Posts by Charlie Clark

Re: Rent seeking

Just don't put the device on the internet, or at least put a firewall (PiHole) between it and the internet. I also think the EU legislation can already be applied to some of these "premium" services. I guess we'll see some test cases in the courts over the next few years.

PS this is one of the few cases where it's "rein" not "reign".

Re: Wrong

Apple and others would beg to differ. However, I do think consumer protection legislation in many countries may put an end to this seemingly endless grab for our wallets.

The power of lobbying. When you consider that the reason for developing the internet was to defend military communications from a single point of failure… it should actually be inconceivable that anything used by the military has only a single supplier and software that isn't open source.

Re: "The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe"

The statement is only there to grab attention and it succeeded.

Re: Hmmm, I wonder..

I very much doubt that such a clause would be allowed to stand because it's discriminatory. This sounds like fair use so the only the real thing to work out is whether attribution is possible. I suspect something like LegalAIgles™ is already working on this… build a model from the same corpus that can detect sources.

I think you're right. Even the current government has decided to turn the corner and pick up the phone. The next government is likely to be even keener and it will be harder to stir up the populist pot again for one technical agreement after the next. In addition, the generations growing up now are more and more receptive to Europe, though I think the period being bookended by the Syrian migrant crisis and the Ukraine war show two extremes of how events can drive sentiment.

Re: Some balance?

Thatcher's reforms drove UK government debt…

Re: Never forget that the original had the emphasis on "my"

Denmark and Ireland are required to do so by their constitutions…

Re: Perfect example of regulatory capture in action...

In Germany, such price rises explicitly allow you to terminate the contract early. That's standard contract law that the regulator doesn't even need to get involved with.

Re: standard American punctuation style

Not really, but it is at least known. The Economist Style Guide (sadly alas no longer directly available online) has the following to say about it:

With other punctuation the relative position of quotation marks and other punctuation also differs. The British convention

is to place such punctuation according to sense. The American convention is simpler but less logical: all commas and full stops precede the final quotation mark…

I'm sort of meh about this to be honest as I think there are other differences, especially neologisms, which are more annoying. But it's also the hallmark of a poor publication that enforces this kind of thing on a language that is infamously resistant to prescription.

Re: How about 112 and Advanced Mobile Location?

The example is a little weird. If you're mum isn't well, she could call the emergency services herself. Language might be a problem but it would for you trying to make the call for her as well.

Re: If it were anyone else

Yes, there was outrage and then most people forgot. But Facebook has still not implemented the proposed changes.

Re: He chose the nuclear option

What's this Bluesky of which you speak? Yet another network that will claim to be the people's voice?

I don't like embedded tweets: it's passing my IP-address to another provider without my permission (this is the whole reason behind it, a sane system would provide an API).

Mining Twitter for AI? I think not. The days of "sentiment analysis" based on Twitter passed as soon as researches realised that it's full of bots and the few users who aren't bots are from a very skewed dynamics. Pity the journalists never got this note, but it was just so easy to copy and paste a few quotes as "representative" of opinion.

I now heard several reports that rate limiting was enforced as part of contractual negotiations…

Re: I wonder

I'm trying to think of the notion of "temporary travellers" in somewhere like India. The overwhelming majority of travellers will be Indians and there will be shops selling phones, just go in one of those. Of course, even if you get a phone that reduces your costs, you'll be increasing the costs for anyone who wants to call you.

Re: 6G may be

You forgot that 5G is only really a rebadged version of 4G LTE (maybe lower latency and higher guaranteed rates but nothing really new in the standard).

Re: Roaming?

I can understand some kind of surcharge but it doesn't need to be anything like as much as current rates. Think of some popular holiday destinations that get swamped by foreign visitors: some kind of charge would help them invest in their networks. The problem with roaming charges is that the "home" networks like to levy a charge and effectively auction their subscribers to the roaming networks.

Mind you, here in Europe we've largely forgotten about roaming charges thanks to those dastardly socialists in Brussels! :-D

Re: The computers causing the traffic are Microsoft's, hence it is Microsoft's fault.

Your making false comparisons, except perhaps with Twitter. GitHub is a service that is run by Microsoft. This makes Microsoft liable for what happens on it. This is also why the T&Cs are important because they indemnify Microsoft for anything that happens on the platform, ie. users can be made to pay for any costs incurred.

In some jurisdictions, Twitter doesn't benefit from the US Safe Harbour provisions and can and, indeed, has been made liable for posts on the platform.

Re: So, how much...

Here, we're supposed to take our electronic junk to the local tip. Problem is, my nearest is 7 km and I've only got a bike… most of it isn't worth much (cables, adapters, drives, etc.) but even a symbolic price per kilo would encourage more recycling. In theory, any profits made recycling are used to reduce our bills but this is probably a classic principal-agent problem.