Posts by Doctor Syntax 42420 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"And EU regulations are enacted into British law. With UK detached from EU law i understand those enactments could suddenly find themselves challengeable to their legal standing."
A little task for Team Leave to sort out. Maybe IDS could take a look at it. He did so well with Universal Credit...
"We had almost a years delay on selling a system because the US didn't adopt ISO-some-long-number::2014 but stuck to ISO-some-long-number::2012 while the component supplier moved to the new one."
I thought you said the problem was with the UK, not the US. And if you don't have the ISO numbers at your fingertips do you expect us to believe that you're really your company's strategist when it comes to regulations?
In the meantime, it's no change so if you want to sell stuff here under the current EU regs you can do so. If potential customers can put up with the whining.
"The EU bureaucracy has allowed a large, hostile contingent to form in several European nations. Perhaps now an inward gaze, compelled by credible criticism, can form a more perfect union."
It'll probably take a couple more exits before they start thinking "Could it be something we said?". After all, when you know you're right you tend to adjust reality to match your views.
"It takes several years for petrol to go off"
In the 70s during the loyalist (sic) strikes in N Ireland a colleague stockpiled petrol for a relatively short period - maybe weeks, months at most & found that he couldn't start the car on it. Some of the lighter fractions had evaporated.
"but it is possible the Brexit will be reversed by a General election."
That possibility occurred to me. At the very least we now ought to have a general election. Admittedly there's current legislation saying we can't but, given the will, that could go through Commons & Lords in a single day.
"The fuel in the pumps now, that you are buying now, has taken between 4 and 12 weeks from its purchase time to reach those pumps."
But the replacement stock for what you buy now has to be purchased now. As if that made any difference to an oil company's chance of making a profit.
"with our first past the post electoral system it is quite possible this was the first time he cast a vote which did count."
With our first past the post system votes count, otherwise nobody would get past the post. What do you think all those people are doing in Town Halls on election nights?
'My biggest concern now is that Remainers who won't accept the decision will fuck everything up just to "prove" they were right.'
I doubt it. It's over to Leave now. Let's see what they do, apart from act shocked as, for quite a lot of them, I expect, their sole target was to win the vote and let someone else deal with reality.
Leaving aside the UPC element, consider the headline. Right now there's no basis for saying that patents and trademarks would need to be re-filed. Like everything else that involves EU influence there'll have to be a decision taken about the status of existing registrations. It may well be that the outcome will be that all existing registrations still stand as applying here after exit and that double registration will only be needed after some future, yet to be announced, date. In fact, I'd say that that's likely for the simple reason that sorting things out is going to be complicated enough without making further complications.
"Even if whatever bunch of British public schoolboys (yes, it is our government that is run by more out of touch elitist pricks than any other in Europe)"
Once upon a time we finally had a generation of grammar school politicians in power. They promptly pulled up the ladder behind them so are you surprised about what we have now?
"If a country wanted to get back to manufacturing and increasing exports rather than relying on imports, isin't[sic] a lower valued pound a benefit?"
It makes imports more expensive so it only operates on the value added in production and that benefit then has to outweigh the tariffs it faces.
"They'll rebrand themselves as the people's party and press for an early General Election"
I'm not sure about that. I doubt many of the Leave campaigners had any plans beyond the referendum except "magic happens".
I'm not surprised, BTW, that the leading Leave Conservatives wrote to Cameron just before the event saying that he should stay on whatever happened. They belatedly realised they hadn't a clue what to do if they won & wanted someone to come along and look after them. Who do they have in their own ranks? IDS who has presided over the on-going car crash of Universal Credit? Gove who seems to have got up the nose of everyone working in the areas he's overseen as a minister? Boris, who was the great cheer-leader of the City that may currently be doing nicely (in the short term they can always make money) but are in for bleak times in the longer run? No wonder Boris is going round saying that they don't have to invoke Article 50 any time soon. Well, they and Farage have now got what they asked for and I doubt they're going to enjoy it for long.
'It seems to me that "stupid" is allowing there to be two files with names that are identical in all but the capitalisation and that these be considered different files by virtue of nothing more than typographical differences in the name.'
"all but"? "differences"? So they're not the same but you think they should be. Once we start ignoring differences where do we stop? Do we start treating punctuation marks as the same?
I must admit that when I first saw the announcements I thought it was just an extension of keeping applications and dependencies together in /opt. I'd missed out the containerisation. On the whole it seems like a step forward. However, as Matthew Garrett has pointed out in relation to X there's a vulnerability where containerised applications still depend on a leaky common service. It's not yet clear to me how much sharing of common libraries will continue. I suppose the answer is to look at the Pi version of Ubuntu Core. Another thing to do when I get a round tuit.
"Great, so a common library gets a security upgrade and we have to update every single package"
Looking through ls -R /lib /lusrlib leads to the thought of "do I really need all that stuff?" (running ls -R /lib /usr/lib|wc -l returns 67257 on my Debian LTS). And I have to conclude that I don't know. What I do know is that a good many of "every single package" are there to provide those libraries just in case I happen to run some application that calls them and that updates to those, whether I ever execute them or not, are part of the overall updating.
Given a system where the core is truly minimal and I only have the application package I want a good deal of those libraries and the packages which provide them might not be there. So I'm by no means convinced that the update frequency and volume would be greater than at present; it might be less.
The other side of the coin is that dynamic linking introduces dependency hell (Windows users will be familiar with the DLL equivalent) when trying to use something that wasn't in the distro. Compiling WonderPackage requires some library at a later version than the distro. Installing that version promptly breaks the distro.
A current solution to this is to install the package and its dependencies in /opt. I currently have several such examples. Snaps seem to combine the principle of this approach with the isolation of Qubes. Now if we could see this extended to controlled access to files...
" I can't honestly see much advantage for things like Libreoffice. I've no real desire to get the very latest bleeding edge version"
Currently Debian LTS is on LO 3.5. The current stable, not bleeding edge, version is 5.1. I'm not sure of the distro verison of QGIS but it might be around 1.7 and the current stable version is 2.8, bleeding edge 2.10 last time I looked. So there's some merit in ignoring distro versions of packages like that where there are stable versions which the distro maintainers are ignoring.
'I don't think this was what the electorate had in mind when they said they wanted "more openness and transparency" from the government'
And when a government talks about openness and transparency it's the electorate's stuff that's to be open and transparent, not theirs (except to state-sponsored APTs, of course).
'Your argument (possibly made more in hope than expectation) is "Not illegal. Because internet."'
Can we please distinguish between the internet as a whole and the WWW? That's an important distinction to make because hyperlinks are how the web works; no hyperlinks, no web. Every page on The Register has loads of them. So can we get rid of the notion that hyperlinks in themselves are illegal or a breach of copyright?
We then have to consider some of the areas of complaint. One is the row about deep linking. One site publishes content. Another has a link to that content. First site complains that its content is being "stolen". As above, hyperlinks are how the web works. If you don't want people to link to it, don't publish it on the web. Possibly the context in which the deep-linked material is presented is intended to deceive the viewer into thinking that it was the second site's work. In that situation there may be a case to answer but it's a case about the deceptive presentation, not the link itself.
The other is material uploaded and made in breach of copyright. That's the offence. A link to it is, in itself, no more than a statement of fact. To go beyond that you have to look at the circumstances in which the statement is made.
Take an example: You tell me that you're looking for a good picture of a sunset. I find a really cracking example on the web and email you a link. It turns out that the picture was actually a third party's picture, uploaded in breach of copyright but with no indication that that was the case. All I've done is make, in all innocence, a factual statement as to where you can find what you were looking for.
If someone is publishing a list of links to such material in a context where there's a clear implication, if not an outright statement that the material is hooky then secondary liability comes into play but it's not the links themselves that are the problem, it's the context which forms an incitement to commit further breaches of copyright that should give rise to secondary liability. What's more it's not the communication's being in the form of a list of hyperlinks that gives rise to the liability, the same liability arises from telling someone that there are stolen phones for sale in a particular pub.
"What I can't decide is if this distinction makes it copyright violation."
I doubt it. In one case you're providing a URL which has to be copied into the browser, in the other you're providing a small bit of extra wrapping which allows the browser to automate the process. The information is the same, the presentation is different.
"A decision to put hyperlinks beyond the reach of copyright would place the European Union in breach of its Berne Convention obligations."
Really?
Let's take a real world example.
I copy a document that's somebody else's copyright. Unless I'm covered by fair use that's a breach of copyright. I post that copy somewhere public, maybe by displaying it on my front gate, maybe stick it on an advertising hoarding, wherever. That's definitely a breach of copyright.
Someone then spreads the word that there's a document there. Just that. It doesn't say what the document contains*. It doesn't say whether it's a copy of something that's somebody else's copyright. It just says that there's a document there. How is that, in itself, a breach of copyright? It's a simple statement of fact. Or is it even that? If I remove the document but the word is still being spread and is now erroneous.
*The name of the document in the link might be arbitrary, something like image_$1.jpeg or it migh hint what the document contains, something like elReg_vulture_icon.jpeg, but even that doesn't guarantee that the document actually matches the description.
Interesting. a downvote. Presumably from someone who doesn't mind their backup going up in the conflagration or being stolen.
Chubb used to tell a story about their fire-safes. The Co-op in Belfast stored their backups in one of Chubb's safes in their HQ, same building as the computers. When the building burnt down the safe fell several floors and jammed shut. Rather than wait for the locksmith to arrive and sort it out someone decided to use a torch to burn their way into the safe (fire safes are designed to resist fires, not oxyacetylene torches). The backups next to the opening were destroyed by the torch.
