Posts by Doctor Syntax

Inverse Finance stung for $1.2 million via flash loan attack

Re: Programming for smart contract execution... What could go wrong?

It's one way. The other way is that it's buggy. It doesn't matter how many machines execute it, all they're doing is making the same error.

Re: The final stage of the crypto collapse

Whatever it is they're stealing from each other is only worth anything unless they manage to cash out and the moment they try to do that the price goes down again because, as you say, the supply of greater fools is drying up.

BOFH: Tech helps HR investigate the Boss's devices

Re: Absolutely superb episode

Obviously the BOFH will have hijacked created the system

FTFY

Re: Inspirational!

"the people who do the jobs that actually need to be done are the first to go"

Because manglement two or more levels up have no idea what they do so they can't be doing anything important.

The recording will be quite valuable the boss.

Leave that sentient AI alone a mo and fix those racist chatbots first

Re: Do androids dream of electric sheep again?

"And yet I can't help wondering if it;s not cheaper to retain existing customers"

I don't know if it still happens but I used to see motivational posters in offices about it being cheaper to keep an existing customer than to win a new one. The trouble with so many top managements is the view that what applies to the plebs doesn't apply to them and it's their decisions which determine whether it's possible to retain customers.

Re: Do androids dream of electric sheep again?

"try the forums that also run where unpaid other customers are expected to help you."

I can't help feeling that these must be very open to being gamed. Imagine a query starts off "I just bought an Acme Squidifier MkII..." and that's pounced on with "Well, that's your mistake right there. You should have bought Superbo's model instead." Is that genuine advice, if not actual help, form another customer or one of Superbo's PR staff?

If your employer prefers this form os customer support please feel free to point out this possibility.

Re: Chat bots: we've already got our AIs, now we need something better

One difference is that the human mind can, if it so wishes, start to think for itself, evaluate the various sources and, therefore, the information it's obtained from them and form its own opinion.

Re: Shotgun...

"These do terrible things to your cabbages."

Cheep slugs are even worse.

Re: They absorb any old shit you feed into them

I've certainly encountered customer disservice agents who, in the days before chatbots, were probably human but would have failed the Turing test.

Password recovery from beyond the grave

Re: Ouija Board

The ouija board only delivers one letter at a time.

Re: Write them down...

It's not going to be the Death Recovery Plan.

Re: Legal issues

"was told, not unreasonably, that they couldn't just take my word for it over the phone"

So far so good...

"but that as I had stated she was dead my LPA was no longer valid"

So they were taking your word for it.

Re: Legal issues

"Wouldn't life be dull if English was such a tightly controlled language that there was only ever one correct way to say something?"

We'd have to start borrowing phrases from French.

Re: Not happened to me, but

Snowdonia?

That must have been expensive for the location shots. They didn't normally go so far from Pinewood.

Re: R.I.P.

You could vary it - "What if so-and-so is fired and marched out of the building?"

As to being in the same plane, travelling in the same car is as likely a risk.

Re: Talking of the DR plan in the safe ...

"and only they will know"

Sitting around in an office in court one day, waiting to be called as a witness I noticed one of the police witnesses, equally bored, twiddle the combination lock to open the office key safe, just for something to do.

Re: Not happened to me, but

What's written on the bank cards will be the first step. Then follow transfers between those accounts and any others. Just take care not to cremate the cards with the deceased.

Re: The Real Hero of the Story

The instruction may just have been "Give this to Mark" and this was the first opportunity.

Re: Legal issues

And the attorney and executor may have quite different responsibilities. For instance the attorney might be trying to keep creditors at bay while the executor's duty will include realising the maximum value of the estate to ensure creditors are paid.

Re: Legal issues

The reason the LPOA stops on decease is that it's no longer needed. The executor takes over.

You won't have purchased any music on line. You'll have purchase the personal right to listen to it. Online storage is another matter (depending on the T&Cs) and this would be dealt with by ensuring the executor has the passwords.

Microsoft readies Windows Autopatch to free admins from dealing with its fixes

I wonder if, in the future, there'll be an annual commemoration of "The Day The Desktops Died" when a rolled out auto-update bricked every Windows machine on the planet, other those kept resolutely off-net.

Will optics ever replace copper interconnects? We asked this silicon photonics startup

Re: "using air rather than glass the light is travelling faster"

Agreed. However I intended to reply to Richard's comment on fragility and the difficulty of making pluggable connections (USB10?). If you're looking for short range optical connections it might be the way to go.

Just thinking idly for a moment... For short range do you need any fragile connections?

I can seen what's on my screen here with no fibre optics getting in the way and, as Pete implies, using air rather than glass the light is travelling faster. A broadcast or, at best loosely aimed set of transmitters and receivers would do just as well.

At first sight this is OK if there are only a pair of end points trying to communicate in this way, otherwise there would be conflicts. But we already have the technology to deal with such conflicts - CSMA/CD. Optical Ethernet.

UK Home Office signs order to extradite Julian Assange to US

Re: My advice for Biden

UK with an extradition treaty with the US, Sweden not? It looks more likely he was just avoiding the most immediate problem without thinking long term.

Re: While ya'll

"Skips bail losing 1 million quid in the process"

Not his million, of course. That must have disappointed some of his better off supporters. (Wasn't it more like £240,000, however?)

Re: Appeal

Perhaps you'll be a witness for the appeal. As things stand before the UK courts an assurance has been given and, without proof that it will be broken, that must be accepted. If it is broken it will result in a huge row, very likely be the basis for getting such charges thrown out of court in the US and make any further extraditions that much more difficult.

Adobe lowers 2022 forecast, blames Ukraine war, strong dollar

Re: Blame

Even for subscribers, when times are hard they'll start asking how many seats they really need.

Cookie consent crumbles under fresh UK data law proposals

Give sites the option of consent or do not track with a mandatory fine 1% of global turnover for every user tracked.

SpaceX staff condemn Musk's behavior in open letter

Re: I'm split

"And the MBA can - if well trained - be fabulous, by literally leaving the creative / engineering side to get on with it, but making sure they're not too wild. "

This applies to both of them.

EV battery can reach full charge in 'less than 10 minutes'

Re: Full charge in 10 minutes?

About half my annual mileage is done within a few miles of home. The other half is done on holiday over a couple of weeks per year. I could easily live with an EV charged at home for the first half. For the second I'd need to have confidence in an infrastructure that would enable me to find and use a charger as conveniently as a normal petrol station. If we're talking about a 20 to 30 minute charge at a service station then it means that almost every place in the car park would need a charger so as to be sure of finding one. If we're talking about fast chargers at "filling stations" then we need a similar network to those currently selling petrol. That's the sort of infrastructure that's needed.

Re: Full charge in 10 minutes?

In this rural area there are many houses which have no off-road parking. There is no possibility of them being able to provide home charging. Can people charge them at work? That means a charging point at every car parking space because the driver would need assurance that a charger would be available and first come first served isn't going to work if, say 10% of spaces have chargers. And that would not be off-peak charging.

Re: Full charge in 10 minutes?

The essence of a battery swap scheme isn't the battery, it's the charge. You're buying so much charge. The battery is just the container and is owned by the business that sells the charge. Obviously one of the requirements for making such a scheme work would be a suitably accurate means of measuring the charge - both what's left in the battery that's swapped out as well as what's in the battery that's swapped in. The cost of the battery gets split across the many times it will be used during its life.

Re: Waiting for AA format

And the crosshead screw holding in place needs a smaller screwdriver than you've ever seen.

Look to insects if you want to build tiny AI robots that are actually smart

Re: The largest multicellular organisms on earth.

"The six-legged creatures are the largest and most diverse multi-cellular organisms on Earth."

If you're counting the entire colony as a single organism it has a lot more than six legs. If you're counting the individual colony members as organisms then the size is very strictly limited to the maximum that an insect's respiratory system can support.

Re: Memo to developers:

AFAICS this isn't what the roboticists are interested in. They seem more interested in the apparently intelligent behaviour that arises from the combined activities of social insects. The units might be cheap but to achieve the results you'd need a lot of them, all doomed to end up as yet more electronic landfill.

Bill Gates says NFTs '100% based on greater fool theory' amid crypto cataclysm

Re: He’s right.

The way things are going for them he's probably the least of their worries.

A word of reassurance to Bitcoin holders. Losing 30% of Monday's value in a week is OK. It can lose 30% on next Monday's value next week and keep on doing that for ever and still end each week with 70% of what it started the week with.

Re: NFTs have no intrinsic value whatsoever, but have sold for multiple millions.

If you can get a fool to believe it and part money for it it has value. That fool can even make a profit if he can find a greater fool.

Musk can't tweet about Tesla without lawyer approval – and he's still fighting to end that

Re: Potentially an interesting legal case

The 2nd amendment, AKA the right to get shot.

Re: He needs HMG governments lawyers on the case

If HMG were able to disappear in a puff of paradox it would already have done so. The entire Brexit/Good Friday Agreement/maintain the Union situation was paradoxical. It was a "pick any two" situation.

Re: Potentially an interesting legal case

There's an old saying that my right to extend my fist stops just short of your nose. In other words, we do not live in some ideal environment where individual actions have no consequences. We must consider those consequences. I might have a right to extend my fist, you have a right not to be punched in the nose. The limitation on my right is my responsibility to respect yours. Note that word: responsibility. There are no rights without responsibilities. They are opposite sides of the same coin. Our concept of "rights" is essentially one of mutual respect, our laws are simply a delineation of where those rights and responsibilities lie.

One of the SEC's responsibilities is to prevent the share-buying public's rights not to be misled, either deliberately or accidentally, by what's said by people with inside information or decision making powers in the companies whose shares they might buy or own. They do that by placing a responsibility on the people in that position not to make misleading statements, a responsibility that comes with the right to be in that position.

In this particular case Musk's tweets, because of his position in Tesla etc. can induce individuals to spend money in the belief that he will do what he says and those individuals then find themselves out of pocket. His indulgence in what he considers free speech infringes the rights of others. The SEC is trying to prevent damage he causes.

If, of course, he were to completely leave the management of the companies and divest himself of his significant holdings then his tweets would carry no more significance than those of the man in the Clapham Omnibus. Assuming he does not wish to travel in the Clapham Omnibus but to retain his rights to occupy those positions and hold those shares then he needs to respect others' rights and exercise his responsibilities. The SEC's settlement required him to respect those rights. There's no reason to think that his statements will have any less effect now and, therefore, no reason to think that his responsibilities have disappeared.

My alternative suggestion above was that if he wants to keep his rights to tweet whatever he thinks as he thinks and maintain his other rights in regard to the companies then there should be a mechanism whereby he takes personal responsibilities for any damage he causes. I wonder if he would consider that a fair deal.

Re: Advice from Twitter?

There is, of course, the argument that the gene pool is already too large.

Swap the requirement for one that appoints an arbitration panel to decide the compensation he has to pay to anyone who loses money as a result of his Twitter powered manipulation of share prices. No lawyers involved because the agreement would be to pay what the panel decided so he wouldn't be able to dispute it. No legal fees, therefore, for the claimants; just put the claims to the panel Then the SEC shouldn't be concerned that his tweets affect the share price because the only person losing money would be himself.

It would be a reminder to him of the difference between free as in speech and free as in beer.

Businesses brace for quantum computing disruption by end of decade

And what is the basis for these business leaders and executives' beliefs? Deep technical knowledge and judgement or FOMO?'

End-of-life smartphone? Penguins at postmarketOS aim to revive it

Re: 53.6 million tonnes of e-waste

What "we" need is a financial market that doesn't expect umpteen percent growth per year.

Teeth marks yield clue to widespread internet outage in Canada

Lodge a complaint against it.

Re: Emergency credit?

Or just carry some cash for emergencies.

Former US state agency CIO, IT exec plead guilty to bribery and extortion scheme

Re: Americans Are Big On Sentencing

Those are maximum terms for the offences, not necessarily what the court will hand out.

Open source 'Office' options keep Microsoft running faster than ever

Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. You don't say what you find objectionable about LO's layout but personally I find that it can use the same icon set (Oxygen) as almost every other application on the laptop, it's the one I've used for years and therefore it makes UIs that use it unobtrusive which is a desirable characteristic. I don't want an eye-rattling UI.

Oddly enough I spend scarcely any time at the web site except when there's a new version to download.