Posts by DavCrav

Re: The Great Wall of "Thanks, but no thanks. We're good."

"What's the problem with China building industries and being independent of the USA?"

What's the problem with a country being independent? None in theory.

What's the problem with a murderous, Orwellian dictatorship superpower able to act with impunity throughout the world? Well, I assume that one's clear. The US doesn't exactly have an unblemished record in that respect and they are infinitely preferable to Chinese preeminence. Can you imagine what the US's actions would have been in, say, Vietnam, if they didn't have to worry about public opinion either at home or abroad? They could have, for example, rounded up a million Vietnamese and shoved them in concentration camps. Just off the top of my head.

Re: Brexit bollocks

"Of course, but "disagree, gloat, and do fuck all to make it work" isn't a constructive option."

I voted Remain. Why should I have to do anything to 'make it work'? Leave voters should have to shoulder that burden. After all, they thought it would be easily workable, and I don't. Sitting here and repeatedly saying 'it will be a shitshow, and I will sit here repeatedly saying it will be a shitshow' is a perfectly reasonable option.

Re: "we know natural methane is odorless"

Also, all methane is odorless, not just 'natural' methane. (As opposed to the methane that exists outside nature?)

Re: Good on them...

"And if being included in the search choice screen is valuable, why should Google give it away for free? It doesn't make sense."

It does, if you understand the terms 'monopoly' and 'abuse of power'. Any monopoly will, in a well-regulated market economy, require special regulations to stop it leading to market failure. One of those is the inability to extract monopoly rents from anyone and everyone. This would be such an example of abuse of a monopoly position to extract rents.

I came to say the same thing. It's like "I wouldn't necessarily call it murder, it was just the deliberate ending of someone's life".

Re: Though there is scope for savings

"Some universities have good upper management, unfortunately lots do not."

I'm not sure I agree with you there. I don't know of enough universities with good senior management to use the word 'some'.

Re: Without googling (of course) Hands up who knows about "Hamming distance" ?

"Without googling (of course) Hands up who knows about "Hamming distance" ?"

I was wondering what happened to their error correction. So flip a few bits and everything goes to hell in a handcart? Hmm.

Re: Total bollocks

"Total bollocks"

I think you might be mixing up individuals volunteering their time and companies giving donations in kind. Take a look a p11 of this pdf from the Electoral Commission:

PDF.

Of course you could still be right, but that document does seem to suggest that you are not. If you can explain why you are, I'd love to hear it.

Edit: here is the definition of a volunteer, to help you: someone who is not paid for their time, and chooses of their own free will to work for free. Now, while they are in their offices working for CA, were they volunteers? I'm guessing not. Also, even if they were, all of the office equipment, databases, etc., have a commercial value as well. And databases cannot volunteer.

"He ain't seen nothing yet, he won't exist after Google has finished expunging him."

Yes, nothing says 'definitely not an aggressive monopoly that needs to be regulated into oblivion' like being able to take massive retaliatory action against someone trying to obtain legal redress against their (alleged) law-breaking.

Re: I don't know if he's a crook or not, but...

"All those circular transactions do look strange."

It depends though. In a sense, all transactions are circular. I give you something you want, you give me something I want. In many transactions one side gives the other money, but as long as both sides get something they want that's not a problem (except both sides give it a monetary value for tax purposes). So circular deals should be separated from 'fake circular' deals, where neither side wants what the other is offering but they both do the deal to pad their income (but not profit).

Re: Will the 737 MAX ever be safe?

"That was exactly the wrong thing to do because raising the flaps is what enables MCAS and they cannot be lowered again until your speed falls back below the threshold level."

So your suggestion is to work with the known lethal software? This is post-fact bullshit. We now know that MCAS is causing major problems, so you are positing (potentially incorrectly, I do not know) a solution that assumes you already know the cause of the problem, are familiar with how the software works and can try to kill you, and know how to stop it.

Of course, if you knew all that, you would refuse to fly in the piece of shit until the software is fixed and properly tested.

Re: Barr is thinking of the future

"All I see is a bunch of correlations without providing evidence of exactly WHY unleaded gasoline and abortion dropped crime rates."

The lead thing is known: lead has a known causal effect on brain chemistry. It wasn't just lead in fuel; countries that got rid of lead paint experienced a similar improvement.

As for abortions, I assume the causal link is that a lot of crime is drug-related, and a lot of people get into drugs because of a shit childhood. One possible cause of a shit childhood is a family that didn't want you/cannot look after you.

Re: Hold on a second

"when they do eventually decide to stop sponging off the taxpayer."

Which would be themselves, as you can only get parental pay if you are a taxpayer.

"So, you criticise the EU for taking a certain position, then criticise them again when they respond to criticism and do something you thought they should do."

Yes. You can criticise someone for being an idiot. And then when they finally change their mind following the fallout, you can still criticise them, because they were still an idiot.

The point is they didn't think before they acted, and then waited an age before performing the U-turn.

Re: MoD payed Serco £10M to avoid problems?

"The Law, you can't blackball suppliers like that on government contracts."

There are plenty of other reasons to blackball Serco though.

Re: The simple answer ...

"That would be something akin to slavery and forced labour. Arbeit Mach Frei."

Oh shut up. If you are deemed an employee you can resign. So no, it's not slavery.

Re: Autonomous driving is months, years, or decades away

"I can see premiums for manual control skyrocketing and/or insurance companies insisting on enhanced driving training before they offer coverage at all"

Why? My risk hasn't changed. So I'm still a £200/year risk, whether terrible drivers are priced off the roads or not? Now, if you mean to say that insurance companies look for any excuse to rake in more cash, and this will be a good excuse to increase my premiums then that is true, but that would require them to all form an illegal cartel to do that.

Re: Unpopular Opinion

"The following analogy may be over-simlipfied, however, if you report your car stolen, the police tend to try and find out who stole it, and go after them for punishment. They dont turn around and fine the victim of the theft, saying that they should have better protected the vehicle."

They didn't own the data, it was someone else's. If the 'we hold your possessions securely' storage company actually just lets anyone in and lets them take anything they want, they will be done as well.

"They obviously have some level of basic security deterrents in place, all companies do. "

Apparently, although I am not an expert in this, their safeguards were well below best practice, hence the fine.

Re: Mozilla are only partly right

"Your *right* for *me* not to have something? Who the hell made you the arbiter of my possessions?"

Attitudes like that are why I don't want other people to have guns.

Re: Raj's response to authors response

"Can he explain why they are wrong?"

Here's where they are wrong:

"[...]admitted that their model was trained and tested on a subset of the same data[...]"

And then I ignored everything they said after that as special pleading and 'but we know what we're doing, we're scientists'.

He doesn't have to prove them wrong. They are wrong by assumption. They have to prove that they are right, to others' satisfaction. And someone else needs to be able to reproduce their results using the same data, which apparently cannot be done, at least easily.

Re: Think with your mind, not your wallet

"If she remembered the age of her kid, she could have just cloned her car keys for a few bucks and give them to the little tyke, for some reason babies love car keys."

Note: the baby wants car keys. They don't actually have to operate your car. (The 'they' in the sentence can mean the keys or the baby.)

Re: correct me if I'm wrong ..

"But don't many of those companies sell their own cyber (euughh) defence services?"

Sure, but they are selling you defences against a guy in his bedroom. Protecting yourself against the Chinese state is a whole different matter, and eventually hopeless. A guns and ammo shop in the States can get you tooled up to prevent a house invasion (not really) but if the assailants are a foreign army you are still in trouble.

You keep your crown jewels off the network, and check everyone going in and coming out of the room. Only way to be sure.

Re: New from Ralph Nader

"And before you lay the blame entirely at Boeings door remember - they build aircraft to what the airlines will pay and that's a function of what you pay for tickets."

OK, I've remembered that. Now I can lay all of the blame for this at Boeing's door. Although the door would probably fall off as it opened.

Re: Cross-examining Devil's Advocate

" in this case they *knew* that they were not able, and had quietly subcontracted an expert they *hoped* might be."

Thinking about it more, it's actually much worse than that. It's like going to a locksmith because your car key doesn't work. They cannot fix the lock, but they can get in touch with the guy you know broke your lock in the first place. For a bit of cash, and their skim, he---as a car thief---can break into your car for you.

Now given that they wanted TeamViewer installed, what they were suggesting is to just hand over your car to him and hope he breaks into it, nice and gentle like, and then lets you back in it, rather than stealing it.

As well as the whole legal problems of now being tied to organized crime rather than to a supposedly bona fide security company, you are also unknowingly funding the very people you were trying to avoid. (One example of a legal problem is banks' 'know your customer' regulations. Have you paid a company a few thousand pounds that has lots of very dodgy bitcoin payments to known criminals? Sorry, we no longer want your custom.)

So yeah, Knacker of the Yard time.

Re: Barking mad, are we?

"If it made sense, half the programmers in the USA would be unemployed!"

The other half are writing accountancy software.

Re: "Antisocial media"

"Well at least everyone gets a go, as opposed to just those who have the money/power to influence media. If it's a choice between only the elite being able to spread rampant bollocks or everyone can do it; then I will opt for the latter every time."

How do you reckon that little experiment is going so far, hmm?

Re: Can someone tell me why Venmo is a thing?

"Over here, Germany, you generally each pay your part of the bill. The waitress just crosses off what you've paid for and tallies it up and gives you the bill for your portion. You then pay with either cash or debit card."

Yes, one of the first things you should learn when visiting Germany is "zusammen oder getrennt?", because you will be asked it.

Re: Mens rea

"A guy who is off his head on drink and/or drugs is considered lacking the mental state to do a deliberate crime."

I believe being (intentionally, i.e., not spiked) drunk at the time is considered an aggravating factor in sentencing, not a mitigating factor. It's a myth that is mistakenly employed by the small army of people having to defend themselves in court: they say they it was the drink not them, and then that increases the sentence rather than reduces it.

Re: Surely...

I don't know about the US but prosecuting in the UK would be difficult. You could claim the Computer Misuse Act, because the Theft Act requires the removal with the intention to permanently deprive. As they clearly have no intention to permanently deprive, no theft has occurred. However, an unauthorized intrusion has occurred, so CMA could apply.

The problem with this is that the unauthorized access was to prevent a theft, and so there is no mens rea. Indeed, not acting would probably lead to the commission of a crime, so there's a significant public interest defence.

Standard IANAL label applies, this post is for entertainment purposes only, etc.

Re: There's a problem with giving 'value' to aged accounts....

"He's learnt a lesson (don't rely on free services for something so important) and so I'm not really sure why this is even in the news?"

I guess so people who aren't him can learn the same lesson? I know that it often takes damage to oneself personally to learn the following two lessons, but hopefully one or two people are able to learn from others' mistakes:

1) Always have a backup;

2) Never rely on companies that offer to host your data online, especially for free.