Posts by Ken Hagan 8168 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007
JS is basically a functional, lisp-like language with a C-like syntax. Features like indexing arrays with an integer were added to pander to people who had never heard of cdr or car. Hence, I suppose, the expression "all at sea". (C what I did there?)
"There needs to be consensus on what qualifies as a link and what qualifies as a full post that requires compensation imho."
I'd be surprised if there isn't such a consensus already. This is a link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/. Any snippet that goes beyond that is reproducing someone else's content. It would appear that the Australian law actually considers links (according to my definition) to be an "interaction with" the news site, whereas most normal people would reckon you were smoking something if you said that.
The difference matters because if FB (or anyone else) can provide enough of a snippet that you don't have to leave their site, then you stay put and continue to contribute ad revenue to FB. If, however, you have to at least /visit/ the news site, firstly you trigger ad revenue for them and secondly there is a non-zero chance that you might stay there for a bit and not return to Zuckerland. (Oh noes!)
Given that difference in behaviour, with its real financial consequences, it is absurd to consider a raw link as an interaction and the law should not do so. However, the rest of the idea is sound because it makes it hard for the likes of FB to cherry-pick news sites for free. IANAL but I suspect the Australian law could be fixed by deleting two lines of text: 52C.1.b.
52C Interacting with content
For the purposes of this Part, a user of a service interacts with content made available by the service if: (a) the content is reproduced on the service, or is otherwise placed on the service, and the user interacts with the content; or (b) a link to the content is provided on the service and the user interacts with the link; or (c) an extract of the content is provided on the service and the user interacts with the extract.
Speaking as a programmer, this sounds like a horrendous idea, at least for the PC market.
End-users would buy the PC and implicitly choose the features in the CPU. *Then* they'd buy my software. Then they'd find that they'd bought the wrong CPU. Then it would be my problem.
Hitherto, Intel have made pretty much every CPU feature (at some performance level) available on pretty much every chip they sel of a given generation and each generation preserves the features from previous ones. (Yes, I'm typing this on a Xeon box that lacks any kind of Intel GPU, so I'm aware of the edge cases in this line of argument.) That has meant that I've been able to "demand" support for MMX, SSE, AVX and their ilk over the years and customers have been largely oblivious to this "requirement".
As an engineer, this offends my sense of minimalism, but the economics of CPU making seems to be "pay squillions for the first one, all the rest are free", with such variants as there are emerging from QA rather than intentional manufacture, so (happily for my programmer self) I don't expect Intel to take up your suggestion.
...but have we considered the possibility that this is intentional? Who reads small-print on a shopping bag anyway, and the Japanese have a long-standing tradition of using western text at least as much as an art form rather than a medium so perhaps the same thing is happening here.
Er, not really. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron) The neutron contains three quarks and one of them can decay into a different kind of quark and produce a W- boson which then decays into an electron and an electron neutrino. Takes about a quarter of an hour if there's nothing else about, so there's probably a cup of tea involved, as well.
There may be politicians who feel that way, but the smart response is to recognise that everyone tried different approaches and (based on what we knew 12 months ago) it is completely random who got lucky and produced a working vaccine.
I am grateful that the French tried whatever it was they did. That could easily have been the only one that worked.
If your editor and computer don't crash every five minutes, why would you ever lose work because you didn't have auto-save? And when "Save All" is only ever a couple of keystrokes away, why is it such a "great feature" for the computer to do it for you?
My memory is a bit dim if you go back too many decades, but the only times that I have ever felt that I'd "lost work" were when I saved something broken over something that wasn't without having first put the working stuff to revision control. Auto-save sounds like a way to automate that mode of failure.
"No one wants a personalized ad based on browsing history ruining all the fun," said Microsoft, using the example of a surprise gift's recipient perhaps seeing an ad over the user's shoulder.
A prize to whoever thought up *that* example so that they didn't have to admit the *actual* motivating example.
Three points:
Almost no-one actually writes x86/x64 -- we have machines for that now.
Instruction decode is about 1% of the die and only that big because it is done 16-way parallel.
Intel *were* very good at the physical process of making chips. Their current woe is almost entirely due to a succession of mis-steps in that area. *This* has to be Gelsinger's priority.
I think Intel's last Atom that could not run 64-bit code was around 2010 or so. Such machines are almost certainly still running and usefully employed, but probably not owned by people capable of contributing to the code maintenance. Also, how easy (and cheap) would it be to replace the hardware? Quite easy for an atom based "normal" PC and much harder for an embedded system, though the latter may not be something you want to slap Debian 12 onto!
Am I mis-understanding Bitcoin or should these people have kept a backup (or several) of data that they believed was worth many thousands of pounds?
I realise that the clever blockchain crap means you can't just print money by copying the data, but you can at least protect the money you've got, no?
I think the rationale behind the very fine distiction is that you can change the message but you cannot change your sexuality. Similar lines of argument apply to other characteristics such as biological sex, sexual identity, race, age and disability. Whether they also apply to religion is, I suspect, unresolved.
Picking and choosing, where the material is legal to publish, is an editorial judgement and ought to make them liable for what they leave up. (Enforcing whatever the law says, OTOH, is not IMO an editorial decision but simply complying with the law and refusing to be an accessory to someone else's crime.)
According to wikipedia, about 0.3% of the worlds population are identical twins. I realise that these aren't truly identical, but the one in a million claim for the general population translates to a one in a thousand claim applied solely to identical twins, and that sounds pretty unlikely.
Face recognition might be a nice first line of defence, excluding most random hackers fairly easily, but given that "a familiy member" might well be exactly the kind of person you are trying to lock out of your stuff, I wouldn't want it to be the only line of defence.
"I love America but by God they make it hard to do so."
Au contraire, you should be proud that your country tolerates these fools and their damaging nonsense so indulgently. Lesser countries might just arrest them for bad thinking and put them in a special place where they can be re-educated.
"the UK should be identifying other companies in a similar position and acting to protect its national IP from situations such as this"
That would have the side effect of discouraging anyone with a good idea from starting up in the UK. Why not start up somewhere else, where you might be able to sell the resulting company for a market rate, rather than the depressed prices you'll get from a limited number of buyers.
It might not be fatal discouragement, but it will probably be enough to discouraging anyone who isn't already in the UK from coming here with their idea.
The article suggests that the ITU's rules basically mean that Nokia *gave up* their patent rights when, *as members*, they kept schtumm whilst the IP was being incorporated into the standard. IOW, the rules of membership trump the normal IP rights.
If Nokia don't like that, membership of the ITU is optional and they were free to withdraw from either the ITU or the standards effort, and they were free to mention their IP in this area and keep it out of the standard if they wanted to continue to assert their patent rights. They chose not to do any of these.
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