Posts by DavCrav

Re: few days?

"And yet here we are, less than a human lifetime later.... Progress!"

Yes, that's the interesting thing about long run times. Often the best thing to do is to save your money for the first few years and buy a better computer, then solve the problem.

"Meanwhile, each character added to lengthen your password *exponentially* increases the time needed to brute-force it, as long as it is actually a random selection and not a predictable variant."

It's still exponential unless there is a unique predictable way to extend it.

Re: Is anyone surprised ? Really ?

"No amount of clever keyword wrangling is ever going to match true intelligence - which involves KNOWING WHAT THE WORDS MEAN. Not what your database of lexical connections thinks "meaning" is. But ACTUAL MEANING."

I know this isn't the place for actual philosophical debate, but we have yet to decide what the quoted passage itself means. Fundamentally, we will not be able to easily train algorithms to divine meaning from sentences because we ourselves cannot do that.

The words trigger concepts in our brain, and putting words near each other triggers concepts sequentially, in the hope that those linked concepts elicit some sort of understanding in the reader. Unfortunately, the reader does not possess this knowledge beforehand, and so does not have the shared experiences necessary to form this understanding quickly. Thus we must choose our words carefully in order to force the reader to make the leap of knowledge necessary to pass on this information.

This is why writing is hard. But Wittgenstein and others had trouble even with the notion that any thought can be shared, as one would need to have all of the previous experiences of the writer in order to truly understand that which they had written. In practice, this does make a difference, and impinges on what is the topic of this article.

If you are a member of a particular social grouping then you have previous shared experiences and knowledge that mean that the sentence 'Whassup nigger?' means something very different to someone from my social grouping. Offense is just one facet of this. Take the following example sentence, that I said earlier today:

'I think the diagonal sits on top.'

Each of those words has a meaning in the dictionary, and if you read it, you will have no idea what the meaning of the sentence is. If you add extra knowledge 'The two people are joiners' then one has a better guess as to what the sentence means, but you need to know exactly what is being built to know whether I am right in thinking that.

However, I am not a joiner. I am a pure mathematician. Now the meaning of diagonal changes completely, but probably to something in geometry. But I am not a geometer, I am a finite group theorist. Now the meaning of diagonal is more clear: it is short for 'diagonal automorphism', and I am thinking that a diagonal automorphism is acting on some finite group of Lie type. But unless you know which finite group I am considering, you cannot answer that question either.

In short, although context is key to the meaning of a sentence, context is not just subjective, but purely invested in the author of the sentence. Any attempt to transfer information through words is likely doomed to failure because not everyone has the same shared experiences and attitudes. Even simple factual sentences can be misinterpreted, for example as the author being sarcastic.

Re: Blizzard Streisand

"While it can be used to help protesters avoid police, it could also be used to rally protesters to specific locations either as part of an escalation in violence or as a trap for protesters."

It was mostly used by people trying to avoid protests.

Re: Freedom-hating assholes

"Ohum... You could make about the same speech replacing “Hong Kong” with "Hawaii"."

Bollocks would you. If a gamer shouted "Freedom for Texas/Scotland/Catalonia" at the end of their game, I bet you that the person wouldn't be banned.

(the amount going on state pensions this year is apparently £96Bn, which isn't very much in the scale of things)

According to this website, UK expenditure on pensions is £160bn this year. Now it's about 60% higher than you thought, is that enough?

"Maybe, oh I don't know, stop voting Tory then, and some more money might start going towards pensions,"

It's also a lie though. Because of the ridiculous and unaffordable triple lock, pensions must go up at the fastest of 2.5%, wages and inflation. Thus pensions will always go up at least as quickly as tax contributions, assuming constant burden. Since longevity increases, you have one of a few options:

1) Increase pension age rapidly, none of this one year here one year there nonsense. Add ten years on.

2) Continually increase the tax burden on workers until they all give up and leave, then use another option.

3) End the triple lock.

4) Kill off some pensioners.

Re: Flash John Prescott

"Attacking politicians for campaigning in an election is seriously out of fucking order, and if you support it then you are too."

It's chucking a milkshake over them, they don't end up in hospital. And it generally only happens to those people whose own supporters actually do put people in hospital.

"Yes. If "3 strikes you're out" is good enough for the plebs then something similar should apply to businesses: 3 strikes and 3 members of the board of directors (randomly selected by the court) are banned from being board members of any company for 3 years."

Or just three strikes and the company is liquidated.

Re: IR35 idiocy

"Today English is king of "lingua latina" of the IT."

Yes, but you have to actually live in the country as well. For somewhere like Berlin you can get away with only knowing English for most things, unless of course you ever need to interact with the German tax authorities. But that is a lot less likely in Essen.

Re: How many hours a week?

"Is there a number of hours/week below which IR35 would not apply? e.g. if a contractor only did 2 days a week at employer A and 3 days a week at employer B?"

IANAL, but if you have two distinct employers, and it isn't disguised (like working for Santander two days and Sabadell the other three) then you should always fall outside of IR35. But I quite possibly misunderstand the legislation.

Re: IR35 idiocy

"Much more UK (IT) contractors will start applying for contracts outside UK."

Almost all won't. Most Brits cannot speak another language, so Anglophone countries only, more or less. And for many people, uprooting your whole family because you have to pay tax is not going to fly as an idea.

"The government just shoot themselves in the foot.

They should just adjust the tax rate to make the non NI contributions fairer, (a once a year tax calculation)"

I've always said that there should just be income tax. No NI, no CGT, no inheritance tax. No difference between earned and unearned income. All income from that tax year is taxed the same way (with graduations, as now of course), including inheritance. (For inheritance, I favour a 'lifetime allowance' for gifts that you get tax-free, and above that you pay a decent wodge of tax. Because the recipient pays it rather than the estate, and gifts (of above, say, £1000 per person per year) are also in this, all shenanigans are off.

Then personal services companies are largely pointless, since all income is taxed the same way, whether routed through a company or not.

"Nah, it's the judiciary enabling a totalitarian Parliament."

The only democratically elected branch of government cannot, by definition, be totalitarian.

"Point being we, the people still voted Leave."

Yep, in an advisory, non-binding referendum. Which was then superseded by a general election. The principle of parliamentary sovereignty is that no parliament can bind its successors. Even if the referendum were binding, it would have no impact on the 2017 parliament.

That's how democracy works. You cannot tell your successors what to do.

"Especially as a large chunk of Parliament have been acting contrary to their electors, ie MPs with constituencies that voted 'Leave'."

Quite a few MPs are elected on less than 50% of the vote. So I assume you would like an alternative voting system, like PR, IRV or STV?

" And then also demonstrating to the world that our MPs are completely incapable of negotiating a simple* treaty, ie failing to agree to a deal, or propose a viable counter-offer."

The executive negotiates treaties. The lesiglature ratifies (or not) them. Bring the legislature something it likes, and don't try to bounce it.

"'OK!, first order of business is a general election!'"

Parliament votes No. Resign or do your fucking job, Johnson. No more playing politics and trying to ram through your own demented vision.

"How many actions by previous prime ministers have been unlawful"

If you are talking about these right-on people who keep trying to make a citizen's arrest of Mr Blair because of the crime of aggression, you should know that that particular law didn't exist at the time of the invasion of Iraq.

"If the opposition had actually tried putting forward some usable policies it would have helped"

Why should they? The PM is in charge. It's up to him to produce something that parliament can pass.

If you want to change constitutional law so that the legislature is in charge of negotiating treaties as well as ratifying them, then I would like to look at your proposals. It probably would be a worse system, though.

"I don't feel great about the constitutional implications of this ruling."

The constitutional implications are that the royal prerogative is an outdated tool, and as time goes on its power is being chipped away. Eventually it might even be removed altogether.

Which would be nice.

"So Gina Miller has now shown that she knows the law better than the Government, the Attorney General all the political advisers and all their legal representatives, not once but twice."

Not really. What Ms Miller has shown is that she was right. The Government knew this was shady, they just hoped to get away with it.

Re: 1:1 inequivalence

OK, so Libra is almost exactly like special drawing rights.

So the value of your Facebook funbucks changes over time. I'm sure people who lose when that happens will be oh so terribly impressed with Facebook. This is just a little bit of FX trading with added privacy violation then.

Poor comment

"You (El Reg) have every right to attack Facebook. But please at least give us a reasoned argument, rather than an ill-considered rant!"

They already did this before. And the politicians are doing it, both before and now. But Facebook isn't listening and still singing the same tune, so sarcasm is perhaps a better route.

"Facebook has every right to evangelise its proposals, which seem to be the subject of the article."

And we have every right to take the piss. Which is the subject of this article.

"You can disagree with those proposals"

Oh thank you for permission. You probably meant 'you might disagree...'.

"(as some politicians are doing)"

More or less as everyone other than Facebook is doing. Nobody not employed by them is saying this is a good thing.

"AFAICS Facebook is not arrogantly saying "you're wrong" as characterised in the article; rather it's arguing "we're right, and here's why"."

No, they are saying 'we're right, because [waffle]'.

"Also for what it's worth, I haven't dabbled in any cryptocurrency. But it seems to me that the Libra looks like a big advance on Bitcoin by virtue of being backed by 'real' currency."

Not really. You give Facebook real currency, and they give you funbucks. If you try to change your funbucks for a different currency then Facebook has to either dip into its reserves of that currency, or do some FX trading.

So, like a bank. A global bank that is not beholden to any regulators anywhere.

"Insofar as that's a Bad Thing, it's because those currencies are themselves routinely debased by governments and by fractional reserve (banks)."

FRB is not the bogeyman that everyone who hasn't understood the 30-minute seminar on it seems to think it is. FRB is just where a loan to someone else is also considered an asset. If I lend you money, the fact that you owe me money means I hold an asset. People who say FRB debases currency don't seem to grasp that that asset has a monetary value, and when you include that on the balance sheet, banks are at (more or less) 100% reserve, in fact above that usually.

100% backed up lending is impossible unless you want to lent money only by billionaires. All banking is FRB.

Re: Backed by real money 1:1

It sounds a bit like special drawing rights, rather than a currency. Still, ban hammer is the best and only option here.

Re: 1:1 inequivalence

"Telling countries that your currency isn't a currency because it has a fixed exchange rate with existing currencies is ... not instantly persuasive."

They appear to be trying (badly) to say that because Libra is pegged they are not producing their own fiat currency.

Of course, this is garbage. Unless the basket of currencies is exactly equal to the proportions of each fiat that is being turned into Libra at any one moment, and is instantly hedged according to the currency that the person wants to change Libra into later, it cannot be 1:1.

Cross-border delayed transactions into an as-yet unknown currency cannot be 1:1. Facebook is (once again) lying.

"By going with a Germany publisher, Snowden clearly shows he doesn't trust the UK not to be the US's poodle; before or after Brexit..."

My latest book is with a German publisher. Does that mean I don't trust the UK not to be the US's poodle?

It just means that the German publisher and he reached an agreement.

Re: SMETS2?

"But you will have to pay for it if you live in Englandshire. The EU is building a HVDC interconnect from Aberdeen to Norway"

1) Norway isn't in the EU.

2) Scotland (possibly) won't be soon either.

Re: Surely...

But the sign saying that it's 15 and special is on the opposite side to the one facing you when you drive down the road they sent you down.

"The main problem is that technically "Brexit" may then have stopped, all the surrounding resentment between various groups in society, politicians (corrupt and otherwise) and family members will remain. The vault lines in society will remain. It will probably take a generation to heal so in some form "Brexit" will not go away."

Sorry, I read that as

The main problem is that technically "Brexit" may then have actually happened, but, all the surrounding resentment between various groups in society, politicians (corrupt and otherwise) and family members will remain. The fault lines in society will remain. It will probably take a generation to heal so in some form "Brexit" will not go away.

Might as well cancel Brexit, because the underlying problems won't be magically healed just because Brexit happens. Instead, if and when it does happen, we will have

1) A bunch of bastard gloating racists, who got what they wanted (leave the EU) but not what they want (kick out all the Pakis). And are also annoyed when Brexit turns out to be complete shit.

2) All the most educated and useful people in society, who were utterly betrayed by politicians, and who now hate the part of the population from 1). They both didn't get what they wanted and their lives are turned upside down by said bastard racists. The most nimble ones are packing up and taking their skills with them. Those that remain are bitter and want to see the bastard racists suffer.

3) A bunch of hedge fund people who made a killing off Brexit using the resulting money to try to push the UK into some kind of dystopian cross between the US and Singapore.

4) Everyone thinking that politicians are utter utter bastards who cannot be trusted with anything at all.

5) A slowly sinking economy, even if the immediate problems are avoided (which they won't be).

6) Hopefully, Boris Johnson dead in a ditch somewhere.

Re: First problem, right here ...

"It's our government that either rejected that or failed to confirm they would allow it (can't remeber which they said at the time), but the ball is firmly in their court to allow or prevent is from having VISA free travel in Europe."

Except that's not true. You can *believe* or *think* that if you offer visa-free travel to EU27, well EEA+CH+..., they will reciprocate. However, that's not the same as knowing. That was my only point.

And just because they said that will happen, doesn't mean it will. There's a whole new top team at the EC, the other EC, and the EP, starting on the 1st of November, and they are not necessarily bound by their predecessors pronouncements that are not in writing and ratified.