Posts by Alan Brown

Re: Tone deaf article

"but I suspect the outcome of a "robot" doing something illegal will put the onus on the robot owner."

I'm minded of the plethora of patents for "Doing XYZ well-known and unpatentable business process ON A COMPUTER" which proliferated in the 1990s until the courts ruled they weren't novel and rapped the USPTO over the knuckles for not rigourously inspecting things.

Unfortunately the USPTO (and other countries too) have taken the attitude that income matters more than novelty, therefore virtually every application is approved and it's up to the courts to deal with challenges. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find patents again being issued for perpetual motion machines

GIven past history, patents & etc will start being granted for "XYZ, but USING AN AI"

We already know that "training" on existing data is a really bad idea - the way AI insurance and legal software ended up with systemic biases against various racial groups is a classic example of how it perpetuates rotten input unless that input is utterly ruthlessly audited - and also a good example of how users took the outputs at face value "because the computer said so"

If I wanted screeds of bad code, I'd farm it out to Bangalore(*). The only advantage an AI will have in the longer term is that it will undercut even the cheapest lousy human programmers in the "why output 12 lines of solid code when 8 pages of obfuscation wll keep us employed for decades?" stakes

(*) Sooner or later some other city/country will take that crown

Re: The complaint isn't about the use of FOSS code, it's about attribution

"Copyright law was designed for books"

also, it was only valid in geographic areas (the USA famously built up its technology by ignoring european copyrights and encouraging rampant IP thef) as well as having a term limited enough to ensure that creators COULDN'T rest on their laurels and simply rely on residuals forever

The system is broken in a lot of ways, but GPL has turned the efforts by Eisner et al to its advantage

It should be noted that patents and copyrights were BOTH suspended in Britain by James 1st because of rampant abuses and shakedowns not that much different to those being seen today - and weren't reinstated for over a decade (with new rules more similar to what we trhink of when we see the words today)

The reason for killing the system "as was"? It was harming the economy and stifling innovation

Re: profiting off your code

GPL is simple at its heart: comply with the license conditions or you're into copyright violation territory

The license says you must show your sources or the license is void. There are no restrictions on commercial/non-commercial use other than that

ie: You're more than welcome to make money off it, but you MUST NOT hide the origins

If I wanted people to use my code unattributed and hidden, I'd release it under BSD license. GPL exists because of companies which kept taking code, putting it behind paywalls and claiming copyright on other people's work

Re: Latency

"depending on what you’re doing MEO can actually be lower-latency than LEO"

IIRC early Starlink proposals included MEO relays. This might still happen

Re: Oh boy

The DF21 and its cousin the DF4D don't need to be nuclear armed for the task they have

A nuke in such an instance is useful if you have a delivery radius of a few hundred metres

These things are quite capable of reliably putting a hole in the flight deck. In many ways you don't need any explosive at all when the kinetic energy is considered - a mission kill is more than adequate to send the aggressor home, without actually sinking the vessel

(China has more than enough ASBMs to rain a bunch down and force an escort group to expend all defensive weapons before picking off the ships themselves unoppose, or to drop them around the main vessel to make a point that they COULD sink it if they chose to do so, but they want people to go home. The biggest unknown right now is that the leadership is suffering from having the same guy at the top for too long. There are good reasons WHY democratic countries change the management periodically - it stops people from being utterly surrounded by yes-men)

Re: Not the same

This comes back to the issue of medical egos. Everyone has their own best system and the aviation model of standardising _everything_ to minimise risk/mistakes plays second fiddle to massaging those egos

Once upon a time (not so long ago), pilots were much the same too. Things can be changed.

Re: another closed system with no upgrade path

"The message I'm getting from this thread is that a major reason for NHS IT systems being unfit for purpose ..."

And yet, most of these software companies are headed by groups of doctors

Re: What about missing patients?

This kind of thing is a long-solved issue - lawyers did it in the 1990s when data warehousing due to the extreme costs of real estate in places like New York City

reinventing the wheel inventing a new conversion and records system for every single local trust is beyond stupid

Re: Why a specifically NHS problem?

"That makes them reluctant to allow interoperability. "

Which is why you make it a legal requirement and then use legal paths to remove beancounters/manglers who refuse to toe the line

"We wander the whole hospital and use the nearest computer whenever we need to check something or print a form out"

Which is arguably entirely the wrong approach in the first place. You should have a tablet you can carry and the ablity to simply throw printing at the nearest device

"They were so efficient using it's arcane series of shortcut keys. Whereas the newer windows based GUI system (name escapes me) but it took so many clicks to do anything emis users hated it."

There's nothing preventing both modes to be provided.

Being GUI-only is the kind of mistake that can be cured by introducing the dev's face to the desk in front of him - at speed

The worst part is that this stuff is tunable.

I'm guilty of having done this - enabling everything that's there to see what people actually want/don't want

Once you have feedback you can remove the uncesseary items for various groups - manglement-interest stuff not showing up on the coalface forms unless people go into advanced mode, etc

Re: Noooo!

"The UX people worked with the people who had spare time"

mistake #1 in a lot of orgs.

Those who turn up "in their spare time" for such consultation sessions are the LAST people you want to be involved

Find those "who don't have spare time" and schedule breaks in their workload so they CAN attend

Re: Noooo!

Get the UX people involved, with a bunch of endusers prepared to hit them - HARD - around the head and shoulders if they make it difficult to use

"I'll just add this whizzy bit here.... Ow! ow! stop! ok, I won't"

Re: Confused..

LEAs have a fundamental failing inasmuch as poor counties are poorly funded.

The same applies to local NHS funding and housing

National bodies are vastly more efficient and not as subject to local politics (which is VASTLY worse than national level stuff due to so few people taking an interest in the antics of their elected local officials)

Don't take my word for it, look at how well national level education, health and housing departments do in places like New Zealand (the isolation and low population density there, with high costs of keeping offices interconnected demonstrates economies of scale quite well: It IS more efficient - and when politicians threaten an national service more people take note. Localism is a path to privatisation and carving up for profit)

Re: It had to happen

Once you know a property's been rented out, if it drops off the radar it's relatively easy to check up on it and anyone doing "off the books" stuff will find out the hard way that hiding from the taxman is a bad move

Re: Victim blaming

China learned from the best - the USA did exactly the same thing in the 18th, 19th and early-mid 20th centuries

Pot and kettle spring to mind

Re: And behind the scenes, COVID has it's effects again

"Rumor has it that GM has also had to retest, repair and recertify hundreds of pickup trucks due to rodents chewing on wires while the trucks were waiting"

Which makes the point that vehicles should be built to prevent this being a possibility in the first place. Rodent damage is a constant theme in some areas - it's not exactly a new phenomenon

Re: Military priority

Hohlraums were originally envisaged as a way of making civil power, but the applicability for weapons simulation is what gets the bills paid

Most of the R&D funding for ORNL's MRSE was provided as part of the Aircraft Nuclear Reactor Experiment. Nobody involved believed they could actually make a safe flyable nuclear reactor but it was a convenient cover story to get money for the research

Re: Military priority

> (which is pretty much the same way it's been in fusion reactors for 60 years - the priority isn't to produce energy, the priority is to provide fissile material, with the energy being a byproduct).

ITYM fissoin reactors

This was the fundamental sin of the ORNL Molten Salt Reactor Experiment - if commercially adopted it would have broken civil nuclear power generation free from the shackles of being dependant on the waste products of weaponmaking(*), therefore would have meant that the "enrichment plants" would stop being dual-purpose and start being subject to nuclear limiitaion treaties

(*) 3% enriched uranium is the WASTE product. The desireable substance from a mliitary point of view is depleted uranium - that's the feedstock for making weapons-grade plutonium. "Highly enriched uranium" is a conjurer's misdirection tactic for the most part - it costs so much that anyone wanting to make a bomb out of it would find it cheaper to simply _buy_ their enemy instead (it's far too radioactive to be used in an implosion weapon, as is plutonium made from uranium with natural levels of U235 - and uranium made from thorium (U233) has so much U232 in it that attempts to use it have always resulted in _decreased_ bomb yields to the point of verging on fizzling (see: operation teapot)

At least China is still working on their MSR reactor, although they've been quiet since it fired up a year ago...

Re: Laser ignition fusion

It will if cloning technology ends up being able to produce perfect adult replicas...

Re: Laser ignition fusion

paved roads as we know them now were originally something created for bicycles to use

(Even the original non tar-sealed MacAdam surfacing)

Re: Tritium can be (and is) produced by stuffing a bunch of lithium in a nuclear reactor …

There isn't enough to support ONE commercial fusion power reactor

That might change but the easiest way to produce it involves molten salt nuclear reactors and those and a relatively easy heat (energy) source with very low waste output and were proven 55 years ago

Re: Nuclear fusion reactors are very common. They're called 'stars'.

Putting it in context - the world's entire annual production of tritium and deuterium isn't enough to keep ONE 1GW fusion reactor fed for a year

This is one of the fundamental issues with fusion. Yes, duterium is in seawater (nordic hydro, etc) and you can make tritium from lithium but the former is expensive to extract and whilst 7% of all natural lithium is a candidate for tritium production the latter works out at $50,000 per GRAM

(Also, heavy water is relatively dangerous. It turns out that many life processes rely heavily on quantum tunnelling of hydrogen protons and deuterium essentially "doesn't tunnel". This shuts down mitochondria, stops photosynthesis and prevents DNA unzipping, amongst other issues)

Fusion is "the future" but we need to drastically cut carbon emissions NOW, not in 100 years, so waiting around for it to be ready isn't a viable strategy (If CO2 levels get too high then sea level rise or climate change is irrelevant - if raindwater gets acidic enough (carbonic acid) to start affecting plant life then a runaway process becomes unstoppable - this isn't theory, it's happened in Earth's past and took less than a decade to go from "oh shit" to "Dead Dave, everybody's dead. The entire planet's dead, Dave" (Gaspacho is optional)

Re: Nuclear fusion reactors are very common. They're called 'stars'.

Don't forget that 3MJ output (not watts, joules) then has to heat a carrier substance (water or CO2) which then has to feed into a heat engine of some description

In the end it's all just a fancy steam boiler driving a turbine (Yes,. I know about electric field direct generator ideas but they're pie in the sky until someone actually makes an actual working model) and the best you'll get out of one of those with 3MJ thermal energy in is about 1MJ of electrical energy out

Once it's running continuously then you can start talking Watts (joules per second), but until then it's just an impulse - they still haven't managed to get two firing in a row, let alone the 50-100 times per second needed for power generation

Hohlraums were theorised in the 1980s and first attempted in the 1990s. Taking this long to achieve ignition puts them vastly behind Stellerators or Tokamaks at a similar point of development and it's taken over 50 years to go from those achieving a pulse to running for a couple of seconds

Fusion is like rocket science - the conceptual parts and theoretical physics is relatively easy, The ENGINEERING is where it gets difficult - and the more we discover about subatomic particle interactions the more we realise is still needed to discover. Thanks, Heisenberg!

Re: Hard Currency

Blockchain as a transactional medium is fine.

The problem is that people are trying to speculate with them and they're just not suited to that purpose. Eventually the bubble always pops

Re: Hard Currency

You can't eat gold

ANY currency is only as good as long as people agree it's good and accept it for trading

When 4th century Rome took action to deal with centuries of coin debasement, the unintended effect was that people looked at the new coins and started refusing to accept ANY Roman currency - despite the new coins having more silver in them than the old ones.

The Empire was over in less than 18 months after that

Re: Pack of cards....

There are a lot of people shorting crypto right now...

Re: Indian Point

Nuclear power plants cost more to run than coal ones - this is why there have been so few planned since the 1960s

It was costs which was the main driver of abandoning plans to build nuclear and sites in-progress. not protesters. Environmentalists have never suceeded in stopping anything which was actually profitable and are frequently used as an excuse to get out of marginal businesses without penalties being imposed

Change the underlaying nuclear technology to something which costs 80% less to build/run and reduces waste dramatically (ie: Molten Salts) and the math changes markedly - but Molten Salt nuclear technology has been illegal since 1972 in the USA (you can have molten salt and you can have nuclear, but you can't put radioactives in your molten salts)

Re: Assuming facilities wasn't contacted

One small datacentre I was involved with has contractual wording forbidding water piping in the server room or data store

Every piece of plumbing in the building was routed through the ceiling space of the data store and the builders refused to remove it "because you aren't the customer" (facilities was)

water pipes for the radiators on the floor above were also routed through the server room. I proposed hacksawing them out and was threatened with GBH by the site foreman