Posts by TRT

UK regulator set to ban ads depicting bumbling manchildren

Re: That's a start

Do I need to do the Microsoft vacuum cleaner joke?

Re: Quite Right!

No more party political broadcasts from the Tory party then? ;)

Well I'm...

beach body ready.

Security robot falls into pond after failing to spot stairs or water

Re: "is there actually a business case for this thing"

Looking cool? Change for change's sake? Tax write off?

Re: Design cues

Mind the gap.

The law of unintended consequences at play...

You see AI has a lot to answer for. When the robot was instructed to patrol the mall and take a closer look if it saw anything fishy...

Re: Back story?

"Well, you're forgetting one thing. If I fail to report, robot K6 replaces me."

"I trust it will be more successful."

Re:Not butter...

Fish, and plankton. And sea greens, and protein from the sea. It's all here, ready. Fresh as harvest day. Fish and sea greens, plankton and protein from the sea. And then it stopped coming. And they came instead. So I store them here. I'm ready. And you're ready. It's my job. To freeze you. Protein, plankton...

Not really. They don't have a gene pool to keep clean. Although perhaps this one was getting broody and decided it would have a go at cleaning the pool anyway.

Re: Design cues

The design looks like some sort of butt plug to me. Not that I know ANYTHING about butt plugs of course.

Tech services in the Robot Bay - later that day...

PFY: Hey, you don't think it was anything to do with the firmware upgrade we applied the other day, do you?

BROFH: Nah. But... you know... better read the manual anyway, just to cover our arses. Where's the box they shipped the upgrade in?

PFY: Ermm... here in the top of the bin. Good job cleaner bot was down for maintenance. *passes box*

BROFH: Let's just get this small booklet out of the plastic shrink wrap... why do they wrap the manual in a polythene bag? Not only is it bad for the environment, it makes it less likely that anyone's going to...

PFY: *interrupting and holding out the box she's been reading* I think you ought to take a look at this...

BROFH: No need, I've just seen the front of the firmware upgrade notice here. Someone in shipping made a royal screw up. "Firmware upgrade v1.08. Applicable models - Boaty McBoatface I all revisions & BoatyMcBoatface II rev. 1.0, 1.1 and 1.2"

PFY: Do you want these burned or shredded before the PHB arrives? I can see the executive lift is on the way down already.

BROFH: Best shred it. The burning smell might give the game away.

Re: @Michael H.F. Wilkinson: Your thinking about it wrong...

Colin? COLIN! Here, have a towel.

John McAfee plans to destroy Google. Details? Ummm...

Re: I'm a statistic

“We are not numbers. I'm not a statistic, I'm not a collection of attitudes and desires, I'm a human being with my own dreams and hopes and problems, and by making me a number, you've removed my dignity”

Where am I?

In the global Village.

What do you want?

Information.

Whose side are you on?

That would be telling. We want information… information… information.

You won't get it.

By hack or by crack, we will.

Who are you?

The new Number Two.

Who is Number One?

You are Number Six.

I am not a number! I am a free man!

[laugh]

The curious case of a Tesla smash, Autopilot blamed, and the driver's next-day U-turn

Re: They're both faultless...

@Esme - It was all done in the best POSSIBLE taste.

Re: They're both faultless...

Rubbish! Clearly the cyclist's fault. Round 'em up, put 'em in a field and bomb the road tax avoiding, Lycra-wearing, smug, aggressive, road-hogging BASTARDS!

This comment was brought to you courtesy of The Daily Mail.

Vendors rush to call everything AI even if it isn't, or doesn't help

The Great Hyperlobic Omni-Cognate Neutron Wrangler...

could talk all four legs off an Arcturan MegaDonkey - but only I could persuade it to go for a walk afterwards.

Re: We are heading toward

Do you remember "Fuzzy logic"? That genius buzzword that sold us washing machines and microwaves etc. that were apparently designed to cope with more than one sensor input at a time - extending wash times if the water temperature was lower, or giving it an extra rinse if the water was highly conductive due to a lot of dissolved particles (meaning, presumably, that the clothes were super dirty). I wonder whatever happened to those?

Jesus walks away after 7,000lb pipe van incident

Pray tell what is the technical IT angle to this miracle?

Hyperloop test track delayed...

Re: You said it, man.

8 year olds, Dude.

a segment of a pipe is just a pipe, shirley

Not really. You see what the article is referring to is just a pipe. A SEGMENT of a pipe would be any pipe formed by two planes intersecting a pipe which are not perpendicular to the axis of the pipe; where one or more of the planes ARE perpendicular to the axis, these form the special cases of a "pipe wedge" in the case of one plane only, and a "shortened pipe" in the case of both planes.

Re: Meanwhile...

That, and the motorway flyover was later found to consist only of a coat of paint.

Re: The funny side is a bit morbid here

That's not good! Unfortunately I've also seen insecure loads on fast roads more times than I'd like (i.e. >0) The worst I saw was the side panel of a lorry carrying scaffolding tubes that popped open under the Gs on entering a roundabout. The person in the next lane was not amused, nor was I - I have quite sensitive hearing.

Meanwhile...

as Jesus Escobar climbed out from the centre of the pipe which had miraculously fallen exactly so that he was protected in the hollow core, a large bird was heard to say "Beep Beep" before pulling out its tongue and running away at a prodigious speed.

Juicy fine for Bradford firm after it blurts one million spam texts

Oooh! Satsuma Loans...

Are they taking the pith?

Also "...an irritation and, in the worst cases can be upsetting." I love the mild under statement.

Nearly three-quarters of convicted TV Licence non-payers are women

Re: Just move

1) Probably marginally more interesting than the programmes that fill the gaps between adverts

2) Drink Neshazzbrando coffee... this very attractive man who represents an aspirational archetype is using it as an aphrodisiac so he can bed this very attractive female who has a hint of smart coyness about her. And you can make it so easily and quickly, looking like some sort of Adonis, by just pressing a button on this slimline and sleek coffee machine which is the only appliance in the Italian Carrera marble kitchen.

Absolutely this.

Meanwhile next door...

the monetisation of television consumption continues unabated.

Media mogul Murdoch's 'Sky dataset' swallow poses 'grave threat'

Re: Data Slurping

If only there were a scheme where people could pay a token sum which funds an advertisement free broadcaster; one where any form of product placement or broad political bias was very severely frowned upon or even outlawed.

Google unleashes 20m lab-created blood-thirsty freaks on a city. And this is a good thing, it says

Well, depends what you mean by "won". The mutations that "adapted" to DDT, for example, were primarily ones that 1) Had super thick myelinated neurones and were, as a result, thicker than dried pig shit and quite often died because they kept e.g. forgetting to breathe or 2) Jumped a mile at even the merest hint of a shadow passing nearby, thus avoiding the aerial DDT spraying, but expending far, far more energy than the "regular" type.

Radiohead hides ZX Spectrum proggie in OK Computer re-release

Re: The ZX Spectrum does not have 'apps'.

UK spelling. For The Great British Computer...

Oooh... now, there's a thought... The Great British Code Off... Right, BBC, that's £1.4m in rights fees please... although it IS a bit more 11pm Wednesday evening on BBC2 than 7pm Saturday evening BBC1 Primetime... so I'll settle for £20 and one of Nadiya's fruit flans.

It's too old to be an app. It's definitely a program.

Hey, remember that monkey selfie copyright drama a few years ago? Get this – It's just hit the US appeals courts

Re: if cost == 0 then panic

My understanding of Mr Slater's creative input was from this 2011 article where he describes leaving his camera on a tripod for a moment and unexpectedly discovering that the animals were using it, taking 100s of photos. He gives a different account later, saying he trained and coaxed them.

Now, it's utterly, utterly unfair of PETA and Wikipedia to fight him legally about this, incurring up-front costs even IF the courts make a costs order in his favour. I feel Mr Slater *should* be entitled to make a living from his DISCOVERY, but there's no more copyright in the original photo than there is in discovering a piece of tree bark in the shape of the Virgin Mary. However I do take the point that as he has effectively taken a photograph of the photograph, then he owns the copyright in that!

Who owns the copyright in my collection of a particular favourite photographic subject of mine, photographers taking pictures?

Re: So why does Nauto live on Endor?

He doesn't live there - e'wo(r)ks there.

Re: Naruto or would he rather be known as ..... .?

Orochimaru?

Re: Devil's Advocate

Well, the police would have to subpoena the image before presenting it as evidence, as use in a criminal proceeding is NOT an assignable use under copyright law. The copying and distribution of the image in evidence bundles would be an assignable use, however. There are caveats, I believe, which allow evidentiary use of things to override other considerations, or you would have companies claiming that their tax ledgers are copyright.

Re: Concept of "legal person" and copyright ownershi

Copyright is a component of intellectual property rights. It requires an intellectual effort, however minimal, in order to be created. Does copyright exist in the paint splatter when someone accidentally knocks a paint-filled balloon off the top of a tall building?

Re: if cost == 0 then panic

There seems to be an implicit belief that a created work MUST belong to someone, i.e. someone must have copyright. And yet there are thousands, millions, of things around the world which have no copyright; mainly because it's expired.The normal situation is that there IS no copyright - copyright is an artificial concept, granted by a court or the legal system, in order to protect the intellectual property of an individual, especially where use of said property involves pecuniary gain.

I don't think Mr Slater could claim his "method" was patentable, well he could claim it was but it isn't, so the original image straight off the camera would have no copyright and be nobody's intellectual property. If he claimed that his enablement of the monkey to take a picture came him an intellectual claim to the image, then NIKON (or whoever) would likely have far more claim to images than almost any photographer on the planet as their intellectual contribution to the process of taking an image vastly outweighs the intellectual contribution of the photographer!

HOWEVER, the fact that he processed the image, cropped it, adjusted the contrast, vibrance etc. means that the image used by various people across the internet is a derivative work. However a derivative work in itself does not embody its own copyright unless the work creating that derivative is significant... to be subject to copyright the creation of the derivative work must itself be an original work of skill, labour and judgement; minor alterations that do not substantially alter the original would not qualify.

So we come down to the question of how much work did Mr Slater put into creating the final image that they're quibbling about? I'm say that level tweaks, crops etc are trivial adjustments... if someone took one of his images and did a couple of such tweaks then tried to claim it as a significant derivative work then he'd have something to say on the matter.

So in my considered opinion... the original photograph had no attributable copyright, no intellectual component (I don't believe primates are legally recognised as having intellect, although they do have other rights that WE HAVE GIVEN THEM, such as under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981), and the work derived therefrom, having not had any significant work put into it in order to create it, would not have any copyright of its own and ipso facto the photograph is the intellectual property of no-one.

Re: Devil's Advocate

Well the police (OK, Maurice Gatsonides) devised a method for a vehicle to trigger the shutter of a camera, taking two closely spaced photographs of the vehicle... does that mean that they own the copyright to every photo of a speeding car? Or could a car driver say that THEY own the copyright of the photo, and thus control how that photograph is used?

Re: Just sayin'

If a river can be a legal person, then a monkey could too. It just shouldn't, is all. Although I'm sure that if you started throwing sueballs at it, it will respond by flinging something similar sounding back.

User left unable to type passwords after 'tropical island stress therapy'

Re: Da job Bag

Missing a punch down tool there. I had a job two months ago - the "internet stopped working" intermittently for around 10 minutes at a time. The user had one of the very crappy original wall plates - most others were new additions (seriously, who installs just two RJ45s in a two-person office when the phone runs through one of them? Oh, the floor has 1,000s of sockets - each metre of bench space on the laboratory side has 6 RJ45s which is some going for a molecular biology lab). Unscrew wall plate and find a rat's nest of a Cat5 termination. It looked like the way BT engineers used to do extension wiring. Out comes the termination tool, snip cable flat and even, strip 2cm of outer off, break out pairs , cable tie outer to plate at provided point, punch down and trim. Job's a good 'un.

Oh, cable ties. Can never bring too many cable ties to a job.

Re: Nailed it in one

You DON'T use your nails as tools. My flatmate keeps telling me this. At least twice a week.

Now here's a novel idea: Digitising Victorian-era stamp duty machines

But not, necessarily, the stamp.

Pretty fly for an AI: Bioboffins use machine learning to decipher fruit flies' brains

Ah! Dada Nanichimo ooneetah!

Bas nah! Koonyah mahlyass koong! Ees too rong tah oong jedi mind trick!

Sleuths unearth 'Panic Mode' in Android, set off by mashing back button

Re: If something bad is run...

like, say, Windows 10 mobile you mean?

Re: 43 times

You only have to press it once - the screen lights up with the message "Do not press this button again".

AI vans are real – but they'll make us suck at driving, warn boffins

Re: Skill deterioration

If it's a learning AI, then I expect it would react something like this.

Re: "Neither, we were told, does it read road signs"

Presumably it would detect the presence of the barrier in the road. It's not like it's Big Trak delivering a can of beer.

Re: They can't make us suck at driving...

I believe Hugh Grant was parked up at the time...

Re: HGV drivers are already at a disadvantage

The driver who overtakes is supposed to only pull back into lane when they are clear of the stopping area + a safety margin of the vehicle(s) they have just overtaken. This is something I do. Overtaking a car, I will have to be at least 2.5 seconds in front of it before I pull back into lane. Overtaking a lorry, it's at least 50m before you can pull into road space which isn't within their braking distance, which can amount to an additional 2.5 seconds or more. When you see how big that distance is actually on the road, it looks ridiculous, but it isn't. For lead-foot Joe in the Audi or the Merc behind you, that 5-6 second gap is an eternity and they so often nip through on the inside, crossing into the crush zone to do so.

So that's why an AI system trying to maintain that safe space in front of a LGV/HGV will need to be pretty smart to avoid bringing the whole motorway to a halt trying to compensate for the nano-cephalic death wish idiots we have on our roads.

Virgin Trains dodges smack from ICO: CCTV pics of Corbyn were OK

They have CCTV. They are required to publish a DPA notice because of it, controller details, purpose of recording, yada yada yada.

They broke that. But not in a terrible way. Although if travelling salesperson Fred who was supposed to be attending a company sales conference in Portsmouth that day got spotted on the news by his wife as he was travelling in the opposite direction... well... questions could be asked. Awkward, divorcey questions.