Posts by Doctor Syntax

From cage fight to page fight: Twitter threatens to sue Meta after Threads app launch

Re: what's the biggest different in data privacy/security between UK and EU?

"The EU actually bothers to enforce the rules."

The EU will continue to have rules.

"Anyone who signed an agreement in exchange for severance may owe Twitter ongoing obligations, if that is enforceable."

If it is enforceable at all it would assume the severance was paid.

Re: Twitter's biggest Trade Secret

"The thing that made Twitter worthwhile was that for a long time everyone was there."

Not everyone. Maybe everyone you knew.

Re: Whoever wins ...

The unpleasantness seems to leak out to affect us all.

Nobody does DR tests to survive lightning striking twice

Re: Lightning always finds a way... of least resistance.

"for his troubles"

And his long term survival.

You think a strike might animate them?

And nothing too precipitate

Re: No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

"She sent them back to him with something pretty unpleasant written across the card."

I hope the flowers were roses with plenty of thorns on the stems.

Ex-Amazon manager jailed for stealing $10M using fake vendor invoices

There's only one silly error really: assuming they can't be caught.

Re: "more crimes while on release after posting bond"

They obviously never got the advice "when you're in a hole stop digging". If they think 16 years is going to be a long sentence they've yet to discover how much umbrage a court will take over forging court papers.

UK's proposed alt.GDPR will turn Britain into a 'test lab' for data harvesting

According to the Computer Weekly article the adequacy agreement also covers law enforcement data. I wonder what the consequences of losing that will be.

Re: Yet..

I'm retired. I no longer run a business. However if I were running a business I might have had to reconsider location. And if I were an employee of a business that depended on trade with the EU and relied on an adequacy situation I'd be very worried indeed. I'm old enough that I can probably see out my time here without too much personal inconvenience.

My children and grandchildren have dual citizenship (as will have any future great grandchildren) so they have a degree of flexibility.

Re: Weird perspective

"Whether we're in or out of the EU (boring subject)"

Only boring if (a) it has no consequences either way or (b) it has bad consequences which it would be embarrassing to have to discuss.

"as anyone who wants to do business with the EU will still have to meet the requirements of the EU GDPR"

And the easiest way of doing that will be by moving to the EU.

Re: turning the UK into a 'test lab' for experimental and abusive uses of data

"the hope is that they'll move here to harvest it."

A vain hope if ever there was one.

Brexit was always obviously a matter of removing citizens' rights wrapped up in jingoism and the deliberately misleading* slogan of taking back control. There's not the least surprise in all this going on. It may benefit a few big businesses in the short to medium term. In the long term it will be more and more difficult for them to squeeze profits from the UK.

* In case you still believed that was to benefit you, take a moment to think who it was who was going to get - and has now got - control and what that control achieved. It wasn't and isn't you and it was to provide protection for the individual.

Brits negotiating draft deal to rejoin EU's $100B blockbuster science programme

The borders were always there. We (usual disclaimer) deliberately moved from one side to the other. The obvious consequences were pointed out and at best ignored, but usually the pointing out was deprecated. What's to sort out?

"even Brexiteers aren't that stupid"

Citation needed.

Re: seeing the way they have punished the UK for wanting to leave

"I wasn't referring to Horizon when talking about the UE trying to punish Britain for leaving."

So you were OT? I know el Reg threads are apt to drift OT. Drift, not take a speedboat.

"I was talking about all the other stuff, which I don't think we need to regurgitate."

In the circumstances it's a bit difficult to work out just what you were talking about.

All the red tape now involved in exports to and imports from the EU? That was there previously. We were inside the red tape envelope previously. We* moved outside. We're now treated exactly the same as non-EU countries always were. Lots of us said it would happen. If its a punishment it's a self-inflicted one.

The ongoing problem with NI? Again, very predictable. The Good Friday agreement required a soft border between NI and the Republic. This was accomplished by NI, as part of the UK, and RI both being in a customs union as part of the EU. The Union (it's signified by the U in UK) required no trade barriers between GB & NI. Those requirements were mutually compatible. So along comes Brexit proposing to remove the UK from the customs union. That created a situation which could not be compatible with both the other two so we have an unstable fudge.

Or were you talking about some other equally foreseeable, self-inflicted consequence of no longer being in the EU for which you which to blame the EU because it's embarrassingly inconvenient to blame the lack of exercise of foresight by leavers. If you were a leaver and now don't like the consequences you have no cause to complain; those of us who weren't have every reason to - about the leavers.

* Some of us unwillingly, of course.

Re: Never forget that the original had the emphasis on "my"

Given that the vote was labelled advisory and in absence of a previous impact assessment it would have been an appropriate reaction to carry one out as a first response to the vote. Instead Cameron panicked.

Two new Linux desktops – one with deep roots – come to Debian

Re: Beautiful? Really?

It might look dated to you but I'd prefer it to any modern flat and ugly alternative.

Lamborghini's last remaining pure gas guzzlers are all spoken for

The original Lamborghini, the Miura, was arguably the best looking, if possibly the least practical, road car ever built. Its immediate successors were ugly things. Since then I've paid no attention to them but doubt any ever came close to the original.

"300km is 185 miles, so at least 2.5 hours - which is definitely comfort break territory, and that usually takes quite a few minutes."

There's a couple of further requirement to add to that - there needs to be a vacant charging point available when you stop for that break and the price of the charge doesn't exploit the monopoly situation of a motorway service station.

Your journey that gets broken after 185 miles is probably largely on the motorway. If you're going to get your 80% charge over the period of a typical motorway stop you'll need to be able to park next to a charging point. In order for that to happen once pure EVs form the bulk of the fleet most if not all of the spaces in a motorway car park will need to have chargers. What's more the overall power feed to the service station is going to have to support all those chargers in use - if not the current is going to have to be limited at each charger and you're not going to get your 80% charge. What's the investment needed to get to that point and when is it going to happen.

As far as I can manage it I always arrange long journeys so as not to have to buy petrol at motorway service stations because of the prices. That's usually feasible. Having to break a long journey to recharge means that using motorway chargers would be almost inevitable. It will take strong price controls to stop them getting their hands in our pockets right up to the shoulder. Hybrids migth go some way to keeping them honest.

Boss such a tyrant you need a job quitting agent? It works in Japan

Re: Do emotional support clowns count?

The report mentions support animals. Maybe one that would crap on the carpet on command would be best. Forget emojis, nothing beats reality.

"I don't know if our reporter here has had many jobs, but I can guarantee that working extra hours will almost never earn you a pay rise or promotion either, but now you've wasted half your life working extra hard for no benefit."

I think you're confusing being present with working. The idea of quiet quitting is to do one without the other.

It would be very easy to see this combined with a job search/recruitment agency.

Oh, great. Yet another tech billionaire thinks he can get microblogging right

Re: Funny

"personal support between friends"

There remains the possibility of dialling the friend's number, putting one end of the phone to your ear and talking.

Re: Funny

I think you missed the word "now" in the OP.

No open door for India's tech workers in any UK trade deal

Re: "Negotiating a trade deal will be easy"

Oh, look, another. Or same one with different handle?

Re: Nothing economically beneficial will happen until the Tories get kicked out.

Yes, I'd like to downvote reality too. But it just doesn't work like that.

Re: Nothing economically beneficial will happen until the Tories get kicked out.

As I said above, even ignoring immigration our population has increased because we're living longer but birth rates are falling. That means that the demand for services increases whilst the population supplying those services is shrinking (extending retirement age is unpopular). Household numbers are also increasing because there are more adults living singly.

Whatever your political inclinations those are the demographic trends you have to work with.

What's your solution to balancing those supply and demand factors?

Re: Nothing economically beneficial will happen until the Tories get kicked out.

I think I'd prefer a return to the Danelaw. Slaughtering Lancastrians would be a possibility but the priority would be keeping Wessex and Mercia out.

Re: I want COMPETENT, not cheap workers

ISTM that the Brexiteers were relying a lot of voters not being well-enough educated to indulge in a bit of critical thinking when it came to marking their referendum papers.

Re: "Negotiating a trade deal will be easy"

From what I recall it was political shrills who were making the deal. And remember that we're pretty good here at spotting shills when we see them.

Re: This isn't the Brexit we voted for.

Poor old Nige might not be able to pay you - he doesn't meet Coutts' wealth standards to keep a bank account there. Maybe someone will have to organise a whip-round for him.

Re: This isn't the Brexit we voted for.

"Perhaps we have issues with NHS, schools and pretty much everything because our population has increased faster than the services? Perhaps cost of living has increased due to the demand for housing, due to the population increasing faster than the housing stock."

You're looking at an issue which has a lot of dimensions to it. Population is increasing partly because we're living longer, something which I personally can only approve of. It's the ageing end of the population which has increased demand for NHS services.

Increased demand for housing stock is partly due to more people living singly, either not forming relationships or those relationships breaking up so there are more but smaller households.

The increased number of singletons, and the smaller family sizes for those having children means that the birth rate has been low for some time and is now actually below replacement rate so that there are fewer locally-born recruits to provide services - including staffing the NHS and it certainly hasn't helped that we haven't been training enough staff for the NHS for years.

Re: This isn't the Brexit we voted for.

"Hello day-old single-issue handle."

It's amazing they don't realise we can spot them a mile off.

Re: This isn't the Brexit we voted for.

"Thats a barefaced lie.."

There were a lot of those about at the time,

Rocky Linux details the loopholes that will help its RHEL rebuild live on

"As we recently described, Red Hat goes to extreme lengths to keep old kernels supported and secure."

My takeaway from that talk was that it was about the hoops external contributors had to go through and the testing RH would perform to get external submissions into the long-term supported kernels. The contributors may have been upstream recent kernel contributions to be back-ported or third parties (?H/W vendors) wanting to get things in. Unless I missed something - possible as I found the delivery extremely soporific - there was nothing there about RH providing their own additions.

Re: Licence

"can we expect a license change to the Linux kernel along with the multitude of other upstream components Red Hat uses forcing them to make their source code freely available if they want to make use of any future release?"

The Linux kernel has, over the years, had a large number of contributors. All have contributed under GPL2. In order to change it all those contributors would have to be contacted and their consent obtained. Some will not have been on contact with the kernel devs for some time, maybe years, and would have to be traced before they could be contacted. Some will have died and the tracing extended to find their heirs. And some will work for Red Hat. Failing such consent the non-consenting and untraced contributors contributions would have to be replaced. This has been pointed out in every thread relating to this.

Taking all that into account, you tell me - can we expect a licence change?

Re: To free or not to free

The copyright owners have rights here. If they think RH are breaking copyright terms then they can take RH to court. Now here's a thing to ponder. There are an awful lot of them. There may even be more of them than RH/IBM have lawyers. What happens if they individually challenge RH? How many fronts can RH fight on?

Re: making them Red Hat customers, at least briefly

"Red Hat are trying to restrict access, whilst the rest of the world only needs one person to get the source code once, then redistribute it."

The ROTW needs to access it every time a change is released.

" If you are using hardware whose vendor only offers drivers for RHEL, or the applications that you need are only supported on RHEL – " then you might be having a bit of a discussion with that vendor right now.

For H/W manufacturers drivers are a necessary means to sell their product, they aren't a product in themselves. If the availability of a say, Debian, driver becomes essential for selling product then a Debian driver will be along in due course. After all, they're both Linux drivers; it's not like they'd be starting from scratch. The reason why there's only RH at the moment is going to be because marketing tell them that's all they needed. Markets can, and do, shift.

Deloitte wins deal worth up to £100M for UK border platform

"Post-Brexit strategy set to replace legacy of patchwork systems"

It's not the strategy that counts, it's the implementation. Any fool can come up with a strategy as is clearly evident.

Re: I'm struggling...

They all had their explanations. They were all different. They all involved a minimum of 2 hands waving.

Artificial General Intelligence remains a distant dream despite LLM boom

"I grew up implicitly thinking that intelligence was this, like, really special human thing and kind of somewhat magical. And I now think that it's sort of a fundamental property of matter..."

Observer bias following on from thinking that life is a fundamental property of matter.

Re: Oh, the irony

Together with an undefined property: "soon".

AndI've come across hell desks that would fail it.

With any hype train you always have to ask "Have we seen this before?" The trouble is, they never do.

The better question is "are we really seeing this now?" The answer to that is inevitably "no". Reality falls short of the hype.

Jam tomorrow. It's always jam tomorrow.