Posts by Charlie Clark

Re: gender-neutral languages

There is no concept of "gender" in Japanese

I know nothing about Japanese grammar but Wikipedia has this to say:In the modern Japanese, kare (彼) is the male and kanojo (彼女) the female third-person pronouns. and even that particular speech patterns are considered male or female.

Linguistically the important thing is that the grammatical role of gender has little or no ideological relevance, ie. in the real world.

Re: Educate, don't legislate!

Look, once we finally get back to the 18th Century we won't need to waste time and money on education for the masses. LRM knows best: get the kids working and they won't have no time for any porn.

Re: If anyone

This type of fraudulent phone call is a world wide problem. I doubt there is not anyone with a phone who does not get several of these a week if not a day.

I don't I get about 2 a year and I can blacklist the numbers. A few years ago the rules in Germany were changed so that telcos letting the calls onto the German PoTS could be held liable for abuse. This is an extension of the polluter principle because it gives the telcos and incentive to clamp down on rogue parties no matter how the call is routed.

Re: share of moonballs

The consequences of the lefty moonbats are always more severe.

Comparisons of left and right only really make sense for moderates. Extremists are extremists whether they are Marxist or Fascist. Was Pinochet really better than Chavez? Cuba under Castro had little freedom of expression but better healthcare for the poor than the US.

Re: Only 5 years??

Shouldn't the tale stretch back longer

The article does make this very point: Nokia's reorganisation when it was world leader effectively prevented it from developing really marketable products. There were lots of experiments but no commitment to a single line.

The competing department theory was very much in vogue at the time, based to some degree I believe on the Goldman Sachs corporate culture.

It would be nice to see someone revive the good bits of the Symbian stuff at some point.

Re: PyCharm

JetBrains has done a great job with PyCharm, something that can't be said of PyDev for Eclipse. But I can't get used to the Javaness of PyCharm so I'm sticking with WingIDE, which I love. But each to their own.

I know quite a few people who like VS Code and run it on other platforms. But the T&Cs do make it a bit of a no-no for many.

Re: 3.6AU per year

Throw a rock in the air. It rises slower and slower, hangs in the air, and then speeds up again as it falls.

Unless it achieves escape velocity. But, yeah, it will have been subject to gravity from the sun and the larger planets since the last flyby manoeuvre, though I suspect the effects are now negligible.

Re: Relativity - Great! But what about String Theory, Dark Matter and Dark Energy?

They have never been detected

… the names are perhaps unavoidably misleading but dark stands for undetected. These are conjectures that help us explain the observed rotation of galaxies (dark matter) and expansion of the universe (dark energy). It might be more correct to use unexplained mass and unexplained energy.

Other hypotheses have been proposed but nothing has so far been validated, largely down to the fact that we don't know what we don't know and, therefore, not how to look for it.

1: fixed the security hole on affected devices - public service, good for him

You might think so but it's definitely tampering under the law.

Re: Headphone jack

Your phone just thought that there were headphones plugged in as it measured that there was a (beer) connection between the contacts.

I realise this, even if it took me a day to do so. Just wanted to a highlight one possible reason for not having one, but another argument against some stupid adapter for the USB/Lightning port.

Re: castrated

Everyone else with a drone just uses a GoPro…

Which is why sales of GoPros have fallen off a cliff? The phones have much better economies of scale. Nowadays you only find them where you can't put a phone.

Re: castrated

And that really matters? On a phone?

Generally, no. But for example, drones are increasingly being used for aerial photography in TV productions (to great effect in things like "Whitehouse and Mortimer Gone Fishing") and the drones are designed to carry phones. What other kind of highly portable 4K camera can you think of?

Re: Huawei has scared Samsung

FUD: Samsung's premium sales are holding up fine, the mid-range has been a bloodbath for a while but Samsung is well-represented with the A, J, K and blends of their flagships, missing some top-end stuff but fine for most people otherwise.

But the key element in the article maybe in the enthusiasm from the networks who may be seeing a general turn away from the most expensive phones by their customers.

Re: Whenever I see these "overly diverse" SKU options

That's an odd feeling to get when seeing a bunch of virtually identical phones. If anything, that makes it much easier to support them.

Not really. They may look the same but if the SoCs are difference then they're different. Same applies to Apple of course, but they're more subtle about it: the next version IOS will support older devices, but they may just run shit. And, according to a mate of mine who's had an I-Phone for years, you're likely to be forced to update IOS by the next version of whichever app you're using.

That said: don't expect to rely on Huawei or anyone else freely providing updates any time soon, though anything that runs Android >= 8 should be a lot easier to update. Guess we'll find out over the next couple of years.

Re: Criminal wants record of crimes expunged so he can continue his criminal ways

If anyone is going to suggest that someone convicted of financial fraud should be able to have that record hidden

But nobody is suggesting that so you can get off your high horse. Anyway, it's not as if being a serial fraudster is a hindrance to any career in the US, including the presidency,

Re: Right to be forgotten

Yes, but would the average member of the public know how to do this?

They don't have to. Such company registrations and professions require disclosure and should be checked by the relevant authorities. But there are also some times when the UK's "light touch" regulation doesn't cut it: the building industry springs to mind just as much as the financial services one does.

Re: Right to be forgotten

The legal system, rather than insisting it is right and society is wrong, should be listening to society and ensuring sufficient punishment for offences and proper rehabilitation

Ah, the court of public opinion. Whip up sufficient frenzy and you can criminalise pretty much everything and imprison anybody, and turn them into proper criminals by doing so. The legal system is far from perfect but keeping it from having to bow directly to public opinion is essential. Tougher sentences invariably means more prisoners, means more prisons and prison officers, which means much higher spending. People might love the idea of tougher sentences, but they're often not so keen on paying for them. Along with 101 on the populist's wishlist.

This notwithstanding: non-violent, so-called white collar crime such as fraud is much less likely to land someone in prison than robbery. There may be good reasons for this or it could just be good old-fashioned class bias: can't have people like Stephen Fry or BoJo or, <insert name here> doing time for a hearty jape now, or can we?

Re: How is it Google's fault ?

In Luxembourg I can tell you that if you have a criminal record, you will not be setting up a company

Luxembourg has more than enough wheezes for financial companies including the new "freeport" thingy, which is a classic "don't ask, don't tell" wheeze.

Re: Right to be forgotten

Criminals are both self selecting and stupid enough to get caught.

That's a bit sweeping. You can get a criminal record for a fairly minor offence. Or keep one after a change in the law (Alan Turing springs to mind).

And society judges people rehabilitated once they have served their sentence or paid their fine, and criminal records in many cases are expunged after a certain time, assuming no new convictions. IANAL so I'm probably wrong on the details here.

Criminal records are public so that it is possible to check them without using a search engine.

That said, this chappy does seem to be on a hiding to nothing and is likely soon to have his name splashed all over the interwebs precisely because he does have something to hide.

Re: Plus ca change...

So what's changed?

Windows RT was Microsoft's attempt to have its cake and eat it: cheap devices that wouldn't cannibalise sales of Windows. But the absence of any kind of emulation meant that no one would buy Windows RT, because there was no software, and no one would develop software because no one was buying the hardware. Emulation, especially in hardware, changes everything.