Posts by Ken Hagan 7044 posts • joined 14 Jun 2007
You're paying for a transient pleasure, like going to the cinema or a pub or restaurant. Plenty of music isn't worth owning but is worth a few pennies for a period of time.
I prefer to own music myself, but I can understand those who prefer to rent and in doing so get access to a much broader range than I could for the same money.
A machine that can generate hate-speech *might* be something that you could re-purpose as a machine to detect hate-speech generated by others. That might be quite useful in the same way that a spell-checker or a grammar-checker is.
"It looks like you are writing bile-ridden slander. Do you want some help with that?" -- Clippy, 2021
"In what way is it anonymous?"
How hard is it to create an account on Facebook under a pseudonym or an email address that 99% of the population cannot trace to you? For bonus points, how hard is it to do that in such a way that the law enforcement experts of some random foreign counrty (like, say, the US) cannot trace you or touch you in court even if they could trace you?
"It's because the team that enforces our policy against dangerous organizations is a specialized team,"
No, Zuck. It's because the task of enforcing that policy is simply impossible on the scale required to make your business model work.
Your business model is "Everyone can post whatever they like for free and we finance it by data-mining and ads.". Sadly, "everyone" includes the very worst that humanity has to offer and they get to hide in amongst the other 8 billion. There is simply no way to make a site like today's Facebook work in a reliably legal and ethical way. AI is nowhere near to understanding the level of nuance in human social interactions and policing with real people simply doesn't scale up to 8 billion users.
The world does not owe you (or anyone else) a business model. It is your job to either change how FB is financed and/or change how users are allowed onto the platform. If you don't, the rest of society is entitled to assume that you don't care about the criminality on the site as long as it makes you money. *That* is not going to be an acceptable defence when you end up in court.
"We have an opportunity now to do something about climate change by travelling less and WFH more."
It's not just climate change. WFH with kids around your feet is a challenge, but so is being tied to your desk all day when those kids are kicked out of school mid-afternoon, and so is spending an hour or more each day travelling. The last six months have allowed some people to discover that there is a completely different way to play work/life balance and with appropriate technology can be a far better balance.
On the other hand...
If your job involves large or expensive equipment, or involves actually being in a particular place to engage with the people there, then WFH isn't an option and you've probably spent the last six months in a state of inner fury at all the journalists writing yet another bloody article about WFH.
Also, most of us who have spent the last 6 months at home already *have* decent working relationships with the colleagues we meet on Teams or Zoom. It would be interesting to know if someone starting a new job from home feels the same way. ("I've been here 6 months and haven't met anyone yet.")
Also, personality types aside, some jobs are naturally solitary because they require a lot of concentration but other jobs are typically done in very chatty offices. I wonder if the latter are best done "from home" with an 8-hour long video conference call running to enable the same environment.
"even though it [NT] was quite resource hungry"
I never saw a machine that would run Win9x faster than the contemporary version of NT. Architecturally, 9x was a 32-bit "kernel" that had a "DOS box for drivers" with a whacking great mutex to serialise access. It was an impressive hack, but one that had obvious costs in performance and stability.
The only reason to use 9x was that you had some DOS software that needed to bit-bang on the hardware. (That was usually an actual DOS device driver, but it could have been an application.)
It's also a process that can easily result in issues when you don't support 99% of existing extensions, no matter how slowly you execute the process.
This is like an OS changing its driver model and pushing out an auto-update when only a dozen or so common disks, rodents, keyboards and displays are supported. It beggars belief that anyone thought they would get away with this.
You are probably better off learning about computer security, so that you can takeover the enemy's assets mid-war. Given the "state of the art" in that, I'd have thought that the outcome of WW3 was completely up in the air. (The side that *builds* the best drones may not end up being very important.)
I wouldn't call it "busy". Work out the volume of a sphere of that radius and consider the fraction filled by satellites and the volume of the cylinder swept out by the rock.
Even Earth appears (fortunately) to be quite hard to hit and it has measurable gravitational field. (Pedant's alert: Yes, I know that you can measure the gravitational field of a small lump of metal and have been able to since Cavendish's time, but you get my drift.)
There has been a general move away from user-space threading. I think they started life in Solaris. Microsoft have deprecated their "fibers", Linux added and then removed its M:N scheduling. Apparently it is one of those superficially attractive ideas whose deficiencies only become apparent after you've invested a year or two.
This is essentially the stackless versus stackful debate for co-routines, and languages are increasingly coming down on the stackless side of the fence. As far as I can tell, the main reasons are:
If you don't know which thread a routine is going to run on, you can't safely use any OS API that depends on per-thread kernel state. If you can recode so that there are no such dependencies, you've basically done all the work needed to refactor your program as a (kernel) thread-pool feeding on a queue of work packages. If you can't recode in this way, kernel threads aren't *that* much more expensive and work as intended.
There's no technical reason to use *any* encryption, since the update files are signed, but that's not my point. MS *could* gratuitously use a transport that they know is blocked by some users with the intention of being awkward. They might even try to justify it on privacy grounds, since the updates that you query for, request and retrieve, give away information about your system.
Why would they be awkward? Well, there is a Chinese version of pretty much every major western player in technology (search, tat bazaars, social media, ...). Sooner or later, there will be a Chinese "Windows-compatible" OS as well. (They must surely have the source code. It's just waiting for Winnie-the-Pooh to give it his sign-off.) Once that happens, there is no money for MS in China and they might as well close the door behind them.
I suspect this (entirely sensible) plan falls flat when confronted by a website that pulls resources, including code, from a dozen different domains because that's easier than actually taking responsibility for serving them up from your own server.
On the other hand, this might not be a bad thing. If the site was thrown together by an idiot, I probably don't want it to work as they intended and probably do want to be encouraged to find an alternative site.
They may have such devices, but that doesn't mean they can force their bosses to use them. Example: UK cabinet meeting held over Zoom. Earlier example: Trump refusing to use the phone offered by his three-letter-agency because he prefers the one he has. Still earlier example: Clinton's email server.
Russian is a language where you can't say you are having a friend round to dinner without disclosing the sex of the friend.
With some truth, it has been said that grammar dictates what you cannot avoid saying, rather than what you can say.
This is not the answer. I doubt these accounts would exist for more than 24 hours after being flagged. Also, I doubt that many people actually care about their sources of information as long as it feeds their preferred narrative.
What Putin appears to have done is provide covert support for a position that was being openly pushed by a minority. (That, incidentally is the difference between his intervention and that of the EU and US. All three had a public position. Only Putin had an army of anonymous influecers.) That would have been almost impossible with proper fact checking, but proved fairly easy if you can get away with lying on an industrial scale.
So blame all round, really. Still, we'll learn. Experience is a hard mistress, but fools will learn from no other.
If so, then it would be possible for someone to maliciously hotlink to your site and then get you into trouble. That seems perverse, so I imagine that a court would let you off and instead suggest to the prosecutor that the hotlinker is the one who has violated the law by wilfully failing to maintain control over the processing of their own customers' data.
But, as you can probably tell from my "That seems perverse, so..." sentence, IANAL.
"Linux is not then an option in this case. The GUI is totally different to what he is presently using."
Browsing, email and basic office-y stuff is identical, the Linux update mechanism is faster and more reliable, and the number of threats to privacy and security is much lower. We don't know what his workload is, but I would guess that "totally different" is almost totally wrong.
If it isn't your house then it isn't personally identifiable as you. At least, not unless Google are way ahead on the AI and can understand your host welcoming you by name. When setting up the Assistant, you let it voice print you (presumably to redice the risk of visitors issuing random instructions as in the XKCD cartoon on this topic) so anyone else is just background noise.
So I don't think GDPR applies.
Also true for operating systems, office suites, web browsers, email clients...
The odd thing is that in all these other markets there is now a free alternative, but trying to put a free OS on your phone usually involves finding a bug that someone has turned into a rootkit.
"1 word is used to describe several different unrelated situations"
All real languages do that. Metaphor is fundamental to applying language to new situations. Computers as we know them did not exist 100 years ago so pretty much all computer jargon is metaphorical.
The argument here is just about which metaphors are allowed.
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