Posts by energonic

UK govt promises to sink billions into electronic health records for England

Doomed project. To get that many people to agree on way system should work is unbelievable. Promising the impossible makes good headlines, but par for this government's course.

UK terror law reviewer calls for expanded police powers to imprison people who refuse to hand over passwords

Judge

What is wrong with divulging a password to a legal judge, not directly to the police? The police may then request the judge to provide them with the password. That gives legal traceability.

The wheels on the bus go round and... Oh dear. Chancellor Sajid Javid unveils spending review

Re: "the opportunities created by Brexit".

"Everything will get more expensive..." Well, at least that might have a beneficial effect on the environment; reduce consumption! Not so good for the economy though.

GA'day, mate: Open the plonk, turn up a banger, Visual Studio 2019 is officially here (don't get too excited, Mac devs)

Re: How does it compare to vi and bash?

Vim is about right for me. Simple, reliable, basic commands. Available everywhere. Language helpers do indent and syntax.

VS, and other IDEs, tend to be complex and have all sorts of extras I don't need. Probably useful for early coders but you quickly grow out of it.

OpenAI challenges you to beat 1990s classic Sonic the Hedgehog using machine learning

Essentially a way to understand better how humans learn (or not).

Ubuntu 'weaponised' to cure NHS of its addiction to Microsoft Windows

Support

Open source or not, vendors are apparently not willing (or able?) to modify their expensive systems to accommodate system security updates. What do you get when you pay for support on an MRI scanner?

WannaCrypt: Roots, reasons and why scramble patching won't save you now

Re: First, identify the constraint

The MRI machine vendor must have a software development team and should be subject to a support contract (what T&Cs?). Why can't they convert this expensive machine to Windows 7,8,10...? Is the real problem the extra costs to the NHS?

New science upsets calculations on sea level rise, climate change

Re: Antarcitc ice cap is NOT "growing".

So this is science 'in progress', as it always is. Public debate about inconclusive science is easy to come by - Higgs boson, Dark Matter, Black Holes, etc. - but it doesn't add much, if anything, to knowledge. Better to put that 'spleen energy' towards real study (I don't mean cherry picking) - if you're serious.

Study: The more science you know, the less worried you are about climate

Obvious

Perhaps the most likely reason why more education results in more scepticism is that the figures are all open to interpretation. What degree of certainty can anyone put on a global warming prediction some years in advance of it happening? This is the realm of probability and it is notoriously hard to get right.

SpaceShipOne man, Nobel boffins: Don't panic on global warming

You do better

Who caused, or didn't cause, global warming is irrelevant now. It's an academic (and amateur) discussion that won't change anything. What has, or hasn't, caused it is much more interesting and much more relevant.

The important thing is to be able to understand and predict climate well enough to be able to mitigate the bad effects and benefit from the good. So climate models need to be good. You deserve to be heard only if you can demonstrate modelling methodology and results that fit the known facts better than the current models.

Mac Lion blindly accepts any LDAP password

Caching?

It is not clear from comments so far but it sounds like the security problem is that a client user logs in to a server session with legitimate credentials and some time later a user who doesn't know those credentials uses the same session. Or is it a different session, that uses cached credentials?

If the former, this is a client-side security problem for any client-server system and it is not something the server can do much about. Perhaps a session timeout would help in some cases, but it would be intrusive. On the client it is mostly about physical security.

If the latter, then the client software is remiss in reusing the cached credentials unprompted for a new session. Sounds relatively easy to fix.

OpenOffice files Oracle divorce papers

My Office

You know MS uses 'My Computer'... so lets take 'My Office'.