Posts by Paul Smith 512 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jul 2007
They say you get the politicians you deserve.
There is an apocryphal story of the man on the Clapham omnibus being asked if he would vote for a politician being accused of corruption. "Of course", said the man, "if he can't look after himself, how can I expect him to look after me?"
The Tories may be corrupt, but at least they can look after themselves.
"No reason to assume she was a criminal." If you believe that a stranger is simply someone you haven't met yet, then you are right, she is innocent until proven guilty and all that. If, however, you believe a stranger is a threat, and many people including police training officers do, then you get guilt by association laws and a tendency to shoot first and ask questions later.
The US cigarette and tobacco industry revenue in 2022 was $52bn. (https://www.ibisworld.com/industry-statistics/market-size/cigarette-tobacco-manufacturing-united-states/).This one single crypto company lost $42 billion all on its own. For a judge to say it can not be compared in importance is ridiculous!
Strong encryption is any encryption where the cost in money/time/effort to crack exceeds the value of the information retrieved.
Since the value of the information being protected is variable, the relative strength of the encryption used is also variable. ROT-13 is strong enough to protect my Christmas present shopping list from my children's prying eyes this year, but might not be strong enough next year.
I bought my 1060 in May 2017 so at six years old, it is definitely is getting a little long in the tooth but in all that time, this is the first card that I have even looked twice at as an upgrade. I am still not convinced and going fro 6G to only 8G is not going to do it for me. That said, it will have to get some pretty amazing reviews if I am going to even consider spending €400 on it.
If you searched for X, Y, Z, W...
you are categorized into the group of people that searched for X,Y,Z,W...
we will offer you more of what you have already searched for (eg ads for products you bought last month)
or
we will offer you what others in your category searched for that you did haven't (ads for things they bought that you haven't).
if we don't know enough about you to put you into a category,
we will offer you random shit.
I confess to getting a giggle from all the photography nerds discussing the impossibility of such photos as if the 5 stop range of film applied to digital cameras as well. It doesn't. The most spectacular shots I have taken in the last few years were not on my Nikon (which has been effectively retired) but on first a Pixel 4 and then a Pixel 6. What made them spectacular was the phones ability to work in a range of lighting in dawn, dusk or night conditions. Detail in the shadows. Getting a good shot of the moon is not hard if you switch to manual. Getting a good shot of the moon and what ever was going on that made it interesting, is a real challenge to even expert photographers, but is something that digital phones can do quite well.
Modelling graph traversal on a relational system isn't really difficult, but then, writing the entire DB system in Perl is also possible, but neither is actually advisable. If you have an RDBMS problem, then use an RDBMS to solve it. If your problem is graphing relationships, then a graph database is the most natural tool to use. This is not an either/or debate.
This deal would appear to allow the UK authorities to request information about non-UK citizens (as long as they are not US citizens) if that information is stored in the US, and allow the US to request information about non-UK citizens that is stored in the UK. Anybody providing that information will have to deal with the consequences of being forced to be in breach of GDPR. This could get entertaining...
Duh, no it doesn't.
Finance depends on having an edge and the biggest edge you can have is knowing what is going to happen before the rest of the market. Traders have always shared that knowledge among other traders to earn or repay favors. Before phones were invented, those back channel communications took place in coffee shops which is why financial institutions are packed so tightly together into places like wall street or the square mile.
What utter nonsense. Programmers then were the same as programmers now; some good, some bad, some lucky and some clumsy.
C was designed to solve a set of problems that had no other easy solution in the early 1970's. It was easy to learn and easy to use and you could get something working quickly so it became popular.
Rust was designed to solve problems that didn't exist in the 1970's. It is not as easy to learn or use as C and it takes a little longer to get something working, so it will never be as popular as C, but if the problems it solves are ones that concern you, then it will repay the extra effort required to learn to use it well.
Personally, I find I can solve most of the problems that matter to me most easily using Python, but when the occasion demands, I will and have used most other languages
Exactly who is this change supposed to benefit? Lose the adequacy agreement and the UK loses access to easy data exchange with the EU, on the other hand, it means the likes of Facebook can do whatever they want with data about UK people. Cambridge Analytics MkII?
I would suggest that someone takes a very serious look at who is lobbying whom and how much they are paying, because this stinks.
I am afraid that you don't seem to know very much about how cell towers, communications or telcos work. You aren't a politician by any chance? The telco buys the gear and installs it in base station at the foot of the cell tower. Huawei don't choose who buys their gear, Huawei don't choose where it is installed, and Huawei doesn't pay for the juice it consumes. Double the data and you double the juice and yes, the telcos would notice, and no, you couldn't slip an extra power supply in there, telcos would notice that as well. Also, since telcos haven't been allowed to buy Huawei gear for quite a while, these towers must have been installed quite some time ago.
MaCarthyism is alive and well in the land of the free.
Does this actually count as theft?
Stop laughing and think for a minute. The 'rightful' owner of the crypto currency token is which ever wallet it is registered with in the blockchain - if the blockchain is updated so coins that were in your wallet are now in my wallet, then the coins that were yours are now, legitimately, mine. You might argue that the blockchain update was not correctly authorized, but you can't say I 'stole' your coins.
Most of us are lucky enough enough to live in societies that have a legal system based on "innocent until proven guilty", unfortunately that belief belongs to a time when a stranger was simply someone you didn't know yet. Modern society, particularly in the UK and the US has shifted to believing that a stranger is a threat and that is incompatible with the presumption of innocence. If you are innocent, then nobody has a right to intercept or interfere with your communication. If you are a threat, then the state must protect itself from you by any and all means available. So, which society do you want to live in?
"One of the joys of academic research is that if you do it right, you can prove the truth". Sorry, but that is not how science works.
One of the joys of science is that anyone can prove something is false, but nobody can prove it is true. We can say our theory for how we think something works and we can present loads of evidence supporting that theory, but if anybody, at any time, finds a single piece of evidence that our theory can not explain, then we have to go back to the drawing board. It doesn't mean the theory is no longer useful, but it is not the "whole truth" and it might be false. Newtons laws of motion are the perfect example. His theories provide a simple and complete explanation for how things move, and they cover every possible situation - unless they move very, very fast or are very, very small, when Newtons laws give the wrong answers and you need to use the theories of relativity or quantum mechanics to explain what is happening.
"Google knows what every byte of that data is, and what it's used for." Now that is hooey. They collect the data because it is there and can be collected. They have no idea what most of it means or how it can be used, but they are afraid that if they don't collect it they might miss out on something that later proves to be important.
A task that took 18 hours twenty five years ago, which could be halved every 18 months for a near constant £1500 by the application of Moore's law, made upgrading worth every penny. Twenty five years later the same Moore's law means the same task takes under a second, so it is much harder to justify an upgrade to reduce the time to half a second.
The American political system requires a 'them' to give the people someone to be afraid of. It happens to be the turn of the Chinese to fill that role. Do you not think that if they had any actual evidence of wrong doing, it would be splashed all over the front page of the NYT and the lead story on FOX and CNN?
That's exactly what I said and I got a bunch of down votes. Regardless of how scummy you think Google et al. are, this case was not about altruism or defending the poor and downtrodden. It was wasting the courts time in the hope of a big payout.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2023
