Graham Anderson

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Commented on What do ISPs charge the law to spy on you?
In the UK, under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, ISPs can charge the same kind of fees to cover costs for law enforcement requests. As reported by the BBC and others, those charges can be "as much as £65...
Commented on Errol Morris on frauds and fakes
Frank Wynne's I Was Vermeer, published in 2006, is another engaging take on the Han van Meegeren story (Amazon). It was Radio 4 Book of the Week. Before Frank wrote the book, it was going to be a film project...
Commented on Amazon goes crazy, banishes books with queer content to "adult" purgatory -- UPDATED
The silence from Amazon is what's helping to fan the flames of the twitferno. If Amazon had a blog, then we wouldn't have to rely on the only two quotes from the company. Quote 1 in a blog, where some...
Commented on Wikileaks reveals secret blacklist behind proposed Great Firewall of Australia
If the Aussie list includes URLs for a whole load of child abuse image sites, how long before the IWF adds Wikileaks to *its* block list?...
Commented on Faraday Bags: Pouches with RFID-blocking mesh liner
Perhaps a sideline in... hats? For London shoppers you could include a pocket on the *outside* of the mesh to put your Oyster card in. Passport = safe / Oyster = usable....
Commented on DIY funerals
The funeral industry in the UK at one point was being bought up by the big American chains. I'm not sure how successful they ended up being. When the great love of my life died, his mother and I set...
Commented on Prison ships converted to guestworker housing
"multinationals stand accused of violating their labor agreements by shipping in cheap workers from abroad" - an accusation which the company involved in the dispute being cited flatly deny. They state that all of the Italian and Portugese workers brought...
Commented on Siphon Coffee: Because Single Origin Brew Wasn't Elitist Enough
Bodum make a version, and I just ordered a version for £42 from http://www.coffeehit.co.uk/PRD_ProductDetail.aspx?prodid=55&...
Commented on How to Get Free Electronic Goods In Japan
In W14, London, items left on the pavement would be taken away by scavengers within hours. People would sometimes put helpful notes on them "working fridge - please take me", but regardless, things just went. My friend in N1 calls...
Commented on Nikon unveils a couple of superzoom digicams
I loved my Panasonic LZ2 and LZ3s as they offered more than the run-of-the-mill zoom (6x). When the TZ3 came out, I bought it for my round-the-world trip - and while the extra zoom (10x) was great, its exposure and...
Commented on Maggot cheese that tries to eat your eyes
Channel 4 just showed "Could you Eat An Elephant?" which included a similar cheese - Pecorino Marchetto http://turismo2.egov.regione.abruzzo.it/web/guest/scoprilabruzzo/isapori/formaggi/pecorinomarcetto According to the two chefs making their journey around the world eating taboo foods, songbirds and maggoty cheese - good. Snake -...
Commented on UK govt charges taxpayers to view 1911 census, conducted with tax-money
I'm intrigued as to why Google hasn't stepped in to take this problem off the National Archives hands. I'm assuming that FindMyPast have paid the Archives to take the documents, scan them and make them available - charging punters to...
Commented on The breakup of the United States
Wot, no Gilead?...
Commented on Idiotic British tourists acting like jerks in Tokyo's Tsukiji Fish Market
Of course, if they were in thongs and being followed around by a midget and a film crew, it would just be Jackass. Fill a tourist with enough fine Japanese beer and I think you will get idiocy, no matter...
Commented on Britain ordered to destroy its database of innocents' DNA
Lots of people seem to be laying this at the door of Jacqui Smith, as if it were all her idea. The truth is that there has been a succession of nutso Home Secretaries under NuLabour - John Reid, David...
Commented on How Apple wins the smartphone game: By ignoring the marginal customer
W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne's concept of Value Innovation relies in part on the idea of the "Eliminate-Reduce-Raise-Create Grid". Basically, many products and services are too complex, driven by technologists' love of inventing new things and thinking that by...
Commented on Andrew Keen predicts the end of "free labor" online
Sadly, BBC Radio 4's Iconoclast programme is going to be featuring this trolling next week: http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/programmes/iconoclasts/...
Commented on Icelanders don nonthreatening knitwear, insist they are not terrorists despite UK government's claims
Icelandic banks were allowed to operate as deposit banks in the UK because - although not part of the EU - they were members of the EEA. Under European economic rules, they can operate here and their regulator has to...
Commented on You'll need a passport to buy a mobile phone in the UK
@bugs - when I have done this in the past (with T-Mobile to be precise) there was no problem at all in the new person signing the requisite paperwork and taking over the contract. And as my example shows, in...
Commented on You'll need a passport to buy a mobile phone in the UK
It is already getting harder to move contract phones between people. In the past, I have on a number of occasions in the past taken out a UK mobile phone contract in my name for newcomers to the country who...
Commented on Palin Debate Prep Flowchart
My personal bugbear is Palin's vocal tick of "also". The whole "maverick, maverick, maverick" thing is a deliberate branding exercise, but the "also" thing strikes me as similar to the the Estuary English "innit" or "do you know wot I...
Commented on Arctic sea "foaming" with methane?
Use it for something - like in the patent for clathrate mining? http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/6209965.html...
Commented on Arctic sea "foaming" with methane?
I love the cool name someone came up for it - the "clathrate gun hypothesis" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis). Maybe if all climate change evidence was discussed like it was a Dirty Harry script, Dubya might wake up from his slumbers in science...
Commented on Saul Bass's iconic logos
It is ironic that the article should confuse Bass and Bell. Bass Breweries' red triangle logo is the oldest trademark in Britain, being registered in January 1876 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bass_(beer) ]...
Commented on English is a user-modifiable technology
My own personal view is that the making up of new words should be reserved for those who have achieved a certain mastery of the existing ones. Innit?...
Commented on David Byrne and Brian Eno's kick ass new album in a million downloadable and physical formats
Just tried buying with my UK details and their site falls over by inserting USA! USA! into the address. Sigh....
Commented on Londoner videos his bullshit anti-terror stop-and-search
Well, they got your date of birth wrong - its a good job they didn't do the old Tuttle / Buttle switcheroo......
Commented on Air Force defies Congress, spends anti-terrorism money on "comfort capsules" with "aesthetically pleasing wall treatments/coverings"
In other news, the Department of Homeland Security has commissioned Alexander McQueen to design new jumpsuits for the guests at the Guantánamo Bay - fashionable and uncomfortable! The designs feature electric eel skin shock collars and snow-washed denim for the...
Commented on Pedo-crazed parents call father a "pervert" for photographing his own children at a park
I couldn't resist... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaUkt59vY1Q "I AM THE PAEDOFINDER GENERAL!"...
Commented on I think I'm trying to say that most tech pundits are dumb
One great thing that my old company decided to do (next to the many, many dumb and awful things) was implement a massive programme of customer interviews based around Kim & Mauborgne's "Value Innovation" methodology. Going into people's homes and...

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mdh commented on What do ISPs charge the law to spy on you?
All three are unpredictable (except possibly a court order) false. Information NOT kept cannot be released. A null option's chance is always zero. A zero sided die cannot roll a 1. There is a constant zero percent chance. If there is a constant low chance of kept information being released, then the passage of time, in fact, increases the odds of said release. Roll a 10,000 sided die repeatedly and eventually you wil roll a 1....
Cowicide commented on What do ISPs charge the law to spy on you?
Id be more worried if they didnt charge. Giving them a profit motive to put you in jail... what could possibly go wrong? http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/us/13judge.html?_r=2&hp...
echolocate chocolate commented on What do ISPs charge the law to spy on you?
Rolling the dice repeatedly does not increase the odds of a certain number coming up. You are no more likely to roll a 1 on any individual roll but we're talking about the cumulative probability of lots of rolls. You can think about it like this: For a 6-sided dice, the probability of rolling a 1 is 1/6. So, the probability of NOT rolling a 1 is 5/6 (0.83..). For two dice rolls, the probability of not rolling a 1 is (5/6 * 5/6) = 25/36 (0.694..), so the probability of rolling a 1 is 1 - (5/6 * 5/6)...
mdh commented on What do ISPs charge the law to spy on you?
well said. Thanks....
AnthonyC commented on What do ISPs charge the law to spy on you?
"s that a statistical fact or conjecture? Do odds and averages really work that way? If Yahoo (for example) keeps account records for one year, five years or forty years it would be interesting (statistically) to see if year one is any different than year forty." This is irrelevant. There is some chance of "harmful disclosure" in year one, some chance in year two, and so on. Call these event one, even two, event three, etc. The probability of disclosure in either year one or year two (P(e1 or e2)) is necessarily as large as or larger than disclosure in...

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