Posts by Doctor Syntax

Apple to compel workers to spend '3 days a week' in the office

It could be that what gets collaborated on most in person is dislike against Apple. Has there been any prior history of unionisation there?

Blackboads were even better if dustier. Permanent chalk isn't a thing.

I think it applies to a larger sub-set of employers than that.

Re: UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who insisted...

Nothing political in this. As far as BoJo is concerned it's purely personal.

UK launches 'consultation' with EU over exclusion from science programs

Re: Bankrupt the country so you can sell it to Rishi's father in law

"You wanted to leave, you got the votes and Brexit happened. Stop trying to get your snouts back in the trough you claimed you didn't want or need."

As ever, it's not quite so simple. The vote was tight. Those who are the losers in this are likely to have voted "No". In fact some of them would have been too young to vote at the time.

It is grossly offensive to tell people whose careers were ruined by no action of their own that they're wanting to get their snouts back in the trough.

"The idea of Liz Truss being able to negotiate anything is laughable."

WHile I agree with your assessment of her, unfortunately it's not laughable. She's one of two candidates to be the PM. The other is married to someone with a major interest in the Indian outsourcing IT industry. I don't consider either a good outlook.

Re: Reap what you sow

"and will thus quit science"

Or the country.

"Liz Truss says bloc 'in breach of agreement'"

Translation: everybody's out of step except us.

Excel @ mentions approach general availability on the desktop

Phising applications incoming!!!

There's no place like GNOME: Project hits 25, going on 43

Re: Plus ca change - lentement

For some value of "somewhat".

I wonder what the split would be between the various Linux/BSD desktop managers. Perhaps there's scope for a Register survey. FWIW my vote would be KDE.

NASA uses occult means to spot tiny moon orbiting asteroid

"Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em,

And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum"

Australian court overturns 'Google is a publisher' decision

Re: Testing boundaries

With a right to be forgotten there's a legal basis, the scope is defined and it's up to the data subject to be pro-active. In the general case the legal basis is dubious, the scope is far from well defined and these, I think, are good arguments for the search engines not to be pro-active.

Look at the OP's criteria: untrue, out of date or irrelevant.

Who decides on those instances where the truth is disputed? Do you wish to have Google usurp what might reasonably be a court's prerogative?

Who decides when something is out of date? What if you have a web page where you rely to a large extent on search engines bring you traffic? Would you be happy if search engines ignored you because your page was a year old but you believed its content was still current? Who would get to decide whether it was still current or, indeed, what the cut-off period should be?

And who gets to decide on what's irrelevant? That, I find an easy one: it's the person making the search. It would be nice if there were some effective means of communicating that to the search engine but IME the trend over the years has been away from such a facility.

Agreed, the newspapers are accountable. That was not at issue.

But if you hold Google accountable do you or do you not also hold the libraries than make newspapers available to the public also accountable? If not, why not? And if you don't hold the libraries accountable why would you hold Google accountable?

"the adtech giant surely knows it has a symbiotic relationship with newspapers"

Aren't these are the symbionts that were the one was being sued by the others? An odd sort of symbiosis.

Modeling software spins up plans for floating wind turbines

Re: Now this is more like it

Hi there, big buoy.

"US Department of the Interior's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management"

Isn't that a bit self-contradictory?

Dinobabies latest: IBM settles with widow of exec who killed himself after layoff

You are mixing at least three different things here.

1. These cases proceed under civil law. The claimant only needs to succeed on the basis of balance of probability. Where the case is settled out of court, as these inevitably are, not even that is recorded. A settlement is not the same in terms of public record as the winning and losing of the case.

2. A case under criminal law requires proof beyond reasonable doubt which means a lot of evidence. You also need to think about how a criminal investigation gets launched. Usually it's as a result of somebody alleging a crime to the police. If IBM's ex-employees are looking fo a pay-out they're far better off doing the civil route and getting a settlement rather than the criminal route which gets them nothing except probably a civil counter-claim against them from IBM.

In the absence of one or more complaints it might be possible that a public prosecutor could decide there's something to investigate; that might be more likely in the US than the UK. What would the charges be?

And where does such a prosecutor's search for evidence start?

Warrants to search IBM's records? In that case IBM's lawyers* are going to object and they'd tie the whole thing in knots in court for years amid growing complaints of the cost to public funds.

With the plaintiffs in the civil cases? It would be very difficult to make a criminal case out of a situation where the parties have already settled and those that are still pending are trying to get the evidence they need for the lesser standard of proof - they wouldn't really be of much help to establish the greater. It would involve spending vast amounts of public money with very limited prospects of succeeding.

A criminal case does not, as you seem to think, exist to provide civil redress. A successful prosecution might result in fines for the company, possibly jail time for execs. Aggrieved ex-employees would still need to sue if they hadn't died from old age while their evidence was still being fought over in the criminal case.

3. A public inquiry is different again. It would only be instituted where something is of major public interest. Remember that "public interest" is not the same as "interesting to the public". If IBM were losing case after case in the civil courts that might, just possibly, raise sufficient of a public scandal and IBM isn't going to allow that to happen, not if they can keep settling.

* It might help to think of IBM as a law firm with an IT operation attached.

"There is not now any public interest in access to documents that might form the basis of a judicial decision,"

Is that final? I suppose some of the litigants whose cases are now pending might challenge it.

Elon Musk 'buying Manchester United' football club

"But that lack of a round ball background won't stop some fans from hoping Musk's tweet expressed a genuine desire to acquire the team"

I'd have thought that it would be reassurance that however bad things are, they're not as bad as they could be.

UK hospitals lose millions after AI startup valuation collapses

Re: Shoddy reporting

You missed "tricked" from your quote. There is no evidence that the company's management intended to collapse the company. If they had then "tricked" might well apply. As far as can be seen the trusts were participating in a development that could be of use to them in their everyday operations. It's entirely possible that they might have participated in that without the offer of shares.

The complicating factor here seems to have been that the shares were listed and hence received a value that had to be entered into the accounts. If that were not the case then they could have been entered with a nominal value reflecting the cost of the effort needed to prepare the data for sharing. That is the actual cash loss which has been incurred here.

Re: Consent?

Where do "our elected representatives" come into this?

CIA accused of illegally spying on Americans visiting Assange in embassy

What were they thinking of? Why not leave any devices with someone trustworthy beforehand?

Possibly they were taking in burner devices with this step in mind, otherwise they were ignoring the most elementary precautions.

1,900 Signal users exposed: Twilio attacker 'explicitly' looked for certain numbers

Re: As Wikipedia would say…

I think your downvotes might be for not having researched how it actually works.

Re: How can be…

You do realise, don't you, that a burner phone can be used for registration? Viewing the YT videos on how to do this might be educational.

How do you choose a Cloud Security Provider?

Really?

Sony camera feature hopes to make digital images immune to secret manipulation

"camera makers including Nikon and Leika,"

Nikon and who?

Oh Deere: Farm hardware jailbroken to run Doom

Re: Internet of Farming Things

"he GPL requires that the resulting product be hackable by the recipient"

Could you quote this term in the licence.

When will the UK take another giant leap into space?

Re: Rocket Who

OK providing it's not this one: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@53.6341077,-1.7486348,3a,37.5y,66.49h,77.71t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s9H0FG1FliF5jQoK-RBp-sw!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?hl=en

Re: Johnson, Truss, and Dorries

Shudder.

After suffering $1b subsidy snub, Starlink lands $2m US Air Force deal

Re: OneWeb

"OneWeb attempt 2 cannot be competitive. It only makes sense if you absolutely need something that the USA cannot turn off on a whim"

I think anyone's being able to turn of at a whim has become a larger concern in most government's eyes this year.

This tiny Intel Xeon-toting PC board can take your Raspberry Pi any day

Re: Not the same.

"I'm not surprised that the Aaeon beats the R Pi."

OTOH I don't think it will be running OSMC bolted onto the back of my TV.

UK government lines up billions to refresh legacy tech in 600-system tax dept

Re: The need in the past to forgo operational maintenance and upgrades...

Whose cloud? All the UK's tax affairs at the beck and call of the US CLOUD Act?

Epson says ink pad saturation behind 'end of service life' warning on inkjet printers

Re: Been a thing for at least 4 years

My daughter had a work-supplied HP printer for her home office a while ago. I came to the conclusion that the badge on my older model HP laser was more solidly built than that.

"It may be more economical for us to purchase a new Epson product."

I think that's what they meant.

Microsoft's Secure Boot fix sends some PCs into BitLocker Recovery

So much for trusted computing.

More datacenters coming to Ireland, despite energy concerns

A device for measuring is a meter.

A unit of measurement is a metre.

If we're going to have to put up with US spelling we maight as well just read Slashdot.

"a ban on datacenter buildouts in the Dublin area has reportedly been challenged by one developer"

Not a problem. Give him permission to build the datacentre [sic] but not to connect it to the grid.

Nuclear power is the climate superhero too nervous to wear its cape

Re: You fail physics forever

It's a multivariate thing: how much is there, what's its half live and what's it emitting and at what energy? Then there's can the ticking bits be separated out and can they be usefully recycled? But it's all just "nuclear waste" and regarded as all the same thing.

Re: More people have died on UK roads so far this year ...

Proof that we balance risk against utility.

Re: Clean up

To say nothing of how to get to work in the morning.

Re: About Accidents

Agreed. Coal tip collapses and dam collapses* also shouldn't occur. We need to take them all into account when making decisions.

* Tailings dams from mineral extraction holding back toxic waste as well as hydroelectric dams.

Re: Biggest hurdle is trust

It doesn't help having industrial qualities of mistrust being manufactured by those who fail to compare one technology with another.

Re: Volcanoes ?

"here will also be some downward convection"

That's at the subduction zones. There are usually volcanoes quite near them on the principle that what goes down must come up. I don't know how the timescale works for that relative to nuclear wast half lives. Anybody?

Re: "Why is anyone worried about the plant at Zaporizhzhia being shelled"?

Nor is hydro-electric or anything else.

Re: Deaths are not the only metric

"Some people think that Chernobyl was the result of experiments with military Plutonium production, not a general exercise."

I thought it was due to vodka.

Re: Deaths are not the only metric

"Yet again, it's convenient for you to ignore them because each one may be small."

They're easy to ignore. After all, they're Somewhere Else and they haven't had as much exposure on the news.

Re: Deaths are not the only metric

"I'd expect 25 years lifespan"

Perhaps you should divide by two as you'll only be using it half the time. What are you going to use the other half?

Re: Deaths are not the only metric

Tritium!!!

Weak beta, half life about 12 years.

Up to a point. The "investment in nuclear technologies that work" is largely reaching the end of its working life. Not investing in anything at the rate needed is more like it.