Posts by doublelayer

Court erred in Neo4j source license ruling, says Software Freedom Conservancy

Mangle a license, get confusion

When they decided to knit together a frankenlicense, they created a lot of really unclear stuff. Unfortunately, I don't think the court interpreted it incorrectly, and perhaps though I don't write contracts, the FSF could have written it better.

The problem is with relative terms. The clause that says you can remove restrictions starts like this:

"Additional permissions" are terms that supplement the terms of this License by making exceptions from one or more of its conditions.

The problem, which is repeated frequently throughout this section, is the phrase "this license". Someone can argue that "this license" always refers to the AGPL3 in its original form, but it's also somewhat easy to argue that it instead refers to the license you are looking at that contains this clause. And in that case, the restrictive clauses in the license would have been an original part of "this license", and therefore could not be removed. For an analogy that's not direct, it's like saying "You may take any object that wasn't in this room" and letting people sort out whether you meant "wasn't in this room when you came in", or "wasn't in this room when it was constructed, meaning every object that wasn't built in place". I think the FSF could have made this work by replacing "this license" with the specific name of their license, but if they had, that part would probably have been deleted.

Don't misunderstand me, I don't like the sneaky way they've manipulated the license to mislead users of the software. However, I think the court is probably correct in its decision that they can write new terms into a contract and apply it to code they've written.

Cybercrooks target students with fake job opportunities

Re: Educational level without brains

Right, you have a strange idea of how students and these scams work.

"The mark is greedy for something: a fancy posting to add to their cv, more money, something that has not been earned.": No, they want those things, just like you would like to be paid. You earned your paycheck, didn't you? They think they're going to earn theirs.

"Why would someone just out of university expect to be hired into an executive position at UNICEF? And at a market wage or better, no less, when it's well known that NGOs pay significantly less than private-sector employers?"

They don't. Did you read the article? The job title on offer was "Executive Personal Assistant", as in assisting someone else who has an executive position. That's an entry level job, requiring little educational experience.

"Yes, someone will be willing to hire them, but it's going to be an entry-level position paying an entry-level wage with an entry-level title. Because that's the career stage they're at! Expecting more and believing anyone is going to offer more is greedy, or at best vanity and pride"

They are expecting an entry-level job with all the stuff that comes with that, and if they were not, it's not greedy. I had a nice job as a programmer when I had my degree. Does it make me greedy to have applied for and gotten a better-paid job?

"Greed needn't be for cash, it can as well be the desire to avoid putting in the time and paying one's dues, or for someone to cater to vanity, or for anything else unearned."

You just made up the whole "unearned" business. The students didn't expect to get something without doing work. It's a job offer, and those who accepted it expected to be asked to work for their wages.

"As for "blaming the victim", I am assigning exclusive and total blame to each party for its own actions. The victim is guilty of greed. That isn't a crime, but we shouldn't be excusing or rewarding it, either."

Who is rewarding anyone for this? And you are blaming the victim by assigning them a motive that clearly isn't supported by the situation.

Re: Educational level without brains

We live in a world of lots of random and at times stupid things. Raw intelligence, assuming that's what you find in every university student, doesn't teach you all of those things. No matter how many complex mathematical theories you can correctly use, prove, and expand upon, you still might not know how to spot someone taking advantage of you. They're separate sets of knowledge, and you'll only learn each by experience and attention to that one specifically. We don't even have to go that far--we all know people who can be incredibly skilled at one thing that's taught at a school and terrible at another, like someone who can write a bulletproof compiler in a week and couldn't write a readme for it that anyone could understand.

And of course, not every university student is a genius. There are a lot of people there who won't score top of the class and many of them aren't planning to. This doesn't mean they're idiots. It means they don't have the same goals as we probably did while there. They're there to gain experience, and falling for this will be a very painful but educational experience indeed. Of course, it would be nicer if they could learn about the scam without falling for it, but that happens too.

Re: Educational level without brains

That's a very easy and wrong explanation. No, it doesn't come down to greed, any more than you wanting to be paid does. Students want job experience, and in many cases, it's hard to get because they don't yet have the ability to write a lot on their CV. Getting a job offer is something they're trying for all the time, so the scam starts by playing on that emotion. In these cases, the students aren't expecting free money; they're expecting that a company or organization wants work done and thinks they're qualified to do it. The student, at this point, is perfectly willing to provide value and expects to do so in return for this paycheck.

As I've established, greed isn't required to fall for the fake job offer. How about the fake check that comes later? It's still not greed. A greedy student would want to cash the check and either not give the company anything or find out how to get more checks. A student who doesn't know how these things work would want to follow instructions, assuming their weirdness sensor hasn't gone off yet. We know that a company won't start off this way, but a student with no real job experience except basic jobs doesn't. After all, while we wouldn't expect to be given a check then asked to send money on, there are companies that ask people to pay for expenses and submit an expense report to have the money returned to them, and that's perfectly normal. It takes a bit of credulity and a lack of experience. Greed would only hamper the process. I think you're jumping to blame the victim is not only needlessly disparaging to them but also gets the facts wrong.

Man arrested, accused of trying to track woman using Apple Watch attached to car

Maybe a day, though if it has to run its GPS and mobile connection, probably not so well. At least the screen wouldn't have to be on. The real problem is with the elements. Even if the acceleration didn't damage it, and it probably would, that thing would be very close to the ground and moving rather fast. A stone hitting it at speed could cause serious damage. Driving through a puddle could also do so (they're supposedly waterproof, but not against pressurized water or with contaminants).

I'm now considering finding something I don't need that's basically watch shaped and testing this out. I probably won't do it though because I'm guessing it will become dislodged quickly and I don't want my experiment to turn into littering.

Nvidia releases $1,999, 8K-capable GeForce RTX 3090 Ti GPU

Re: Who can actually see the 8k benefit ?

I doubt that it will be. While there probably are people who have 8K screens for watching stuff, most of it will be people who record 8K video so they have lots of room to edit. The final product will be 4K, but edits will be less obvious. Editing and converting will still require a bunch of graphics processing. Similarly, I don't think it will be "the last generation of non commodity graphics cards" because game designers and players constantly find new ways to need even more graphics processing. They have 144 Hz screens and so, even if that rate isn't necessary (and I wouldn't know), they have a target to aim for that can stress a GPU.

"We also know using GPUs fot AI is too difficult for most,,": Not really. It depends what you're doing, but the people building big models tend to want GPUs to do it with. There's a good market in GPU-intensive servers from cloud providers, and I doubt they're being used to play games.

The first step to data privacy is admitting you have a problem, Google

Re: Ethics and business

"The question is, how do people think Google is going to pay for Google Search without this revenue?"

That is not my problem. If they choose to violate the law in order to make enough money and they can't find a legal way to do it, then it's time for them to die. We never ask how the extortion gang can continue to afford their nice houses when their schemes get shut down, do we?

There are some things they could try, though. The first is ads. Not data collection to tailor the ads. Not identifying the user to advertisers who then send ads. Just ads, based on the search terms and not recorded afterward. Or they can ask for donations. Or they can charge for use. Lots of options. If none of them work, too bad for them and it's time to see if someone who isn't evil can make it work. There are places that have succeeded in making a profitable business without breaking the law.

In the graveyard of good ideas, how does yours measure up to these?

Re: Horse, cart

"There was a time when everyone was near a branch. That's how it worked."

No, that's not the case. If you moved, it's possible you moved to a place where your bank didn't have any branches. The locals might have been using the banks that did, but unless you always switched bank every time you moved, you could end up far from them. This could also happen if you just traveled to such a place. Banks didn't have complete coverage of the country, let alone in others. For that reason, something that worked even if there wasn't a branch is useful. That it causes the banks to close branches isn't convenient, but as I said, they could keep those open while still having online banking, so the problem is what they chose to do rather than the online bit.

Re: Examples.......and more to come!

I don't think they're all perfect examples. Remember that the definition must include a reason, but it doesn't require you to obsolete everything else. If there is a benefit to the new thing, then it's not that type.

"(1) Python3.": They made the Unicode handling different. Switching wasn't fun, but there is their reason.

"(2) GTK4.": Don't know this one.

"(3) Online banking.": If you want to do something and you're not near a branch, then it's useful. They had a reason. This doesn't mean they should eliminate the branches, but your problem isn't with the new thing but the lack of the old one. They could easily have kept the branches and still had the online option, and some banks have done that.

"(4) Cloud backups.": It gets data off-site quickly and doesn't require a bunch of manual work. It has many downsides that you've correctly mentioned, but there's a reason for it to exist.

"(5) 4G (or 5G)": This is another situation where your problem is the old thing being removed, not the new thing. 4G was a lot faster than 3G if you could get it. That made many things work better on a mobile connection. There was a reason for it. 5G is theoretically the same benefit, but it's less obviously required.

"(6) "The Ribbon" M$ Office...": No, you're completely right on this one.

"(7) Windows 8": And also this one.

Re: Level 3

I think the specific $289k figure in the article is the point at which households spend less than 1% of their income on fuel. That explains where it came from, though not why they decided to put that number in the headline; it appears to have no other meaning, and they also talk about the effects of inflation on people earning $19k which demonstrates they know those people exist.

I agree that the suggestions are basically worthless. They all boil down to "Buy less of the stuff that got more expensive", which is what people who don't have enough money already know.

Re: Level 3

"Because I know next to nothing about the US... how does $289k compare with "average" wages in the US?"

For an individual, they'd be earning at the 98th percentile and 525% the medium individual income for full-time workers. For a household, it's the 96th percentile. It's a bunch of money. Someone earning more than that is going to be fine with inflation, but so are a lot of people earning less than that. Sure, everyone gets hurt when inflation's high, but someone earning that much is very unlikely to have problems meeting necessary expenses. Also, note that like other countries, there's a wide variation in the cost of living depending on where someone works. The median income for full-time figure I found ($55k) includes the entire country, but could be insufficient for expensive places to live.

Debugging source is even harder when you can't stop laughing at it

In a probably different functional language, you could do comparisons with function pattern matching or a case statement. The pattern matching would only do exact values, so if you wanted to do something as complex as checking whether a number was even, your only choice was case. The problem was that you could only do a case statement in the return from a let statement, which when you wanted to look at the parameter you already had was not required. This led to code like this:

let int WasteMemoryAllocation = 0

in case [your real check]

end

Help, my IT team has no admin access to their own systems

After you get fired, you have no professional duty to keep working. Sabotage would have been both. Not doing free work, however, should be expected.

HP finance manager went on $5m personal spending spree with company card

How did this work

I understand how she faked documents for HP, and assuming they were done well, HP wouldn't know that her charges were false. However, if I'm understanding correctly, these payments were expected to be paid to a supplier, so how did she avoid the supplier complaining about not being paid? I would have thought that, after every supplier she handled started reporting late or nonpayment, someone would have checked on it if only to prevent angry suppliers. Somehow, this worked for three years.

C: Everyone's favourite programming language isn't a programming language

Re: Umm

They could create one. I am not saying they have to, but even if I argue for the point they made, your objections don't apply. They did not ask for Rust to be the IDL used by operating systems. They said that C wasn't good at that purpose and could be improved. Since Rust takes a lot of its influence from C, it's likely it wouldn't be great at it either. It's not new to use a language for interfacing that wasn't used in writing the system, and other operating systems have done it.

"It seems weird to me that C provides a way to call into C, *and* a way to call out of C, and gets criticized because the language it uses is C."

C doesn't have ways to call out of C. Other languages link to C stuff and call in, but you never see a C program directly linking to Java or Python. It can link to libraries written in other languages that have chosen to have a compatible format, but in each case, the other language has to change itself to match C. If a C program contains a component in something that doesn't follow the standard C linking structure, a different interface language is used for that connection. This doesn't make C bad. It makes your compliment wrong.

Re: Other languages....

But they do serve a similar purpose and so it makes sense to compare them. However, it does not make sense to compare them in the simplistic way I did, hence my analogy to the simplistic way to compare programming languages that also doesn't make sense.

Re: Other languages....

The examples listed do not function under this rule. Java is listed under procedural, not scripting, but it is interpreted. So even if you choose to use this distinction, the original suggestion wasn't. This is why that categorization doesn't work very well.

Re: Meanwhile in 2040 ...

"... there will still be the same old my language is better than your language (grandad!) arguments."

Yes, but there will also be the "My language is real and because you use something else, you're pathetic" arguments, often from people who use something else but don't admit it. Both are cringe-worthy. There are cases for most languages that exist today, and just because someone uses one for speed, easiness, portability, or even familiarity, they probably are doing that for a reason. The argument that you must use Rust because you are likely to do your memory management wrong eventually is annoying, but so is being told that if you don't use C, you must not understand how computers work and you're thinking wrong.

Re: Umm

"The fact is that whatever language is most prevalent for writing OSes will require any other 'proper' programming language to have some sort of interface to enable system calls."

Yes, but that interface doesn't have to be the same language. You can write something in C and provide a different interface. This can have advantages in application portability and language usage. I think that's the main suggestion (or more likely lamentation) of the person quoted in the article. Many systems create an interface that doesn't require all applications to link with them, but most common OSes have taken a different view.

Re: Other languages....

I think this structure doesn't work very well. For one thing, what's the difference between a scripting language and a non-scripting language. Usually, the argument comes down to "I want to say that this one isn't good enough, so it's just for scripts". Lots of small maintenance scripts have been written in C. Many large applications have been written in Python. There's no real distinction.

Also, procedural is usually defined to include C, because each operation has effects which are present for the next operation. This is often as opposed to functional languages that attempt to avoid side-effects, languages that don't appear to be in your categorization system. This is without considering languages that manage to have both features. And even if you want to use the categories, you need a better name than "Algol-like", because some of those are not like Algol and you can argue for hours about how much alike they can be before the category applies.

This is like dividing operating systems into program loader, Unix-like (including Windows), RTOS, and just expecting everything to neatly fit in.

Re: Nothing new...

"I don't know. How many Fortran programmers love Fortran? How many COBAL programmers love COBAL?"

A lot of them. Whenever Cobol gets brought up here, many people remark on how much they liked it, how easy it was to read, how much they wish people still used it today. I don't know because I'm too young to have written it. People seem to like the things they've used enough because they already know how to use it. I'm guessing that, if people didn't like it, they did everything they could to switch to an alternative. This leaves us with many choices that some group of people really like, but not necessarily choices that have been designed well. There's a reason that Cobol isn't much used except in old systems today, and it's not because nobody liked it.

Complaints mount after GitHub launches new algorithmic feed

You already couldn't do an alphabetical sort if any number went over 9. And the reason that single integers aren't used is because people want to avoid breaking changes but still to get patches, which, when breaking changes are going to happen, means there are multiple branches. This is also the reason dates don't work if there are ever two versions being supported. You separate by . characters and do an integer sort from left to right. It's not that hard to do.

It's not at all new, and I don't think anyone would claim it. It's just a standard to clarify a few things that a lot of people have already done for a while. For example, we don't get the 2.01 version number format under that standard, but most people had already realized it was annoying and stopped doing that. It's an old concept, and nothing got invented in stating a few suggested rules.

Nvidia reveals 144-core Arm-based Grace 'CPU Superchip'

There's not a ton they can do about the fact that more people want to buy them. I'm sure they'd like to make a bunch more of them, but that's true of a lot of places and TSMC has its hands full building everything else we also want. Also, depending on how much power you need, there are GPUs out there at more reasonable prices. Not the most powerful ones, sure, but you can do a lot without having the best chip released.

How not to attract a WSL (or any) engineer

Re: high school

"When it comes to assessing culture fit... What's really quite important to me, is that someone can recognise their flaws or things they do that would get people's backs up. We all have them right?"

Absolutely, and if you asked me this question and I didn't want to leave, I would do all I could to not tell you what they were. An interview is where I convince you I'm good at this job, so bringing out a list of things to see if any of them are stuff you hate is not on my list of priorities. My teams tend not to hate me. I've been complimented on my group interaction by lots of colleagues. I'm more diplomatic than many developers I've known. You don't find that out in half an hour, so, since everyone who is not is going to act that way, I will too.

More importantly, the self-assessment part of this isn't the important part of this. You would like to know how people react to having this pointed out and changing things, because an annoying person who doesn't want to be and acts to change their ways is better than a mostly fine person who refuses to consider anything could be wrong. You also have the problem that what a friend might consider annoying might not apply to work (my friends might not care about many of the things I know a lot about and consider me boring, but I tend not to make my colleagues talk about irrelevant things). I have a feeling that, if I (a complete stranger to you) asked you to catalog your flaws to me, the resulting list would be hard to create and would probably not have a ton of relevance to you in your actual life. Your interviewers are complete strangers too, and they'll act the same way.

Re: high school

I thank you for the sentiment, and improvisation was definitely my favorite part of being in that band. However, I don't think most hiring managers take the same view which is why I don't include any musical credentials on my resume. Maybe I just don't know how they think (actually, I know that is true), but whenever I've mentioned something that's not directly in line with the job they're going to ask me to do, many seem to take it as a negative. Anywhere I could go at least accepts all my technical projects as assets, but most other things appear to be ignored.

Re: high school

You want to tell us what reason that would be? Because from the face of it, it seems like a way to indicate to someone that they don't want to work for you. Maybe it's a test of how quickly they can come up with a fake annoying trait that seems to speak in their favor--you didn't think they were answering honestly, did you? Or are you just seeing whether they can be insulted (with the stupidity of the question, not the content) and not show their displeasure?

Re: high school

The person to whom you replied was complaining about the term "high school", not the question. I do have an answer to your question though. First, I don't have a problem with the term; I assume this was written by and for a country where that is the typical term and that they could easily translate it if they wanted to inflict the same questioning on someone in a different country.

But now, no, I can't think of a legitimate reason for any of those questions. "How did you get on at high school?" is stupidly generic and has no right answer. "What would your high school peers remember you for?" isn't going to receive an honest answer, and I'm assuming they want an answer along the lines of "That guy who only wrote kernel drivers and so we don't remember them", which just isn't true; I wrote code but I did other things, but I have a feeling that playing in a jazz band isn't going to win me the job.

Asking specifically about mathematics is a little more relevant, which still means not relevant. If they want to hire someone who has advanced skills in that area, ask them to solve some typical mathematical problem. Even looking at their university courses in the area would give you more information. A person could rank highly in math due to being in a small school or could rank low if they're being compared only to similarly advanced students. Also, nobody knows that number now and in most cases, they didn't get one at the time (I got As in all of them, but I don't know how many people had those so I can't give you a ranking). What's more, they're looking for a developer. That probably includes a bunch of mathematical skills, but they're not even asking this of someone being hired as a mathematician.

Russian court deems Instagram and Facebook as 'extremist', WhatsApp spared

Re: Perhaps

There are two reasons that might not work very well. The first is the blame game. If Russia forces the app to close, the government can only do so much to explain why and the protests would be against them. If WhatsApp closes on its own, the government can say that, had they had the power, the app would still be operating. They can paint the action in the same light as the other companies that have abandoned Russia and blame either the company or a different country for making it happen. This argument wouldn't be incorrect, though it would be misleading.

The second reason is that WhatsApp allows communication using encryption, which is quite important for people inside Russia. With government crackdowns on all protesting activity and anything that looks like it might get there, anyone who is going to talk about Ukraine, let alone arrange to help in any way, needs protection from Russian surveillance. WhatsApp isn't my favorite way to get there, but it does work. Cutting it off could hurt those who use it to evade the dictators more than the dictators themselves.

Android's Messages, Dialer apps quietly sent text, call info to Google

Re: Gdpr 3% fine

The way things have been going, they will pay nothing because something very bad has happened to the Irish Data Protection Commission. I imagine it looks like those science fiction shows where the terrible alien plague has left an area visibly undamaged but with every human instantly killed. At least that would explain how all the privacy risks under their jurisdiction continue completely unchecked. We may need GDPR 2.0 which is identical to the first version but says that any EU country can take any action named in the law, reserving none to the country in which the entity is based. It also has the benefits that many countries can assess their own 4% fines.

Review: ASUS dual-screen laptop may warm your heart, will definitely warm your lap

If they keep all the same ports and switch the power port with another USB-C, that's exactly what you get. I don't think having a port that doesn't have data lines helps ensure they didn't skimp on the other ports. I also value that it's easier to find a compatible USB-C adapter than whatever proprietary cable the manufacturer chose.

Unable to write 'Amusing Weekly Column'. Abort, Retry, Fail?

I would prefer longer labels. Having a button labeled "No" is confusing when there's no "Yes". You have explained what they're for in the message, which at least avoids ambiguity, but it still looks weird. You could put labels on the buttons that clearly indicate what they do: "Save and exit", "Discard changes", "Continue editing [or whatever they're doing]".

The file format thing is true in a lot of applications. They all do something like it. Libreoffice is, unfortunately, one of them. Yes, I know that the ODT format is nicer and open and all that, but this file is a docx and the user who sent it to me is expecting a docx back. Stop complaining that I'm going to use a format you already know. At least Libreoffice has that option. Some other word processors (Apple, this means you) won't allow you to save in anything but their own format and will pull up a dialogue if you try. For someone who has the habit of saving whenever I've completed part of something, this is very annoying.

Re: Is Your Message Really Necessary?

Macs now use APFS which they switched from HFS+ a few years ago as long as you're using an SSD. This switch was a source of several problems. Apple figured this was doable during an OS upgrade and didn't treat it as concerning. Some machines simply failed to switch, causing them not to boot at all. A full reinstallation was necessary. I had this happen to me and debugged it on a couple others as well. I figured that would be the last of it, and for a while, it was.

Then a friend who hadn't had that happened came to me looking for help clearing files from their disk as it was nearly full. I gave them the standard advice on finding caches or unneeded software and deleting it, but it wasn't working. When I finally ran manual tools to figure out what data could be purged safely, I found that, for some reason, Apple had converted this laptop to APFS successfully, kept a backup HFS+ copy of it all, and had been automatically cloning every operation from one to the other for years, halving the disk space available. I backed up everything, including a full image of the disks, and nuked that from orbit. It was the only way to be sure.

Re: Turbo Pascal - Missing Semi-Colon at line 454

In one of my courses on programming language design, the professor wrote several small languages which were designed to teach us how different programming languages would be designed if someone only knew lisp syntax, didn't mind lots of unclear reserved terms, and wasn't at all interested in not having people hate him. These small languages had canonical interpreters, and the students would first write some projects in those languages, and later would reimplement part of the interpreter. The canonical ones had very bad error messages. You'd never get a line or location reference, and as I recall there were a total of five possible messages: "Invalid syntax", "Invalid type", "Invalid value", "Code error" (this mostly meant stack overflow), and "Test failed").

When we were tasked with reimplementing these, we were graded on whether it could run proper code and reject erroneous code, but not on exact duplication. So I gave my versions proper error messages. This was mostly because, if I did it wrong, they were helpful in debugging. Still, I couldn't help but adding a message along these lines: "This is where [language name] would say invalid type, but since this is a proper one, your actual error is". I would remove that part before submission in case the professor saw it and didn't like it, but I got an approving comment from one of the graduate students who assisted them.

While I haven't seen that one, I have seen "Are you sure you want to cancel? Continue/Cancel". I had a fun argument over what each button was supposed to do.

The answer in this case was that cancel canceled the cancellation and continue continued the cancellation but didn't work, giving you a new box with a cancel button and a progress indicator that never moved. Clicking that cancel button, which should theoretically have canceled the continuation of the continued cancellation didn't do anything, which was probably for the best as the confirmation box for that would likely have been recursively confusing.

Client demo in 30 minutes. Just what could go wrong?

Re: What's in a name?

I wonder if that's due to birds' use of magnetic fields. The power cable probably leaks more of a field than data cables. Either that or they're just a different diameter and the data ones are more fun to eat.

Samsung updates its most popular smartphone range

Re: Dear Samsung.

While Samsung isn't the only one that makes that kind of thing, they've got one. It's the Galaxy Xcover 5. For each of your requirements:

"makes & takes voice calls & text messages,": Right, like all the others. It does it.

"has a headphone jack,": Yes.

"a removable battery,": Yes, capacity 3000 mAh.

"an SD card slot that accepts high capacity cards,": SDXC supported.

"an update schedule on the software that means it won't be landfill in a few years,": It's on Android 11 and they said it's getting updates. They could be lying, but they've actually been doing it recently.

"all for a price under $500USD.": You can find the price in your country, but I saw it for €240 (converts to $275), so it should hit your limit even if the first search result was off.

This should do it: compares the A3 (2017), the A32 5G (2021), and A33 5G (from this article).

Re: *This* shiny stone is much better than that shiny stone I sold you yesterday!

There are sites that compare specs, but it really comes down to exactly what you want to match. Do you want a phone that has as fast a CPU as your S8? Similar battery life? Same size? Same number of lenses sticking out of the back? Same number of pixels captured?

Qualcomm reveals it's not selling to Russia during Twitter spat

Re: Policy via social media: It's a thing now

Media is not the problem. You can replace the archives with archives on new media if you decide it's not good enough. The archivists know this already--if they decided to use a kind of tape, they kept the drives around to read it at least until having copied it onto the new kind. People who didn't intend on archiving their stuff didn't, but most of that would, if on paper, have been shredded and recycled by now anyway.

"Then there's old proprietary stuff like memory sticks and CompactFlash cards. I had family photos on those that were a nightmare to recover."

What was the problem? Because if it was that you didn't have any readers, that's a problem that can be fixed easily on Amazon. I've still got a CF reader here. I don't have any cards anymore and the reader runs on USB 1.1, but it's still available.

"Heck, how about old formats like Flash? [...] trying to play them now is almost impossible."

No, it's not. The flash player isn't installed by default anymore? Go download it manually. Or use an OS that didn't have it removed. We have converters for a lot of this stuff and virtual machines for the rest. I won't guarantee that every format can be converted, but if you're willing to do some work, you can tackle most of them.

Red Hat effort to shut down WeMakeFedora.org deemed harassment

Re: Pocock is a wanker - Not!

I am not familiar with all of his statements. I have read the one you linked. However, it's difficult to decide which group of people is correct without a lot of background knowledge that they have and I don't. I can say that the statement you linked is not a clearly good one; it identifies inconsistencies in the actions taken by Debian to resolve a set of harassment claims. That's well and good, however, it uses those inconsistencies to jump to the opposite conclusion that Debian came to without doing any more to prove that one (I.E. Debian said this guy was wrong, there was a possible conflict of interest* and some sources who didn't announce themselves publicly, thus this guy must be perfect and the accusers are wrong). It also includes several strange statements, such as alleging that a person was likely present at a crime (which was also alleged to have not happened) and chose to do nothing about it. That's not a convincing argument to me.

I cannot say who is right. I can say that when two large open source projects both decide they don't like you, there's probably a reason that's larger than disagreeing with their decision after you resigned.

*The alleged conflict of interest was running for election to the board of an open source project, which doesn't strike me as a large one, but anything's possible.

Even complex AI models are failing 5th grade science

"moving a satellite does not include checking the rear-view mirror for another satellite in the left lane, or paying attention to road signs, or needing to be wary of rain, snow or ice."

It does though. If you're moving a satellite, one of the major reasons you'd be doing it is so it isn't going to hit another one or come close to doing it. That's both now as you move it and later on because you can't constantly be moving the thing. You also have to be aware of local conditions, which includes space weather. Those are the things the computer calculates when it decides where the satellite should be going and the correct movements to get there. That's going to be reviewed by a person, but the person doesn't do the calculation and tell the computer.

Re: Interpreter please

I'm not sure which countries use which set of terms. Since these are American researchers, they're using the American grade numbers, which go from 1st (age 6-7) to 12th (17-18).

Re: The next question...

I suggest that's a different proposal. Driving a car is a mechanical task, albeit a very difficult one requiring a lot of things the human brain is good at doing. Writing a program to drive a car may include a bit of statistical calculations for visual things, but most of it will be non-AI code that can be more rigorously tested. In either case, the car doesn't have to figure out your goals in order to follow the course you set and not drive into any solid objects. Many other processes have been automated in this manner, and while I expect this one to take a lot longer because it is much more complex, you don't need to get AGI to do it.

The thing this research tested is the problem solving ability of AI software, which as we know is abysmal. Even if it wasn't, it's unlikely we would want a car to start doing it--it shouldn't decide where to take you, after all. There are things where you need general intelligence and problem solving, which is where humans come in useful, and cases where you need fast and accurate machines. You wouldn't ask a ten-year-old to move a satellite in orbit either, but when a computer does the calculations and activates the movement, it's completely normal.

How CAPTCHAs can cloak phishing URLs in emails

Ah, with plain text, there's no risk. There's no way it could look like this:

New required training from HR. Please complete this training by the end of this month through our external training provider and acknowledge completion. Take the training here: https://convincingfakeprovidername.training/2In2lc4Z

With that URL leading to a captcha to throw off a scanner looking for URLs. Are you about to ban them as well? The same tactic can be used by putting the URL and/or link in an attachment, which could be PDF, DOCX, ODT, or HTML itself, whatever is most likely to be opened by a user. Somehow, you assume that having a link that doesn't show the URL makes this worse even though a user can see the URL and all the security training suggests that they do. The users who still don't check would often cheerfully load even very suspicious URLs.

Re: An automated scanner gets stopped at the puzzle.

If your workers only need the internet for a small set of sites, that should work fine. If they need to do more with it, for example if anyone would ever be expected to do online research which could take them to sources you hadn't known about, it won't work. My employer does not do that because, if they did, I'd have hit it about ten times in the last month and that would be low in comparison to others.

The right to repairable broadband befits a supposedly critical utility

I thought the same. I can go into the cable system and figure out where my line is (or probably I can't, having never done it, but I'll at least figure that out before doing something). Having recently had a network debugging phone call with a nontechnical person, including the verbatim quote "Should we connect the router directly into the WiFi" on a network that has only one router that also does the WiFi, I do not want the average user going down to where my line is. If the downside is that I don't either, that's a reasonable precaution.

UK Supreme Court snubs Assange anti-extradition bid

Re: Wasn't it Facebook what won it for Trump?

The argument is that the information was stolen by Russia and put on Wikileaks so that the various Facebook operators could refer to it. In addition, Wikileaks isn't free software that people can use on their own, it's a platform over which a few people have control whether they choose to use it or not. You can decide whether you care about either distinction.

Viasat, Rosneft hit by cyberattacks as Ukraine war spills online

Re: As much use as a chocolate teacup

"How are they going to receive the email if their connection to the internet is down?"

Using a phone, a neighbor's connection, someone reading it to you from a different place. How would you like them to get the information out? They probably have sent paper mail, but it's not going to arrive before the users have found an alternative way to connect.