Posts by Doctor Syntax

Universal basic income is a great idea, which is also why it won't happen

Re: fast forward.

"The tax bands and rates will change so that for instance someone like me in a normal job doesn't get any benefit for the UBI even though I still get it (heck might even lose a little bit in tax)."

If you rely on extra tax on high incomes or large corporations to make it work, take a look around you. If X hours effort expended on rearranging tax affairs brings in more money than if it were expended on earning then that's what will happen and your hoped for taxation to fund it will be elusive. Should you manage to lose the benefits bureaucracy - IMV unlikely - you'll probably just redeploy it trying to collect taxes.

You might be able to find a new tax base in terms of taxing the output of machines on the basis that these are going to take over employment. Employers will just respond by continuing to employ low paid workers (will there be any justification for a NMW/LW with UBI?) and lock in low productivity still further.

Re: fast forward.

Additionally, if you set the UBI at sufficient rate (basically the most all of the welfare budget) then you can get rid of most all pensions and benefits so you can then remove the biggest and most bureaucratic department of our government

FTFY

I think you underestimate the ability of any bureaucracy to hang on undiminished. Even if you got rid of the entire pension and benefits system you'd probably find they'd need at least 10% more staff to handle UBI.

Re: fast forward.

"All of your hypotheticals apply equally to the current system."

Not equally. It's certainly possible to find families where nobody has worked for years and where education is ignored if not despised but they're a small minority and, however reluctantly, are supported by the rest. But what would happen if this were extended to the rest?

“A low UBI would leave in place means-tested benefits, but it could take a lot of households off various means-tested benefits and because the administrative cost of UBI would be very small the net effect would be a reduction in administrative costs,” [My emphasis]

Does he really believe that? As long as there were any means-tested benefits the entire administrative apparatus would still be in place. It's just the way things are done.

Your attention has value, personal cryptocurrency will advertise it

Re: This has been tried before

"> Users are required to complete a KYC (know your customer) process in order to withdraw BAT from the local browser."

There's only one thing they'd need to know about me: that I react adversely to ads and the only value in serving them to me is negative. How would they propose to move on from there?

This is the central problem with online advertising. People find it annoying. That's why they use adblockers. The value of an ad that's not seen is greater than one that is because the value of the one that is is negative.

AFAICS this is just another attempt to pull the wool over the advertisers' eyes and pretend that there's real value in shoving crap in the viewers' faces. Because once the advertisers realise they're being played for suckers by the advertising industry it's game over.

Re: Forgive me if I'm being slow

"As far as I can tell this is identical to the cycle involving BAT in every respect, except you don't need to worry about swapping real money to pretend money and back again."

Isn't going to happen. There's no mechanism for either 1 or 2 and even if there were the cycle would be more like

1) Advertiser pays viewer

2) Viewer pockets it

Re: Another BATty idea

"Pricing adverts already happens."

Not by their objectionableness to the viewer.

"That's how they end up on your browser."

No they don't.

Re: Forgive me if I'm being slow

"Or is there some arrangement where a website receives a proportion of the BAT paid to the end user which can then be exchanged for beer and pizza?"

From TFA: "Users gain the capacity to pay publishers directly for their content - in BAT."

I take it the proposed cycle is this:

1. Advertisers buy BATS for Real Money(TM) from Brave.

2 Brave holds the stock of BATs on behalf of the advertiser.

3. When the advertiser pushes an unwanted but nevertheless unblocked advert to the viewer it pays the viewer in BAT.

4. The user pays a publisher in BAT.

5. The publisher sells the BATs back to Brave for Real Money.

The slight snagette here is that Brave is supposed to be an adblocking browser. Presumably the twist is that the viewer buys the advertiser's BATs from Brave instead of being advertised at. The publisher gets paid, Brave gets paid twice and the adverts aren't seen. The advertiser actually gains from not pissing off potential customers but they'll not see it that way; they never do as they lack the requisite self-awareness.

Another BATty idea

But just thinking about this, how do we price the advert? So much per pixel? Animated GIFS cost more? Sound costs more? Video cost a huge amount more? Irrelevant ads cost more?

This could bring the advertisers, or at least the advertising industry, into even more disturbing (to them) contact with reality than ad-blockers. Their favourite tricks which they believe are most effective at grabbing my attention would be those I'd price most highly as they're most annoying. If the advertisers caught on that they were paying more to be disliked....

Your next laptop will feature 'CMF' technology

Re: Translation :

"It's worth investing a little bit in making something look and feel pleasant if you're going to be looking at it for that long."

If the cosmetics aren't somewhat anodyne the pleasantness of the look may depend on it being the latest model. Nothing dates faster than fashion. It's called planned obsolescence.

Re: Sopmething pretty for the ladies?

"if other people, some male, undoubtedly more female, want a splash of colour, a leopard skin pattern, snakeskin cover, what exactly is your worry?"

The worry is that externals become everything and internals don't matter. The price goes up to cover the cosmetics which are wrapped round an inadequate set of internals.

Once the stylists get their hands on things it ceases to be a case of form follows function; it becomes form over function and then style over function. Even if you can buy the plain brown envelope version you'll find they haven't bothered to change what's inside.

EU court advised: Schrems is a consumer in Facebook case, but can't file class-action

"Just as happened with the banks over their fees all the little cases will get adjourned until one test case makes it through."

Yup, but as is being made clear, Schrems will be that test case.

Another case I'd like to see is one where someone doesn't have an account but FB have made a shadow profile from others' postings. That should raise some issues under GDPR.

If the €500 falls within the small claims limit in a particular jurisdiction then why not death by a few million cuts - in this case small claims court cases? I don't doubt that FB would rather tackle one class action than find itself in every small claims court session up and down the EU.

Crap London broadband gets the sewer treatment

Re: There are disused and forgotten conduits and pipes out there

"Since then, I always ask people about what might have been forgotten, it can be very cost effective."

London had a hydraulic network for powering lifts etc but AFAIK that's already been used.

Re: Access

"But surely access to sewers is much easier."

Not during heavy rainfall.

Donald Trump's tweets: Are they presidential statements or not?

I'd have thought that when you take on a post of sufficient prominence any statement you make in public has to be treated as being made in that official capacity unless it concerns matters outside the scope of that post as it must be assumed that it reflects the thinking that informs the decisions you will make in that capacity. Is there anything outside the scope of POTUS?

MPs slam HMRC's 'deeply worrying' lack of post-Brexit customs system

@H

Eventually pragmatism takes over. You've got several boatloads of HGVs in Dover harbour all queuing for clearance, all available berths occupied by ferries that haven't yet discharged because there's no room for them to do so and another approaching. What do you do. Wave them onto the A2 and tell them to park until you get round to them? Then tell them to move up a bit further? On to the M2? What happens when the queue gets to the M25? At some point you have to realise that you're never going to be able to process stuff and stop pretending you can. You just check 1 in N as some sort of gesture.

"I suspect it will need to be tightened after his recent gaffs too."

Tightened as a gag, one hopes.

"I haven't worked out if they are f*cking it up deliberately or through a mixture of incompetence and arrogance."

Neither. Just through sheer impossibility. It's just that some of us could see that and voted accordingly. The rest are having to find it out the slow and painful way. Some will cotton on and others will go down the "no true Scotsman" reasoning to delude themselves for ever.

Re: Gah!

"the EU demands 3 things- money, EU citizens get special treatment and Irish border."

And we, apparently, want out. Well, it's us making the initial approach and if we really want out then we just have to accept the price because it's the EU that's in a position to set it. You never realised that before you voted "yes"? Why-ever not?

Re: Gah!

"All those 70 year olds who voted leave"

Not all of us 70 year olds voted leave. Still, stereotyping is easier than thinking.

Re: Gah!

"It was a piss-poor campaign. Both sides deserved to lose."

Both sides have. One side has yet to realise that.

There is a fall back: just wave stuff through unchecked. It should also solve the Irish border problem.

Re: Why do we need to import anything...

"Nor anywhere in the EU, for that matter."

<cough> https://tregothnan.co.uk/

Re: Why do we need to import anything...

I think you'll find that the tea in the teabags isn't actually GROWN in Yorkshire

Tea is Camellia sinensis. I'm sure it could be grown on Ilkley moor: http://www.rhsplants.co.uk/plants/_/camellia-sinensis-var-sinensis/classid.2000021386/ It's an ericaceous plant so the soils should suit and the climate can't be worse than the Himalayas.

maybe we can look forward to decades of drinking delicious "rhubarb tea"

That should keep things moving.

Re: "I'm sure there'll be some left out of the £350 million per-week ...

"So no my little Brexit voters, your NHS won't be getting that money after all."

Not that it ever was except, maybe, on whatever planet BoJo inhabits.

And why, when I reply to an existing post with a long title, does el Reg barf because the title's too long?

80-year-old cyclist killed in prang with Tesla Model S

Re: The Man Who Fell To Earth

"On balance, it would seem to be more likely that the car hit the cyclist than the cyclist hit the car."

Having seen a cyclist suddenly turn square across the road in front - but just far enough away for an emergency stop - I'd say either is possible and, in the absence of more detailed evidence, I'd hate to decide on balance of probabilities. OTOH it does seem less likely that he was a MIMIL and learned to cycle in an age when the Highway Code was drilled into cyclists.

Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat, look out for must-have toys that are 'easily hacked' ♪

Re: No electronic gizmos this Christmas

"A lump of coal and / or an orange."

"And"? Your generosity knows no bounds.

"This tradition was passed down to the UK mains plug, the single most painful plug to step on."

I once owed a house where the previous owner had come up with an interesting wheeze to provide power in the garage. There were a number of sockets in the garage. One of them could be connected to a socket in the kitchen by means of a flex with a plug on each end. If the kitchen end was plugged in the plug on the garage end would have been even more painful than normal.

Re: Keep it traditional - keep it safe

https://www.elitereaders.com/dangerous-toys-from-the-past/

I'd have loved most of them. They sound like the sort of thing that would form the basis of a good education.

My chemistry set had potassium permanganate in it. So what?

WikiLeaks is wiki-leaked. And it's still not even a proper wiki anyway

"Just a reminder: none of this is normal."

Not even in Norfolk?

Thousand-dollar iPhone X's Face ID wrecked by '$150 3D-printed mask'

Re: Nothing to worry about

"This is actually probably quite difficult to do for your average thief. Id be comfortable with face ID if I knew this was the length someone had to go to get past the lock screen on my phone."

Your average mugger, however, just has to wave the phone in front of your face. But look on the bright side - it's a disincentive to damage your face too much.

Brit cops slammed for failing to give answers on digital device data slurpage

Re: "10 said it would require a manual search to get it."

"simply pointing out that this sort of monitoring needs to be designed in from the start, and some of the decent systems pre-date the FOI act."

Way back when HOLMES was being set up I was shown what purported to be a specification for it. It didn't include any reporting function.

Openreach fibre plan for 10m premises coming 'before Christmas'

Re: Meet the new monopoly.

@ John Smith 19

There are, of course, alternatives.

1. All you have to do is find a magic money tree. Then OpenReach doesn't have to get its shareholder to get money or permission to raise loans.

2. Separate OR as O2 was separated, watch some other telco take it over as O2 was taken over, hope they make the investment and watch the new monopoly operate.

3. Find someone with the money to set up a parallel network.

4. Nationalise OR and let HMG finance it just like they didn't for decades before privatisation.

Big investments require big money - nobody's going to work for free and whoever makes the investment is going to want a return to make it worth their while. I'm sure everyone who's got and is happy with FTTC is really going to be happy paying for FTTP instead so that those who want the latter can get it without paying full whack.

Why would BT invest in fiber optics when it can continue to milk the copper cash cow?

It's not as simple as milking the copper cash cow. Consider what's behind this quote

“we need to be able to switch off the copper network. The economics don't make any sense if we keep the copper network running at the same time as we overbuild with a fibre network.”

Why don't the economics make sense? Because customers with a satisfactory copper connection, either POTS or FTTC won't want to pay FTTP prices. All fibre would be a much fatter cash cow. Make no mistake, if OpenReach can get rid of copper everyone pays more.

CopperheadOS stops updates to thwart knock-off phone floggers

Re: Folks stealing their stuff?

"I assume they are compliant with all the various licences and their requirements?

I somehow doubt it if they're expecting payment for the product (OS) rather than for tech support."

It depends on the licence. The BSD licence simply requires that a copy of the licence and attributions be included. The GPL requires that any derived work has its source code made available if the recipient of the binary asks for it. If Copperhead follow these then they have no problem - neither licence forbids selling the S/W. Read that again if you didn't understand it: neither licence forbids selling the software.

The curious thing here is the CC-NC licence. I don't see how they can force a non-commercial term onto GPL S/W - which is almost the opposite of what you seem to think is the problem. It might, of course, be in relation to S/W which is in userland.

Computing in schools improved, but still needs major patching – report

I think there are three separate things to be taught.

One is the skills needed to move into a professional life in the IT industry, a second is the skills that will be needed in a world where using applications is just part of a normal job, be it office work, manufacturing or anything else.

The third, which has only obliquely been touched on, is simply teaching logical and critical thinking skills. That was what its proponents claimed for Latin and, when CS courses were first introduced into the curriculum, they were pushed as the "new Latin" for this reason.

In the first two cases there's no option but to teach using what's available at the time, either what's in use in the real world or some specially devised educational version. Whatever the option taken either pupils are going to have to relearn the details over the course of their lives (or be locked in, which is indeed a risk) but what they need to learn are the principles.

The third, however, is more difficult. Do kids need to learn computing to tell that Rudd's spouting bollocks? Perhaps a more general approach would be to embed those skills in other subjects; learn that anything a politician or other salesperson says must be treated with scepticism..

Re: kids should learn management skills

"the percentage of them that will finish up in a management role is extremely small?"

And even then all too many of them shouldn't be there.

"In my experience schools are a soft target who will buy any shit that professes to be useful"

Do schools have the budget to buy anything?

Re: Same old same old

"but your acronyms need work"

Or my memory.

Re: Same old same old

"every school child is subjected to the discomfort, misery and humiliation of PE and games, and as soon as they leave school, 95% decide never to engage in any form of sport at all."

Sorry, only one upvote available.

How did someone hijack your Gmail? Phishing, keylogger or password reuse, we're guessing

Re: Not Surprised

"Everyone I support I try hammer home the idea of using different passwords on accounts."

Go a step further: use a different email for each account. And for one-off uses, use a one-off address or at least set up a temporary address every few weeks and then discontinue the old one.

Parity calamity! Wallet code bug destroys $280m in Ethereum

"f Anthony rather asked what would happen if everyone spent what ethereum they got as they got it and accepted more of it every other week as compensation for their labour and/or goods they had to sell, I think we would all agree that it is functioning as any currency should."

Can you see why it isn't a real currency?

Re: How many DevOps are we talking about here

"I suspect the name refers to this Doctor Syntax, a comic character created by William Coombe and cartoonist Thomas Rowlandson in the early 19th Century."

Well done that man.

I always thought it would have been a good company name to use for IT contracting but in the end I went along with the more prosaic alternative of an off-the-shelf company.

Re: How many DevOps are we talking about here

"It's just that the singular and plural forms are spelt and pronounced identically."

The singular form is thee/thou and is nowadays regarded as archaic.

Re: why is the 2nd person always plural in modern English?

"Not in N.I. or Scotland. Perhaps not in Northumberland and Yorkshire. Maybe for youse lot in London."

I'm in Yorkshire. And, sadly, what was in use (thee and thou) when I wor a lad has died out, nor did I hear it in NI when I lived there. AFAICS "youse" is a variant of "you". cf the French: "tu" versus "vous"

Re: devops199 said they were a newbie

"the target of criticism since the late 19th century"

That's the consequence of grammarians trying to force-fit the grammar of another language, Latin, onto English.

I suspect that underlying all these issues is a sense not of number but of the personal vs the impersonal. The "singular" is more personal than the "plural". Where a less personal form is needed we instinctively use the "plural", hence not only the singular they but also the royal we.

I wonder what the use of the impersonal "you" ways about us. Have we simply become too impersonal in our dealings with others or is the etiquette too complicated: I can thou thee but don't thee thou me was how to express it to a junior.

Re: How many DevOps are we talking about here

But if I may point out an exception: in some places in the US, 2nd person "youse" is singular, "youse guys" is plural.

Youse as in Scouse.

Parity's $280m Ethereum wallet freeze was no accident: It was a hack, claims angry upstart

Re: ...thus setting back blockchain development by years ...

I'm surprised no one has asked "cui bono ?" and suggested the 5-eyes might have had a hand ?

Someone just has. You.

Re: Hmm I thought 'smart' contracts meant no laywers

"It was my impression that a smart contract was code that defined what was supposed to happen. Since the code is the contract, it is always the 'law', thus eliminating messy lawyer paper shuffling and court disputes."

Code can shuffle electrons about. The electrons can represent Bitcoin, dollars, pounds, euros or any other currency and, providing it's bug-free it might well be 'law'. As soon as you want to swap those electrons for something else, such as food, it ceases to have any real effect.

Yes, you can have the code operate a vending machine but you still require someone to have filled the machine with what it's supposed to contain. As soon as someone didn't you've stepped outside the realm of code into real law to get it resolved.

In this case we're told it wasn't even bug-free so it wasn't even effective 'law'.