Posts by Doctor Syntax

Good news: NASA boffins spot closest near-Earth asteroid ever. Bad news: We never saw it coming. Good news: It's also really small

Re: Reputation

"Teslas on autopilot must miss things well over 32000 times per day but that almost never appears on the news."

Non Teslas drivenby humans miss things many, many more times than that. That's not on the news either.

Pass that Brit guy with the right-hand drive: UK looking into legalising automated lane-keeping systems by 2021

I think the article must have missed something out. I'm sure there'd be something in there about making the UK the world leading country for....

It's a government statement; hubris is mandatory.

Anti-5G-vaxx pressure group sues Zuckerberg, Facebook, fact checkers for daring to suggest it might be wrong

Re: Covid 5G

It's a very nicely planted one. When they present with symptoms and say they got it from 5G you don't medicate them (unless they demand bleach), you tell them to protect themselves with a tinfoil hat and self-isolate hide in a Faraday cage. Darwin rules!

Re: I don't understand

Signal transmitted: "You don't have a chance of winning"

Signal received "You have a chance of winning"

Signal remembered "You have every chance of winning"

"At least in this case people know how bad Coronoavirus can be."

I don't think we do - which adds more weight to your argument of course.

Research is just starting on the extent to which there can be long term damage to people who think they had it lightly. It's going to make assessing the overall consequence more difficult. HMG have just revised their death toll estimates by putting a 28 day limit in place having realised that under the previous methodology someone previously diagnosed but dying from a road accident would have been counted. But now it's looking possible that damage to various organs could contribute to death some years down the line.

Re: Idiots

Errrrm.

Re: @Jamesit ... @Mark 85 Tossing their toys about

They're being censured, not censored.

And vice versa/

Tricky things, rights. Really they're nothing more than pre-negotiated agreements as to how we all behave to each other.

One corollary of that is that they have to apply all round. So if X has the right to post that 5G caused Coronavirus-19 then Y has the right to post evidence that X's post was bollocks. X can't then argue that Y shouldn't have that right without arguing that they don't have it themselves.

Another corollary is that as soon as there are multiple rights is that there's a possibility of conflict and precedence is needed to sort them out. We usually put the right to life first so freedom of speech has to take a lower precedence.

Re: Idiots

"We have villages missing an idiot"

The perspective from out here in the villages is that we're being invaded by urban idiots.

This is barely indistinguishable from middle-ages peasants who didn't know where the supernatural ended and science started

FTFY

One of the consequences of Thalidomide, of course, is that clinical trials have become more rigorous. If things didn't move on in medicine and epidemiology we'd still be catching and dying from the plague from rat fleas, cholera from dirty water, smallpox from each other and dying from numerous bacterial infections.

"I've had Corona"

Was that diagnosed with a specific test* or was it just some unspecified upper respiratory tract infection?

Assuming you genuinely did have it how many (obviously unvaccinated) people did you pass it onto? How many more got it passed on indirectly? How many of those did you indirectly kill?

"I've had Corona" isn't a straightforward statement to make for anyone. Unless they isolated themselves before becoming infected they must realise that there's an ongoing chain of infections extending before them and that people could be dying from what they unwittingly passed on. I'd have expected that the one thing anyone in that position, who thinks the thing through and has any trace of conscience would support anything that breaks that chain.

* And if you don't trust science how would you know that the test was right? Or even that the virus exists?

The group wants ... Zuck, Facebook, et al "make a public retraction of their false statements."

Let's have that generalised - the loser makes a public retraction of their false statements.

Not now, Gartner. We've had enough of the future to last a lifetime: Meet 'Formative AI' and 'Algorithmic Trust'

" a flurry of technologies as yet unproven outside the lab"

Only outside?

SQLite maximum database size increased to 281TB – but will anyone need one that big?

Re: 281TB. Cant wait to index that so I can search it in less than a day.

What's your problem? Only 280 rows, they just have 1TB blobs in them and a 1 byte primary key (with nulls, of course).

Re: Bad Developers

When they're using unit tests a good approach would be if it's an aspect of behaviour that's not covered by a unit test don't rely on it*. So did the early unit tests specifically check for nulls being allowed in primaries?

* A consequence is that future unit tests shouldn't specifically contradict the specific expectation of an earlier test.

Re: Looks like I need to

It depends on how much of that 16Tb you need to access at any one time. If you're using most of it for swap you might have a point, of course.

"There are approximately 640 times more lines of code devoted to tests than there are in the database engine itself."

Who tests the testers?

With that degree of excess I'd hope that some of those LOC are there to test the tests of the engine and that some are there to test the tests of the tests...

Pretty wild that a malicious mailto: link might attach your secret keys and files from your PC to an outgoing message

Re: hah! paranoia pays off

Even the links which, at first glance, look kosher turn out to be subdomains hosted by somebody else.

Ex-Apple engineer lifts lid on Uncle Sam's top-secret plan to turn customized iPod into 'Geiger counter'

Re: I call BS

"a scintillation counter"

Point of information - gas proportional counter also does this. It was the first system in use in the QUB carbon dating lab. But in terms of volume and need for high voltages, not in this application.

Re: Supposition!

"An iPod wouldn't send data back to base in real time"

Maybe radio transmission that was the extra hardware. Apple guy suggests something quite irrelevant to actual project? Thank him nicely and carry on.

Re: Apple should launch this for the public.

OP didn't explain ammonium nitrate. That's only half of ANFO.

Re: Apple should launch this for the public.

"Fertilizer by a government building = worthy of investigation."

Bovine fertilizer in a government building = completely expected.

Trump backs Oracle as potential TikTok buyer

Another for the abuse of office writs piling up for the day after he steps down.

Linux kernel maintainers tear Paragon a new one after firm submits read-write NTFS driver in 27,000 lines of code

"let me build our half of the bridge" doesn't sound much like a flame-thrower approach.

Sun welcomes vampire dating website company: Arrgh! No! It burns! It buuurrrrnsss!

Re: vampires still exists

Well played, sir.

Re: Appearance et al...

"No. I'm sorry, I haven't the foggiest."

The better option is to call over to someone else "There's somebody here who's lost their memory. Do you know who they are?"

Re: Monkey on my back

It is. You got there first, dammit.

Re: Not me, but someone else

But satisfying.

Re: Not me, but someone else

"they took one look at this ruffian clutching a supermarket carrier bag"

One of the best - and truest - lines in LOTSW was along those lines. The scruffs were wandering through a car showroom. One salesman to another: "Shall I throw them out?" "Nay lad, round here they can look like that and be millionaires."

Re: Inappropriate garb

"almost an acknowledgment that your interview was just a pony show to get you in the door"

It is. Just like the CV is written to get past the gatekeepers in HR.

Re: Appropriate attire?

"Being both young and foolish I agreed, especially as it came with a 15% pay rise."

Nothing foolish about accepting a 15%rise. I trust you kept it after abandoning the suit.

Re: Appearance et al...

I suppose that's one occasion when "Do you know who I am?" really was appropriate.

Former HP CEO and Republican Meg Whitman – who split HP with mixed success – says Donald Trump can't run a business

"You wouldn't think she would want to draw attention to her miserable failure at HP."

Who says she failed? Everyone else,of course, but in her own mind there'd be no failure at all.

Re: China

his platform seems to be essentially "Vote for me, I'm not Trump"

To be fair, it's a line with a lot to recommend it.

I assume the shortened URL (a curse be upon all shortened URLs) was to something like this latest news of Dido Harding's relentless failing upwards https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-53813480

CenturyLink caught trying to steal customers despite promising court it wouldn’t, promises it won't do it again

Re: May be held in contempt of court in future

On seeing the headline I wondered that. From what I understand of the report it wasn't a court decision in the first place, just an agreement with a Govt department who was trusting enough to to put in that provision originally.

Perhaps the better option now would have been to just break it up without the option on the basis that now the conditions have been breached the benefits can't possibly exist. Apart from anything else it would terrify the others.

How to have a more positive 'outage experience' according to Microsoft: Please don't rely on the Azure Status page

Outages are "an unfortunate inevitability of the technology industry"

Outages are an inevitable consequence of that attitude.

Australian regulator slams Google ‘misinformation’ in pay-for-news-fight

Re: Nope

"both the local and BBC sites covered some of them them. Today neither of them does"

So the local paper doesn't have the Beeb as competition any more. If it wanted to invest in building up its local reporting it could do so.

I suspect the malaise of local press is more that it isn't local any more. Many of the local papers got bought up by national chains that had no local focus.

How would newspapers and websits manage without Streetview when they need a picture of Backwater Street, Ballygobackwards when something happens there and they want to print the story they got from Twitter?

Re: Nope

"local press particularly hard hit and virtually out of business in some parts of the UK. I don't believe that Google is the primary cause of this"

Quite.

Taking "press" literally the problem is delivery networks. Our local newspaper shop can't get kids to deliver to us any more and I'm not trailing all that way every day just to get a paper.

Online they totally disregarded GDPR with needing to provide 100+ opt-outs every time you went online, one of the many reasons why I have one browser set up in amnesiac mode.

Since then things have got worse as, with so many in the group their domain is $OLD_TITLElive.co.uk and, amid the mess that's now its UI, persists in wanting to throw at me local stories from all over the place except here.

Please stop hard-wiring AWS credentials in your code. Looking at you, uni COVID-19 track-and-test app makers

Re: Phone is not person

"If you want them to stay on campus for 14 weeks, put a guard on the gate."

Or just close the place down for lack of students.

Re: Just another example of why

It makes no difference if they are when senior management find it too expensive, too inconvenient or just too unnecessary.

"The AWS keys are no longer present in that version, Q3w3e3 said."

They may no longer be present but that in itself is no guarantee that the keys have been changed. Without Q3w3e3 or anyone else who'd copied them actually testing you'd just have to trust the company based on its past record.

UK.gov shakes hands on cloud agreement with 'non-cloud service provider' HPE

"The main rule about cloud club is that you talk about cloud club... a lot"

The other rule is that you don't talk about the CLOUD Act at all.

Whoa, no Huawei wares, Hua-wei, livin' on a prayer: US government says we've got to hold on to what we've got

Re: Stupid US

"Block all Microsoft and Oracle products from China! Oh no, whatever would they do without Microsoft or Oracle products!??"

No problem there. And as regards Windows in particular the Chinese already have that in hand with Deepin Linux.

I suppose when the US has no remnants of feet left they'll stop shooting at them.

From per-processor licensing to... per-follower? Oracle said to be in talks to buy TikTok’s US operations

"Why Oracle would want any part of TikTok is hard to understand."

FOMO.

What else do they have that's a recognised consumer brand?

Oh what a feeling: New Toyotas will upload data to AWS to help create custom insurance premiums based on driver behaviour

At about 7,000 miles per year I'll have to hope that our two current cars are enough to see us through to the end of our driving days.