Posts by Doctor Syntax

Re: what does it change?

"If you're told you've been in contact with an infected person, you're supposed to isolate yourself for two weeks so you don't pass the disease on. Regardless of whether you have symptoms. That's what it does (supposedly), and if it worked it's very relevant."

The first thing we need to know about whether it's relevant is the number of false positives that will be generated.

Without testing it's quite possible that either:

- Large numbers of people will be self-isolating needlessly

- The system rapidly loses public trust and is ignored

or

- In order to avoid the above the threshold is set so high that it generates large numbers of false negatives instead.

Re: There is no breach

"There's just idiots with money who reuse their password."

Are you sure about that? If was just a matter of reused IDs and passwords it seems unlikely that there'd be a sudden spate of logins. It's not as if Wiggle even make it hard to guess user IDs - a quick look at their login screen indicates that they're email addresses.

Re: Proximity and stuff

"There exist audio recording from freed slaves"

There also exist documents from feudal times in England. It doesn't make feudalism "recent". And properly curated those audio recordings will still exist in several hundred years time.

Re: Bowdlerization

Yes, our culture goes through these periods of puritanism. They always get looked back on with incredulity. Unfortunately those swept up in it seem to have such little grasp of history that they're unable to realise how they'll be regarded. It would be nice to think the pendulum will swing swiftly enough for them to find themselves being laughed at in their own lifetimes; usually it takes a bit longer.

Re: Slavery is still happening

"I'm reminded of talking, long ago, to someone who said that you could tell that the people who wrote Unix didn't have children, because the terminology of parent processes killing and reaping their children was just horrible to someone who was a parent."

As a Unix user and a parent I've never even thought about conflating the two sets of meanings. I suppose I'm just not diligent enough in seeking out offence to take.

"more attempts at early diagnosis of people with no or mild symptoms"

I've been having a rethink about this. Is there a genetic element on the viral side to asymptomatic infections? Killing the host is a poor strategy for a virus. This particular virus is endemic to bats. Presumably it has adapted to the bat environment to be able to propagate without causing significant damage to the bats so the ground isn't littered with bats falling out of the sky. It isn't. however, similarly adapted to the human environment, or not completely so, but like all viruses it does mutate. Darwinian thinking suggests that it should evolve to become harmless like the coronaviruses that cause common colds.

If there is a spectrum of harmfulness in the various viral strains then we'll already have been exerting a selection pressure in favour of the milder varieties by isolating those with symptoms and their households and segregating those with the worst symptoms in hospital for treatment. Track and trace based only on the symptomatic cases would increase that pressure. Does the variability needed for this to work exist? It's one of the things I'd expect virologists to be looking at because its such an obvious issue but I haven't read anything about it.

Nevertheless tracing of contacts should be followed up with testing; there's no point in isolating those who didn't catch anything.

Re: News Feed

"Why not just go somewhere that does news in the first place?"

Because the websites have dire search facilities (it's easier to search for a Beeb news item on Google than on their own site) or are just plain dire. We used to have a local paper delivered. Then the local newsagent couldn't get anyone to do deliveries so i turned to their website. It was mostly OK but gradually became more eccentric so I gave up. One annoyance was the 100 plus opt-outs introduced with GDPR. Since then it's got worse as the publishers seem to have reached a little further in their efforts to scrape the bottom of the barrel and appear to have only one site for all their local news. If I go there now it's lost all its original branding and wants to throw news from the all over the UK at me.

Re: Solution

"In the UK we have safe seats because no one in the area ever elects another 'party'."

You can't have been paying attention to the results of the last general election. Just check out where some of that 80 seat majority came from.

Re: Also deals in milk as well as alcohol

Does it also have a sideline in yeast-based foods? The effect of lock-down on brewing here has had a knock-on effect on the production of Marmite. You may be pleased or upset to hear that but, allegedly, nothing in between.

Re: Sneeky

"That's a proper back door."

It's not a back door, it's a back room.

Re: @ Iglethat & "since hes proven that hes a gullible idiot"

I probably do know a bit about it. I'm a biologist by training and a techie by adoption. My first venture from science to IT was in the mobile industry. And you?

Re: Distinction

The complaint states that only data about the scooters is recorded including the start and end points. The basis of the complaint is that this is sufficient to deanonymise the data.

Re: Buy more cars - drive them less

I should have added that because my annual mileage is fairly low it would also mean hiring a car for a not inconsiderable portion of my annual mileage. It doesn't make sense.

And would those two down-voters try answering my original question?