Posts by John Brown (no body) 25434 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010
"I can hear the bells ringing out loud from the rooftops throughout the U.K. to celebrate getting 'advice' from the "hallowed ones" that no one else would ever have thought of."
Maybe they can advise us on the best negotiating position to take on our prospective new PM and what to do about the NI "border issue" while they're in the mood for dishing out useful advice?
"NPM might also require a two or three character distance difference between any new account and any existing one."
I'd think that would the best option as a first choice, primarily because it will also preclude accidental typos from happing in many cases, let alone malicious one. Something that should be fairly easy to block programmatically, at least for new names. There will be cases of people wanting a very similar name, but that should be limited, in the first instance, to those people who already own the original name. Of course, enforcing this properly will also require more humans to check and arbitrate for genuine name clashes and that costs money so it either won't happen or it will be entirely automated leading to disastrous "unforeseen" consequences.
"only for the victims to potentially be defrauded 0.5/1/10/100 years later based on some of that data."
Yes, the usual sop is "one years free identity theft protection". Which is a cheap get-out and not actually protection as such. It's more of an early warning system that you identity has just been stolen. And as you state, that data is still out there, and much of it can't be changed. Two, three, four or more years down the line, when you "free identity theft protection" has lapsed, you lose everything and can't claim back on the people who incompetently lost your data three years in a row.
It's reaching the point (or has already reached the point) where some people are probably running multiple and consecutive "free identity theft protection" because they have been subject to so many data thefts.
"I'm very glad that they've never scanned any of my credit cards, nor any of my ID documents, and if it's left up to me, they never will"
I'd like to think that's the case for me too, but one can never be sure just who runs that hotel you booked. Is a sub-brand or sub-sub-brand or recent acquisition of some global brand? In my case, it's quite unlikely. The only hotels I've been booked into in the last 10 years have been for business and booked through my employer so they should only have my name and my employers details, possibly my mobile phone number (also provided by my employer)
"The courts interpret and enforce the law. Who writes the laws? Politicians in most cases"
But laws, especially these days, seem to be very woolly and grey such that no one really knowns what is or isn't illegal until it's tested in court. At which point the judge(s) and/or jury get to decide how the law actually works. Well, in theory. There's always the highly paid lawyers funded by deep pocketed $big_Corp who will appeal and appeal and appeal before eventually settling out of court, leaving us back where we started with a woolly and grey law, unproven in court.
"Just make sure that the fines which will (inevitably) be handed out are large enough to cover the cost of enforcement."
I'm in two minds about that. In the case of huge companies breaking the law in way that may affect millions of people, it sounds like a good idea. In the case of general upholding of the law, as a basic principle, not so much. Can you imagine the fine for littering if that had to go towards the total cost of policing such that policing became cost-neutral? Every time the cops get a pay-rise, "productivity" would have to increase to cover the increased running costs. No thanks :-)
"Facebook could be bankrupt by then (hey, a man can dream!) in which case good luck collecting anything from their carcass."
Or, more likely, have morphed into a "new entity" which will make all the right PR noises while denying any relationship with "old Facebook" and therefore no responsibility for any wrong doing or fines incurred.
"Are these really "new" particles"
Maybe you need to define "new" first, when asking your question. A bit like "new" species of plants or animals being "discovered". The people who live in that area don't see them as "new". After all, they took time to evolve and the locals probably have them pan fried for supper every other week. But they could be "new" to science, in that they've not previously been recorded in "The Big Science Book of Everything" yet.
" you accept infinity which is so easy to accept looking forward but harder looking back."
Absolutely. People often say, "in an infinite universe, anything can happen". Well, if it's really infinite, everything has already happened. Which is probably the simplest argument to say it isn't infinite. It's big. Really big. You won't believe how vastly big. But not infinite in either size or time.
"I thought the particle physicists' idea of how to work out the composition of the universe was to collide it with another universe (terribly fast) and see what comes out of the collision."
I suspect it would a very Big Bang and we are the result, not the cause :-)
Maybe this is a valid argument for cyclical Big Bangs and Big Crunches, except the Big Crunch isn't natural but made by inhabitants with an overdeveloped sense of curiosity, too much time on their hands and a Very Large Hadron Collider.
"You are just banking your company on that the cloud provider is going to have required capacity when you need it"
Yes, "cloud" may have started out with those lofty ambitions and ideals, then the accountants took over and asked why all this spare hardware was just sitting there hoping for a paying customer. "Do we really need 20% over capacity just in case? Why not cut it to 15%? 10%? 5%?. Why not just optimise for 100% usage and slow down the less important customers and sell their resource to the higher paying customers? Just put that in the Ts&Cs of the cheapskate contracts. After all, they sold all their on prem kit and are trapped here now.!
"SpaceX didn't achieve anything that hadn't been done before. Even the re-usable part of it is dwarfed by what the Space-Shuttle did."
I'd not go quite that far. The shuttle was impressive for passenger and payload capacity, but it's actual reusability was questionable, in terms of the SRBs and the external tank, not to mention the engine rebuilds etc. In terms of amount of hardware per launch, SpaceX probably bring back less of the vehicle total but the reusability of what does come back seems to be far more efficient. When Starship flies, it's looking like near total re-usability with a far larger payload and passenger capacity, albeit without the coolness factor of a "space plane" landing. On the other hand, it does have the coolness of 1950's SciFi tail landing rockets :-)
"No one comes close to SpaceX for lots of cheap launches in quick succession landing back at the launch site, or nearby. Nobody."
Is there even a need for a rocket factory near the intended launch site when your rockets and bootsers can land at a different landing site than that from which up-go'ed. You could even save money by doing a full on launch and then "simply" landing where you next need it :-)
In reality, of course it depends on how much checking and refurbishment is needed after each launch and you still need the non-return parts to be shipped to the launch site. Starship may "just" need the catching arms and fuel supply at the new launch site.
"The tariffs would be lifted, not because China is now "better" than they were, but because we're worse?"
The tariffs were introduced because Trump want to "fix" the US economy while using the Chinese human rights record as the "reason" for imposing the tariffs. Now the US is in an economic bind, Biden, while supporting the human rights principles the tariffs were supposedly enforced for, now see the US dollar as more important than those principles. Whatever may be said in public, it's always about the almighty dollar, never about the principles. All governments are the same in that respect, most of the time.
"They have also discussed removing the fuel taxes for a while, but there is no trust in the petroleum industry to not take that as even more profit."
The UK tried that. A whole 5p off a litre of fuel. Whether it had any affect, I don't really know. It was a such a small amount and fuel was/is still rising such that even that tiny effect was barely noticeable. There were multiple news stories about whether the filling stations/fuel companies ever actually passed that price cut on. There are current stories about pump prices still going up or at best remaining stable at high levels while the wholesale cost of fuel has dropped a bit over the last month.
Looking at a live price chart on crude oil, it's down between 3% and 10% today.
Looks like it peaked at over $120 per barrel across the first two week of June and has been mainly falling to about $97 per barrel today. I'm not seeing that fall at the pumps yet, but it goes up *instantly* when the well price goes up.
"From what I can tell, Wayland doesn't even plan to implement anything like this."
They have specifically said they will not do this for...$reasons they never seem to state. I doubt it would even be possible to add the feature now since it's quite a low level function that would impact on the entirety of the Wayland codebase.
NB, Subject line trimmed as the prepended Re: made it too long for the forum s/w to cope.
"If the purpose of email is mostly to organise meetings,"
That's quite an assumption. The corollary to that would be if one is spending so much time organising meetings, inviting to meetings and accepting invitations to meetings, then a dedicated meeting/calendaring system tuned specifically for that function would make more sense than shoe horning the function into another app. Clearly in the situation you describe, the email function is merely an addendum to a calendar :-)
"And none of the Open Source mail clients had the convenient calendaring and scheduling functionality of Outlook."
That's the bit I never quite understand. Is this something that is demanded of a mail server or is it just something people have been managed into expecting by MS? Email and "calendaring" don't immediately spring to mind as instant happy bedfellows. It always feels a bit like shoe-horning database functions into a spreadsheet and treating that normal.
"Some of the unusual features were that you could use unary maths (another of my ideas that never took off) with a single key keyboard, it didn’t matter if you pressed the key or not. You also had a single pixel monitor and it didn’t matter if it was lit or not."
Apple did that with their mouse. So only the keyboard and screen to try now :-)
"Corporations that were developing such a thing and then learned it has been patented by someone should be paid compensation."
It seems to me that the entire US patent system is based on "if it's not currently patented, register a patent ASAP before someone else does". It doesn't seem to matter if the application is obvious or already in use, the USPO will rubber stamp it and let the courts decide. Meanwhile, those with less deep pockets either have their inventions[*} stolen from under them and go bust, or have to pay ridiculous licencing fees for their own invention.
[*[ for "inverntion", I mean what said at the start of the post. The "invention" may simply be obvious or public knowledge, ie unpatentable due to prior art.
"The Microsoft account requirement recently popped up a new irritation on our test install: it automatically keeps the Desktop folder on OneDrive,"
Seriously? I can see that very much cramping the style of anyone working from a laptop and a SIM card or tethering to a mobile phone and wondering why they reached their data cap so quickly.
Indeed. Mine seems to be labeled as a "pensioner phone".
That's funny :-) The people currently retiring or who will do so in the next few year grew in the world of computers, many of used them at work, many have smartphones. It's like when an "event" is organised at retirement homes. It's all "wartime" music, Bog Band sound etc., yet many of those people grew up with Elvis, rock and roll were mods'n'rockers, punks, etc. Yet there's a stereo-type of nice little old ladies and men who love home made jam and scones. Some of those people in the retirement homes where thugs, whores and gangsters :-)
It's more than you might think.
In 2019, figures from Statista show tha the number of international tourist arrivals to the US stood at almost 80 million after being on the rise for over a decade. Thanks to this influx of visitors and a boost in US travel spending, the travel and tourism industry contributed over 1.1 trillion US dollars to the country’s GDP and supported millions of jobs in 2019.
However, since the beginning of March, the Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in over US$500 billion in cumulative losses for the US travel economy, equating to a daily loss of approximately US$1.75 billion.
"but unchecking the "Deceptive Content and Dangerous Software Protection" setting in Firefox's Settings gets definitely rid of that rogue Google cookie."
Unchecking? That sounds a bit counter-intuitive. Was that a typo, or are Firefox in bed with Google for dark pattern practices?
And with a $10,000 bounty for information leading to a successful prosecution paid to any private citizen or business even just for assisting someone to have an abortion, it's going to make for some very interesting and scary moments in Texas especially. Potentially even cases against public transport, eg bus/train/airplane companies as "accessories" (likely to fail since the prosecution will have to prove intent or knowledge), but certainly anyone providing information on which States people could travel to, addresses of abortion clinics in other States. Search engines may have to block this info in those States banning abortions so as not to fall foul of "providing aid".
Interesting case in Malta invloving a US woman and what can happen in a jurisdiction with an abortion ban, I'm not sure if their law is as draconian as Texas though.
"Boomer here."
I was born right at the end of what is defined as a "baby boomer" and the beginning of Generation-X. I'm confused as to whether I should be entitled or blaming myself for the ills of the world. I guess the reality is that this highlights just how ridiculous those labels are. Almost as stupid as star signs defining personality traits.
...and Labour had to deal with the end result of Thatchernics and Majornomics and each party had over a decade to implement their "solutions".
I'm not saying either side was right or wrong here. Just that both sides had a long time to deal with the so-called "disasters" the previous government created and they only ever plan for a single term in government. Few politicians instigate long term plans because they know they may not be around to reap the praise.
Thatcher had the Falklands as a distraction. Blair had Iraq. Bojo had/has a pandemic.
If an OS is mandated by an authoritarian government, then you have to make do or write what you need. If all the universities are pushed this way, then that's where all the dev work will go. China has a very large home market, they can develop stuff just for their home market and still have a lot of customers. It doesn't have to be all FOSS. As per the article, they've tried this before. I suspect it was a bit half-hearted. They seem a bit more serious this around. And don't forget, China is good at playing the long game.
"Presumably he thought he could get away with it because he wasn't named or being actively monitored."
On the other hand, I'd not be surprised to learn that ANY large transaction during a "blackout period" is looked at more closely than usual. After all, look how many insider traders have been caught getting others to do the trades for them, eg friends and/or family. I'd imagine even with a company the size and value of Apple, $10m trades don't happen all that frequently, especially close to an earnings/performance announcement.
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