Posts by John 73

Girls Who Code books 'banned' in some US classrooms

Of course it is: making decisions about how to spend money (and how much money to spend) is one of the most basic and central things a Government does! And, as you say, politics is the art and science of government.

Those questions I mentioned all relate to how government should work. They're also absolutely ethical.

Re: critical race theory, sex education, and inclusive gender language

Sure, but your choice not to "worry about gender etc issues" has mean that people who don't have the choice to ignore those issues (because they're directly affected - women, disabled people, minoritised ethnic groups etc.) didn't get your support. Which was my point: ignoring the issues is a privilege that some of us have, but doing so isn't neutral.

TLoTR is deeply political - it's about individual action against overwhelming evil, about the merits of industrialism and pastoralism, about how we decide when to help others, about how power should be exercised in the world...

It's not *party* political, but it's unabashedly political.

And, if your "bad something" says nothing at all, it's not very bad and won't be make a good foe. It's precisely in what we allow to be "good" and "bad" that we make political decisions. If you don't notice the moral or political dimension in that choice, it's only because you've never had to, because you agree with the author's political position.

Re: too much free time, too much time on their hands...

It's unclear which group you think have "too much free time" - the people who orchestrate these book bans, or the people who report on them?

Re: critical race theory, sex education, and inclusive gender language

You survived, but many other people didn't. Arguing from your personal experience as a "success" is a classic example of survivor bias.

It's unarguable that computing (and tech in general) are very male-dominated and very white (that latter complicated perhaps by the importation of cheap Indian coders on special visas). Helping people imagine that they have a good future that could include in interesting and well-paid career is surely not a bad thing!

The PEN America list certainly covers a range of actions that have been taken about a book, but doesn't include "not mandatory reading". Inclusion in the list requires that the book has been removed from classrooms, been banned from being taught (not just "not mandatory") and/or removed from libraries where it was already on the shelf.

The problem is that these campaigns to get certain books (and classes of book) banned are often very organised, but operate at an extremely local level because of the way that US schools are run. So gathering the data is hard, and the picture is rarely simple because of the huge variation across cities, states and the country as a whole.

By contrast, the noise from the right-wing about "classic" literature being "banned" in colleges does generally boil down to "we're not teaching Jane Austen this year, we're teaching Emily Bronte instead."

There are some fantastic new books being published for children, but they can certainly be drowned out by the dross. Long series of books written to a formula aren't new (I well remember the "Astrosaurs" and "Beast Quest" books from ~20 years ago when my son was small). But take a look at what's out there, especially from smaller publishers (but generally not self-published!).

All "heroes" in a book struggle with some kind of hardship in their life. That dramatic tension is what drives the story. How interesting is a story that goes "Jonny had a lovely life. He was driven to school where his teachers told him he was very smart. Then he had chips and chocolate ice cream for tea. The end"?

The tell here may be the phrase "moral messages and politically correct box ticking". All stories have a moral and all stories are political. The question is whether we feel we can ignore the politics because it happens to be one we agree with, or that is amenable to our view of the world.

Janet Jackson music video declared a cybersecurity exploit

Re: Lay off Janet

You mean the time that Justin Timberlake ripped off her clothes live on stage, and she was the one whose career was harmed? Oh, you'd forgotten that it wasn't actually her doing, or that the display of her body on TV doesn't seem to have been fully consensual? Funny, that.

Re: Lay off Janet

Who's "we" in that question?

And there's criticism and then there's casual denigration of a hugely successful musician who's suffered huge prejudice in her career, for a cheap gag.

Re: Lay off Janet

Top of the Pops stopped in 2006...

Re: Lay off Janet

Actually, I particularly noted the phrase: "hardly anybody listens to Janet Jackson anymore." Which is absolutely untrue.

Re: Lay off Janet

The writing was lazy, talking about Janet Jackson as though her music is axiomatically rubbish. The story was a fun piece about music trashing HDs. No need for casual dismissal of the music and its creator, surely.

I fully appreciate that El Reg has a casual tone, but there's casual-fun and casual-thoughtless. Let's try and avoid the latter.

Lay off Janet

Fun story. But please, when writing, lay off the anti-Black prejudice. Sure, you may not like Janet Jackson's music yourself, especially the old stuff, but she's still an icon for many people. She's as talented as anyone else in that family, has been making music successfully for decades, and has suffered a *lot* of nasty attacks because of her race and gender.

It's really not a good look to be bashing Black culture so casually, when the story's actually about something else. Do better, please, vultures!

The sad state of Linux desktop diversity: 21 environments, just 2 designs

Re: So what would a a 21st century UI look like?

Programming isn't the only thing in the world, though. For example, using camelCase is absolutely standard and expected in hashtags on social media (e.g. #CodingIsCool). The reason for this is, again, accessibility: screenreaders can use this extra information to read the hashtag in a meaningful way, rather than spelling it out.

And, as a human being, I would absolutely maintain that camelCase is far easier to read than all-lower-case (thisstringissurelynonsenseyes is harder to parse than thisStringIsSurelyNonsenseYes). Adding extra information with the use of capital letters is similar to adding extra information with the use of punctuation: it's not essential and wasn't there in the original version, but it can make a huge difference.

We take Asahi Linux alpha for a spin on an M1 Mac Mini

Re: Nothing new...

Linux (of various flavours) installs fine on my 2013 MacBook Air. That's the newest Mac I have, though. I don't believe there are significant hurdles on any of the Intel Macs, but I could easily be wrong on that!

BeOS rebuild / Haiku has a new feature / that runs Windows apps

Re: Outliners

Fair enough - it's horses for courses, as ever with software! Personally, for that sort of writing tool, I do love Scrivener.

Outliners

If you want a decent outliner that runs on Linux, try out Trilium. It's actually an outliner, too, which Word isn't! :-P

Google Chrome 97 relaxes privacy protection just a little to help out Microsoft

Isn't cookie deletion advice required by GDPR?

If anyone's ever read the cookie policy on any websites, you'll see that they almost all contain advice on how to delete cookies from your web browser. That's because privacy legislation like the GDPR requires this information to be made available if you're storing information on someone's computer. So, removing the ability to delete individual cookies would seem to clash with the GDPR. Any thoughts?

Linux PC shop System76 is building a new desktop environment in Rust

System76

Perhaps worth noting, for context, that System76 seem to have a beef with Gnome more generally, and perhaps a pattern of behaviour towards their upstream that should colour the reporting on them here at The Reg. Some background in a fairly detailed blog post today from a Gnome here: https://blogs.gnome.org/christopherdavis/2021/11/10/system76-how-not-to-collaborate/

Slacking off? It used to be there was pretty much one place to chat with your fellow developers: IRC

Another good alternative

Another good alternative to the disorganised chaos of Slack and IRC is Twist (https://twist.com). It's like an even-more-organised version of Zulip. It's fully thread-based, and provides each thread with its own home. Much calmer and more useful long-term than something like Slack or Discord. It's not open-source but, apart from that, well worth checking out. It's about the same price as Zulip (a bit cheaper, actually) but you can't self-host.

(No connection other than being a user!)

Atheists warn followers of unholy data leak, hint dark deeds may have tried to make it go away

Re: Same could be said about religious people

Please, please, don't assume that other people here don't understand that "truth is a bit different in science to other discourses." Indeed, given the venue, I think it's safe to assume that the great majority of people here are trained and/or practising in some scientific or at least technical field.

Re: Same could be said about religious people

Err, no. "Atheism" is the belief that there are no gods. The belief that there may or may not be gods but that we lack the evidence to make a conclusion is agnosticism. Deduce what you will about my own beliefs (you'll probably be wrong), but that's just what the words mean! (Try and tell Richard Dawkins, for example, that he can't be sure that there's no god!)

But you're right towards the end that the more interesting questions may not be "Is there a God?" but "What do we mean by 'God'?" and "Can we know anything about entities we might term 'gods'?"

Re: Same could be said about religious people

Atheism is not a state of waiting for information (that's agnosticism) but a declaration that a decision is possible, and that the conclusion is that there are no deities. (Or, strictly, that there are no theistic beings - deism being something a little more than theism!)

And, of course, it's ridiculous to suggest that all (or even most) atheists have actually made a thorough investigation of the topic from a philosophical or theological point of view. Most people make up their minds on the basis of a raft of other influences - friends, culture etc. - and then examine and justify their experience on that basis.

From Amanda Holden to petrol-filled water guns: It has been a weird week for 5G

Who'd have thought

It's all of a piece with the "people have had enough of experts" nonsense. It's no surprise that, when those who are supposed to lead us instead start deliberately destroying the beliefs and institutions that sustain our society, people point their new non-expert opinions at all sorts of random targets.

Like a BAT outta hell, Brave browser hits 1.0 with crypto-coin rewards for your fave websites

Re: Photo ID required

There's no ID requirement to use Brave or its BAT payment scheme. Perhaps that was a while ago?

In a world of infosec rockstars, shutting down sexual harassment is hard work for victims

Thank you

Just to say thanks very much to Shaun for writing this article, and to The Register for publishing it. All too often (as the article itself says), these actions are excused and ignored. Part of the answer is to admit what's been happening for so long and to talk about it, including in the media. So, keep up the good work!

Good luck deleting someone's private info from a trained neural network – it's likely to bork the whole thing

Re: Why use personal data to train AI?

Many, many use cases require PII - trying to link sexuality to facial features, criminality to home addresses, medical history to insurance premiums... Sure, they're a Bad Idea, but they're out there.

Go fourth and multi-Pi: Raspberry Pi 4 lands today with quad 1.5GHz Arm Cortex-A72 CPU cores, up to 4GB RAM...

Re: Pi-top

It won't - it uses the HDMI connector to connect its screen. Plus, if the CPU is in a slightly different position, the heatsink connection wouldn't work. But it shouldn't be *that* hard for them to produce a new bridge for the new configuration. The extra RAM would definitely be helpful because their Polaris OS is a lot hungrier than basic Raspbian - I swapped mine over to vanilla Raspbian for various reasons but mostly that RAM issue, and it's a lot happier.

What a smashing time, cheer astroboffins: Epic exoplanet space prang evidence eyeballed

Some mistake, shurely?

"Kepler 107c could have been born when two exoplanets ten times the mass of the Sun crashed into one another"

Planets that are 10 times the mass of our Sun? Mind-blowing if that's correct, but from context I suspect it should be "ten times the mass of the Earth"...

Do you feel 'lucky', well, do you, punk? Google faces down magic button patent claim

Re: Yiddish?

Absolutely - this was a very jarring usage with no place in an august organ like the Reg (the pejorative overtones of its use in this way should be obvious). The official language of Israel is Hebrew. I'm sure this was just carelessness, but it's not a great look.

(I'm neither Jewish nor Israeli, BTW, just someone who cares about how words are used.)

National ID cards might not mean much when up against incompetence of the UK Home Office

Missing an important point

Comments so far seem to be missing an important point. Aside from the fact that ID cards solve the opposite problem (as other commenters have said, Windrush was all about over-strict demands for ID), imposing ID cards would merely deny healthcare etc. to more people (mostly poor, immigrant or otherwise vulnerable). This is because these groups are less able to get through the system even when fully entitled - or less informed about the need, or have bigger issues at any given time like finding food. Any ID system that is used to prove eligibility for basic services but that doesn't take into account the fact that those most in need of those services are also those least likely to have the relevant ID, is fundamentally flawed.

Much-hyped Ara Blackphone LeEco Essential handset introduced

Screen

Did anyone else look at the picture and wonder about the screen? It seems to go right to the top of the device, and actually has a cutout for the camera. Now *that* could be innovative. Or crap, of course!

Amazon tweaks so-called 'assisted suicide' publishing contracts to ink EU deal

Legally binding...

These aren't just voluntary pledges on Amazon's part, BTW, they're legally binding. "If Amazon were to breach the commitments, the Commission could impose a fine of up to 10% of Amazon's total annual turnover, without having to find a violation of the EU competition rules" (from http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-17-1223_en.htm).

Engine warning light appears on Uber's $100m driver settlement

Re: Labor protection laws in the the US?!

Kind of the point - even *US* labour laws have limits, and Uber seems to have exceeded them!

Irish mum coughs to children's allowance fiddle

Tenuous. Very tenuous!

Thought I was reading the Daily Fail for minute, there!

Web Summit looks at new homes ... this time with sun and decent Wi-Fi

"Dublin hoteliers may already have killed the goose that laid the golden eggs, with attendees last year complaining that hotels had cynically raising prices by up to 500 per cent for the days of the summit."

So that will be bog-standard economics in action, then? Increase demand for a constant supply, and the price will go up. Anyone familiar with other popular trade shows and conferences will have seen the same effect everywhere (except places like New York, where the almost-constant supply of such shows means that prices are high all the time!).

German court slaps down Uber's ride-sharing app

Uber arrogance again

Love the line that this is "a fundamental infringement of our ability under European law to establish and provide a service". Someone needs to remind arrogant Silicon-Valley types that there is NO right to establish and provide a service! It's a privilege to be able to do so, earned by creating and delivering value in line with the best interests of your customer (not yourself). (And I say this as a startup founder and CEO myself.)

While bureaucratic caution can cause all sorts of problems, these ride-sharing services seem like ticking time bombs to me. There's a reason that taxis were traditionally licensed in most countries and cities: it makes it safer for the customer.

How to strip pesky copyright watermarks from photos ... says a FACEBOOK photo bod

Re: As far as I am concerned

"If the image is of me and I am alone in that image I am the copyright owner."

Then you don't understand copyright. The photographer has copyright because it's their creative work that is embodied in the photo - the composition, selection and general artistry in getting a good photo.

You're quite correct, however, in the second assertion, that permission should be requested from the model. 'Model rights' are a real thing as well, and you similarly can't just grab an image of someone and use it for your own purposes, even if the photographer has placed the image in the public domain. Think how all those famous people would react if that was the case (being used in adverts etc.).

There are some blatant abuses of the various forms of IP, but just declaring that 'information should be free' doesn't actually address any of the very real issues that its defenders are concerned about. Or would all you software writers be happy for your code to be stolen with impunity?

Amazon, Hollywood, Samsung: PLEASE get excited about 4K telly

Re: Can anyone tell the difference?

Thanks for that but it was a different article from longer ago, specifically about whether 1080p and 720p were visually distinguishable. Not sure it was an El Reg piece, as I say!

Can anyone tell the difference?

ISTR reading an article (may even have been on this august site) back when HD tellies were just going mainstream, saying that the human eye simply can't see the difference between 1080p and 720p on a TV smaller than 36" when sat six feet away.

On that basis, there's going to be remarkably little point getting a 4k telly unless you've got the 105" monster in your living room!

Oh, shoppin’ HELL: I’m in the supermarket of the DAMNED

Waitrose FTW

Waitrose does the self-serve thing properly. You get your own scanner, which you carry round the shop and merrily scan each item as you buy it. At the end, you swipe your card and it downloads the info from the handheld scanner and Bob's your uncle. Very rarely has any problems, and no stupid 'bagging area' required. (You can put stuff straight into your own bag as you shop, which is great.)

Chrome, Firefox blab your passwords in a just few clicks: Shrug, wary or kill?

Users aren't the real problem

What woke me up to the real problem was installing LastPass. It could slurp all the passwords I'd stored in Firefox (usernames and passwords, indeed) and import them. Indeed, it actually makes this point explicitly during the installation - if LastPass can do this as a normal extension, so could any other extension.

Your passwords are not secure stored in any of the main browsers, whether from other users or from malicious code. The only answer is to remember all your passwords yourself (unlikely for most of us), use LastPass/OnePass/whatever service to store them, or use a local secure keyring if your browser will play nicely with it.

DARPA looks for a guided bullet with DEAD reckoning navigation

Re: Inertial? no way -"Still, it would be WAY better to have that for a grenade launcher."

You have rather missed ribosome's point, it appears.

Researchers find cloud storage apps leave files on smartphones

That's how they're supposed to work

Bizarre 'research'. The point of cloud-sync apps is absolutely NOT to place all files on the server and never to have them on the device. Rather, it's to use the server as a way to ensure that the same files are available on all devices.

So, for example, I use Dropbox precisely to ensure that I can have local copies of files on my phone/tablet/desktop. If they weren't on the device, what use would they be to me?

Now, it could be that a 'securely remove from this device' function would be a useful addition to these services, but none claims to offer this AFAIK.

Publishers pony up $69m in ebook price-fixing settlement

Learn something before speaking

In a vain attempt to forestall the usual freetard comments, I'll repeat what many seem to be unwilling to remember - less than a quarter of the total cost of publishing a book is spent on manufacturing and distribution of the physical product. That's true across the industry, and in some areas it's considerably less than that (scale having its benefits).

Add in the significant cost of formatting the text for all the various devices (which is a lot harder than you'd think if you've never tried) as well as the VAT issue, and there is genuinely very little room for savings in ebooks.

And for those who accuse publishing of excessive profiteering, you've clearly never actually looked at the results of most publishing companies. If we wanted massive profits, we'd be in a different industry - software, perhaps!

Canon PowerShot G1 X compact camera

As a recent CSC purchaser...

...I say No to the final question in the article. One big reason is that compacts with the quality of CSCs seem to be more expensive than the CSCs for some reason. Also, even as a beginner, being able to select a brighter pancake lens instead of the zoom means I can take photos I wouldn't otherwise be able to.

As ever, it's horses for courses and I suspect that the (no longer very) new formats will at the very least force manufacturers to think more creatively about what they offer customers.

Navigation app CoPilot Live goes freemium next month

Good satnav but what about keyboard support?

I use this on the occasional days I need satnav, and CoPilot does the job well, guiding me to my destination with minimum fuss. It's also quick to find routes and to re-route when I stray from its wishes.

However, it has one glaring flaw that never fails to irritate: it doesn't support any keyboard but the built-in Android one. Try using another keyboard (like something that supports predictive text entry) and it just fails. Instead of using Android's own text fields, it's implemented its own (presumably for cross-platform reasons) that don't handle changes well at all. To enter data, one has to leave the app, change input method, go back to the app, enter your destination and then (of course) reset your keyboard to the normal one. There's no good reason for this, especially after all this time. Sort it out, ALK!

Rumoured 'GarageBand for e-books' to bulldoze textbook biz

"The problem is that they want the same price as the print editions"

Don't forget that manufacture and distribution account for <20% of the sale price of a textbook. When you take into account the fact that print books are VAT free and ebooks aren't (in most territories), the price differential is actually pretty small - unless you expect publishers to take less revenue from digital simply because it's digital rather than because it's cheaper to produce (which it isn't by very much).

Yeah, right

Well I work in educational publishing and those commenters were right on the mark. What is crucial in education is not the format but the content. Creating "Garageband for ebooks" doesn't even address the hard problem of generating high-quality, pedagogically useful, relevant and appealing content for the classroom. At best, it will help teachers to distribute their own material in nicer format. Which may be valuable but is hardly 'disruptive' to the educational publishing business.

In other words, once again we (may!) have a tech company looking only at the technological portion of a problem and failing to grasp the larger picture.