Posts by graemep 188 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Oct 2024
Its not a racial bias. Stop and search is mostly done in poor areas and reflects the ethnic makeup of those areas.
If you have a look at the stats you will see stop and search numbers for groups that I am pretty sure look the same to the average copper (e.g. ethnic Indians and Bangladeshis) have very different stop and search rates which correlates pretty well to how well of they are.
Its not got a lot of legal significance other than being the age of consent, and one reason for it is to avoid criminalising teenagers who have sex with each other.
You are not generally treated as a responsible adult (able to buy alcohol, able to vote, in contract law, able to marry, etc.) until you are 18.
I actually agree about limiting kids access to social media, but I do not think age verification is the way to do it.
That is interesting, but you do not need a second account on Linux - lots of Linux distros use sudo or similar. All you need is to re-enter your password to install software, which is not a big ask.
Legacy software that needs admin might be a problem, but is there still a lot of it still around? There are decades of Windows software, but running really old software is rather niche.
I think you are wrong about the risk of people suing. Given the things software companies get away with the chances of people suing because an upgrade broke old software is negligible, and they would have no chance of succeededing
If this v7 genuinely was mostly generated by an LLM, existing court rulings say that it is not covered by copyright.
They do not. Thaler v. Perlmutter in the US only ruled that an AI cannot be the author of a copyright work. It did not even consider the question of whether then human operating the AI is the author (which the almost certainly are).
In the UK the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act expressly says "In the case of a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work which is computer-generated, the author shall be taken to be the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken."
So does the UK. You can just get a passport. I always had a valid UK passport when I lived in the other country of which i am a zitixen.
The certificate of entitlement is probably meant for people who have a right of abode but are not citizens, so it must be very much an edge case that is more manually processed with lots of checks.
Its cheap in the context of long term visas for foreigners. My daughter's husband just paid £2,000+ to renew his spouse visa (which is a lot!) and the same again for the NHS surcharge (which is unfair as his taxes already pay for the NHS).
> Tell that to all the innocents who get stopped & searched just in case, disproportionately ‘of colour’ because of statistics.
Causation does not imply correlation.
If you are attributing some ethnic groups being stopped and search more often to racism rather than other factors (e.g. wealth, living in big cities...) that correlate to race that implies the average cop can tell the difference between someone of Bangladeshi ancestry (high stop and search rate) from someone of Indian ancestry (low stop and search rate) at a glance.
[quote]At the risk of triggering a slew of angry comments, it can best be described as software that runs first, then starts other required services and applications.[/quote]
Common misconception. That is one component of systemd, the init system. There are lots of other components. To quote the systemd website "systemd is a suite of basic building blocks for a Linux system. " and these include "Other parts include a logging daemon, utilities to control basic system configuration like the hostname, date, locale, maintain a list of logged-in users and running containers and virtual machines, system accounts, runtime directories and settings, and daemons to manage simple network configuration, network time synchronization, log forwarding, and name resolution. "
The entire objection to systemd is that it is not just an init system. https://systemd.io/
Do not put secrets in .env files. You should not be keeping secrets in your project directory at all. You should also be running AI agents like Claude restricted in some way. A container, or a VM, or some way of limiting damage if they go wrong which makes it a lot easier to stop them reading what they should not.
Yes, and as with "some other governments" (which seems to be turning into all western governments) the intent is to enable mass surveillance because actual criminals will be careful to take precautions against this such as encrypting files before sending, or using code words, or steganography, or private systems (maybe located in another jurisdiction), etc.
Which does make me wonder whether it is useful.
There are lots of forks of those browsers which do a lot more but are still compatible, or you can just change the settings yourself. People who cannot change a few settings are unlikely (and should not be encouraged to) run a CLI script from downloaded from github.
China has alternatives.
Neither the EU, nor the rest of Europe, nor (AFAIK) anyone else in the world has any plans to do this. Lots of noise, a bit of moving government cloud stuff off US providers, but that is about it, and they are (if anything) increasing dependence on Google and Apple for things such as ID and age verification apps.
European governments mostly want spyware, as it extends their surveillance abilities so are delighted to work with US big tech.
I love this feature. It is the fastest way to copy paste with mouse selection.
Gnome has for many years been becoming more touch screen focused. I think maybe the future of the big Linux DEs is KDE for keyboard and mouse users and big screen and Gnome for touch screens.
Cosmic is a possible challenger, and there are many other options but those are more niche.
> Firstly, if you use the website, you still need the app to generate 2FA codes.
You can get them to send you a hardware authenticator thing.
> If you do a cardholder not present transaction, you need the app to authenticate/approve it.
Use another card. They get less business.
> Some accounts, such as the Global Money account (if you are receiving / sending money abroad, this is a lot cheaper than doing it on the regular current account), only work on the app, not the website.
Plenty of alternatives for that
From what I've read, the UK is in a similar boat - far too dependent on US cloud infrastructure even for critical policing and security functions.
The last time I looked at a map the UK was in Europe and the article is about Europe, right? Not any particular region of Europe that excludes the largest and third largest European countries among others. Oh....
The UK, the EU, and everyone else will be a bit better off with sovereign cloud, BUT end point devices remain almost entirely American controlled which means we are all still dependent on the US. If anything governments are strengthening that grip through things such as pushing the use of apps. Sovereignty is good, but cheap is better.
There is heavy use of American SAAS as well.
There is no plan to encourage the private sector to reduce reliance on American technology so the economic dependence will remain. The US could shut down virtually all cashless payment systems, the NHS, and a lot more if it chose to.
He did not. In the Hacker News discussion of this he said he had his family photos etc. backed up outside Apple's systems, and it sounds like most work stuff is too.
The problem is that its disruptive - he does not have access to shared documents etc. that rely on the cloud so a lot of work in progress is lost.
A lot less useful, and their customer service is terrible.
I tried to get one for my daughter as ID for exams because I was worried we would not get her passport (which needed renewal to go on holiday) back in time because of strikes and they failed to verify a scan of her passport and then fell back to a paper method that would take even longer.
Its not going to be accepted everywhere a passport is. Fine for things like an 18 year old wanting to buy alcohol, but that is about it.
You are now making an entirely different claim to your original, which was:
you can use Hurd, or some BSD kernel instead and the feel of GNU doesn't change in the slightest
You have backed off that claim to now just claim that you need some GNU software to compile Linux, which is an entirely different claim that no one contested.
It's unacceptable to downplay the importance of GNU and all the other packages by claiming that it's; "all Linux".
Again, you are arguing with a claim no one made.
the idea is that the user goes and installs the missing parts of GNU later, without even realizing that they installed the missing parts of GNU.
That shows a severe misunderstanding of the aims of Alpine and Chimera.
if you look though the BusyBox source code, you'll realize it contains extremely old GNU code that was copy pasted
Do you have examples of this? Given the vast difference in the size of the code it seems improbable on the face of it that there is a significant amount of GNU code there and I cannot see anything to indicate it in the AUTHORS file
> All OS's that use the kernel, Linux need GNU and therefore "most distros" is incorrect - it's all distros.
So what? lots of software is built using make and Bash. You also need Python etc. and lots of other stuff to compile Linux.
> All OS's that use the kernel, Linux need GNU and therefore "most distros" is incorrect - it's all distros.
Its correct. Alpine and some other distros use busybox instead of GNU utils. Chimera Linux uses BSD utilities.
> Linux being included is optional - you can use Hurd, or some BSD kernel instead and the feel of GNU doesn't change in the slightest
I would say having significantly worse hardware support changes the feel quite significantly. So does having a different range of non-GNU utilities, and anything else that relies on compatible syscalls.
There are differences between BSD and GNU utilities and I generally prefer the GNU ones - but its not a huge difference. Even the lightweight busybox versions do not make a huge difference most of the time.
They will have to rewrite it using components that are not GPL. They can replace the kernel with a BSD one, and bash with zsh etc. Do they have a replacement for ffmpeg? BSD awk exists but is not completely compatible with GNU awk IIRC.
Its probably going to be a substantial rewrite. Even if they do that they still have to release the source to the existing GPL software.
You are technically correct that React per se is not a cloud technology, but one of the reasons this flaw is so widespread is that it works with the defaults on next.js which usually runs on Vercel's cloud hosting, and is specifically designed to be used that way (and its a real pain to deploy on your own servers ).
It is a vulnerability of React "backend for front end" servers which generally runs on cloud. People running their own servers are generally resistant to this sort of architecture. There will be people running React on their own servers who are affected but its going to be rare.
We also have a number for how common it is in cloud environments, and not for non-cloud environments.
An interesting alternative to the UK approach, where commercial competition solves all ills (as far as government is concerned, and in defiance of all evidence).
Western politicians have forgotten that a working market requires actual competition. This is as welcome to business as Christmas is to turkeys. A certain Adam Smith had things to say about this, but people prefer to just remember the "invisible hand" and forget the messy bits.
The thing is, if the encryption is worth a damn, they can't put in special backdoors for Les Rozzeurs because maths just doesn't work like that.
The authorities may not know or care. Remember the Australian Prime Minister who said "“The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia," over the same issue?
I quite like Bitbucket.
If you have a thousand devs the extra work is not significant. You would be paying Github thousands, maybe tens of thousands of USD/month.
For smaller systems the work will scale down.
There are alternatives to git too. For a solo developer or a small team I would seriously consider Fossil which is dead easy to self host.
The reasons legislators think like that:
1. the experts (i.e. the big businesses like Twitter and FB) told them this was a better approach
2. both the big businesses and the government want to be able to identify people to better track what they do online so they want age verification as a way to slip in identity verification
3. the people with age verification products to sell told them it was the best approach.
There are lots of other approaches. For example providing filtered SIMS (which already exist) and routers with blocking options so you can turn it off for adults and on for kids devices. The technology exists and is a lot more solid than age verification. There will be ways past it but they can be difficult enough to at least protect most, especially young kids.
Some of these things probably should be illegal. How is nudification that different from upskirting which is illegal? I can understand a provider failing to stop bad uses for a product but these people are selling it as a nudification service.
If anything European dependency on the US is increasing.
Multiple European governments are introducing age verification and ID apps that require an American controlled smartphone.
The push to move to cashless payments also increases the dependence on American payment providers, both the old ones (Visa and Mastercard) and the tech ones (Apple and Google).
The new gov.uk login system runs on AWS, as does the NHS system being pushed on GPs, as does the NHS API for third party systems.
There is no effort anywhere to get the private sector off its dependence on American cloud. Even if some government functions off the American clouds, if a huge chunk of the private sector depends on them, then your economy does too.
Its not just AWS and Google cloud. Its Gmail and Microsoft and SaaS in general.
In the worst case however, it kills originality of action and thought - Dark Ages stuff. AI has the power to let us lead us into the new Dark Ages, if we let it.
Maybe reading one of those articles by an irate historian about why the dark ages were actually quite a good time will make you feel better.
You cannot add a revenue decline to a loss! Maybe you should have a very basic grasp of finance before being allowed to write about it? Revenue is not profit!
If you look at the JLR announcement it says there was a loss before exceptional items of £485m and exceptional items of £238m. That makes a £723m loss. Even if you add the profit they hypothetically would have made without the interruption to production you can only get something under £1.3bn, and there is no way you can get that to £1.8bn.
There will be knock on effects into the next quarter, at least the article is right about "still counting".
