this new CSS file
needs bigger gutters.
Posts by Frumious Bandersnatch
2662 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Nov 2007
Page:
An AI system has just created the most realistic looking photos ever
The internet is going to hell and its creators want your help fixing it
It's a, it's a, it's a SYN flood: Quick, ditch that packet
For fax sake: NHS to be banned from buying archaic copy-flingers
Official: Voyager 2 is now an interstellar spacecraft
Ecuador says 'yes' to Assange 'freedom' deal, but Julian says 'nyet'
'Say hello to my little vacuum cleaner!' US drug squad puts spycams in cleaner's kit
BOFH: State of a job, eh? Roll the Endless Requests for Further Information protocol
Why millions of Brits' mobile phones were knackered on Thursday: An expired Ericsson software certificate
Wow, what a lovely early Christmas present for Australians: A crypto-busting super-snoop law passes just in time
Awkward... Revealed Facebook emails show plans for data slurping, selling access to addicts' info, crafty PR spinning
Thought black holes were donut-shaped? It turns out they're more like deadly fountains
Doctors join wombats in sh!tting bricks to help parents relax about kids chowing down on Lego
Big data at sea: How the Royal Navy charts the world's oceans
New era for Japan, familiar problems: Microsoft withdraws crash-tastic patches
Wednesday 21st November 2018 16:19 GMT
Re: year zero , all over again
Or also with a specific Unicode point. For example, 平成 has its own "hangaku" (half-width) rendering that squashes the two characters together: ㍻
I read somewhere (NHK News?) that even getting the new character into the official Unicode list is not trivial and it may not even be possible to complete until a while after. And then, all those OS updates for all those devices out there...
The most pragmatic solution (for programmers and the like) is to just pretend that it's still the 平成 era for a while, then go through a period where these non-existent dates coexist with implementations of the new naming. Quite a lot of work and scope for problems, but not quite as bad as a Y2k-style counter overflow problem.
Behold, the world's most popular programming language – and it is...wait, er, YAML?!?
Tuesday 20th November 2018 15:13 GMT
“the good old days”
As a Perl programmer, I've been using YAML since .. forever, it seems. It's "interesting" (for low values, and all) that it's suddenly trendy.
I don't think it's a good language for user-editable config files, though, unless they're quite simple. For a start, I don't think users should be forced to look up syntax rules. Also, I like a config file format that allows comments so that you (or another user) can use to understand what's going on. YAML can have embedded comments, but if you slurp the file and then regenerate a new copy, those comments get lost. Compare this with simple key-value files that you can "source" in bash/sh (so regenerating or updating is just a case of changing specific KEY= lines, and passing everything else, including comments, through) and it's just needlessly adding complexity.
Where YAML shines for me, though, is when it comes to working with complicated data structures. A typical programming task for me is to collect data from some mix of sources (eg, web pages) and pull out salient information for later processing. If I was doing this in a project, my manager would probably ask me to document a schema, create some databases and so on. However, usually I don't know in advance what these schemas might be, so my scripts just evolve, adding new data fields and even entirely new structures as I go. I often add "pointers" (cross-references) from one structure to another. At the end of if, I can just dump all of these structures into a single YAML file.
Later on, I can write a second script that reads that YAML file and creates something more refined out of it, eg, turning it into a proper database, with referential integrity and all that stuff. Or, this being Perl, I can keep the YAML file as a first-class data/object storage format, even embedding it into a library file if I want to. If I ever decide that I want to switch languages, eg writing a C or Python application, I can either use the YAML import features of that language or write a simple code generator to, eg, output a set of literal C structs or whatever.
In summary, YAML is good for sloppy/fast development cycles with quite complex, loosely-defined data schemas, but if it becomes important to impose more structure (eg populating/updating a database with a more rigid schema, or embedding it into some other bit of code), then YAML is still a good stepping stone. Less end user, more rapid development aid.
Japanese cyber security minister 'doesn't know what a USB stick is'
Friday 16th November 2018 00:06 GMT
1 dunno
2 dunno
3 unlikely as there is a standard dictionary ordering based on phonetic spelling (A Kat Sat Thinking oN How Many Yakult (are) Rancid for one possible mnemonic)
I'm still a bit concerned about how many textbooks are still out there telling you that you have to learn the word 電報（"telegram"）
Yikes. UK military looking into building 'fully autonomous' killer drone tech – report
Junior dev decides to clear space for brewing boss, doesn't know what 'LDF' is, sooo...
Which scientist should be on the new £50 note? El Reg weighs in – and you should vote, too
Saturday 3rd November 2018 10:10 GMT
Thomas Midgley Jr.
Posthumous awards are fine, but they're really just to make us feel good/special/whatever. Wouldn't it be nice if we could also admit that we're often amazingly stupid and doing great harm to ourselves and our planet?
Roscosmos: An assembly error doomed our Soyuz, but we promise it won't happen again
Great. Global internet freedoms take another dive as censorship and fake news proliferate
Pirate radio = drug dealing and municipal broadband is anti-competitive censorship
Erm... what did you say again, dear reader?
Wednesday 24th October 2018 12:34 GMT
reminds me of...
old Japanese man ranting about the national public broadcaster (NHK, like BBC) over loan-words entering the language. I did read an article pointing out some good arguments, such as that many of the "native" words he suggested are in fact imports from China, but I can't find it again.
London flatmate (Julian Assange) sues landlord (government of Ecuador) in human rights spat
Hunt for Red Bugtober: US military's weapon systems riddled with security holes – auditors
US may have by far the world's biggest military budget but it's not showing in security
Hunt for Planet X finds yet another planetoid, just not the right one
Holy macaroni! After months of number-crunching, behold the strongest material in the universe: Nuclear pasta
Thursday 20th September 2018 01:47 GMT 
I love physics
String theory in particular seems to be a case of "throw it at the wall and see what sticks". (same for dark matter, but I'm not going to root out the wine-dark honeyed centres here—it's a load of Bologne)
(oh, and yea, it was prophesied and so his noodly appendages came to manifest and such)
Where's my hat?
US govt concedes that you can indeed f**k Nazis online: Domain-name swear ban lifted
Skype can now record your 'special moments' in front of the computer
Voting machine maker claims vote machine hack-fests a 'green light' for foreign hackers
Fire chief says Verizon throttled department's data in the middle of massive Cali wildfires
Wednesday 22nd August 2018 01:46 GMT 
"appraised them of the situation"
It's "apprised."
http://grammarist.com/usage/appraise-apprise/
Also... "reached out", "going forward", "1/200 or less than", "a mistake in how we communicated with our customer about the terms of its plan".
Only one way to deal with these: kill them with fire. It's the only way to be sure.
Self-driving cars will be safe, we're testing them in a massive AI Sim
Google Spectre whizz kicked out of Caesars, blocked from DEF CON over hack 'attack' tweet
Space, the final Trump-tier: America to beam up $8bn for Space Force
Boffins build a NAZI AI – wait, let's check that... OK, it's a grammar nazi
Make Facebook, Twitter, Google et al liable for daft garbage netizens post online – US Senator
Tuesday 31st July 2018 01:16 GMT
Re: It's the easy way out...
Oops. I was obviously away with the fairies on that post. I thought I was commenting on this fine article.
Tuesday 31st July 2018 00:49 GMT
Re: It's the easy way out...
Well, no.
The problems are many, but the main one is that this kind of spread of misinformation falls between the cracks of traditional legislation. The SNS (social networking) companies aren't counted as traditional media, so no count is made of the amount of pound-euro-dollars that are spent on it during political campaigning. That means less accountability and less transparency in what is supposed to be a free vote. We presumably still have those.
The other, related, problem of this "social media as God" (of the gaps) situation is that if we want to regulate it, we quite reasonably want to do so in a way that causes the least amount of harm to the existing body of jurisprudence. That's what the proposal is mainly about: we don't want "proper" reporters (like on this site) to fall foul of new laws, but we do want to clean up the "wild west" situation where actors hide behind a flag of convenience (like "aggregator", "conduit", "advertising agency", "charity", etc.) that shield them from accountability when it comes to spreading political messages for profit and for their own vested interest.
Obviously, drawing a distinction between "proper" journalism and these "bad actors" isn't easy, especially given that much of the legitimate media is increasingly consumed online. Maybe this third class of "media organ" isn't strictly necessary. Maybe we just have to look into tightening up controls on how political funding is reported, which agencies can receive charity status, or improve across-the-board transparency of ownership and funding structures (and not just for political campaigning, though this is an overarching problem that is much more difficult to solve).
On the whole, though, I applaud the thinking of the report. It shouldn't be too hard for legitimate interests to engage in public conversation to explain why they shouldn't be tarred with the same brush as the kinds of bad actors that we know are out there. I think that they would be pushing against an open door with this particular committee/working group, and their public would no doubt also be receptive to arriving at some sort of workable solution.
The internet's very own Muslim ban continues: DNS overlord insists it can freeze dot-words
Monday 30th July 2018 22:47 GMT
Yes, it's fucking political!
FBI boss: We went to the Moon, so why can't we have crypto backdoors? – and more this week
Some Things just aren't meant to be (on Internet of Things networks). But we can work around that
Engineers, coders – it's down to you to prevent AI being weaponised
Tuesday 24th July 2018 00:17 GMT
If there's one thing that I've gathered
from reading the various pro/anti arguments above, it's that even people cannot decide on the ethical standards that should apply in all this. Or how a particular scenario should be evaluated, if you will.
How can we expect AI to improve this situation, especially given that only the "pro" side will provide the training data?
Better to have everyone agree to some sort of normative standard of ethics before things get out of hand. Asimov's three laws seem uncontroversial enough.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
