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Authored by wol on Sept 24, 2015 8:29:33 GMT
In defence of Volkswagen, do the regulators actually understand the regulations?! How do you define what the emissions "should" be? WAS THERE ANY *DELIBERATE* INTENT TO DEFRAUD? Or is this whole thing a storm in a teacup because the regulators don't understand the tech, and nor do the PHB's?
Let's look at the facts. The Engine Management Software engaged a profile that was intended to minimise emissions, because it (allegedly) was programmed to recognise the fact that it was on a test-bed. Or was it? Given that the system is DESIGNED to choose the MOST APPROPRIATE profile for the car based on the situation the car was in, how on earth is the test bed *ever* going to return a "valid" reading? How do you define "valid"?
And it would not surprise me in the slightest if there was a profile meant for "boy racer revving the engine at the lights", which is quite likely going to be a close approximation to "car sitting on a test-bed". Surely it makes sense, if the system detects that the car is doing nothing, to select a profile that minimises emissions? No intent to deceive whatsoever. Every intent to comply with the regs. And at the end of the day, what f*** is the testbed designed to test for? Anybody with half a brain knows that's it's a completely artificial environment that returns results that meaningless results! The "mpg in urban cycle" and "mpg at 56mph" are useful figures, sure, but anybody who expects to actually GET that mpg is an idiot. Likewise, anybody who actually expects to get the emissions as reported on a test-bed is an idiot.
To my mind, the car was in all likelihood programmed to detect that the engine was not doing anything much, so it selected the highest eco profile it should. A lot of newer eco engines would have switched the engine off! That would really have messed up the test results! :-)
Cheers, Wol
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Authored by wol on Jun 27, 2015 19:57:42 GMT
Hmmm ...
The idea sounds neat, but I can see a very big fly in the ointment.
You're not targeting Hollywood, one of the biggest sources of bad legislation (and with the money to brainwash people into believing ten impossible things before breakfast ... :-)
The big difficulty we have, is that most of the press is (a) sensationalist, and (b) won't let the facts interfere with a good story. Unless we can get good, insightful coverage in the gutter press, I think we're on to a loser whatever we do. That said, it's at least worth trying. The *major* effort needs to be aimed at legislators - the problem there is the lack of any sensible restraint in most legislatures. We at least USED to have the House Of Lords, who for the most part actually read and tried to understand most legislation. I believe the quality of our laws has rather gone down since the reforms :-( A revising house is rather a good idea - it can at least throw out anything that doesn't make sense, which would probably decimate (quite literally) most modern legislation.
Cheers, Wol
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Authored by wol on May 14, 2015 17:33:27 GMT
I haven't read it all properly, but the comments (and this was my initial reaction too) was that this merely allowed linking to the original content. So if the original site took it down, then it would automatically disappear from all the other sites too ...
I wonder how this impacts on the Scottish newspaper case from a fair few years ago. One paper "copied" loads of articles from another newspaper's site by deep-linking them. The Judge's ruling disposed of the case in a very matter-of-fact and fair manner. There was no copyright violation, because the second paper was merely redirecting readers to the first paper's site. But it was a blatant case of "passing off", because the readers of the second paper had no way of telling that the stories actually belonged to the first paper. So the second paper got done, but for a rather different offence than the one they had cleverly cheated on.
Cheers, Wol
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Authored by wol on Feb 20, 2015 18:39:58 GMT
lwn.net/Articles/634041/Interesting article. Short summary: for a short period Lenovo laptops shipped with a self-signed root https certificate. In other words, anybody with access to the machine (including hackers and drive-by-hack websites) could do a man-in-the-middle attack and hijack any https connection - including things like bank sessions! Lenovo doesn't see anything wrong in compromising security "because customers like adverts". Cheers, Wol
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Authored by wol on Dec 21, 2014 20:00:16 GMT
Did is my daily visit to Groklaw (yes, I'm an addict). Got an SQL error. Does se anyone know who to contact? Wayne madhatter.caEmail PJ? Yes I know about being addicted, I *still* haven't deleted Groklaw from my home pages - we live in hope. Cheers Wol
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Authored by wol on Oct 8, 2014 22:22:11 GMT
Hmmm - I thought posted later to say I'd actually managed to post a comment. I think the site is a little aggressive at trying to suck you in, and I'm very picky about what sites I take an active interest in.
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Authored by wol on Oct 8, 2014 10:58:35 GMT
I wanted to leave a comment, but I couldn't even get past their sign-up pages! I said "use my google account" and it just got stuck :-(
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Authored by wol on Oct 1, 2014 15:18:54 GMT
I've got my windows configured to "download but not update". Which is fine, except part of the shutdown procedure, by default, is to apply updates anyway. So if you want to review them it's too easy to apply them by mistake.
If your PC is actually running Windows, at work, you probably say "shut down" and walk away and leave it, but for me at home Windows runs in a virtual box, which prevents linux shutting down, so I sit and curse as it invariably does it at completely the wrong moment ...
Cheers, Wol
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Authored by wol on Sept 29, 2014 18:25:34 GMT
How do businesses cope? They don't. That's why so many of them are still running XP.
When it gets too much, they buy a load of new PCs, get the IT staff to build and test them with the corporate software bundle, and just go round the desks replacing the CPU unit (or the entire thing). Even (or especially) when the IT staff is a staff of one (my last employer) that's the typical way, which is a horrendous load on the poor IT staff. Bigger companies pay to outsource the problem. Then they throw away the old PC.
And actually, it works reasonably well, because you work out how to upgrade one PC, then you bulk-upgrade a whole bunch of them.
Cheers, Wol
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Authored by wol on Sept 24, 2014 22:13:05 GMT
Dice is a funny word. It turns out you can have one dice or many dice. It is not always plural. No. As Wayne says, the singular is "die". I know we regularly abuse that, but it's still abuse ... :-) Cheers, Wol
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Authored by wol on Sept 24, 2014 13:01:06 GMT
> 26: Is "data" plural or singular? It's a collective noun, and in American English a collective noun tends to be singular. However, "data" is often an exception ...
Singular datum, plural data, as in "a datum point".
Like a web forum, but several fora. Your basic latin ... what DO they teach them at school nowadays? (A nod to C.S.Lewis, who died 50 years ago ... :-)
Like how many people know "dice" is a plural, you can't have one dice :-)
Cheers, Wol
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Authored by wol on Sept 12, 2014 17:56:49 GMT
In my young days I was coveting a S100-based system ... :-)
Cheers, Wol
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EMAIL
Aug 26, 2014 13:46:29 GMT
Authored by wol on Aug 26, 2014 13:46:29 GMT
Sounds a bit too much like Edison's "invention" of the light bulb.
It's fairly easy to invent something when you've already seen it in action (not that I'm saying Shiva had seen Ray Tomlinson's version).
Cheers, Wol
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Authored by wol on Aug 17, 2014 14:02:32 GMT
If you look at it, there's a couple of places that would be good for support. Email me of course (can you get my email off my profile here? Or if you know my real name, it's firstname at lastname dot org dot uk - I don't like posting it "in the clear" on websites for obvious reasons :-)
And there's a generic multi-value group on google "mvdbms@googlegroups.com" that I'm on and I think there'd be plenty of people happy to help you get started.
Cheers, Wol
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Authored by wol on Aug 17, 2014 9:59:32 GMT
You know I go on about it, but you might take a look at OpenQM. It'll take a bit of getting used to, but I hope you'll enjoy using it. www.openqm.com/cgi/lbscgi.exe?X=bi97k2loqe&t0=h&t1=personalThing is, Pick is very easy for non-programmers to use, and of course you know I'll help you to the best of my ability :-) But one of the reasons professional computer people are so snooty about Pick is a lot of the code is pretty awful - because the guys who wrote it were *users*, not programmers! It does pay to have programming knowledge and do things properly, though. (Oh, and a lot of the code is available as ScarletDME, although that's an outdated version of the OpenQM codebase.) Cheers, Wol
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