Posts by Doctor Syntax 42407 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"But, as with so many other things around Brexit, the truth is that the UK cannot exist in the modern world as its own digital island and so will have to reach some kind of agreement with Europe, or face the risk of being cut off from the continent when it comes to sharing data."
Yes, but who's going to explain all that to the ERG.
Perhaps they shouldn't have kept Thunderbird onboard. There was some talk a while back of the possibility of it going into the Document Foundation as part of LibreOffice. That would have reduced the costs a bit. With Tbird, or even better, Seamonkey, Lirghtning and Lightbird all incorporated, maybe as optional extras, it would have beefed LibreOffice up into a fuller package.
"So if there are enough Linux world patches to fill a monthly roundup"
The point is that there aren't. A while back when we had HeartBleed etc there were a good few security patches and a lot of activity following the story you broke on Intel leakage. There are probably a lot of patches come through on bleeding edge distros but for the likes of Debian stable releases not much which suggests security patches are few and far between. Now does that mean that either (a) people have reverted to neglecting such things or (b) development practices have moved on and security has become part of the initial build? Whether or not you think there's scope for a story in there there's certainly scope for comment.
The clean room implementation still has to be an implementation of the API and it's the copyrightability of the API that's the issue.
Why is it an issue? Well, look at a C program. At the top you'll see a lot of #include statements. They're copying various files into your program. What are those files? They're parts of the system's API. The same thing is apt to apply in other languages.
Any program being compiled incorporates at least parts of the API(s) it's written against. To raise any form of copyright issue against those is very worrying for the way in which the entire software industry works which is why pretty well the entire set of big players in the software industry apart from the principles have weighted in with amicus briefs. You should at least consider the possibility that they know what they're doing in spending money on lawyers to do that.
"Not a huge problem for China which seems to regard copyright as yet another crazy round-eye concept that they must occasionally pretend to respect."
Not really. They're just taking a lesson from the round-eye US of the C19th.
"The UK government seems to change its mind regularly about whether it wants to stay aligned with the GDPR and other EU privacy regulation or not."
What a pity HMG hasn't come up with something like this: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2019/419/introduction/made
Make him an offer. Hand over the suspect phone along with his own private one. Make best efforts to crack both phones. If they succeed the contents of his phone get published for the world to see, this, of course, being the effect that success would ultimately have one everyone else's phone. If he doesn't like the deal he shouldn't inflict it on everyone else and anyway he doesn't have anything to hide, does he? Does he?
Yup. The initial assumption with carbon dating was that the constant cosmic ray flux would lead to a constant level of carbon 14 in the atmosphere. Then it was realised that the constant wasn't and that plus other factors resulted in variations so now we have calibrations from dendro samples.
In my case there's a W7 Starter edition on a little dual boot net-top. As of yesterday it had 4 updates that failed to install (5 really but one seems to be the one that warns of doom and EoL so I hid that). I'm not really persuaded that, even with best efforts to keep it updated, a current Windows box can be kept secure. Fortunately neither that nor the W2K VM are going to be used on the net.
I think that's what Linus wants to do. But it's hard for him to express this without the use of profanity... do this without contacting and getting the approval of all past kernel contributors including those who have experienced their own kernel panic and gone to that great dump partition in the sky.
FTFY
A database with a maximum record size even within sight of a feasible row size? Shudder.
But there's a lesson here for (Fr)agile development. Changing your code may be easy* but changing data is a different matter. If your data is doing the heavy lifting for a business there'll quite quickly be a lot of it and you'd better hope there's a window of time long enough for all your changes.
There's no substitute for getting the database design good enough to last for a long time and that means up-front design.
* Relatively depending on how well your automated testing works.
It used to be the case that your accounts system would have a postal address for a supplier, probably with some control management procedures to cover set-up and changes. Payments were made by printing out a piece of paper and posting it to that address. The supplier took the piece of paper to their bank to arrange for a credit transfer.
Of course this was far too cumbersome to continue into the C21st. We need something much slicker, otherwise we'd be taking the bread out of the mouths of children of fraudsters like this. That would be unacceptable.
"Check Steve Lehto on YouTube for commentary on that one."
Actually, I'd rather check the text. It's at https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:31996L0009&from=EN but the summary is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_Directive
"The bigger problem with mega cities is they are just too 'ing dense. Most people don't want to live in them so they find a house or flat in the burbs and commute."
Those are the second and third order problems. The first order problem is that they're too big in terms of both population and the volume of business being conducted in them. Distribute the business to smaller cities which need a smaller population, less density and less commuting.
There may, of course, be a zero order problem of too many people but we seem well overdue for a pandemic which could take care of that.
"it wouldn't be too much to ask the Boeing be broken up and sold off"
I can imagine something of that sort happening. The US would want to preserve the armaments business. If the loss of reputation on the passenger side were to put that at risk then breaking it up might follow PDQ.
