Posts by Doctor Syntax 40471 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
" if Alice hands letters to Bob, Bob reads and then burns them, they cannot be compelled to supply the information lost surely?"
It doesn't work like that. Alice hands the letters to the gummint. The gummint reads them, makes a copy, decides whether to hand them on. If they decide to hand them on they do, Bob reads them and burns them. Gummint keeps its copy.
"Bereavement, redundancy, bankruptcy, terminal illness, domestic abuse victim, rape victim, marital troubles, criminal convictions to name the ones I can remember from my argument with the MP."
You asked her the wrong things. You should have asked her for her bank, Amazon, eBay etc details and passwords. And been prepared to explain why in words of one syllable or less.
"hese companies spend millions on ML systems research to mine all that juicy data to be able to predict the next big thing we the plebs will want."
And get it wrong.
Not that it makes any difference to them. They sell the results to their mug customers, the advertisers, who promptly pass on the costs to us, their (the advertisers') customers.
"If you have trouble understanding the difference between non-compliance and permission, ask a grown up for assistance."
If you have difficulty understanding the difference between opt-in and opt-out, ask a grown up for assistance.
Likewise if you have trouble understanding "Avoid making consent to processing a precondition of a service" ( https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general-data-protection-regulation-gdpr/lawful-basis-for-processing/consent/ ) ask a grown up for assistance.
"The only reason anyone would want to keep it secret is if it's doing something it shouldn't be such as profiling by race."
A few other possibilities. One is that it's such a pile of crap that they wouldn't be able to sell it or those that bought it would want their money back. Alternatively, it's such a pile of crap that the victims would take them for everything they've got and more in damages. More likely it's another of those AI things where nobody knows how its arriving at conclusions so it's not so much they don't want to disclose anything, more a case of they can't.
When NI had the judge-only courts the judge had to give a reasoned account of how he came to his decsion (which, of course, is more than a jury has to do). If S/W were to be a tribunal of fact I'd expect failure to give a reasoned decision to be basis for appeal against conviction. I'd also be interested in how S/W instructed itself in matters of law; with a jury trial this is always done in open court and can be a basis of appeal on the grounds that the judge made an error in law.
If the S/W is determining sentence then I'd expect lack of explanation there to be the basis of an appeal against sentence.
"despite being techheads of the first order, we both insist on getting paper letters for appointments which we take with us to the actual appointment."
Despite? More likely because of.
We had the experience of turning up for an appointment of my wife's complete with letter and being told it had been moved to the previous day and we'd been notified (Oh no we hadn't) about 3 months previously.
"Cue my boss patiently trying to explain how SMTP works for an hour, before giving up and pointing out it's about as secure as a postcard."
And the irony is that in all probability the business's marketing department were paying some marketing company to spoof emails to customers in exactly this way.
It's high time email clients, as a default, would raise a conspicuous flag on messages that don't originate in the domain they purport to come from. Yes, it would make life difficult for marketing departments and the spammers they employ (I can scarcely contain my indifference) but it would also make life a little more difficult for malware flingers if their spoofing were to become exposed.
"against not just Oracle but also executives Safra Catz, Mark Hurd, Larry Ellison, Thomas Kurian, Ken Bond and Steve Miranda, citing allegations of fraud."
Suing the named execs I can understand. But, assuming they still hold shares, they are part owners of Oracle. Why are they suing themselves and their fellow (alleged) victims?
"“We’ve been trialling a new IT printing system and a number of mistakes were unfortunately not picked up before this letter was dispatched.”"
Translation 1: We didn't bother proof-reading the boilerplate.
Translation 2: Our proof reader was illiterate.
Translation 3. We told our proof reader they were just being negative and passed the boilerplate as correct.
"And a round of golf lasts how long?"
We had a putting green behind my hall of residence in London. I never did finish it. If I'd been able to stay I'd probably still be punting little, no longer white, balls backwards and forwards past those holes. So it could last well over 50 years.
Stupid game.
"The solution that a solicitor would charge for:
1) Jag modify the contract customers sign on taking on a vehicle: Customer consents to Jag letting selected third-parties such as subsequent owners of the vehicle have access to vehicle data"
The solicitor would need good public liability insurance. That tack would break the rules on opt-out.
The nearest to "off-road" they ever get is going up the bloody kerb.
Don't assume the only reason you need 4-wheel drive is to go off-road. In winter the road-clearing is so abysmal you need it if you live on a hill. And round here there are a lot of hills.
(There's also an argument that general road maintenance is so abysmal there isn't actually that much difference between on-road and off-road.)
"Quite possibly the intent, but the early creators of the web were not photographers or others who earn their living by the creation of copyrighted works."
No, but those who do make their living in that way should take the time to understand how it works before they use it.
"But he can get someone else to front one for him..."
From TFA (my emphasis) banned in July from directly or indirectly being involved. Getting someone to front for him becomes a criminal offence with time as a guest of HMQ as a distinct possibility. I suppose that would also apply to whoever did front for him if they did so knowingly.
I'm not saying he wouldn't do it but he would be heading into progressively deeper shit if he did.
"So the focus becomes almost entirely on things that are easy to measure."
That's by no means confined to teaching.
On the subject of measuring in general. I remember a long time ago an article in a motoring magazine about engine tuning. One approach was "if you can't measure it you don't have it". The other was "if you need to measure it you don't have it".
"They had 625 lines instead of 405. But required purchase of new TV and aerial."
The killer there was that UHF sets were on sale for a long time before VHF was turned off. That meant that there was a long time when the broadcasters were supporting two systems. The switch-over to digital was handled by having digital to analogue adapters available and also dual-standard receivers so that the analogue only sets could die a natural death without being unusable.
The TV analogy is also limited in application because on the whole in a household with multiple sets each one could go irretrievably TITSUP with out affecting the rest. But throw in a mixture of IPv4 printers in a domestic situation and the occasional box that absolutely has to run XP in a commercial situation and the TV analogy doesn't apply.
"It's impossible to do a completely seamless transition, because v4 is just not designed in a way that supports that,"
And given that there are several billion nodes out there on v4 don't be surprised that uptake of v6 isn't happening at all fast. As other comments have said, the time when the change should have been made was a long time ago. There are a huge number of people who have bought, or been sent by their ISP, a box, plugged it in and had everything just work because every single thing they have that connects to that box will use v4. Replace that new box for v6 and something will break - sod's law will ensure that. Nobody is going to want to handle all those support calls.
"I'm not sure why you mentioned NAT here, unless it was just simply because you misunderstood what NAT was doing for you."
I'd guess that what the OP was alluding to was that the NATed device can't be routed to so that anybody running round knocking on random IP addresses to see if they can find an open port won't be able to see such a device. If all addresses are routeable then that level of protection doesn't exist and you're left depending on the firewall; let's hope that that's properly configured at source and stays that way.
"The solution was to take IPV4 and make the packet size and address field larger"
The tricky bit of this is doing it in a way that lives with a lot of kit that doesn't know what to do with such a packet. There needs to be a way for your extended protocol to allow a node using it to be able to recognise that the node it's trying to talk to is plain old IPv4 only
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