Posts by Doctor Syntax 40485 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"My grandfather had a horse & cart that he used to do that on."
Back in the C18th a several times ggfather was killed falling from his horse. The same diary that records that also records a clergyman killed falling off his horse when drunk. The horse might be an autonomous transportation unit but it isn't safe.
"US tech firms are, of course, very worried ... any backdoor would kill their sales, both domestically and internationally."
They would of course, have the option of becoming non-US companies. I'm quite sure there are a number of companies that would be happy to accommodate them. Ireland anybody.
They'd have to sell weak encrypted products in the US which is rather ironical. Back in the day the US was very insistent that they should have strong encryption and the rest of the world would have to have weak encryption. If Comey gets his way that might be reversed.
"some unexpected effect of microgravity on the minION tester"
There are millions of gadgets. Are they going to fly examples of all of them to test in microgravity for unexpected effects?
BTW, what sort of sample prep is needed for this? The nanaopore FAQ said read the list of laboratory equipment but didn't provide one that I can find. The idea of using a centrifuge on the ISS seems interesting....
What MAF said, plus from the article it appears that they only took prepared DNA samples into space. That avoids all the difficult sample prep work. It doesn't have much to say about what the effects of being in space might have on DNA in living organisms but that could be addressed by before and after sampling on the ground. In fact it sounds more like the sort of thing that you'd get out of a space agency/school publicity stunt: how do these seeds germinate in space etc.
Although dark matter doesn't interact via EM forces AIUI it interacts via gravity, its existence being deduced by the need for some gravitational effects needed to explain the behaviour of observed matter.
But if it interacts by gravity with observed matter the two should attract each other so why don't these forms of matter co-locate? As observed matter clusters together under the influence of gravity my expectation would be that dark matter would cluster with it instead of being in some form of galactic halo.
Or to put it another way, why aren't we all 10 times heavier than we are (take all junk food jokes as read)?
"The first seven characters are from a previously owned vehicles reg plate"
I can only even remember 3 of my car number plates: the first because, well, it was first, second because it was my MG and it was an easy one to remember and my current one because I have to. As soon as one becomes no longer current, it's gone.
""Excuse me while I watch you type in your password, no? well could I just borrow your laptop for a sec while I extract your crypto keys.""
"Could I borrow your laptop to install this code which will enable me to extract data when you have a USB storage device plugged in."
"The very existence of the EU is at threat and the single market is right up there as the biggest cause of the problems."
The single market was what it was all about originally. It's all the "ever closer integration" nonsense that's the cause of the problems. None of which is relevant to this case. The issue here is that Ireland decided to let Apple play silly buggers with paper companies. Apple would still have got a good deal at Ireland's standard tax rate although they'd probably have found a different tax haven for all the rest-of-the-world business that's been put through Ireland. In general I don't think the rest of the EU are terribly happy with the standard Irish rate but short of the EU imposing yet another EU-wide diktat they have to lump it.
"The sale of products of services within a country should be taxed in that country."
OK, assuming you're in the UK*. You buy something off an eBay seller in Ireland. In which country is the deal done?
This, of course, oversimplifies the matter given that eBay is Luxembourg so that's another country thrown into the mix.
*It doesn't matter if you're not. It applies to any pair of buyers and sellers in different countries.
"Governments everywhere have to start recognizing that in a global economy they all have to co-operate and agree to a uniform tax structure"
Some governments - e,g, Ireland - realise that at the level of multinationals there's a free market in tax rates. Individual governments can decide whether they're better off being poor competitors in that market in order to clean up taxing purely domestic businesses so it's not going to be a race to the bottom, more a matter of strategic choices.
If the US wants to continue the high tax route it can scarcely complain about the obvious consequences with multinationals. Nobody's stopping them from lowering their tax rate if they wand to.
Countries such as Ireland, however, are better off with a low tax strategy. Would it be right for the US or anyone else to force them into a tax regime they don't want to apply?
"I wonder if they will now leave Ireland, since the benefit maybe isn't there, and if other high tech firms will follow?"
It depends on what the EU decides about the other arrangements with Luxembourg etc. but for US companies 12% plus English as a 1st language is probably going to be a competitive deal.
The cached Google page says that it "comes with the latest OS X El Capitan installed". The current version of the page says that it "ships with everything needed to start running the latest version of OS X" but "Once installed, OS X cold boots...". Maybe they've already had a call from Apple's lawyers.
" For some of my clients, 40 to 100mbps are needed to backup their data to the Cloud."
So basically you're saying that you think the tax-payer should subsidise your clients backups in the cloud rather than have them pay for the kit to backup on premises and store the backups off site. Or have I missed something?
"I too don't like lawyers - on principle!"
What principle would that be?
One of the principles in which I believe is that enunciated in Magna Carta: that we should be protected from arbitrary treatment by due process of law. It's something I've said here a number of times when we find TPTB getting above themselves with surveillance and the like. I don't recollect any cotrary arguments here. If we are to have due process of law than we need people to operate that process. They're called lawyers.
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