Posts by Doctor Syntax 42396 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"Her petty revenge not only created a huge security risk for the bank"
I think the security risk was created by whoever failed to revoke her access or maybe whoever failed to set up a procedure for doing so (according to TFA IT were only asked to revoke it, not told to do so). She only realised that risk. A risk is at least as likely to be the result of a failure to do something.
I think it's not so much party based as role based. They're acting like an opposition because they are in opposition. When the political pendulum swings the other way they'll regard such requirements as business as usual because they are business as usual for governments. Nothing changes except the colours government and opposition wear.
Sigh.
A violation is only a violation when the court says so. Nobody would dare take possession of a timetable to court because the result would be a not guilty, harsh words from the judge, very likely including the words "contempt of court" and further action for misfeasance in public office or malicious prosecution.
Perhaps you should also look up "de minimis".
OTOH gathering this information by Guntrader might not be such a ridiculous case.
We had statistical analysis machines with techniques such as cluster analysis at least back as far as the mid '60s. Back about 50 years ago I was helping an archaeology student with his honours project trying machine classification of bronze swords.
That sort of analysis could certainly give the exact reasons why it made its choices provided you could handle the volume of print-out. The real problem, now as with the bronze swords is what of the input data is meaningful and how should it be weighted. Measuring is hard if you want to do it accurately so people will measure what's possible, what's easiest, or just what they recognise as being measurable. These are not necessarily the things which are relevant or the subtle cues we use when we recognise things. And it seems things can be even worse when the machine is left to make its own decisions.
A few months ago I replaced a previous laptop with a new one as my daily driver. The old one have been bought with W10 but replaced with Linux. New I've shunted back in its original hard drive and reinstalled W10 from the reinstall medium.
My what a mess.
It was restored to - I think - autumn 2017. It repeatedly failed to run updates to what was effectively a virgin W10 install. And it persistently complains about a bad exe for one of the many cloud services it keeps trying to flog to me. Searching tells me that these are common afflictions and none of the advice given works for me nor, it seems, for many if not most of those who enquired in the past.
The UI is tamed a bit by unpinning every single live tile so I'm left with a menu that looks fairly sane except that it's strictly alphabetically rather than functionally organised. Even previous Windows versions were functional alhough memory is hazy as to the extent that they could be entirely customised in the way that KDE menus can be.
Updating by the expedient of downloading and installing what amounts to a rolled up service pack got over the stalled updates and left a few duplicated menu items and a few others I'd like to get rid of as well. Some can be uninstalled from the menu but others take me to the general purpose install/uninstall app of yesteryear that used to list all the installed programs so that I can use that to uninstall them - except that none of the non-unistallable programs are listed.
My what a mess. And people are prepared to pay for this.
"even the most radical GPL-Taliban want a good FPS-game from time to time"
Good to know I'm not a GPL-Taliban then because I couldn't give a stuff for games.
And it comes as a surprise to discover that an OS can't thrive on FOSS end-user applications alone. The one set of non-FOSS applications I do use - occasionally - is as much for nostalgia and familiarity from Unix days than anything else as most Linux users do actually use FOSS equivalents.
The fact that a KDE developer responded to her shows that it's not a matter of divisiveness, more a matter of what I'd call multiplicity. I view the multiplicity of Linux DEs as a strength, not as fragility. In fact many (?all) Gnome applications seem to work on KDE; the Gnome calculator is the one sitting on my KDE task bar. But it does seem to be a solution in search of a problem given that there's an existing site for Gnome apps.
Thanks to Tim and the article for links to the KDE site, BTW.
"I also recall being shown a very big laser printer that could eat reams of fanfold paper per minute"
The machines that printed the cheques were like at as well. And the MICR line was placed WRT the bottom LH corner, just for fun when the positioning of the print engine worked from the RH edge, requiring much wielding of a cheque gauge and micro-positioning.
Wowstick.
From Amazon: "Cordless Lithium-ion Charge"
There's the problem right there. At some point you're going to have to take it apart and then once more you're in the odd parts problem. I tell you, it's missing/extra small parts all the way down.
BTW on the subject of magnetic and LED lit gadgets there's loose screw picking up gadget. The LED shies through a little window which is built into the magnet. It picks up iron filings which cover the window and block the light. Nice idea in principle but once the it gets blocked it stays block. No way is the magnet going to release those filings.
"an increasingly geriatric BSA Bantam, ultimately stripping the engine for a gearshaft replacement"
Ours (dad's and eventually mine) were stripped and rebuilt more or less annually. We even had a small paint tin, carefully preserved, which was exactly the right size for compressing the clutch to get the cir-clip out. Dad was long-sighted and resisted getting specs for many years so never believed the rest of us could quite easily read the colours noted on the wiring diagram for the switch.
Years later, taking my MGB's head in to get the valve seats re-cut (the backfire through the carps eventually set the paper air-filter on fire, complicated by the fact my father-in-law was the passenger at the time) I noticed a bike propped up against the workshop wall. It looked familiar - a Banty - but unfamiliar. It took a little time to recognise it as one of the very early ones without a rear suspension.
"there's always a screw left over after reassembly"
This is not strictly true. The Universe conserves screws but as screws are quantum objects they don't always materialise in the place you expect. Your surplus screw is someone else's "Why are there not enough screws left?".
It's possible to argue, of course that that it's the holes which are affected - the reason you have a screw going spare is because the hole it should have fitted has reappeared in my laptop case. I'm not persuaded of this because the other consequence of this phenomenon is that the screws available for reassembly can be of correct number but not the same selection of lengths as the depths of holes. This is because the number of screws overall has been conserved but some of them have been exchanged with those from someone else's disassembled laptop.
"How about a case-insensitive file system?"
This is just a guess but I wonder if you know that was one of many things that Linux inherited by way of being Unix-like.
It's one of those things that's part of your way of thinking. For many of us case-insensitive file systems are a strange anomoly - why would you add the extra load onto all the file handling software to say nothing of remembering that Fred, fred and FRED are all the same when quite obviously they look different?
"As will many, probably almost all, parents. It's normal and one could argue that not having such photos would be abnormal."
Based on a sample of how many?
We certainly didn't take any photos of ours like that. I'm not aware of any other parents I know having done so. Maybe it's a generational thing.
"Every image which goes into an MS Office document/note/presentation is subject to the same kind of checks because the image is uploaded to Microsoft’s cloud"
Even if the PC is off-line?
Not that I wouldn't put it past them if they got the chance. As I recall from the early days of W10 their T&Cs were artfully worded so as not to exclude them from almost anything.
"The content warning is between child and parent,"
The announcement at https://www.apple.com/child-safety/ does indeed mention warning parents but it also says
CSAM detection will help Apple provide valuable information to law enforcement on collections of CSAM in iCloud Photos.
"if the government might intervene when it comes time to try and get your money out, by selling an asset."
Inadvertently you've put your finger on the problem. It's investors wanting to come in and make a big capital killing. If all investors think like that why should anyone want to buy the company to get their money out? The only ways to keep playing that game is the pyramid scheme - you borrow more money, load the company up with debt and sell on to someone who'll do the same and hope that you're not the one left holding it when the debt burden makes it collapse or, alternatively, strip the assets.
The only thing that makes it worth buying successfully is take ongoing income from trading profits - but in that case the sort of investment a government should encourage is one that creates the business to do just that in the first place. It may well be that that's what they actually do want to encourage. It generates employment - always something that helps get them re-elected. It contributes to GDP. It contributes to tax income. It's just that over the years governments of all colours have just let anything worthwhile be bought out, stripped and closed down.
" the licence costs are less of a problem than potential retraining costs"
Why do you think MS introduced the ribbon UI? No skin off their nose that it dumped a whole lot of retraining costs on their users but it built a wall round their product that they'd lost when they were obliged to turn their formats into a sort of open sort of standard.
My sister-in-law found she could no longer open a couple of Office docs. She emailed them to me. I opened them in LO, saved them back in MS format, emailed them back and she can now open them again. No updates to her Office suite that she's aware of.
