* Posts by Doctor Syntax

32780 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014

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Feds charge two men with claiming ownership of others' songs to steal YouTube royalty payments

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Re: YouTube copyright enforcement: extra judicial and surely illegal?

From the report it seems to be biased in favour of alleged copyright owners. What seems to be missing, both by YouTube and AR, whoever they might be, is an effective means of de determining actual copyright holders.

NixOS and the changing face of Linux operating systems

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Re: @Charles 9 - rm -rf /*

It's the people who aren't just playing you need to worry about.

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It all started going downhill when people started putting stuff that wasn't users' home directories into /usr

Dev loses copyright appeal over forensic software after judges rule suite was owned by his employer

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Re: From memory...

AFAIK it's the default position in employment law whether it's specifically stated in the contract or not. It's the same as if you work in a factory stamping out washers; the washers belong to your employer, not to you. Where it gets dodgy is if the contract tries to claim IP on anything you do outside of your employment. I'd certainly want that removed.

By having a clause struck out which is specific about employer's ownership of IP on work done in the course of employment the employer loses nothing but might have made it worthwhile having a try if you'd hit the jackpot with something you'd written at home. They could argue that you'd waived your right to limit their IP claims to what you did at work. It might not be a strong argument but if the pay-day was worth it they might try and you might agree a deal rather than see it all disappear to the lawyers.

Microsoft 365 admins 'flooded' with bulk and bogus notifications for over an hour

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NaaS

Notifications as a service.

BadgerDAO DeFi defunded as hackers apparently nab millions in crypto tokens

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"a malicious script injected into their app's web-based interface"

Really? Whoever heard of such a thing?

UK data watchdog fines government office for disclosing New Year's gong list

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" a new IT system... to process the public nominations for the New Year Honours"

Spreadsheet.

New UK product security law won't be undercut by rogue traders upping and vanishing, government boasts

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What's worse section 55(11) of the Bill seems to have been written in terms which will exclude them. By the look of it it would have been intended to exclude finance companies but I can see how online market places will at least argue that they fall under the exclusion.

What's needed is legislation that recognises a gatekeeper role and makes the gatekeepers responsible.

Think that spreadsheet in your company's accounts dept is old? 70 years ago, LEO ran the first business app

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Re: Can someone explain

On top of that ingredient orders would also have to be managed. Then the baking schedules would have to be organised so that batches due for baking in succession would require similar oven temperatures and the mixes would have to be ready at the right time.

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Five days. As it was compulsory I wasn't keen* and I was accompanying SWMBO on a field trip to Scotland. Not being in a hurry to get back I missed the first day. I'm not sure what they did on the first day but it couldn't have been much. The remaining four days were enough to show it was all straightforward. Maybe things went downhill a little after that.

* Compulsory was always bad news, right from gym at school.

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Pint

Oh.

Shit.

It must have been about 50 years ago, maybe a year or so more, that I got sent on a FORTRAN course. That means that I've been dealing with this stuff on and off for most of the time since Lyons started commercial computing. It's a sobering thought. So sobering I need...

You, me and debris: NASA cans ISS spacewalk because it's getting too risky outside

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Re: Priorities

"Maybe the final frontier will soon be blocked."

The final tide-mark.

Microsoft adds Buy Now, Pay Later financing option to Edge – and everyone hates it

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The frightening thing is that while the likes of Reg users hate it in practice it'll probably be used a lot. Still, it's good to be reminded why I baled out of using Windows a long time ago.

Want to buy your own piece of the Pi? No 'urgency' says Upton of the listing rumours

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Coat

Re: Big valuation....

If it's running Windows is it a bilberry?

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It's called retiring.

Can Rust save the planet? Why, and why not

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Re: That learning curve

Verily, would deserve a 2nd upvote for reference to Verity.

UK competition regulator to Meta's Facebook: Sell Giphy, we will not approve the purchase

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Re: Real problem

I doubt what you ask for is within CMA's remit. We have enough problems with govt. over-reach without trying to encourage it.

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"A Meta spokesperson sent us a statement:...."

To quote - well, they would say that, wouldn't they.

Quantum computing to grow by 50 per cent per year until 2027, when revenue will still be chump change

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There seems to be a misplaced B in the subheading.

Hubble space 'scope brings its Cosmic Origins Spectrograph back online

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Surely any end-of-life is going to be unplanned. Didn't the planned end-of-life pass long ago?

Kudos to all who are keeping it running.

AI-enhanced frog stem cells start to replicate in entirely new ways

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Re: To paraphrase Arthur Dent:

They are clumps of cells and not cell fragments. The stem cells, if left to their own devices in a suspension, clump into spheroids of epidermis with the outer cells producing cilia by which they swim. As far as I can make out what they've done is work out Conway-like rules about how they associate in clumps and from that have worked out a shape - something along the lines of the glider gun - which will assemble smaller similar shaped clumps from loose cells. They then carve up the self-assembled spheroids into this shape. The reconfigured clumps work as predicted.

Each generation, however, is smaller. As they don't actually grow the limit is reached with a generation that's too small to assemble another one. They don't acquire energy from external sources so even the unmolested spheroids will eventually fall apart. The system is not self-sustaining.

It looks as if it depends on some mechanism for interaction between cells which must be related to the mechanisms for growth, embryogenesis, repair and differentiation in the whole organism but which lacks the structure of the whole organism to direct it. It may offer some insight into how collections of single cellular organisms could come together to form simple invertebrates with more advanced behaviours.

China plans to swipe a bunch of data soon so quantum computers can decrypt it later

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Re: Quantum computing and decryption

"A bit too complicated to describe here"

The margins aren't big enough.

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Re: Quantum computing and decryption

It's a little gem.

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One aspect of this is that each time it's read it's different so it must be very actively maintained material and hence of even more interest.

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Rather than actually generate and store, just simulate a file system and generate the random stuff when an intruder "reads" it. The cost of storage then falls entirely on the intruder. For bonus points simulate an entire network. Let them keep "discovering" another server full of stuff.

Nextcloud and cloud chums fire off competition complaint to the EU over Microsoft bundling OneDrive with Windows

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Re: No problem with Android and Google Drive, and iOS and iCloud?

Apart from deliberate adulteration it was advisable to run a magnet over your ground coffee in case ground off bits of the machinery were in it.

The Co-operative movement was partly in response to adulteration. BTW the Rochdale "pioneers" weren't the first.

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Re: No problem with Android and Google Drive, and iOS and iCloud?

"Nobody wants that for modern CEOs."

Citation needed.

Sweden asks EU to ban Bitcoin mining because while hydroelectric power is cheap, they need it for other stuff

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Re: What's next?

The article fails to mention that by the end of the C19th physics was widely considered to be more or less complete. A great deal of recent technology is built on top of the discoveries made after that.

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Re: Run a cloud company

There were reports of this being done a few years ago. I haven't heard much about it since. It probably failed when the householders switched off in a heat wave.

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Re: Heatpump noise?

I doubt HMG is going to be mandating that level of local storage, just the heat pump that makes the electricity supply a single point of failure. I also doubt many town dwellers, let alone city dwellers, have a 4.5ha country estate.

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Re: Heatpump noise?

The Beeb reports some areas still without power after 4 days.

But I think you miss the main point. HMG is trying to replace gas-fired central heating with heat pumps. Those are going to draw more than 150 watts. If gas is phased out that leaves you with no heating at all in the event of a power cut. It also leaves you without the ability to make hot drinks (if you already have an all-electric kitchen you lose that anyway in the event of a power-cut). Your electricity supply becomes a single point of failure.

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Re: Let's make crypocurrency healthy

Anti-vax conspiracy theories are working quite well.

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Re: Heatpump noise?

Enjoy your next winter power cut. Your gas central heating wouldn't have worked, of course, but your gas fires would.

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Re: Or...

On Saturday morning we had a power cut of about 8 hours and snow outside, all thanks to storm Arwen. It's just less than a year since we had a 17 hour power cut due to an underground cable fault.

If, during those outages, our sole source of heat had been electricity, via heat pump or more conventional means we'd have had none for the duration. In fact we'd have been knocked back to a situation worse than when I was a kid in a house that was off-grid for electricity but had coal fires and gas. I'm very sceptical of the notion of going all-electric. It lacks resilience.

When civilisation ends, a Xenix box will be running a long-forgotten job somewhere

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Re: "temporary"

The strategic fix would be the same fix with the objective being to give time for the fixer to find a job elsewhere.

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Re: At Grace, re: temp solutions...

There's also selection at work. The ones that survive haven't been subject to "You know that....Could you just....". The ones that were and could have kept on running are gone.

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They're going to have to do something about it in the next decade or so. I doubt Xenix will be Y2038 compliant.

Smart things are so dumb because they take after their makers. Let's fix that

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If Server error 500 is a catch-all for errors that should have been caught and maybe automaticelly recovered some way back along the chain it won't help you very much.

Australia will force social networks to identify trolls, so they can be sued for defamation

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Re: Down with anonymous cowards!

"I'm the original AC that posted this TLP in the first place"

So you say...

BOFH: What if International Bad Actors designed the vaccine to make us watch more Steven Seagal movies?

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Re: I can disprove that

Well played, sir.

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Re: Loonies are reading this

It's not empty. If you can't see anything your browser must be blocking the word

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Has anyone else come to the conclusion that Unicode is the green ink of the internet?

Government-favoured child safety app warned it could violate the UK's Investigatory Powers Act with message-scanning tech

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I've seen the occasional case that was too ridiculous to end up in court ending up in court. In any case my point still stands: without a ruling there's no way of knowing whether the interpretation is valid.

You forced me to use this fancypants app and now you're asking for a printout?

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Re: Holidays

"That consultant had a strange career progression"

Very strange. You don't usually find traffic planners with such a thorough training.

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Re: Like 2 decades ago

"Welcome to France, where the view from the top and from the field has absolutely no connection."

It sounds just like everywhere else but in French.

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Re: I guess I’m just lucky

Thanks, folks. A nice list of suggestions to work my way through.

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Re: I guess I’m just lucky

"Cetirizine will make me fall asleep whilst talking in the middle of a meeting."

You'd need to do a controlled trial to (a) separate the effect of the Cetirizine from the effect of the meeting and (b) check for synergy between the effects.

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Re: A modern-day Adventure.

Or, if you believe the conspiracy theories, all alike.

Swooping in to claim the glory while the On Call engineer stands baffled

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Re: Sleep

I think it's the fact that you have the more or less full picture of what you're working on in your head but if you're staring at a small amount of code on the screen you focus on that but it's not where the problem is. Once that block is removed a part of your brain is free to look at the whole picture. I've had a problem solved that way whilst just walking out of the door and across the car park but driving, and hence having something else to claim focus, was particularly effective.

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