Posts by Doctor Syntax 42396 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
e) If I (and this has to be expressed in 1st person terms) exist in a simulation then none of you, el Reg or anyone else exist except as inputs presented to me. That includes the papers you write which I'd have no way of verifying as I have no access to the observatories that don't exist. So if one were to consider oneself as living in a simulation one doesn't have to believe that everything an entire universe is being simulated all the time because nothing outside one's immediate experience needs to be simulated all the time; it can just be instantiated as needed.
"the hypothesis we're talking about depends so strongly upon something we can't prove to be true"
Or prove to be false?
It used to be the case that science proceeded by making empirically testable hypotheses and testing them, discarding the duds and retaining the not-yet-proven-to-be-duds. Now we seem to be proceeding by only hypothetically testing hypotheses.
It's the white one with a big ferric chloride stain.
"it is too difficult for police to solve most simple theft in modern cities."
Simple theft is apt to leave few clues. You stand more chance of getting the culprits when they do something stupid. That doesn't, however, mean that there shouldn't be a preliminary investigation otherwise the opportunities will be missed.
"Not everyone needs to get from A to B in as short a time as possible ALL OF THE TIME."
But some of the people you're holding up need to get from A to Z and the accumulation of time spent behind those who don't means that they end up driving the latter part of their journey much more tired than they need to be.
"It took a heck of a lot to kill those DEC terminals."
And maybe other DEC kit. Back in the '80s of Big Bang London there was the story of DEC being asked by a non-customer if they could supply a copy of the OS. They asked what it was for. Someone had found a presumably surplus Micro-VAX tossed into a skip.
"I say just do it.
Then all the companies running DNS servers and not maintaining them will get an in-flood of angry customers some will leave and the company will learn it's lesson to not leave stale infrastructure out there."
Maybe a half-way house. Roll it out for a short period then roll back (they did have a roll back facility in their plans, didn't they? Then announce "Did you have a problem? If so you've got a month to fix it, then it's permanent."
"the servers handling authentication are much less likely to have been compromised with malware"
OTOH if your device is compromised you lose control over your own passwords and, frankly, the bank isn't going to care about that. If the authentication server is compromised they lose control over everyone's passwords and. of course, the bank ... Yes, you can see why they're choosing such an insecure option.
Seriously, there are two aspects to risk. One is the probability that something will go wrong, the other is the scale of going wrong.
"We can't be arsed to do our job properly unless you hang out your dirty laundry in public on Twitter" approach to customer service
AFAICS customer service was doing its job - it even escalated the problem, a step which seems to be unknown to many these days. The tech side -trying without success.. It's PR that needs to be hung out to dry.
"Entering a globally highly competitive market with well established multi-national players in an environment where you are about to lose all your global trade deals, ironically due in part to your own lobbying."
He off-shored production some time ago. He doesn't need UK-global trade deals except for those which make imports from his factories cheaper. Brexit increases costs for such manufacturers who remain in the UK. Are you surprised he lobbied for Brexit?
"Post 2020, what sane car maker will spend £5bn developing a new ICE car for European markets?"
Unless something drastic happens to the range/charge time ration, anyone who wants to sell a car to customers who want to travel more than a few tens of miles at a time.
And if ICEs are totally banned (including ICE/electric hybrids) then the govt will have finally achieved the goal it's had for years: limiting the freedom of movement that the car brought to the masses.
"Look under the bonnet of your car, remove everything and put back a single computer to control a single electric motor, and perhaps some aircon rads and a fan. Of course brakes and steering are still required"
You've left in the entire transmission. You might want to take that out and replace it with a motor at each wheel. You also have to think about regenerative breaking and how to recover power back into the battery, otherwise you're going to have a very short-range car. The aircon rads aren't going to be much use because you've removed the aircon pump which is driven by the engine.
Yes, we need additional capacity if we have a fully electric transport network, but that’s not going to happen anything like overnight and can could be planned well in advance.
FTFY
Whether it will be planned well in advance is another matter. The usual HMG response to this has been "Ooh, expensive. Maybe later".
"It will be interesting to watch Mr Leave Business Poster Child trying to sort out his supply chain to build anything that size and/or complexity. "
Given that he doesn't build his existing products in the UK or elsewhere in the EU I doubt he'll build this one here either. The mess that he leaves for UK manufacturers won't affect him.
These questions have been posed in the comments of just about every GDPR article.
As regards backup, there is wording about technical feasibility (this is an off the top of the head rely so you'll have to go and check it if you want the exact words). The upshot of this would appear to be, no, if it;s not feasible you don't have to go and edit your backups. OTOH, if you were to restore one of those backups you'd need to have a means of re-doing the deletes that happened between the taking and restoring of the backup.
There's also wording about not having to remove data relevant to performance of transactions. So you'd be able to justify holding onto warranty data until the expiry of the warranty.
But as with any legislation, the ultimate way to decide what to do is to read it to find out how it affects yourself.
"consulting companies are not always practicing what they're preaching."
OTOH in such a field the you should expect to be judged by the way you run your own business. If that isn't very good why should you expect anyone else to buy your services. In fact, you're no better than all those would-be SEO specialists who write from gmail addresses and don't seem to have a domain name that should logically appear on first page in Google if one were to search for "first page in Google".
"How would you feel if low income workers who were fired for incompetence or misconduct had to give back several years of historic pay?"
They're not going to be the ones making company policy or overseeing company policy being carried out. The reason CxOs are paid a lot of money is that they carry responsibility. If they fail to discharge that properly that over a long period why shouldn't some of that money be clawed back?
"having monitoring of the conditions would be useful"
Every freezer I've had monitors itself. If the temperature rises above a limit it sounds an alarm. If a fridge or freezer isn't located where the alarm wouldn't be heard it's not beyond the wit of man to run a bit of twin core to sound the alarm somewhere where it would be. It doesn't need to be connected to the internet; that's just needless - and dangerous - shiny for the sake of shiny.
"Things have to be done RIGHT NOW because hospitals are vulnerable"
Let's look at that a little more carefully.
What has to be done right now?
I'd say the first thing that has to be done is to find out what has to be done (yes I did spend time living in Ireland ;).
The medics have a term for this, it was used in the article: triage.
Some things can be done quickly but everything can't be done at once because you always have a finite number of people to do it and things have to be done in order: if you think the network needs to be rearranged so as to isolate the more vulnerable equipment then that has to be planned, otherwise you may accidentally fail to do so by missing out on some bridge or you may separate a piece of equipment from other systems it needs to work with. Then you may need to buy more kit which has a lead time.
You can start doing things right now (Starting telling TPTB you're going to need to budget time and money is one). You will actually be able to finish doing very little right now.
Above all you need to avoid the politician's syllogism: something needs to be done, this is something therefore it must be done.
