Posts by Ken Hagan 8168 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007
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.
"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.
"In October last year, a Texas jury awarded ..."
The original article is worth (re-) reading. I'd be interested to know how the damages compare to the amount of money that HP overpaid in the first place. They (HP) speak of billions of dollars of drives so it would only have to be a small percentage markup for the culprits to have effectively got away with it. (At least, until the damages got tripled. I expect that hurts.)
If the odds against actually getting caught are N:1, the damages need to start at N * the benefit of committing the crime. I do sometimes wonder whether lawmakers and judges understand this point. They often seem to feel that N=1, whereas business types (especially crooked ones) take a different view.
"What could possibly go wrong?"
All sorts of things, obviously, but don't worry. If the good devs mark their ActiveX code as "safe" then we can put a switch in the browser to only run the good ones.
(Edit: It has just occurred to me that some of my readers may be too young to get the joke. For their benefit, then: Yes, Microsoft actually did this.)
"Security, Privacy, Control (of your own data and online persona)"
That's three aspects of every new feature that will, inevitably, be things that may or may not be supported on the customer's browser (depending on that customer's settings). These same devs who moan about having to code for different browsers seem to be determined to demand new "differences that they will have to code for".
I made exactly the same observation when I was about 12 years old. I discovered this the hard way, but obviously pretended to have worked it out by pure thought when I reported it to Mum and Dad. (Didn't want them thinking I was stupid.) I'm now quite a lot older and that's not the only time I nearly wasn't "now quite a lot older". Quite scary, really. Who'd be a parent?
I think most people here reckon there is only one option that is likely in practice:
- spend boatloads of taxpayers cash assembling the database and then accidentally spaff the whole lot on the internet for free, and then spend even more cash paying for the benefits at the market rate.
So yes, *your* three options are worth discussing, but probably not with the stratospherically incompetent idiots who are currently running the show and until those twats are out of the picture the only safe thing to do with the nation's medical records is to sit tight.
I think it might also be a problem if you're a patient and the person treating you does not have access to all the relevant information. (They can't rely on you to tell them because even if you are conscious you don't know what's relevant.) So what they do instead is assume that you are average.
Exactly. Good luck anonymising *that* once the entire database gets spaffed across the internet.
Oh, and good luck actually selling the database to any commercial partners once the entire database has been spaffed across the internet.
And good luck avoiding such spaffing several times even before you've finished assembling the database from its multitude of source records.
I just upvoted you and then downvoted you, twice. The net effect was one downvote.
Please could the next commentard who passes undo my experiment.
(I am reminded of the joke about the programmer who is asked by his (yes, it's an old joke) wife to go into the village and while he is there buy eggs. He leaves and never comes back home.)
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