Posts by DavCrav 3894 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Nov 2007
"It also seems odd (although not implausible) for someone of his learning not have kept important files backed up, so perhaps there is something more complicated to this."
He did. They took all of his hardware. You want him to have an off-site backup as well? There are trust issues with off-site backups.
"I heard Margaret Thatcher's hometown"
She came from Grantham. I know that because my uncle used to live in Grantham. I spent a reasonable amount of time trying to decide which of the two I liked the least.
"Of course, such statues would be inexplicable, but that hardly catches the vitriol at least some of your candidates stir in my gut."
Yes, here is a list of statues that could fill an Inexplicable Statues Park:
1) Ho Chi Minh
2) Easy-E from NWA
(These two are founding members.)
3) Ant from Ant and Dec, but not Dec.
4) H from Steps.
5) Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
6) Otto von Bismarck.
7) Norman Borlaug.
8) Lord Laming, member of the Consultative Panel on Parliamentary Security.
9) Luke Goss, one half of Bros.
10) John Craven, first presenter of Newsround.
"Once upon a time, if the ruling party lost a vote in Parliament then we had a general election but not any longer, they just say "ops" and try again, and again, and again."
When was that? Only certain votes were considered confidence votes, like Suez and adjourning of Parliament. Something like Brexit, where there isn't even a consensus from Government, never mind Parliament, would never have been treated as a confidence vote.
"Do that in the UK, I dare you..
You'll find yourself in jail for obstructing justice."
No you won't. Saying 'No comment' to every question is perfectly legal. Obstruction of justice isn't even a crime in the UK. If you mean perverting the course of justice, that is a crime. According to Wikipedia, that involves one of three things:
Fabricating or disposing of evidence
Intimidating or threatening a witness or juror
Intimidating or threatening a judge
Please don't make stuff up about the law. Some people might be wrongly induced into incriminating themselves.
"You don't need to *encrypt* the contract - just sign it with your private key."
How does that stop the contract being changed after the signing process? Unless the signature contained a checksum of the contract, which is from my perspective the same thing as encrypting the contract.
I was also discounting the existence of public/private keys. If you allow them then that's fine, but private/private keys are more secure, as this is a situation when other people don't need to encrypt stuff for you.
Even at the end of this article, on applications of blockchain, I have heard 'in shipping', but no actual instance where it would come in handy.
Blockchain needs a situation there is no central authority, many actors who cannot band together to sully the record, and a regularly updated database of information, but not very regularly (to stop the record getting too big). The actors will need to want to do this repeatedly, as it will require some setup to work.
Everything was going well for the Land Registry until the last statement. Once that falls, I don't see the point of it in any situation that cannot be replaced by a cryptographic signing. Smart contracts are bullshit: just encrypt the contract with both of your private keys: then you both keep the double-encrypted version. There's a dispute? You both decrypt the contract in front of the court. One of you refuses to hand over the key? Fine, you lose the dispute. You lose the key? Well, that happens with contracts as well.
"As a baby engineer, I once got stuck on the Coventry ring-road after visiting Marconi. Every turn I took eventually brought me back onto the bloody ring-road. I began to seriously suspect I may die there, endless circling 'picturesque' Coventry..."
I drove on the Coventry ring road once. Never again. That thing is a nightmare.
"but, if the need arose, I could (although I'd probably brew and distil alcohol instead of refine petrol, petrol isn't great, even with ice and a slice)"
You have to distill the octane from the crude oil before you refine it, which involves getting rid of as much octane (and replacing it with such catchily titled compounds as (2,2,3)-trimethylpentane, although (2,3,3)-trimethylpentane will burn better). I'm saying you can't do either yourself.
Did you make the device you typed your comment on yourself?
"Anything that can operate outside the context of a Turing machine can usurp said machine."
If the operation allows it to modify the instructions of the Turing machine then obviously, just by replacing the instructions with a different set. If the operation allows it to modify the input tape of the Turing machine then the same statement can hold in a strict sense: print your program a long way away from the input on the Turing machine and the machine won't see it, so it won't be erased or run. Otherwise it's an obvious no for an arbitrary machine: the machine that does nothing at all is a perfectly good machine, and cannot be hacked.
If you want to force the Turing machine to run arbitrary code, then we'll need a universal Turing machine for that, rather than a Turing machine. Then if you modify the tape, of course you are modifying the program as run into the machine's memory, so again you can do whatever you want.
But if you leave the program alone and just alter the input then no, you cannot force an arbitrary Turing machine to do your bidding.
The main issue is that good machine learning algorithms depend on lots of high-quality training data. In order for them to be useful in our lives, it will usually be personal data. So the countries that can mandate users to hand over personal data for the good of the glorious revolution (China) will have the best data, and then the countries where companies can hoover up whatever they want with no regard for your privacy (US) will be behind them. Europe, with GDPR, will be far behind.
"The exact historical timing of the cosmic prang isn’t clear, though it appears ice has been eroding the crater for anywhere between a hundred thousand years and a hundred million years."
I wish I could get away with such estimates.
"How fast were you going, sir?"
"Oh, well, somewhere between 0.2 and 200 miles an hour, I know that"
"It certainly did, with the result that it is now a post apocalyptic wasteland, it's population homeless and starving, killing each other for the chance to lick the nourishment from a discarded fishskin..
Oh, hang on, that might not be entirely the case."
No, what they did was tell all business customers in foreign countries (i.e., many UK Councils) to piss off. Having lost all their reserves, many such councils are now mostly bankrupt.
So yay.
"So show us the evidence then."
You want evidence that China has a mass hacking programme directed towards stealing Western technology?
There you go. It only lists a few. Of course, you are likely to say "you cannot trust the victims not to lie about being victims". So now, what kind of evidence would satisfy you?
"The past looks just as dark. While having removed elected governments all over the world, their typical supplement were puppet fascist dictatorships.
I'd say, it's rather obvious who the real pestilence is and has been. I don't expect much to change there in the foreseeable future either."
Sorry, who are we talking about here? I guess you mean the US, because you used fascist, but remove that word and you could be talking about the Soviet Union, the British Empire, the Roman Empire, Charlemagne, the Ottoman Empire, the Mongol Empire, etc.
That in the 1960s and 1970s the Chinese Han Empire was only busy slaughtering people in its own borders, rather than in other countries, shouldn't really matter too much. Once they've finished their cultural genocide of the Uighurs (1m in concentration camps, if you haven't noticed) who do they come for next?
China also has a long history of mass slaughter; just because they didn't attack places you care about, doesn't mean they won't next time.
Look up the history of the kowtow. While you are at it, you might want to look up the history of the Chinese Empire, and how it treated other countries (all other countries, not just those in its empire) for hints of what lies behind the mask. You get the odd hint of it when, as punishment for Canada following its own legal system, China kidnaps a few Canadians and decides to kill another.
Be of no doubt, if China is the new boss, it will be very different to the old boss.
"If a reasonable argument can be made that publishing the picture is legitimately newsworthy, then I believe that doing so would be legal even without the subject's authorization."
I'm not surprised that there is an exemption for journalism in publishing photographs you don't have the copyright to, but I find it difficult to believe that anyone can argue with a straight face that this is about journalism, especially now that there's proof they would only do so as a form of blackmail/revenge.
"they didn't publish this information, so they can't have broken that law no matter what."
Sure, I was wondering whether it's even legal to publish a (stolen) picture of someone's penis without their authorization. I cannot see any obvious journalism angle here, but then Trump has appointed many of the US's judges, so I can guess which way that case would go.
"Instead, they decided to engage in blackmail/extortion, which isn't legal under any circumstances."
I have to assume this somehow technically doesn't fall foul of extortion law, because if it does then AMI's lawyers are absolute idiots. I mean, that doesn't necessarily mean it doesn't, but come on.
"France is in Schengen, RoI isn't. There's no land border between the countries, but there is a de facto border, and always has been."
So all we know is that the person driving the lorry had a passport that the Irish border guard liked. We have no idea what's in the lorry, because there is no customs point between them.
"Wrong.
And even if there IS a hard border -- ever driven across the EU-Swiss border? They don't quite have a sign saying "please don't rev your engines, you'll wake the customs officer" but it's pretty close."
The WTO requires customs arrangements. It's either hard border, an FTA, or magic.
Switzerland has an FTA, in fact thousands of bilateral agreements, with the EU. When the UK leaves the EU, at least right now, it will have none.
Please don't mislead with this stuff. It's serious. Max fac is magical thinking. If there is no border between France and RoI, RoI and NI, and NI and GB, there is no border between France and GB.
"The WTO do not require a hard border, they require that customs are maintained across a border. That does not have to be through a physical stop at the point of crossing. Both the EU and the UK have said that they would be OK with checks occurring away from the border and through technological means, and the WTO is understood to accept such arrangements."
This doesn't exist anywhere else on the planet. No such systems have been shown to work. Even in theory it would be impossible to stop mass smuggling, never mind in practice.
"The NI issue is a red herring. The UK government and people of Ireland don't want a hard border, the EU do. So, let the EU require Eire to institute a hard border with Northern Ireland, but the UK and Northern Irish government don't need to implement any such arrangements. It would be a one-way border control system. If the armed thugs choose to attack it, it won't be Northern Irish officials in the firing line."
Congratulations, with one paragraph you have demonstrated that your opinion is worthless.
It's the WTO that requires the hard border. Unless we are in a FTA with the EU, we need to set up customs. If we don't, we are legally barred from stopping ANY COUNTRY ON EARTH sending us whatever they want, duty and inspection free. That's how the WTO MFN clause works. You have never heard about it, but that's because you don't actually deal in real things.
"If you told me that at the time the Brexit vote happened, I would have been more sympathetic."
Told you what? That people voted for fantasy Brexit? I could have told you that. The Tories have at least three versions of Brexit in their ranks, Labour's six tests were fundamentally impossible, and were only abandoned yesterday, and so on.
And the general public, the Brexit-voting half of it (which apparently is the only half that needs to be considered) mostly voted out so they could kick out anyone called Mohammed. Who aren't actually from the EU in the first place.
So it's still a mess because, fundamentally, the whole this was always going to be a mess.
"Instead of spending two years bickering and fighting like a bunch of school kids perhaps they could have ... I don't know .... done some fucking work for once !
I mean, its not like Brexit is an important topic that might impact the country for generations to come or anything like that."
MPs aren't magicians. People want no freedom of movement, but also want a seamless border with NI/RoI and to have all of the benefits of being in the EU. This isn't possible, hence bickering as to which bit of the pipe dream should be thrown away.
"In what way? How are they a monopolist?"
You don't have to have 100% of the market to be a monopoly. Not according to almost every legal text. Google easily has more than 50% market share in a number of sectors, which is usually enough to be classed as a monopoly.
E.g., Microsoft is considered a monopolist for OSes, despite Linux/MacOS existing.
"Google can promptly stop linking to any site demanding money."
Thus demonstrating that it is an abusive monopolist and needs to be broken up, for the good of the free market. I mean, Google is definitely an abusive monopolist, but this would be another confirmation.
"The real question is how many people did the system flag as being wanted when they weren't? If the false positive rate is very low, then a high false negative rate can be forgiven in a system like this. If the false positive rate is high, it's worse than worthless."
A high false positive rate doesn't make it worthless at all. 50 to 1 is pretty fine. It means one guy is sitting at the computer: it flashes up a mugshot and a surveillance picture 50 times saying 'Are these the same person?' A hell of a lot better than the current method, which is showing pictures of known criminals around back at the nick and trying to get cops to remember what they look like.
"Or am I missing the point?"
No, you aren't. That one wanted man (in fact more than one by the sounds of it, as the 15-year old alleged burglar was also caught, even if he was then released) walked past and was apprehended is already surprising. And the trouble is, we don't know how many wanted men walked past the camera without it noticing, but it cannot be that many: there aren't that many wanted men.
So I'd have said that the facial recognition technology seems to work. Now you just need to sort out the stuff around it (for example, regulations, making sure the database is up to date, not fining people who cover their faces, etc.).
"Well _this_ Remainer wants to join Schengen and the Euro, and I believe dropping the rebate would be a small price to pay for that. However I recognize that these are not particularly popular choices in the UK. "
1) Schengen makes no real sense when we have no land border with Schengen.
2) Joining the Euro is a terrible idea until it's a fiscal union. And then it's a terrible idea because northern Europe would be driving trucks full of cash south every week.
3) You want to pay more to join the Euro?
Remain in the EU, yes, but the Euro as currently implemented is idiocy.
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