* Posts by DavCrav

3894 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Nov 2007

Julian Assange jailed for 50 weeks over Ecuador embassy bail-jumping

DavCrav

Re: Being a bit of a Devil's Advocate...

"You, reasonably, resist. Now they do you for resisting a wrongful arrest! It's not that different."

1) Yes it is. The Swedes dropped the case because he was too hard to get, not because it didn't have merit.

2) Indeed, you can be arrested for resisting arrest, even if the arrest, it later transpires, is wrongful. Although just because you didn't do something, doesn't mean the arrest is wrongful. A wrongful arrest would have to be if the officer does not have reasonable belief that you were a suspect, and enough evidence to make an arrest.

DavCrav

Re: £16m of taxpayers' money

"We have 122000 police officers in the UK. Assuming 8 hour shifts, that's 40,000 officer days or 40 billion pounds pa. Apparently we spend 34 billion on public order and safety so the justification is already starting to look dodgy."

On an FEC basis, it looks like it's not so bad, actually. It already shows that it's the right order of magnitude. Now don't forget that most officers are employed during the day, and that 2/3 of the time spent watching Assange was overtime/nightwork/holidays.

DavCrav

"The problem is with the spending and the allegation that Assange wasted it. And no, he was not held to the same level of accountability."

Try jumping bail and publicly holing yourself up in a building, and see if the cops don't come to arrest you. In his case he hid in a diplomatic mission, so they waited for him to come out.

Blaming anyone other than Assange for the cost of trying to apprehend him is bizarre.

DavCrav

"It's the judges opinion, stated during the summing-up - an opinion which suggests her judgement was far from neutral. Retrials have been demanded for less."

But have they been granted?

Frequently the judge calls the convict a reprehensible human being or other such terms, once the verdict has been handed down.

DavCrav

"then tells lies to support the expenditure"

Which lies in particular? From the article there were only two quotations from the judge:

"Your continued residency [in Ecuador's London embassy] has cost £16m of taxpayers' money. No one is above the reach of the law."

"It's difficult to envisage a more serious example of this offence."

So, you believe one of the following:

1) it did not cost £16m. You seem to think it did by the rest of your comment.

2) Someone is above the reach of the law. I guess this could be considered true, depending on your position. Technically the Queen is above the law.

3) You can easily envisage a more serious example of bail jumping.

Boeing boss denies reports 737 Max safety systems weren't active

DavCrav

"Not the entire chain (as then you’d have seen every 737-max crash instead of just 2)"

I don't see that. You seem to be conflating "all things that have gone wrong were done by Boeing" with "all things that Boeing did went wrong".

DavCrav

"and..... queue all wanna be airline pilots, air frame technicians, aeronautical engineers, watchers of "aircraft investigation" and the like to begin cutting and pasting their views.... and go."

If only we had a website where lots of technology/software minded people gathered. It would need some news stories about technology to get them here, then have some kind of comment section for them to discuss the topics. As it's tech-based website, we maybe could call it something that has a meaning in both the tech world and in the news world. Any suggestions?

DavCrav

"There will be a immediate cause such as "blown tyre" (proximate cause of the accident) but there will be a reason the tyre blew eg it was worn, then there will be a reason why a worn tyre was used on the aircraft eg not picked up at inspection, then there will be a reason why it wasn't picked up at inspection eg insufficiently trained inspector and vague checklist and then there will be a reason why the inspector wasn't trained correctly and a reason the checklist was vague. And there lie the "root causes"."

This guy is saying "MCAS isn't to blame. There are a lot of people doing stuff, it could be any of them." Since it's blatantly MCAS or something concerning MCAS that's to blame, all of the possible points of data in the blame game are inside Boeing. He should shut his trap and start writing cheques.

DavCrav

"As in most accidents, there are a chain of events that occur. It is not correct to attribute that to any single item."

I don't believe this for a minute. In most accidents, there is a root cause (blown tyre, kid runs out into the road, O-ring, metal fatigue around windows, etc.) and it might have been saved if other things did something/worked, but the root cause is the problem.

MCAS is the problem, this guy's lying to save his company and his personal stock options.

America's anti-hacking laws are so loose, even Donald Trump Jr broke them. So, what do we do about it?

DavCrav

Re: @Wellyboot

"I'd say the Swiss would disagree with you. Swiss referenda are always binding (as long as enough people show up, which always happens) and they have several national ones and more cantonal ones every year."

Really? How's that Swiss referendum to restrict immigration going? Implemented in full? And the quotas?

Bitcoin drops 7 per cent on New York Attorney General's allegations of $850m fraud by Bitfinex

DavCrav

Re: It really isn't a currency unless...

"It really isn't a currency unless like a language, it has an Army (Navy/Air Force/Marines) behind it as well as some taxing authority."

I don't even know where to begin. Which marines are backing up Breton? And Costa Rica doesn't have any armed forces.

Bitcoin is a pile of obvious shit, but not for your reason.

DavCrav

Re: International Bank of Villainy

"I'm not aware of any method of offloading bit coin risk in this way."

That's an interesting point, but perhaps more a sign of the fact the Bitcoin is immature and ill-regulated than anything intrinsic to the notion of a digital currency in general. If Bitcoin is a currency then you should be able to hedge against it falling in value. Some banks were starting to dip their toes into the water, but then there was a massive collapse, and I don't think we will see it again soon.

DavCrav

Re: International Bank of Villainy

"But $100m debt is not worth $100m in most situations, because of risk. Just the same as $100m of Richter paintings aren't worth $100m, because if you need to sell them it would generally crash the market in Richters."

I should correct myself here. They are not 'Just the same'. The second is risky because the art market is too shallow to accept that amount of extra artwork, so the price drops markedly to clear it. Probably not as far as you would think, because once it gets down a reasonable amount you will get new entrants who think they can smell a bargain.

On the other hand, the first case is straight-up default risk. Bonds and debt are essentially the same thing. They pay out and there's a risk of default. Shares are similar but not exactly the same, because they often pay out dividends but there is a risk of losing your capital.

DavCrav

Re: International Bank of Villainy

"That's like saying "debt is an asset"."

Debt is an asset. Not all assets are cash, in fact almost all are not. Some are, for example, antiques, art, houses, bonds, shares, currency, patents, and debt. Each of these is worth a figure on paper, which might not be correct when you realize that asset. For cash, that is true if it is not in the currency that you want to realize it. Debt can be sold, but at some discounted rate from face value. If you have booked it in your accounts correctly, you should get more or less what you have written down.

But $100m debt is not worth $100m in most situations, because of risk. Just the same as $100m of Richter paintings aren't worth $100m, because if you need to sell them it would generally crash the market in Richters.

DavCrav

"Actually that's cobblers, the Government is the one to fear because they can make and break the rules."

Which rules are being broken by the Government (which I assume is capitalized here like 'The Man')? Bitcoins are being seized left, right and centre because they are being involved in money laundering and fraud left, right and centre. When an exchange loses all its money, it's because either:

1) they committed fraud and legged it with the cash;

2) someone else committed fraud and legged it with the cash;

3) everyone has been committing fraud and now one country's authorities have seized the cash.

Slack files for IPO, warns of bumpy valuation as it swerves big bank underwriters

DavCrav

The business model is so-called 'blitzscaling': gain size very quickly, in the hope you can dominate the market and squeeze out monopolist abnormal profits later on by creating high barriers to entry. It cannot work with Slack, it's not going to work with Uber/Lyft.

Unicorn shit is still shit.

DavCrav

"Although Slack has yet to make a profit, it has doubled revenue for each of the last three years – from $105.2m in 2017, to $220.5m in 2018 and $400.6m in the year ended 31 January 2019."

Oh, are they making a loss on each unit, but making it up in volume? The unicorn way.

Gather round, friends. Listen close. It's time to list the five biggest lies about 5G

DavCrav

Re: Chinese law

"Therefore, if I had anything to feel worried about, I would far rather be subjected to Chinese or Russian spying."

The Russian government has a noted habit of murdering people outside Russia. The Chinese government appears to be getting a bit into the extra-territorial kidnapping business as well. Currently it's just their surrounding countries, and for heinous crimes like printing books, but coming to a city near you soon.

Parents slapped with dress code after turning school grounds into a fashion crime scene

DavCrav

Re: "their freedom to wear whatever they want"

"You do realize that portmanteau isn't actually English (it's French: porte-manteau), and is itself a portmanteau, right?"

Portmanteau was a type of suitcase, and was then a portmanteau. Nowadays its use is different, and perhaps should no longer be considered a portmanteau because it is not a new idea described with a blend of words.

DavCrav

Re: "their freedom to wear whatever they want"

"(plus or minus a couple of virtually meaningless percentage points)."

According to this UK parliamentary report, in 2016, 26.2% of adults were obese (BMI>30)*, and 3% were morbidly obese (BMI>40). According to this NIH report, 37.7% of US adults were obese in 2013 (so higher in 2016), of whom 7.7% were morbidly obese.

* Yes, BMI can only be used for bulk populations. Well, guess what? We are talking about bulk populations here. In more than one way.

DavCrav

Re: "their freedom to wear whatever they want"

"i've noticed that people who don't like the term "sheeple" are usually afraid that it applies to them."

Or just like the English language and think it's a stupid portmanteau.

Jocasta? Jocasta! Don't ram that trolley into the man: New tech promises an end to this scenario

DavCrav

Re: Own up

"Don't block other people. Lesson learned?"

1) You cannot be blocking someone if you are in a corner. 2) Blocking someone is not an excuse for them to assault you. I guess those are two lessons.

"And grammar lessons may be an idea too."

Do you mean 'might'?

Internet industry freaks out over proposed unlimited price hikes on .org domain names

DavCrav

Re: Competitive market?!

The article said

"From the perspective of Public Internet Registry (PIR), the non-profit that runs the .org registry, the price caps are an outdated control mechanism in an increasingly competitive market."

but obviously that is buillshit. If it's increasingly competitive then the price caps aren't a problem, because competition is keeping the cost down, not the caps. If someone wants to remove the cap, it's only because they want to charge more than the cap.

Owner of Smuggler's Inn B&B ordered to put up a sign warning guests not to cross into Canada

DavCrav

Re: Both sides?

"Actually pretty clever."

But surely writing "holding can with left hand is a violation of Federal law" on the side of a can of Coke doesn't actually make it a violation of federal law, even if the bastard holds it with his goddamn left hand. So he can admit away and there's no problem.

FYI: Yeah, the cops can force your finger onto a suspect's iPhone to see if it unlocks, says judge

DavCrav

Re: Doesn't compute

"Sigh, even ElReg journos seem to buy into calling data about who you called and when "metadata" "

It's a pretty good word for it. Meta(-) is, broadly speaking, (-) about another (-). Metadata is still data, its specifically data that describes another piece of data.

IT sales star wins $660k lawsuit against Oracle in Qatar – but can't collect because the Oracle he sued suddenly vanished

DavCrav

Re: first rate arse licking

first rate arse licking

""Qatar being an amazing country where its foreign workforce is treated with fairness and respect with a very fair judicial process," he said.""

Oh come on, it's first-rate sarcasm. The guy doesn't live in Qatar any more. If he did, it would be first-rate trying-not-to-get-arbitrarily-imprisoned.

Tesla touts totally safe, not at all worrying self-driving cars – this time using custom chips

DavCrav

Re: This time for sure?

"They don't have to be better than Lewis Hamilton - just better than the average human driver - which is a pretty low bar tbh."

Amusingly I would guess that it's far easier to be faster than Lewis Hamilton on a racing circuit (ignoring overtaking) than to drive around a crowded city without crashing into anything.

Bloke faces up to 20 years in the clink after gun held to dot-com owner's head in robbery

DavCrav

"Have you ever considered that the sort of stuff this miscreant was posting on his site is tantamount to rape in many ways?"

No, I have not ever considered that hosting clips of drunk people doing stupid stuff in public is tantamount to rape.

We've read the Mueller report. Here's what you need to know: ██ ██ ███ ███████ █████ ███ ██ █████ ████████ █████

DavCrav

Re: @AC The Mueller report was one big nothingburger

"Now think about what he could have accomplished with the Dems actually doing their job?"

Wait, it's only the last few months that the Republicans didn't have control of every lever of government. If you are seeking to blame the Democrats for anything, that shouldn't wash. The White House, both houses of Congress, and the Supreme Court, were firmly in the control of the Red Team. Everything that failed in those years is 100% a Rep fail. Democrats were blameless.

DavCrav

Re: DavCravThe Mueller report was one big nothingburger

"Son put down that crack pipe. You have no clue about American politics."

I am well aware of US politics. Sanders is a centrist by most standards. In the narrow viewpoint of US politics, which ranges from lunatic right to right-wing by UK standards, and from lunatic right to extreme right by most European countries' standards, he is extreme left. But that Overton window is moving in the US once again, having been shifted massively right by the evangelicals/neoconservatives over the last few decades.

DavCrav

Re: The Mueller report was one big nothingburger

"The far left does itself no favours, some are even calling Bernie right wing! I mean WTF?!"

Sanders should be described as a centrist. He believes that certain public goods should be paid for by government, such as healthcare and education. However, as far as I know he does not believe, or at least does not publicly state, that the state should own stakes in companies like manufacturers, which would be more left-wing, or further, that the state should own the means of production entirely, which is extreme left. For balance, extreme right (from an economic point of view) is that the state should not regulate any freely consented transaction, so no minimum wage, for example, and selling organs should be allowed.

Right-wing and left-wing only exist in each dimension, and right/left on economic issues bears little resemblance to right/left on social issues. Two-party systems narrow people's ideas to a continuum, where a belief in free markets seems to be coupled with not liking gay marriage. The two are totally separate.

DavCrav

Re: The Mueller report was one big nothingburger

"Thing is if it's not illegal nobody will give a shit who matters."

Even the redacted report makes it plain that Trump obstructed justice. He does not make a determination because it wasn't in his remit to fully investigate and make a determination on it. Trump wasn't (despite his lying to the contrary) exonerated by the report at all.

Now here's a Galaxy far, far away: Samsung stalls Fold rollout after fold-able screens break in hands of reviewers

DavCrav

Re: Need better testing

"I'm guessing the need for secrecy may have gotten in the way, but that would have been another advantage of 5 year olds :)."

Hang on, a five-year old will tell every person every thing. I assume you mean that you don't need to worry about secrecy with five-year olds, because you will never have any.

DavCrav

Re: Who Wants It In The First Place?

"Just someone who lives a life you can’t comprehend."

Yep, someone who steps over homeless people to buy a jewel-encrusted iPhone.

Take your pick: 0/1/* ... but beware – your click could tank an entire edition of a century-old newspaper

DavCrav

Re: Guess back in the days when every byte counted

"Bothering to have the program announce itself as "Windows Formatter" or whatever it was really called, was too much to ask or something..."

If you use the text editor 'ed', all error messages and confirmation messages are just '?'.

DavCrav

Re: destructive hdd check

"How do you test a disk write function without writing to it?"

Well, for a start, you have the warning message:

"WARNING! ALL DATA ON THIS DRIVE WILL BE LOST. ARE YOU SURE YOU WISH TO PROCEED? YES/NO."

Strong-willed field support op holds it together during painful customer call

DavCrav

Re: I've been that client.

"Asus tech support insisted that their company is pronounced A-Zeus, so I think they get that a lot."

Do they happen to know Hyacinth Bu-cket?

Wannacry-slayer Marcus Hutchins pleads guilty to two counts of banking malware creation

DavCrav

Re: So now he has admitted to creating nasty malware.

"He has made a full and free confession"

After being virtually imprisoned for two years thousands of miles from home. So i'd put inverted commas around the 'free' bit there.

DavCrav

Re: So now he has admitted to creating nasty malware.

"The facts:

He has been accused of writing malware

He has been accused of lying.

Under significant duress he has admitted to whatever the DoJ shoves in front of him to sign.

He found the kill switch."

FTFY.

DavCrav

Re: So now he has admitted to creating nasty malware.

"So now he has admitted to creating nasty malware.

And telling lies.."

But, to be fair, he was imprisoned for two years without trial before he admitted that. I don't know whether to believe he even did the stuff he admitted to. The US legal system (I won't say 'justice') has a way of making you admit to all sorts of crimes, whether or not you actually did them.

Double trouble for Lyft after share price drop sparks class action lawsuits claiming hype

DavCrav

Re: Ridesharing?

"The question being why a taxi or minicab needs a license and why a city council gets to administer it ?"

If lots of hairdressers started behaving like Sweeney Todd, then hairdressing would be regulated. (And is regulated in some places.) Lots of taxi drivers were crooks and/or dangerous before regulation. Hence regulation.

China Mobile, you can kiss good Pai to America: FCC to ban 'spy risk' telco from US

DavCrav

Re: Let's see if I understand this...

"find that China Mobile is vulnerable to exploitation, influence, and control by the Chinese government."

Well, to be fair, since the company is owned by the Chinese government, if they weren't able to influence and control it I don't know what the term 'ownership' means.

Let 15 July forever be known as P-Day: When UK's smut fans started being asked for their age

DavCrav

"I expect to still be able to read the articles on my favourite gentleman's sites on July 15th without need for workarounds."

Depends on whether they add it to CleanFeed or whether they apply for court orders for each one. I suspect they might go down the CleanFeed route, thus making CleanFeed a loss less clear-cut from a moral point of view.

As long as there's fibre somewhere along the line, High Court judge reckons it's fine to flog it as 'fibre' broadband

DavCrav

"Frankly I think that the company got off lightly just getting the case kicked out. Judges have previously administered severely expensive judicial kickings to companies without a case that are attempting to use the criminal justice system as a hammer to damage their competitors."

But the company was right, and the Judge was wrong. Fibre does not mean occasionally fibre, it means fibre. A paved road is not a part-paved road.

The argument is 'it's OK to lie to customers because they wouldn't understand the difference anyway'. Which is a bollocks argument.

IBM bid to unmask age discrimination whistleblower goes down in flames

DavCrav

Re: I wonder ...

"Whatever happened to Autonomy?"

That was HP. The other slowly dying megalithic US technology company.

Uncle Sam wants to tackle bias in algorithms by ordering tech corps to explain how their machines really work

DavCrav

"It's really easy to explain. You start off with your standard multilevel regression and post-stratification model, you see, but then..."

DavCrav

Re: Testing vs secret sauce

"What they need to be able to do is test the system to see what results it is given. If they show bias, then that's all they need to show the company isn't up to scratch."

Ooh, I'll bite. Define 'bias'. Do you need to input two identical sets of data into the machine but change M to F, or white to black, and see what happens? Or are you going to use imprecise real-world data, with other confounders, and then infer bias from that?

DavCrav

"The should be no exceptions to this rule."

Can you please clearly explain how you arrived at that conclusion. Your decision will severely affect the development of self-driving cars, and will result in thousands of people being fired.

If a human's decision can adversely affect their subjects and they don't provide a clear explanation of how they arrived at each conclusion, then they must NOT be placed in any position that can affect a living person.

(I'm not totally against your position, by the way, I can just see the hypocrisy of humanity imposing way higher standards on artificial intelligence than on natural intelligence.)

DavCrav

"If the algorithm isn't following any kind of logic, then why should we imagine its decisions will provide any benefit?

If it is following some kind of logic, then it's not unreasonable to require that the owner of the algorithm should be able, on demand, to explain its process. The decision tree may be unfeasibly complicated to put into a generalised if... then structure, but it should still be possible to map the path to any particular conclusion.

If it doesn't allow for that level of accountability, then it's not fit for use."

Who are we explaining it to? There are algorithms I know about that I can explain to a few dozen people, and they would say 'yes, that's fine', but the other 7bn wouldn't have a clue what I was talking about. Are they allowed?