Posts by Doctor Syntax 42029 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"Which in real terms would mean cars travelling 300-500 miles on one charge for less than $10 – a fifth of the price of gasoline."
It's not just a matter of range and cost. It's also a matter of how quickly you could get the energy into the car. Can they achieve a charge rate equivalent to a petrol pump's delivery rate and as simple to operate?
"Nope, not in his view."
In fact he seems to be rather ambivalent about it.
ISTM that he's been lobbied into making a speech in favour of the advertising industry but realises that users have made up their minds and it would be politically stupid not to go with the flow. So he's started off by saying what the industry wants to hear but then put the users' viewpoint and some meaningless dribble about being ready to help. When push comes to shove he's got his marker in which will enable him to take the popular line without being accused of a U-turn.
"I know the digital sector prides itself on [self-regulation and co-operation]"
Belief in that, at least as it applies to the advertising sector, can't be described as sensible.
At present we have the ASA as an advertising regulator, proof needed, if anything, that the advertising industry in the UK can't self-regulate. The ASA can only act after the event; good luck with using that as a means of cleaning up malware served up via an advertising network. And the ASA only has authority in the UK at best.
Ad-blockers are no longer an option for people who don't want ads, they're another part of the PC user's security toolkit.
“We need the whole advertising sector to be smarter."
The heat death of the Universe will arrive before the advertising sector gets smarter. And there's absolutely no point in him trying to either encourage self-regulation or legislate in the only region where he has any influence. Someone needs to explain to him that the first two Ws stand for world-wide.
The only people who can regulate advertisers on this scale are the users and ad-blockers are the means they use.
"James Webb telescope ... would be able to see much farther than Hubble. Now, not even a week later, it turns out maybe not THAT much farther since Hubble can apparently see farther than ever imagined."
Of course if the James Webb telescope turned out to be able to see much further, say in excess of 14 billion, things could get really interesting...
A phone running Ubuntu could have an appeal. Being able to use it as a general purpose computing device wouldn't be the major part of the appeal. The appeal would be that I buy the phone and that's the end of matters. What runs on it, apart from the phone S/W itself, is my choice, not the vendors. What it reports back to the vendors is my choice (nothing as it happens). Whether Ubuntu and their vendors would be prepared to restrict themselves to that sort of deal remains to be seen.
"Businesses who do report these types of issues are beaten viciously and at length with a stick by our fine selves"
And rightly so if they have their customer database popped by teenager skiddies via an exploit older then themselves. If they get DDOSed that's a different matter.
"The bigger issue is with companies that are selling personal data besides credit information. There are no legal requirements for those companies to give somebody a copy of the data they hold about them and have no legal obligation to remove incorrect information."
That's one reason why we don't like personal data being sent to the US.
"It's high time Facebook gets an anti-monopoly boot up its arse. (And a completely unrelated privacy boot up its other arse)."
I see them more as two halves of a single operation - like hammer & anvil. The privacy charge could be evaded on the basis of "they agreed" and the agreement argument gets nixed by "no they didn't because of the monopoly".
@ Richard 12 (and assorted others).
Read this very carefully. Read it several times if you don't understand it first go.
The FBI want to try brute force.
What they're trying to brute force isn't the encryption key.
What they're trying to brute force is a pass code of a few digits.
'Yes you'd think so, but by the time the process has been bloated with "eye candy", large images, buttons that are images so must be downloaded before you can see what they are'
Testing.
Not just testing on the dev's box sitting on the desk but build a prototype and go out into the field and test it from there on the sort of links that will be used in practice.
"Ahh, the joys of having to use internal IT resources rather than going out to the market for the best supplier."
I'm not sure about this. There would be a good argument for having real internal IT, namely internal to the individual departments who could work with the rest of the department on a regular basis and call in outside resources as and when needed. Part of the problem seems to be the lack of skills required to even communicate with outside suppliers or even to work out requirements in an orderly fashion.
"typical power grabbing senior civil servant behaviour"
AIUI these were CEO types parachuted into top posts rather than having come up through the ranks. Maybe this is typical of senior civil servants these days. If so it tells us that recruitment to senior civil service posts is every bit as bad as recruitment into the top levels of corporations.
It's a consequence of seeing anyone who does the work as an expense to be outsourced to the cheapest bidder rather than the core of the operation and as a possibility for the next generation of managers. In fact they're likely to be seen as a threat to the current generation if they're any good. And that also applies far more widely than the civil service.
"And yes, I did once work for an Ad agency"
Do you know if the industry has ever attempted to measure the net effect of advertising? They can easily say x% of people who saw an ad bought from it. But if y% were so pissed off that they made a mental note never to buy that product the net effect is actually x-y% and that could very easily be a negative number.
I doubt its something that could be easily researched. I also doubt that anyone with any sense in the ad industry would avoid doing that for fear of what they might find but there seems to be sufficient arrogance that the possibility of finding something to burst their bubble might never occur to them.
"I am obviously in the minority, because I would rather pay than see adverts online."
I'm not sure that that's properly tested. The number of sites one would pay for is always going to be less than those one might arrive at by a link from a paid for site. But that doesn't mean that there wouldn't be scope for worthwhile sites to earn paid subscriptions and - who knows? - maybe make more than they could through adverts.
I can't help feeling that the people who are really being ripped off in all this are the actual advertisers, the people with the products being pushed. The advertising industry is taking money from them and presumably they see some orders coming in but the industry's antics might well be losing them more potential customers than they bring simply by being so annoying. But then, as I've said before, the one thing you can be sure the advertising industry sells successfully is itself.
"And realistically, building the infra for a dedicated secure network would bust the chops of most power companies."
It shouldn't bust the chops of most telecoms companies. What do you think the power companies used before they had the internet to do their coms?
Nevertheless something other than Windows wouldn't be a bad choice. Dependence on an OS that can be obsoleted at will by a vendor isn't good.
There's clearly a need to known how many. The neediness to know who is much more questionable. When we see statements such as "legislation to make it easier for local authorities and government departments to share citizen data without breaching the Data Protection Act" we really should be questioning this. Firstly is the DPA there for a reason? Secondly does the DPA allow for this sharing already? If it does why do we need extra legislatation? If it doesn't is this additional legislation intended to weaken the DPA so what's illegal now can become legal whilst still claiming to be not breaching it? And if so does it make a nonsense of the reasons we have the DPA?
"what happens when networks get the bright idea of selling ads themselves"
Given that they seem to have cottoned onto the fact that users don't want ads then if the other networks do provide ads themselves not doing so is a valuable differentiator.
There's a big difference between being ad-supported and providing a paid-for service. Ad-supported sites could suffer in the sort of thermonuclear war you suggest. Paid networks aren't going to nuke themselves unless they have very stupid managements.
BTW, re your prediction. How are Google going to send ads to Android devices if the networks are ad-blocking?
But should Net Neutrality mean that users pay for the advertisers' bandwidth? I'd suggest that whoever wants to use the bandwidth pays.
At present the objections to ads are (a) they're annoying (b) they may be malicious and (c) they steal bandwidth the user paid for. If the advertiser wants to sell something to me then stealing from me isn't exactly a good start.
So if the advertiser pays their share then that's one obstacle removed.
The next is that if advertisers are paying for their bandwidth then they may start paying attention to just how effective their ads are and realise that pissing off the potential customer by being annoying isn't a good idea either, not it wasting money sending out ads for something their tracking tells them the customer's bought already. So the ads might get less annoying.
The worry is that the only "ads" worth paying to send the user are ransomware or the like.
"That would make the court a lawmaker."
Well, making case law is a role for the courts. But I don't think it's a matter of defining what's acceptable. It's already said that the pig wasn't for specific reasons. It will then have the job of deciding whether the pig with lipstick is any better depending on whether the specific reasons have gone away. Somehow, I think that lipstick or no, the pig's going to remain earth-bound.
"1) Security pays what? 6 - 7 quid an hour or thereabouts?
So, you are basically going to get either: Total monkeys "who like the uniform" or those people with other problems in their life (like being recently out of jail or supplementing their measly salary in ways that might land them in one). Neither character is going to be around for long, why train them? It's not like anything they do will come back to you (If it does, you can always sack them)."
If you're safeguarding important installations with international security regulations pertaining to them then these are not the people you should be hiring to do it, the people you're hiring should be trained and if 6 - 7 qph isn't enough to recruit and retain the people you should be hiring and training, then it's not the rate you should be paying.
"Theft is theft, there is no time limit or extenuating circumstances such as saying that you were going to return the item eventually."
Theft is indeed theft. It's taking with intent to permanently deprive. That's why the charge against a joyrider isn't theft, it's taking and driving away.
