Posts by Doctor Syntax 42414 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"Personally speaking I believe copyright laws should be strict; a grey area on that matter won't serve anyone."
The only thing worse than a grey area here is placing APIs under copyright.
There is a grey area in copyright and that's the idea of fair usage. The assumption which has been fundamental to S/W development in general, not just open source, is that use of the code that defines an API is fair use. If the line is drawn on the other side of that then part of almost every body of code are infringing copies of someone else's code. Oracle are probably as vulnerable as anyone else here: inter alia who owns the copyright to SQL?
This decision is dangerous to anyone in S/W development wherever the decision is binding. It's not too hard to envisage development driven out of the US altogether and any S/W sold into the US carrying a copyright surcharge.
"But 5% is not 10%"
Always allow for optimism in economic forecasts. As long as I can remember Treasury forecasts for annual growth a few years ahead were always at least twice those of the forecasts for the next few years. By the time those actual years were the next few years they'd fallen to next few years level.
"I'd need some considerable persuasion to be convinced that a £900 phone offered me a more-than-sixfold increase in utility."
The people who spend that much aren't looking for a six-fold increase in utility, they're looking for a six-fold increase in self-image.
The government will have this exemption confirmed in the act, by amending the GDPR
They can't. It's not exclusively their legislation and soon they'll have no input into any amendments (it's called taking back control). They'll also need to be judged to have equivalent legislation in order for a lot of the business UK companies will want to conduct with the EU.
and withdrawing from the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights
This would bring yet another problem with the Good Friday agreement.
"Then you get surprised that it can't jam every object in the universe into tight categories based on that training as well as a human who's been doing that for 30+ years constantly with a much higher connection of brain and intelligence and vision than anything the biggest supercomputer can even approach."
30+ years? The human brain develops that ability very quickly. It will also very quickly extrapolate from a picture to a real elephant or vice versa depending on which it's shown first. However it has very many generations of human and pre-human evolution shaping the recognition neuro-system responsible. And yet autonomous vehicle supporters don't see this as a problem.
"i.e. an algorithm that can identify four legs meeting a seat at right-angles, etc."
Before that you need algorithms that can identify legs and seats. You also need to take account for the fact that they don't usually meet the seat at right angles. A Windsor chair has splayed legs Sabre legs don't meet at right angles either. And as for cabriole legs....
"Users should be following the policy, and the policy should have the backing of senior management."
The only thing that would ensure such backing, short of a massive breach costing money for compensations and fines along with a loss of reputation, would be board level insistence. That insistence would need to be backed up with loss of bonuses and/or promotion as appropriate in the face of an audit report such as this.
"This was a bitter disappointment of an operating system that took us nowhere"
You have to look at context. The underpinnings were still MSDOS. I'd been using W3 with HP New Era on top of it and that was a distinct improvement, introducing a good few bits of what we now take for granted in GUI which weren't there before. A lot of that seems to have been incorporated into W95 but the scatter of files which held it together were rolled into the Registry. It also introduced some elements of HP VUE which became CDE but its single cascading menu was, in my view, a step in advance of that.
Its weakness, however, was that it didn't have anything Unix-like under it, nor even VMS-like along the lines of NT. This is maybe not too surprising given the minimal H/W requirement.
I think it's fair to say that the Registry is a confused and confusing structure. OTOH the Open Desktop stuff underlying the various Unix-like desktops follows on from the New-Era style of multiple files even more widely scattered through the file system.
"Globally, 4.6 per cent of respondents believed a colleague fell into the grey category, which rose in the UK to an alarming 7.9 per cent."
I'm sure most of us can think of at least one colleague or former colleague who could have done serious damage to a competitor had they tried to cooperate with them.
"But isn't it more expensive to launch the further you are away from the equator and hence why Ariane launches from French Guiana rather than anywhere in Europe?"
That depends on the orbit: it's true for equatorial orbits such as geostationary satellites. Navigation satellites are in polar orbit so one place is as good as another with a preference for there being uninhabited areas downrange where bits of rocket fall. The proposed spaceport in NW Scotland is fine for that as there's a lot of sea downrange.
"Remember all the products that were NTSC only because it just wasn’t feasible to make a PAL offering based on market size?"
Isn't the European market actually bigger than Never Twice Same Colour land? More likely marketing execs in the US don't even realise there are other countries out there let alone know what their standards are.
"Oddly, if you look at our history BEFORE we joined the EEC, it was a lot better."
You're looking at a time just after WWII - and really seeing a continuation of the inventiveness that engendered (radar etc.). After that the arts & PPE graduates took over and they didn't like these little men in brown coats with pens and screwdrivers in their top pockets.
"It's not how much the data is actually worth, it's how much the advertisers think it's worth. And you're talking about marketing people here."
Got it in one.
As I keep saying here, the only thing the advertising industry sells is advertising. "Targeting" data is part of that product and they keep finding mugs to buy it.
"corporate marketing"
It might be worse than that. The report on the Beeb suggests it could be the work of an activist investor who now has a seat on the board. Maybe the board decided the best way to deal with him was let him have his head and then when everyone was pointing and laughing at the result, give them a chance to fire him without comeback. (Ringing the BOFH for carpet & quicklime would finish the job nicely.)
"In around 10 - 20 or so years the UK will be wanting to rejoin, lots of hard exit people died off and young wanting to be in EU people out numbering the ones left."
My guess is that it'll be almost impossible to find anyone claiming admitting to vote Brexit in a far less time period than that. And I'm sure joining the Euro will be part of the price for that. I'm with Codejunky and the rest on the Euro not being a good thing but it's what they'll have brought on us.
