Posts by alain williams 2102 posts • joined 29 May 2007
I approve of that - it is barmy that we drag a lot of stuff ½ way round the world when we should make it here. Reducing dependence on an increasingly aggressive dictatorship is also a good idea.
Unfortunately stuff from China is often cheaper. Is this just that wages are less there ?
This is what will happen in some states. Helping pay for a flight or even driving someone to an airport to go get an abortion will open you to criminal proceedings. Will these nice sounding policies survive an onslaught like that ? I hope so, but ...
This worries me about working with Plantir, how can we be sure that they, or the other bidders, will not quietly add what they learn to the profiles being built about us. Especially so for USA based companies that are subject to the Patriot Act.
Why is it that I always misread Peter Thiel as Peter Thief ?
Ie $200 million/year. The 2022 USA military budget is $715 billion, some 3,500 times as much. It seems to me that the priorities are not quite right here.
OK: I know that increasing funding can only speed up R&D so much but given the huge cost of impending climate change - surely we should be investing more; we being more than just the USA.
This is something that I like. I want my computers to be boring - ie just work and not have things fail because of some improvement (ie update) that breaks the way that I do things. This is why my servers run RedHat (or Rocky) or Debian - long lifetimes. I can keep the base OS but run the current version of PHP or similar -- so get the best of both worlds.
Linux Mint for my laptop and what I recommend to friends.
OK: I will also run bleeding edge (Arch) in a VM as I am a techie and want to see what is coming down the line. If I was not I would not.
The one thing that I would like stable OSs to update is the latest Unicode glyphs - so that I can understand what friends are saying when they send an email containing a new emoji.
No-one (or almost no-one) wants to dig around for a third rate alternative to the software they've grown used to.
Also: no one wants to learn to use a first rate alternative to the third rate software that they've grown used to.
Unlike many here most people have zero interest in software, many stare blankly at you when you ask them which web browser they use - it is "the Internet", they are unaware that there is a program that they use to get there.
They buy a PC/laptop and just accept whatever it comes with to use the Internet. Everything else (eg view an image, open a document) just happens - they do not think that programs are involved, even less that there might be a choice as to which program to use.
We are the strange ones: those who think about such things.
(Speaking as someone who got into Unix 40 years ago and now just uses Linux)
they must be forced to fully describe what data they take and what they do with it. Eg none of this sort of games by Google.
Users must be allowed to say "no" to this data grab in a way that is just as easy as re-enabling it; the default should be "no".
If this is broken the penalty should be a large fine AND jail time for the programmers & their managers all the way to the top.
The only way of stopping this sort of thing from happening again is fines levied on individuals: a sum about equal to 1 year's salary would be about right. This should be paid by the: programmers, their managers all the way to the top.
If it is a find paid by google then little will change.
The latest pretext to draw the West into conflict.
What is the advantage to Putin to start a punch up where, at best, everyone gets a bloody nose and at worse we all get destroyed ?
Unless the thinking is "I am going down, I'll take everyone else with me."
I always assumed that politicians had some sense of history: how will they be viewed in 200 years time, hero or villain ?
I think that it is unwise to label someone who is dangerous as insane as we then downplay, to ourselves, how they can act: sometimes very rationally. Thus we might not take it as seriously as we should.
We need to understand that he has a plan. This plan is long term and has been worked on.
I suspect that the plan has feet of clay as none of his advisors wants to be the one who tells Putin of invalid assumptions, etc, that the plan is based on.
Having said that I am fearful that, when his back is to the wall that, he might show little restraint and start chucking nukes around. If he feel that he is on the way out then why worry about anyone else being blown up.
Would Putin be able to blind it by pointing a powerful laser at it ?
Do the satellites have some protection to stop the cameras being so burned out ?
Does Putin care ? As long as he controls the media in Russia it does not matter what sky eyes tell the rest of the world.
I suspect that any passport will do. How do they verify that the passport that I give them is mine ?
I think that we should all submit that of Nadine Dorries or Nick Clegg - depending on which gender we decide that we want to be today.
Like that we would stop SM sites from data mining our passports & joining up everything we do on-line; before it all goes AWOL in a huge data breach or is sold to some future Cambridge Analytica.
The GDPR has several things to say about this.
* Right to be informed Does MS say what it does with the personal info, how long it keeps it, etc, and be concise, transparent, intelligible, easily accessible, and it must use clear and plain language ?
* necessary Why is this data necessary for the PC to work? It has not until now, so what has changed ?
The EU might take MS to court - but until then MS may refuse to let your PC work.
We should not expect our communications to remain private
It makes it easy to click on the wrong yes/no. I know that the el-Reg readership is by & large intelligent but we can be busy or rushed.
The question would have been much better worded "We should be able expect our communications to remain private"
I wrote a script to do automated backup of a Linux box at night to a remote (NFS) disk. Old backups were removed to not fill the backup disk.
The script sent an email saying what happened. My customer did not want to pay for me to check the emails, so to him only.
Several years later some gremlin removed a bunch of files. I was asked to restore from backup. The backup disk had gone full as what was being backed up had grown.
"Did you not see the error emails ?" I asked. He had got bored with the backup emails and set a rule to automatically save them somewhere so that he did not have to look at them.
Too clever by half!
Still, I'm struggling to understand how he can be extradited while the UK fraud case is unresolved.
Because the USA government wants to give a USA company its money back. Money that it lost as it did not do due diligence before it bought Autonomy. Once he is in the USA he will be found guilty no matter what is the outcome of the UK fraud case. He will prolly be offered a plea bargain: admit guilt or risk 200 years in prison.
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