Posts by Doctor Syntax

The self-disconnecting switch: Ghost in the machine or just a desire to save some cash?

Re: Armoured cables no problem mate

I remember a case from about then. Not what you'd call a supermarket but a privately owned shop big enough to employ several staff. The owner couldn't have been keeping close enough watch on his accounts as it was either his accountant of bank who warned him. Surveillance cameras went in and worked out that several staff were working together. The cashier would wipe her hand along her thigh which looked innocent enough until you realised she'd palmed a note and the action rolled it up. The note was then deftly passed to another member of staff who just happened to walk by.

Re: Well, two switches maybe would have still filled half a rack?

As a precaution against bailiffs - add asset tags showing it belongs to someone else.

Re: How much?

"Steps, which we hasten to add, could lead to an unpleasant day for you."

Steps down which you might fall. Onto the roll of carpet.

Forcing us to get consent before selling browser histories violates our free speech, US ISPs claim

Re: Stop the Press

"If you think your country sees them any differently, you should probably take an economics course."

Economics? Try law, because that's where how a country sees companies is expressed. And one of the provision in UK law is that at least one director has to be a natural person. UK law distinguished between companies as persons and actual real human beings as persons. Your rhetoric might sound great but sometimes you have to look at facts.

Re: Stop the Press

Legislators do actually like to have someone on whom to come down like a ton of bricks.. UK company law, for example requires that at least one director is a natural person. I'd be very surprised that US legislation doesn't have that provision. The responsibilities of the directors under UK law include a requirement to act within the company's constitution and that is a set of documents registered with Companies House who aren't going to accept a declaration that the company is going to act outside that law, The legislation also makes reference to common law responsibilities. It also makes reference to offences being committed by the company and any officer in default. You'll also find other legislation putting officers of the company on the line, for instance the current DPA sticks closely to GDPR and does just that.

I've probably been on this planet longer than you and certainly long enough to have spent a decade or so as a company director. Whilst the above might not have been a day-to-day concern it was one to be kept in mind.

How public-spirited of these ISPs to draw their customers' attention to the fact they can't be trusted with those customers' data.

Re: Stop the Press

"Funnily enough it seems to be hard to send a company to jail if it breaks the law"

It's not hard to send its directors to jail. Surely even in the US they're obliged to see that the company conducts its business in accordance with the law.

Galileo got it wrong – official: Jupiter actually wet, not super-dry: 'No one would have guessed that water might be so variable across the planet'

Re: Really?

On Earth we can look at the distribution of land and sea in relation to the circulation of the atmosphere and see why the variation of water vapour arises from that combination. How do you see that variation arising on a gas giant from circulation alone?

Re: Dodgy analogy

As per your example: the mixed atmosphere on Earth is due to the fact that an almost (but thankfully not completely) negligible atmosphere is circulating over a large solid body with an irregular surface partly covered in water. But how does a gas giant come to be so irregular?

Researchers trick Tesla into massively breaking the speed limit by sticking a 2-inch piece of electrical tape on a sign

Re: Sigh.

"single track, with multiple blind, right-angle bends...The speed limit is NSL (60mph)"

Even more interesting I have a road like that - not actually single track but narrow. For a vehicle depending on this sign reading it would be NSL coming from one directions and 30mph from the other.

Now Internet Society told to halt controversial .org sale… by its own advisory council: 'You misread the community mindset around dot-org'

Re: Sniff of some cash

"you can be pretty sure that they've consulted their lawyers about that"

Who may well have told them pretty well what Kieran concluded but wrapped up in a lot more, very expensive words.

Among those pardoned by Trump this week: Software maker ex-CEO who admitted hacking into rivals' systems

Re: King Trump

The Lib-Dems' problem was that their supporters were largely protest voters. For them it wouldn't matter what the party's policies were, it just enabled them to wash decry whatever the government did because, left or right, they hadn't voted for it. When Clegg made the entirely responsible decision to go into a coalition they threw a collective wobbler because the party they'd voted for now had to deal with real situations and make real and hard choices.

Re: "now he’s not a federal felon because of the president"

That's the general idea of a pardon. Nothing new in that.

Re: King Trump

"The US and the UK are suffering from the same political nightmare"

Ultimately, the US's political nightmare is to combine Head of Government with Head of State. They have no excuse for that because by the time they became independent separating them more or less accomplished in Britain.

Re: Things just started to look better for Harvey Weinstein

Who's going to tell him?

I think you're over confident about modern states in general. All Trump seems to be doing is pushing the envelope a bit more and I fully expect others to follow.

It needs to be SOP everywhere that the moment a head of government leaves office an investigation starts to look for any criminal activity in their conduct in office and in the run up to it. Any offences should be pursued through the normal criminal courts, not by a political process such as impeachment. And, of course, attempts by the current govt to influence the investigation of the previous one will in turn be looked at.

The European Commission digital strategy wants to, er, take back control of citizens' data

Re: 5 year plan

And there was I reading into it things like the EU seting out to even up things in regard to the US giants (although excluding fiat seems to make that a non-starter) and generally doing bits to protect citizens and thinking "what a pity we've lost out on that". But then I rather suspect that that's the way Cummings and his glove puppets want it.

Don't use natwest.co.uk for online banking, Natwest bank tells baffled customer

Re: URL Shortener

"Why condition customers to think that such a practice is normal?"

For banks and building societies it's SOP to condition customers to think any dodgy practice is normal.

Re: So not nwolb.com then?

"Despite it obviously being the shitest domain they could've used."

You think that's shittier than a URL shortening service?

Larry Tesler cut and pasted from this mortal coil: That thing you just did? He probably invented it

Oh for those early, free-wheeling days of computing.

It gets worrying to see so many of one's own age group going.

Re: The AI Effect

"consciousness requires architecture flexibility"

I suspect massively parallel processing helps as well.

Re: Newton - MessagePad

In my case it would be magical.

When the air gap is the space between the ears: A natural gas plant let ransomware spread from office IT to ops

Re: Hmmm

No budget to maintain separated networks. Instant budget to clean up afterwards.

Assange lawyer: Trump offered WikiLeaker a pardon in exchange for denying Russia hacked Democrats' email

Re: Bollocks

"Obama/DNC are after him"

Ah, yes. The repeated extradition warrants when Obama was President. How well we all remember them. And how restrained the present administration has been to only issue one.

"Assange doesn't give up sources."

In this case he might. I think it would be reasonable for anyone visiting the blessed broom cupboard to assume that anything they said might be recorded and not for purposes of staff training.

And they said IoT was trash: Sheffield 'smart' bins to start screaming when they haven't been emptied for a fortnight

Re: Road maintenance in Shropshire.

Sometimes, however, there can be a little too much enthusiasm about filling things in. Away down the road there's a freshly laid patch or asphalt already peeling away. To reveal a slightly sunken manhole cover underneath.

Re: Something seems wonky in that sentence

I remember years ago some functionary from Sheffield bragging about bagging some new industrial project that was going to bring so many more jobs into the city. Then a couple of weeks later another moaning about traffic. Total disconnect.

Re: How about...?

"Milk floats usually travelled at roughly walking speed, just like a bin lorry."

When they're actually collecting, yes. But to and from the depot is another matter.

I went to a talk by a pathologist from Sheffield back in the '80s. His standard opening was "Greetings from the People's Republic of South Yorkshire".

Ring in the changes: Mandatory two-factor authentication, login alerts, targeted ads opt-out after punters voice privacy gripes

Re: "allow users to opt-out of sharing personal information"

If they want to do business in the EU and maintain that attitude they'd better add paying regular fines to their business plan.

Re: "personalized advertising can deliver a better customer experience."

Of course it does. Personalized to customer's choice. My choice is NONE.

Shipping is so insecure we could have driven off in an oil rig, says Pen Test Partners

Re: Doesn't matter how poor the excuse is

"the expense of an avoidable incident."

There's never a budget to prevent an incident but there's always a budget to mop up afterwards.

After reading their description I'm left with a vision of an oil rig slowly revolving to the tune of the Blue Danube, 2001-like.

Auf wiedersehen, pet: UK Deutsche Bank contractors plan to leave rather than take 25% pay cut for IR35 – report

As someone who has long been a salaried employee not been prepared to risk going into business in my own right I object to those who have been prepared being treated like businesses.

FTFY

"Like other companies across the UK, we are engaged with contractors to ensure we are prepared for IR35."

I.e. prepared to dump their contractors into it with predictable consequences.

Good news: Neural network says 11 asteroids thought to be harmless may hit Earth. Bad news: They are not due to arrive for hundreds of years

The orbital data aren't precise enough for prediction by calculation but you can still get a good result from a "how long is a piece of string approach". Really?

How the US-China trade war is felt stateside: Xilinx trims workforce after lucrative Huawei sales pipe blocked

Isn't it wonderful what happens when economic policy is driven by foresight that doesn't extend beyond the next tweet. Or referendum.

You set up an account just so you could post that garbage?

C'mon SPARCky, it's just an admin utility update. What could possibly go wrong?

Re: Just following instructions....

This whole "cloud" thing is just another name for service bureaus renting out centralized computing.

I'm waiting for someone to reinvent a PC (no, not a phone) to be followed by on-prem servers to be followed yet again by yet another name for bureau service.

We all know what not to do. The problem is that sometimes our fingers think they know better.

Re: As usual ...

"He still hasn't worked out how I know. Even if he does discover my edit, he would still have to discover the slight modification to a standard cron job that replaces my code every night "

Are you sure he doesn't know about el Reg? If he doesn't, by the time he's worked out what you've done he'll be up to speed.

25 years of Delphi and no Oracle in sight: Not a Visual Basic killer but hard to kill

"C got its name because it was the next letter in the alphabet after B"

But did it? There's another school of thought that says it was the next letter after B in BCPL. Because there was never a successor we never found out.

Re: "Thinking back to 2002-2005,"

"Their previous attempt to deliver a Linux tool failed too"

Kylix. Forget all the other reasons - it failed because it didn't work. IIRC it just ceased to work about the time the 2.6 kernel rolled in. Again IIRC there was some amended GPLed component in there but, of course, the amended source wasn't. And I remember trying to get some database driver code to compile which it insisted had syntax errors in but yet, oddly, compiled fine in Delphi. Then FPC and Lazarus came along and it no longer mattered whether Kylix was any good or not.

Re: "Pascal was a horrible language for real work"

"Don't know about the UCSD version, because I never used it."

An OS written in a high level interpreted language was pretty neat. Yes it compiled down to p-code but p-code was then interpreted.

I don't know how novel its UI features were but coming after cards on mainframe and CP/M (even CP/M with FORTRAN) they seemed pretty innovative. There was a ton of clever stuff in there.

Voatz of no confidence: MIT boffins eviscerate US election app, claim fiends could exploit flaws to derail democracy

Right now anyone wanting to derail democracy must be standing in a long queue.

Re: Some things just need to be done properly

But...but..but. It's so not 21st century.

Aw, look. The UK is still trying really hard to be the 'safest place to be online in the world'

Nutrient agar.

Bloke forks out £12m, hands over keys to tropical island to shoo away claims that his web marketing biz was a scam

To be fair, it was a business education, just not the one they were looking for.

Can AI-enhanced virtual sports presenters do the job? It's a big ask

"Somehow, Reuters persuaded its global sports editor Ossian Shine to help advance the date of his own redundancy by being the video-captured human in question."

If he's on for royalties it could be a smart move. "He" can report from a dozen different venues on the same day and he just picks up the money every week.