Re: 99.999% of humans are XX or XY.
Ta for the fact-check, but ... could someone explain how we got onto chromosomes?
8137 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007
"When did any Government suspend copyright for the emergency?"
The operators of various online book stores are particularly keen to know this, since they are still selling at the full (copyright included) price. Jef Bezos, for one, is not normally left squatting in the starting blocks when it comes to cutting (his) costs.
I understand why people think that IP law needs a comprehensive re-think. I don't get why people think that they can just ignore laws because they don't like them. I bet there are some laws that these people are quite fond of and they'd be outraged if someone else just ignored them. We have a system for changing laws and, yes, that system sometimes feels broken too, but it is *much* better than the alternative.
"Because morons like you keep using packages like this."
Careful now. You don't know that the person asking the question is a user. In fact, if they are a user then they surely know why they use it themselves and it is a simple matter to assume that others are making a similar judgement. More likely then, that the person posing the question is (like you, I assume) not using this kind of code and merely bewildered that others are.
OR ...the economics favour "shoddy code now" over "decent code later" and packages like this facilitate the former whereas coders like you, dear Irongut, favour the latter. Perhaps the Invisible Hand of the Meerkat needs to deliver a hearty slap.
OR ... the world is full of morons. Yeah. Maybe that.
I wouldn't, particularly as we head into spring in the northern hemisphere.
I haven't changed my central heating or hot water controls, and we have our main meal in the evening anyway, so the only real difference is that my employer can run the office a little cooler. (Except he can't, because there are some staff still there, each at some safe distance from each other, natch.)
It's probably still there, but the fraction of the atmosphere that is over China is relatively small so once it has diffused over the rest of the planet it doesn't show up as a big orange-red false colour splotch.
An atmospheric chemist (which I'm not) may chip in shortly to tell you that NO2 gets washed out as acid rain fairly rapidly whereas CO2 doesn't. Maybe. Or maybe they won't. Let's leave this assertion here, so that someone who knows better feels obliged to chip in.
"Microsoft never learned to multitask, they still allow a single executable to hog the entire core it is running on and halt everything else on it, instead of reallocating anything to empty cores."
Not my experience. I've never see a core being left idle when there is a thread ready-to-run. I do often see a thread maxing out a particular core and I also see that thread being migrated around the available cores on a longer timescale. Staying on one core in the short term is actually the only sensible strategy, because switching cores just for the aesthetics will cost you a squillion cache misses. On a longer term, however, hopping to a different core lets the first core cool down. (Modern cores can run for short periods at a clock-rate that generates more heat than can be shifted off the chip on a continuous basis.)
The monopoly is the whole PC architecture. That's what allows a single OS image to run on just about any "compatible" box you can buy. That's why Intel and AMD can both make good money selling one of the high-value components in that architecture.
That "whole standard architecture" is what doesn't exist for the ARM, which is why AOSP being open source means very little in practice -- you have to have an Android that is provided (and maintained, or not) by whoever built the specific device. If you want to run AOSP (in Lineage, for example) you first have to wait for someone to find a kernel crack to let you load it on your phone (against the wishes of the vendor) and then you have to hope that these same people don't lose interest in your model (which they will, after a few years).
It is interesting that the commercial pressures don't seem to have forced the Android vendors to standardise their architecture.
I suspect it doesn't exist for RISC-V either and the commercial pressures might not be in the right direction there either. We'll see.
I think the sort of content that is always trotted out as an example of what we are trying to eliminate is already illegal in every jurisdiction, so presumably we already *have* a worldwide content moderation regime of the kind you describe.
The trouble is, social media as currently implemented makes it fairly easy for criminals to operate more or less anonymously. This bill attempts to eliminate that anonymity by saying to websites "If you can't give us a better lead as to who published this, then you published it.". That will be a pretty easy idea to sell to the vast majority of voters, so if this bill is technically flawed you had better come up with a better idea, or a better implementation of this idea.
I assume that the analysis will mention what proprtion of the 2.6e23 flops were carried out when. I expect a balancing act between the initial enthusiasm bringing numbers of boxes to the party and later tech bring fewer but vastly more powerful ones.
In fact, I wonder whether it is sensible to run a distributed computing project over such a long period.
Not really. For the font to be usable, it has to make glyphs look recognisable to a native user of the script. Scripts, in turn, have a habit of containing (for example) a letter that looks like a small circle. You can't make that look different from another small circle without making at least one of them look wrong.
On the other hand, a mixture of scripts within the same part of a domain name is almost certainly dodgy, so there does appear to be an easy way for browsers to detect the fraudsters.
"This is why Americans just should not have that power."
Americans don't have that power unless you register under one of the three-letter TLDs. If you use your own country-code TLD then they'd have to deal with your country's legal system. That's not impossible, but I haven't heard of it actually happening. I suspect that if this UK outfit registered under .uk then they'd be pretty safe from American mistakes.
Given that just about everyone *finds* stuff with a search engine, I'm surprised that businesses still believe that a ".com" actually matters. It doesn't. It just means that an important part of your business is outside your country's legal system.
"He who makes the law can break the law"
In the US, it is Congress who makes the law and USG is a distinct entity, very much subject to those laws.
They used to have a different system, with a King who could tell them to eat shit and that was the end of the discussion, except that it turned out that that wasn't the end of the discussion.
I suspect you can't sign away constitutional rights in the US either and in the context of other stories we have frequently been told that those rights are granted to "persons" and not just "citizens", but they might only apply to "resident persons" (which this UK company isn't) and would in any event require the hiring of a lawyer to actually enforce. Since you are effectively trying the stop the Homeland Security people from doing what they believe is their job, it might need to be quite an expensive lawyer.
Relax, it's just a label.
Whilst there are christians who are on the right of politics, the group that self-identifies as "the christian right" is not christian in the eyes of pretty much every other adherent of that faith. It is more like the "German Democratic Republic" or the "Chinese Communist Party".
Just like my phone (landline or mobile) and probably a zillion other ways in which a commercial provider could invade my privacy. Somehow we survive.
And I'm only giving up my anonymity to each site on a case-by-case basis, which I'm doing to a large extent *already* based on my IP address and (if I permit) first-party cookies.
And, where I live, the ability of those providers to sell onward my personal profile was (until fairly recently) barred by GDPR.
Wrong. They are the UK government. Their budget is finite and shows no signs of increasing in the next few years. Quite the reverse. We've just spaffed over a hundred billion on a train set, Boris is talking about another few dozen billion for a bridge, and I read elsewhere that the City of London (a fair chunk of our economy) is facing an existential threat.
"Make payment for online services obligatory, no more of this freetard ad funded business model."
That, indirectly, is more or less what is being proposed. If it becomes impossible to police the content under the current "ad-finananced, free at point of delivery" business model, then businesses will switch to something that lets them push the legal burden onto those creating the content. As you point out, a follow-the-money apporach would probably be effective.
It mostly works in the Real World, after all. When was the last time you saw images on a public billboard of someone actually being raped? It's unthinkable that anyone would be stupid enough to even try it, let alone that they'd get away with it. And yet, the same thing is possible on the web (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-51391981).
If the internet's freedom fighters spent less time spouting platitudes and more time engaging with their fellow citizens, we could probably figure out a workable way of doing this. As things stand, however, I'm afraid that the likes of Nicky Morgan are going to be given no help and will come up with something that causes a whole lot of colateral damage.
"We’ve all enjoyed using sites with it over two decades."
Speak for yourself. In my experience, Flash was used to produce sites that were slow to load and content-free when they arrived. I decided years ago that disabling Flash was actually a smart move because it flagged up all the sites created by that mindset, which I could then avoid.
That would depend on the employment contracts of the inventors. I think most universities these days encourage researchers to patent stuff and the legal arrangements make it profitable for all concerned. Otherwise, you just lose your top researchers to universities (or countries) that do.
"The one I have trouble with is #2."
You probably ought to be suspicious of #1. Yes,it sounds excellent, but so does the equivalent rule for human beings ... and yet no legal system ever has actually imposed that rule on people. You *are* allowed to hurt people under some circumstances and you are allowed to leave people to get hurt under quite a large number of circumstances. I expect Mr Asimov was aware of this.
"or trying to break into government systems"
Sadly, the same politicians who are wringing their hands over Huawei are the ones those think end-to-end encryption should be banned. Perhaps they are now nearly at the point where they will appreciate what the rest of us have been trying to explain to them for several decades.
From the printing press onwards, pretty much the first things that any new communications technology has been used for have been porn and fraud. Good luck finding a reasonably priced scribe for all your clerical needs.
OTOH, since I browse most of the web with NoScript active, I am probably closer to your basic stance on this than this reply might suggest. :)
You are assuming that the changes made year-by-year can be expressed as changes of parameters to a fixed algorithm. I very much doubt whether governments would even understand the sentence I've just written, let alone take the trouble to constrain themselves in that way. It is probably more likely that you change the code but keep the parameters the same!
Libraries can be replaced, perhaps with shim layers. Compilers can be changed. Compiler options can be switched. This is not rocket science, but...
If you have a decent test suite, ideally automated, then you can port gradually and you can be releasing the semi-ported version and the porting work can proceed in parallel with the normal product evolution.
If you don't have a decent test suite then you have to do the port as a Big-Bang change and you have to execute that change quickly enough that Sales and Marketing don't lose patience and insist on "briefly" going back to the old code, making some "minor changes" and releasing a new version. Every time they do that, your goal-posts have moved and it will take longer to complete the porting project. You don't need many such changes, drip-feeding in, before the porting project becomes essentially impossible because the old codebase is evolving faster than the port is progressing.
So my guess is that anyone who says they *can't* do a 64-bit port probably doesn't have a decent test regime.