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3851

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« Last post by IainB on June 22, 2013, 12:12 AM »

An American schoolchum of mine just sent me this. It's a joke about bigotry, and it pokes fun at the ludicrous irrationality of politicising sexuality or sexual orientation according to religio-political ideologies.
(I didn't know that the laws relating to homosexuality might be different in different US states.)

Daddy Long Legs
Stories about children and their views of the world are always touching.
A father watched his young daughter playing in the garden.
He smiled as he reflected on how sweet and pure his little girl was.
Tears formed in his eyes as he thought about her seeing the wonders of nature through such innocent eyes.
Suddenly she just stopped and stared at the ground.
He went over to her to see what work of God had captured her attention.
He noticed she was looking at two spiders mating.
“Daddy, what are those two spiders doing?' she asked.
“They're mating,“ her father replied.

“What do you call the spider on top?“ she asked.
“A Daddy Longlegs,“ her father answered.
“So, the other one is a Mommy Longlegs?“ the little girl asked.

As his heart soared with the joy of such a cute and innocent question he replied, “No dear.  Both of them are Daddy Longlegs.“
The little girl, looking a little puzzled, thought for a moment, then lifted her foot and stomped them flat.
“Well,” she said, “that may be OK in California , but we're not having any of that shit in Wisconsin.”
__________________________

The above is an entirely new twist to an old joke that has been around in original form for years:

A little girl was playing...

A little girl was playing in the garden when she spotted two spiders mating.

"Daddy, what are those two spiders doing?" she asked.

"They're mating," her father replied.

"What do you call the spider on top, Daddy?" she asked.

"That's a daddy longlegs spider." her father answered.

"So, the other one is a mummy longlegs?" the little girl asked.

"No," her father replied, "Both of them are daddy longlegs spiders."

The little girl thought for a moment, then raised one foot and stamped hard on the two mating spiders, squashing them flat.  "Well," she said "we're not having any of THAT sort of homo shit in OUR garden!"

3852

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« Last post by IainB on June 21, 2013, 12:51 AM »

Cat stands for election in Mexican city

Campaign shines light on political disenchantment with slogan: 'Tired of voting for rats? Vote for a cat'

This cat has it's own Facebook ID, website and T-shirt.

3853

Living Room / Re: Worth Reading: Trevor Pott's editorial on NSA PRISM and its real ramifications

« Last post by IainB on June 20, 2013, 07:15 AM »

I read a post in another discussion forum (Samizdata) where they suggested that the NSA had merely implemented TIA (Total Information Awareness)  via the Information Awareness Office.

I had never heard of this concept before.

3854

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: PDF-XChange Viewer ($FREE version) - Mini-Review

« Last post by IainB on June 20, 2013, 12:56 AM »

Update: Current Version - v2.5.211 (17 Jun 2013).
Having installed this I have also updated the opening post.
PDF-XChange Viewer now gets a 5  x   from me (was 4½).
No issues re OCR, now - it all seems to work just fine. I see that it currently caters for English, French, German, Spanish, but I have only used the English OCR functionality so far.

3855

Living Room / Re: Peer Review and the Scientific Process

« Last post by IainB on June 19, 2013, 11:00 PM »

@barney: It's not a bad analogy. You seem to have hit the nail on the head.
   From experience, it is largely the same for program critique/review in this forum as it usually is elsewhere in mainstream programming.
   For example, it was whilst I was lecturing that I learned to code in an assembler programming language, and I had a bunch of useful minds nearby to review/critique my efforts - which, whist being a somewhat humbling experience, helped me a lot and taught me to avoid underestimating my own level of ignorance.
   Later on, I became increasingly involved in developing/supporting commercial computer programs used for solving problems in scientific/mathematical/statistical analysis and modelling, mostly written in Fortran. These programs absolutely had to work spot-on and with a clearly-identified margin of error, because the outputs were critically important. For example, including things such as: audience research and identifying TV audience viewing habits so as to target adverts appropriately; the design of a new missile's aerofoil; the optimum mix of materials going into a steel smelting furnace to make a particular kind of steel; predictions about wave height in the North Sea (for scheduling safe voyages to/from oil rigs); the econometric predictions of the UK's economy.
   The only way you could be sure to achieve some degree of assurance that a program worked and was fit-for-purpose was through rigorous testing and review by the users - typically Operations Research people, and/or mathematicians/scientists/engineers who used the programs for their work on a daily basis.

3856

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« Last post by IainB on June 19, 2013, 07:36 PM »

This was a surprise. Since it's kinda PC-techo, I wasn't sure whether this should be posted here or in the general software part of the forum, but I found it amusing and so I settled for here. Probably the same method could be used to uninstall Norton Antivirus too.
It's by John McAfee himself: How To Uninstall McAfee Antivirus

3857

Living Room / Re: VPN Gate - Univ. of Tsukuba launches Academic Experimental [Crowd] Project.

« Last post by IainB on June 19, 2013, 09:05 AM »

...Those South Korean servers are fast!  Not much latency compared to the North  American servers.  Good speeds through Japan too...

-464codemeright (June 19, 2013, 07:40 AM)

Yes, they usually seem to be blazingly fast. Making a connection is fast as well, and if the connection is dropped (e.g., if I put my laptop to "Sleep" mode and then later wake it up), it usually auto-connects to the VPN node in double-quick time. Very nice.   

3858

Living Room / Re: Protests in Istanbul

« Last post by IainB on June 18, 2013, 07:18 PM »

Is @eleman in any of the photos here, I wonder?
In Turkey, a New Form of Protest: Standing Silently for Hours.

Probably not much fun if one has varicose veins...

3859

Living Room / Restoring the good name and integrity of UK academic research work.

« Last post by IainB on June 18, 2013, 06:29 PM »

I wondered when the UK would take some action to stop the evident decline in academic research standards achieved over the last few years, as displayed in some sub-standard output from some UK universities and some other UK research bodies (e.g., in the domains of climate science and medical research). Looks like they have started to confront/address the issues by focussing on aligning funding allocation with research integrity. (As the saying goes, "Follow the money"?)
Better late than never, I suppose. Yay for Britain!   
Let's hope it has some good effect. We shall see.

Britain’s Bad Science Scandal: UK Research Position Threatened By Fact-Fabricators
    Date: 18/06/13
    John Lawless, The Independent

Britain’s leading science institutions will be told on Monday that they will be stripped of many millions of pounds in research grants if they employ rogue researchers who fake the results of experiments, The Independent has learnt.

The clampdown comes as retractions of scientific claims by medical journals are on course to top 500 for the first time in 2013 – having been just 20 a year in the late 1990s, when Andrew Wakefield notoriously claimed that the MMR vaccine caused autism in children. In April, the UK’s first researcher was jailed for falsifying data over a prolonged period.

The Government is concerned that Britain’s prized second place in global research behind the US will be at threatened if more fact-fabricators are exposed. It knows that hundreds of thousands of jobs could easily go to foreign rivals if British laboratories do not keep coming up with new product ideas, to be made by major multinational companies in UK factories.

All of the country’s 133 universites and colleges of higher education are being forced to sign a new Concordat for Research Integrity – having been warned by major fund providers that those who do not will be refused access to more than £10 billion in research grants funded each year by British taxpayers – and as much again from the private sector.

A spokesman for Universities UK, which chaired negotations with the grant providers, said: “From next year, universities in the UK will have to prove compliance with the research integrity concordat in order to receive research grant. They are doing this to help demonstrate to government, business, international partners and the wider public that they can continue to have confidence in the research.”

Full article in The Independent: The bad science scandal: how fact-fabrication is damaging UK's global name for research.

3860

Living Room / Re: Peer Review and the Scientific Process

« Last post by IainB on June 18, 2013, 06:03 PM »

Over at hunch.net the Machine Learning (Theory) blog has a cogent and useful post on the subject of peer reviews:

Representative Reviewing
6/16/2013
Tags: Conferences, Reviewing , Workshop — jl@ 10:09 am

When thinking about how best to review papers, it seems helpful to have some conception of what good reviewing is. As far as I can tell, this is almost always only discussed in the specific context of a paper (i.e. your rejected paper), or at most an area (i.e. what a “good paper” looks like for that area) rather than general principles. Neither individual papers or areas are sufficiently general for a large conference—every paper differs in the details, and what if you want to build a new area and/or cross areas?

An unavoidable reason for reviewing is that the community of research is too large. In particular, it is not possible for a researcher to read every paper which someone thinks might be of interest. This reason for reviewing exists independent of constraints on rooms or scheduling formats of individual conferences. Indeed, history suggests that physical constraints are relatively meaningless over the long term — growing conferences simply use more rooms and/or change formats to accommodate the growth.

This suggests that a generic test for paper acceptance should be “Are there a significant number of people who will be interested?” This question could theoretically be answered by sending the paper to every person who might be interested and simply asking them. In practice, this would be an intractable use of people’s time: We must query far fewer people and achieve an approximate answer to this question. Our goal then should be minimizing the approximation error for some fixed amount of reviewing work.

Viewed from this perspective, the first way that things can go wrong is by misassignment of reviewers to papers, for which there are two easy failure modes available.

• 1. When reviewer/paper assignment is automated based on an affinity graph, the affinity graph may be low quality or the constraint on the maximum number of papers per reviewer can easily leave some papers with low affinity to all reviewers orphaned.
• 2. When reviewer/paper assignments are done by one person, that person may choose reviewers who are all like-minded, simply because this is the crowd that they know. I’ve seen this happen at the beginning of the reviewing process, but the more insidious case is when it happens at the end, where people are pressed for time and low quality judgements can become common.

An interesting approach for addressing the constraint objective would be optimizing a different objective, such as the product of affinities rather than the sum. I’ve seen no experimentation of this sort.

For ICML, there are about 3 levels of “reviewer”: the program chair who is responsible for all papers, the area chair who is responsible for organizing reviewing on a subset of papers, and the program committee member/reviewer who has primary responsibility for reviewing. In 2012 tried to avoid these failure modes in a least-system effort way using a blended approach. We used bidding to get a higher quality affinity matrix. We used a constraint system to assign the first reviewer to each paper and two area chairs to each paper. Then, we asked each area chair to find one reviewer for each paper. This obviously dealt with the one-area-chair failure mode. It also helps substantially with low quality assignments from the constrained system since (a) the first reviewer chosen is typically higher quality than the last due to it being the least constrained (b) misassignments to area chairs are diagnosed at the beginning of the process by ACs trying to find reviewers (c) ACs can reach outside of the initial program committee to find reviewers, which existing automated systems can not do.

The next way that reviewing can go wrong is via biased reviewing.

• 1. Author name bias is a famous one. In my experience it is real: well known authors automatically have their paper taken seriously, which particularly matters when time is short. Furthermore, I’ve seen instances where well-known authors can slide by with proof sketches that no one fully understands.
• 2. Review anchoring is a very significant problem if it occurs. This does not happen in the standard review process, because the reviews of others are not visible to other reviewers until they are complete.
• 3. A more subtle form of bias is when one reviewer is simply much louder or charismatic than others. Reviewing without an in-person meeting is actually helpful here, as it reduces this problem substantially.

Reviewing can also be low quality. A primary issue here is time: most reviewers will submit a review within a time constraint, but it may not be high quality due to limits on time. Minimizing average reviewer load is quite important here. Staggered deadlines for reviews are almost certainly also helpful. A more subtle thing is discouraging low quality submissions. My favored approach here is to publish all submissions nonanonymously after some initial period of time.

Another significant issue in reviewer quality is motivation. Making reviewers not anonymous to each other helps with motivation as poor reviews will at least be known to some. Author feedback also helps with motivation, as reviewers know that authors will be able to point out poor reviewing. It is easy to imagine that further improvements in reviewer motivation would be helpful.

A third form of low quality review is based on miscommunication. Maybe there is silly typo in a paper? Maybe something was confusing? Being able to communicate with the author can greatly reduce ambiguities.

The last problem is dictatorship at decision time for which I’ve seen several variants. Sometimes this comes in the form of giving each area chair a budget of papers to “champion”. Sometimes this comes in the form of an area chair deciding to override all reviews and either accept or more likely reject a paper. Sometimes this comes in the form of a program chair doing this as well. The power of dictatorship is often available, but it should not be used: the wiser course is keeping things representative.

At ICML 2012, we tried to deal with this via a defined power approach. When reviewers agreed on the accept/reject decision, that was the decision. If the reviewers disgreed, we asked the two area chairs to make decisions and if they agreed, that was the decision. It was only when the ACs disagreed that the program chairs would become involved in the decision.

The above provides an understanding of how to create a good reviewing process for a large conference. With this in mind, we can consider various proposals at the peer review workshop and elsewhere.

• 1. Double Blind Review. This reduces bias, at the cost of decreasing reviewer motivation. Overall, I think it’s a significant long term positive for a conference as “insiders” naturally become more concerned with review quality and “outsiders” are more prone to submit.
• 2. Better paper/reviewer matching. A pure win, with the only caveat that you should be familiar with failure modes and watch out for them.
• 3. Author feedback. This improves review quality by placing a check on unfair reviews and reducing miscommunication at some cost in time.
• 4. Allowing an appendix or ancillary materials. This allows authors to better communicate complex ideas, at the potential cost of reviewer time. A standard compromise is to make reading an appendix optional for reviewers.
• 5. Open reviews. Open reviews means that people can learn from other reviews, and that authors can respond more naturally than in single round author feedback.

It’s important to note that none of the above are inherently contradictory. This is not necessarily obvious as proponents of open review and double blind review have found themselves in opposition at times. These approaches can be accommodated by simply hiding authors names for a fixed period of 2 months while the initial review process is ongoing.

Representative reviewing seems like the real difficult goal. If a paper is rejected in a representative reviewing process, then perhaps it is just not of sufficient interest. Similarly, if a paper is accepted, then perhaps it is of real and meaningful interest. And if the reviewing process is not representative, then perhaps we should fix the failure modes.

Edit: Crossposted on CACM.

This is coincidentally the same website as @mouser referred to in another DC Forum discussion thread in 2006: Nice blog essays on Fixing Peer Reviews and Collaborative Research « on: 2006-09-19, 00:54:05 » - where he quoted from the hunch.net post What is missing for online collaborative research?:

I've been reading http://hunch.net/ for their take on machine learning articles but they've been posting some nice essays recently on the underlying frameworks for reviewing papers, etc.

Reviewing is a fairly formal process which is integral to the way academia is run. Given this integral nature, the quality of reviewing is often frustrating. I’ve seen plenty of examples of false statements, misbeliefs, reading what isn’t written, etc…, and I’m sure many other people have as well.

Recently, mechanisms like double blind review and author feedback have been introduced to try to make the process more fair and accurate in many machine learning (and related) conferences. My personal experience is that these mechanisms help, especially the author feedback. Nevertheless, some problems remain.

The game theory take on reviewing is that the incentive for truthful reviewing isn’t there. Since reviewers are also authors, there are sometimes perverse incentives created and acted upon. (Incidentially, these incentives can be both positive and negative.)

Setting up a truthful reviewing system is tricky because their is no final reference truth available in any acceptable (say: subyear) timespan. There are several ways we could try to get around this.
...

-mouser (September 19, 2006, 12:54 AM)

3861

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« Last post by IainB on June 17, 2013, 09:59 AM »

From National Post:
Internet censors up in arms as bloggers note uncanny resemblance between Winnie the Pooh and China’s president

Following the recent California summit between Presidents Barack Obama and Xi Jinping, Chinese micro-bloggers picked up on an uncanny resemblance between a photograph of the two strolling through the Sunnylands estate and a cartoon image of AA Milne’s cartoon creations. The two images were published side by side this week on the Chinese social media site Weibo.

I think it's cute. How the heck do people find such parallels? (Or is it photoshopped?)
Amusingly, the post goes on to say:

  China’s army of Internet censors has picked an unusual target in its battle to wipe dissent from the country’s computer screens: Winnie the Pooh and Tigger.
   Following the recent California summit between Presidents Barack Obama and Xi Jinping, Chinese micro-bloggers picked up on an uncanny resemblance between a photograph of the two strolling through the Sunnylands estate and a cartoon image of AA Milne’s cartoon creations. The two images were published side by side this week on the Chinese social media site Weibo.
   But the posts were almost immediately “harmonized”, as censors appeared to take exception to the comparison between their president and a podgy bear with a penchant for honey. Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post said overzealous censors had “nipped in the bud what could have been a positive PR campaign, tailor-made for President Xi Jinping”.

3862

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Malwarebytes FREE and PRO - Mini-Review.

« Last post by IainB on June 17, 2013, 08:55 AM »

Update 2013-06-18 re MBAM Chameleon app. (in addendum in the Mini-Review).

3863

Living Room / Google Balloon ('Loon for all) - initiative for a balloon-distributed Internet.

« Last post by IainB on June 17, 2013, 06:17 AM »

   I had been nonplussed by reports that Google were "floating" the idea for a balloon-distributed Internet.
Last night I had call from my brother in the US, where we discussed family news and other things, during the course of which I asked him what was the sense in the Google balloon idea.

   I should mention here that I asked him this because I knew that he of all people could be prevailed upon to give a pretty useful answer. He is a boffin - an aerodynamics engineer - and has been absorbed in aircraft design problems for most of his life from teenager onwards. He doesn't talk much about his work, and is pretty offhand about it - e.g., describing the Boeing 787 (I think that was the one) as "really just a big plastic boat - I've got a small model in my yard" (referring to an old fibreglass dinghy that he has).

   His answer to my question was not quite what I had expected though, and was quite educational. He said that the Google idea was an old concept - designs having been registered with the Patents office years ago - and feasible. As he described it, the idea was a logical extension of distributing the nodes of a network via geo-stationary satellites (per A.C. Clarke) - which was a humungously expensive approach, as you needed to send them up in rockets that would position the satellite at precisely the right point in space to achieve geostationary (orbit) equilibrium. Nearer stationary satellite nodes were also feasible and cheaper to put up, used mostly for military purposes, and their orbit slowly decayed during their working life until no longer required. The balloon idea was to give you some control over where the network nodes were positioned - you could move them around by "moving gas from one bag to another", which made them go up or down, and since you knew which layers of air or jetstreams in the stratosphere were moving in which direction, you could position them pretty much where you wanted.
   I recall reading from WW2 history how this technique was used by the Japanese, who bombed the US during the war - by releasing the bombs from high altitude balloons carried from Japan and over the US by these jetstreams.
  However, since the balloons idea was dependent on having a power supply, they had to carry it with them, and they stopped working when the power ran out.
   What Google have apparently done is used modern technology (for batteries and solar cell power) in the design, to power the computerised control systems and to enable these balloons to have quite a feasible and relatively long working life. The network could literally be "in the clouds", though the ground stations and servers couldn't move up there as they required gigawatts of power.

Quite coincidentally I found this in my feed aggregator today. It provides quite a good summary of what Google is about, including a short explanatory video cartoon: How Google plans to use balloons to bring the Internet to some of the world’s most remote regions

I could be wrong, of course, but I reckon this might be a purely philanthropic move to distribute education - which at any rate is the impression given in the video cartoon.

EDIT: Also saw this a bit later: [G] Introducing Project Loon: Balloon-powered Internet access

3864

Screenshot Captor / Re: LATEST VERSION INFO THREAD - ScreenshotCaptor - v4.3 - April 22, 2013

« Last post by IainB on June 15, 2013, 05:47 PM »

^^ Thanks for the quick response.
No hurry at my end.

3865

Screenshot Captor / Re: Screenshot Captor DirectX Capture Addon - EARLY BUGGY BETA

« Last post by IainB on June 15, 2013, 05:42 PM »

Add me to the list for this, please. Ta.
(Tag: scdxcap.exe)

3866

Screenshot Captor / Re: LATEST VERSION INFO THREAD - ScreenshotCaptor - v4.3 - April 22, 2013

« Last post by IainB on June 15, 2013, 05:40 PM »

@ewemoa:
   Thankyou!
I of course had been searching for "scdxcap" and "scdxcap.exe", not the generic "DirectX".
I wondered what I might have been doing wrong. Got no hits at all...

3867

Living Room / Re: Worth Reading: Trevor Pott's editorial on NSA PRISM and its real ramifications

« Last post by IainB on June 15, 2013, 11:44 AM »

Some relevant cost estimates from the Internet Archive blogs:
Cost to Store All US Phonecalls Made in a Year in Cloud Storage so it could be Datamined

3868

Living Room / Re: Worth Reading: Trevor Pott's editorial on NSA PRISM and its real ramifications

« Last post by IainB on June 15, 2013, 11:33 AM »

Before I ever read anything about the NSA leak, I had found these two items rather interesting:

• Wolfram|Alpha - Personal Analytics for Facebook
• Stephen Wofram Blog - Data Science of the Facebook World

If it is/was common knowledge that all the vested interests have/had their feet firmly in the public/private data trough, then, maybe the most surprising thing about it all might be that there is any surprise at the Guardian's publishing details of the leak.

3869

Living Room / Re: Encrypted DNS queries via OpenDNS dnscrypt for Windows / linux / BSD / iOS / OSX

« Last post by IainB on June 15, 2013, 08:23 AM »

^^ Oh good! You got a pretty quick response.
In answer to your Q: I have used DNSCrypt since it was first available for ß trial (refer discussion threads elsewhere in the DC Forum). I have relied on the standard update installers to set up the software, and I have never tweaked it - so it is a bog standard installation.

My suggestion would be to look at setting up a User Account as Administrator, and  then using something like X-Setup Pro. That can tweak your system to auto-login your account at bootup, so the DNSCrypt will be happy, and you can still remotely access the PC.

From the website: (Look how many times it has been downloaded!)   

Download X-Setup Pro - MajorGeeks
http://www.majorgeek...ils/x_setup_pro.html

All In One | X-Setup Pro 9.2.100 Official Mirror for X-Setup Pro
Author: XQDC Ltd.
Date: 06/02/2010 09:02 AM
Size: 4.21 MB
License: Freeware
Requires: Win9x/NT/200x/XP/Vista
Downloads: 2062797 times

Sponsored Link TIP:
   
Download Locations
Download X-Setup Pro Download@MajorGeeks
Download X-Setup Pro Download@MajorGeeks
Download X-Setup Pro Internode - |Australia|

   
Rating: 5 (1738 votes)
Bad Link Report a Bad Link

download

Serial key provided to Majorgeeks by XQDC Ltd for anyone to use: XSA092-11TA9R-8K12YT

X-Setup Pro is the ultimate in system configuration or tweaking as some people would say. It covers all types of options and has many useful features - for more information please read the rest of this section or browse to http://www.x-setup.net/

X-Setup Pro is not yet another Windows Hacker; it is the ultimate tool for black belt system tuning and tweaking, running on Windows 95, 98, NT 4.0, 2000, ME, XP and 2003 Server.

From simple boot options up to server settings and hardware settings, internet settings or Office options, X-Setup Pro allows you to change nearly 1800 (!!) settings with some simple button clicks. This makes X-Setup Pro the most complete hacker/tweaking utility ever available!

Because these settings change often and fast, X-Setup Pro uses XML-based plugins - they are very small (3-6 kB) so updating them is easy too. X-Setup Pro can download updated or new plug-ins directly from the X-Setup Pro web site. Best of all, you can always view the source for any plug-in! And with the also available information on our website you can even create your own plugins or wizards and use them in X-Setup Pro.

With this release, you'll also get the new X-Setup Pro Restore Log. No matter how many changes you have made (either by using a plugin or a wizard) the Restore Log can all restore them to their original values with two simple mouse clicks. This feature works completely independently from the "Windows XP Restore Points" and can therefore be used on any Windows system X-Setup Pro supports (from Windows 95 up to Windows Server 2003). No other tweaking software offers you this!

In case you wish to lockdown a different user on the same computer, Registry Loading will be your best friend. Simply select ?Load user registry? from within X-Setup Pro and you can apply all tweaks and settings X-Setup Pro supports to a different user without fearing to lock you out yourself. Securing or locking-down your computer for colleagues or your kids has never been easier!

With the BartPE Enabler Tool, you can use X-Setup Pro on a bootable CD-ROM created by the freely available BartPE system. This means, you can put X-Setup Pro on a CD, boot this CD on any computer and tweak the settings without even installing X-Setup Pro. This can also be a huge help for repairing a misbehaving system.

Network administrator will love X-Setup Pro Recording. Simply turn recording on, change the settings you want and it generates a *.REG file on the fly that can be deployed to thousands of computers without installing X-Setup Pro.

Although it offers lots of features, X-Setup Pro is extremely easy to use. It has an Explorer-like look and the famous back and next buttons you already know from your Internet browser. Plus, X-Setup Pro offers wizards that assist you when changing the configuration - there has never been an easier way to hack your Windows!


Dear Customers,

Because of the insolvency of WUG all operations regarding X-Setup Pro have been shut down.

We thank all customers, partner and friends for their support during this time. We hope you had as much fun using X-Setup Pro as we had making it.

We wish you all the best,

TeX and Eric

You can use this key:

XSA092-11TA9R-8K12YT

3870

General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox Extensions: Your favorite or most useful

« Last post by IainB on June 15, 2013, 07:34 AM »

Quote URL Text_1.0.9b (title, url, quote, date)
multicopy_1.1 (list of Ctrl-c clips)
Scrapbook_1.5.6
Web Of Trust
firefox_18.0.1 in live linux puppy-precise_5.4.3 from DVD-RW in amd64 box

-sword (March 05, 2013, 02:15 PM)

I have been using this add-on for some time now and am keeping it. It really is useful and a real timesaver.
The great thing is that the selected text and all the associated URL metadata is saved as text into CHS (Clipboard Help & Spell) - which is a feature in CHS that I have wanted for quite a while.
Developer's website: http://qoelabs.com/quoteurl.php
Mozilla addon site: https://addons.mozil.../addon/quoteurltext/

I went to the latter website, highlighted some text, pressed Ctrl+Shift+C, and pasted the text in the Clipboard below, in the quote. Note that the emboldened text in the quote was the selected text, to differentiate it from the rest of the text - which is related metadata collected by the add-on.

QuoteURLText :: Add-ons for Firefox
https://addons.mozil.../addon/quoteurltext/
Sun Jun 16 2013 00:08:19 GMT+1200 (New Zealand Standard Time)
QuoteURLText 1.0.9b
by Jay Palat

Quote URL text will copy selected text to the clipboard including Page Title, Location and copy date.

Pretty nifty.

3871

Living Room / Re: Where all those rules against possibly upsetting people will soon lead all of us

« Last post by IainB on June 15, 2013, 06:23 AM »

Same issues, different country. Rowan Atkinson pretty much summed it up in his speech at the UK's Reform Section 5 Parliamentary reception. He quoted President Obama too. (Published 18 Oct 2012.)

Transcript:

Spoiler

Source: http://www.youtube.c.../watch?v=gciegyiLYtY
My starting point when it comes to the consideration of any issue relating to free speech is my passionate belief that the second most precious thing in life is the right to express yourself freely.
The most precious thing in life, I think, is food in your mouth, and the third most precious is the roof over your head.
But a fixture for me in the number two slot is free expression, just below the need to sustain life itself.
That is because I have enjoyed free expression in this country all my professional life and fully expect to continue to do so.

Personally I suspect it highly unlikely to be arrested for whatever laws exist to contain free expression because of the undoubtedly privileged position that is afforded to those of a high public profile.
So my concerns are less for myself and more for those more vulnerable because of their lower profile, like the man arrested in Oxford for calling a police horse "gay", or the teenager arrested for calling the church of scientology a cult, or the cafe owner arrested for displaying passages from the bible on a TV screen.
When I heard of some of these more ludicrous offenses and charges, I remembered that I had been here before in a fictional context.

I once did a show called "Not The Nine O'clock News", some years ago, and we did a sketch where Griff Rhys Jones played constable Savage, a manifestly racist police officer, to whom I as his station commander is giving a dressing-down for arresting a black man on a whole string of ridiculous trumped-up and ludicrous charges.
The charges for which constable Savage arrested Mr.  Winston Kodogo of fifty-five Mercer Road were these:
"walking on the cracks in the pavement; walking in a loud shirt in a built-up area during the hours of darkness;" and one of my favourites "walking around all over the place."
He was also arrested for "urinating in a public convenience and looking at me in a funny way".

Who would've thought that we would end up with a law that would allow life to imitate art so exactly?
I read somewhere a defender of the status quo claiming that the fact that the gay horse case was dropped after the arrested man refused to pay the fine, and that the scientology case was also dropped at some point during the court process was proof that the law was working well, ignoring the fact that the only reason these cases were dropped was because of the publicity that they had attracted.
The police sensed that ridicule was just around the corner, and withdrew their actions.
But what about the thousands of other cases that did not enjoy the oxygen of publicity, that weren't quite ludicrous enough to attract media attention?
Even for those actions that were withdrawn, people were arrested, Questioned, taken to court, and then released.

You know that isn't the law working properly.
That is censoriousness of the most intimidating kind, guaranteed to have, as Lord Deere says, the chilling effect on free expression and free protest.
Parliament's joint committee on human rights summarized, as you may know, this whole issue very well by saying:

"While arresting a protester for using threatening or abusive speech may, depending on the circumstances be a proportionate response, we do not think that language or behaviour that is mainly insulting should ever be criminalized in this way."

The clear problem with the outlawing of insult is that too many things can be interpreted as such.
Criticism is easily construed as insult by certain parties, ridicule easily construed as insult, sarcasm, unfavourable comparison, merely stating an alternative point of view to the orthodoxy can be interpreted as insult, and because so many things can be interpreted as insult, it is hardly surprising that so many things have been, as the examples I talked about earlier show.

Although the law under discussion has been on the statute book for over twenty-five years, it is indicative of a culture that has taken hold of the programs of successive governments that with the reasonable and well-intentioned ambition to contain obnoxious elements in society, has created a society of an extraordinarily authoritarian and controlling nature That is what you might call the new intolerance, a new but intense desire to gag uncomfortable voices of dissent.

"I am not intolerant" say many people - say many, softly-spoken highly-educated, liberal-minded people - "I am only intolerant of intolerance", and people tend to nod sagely and say "Oh yes, wise words, wise words", and yet if you think about this supposedly inarguable statement for longer than five seconds, you realize that all that is advocating is the replacement of one kind of intolerance with another, which to me doesn't represent any kind of progressive at all.

Underlying prejudices, injustices or resentments are not addressed by arresting people.
They are addressed by the issues being aired, argued and dealt with, preferably outside the legal process.
For me, the best way to increase society's resistance to insulting or offensive speech is to allow a lot more of it.
As with childhood diseases, you can better resist those germs to which you have been exposed.
We need to build our immunity to taking offence, so that we can deal with the issues that perfectly justified criticism can raise.
Our priority should be to deal with the message, not the messenger.

As president Obama said in an address to the United Nations only a month or so ago,

"Laudable efforts to restrict speech can become a tool to silence critics or oppress minorities.
The strongest weapon against hateful speech is not repression, it is more speech."

And that's the essence of my thesis - more speech.
If we want a robust society, we need more robust dialogue and that must include the right to insult, or to offend.
and as - even if - as Lord Deere says, you know, the freedom to be inoffensive is no freedom at all.

The repeal of this word in this clause will be only a small step, but it will I hope be a critical one in what should be a longer term project to pause, and slowly rewind the creeping culture of censoriousness.
It is a small skirmish in the battle, in my opinion, to deal with what Sir Salmon Rushdie refers to as "the outrage industry".
Self-appointed arbiters of the public good, encouraging media-stoked outrage to which the police feel under terrible pressure to react.
A newspaper rings up Scotland Yard.  Someone has said something slightly insulting on twitter about someone who we think a national treasure.
What are you going to do about it?
The police panic and they scrabble around and then grasp the most inappropriate lifeline of all, section five of the Public Order Act, that thing where you can arrest anybody for saying anything that might be construed by anyone else as insulting.
You know they don't seem to need a real victim, they need only to make the judgment that somebody could have been offended if they had heard or read what has been said.
The most ludicrous degrees of latitude.

The storms that surround twitter and facebook comment have raised some fascinating issues about free speech which we haven't really yet come to terms with.
Firstly, that we all have to take responsibility for what we say - which is quite a good lesson to learn - but secondly, we've learnt how appallingly prickly and intolerant society has become of even the mildest adverse comment.
The law should not be aiding and abetting this new intolerance.
Free speech can only suffer if the law prevents us from dealing with its consequences.
I offer my wholehearted support to the reform section five campaign.
Thank you very much.
(Applause.)

Previously posted to: Re: Internet freedoms restrained - SOPA/PIPA/OPEN/ACTA/CETA/PrECISE-related updates

3872

Living Room / Re: Worth Reading: Trevor Pott's editorial on NSA PRISM and its real ramifications

« Last post by IainB on June 15, 2013, 06:05 AM »

Ron Paul apparently warned about this sort of thing in, erm, 1984...
September 6, 1984: Ron Paul Warns of Surveillance State - Don't Ever Say We Weren't Warned.

3873

Living Room / Re: Worth Reading: Trevor Pott's editorial on NSA PRISM and its real ramifications

« Last post by IainB on June 15, 2013, 06:01 AM »

Accused bank robber wants NSA phone records for his defense
And so it begins...

-wraith808 (June 14, 2013, 08:21 PM)

That is priceless.

3874

Living Room / Re: Encrypted DNS queries via OpenDNS dnscrypt for Windows / linux / BSD / iOS / OSX

« Last post by IainB on June 14, 2013, 07:29 AM »

It didn't work. It still pops up the UAC thing and makes me click to get it to work.

-Deozaan (June 14, 2013, 01:00 AM)

Then like I said, send them some feedback via the Preview Feedback in the DNSCrypt GUI. When you do that, it sends an email and attaches details of your system and DNSCrypt configuration. They should be able to spot the problem right away from that.

3875

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« Last post by IainB on June 13, 2013, 11:13 AM »

Apparently a recent and genuine apology published in the Sun newspaper (UK):