* Posts by Loyal Commenter

5761 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jul 2010

UK High Court rules Snooper's Charter doesn't break Euro human rights laws

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

the Bill of Rights 1689 states "proceedings in Parliament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court".

AM I the only one here who wishes we could have one day a year, Purge-style, where parliamentary privelige didn't apply, and the politicians were fair game?

Rise of the Machines hair-raiser: The day IBM's Dot Matrix turned

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: Try a Lathe

The CDT teacher at our school came from a real engineering background, and had the missing fingers to prove it. He used to regale the kids with (probably apocryphal) tales of industrial accidents he had seen. One involved a fatality in a metal press and a red line left on the wall behind it as a warning to others.

he would have been working in industry in the '60s/'70s, before Health and Safety legislation, and his experiences are, no doubt, similar to many which led to the introduction of such. It's worth noting that those who object most vocally to workplace safety are the ones who back then would have owned the factories, not worked in them, such as the UKIP councillor who, a few years ago, had someone die whilst digging his swimming pool unsafely.

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: Chain Printer

...although frequently sent to the machine room to work with those, for instance to debug issues with print jobs, we were told we were still required to wear ties (but that we could tuck them into our shirts). I'm still amazed there were no serious accidents at that place (that I heard of), although they did go out of business about a year after I'd finally had enough and left.

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: Health and safety gone senile

I have one of those.

It's quite dusty behind the monitors, at the back of my desk, with the piles of nominally useful papers. The badge is in my pocket.

Yes, we have a clear-desk policy too. No, nobody has been stupid enough to raise the disregard for it with the person who fixes all their problems...

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: I had the reverse situation

It's either that, or the fact that very attractive people (male or fermale) never have to develop a personality in order to get others to pay attention to them. It's absolutely not their fault, it's an evolutionary pressure to not spend resources where you don't have to, and they'll be well beyond the age where they can pass their genes on by the point everything starts to sag and suddenly having a personality becomes important.

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: Chain Printer

In a previous incarnation, I had to work with industrial printers. These involved puny sheet-by-sheet belt-fed Xerox machines, and the more repectable (as in whould be respected, for your own safety) Océ printers, which were named for the number of feet per minute of paper they consumed. 350, and 440 IIRC. Get your tie stuck in one of those, and you'd better hope the safety cut out works before your head is flattened.

It's Prime Minister Boris Johnson: Tech industry speaks its brains on Brexit-monger's victory

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: Disaster

The last time I checked, 2007 was the 21st century, although your point stands...

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: Disaster

Many countries have successful and stable coalition governments, so no reason why it shouldn't work in UK.

The most immediate and obvious barrier to this is the FPTP system which unnaturally skews election results in the favour of larger parties, so that minority parties get little or no representation. It's hard to have a "rainbow coalition" with two colours. We need electoral reform to a proper proportional system first, which is not in the interests of the large parties who are the ones who have it in their power to change.

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: Disaster

Wasnt there an outcry of a lack of democracy for a winner recently?

You mean that bit where NF complained about someone winning an election with 52% of the vote, apparently with no sense of irony?

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: Disaster

most leave constituency

Brain-fart there; I did of course, mean the most remain constituency.

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: Disaster

He ran as an MP and got more votes than any other candidate in his constituency.

In a safe tory seat. For other examples of policians in safe seats, see also the repellant Kate Hoey, who manages to be a rabid brexiter in the most leave constituency in mainland Britain.

Then, upon TM standing down as Tory party leader (and hence PM), he was elected by the party as it's leader (and hence PM).

Out of a candidature of a small number of around 400 tory MPs, after the better choices had been exhausted (if you can consider the victors in the previous two tory leadership elections better choices), whittled down to 2 unpalatable choices from the 8 or 9 who decided they wanted to pick up the poison chalice of brexit, and then selected by 0.1% of the population (those members of the Tory party that actually voted for him).

I'm not going to claim he didn't go through what are, technically, the correct channels to get the job, but it's no shining example of representative democracy in action.

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: TL; DR

Not sure why, but this made me think of "Death or Mau Mau"...

El Reg sits down to code with .NET for Linux and MySQL, hitting some bumps along the way

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: nice but is it worth it?

The "EEE" business model was dropped some time ago when MS realised there is mnuch more money to be made from selling SaaS. If they can proivide Linux VMs in the Azure cloud, then they can charge for them per CPU cycle. If you pay money for MS licensed software, you get the support from MS, if you go for the free option, you don't get much more than the basics. Apart from the potentially eye-watering costs of Azure, it all sounds perfectly fair to me.

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: Is it just me?

Is there a point to all this?

It's called software architecture.

It's not a MS thing, it's just good practice to separate your data layer from your application logic and your UI layer. It's also good practise to keep your auth and security separate from your application logic/data, and configuration separate. It helps with things like maintainability, testability, sclability, etc. etc. as well as the abiliy for someone else to work on your code. You're not one of those programmers who puts everything in one file, are you?

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: MySQL?

If you're entering unsanitised and unescaped strings directly into your database, I know this guy called Little Bobby Tables who would like a word with you.

Also, you need to do a basic computer security course.

Loyal Commenter Silver badge
Flame

Burn the unbeliever! Emacs is the One True Editor, etc. etc...

Meet the super-speedy white dwarf binary system that's going to grav-wave our world

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: LISA!

Oh hi Danny

Loyal Commenter Silver badge
Coat

Re: LISA!

You're my future wife Lisa!

Here we go: Uncle Sam launches antitrust probe into *cough* Facebook, Google *cough* Amazon *splutter* Twitter...

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: Too Easy

Free speech not the same as having the ability to shout fire in a crowded theatre.

I'm not going to disagree with that, although that specific example it's a pretty tired cliché, so I try to avoid using it, in favour of more contemporary examples.

I am allowed to say I dislike x group on y grounds, as is anyone. I am not allowed to incite violence against x group for z reasons.

Again, correct. Worth noting that x is also allowed to criticise your reasoning, y, as are others, if your reasoning is based on unreasonable bias, such as racism. They're also allowed to call you rude names, and mock you for your opinions (even though it's a dick move to do so). For example, I've seen racist right-wing commentators seriously try to justify their views by claiming that black people are inherently less intelligent than white people. It's not just that this sort of argument is repellant, but it is also, more importantly, completely wrong. There is an awful lot of "justification" of vile opinions on the internet that is based on dodgy "facts" such as this, and a lot of it comes from the far right (who often try to present themselves as "reasonable conservatives"). Apologies for the excessive use of quote marks here - it saves the need for invective.

Now, as to the matter of incitement to violence. I'm not going to say much about that, other than I didn't raise the issue of incitement, which is pretty obviously a bad thing. In this discussion, it is a straw man, because we are talking about the limits of acceptable speech, not something that lies well beyond them.

What happens on the internet, on social media and on messageboards, and in discussion groups, is that the hosts put in place acceptable use policies. These typically run into several pages of legalese, but the general gist is, "don't be a bigot" - i.e. don't post sexist, racist, homophobic, etc. content. They are often accompanied by rules about not posting adult material such as pornography. People get banned for breaching those rules. If more people who self-identify as conservatives get banned for breaching those rules, there are two posible reasons why: 1) More "conservatives" are breaking the rules, or 2) There is some sort of "loony-left liberal" conspiracy against them. It's also worth noting, in this context, that belief in consipracy theories is more prevalent amongst right-wingers, even moderate conservatives, there are plenty of peer-reviewed studies showing these results, so feel free to look them up rather than take my word for it. Now, I'm not going to suggest for a moment that conspiracies don't happen, but the hallmark of a successful conspiracy is that is is secret and involves a small number of people. Actual evidence for them tends to come to light at some point as well. Based on this, I'm far more inclinded to accept (1) as the explanation than (2).

There are many many people spreading hate and discord without an imaginary sky friend - antifa being the first example to trip off my mind.

"antifa" is one of those terms I hear bandied around, like "SJW" that seems to be ill defined. If you are referring to people who are, as the abbreviation suggests, anti-fascist, then that really should cover 99.9% of the human population, because if you're not anti-fascist, then you either don't know what fascism is, or you are pro-fascist. Given that a big old war was fought over fascism in the middle of the last century, I can't imagine that there are many people who are blissfully unaware of fascism.

Perhaps, however, you are referring to violent left-wing "anti-fascist" protesters? Now, I've never seen any of these, and I've been on several large political marches in my time. One notable instance of this was a recent march in central London that gathered 750,000 ant-brexit protestors. There was a small counter-protest to this, of perhaps 30 people who could be described as "pro-fascist", not "antifa" attacking them though. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary I'm going to assume that either the people you are referring to are a vanishingly small group, or that they are an invented foe of pro-fascist groups dreamt up as a justification for their own vile actions. If you can give examples of the people you are talking about, and demonstrate that they have anything like the numbers and influence of current far-right groups, I'd welcome that information.

If you look I have said many times that objectionable speech should be allowed by ANYONE. I don't want censorship for ANYONE. I also don't want people to be violent.

These are laudable goals, but ultimately utopian. The issue with perfect free speech is that implies perfect responsibility for your actions, and in an ideal world, everyone would be responsible, and everyone could have that right to say whetever they liked. However, in reality, people abuse those rights. There is a balance here, however, in that this argument can be used by oppressive governments to silence legitimate dissent. I don't claim to have all the answers, but the logical conclusion is that the limits of free speech should lie somewhere between perfect free speech and censorship. Personally, I think that they should tend more towards the free speech end of the spectrum, but that there should be important limitations (incitement ot violence, racial hatred, etc.). if those limits overreach, there is an issue with the limits, but if you find that the things you want to say often run into those limits, perhaps you have the problem.

There is one important distinction that I'd like to end with; the legal limits of free speech (such as various incitement laws) and the limits set down by a service provider (such as Twitter) are not the same thing. The owner of any forum is perfectly entitled to say ,"no X speech here" without breaching free speech laws. it is their forum, and thier rules. "X" may be anything in this context - "sexist", "racist", etc. or "football", "train-spotting", etc. If I go to a forum dedicated to, for instance, modelmaking, and the forum has a rule about not posting off-topic, but then I try to start up a thread about favourite flavours of ice-cream, my free speech is not being curtailed if I get kicked out.

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: Too Easy

It's censorship whoever you ban, but I'm curious how many "liberals" have been banned from popular sites? Compared to conservatives?

Okay, I'll bite.

Free speech has limits, because it has consequences. Deal with it.

For example, hate speech is illegal in many countries. Nobody is going to prevent you, for instance, from screaming "kill all infidels" in the street (free speech), but expect to get arrested (consequences). I believe Karl Popper had some choice words to say on the matter, some decades ago. Those words are still just as true today.

It is also interesting to note that those trying to spread hate and discord often fall back on the idea of some $deity-given right to free speech as a defense against criticism of their words. You mjight have a right to say it, but guess what? Others also have a right to criticise you for it. Don't go around accusing others of being cry-babies if you can't handle it yourself.

As for the question of "how many liberals" vs "how many conservatives" being banned for their speech. This one is easy to answer by rephrasing it - how many sensible people have been banned, compared to raving extremists? Because it's not a Left-Right issue. People get banned from social media for saying things that are not acceptable - sexism, racism, homophobia, Islamaphobia, anitsemitism et al. It's pretty clear which group is more likley to be producing that sort of hate speech, and it's the extremes; the far-right and far-left. Given that the far-left doesn't really exist in any numbers (outside of North Korea in any case), but the far-right is growing, there's your answer - that's where all the arseholes are. By defending the "right" of those groups to spread hate speech, you are essentially saying you agree with it. My response to that would be to politely request that you stop being an arsehole.

Low Barr: Don't give me that crap about security, just put the backdoors in the encryption, roars US Attorney General

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: Why is everyone so mad?

Would that be Vladimir Rothschild?

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: Nope

Or comments n a forum.

Take the thrid letter of the second word of the fifth sentence of...

"This post has been deleted by its author"

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Can you ENCRYPT any further COMMENTS so we DON'T have TO read them?!!11!eleventyone!1

There, FTFY, no charge...

Silly money: Before you chuck your chequebook away, triple-check that super-handy digital coin

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: @iron

And how long will it be before every banknote does RFID?

And how long before a whole bunch of those notes "accidentally" "fall into" a microwave oven?

British ISPs throw in the towel, give up sending out toothless copyright infringement warnings

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: You wouldn't shoot a policeman. And then steal his helmet.

Don't forget to breathe...

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: Dilution of quality too..

So this government has defunded everything they can and have forced the BBC to use the Licence receipts to pay for everything

See also:

-Schools

-NHS

-Police

-Fire services

-Local government

etc. etc., all in the name of "austerity" (while the national debt has grown by more than every Labour government in history combined, but shhhhh...)

Somebody, somewhere, is getting very rich off the backs of the people, but while people continue to suck up the biased drivel broadcast as "news" by the state broadcaster*, and shoved in their faces by the red-tops and the Daily Hate, little will change.

*This isn't just a tirade against tories, we have the previous lot to blame for emasculating the political neutrality of BBC news

'Cockwomble' is off the menu: Uncle Bulgaria issues edict against using name in vain

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

I see Hopkins is still churning out hateful bile

I guess she needs the money to pay off that libel settlement.

Pair programming? That's so 2017. Try out this deep-learning AI bot that autocompletes lines of source code for you

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

It's slightly more testable...

Loyal Commenter Silver badge
Stop

What could possibly go wrong?

If you type the line of code yourself, you should be thinking about every character. Let an AI auto-complete, and that's a recipe for defects that won't get immediately noticed right there...

Estate agent dodges GDPR-sized bullet after exposing 18,610 folks' data for two years

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: Fine too small

a fine of high hundreds of pounds per "customer" would be more appropriate to reflect the huge potential damage

Sadly, under pre-GDPR legislation, the fines were very limited when it comes to being punitive enough. I, for one, can't wait until the 2-4% of turnover type fines start hitting companies who have a less-than-rigorous respect for the personal data of their customers.

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

An estate agent playing fast and loose with customer data?

I'm shocked. Shocked I tell you!

Guess who reserved their seat on the first Moon flight? My mum, that's who

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

And politicans who decided that the money that would have been spent on moonbases would be better spent on pork-barrel shenanigans that would (hopefully) ensure their re-election..

Earth-bound wastefulness aside, IIRC, the main reason for the winding up of the Moon program wasn't just that the money could be sepnt elsewhere, but that it was sucking up so much money, all those "elsewhere"s were getting a bit fidgety from under-funding. The Moon program was a massive dick-waving competition between the US and USSR, calculated to engender national pride at great expense (the great expense was part of the showing-off). Once it had achieved it's goal (essentially nationalist publicity), the politicians pretty much had no choice but to cancel it, because driving your country into recession because of a vanity project is never a good way to get re-elected - and it was a vanity project, because once the tecnhical and scientific advancements had been achieved, there really was little benefit in putting people up there, other than proving it could be done.

It's all a great shame really, but I do believe that actual genuine reasons to want to go to the Moon are now emerging, such as abundance of 3He for when we can finally get working fusion power stations (maybe only 40 years off now?), and the fact that it gets you a good way out of the Earth's gravity well, so makes sense as a place to launch deep-space missions from that can't be done from Earth orbit. There's all sorts of genuine sciency reasons to do those, as well as industrial ones such as putative asteroid mining for useful metals. These are the things that will eventually put a manned base on the Moon, not governments, and certainly not politicians.

Loyal Commenter Silver badge
Boffin

Re: Just FYI

Not sure if one needs to ingest too much Pu-240 for this to occur.

Not to be a pedantic nerd, but...

240Pu isn't the isotope used in bombs, it's half-life is too short, and more importantly, it's neutron-capture cross-section for fission is much much smaller, which (I think) means the critical mass is much much bigger. You're probably thinking of 239Pu.

If you ate any measurable amount of plutonium, you'd be dead long before you got anywhere near the amount needed to go pop. It is apparently very, very, chemically poisonous (according to wikipedia, it's LD-50 in dogs is about a tenth than of hydrogen cyanide - e.g. ten times as poisonous...)

Operation Desert Sh!tstorm: Routine test shoots down military's top-secret internets

Loyal Commenter Silver badge
Boffin

Re: rows of car batteries baking in the 48° heat

Assuming the electrolyte is kept topped up, batteries actually work better if they are warmer, as the electrochemical reactions go faster if warmer. A case in point is that in cold environments, dead torch batteries can often be brought back to life for a short period by popping them under your armpit for a while.

Goggles, because you'd be a fool not to wear them when topping up the elecytrolyte in lead-acid batteries

Li-ion battery 'price-fixing' case settled with bonus fury over lawyers pocketing eight-figures

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

The class-action lawyers are the ones taking the risk since there is no guarantee the case will be won

Surely, if their expensive law degrees and prefessional experience are worth anything, they should have a pretty good idea of what their legal standing is before taking a case to court?

Suggesting that they are taking on an appreciable risk is tantamount to suggesting that they either don't know what they are doing, or are chancing their arm. I don't see why that sort of behaviour should be rewarded, particularly with a seven figure sum.

It's a bit like me, as a software developer, charging well over the odds for something I've written on the off-chance that it might be full of bugs that I need to be paid to fix. That wouldn't wash with any sane client, which is why my employer pays me a fixed salary for the hours I work, and if I churn out rubbish that doesn't work, I end up without a job.

Humans may be able to live on Mars within halls of aerogel – a wonder material that can trap heat and block radiation

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: Aren't we missing something ?

If you're talking large asteroids that are actually dangerous to existence, atmospheres do literally nothing to stop those.

If one of those is due to hit the groudn anywhere near where you are, then the lack of an atmosphere could even be a positive thing, what with the shock waves and atmospheric heating involved. You'd just have to survive the ground tremors.

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: Why not test it on earth?

if someone can bring an asteroid back to Earth, they can drop it on your head.

Technically, if they can get anythign into orbit, they can drop it on your head. It won't make much differnece if it's the size of an asteroid, or the size of a pebble (assuming it survives re-entry), it's still going to mess with your day.

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: Why not test it on earth?

landing probes on comets, trundling robots around Mars, close flyby of every planet in the solar system? Probes leaving the solar system?

GPS, space telescopes, "permanent" space stations (for varying values of permanent)...

I think the main reason we've not really had much interst in the Moon, beyond proving we can get people there, and return them safely, is that ther's an awful lot of nothing much there. Until there's a practical need to have a permanent base there, it's nothing more than an unnecessary expense to build and maintain it, and if you're not going there to prove you can, or to build something there, why go at all?

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: What have the Martians ever done for us?

Watch out for that heat-ray, Ogilvy...

Experts: No need to worry about Europe's navigation sats going dark for days. Also: What the hell is going on with those satellites?!

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: "Galileo is doing a literal fandango in the sky"?

I beilieve you missed the reference. Beelzebub has a devil put aside for you.

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: Testing phase?

That woudl, I guess, entirely depend on what tests they are carrying out. If one of those tests is, for instance, to recover from a (simulated) malicious ground signal to test the system's resilience to interference from hostile actors, then this might be exactly what you would expect...

Turning it off and on again IN SPAAACE! ISS animal-tracker kit needs oldest trick in the book

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: Unfortunate name choice

It's hard to think of a less appropriate name taken from Greek mythology for something that is going up into space.

Bulb smart meters in England wake up from comas miraculously speaking fluent Welsh

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

The world needs diversity, but not to the point of balkanisation.

That's only going to happen if you stick to one language and don't bother to learn any others, in your own little insular parochial way.

You can then go abroad and speak your own language LOUDLY and SLOWLY and Johnny Foreigner had better well learn English, eh?

I don't think it's thr Welsh speakers that are the problem here...

New old Windows bug emerges, your 'strong' password is anything but, plus plenty more

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Did the bot-net that your PC is undoubtedly part of (if it's running XP and is connected to the internet) make that post for you?

Good luck deleting someone's private info from a trained neural network – it's likely to bork the whole thing

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Harry, is that you?

Loyal Commenter Silver badge
Alert

Pretty sure we've been able to delete human memories for decades

...either by the application of voltages across the temples (ECT), or, more drastically, through leukotomy / lobotomy. It;s just that you don't necessarily get to decide which memories get deleted, or how well.

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: Why use personal data to train AI?

What about trying to link employment and home address to car insurance premiums?

Isn't this what actuarial tables are for? Why would you need a trained neural-net AI to calculate risks when it's essentially just a lookup into a big ol' database full of statistics?

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Why use personal data to train AI?

Quite apart from the fact that to do so would presumably require explicit consent under GDPR, what is the legitimate use case for training an AI on personal data? The only one I can think of is to randomise names/addresses, and to use AI for that sounds a lot like a case of the solution looking for a problem...

SQL Server 2008 finally shuffles into the home for retired relational databases

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: AnzoGraph DB

A valid point, but also worth pointing out that Uri Geller is not Russian...

London cop illegally used police database to monitor investigation into himself

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: If they don't fire him

Maybe they could consult West Yorkshire Constabulary?