Posts by Wicked Witch

High-resolution display output or Wi-Fi: It seems you can only choose one on Raspberry Pi 4

Re: Minicomputer

I suppose those computers running 500W CPUs would be minicomputers, compared to workstations and supercomputers, but then what's a computer?

After four years, Rust-based Redox OS is nearly self-hosting

Re: He's completely missed the point of everything being a file in unix

Plan 9 fixed that, but unfortunately it never really caught on.

Internet Society CEO: Most people don't care about the .org sell-off – and nothing short of a court order will stop it

Re: Vanilla TLD WANTED

Isn't ICANN's rule still the same as the one Postel came up with: use the same list as the IPU's country codes and assign responsibility to whichever government is responsible for the post office the IPU has assigned that code to. For the most part they use the de facto government of the territory regardless of any potentially legitimate governments in exile.

Formerly valid CCs have typically been kept and assigned to principal successor states, so .su was handed over to Russia, rather than the last soviet republic.

Christmas in tatters for Nottinghamshire tots after mayor tells them Santa's too busy

Re: I have it on good authority ..

The Palestinian business mostly comes down to a simple case of the enemy of my enemy's friend is my friend. Israel has strong ties to America, especially the American right, so if you hate America and the right wing, there's an obvious common cause to make with the PLO and its successors.

Royal Bank of Scotland IT contractor ban sparks murmurs of legal action

> As the stock market has drifted higher over the month, due to expectations of a Tory majority, the cost of these pledges has risen substantially.

Surely that means that if Labour win the stock market will fall and the cost will go back down?

Irish eyes aren't smiling after govt blows €1m on mega-printer too big for parliament's doors

Re: Details

Adelaide Uni had a Thinking Machines CM5 on the ground floor, and once they got bored of playing with the blinkenlights someone stuck a label on it saying "move to $JUNKROOM" on the first floor. Someone got it as far as the loading bay, where there was a freight elevator. All well and good, except the freight elevator was only about 1 yard cubed, load capacity 250kg, and was mainly used for milk crates.

The only other lifts in the building could only be reached by going outside and there was no route from any of them to the storeroom that could take the weight (even if the lifts could), which they knew because they'd already had to carry a VAX out in pieces because the only route with a strong enough floor to get it in had been walled off with a firewall.

it spent over a decade in that loading bay, where periodically undergrads would clean it and play with the blinkenlights (which was fun) before it was taken away. No one would ever did adit to putting that label on it.

From humble Unix sysadmin to brutal separatist suppressor to president of Sri Lanka

Re: There but for the grace not so much

You just have to make sure you're American, then you'll get a good view of whatever's still standing when they rescue you.

Iran kills the internet for its people's own good as riots grip the Middle Eastern nation

Re: Some facts to add

The mullahs weren't the only revolutionary leaders, and whatever you may think of socialism in general it's not like they would have found it easy to do worse.

Re: Is every dictatorial regime stupid?

They've been monkeying with their subsidies and local-use quotas for the last several years. They used to subsidise all sorts of random products (the standard big-organisation accumulation of decades of whatever seemed like a good idea at the time, applied to subsidies), then scrapped them all for a household-based UBI scheme, then scrapped that and started with the random subsidies again. They've managed to get away with most of them, and probably assumed they would again.

Smart meters in UK homes will only save folks a lousy £26 a year

Re: Smart meter vs dual-tariff (Off Peak) meter ?

Electric cars and, especially in Oz, solar panels, will cause a big shakeup over the next decade+

'Ridiculous, rubbish, outrageous, complete bollocks': Just some reviews for Amazon's corporate contribution to Blighty's coffers

Re: Not really Amazon's fault

Shareholder's best interests is not the same thing as maximising share price, though there are many friedmanites who will claim it is. A clear counterexample is a bank owned by pension funds: if it trashes the economy at large to boost its share price for a couple of quarters, the shareholders' best interests have not been served.

A very simple change would be to require companies to maximise the total tax on their profits, which is supposed to amount to the same thing as maximising their profits. A better solution would be requiring them to act in the country's interest above all else, though that's harder to nail down and so enforce.

Let's see what the sweet, kind, new Microsoft that everyone loves is up to. Ah yes, forcing more Office home users into annual subscriptions

Re: Or...

It depends how strict and complicated your country's fringe benefits taxes are: your employer doesn't want to have to spend £50 on paperwork so you can have a £40 benefit.

I've had it with these motherflipping eggs on this motherflipping train

Re: Making a stink about a.....stink

Unfortunately, in England and everywhere that's inherited english laws there's a 19th century precedent which states that you're not allowed to be a nuisance to your neighbours in a way that's a problem for the neighbourhood as it is now, regardless of who was there first.It all goes back to someone whinging about a dairy's iron-tyred carts making noise on the stone street after they moved in.

Labour: Free British broadband for country if we win general election

Re: Everything will be FREE!!

That depends if you're talking about a raw bit-pipe or a "full-service" ISP. If all the ISP is doing is providing a fat pipe, mainly to overseas peering points and local server farms, then there's no point to competing on whether a prettier bill is worth a price premium. If the market is efficient, then everyone will end up paying pretty much the same price as the network provider charges, especially if either advertising rules or network standards rule out competing on how much they're lying about contention ratios.If you can shop around and get a better deal, then either you're exceedingly lucky or the market is inefficient (electricity is a good example of that).

If we're still talking about traditional ISPs with email, miscellaneous mirrors, and other services, then the national network provider should allow retailers to add features, but they should also allow customers to buy access directly at the same price.

Former BAE Systems contractor charged with 'damaging disclosure' of UK defence secrets

Re: A common misconeption

Top Secret is about how the information is handled: what IT security, how thoroughly checked people need to be, which rooms it can be in, which locks, and so on. There are, or were, special handling instructions beyond those but I think most of those have been absorbed into one of the standard classifications, at least outside SIS etc.

"Eyes Only" is about who can be told, on top of whatever restrictions apply to you telling people in general.

UK Home Office: We will register thousands of deactivated firearms with no database

That law was removed in the 19th century in general and in the 1960s where there was a specific local requirement, mostly left over from the Marcher Lords.

There was also a victorian case in which a totally ignored law was ruled as inoperable because literally no one in the court was obeying it (not even the person who brought the prosecution, which was blatantly malicious) and virtually no-one in the country was, and there had been no prosecutions for centuries.

Senior GitLab exec resigns over plan to stop hiring engineers in China and Russia

Re: Security

He did but they kept giving him matches.

Re: Security

Purchasing power matters a lot to crimes like that. The data's value is global, but your living costs are local, so you need to steal a lot more to earn you enough not to care about being fired and blacklisted in America than in a cheaper country. Also, in America you'd expect to be prosecuted, while in Russia or China you're not going to be extradited to America for ripping off an American company, especially for their own favoured companies' benefit.

Re: Thumbs up

From one of the other comments on the issue thread, they had hired a Chinese or Russian worker whose contract began on Monday, and this policy would have meant withdrawing the offer. Instead they've decided to carefully restrict his access to customer data.

Boffins blow hot and cold over li-ion battery that can cut leccy car recharging to '10 mins'

If the switch is inside there's little risk of theft. The vandalism risk depends on where you are, though if you're allowed to hang an arm over the footpath the risk would be slightly higher (unless it is high enough kids can't swing on it) but the repair cost would be smaller.

By cutting the price of taxis self-driving taxis would increase the area where a car isn't worth owning for those occasional trips to the country or awkward tangential journeys around the city. Given the high labour cost of a taxi (minicab, etc.) if you need a car for an hour or two each week its likely to be cost effective, and then once you have a car the marginal cost of use for local journeys is relatively low, so you'll probably see car ownership collapse across Zone 3 and corresponding areas of other cities. (On the downside, it will make long-distance car commuting less unpleasant and so increase the rate of sprawl across rural areas.)

I think the reason people conflate self-driving with taxis that don't want to be regulated shared cars is their much higher capital cost, so they'll be much more common in taxis than personal vehicles for many years. The idea that individual buyers will own cars and add them to the pool is probably just Uber et al fantasising about not having to pay for drivers or fleet maintenance, but people have been mugs enough to lose money driving their own car in person for decades (before Uber, pizza delivery was the preferred way to wreck your car for someone else's profit) and it's quite possible that they'll continue to do so.

I would expect future self-driving cars to be very cautious about road rules, just as they are now, because any manufacturer who can be shown to have deliberately programmed a car to break the law is painting a big "sue me" sign on themselves.

However, I can also foresee car manufactures and taxi companies lobbying for draconian enforcement of the road rules. That would mean that their cars are not disadvantaged by having to obey the law because so would human drivers and might even make them more cost effective overall, but it would also be something the cyclist and pedestrian lobby groups have been wanting for years so at least the business lobbying would do some good.

Not just adhesive, but alcohol-resistant adhesive: Well done, Apple. Airpods Pro repairability is a zero

Re: That vendor's track record for reparability is miserable

I've had a few el cheapo US$5-10 earbuds, and they last less than a month of everyday use. Some I've been able to repair but if i'd been valuing my time even at minimum wage and had been paying for supplies that would have been a waste of money. A set of mid-market wired ones would probably work better (even apple wired ones, which sound OK but don't fit my ears) would be cheaper, but US$7 per month for that kind of usage isn't all that extravagant.

Come on, you can't be serious: Now Australia mulls face-recog tech for p0rno site age checks

> We can see how an extensive database of its citizens masturbating could be a powerful investigative tool in all sorts of other crimes: public exposure, sexual harassment, even child abuse investigations.

Because clearly anyone running a CP site will decide that they need to add facial recognition and forward that data to the AFP. Its not like they're breaking any serious laws so they probably don't want to risk upsetting the Australian government about anything really important, because then they might get banned and have to use TOR or something.

Your kids will be glad a UK government-funded robot will be changing your nappy and not them

Re: Immoral fuckers!

There are only really a few other options.

1. Keep going as at present: allow immigration to supply enough warm bodies to care for OAPs on top of everything else people want done that's being done by everyone who isn't caring for the elderly. The catch is that those immigrants also get old so now you've got even more old folks to take care of, so you need even more immigrants.

2. Have more babies, and get them to work in aged care. That has all the problems of 1, but takes 20 years longer to produce workers and costs more, thought it reduces the cultural change that upsets certain parties.

3. Like 1, but use guest workers who leave when they retire. This can work, albeit with a pay premium which may or may not be cheaper than paying for their care, but you've got to be careful to make sure they don't form attachments (marriages, children, etc.) that would be politically impossible to break up (or even forbidden by a treaty such as the ECHR). For an example of that plan not working, see Germany's Turks.

4. Abandon other activities (easily achieved by paying more for carers so people choose that instead of the careers). Doesn't do the economy much good, but it works.

5. Don't provide care. Politically unbelievable

6. use "robots" remotely operated from abroad: could work, but probably more expensive in the long run than using real robots, and not noticeably more "good".

7. increase working hours, reduce holidays, and so on. Its happening but is politically unpopular and I'd prefer holidays now and a robot to wipe my arse later than no holidays and some overworked minimum wage person who couldn't find a better way to avoid benefits sanctions.

8. Find a way to stop wasting the potential of unemployed, underemployed, and inefficiently employed people (car wash attendants, a lot of warehouse hands, and anyone else who's doing machine's work) and so get more useful work without making anyone's lives worse or adding more workers. This is the only one that's a good idea and politically realistic, but no government in the western world has been able to solve that problem for decades and the solution found in the east block was so badly implemented it made the problem worse.

Which do you prefer?

Re: "make robots better protected against cyber-attacks"

And all the Japanese companies already working on this problem for much the same reason but with a 10+ year head start will just vanish.

I'm not Boeing anywhere near that: Coder whizz heads off jumbo-sized maintenance snafu

Re: Ah yes ...

The old scilab manuals were pretty bad for that: it was almost easier to try to puzzle out the french documentation with only half-remembered schoolboy french than to read the english, which looked like it was translated by someone who didn't speak english.

Re: Good to know

That's what happened when you let vendors get involved in writing standards: Def Stan 05-21 and 05-24 had the extra requirement that the processes and standards had to be approved by the MoD.

Traffic lights worldwide set to change after Swedish engineer saw red over getting a ticket

Re: Not quite

AIUI you can go to court and argue that you couldn't safely stop even beyond that, but unless the magistrate really likes you that's just going to end up with you getting penalised for driving without due care and attention (going too fast for the conditions) or driving an unroadworthy vehicle (ie one that can't brake).

Y'know how everyone hated it when tuition fees went up? Cutting them now could harm science, say UK Lords

Re: Arts subsidises STEM already

My alma mater did that a good few years ago. Rooms had a price per square metre depending on type and equipment, and obviously staff had a cost, and the course coordinators (the person in charge of a single subject, e.g. Maths 101) had a budget to spend on university or external resources. Labs and workshops (and oddities like the moot court) were assigned mostly to schools, with a few owned by faculties instead, but they weren't billed to courses yet because they couldn't work out a reasonable structure. Still, the schools mostly only taught one or two specific degrees, so the uni knew roughly how much, say, a law degree actually cost them.

Come to think of it, maybe the franchise model would work well for HE: each university could bid for a certain number of a particular degree and be advanced the money to teach them, but have to pay back the advance for anyone who doesn't earn an average of £50000 taxable income (which is what the government reckons is the point you'll make the treasury a profit) until they reach the pension age (except years they work for the government).

Re: Bah!

Also, the way they were set up made the payments from students count as government spending in England, which meant Scotland got extra money too even though the extra revenue was only being raised in England. That helped get a few more votes from Scottish MPs.

The eagle has handed.... scientists a serious text message bill after flying through Iran, Pakistan

Re: My Favourite Birds

So long as it is a grey squirrel, since red squirrels are protected as endangered animals.

Yay! The ozone layer hole the smallest it's ever been seen. That's not necessarily good...

Re: @ Symon and M Thatcher

That's easy: just try to get agreement with those people on the definitions of "own" and "people", let alone the added complexities of "own people". Then apply the different definitions to northerners, miners, poor people, non-Etonians (or maybe Harrovians), Scots, inhabitants of Ireland, colonials, natives (in all its many meanings and connotations), immigrants, "immigrants",…

Plan to strip post-Brexit Brits of .EU domains now on hold: Registry waves white flag amid political madness

Re: Let me sort this out for you all

It's not Corbyn's fault that his support in the party membership doesn't give him control over the parliamentary party in practice or over the party machine, meaning he couldn't do anything except with his shadow cabinet's own resources for the first few years unless the right agreed with it.

What is probably his fault is that he didn't take advantage of that support to perform the kind or purges the right did before and during the time Blair took over the party and so secure control of the party machine and ease out as many of the parliamentary right as possible.

Re: Does the UK require citizenship for .uk domains?

>The UK wants to keep it’s cake having eaten it?

Apparently it was originally "eat your cake and have it too", but somehow became flipped, a bit like the way many people say "could care less" instead of "couldn't care less".

Re: Does the UK require citizenship for .uk domains?

>I know it's said a lot that the UK must be punished to discourage the others. But I don't think it's true. I've even heard it said approvingly by people arguing we should remain in the EU, in a sort of "Good on 'em sock it to us nasty British!" sort of way.

Junker definitely said pretty much that (paraphrasing from memory, he said that deterrence was worth whatever it cost so long as it made an example of Britain and stopped any future talk of leaving), but he said that at a time when Le Pen had rather a lot of support even outside her own voters for policies which were incompatible with EU directives (not unlike Corbyn in that respect), and her platform included polices which could have triggered the sanctions which Lord Kerr designed to force A50 the the rest of the Council wanted to, while at the same time there was much more hostility from the V4 and the Swiss federal government was forced to undo popular policies which violated their web of treaties with the EU.

We're going deeper Underground: Vulture clicks claws over London's hidden tracks

Re: Why obsolete?

The H&S issues would be somewhat reduced by the trains being driverless (they always were, they were originally controlled like a giant model railway), so the only people in the tunnels would be maintenance staff.

ISTR there was a plan to extend the line to the then-new London distribution centre (now the Princess Royal Distribution Centre), which would have made it worthwhile, but shifting fashions and lack of ready money meant no solid plans had been prepared before the switch from rail to road transport for long-distance post.

Google lashes out at DoJ, Oracle as it asks US Supremes to sniff Java suit one last time

With no copyright everything would be effectively under CC-SA (or CC-SA-BY in countries with "moral rights"). That's weaker than the GPL because it doesn't include the "preferred form for modification" and weaker than the GPL3 because it doesn't include the anti-TiVoisation clause, and the common F/OSS patent protection clauses wouldn't work (but presumably there would be no applicable patents either).

However, you can also fake copyright, by releasing something subject to an NDA that the recipient will undertake not to redistribute it except as listed, with their ability to access your secret literature as their consideration to make a valid contract. The major difference is that it would only allow you to sue the first person to release your item, not all the subsequent redistributors who never agreed to your contract.

In the UK the Authorised Version of the Bible also has indefinite copyright, and the proceeds from that go to Oxford and Cambridge universities.

Not a death spiral, I'm trapped in a closed loop of customer experience

Re: "change the old paper driving licence for a photo card."

If you managed to hang onto an old paper one you didn't need to pay to renew it.

Hundreds charged in internet's biggest child-abuse swap-shop site bust: IP addy leak led cops to sys-op's home

Re: Good work by the IRS

The rest of the crimes seem to have mostly been conducted by non-Americans outside America. Also, the BTC payments were the bit that was vulnerable and relatively easy to trace, at least before the South Korea police arrested the owner and grabbed the server (which would allow them to insert malware and hope for idiots).

Re: Blaming the tools

>film cameras, for the people who had a trusted developer (My brother worked, briefly, in a photo-development store, and would regularly turn over photographs of illegal activity to the police.).

So, was there one of them working there and these people just gave their films to the wrong person, or are there just far more brainless criminals out there than I'd previously assumed?

Re: Fair play to the authorities

The TOR foundation themselves say that research and development are funded by US Navy grants. They don't say it is navy intelligence, but I don't think i'm taking an excessively wild guess to suppose that it isn't being funded by the navy's entertainment officers.

Well, well, well. Fancy that. UK.gov shelves planned pr0n block

Re: What About Filtering?

Just ask them to set the evil bit if it is illegal :)

Re: don't trust the government

If a VPN is cheaper than an official wanking permit, a hell of a lot of people will use one, even if they end up running some botnet node to get it.

Re: The EU is not a wet dream..

It looks like there's a few ways to weasel out of it, aside from the classic approach of ignoring it until the Commission or an affected business (in this case just MindGeek) starts proceedings. The simplest is to decide that it isn't "appropriate" to use anything except a free web filter supplied by the government or ISPs or someone.

Re: Yay!

So far there has only been one instance of a country being sanctioned for defying the ECHR, and that took years even though the country was Russia and they were being sanctioned for using blatantly dodgy judicial proceedings to forcibly nationalise a company (one which had significant foreign shareholders too). Since the biggest porn companies were in favour of smashing out the competition, the only reason I'd expect for other Council members to get upset about a porn ban would be as a pretext.

Inside the EU, the much faster internal sanctions process (designed to punish Austria for electing the FPÖ, which looked likely at the time) can be used to eliminate all benefits of EU membership while keeping all the downsides. The EU also doesn't have anything allowing the signatories to exempt arbitrary regions at will, put in for Algeria and which the UK government forgot to invoke in NI.

There's also no real penalty for leaving the Council of Europe, especially if you're planning a lot of ECHR violations (in which case you probably don't care about the cultural and community aspects of the Council), whereas it is generally expected that the next EU treaty will fix the EU's rules to make Council of Europe membership an ongoing rather than instantaneous requirement.

Tearoff of Nottingham: University to lose chunk of IT dept to outsourcing

Re: The peril of getting your wish granted by a very exact genie

And even when you get the contract almost right, you'll get the cheapest possible implementation of the literal text, if you're lucky. Sometimes you get a malicious literal genie trying to make you pay for a variance. If it is a terrible solution that no sane person would choose, hard luck.

Re: RE: And this means

"My contract is ending in 5 minutes time and I estimate that I will not be able to complete the listed tasks, but you may be able to obtain suitable services from Wicked Witch Consulting at £££££££££££ per hour on an as-needed basis."