Posts by Dr Stephen Jones

Re: Could be *very* interesting

" If APIs are copyrightable, the entire software industry comes crashing down overnight"

No.

"Copyrightable" is a word used only by people who don't understand copyright, so I'll go nice and slow.

A copyright holder has have something that adds up to a substantial original work before they can try and to use it to make a claim of infringement. I expect the Supreme Court will simply affirm this. APIs were never not "copyrightable". All it means you need a license if you're going to copy a lot of that original work. So go get a license.

The internal emails at Google show that Rubin understood this very well - he had copied Java, and even used over 30,000 lines of Sun code. The Android execs said: we really should get a license. But with Sun being hippies, they decided to wing it. Not a problem unless a Larry takes over from the hippies.

Given your limited understanding of copyright, I hope to God you're not in the industry.

"AI" = Fake News daily

Shoddy and generally useless research does not merit a press release. Wake me up when Winter starts.

Re: Nose, face, bite ...

"During the initial Galileo negotiations one EU member insisted on a clause excluding non-EU states from access to certain capabilities of the system. Would you like to have a guess which one it was?"

Let me guess. Is it one with a powerful space lobby, a history of shafting the UK, and a lot of runny cheese?

You can stop crying now onefang, removable batteries aren’t coming back.

(Although like you I wish they would)

Last year OpenAI gave them a reaction time of zero. It’s hard to lose when the odds are so loaded in your favour. Nevertheless they were being outwitted in a few hours. OpenAI went very quiet.

Can’t wait to see what “improvements” they’ve made this year.

tbf, that’s all newspapers these days. Sometimes they fail to notice and will publish can’t contradictory cures/causes cancer stories on the same day.

Re: Cui bono?

Shouldn't that be "Cui Bong?"

Re: Pizza party :)

"But Trump", so it's OK.

Re: The biggest UK hackers of the lot then?

Murdoch Dacre and "whoever own the Express" (it's still Richard Desmond - great research, kiddo) make a convenient scapegoat when the public have rejected your ideas.

No self-examination or honesty required when you can blame "false consciousness".

Re: History is about to repeat itself and it's not very well thought out this time either.

" So how is this going to work now with TOR, the dark web, foreign registrars and hosting sites?"

Are you suggesting we shouldn't try and do anything about it, just because it is On The Internet? Or that until there's international agreement, nobody should do anything at all?

You seem to have conflated "difficult" with "impossible", which is very convenient if you're a sex trafficker.

Re: What a bunch of incompetent monkeys

We already knew Manafort was suspected of money laundering and tax evasion in 2014, when the FBI opened its investigation into him. So in almost a year Mueller has added nothing new. Nothing juicy and Russian.

Hit nail on head

"probably due to factors such as the tendency towards an abysmal work-life balance (all work- no life), pointless hyper-competitiveness, and extreme greed of the vultures. The net effect is to create a hostile work place not just for women but also many men who value an outside life"

Damore made this point. If he had said there were cultural reasons for sane, well rounded human beings to avoid working in Silicon Valley no one would have noticed. Instead he tried "because science" and it triggered the lynch mob. I don't think group biological differences should be used to justify prejudice, but then nobody here seriously does - this is a straw man. Damore could have made his point differently.

So no, Google has not had a good week. But then neither has El Reg.

Re: Mixed feelings

"Nonsense. Books, radio, TV and CDs were easy to copy and didn't contain DRM, yet artists (and especially publishing companies) still made billions of dollars with them. "Piracy" is an overblown problem."

Try talking to some people write books or make TV programmes. Even Graham Linehan went ballistic when his C4 show was Torrented before it had been broadcast.

Some of us predicted what would happen to culture if you didn't fix piracy - welcome the world of Kardashians and clickbait.

Re: Encryption is not made "illegal"

If my Auntie had balls she'd be my Uncle.

"Looks like" doesn't cut it. Encryption has not been banned in the UK. The UK has reserved the right to punch a hole in it whenever it wants to, and it will probably be unsuccessful.

This is a disturbing development, but not a surprising one.

Re: Other fact checkers exist already

And half the population doesn't trust either.

Re: Devils advocate (from the right side of the pond)

Are you confusing the Universal Service Fund which has been around for years and which subsidises voice services, every the Connect Broadband initiatives, an Obama initiative that gives money to Telcos to provide broadband?

You are right that Big Telco collected money from consumers and spent it very efficiently creating voice services. Then it collected money from the taxpayer and spent it very inefficiently on broadband. It kept quite a bit along the way for itself.

But both funds are a drop in the ocean compared to the $1 trillion spent on internet infrastructure privately. Do you think the public owns this private infrastructure? Maybe you don't, but I see this argument being used to justify government control, as if the taxpayer paid for everything. Perhaps you can clarify.

Re: Garbage in

Cats out

Re: Loved to Death

@Destroy

+1

It's why they keep losing too, throwing their toys out of the pram. Will they ever learn?

Re: Machine Learning is not AI.

Correct.

It is barely even Maths.

Re: you must know the drill by now . . .

We're talking about a boondoggle to put computers in libraries, don't confuse this with education.

Re: The return of the high horse

@anon

I would not vote for Trump even if I could, and there is plenty of hypocrisy to go round. But:

Your comment is self-righteous, intolerant and ignorant.

Don't you get it yet? You are one of the reasons Trump won.

Re: To sum it all up

Expected more effort from Charlie. It's what you'd expect to hear from mates in the pub and he runs out of gags by April. Houllebecq's Soumission is as plausible and if possible even more scary.

Re: Must be a bad year for Apple

Maybe Apple just didn't do anything interesting?