Posts by Ken Hagan

Re: This is weird

"a) the cops are wrong"

"b) Tesla are lying "

I think we should allow Elon to be just "wrong" rather than "lying". He's no less human than the cops.

Re: on and off is a view feature.

Something like this: https://www.theregister.com/2020/02/03/google_maps_hack_cartful_phones/

(I don't think that story provides evidence that Google continue to track, for traffic jam purposes, even after you've switched off location, but El Reg's article has links to the sort of things you were talking about. Also, I thought the story was very funny and deserves a re-posting every now and then.)

The distribution is not flat. The Russell Group is much richer that many "old polys" and one or two RG universities are much richer than most of the rest and within one of the RG, one of its college's cash piles has to be plotted on logarithmic axes if you want it on the same graph as all the others.

But actually, all that cash (wherever it lies) is probably not the issue. I suspect that the real issue is that universities have these things called students who are much harder to control (IT security-wise) than employees.

Re: "more features that nobody asked for"

Absolutely, but the last time that happened in the world of computers was when the guy added a macro language to the spreadsheet program because he'd finished it early.

Re: You have to separately book the second one?

That was my experience, too ... and my state is the UK so I am a little puzzled by all this talk of having to book a second date.

Re: What About Rust?

Is that mandatory, or simply the common practice? I'd have said that a language that *cannot* represent an interface without also providing the implementation is a language that is brain-dead because it can't consume any useful libraries that are written outside the language.

Re: An excellent idea

I would hope that the /subsequent/ premiums for maintaining the insurance would have the same effect. It seems amazing to me that insurers are not the ones making a killing here. Immediately /after/ a payout, both the insurer and the perpetrator know that the victim is ripe for a repeat attack so why would the insurer not adjust the premium accordingly, to be lowered to a less eye-watering level only once the customer has demonstrated (and continues to demonstrate under regular audit) safe working practices?

Re: Best place to hide a leaf....

There does seem to be a tendency for vendors to release patches on Microsoft's Patch Tuesday. That presumably has a similar effect, overloading the bad guys and buying the smaller vendors a little time.

And given the size of some MS offerings, who's to say that they aren't using your technique too?

Re: My clan of (non)believers is better than yours...

Perhaps they haven't seen Life of Brian. (Anecdote: I introduced my sons to these films and the reaction was mainly "Oh, so that's where all thememes came from.", so perhaps the IAAI haven't used the internet either.)

Or perhaps they just didn't understand the joke.

Re: AI in everything is the problem

"Notice how no-one talks about the Turing test any more? That's because it was passed, ..."

It was? When? How? Who? I've never seen any computer system get anywhere close. Come to that, I've seen *people* fail it (usually working in institutions as customer-facing staff and following rule sets, to be fair). Or did they re-define Turing test, so that I'm not allowed to ask questions that any 5-year-old could answer but that fall outside the computer's domain of expertise? (For example, does this picture show baseballs or a bucket? Obviously a 5-year-old could answer that, but apparently an AI researcher can't.)

Re: Very open-minded

I wouldn't put it past some head-teachers to exclude you until it had grown back. (Particularly in the case of fee-paying schools, where the attitude seems to be that your parents have volunteered you into the system so the school can make up whatever shit they like.)

Here in the UK, a 12yo girl was excluded for several weeks before Christmas because her dress didn't show enough leg. Eventually the school began legal action against her parents for not sending her to school. (Then the story reached the national press and the school has now dropped the case.)

Also here in the UK, a website that collects stories from teenagers has collected numerous examples of girls wearing trousers under their (mandatory) school skirts to reduce the amount of sexual harassment.

It's almost like the kids want to have control over their own bodies. Shocking! They are at school to learn and they should learn to do as they are bloody well told by the Responsible Adults. Except that *some* of the responsible adults seem to be living on another planet.

Re: No, sorry.

Given the distressingly non-zero number of spontaneously aborted embryos, one would to conclude that, for Nature too, pregnancy is a probability and not boolean.

Re: I hate Adobe, but...

I find proof-reading quite hard on a screen. I'm not surprised to find that she prints it out to do that job.

Re: Seems obvious...

Easy, you say? I wonder if the Nominet ballot made that mistake?

I think so. We used to joke about selling London Bridge, but then someone actually did (!) so we've had to switch.

Re: Census 2021 -cash for stats is ridiculous. Gov have EVERYTHING already. The list incomplete

But this is government we're talking about. Collecting up all those records for just one person is probably beyond them. Doing it for the entire population is just ridiculous. (In other words, they aren't paying for the information. They are paying for you to collect it up for them.)

So what? There is no chance that they'd be allowed to build a satellite jammer on land they own in the US and very little chance they'd be allowed to build something in one African country that blacked out all that country's neighbours. Even blacking out China would probably hobble India, Japan, etc to an extent that was seen as an act of agression.

Re: Listening to '1984' on audiobook

If you manage to have sex in public whilst in your own home ... well done, but I think you will find it is still illegal.

Conversely, for the wild flowers case I think you will be able to argue that they aren't wild (by definition) if they arein your garden.

Better examples mighthave been things like theft and violence, which are definitely illegal in the home, even if it is your wife or children.

Re: keyboard condoms

Therapy, or more driving lessons. Most of us can go a bit longer than 30 minutes without mowing down a pedestrian.

But yeah, they can be a bugger to wipe off.

Re: Jpg xl?

I thought jpeg2000 was never used because the patent position was unclear, so I'm not sure what your point is. It sounds like there is prior art here, in the form of the actual inventor who wants it to be public, so if MS are allowed to kill it with legal FUD then we are all the losers.

Re: "the original is so much more valuable than even the most faithful copy"

More to the point, each JPEG became a copy as soon as it moved off the original device used to create it. That device probably no longer exists. Even the $69m version is just a copy.

"I'm wondering if the real fix for this is no SMP whatsoever..."

Nah. The real fix for this is to run your own code on your own hardware. Despite decades of marketing hype, and some pretty serious efforts at encrypted computation, it remains true that if you lose physical security, you lose security.

Given the collapsing costs of actual hardware and the availability of free-as-in-beer operating systems and hypervisors, the movement to renting space in someone else's machine, alongside god-knows-who and at the far end of a long wire, is surely one of the more unexpected trends of recent years.

Re: Irony

This is the same google that desperately wants to adds "APIs" to let browsers (that is, scripts from a fourth party added by a third-party ad-broker to a second-party web-page that you happen to visit) access the whole PC rather than just a sandbox.

Re: A rather large piece of paper for a fair test

The wider problem is that no-one seems to be training AIs on wider problems. A 1yo child has experience of the world through vision, sound, taste, smell, interaction, and (one hopes) the beginnings of a system of externally imposed behavioural constraints. When such a child sees a picture, they know it is a picture rather than the real thing but they can also understand that it can stand in for the real thing in some contexts, such as a conversation.

I haven't seen any reports of AIs being trained on such a broad range of inputs, so I'm not surprised that they still so easily led astray. I do wonder though whether the hardware is now beefy enough to start planning such experiments.

Re: More to this than meets the eye

Which explains why all the world's biggest software companies are Russian now.

Re: the title is (now) too long

I don't think Grayling has the necessary genius-level IT background, but Big Dom is free.

FAT64 ??!?

Sorry, I haven't really been paying attention to the market in ever-smaller-but-more-capacious devices but if someone has felt the need to extend a floppy disc layout to 64 bits then *that* is the most offensive thing in this thread.