Posts by Cuddles

Re: Always listening to our customers

Yep, "The Profits of Religion", 1917. However, it's worth bearing in mind that that book, along with the others in the series, were a satirical attack on various American institutions, and the way people blindly accepted them and the problems they caused. People are likely to be more familiar with his book "The Jungle", which single-handledly halved the sales of meat in the US (obviously only in the short term; people have short memories) when it exposed the exploitation in that industry. The whole point of the quote about having nothing to fear was that it was supposed to be a bad thing - the protagonist was complaining about having all his communications read by the authorities, and the faceless bureaucracy simply didn't care, giving that as the reply.

So it's worth remembering both the origin and its later use. Originally, it was a criticism of exactly the type of spying that Snowden was upset about, and it's tacit acceptance by both the government and the people. Later, it was adopted by the Nazis who took that sort of warning as an instruction manual on how to oppress people. Which gives us something of an object lesson - if you ignore warnings about surveillance and the ignoring of human rights, you risk ending up with people thinking that's how things are supposed to work, and at the extreme, Nazis.

You can't copyright the idea of a branded thing, but you can copyright the specific designs for the branding. And just because it's your own face doesn't mean someone else can't own the copyright to things like logos and such based on it. The claim here isn't simply that Steve Wozniak copied the idea (although that certianly does seem to be the actual motivation behind it), but rather that the specific details created for one business venture were copied and used for another without permission. If you look at the original filing (linked in the article), the copyright claim would seem to boil down to how similar exhibits H (the original) and J (the second attempt) are to each other.

Which would seem to fall completely flat on the grounds that they don't look anything like each other. Woz U looks like it was thrown together in five minutes by someone with access to a single photo of Wozniak and a generic business/academic text generator. They can't have copied the logo, because it doesn't even have one. Other than containing the word "Woz" and his face appearing somewhere at some point, there is no similarity at all. The Woz Institute of Technology looks like it at least had a competent web designer involved at some point.

So the copyright claim is a valid claim that is allowed to see its day in court, but it's pretty much guaranteed to fail because it's obviously complete nonsense. However, that does still leave the breach of contract, which contrary to the claim in this article, has not been dismissed. The counts that were dismissed were for "money had and received" and "accounting". IANAL, but as far as I can see those were connected claims that basically wanted to see the accounts to know how much money Woz U made, and then have some of it. The breach of contract claim is the only one left that seems to have any legs - the final count is for declaratory relief, which as far as I can tell means the court will officially state that Reilly is in the right and Woz did copy his idea and needs to pay for it. But I don't see how that would mean anything if all the other claims alleging actual damages fail.

So overall, two claims have been dismissed and one doesn't really matter on its own. The copyright claim is techically valid but obviously stupid. The breach of contract claim relies on a verbal agreement, a handshake and a subsequent email, so it's only an implied contract and not actually a signed document. Which looks fairly shaky, but I think does have real legal standing so is probably the only thing keeping the case alive.

Re: This is Google Docs comments

"MS have fucked up by pushing this out instead of letting people opt in, but the fact that Google docs uses this style of comments without raising a pitchfork wielding mob makes it clear that it's not what they've done that's the problem, it's how they've done it."

Alternatively, it makes it clear that people choose to use Word specifically because it doesn't work the way Google docs does, and they get upset when that choice is suddenly taken away from them. Not everyone wants social media-style alway-online instant-sharing collaborative editing. Sometimes, that can be useful. For a local sports club event, for example, being able to send out a link to a single document where everyone can fill in attendance details, kit needed, number of people who can fit in their car, and other handy information can be quite useful. When I'm writing a scientific paper, the entire point is to have a static document sent out, then a number of people independently and anonymously comment on it and then send their version back via a third party. In that case, having a shared online document updated in real time with notifications sent out to everyone isn't just annoying or inefficient, it fundamentally breaks the entire process.

So no, it's not simply how they've done it. Sometimes there are good reasons for preferring one way of doing things over another. It might simply mean a lot of unnecessary work to change processes, but it might simply be entirely incompatible with some kinds of work. The "how", in pushing it out with no warning or opt-out, certainly doesn't help. But for some people it's very much the "what" that is the problem.

Re: Looks like shit

The thing about personalisation is that it's personal. People like being able to choose the colour of their phone, or pick their own ringtone. Having everything automatically chosen for you based on some entirely unrelated thing you've set elsewhere has nothing to do with personalisation. The big problem here is that most people don't choose their wallpaper because of it's colouring, and especially not for how well those colours might work in a user interface. An awful lot of people have photos of children, pets, friends, and so on, or at least some picture that has some personal meaning to them. That doesn't mean everyone wants their interface to be the colour of a baby's skin.

There's also the problem of having too much of a good thing. Your partner may well like having a bright pink background on her phone, but I doubt that means she wants everything in all apps to be bright pink at all times. Same principle as photos really - people might like having a quick glance at it before they open an app, but that doesn't mean they want to see the same photo for hours on end all the time they're trying to do something.

Re: Fuck the BBC - fuck iPlayer

Not really. The BBC has always been the broadcasting arm of the government. In theory it's supposed to be relatively impartial, but in practise it's funded by the government and run by people appointed by the government, and that inevitably leads to there being a certain slant on things. The BBC generally manages to be a lot better than most other state-run propaganda vehicles, but it's far from immune to this.

What this means in practice is that the BBC is almost always at least somewhat biased in favour of the current ruling party. At the moment, that means the Tories. And since they've been in power for a while now, and tend to be far more blatant than most about putting their mates into cushy jobs, the effect on the BBC has become rather more noticable. Back when Labour had been in power for a decade, it was the other way around, although maybe not to quite the same extent.

That last part is likely why so many people seem to believe that the BBC gets equal complaints from both sides and therefore must be balanced. Right now, they are biased towards the Tories. 10 years ago, they were biased towards Labour. People who think there are equal complaints from both sides might be correct if you average over a long time, but they're very wrong if you look at any specific point in time. Swinging between biased one way and biased the other doesn't mean they must be doing something right and giving a balanced view, it means they're always doing it wrong.

Re: But what about Apple?

"it would have gone to somebody else who could continue to use it; which is the ultimate form of recycling."

Exactly. This is why the catchphrase is "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle", in that order. Sending a 1 year old phone off to be recycled is terrible. Yes, it's slightly better than just throwing in a landfill, but not by much. Every phone bought will become waste of some form or another eventually, so by far the best thing you can do to reduce that is to not buy a new phone at all. If you absolutely must replace it, then the best thing to do is reuse it somehow, either by giving it to someone who still thinks it's fine or by repurposing it in some way. That latter part is what Samsung has apparently decided not to do. You only resort to recycling when an item is no longer suitable for any use, and all you can do is try to salvage something useful from its remains.

Boasting about Apple's supply chain being great because they dismantle and recycle large portions of perfectly good equipment betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how environmentalism actually works. Binning a perfecly good phone and buying a new one is not a good thing to do. Sending it to Apple who will dismantle and throw out significant parts of it is not a good thing to do. You don't get to justify a needlessly wasteful lifestyle by saying that your waste disposal is very slightly better than the worst option possible.

Re: What?

Personally I'd rather ride in something that did neither. Overly cautious driving can be just as dangerous as overly agressive driving. Although in this case I'd characterise it as just plain erratic rather than cautious - reversing into traffic and having to do emergency stops after randomly deciding to pull out while being passed is hardly cautious. If anything, it drives like a stereotypical old person - slow, delayed responses, but ultimately extremely erratic when it finally decides to do something. The narrator even explicitly calls it out as being aggressive near the start of the video.

As for being ready, I'm far from convinced. Not simply because of the major screwup that's made the headlines, but the whole video is quite painful to watch. It looks like it hit the kerb on its first turn out of the car park (at ~1:00) which is the point where he comments on how uncomfortably aggressive it is (and then immediately tries to claim he isn't really uncomfortable; see the post that started this thread). And while I'm not sure of US road law, it appears to be in the wrong lane most of the time, but also changes lane at random (again, the narrator comments on this), including immediately after being undertaken.

I haven't watched his other 53 videos where supposedly nothing went wrong, but if this one is at all representative, there were almost certainly multiple things that went wrong in every single one. Just not anything wrong enough to make headlines. A failure rate of 1/54 would be pretty terrible for something allowed on public roads in any case, but it actually seems to be significantly worse than that in reality. It's not just catastrophic failures that matter; basic competence like picking the correct lane, not trying to ram cars that are passing and recognising routine features like traffic are all quite basic things a self-driving car needs to be able to do, and Waymo apparently can't.

Re: Why?

There are already plenty of keyboards that allow you to create and run macros. Usually they're gamer-oriented keyboards with extra keys specifically for them, but that's not required. But as others have noted, it's trivial to do that sort of thing in software, you don't need to be able to edit the firmware.

Re: PDF ?

Tigers are the 21st century version of leopards.

I'll sentence myself to another re-read, clearly it's been too long.

It takes no time to open the glove box if they've already broken into the car. The point of having a crappy radio clearly visible through the window is to prevent them from breaking in in the first place because it looks like it's not worth their while. Exactly the same principle as not leaving all your valuables on display on the back seat, or through your living room window. You can't stop someone who is determined to search for anything that might be in there, but the entire point of opportunists is that they'll go for the quick and easy score instead of wasting their time searching every car and house on the street in the hopes of finding something hidden.

Re: The illusion of absolute security

Exactly. It's pretty much always a trade off between security and convenience. You can make a computer arbitrarily secure by making it arbitrarily difficult to access. There really is no other way - no matter how much you try to build security into the system itself, it's always going to be vulnerable to things like malicious insiders, supply chain attacks, or just good old rubber hose cryptography. You really can't protect against an authorised user with a gun to their head, so the only way to be completely secure is to eliminate user entirely. As a wise computer once said, the only way to win is not to play.

It depends what you mean by the ability to do that. Sure, in theory it means you can just fork it yourself if the developer stops supporting it. But in practice, the reason you weren't developing it yourself in the first place is likely because you lack the ability to actually do so. It doesn't matter if that's a lack of technical skill, financial resources, or whatever else, if you were having to rely on an underfunded volunteer developer, that doesn't bode well for your ability to replace them if they quit.

Re: One word:

It's not completely trivial, but it's not as comlicated as it might be. When it comes down to it, the vast majority of software updates these days are either security updates or pointless faffing around with the UI. An airgapped control system doesn't need either of those. Once you have your fuel line, or whatever, up and running, there should be relatively little that needs changing in the future. After all, the main reason security is such a problem with these systems is that most of them haven't been updated for years or even decades.

Re: Biometrics should not be part of ID or Security

But that's kind of the point - your average casual thief may be happy to swipe a phone or other small valuables, but is less likely to be willing to cause serious harm, and much, much less likely to have any interest in targeted severing of body parts. If you're a target of interest to a TLA or drugs cartel, this may be something you need to take into account for your security precautions. But it's simply not relevant to the vast majority of population who only need to worry about casual opportunistic theft and not targeted violent attacks.

Re: Detailed but also quite biased.

"His bias is obvious, but I nevertheless think Apple is going to be on a losing wicket wherever the argument relies on web apps being just as good as native app"

Exactly. We here are free to argue over whether various features in browsers are actually good to have or not. But Apple's argument in court is that web apps are functionally equivalent to native apps, and the long list of missing and poorly implemented features shows that's simply not true.

Re: errmmm

"By the way, Google apparently makes about $100,000,000 per day from AdWords. Exactly what sort of fine needs to be levied to make any sort of meaningful impact and not just be a rounding error as "the cost of doing business"?"

Well, $3 billion would be a good start. That would be 30 days' worth of income, or a bit under 10% of annual. That would seem to be just about the perfect level for a punitive fine intended to change a company's behaviour - enough to certainly be noticeable by the bean counters, but not enough to simply put the whole thing out of business.

But yes, personal consquences for the people actually responsible for making the decisions would likely be far more effective.

Re: French Roundabouts are useless

"Roundabouts only work well if people use the correct lane and signal correctly coming onto and exiting the roundabout."

Not really. Obviously driving competently helps, but the point of roundabouts isn't actually anything to do with rights of way. The important thing is that turning left* is always better than turning right, because it means you don't have to cross through oncoming traffic. This is actually a big deal for journey times, and is a big deal for logistics companies who often now design their routes to avoid right turns - even if it appears to make a route longer, it usually ends up saving time, as well as reducing accidents.

A roundabout simply lays the road out so it is only possible to make left turns. You turn left when you enter it, and you turn left again when you leave it, even if overall that results in you turning right from your original heading. Who has right of way at any given point and how competently people pick their lanes and indicate doesn't change that. People screw up at other junctions all the time as well, especially with Google telling them the wrong lane to use half the time. Obviously having everyone get it right can keep things flowing even better, but roundabouts still work for their primary purpose even if no-one using them knows what they're doing.

*Adjust direction to your local preference.

Re: So if

"One the assistance needs to be listening into the call to hear the trigger phrase. The second and far bigger problem is what should be the end phrase."

Neither of these are problems at all. The former is no different from the mere existence of voice assistants. If you don't have a problem with it listening to you at all times waiting for an activation phrase, why would you suddenly have a problem with it continuing to function during a phone call? Most people are perfectly happy to use their phone while sitting next to an Alexa speaker, and this is no different.

As for the second, far from being a bigger problem we've already demonstrated that it is not a problem in any way. It was a running joke in the early days of voice activated thingies about how they would handle things like TV shows trying to be realistic by incorporating voice commands used in-show, or what would happen if two people in the street happened to be trying to use commands at the same time. The solution turned out to be that it's just such a vanishingly rare problem that no solution is needed. It's trivial to have an activation phrase that just doesn't come up in normal conversation, and even without having any filtering or voice recognition phones just don't pick up commands from nearby people - the idea of walking down a busy street and saying "Hey Google, call Mum" in a loud voice doesn't actually result in anything happening.

In this specific case, all you need is to say something like "Siri, end call". No-one is going to accidentally end a call unless they're deliberately screwing around.

Re: I am disappoint...

"17 years olds drinking with their teachers has much to commend it. Less likely to get bladdered and the kids see that drinking sensibly can be fun."

I guess it depends on the teacher. A couple of chill pints, emphasis on the "sensibly" part, sure. Getting blackout drunk and threatening to kill your students, probably not so great. Having a casual drink with your students after work might be frowned upon these days, but there are thousands of school trips like this one happening all the time (OK, maybe not right now) and it would be very naive to assume that no drinking happens. You just don't hear about the vast majority that don't result in a teacher being sent home early for behaviour that goes way over the line.

Re: move the Earth to a higher orbit,

If we have the technology and resources available to move the Earth into a different orbit, asteroids aren't likely to present much of an issue.

Re: "there is a virtually identical "non-smart" one for the same price"

"But when you do want to use the scope manually e.g. for a quick test you find the physical controls are seriously hard to use."

To be fair, I don't think the problem there is really with the touchscreen, since that just replicates the remote interface. The problem is that the remote interfaces are universally terrible in the first place. I'm not sure having separate physical controls designed by the same people would actually help matters.

Re: "more of a super-cruise-control"

"It's definitely been proposed to ban spares on new cars. At the moment it's primarily done through emissions regulation, though, because carrying a spare makes a significant difference on the emissions tests."

Bollocks. A spare wheel weighs under 10 kg for most cars. A space saver wheel could be under 5 kg. That might make a difference if you're looking at a stripped-down carbon fibre sports car, but it's utterly irrelevant for any normal consumer car.

"Light bulb: Joseph Swan invented and then Edison commercialised in the US"

You're probably thinking of Humphry Davy, who invented the incandescent light well before Swan was born, although the basic principle was demonstrated decades earlier again, and many people were working on the idea before either Swan or Edison got involved. Swan was the first to make electric lights commercially successful, but he certainly didn't invent them. And there really isn't any argument about whether Edison invented the lightbulb - his first patent was specifically for an improvement in electric lights. He might have been a highly ruthless and anti-competitive businessman, but even he never claimed to have actually invented lightbulbs.

That aside, there absolutely can and will be argument about who was first to fly on Mars, as you could see from the comments on any previous articles. In particular, the Mars Science Laboratory skycrane has a pretty good claim to being the first powered flight on Mars, which would make Ingenuity third. That said, Ingenuity will certainly get a decent helping of firsts - first helicopter, first non-rocket-powered flight, first electric flight, first thing to make multiple flights (hopefully), and no doubt plenty of others.

Re: Snake Oil

"What's different now is that some companies are making obscene amounts of money by selling their snake oil and they don't want to have to go back to the old days when they only made decent money and, pro-rata, had to work much harder for it."

What's really different is which companies are actually involved. It's the likes of Google and Facebook that get the most mention in these discussions, but it's important to remember that neither of them are actually advertisers. In the past, it was simple. One company wanted to advertise its services, another was willing to host said advert in exchange for payment. Which part of that is Google involved in? Neither. They're just a middleman which has forcibly inserted themselves in between the two parties with an actual interest in the transaction. That's why they're so obsessed with tracking. They don't actually offer anything of value other than the promise that advertising which already existed will be in some way more effective.

And this makes it obvious why they're fighting so hard against privacy. It's not advertisers who don't want to go back to the old days when it was slightly harder to know if they're adverts worked. It's middlemen who don't want to go back to the old days when they didn't exist at all. It's not about wanting to make just a bit more money, it's an existential threat to their entire business.

Or indeed like YouTube, Twitch, Iplayer, or basically any other streaming video service. I could at least see an argument that a set-top box recording a broadcast and then playing it back with rewind and pause functionality is a bit different from an internet stream that offers such functions directly, but I can't see any way Facebook Live is different from any other internet stream.

Re: another beautiful bit of prose

An update for the modern age. Those who can, do. Those who can't, recruit.

Re: Shine a light

It looks to me as though it's simply everyone gets 1,365 votes plus the number of domains, up to a cap of 208,154. No idea how the exact numbers were decided, but it doesn't seem to have any obvious shenanigans going on.

Re: RIP Stavros.

I'd always assumed it was a Doctor Who reference, but now I think about it it's not quit the right name.

"no military would design a command and control system that inherently wasn't securable"

Sure they would. For most of human history, command and control systems consisted mainly of shouting really loudly, and the more advanced version of hiring a few people to run around the place and do your shouting for you (or carry some bits of paper with shouting written on them) was still widely used as recently as the two world wars. Obviously various efforts have been made to try to keep other parties from hearing what you're shouting, but that's mostly just meant trying to paper over the holes in existing systems rather than design anything secure from the start.

Plus there's the obvious issue that, given the demonstrated competence of government procurement of large integrated systems, even if anyone recognises the need for a system that is inherently securable, their ability to actually design and produce one isn't exactly assured.

Re: Is there an API?

There was an API, but it turned out to be copyright.

Re: Who was the developer?

Indeed, even without the specific mistake made here, the whole thing seems like a really bizarre setup. You already have the information you need, so why not just use it instead of trying to reproduce it from a different piece of information that may not even be well correlated.

On a related note, it's always struck me as rather odd that airlines are always so eager to weigh checked luggage down to the gram and charge extortionate fees because weight is so important to the ability to fly, but they don't care in the slightest how heavy the actual passengers are, or how heavy the rest of their luggage is. Weighing passengers has obvious PR problems because fat people will complain that the laws of physics are discriminating against them. But even without opening that can of worms, I could check a bag full of helium balloons into the hold and take a bag full of gold bars as my cabin bag and no-one would bat an eye, but if I swap those bags around suddenly it's a huge problem because of the excessive weight.

It just seems odd that something so important to both costs and not falling out of the sky is left essentially to pure guesswork. On average, you'll usually be close to correct. But it only takes one plane full of non-average people to result in hundreds of deaths. You'd really think it would all be taken a bit more seriously.

On the one hand, sure, and I certainly wouldn't want to rely on the US as the sole source of chips. But more competition would be nice. Given a choice between having all chips made in Taiwan, and having half there and half in the US, I'd prefer the latter. Obviously it would be even nicer to have them made in many different places all over the world, but given the costs involved that's unlikely, and at least having two or three choices would at least be better than only one.

Re: defeating the Big Bang theory

Nonsense. We've known this isn't true since the 1950s, and even that turned out to be replicating something that was first seen in the 1920s, although no-one had realised what it meant back then. If CP violation hadn't been observed then the Big Bang would indeed have a problem, but we've known the imbalance of matter and antimatter wasn't a terminal issue for it since before it even became the favourite theory for the origin of the universe. I never will understand why people make claims like this as if they've realised something that a century's worth of scientists have somehow missed.

Re: It's this sense of entitlement that get's me

"This report details those communications, which help ensure that iOS or Android software is up to date"

If this data is so important for keeping the OS up to date, how come my phone is still running Android 8.1? For that matter, given that I get (or more accurately, don't get) OS updates from the phone manufacturer, exactly what use would this data be to Google?

If you don't eat your Marmite, you can't have any pudding. How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your Marmite?

Re: Very open-minded

Possibly a taxidermist would be more appropriate at that point.