Posts by doublelayer

Microsoft finally gets around to supporting rar, gz and tar files in Windows

Re: but why?

Sending a spreadsheet as a PDF breaks a lot of things. Try sorting that data in a different way than it was. Try importing that data into a database. Try making a graph out of it. You'll spend much longer on any of those tasks than if you opened that spreadsheet in a spreadsheet program, nearly all of which can open the Excel format. I don't have Excel on this computer, but I do have Libreoffice and it can also open those. I also have libraries allowing me to import them into programs or scripts. In addition, it's not as if PDF is a universal format. Currently, Windows includes a PDF reader by default, but not that long ago, they didn't and you had to install one. That wasn't difficult, but I don't know why you think that's a much more universal format.

As for .rar, I never create them, but if someone has sent it to me, I can read it. Unless there's some problem actually processing the file they've sent, I think it's a bit rude to demand they change their workflow if you're perfectly capable of dealing with their file.

I'm curious what list of formats you think are "universal standard" ones. If you're only including ones that can be processed by the bundled programs that come with a basic Windows installation, that's a relatively small list.

Ford in reverse gear over AM radio removal after Congress threatens action

I don't know, but it is almost certain that it has been checked and been found acceptable. The FCC and many other national regulators do regulate the levels of interference external to the device, which would include any equipment operating inside the car. The interference is much higher in stuff attached to the circuits of the car than in something with an air gap from those circuits, so they could have done some shielding between the electronics and the user which they didn't do between the different parts of the circuit.

Usually, the wording is "must accept interference". However, they mean that the interference shouldn't make it catch fire or otherwise break, not that you should be able to listen to radio clearly through interference. If you have a really tiny WiFi antenna and a poor signal processor, then you will have bad WiFi performance unless the signal is incredibly clear, but unless it's built in such a way that this bad environment will burn something out, the FCC doesn't get involved.

I think you probably understand my point, but in case others didn't, I'll try rephrasing it here. If somebody builds a device so badly that it's interfering with other devices' attempts to receive signals, the FCC will regulate it. If it's built in such a way that it can't receive signals well itself but that doesn't affect other devices, not the FCC's problem. If it could receive some type of signal but the manufacturer decided it won't, also not the FCC's problem. The cars concerned are in categories 2 and 3, but not 1. Hence, the FCC doesn't care.

Re: The only question remaining is ...

No, they don't (I'm sure somewhere someone has built one, but they aren't common and never were). That's for perfectly valid technical reasons. It's not the same as including an FM receiver, which is much simpler to build in a way that works with the rest of the design, and even some phones that have that don't have great reception there either. The antennas typically used for those signals would make a phone a lot bulkier, and even if you're fine with that, most people don't want that in return for a band they may not use, so manufacturers will have trouble convincing people to buy that over one that leaves it out.

It's not interfering with others' use, at least not beyond limits. It interferes more with the internal components that would be receiving it, because they didn't want to add the shielding. I've experienced this with a cheap radio I saw which could be recharged by USB, but if you plugged it in and tried to listen to AM signals, they would be much harder to hear over the internal noise. That didn't affect another radio that was next to it, just the specific unit itself, because the manufacturer had not shielded the components involved.

The FCC would get involved if the equipment was causing problems for others, but it's not their job to make sure that something that receives signals is built in a good way. They are not responsible for making auto manufacturers include that component or build it well.

Intel mulls cutting ties to 16 and 32-bit support

"I know some Linux users will likely squawk because they still use some decades abandoned app that is 16-bit or something, but I'm confident the kernel devs can work out a way to transparently translate the old 16-bit instructions into their closest 64-bit analogs."

I doubt it. Most of the oldest Linux software was completely open source, which means that, even if people are still using it without updating it, it is more likely to work if they recompile it to a native binary than trying to run the old binary. Admittedly, if the code is that old, neither are likely to work, but not because of 16-bit support but by using parts of the system that are no longer present.

Re: Ramifications

"the first thing a tech does with a PC they are diagnosing hardware issues on is to go into the BIOS and enable Compatibility Support Mode, so they can boot their super-duper diagnostics-filled flash drive ... and then changes it back to UEFI when they need to boot MS-Windows."

What OS do you have on your flash drive? I have Linux on mine. It boots into an Arch environment with all the utilities I remembered to install already present. For a while, I used the 32-bit version which UEFI could boot just fine in case I used it on an old computer. Then I tried to install some new packages and realized that hanging back had caused some problems installing and updating, so I had to choose between updating that image more frequently or just using the 64-bit version. I chose the latter and since doing so, I've found zero computers that I needed to use it on which didn't accept it.

"Older hardware frequently have firmware updates and profiles which can only be loaded using a manufacturer's program, which runs only under some 16-bit operating system"

You're already out of luck on that one. I can't boot those operating systems natively on newest hardware anyway. If I have such a device, I'd either get an old computer whose entire purpose would be running that software or I'd see if I could pass enough stuff through to a VM to make it do that. Also, while I'm sure there's plenty of hardware with such limitations out there, I question whether it's really getting firmware updates that still need a 16-bit uploader. If the company is really still updating them, that company can make a more modern firmware uploader.

"Older industrial, machine, and application programs run only under (some form of) DOS.": Again, I know it's true, but those machines tend to include their own computer. They don't just let me slot in a new computer, which is fine because the new computer can't run DOS already and probably lacks the interfaces and/or custom chips they've built into theirs.

"Techies (used to) have all sorts of DOS-based and bare-metal based diagnostic and testing programs. [...] Many of these programs were hobbyist-or small-company-written, and their functionality will not be effectively replaced by the larger software houses"

Do you have a single example? I knew a few of those tools, and they have either been replaced by something open source or they no longer do anything particularly useful because, when the author of the 16-bit version stopped working on it, it stopped being useful for problems that happened on newer hardware.

Lenovo Thinkpad Z13 just has this certain Macbook Air about it...

Re: old style clicky

This isn't always true. Apple has a system they call Force Touch which involves a shorter vibration system unlike the more familiar vibration feedback we've seen before. They've used it for trackpads and buttons, and those really do feel like they are moving downward when pressed and upward when released, even though they are really not. It's much more convenient trickery and helps with usability because they can detect different levels of pressure, and they are therefore just as convenient as interfaces with moving parts. For example, if I simply touch the home button on an iPhone that uses that method, it's not going to activate unless I then put pressure on it.

Re: USB

"Why are you arguing against this? What are you trying to prove?"

I'm arguing against this for a pretty simple reason: I disagree with you. I think you figured that out already, though. I don't think that a single USB port is sufficient for the way I use a computer as I have experienced it before, and I imagine I'm not the only one who has that situation. Hence, when I see computers that have very few ports on them, I find that setup inconvenient, as did the reviewer in this article and at least one other person in the comments.

I find your question a bit strange; clearly we have different views on the usefulness of ports. Why do you assume that stating my opinion, as you have stated yours, is trying to prove something? In my usage of a laptop, sometimes none of the ports are in use, but sometimes I've got the charger plugged in, some mobile device charging or syncing, a USB authentication token, and then I want to connect a cable to some piece of hardware I'm working on. I use USB for a lot of peripherals, from audio equipment to hard drives. Two ports is not enough for that use case, so I prefer to buy computers that have more. If that's not something you are dealing with, no problem. As for the mechanics, another USB port is not very expensive when you're looking at the prices mentioned in the article, and if thickness is a major issue, they can always be more USB-C ports which clearly already fit.

Re: Working as designed?

The EFI is the thing that finds the partitions on a disk. If it's not running, it's not going to locate any partitions. If you destroy the EFI partition on a Mac, the recovery partition that Apple installed on the disk won't help you because it too requires the EFI to load. All you have left after that is online recovery, which is there because Apple has a part of the firmware which runs before the EFI does.

Windows can't just install a bit of firmware which will run before the EFI. OEMs could put that in by installing a bit of memory preloaded with a firmware image, but for existing machines, it's not compatible with the boot process. Making that change would bring Microsoft into a part of the system that has formerly been the OEM's to manage and it would give them theoretical control over every part of the boot process. Anyone who doesn't trust Microsoft is going to be very angry if this ever gets built.

Your alternative suggestion basically just boils down to having a second EFI partition, which you would know how to switch into, but others wouldn't. That partition is also no harder to break by doing an installation incorrectly.

Re: USB

Once you get into having an expander, you're in the same general area as having a USB-C hub, which isn't that much bulkier and is generally more useful. Either way, you will have to carry around something which you can't leave attached and you have to be careful not to forget it on the desk on which you last used it. When the alternative is that the manufacturer puts some normal ports on the machine they expect people to pay so much for, which one seems easier?

Re: Working as designed?

"If startup repair could recover from that, it would kind of negate the value of EFI, wouldn't it?"

I thought the same thing. The Mac can boot to a recovery environment because Apple's put an internet stack in their hardware, which downloads an OS image from Apple and only from Apple (it's signed and verified). The on-disk recovery won't work if the EFI is broken; only that online method will. How would people react if it was announced that Microsoft has installed a new piece of firmware which will contact Microsoft servers, download and run signed code from Microsoft, start up before anything else starts, and can't be replaced? It would be exceedingly unpopular in these forums. I trust Microsoft more than the average person here and I still don't want it. Is Liam really asking for that?

Re: USB

That fixes the problem of having a USB-A device you want to use, but it doesn't really help with the inconvenience aspect. It's possible to argue that it doesn't much matter when you're using an external screen, because you can have a dock with lots of ports installed near that screen anyway. For portable use, however, if you have two of these adapters, you can still connect just two USB devices, which isn't a lot of them when one of those could easily be the charger. I'm also not sure what the point is; there's plenty of space to put more ports and it's not as if the hardware to add a port you already have is going to increase the price of the equipment very much.

Social media may harm kids. US Surgeon General says so

I don't like social media, but I think I have to defend them here. Their comment is in reply to this:

> ...despite potential benefits...

I have yet to figure out what they may be.

They may not have been saying that social media is great on balance. They were just trying to explain the benefits that cause users to use the platforms. We all understand that these things have features that people enjoy using as well as their many detrimental aspects, so it's a bit disingenuous to pretend as if they're purely negative for their users, even if their positives are not things we're interested in.

Re: Welcome to the Idiocracy!

"When we have kids of 8 out there who want to be an "internet influencer" when they grow up, humanity has lost the plot."

When you were a child, what did your peers say? Would I be completely wrong in assuming that some of them wanted to be a rock star, actor, or sportsman? To the unfamiliar child's mind, jobs like this look like you get a lot of money and fame for doing something fun and everyone likes you. They don't have the information to understand how it actually works, and it probably looks more engaging than my job where I spend hours in front of a computer complaining about interfaces, whatever those are, or any of the other jobs they see people doing. So children have a bad understanding of how the adult world of jobs works. What else is new?

In my opinion, social media has lots of downsides, but this isn't really one of them. If we were able to teach them what an influencer's job is really like, they still won't understand the realities of adult life. Fortunately, as they age, more of them will figure this out, though if we could help speed that up it could be a good idea.

AMD scours parts bin for old CPUs, GPUs to put in Chromebooks

"However, you mention the Steam Deck (based on similar tech)... and if you don't have one I suggest you look at what it's capable of. Because "for a handheld", it's incredible."

As they pointed out, though, it isn't the same GPU as that has. It's just using the same technology. The Steam Deck's GPU has four times as much of everything as the GPU in these chips. It has more levels of cache and larger amounts at higher levels. It has a theoretical performance of 3.277 FP16 TFLOPS compared to the Radeon's 972.8 FP16 GFLOPS. The devices will also have different levels of memory, as both GPUs are sharing main memory and Chromebooks aren't generally optimized for gaming use. Just because the cores are of the same age doesn't mean the GPUs are equally powerful.

US bans North Korean outsourcer and its feisty freelancers

Re: $300,000 a year?

Almost certainly they are. These people aren't really trying to have a long-term career. They know that many of their employers will dump them as soon as they figure out it's a North Korean doing the work and that, if any legal paperwork is required, they're unlikely to be able to meet the requirement. They're probably going for short-term projects to earn some money before they're kicked out, so why not take on multiple jobs simultaneously? Also, their bosses want money and don't much care about their work-life balance, so it is likely they're as overworked as possible to keep the money coming.

Nearly 1 in 5 academics admit close encounters of the anomalous kind

Re: Why a Cellphone Camera will NEVER Capture a Picture of a UFO

The last few items might be right, but you can replace items 3-5 with tapping the camera icon on the lock screen. On all IOS devices, you can access the camera without unlocking with a swipe, and most Android devices I've seen have put a method of accessing the camera on the lock screen which can be changed in the settings but people don't bother. People who take a lot of pictures with their phones are probably pretty familiar with doing that quickly, and even I who very rarely use the camera know it's possible.

You can also replace steps 6-13 with nothing, because you made that up. Have you used your phone's camera and gotten a startup crash every time? I have used it, as I said, on occasion and it doesn't take forever to open or crash.

Re: Cool

We certainly do explore, but we haven't bothered exploring a lot of places. The deepest part of the ocean? Yes, we've been there. The other parts of the ocean that are not as deep? Most of them are untouched by humans, and those that aren't are touched because we ended up dropping broken ships on them, not because we deliberately went there. There are even parts of land that have had relatively little exploration, and I'm not only limiting that to Antarctica.

It's always possible that alien life exists somewhere, but if they're coming here, they probably live pretty close to us. We aren't interesting enough to visit otherwise. Our planet isn't particularly interesting from afar, so unless they're coming just to look at life, they won't be attracted. However, if there's one civilization elsewhere, it's likely there are more, and they may have seen enough alien life that they don't really need to see more. That's assuming that any life that may or may not exist has travel technology that we don't have and may not be possible to build, something we won't know for a few more centuries.

Re: Cool

"If experts look at the video and say "we can't prove it is a fake" will you believe it is real or that I found a way to fake it that fooled the experts?"

Neither. I will believe that we don't know what happened. However, there's a major difference between "can't prove fake" and "can prove real", and I will apply Occam's Razor; if you saw something hanging above you and nobody else saw it, it's more likely that it was created for the shot rather than that some craft appeared near you then instantly disappeared again. I'd also point out that experts don't just say "I can't prove that doesn't exist". They provide a lot of data which I can verify which explains what factors make it more likely to be real or not. People know a lot about cameras, lighting, movement, and trickery, so they'll analyze it under a lot of conditions and summarize all those findings.

The reason I find this more logical is that it's what's happened every time a famous UFO has come along. People have demonstrated gaping holes in the stories, and in some cases they've gotten the evidence of deliberate creation. Even when they haven't, they are able to point to clear problems with the story which make it unlikely to be true even though they can't prove it false. An expert's conclusion of "I can't prove this false, but there are a bunch of red flags that make the story implausible" is more common than "I can't prove it true, but everybody's analysis says that it probably is".

Re: UAPs, previously known as UFOs

If you use a term for something, and people start misusing that term and sounding like complete lunatics, there are two approaches you can take. The first is to get very pedantic and correct anybody who uses the term, but if your use isn't the most common, you will lose that fight. The second is to make up a new term for your thing and let them have the old one. This is in addition to the correct points others have made about the precision of UAP being higher than UFO.

Here's a parallel. "Alien" used to mean a person from another country, basically a foreigner. The dictionary still has it now. It's not used that way anymore; sometimes it's used for a foreigner who doesn't have legal permission to be somewhere, but even that use isn't the most common. Since people started using the word to refer to potential extraterrestrial life and science fiction made that usage familiar to most English speakers, it started sounding pretty weird to call people aliens. UFO worked when someone wanted a term for "I saw something in the air and I don't know what it is", but after people turned it into "a thing that's either definitely an alien spacecraft or never existed because someone made it up as a hoax", we needed a new term for "I don't know what it is".

Parent discovers the cost of ignoring Roblox: £2,500 and heart palpitations

Re: Dystopian

Possibly they didn't check the statement until the next time they balanced it, and the purchases were made somewhat quickly? I have alerts set up for charges, but not everyone wants those or is willing to have the banking apps that deliver them.

That Meta GDPR fine is €1.2B. Plus biz must stop sending EU data to US

Re: Once you stop Facebook storing personal information......

No company would store EU data in the EU? Because Meta already does. They have a bunch of servers in three EU countries which are used, unsurprisingly, to store and process data for their EU business. There are lots of reasons to do so, from access speed to geographic redundancy. The problem they have is that they're also storing data elsewhere, which they do because they don't want to follow the other parts of the privacy legislation.

"If somebody confiscates a billion euros from you in one jurisdiction,, and says “I’m going to confiscate another billion, unless you put another asset of even larger value within my control”, are you really going to comply?"

It's a reasonable question, despite your post not really going that way. After all, other countries try the same tactic and I wouldn't comply with them. The calculation you have to make is whether it's worth it to you complying with all the local regulations in order to get the benefits from doing business in that location. I don't have a problem putting assets in EU jurisdiction because I support the privacy legislation and I trust EU governments to follow that legislation, only punishing people under that legislation if they break it. I would not comply with similar orders from a country like China because I don't support a lot of their regulations and I don't trust them to stick to the letter of the laws. Other companies might make that decision based on a more commercial view, hence all the companies that cheerfully censor for Chinese customers, but they're still using the same methods to decide whether they will comply. In Meta's case, they have a pretty complicated decision to make; if they don't move their assets out of the EU, continue to operate in the EU, and continue to violate the GDPR in some of the most obvious ways, nothing saves them from the possible fines. They'll have to change one of those three things, or accept the risk that they may not always be able to keep Ireland's regulator loyal to them and one that is following the law more actively could be costly.

Re: Honest question

What makes you think that their assets are less than the fine? Here's one problem related to that: they've put most of their assets into their Irish company so they aren't paying tax in the U.S. for revenue from users outside North America. That's not just their EU customers, but everybody outside the U.S. and Canada (I'm not really sure why Canada isn't included, but I'm no tax lawyer). That's a large chunk of their revenue stored in an EU member state. Unless they quickly move all of it away and find a new place to incorporate, they have plenty of assets there. They also have three DCs built inside the EU, and their investment figures for a single one is higher than their fine. While it's certainly possible that there's been some depreciation of those, if those three were liquidated, it would come to more than their fine amount.

Even without considering that they earn plenty from having customers in the EU and they don't want to lose it, they have plenty of assets that could be taken if it came to it. Your question may be based on faulty assumptions.

Russian businesses want to party like it's 1959 with 6-day workweek

Probably some of them will start explaining how sanctions never work and Russia's economy is doing great, while another set of them will explain how the sanctions are having a large effect on the general citizen and aren't we evil for having them. Some will say that the increase in work hours is a completely normal thing to do during a crisis and some will say that they only have to increase the hours because we're denying them important stuff they need, so people are having to work on subsistence industries. Then we'll have to make room for the relatively small subset who might try to explain that this isn't actually happening. Probably the largest group will be those who don't say anything at all about Russia but start making jokes about how bad things are for workers in other countries and explaining that, even if your country isn't one of those and all the countries you're allied with aren't one of those, that you're still to blame for it somehow. Oh, I forgot, the other subset who aren't intelligent to focus their whatabout system on something related and will jump to something that's not, as one of them has already proved by focusing on their favorite topic: the Iraq war as if they think that everybody who supports Ukraine supported the invasion of Iraq and lived in one of the countries that participated. Logical fallacies are fun for these people.

Sci-fi author 'writes' 97 AI-generated tales in nine months

Re: Write 10 books a month

Only if he can find a way to distribute that many books. At some point, his cranking up the supply of crap books will just inoculate people who don't want to see any more of that, and they will go to more lengths to ignore them. If that means that, by spamming out all of these short stories dressed up as books, he ends up decreasing the demand for any self-publishing platforms that continue to host them, that's too bad for those platforms.

Re: We are surrounded by morons..

Fine, but can you come up with a character that's actually unique? If you're limited to three attributes, you basically can't; there are too many books. Of course, if you let the program keep going, you would eventually get uniqueness by adding more and more attributes to the character, increasing the possibility space until the chance of having that exact character are lower. The chances are that the program wouldn't generate an interesting character, but uniqueness is easier.

Asking for a character that has literally never been seen before will inevitably get into arguments. Someone who wants to argue that the attempt succeeded will point to tiny details and say that, because no character like yours discovered at the age of five that she could converse with frogs and only frogs, that the character is now unique. Someone who wants to argue that the attempt failed can ignore most aspects of a character and say that, since the character was also trained in the use of her magical powers by an annoying older magical guy who refused to answer perfectly normal questions, that it's formulaic no matter what other things the character has. Character uniqueness is too subjective to be proven and not really the point of the author's creative effort, which is and should be more focused on making an interesting character.

MariaDB CEO: People who want things free also want to have very nice vacations

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I have no clue why you think I validated your point. My comment boils down to listing a large number of situations where your ideas of where payment comes from are incorrect, acknowledging that there are a few exceptions. You can't guarantee to be one of those exceptions, and if we don't want to stifle creative work, we will have to either keep copyright the way it is or come up with a much better plan for replacing it than hoping that nothing will change just because we say so.

Cheapest, oldest, slowest part fixed very modern Mac

Re: Always craving 'the latest'

"The sad truth about software is that it doesn't wear out [...] So unless there's some kind of critical change in the job then whatever was working last week, last month, last year -- or even last decade -- will continue to work just as well now."

Sure, as long as your hardware hasn't changed and not only do you never find that you need something else, you never think "You know what else a computer could do". If even one of those statements isn't correct, your software will in fact wear out. Try running an old operating system nowadays. There may be a few hardware problems, but if you put a week of effort into it, you'll probably get something functional. Now try to do the things you do today with that system. It's not going to be as useful as it was when it was new, and most likely, you'll find problems in the old versions that nostalgia has hidden.

Re: Universal... what?

And yet, I'll still take the everything badly version. Maybe it's because I haven't seen that many alternatives that accomplish the one thing well approach. Many of the ports that came before USB appeared to take the "one thing just about as badly" approach.

Phones' facial recog tech 'fooled' by low-res 2D photo

Yes, both of the scenarios you mention are not only possible but happen routinely. Multiple people have reported phone thefts, usually to try to access other accounts, by either attacking or drugging people to scan their biometric unlock. Law enforcement will frequently use those unlock mechanisms to open a phone, although depending on your location, they may be allowed to demand the unlock code from you and punish you if you don't give it to them. For these reasons, I don't choose to enable the biometric hardware that my phone has on it, and that's also why both IOS and Android have a method to quickly disable those methods in an emergency.

Re: Biometrics!

Generally, yes, at least for fingerprints. What often happens is that there is a separate processor reserved for storing the biometric in a secure memory region and also contains the encryption key for the device. If the fingerprint matches the stored representation, it releases the encryption key. If that processor thinks that the situation doesn't call for one (for example right after it's been restarted), it declines to read the fingerprint and requires the user to enter a code. It can also be instructed by the phone not to scan if the system thinks the fingerprint is not acceptable at the moment.

Facial recognition may work differently. Fingerprint sensor chips are more common, whereas the image recognition part may just run on the main processor. It probably depends on the specific device and how they built it. In that case, it's still storing an encryption key somewhere, hopefully on a part of memory that's not easily read from an external device, and using that key if the algorithm decides there is a match.

Teen in court after '$600K swiped from DraftKings gamblers'

Re: Does rate limiting mean anything to anyone ?

If you're pulling in hundreds of thousands of dollars, and you already bought a bunch of credentials on the dark web, then you have the resources and ability to find the people selling access to a botnet to run your scripts on. You only need each bot for about two minutes before it does something worth blocking. Buy a few thousand of those for a few minutes and spam some out. Wait a day and buy some more, either the same ones again or try a different product. That gives you tens of thousands of login attempts per day. Sure, trying your entire dataset in one day would be faster, but that decrease in speed is probably not extreme enough to cause problems for the criminal.

Ex-Twitter sextet sues Elon Musk for 'stiffing' them on severance

Re: Where are . . .

Well, a few months ago, they did start risking those servers. Some of them run in AWS, and Twitter decided to stop paying Amazon for them. I'm not sure what would have happened, but Amazon still advertises on Twitter and they threatened to stop paying for that. Twitter backed down that time. I don't know about the physical servers, but maybe they know enough to continue paying those bills.

Professor freezes student grades after ChatGPT claimed AI wrote their papers

Re: @Filippo

I think you have misunderstood their point. Your first question indicates this: "Why bother using ChatGPT for that?" They were using GPT for that to make a point, not because they actually needed the output. They weren't saying the output showed creativity, hence why they called it formulaic. They said that the concept of coming up with characterization is a creative task, and if humans aren't consistently doing better than a program, why do we say that those humans are creative and the program isn't. In short, they were making a point about what we call creativity and the problems with making an objective decision on what is or isn't creative, not saying that they were using GPT to help them write a book.

Re: LLMs: plagiarism devices

So, in your mind, if I can find a single document talking about a war that doesn't call it by a certain name, that name is forbidden under all circumstances? A civil war is a war which occurs between groups in the same country. Before the American Civil War, they were one country. After the American Civil War, they were one country. It was a civil war, and it was the only one to occur in that country, thus The Civil War is a perfectly appropriate title for it. The alternate names you suggest are not great, especially for a global audience:

"the War of Secession": You're going to have to tack on some more adjectives, as there have been a lot of secessions over the years. And, given that this secession completely failed, maybe that's not the best name.

"War Between The States": This works a bit better, but it's more words for the same concept as "civil war".

"War of Southern Independence": Without independence happening. That's kind of like talking about World War II as "The War of the Abolition of Poland" even though, at the end of it, there was still a Poland.

"The Late Rebellion": This is just silly. That phrase worked a decade after the war since "late" meant "recent". Right now, that war is no longer recent and we tend not to use "late" for that purpose anymore.

"The War of 61 to 65 (most accurate)": Come on, if you're posting here, you should already know that you can't just use two-digit years, and you should probably also know the benefits of uniquely identifiers. If we're going with that, I can name the first post-independence civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (1961-1965), or depending how early you're willing to go, the Burmese-Siamese war which ended in 1665 and started, depending on your definitions, in 1661 or 1662.

Re: LLMs: plagiarism devices

And we're still talking about different things. There is a moral argument about whether fighting is justified when your chance of victory is small enough, and there's a related one about forcing others to fight for you under those conditions. Neither falls under your "might makes right" case, which usually applies to an argument which declares that the victorious side's rationale for fighting the war is the moral one, not necessarily that their conduct during the war was moral. Similar, you can choose to interpret "wasted lives" in a number of ways. It can be a moral judgement on whether the battles should have been fought. You can also read it as an amoral argument: if you waste some lives in a bad military tactic, then you don't have those lives for other battles which are more important or more likely to lead to victory. Or you can take it as a moral judgement for the opposite side: if you don't waste lives on a resistance that fails, you will have more people to resist the post-war situation which may have a greater chance of success, which is a tactic that has been used several times in world history.

The fact that you called it "The War Against Northern Aggression" suggests you may have an opinion on the causes of the war, but that doesn't make that the topic they were asking about.

Re: LLMs: plagiarism devices

It didn't sound like a moral premise to me. It sounded like a premise of pragmatism. Not "was it right for [insert side here] to do what they did during the war", but "did [insert side here] have a reasonable chance of victory against the tactics used by the other side". You could have a group incapable of victory using their tactics whether or not that group is also morally right. In short, you appear to be arguing about the causes of the war against someone talking about the practices during the war.

Re: Education itself is partly to blame here.

"But we need to remember that we got into using assignments so education could become an "industry" and make money."

At least sometimes, we got into assignments so that students could learn better. There are a lot of things in life that don't fit as well in an exam as they do in a longer assignment. Since we're mostly IT people here, a good example is computer science. Of course I did computer science exams, and they're worth doing, but I didn't write big programs for those. The exams often had us writing code on paper and eventually stepped up to a text editor, but we weren't testing things and we weren't called on to innovate. When they assigned us projects, we were doing both of those. Which better represents the way that knowledge will be used once you have the credential? Similarly, both exams and assignments sometimes included adding or modifying an existing codebase. The exams had small ones so you could actually read and understand them in the three hours this question shared with all the others, whereas the assigned ones had much larger ones, in some cases up to ten thousand lines. When I started working, I often had codebases to learn and integrate my code in, and they were rarely three pages long.

Exams are useful in some cases, but there are many activities that education should simulate which don't fit in the exam format.

Re: Artificial Irony detector required

I don't know. My only guess is that he didn't use GPT to do his grading work, he used it to judge students and didn't even bother grading them. I'm not sure that's a big enough technical inaccuracy to justify downvotes, but it's all I can think of.

I wonder if any teacher has yet used GPT to actually grade an assignment. It will do it, of course, but I'm hoping that's at least below the threshold where even the less informed realize that's a terrible idea.

Re: re. Why not go back to oral exams for the Finals?

You have to be careful before using any kind of automated analysis to see if it's reliable enough to use to punish people. People hate it if some algorithm they can't control or audit is used to decide that they're guilty, and they have a reason to feel that way. Existing tools that check for plagiarism aren't affected by this, because even if it puts a high plagiarism score on a document, it can be made to tell the professor and the student where the words were copied from. They can check that to see if the program has screwed up by referring to the student's own work, by not recognizing the use of quotes, or by just being wrong.

If a statistical model says "92.537% confidence that this writing does not match the historical corpus from this student", what can you do to test whether that's true? How high is that confidence when you compare a student's carefully-written essays against the one that they ended up doing all at once while lacking sleep? How accurate is it when comparing an essay written by multiple people against the essays made by individuals? How confident is it when comparing a student's essay from a literary analysis class to their readme for a computer science project, and what happens when it goes from essays with no references to a heavily-cited work performing a meta-analysis? Unless you have all those answers and they're all in the 0-1% range, it's likely that this will punish completely innocent students.

Don't panic. Google offering scary .zip and .mov domains is not the end of the world

Re: Still not understanding the point?

I'm not sure they really have a purpose. When they started making them, the idea was that people wanted domains so badly that new TLDs would help, and a lot of people poured a lot of money into that idea. I'm not sure how well it's going, but I've seen some of the domains sold off and several shut down before launch, so maybe it's not as profitable as hoped. In that case, I don't know why Google decided to set up some new ones now that they've had a chance to see how well it worked before.

Re: The hubris...

No, it's required behavior from RFC 3986

The userinfo subcomponent may consist of a user name and, optionally,

scheme-specific information about how to gain authorization to access

the resource. The user information, if present, is followed by a

commercial at-sign ("@") that delimits it from the host.

Do you really feel it's more patronizing for them to follow specified behavior rather than send up warning screens for stuff that's explicitly specified and is in fact used in that way by several systems that accept HTTP authentication?

Re: Have I understood this correctly?

No, but ICANN does and they will use that power if you give them enough money. You too can own your own new TLD if you have a large amount of cash that you wouldn't mind never seeing again. You can probably get some of it back from scammers, though.

Re: Speakin of .com

The ship has sailed on that. Most filesystems don't have a place to embed that data, and it's not just Windows. I don't have fields for that in most Linux filesystems, and when that is available, the system doesn't use it.

I'm also having trouble figuring out why that's better; just like a file extension, it's a free format string that anyone can change. If that was used to identify file types, the ban would apply to that one instead. This also decreases the extensibility, since there is a defined list of authorized types. I've checked out IANA's list, and it's missing several types that people like to distinguish. I see a few types that name a specific script format, but for example both Python and Rust files don't have a type and would probably be labeled text/plain. We'd either have to constantly apply to add types to that list, make up new type designations and hope that everyone figures out to use them, or just ignore the type and use a different indicator.

Several reasons. The first reason is what I already said above: the part they think they're reading is login information because it's before the @ sign. Incidentally, paths can be anything as well, no need for those to be ASCII. Only the domain part of the address might have a restriction against Unicode, but it might not.

As for mixtures, nothing in any specification prevents someone from having a username with multiple kinds of Unicode characters. There are many languages where that is common, where Latin letters are used so they're using some bytes from ASCII's English area, but there are other letters, diacritics, or symbols which are found elsewhere in the Unicode codespace. If they tried to make a database of languages so they could ban sequences not associated with a language, it would be a lot of work that would likely just annoy people whose language hadn't been inserted yet. I'm allowed to have a path or username on my system consist of mixed alphabets, and if the browser couldn't support that, they're breaking the standards that implement Unicode support.

Re: pointless

I don't do bans of large sets for exactly this reason. I wouldn't block an address just because it chose one of those TLDs. This is more about what I think when I see one. If I see a .com address, I'm thinking that it might be legitimate, if I see a .xyz domain I think there's a lower chance but it may be real, and if I see a .top or .buzz domain I assume it's a scam unless I have information that it's not. I'm sure some legitimate sites use those TLDs, but I don't think I've seen that many, which keeps me from using them either.

Re: What is this file extension thing

That introduces three problems. First, you have to open the file and read from it in order to know what can be done with it. You'd have to have a big database of magic byte sequences and an easy way of adding new ones. If anything did that automatically, you'd likely see performance dropping from extra reads, and that would get worse if there's a network link somewhere in the process.

The other problems are related, and they come because the user lacks information about what the file claims to be. The simpler problem is just inconvenience, since a user can generally understand what is contained in a file that uses a standard extension, but would have to read your file, hopefully with the same magic number database that you have, in order to figure that out using your method. The extension can also indicate something that your database probably doesn't, such as whether this file which your database correctly identifies as "plain ASCII text" is text, configuration, or source code, and if it's code, what language it's for. If you've sent a large collection of files, they may not really want to do that to every one of them to figure out which is which, and a good name that indicates the type makes that easier. The other side of the coin is worse: if the user recognizes an extension, they have a pretty good idea of what program will try to read the file if they open it. If I have a .zip file, I know my archive compressor of choice will try to open that. If somebody sent me a different kind of file with the .zip extension, the archive program will give me an error message. What can't happen is that the .zip file is an executable in disguise and will execute, since my software won't just execute a file without the correct extension set (admittedly, that extension is an empty string on my system, but it has to have a bit set so that evens it out a bit). The extension system is far from perfect, but I prefer that to guessing every file's contents and taking automatic action based on that guess.

Re: Speakin of .com

"The fact that the mime-type was "text/plain" mattered not one jot. Presumably MS looked at names, not actual information (standards - what are they?)"

Blanket bans may not be a great idea, but if you're going to have one, of course you'd use the file extension instead of the type. If the user saves the attachment and clicks on it, the OS is not going to crawl through the email database, check the type, and use that to open the file. It's going to look at the extension to do that. The type won't stay with the file, and Windows Explorer and many other GUI file managers have established years ago that they will use the extension for that purpose. Of course, your file wouldn't have executed, but people became worried after viruses, most famously Iloveyou, used a .vbs attachment and users who just blindly opened it, so they ended up using a big hammer to try to block anything that could execute just by clicking on a file.