Posts by Doctor Syntax 33129 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"Sufficient fuel for a 500 mile journey in a car can be transferred into a tank in 5 to 6 minutes and the existing distribution network can be used to deliver it with very little modification with the costs of modification on the current providers (fuel companies) which are able to afford it now."
So very little modification is needed between handling a liquid and a compressed gas which is particularly good at finding its way out of almost any joint.
"As such parked EVs are ideal for storing intermittent solar and wind energy"
That assumes they're parked somewhere where they can be connected to the grid. And if they're so parked when there's a demand for power you'll find you can't get home. Any chance of walking to the filling station to get a Jerry can of leccy?
"My bet is the introduction of a mileage tax once electric cars are firmly ensconced."
And that will probably be in addition to duty and VAT on electricity and VED (once called the Road Fund but damn-all of that gets spent on roads these days). Don't expect the Treasury to just take once.
"We don't need to wait until every corner case across the planet is solved before deploying them."
Corner cases are the accident opportunities. What you're saying is that we don't need to wait until they can avoid accidents.
A data collection exercise like this won't learn much about accident avoidance most of the time. On the rare occasions when the driver avoids or fails to avoid an accident there is an opportunity to learn but how general will the learning be? Unless it occurs at an accident black-spot it'll probably be a unique set of circumstances - and if it is at a black-spot it would be better fed back into a redesign of the relevant bit of road.
"I still think the offence should be not properly de-identifying the data rather than taking advantage of that fact or atleast there should be an intent to cause harm requirement"
Let's say I have a record of things bought from me. I have a record that you bought a yellow-spotted whatsit, your address and paid from an account at Grip and Holdfast Bank. I delete all the names and addresses except for the post codes. I've deidentified the record of your purchase. By having the post code and bank details I can still verify a warranty claim you may make. If I don't retain sufficient for that I might reject any such claim. Short of such a claim I've no longer any idea of who bought what.
Someone else makes a list of people seen in possession of yellow-spotted whatsits and where they were seen. If they then come into possession of my records they could reidentify them by matching up with their own and deduce that you have an account at Grip and Holdfast.
Their reidentifications may not be 100% correct but those which are could be enough to cause trouble.
I've deidentified the record to the best of my ability, bearing in mind any future need I may have. The reidentification is entirely down to the person who matched up two sets of records. What, in your view, have I done wrong?
"So I can't delete the data I'm no longer using in case the subject in the future wants to raise a Subject Access Request to see the data that was being held on them."
It's not particularly difficult:
- You only collect what you need.
- You delete it when it becomes irrelevant.
- If someone demands to see what you hold about them you don't then delete it so you can say you don't have anything but if it was deleted as routine prior to the request then you're no longer holding it.
- If there's a demand to delete anything data you have to hold by law or still relevant to an ongoing transaction is exempt.
- You only delete what's feasible: you don't have to delete what's on the backup tapes but on a practical level you'll have to think about keep a copy of the deletion requests since the backup was taken so that you can re-delete it if the backup has to be restored.
"Linux, long lauded for it's security, is the OS of choice for IoT... and is suddenly a horrifying securing apocalypse waiting to happen."
Let's try and construct a physical world analogue of this.
You have a strongroom with reinforced concrete walls, triple locked steel doors - and the keys hanging on a hook beside the door.
The basic IoT problem is one of deployment - allowing the user to start the device functioning on the net without setting a strong password.
"After all, we're not customers of Equifax who can refuse to provide data for its servers – it just collects it all, one way or another, and sell it on to others."
The way in which it collects it needs to be looked at. If you as a data subject pass data to some company who then passes it on to Equifax then that company needs to be held liable. Either that or Equifax needs to be held liable in a UK court. I'd like to know what the ICO is doing about this. A quarter of the UK population is affected. Perhaps if everyone who gets one of these letters were to write to their MP to raise the matter in Parliament it might actually be borne on the Home Secs - both of them - that this privacy thing needs to be taken a bit more seriously.
"China who used N.Korea as a pawn but now fears the flood of refugees as people take the opportunity to run."
I'm surprised they haven't invited him for a state visit during which he'll suffer a sudden and fatal heart attack. That's the way it would have been tackled in the old days.
"This is a problem of design, or rather, a lack of design thinking with respect to the security and privacy of the individual."
The real problem here isn't the design. That's simply meeting the requirement. The problem is the individual users who choose to make public so many details of their lives and the requirement is to fulfil that choice. Or maybe the problem is the vendors who sell them on the idea.
"overpaid tosspots chasing a pigskin round a field."
The perpetrators of the petition want a word. They want to tell you the field isn't round.
Personally I think the sign should be changed to an image of an inflated porcine bladder in the interests of historical accuracy.
"Someones P45 is on the way I think."
Several one would hope. The whole chain of command that allows someone to set up sensitive stuff like this without someone else performing a sanity check.
It's all very well to make reassuring sounds about multiple layers of security waffle waffle. Having multiple layers isn't very useful if you hang up a set of keys on the front of the building. I think I'd like reassurance at a greater level of responsibility and understanding than a PR mouthpiece. These bankers handle my pension.
"You yourself are surely a better driver now than when you first got your license, and even more so than when you started to learn to drive. Self-driving cars will take much longer to learn than human drivers, and in the end might not be as good as the best human drivers, but all that is needed is that they are at least as good as the average human driver."
No. They need to be better than an experienced human driver. Why should such a driver hand over to the equivalent of a less experienced version of himself?
"Reproduction is not copying yourself."
What's this self that you'd be copying? Yourself today may look very much like yourself of yesterday or even of a few moments ago. But yourself is a dynamic object.
However still you may try to stay your heart pumps, blood circulates, sugars are broken down into simpler organic acids, oxidised, electrons pumped, adenosine phosphorylated, transported and dephosphorylated, your ribs and diaphragm move to pump air in and out of your lungs and that's only the basic respiration providing energy to the rest.
Over the slightly longer term hair grows slightly from day to day and gets lost :( skin grows and flakes of it are also lost. Internally cells die and their remnants scavenged to form new cells. Food is taken in, digested, used and waste excreted.
Germane to this thread, pulses pass through the nervous system.
You're not a static object that can be copied. Come to that, neither is something as apparently simple as a glass of water - an ice cube, maybe and the glass but a mass of fluid, no.
Nevertheless, living organisms have been reproducing new instances of these complex arrangements for a very long time now. We may not be able to characterise such chaotic entities in complete detail but, like every other species, we can reproduce without the need to of such characterisation.
"Not a bad idea per se, but why is the Attorney General's department in charge?"
I suppose that as the govt's chief law officer the AG can step in if nobody else does. The scheme has the merit of being able to ensure that everything essential is covered if the relevant departments can't be bothered or, worse, have been subject to regulatory capture.
"Maybe knowing which companies are subcontracted to work at These places could be useful (but even that seems a bit of a stretch). But knowing who has Access."
The thought does occur to me that, just possibly, access, in this context, might mean companies subcontracted to work there and in particular, outsourcers. Wouldn't that be a more practical interpretation as well as being essential to the plan of holding those with control responsible for security?
This is the second US case reported here recently where it's argued the leakage isn't damage unless some consequent harm falls on the data subject. In the EU the leakage itself is a reportable and punishable occurrence.
This different legal attitude in the US should in itself be sufficient to invalidate the Privacy Figleaf, model clauses and all the other claptrap thought up to allow our data to be shipped across the pond.
Unless they're held legally responsible for securing the data from all comers, empowered to do so and punished for failing no US company can be considered a fit guardian for PII from the EU.
" based on the contents of their commentary, never make programming blunders, are expert at all kinds of programming, and have a flawless knowledge of business execution as well."
On the contrary, we're well acquainted with what can go wrong. That's why at least some of us hope not to ever find our lives entrusted to autonomous road vehicles.
"There is such a thing as test-driven development, where you write a test, before you even write any code to make the program pass this test. And of course, all of these tests stay in the program, so that every time you make a change in the program, then you run these tests again to make sure that you haven't broken anything that was working before."
It's a solution to Brooks' definition problem: is the product defined by the document or an actual example? It can be defined by the tests instead. Brooks' example which posed the problem was the first shipped model of the 360 which left undocumented data in registers after an operation, developers started writing code that used that data so that future models had to behave in the same way; that wasn't intended. If the tests define the product then what the test says happens has to happen but anything the test doesn't cover has to be taken as undefined.
Which brings us to the problem of test-driven development for critical stuff: how do you know the set of tests is complete and correct?
"Shame they didn't learn that lesson and just started stuffing Firefox with unnecessary features instead."
You mean the product that became Seamonkey. That's my preferred option - all the bits I want in one box. I just keep Firefox around for the occasional job when I need a site that doesn't work with everything firmly bolted down in the way I have Seamonkey set up. And there are very few that pass the "need" threshold.
<e."It would have taken me about 30 seconds to figure out how to get big discounts on stuff from that store. Print my own bar-code labels!"
Which is exactly what happened and resulted in a number of prosecutions for fraud.</em>
I can vaguely remember, back in the days when price labels were human readable and the checkout operator had to key them in, being presented with a case of alleged attempted fraud. IIRC it was alleged a store detective had observed a customer trying to pick the top label off a can with multiple labels, presumably on the basis that the price had been marked up and the first label would have been cheaper. Carefully peeling off the top label I found the original price was higher. I never got called to court on that one.
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