* Posts by veti

4483 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Mar 2010

Tesla driver charged with vehicular manslaughter after deadly Autopilot crash

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Re: Slap Tesla with an injunction.

This. Even if Musk himself is the only person Tesla is paying to spend his days on Twitter and Instagram (and I don't know if that's the case), how is that not advertising?

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Well, it mostly is a technology problem. Because the technology has been developed specifically so that it can be sold like this. If "full self driving" weren't part of the description, the Tesla would be a much simpler (and cheaper) type of car.

Big shock: Guy who fled political violence and became rich in tech now struggles to care about political violence

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Re: No shock!

Narcissists are not, as a whole, any more successful than the rest of us. They still need talent and opportunity to make it big. Their advantage is that when they get those things, they're not held back by doubts or hesitancy. "Imposter syndrome", which strikes most normal people from time to time, is unknown to them.

Prime example: the former POTUS.

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Re: Too true

The "evidence" is ambiguous at best, and a lot of it is manipulated, spun, or outright fabricated by people with their own political agendas that I'm sure I don't have to spell out to you. I doubt we'll ever really know whether Covid spent part of its development cycle in a lab.

The real major pointer that suggests this is the Chinese government's attitude, which oscillates between defensive, unhelpful, obstructive, and outright stonewalling. It's not what we would think of as the attitude of an innocent party. But there's a lot of political considerations bundled into that too - Xi can't afford to look weak, and anything that smacks of admitting that other countries might have some sort of legitimate interest or right to investigate anything inside China would be painted by his internal party opponents as opening the door to western neo-colonialism.

Ad blockers altering website code is not a copyright violation, German court rules

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Re: Great idea

I'm perfectly fine with them asking for whatever they feel is appropriate. Their shop, their rules. Whether I choose to answer their questions is another matter. I of course reserve the right to walk out again.

But if I walk into their shop, I don't complain about the goods or ads on display there. (Well, OK, I might. But not on the grounds that I don't like them or aren't interested in them so they're wasting my time. That would not be reasonable.)

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Re: Great idea

You clicked on the link or otherwise navigated to the page. That action constitutes an explicit request to have the content of said page transmitted to you. What are you complaining about exactly?

Open source, closed wallets, big profits – nobody wins the OSS rock, paper, scissors game

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Re: Tragedy of the commons

The description on Wikipedia even specifies that the TotC is something that happens when there is no effective community governance. That would be the refinement added by Ostrom.

I think the lack of community governance can be assumed in any domain related even tangentially to software.

Bug in WebKit's IndexedDB implementation makes Safari 15 leak Google account info... and more

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It's more than that, it's wholly imaginary. There are several other browsers available on ios and iPad, including Firefox, Opera and more.

Scam, pyramid scheme, environmental disaster: Vivaldi boss shares his thoughts on crypto-coins

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Re: Wall Street?

It's easy enough to come up with superficially-plausible use cases, and we've heard enough of them over the years.

But why, in all that time, haven't we actually seen any of them being used for real?

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Re: Wall Street?

Everything goes to zero "in the end". But I see no reason why fiat currencies should be expected to get there any faster than crypto, or gold for that matter.

The US dollar has existed in an unbroken continuity since 1785. That makes it a veritable stripling compared with the British pound, whose history goes back to the 9th century. Sure, they've gone through changes and upheavals, wars and revolutions, but in all that time there has never been a time when the pound you had yesterday became worthless today.

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Re: Wall Street?

Millions of people using it.

US-China chip cold war? It's only helping the Middle Kingdom, silicon makers warn

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Re: Sanctions

It's far too late to talk about "maintaining US hegemony". That moment passed 20 years ago. What's left is maintaining US security, which is best done by restoring the network of alliances that Obama neglected and Trump wiped his arse on.

China can't be "isolated" - what does it even mean to "isolate" the biggest country on earth? If they need to be completely self-sustaining in all things tech, they absolutely can do it. They've got the people.

And they're neither stupid nor ignorant. Given a clear objective, Chinese engineers are every bit a match for their American counterparts. (Witness their significant lead in hypersonic missile technology, for instance.)

What's still holding them back is a centralised decision making process, which prevents them from exploring many lines of investigation at all. But once they know a technology is useful - be it nanometer chip fabs, quantum computing or whatever - they can develop it for themselves.

'IwlIj jachjaj! Incoming LibreOffice 7.3 to support Klingon and Interslavic

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Re: StarOffice, OpenOffice, LibreOffice

Unless they're imaginary languages used by nobody, anywhere, ever, with no underlying culture.

I'm that case they're just a waste of perfectly good bytes. An abuse of the time of everyone who has to scroll past it in a menu.

No defence for outdated defenders as consumer AV nears RIP

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Re: Going Bareback

I agree, this is the strategy. Fixing a computer is just a matter of time, it's the personal data on it that's precious and vulnerable. For that, a decent backup strategy is by far the best defence.

Spruce up your CV or just bin it? Survey finds recruiters are considering alternatives

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Most employers I've applied to recently gave me an application form, which asked for pretty much all the same info as is on my CV but in their format rather than mine.

It's not just major employers either, there are third-party agencies that will rent out an online application form for quite small companies.

Snap continues to make a spectacle of itself as it tries to trademark the word spectacles

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Trademarking common words is not unusual (see "Windows", for instance). It's the specific context of computing and camera that makes it distinctive.

Notes on the untimely demise of 3D Pinball for Windows

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Re: Bah!

And that's all fine, but nowadays no one wants to pay, even peanuts, for the loving care and frequent intervention those machines need.

I remember Space Cadet from W95, I spent probably too much time on it. It was a fun game. Obviously not like the real thing, but it did a decent job of simulating the random violence of bumpers.

It even had tilt detectors - I forget the details, but there was a button assigned to something like "nudge", and if you pressed it for more than about a quarter of a second you got a tilt.

Microsoft rang in the new year with a cutesy tweet in C#. Just one problem: The code sucked

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Re: Am I reading this

It would get a "WTFF?" mark in my assignment. "FAIL" is for things that don't do what was intended, but this case is so bizarre I can only assume the intent was something quite unclear and I need to see the spec.

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Re: Fixed it for you

Well, duh. Whose time zone would you like to be wished "Happy New Year" in?

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Re: Nowt wrong with a bit of genuine old fashioned C

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume this comment is hilarious, rather than tragic. Thank you.

veti Silver badge

Err... no, it was 5 Jan here when you posted that.

Predictive Dirty Dozen: What will and won't happen in 2022 (unless it doesn’t/does)

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Re: AI transcription and translation improves massively

Define "really understand"?

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Re: Toyota.... paying to retain capability

More commonly known as "Uber".

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More than two

It seems to me that this article features quite a multiplicity of balls.

Yule goat's five-year flame-free streak ends ignominiously

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Re: Yup, she really was brains of Britain wasnt she

Rubbish. BL did invest in new models. The Ital, Ambassador, Acclaim and Maestro all launched during Thatcher's first four years. That's a lot of models in such a short time.

The problem was that they all sucked. Partly because they were outmoded designs that simply didn't appeal when viewed side by side with a contemporary Renault or Volvo, but more importantly because the build quality was stuck in 1971, at a time when everyone else in the market had learnt to do better.

You geeks have inherited the Earth, but what are you going to do with it?

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Re: Hmm ...

I can't find most of the physical photos I took with my last camera but three. Most things don't get kept in a well defined format and dedicated space.

As for my last phone but three, that didn't have any kind of camera.

If this is a dark age, it's not because information is ephemeral. It's always been that. It's because storage and transmission are so undisciplined.

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Re: What do we do? More or less what today's lords demand from us

That's fine if your estimate is less than 2 hours.

If it's more, then don't forget to inflate to the next higher time unit. (The multiplier becomes a matter of individual choice.) So "two days" becomes at least "four weeks", and a good deal more if you actually want to beat it by a good margin.

Please pay for parking – CMOS batteries don't buy themselves

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Re: Tesco....nicked our car park..

Yep, this is one of the transatlantic differences that can be wholly explained by population density. In all but a handful of US cities, the idea of parking at one store while you visit another is just bizarre, because it means a twenty minute walk back to your car.

British cities are quite another story.

Intel ‘regrets’ offending China with letter telling suppliers to avoid Xinjiang

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Re: The only alternative atm.

"War or embargo" is not a choice. Embargo would rapidly devolve into war, just like it did against Japan in the 40s.

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Pretty much everyone alive today lives on the back of acts of genocide committed by their ancestors. Consider the settlement of America, for instance.

But the only reason it's easy to cite America is because the brutal treatment of its former natives is recent enough to be well documented and remembered. Long before that, the Normans were kicking Saxons off all the best land, and the Saxons in turn had driven off Celts and Anglo-Romans, and so on back through history. And every other country in the world has a similar history to tell.

If you really want to erase all the injustices of the past, that would require a truly radical change, such as abolishing inheritance (of money, nationality, status, name, education or any other artificial advantage) entirely. You're welcome to advocate for a change like that if you want to, but I doubt you'd win over many people.

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Well, there's a difference between holding a company accountable for what it does today, versus holding it accountable for what it did before any of its present management or shareholders were born. If moral blame is something that follows you through generations not only genetically and nationally but also professionally and commercially, we're all pretty much screwed.

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Are you kidding? Evil doesn't wait for the end, it wins out right from the get-go. The only reason Good ever gets a look-in at all is because the person telling the story gets to decide both what "good" is, and also when to end the story.

Developer creates ‘Quite OK Image Format’ – but it performs better than just OK

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Re: 8-bit

If that's 8 bits in all, then - congratulations, he's reinvented GIF.

If it's 8 bits per channel, that's 24 bits of actual colour depth, which is respectable IMO.

Thank you, FAQ chatbot, but if I want your help I'll ask for it

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Re: I am here to help. What can I do for you today?

"It looks like you may be thinking about buying ink refills from a third party. Have you thought about just f***ing off and not wasting our time, you deadbeat?"

East Londoners nicked under Computer Misuse Act after NHS vaccine passport app sprouted clump of fake entries

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Re: Why bother?

Yeah - nah. When the CinC tweets that governors who impose lockdown orders are tyrants and it's his followers' civic duty to resist them, violently if necessary - it's kinda hard not to see that as interfering with the response.

As well as his other crimes, Trump also seems to be the world's worst line manager.

Clearview's selfie-scraping AI facial recognition technology set to be patented

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Nope. If it was patented, at least we'd know what it was.

"Complexity for the sake of complexity alone", it seems likely, will not achieve anything ever, and I don't see anyone suggesting it. But if, as seems increasingly likely, highly complex linguistic processes can convincingly simulate a real human interlocutor, what exactly would be the basis for dismissing it as "not intelligent"?

Or to put it another way, can you describe a thought experiment whose outcome would make you admit that an artificial system was really "intelligent"?

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Although larger systems were more fluent and coherent at generating text, they were still prone to output toxic content reflecting stereotypical biases as well as false information. All models struggled to perform tasks that required logical reasoning or common sense knowledge.

Sounds uncannily like typical human intelligence to me.

Playing jigsaw on my roof: They can ID you from your hygiene habits

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Re: Address label removal before disposal

"Destroy"?

The dark equation of harm versus good means blockchain’s had its day

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Yes, that's been the rationale behind a huge wave of changes that have been making banking steadily more difficult for the past two decades.

I'd be interested to see if there's any quantitative analysis of how much crime they've prevented, in total.

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Re: The power consumption thing

Citation for both of those facts?

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Re: Lack of comprehension and imagination ...

If only you'd mentioned the "plandemic", I could have cleared my Troll Bingo card on a single post.

Shocking: UK electricity tariffs are among world's most expensive

veti Silver badge

Ask E.ON or NGC if they want to take on the job of billing energy users. Watch them squirm at the very idea.

Electricity retail is a highly regulated and also very competitive market. If you think you can make good money at it, do it. Nothing is stopping you. But be warned, the margins are nowhere near as fat as you think.

Comparing consumer prices with Libya, which provides oil basically for free to its power stations *and even then* also subsidises the bills directly, is just stupid.

MySQL a 'pretty poor database' says departing Oracle engineer

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Re: There is no reason not to choose Postgres

Excel is also a distributed target. Even if you could hack all instances of a single version - in itself, not something that has ever been demonstrated even conceptually - you'd still only hit a minority of global spreadsheets currently in use.

Utility biz Delta-Montrose Electric Association loses billing capability and two decades of records after cyber attack

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Re: we lost the majority of our historical data for the last 20-25 years.

The difference between a customer who always pays on time and one who needs chasing - is substantial in that business.

And then there are the records of properties built, wired, inspected and connected, meters installed... Obviously the vast bulk of records will be substantially newer, but a few outliers can go back a very long way. And *those* records could be very important.

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Re: Impending Audit

Great. So a company took the hit without paying a ransom, and now it's taking a bigger hit to avoid inconveniencing its customers, and what is its reward? Victim blaming and unbroken cynicism.

I hope you get to live in the country you deserve.

Prisons transcribe private phone calls with inmates using speech-to-text AI

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Re: Difference?

Indeed, that's a principle worth fighting for. I believe your home secretary has gone on record as saying that citizenship is not a right. If you can't see the danger in that claim...

In the USA, people are considered to have rights to do anything within the law. If the law says that an imprisoned person has no privacy, then that's fine. (Anyone who feels that law is unreasonable has various recourses to challenge it, but that's not what we're discussing right now.)

But if no one bothered to write that into the law, then whatever the legal basis is for invading a prisoner's privacy - is a legal logic that can also be applied to anyone else.

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Re: Difference?

If prisoners don't have rights, then neither does anyone else. If a right can be taken away from you by something as capricious as a court, then it was never really yours to begin with.

So unless the penal code explicitly says "during your term of imprisonment you have zero expectation of privacy", prisoner privacy is an important right that deserves protection.

Feds charge two men with claiming ownership of others' songs to steal YouTube royalty payments

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Re: YouTube copyright enforcement: extra judicial and surely illegal?

Patents protect methods, copyright protects words. Two very different things.

Copyright lasts for ages, patents expire in a reasonable timeframe.

Patents (and patent applications) are published in a searchable database. Copyright isn't published in anything, not even Google.

Most saliently, the point the GGP was so exercised about: patents are submitted, reviewed and granted at the whim of a central office. There is absolutely no such process for copyright.

If it weren't for the fact that they get grouped together under the misleading term "intellectual property", nobody would even suggest they're similar.