Posts by Charlie Clark 12165 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007
No, but declared the act was unlawful, ie. illegal, should someone decide to make a case, which I think they will at some point. Presumably Bojo will resign before he Parliament decides to hold him in the contempt which he deserves.
Difficult to fault the judgement on points of law, but that was the impression last week when the government's legal team (B-team at best) made their argument, that the court wasn't allowed to decide.
Government without a majority with a leader who broke the law…
PS. the IT angle is surely GNU (government of national unity)
My S5 has flown several times from my handlebars in an Otterbox when I failed to lock it in entirely, otherwise it was in a € 10 case with cover. No problems. The S10e is a Quadlock case all the time and, again, no problems so far.
Mind you, also got a mate with a Blackphone? (cheapish, hardened thingy anyway) which he's almost demolished by running into things with it in his trousers. I think a direct hit on a washing machine saved him from stitches and means he'll need a new screen protector at some point.
Worth noting that even in a good case, a phone isn't a Thinkpad™, so don't go driving over them! And don't give kids the bling!
You could also see that in the way the Samsung bounces more, or in the edge drop that it transferred more energy to the holding clip.
Suffice it to say, if you're going to spunk a lot of money on this kind of kit: get a good case. Currently, the fashion, here at least, seems to be for dweeby clear covers that you can hang around your neck, thus hopefully reducing the chances of dropping the thing and keeping it handy so you can read shit while walking into traffic…
Otherwise, I've found Otterbox and Quadlock to be good and the one advertised in the video looks good.
At least, I think that's what the article said. But I think it was actually saying, that if you can guess the model that a particular bot is using, you can trick it into saying things it shouldn't.
Fortunately, there aren't many unsupervised chatbots out there doing anything. This is one of the reasons why Google, Amazon, et al. have been found out listening in to what people tell their "frozen" bots so that they can improve them, but basically they're just a front-end to existing systems.
I think domain-specific chatbots are vast improvement on the rules/script based approaches to first level support, but the key is keeping them dumb enough to do the task in hand and at least one API away from sensitive information: what they can't access, they can't divulge.
Also surprised the boss didn't enquire as to if it could be replaced with a raspberryPI or some such.
Eh? this this the Boss, you realise?
And Amigas aren't esoteric, at least not for the time. A PC with a very custom board, ie. one that did all the work, was way more esoteric and completely unfixable.
While what you say is largely true, it's also doesn't matter. What matters here is how Lyft responded to customer's complaint and report of sexual assault and how it fails to check its drivers properly.
You comment on public transport is entirely irrelevant as this is about private hire.
Independent of the merits of the case, which as described should be open and close not least because of the available, telemetry, it's not a secret that the main advantage for these companies is the lack of regulation, which means they can undercut existing services. Unfortunately, the media is at least partly guilty of providing them with free publicity focussing on the convenience and lower cost. Only recently on QI Holly Walsh boasted about relying to get home with Uber no matter what state she was in.
Fundamentally this is a failure of regulation: harmonising the rules in the UK for private hire vehicles and taxi cabs would be easy; as in America would be removing the artificial restriction of taxi licences, which turn it into a restricted trade with not enough capacity when and where required. But we shouldn't overlook our own culpability in continuing to provide PR for these companies.
Back to the case itself: in the US things do get very tricky as soon as crimes cross state lines. Nevertheless, there should still be a case to answer with New York alone if the journey was not as specified.
And even if there are situations where you can't pass parameters separately, not come across this personally, sanitisation and quoting should be handled by a separate, testable and tested library, preferably from the relevant DB.
If you do write your own sanisation code you must assume it is broken because it's axiomatic that you'll never be able to dream up the crap that users will enter and that's before the hackers even get started.
Splitting them up does make sense because they're very likely to occur in different contexts.
Validation on a website is really important UX for the user who needs to be told as quickly as possible if they've missed something important out or got something wrong. Ideally, this is done client-side before a screen refreshes and this has been impoved significantly by HTML5. It's just such a pity that browsers took so long to properly implement the new controls.
You do then need to do sanity and sanitary checks: is this a bot.
SQL injection itself should really never happen as a result of client code. Parameters should always be passed separately. This is not to say that things don't go wrong, because they do, not least because passsing the parameters separately simply makes it the DB's job to do the checking. But any code that hands data off to another system: DB, network, app, also needs to make sure it follows the API correctly as this is where errors are likely to be most serious, leading to the privelege escalation you mention.
In many situations it's possible to find that the code itself was all correct but exploits were still possible. Hard to think of a better way of learning about this than seeing it happen to your own stuff.
People seem to always point this out with C++, as if wrong programming practices would result in good code with a different language.
Rinse and repeat for several languages. However, it is surprising that some of the problems are more prevalent in some languages than in others. So language design and choice do matter.
Modern development environments and compilers do make it possible for higher level languages to produce the same compiled code but with fewer of the common, systemic errors.
So, even if profits exceed predictions, you don't tend to see much movement, but you will see sell-offs if they're not met. But currently the stockmarket is finally worried if the exceptional corporate profits can be maintained. They're also starting to query some of the purchases that they've cheered on over the last few years.
They love the subscription model but are petrified that customers might wonder if they have a choice. Some of these areas need looking at by the antitrust lot.
Cabin baggage is always slower than hold baggage which is largely automated.
But, airports want people to buy as much shit as possible to carry on, which is why they consistently reject repealing restrictions of liquids that people can bring into airports, despite there being no evidence that this would affect security. In any case, it's not as if the determined terrorist with basic chemistry couldn't cobble together something with items from duty free. Especially if they work out how to open the emergency oxygen supply: who needs oxidising agents when you've got the real thing? Guess we're just lucky that most terrorists are stool pigeons.
Presumably, there'll shortly be a knock on my door for divulging this dangerous and subversive information.
I can't remember which one, but one of the US companies has the opposite policy: you pay for cabin luggage. As a result they have the fastet boarding and fewer passenger-induced delays as a result.
The marketing whizzes who came up with differential pricing which forces upselling for standard services were only trying to reduce the amount they pay to airports, which meant they could trail lower fares. Would have been easy enough for the CAA to stop by saying: all airlines have to pay the same passenger and luggage handling fees. By not doing so they opened the door for subsidies as airports started to undercut each other in order to get traffic.
but at least you'll be able to board faster at Gatwick
Invariably boarding time is limited by the queue formed by passengers after they've show their boarding pass. Getting people to board in order (from the back) and staggered has been shown to be much faster than letting the idiots choose their own order of boarding, which is even worse when seats aren't pre-allocated by airlines trying to make more money by charging for the privilege.
So, this is merely about being able to have fewer people at the airports. Granted, most of their work is low-skilled, but even so there's almost always something they need to fix.
And now it has turned full circle, my current employer has a COBOL based ERP system, written for UNIX and running on POSIX on a Windows Server, although it should be replaced by a new, native Windows version soon.
You have my sympathies! How many of these migration projects ever happen on time or deliver anything remotely like the full functional specification? But it will at least probably be pretty!
Ports and buttons are notorious for "mechanical" damage, which is why some kind of quick release for charging (magnetic or like Nokia's chargers) is desirable, even better is wireless.
And you wouldn't believer the shit that gets under the buttons: fluff, dust and water are just the start of it. Hence, again why modern phones have fewer buttons.
It's generally understood, and you can see this from Netflix's accounts, that most video streaming services are loss-leaders. It's more of the traditonal attempt to get as many users as possible and lock them in, something Apple knows all about. We'll start seeing segmentation as the content holders start running their own exclusive services and try to freeze Netflix, Amazon, et al. out. By which point NetFlix hopes to have enough of its own catalogue to be able to keep subscribers interested.
The CCDs and the software are indeed fantastic, but "ye cannae change the laws of physics" so a bigger lens and CCD is always going to help.
For the majority of snaps most people won't notice the difference. But, for professional work, it's less about the camera than getting the lighting and depth of field correct, these can make all the difference. Yes, with multiple exposures and software you can do pretty much the same in post-production, but for somethings it will be too late.
So, the badge is simply more aspirational marketing so that people will buy the phone intending, one day, to make a professional film with it, though that day will never come.
Didn't Philips develop a fluid one for phones? Presumably there were problems with mass production, which is why we don't see it. Tha and, of course, other approaches that can be done in software such as HDR and adding a second lens.
Apple should be able to cross-license with Disney, but otherwise it will be difficult until the competition authorities wake up and force licence-holders to offer their content at reasonable prices (comparable to local-loop unbundling). Can't see that happening in America any time soon but the EU will be a different matter.
Anyway nice to see Apple being the cheaper option for once.
In practice, the syntax changes between Python 2.7 and Python >= 3.3 are minimal. The main change that caused problems, apart from print "hello world" becoming print("hello world"), was the stricter separation of unicode and encoded strings, which unicode becoming the default. Turns out that Python is used for lots of network and file system work so that this caused a lot more problems than anticipated. Once the unicode literal was reintroduced in Python 3, it became easy to write code that runs well in both and is straightforward to maintain.
The change was necessary because Python initially didn't have unicode support and added later. This wouldn't matter that much in an ASCII world, but Python has long been very international. There were other changes under the hood but this was the main sticking point for most. To this must be added that Python 3 required more memory and was slower than Python 2, which had benefitted from a performance release with 2.5. So 10 years ago developers were being asked to do some work to migrare their codebase to a slower platform. Yeah, not the best of arguments.
However, having maintained the codebase of a popular library since 2013, I can confirm that writing code that runs in both Python 2 and Python 3 isn't that hard.
Then I had to move everything from Python2 to Python3.....even for my modest portfolio of code this was an absolute nightmare.
Can't agree with that. If your code runs in 2.7 then changes to syntax should be minimal, and avoid 2to3. You'll obviously have some work to do with extensions, but again nothing insurmountable. But, of course, all such changes are work.
Python 2 was actually just a rebranded version of Python 1.6, which is why moving to it was painless.
Yep, the article and the conclusions do seem a bit dated. The biggest threat to Apple's model is people deciding not to be buy a new one not only this year, but next year as well. They've already intervened in the market to keep the resale value of older phones high and provide a disguised discount because sales were quite a bit lower than expected.
But they've been pushing into services, and thus repeat revenues, for years. With the walled garden this is what really counts as idiot tax, once it becomes you can use any streaming service as long as it's from Apple or Apple gets 30%.
Not scum like Dr Lee, who's Bracknell constituency voted leave.
As the referendum wasn't by constituency then it doesn't matter. Furthermore, MPs are representatives and not delegates either of constituences nor party. Numerous votes, not least the repeal of the death penatly, were probably unpopular with a majortiy of constituents at the time. Nevertheless, the principle of the MPs freedom to vote is central to our parliamentary democracy, which we're seeing the current government trying to dismantle.
It was a simple leave/remain choice, with no conditions attached.
That is just one of the many interpretations. Inasmuchas staying in the single market or customs union would also involve leaving the EU, they were and are equally valid.
This is why parliament sought and was granted by the Supreme Court permission to scrutinise the process and vote on any negotiated settlement, all the Daily Mail, et al. bluster notwithstanding.
Given that the Supreme Court confirmed parliament's right to scrutinise any deal, it was the government's fault for not involving parliament earlier. Just like it was applying to leave without having worked out a strategy.
Parliament has not ignored the result of the referendum. But the result was also never a piece of policy, let alone legislation. For example, the referendum never said whether the UK should stay in a free trade area with EU or in a customs union, it was also silent over the UK-Ireland border, although it has already agreed by treaty to avoid one. Difficult to do once this becomes an external border.
Parliament and the government have to decide how best to interpret the referendum, including what kind of relationship it should pursue with the EU. People hate such details, which is why catchy, populists slogans are so effective. Strange thing is, however, catchy, populist slogans don't solve problems either.
You don't know how they tested the folding. But whatever they did, they had to do mechanically because of the time constraints. Mechanical testing is standard for all kinds of components like switches and buttons, which are routinely rated far above what's physically possible, to compensate for the stupid users. Of course, it doesn't always work, which is why we've seen the gradual removal of physical buttons from our phones. And companies, like your beloved Apple have opted for sub-optimal devices either for price or aesthetic reasons, with predictable consequences.
This phone represents a fairly unique value position. Yes, it's hideously expensive, but personally I find it more interesting that say an I-Phone X, which fully kitted out gets close to the price. I guess we'll see over the next six months to a year whether sales meet expectations (I'd expect Asia to be key) and whether they really have, er, ironed out all the kinks.
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