditto just using a Smartphone to do the same. This would however require that anything transferred to a PC would need a darned good scan before use.

[Ed P]

I agree, the test speaks nothing to the real traditional values and basic tenets of conformity and treating other (of both sexes) as you would wish to be treated. Neither does it address the things everyone needs to know in order to survive in the modern UK environment.

It is mainly just a history test that means very little. Who cares if Henry VIII or Richard I brought Wales into the Union?

[Ed P]

Snap Dave, I did not realise the Scots had so many people on their Juries.

[Ed P]

Not just destructive to one PC Bob, it appears it actively searches your network then uses some modified NSA tricks to hit all M$ OSs whether using SMB or not. Looks like full off-line backups may be an essential defence.

[Ed P]

I think it may be an Intel mobo thing, there were a number of published issues with the Intel drivers. link

[edit] Specifically this is the action that Intel always recommend for NUCs.

“… install the latest Intel chipset and Intel® management engine driver, ”

This latter is the route that will give updates not suggested by M$

[Ed P]

My wife has a NUC, it is an excellent small footprint machine for most situations with one huge caveat. You MUST use the Intel update site and ensure that you have up-to-date drivers as amazingly some of the Windows 10 updates have not been fully compatible.If you just use the Win10 advice for driver updates it does not give the most up to date drivers! So I guess I echo the comment that it unfortunately the NUC is not for those adverse to technology.

As usual it is the sound and graphics drivers that are most vulnerable.

[Ed P]

Not true wrt Russia Bob:

“The Russian anti-virus firm Kaspersky Lab said its analysis showed that there had been about 2,000 attacks – most in Ukraine, Russia and Poland.”

[Ed P]

Updates will do this Steve if you have not selected the ‘only use wifi to update’ option. ISP are very ‘naughty’ in deliberately leaving the default to always update via 4G or whatever.

[Ed P]

Please translate the Leet Graham. I recognize the symbols but try as I might I cannot transliterate them into English.

[Ed P]

I’m in Bob’s corner on this one in terms of being a late adopter.. However I think if I were working and having to do a lot of time-management and multi-tasking a smart phone would very rapidly prove to be an essential item.

All that said most of my posting and all my programming is done on a PC as I would find it impossible to do more that write a very simple script on a phone.

[Ed P]

Rumour is that it was a  Ukrainian Tax Advice program that was the initial vector!

[Ed P]

It does not require many Tory old pharts to die to completely change the balance of power. Now that ‘youth’ has discovered its power the whole political scene could shift quite markedly. Eighteen months is a long time and there were 23 politicians over 70 (not sure after the election what the number is now)

[Ed P]

doctoryorkie wrote:

More dumb?

Probably, but the American term is acceptable in colloquial English, and it makes a pithier topic header. Certainly better than the more accurate ‘Smart phones reduce your attention span’. Imo English is superior to most languages for the way it rapidly absorbs foreign words and neologisms into common usage’

[Ed P]

Simple question – who do you distrust the most, the French or the Yanks? My answer is now very different from the one I would have given twenty years ago!

[Ed P]

Spedley wrote:

I don’t see how any of those figures are usefull? If I sell £22 of veg a day to my local corner shop I and buy £14 worth of stuff from them it doesn’t tell me anything about how much the shop depends in my trade.

In reality you have to look at who is in your corner and who is not. To most of the 27 the balance of trade means very little, they will just be fighting for their own ‘pork-barrels’. The elephant in the corner is Germany. As your percentages point out they account for most of the EU’s trade and they also have a huge BOT surplus with the UK. As they control the EU’s purse-strings they will not want to lose their trade advantage and the rest of the EU ex perhaps France will be influenced by Germany’s attitude.  Hence I believe the pure trade aspects would have been relatively easy to negotiate were it not for for the very important Financial sector.

In stating this, the immigration/free movement requirements of the EU are hugely complicating issues and it would not surprise me if in 17 months time nothing has been agreed and the country will have no other option but a hard Brexit. Whether this would trigger another referendum is going to be a very different and difficult political decision for that time.

I know someone will cry foul, but it is not unknown for a referendum within a country to be reversed. The Irish have already done exactly this over an EU issue.

[Ed P]

To be honest Spedley I could not understand your numbers or methodology. I always find that using percentages with different huge divisors can lead to all sorts of weird interpretations and I would have been much happier just to see euro currency numbers.

Instead I just used the KISS principle and only looked at the sterling values of UK/EU imports and exports from the Office of National Statistics.

These roughly show:

Trade Goods Imports from EU               (approx) £22Bn — link

Trade Goods Exports from UK to EU   (approx) £14Bn — link

Financial are roughly £22Bn of exports, and £3Bn of imports  — link

I’m pretty sure that this is the correct way of looking at things as these are the sorts of numbers that the fact-checking group published. link

 

 

[Ed P]

Unfortunately there are still a raft of XP zero days still at large, courtesy of the NSA. To be relatively safe for the medium term the C&C system would need to be air-gapped from any insecure networks such as those providing Internet to the crew or management updates to the Officer’s laptops

As Steve said, this IS XP and afaik M$ have not made any moves to provide patches for the exploits not so far publicly released by ShadowBrokers. If any of these exploits follow the Stuxnet example they are aimed specifically at the sort of air-gapped Management Control systems employed on the Effalump.

However maybe the MOD have had the wisdom to do a separate update/patch deal with the NSA and M$!!

[Ed P]

I’ve been guilty of loose terminology again!.

I should have said ‘If however you think of them as wave packets with ENERGY distributions…’

As frequency is proportional to energy this implies that even a ‘single’ frequency lasered photon consists of many frequencies however the distribution of frequencies is such that the probability of finding a place in this energy distribution which departs from the average value is very low, In the case where a very large number of such photons is emitted (i.e. very high energy) then the probability becomes finite and other frequencies exist within the distribution.

Unlike Einstein I do believe that ‘God’ plays dice!

[Ed P]

Spedley wrote:

Intersting, didn’t realise it hadn’t been done before. Strangely I had actually wondered what happens when two photons bounce at the same time!

“…The light’s coming off at different angles, with different colours, depending on how bright it is.” ”

I guess it becomes difficult to visualise if you think of photons as old-school particles. If however you think of them as wave packets with intensity distributions then scattering and Moiré interference patterns from collisions are almost inevitable. Both the scattering and any interference patterns are going to be highly dependent on the surface of the object hence the comment about tiny cracks being visible.

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