* Posts by JimC

1939 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2007

Cops: Autonomous Uber driver may have been streaming The Voice before death crash

JimC

Re: You had just one job!

On what we've heard here it certainly sounds as if the driver bears a heavy responsibility, but the underlying culture needs looking at too.

This being Uber, its a fair bet their 'safety drivers' are minimum wage peons, when actually they need to be highly skilled with very fast reactions because their job is to evaluate when action is needed and take it as late as possible.

Similarly the authorities will need to know if the drivers are just told to go out and sit there. or whether they are specifically briefed before each journey with a test plan.

And ye, as in the above, the authorities will also want to look at to what extent Uber monitor that their safety drivers are doing exactly that, and not sitting their watching videos. Bearing in mind the demands of the role it would not be inappropriate for the drivers to be banned from taking phones with them. Its hard to imagine an aviation test pilot having their phone with them!

Schneier warns of 'perfect storm': Tech is becoming autonomous, and security is garbage

JimC

Re: ahum, dumb fucks ?

No, calling your user base dumb fucks is diagnostic of an industry that has completely lost the plot. If your products aren't fit for the mass population as it exists then by definition they aren't fit for the mass market.

An industry which believes that if its too difficult or too expensive to deliver a satisfactory service whilst still making a tiny minority rich then they should be allowed to deliver rubbish, ignore the law or be socially irresponsible.

UN's freedom of expression top dog slams European copyright plans

JimC

> political types legislated pi=3

Except they didn't. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/alabamas-slice-of-pi/

But boy, Google's tame useful idiots are out in force at the moment.

JimC

Or to put it another way

Big advertising (my sponsors) think that it will be too much hassle to try and stop theft, so we should make it legal. If the law gets put in place the capability will follow as if by magic. If there are no restrictions the man will always say its impossible to implement. As ever, think Mandy Rice-Davies.

Scrapping Brit cap on nurses, doctors means more room for IT folk

JimC

Re:Actually we train a lot in the NHS then they bugger off

That big boy took my sweeties so I'm allowed to steal them off all the little kids??

JimC

Why does britain

Deserve to plunder the rest of the world of their health workers?

In defence of online ads: The 'net ain't free and you ain't paying

JimC

Re: so much "decided" not to pay as "can't afford" to pay

Well, this is how money works. If no one pays for anything no-one gets paid for anything.

JimC

Re:It looks you came late to the party.

Fair comment, I was little involved with the net before 1995.

JimC

Re: Ads are OK. Data gathering behind my back is not.

> the internet existed and worked before Facebook

On a small scale, and heavily subsidised by government/academia in the early days.

Oddly enough, when a Tesla accelerates at a barrier, someone dies: Autopilot report lands

JimC

Re: drive the fscking thing properly. Hands on the wheel, 100% of your attention on the road.

That would be nice if the meatsacks actually did. Unfortunately, as is clearly demonstrated every time there's poor visibility, the average driver is not safe on the road either.

The sad reality is that an automated car will not be "safe" at the current level of technology. But a manual car is not safe either. The simple fact that the crash attenuator had already been destroyed by a human driver demonstrates that.

Its not a choice between an imperfect technology that kills 50 people a year and no deaths, that's easy. Its a choice between the imperfect technology and 200 deaths a year caused by human drivers. The other question that could be asked - and will be in some readers life time I predict - is how many people, many of them entirely innocent 3rd parties, must die because we permit manually controlled cars?

JimC

Re: OlaM

I think there's probably an age thing going on here. I grew up in the 60s and 70s, and my father was in the flying business then. My default understanding of an autopilot is something that flies the plane straight and level when there's nothing difficult going on, and needs to be overruled for take off, landing, evading Messerschmitts or Migs and anything else difficult. That fits the Tesla offering reasonably pretty accurately. I think of autoland and so on as extra capabilities above and beyond the autopilot.

Clearly a younger generation is thinking differently, and we have a cultural gap. For them, it seems, autopilot is not the right word.

Stern Vint Cerf blasts techies for lackluster worldwide IPv6 adoption

JimC

Re: You have to admit...

But as a techie too, its much easier to work with 12 digit decimal numbers than 32 digit hex. You can fix the one in your mind, less so the other. But it was RFC1597 that killed fast IPV6 adoption. RFC1597/1918 also forces a number of convenient security practices, and also effectively prohibits a number of foolish practices, which is a useful weapon for techies seeking to impose good practise on management. So all in all sticking with IP4 generally suits the techies as well as the suits.

RoboCop-ter: Boffins build drone to pinpoint brutal thugs in crowds

JimC

Re: False Positives and automated systems

Whether false positives are a problem depends what you do with them. If an airborne Laser zaps the unfortunate victim to a greasy smut, that's a problem. However if the false positive then goes to a further level of checking and is discarded without the subject ever being aware of it or the misidentification recorded then its no big deal.

Ex-CEO on TalkTalk mega breach: It woz 'old shed' legacy tech wot done it

JimC

Possibly legacy tech

Is the stuff that isn't trendy, you still need, haven't outsourced to India, but all the people who understood it have been made redundant.

HostingUK drops offline after losing Farmer vs Fibre competition

JimC

Re: but fail to mention they all use the same pipes.

Or are completely unaware that the carefully specified physically separated routes into the data centre have been merged into the same pipe a few miles down the road in spite of what the telco salesman said...

Mirror mirror on sea wall, spot those airships, make Kaiser bawl

JimC

Mather/City and Guilds - Tucker/Imperial

City and Guilds College (Engineering) and the Royal College of Science (eg Physics) were merged in 1907 (also with the Royal School of Mines) into Imperial College, so Messrs Mather and Tucker would be from the same campus, but rather different parts of the organisation - the constituent colleges retained a fair degree of independence.

A Reg-reading techie, a high street bank, some iffy production code – and a financial crash

JimC

re I have long been an advocate of writing slightly more verbose code,

Agreed. There is very little more important than readability.

Flamin' Nora! Brit firefighters tackle blazing fly-tipped boat

JimC

Re: If you’ve got the money to buy a boat,

You don't know boat ownership. Buying a boat is very cheap, people almost give ratty old boats away... If people fancy the idea of speeding round the water with the wind in their hair and bikini clad beauties on the foredeck it seems like a very good deal. But what the new owners find out very soon is that owning and running a ratty cheap boat is even more expensive than owning and running a new flash expensive boat, and so its soon back on the market very cheap, and hey, you can hardly give them away, the cost of disposing it legally is about twice what you paid for the boat and the wife is whinging about the lump on the drive and...

Want to know what an organisation is really like? Visit the restroom

JimC

Had you just happened to hit the executive facility?

Another rather revealing observation can be if you inspect a number of facilities. At one large company I worked it I was struck by the variation in facilities between the areas which were close to executives' offices and those that were nearer the 'oi polloi areas. Also interesting was the difference in cleanliness of various facilities towards the end of the day. With all facilities being cleaned under the same contract it was difficult to avoid the conclusion that some services were, well, less social than others.

Julian Assange said to have racked up $5m security bill for Ecuador

JimC

Re: Courts use video links

I think they are normally organised from police stations or elsewhere in the court buildings though. My recent experience as a juror on a trial where one was organised was that the link was from a room in the court complex.

JimC

Re: screwed god knows how many liberal luvvies out of the money they stumped up for his bail

Just goes to show, there's a bright side to almost everything...

Wah, encryption makes policing hard, cries UK's National Crime Agency

JimC

Re: Do you seriously suggest watching all 19,000 subjects 24x7x52?

And searching them every time they go to a public place?

WS Gilbert had it right...

JimC

> So, when said known person is suddenly walking around a known tourist

Its a bastard isn't it, how rarely the cops arrest people who might be going to commit a crime, but haven't done so yet.

Navy names new attack sub HMS Agincourt

JimC

Artful as in Artful Dodger

Sounds like a really good name for a submarine. The whole idea is to sneak up, do the deed, and slip away without anyone seeing you.

Robo-callers, robo-cops, robo-runners, robo-car crashes, and more

JimC

Re: "... so dialed down the AI to ignore them."

Well an AI that slams on the anchors every time a plastic bag blows across the motorway is going to cause some horrendous rear end pileups, bearing in mind how all the meatsacks drive dangerously close. So you can see the issue. There's definitely a very big risk in false positives. That being said this should still never have happened. The problem, more than anything else, seems to be with the monitoring driver. Project doesn't seem ready for minimum wagers who spend more time on the phone than watching the road, but that's not the Uber way...

Fixing a printer ended with a dozen fire engines in the car park

JimC

Re: Re:Victorian railways had a few exploding boiler incidents

Its more often told as screwing down the safety valve to increase boiler pressure and therefore power.

I do know that tamper-proof safety valves were being commonly fitted by the end of the 19thC.

Here's an accident report which blames the driver for tampering with the safety valves.

http://www.railwaysarchive.co.uk/documents/BoT_Bray1872.pdf

Scrap London cops' 'racially biased' gang database – campaigners

JimC

Re: Sadly

I dunno, back in the 70s I was stopped and searched every couple of weeks and I was white, middle class and lived in suburban Surrey. I assumed I was targeted because I had longish hair, rode a bicycle home late at night and, frankly, that the cops were bored and had nothing else to do.

Uber and NASA pen flying taxi probe pact

JimC

Sounds more like investor bait

Than serious technology with potential to be implemented in the medium term to me.

Waymo van prang, self-driving cars still suck, AI research jobs, and more

JimC

and if you are an ethical AI thought leader

Do you want to work for Facebook? Might be a very uphill struggle...

Under-fire Silicon Valley to gain new copyright 'safe harbour' in EU, fume critics

JimC

Re: Private property

Big advertising is acting very like a fence.

They are receiving stolen property and selling it on at a huge profit. And, just like householders who have had their property stolen, its impractical and ridiculously expensive for the householders to go round all the retailers of "Oh, is it stolen, we had no idea" goods and try and retreive their property.

JimC

Interesting...

Do you upvote this post if you think its a good thing that the music creators get paid, or upvote if if you agree with the premise that you should be able to raid other folks content without permission or payment?

And indeed the same dilemma could be said to apply to this post.

BOFH: We know where the bodies are buried

JimC

Re: Where the bodies are...

Funny you should mention ink. Its that big pen plotter you see, it really scatters the stuff around. That's why we need to have that bigpiece of carpet in the server room to stop it getting on the tiles.

Scissors cut paper. Paper wraps rock. Lab-made enzyme eats plastic

JimC

Re: I found out how to "recycle" PET bottles years ago.

1 Buy the cheapest bottle of spring water available.

2 Place by the bed and drink as desired.

3 Refill from the tap when empty.

4 Realise how disgusting the local tap water tastes, give up and go and buy another bottle.

JimC

Re: Doomwatch... The Plastic Eaters...

Well yes. Its funny how often people forget that crude oil is a natural product so of course there are bacteria that eat it: there are bacteria that will have a go at practically anything.

But for all the doom doom about it escaping, we have a world full of bacteria, fungi, insects and goodness knows what else that happily eat wood, and we manage to live with it quite happily.

Incidentally I am very unsure about this "Plastic lasts thousands of years" stuff. I'm 30 plus years out of date now, but when I was briefly in the industry the problem that was always exercising us was stopping the stuff breaking down ion its own.

Autonomy pulled wool over Brit finance panel's eyes, US court told

JimC

Re: It's all very odd...

I suppose if due diligence auditing had to be of sufficient depth to uncover a determined fraud that was good enough to be hidden from the company's own auditors, then the due diligence auditing would be so expensive as to render most deals and takeovers impractical, and in that case executives would have to revert to making a reasonable income running their companies better instead of making megabucks from the deals. And that would *never* do...

'Our way or the highway' warranty scams shot down by US watchdog: It's OK to use unofficial parts to repair your gear

JimC

Re: Enough with the replacement part conspiritards.

Oh come on, every damn company in the world is on the cheap initial purchase, expensive parts game. For sure the manufacturers would like to eliminate all competition so they can minimise the purchase price and make a good living on consumables. Like it or not that's standard business pricing these days.

Having said that I'm also completely in line with the companies too. If you pay xyz manufacturing a premium price so all your parts and spares are very tight QC and low tolerance, and then the customer fits crap that you would never pass for use, and then you have to fix it, that's going to be pretty galling. Seen quite a few problems failures caused by second rate pattern parts in my time in the bike trade.

Short of legislation to enforce the same profit margin on new kit and spares though I haven't got a clue what the solution is, especially as any such legislation would be a major vote loser since it would put headline prices up.

£12k fine slapped on Postman Pat and his 300,000 spam emails

JimC

Re: The language got them busted?

The language got them busted?

So next time your marketingdroids want to hype up a straightforward customer communication in the usual exaggerated buzzword b******x, tell them to remember the Post Office's fine and b*****r off.

I have a very limited sympathy for the mailmen, in that they were apparently trying to avoid being accused of putting their price cut notification in the usual beware of the leopard branded filing cabinet, but I have little doubt from the report that the marketing morons said, "Yipee, here's our chance to send a marketing message to the opt outs", and seized on it with glee.

[there you are pedants, yes I carelessly typed BT instead of Post Office. Bite me.]

An easy-breezy attitude to sharing personal data is the only thing keeping the app economy alive

JimC

kill the money chain

Well that's fine, but the subsidy the net gets from the advertising industry will have to come from somewhere else. And I fear that ship has already sailed. Too many people expect everything on the net to be "free" for alternative payment to work.

Facebook dynamites its own APIs amid data slurp scandals, wrecks data slurp applications

JimC

The extent to which Facebook have broken stuff

is staggering. I run a sports club website, and my front page uses/used the graph api to grab (read only) the contents of *public* posts on the *public* group so that those who steer clear of the Z monster can see what's been posted there, and those who can only use it have some avenue of communication outside their ghetto.

I spent yesterday struggling with their appalling documentation and notification to try and find out exactly what they've broken and what if anything I can do about it, and basically just wasted the day. I can screen scrape it of course, but it will be a lot of effort to clear out all the nonsense and structure what I get back properly.

We made a king sized mistake back in the day when we sold our mojo to the advertising industry in the foolish belief that advertising meant everything was free, but I'm damned if I know how we can extract ourselves. The belief that nothing on the net needs paying for is just too deeply rooted...

*Thunk* No worries, the UPS should spin up. Oh cool, it's in bypass mode

JimC

Re: the mail for a department got dumped on a table and you had to look through it to find your own.

At the start of my IT career data entry to the major business systems was done by trained typists who could type quickly, easily and accurately. By the end of my career large quantities of that data entry was done by managers who could do none of those at a vastly greater hourly rate...

Law's changed, now cough up: Uncle Sam serves Microsoft fresh warrant for Irish emails

JimC

Retrospective - Muddled thinking

There's nothing retrospective going on at all. They are making a request in the present for something that exists in the present.

Retrospective would be fining Microsoft for not handing over the data before the new law came into force. Now the new law is in force companies and people are now required to comply with it.

Doomed Chinese space lab Tiangong-1 crashes into watery Pacific grave

JimC

Re: Okay, I'll bite...

It depends on your definition of near. From what I can make out it came down some thousands of miles away from point Nemo.

Europe dumps 300,000 UK-owned .EU domains into the Brexit bin

JimC

Re: Not too bothered..

One might almost wonder, though, if there has been a significant contribution to someone's funds from www.imacybersquatter.eu, who fancy the idea of having all these nice active domains to use to host link farms, malware and other dubious content...

Uber self-driving car death riddle: Was LIDAR blind spot to blame?

JimC

> at some point she was in the headlights,

This strikes me as another weakness of the human monitoring. *If* we take the video on trust, then the car was being driven with dipped headlights which made it difficult for the human driver to spot the pedestrian.

But I just cannot imagine the human driver going along switching headlights from dipped to full beam all the time if the car auto doesn't depend on it.

But there's so much about that video that makes you think WTF. And indeed the whole situation.

User asked why CTRL-ALT-DEL restarted PC instead of opening apps

JimC

Re: Feeling Old...

600: pah. We had a Unisys Office automation application that required about 620, and we needed to run a Netware LAN stack as well.

Fog off! No more misty eyes for self-driving cars, declare MIT boffins

JimC

Re: FAIL

Have to agree. That should have been an easily avoidable collision. The pedestrian appears to have been crossing the road at a steady speed and direction. Its certainly possible for a pedestrian to do things stupid enough for it to be impossible for any reasonable automated car or human driver to avoid them, but this shouldn't have been one of them.

JimC

Re: Red flag laws ...

By 1926 there were nearly 5,000 deaths a year on the roads. Abolishing that red flag law cost literally thousands of lives...

Internet Society: Cryptocurrency probably not an identity system

JimC

Identity is horrendously complicated though,

Its not a simple concept like pseudo cash. For the naive, it seems just as simple as currency : 1 person, 1 pseudo dollar each needs to be identified, what's the difference.

Well, once you have had real time experience of the horrendous complexities that you run into with some of the strange things that folk do who are, shall we say, not totally assimilated into the mainstream of society, well... As ever its the boundary conditions and exceptions that get you... And the trouble with something like identity is it really does need to cover 100% of cases.

I''m sure plenty of commentards will pile in saying, no of course its not complicated, don't be ridiculous. But, as ever, they'll be the ones without the real world experience.