* Posts by Ken Hagan

8137 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007

AI-friendly patent law needed 'as a matter of national security', ex-USPTO boss says

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Plus the fact that, if all you have done is build a neural network and trained it, then I'm afraid it isn't novel. We already know how to do that. The fact that we haven't yet built and trained all possible NNs does nothing to make your one "non-obvious" to "one skilled in the art""anyone with a clue".

No "invention" that consists of just a trained NN (with and input and output mechanism) should be patentable. It is old and obvious. There is no benefit to society in granting you a monopoly.

Post-quantum crypto cracked in an hour with one core of an ancient Xeon

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Microsoft, IBM, Bell Labs, Xerox ...

Sooner or later, if you throw enough money at an organisation, no matter how incompetent it is, something good will happen by mistake, somewhere where manglement aren't looking too hard.

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Pint

Re: Cheaters!

The mental image of a large-scale rubber-hose attack tickles my fancy.

Bad news, older tech workers: Job advert language works against you

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https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/drugusealcoholandsmoking/bulletins/opinionsandlifestylesurveyadultdrinkinghabitsingreatbritain/2017/previous/v1

They're not lightweights. They're teetotal. Drinking is going the way of smoking, but maybe half a century behind, and slightly ahead of eating dead animals. As long as my bloodthirsty, alcoholic habits are quietly tolerated for the rest of my years, I don't really care.

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Re: Anon CVs

I think "J.G.Harston" was the OP, so it's a fair substitution.

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Re: Anon CVs

I assume there is a missing "if" in the original text.

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Re: Don't know about that

Blake was a deluded, romantic fantasist. I'd like to think I have higher standards than he.

Funds sought for first submarine cable to Antarctica

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In engineering terms, I don't see why it would be different from any other long undersea cable. The notable feature here, surely, is that someone now thinks this is economically worthwhile.

Scientists use dead spider as gripper for robot arm, label it a 'Necrobot'

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Re: What's the point?

Yeah but most of the naturally grown brains turn out to be defective. The lure of AI is that we could build a good one and make millions of perfect copies.

Whether it actually works out that way is, of course, the subject of much speculation amongst sci-fi authors.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"Surely killing a creature is the most extreme form of abuse going."

I'm pretty sure that doing the same experiment but keeping the spider alive would have been more abusive.

Garuda Linux 'Talon': Arch, but different. Dare we say it? Better

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"It isn't going to be the Reg FOSS desk's new OS, but we definitely have a new option to recommend to Windows-oriented techie friends."

Hmm. I'm not sure I'd recommend a rolling release distro to a Windows user. (Please insert Win11 snark here.) I'd recommend something more stable, almost fire-and-forget, even if its packages are older. But perhaps I'm missing something. What do you lot think?

Charter told to pay $7.3b in damages after cable installer murders grandmother

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Re: $7.3b in damages

Presumably it is the second comparison that is relevant here. The damages need to hurt the offender (deemed to be the company in this case, not the employee) and not just compensate the victim's nearest and dearest.

There is a path to replace TCP in the datacenter

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For most programs, the abstraction offered by TCP is just a reliable stream (pipe) between two endpoints that can be addressed by a short piece of text.

If you have the source code, it really wouldn't be hard to slip in an alternative "reliable stream" transport protocol.

Amazon gave Ring video to cops without consent or warrant 11 times so far in 2022

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Re: One up on Stalin

Very few UK streets (including the pavements on both sides) are less than 20 feet wide, so I strongly suspect they are outnumbered by houses with front gardens big enough to park a car in.

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Re: One up on Stalin

In far more places, though, it doesn't even reach the street.

Russia fines Apple and Zoom for failure to prove domestic data storage

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...coz I bet those "Chinese Android phones" all store your personal data on Russian servers. Oh yes...

I'm a bit conflicted, though, since it seems perfectly reasonable to me that a Russian citizen's personal data should be store in a place that is subject to the jurisdiction of a Russian court -- that being far and away the court that said citizen has the easiest recourse to. You wanna be a multi-national company? Learn how to make your business work legally in multiple nations.

FYI: BMW puts heated seats, other features behind paywall

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Re: SatNav Updates

My phone does that for free. What's the point of paying for SatNav, third-party or otherwise?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

If *that* were the case then you wouldn't be able to sell the car on in the second-hand market. Since leasing actually exists as a genuine car-ownership model, I'd be surprised if a court found that "purchase" was just a vastly more expensive way of achieving the same thing.

Get over it: Microsoft is a Linux and open source company these days

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Re: Sometimes, it's the little things.

You can SSH into those servers without WSL. The client is supported at any command prompt.

These centrifugal moon towers could be key to life off-planet

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Re: Not practical

Rather less clever engineering is required if you bury the structure and treat it like a fairground ride. Most of the mass of the mechanical support could be stationary and embedded in the rock.

Also note that you only need to provide 1G for the bit that people spend most of their lives in. Things like industrial or agricultural zones can make do. Also, humans can use avatars to go walkabout, so you probably need less living space than you think, even for an active lifestyle.

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Re: Dealing with two "down" directions might be tough

That's why the outer wall is curved like a wineglass. There's only one down.

Even robots have the right to learn from open source

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Pint

Re: GPL code is GPL code

If your argument stands up, then anyone who has ever learned anything from looking at GPL-ed code is forever afterwards incapable of writing non-GPL code.

The existence of WSL therefore makes the whole of Windows GPL.

Choosing a non-Windows OS on Lenovo Secured-core PCs is trickier than it should be

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It's also not a problem for the vast majority of Windows users, who get no support guarantees from Microsoft.

AI inventors may find it difficult to patent their tech under today's laws

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Re: Simple

"The only patentable bit is the untrained HW/SW..."

...except that in 2022 the idea of throwing a lot of data at ML and seeing if it comes up with anything is hardly an innovative step, in the same way that "doing X on a computer" should not have been regarded as patentable at any point from about 1980 onwards.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Who owns IP for art, music etc

"the author waives all rights..."

I should hope so, since Mozart did much the same thing a couple of centuries earlier.

Broadcom's VMware buy got you worried? Give these 5 FOSS hypervisors a spin

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Re: Oracle VirtualBox & Poor Software Quality

VirtualBox has one closed source plug-in that you can ignore if your VM doesn't need USB 2/3 support. The basic product is GPL2 and perfectly usable as-is.

Oracle's licence for the plug-in is quite restrictive and their pricing (minimum $5000) explains why businesses are keen not to get caught with a bootleg copy on someone's machine, but it doesn't make the rest of the product worthless.

Someone may be prepping an NPM crypto-mining spree

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NPM is astonishing

NPM is the ActiveX of our time. Both result in victims running code on their computers without any control over provenance. It is astonishing that people are still willing to make this mistake.

Union tells BT: Commit to pay rise talks next week or else

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Re: Profit

The fact that pension funds don't own the majority of UK shares doesn't mean that pension funds don't get the majority of their income from shares.

Tech world may face huge fines if it doesn't scrub CSAM from encrypted chats

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Re: WTF???

And clothes make it easy to conceal a weapon, so all clothes should be see-through and MPs should lead by example.

Gtk 5 might drop X11 support, says GNOME dev

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Re: Gnome devs who drank the Wayland coolaid...

"is going to be having done"

This isn't even future tense. It's fiction, so you need a tense that works sideways.

Marriott Hotels admits to third data breach in 4 years

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"red hat"

Can they really claim that if they've issued a demand for cash?

Oracle, IBM losing ground to local databases in China, says IDC

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Re: Fairly meaningless

It would surely be rather surprising if they weren't simply a commercial support offering around an existing system, or at least were to begin with. Nothing wrong with that; it's what Red Hat did until they became so successful that IBM felt it necessary to screw buy them up.

NOBODY PRINT! Selfless hero saves typing pool from carbon catastrophe

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Re: Uniplex "my God, it chills me just mention the dark lord's name,"

I'm always amused by reports of code that could cope with the end of most centuries except for the one the code was written in. If they'd been either more or less lazy, they'd have been OK.

Arrogant, subtle, entitled: 'Toxic' open source GitHub discussions examined

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I thought the 7zip reference made it pretty obvious, but as was known even back in the days of Jon Postel, nothing is completely obvious in online discourse.

China is trolling rare-earth miners online and the Pentagon isn't happy

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Presumably they know this because the Chinese mines do these things. I wonder if they have informed the local population in China of this?

Arm says its Cortex-X3 CPU smokes this Intel laptop silicon

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Apples, meet Oranges.

It looks like they are comparing a processor design, available in the near future, with an actual processor, that I can buy now. Is that fair?

Graphical desktop system X Window just turned 38

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Re: Secure network connection

Doesn't running X over SSH remove that problem?

Well, I say "remove" but I mean sidestep, since the X connection is running oblivious to the security being provided by the SSH connection underneath it, the latter having been set up in the traditional direction.

Always read the comments: Beijing requires oversight of all reader-generated chat

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Re: Too risky

No, you just made a post that ignored the word Victorian and thereby completely missed the point of the post you were "replying" to.

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Re: That would be a huge change

I'm sure anything other than standard chinese is subversive-by-default.

AI's most convincing conversations are not what they seem

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Re: Sentience? Meh...

We're relying on human language. I expect I'd fail a Cat Turing Test.

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Re: The real issue

"I think therefore I am." is an unsupported conclusion based on an unestablished premise. Define "think", "am" and "I", and we can start talking.

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Re: The real issue

Do we even know that our own brains continue to function in the absence of external input? I'd say the only experiments ever conducted on the point are inconclusive, because we've never been able to re-attach the head.

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Re: Chinese Room

All discussions of this point run aground on issues like "Define think" and "Can brains think?".

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Re: The whole article

The article seems to be suggesting that the point of the Turing Test is to determine whether the human participant is intelligent or not.

And last week, most of us failed it.

Cookie consent crumbles under fresh UK data law proposals

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Re: And for EU visitors ?

Not necessarily. A fair number of US sites dealt with GDPR by blocking EU visitors.

Airbus flies new passenger airplane aimed at 'long, thin' routes

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Rather than being bent at hips and knees and shipped as freight?

On the face of it, the packing density ought to be better so it's a little surprising that no-one has tried this yet.

Bill Gates says NFTs '100% based on greater fool theory' amid crypto cataclysm

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Re: A pipe-smoker comments...

That might have been true on the day he said it, but imports became more expensive the following day and inflation eventually adjusted the value of the pound in your pocket to make Harold a liar.

Proof that politicians have always been willing to insult the electorate's intelligence if they think it will make the awkward question go away until later.

Teeth marks yield clue to widespread internet outage in Canada

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In this case, the cables were distinct. Only the poles were shared. Does that count as layer 0?

Makers of ad blockers and browser privacy extensions fear the end is near

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Re: Chrome is the hellmouth

"if you have certain active scripts blocked, the "Install Chrome" panel is missing, and you get a silent install - very crafty."

Is that actually legal? Does it not count as using someone else's computer without their permission? If not, why not, and can Joe Public use the same loophole to install spyware on other people's machines?

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Re: I don't get it.

"Use it from a browser that isn't Chrome and you'll get told the right way to use it is in Chrome."

Not true for me, 30 seconds ago, using FF on this phone.