Posts by Doctor Syntax 33045 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"argued – or tried to – that actually the European Court of Justice had decided wrongly and that everything was fine"
Why can't these people get it into their heads that it doesn't matter whether they like it? It doesn't matter if they think the court didn't get it right. It doesn't even matter if the court didn't get it right if there isn't a higher court to which they can appeal, which in this case there isn't. The court has ruled on what the law says and that's that.
Start Rescue are much cheaper. Not had to use them yet myself but turned out in an awful rainstorm on the M6 to sort out my daughter's car. I know how bad it was because we were a few miles in front and had to double back to pick up the grandchildren and take them on to Tebay to get dried out.
That would require that security experts join FOSS projects.
The survey suggested that half the people working on such projects are actually paid to do so. The employers sponsoring them might usefully consider seconding any such specialists they have on their staff to spend some time doing this. However some such companies may only be contributing to the extent that specific features of the project benefit them and may be reluctant to pay for something that benefits the project as a whole - including other contributors who may be commercial rivals.
Other projects which can be quite critical to the whole FOSS "ecosystem" have turned out to have very few contributors and generally run on something less than a show-string with no commercial support. That needs some external foundation to step up to support them.
I'd go a step further. The average member of the pulic doesn't want security because it would make the product more difficult to use. Security generally gets traded off for something - convenience, performance, cost, whatever. Right up to the time it becomes obvious it shouldn't have been.
I think whoever suggested the foil was thinking that it would hold the glass together if he bumped into it rather like a laminated windscreen. Before switching to a mirrored plastic I'd take a hammer to a sample to make sure it doesn't shatter too easily. In fact, take professional advice - I'm sure the safety elves must have looked at this.
My preference would be having it mentioned on the death certificate as the sole criterion. Otherwise the "hit by car on leaving the test centre" problem is still there. In the early days there could have been a problem with a doctor misdiagnosing some other respiratory illness as COVID or vice versa when there was insufficient testing capacity but that's not going to be a problem now. However the GRO isn't going to process death certs quickly enough for monitoring purposes.
The within 28 days limitation was introduced because the original, hasty definition was really ill thought-out. According to that if you died after a positive test you were added to the statistics. If you were hit by a car leaving the test centre you became one of the COVID count. If you died of old age decades later you'd have become part of the count. It was a definition that ensured that sooner or later 100% of those with positive tests would be defined as having died of it.
There are other definitions such as COVID being mentioned on the death certificate and the ONS figure of deaths in excess of the average for time of year. The Beeb reports these as well but they are not available on a daily basis, only the deaths within 28 days. When reporting these statistics they're properly labelled; this isn't some form of casting aspersions, it's simply good practice.
"A system created by remote and ineffectual dons is not fit for public and commercial use"
If the likes of Doug Engelbart, Ivan Sutherland, Bob Taylor and Larry. Roberts are ineffectual in your view I'm puzzled as to how many people in this world you would categorise as effectual.
None of which has anything to do with the inepts who set up the sort of commercial departments described in the article assuming that everyone will type in their correct address and fail to ask themselves "what could go wrong?".
This is simply corporate obtuseness and not confined to email. One delivery company whose name is a TLA persistently fails to deliver here. My house doesn't have a number, just a name - carved 6" high on a block of stone beside the gate - and they seem unable to get their heads round this despite long exchanges of emails. They have, apparently confirmed that they have the address in their system but, despite having been send GPS coordinates seem to send their drivers to an address a hundred metres away, just out of sight round a corner. Only one recent attempt has succeeded, possibly because the driver had the initiative and sufficient command of English to phone up and ask for directions. I will no longer order from businesses whom I believe will use them for deliveries.
Businesses that have no mechanism for correcting errors in the data they hold will fail repeatably indefinitely.
There comes a point in the life of every useful ad hoc application where it should be re-implemented from scratch in a way that enables it to be supported and adapted to changing requirements. The trick is to identify that point correctly. If you miss it the entire mess has grown out of hand, the data set has grown to big or complex, the original author has moved on leaving nobody who quite understands how it was supposed to work or you end up rewriting the damn thing every time a new requirement comes along because it's quicker than the rewrite and the fact that you've got 20 variants to select the correct one form is something that only dawns on you when its too late
When looking for our first house in N Ireland we walked away from two. The first one we didn't realise was prefab until getting a survey which pointed out that the roof ridge was a steel tube, presumably propping up the gables against each other. Fortunate - it was before the Troubles got under way and I think it was a bit further south in Co Down than would have been healthy for me in my subsequent career. The other was very obviously largely composed of asbestos panels; a pity as it came complete with an Iron Age ring-fort.
OTOH they can be very good properties; an aunt and uncle lived in one for most of their married life until they had to move to sheltered accommodation. The whole street of semis is still there and not immediately prefab unless you're told.
The wonky prefab lab with a metal frame and precast panels was a different matter - a slight shifting of weight on the floor would cause the reading on a balance on the adjacent bench to change.
And the nails being elastic will vibrate so even is there are no vibrations coming from the environment after the ball hits the first nail the rest of them will be vibrating slightly before it gets to the second. Don't forget the influence of the grain of the wood...
The real world is full of little details that get in the way of predictability.
Proteins fold themselves consistently, they're all built systematically by adding one amino acid to another so it should be possible to calculate the forces that will determine the new configuration from the old as each one is added - but informed guesswork, i.e. AI, is better at working out the configuration from the sequence than predictions based on things we should, in theory, be able to work out.
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