Posts by Doctor Syntax 33072 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
The Domesday survey was essentially a survey for tax purposes. The term used was "geld" but no longer paying off Danes. e.g., from Scafe's translation of Yorkshire Domesday: " In Tatecastre (Tadcaster), Dunstan and Turchil had eight carucates of land for geld, where four ploughs may be."
Yes it was a poetic expression of an idea. But historically collection of geld by government long outlasted the original purpose.
As one of the old crusties with children and grandchildren to think about I hope to live to see that rejoining. However, as an alternative they all have their Irish passports and hence EU citizenship on account of said children having been born in NI.
In the meantime, stuff your ageism where the sun don't shine.
"Presumably both parties make/save more money this way or the practice would have died out by now."
No, it only requires the party of the 2nd part, the analytics people, i.e. people in the advertising industry, to persuade the party of the first part, the advertisers, that they're saving money. In fact, of course, they're paying for the analytics instead.
On the assumption that this is on the level and not ironic, let's look at a situation which is a little more clear cut, in the physical world.
The other day, along with the usual payload of bills the post included unaddressed leaflets for some junk or other I'll never want. Yesterday it included the Radio Times for SWMBO and out of that fell several leaflets for junk we'd never want.
There's only one way to describe this: litter.
And litter is a form of pollution.
What possible justification is there for an economic system that depends, or claims to depend on producing pollution? That's pollution as a deliberate product, not as a by-product of something else.
"Laws only provide a penalty phase, not actual prevention of someone doing something wrong. Putting product security into the realm of product liability for damages would be an incentive to improve."
Liability for damages would still be law, just civil rather than legal.
The legislation is only the means which enables the penalty which is the deterrent (or incentive to improve if you prefer).
I'm not sure that targeting a distant manufacturer is the best way to go about it. Make it an offence to offer the stuff for sale, that's more likely to make at least some vendors amenable. OTOH the only effect would be to make stuff available in the UK only through Trotters Independent Trading. There's no chance of manufacturers producing a new, improved line for the UK market. This is the sort of thing that could be done effectively via the EU where the market size would be more worth-while. How good of the MoF to underline why leaving is a mistake before we've even done it.
"This could significantly increase the number of passwords the average household has to manage – and there are also questions about what happens when such passwords are forgotten or misplaced."
He says that like it's a bad thing. Hasn't he heard that re-use of passwords is a big problem?
There's a bit of a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation here. An alternative, which would deal with the lost password, is to be able to reset the device to a state where the user has to set a password before it becomes operational. This would ensure that an operational device doesn't have a well-known password but it does facilitate setting a weak password or the re-use of passwords. Alternatively have the device generate and display a new, random password on a factory reset. Any reset-and-cahnge system, however, needs to be protected against a remote reset.
If I were to acquire a commercial licence I have to get the source; that's the GPL.
If I then sell an application built with that code I have to provide my customers with the source and a copy of the GPL. That's also part of the GPL.
Those customers can then distribute the source because the copy of the GPL they receive says that.
In that case I fail to see how anyone who wants a copy of the supposedly commercial-only LTS version can't get a copy,legally, from a customer of a commercial licensee.
There seems to be a conflict here. First of all, does Qt as it stands consist entirely of code written by employees and former employees? If not are there external contributions under GPL or LGPL? If so how do they propose to make LTS commercial only? They can't apply a non-GPL licence to those contributions which means that any end user has to be able to receive the source.
Even if the previous code is employee only asking to give back in the form of code contributions is going to present a problem: if those are made under GPL type licences it introduces that problem and if not then I don't think there'll be many of them.
Govts. seem to want the tech industry to develop this magical system for free.
They have the option of putting their our money where their mouth is and offering the tech industrymoney to develop a workable scheme. Perhaps an initial competition for a contract to develop it. The bulk of the money would only be paid when the result had passed scrutiny by industry experts - who would also scrutinize the competition offerings.
If they can't get a workable system out of it they might finally reflect on what it was they were wanting and why nobody in the industry has attempted to do it on their own initiative.
"For years their work was made easier by the large amount of intelligence and evidence they could gather by simply monitoring communications"
It seems that every terrorist incident over the past few years, at least as far as European experience has been concerned, has been committed by someone known to the security services. The problem has been that, through lack of staff time, they have been ignored in favour of other targets. If the services are unable to process what data they have already it seems very unlikely that they'll be helped by having more.
"If I wanted to hire the brightest band best I still need to convince the home office they fit the criteria."
There is a big change in this regard. The decision is being taken out of the hands of the HO and put into the hands of the UK Research and Innovation Agency.
Your real problem will be whether your brightest and best fall into this scheme. It looks as if it will only benefit an elite.
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