Posts by GrapeBunch

"Draft EU AI Act regulations could have a chilling effect on open-source software"

Only if the open-source is struck directly with the tube of frozen sperm.

The Wisdom of MOIS-es

"While these latest sanctions won't be a serious roadblock for the Iranian regime's online army, they do provide another avenue to go after American companies seeking to do business in the theocracy. ® ®"

is the concluding paragraph. My issue, by comparison, is a trivial one. They call the Iranian agency MOIS, an acronym of four or five English words. English is not Iran's national language. Back in my day, scary foreign agencies had acronyms in their own tongue, such as NKVD and KGB. Is using an English acronym a way of belittling the opposition? A sub-issue is that intelligence agencies are prodigious liars. It's part of the job. "That was then, this is now." don't cut it no more. "We are aware of these Mandiant-associated claims. At this point, we do not have any evidence to support their claims. We will continue to monitor the situation as it develops." , to slightly edit a statement from one of Mandiant's own press releases.

Music to ears

It's not clear to me why a US internal gov't department is meddling.

Near the end of WW II, USA leaned upon neutral Ireland not to accept ex-NAZI immigrants. Telling Ireland what to do, given the history, was not a classy move. Or maybe it was a class move, but of the wrong sort. Of course, USA did welcome ex-NAZIs, as immortalized by Tom Lehrer in the lyrics of his song "Wernher von Braun"

... "Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?

That's not my department!" says Wernher von Braun

... In German, und Englisch, I know how to count down

Und I'm learning Chinese!" says Wernher von Braun "

which sound curiously apt for this story.

La difficulté juste

Maybe it should be difficult to install an extension. Another advantage of Opera and Vivaldi over Chrome. With Opera and Vivaldi, you're not 100% sure where to get extensions. Or at least, in my extended noob-hood (copyright pending ha ha), I am not 100% sure. There's also a role for reviews, and the cordon sanitaire of installing an extension only once it has a century of widespread acceptance.

"Redis releases automatic cluster recovery for Kubernetes and RedisInsight GUI tool"

Come again?

Oy, Looks like the victim of a sophisticated attack.h

VHS tapes, for example

IANAL, and I'm afraid that IP and copyright matters bid fair to become impossible to figure out. Maybe the gov't dep'ts are issuing directives because that's what's expected of them, but their directives may have no more rightness than a smelly fart. I'm sure that some people voted Leave because of the level of cussedness implicit in Euro rule, not expecting that their own Brit bureaucrats would invoke the same level of cussedness, or even worse. Blame that on short collective memories?

I do have a question, though. "Fair use" of IP might involve "educational purposes". So, let's say a person has a collection of old VHS tapes, programmes time-shifted from an earlier age of television. If the person then gives the collection to a College or University, for their "Media Studies" department, what happens next? I do understand that the next step might vary between jurisdictions. Feel free to state the jurisdiction(s) that apply. Implicit is that the material has value to the recipient, or to the recipient's students. I'm hoping that will suppress any "bin as worthless" replies.

Do I hear four?

I think that another potential reason for a "let's not sweat the shillings" full-list-price barter [bad joke alert: why did the musician go to New Zealand? A: to play in an Auckestra] transaction process would be to establish a high cash value for the product, a ballpark figure. Which cup is the pea under? You can never win, but when you see somebody win, you might be inclined to join in. The difference is that the product (presumably) works, so the process would not be a fraud, it would be Marketing. Why did the customer pay 800 quid for pantaloons? Because he saw a well-dressed man do exactly that, and because the sales rep made him feel appreciated. Regardless of whether an equal or better pantaloon was on sale down the road for 8 quid. Fair game, in the society we have. I am not saying it is a Good Thing.

That makes three reasons for this sort of activity: to inflate bonuses, to make the company look more attractive to a potential buyer, and to make the product itself more attractive to a potential licensee. Do I hear four?

Even the most rudimentary sort of diligence on the part of a potential buyer should reveal this, and allow them to temper their bid accordingly. IANAL. Of course, this is not a legal opinion!

Everywhere in Canada you say? Pity.

Definitely true in Canada. The major ISPs have ridiculously rich published rates. They want you to haggle. One of the majors had a "no contract" policy, every deal was month-to-month. That just made the haggling more intense. That major has since changed their policy to 2-year deals. Haggling is still a big thing. By contrast, if you tried to haggle the price of an item at a store (unless "price-matching"), you'd be politely laughed at.

I think that the underlying reason for the haggling (which, as Quakers confirmed, is a terribly wasteful endeavour for society) is that ISP majors are required to rent space on their networks to the ISP minors. If the published rates are way high, they can pass along enough costs that the ISP minors cannot compete on price. The ISP majors probably have additional ways to discourage the minors.