Posts by veti

Re: near miss meteors

Yeah, lots of people talk about this.

But oddly enough, the people launching and maintaining the satellites don't care. The reason being, they know how big space is. They've actually done the maths.

Require anyone planning to maintain more than 1000 communication satellites to also sponsor one orbital telescope for the same period.

Re: you do it to yourself, just you/You and no one else

Uh huh. What selection process do you think is going to be used to pick this 0.01%, and what are your chances of being included?

Undersea cables are pretty extensive, though. Niue makes Guam look like a humming metropolis, and it's way more remote, but even it has its own cable connection.

Just because one of them lets fly a bit of shrapnel, doesn't mean they all immediately explode. I think you may be underestimating how easy it is to miss a target the size of a satellite at a range of several hundred kilometers.

Let's imagine a solar panel flies off in a random direction. The area of the orbital plane at 600 km is approximately 2.5 billion km2. 40,000 satellites, each filling about 40m2, will fill about 6.4e-10 of that space. That's the chance,per orbit, of an accidental collision, and that's assuming the debris flies off in exactly that orbital plane. If we allow for a bit of variation in orbital radius, it rapidly becomes way less likely.

That law could pose quite a problem for NASA. If anything they publish automatically becomes public domain, then they can't comply with most "open source" licenses, since these unanimously assume that the code creator holds on to the copyright.

Re: MIPS and RISC-V

That would be a valid point if we were talking about China's decision, but we weren't. That was the US's decision.

There is no issue with being based on other people's architectures. Everything is built on what came before, that's how technology works. The point is that there's nothing that needs to be licensed, so nothing that can be restricted by the whim of some foreign government.

Of course that's of no value to anyone outside China (except possibly in places like Iran that are subject to similar restrictions), but from their own point of view it's still worth crowing about. It's sending a message to the US in particular, that this is one less lever it has over China.

Re: "CPU architectures as a means of control"

Of course CPU architectures are a means of control. That much has been obvious at least since the Intel/ARM wars of the 80s.

The question is how this architecture will be any different. Seeing that it's clearly not even fully documented, let alone open source, my guess is that it won't. It's better for China, and only China - not for any other country, and not necessarily even for any given Chinese company or customer. For everyone else, it's just another option to be evaluated on its merits, whatever they are.

That's the underlying philosophy of all EU directives. It's not the specific goal of that one.

Re: Without journalism, you get guaranteed corruption

I suggest that says more about what your job was at the time - and hence, what subset of journalists you came into contact with, and in what contexts - than about the class as a whole.

Back in the 90s I was a magazine editor, and I know what you're talking about, but you have grossly exaggerated.

Re: Wishful thinking

TMI.

Re: Wishful thinking

And that's why, today, Microsoft is the almighty monopolist to end them all, way bigger than Alphabet or Meta...

Wait, what?

I remember the 90s. Everyone said Microsoft couldn't be touched. But now they're almost irrelevant. Don't underestimate the power of change to lay low Google as well, in time. No matter what they do to prevent it.

Re: Motivations

Referendum questions aren't about "facts". No-one puts "How many moons does Saturn have?" to a referendum. They're about preferences. "Do you want this, or that?"

Nobody is more expert in what the general public wants, than the public itself.

Re: How about ...

And they get zero special exemptions. "Oh, you're a journalist? Case dismissed." - is a phrase not used in a courtroom in the US or UK, ever.

Journalists are subject to exactly the same laws as the rest of us. To the extent that there are rights - such as the right to protect your sources - those rights are available to anyone in the same circumstances. It's not about who or what you are, it's about what you're doing.

Re: How about ...

They do redact PII from their published leaks. The problem with Assange is that he was never content with just publishing stuff. He editorialised on it. He broke one of the cardinal rules of journalism, by making stories about himself.

We saw this all too clearly during the 2016 election, when he - obviously in concert with the Trump campaign - managed the Clinton email leaks over a period of weeks, teasing highlights in advance. That wasn't simple publicity, that was active campaigning.

Having said that, that doesn't make him "not a journalist". Just not a very good or trustworthy one.

And finally, what's with the whole "is he a journalist?" question anyway? Neither US nor UK law gives a damn about that. Journalists, contrary to common belief, are not a specially protected class.

Why does that mean the code can't be screened for malware?

Re: Paraphrase

To the downvoters: I was asking a question. I assume there is some reason why we don't do this, but I can't honestly think of any good reason. What's the answer?

Re: David Swanston should have spoken to the ICO

Don't be silly. Schools are public sector, so I assume the contract will specify that all the business risk in the event of the contract falling through - falls on the government in some way.

Re: Paraphrase

How would it be if we just forgot about payment completely? Serve the food to whoever turns up, and rely on the school's normal physical security to ensure that only enrolled students do turn up.

Re: I have encountered specific instances of Safari not implementing certain standards correctly…

I understood that comment quite clearly. Don't know if it's true, but the meaning seems perfectly clear if you have even a nodding acquaintance with relevant jargon.

Re: Smart bombs

"Journalism and protection for journalism" is what has given us the Sun, Express, Mail etc. Say what you like about them, their journalism is world class. The trouble is, "protection for journalism" translates to "complete lack of accountability for their owners".

Re: Good luck

There's no denying, Tesco's knows a thing or two about logistics. Whether that expertise translates into a whole national economy, though, is not yet clear.

Clearly the competition will abruptly switch from "lowest corporate tax rate" to "most relaxed accounting standards". It's not hard to see how that will work.

Re: And who pays those corporate taxes?

How exactly did you post that message? Whose computer and internet connection are you scrounging? Who do you think hosts the server you posted it on, who keeps it up, who maintains the internet infrastructure you're using right now?

Good grief, how naive can you get.