Posts by Doctor Syntax 42396 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"However, many people, including myself, have discovered that the results of our intellectual labor was created by somebody else earlier. This is why the patent office has a first-to-file rule."
If something is independently reinvented should it really have passed the originality test to receive a patent for first to file?
"I used to translation software a lot in 2005 and it was basic at least. Not usable but gave a quick basic understanding of the sentence. Now, the result is better than expected and is native-level."
So as a user of S/W trained on massive amounts of other people's work without their consent, how much are you proposing to pay those people for the benefit you obtained?
Many years ago SWMBO, being a real botanist, got a job in the gardening department when the local B&Q was being set up. Back then it was really well managed. All the staff who helped on that set-up got their names on a beard mounted very visibly but high up. There was a little demo theatre - she actually bought manky roses from a local, then not very good, garden centre to demonstrate pruning.
B&Q management became manglement. The demo theatre went. So did the board. Taking it down would have actually cost money. OTOH I've usually found their staff to be better than they deserve.
"It's quicker to queue up for the bored teenager on the till"
My experience of self-service checkouts is that 3 items is the limit. After that the probability of it getting confused by a barcode it doesn't have in the database or it has the wrong weight for or the like is getting too close to 1 to make it worthwhile.
As I keep saying, the only thing Google sells is advertising. As to the marketing dweebs, I suspect a lot of them know perfectly well that it's crap. It's also their job, that budget has to be spent somewhere. The real dweebs in this situation are the boards and C-suite who are handing their marketing departments this money without paying the slightest attention to how it's spent.
They demonstrably don't work in some situations. In that case how do you determine the boundary between those areas where they do work and those where they don't? If you have a hundred or a thousand instances of a system working correctly how can you be certain the next one - or hundred or thousand will still be OK?
I had a similar experience. In this case it was a client-written report for a commercial ERP system. I think whenever they'd tried to run it they ended up knocking on the head after a couple of days. For reasons* we weren't allowed to set the optimiser statistics. I was asked to look at it during my first week on the gig.
The report queried a mix of big and small tables. I turned on the query explanation mechanism to get the query plan and found that it had chosen to do the initial selection out of a small table and then join it to a big table on an un-indexed column. And then another. I rewrote it query in a sensible order into temp tables. By the end of the morning I had it down to a run time of about 10 minutes.
*I suspect because the package had been written by someone familiar with the older version of the RDBMS who was used to hand optimising selections and didn't trust the new-fangled optimiser. I'd also been used to the older version so I knew such tricks existed. But I'd enough experience to trust the optimiser.
"being the go-to guy should mostly be considered harmful"
Only if you're not freelance. Being the go-to guy gets you the gigs without having to use the pimps agencies. Because you're only there for the length of the contract you automatically duck out before it's too late.
"PCs were in businesses for (call it) 20 years before they became prevalent in the home. The wrinkles were ironed out to a great degree by then (honest!). Those preceding live tests were undertaken by [orgs] with the capacity to support/fix/develop/mitigate any glitches. They paved the way for domestic/public utility."
And then what happened? Because all the wrinkles had been ironed out it was decided that new stuff could now continue to be rolled out without further testing
"turn on the demister ... I want to use a simple switch on the dashboard that I can access easily from my muscle memory of where the switch is."
My demister is a simple push-button - flush with the electronics screen so it's a matter of faffing about trying to feel the edge. Ditto the aircon temperature buttons - did you just turn it up or down?
So exactly what is the issue?
1. Are they claiming the content is a national security issue? Have they any examples of this?
2. Is the ability of operators in one country can see personal data of users in another? If so, then why, as a matter of principle, does the US not forbid its own companies to see personal data of users in other countries?
3. Is this in competition with US companies offering similar services?
There is only one word to describe issues 2 and 3: hypocrisy.
"This is known because US spies found that china documented secret military bases due to geo tracking by the app on service members phones.... but yes the app is abused by spies"
Whose spies?
All those kids posting videos giving away US secrets. Must be a security risk.
TP-Link has about 65 percent of the US router market for homes and small businesses.
In late October, Microsoft warned that Chinese government-backed threat actors had compromised thousands of internet-connected devices for password-spray attacks against its customers, and noted "routers manufactured by TP-Link make up most of this network."
So what would constitute "most"? About 65%?
"that there is a belief that the computer is never wrong, journalist Nick Wallis, on his site postofficescandal.uk, reports that this is currently a legal presumption in the law of England & Wales"
ISTR that this was specifically introduced in the Police & Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) or an amendment and that the prosecutions post-date that.
"and then presenting evidence that they DID know all along"
The shameful thing is, they're not presenting it in evidence, they're presenting it in a closing statement. If they had this evidence the correct time to come out with it would have been while the enquiry was taking evidence.
Also, are they saying they didn't know the prosecutions were going on? If they did - and it seems overwhelmingly likely that they did - then why didn't they intervene? Public responsibility should have taken precedence over responsibility to a client, otherwise they're risking charges of conspiracy to perverting the course of justice.
I think I recognise bits of the introductions to the published rolls in that. It doesn't say very much beyond what perplexity says except in telling me how to find the rolls on archive .org although the qualification of published rolls should be a clue to the questioner's is well aware of the situation around publication and availability.
However it's not that difficult to distinguish between a text that simply says "dig", one that says "dig" and "sell" and one that just says "sell". The most complex one really is the case of the guy who dug coal, burnt some himself and sold some. It took me an hour or so to go through and tally about 7 different categories all told and decide that the impression I'd got on casual browsing wasn't there in the numbers. Lack of built-in number handling is likely a likely to be a handicap in all this AI stuff.
I tried it with a query more to its strengths, current thinking on the significance of "waste" in Domesday for the West Riding. It came back with a non-committal (as expected) summary although it wasn't difficult to see where it had been taken from in its main sources which didn't include one I've seen refereed to a number of times but haven't got my hands on. But it then went on to list several points and I asked it to expend on one of them which it did. On the whole the outcome was useful, especially as one of its sources was a downloadable recent PhD thesis.
In order to be able to apply a term to something you've both got to know the term and what it refers to. Victims become victims because they don't recognise the latter until it's too late. If they don't recognise that they're unlikely to know the name, whatever alternative gets substituted.
However having PR people onboard to complain to the media is probably easier than recruiting and training more investigating officers to try to get a few scum into court. A good clearing-up ratio and the possibility of redress and getting money back is likely to be the more effective at getting reporting up.
