Posts by doublelayer

$180 for an overpriced, dubious SSD drive? Maybe don't join the USB Club

Re: Maybe...

I wondered if this was some kind of piracy tool, where you claim you're buying a weird USB drive but what you're really buying is access to a server where you can upload a terabyte of something and download others' terabytes of something. That could be a way of getting video files or, you know, some very normal files that you need a terabyte of storage for without making it obvious you're doing so. The automatic deletion thing could help clear any trails if someone wanted to check what it was used for. However, on reading this, I'm beginning to think this idea might be more thought through than whatever they actually intend.

Arm to Qualcomm: See you in court? Oh yes, please

Re: Arm shoots itself in the foot...

"Is there a standard for the Arm based PC ? such that other vendors can produce the CPU."

Of course. The only problem is that nobody else follows it, nobody else has coordinated to help build it, it may not be completely public, and Qualcomm isn't exactly standard themselves, just some of the chips they run Windows on are. Theoretically, if Qualcomm had to stop making any chips, nothing stops MediaTek or, well probably just MediaTek from taking their place and building something. I'm not sure they will, though, and unless they've already started, getting from their existing chips to one Microsoft will be happy selling is not going to happen overnight.

In case you're interested, I don't think other players in ARM will be able to because Samsung's chips are not as powerful (though they're getting there and are the most likely of these options), Unisoc's are mostly for budget phones, ThunderX (formerly Cavium's*) successors are mostly aimed at servers and I don't think they'll be able to get the long battery life that's the main selling point of Windows on ARM devices, the same goes for other server ARM boards, Apple isn't going to, and nearly everyone else makes low-end chips for embedded devices and SBCs.

* Cavium might be a good comparison point for Nuvia. They were sold to Marvell in 2018, they had a license to produce custom cores, and Marvell still does that. The contracts are probably not identical, but I do wonder whether Marvell paid ARM to keep the license. Not enough to search around for the answer, but it might be an interesting answer.

Arm reportedly warns Qualcomm it will cancel its licenses

Re: Actually ...

And if, therefore, every processor designer put in custom extensions designed to make it difficult to copy their designs because otherwise any of the expensive effort involved in designing a good chip or ISA was taken by free for others? That's what you would have gotten if IP wasn't a thing. And if anyone mentions it, RISC-V is not a counterexample. The core instruction set is public, but manufacturers' designs are protected by IP and extensions may be as well, though sometimes they choose to be open with those in the hopes that others will use them and require them in their software which would advantage their chips. That does a lot of negative things, for example why I'm worried about RISC-V fragmentation weakening the architecture, but it does mean companies can design new and better chip designs which is necessary for any meaningful progress.

Re: Licence

Neither of those are realistic problems with such a license. The license is of lesser value than one without the prohibition and I wouldn't want to sign one, but it is easily accomplished. First, the license can be non-transferrable without ARM's permission, but if they approve, or more likely if the purchasing company gives ARM some of the money, they can accept it. That reduces rather than eliminates the sale value of the IP, to say nothing of the making actual products value of the IP. The problem of the license being easily cancelled is easily fixed by making it survive an attempt to sell to the same person, to a holding company owned by the same people, etc, and that's if you need to do that at all. There's not many reasons why a company would want to cancel the contract. They've already paid for their end, and if they cancel the contract, they have to stop selling and, if you believe ARM's lawyers in this case, destroy the plans for, the things they built under the contract, so they don't want that thing cancelled.

IPv6 may already be irrelevant – but so is moving off IPv4, argues APNIC's chief scientist

Re: long numbers are long

So do you think it would be easy to remember and use the address

184.53.92.138.4.236.148.95.0.0.0.0.0.52.91.133

I'll admit that I do have trouble memorizing IPV6 addresses. I don't think it's the hex that does it. I think it's the length. However, the length makes it easier after you get long enough. Once I've memorized those bits that lead to my subnet, I can allocate the rest of them in whatever way I think makes them easier to manage. I can split subnets on a digit boundary when it wouldn't be feasible in IPV4 because there isn't enough address space. If it's a small network, I can simply make as many high order bits zero as I can, meaning that the addresses can be as simple as my-subnet::3. If I don't like letters, I can do that, but skip the hex addresses. my-subnet::9 can go straight into my-subnet::10. Chances are that I can live without allocating my-subnet::a in this network.

SuperHTML is here to rescue you from syntax errors, and it's FOSS

Re: would like to see a switch back to plain old static HTML

That depends on what you want your site to do and how much you want to do to make it happen. Most of the sites I have made, not being a professional web designer, are hand-written HTML. I still need a backend language though because most of them do at least some nonstatic things. They take user input and send it to me, or they build pages from templates so the user can select something I hadn't premade a page for and still get a result. Someone who likes the splitting approach (XKCD) might say that I'm making web applications rather than websites, but when the application is humble enough, the dividing line isn't clear. I tend not to use JavaScript, not because it isn't useful, but mostly because I don't like it and some people won't run it.

Making a website out of text files is possible, because most browsers will display a text file when they're sent one. You won't get most of the nice things about HTML unless the browser chooses to interpret the text file as HTML anyway, which sometimes happens, but in that case you're not using plain text, just badly written HTML. If you want clickable links, you don't want plain text. Maybe you want a markup language that's closer, but if you want features other than characters and line breaks, it's not plain text.

Huawei makes divorce from Android official with HarmonyOS NEXT launch

That may be the size of the set of apps you use and the apps you imagine others using, but as usual, there's a lot of people with many use cases. A lot of those apps are useless inclusive or riddled with malware, but that doesn't make the remainder that small. We also have no information about what kind of apps you can use on the Harmony OS devices, because that count could be 15000 trustworthy and useful apps or 8 of those and 14992 automatic translations of a cheap game or utility, ad presenter, and spyware.

When existing phone platforms failed, it was often because they didn't have the kind of third-party software that the established ones did. This was often described in terms of the well-known services whose apps weren't available, and that was part of the problem, but so was the lack of or poor choices for everyday utilities that people had gotten used to wanting.

Feature phones all the rage as parents try to shield kids from harm

Re: Feature Phone is functionally better, and better value

I'm not following some of your objections, and some others are easy to understand but I haven't experienced them.

"Feature phone works well with pay-as-you-go. Smartphone requires contract (£20 a month is cheapest I can get)"

Why does it require a contract and why that contract? I've had smartphones on no-contract plans. It worked fine. The restricted data meant that I chose to prevent most applications from using mobile data, leaving only a couple I wanted to keep, but otherwise, it was fine. Is your device locked? Otherwise, why can't you put in whatever SIM you want?

"Feature phone starts in seconds (useful for banking 2FA). Smartphone - takes long enough to make coffee."

I just don't experience that. Smartphones I've had are pretty fast to unlock and cold start in at most thirty seconds. The only way they would take longer is if I've completely discharged them. I wonder if there's something unusual about your phone.

On some other points, especially the size, I definitely agree with you. Manufacturers seem to agree that people want long and wide devices, and while they hire researchers so they probably have some data to back up this idea, I am not in that set. Finding something small enough is a challenge and one I'll have to deal with when mine breaks, which I hope will be years from now.

Re: > can text

Not all of the devices do. For the ones that have more than phone and SMS, it's common to see KaiOS running them, and KaiOS has both of those services available. I don't have such a device myself, so I don't know how well those work, but I think you'll probably find a few of those around. It is a fork of what used to be Firefox's mobile OS attempt. It's mostly closed-source now and when I looked at the internals, I wasn't that impressed, but it can be sold quite cheaply.

Major publishers sue Perplexity AI for scraping without paying

Re: 139 words

"The claim that Perplexity owes WSJ/NYP for being wrong, i.e. not using the WSJ/NYP source, I doubt that has standing."

I don't think standing is the right word there. I think I agree with you in that I'm not aware of any law they can use for that. That they have been harmed, standing, is clear: the bot is not just being wrong, it is attributing that wrong text to the papers. It would be along the lines of me saying that "The Register forum contributor O'Reg Inalsin said 'I like to kill people'". I might not have violated any law by telling that lie, especially if I believed it to be true, but you wouldn't be advantaged if I did it.

Fair use is the most typical argument, and I've never found it very convincing. Even if they're only taking that much of the article because their bot can't get past the paywall, nothing makes that text free for the taking, and it indicates that, were they able to, they'd happily quote more. Whether the inaccuracy is due to not having the whole article in the training data or is just LLM quality issues, they don't have an automatic right to use the stuff they have gathered from these papers or from any paywall-free site on the internet.

Re: AI sounding the death knell for copyright?

I'm sure, given your opinions on copyright being evil, that you embrace the prospect of the elimination of copyright, either through direct legal abolition or through global failure to enforce it. That doesn't mean that is the inevitable outcome. Those who support the existence of copyright can and should try to prevent it from collapsing. You're calling for a preemptive surrender, but we aren't that far along yet.

People have been making similar arguments for a long time. When the internet made it easier to obtain copies of things you wanted without paying for them, people loved to sound the death knell of copyright, but as things developed, it didn't go that way. Piracy actually became less popular when it became possible to more easily obtain legal versions of the thing you wanted, versions that came with less risk of dodgy sites or poor-quality versions. As the companies that make that available start to make terms worse, it's likely that piracy will increase in popularity again, but that can go in both directions.

As for your hope that some countries will decide not to have or enforce copyright law, you may be surprised to find out that they do sometimes make IP themselves. India was in your list, and it has a large and relatively popular film industry. They want copyright protection on those works. If they decided to be egregious in assisting the violation of others' copyrights, they might find that their own copyrights have lost value. As these countries get richer, more and more of their economies will rely on IP. Their current spotty enforcement is not the same as your preferred abolition of the concept, and there is a reason to think that they will improve it, at least for their own IP, rather than go in the direction you've pointed.

Qualcomm unveils Snapdragon 8 Elite with custom cores for Android phones

Re: Video specs

I think the main use is to record in 8K, then edit and export as 4K, but you have more data so the editing causes less degradation. I'm not sure how many people who do that are using a phone camera in the first place. Okay, probably lots of people do, but I'm not sure how many people who make anything where it would matter in the slightest are doing so.

Probably not. From their perspective, what's the point? They sometimes make embedded versions, as in ones that are sold for less consumer-oriented hardware, by taking phone chips and stripping out unnecessary things. For all I know, that might be a binning thing. However, that's usually mid-range chips because they're making more of them and the devices the clients use them for can manage with the lower performance. The other types of variant they sometimes do are more likely to use the high-end cores, but they're also more likely to want to keep the NPU. For example, their XR processors have a relation to their high-end phone chips, but XR devices are likely to value something that the NPU will accelerate, so it probably won't be dropped there either. Is there a reason you want that?

Re: "flagship mobile SoC"

It's likely that they share core technology, but they don't use exactly the same chip for both because the constraints are different. The same works with Apple. Yes, the core designs may be similar or even the same from the M* laptop/tablet chips and the A* phone/also tablet chips, but the clocks are different, the caches are different, the on-SOoC GPU is different, and the memory is different. This is mostly because power and thermal constraints are different whether you have a phone or a laptop. Anything that this SoC has which wasn't already in the laptop cores will likely appear in one soon enough.

It's about time Intel, AMD dropped x86 games and turned to the real threat

Re: others' -> other's

I assume you're talking about:

"Ultimately, the union boils down to this: the last thing anyone needs or wants to deal with is compatibility edge cases because Intel or AMD decided their implementation of the x86 ISA was better than the others'."

In which case, yes, there are multiple others. The only two that matter most of the time are those, and that's the other they're most likely looking at, but you do have Zhaoxin/Via as well. Most of the ones I've seen have been lackluster, but as AMD64-compatible chips, they could come up with interesting implementations. Technically, there are a few others, but they mostly make 32-bit ones for embedded, so they're probably not doing anything that new. Still, "others".

The billionaire behind Trump's 'unhackable' phone is on a mission to fight Tesla's FSD

I don't think so. That sounds like the thing you often get when transcribing someone's informal speech. It wasn't too much repetition, and the fragment is a pretty standard thing when trying to intensify something, so standard that a grammarian would probably accept it if a comma was used instead. To get a Trump, you need more irrelevant asides:

There is no feature, and we have lots of great features, features like you'd see in other operating systems, but our features are the most secure you've ever seen. And sometimes you see features like in Windows where the files, the files are important, you need the files and sometimes a hacker will go after the files and you don't know where the hacker came from so you need it to be secure and the hacker is from China or Iran and the hacker is a bad guy. So we want to keep the hacker out so we only make a new feature, well sometimes you have a different operating system like Linux where they want the feature too, so they pay someone like Russia to make them the feature, but they don't think about the hackers. We do think about the hackers right here in the USA, which is why we have the most beautiful, most beautiful hackers and they spend all day finding problems where we need to be more secure...

This isn't just a president. If, for example, this was used by the president and their protection detail to coordinate routes, that might work. However, the stated purpose was to be used by campaign officials so that things like the Iranian attack on them don't happen again. Campaigns are made up of lots of people who are not trained in security or anything else, working in all sorts of places doing unplanned things. It is more difficult for them to adapt to restricted methods and they're the kind of people who aren't eager to adopt that in the first place.

A campaign is a lot like a company. Consider what would happen if you had to convert an employer to a restricted communication system for all internal messages. If it was a small company where everyone was knowledgeable about security risks, you could probably do it. I think you can imagine how hard it would be and how many people would ignore you if you tried the same with managers who don't want anything that will slow down their messages, technophobes who have become comfortable with something and resist any change, and processes that are considered critical and indispensable which don't yet work through the system you're trying to switch to. I've had to do it before and, even more frequently, I've had to watch the IT people try it and struggling to implement something against organizational inertia, then catch all the people who deliberately bypassed their policies.

Re: really long lines

If they're writing in C, which seems likely given the age and what it's supposed to be, you don't need any line breaks at all. For convenience, set your editor to interpret any semicolon and either curly brace as having a new line after it, but don't actually insert them. Only use /*...*/ comments and do the same with those. Insert a few line breaks so that you don't actually claim that it's just one line.

I'm still expecting that it turns out that ten thousand is the lines of code for some component that is important, but not the only thing in which vulnerabilities are found, or that it can't actually do very much and won't get used. I could see an encrypted text-only message system being built in 10kloc, most of which would be the code for whatever communication system was chosen, but what's much harder to imagine is people using it when they are more familiar with smartphones.

Not if, for instance, people like sending pictures. A lot of people do like that. SMS can't handle them. Likely this OS, if it's actually as small as described, can't do it either. Say hello to WhatsApp or something like it. The same applies if people like videocalls. True, they probably aren't needed, but that doesn't stop people from preferring them to voice calls for some reason. If you're careful to use the secure device whenever possible and to do without things that your secure device can't do, then you're in a good place. A lot of insecurity comes because people are not willing to do one of those things.

Pixel perfect Ghostpulse malware loader hides inside PNG image files

You don't even need steganography for that. With their current technique, it checks whether a given 16-byte block is part of the instructions or not. All you need to do is not include too many of them. The picture as a whole is a perfectly normal full screen graphic and looks normal enough, but 40k/3.69M pixels would look weird. Maybe you could notice that if you looked at it long enough, but an AI probably wouldn't tell that there are little areas where something looks different in this picture. You could train one specifically to recognize tiny imperfections, but then you're specifically fighting against this one method and might miss plenty of other ones.

Re: Windows key...

It probably confuses the majority of phone scammers who aren't that technically aware themselves, but it wouldn't be much of a protection against a website like this one if they tried for about ten minutes. Linux and Mac OS have key commands that would accept commands, and user agent strings will generally tell them which operating system you're running*. So they could easily present the average user with instructions that will run a script on their computer whether it's Windows or not.

* Yes, you can lie about the operating system, but chances are that if you know why you're doing it, you also know not to open a command window and paste things in it. For someone who was given a Linux system by a friend, they won't have chosen to change their user agent. If you have given Linux systems to your family members but switched the user agents beforehand, you're in a pretty small minority even of those installing Linux for others.

AWS boss: Don't want to come back to the office? Go work somewhere else

Re: Inverted subtitle logic?

The i prefix was early 2010s, after the e prefix but far from trendy now. For today's trend, you have to capitalize it and stick an A at the beginning.

I think your assumption is exactly what they intend but won't get. My guess is that they know there are some people they don't want to lose who will not agree to come into the office and they figure they'll give them an exception and never speak of it again. However, without telling managers that they can do that, they won't get it. Even if they did, workers who aren't aware might not bother asking, or managers might find they can't get an exception approved. So while I think they're planning on exceptions, I think they'll approve far fewer than they're willing to because of bureaucratic inefficiency.

What I mostly expect is rampant noncompliance. People who are really unwilling to return to the office will likely try not coming in to see if anyone gets mad. I don't know what they'll do about that, though in previous rounds covered here, their response seems to have been sending scary emails suggesting that you will be fired any time now, sometimes to the wrong people, then not necessarily following through on the threat.

Since your ability or lack of ability to remote work mostly doesn't depend on where you put servers, I doubt that will have much of an effect. It would make as much sense as saying that a primarily remote AWS is bad because it means it's not good for people working in an office. That kind of argument might work a little for a company like Atlassian whose products are at least supposed to be related to teamwork, collaboration, and project management, but AWS doesn't have many things related to that and those they do have (hands up who can name the AWS videoconference tool, which I assume is only used in Amazon but you can buy it if you want) aren't really what people are using AWS for.

Tesla FSD faces yet another probe after fatal low-visibility crash

Re: MotorStorm AI

How often does it rain in the virtual world, and when it does, does the simulator simulate camera faults because the rain reflected light in a weird way?

Re: Camera only is bad ?

That is kind of my point. You need to collect that much data, undoubtedly involving many deaths, in order to do a direct comparison in the first place, so you can't do a direct comparison because people won't accept that. Even if you did, people won't follow a purely utilitarian system of "fewer deaths is better, so the method that caused fewer deaths will be chosen". If it's not significantly and provably better, it won't be accepted and people are great at resisting changes to the status quo.

Let's assume that someone, and I'm quite certain it wouldn't be Tesla, made a perfect self-driving system. Even when that system has been put to the test, driving in all conditions, and the only accidents it got into were entirely the fault of something else, for example it was driving along when a massive earthquake struck and toppled it off a hill and into a building, there will be some people who resist its adoption. That will be hard enough to overcome. By painting something as perfect when it's only good, we make that problem worse. By painting something as good when it's actually mediocre, we may kill it before we can get any better. And the levels of quality have to include not only pure statistics but the average driver and pedestrian's view on what is reasonable.

Re: Camera only is bad ?

To some extent, you're correct. A car that is safer than a human can be convincingly argued to be better. However, you have two major problems. People will evaluate these differently because they're a different type of product. If they see them making catastrophic mistakes that they wouldn't have made, they won't be confident in them even if, with accurate results, they're making those mistakes less frequently than humans would. People will freak out over a situation where a human would crash, and that will be hard enough to overcome. You will not help the point by having lots of other examples where a human driver would have been better able to prevent them.

The other problem is that you won't actually know if they are safer than a human driver until you collect a staggering amount of data that is controlled for everything. Set loose ten million self-driving Teslas to drive on large roads, small roads, urban roads, rural roads, at all times of the day or night, in all conditions, then compare the number of deaths caused to human drivers. Then you can use that data in comparison. With existing data where the software is only used on one type of road and with completely uncontrolled and unmonitored conditions, the data is not comparable. Of course, if you try to implement the necessary data collection, you will get some rather indignant public reactions about the experimental not confirmed to be safe things unleashed on the public streets, so you can't actually do what you need to do to collect the data for that comparison. That is why individual situations are considered by road safety regulators before public testing is permitted.

UK ponders USB-C as common charging standard

Re: "wall wart of fortune"

Then you are lucky in comparison. I've found lots that don't list any of those on the device, and their manual only mentions one of them. Great, a 9V power supply. Current, polarity, barrel size, none of those are listed, but I can at least limit myself too 9V. The Dell laptops I mentioned, in addition to not listing their power requirements on the case, didn't even have model numbers there. In order to find the details, I had to find the model number through Windows and look it up on Dell's website.

Bandai Namco reportedly tries to bore staff into quitting, skirting Japan’s labor laws

Yes, you would receive similar pay, although you can give up on raises, but remember that this is entirely to get you to hate it and quit. Some people, certainly I would be one of them, would already hate it at that point. I would find that quite cruel, and although I'd still do it for the funds while finding something else, I would not be content. Maybe you would, but they would notice. They're not paying you to count paper clips because they want them counted, so they will give you a different demeaning task until they hit on something you're not happy to continue. I'm not sure what it would be, but if mere mindlessness is not enough, they have lots of other aspects to add in. For example, how about counting paper clips under a strict time and quality standard so you can't count them well enough? Or they can look for a more unpleasant menial task to assign you. Maybe you would be happy getting paid the same without using your skills, but there is a level of drudgery at which you would not be.

Re: Just not with a Ubisoft game?

That is not what "specific performance" means. Specific performance is a court order to follow the terms of a contract. For example, if I've signed a contract to deliver a certain amount of items to you and I don't, you can sue me. Perhaps I'll be ordered to pay you damages in cash, but I might also be ordered to comply with the terms of that contract and deliver the items, with more penalties from the court if I don't. That would be specific performance.

I am not a lawyer either, and so maybe such a construct exists. I have not seen it used, nor could I find it with some web searches. It seems like a bad idea, but worse ideas have been enshrined in law, so that's no proof it doesn't exist. However, I have a feeling it's going to fall into a similar category as things above, namely that even if it does, chances are that it's not going to apply and it's not a good idea to rely on it. For instance, in the specific case of remote working, an employer can say that they were required to allow remote working for safety, if not by law, and therefore the change was not made by choice. Therefore, their nonenforcement of the come to office bit was not because they didn't want it. The contract says it and doesn't have provisions to alter it. The court can be presented a reason to justify other actions. In fact, you might have had a stronger case if you sued your employer for starting remote work than for stopping it.

Re: Just not with a Ubisoft game?

It is possible, but it is ambiguous. If, for example, these people used to work in an office and were allowed to go remote during the pandemic, then their contracts may specify the office. As long as that office is still available, not only is that not an intolerable change, from a legal perspective it's not a change at all. I've known many people who want things they don't like to be illegal, but just because a law theoretically lets a court decide doesn't mean they have a strong case. Those who continue to ignore this sometimes find that they've relied too much on a bad assumption.

Which is why I made up my scenario. Getting any kind of employment claim has some difficulty, but it is probably relatively easy to get one for "they told me to sit in a room and not move". Getting one for "I am a programmer and they want me to write a stupid program that nobody really needs" or "I am a manager and they're making me check and correct reports that nobody really needs" sounds pretty hard to spin as intolerable changes. Giving a lot of latitude to a court makes things more ambiguous, but it may favor a company that has an employment law expert on call when the changes they're making are specifically intended to bypass other labor laws.

It's a vague enough concept that, even though some laws probably forbid something like it, you could probably implement something to get around those restrictions. For example, a law might cover the doing nothing option, but might not cover doing something boring or annoying. In fact, if they actually have you doing nothing, you might find a way to employ the time even if you do have to be present in a location, so doing something stupid might be more effective.

Many contracts are unclear about what exactly counts as an activity you're employed to do, but if it really came down to it, you could always find some boring and pointless thing that sounds like it's part of your job. So you're an IT person, normally administering servers? Well, cleaning out old keyboards could be a job function. Remember that we want to verify that the keyboards still function well for fast typing, so you have to press each key a hundred times and verify how many times it missed. Meanwhile, next door, a programmer is writing a program to intercept and count key presses and verify the machine-generated report against the human-entered report. A manager is one door down from that and has to have a meeting every time the reports differ to discuss why there are inaccuracies in the report. The company can argue that each of those people is doing something related to their job function that could have a beneficial effect on the company if they had to.

I feel guilty for coming up with that method. I hope nobody actually does it.

Parents take school to court after student punished for using AI

Re: History repeating

People keep saying this. The inclusion of the word "research" does not remove the other words. The article and court filings all indicate that some amount of AI-generated text was included verbatim in drafts and included edited in later work. How much of the essay was made up of that is unclear, and likely the student doesn't know either. Your assertion that it didn't happen has been directly contradicted repeatedly.

Re: History repeating

Those cases have no relation to one another. However, if I try, I am not on your side. If your school mandated fountain pen and informed you that other methods of writing were going to result in a penalty, then you have some good options:

1. Write in fountain pen.

2. Argue that, although they're asking you to write in fountain pen in order to train you to have good handwriting with them, ballpoint pens are going to be common enough that you don't need that skill, and therefore their policy should be changed.

3. Argue that, although you were told to write in fountain pen for handwriting, this course is not related to handwriting and a different form should be acceptable, and therefore their policy should be changed.

And some bad ones:

4. Write in your preferred method without permission and without attempting to argue otherwise, then act surprised when they do what they said they would do.

5. After receiving your penalty, demand that they refrain from enforcing their clear rules, not because you're arguing the rules are unfair, but because you don't like the consequences.

If you want to try an option 2 or 3 argument on AI, you can. We'll all listen and decide whether we were wrong and AI use is more acceptable than we thought. So far, you haven't, and nor have this student or his parents. They've gone for option 5, and you've chosen option 6: make up irrelevant analogies and pretend they apply when they clearly don't and form a coherent 2/3 argument in favor of something.

You keep saying this, and you're wrong on several different levels. Starting with the facts, you allege that AI was only used for research. Is that even true? The school's motion suggests it was a bit more than that:

Incredibly, RNH and his parents contend that using AI to draft, edit and research content for an AP US History project, all while not citing to use of AI in the project, is not an “act of dishonesty,” “use of unauthorized technology” or plagiarism

How do you know it was not also used to write some of the paper, whether it was later rephrased or not?

But even if you were right, do you see something in the rules that says "AI shall not be used unless you're using it as a search engine, then you're fine"? I don't see that. So maybe it's the other way and it says "AI is forbidden only for the following purposes" and those purposes don't include searching? Do you see that? I see a global ban on the technology unless it's authorized, which the school indicates they did not do.

Take a calculator to early mathematics classes and see how quickly they take it away. Take a more advanced calculator to classes and they'll require you to downgrade. Take an unapproved calculator to tests and they'll disqualify you. Education and testing are performed under constraints. If you deliberately violate them, that's called cheating. If you think the constraints are bad, then you can try to change them, but if you act like they don't apply because you don't like them, you'll quickly discover how much your opinion affects what the rules say.

Re: School rules

We don't have the full text of the rules, but "should not and you will be penalized if you do" is equivalent enough to "must not" for this situation.

Sysadmins rage over Apple’s ‘nightmarish’ SSL/TLS cert lifespan cuts plot

Re: OK, then let's focus on really strict security

It's not that hard. Although certificate revocation isn't always used, I'd ask the former owners of something I bought to revoke that certificate, indicating either the "affiliation changed" or "cessation of operation" reason codes, then verify them myself. Then I'd consider the domains switched over. True, that would not stop someone who didn't check those lists from getting untrustworthy data, but it's better than assuming and not checking that they did something with their old certs.

UK electronics firms want government to stop taxing trash and let them fix it instead

Re: Repaired or refurbished?

I think we all know why those fees are present. That doesn't change the fact that those fees, and by extension the need for repair techs to charge them, are high enough that it makes repairs expensive and less likely. It doesn't mean we have to find a way of eliminating them and there's little chance that we can. However, when discussing how we can encourage people to repair rather than replace their possessions, we have to understand why they don't. The high cost of labor means there is a floor for the price of a repair no matter how simple, meaning many people will decide that a moderately expensive gamble which might fix their device or might only be the first step before expensive parts have to be purchased or it takes several hours is not worth it when a new replacement could be purchased. In my case, it's much the same, except my alternative is figuring out how to repair things myself. Often, if I can't repair it myself, I assume that calling another repair tech is going to be expensive and doubtful of success because I've already done many of the simplest things, so I am also unlikely to engage the services of one.

'Newport would look like Dubai' if guy could dumpster dive for lost Bitcoin drive

That is not how stores of value work. Something is a good store of value if the value you have is reliably maintained. If I bought Bitcoin in 2013, I'd have lots more value. If I bought it in 2021, I'd have lost 17%, not counting inflationary losses, which there would also be if you're going to use them for pounds. If you're using inflation rates to calculate the real value, that has to be included for all of them. This doesn't make it a good store of value. If it was, I could buy it today with the reasonable belief that the value I put in would be maintained.

As an investment, Bitcoin was very good in the long term. That is not the same as a store of value and should not be confused for one. In addition, you are making the unsupported claim that, because Bitcoin rose a lot in the last decade, it will be good in the next one. You haven't been clear whether you think it's going to rise similarly, with a 2034 price in the millions, or be more stable, but you've clearly argued on no evidence that it isn't going to crash. As investment advertisements have said, past performance is not a guarantee of future results.

Re: Labeling & Storage

He's been trying to get this back for some time after the drive was trashed in 2013. I'm sure he would happily have gone looking in 2014, in fact the internet suggests that he tried and failed. I merely indicate that, even at the 2013 low of $13 per coin, that was enough value that he should have backed that up and been more careful with the disk until he did. It probably wasn't worth much when he mined it in 2009-2010, but by that point, he would have known that the value had increased and should have acted appropriately. Either he is lying about the value, which seems unlikely because there's no real benefit in excavating a landfill otherwise, or he made a really stupid decision at the time and has to suffer the consequences.

I'd have felt more sympathy if the drive was discarded when the value was very low. It wouldn't change reality, but I could imagine losing something because it wasn't enough to buy a coffee so I didn't look after it. Doing that and later finding that it was worth millions would be quite disappointing but I wouldn't blame myself. Doing that when the current value was enough to buy several cars would be a lot more on me.

There is a size of working blank hard drive which is low enough for me not to. A 120 GB spinning hard drive with twelve years on the clock, I don't need that. I probably don't need the number of working hard drives I have. They're not SSDs, those are almost all in use. Maybe it was something like that. You only need about 6 kB for a wallet.

Re: Labeling & Storage

It probably wasn't worth very much when it was first mined, so it seemed relatively meaningless, but by the time it was discarded, that value was probably around $90k US, so upgrading its handling might have been a good idea. Back when I mined a small amount of cryptocurrency to see how it worked, I also didn't treat my wallet IDs with care, meaning I lost my all-time funds with an approximate value of $0.23 US, which would be today [checking...] $0.84 or so. I'm fine with this. If I wasn't, I had lots of options.

Opening up the WinAmp source to all goes badly as owners delete entire repo

You are right that open sourcing isn't only done when you no longer care about the code. However, it is one of two main times when someone considers open sourcing something they previously considered proprietary. Usually, these are the following:

1. They want more work done on it for their use of it and are willing to give up revenue to get that.

2. They no longer want to support it, and people who still use it are asking for it to be open sourced.

This problem doesn't much affect branch 1, but it is quite limiting for branch 2. I was talking with a company a while ago who in spirit was willing to open source something which I would help to manage afterward, but, even without doing a code review which, given the code's age, wasn't likely, they didn't want to spend the time checking out the legal situation. The code had been inherited from a previous company which had been acquired, and that company got some of it from a university project, so it would have taken some time to check whether the university still owned any of it. The project concerned was in the 1980s and wasn't used elsewhere, so it was pretty obvious that nobody at the university would actually care, but the legal side doesn't really work on the basis of nobody caring. The code is still unavailable today.

Re: Simplest solution

To be honest, I brought the word evil in by saying that proprietary was "not evil", but they adopted the contrary argument, still including "evil", with a lot more confidence than I expected.

Re: Simplest solution

Do you have one, and remember that your solution also needs to overcome the effects of your previous policy of "if you can copy it, then everyone can have it without restriction and you are required to release it immediately without any compensation". If you don't, I see you retreating into vagueness because your idea is harmful in many ways and you have no ability to do better. Maybe we should consider changes, but a non-specific statement like that doesn't argue in favor or against anything we currently have or anything we could do differently.

Re: which permits forking but prevents distribution of modified versions

It depends what you mean by "compiled binary". If you install WinAmp to C:\...\winamp, you have a few options:

1. C:\...\winamp\winamp.exe contains the GPLed code: license is supposed to apply to the whole thing

2. C:\...\winamp\somelibrary.dll contains the GPLed code and winamp.exe loads it: license is supposed to apply to the whole thing

3. C:\...\winamp\otherthing.exe contains the GPLed code, winamp.exe calls this: only otherthing.exe is covered. If otherthing.exe is a direct compilation of the GPL project, then there will be no new code at all, although they're supposed to tell you.

4. A DLL loaded by a separate process, see number 3.

We have the other option of

5. It wouldn't be installed at all. They just dropped it in by mistake.

Re: Simplest solution

A super abundant resource? Do you mean the kind of code you get by paying hundreds of people with rare skills lots of money for a long time? Stop paying them and see how abundant that resource is. Some of the code I have bought licenses to isn't simple. It's not something I could just write if I spent a weekend. It often involves doing lots of painstaking labor, for example collecting lots of data, normalizing it into a format that can be easily handled by a program, writing a program that can do useful things to that, and then thoroughly testing that program so I can do things the authors didn't imagine and they work reliably. If open source groups got together and made that, it would be great, but in many of these cases, they didn't and won't because it is too large a task to do without paying people and they don't get enough in donations to manage it.

Let me guess. You think that, because making a copy of the files is free, that means it should be free. That doesn't work. Most of those files will not be created if the creators can't benefit by doing so. Those who are willing to do that for free already do and use open source licenses to encourage others to do the same. I am one of those people. That is me choosing to give my work away. Requiring that everything I do be treated like that would force me to do a different job, meaning less code created, both open source and proprietary. It's a bad argument every time it's tried. I'm not sure I can do anything to convince adherents of this fact, but it remains a fact.

Re: which permits forking but prevents distribution of modified versions

If that GPL2 code was linked, yes, maybe. If it was something else, that does not automatically apply GPL2 to the rest of it. It just indicates that they can't apply their proprietary license to those bits. For example, if that was a separate binary which they called to decode something, quite common in media players, their code is not covered by the GPL, explicitly or implicitly. If that code was included in the repo by mistake and isn't required to use it, not covered. Only if they took a GPLed library and included it directly in the application is the code of that application covered as well. Given that code for unrelated projects was coming through, the presence of that code in the repository is not enough to conclude that it covers the whole. You have to read the code to determine what part if any it touches.