Re: Thales is pronounced Talis
Perhaps they should take a leaf out of Hyundai's book, and commission a TV ad campaign to express how narked they are about people mispronouncing their name.
447 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Oct 2013
It is all there, but they don't make it easy to find.
A good starting point is to go to the HMRC guidance and regulation page, and search for "manual".
https://www.gov.uk/search/guidance-and-regulation?parent=hm-revenue-customs&keywords=manual&organisations%5B%5D=hm-revenue-customs&order=relevance
They did not do the thing that about which you claimed "And yet they did."
The Reuters article does not say the EU wanted to limit the power output of kettles, it says that some people fear that. The Full Fact article is not terribly well written, but it is saying that not all of the 29 product categories would be regulated based on power output.
It takes a fixed amount of energy to boil a quantity of water. Reducing the power used does not change that; if anything, energy losses would be greater. The EU wants to reduce the energy consumption of appliances. Reducing the power consumption of a kettle would be counter to that goal, so they would not and did not consider that.
They did not. You've read the European Commission's study on the matter? No, of course you haven't. You've read the Daily Mail's lies about that study, and chosen to believe them, despite the fact that those lies should have been quite transparent, for the reasons already explained.
No, reducing the power of electric kettles was never suggested in any EU consultation or legislation. It was a fiction created by the UK right-wing press, one contributor being Stephen Johns in the Daily Mail.
Of course the idea of it would be daft, anyone with a bare passing grade in O-level physics can see that. The people whom the EU commissioned to study electrical appliance efficiency were not barely-passing O-level students, they were engineers and scientists with Masters' degrees and PhDs, and they never suggested such an idea. In fact if you read the original Stephen Johns article, he doesn't actually say that they did. He just sort-of implies it. That his readers chose to believe this nonsensical fiction speaks to the blindness of their prejudices.
ChatGPT doesn't understand maths, that's clear. What has surprised me, when asking it similar questions, is how good it is at producing an answer that, although wrong, looks plausible: if you didn't bother to check the maths, you could easily take its answer as valid. So it's not doing the calculation - if it was, it would produce the right answer - but it's not churning out random numbers either.
For the providers designated "gatekeepers" under the EU's Digital Market Act, it's not a request, it's an obligation.
The problems may not be easy to solve, but they have to figure it out somehow.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/29/eu_mandated_messaging_interop_paper/
Politicians love banning stuff, apparently oblivious to its ineffectiveness as a tool of policy... but it's not the only lever available.
Tax would be one option. I'm sure some clever economists could devise an international regime of tax on profits from internet services, such that the only viable ones would be those that generate genuine value, or that someone is prepared to run on a non-profit basis.
Extreme privacy controls - legal or technological - would be another. No doubt most of those sites that the OP was referring to are the sort where the user is the product. If privacy controls were so tight they couldn't monetise their users, a lot of them probably would be gone tomorrow.
The alternatives would be "honest mistake, accidentally pressed 'release to production' instead of 'delete' on experimental code written purely for research purposes"; or throw a "rogue engineer" under the bus with the "a few bad apples" excuse. Though the latter didn't go so well for VW.
I think hoola has a point though. GPs were always "privatised," but they were not always "privatised in this way." There's a world of difference between an LLP owned by the GPs (or dentists) themselves, and a large corporation serving hundreds of thousands of patients with the cheapest service they can get away with.
They ought to be measuring the overall performance of the system, including the human, as long as the human is still part of the system. If the AI never crashes, but the human crashes more when they're forced to take over, then the AI hasn't achieved any safety benefit.
As far as I can see, there is not.
The Commission has reserved the right to executively alter the specifications "in the light of technical progress." But that looks rather like a chicken-and-egg situation, doesn't it. They won't allow a new connector until someone's created one, and no-one's going to create a new connector that's not allowed.
Enshrining a specific connector in law seems like a mistake. We're now stuck with USB-C for good or ill. A better idea would've been to allow any connector that meets some standard of non-proprietary openness.
The Quakers took it to the extreme, certainly, but a lot of Victorian industrialists shared those paternalistic ideals to some extent. When I first entered the world of work, most of the biggest employers nearby were companies that had started as family businesses in the 19th century, and they all had really nice sports & social clubs, with sports pitches, bowling greens, bars and function rooms... one even had a rifle range. All of those are gone now, sold off for housing development.
Well good news John, P455w0rd36 is in fact not in any password breaches known to haveibeenpwned.com.
Too bad it's been burned now!
But yes, as Len described, once a password has appeared in a breach of plaintext passwords (probably pinched from some site that stored them in the clear or used weak hashing), then it's in every password-cracker's dictionary. If they lift a database of password hashes from a site where you used one of those passwords, then they will decrypt it via a dictionary attack, even if an expensive hash function was used in that case.
Apparently haveibeenpwned has a dictionary of "hundreds of millions" of exposed passwords. So in cracking terms, any password that's in that list, no matter how long or complex, is reduced to about the level of a 5-character alphabetic password (380 million combinations).
The real answer is for the sites not to enforce composition requirements, which has been the official CESG/NCSC guidance for some years. Specify a minimum length - nothing more in terms of composition - and then check the password against a dictionary of known weak or compromised passwords, is what they should be doing.
I think that's a good call. For all the shortcomings of languages like JavaScript or of inexperienced programmers, they're secondary issues; I'd agree the number 1 barrier to maintainability of systems is choice of dependencies.
Everything has dependencies of course, but if you've stuck rigidly to "dinosaurish" dependencies like, say, Oracle or MS .Net, or something defined in an ISO standard, then the chances of your code still running in 10 or 20 years are good. If you've machine-gunned your system full of random stuff off NPM or NuGet, then chances are not so good.
It's fine that the code quality is terrible. A couple of years into the future, the framework that it's all written on is no longer flavour of the month, and most of the hundred other dependencies that were dragged in are no longer maintained at all. What's the point of building maintainable code on top of such a house of cards? Consider it disposable from the start. Throw it away and build a new one. Building code that'll be runnable and maintainable for a decade or more is such a 1990's concept.
Ponzi scheme sounds about right.
As long as we're not all smears of carbon on the pavement, it's doing what it's supposed to... or, at least, you can't say it's failed. I hang old AOL CDs round the garden to stave off the nuclear apocalypse, and to be fair, the empirical evidence for the success of that strategy is equally strong.
If there even is a standard that covers this, which there probably isn't. More likely Mazda's developers just made a wrong assumption that a JPEG file name will always end with .jpg because they usually do. Presumably other manufacturers' software was displaying them correctly.