Posts by Charlie Clark 13453 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007
That would be based on the network cell data, which is "good enough" for that kind of task and can be enforced by court order but uselss for the kind of "ant tracking" that eveyone is somehow will solve the problem. It won't, of course, but there is research funding going and PR to be had.
The US is pretty good at enforcing its laws in other jurisdictions using things like the Magnitsky Act, or declaring any particular group or country as "terrorist". But the problem they face with Signal is that the code and research (the peer reviewing and theoretical validation is perhaps as important here) is already public so it would likely become a whack-a-mole and some countries might have problem complying with US demands and their own laws, relying on lax enforcement, or using that US stalwart the anonymous shell company or trust to obscure everything.
But when has that every stopped them? Hard to think of anything more sinister and pointless than the Committee for Unamerican activities but I'm sure history is replete with them. :-/
And WhatsApp switched to using the Signal protocol for encryption a few years ago, not least because this would leave it less open to lawsuits when its own shitty protocol was compromised. Not sure how it handles groups, not least because I don't use WhatsApp, but it seems more than happy to scrape (and leak – in a group everyone's telephone number is visible to everyone else) metadata, but zero-knowledge encryption for groups is difficult as recent reports from Signal show. I guess the NSA wants to hold the tide back before the proposed zero knowledge group code becomes generally available.
Once you've got it, it's easy to give some of it away. That said, the Gates Foundation does deserve some credit for choosing some of the harder, and less popular, problems to tackle such as malaria. A disease, which yet again, will probably kill around 2 million, mainly young, people this year and, as such, easily outkill covid-19.
What's that you say? Famine due to locusts in east Africa? Let's wait till they're dropping like flies before turning up with the aid and the cameras…
Yes, Kieren doesn't understand the principles of the single market:
But no, this is the EU and everything must be done through centrally.
No, but one of the available will be chosen as the "winner". The French will probably still do their own.
The current pandemic is a goldmine for all kinds of research projects that, if you squint hard enough, look vaguely associated with epidmiology. Rather than writing articles like this Kieren should be getting his grant application in. Especially now that president Trump has removed oversight from the money tap.
So, if I watch the news and it contains terms I don't understand the meaning will somehow seep into my brain? I'm not that steeped in UK employment law but my understanding is that it is a US-only term and covers all forms of leave:
a period of time that a worker or a soldier is allowed to be absent, especially to return temporarily to their own town or country.
In the UK the term is "unpaid" or more likely "enforced" leave (of absence) and "furloughing" has no legal status.
Is that it is currently "free" to use even for large groups: Skype and Hangouts are limited to 10 users per telco for the free versions; you need a paid Microsoft acccount to start a Teams call. If Microsof wants market share it should either have a usable free version of Teams, or, allow more people on Skype calls.
Though if you're not particularly fussed about having access to your apps, or have the technical nous to find them elsewhere,
It's not exactly hard to install another app store with nearly everything you could want and a lot of people do this anyway to get stuff that, due to heinous practice of geo-blocking, they can't get from the Google store either.
The current affordable Samsung phones (the Axx range) dont have wireless charging for example (saves the usb socket from damage).
But this is how market segmentation works… The A series has 90% of the feartures of the S series but costs 50%, because premium features come at, erm, a premium.
Can't see 5 years ever being the case for such extensive support and I'm not sure it would be practicable The 2-year warranty in the EU is already pretty unusual, but I suspect the real improvements would be made by enshrining a right to repair and beefing up the liability relating to security updates, which is currently almost non-existent. And, to be fair, the industry has improved in this respect. Samsung used to have support for about 18 months for all devices and Google's Project Treble means that devices like the S8 can get security updates via the Play Store. But there is definitey a long way to go!
So Chromium-Edge was basically an admission from Microsoft that they're bad at making browsers...
No, it wasn't. In among all the proprietary Active X crap there was, at least with IE ≥ 9 some reasonable code and the IE team did make some significant contributions to the HTML and CSS test suites, though it didn't seem to want to support SVG or other video formats, that it wasn't in the patent pool for. The problems were not really with the rendering engine but in the fucking brain dead twins of bundling the browser code in the OS file manager (and Outlook), and nurturing privilege escalation attacks through Active X plugins, which were always exploits waiting to happen.
But, developing a browser rendering engine is a lot of work and Microsoft had realised that it could achieve lock-in in other ways. So, by switching to Chromium it could pursue lock-in and sack a load of developers and QA and let Google do the work on the rendering engine, which it now uses for more and more subscription products.
Or that vaccines cause autism?
Probably, of course, they're the same people who will be at the front of the queue when a vaccine for Covid-19 becomes available. And, they will also see no irony in complaining about mobile phone masts and at the same time bitching about poor signals…
People are just fucking idiots!
Exceptions prove the rule or do you really think that the majority of the current video conferences actually require that kind of one-to-one interaction? What about the problems due to being distracted by looking at group of people in close up with headsets?
Why did you need 5 simultaneous video streams? I try and hide these whenever I'm on calls where people have the camera running. It would be nice if you could easily switch off incoming video feeds.
Used Skype a lot recently and quality has generally been okay but I think a lot will depend on the network traffic on whichever server is doing the mixing of feed.
Will probably be facing that problem soon: current MBP has severely swollen glands (batteries) that will need replacing fairly soon and I will need a backup machine. I think you can downgrade the OS when installing from backup but I guess I'm going to find out when computer says "No!"
It's the herd mentality. And we've been conditioned by the media bombardment to act even more irrationally than normal. Clever marketers from the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation (and others) are at this moment looking at best to make use of the "programmed responses" we've all developed.
Look, the government's taking your rights away
Yeah, it's a shame but have you since this face mask with the picture of a kitten on it? Now not only am I safe but I also look great!
I don't mind new languages per se. And there are always ones worth taking a look at: Rust for example seems to have found a niche and plenty of friends, and there will always be a need for a new functional language…
Swift might have had more success if Apple had made it open source from the start and didn't restrict the GUI to Apple devices. As it is, it's nice for research and I'm sure some people will be looking to borrow good ideas from it.
Windows Swift for Tensorflow, used for working with ML models, is a good use case
Hardly, it will be competing against the established Python toolchain, which with things like Jupyter Notebook and Pandas, just brings more to the party. As all the heavy lifting is handled by Tensorflow, there's little to be gained from minimal improvements in the language marshalling data to run on some GPUs somewhere.
The Gemini also got an update in December but since then nada. Planet is presumably largely dependent upon Mediatek providing the updates for the SoCs. They've wasted their own resources on things like a crap version of K9 and a database that no one needs-
Not sure why you quote the money raised, but if you know anything about the device business you'll realise this kind of turnover is not sufficient for a hardware company.
They have actually delivered the devices but they have really failed on the software side. My Gemini has had two software updates since release and still has lots of really unnecessary bugs: such as icons in the dock disappearing after every app update. Unfortunately, as might be expected from a company that is so dependent upon cashflow from sales, after-sales service is more or less non-existent.
So, much as I like my Gemini, I won't be buying another device from Planet and wouldn't advise anyone else to. I've since bought a kickstand cover and a Bluetooth keyboard for my S10.
Just answering this bit specifically - the problem is that the further away from your home you are, the more likely you are to require assistance from emergency services if something goes wrong
This is a logical fallacy as the long catalogue of household accidents demonstrates. You probably meant to say that people who drive to places like the peak district, Dartmoor, Snowdon, the Cairngorms, etc. often need the emergency services because they are unprepared for the conditions. But this is not a general rule.
Not if the deputy is Raaaaaaaaaaaaaab! It's like wanting to get rid of Trump only to realise that James Brain Mike Pence is waiting in the wings.
The FDA expressly forbids the kind of remark that Trump made for precisely the reason that some idiot might follow it: remember in the USA unlimited liability. If he was anyone else he'd be looking at a massive fine and possibly even jail time + potential class action cases.
Isn't the Telegraph still reporting about the Spanish Flu?
The Lancet published a report in January that was sceptical: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/wuhan-seafood-market-may-not-be-source-novel-virus-spreading-globally and there is increasing discussion about the strain in Italy, significantly different to the one here in Germany.
What is not in doubt is that the outbreak was first discovered in Wuhan but, as any statistician can tell you, correlation is not causation.
Much of the media, driven by the 24 hour news cycle, continues to rehash stories and run the "league table" of known infections and fatalities while doing very little fact checking or comparative analysis. After a slow start in the virus season America has caught up and now leads the pack…
Sure, which is why they continue to hold a certain appeal. Of course, over time dictatorships tend to become inefficient because power gets handed to yes men. China has been able to mask some of the most spectacularly poor investments by focussing on growth at all costs and allowing its massive domestic market to support exports. And, in contrast to Soviet Russia, Deng's reforms meant that companies can sell pretty much anything for which there is a market, apart from free speech that is, of course.
For much of its life, Huawei didn't have to think too much about its software ecosystem,
You do know that Huawei develops network kit for networks, builds servers and runs data centres? How's it supposed to do this without knowing a bit about software? And, seeing as it doesn't rely on the Google Play Store in its biggest market (China), do really think that finding a replacement for this for other markets is really going to present a challenge?
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