* Posts by Alan Brown

15029 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008

You've duked it out with OS/2 – but how to deal with these troublesome users? Nukem

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: DUKE NUKE'EM

"Thrud"

My memories of that character go back to early issues of White Dwarf

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Reg Anonymiser needs re-calibration

Only if your tucker bag is full of wombats

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Downgrading OS/2 to Windows 3, really?

"I bet there weren't much more banks which did that. Especially banks and insurance companies held on to OS/2 even for many years after IBM already abandoned it..."

Not many at all. Guess where Redhat's largest customer base is?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Had a mischeif disk...

"the majority would be better served with STEM over language"

STEM _is_ another language in many ways - and it has similar effects on neural pathways - there's a strong correlation between "only speek one language" and "anti/utterly ignorant of science/math etc"

One of the largest problems in the english speaking world is that we don't regard teachers very well and pay them badly - this makes the area a prime target for underachievers (anyone with decent skills/qualifications can get jobs elsewhere) and religious groups (evangelicals have been pushing their young women at teaching as a way of recruiting out of the 5-10yo pool for decades - my mother noticed this occurring whilst a school principal as far back as the 1970 and it became a flood of anti-STEM religious nutters in the 1980/90s)

Yes there are a lot of good teachers - but they get drowned out in the tide of jobsworths only there to put in their hours and the even more toxic red tide of naive religious fruitcakes

Of course the fact that the low pay and shitty conditions have resulted in recruitment of several generations of lousy teachers means that teachers GET low pay and shitty conditions. It's a vicious loop.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Had a mischeif disk...

"Same way there are several different versions of English (British, American, Indian) that are mutually intelligible, conversationally similar, but when written start to differ more,"

Knowing how they differ - and why - is useful to weed out people who "aren't from where they say they are" - someone assuming a non-native idiom will always slip eventually in ways that speakers of the other idiom will let slide, but which is a red flag if you're looking for it.

Once you understand the differences, things like standardising communications on International(Maritime) English start to make a lot more sense.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Why reinstall Win3.1?

"Windows NT 4.0 (never tried NT 3.x) could multitask quite nicely, and programs couldn't fuck it up. But drivers could, and did a lot."

The Windows NT kernel is great - it should be as it has a *lot* of VMS in its fundamental DNA - and programs run on a NT box are great too - IF you get rid of the GUI.

That GUI has always been the MS weak point and decades of development haven't solved the way they deal with it - only one program at a time gets to access it, if something along the line is badly behaved your UI grinds to a halt (even if things are chugging along nicely in the background)

That's why WARP was so useful - each iteration of windows (screen) had its own rigidly enforced timeslice and if it screwed up it only screwed up in its own window. Quarterdeck's offerings did something similar on top of a dos system which you could run windows inside of - but generally didn't need to as it had its own UI and would run windows programs directly woth FAR better memory manglement.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Why reinstall Win3.1?

"And still, 20+ years later, Microsoft continue to demonstrate that they don't really get pre-emptive multitasking, despite all the improvements they have made since those bad old days of 3.1. "

Those of us with long memories and experience on lots of systems remember that this style of multitasking was also the norm on the 68*00 Macintoshes for a _very_ long time and had most of the same problems.

Before Linux and WARP the done thing for home PC-class systems was "Coherent" - BSD on PCs at the time was "difficult" (specific hardware requirements, wouldn't use a lot of PC hardware, no GUI, SSCI only for a long time) despite being "free" - meaning it was virtually impossible to get running unless you had an experienced guru available.

Whilst BSDers might decry Linuxers it remains the case that SLS and Slackware provided a path into *nix that up to that point was unavailable to most people because there was a huge hurdle to get past simply getting up and running (Who remembers the Platypus?). Thankfully BSD devs took up the challenge and made it more accessible pretty quickly with PCBSD forks from FreeBSD - the devs that did that are still around (IxSystems) - but it was always several generations behind the latest hardware for a long time due to a lack of critical developer mass (no longer the case thankfully)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Timing is off..

"What really let it down was they'd clearly made no effort to tune the machines to work at their peak on those machines, so they performed really badly."

That was supposedly deliberate - so that people would hype them up as working far better than the demos instead of griping that they only got 80% of the demos as was common in windows builds.

(Dale Carnegie redux - if you undersell and overdeliver you win converts. If you do it the other way around you not only make enemies, they tell EVERYONE about their rotten experience)

One of the bits of OS/2 lore in the early 90s when it was finally released as platform agnostic was that the IBM devs were deliberately NOT given high performance systems - forcing them to optimise the shit out of everything rather than forcing customers to buy the latest/greatest hardware (ie: the expensive stuff the devs had built the OS on) for the newer releases.

With MS releases driving increased higher spec hardware sales and OS2 releases not doing that, retailers quickly came to the conclusion that it was not in their interest to sell OS/2 systems or OS/2 _at all_ - and many would actively rail against it if a customer wanted it. Which frequently didn't go down well - those customers who knew what it was knew why they wanted it and weren't happy about a 2-bit sales idiot trying to stop them buying it.

This was also the time when a system (or even a motherboard) "MUST BE SOLD WITH AN OPERATING SYSTEM" supposedly to prevent piracy - so you got windows bundled whether you wanted it or not. Retailers would frequently refuse to accept returns of unopened OEM shrinkwrap due to suppliers hitting them with a 25% restocking fee, etc - which annoyed a lot of Linux and OS2ers (about this time I saw a lot of Novell tower servers with an unopened win 3.1 license sitting in the box containing the paperwork)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Timing is off..

"The IBM SurePath BIOS code was licensed to Phoenix in May 1993 as part of a joint development project."

That was a very LONG time after the Compaq Phoenix BIOS made its appearance - as in around 12 years after.

By that point IBM had given up on protecting PS/2, microchannel and any hope of proprietary BS on the PeeCee platform - they'd even put OS/2 into general release to compete with WIndows 3.11

My very first "MessyDos PC" was a ~1982 Sanyo MBC-550 with a whole 64kB ram (upgraded to 256kB) - acquired as a swap for a case of beer in 1985. It was limited but it did the job (primary need was Wordstar 3.3 and 1-2-3), all off a single 360kB floppy (quickly upgraded to a 360kB floppy AND a 180kB floppy)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Expensive

"I went back to Doom after that as RAM for that computer was pricey"

We found DOOM useful as a ram test:

About the time Doom came out there was a burgeoning industry of hacking BIOSes and shipping 386/486 machines with fake cache ram (remember when cache was SRAM on the motherboard?)

Linux would manifest this as Sig11 faults when compiling the kernel, but of course you'd have to install the OS and drive it hard to find this.

DOS Doom would simply CRASH hard after 5 minutes or less, so it became the first test we'd run on a new machine.

Several retailers we worked with got bloody stroppy with us returning systems over this issue and swore blind there was nothing wrong with the boards - until the largest distie in the country was slapped with a $StonkinglyLarge fine for distributing boards with fake cache - and the commerce regulator determined it was a deliberate strategy of deception in collusion with the manufacturers.

After we pointed this out, many of the retailers still disputed the issue and produced letters from the distie saying it was all a misunderstanding (the distie also posted the same excuse to Usenet).

The Usenet posts and a couple of copies of the letter got back to the commerce regulator, who then _tripled_ the fine because the distie was denying the issue (remember they'd already determined the activity was deliberate) and went after the distie's management in court - they also issued a press statement putting any retailer who continued to deny the issue in the crosshairs for further fines - only one in our area was stupid enough to continue after THAT came out (unsurprisingly, a retailer who specialised in selling the cheapest nastiest most unreliable possible - including cases with razor sharp edges - at the highest prices, to the local evangelical christian crowd, who were convinced that as he was "one of them" he could do no wrong - that was my first real introduction to how gullible evangelicals really are). After the commerce regulator went after him he simply phoenixed the company and went on doing exactly the same thing.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Expensive

"Although the less said about the eventual sequel the better."

High Maintenance Girlfriend: The Return

Chips that pass in the night: How risky is RISC-V to Arm, Intel and the others? Very

Alan Brown Silver badge

"But it would require someone with deep pockets to put the investment in as the returns would not come until down the line."

For the big datacentre operators - the OSes are already there, all you need to do is run up an instance of whatever software you need on whatever platform you need.

The gains for them at this point are purely around _total_ compute per _total_ watt.

As we've seen repeatedly ARM when cranked up starts drawing as much as x86, but x86 has the advantage of overall platform integration and power usage - it's not just the CPU. RISC-V is still too immature to call on this

The moment ARM or RISC-V undercuts Intel by 5-10% in a server chassis, it's going to be game over for x86 in these datacentres. At 2-5% they'll be rolled over as systems age out and might have a chance to play catchup.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Been here before

' Andy Grove, the founder of Intel, taught us that "Only the Paranoid Survive" and was not afraid to do whatever it took to keep the competition at bay. '

Including unlawful behaviour that Intel was eventually called out on

' Never assume that Intel doesn't recognise danger or is afraid to use its formidable powers to survive. '

Having engaged in documented anticompetitive behaviour in the past, regulators (PARTICULARLY the Chinese and EU ones) won't tolerate that kind of game again and a sniff of it (such as playing favouritism games in the supply chains - a solid go-to in the past when regulators stomped on direct tactics) will result in harsh penalties

Unlike the USA, it's a _lot_ harder to bully/bribe/coerce those regulators into backing down when they see market damage being done

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Problem?

"China is already doing it. RISC-V is base for their (incoming) supercomputers."

Which is a little surprising considering their indigenous investment in MIPS and MIPS64 (LongSoong)

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Intel has a bulletproof insurance: It builds the CPU that runs Windows (and Apple),"

Until it doesn't.

Windows has been demonstrated on other CPUs - most recently ARM, but I'm sure oldtimers can remember SPARC, Alpha and Itanium versions (as well as a rumoured MIPS port)

Apple have already demonstrated their CPU agility

Regulators have noted the past attempts at dominance where Intel would nobble supplies to makers selling appreciable quantities of AMD systems, rather than competing on merits

x86 shouldn't have won out - it had the highest power consumption AND slowest execution speed of all the competing processors. The only thing which kept it afloat was dominance of the desktop market via Windows and with that it was able to leverage into the datacentre.

Scenario: Apple announces the next generation of powermacs are ARM-powered and shortly afterwards MS launches Win10 for ARM to land on the increasing number of more powerful ARM notebooks (and gets out of the Surface hardware market entirely)

(Could be risc-v, could be ARM, but ARM is more likely in the short term)

At that point I would not like to be an Intel shareholder. AMD are a bit better insulated thanks to their GPU holdings

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Eh?

"Microsoft failed to extend its desktop monopoly into search, browsers, or mobile"

Mostly due to regulators in various countries becoming aware of the dangers of its monopoly.

Remember the Halloween memo

FYI: When Virgin Media said it leaked 'limited contact info', it meant p0rno filter requests, IP addresses, IMEIs as well as names, addresses and more

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Join the class litigation

The amount consumers get back isn't really the point in a GDPR case - the idea is to cause MAXIMUM POSSIBLE PAIN to the offending company, "pour encourager pour les autres"

We know that whatever ICO fine is announced will be negotiated down to "fuck all" behind closed doors but it's far harder for them to hide it in court discovery, avoid the litigation costs OR the commercial hurt that comes from exposure of the decisionmaking processes that led to this shit happening

Ideally you want to make the management so toxic that nobody will ever hire them again.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Which is why...

"First time I had one disabled it was keeping me from vital engagement with various beer sites. "

I ran into it blocking the Sarracens rugby club website. Some might think that's vaguely pronographic but if you're trying to park around Watford you need to access that website to know the availability of public carparks on match days.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: No excuse for not encrypting that data at rest or in transit even behind closed doors.

"It takes time and money to make changes to insecure applications, which cuts into profits, share prices and ultimately exec bonuses."

So do GDPR fines.

I just hope there's an audit trail for the "I told you so" moment when manglement attempt to shit on staff who tried to do the right thing (and that those staff kept copies of the warnings they issued)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Internet facing database?

"I got one fixed by telling them kids were storing what looked like fireworks in it..."

Funnily enough, this works well for busted BT cabs too.

If you're wondering how Brit cops' live suspect-hunting facial-recog is going, it's cruising at 88% false positives

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: One person.

" the real issue isn't accuracy here, it's rights"

Absolutely correct.

One of the lesser known things about the Holocaust is HOW the Nazis knew who was Jewish, gay, gypsies, etc etc

Long before the Nazis were a thing, the 1923 census asked this question in order to be able to gauge discrimination in the Weimar republic. The Nazis were able to refer to the answers.

Just because something seems to be a good idea at the time, doesn't mean it can't be abused later.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"badgering people into an annoyed response and then arresting them for it."

This is EXACTLY what the Met has been recorded doing around these sites - and then getting slapped on the back for a job well done by the very media recording the badgetring.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Motives and false negatives

"the measure of a good cop and the basis for advancement is in the arrest rate"

In the USA and a number of other backwards countries, perhaps.

In other countries, individual cops with high arrest rates get investigated to ensure they're not doing illegal things and the measure of sucessful policing isn't REPORTED crimes and solve rates, but the surveys which run to pick up what's NOT reported (where people don't bother because the police won't do anything, or not record it - UK police featuring highly in the latter category)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Motives and false negatives

"I wonder why they didn't try to to test the false-negative rate."

You know full well why - various bad actors have already been boasting about sauntering past these cameras without a hit being registered and the Met don't want the false negative rates to be quantified.

As for the "idea" that facial recognition will deter crime - opportunists don't care about being fully visible on CCTV as it is (impulse control issues) and actual criminals know the things are next to worthless as locations are easily seen

In general if you want to catch an _actual_ criminal then the only kind of video surveillance that works is _covert_ cameras - which in public places are a spectacular own goal as soon as their presence is known.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "inaccuracy rate of 87.5 per cent"

This part is very telling:

"Some were stopped for a crime the courts had already dealt with"

In other words, the they had no good reason to be on the wanted list AT ALL

"but were arrested for a more minor offence that would not normally be considered serious enough to be tackled using facial recognition."

In other words "We need to justify this, he's a bad man, so we arrested him on charges of walking on the cracks in the pavement, loitering with intent to use a pedestrian crossing, wearing a loud shirt in a built up area during the hours of darkness and being in possession of thick lips and curly black hair"

I'm willing to bet that the arrests were later voided, but the Met won't be breathing a word of that.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "inaccuracy rate of 87.5 per cent"

"Well now we know : 12.5% efficient."

Nope, not even close - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy

These systems have already been shown to be AT LEAST as likely to MISS a wanted person as to flag innocents as wanted - but because the Met don't _measure_ a false negative rate the real figures are utterly uncalculable.

A system which flags a middle aged, short, fat black woman as matching a wanted, tall slim 19yo black male - whilst failing to go off on 20 wanted white criminals isn't worth the cost of the cameras unless your agenda is to perpetuate the ongoing culture of institutional racism.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Nothing unusual here

Their terrorist intelligence work has predicted 300 of the last 15 attacks and they think that's good odds too.

Uncle Sam's nuke-stockpile-simulating souped-super El Capitan set to hit TWO exa-FLOPS, take crown as world's fastest machine in 2023

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: So that explains one thing...

"the US Gov want a wall with Mexico which the Mexicans must pay for"

Didn't you hear?

Mexico said they were happy to pay for a wall along the 1848 border.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Anyone heard

"If you take bombs apart and make them 'safe' (dilute) and put them somewhere out of the way"

Most "out of the way" places so far happen to have been "the core of civil nuclear reactors"

The stuff is equally valuable as fuel as weapons (although Thorium makes more financial sense at $150k/kg vs $40k/kg for 3% U235 civil reactor grade(*) or millions/kg for 50% military reactor uranium)

Weapons plutonium is "dirt cheap" by comparison, as it's made from "depleted uranium" (U238) exposed in the military reactor (U238 also makes cases for "H-bombs" and gives them their added kick - which is why it's kept under lock and key). Thankfully it makes reasonable reactor fuel, so getting rid of it this way is a viable proposition (a Thorium MSR reactor could go 2 better by digesting U238 AND most "high level nuclear waste" from conventional reactors, reducing waste output by at least 99%)

(*) Uranium and Thorium out of the ground are about the same price, but you 'throw away;(**) at least 89.5% of your natural uranium as "depleted uranium" to make civil grade fuel and it takes stupendous amounts of energy to run the centrifuges to get that far. $40k/kg is believed to be a highly subsidised price.

(**) Except you don't - depleted uranium is part of the weapons cycle used to make plutonium and MIRVs. This is the shell game of weaponisation in the uranium process. Forget reprocessing. Everything's far too crosscontaminated to weaponise at that point. All the evil shit happens here - and THAT is why the military hates thorium cycle MSRs - it would expose the entire cost of uranium systems as military, not civil. (Civilian plant operators hate Thorium MSR because a commercial deployment would render water-moderated steam bombs obsolete, too expensive to build and too dangerous too allow to keep running at a stroke)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: This computer, whose name I'm not worthy of saying

"But the answer is "

...dependent on the number of fingers you have.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Uggghh

Just to set your mind at rest a little:

Oak Ridge is ALSO doing a shedload of research on restarting molten salt fuelled nuclear reactors (The Oak Ridge Experiment) and because MSRs are effectively banned in the USA (you can play with molten salts to your heart's content, but adding anything nuclear to them was explicitly made impossible when Nixon killed off Weinberg's safer mousetrap in 1972(*)), this is about the only way to model the best/safest/most efficient ways of setting up core geometry.

Bear in mind that whilst Thorium LFTR tech is reasonably well understood and not pressurised, the Oak Ridge Experiment used a graphite core - which when push comes to shove is a fire hazard if things go really _really_ wrong. That's highly unlikely in a MSR because you can and do flood the reactor with inert gas if you drain it, but after Chernobyl still a kneejerk response item - and means that less flammable alternatives need to be tested and modelled to provide the necessary criticality.

(*) Standard water moderated nukes are a bloody great steam bomb waiting to go off - Alvin Weinberg invented the water-moderated nuclear reactor for the Nautilus and didn't like his small design being scaled up to Heath-Robinson scales for civil power as he felt it was dangerous, so built a "better mousetrap" in the form of a hotter, much safer, unpressurised reactor.nuclear loop that couldn't burn or contaminate the biosphere. His reward was to be kicked out of the nuclear industry - and the project that Nixon promoted in favour of the MSR (the fast breeder reactor) was a dud.(**)

(**) Bad things to cool or moderate nuclear reactors with:

- water - steam bombs, not hot enough, corrosive and biosphere contamination

- sodium - burns furiously when exposed to air (Monju)

- lead - rots brains (some soviet sub reactors and a few others)

- Helium/CO2/other gases - containment issues

As Australia is gripped by bog roll shortage, tabloid says: Here, fill your dunny with us

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Am I missing something ?

"You bog is often on the floor above your kitchen tap, and sometimes shares the same supply pipe. "

Which (along with washing machines in the kitchen) shows how utterly unfit for purpose and dangerous by (lack of) design most British houses are.

1: That kind of layout is flat out illegal in most parts of the world - forget the water mains and think what happens if there's _any_ kind of disruption to the sewer pipe. (For the same reason a bath or shower above a kitchen would be illegal too)

2: A lot of countries require _at least_ one room's separation between laundry and food preparation areas due to contamination risks - especially prevalent if you think of the words "babies" and "nappies"

The regulations you're talking about are a half-arsed response to a slack-arsed problem that shouldn't ever arise in the first place - very much a case of "Oh, look, we'll deal harshly with a symptom AND IGNORE THE FUCKING CAUSE OF THE PROBLEM"

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Am I missing something ?

"hand washing is an alien concept. Until some bloke on the telly points out that not doing so might make you sick"

I had the same arguments with my wife about leaving cooked rice sitting around.

No amount of showing her the reports would convince her - until some talking head said so on TV - and then it must be true because it was on TV wasn't it, and they don't allow lies on TV do they?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Nice marketing move, though

"They would sell a hell of a lot more if the pages had a selection of politicians faces printed on them."

You mean like this?

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Donald-Trump-Toilet-Paper-Novelty/dp/B07BTZZZXQ

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Ideal for politicians

"Who often confuse their rectal and respiratory systems... By talking out of their arses."

Thy can't do that most of the time, due to their rectocranial inversion (aka head up arse syndrome)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Am I missing something ?

> Don't people normally wash their hands or why are they so overly eager now?

"Wash your hands as if the blood of the rightful king you convinced your husband to kill is on them and won't come off"

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Am I missing something ?

"They hardly use it anyway as they have delux wash'n'wax bogs"

And for the less Japanese of us, searching on Amazon, et al for "Bidet Toilet Seat" will find a number of devices which are more reasonably priced.

HINT: If you think you need warm water, you probably live in the arctic. Cold-water only ones are perfectly tolerable (Yes, I have one and yes they work - but you'll still need a bit of TP to dry off with. The expensive whizzo ones come with a warm air blaster to cover that angle.)

This and "sharuf" sprayers are more sensible approaches than wiping a thin film of .... "stuff" all over your cheeks.

UK data watchdog slaps a £500,000 fine on Cathay Pacific for 2018 9.4m customer data leak

Alan Brown Silver badge

"No! You just don't KNOW if its happened yet."

And of course, if you were to find it NOW, not reporting would be a criminal offence, so you're legally obligated to do so as soon as its found..... (contractual terms don't trump the law)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: sigh...

> I wrote that the a fine of £500.000 was ridiculous.

It's the maximum allowed under the law applicable at the time, and yes it WAS ridiculous - but bear in mind that it was set and HELD at this low figure by our "business friendly" government.

It only went to higher levels once the EU forced the UK government to change it with the rollout of GDPR - and the government did everything it could to resist those changes.

"Taking back control" - among other things means a high possibility that if the government thinks it can get away with it, it will attempt to roll back the fines to traffic ticket nuisance levels. There's a very high historic antipathy to consumer protection laws amongst the Conservative party and their predecessors (who were also opposed to things like laws making sawdust and plaster of paris in sausages illegal, amongst other things)

The ominous black cloud on the Horizon isn't a storm. It's CHICKENS flying this way and looking for their roost.

Brexit Britain changes its mind, says non, nein, no to Europe's unified patent court – potentially sealing its fate

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Why must Britain always lower its standards to meet the EU"

*cough*sewage on beaches*cough*

*cough*air pollution*cough*

*cough*poor people working 60 hours*cough*

*cough*minimum wage laws*cough*

*cough*sick leave entitlements*cough*

*cough*maternity/paternity entitlements*cough*

*cough*prosecution of polluters*cough*

*cough*privacy protection*cough*

*cough*right to a fair trial*cough*mclibel*cough*

*cough*arbitrary seizure of land*cough*enclousure acts*cough*

what has the ECHR ever done for us? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptfmAY6M6aA

Alan Brown Silver badge

"willing to bet large numbers of those moaning about brexit voted tory"

In which case "You voted for it, you won. Get used to it"

Alan Brown Silver badge

"We're taking back control"

The primary objective seems to be for rightwing gov types to take control of the rulemaking back from Brussels so they can walk back personal, business and consumer protections that have been enacted across the EU - with the apparent end goal of turning the UK into a mini-USA or libertarian paradise

Nothing to do with the actual PEOPLE, who will have even less rights and control of their lives as a result.

As for Libertarian paradises: they exist

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/30/colorado-springs-libertarian-experiment-america-215313

https://www.salon.com/2015/03/02/my_libertarian_vacation_nightmare_how_ayn_rand_ron_paul_their_groupies_were_all_debunked/

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: ideology over commonsense

"Is it ideology over common sense to leave an ideological political block that seems to lack common sense?"

The CORE value of the EU, common market and its predecessors is to put an end to 2000+ years of relentless warfare across the continent by getting everyone to play nice together and avoiding the mistakes of the 1870-1914 sucession of interlocking defence treaties that resulted in the assassination of a minor Austrian archduke of no real importance by an anarchist of even less importance causing a bunch of things to click into place and setting in chain events that killed upwards of 6 million people over the next 4 years

This is the longest period _IN RECORDED HISTORY_ that there hasn't been a war of some kind underway in Western Europe. By that metric it's doing very well for itself - and the UK - whose entire political history as a country not part of Europe has revolved around keeping everybody else fighting each other and always being on the side of the largest alliance.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "clarified once the uncertain situation caused by Brexit has been resolved"

"Negotiation is a two-way street. The EU are now negotiating with Boris Johnson because they repeatedly and continuously shat on Theresa May."

Nope, the approach they're taking with Johnson and his ilk is _exactly_ the same one they took with May. They've been remarkably consistent on their position since 2016 and with good reason - They're playing chess whilst the UK conservatives have been trying to play poker.

It's hard to bluff when what you thought were your few good "cards" get up and cross the table. The UK position has effectively trashed what remains of its manufacturing industry, will gut the financial one and the proposed trading arrangements will result in farming being uneconomic across the country.

One example: Brighton's single largest employer is the American Express call centre. It's had its staff on notice to be ready to move EU-side since the week after the referendum - and as the vast majority are EU citizens (language requirements) so there's no issue in them jumping the ditch.

There are similar cases being reported up and down the country with companies relocating head offices or new facilities to EU-land - and as for Nissan - despite the recent "leaks", the more pragnmatic view is that they just put $150 million into enhancing the Spanish production lines without laying a finger on UK-side, so you can see where they're going to go if they don't pull back to Japan entirely now the new trade agreements with the EU mean they don't get import tariffs for Japanese-made cars anymore (Honda closed their plant. Toyota's been building a huge setup in Romania for the last decade and component makers are all moving out.... once they go they take remaining assembly lines with them). Even Rolls Royce has been investing heavily in new Gas Turbine engine production facilities in Germany and it wouldn't take a great leap of the imagination for Short Brothers/Bombardier/Airbus to build new facilities to the south of the NI border, easily justifiable given the age and state of the existing buildings.

When you factor in that a dash over 70% of the Exchequer's net tax income (as in Tax AND NI) goes straight out the revolving door again in state pensions or pensioner vote bribes (fuel allowances, bus passes, free tv licences, etc) it's no surprise to see that there are cutbacks in such things already as tax income is already diving - and set to go down further.

About 12% goes out in "welfare" but the vast majority of that goes to keeping the working poor heads' above water with only 1-2% going in unemployment or sickness benefits - which means gutting those would result in a major crisis and result in companies crashing across the country like dominos as they can only stay in business due to those undeclared state subsidies (it would result in the working poor becoming the unemployed poor - with an increase in overall numbers - and governments can easily find out that welfare isn't to keep people from starving, it's to prevent them from uprising and murdering the rich - with the miltary, police and civil service pledging alligance to Queen and country, not the "government", they'll find that any attempts to repeat Peterloo won't happen as unlawful orders would be refused or crosschecked with the REAL head of the armed forces)

Those of us who took out UK citizenship and have multiple nationalities are already well protected - we can check out any time we want. It's the buggers who don't that are going to have problems.

Don't forget that any dealing with the USA has been predicated on NOT breaching the Good Friday agreement.

And then there's the utterly looney CANZUK proposals - officials in the other three countries were laughing until they cried - they stopped when they realised the Brits were actually serious - then collapsed in a heap laughing even louder.

(Getting support from fringe right wing parties in the other countries is NOT a ringing endorsement, merely a stamp of approval from anti-immigration types who are actually "anti- brownskinned people immigrating")

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "clarified once the uncertain situation caused by Brexit has been resolved"

"very popular with a certain kind of supporter at the start of his leadership and afterwards claimed they didn't."

Indeed, only this time there are better records and it's a lot harder for memories to be "wiped".

Those who wish to scuttle back under their rocks in future may find the cavities they came out of have already been filled with quick drying cement and the spotlight on their own statments/activities are getting brighter.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "clarified once the uncertain situation caused by Brexit has been resolved"

" There can't be a no deal Brexit anymore,"

"Brexit" has happened - kind of. At the moment everything is proceeding on the basis that it hasn't until a deal has been made, or until 31 Jan 2021

Blowhard Johnson has a very long history of lies, fabrications and going back on his "word" which has been nipping at his heels for decades - one of the things to remember about career con artists who keep upping the stakes to keep their heads above water is that they always end up being tripped up by their own fabrications in the end.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Hmm. Signalling?

"here's his opportunity to rebuild humanity from a carefully self-selected group of superior beings - in their own minds."

Reading the last chapter of STARK is recommended

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Hmm. Signalling?

Negotiation 103: If your cards consist of a bunch of used bus tickets and a couple of receipts from Ladies of Negotiable Virtue (the guild of seamstresses) then attempting to bluff is a particularly stupid idea - especially when everyone else is playing CHESS

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: For a contrasting view...

"You can thank these FOSS loons in trying to get stupid patents chalked off "

Yup.

And those FOSS loons actually USE copyright to prevent IP theft.

GPL being a classic example - you can use GPL stuff, you can sell it, BUT you MUST provide the source code and if you modify the original, you don't get to change the copyright and hide the origins whilst making a fortune out of it.

For those who don't mind there's BSD licensing - but bear in mind that a lot of people (like me) switched to GPL because we were tired of our work being stolen and used unattributed. It's particularly galling when you get demands to "fix" something written 20 years ago that a vendor has subsumed into a product put out under "closed source" monikers and has been making $$$ out of, with no expectation of being paid to do so.

Anecdotally: One company told me that using my stuff saved them US$83million in one 6 month period the late 1990s - I suggested they toss something my way as thanks because my equipment was falling apart, but their accountants were having none of that. It's a regular story.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: For a contrasting view...

"The patent system as it currently stands( and especially in the US)"

One of the particular problems with the US "patent system" is that you can patent both "innovation" and "trade dress"

In the rest of the world the latter is "trademarking" and a registered trademark - which you have to USE in order to defend, and is only granted for a particular field of business (and if you don't defend it, you lose it)

The US way is wide open to abuse and is frequently used that way because trade dress patents are conflated with innovation ones.

And that's QUITE apart from the USPTO's well documented issues - which boil down to examiners being told to "pass everything" as well as being graded based on how many applications they process/approve - meaning a diligent examiner ends up being rated "poor" and fired.