Posts by DropBear

Re: "primary effect" is infringement

I'd argue that depends rather a lot on how and who gets to decide how "primary effect" should be assessed. Because for the deluge of copyrightwise-challenged stuff that Youtube hosts, it still drowns in at least an order of magnitude more of cat videos, fail compilations, angsty teenager rants, furious SJW rants, rants of people furious about others' furious rants, rants of Dave Jones simply furious and never needing a reason to be so, "let's play" streamers and other genuine and would-be Youtube celebrities, and generally just people making a fool of themselves in front of a webcam. Astonishingly, even some arguably watch-worthy original content, which is already infinitely more than anything on "legitimate" TV (apologies to any mathematicians offended by equating "anything over zero" with infinity) - but that's just my highly subjective opinion.

Re: Drugs assurance

"What controls does SpaceX have in place to minimise the risk of doped-out or coked-up staff making dangerous manufacturing slips?"

And why do they need one specifically against drugs...? How about tired staff? Or improperly trained staff...? Or disgruntled staff...? And if they don't, why do "drugs" feature in the headlines announcing this investigation...?

Re: Spyware ecosystem

"But then, I use a firewall (as everyone should) to ensure that no apps (or the OS itself) can communicate without my permission"

You do realize that even apps fully firewalled from any network access are completely free to load a webpage in a browser window for you (and it will be the browser doing the net access, not them)...? And that in that process they are able to send whatever data they feel like to the server they load? And that you won't necessarily _see_ said page at all...?

Re: I think I need to follow Ethan Hunt's example

"I need to create masks to wear whenever I go out of the house"

Just get a bike and a tinted helmet. As long as you don't try to do any banking you should be fine...

"Because of that, nothing under at least 100Mpixels is going to compete"

As an interesting bit of trivia, photos easily exceeding that resolution were commonly taken even over a decade ago (well, commonly among those who cared for that sort of thing). It's just that the weapon of choice allowing that was not a traditional photo camera at all - but an even more "traditional" camera obscura with a, uh, flatbed scanner where the image formed. And yes, the subject had to be perfectly immobile while the "shot" completed, so it was mostly scenery shots only...

Re: If...Then...Else

Because that's the kind of instruction that never fails to confuse its audience. First they get "you don't need to" followed by "but you can if you want" and that invariably results in "now should I or should I not?" - I'm pretty sure the syndrome even has a name but I can't recall it. I do understand that this is technically not a fault in the instructions themselves which merely go to out of their way to fully describe all possible options and possibilities, but the fact remains their effect on the user is to cause confusion and paralysis unless said user is unusually adept at this sort of thing. Which is exactly what one should not and can not ever safely assume.

Re: Marketurds vs Reality

In my experience, most modern software seems to fail miserably when it invariably does due to having been written to implement more or less only the shortest and most complication-free path between A and B, invariably keeling over as soon as (more than) one unforeseen factor takes it out of whack. And that is exactly why agile is unfit for purpose with anything that must work reliably: because the whole idea of fully specified requirements is that they're the only way to consider the implications on everything on everything.

Now, this is not to say that non-agile guarantees that those implications are fully and correctly considered; it's not even to say that agile couldn't, in theory, re-consider every single relevant interaction on-th-fly. Rather it is to say that it is not possible for humans using agile to do that in practice, ever, full stop.

It's hard enough even for excellent programmers to hold the entirety of the context of a problem in their mind all at once even when they go brick by brick starting from foundations - sometimes completely impossible already with large enough systems. But trying to do the same thing based just on diffs makes it flat out impossible for anyone, all of the time.

Re: smart meter != reduction in energy consumption

"Gives me a far better idea of what it consumes and how I should ration it if necessary."

Funnily enough, my turning off of an electric appliance is governed by me no longer needing it at the moment. Whereas if I do, it will be on, even if it blacks out the other half of the city. No smart meter or dumb meter for that matter is of any help with doing that.

Re: I Don't Get It...

I find the apparently incredibly popular "auth sticks don't make you perfectly secure so they're worthless" argument rather disingenuous. Yes, it's obviously true - nothing can possibly authenticate you absolutely perfectly, duh. Anything can be either stolen, faked, divulged or guessed. And yes, depending on what local authentication (if any) a stick/token requires to work they can be worse at that job, locally, than a strong password would be.

But they offer something no passphrase can - protection against remote attackers; yes your token may be vulnerable to people who are physically right next to you, but it should protect against anyone who isn't - and that may well be all that some of us need. Outside high-value targeted ops, almost all identity theft occurs remotely, via phished or stolen and decrypted credentials. Tokens do stop that, leaving you only having to secure a physical artefact - a task most of us have quite a bit of experience with.

No, it's not perfect - it can be stolen or lost, and then you're down to PIN / fingerprint / whatever it uses for local auth to protect you hopefully just long enough until you notice it missing and invalidate it; yes, that _is_ a window of opportunity. And make no mistake, absolutely nothing, _nothing_ can protect you against duress. But auth tokens are a formidable protection against the type of threats 99.99% of people can expect to face day to day and it's still a heck of a lot better than any password alone...

Re: @AC - to find a good non-smart TV

"unless TV manufacturer pays for the cellular connection so their TV can access Internet, I'm safe."

Until the first manufacturer who decides that after using the TV unconnected for $time, it just connects to the first open WiFi it can see* without asking you.

* It might be the case that you're living deep in the mines of Moria safe from other neighbouring APs, but most people can at least intermittently pick up at least one open AP wherever they live, and as we well know if something is possible** it's just a matter of time until some bright spark goes and does it.

** Impossible will still happen, it will just take a bit longer...

Would those be the kind of "UI designs" that renders the "back" button (and most conventional ways to navigate a website, for that matter) completely useless...? Because those sites are welcome to rot away together with Flash as quickly as possible. Shooting them behind the barn would be far too good for them.

Re: "...using methods that can be replicated anywhere in this Universe."

"The Kibble balancer wouldn't work in a weightless environment"

That is not wrong, but it needs to be noted that on the other hand the balance would work just fine on the Moon or Mars - for any of those, including Earth, you also need a precise measurement of the local "g", measured using meters and seconds.

The other thing to note is that while the Kibble balance was used to pin down a value as precise as possible for the Planck constant so that it results in our legacy kg being as close to the new definition as possible, once that is done one doesn't necessarily need to use a Kibble balance specifically to derive a reference kg from the Planck constant again - any apparatus linking the two units would suffice - weight may be gravity-dependent but mass isn't.

And indeed, while the Kibble balance may be the most famous, other approached to define the kg starting from the same constant do exist - most well known probably being the Avogadro Project silicon sphere atom count.

Re: To any children reading this

@doublelayer lots of these actually ARE also a phone, that's the whole reason they have a microphone in the first place; they simply are a "one number" (well, actually, some cycle through a few if the previous one doesn't pick up) emergency call device, with a single "call" / "panic" button. My hunch is the "listen in" thing is more of a feature creep / default action ("emergency calling is fine but what happens if _it_ gets called? Hey, I know, let's make a bug out of it, one more feature-bullet on the box...!") than a purposefully engineered feature - it's still creepy as hell though, I agree...

Failing to find any legitimate need to access the Internet beyond the shunned "need to get on Facebook" is not anyone should be proud of.

Re: Clueless

So if not knowing you're doing stuff you shouldn't be doing is an excuse, can I use it the next time to claim to have been oblivious to a law...? Come on, I'm even willing to call it "the Zuckerberg Defence"...

Don't be too hard on them, they were just marooned and trying to phone home. Have you got any idea how hard it is to get your hands on a Speak and Spell on Mars?!?

Re: This is good.

As widespread (dominant even) as 3.3V is, there's plenty of stuff remaining in a hobbyists toolkit that still needs 5V even without any USB-attached stuff. Completely ignoring that is a no-go even if some people no longer need 5V at all.

Re: So why was it granted in the first place?

Which makes it all the more curious how we never saw as much as single peep around here, at the very least concerning his departure, after the deluge of articles concerning basically every breath he took up to roughly a year ago. Then suddenly just deafening silence. One definitely has to wonder if anybody here was "advised" to kindly refrain from biting this particular hand ever again by the Powers That Be.

Re: Could I have that in English to go?

If you need a computer for gaming, you want it to have a GPU because it is much better at calculating graphics stuff than any general-purpose CPU. On the other hand, it's only so good at that sort of task - you may also use it to eg. mine cryptocurrency but moving away to dissimilar but equally specialized task like, say, implementing a neural network you soon find you'd do much better using a different bit of specialized kit.

On the other hand, if your computer incorporates freely configurable silicon like an FPGA, you may not quite equal the performance of a dedicated piece of comparable hardware, but you gain the freedom to accelerate any kind of task a dedicated hardware accelerator could be built for - you just build your custom accelerator from the hardware resources offered by the FPGA, using nothing but software. You get a machine that will probably not quite equal a dedicated GPU or crypto-mining ASIC or neural net, but can do any of those much faster than just a CPU, choosing between any of those tasks at will.

Re: n before g

Ignoble affair indeed...

Re: Guns vs Laws

Possibly; on the other hand, I'd be willing to bet that everyone really, really wanting a gun in those places (99.99% likely obtained illegally unless you're a hunter or something - which would be said 0.01%) is already a deranged psycho with runaway power-fantasies (and probably also a mobster). Certainly better than "guns everywhere" in a statistical sense, yet somehow really not all the encouraging at all if you suspect you might have the misfortune of having to deal with one of those for any reason.

Re: paranoia

Not so. I would trust nobody's "reputation" to vouch for the pristine state of a tchotchke they are offering me, no matter who they are. The knowledge that someone from PR in their organisation hired a conference organizer outfit who outsourced the trinket procurement to a bauble personalization joint shipping the cheapest mass-produced stuff directly from Alibaba fills me with very much zero confidence that anyone interested along the chain did not add a little something to the whole batch. I DID buy local-retail-store-sold photo frames that came malware-laden straight from the factory you know.

Re: Strange bedfellows here...

I'm sure we'll see the sorry old "we insist you send us a mail for corrections because we're too cheap to employ webmonkeys who actually know how to bolt on a report form" excuse again. In 3... 2... 1...