Posts by Ken Hagan

Gutenburg was legally liable for what he printed. Apparently the big internet sites aren't. That seems like a pretty significant difference.

Re: Ironic that...

But you can sign your login scripts.

Re: Uranium? What me worry?

My guess is that uranyl is sufficiently close to urea in spelling that the small child couldn't resist having a sniff of the bottle of yellow dried wee.

Re: Quick

"Some New Mexicans, I assume, are good people."

Yes, and they need to be protected.

Re: Is it Acrobat or PDF itself?

Static HTML will reflow and is safe. Folks use PDF because they are particularly fond of a particular layout, so "reflow" isn't a good thing for them. (In most cases, people are simply publishing information of course and the layout they are so fond of is totally unimportant, but a Wrong Requirement is still a requirement. Sigh!)

Re: I've always wondered...

It wouldn't mean that. Instead, someone would invent a plugin which downloaded a video of the website rather than the pages. Then everyone would get the same service. You could call it something sexy, like Flash. What could possibly go wrong?

Re: How do we know...

Well you certainly won't find the answers to those questions by reading the summaries in the popular press, so I suppose the original research is the only way to go.

(I do sometimes read reports that, if true, imply embarrassing levels of idiocy or naivety in the scientists concerned. I always remind myself that they didn't write the newspaper article and I'm sure the original paper addresses the glaring weaknesses.)

Re: Tip of the Iceberg

A quarter of a century is not "ancient history". It's the gap between WW1 and WW2, for example, and you'd be a fool to suggest that the Germans had forgotten the former by the start of the latter. It is also less than the gap between WW2 and my childhood, during which I distinctly remember West Germany being an inspiring example of how *not* to forget the important stuff of history.

Re: Proof of ownership?

"Happens more often than you think. About 10% of the people listed as father on a birth certificate can be shown to not be the biological father. Not that it matters a lot of the time, being a parent is about raising a kid, not just siring them."

!0% sounds rather high. Any references for that? Nevertheless, I agree wholeheartedly about the raising versus siring distinction. Any prick can do the latter.

Well I cannot speak for Qt (*), but since C++ has had fully automated memory management for over 20 years, I don't think the *language* can be blamed for these kinds of bugs.

(* I did look at Qt4 a number of years ago and found that they were using macros to emulate exception handling, home-grown collection classes, and had a cute little pre-compiler to generate yet more macros. I concluded that if I wanted an MFC-lookalike then I'd probably just stick with MFC. I dare say it has improved since then, but is it perhaps still "bugwards compatible" with the older versions?)

Re: Who was surveyed?

The article gives a strong suggestion as to who was surveyed:

"Developer recruiting biz HackerRank surveyed ..."

...so that would be "people looking for a job".

That's probably over-snarky, since JavaScript (like C++) is a rather elegant language struggling to escape from several decades of historic abuse. The trick is in knowing what that elegant subset is and how to avoid contact with the awful parts. Sadly, the need to work with (and maintain) existing code (and libraries) means that most JS (and C++) programmers are forced to get their fingers dirty.

Re: There be dragons here!

"Anyone else?"

My reading of the article was that they can't actually do any of this yet. The OP's concern (and mine) is that if it turns out to be possible to convert "imagined speech" into external output then this might be a nightmarish device in the wrong hands.

Obviously we, the good guys, need to find out whether this is possible before anyone else, so the research should be pursued with all haste.

Re: Tell me about it

Note to el reg: we still need a whoosh icon.

Re: Enterprise

I expect you are supposed to download it when it comes out and then save it until you think it is safe to deploy. Download 1809 now and save it somewhere, in case 1903 is even worse.

Nice flag, but a bit too red. Maybe if you ditch the St George cross...

Re: Telegram

Well, if you want to receive incoming traffic then someone needs to know where you are, for some value of "where".

Re: "it's not any sane version of any of the originally-agreed models for Brexit. "

The only sane model of Brexit is the (realisable) one where we sent in our Article 50 notice on the morning after the result, spent a couple of months confirming that there was no middle ground on which either side could build a deal, and then spent the remaining year-and-three-quarters making preparations for a hard brexit without chaos at borders and several million nationals on both side wondering whether they were going to wake up as illegal immigrants in the country where they'd lived for however many years.

However, we got dithering, delay, incompetence and no evidence of any preparation whatsoever. I don't think anyone voted for that.

Re: Far reaching repercussions...

"The bottom line is that implementation of APIs and interfaces are copyrightable, but the APIs and interfaces themselves should not be."

Exactly. However, any jurisdiction that disagrees will not be too troubled by the argument either way. It's domestic software industry will disappear in double-quick time and the judges' only contact with "software" will be in the form of shrink-wrap packages written abroad.

Re: "Yeah, like it is a matter of life and death if I pour myself 497ml of water"

Er, what country are you living in, coz the UK still sells beer in "proper" pints.

And that proper pint is actually a legally defined number of ml because the UK adopted metric before it adopted the EU. That may have been before you were born, though.

Re: Author rescinds GPL license retroactivly (yes he can do that)

Your snipping of Mr Rosen's text makes it look like he is implying that it is impossible, in law, to put something in the public domain. That, in turn, would make all the references to the public domain that occur in law and all the mentions of the concept that have ever been made in court cases, a waste of breath. I suspect that the legal profession might beg to differ on that one. I further suspect that Mr Rosen's full text probably doesn't imply exactly that.

Re: national security but without explaining what

FB don't care who you are. They only care that you are the same person that you were when they hoovered up all your personal data and browsing habits.

Re: Biometrics

Bio metrics shouldn't be used for identification either. They are easily copied. They prove nothing.

Re: If the government

Too true. Yes, I should have remembered that one, too. And there were the Magdelene Laundries. Like the previous AC said, it is quite depressing just how many times this has been tried when you stop and think about it. And usually by people who were convinced that it was the *morally correct* solution to some "problem".

Re: Boom!

It will whatever lets you pack the largest number of identically sized spheres into the smallest volume. I think that means one big diamond. I'll let others comment on whether the immensely slow cooling rate favours a flawless crystal.

Re: Pesky microwaves

"One day she muttered perhaps it's the tide while the engineer was there, who had his "Eureka!" CMOA."

Sounds like she (or a friend) had figured it out and just needed "The Engineer" to make an Official Fix.

Re: Home users...check logs...

"technically literate" but completely naive about how your average plod, lawyer or judge will interpret this.

Re: Crazy

It wouldn't make any difference. The shutdown is entirely down to Trump and he'd just pay for his own security and then tweet to the world about what a great guy he is saving the taxpayer those dollars.