Posts by Doctor Syntax 42496 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
Not necessarily. A name can be licenced to a franchisee along with other aspects. It's the least of the problems. The real criteria are the legal and technical ones that permit independence for the duration of the contract - a contract thatcan't be arbitrarily cut short.
The devil is in the detail.
"Subsidiaries" may be a loose translation from German or possibly German law puts subsidiaries further at arm's length that we might understand in the UK and, I suppose, the US. What I've said a number of times is that a franchise arrangement could fit the bill. The franchisee would have to be a locally constituted, owned and staffed company with the sort of arm's length arrangements described in TFA with no US citizens or AWS employees with hands on access, no strings on the use of the rented IP except at the termination date of the the franchise and no dependence on Amazon's infrastructure. It would be doable but a very thorough examination of all the legal and technical aspects would be needed before it could be trusted.
Storing is one thing, processing is another. Are companies using somebody else's computer solely for storage or are they doing processing there? If they are it has to be decrypted and, even if that's done on the fly, the key needs to be available. If the key is passed to the AWS site it can, if AWS are compelled to do so, be tapped off to enable them to decrypt the data.
A corporation's money belongs to the members of the corporation. The members are AKA "shareholders".. So shareholders attempt to claim compensation from themselves. They pay lawyers to do this on their behalf. They also pay lawyers to defend themselves against the claim.
If they win they pay themselves. If they lose they keep the money they'd have claimed. The lawyers get paid anyway.
I wonder who instigated this.
In case of the bank:
For card present purchases the ID is possession of the card or possession of the card plus PIN.
For online purchases It's knowledge of a few short character strings from the card plus possession of a mobile phone whose mobile number corresponds with whatever the bank has currently been persuaded to accept as the account holder;s.
For online access to the account it's a user account ID, password and usually some form of PIN, possibly not the same as the card PIN, plus mobile phone as above. If you're lucky it's also knowledge of the answers to some security questions which the wise customer will ensure don't correspond with readily researchable facts.
In the olden days it was a face the customer's branch staff recognised. Tell that to kids these days and they'll not believe you.
What is this identity thing anyway? Does it prove that you were that baby born to those parents on that date in that place on your birth certificate (which, by the way, is not proof of identity)? You only know because you were told that even if you were specifically told that. Does it prove that you are the person who received the qualifications on those certificates? (For some reason SWMBO seems to have included one of her sisters certificates along with her own - or at least a certificate in her sister's name.)
Just what does identity mean? I suspect any real ID scheme is going to founder as soon as it tries to work out an answer to that question.
"As of jan 2026 the ruling parties in UK/USA/EUc have all done numerous things they promised they wouldn't do when campaigning for office, not little things but major things."
Parties in government have to deal with reality - at least you hope they will although the US is conducting an experiment to test that. Parties campaigning make promises detached from reality.
"or you and your employer are crooks"
That's the whole issue. (Although it's worth asking - do you have anyone cleaning your windows, clearing your gutters or any other cash in hand type job? If so, do you deduct NI from their payment and if not how do you know it's paid?)
The idea of a digital check or a digital ID is that it will make enforcement easier. It won't unless enforcement are checking up but as the problem exists it's clear enforcement aren't checking up and if they're not checking up it doesn't make any difference whether ID is by some new system, NI or anything else.
Maybe another HMG U-turn is called for. The one about easing planning regulations. Make the public good part of the plannng criteria. Ai training centres would have a very tough hurdle to overcome. General cloud services? Maybe demonstrate that they couldn't be ransacked by extra-territorial legislation from another country or ordered to cease providing services to anyone except by order of a UK court.
"Customers whose data may have been accessed will be informed directly. We take the security of our customers' information seriously and regret any concern this incident may cause."
Statements like this should receive a double penalty and be liable for exemplary damages to those affected.
Media should onlyo publish them as part of an interview where they are questioned about the statement.
The real risk is that the contractors each get £9m, each deliver a prototype missile and somebody in government looks at them and says "We paid £9m each for those? Too dear. Cancel." without realising that the £9m went into much more than the bill of materials and fabrication of the actual missile. That sort of thing has been done before.
With the advantage that they can actually be tested against Russia by live firing without the UK doing the actual firing. If, when the whole thing gets washed up, Ukraine gets compensated with frozen Russian funds we bill Ukraine so the whole thing is paid for by Russia.
No, we just wonder what he'll sat tomorrow, next week or the week after. Or maybe he's assuming that all the oil that Venezuela as going to give him (or is it he's going to take) will provide the power, once the reluctant oil companies have ramped up production and refinement capacity.
No government has policies which are both coherent and linked to reality. His less so than most.
Don't forget Brownomics: tying interest rates to an inflation index that excluded cost of housing and ?wilfully ignoring the soaring house prices driven by the resulting cheap loans. And then going round upbraiding countries that didn't follow suit for being dumb. Nobody has tackled that since as the number of households who would have been in negative equity would have been catastrophic.
My experience was not being allowed to leave. I'd installed some reporting stuff I'd written on site in Italy and the system ?started crashing with bits of memory content being left in a lost&found directory. The software worked fine on my client's system back at base and I'd no information as to whether there were crashes before. They didn't want me to leave until it was working and (a) I was booked to leave that evening (b) I was running out of Lira and (c) I had a meeting lined up with a potential new client in England on the following Monday. OTOH it looked like a H/W problem. Fortunately they had a good run & I escaped. I later heard it was indeed a faulty memory module. Quite possibly the extra job just pushed the memory usage up to reach the area with the fault in it which hadn't been reached previously.
This raises an ineresting question. Say address w.x.y.z hosts a lot of legitimate customers' domains and one pirate site. An Italian media company instructs Cloudflare to stop resolving anything to w.x.y.z causing a drop in traffic to the legitimate sites. Who, then, is liable for the losses of those sites? A few lawsuits against the Italian media company might result in a search for a tchnically sensible solution.
Although the 68000 was used in consumer kit I think its main significance was its use in small Unix servers such as the NCR Tower. In that part of the market MIPS was also a competitor in those days. Together with the Z8000 they got Unix into small businesses well before the Intel stuff won out aided by the cost advantage of being able to use PC components for most of the functionality (apart from cards with multiple RS-232 ports, of course).
"They won't support Linux until there is enough demand"
Central and local government of the EU* countries adds up to a pretty substantial demand if the EU stops talking and starts acting. Consider the effect of the EU putting out a call for offers of S/W to run on Linux with the equivalent functionality of $NamedProductOfReluctantVendor for however however many seats that might be. Who do you think would be first in the queue? Very likely $ReluctantVendor offering a port of the the product.
* Yes, I'd like to see the UK do that as well but I despair of them even more than I despair of the EU.
"Unless a business has an ideological reason to prefer FLOSS, there's no real incentive to use it, except for if they already have a decent contingent of devs familiar with the tech."
Ideological? Avoiding the risk of being spied on or held hostage is ideological? I'd say it's a compellingly practical reason. Right now if Trump made a move on Greenland, one of the EU's members there's very little they could do by way of reaction except send a diplomatic protest. Maybe a strong diplomatic protest. Even a very strong diplomatic protest. But they would have no ability to treat him in the same way as Putin was treated when he invaded Ukraine, i.e. with sanctions.
Possibly. It may also have been due to having been buried fairly shallowly. There's no great depth of soil over the bedrock - trench digging is more akin to quarrying - so it may be that the cables are insufficiently protected from traffic damage. On the other hand the crew working on the repair seemed to regard it as a characteristic of the material.
