Posts by cream wobbly

CNDVFS it is then!

Beware of the Leopard?

Not really feeling it, are you?

In computing jargon, erasure is as simple as unlinking. The data's still there, but there's no direct path to its retrieval. It's the electronic version of 'in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.”'

In legal jargon, erasure has a very definite meaning, closer to the common sense concept of erasure: the data's gone. This type of erasure in computing jargon means scrubbing; whether that's overwriting with zeroes, or "dd </dev/urandom >/that/guy" in a loop fifteen times with an upside-down chicken on your left elbow.

Of course if you scrub something, you should log it...

Re: "reflects perhaps misplaced confidence"

Nah, I wanted the new Notepad that handles Unix line ends. It took a while to install Notepad, but it was worth every penny.

Re: Fiat 500

"You can guarantee that the owners have not the slightest clue about oils so just pick up 20w50 and go with it (which to paraphrase Robin Williams is "great when you're in a landcrab, but not so great when you've got VVTi") or (and my neighbour actually killed one doing this) top it up to the valve gear."

So, you don't like the Fiat 500 because someone once didn't know how to do an oil change?

Maybe there ought to be warnings. Just saying....

Worth adding for clarity that the generic name search was the method used to arrive at the list of URLs. But the legal complaint revolves around the URLs on the list; not the search term. The merits or lack thereof for the presence of each URL is what was being debated; and that's where the simplistic methodology came up.

Re: Not useful

"We have only a sample of one (here) which is statistically meaningless."

Not really. We know roughly when proto-life emerged from spiral molecules, and for roughly how long the conditions conducive to forming those (or similar) molecular spirals were in existence prior to that. We know roughly the astronomical conditions necessary to producing the planetary surface conditions. From there we can deduce some very broad probabilities.

Thing about broad probabilities is when you combine them, they either splounce out to infinities, or they limit themselves. It happens that these are the sort that self-limit.

I mean, it's not like we have anything close to useful that could guide us where to look. Pretty much the best we've got is "I hope that star isn't exploding or collapsing", (but even that makes an unreasonably big assumption that stellar stability is key to life). We don't really know how old their planets are ... yet. We don't know anything at all about their surface conditions. But that's just the probability for evolving life. Life, it can be concluded, given certain pretty common conditions, is pretty much inevitable.

When you start talking about intelligent life though [1], the probabilities start to diverge again. Add in technological intelligent life, and the divergence increases. Add in communicative technological intelligent life, and it's almost as useless trying to make predictions about that as it is to prove the existence of a soul [2].

So it's quite possible that we could eventually make great predictions about where to look for signs of intelligent life [1] but technological and communicative? You're just going to have to keep that screensaver running and brute-force it.

1. Yes I know, not the Whitehouse. Ell Oh Ell.

2. Pronounced "arsehole", natch.

Re: Hmmm...

If it helps, Minix, Mach, Hurd, Exec, and Fuchsia (okay, Zircon) won't suffer the 'slowness feature'. Less-than A aitch-ref equals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum%E2%80%93Torvalds_debate greater-than I'll wait for you to catch up less-than oblique a greater than.

Re: Expect better than this from the reg

"the commentards at El Reg tend to have well-developed critical and analytical skills and take great delight in pulling this sort of research apart"

Nope, most of them up to this point have been "Oh I need a wee dram and to sexually harrass some women". The well-developed critical analytic skills you're talking about are few and far between and exemplified by the post you're railing against. Well done!

Re: bazillion other laws or observations we still consider correct

By which you mean, these ain't fudges; they were just written as unknowns which became known later.

Dark matter and dark energy are unknowns. Axions might turn out to be the phlogistons of our age, but right now, we don't know. That's kinda what "unknown" means.

Re: The Quantum of Firefox

That's a bit of a leap.

Re: The Man Who Fell To Earth: a_yank_lurker

"Yet don't require insurance, an annual worthiness test, a proficiency test, to be visible at night and an understanding that red means STOP and green means GO."

Insurance, roadworthiness and proficiency tests aside, bikes are required to be visible at night in the UK and the US, and cyclists are are required to follow the rules of the road; which include not breaking the push-bike speed limit of 25 mph. (You get a lot of pop-pop bikes being impounded in the US for doing 30.)

Other road users also subject to all the same conditions as cyclists include walkers, runners, skateboarders, rollerbladers, wheelchair users. Are you butthurt about them, too?

"and they are called railways"

Almost every logical development of self-driving cars lands on some form of railway.

Every self-driving car making the same observations will choose the same lane of traffic.

Every self-driving car driving in the same lane of traffic will drive along the same two patches of tarmac or concrete. Why not make them metal?

Since everyone seems to be going the same way, scale up from 5 .. 7 passengers per ride to 50 .. 70 passengers per ride.

Sell tickets!

Have platforms!

Sell sandwiches of dubious freshness!

Re: Really??

"but autonomous driving will always be responsible for deaths"

Ahem. That case had nothing to do with autonomous driving. Rephrased, then: the driver who engaged cruise control and then took his eyes off the road to enjoy a movie was responsible for his own death.

Re: IoT vendors bad for health care?

"Not connected to the Internet" but connected to a VPN means two things:

1. there's only one more layer of security to get through to attack such devices

2. there's likely zero security on the device itself because the VPN is seen as sufficient

and for a bonus

3. you can scratch the first two letters of IoT

I would tend to believe a former healthcare professional which she speaks in the context of cybersecurity that these devices don't need to be connected.

Re: Direct link to Deity

"it was probably the one thing that stopped the person taking their own life"

You know, whenever I look for something, I always find it in the last place I looked.

Religion just happened to be the last thing you turned to before you extracted yourself from your suicidal phase, so it feels like it was the only thing that helped, despite it being just the first thing that helped. I hope you find the will to pursue a sounder path out of depression, because mere religion is almost guaranteed to let you down.

Back to the topic: the religious seem to think that secularity is theirs for "potential conversion". It seldom is. It's very seldom welcomed. And if someone wants religion, as you did, they'll go find it. A Christian Linux is a terrible idea. Let's say you'd been told by Clippy that "It looks like you're writing a suicide note... you should go talk to a priest" -- I've a sneaking suspicion we wouldn't be having this conversation today.

Re: Fail to see

You failed to see because you failed to look. Good grief.

Re: TL:DR. Biased training sample --> "Computer says no."

Nope, all are responsible for skewing the data in both examples. Incompetence doesn't absolve someone of responsibility.

What you're angling for is intent: you're actually, really, begging the question.

Re: I'm touched by the weirdness of this request...

Agreed. Mort is where to start. The first two, The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic, make better sense after you've read three or four subsequent ones.

Same but different

1) So you were an illegal immigrant? Although the fact you're British (and with a name like Steve, probably white) means you were an "expat", which apparently makes you better than me, even though you broke the rules.

2) I've seen a couple of those newspaper jobbies emptied in broad daylight on a busy stripmall, to be sold by the "gainfully unemployed" at intersections. I've seen the bolts sticking up from the concrete where they used to be the day before. UK and US criminals are cut from the same cloth.

Re: Ego Overload

Per Lee D, he can have valid points and still be wrong, because of context. Torvalds isn't swimming in Brad's pool; Brad is swimming in Torvalds's. End of debacle.

Re: In slight fairness to Apple...

There is no such thing as 'cheap' Apple products.

And equally:

There is no such thing as 'poor value' Apple products.

The lowest-spec Apple device is still a good device. If it doesn't meet your needs, you're a sample size of one. There are hundreds of thousands for whose needs it would easily meet. Personally, I run a Mac Mini for movies only. I don't need the machine to do much beyond play DVD media from the external disk, and pull down a big stream from Amazon Video into an HTML5-compliant browser, then push it out the back through an HDMI cable and HDCP stripper so I can watch HD on my projector. Since that one's getting old, I'm going to look into the latest ones.

Windows and Linux still don't have proper DVD player and using one browser.

Re: Has a thing that doesn't exist gone too far?

The story is titled "Has AI gone too far?" There's more than a nod & a wink in the article that AI hasn't gone far enough. So in answer to your not-a-question, maybe yes? I think so? One thing I can say with certainty: probably.

Re: Nothing to do with Oracle

If those archs are listed, Magenta could be a sign of something bigger; especially if the Fuchsia OS is roughly API compatible with Android.

Re: Bureaucracy

Damned right, sir. US bureaucracy in my experience is a lot simpler to navigate than the French system. US bureaucracy is brutally up front & efficient with obtuse rules; French bureaucracy wonders why you think it shouldn't be so obstructive; and British bureaucracy would like you to come back tomorrow.

For all its faults, at least the US government is all searchable. This "engineer" rule in Oregon was very much known about beforehand. I've read similar nonsense before. The only reason French and British bureaucracy can be navigated at all is because someone somewhere took pity on you and maybe bent the rules a little. It's because those countries' rules seem to be that the license is the law. Once you have something, it's yours to keep. In the US, the rules *always* apply. An improperly issued privilege can be revoked.

Re: Never on BSD ?

Yesterday Microsoft, today Linux, tomorrow Linux-on-Windows-as-delivered-by-Microsoft.

Re: Honest inquiry

"Fedora, which now has an exceedingly long boot time on a mechanical disk, well in excess of 40 seconds" with systemd.

Jeez, well if 40 seconds is "exceedingly long" you already have other problems. We're running RHEL7 (with systemd baked in) on server and high-end workstation hardware that takes in excess of 4 minutes to decide who it is, why it's been put on this Good Green Earth, also where its arse is. That's before the kernel loads the ramdisk.

systemd doesn't solve any problems for us, but it brings plenty of new ones.