Posts by veti 4489 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Mar 2010
The difference between a customer who always pays on time and one who needs chasing - is substantial in that business.
And then there are the records of properties built, wired, inspected and connected, meters installed... Obviously the vast bulk of records will be substantially newer, but a few outliers can go back a very long way. And *those* records could be very important.
Indeed, that's a principle worth fighting for. I believe your home secretary has gone on record as saying that citizenship is not a right. If you can't see the danger in that claim...
In the USA, people are considered to have rights to do anything within the law. If the law says that an imprisoned person has no privacy, then that's fine. (Anyone who feels that law is unreasonable has various recourses to challenge it, but that's not what we're discussing right now.)
But if no one bothered to write that into the law, then whatever the legal basis is for invading a prisoner's privacy - is a legal logic that can also be applied to anyone else.
If prisoners don't have rights, then neither does anyone else. If a right can be taken away from you by something as capricious as a court, then it was never really yours to begin with.
So unless the penal code explicitly says "during your term of imprisonment you have zero expectation of privacy", prisoner privacy is an important right that deserves protection.
Patents protect methods, copyright protects words. Two very different things.
Copyright lasts for ages, patents expire in a reasonable timeframe.
Patents (and patent applications) are published in a searchable database. Copyright isn't published in anything, not even Google.
Most saliently, the point the GGP was so exercised about: patents are submitted, reviewed and granted at the whim of a central office. There is absolutely no such process for copyright.
If it weren't for the fact that they get grouped together under the misleading term "intellectual property", nobody would even suggest they're similar.
That's why the best programmers make their money in maintenance, not development.
Most software gets developed and used for a brief period in exactly one environment, where it just happens to "work" (for values of work that mean "do something that someone happens to want done at that time"), and then break as soon as something about the environment or the task changes. Something like 93% of it then gets abandoned and replaced with something new, whether better or worse at this particular task, for the new environment.
The other 7% gets painstakingly updated and transferrred to the new environment. That's a painstaking and expensive process, which is why it's only used on a small minority of items.
"The server isn't responding properly. This is likely to be a high profile issue that the relevant people are already aware of and are working to fix as quickly as possible. If you can afford to wait an hour or so, it may clear up in that timeframe. Otherwise you can try calling this number and asking them about it."
The problem is that developers don't like to think about failure modes. It's hard enough (they reckon) to get the bloody thing to work under ideal conditions. If they started affirmatively cataloguing all the ways it can go wrong, someone might tell them to fix some of them.
And they're long past fed up with this project and really want to declare victory and move on to the next shiny.
Their managers mostly feel the same way. And senior management, like sales and finance, just wants to ship a product. Any product is better than none.
Nobody in this whole stack is motivated to make sure failure modes can be correctly identified or diagnosed, let alone described to the poor users.
You are misreading the code. You're falling into the trap of reading "plebs" as "ordinary people", rather than "well resourced layabouts".
Cryptocurrency has no plausible use cases for most of us, but it's great for the handful of people who adopted it early or have stupid resources to put into it. Those people will continue to try to sell it based on advantages that are imaginary (such as limited supply), irrelevant (such as political independence - from the state, you're still wholly dependent on a whole structure over which you have even less control), or both (such as anonymity).
The flagrant Ignobel Prize-fishing research you linked to specifically calls out queuing as an experience that *can* be enhanced by popcorn.
The time to avoid it is when you're watching something that's actually entertaining. As a rule of thumb, if you forgot to eat the popcorn, chances are the movie was pretty good.
I suspect the lifeless multinational will have a decently functional lost property office.
When I lost my Nintendo DS in a taxi in Sydney, I spent hours trying to get it back but the driver and the company denied all knowledge. Humans can be nice, but it's not a universal law. At least robots will probably be honest.
The core team is supposed to be in charge, that's fine. But just because you're in charge, that doesn't mean you're above the rules. A lot of people have died by not understanding that basic law of politics. (See Charles I of England, for instance.)
So there needs to be some kind of mechanism for addressing alleged rule breaches by the core team, or at least by individual members of that team. That's what is missing.
"Act of war" is one of those terms that sounds legalistic, but doesn't actually have any real definition.
In practice the usage is simple. If you want to start a war, you say that (something the other party has done or is doing) "was an act of war", and therefore you're now at war. It's not the act that's significant, it's the description of the act. If you don't want to start a war, you simply don't use that phrase.
Openly carrying a gun into a riot - is just fucking stupid. Of all the people now feting Rittenhouse as a hero, I'd like to ask them - would you encourage your kids to do that?
But, apparently, state law protects people who do that kind of thing.
What I'd like to see is a parallel case where one of the mob successfully hit and killed the lunatic with the gun. Because as far as I can see, they could use exactly the same defence in law.
It's hard to argue that GameStop is still being widely shorted, but the price is still lower than it was when Robinhood suspended it. So anyone buying at that time would have lost money. As it is, the people who really lost money - apart from the funds that were invested in the shorts - were those who sold in the price crash that followed Robinhood's intervention. And nobody forced them to do that.
GameStop now is obviously overvalued for a company with nothing resembling a survivable business plan. Which suggests to me that the successful stock manipulation has been the concerted effort to extract money from gullible and/or sentimental small investors by talking the stock up.
Cars and banks are things that most people buy infrequently, and they represent major commitments, so it's important to get them right. When buying such a thing, name recognition is hugely important because it reassures the customer that this is a serious company that's not likely to disappear next week.
The same dynamic doesn't apply to everything, but it's an element across a surprisingly wide range.
Microsoft has always been a follower, not a leader, in jargon. All their products to this day have the most maddeningly generic names imaginable. Think Word, Teams etc.
"Windows" was a generic industry term before Microsoft began turning it into a trademark. Interestingly, this doesn't affect the validity of the trademark.
Your congresspeople, as well as being monumental cowards, have absolutely no discernable sense of humour between the lot of them. Nor do the ridiculous numbers of police and other security-related goons employed to make sure no-one gets near them.
You have been warned.
Just because one of them lets fly a bit of shrapnel, doesn't mean they all immediately explode. I think you may be underestimating how easy it is to miss a target the size of a satellite at a range of several hundred kilometers.
Let's imagine a solar panel flies off in a random direction. The area of the orbital plane at 600 km is approximately 2.5 billion km2. 40,000 satellites, each filling about 40m2, will fill about 6.4e-10 of that space. That's the chance,per orbit, of an accidental collision, and that's assuming the debris flies off in exactly that orbital plane. If we allow for a bit of variation in orbital radius, it rapidly becomes way less likely.
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