Posts by Doctor Syntax

UK.gov: We're not regulating driverless vehicles until others do

Re: Hmm...

"If others regulate it out of existence that is good news for us as the industry will find it cheaper to do it here"

Not so good for those who become collateral damage of the testing process. There's certainly one regulation that needs to be in place: anyone testing on public roads should put up money in escrow to cover injuries. It should not be necessary for anyone injured or has property damaged or the family of anyone killed to have to sue for compensation. And once the funds in escrow run out testing stops until they're either replaced.

"new laws forcing petrol station operators to install hydrogen fuel pumps."

Nasty stuff to keep where it should be, hydrogen. Wait for the backlash the first time one of these goes up.

'Every little helps'... unless you want email: Tesco to kill free service

"Presumably you will have to buy your own domain"

That's the best solution. It makes your domain hosting independent of ISP. You're free to change either as it suits you.

Re: Damn

"Buy yourself a domain name and have the domain name registrar host it. Set it to redirect mail to whoever provides your mail service and tell your friends to send e-mail via your domain name."

Select a UK/EU registrar who includes a paid for email hosting package. Don't rely on a free as in you are the product service.

2001 set the standard for the next 50 years of hard (and some soft) sci-fi

"A film that ran at such a resolutely languid pace would last less than a week in a modern multiplex."

I saw it, well, bits of it, on TV once. My impression was that it was lasting more than a week. I suppose I'm just not a SciFi fan.

Here's the list of Chinese kit facing extra US import tariffs: Hard disk drives, optic fiber, PCB making equipment, etc

"low value items (semiconductor and electronics parts esp) that will still be cheap enough that the tariff will be paid and the US Govt gets extra cash."

Not necessarily unless the tariff also applies to the same parts in finished products. It makes home produced goods (even) less competitive with imports. Adding tariffs on production equipment pushes that cost up still further.

What's silent but violent and costs $250m? Yes, it's Lockheed Martin's super-quiet, supersonic X-plane for NASA

Damn keyboard. First it was the space bar. Then it was the n which seems to have fixed itself. Now it's errm the key betweeny and i. And damn again, there goes the space bar.

I'm sure an AI headline writer would have come up with "Silent by deadly" or isn't that an expression that crosses the pond?

Hooo boy, Commvault, your activist investor is not a happy chappy

"Go in, change out the board, hollow out the company, get a short term profit, and get out before the company collapses."

Sooner or later the victims' customers will get the message and take their business elsewhere pre-emptively so the company collapses before they can get out.

If Elliott are complaining they must be doing something right.

Do(ug)h! Half-baked security at Panera Bread spills customer data

"eight months after initially alerting the bread biz, Houlihan finally managed to get the culinary company to close its data buffet on Monday by publishing evidence of his findings on Pastebin and alerting the media."

Experience is a dear teacher but there are those who will learn by no other.

Law's changed, now cough up: Uncle Sam serves Microsoft fresh warrant for Irish emails

Re: The "It's Not Cloudy In The Cayman Islands" Work-Around for the CLOUD Act

"Hand the 'Key Encryption Keys' over to an external person-in-trust."

This is vaguely what happens in MS's German setup. I haven't read of them doing that elsewhere. I'd have thought they'd have rolled that out everywhere else in the EU starting in Ireland.

Or go a bit more drastic.

1. Have non-US citizens set up a company in a privacy-favouring country.

2. Hand over to the new comapny the the operation of the non-US DCs as a franchise operation with strict contract conditions forbidding MS any access that would break local laws.

3. Separate off US sales and operations as a local US franchise in the same way. Likewise, separate any other stuff such as development that they want to stay in the US into a local company that provides such services under contract.

4. The non-US company takes over Microsoft Corporation on a share exchange. In effect the former MS shareholders become the shareholders of the new corporation which holds all MS's IP etc, which is listed on a non-US stock exchange and which isn't subject to US legislation and doesn't pay US taxes. Only the rump businesses in the US are subject to US law and taxes. Any MS officers who don't want to move overseas can become officers of the rump businesses; the fees paid by the non-US MS can cover their pay but they don't get to order about the new non-US business and can't be used by the US to coerce that business.

5. Other US corporations look at the arrangements, realise it's the way to do business with the world at large and follow suit.

6. Nice little tech industry you had there, US. Pity something nasty happened to it.

"or somehow try to just get away with flaunting the GDPR?"

Do you mean wave it?

"So long as US businesses have the Irish government on a short leash, courtesy of the liberal application of tax laws"

Well, this allows the EU to impose what's effectively a 4% global turnover tax on US companies. That probably far exceeds anything they'd have taken via a with-holding tax on EU turnover.

Re: "They should have called it the : Amuricah World Police F*ck Yeah ! Act..."

"Don't deal with American companies if you don't want your users to sue you and your directors to go to jail"

Or be fined board-visible amounts.

Why a merged Apple OS is one mash-up too far

Re: re not such a big deal

"given the difficulties that Canonical trying to make a new Top layer/UI had"

As far as I could make out from Unity they were trying to make the same sort of one-size-fits-all Frankeninterface as W8.

OTOH it's perfectly possible to have a choice of KDE/Gnome/Mate/XFCE/whatever at login time. Not, not install time or boot time, login. That's interchangeability.

One of the features of a Unix-style OS is that it's layered with well defined interfaces between layers. It's not as big a deal with such an OS to change the top layer, the UI, as it would be if it were built as a monolithic whole.

Linux 4.16 arrives, keeps melting Meltdown, preps to axe eight CPUs

Re: And so fairwell blackfin, cris, frv, m32r, metag, mn10300, score, and tile.

"One wonders why Linux was ever ported to them in the first place."

They may be - or may have been - employed in embedded systems where the firmware was Linux but which hasn't been updated. If the vendors are still shipping Linux 2.x with a GCC that's not been updated in the last 10 years or more there's no likelihood that anyone's going to scream because it's been dropped from 4.x If in future they really want to skip to current kernels they're going to have to do a lot of work on compilers first.

One solution to wreck privacy-hating websites: Flood them with bogus info using browser tools

"Sounds analogous to the parcelling of bad risk loans that led to the 2008 financial meltdown."

By and large the selling of "good" data is analogous to that. If you buy a washing machine and get sold on as someone likely to buy washing machines the buyer is getting a worthless product. Certainly I've dealt with a car dealer who believes that if I buy a brand new car I'm in the market to buy another a couple of months later.

Ironically junk data is likely to be better: If you get sold on as someone likely to buy a washing machine because you bought a pair of shoes at least there's zero correlation rather than a negative one.

I doubt the businesses would care. They may be getting nothing but noise but they'd still package it as good data and sell it on to their customers who I seriously doubt would know any better. If the ultimate punters, advertisers, are happy to push stuff that you've just bought and aren't likely to buy again then they're not going to be put off by data pointing to something else - it might even be more useful to them!

Just keep blocking the ads. That's what makes data, real or fake, worthless.

Indian comms satellite gives boffins back home the silent treatment

Re: It's actually mostly only shrug-worthy for the operator

"Satellites typically are fairly well insured against such things"

If you get a bad track record for such things the insurance premiums will go up, just like they do for 18 - 24 year-old drivers.

Tech’s big lie: Relations between capital and labor don't matter

Re: Where did it go wrong?

"They were the rich, the untouchable and unions were kinda seen after the 1980's as protectors of legacy and dying industries. Coupled with UK law attempting to blot out union power, why would you join a union?"

My experience of unions back then were that they were a nasty, collusive bunch pitting a smaller group, Civil Service scientists, against the larger, the general service grades. That's why I never subsequently joined a union.

Re: Where did it go wrong?

the crash in 2008 (which technically we haven't actually recovered from)

FTFY

"This can only change if workers in the tech sector face the reality of the situation, accepting that they are just workers, and need the protections of unionisation."

Not necessarily the only option for workers to get together.

There are enough stories here of contracts being shifted off-shore and failing for the sort of reasons the article outlines. The staff being dumped represent the necessary skills and have the necessary contacts to form their own company to either offer remedial services back to the company that dumped them when it runs into trouble or direct to the clients.

Wanna work for El Reg? Developers needed for headline-writing AI bots

Clearly something wrong here

Knowledge of the lyrics of Mary Poppins omitted from the requirements.

Magic Leap ships headsets at last, but you'll need a safe

Magic Leap

"the image jumped"

Maybe the clue's in the name.

Facebook exec extracts foot from mouth: We didn't really mean growth matters more than human life

"Now, none of us can turn back the clock, but we are all responsible for making sure the same kind of attack our democracy does not happen again,"

Translation 1: This kind of electoral interference didn't make us enough money. We'll charge a lot more next time.

Translation 2: We got in trouble for interfering with our elections. In future we restrict that to other peoples' elections.

Amazon warns you have 30 days before Music Storage files bloodbath

Re: Too expensive for Amazon

"and presumably the musiians end up with a few pennies too."

I fear you may be getting into fantasy land with this.

Happy 100th birthday to the Royal Air Force

"This allowed for more compact radar - particularly in submarine hunting planes."

The shorter wavelength was significant as well when looking for smaller targets such as snorkels.

"dropping our mail in the ocean rather than bother to come finds us."

If your address is incomplete what else did you expect. Is that my coat?

Autonomous vehicle claims are just a load of hot air… and here's why

Re: Tea anyone? In France not likely.

"he didn't mention you can only get UHT milk so tea will always taste akin to mild vomit despite the tea makers best efforts."

UHT milk not a problem for tea. Don't put milk in tea. It ruins both.

"What about hydrogen?"

A bit of an accident and it's also hot air but without the balloon.

"He steers by raising or lowering the balloon, so that it passes through different air currents moving in different directions."

It still needs an air current going in the direction the pilot wants to go, or at least sufficient variety of them to sum to that. If there aren't any the pilot can steer but not where he wants to go.

"That seems pretty close to me."

So long as they don't come close to me. Someone else can be their crash test dummy.

"In headlines."

I wondered if you'd slipped that one in deliberately to see if anyone noticed.

Here's one to make your toes curl: living in High Wycombe we used to get balloons floating over from a site used by a ballooning club somewhere further up the Hughenden valley. One day I looked up to see a balloonist who had dispensed with the basket. The pilot was sitting on a piece of board - essentially a swing seat. Nothing else. Just a swing seat.

"Yet another heap of well-meaning nonsense has been slid off a shovel onto my shoes this week"

What was that about insisting on active verbs?

Politicos whining about folks' data rights ought to start closer to home

"That's because the ICO has been, unsuccessfully, lobbying against a number of clauses the government has inserted into the Data Protection Bill (that's the one the government has been bragging about so much in recent days)."

With any luck the UK will be refused an adequacy finding under GDPR as a result of all this and there'll have to be some emergency legislation passed to strip out all the exceptions. If that happens let's also hope that real legislation is required, not one of these Henry VIII manoeuvres.

Europe dumps 300,000 UK-owned .EU domains into the Brexit bin

Re: Plenty of venom still

"Brexit is still a very sore point for some."

Not half as sore as it's going to get.

Re: Not EU? - Declare a new continent

"This is the first (and so far only) argument that I agree with and can believe for exiting."

OK, so what happens in an election following Brexit? You're presented with a ballot paper with a list of politicians' names on it. You have a choice of voting for one of them or not voting at all. Even if the general public chooses not to vote the politicians will vote for themselves and so will a few family or friends (or vote for one of the other politicians if they want to express personal animosities).

How does converting every constituency into a rotten borough vote all politicians out of office?

Re: I'm an European citizen and I hate Brexit and its perpetrators, ...

"I would have no hesitation to vote the same way again."

It hasn't actually happened yet, so at the moment you might say you'd have no hesitation.

What you might do in the future is a matter for conjecture.

Re: I'm an European citizen and I hate Brexit and its perpetrators, ...

"Our only hope is that this error will teach... a few important lessons regarding ... politicians giving easy solutions to complicated issues"

If that lesson wasn't learned generations ago - and it obviously wasn't - it never will be.

Re: Oh dear

"I suspect its not any where near as valuable as you think."

I suspect it's not the OP who thinks it's valuable, it's his bosses.

Re: Where are the Brexit fans?

"I didn't have a vote in the referendum, because I've lived outside the UK (in an EU country) for too long. I would have supported the leave vote if I could because one thing living outside the UK, in the EU, teaches you is that the EU is broken....Certainly Brexit is going to be a huge challenge, and the first few years after it are likely to be difficult for the UK."

Please tell us, are you going to stay living outside the UK in this broken EU or are you going to come back to face this huge challenge that those who think like you dumped on us?

"Stiil, I truly believe that it is an opportunity for the UK."

Surely, if you think it's that great an opportunity you'd have been on the first plane back.

Re: Where are the Brexit fans?

"The brexit fans are all here, but just dont want to engage in the remoaners petty bickering"

The Brexit fans are indeed here. They're here complaining about the consequences of what they voted for.

As these details - ESA a few days ago and now the .eu domain - come to light they complain. It wasn't logical to think that the UK would continue to fit into these entities after Brexit. It isn't even logical that one would wish to remain in them if one wishes to be out of the EU. It isn't even logical to want to have been in them in the first place if they didn't want to be in the EU. But nevertheless here they are, doing the one thing they know how: complaining about the EU even as the consequences of their previous complaints unfold before their eyes.

It was your idea. You voted for it. Stop complaining about getting what you voted for.

Brit Lords start peer-to-peer wrangling over regulating the internet

"In an ideal world we would have an elected upper house or one that was selected of people who have contributed to society in general or are specialist in various fields."

I'll settle for the latter.

In the past I've argued that whoever you vote for you still get a politician. Trump has shown us that not only is that not necessarily true but that when it isn't the result can be even worse.

Donald Trump jumps on anti-tech bandwagon, gets everything wrong

"You criticize KM on the basis of unspecified past articles without reference to anything we can use to check your own accusations accuracy."

And,of course, we can't check on consistency or accuracy sources of the A/C's previous posts.

User fired IT support company for a 'typo' that was actually a real word

Re: Validation Vs verification

"I don't think my wife would thank me"

That's a pretty strong argument. In fact, what you'd get would be a pretty strong argument.

Re: Dangers of OCR and spellcheckers

"They have done. They call them serifs"

What really puzzles me about OCR failings is the ability to read variable-pitch fonts just fine (or at least as fine as OCR can manage) and then fail completely on what I'd expect to be the easier option, monospaced typescript.

Re: If I wrote spill chuckers...

With all due respect -> I you suffer from acute Dunning-Kruger syndrome

Re: "Mangers feature prominently in the Christmas story"

"I thought it would might help to clarify that the same isn't as true on this side of the pond."

For extra clarity, the pond will be the one with the Isle of Man in it.