Posts by John Brown (no body)

Re: Is It Even Worth That Much?

"the banks...they knew/know Elon isn't all that stable and doesn't have any business qualifications"

I don't think that matters to them. They just look at past performance. Just look at the sub-prime debacle and many, many other instances of banks getting it badly wrong financially, usually at huge cost and inconvenience to the rest of us poor plebs.

Re: The Purge: Rise of the Autonomous Vehicle

IIRC, that was (is?) true for carriage/coach drivers back in the horse drawn era, ie out of sight of the passengers.

More recently, there was a case of someone urinating being fined for "littering" LOL, you couldn't make it up.

Ah, here it is :-)

Re: @Doctor Syntax

I'm not sure I agree with your comments re Tesla, assuming you're talking about Tesla as it is currently, since Tesla require that the driver is always technicall in control and should have their hands on the wheel when in motion, even having a warning system of sorts if you take your hands off the wheel. Drivers who choose to ignore that and/or defeat the warning systems are fully responsible for their actions. (lets assume a "perfect" world and not get into the arguments about misleading advertising and the perceptions that Tesla have helped reinforce in their customers.)

I think the discussion of laws catching up to technology is talking about fully autonomous self-driving, not the poor excuse that Tesla is currently using.

Re: @Doctor Syntax

IIRC,. UK law, at least, refers to the driver or operator of the vehicle. I don't think it specifies that said driver or operator is human. Caveat: IANAL. As the UK legal system is based on case law, we'll probably have to wait and see what happens when the first serious accident or offence happens but I suspect judges may well declare who the responsible operator is, or at least I hope so.

Re: @Doctor Syntax

Not only that, but autonomous vehicles and generally computer controlled vehicles have been roaming around factories and warehouse for quite some time now. If there's a work place accident, the company/owners/operators are on the hook for the compensation and fines. It could be argued that the "work place" is the public road network for self-driving cars :-)

Yes, I know this is the USA we are talking about and workplace health and safety is just some sort of commie conspiracy to increase business costs and make them less competitive (and yes, YMMV depending which State you are in) :-)

Re: How hard can it be?

"(b) requiring that the car securely logs data relating to the involvement of autonomous modes and human input and makes it directly available to cops/judges/etc without it going via the manufacturer."

The first part of that is already done. The manufactures/operators want every last little byte and bit of data they can. But as we saw with the Cruise accident, they don't want to hand it over unless forced to, and even then, they try to only follow the precise letter of the subpoena, no more and no less. Companies might be "people", but they are sociopaths with no morals.

Re: If Corporations Are People

"all that case did was assert that _because_ corporations are people, _then_ they have the same free speech rights as human, specifically with regard to election funding (I agree that it was idiotic, as non-US-citizens are also people, but can't fund US election campaigns)."

By stretching the logic just a little further, that sounds like corporations are not just "people" but "citizens" too. Sadly they don't seem to be held to the same account as either "people" or "citizens". Once they get defined as citizens, they'll also be allowed to vote. Which then opens the can or worms as to how much a large corporations vote is worth compared to the average Joe. That could lead a real dystopia (well, more so than the US is already living through). ;-)

Re: If Corporations Are People

I suspect it's more a local culture thing rather than what colour the current ruling party is. Considering Trump and the Reps current reputation for abolishing and abusing regulations in favour of industry, I'm more surprised that Texas has actually got those laws in place already. Laws which "hamper business" and "stifle innovation" is exactly the position most Reps blame on the Dems so I would suggest that you bringing politics into it and blaming "Dems" is just plain wrong. Now if you'd just said "politicians" instead, I'd probably have agreed with you :-)

Re: I think you should name the charity, if in the UK

"I'm a volunteer at Oxfam Music."

Good to know. Sadly, my nearest one is Edinburgh, over a 100 miles away from here. But that has encouraged me to do a bit more research into what others are doing, and hopefully I'll find something a littler more local that does electricals/electronics :-)

Re: VHS tapes

If I was called Tracy Emin or Damian Hurst, I could probably stack them up into a "Lego style" model of a house or garden shed, or better yet, a giant VHS player, come out with some bullshit about how it represents passive consumerism and make millions. But I'm not, so I can't :-(

Re: Electrical and Furniture

"The Law has charities over a barrel, with a very big stick to smack their arses with. I work at a charity, but many of our staff and volunteers are PAT testers, so we can take electrical goods and provide PAT testing as a service to other charities."

I think you should name the charity, if in the UK. Please. I'd love to find one where I can not only donate unwanted electricals/electronics, but be able to buy them too.

Meanwhile, anyone know where I can dump a load of old VHS tapes, many bought ones with actual films on them? No one wants them any more. The best I can think of at the moment is the plastics recycling skip at the local tip "Recycling Village" :-)

Re: Schematics?

I'm not sure where you are, but under UK consumer law, those MSI laptops were still under at least some level of warranty, as by law an item should last a "reasonable length of time" and yours, at least, was borked by a firmware upgrade, which MSI would be directly responsible for. The broken screen, maybe less so, depends what you meant by "broken", ie user damage, or failed electronics causing lines etc in the display. Once the two year warranty is up, manufactures are still obliged to repair, replace or refund some proportion of the original cost if it fails. With laptops, it's probably 5 years or so. Repairs may be charged at labour cost and/or you pay the carriage costs to return it (Parts should be free), but in practice, your complaint is with the supplier/seller, not the manufacturer, as that's who you entered into a contract with at the point of purchase. It's pretty much the same in the EU AFAIK, but could vary wildly in other jurisdictions.

I took a coffee machine back to a retailer after just under two years, they entered my card details, found the sales record, apologised that they no longer sold that model and offered a full refund or to choose a similar model off the shelf up to 20% over the cost of the faulty one, no questions asked. Currys/PCWorld, if anyone is interested.

Re: How many

"I'd have products assessed for repairability against a standard and add a sales tax from 0% to, say, 100% based on how difficult they were to repair."

The EU seems to be moving in that direction already. I wish them luck :-)

Re: Need to make it easier

Money. Household recycling costs a lot to be separated at the recycling plant. Especially different types of plastics which is incredibly difficult if not impossible to automate. This means the recycling centres won't take it, or will just landfill anything not immediately obvious, such as drinks bottles. If it's not economically viable for the recycler to sort, they will refuse it. UK Government has set binding targets on Local Authorities for recycling and large costs per ton on anything going to landfill. This leave the local authorities with very little choice other than to enforce sorting on the householders. We're not too badly off here, with a single recycling bin for glass, card, metals and plastic with an "insert" bin that sits in the top for paper. But I predict we'll be having more sorting forced on us eventually, especially the plastics.

The economies of scale in the recycling world have grown a lot in recent years, but there's still that expensive manual sorting by humans going on in the plants and that will never scale.

Re: "The issue being addressed is what to do with that cord that has one failed light"

When I was a kid, there only seemed to be maybe 4 or 5 common "standard" bulb fittings in Xmas light strings. Many were still MES fittings. And every shop that sold lights sold packs of spares. By the time I had my own house, it seemed like every year the shops bought from a different supplier and every one had a different fitting or voltage and spares where nigh on impossible to get. We still put up the incandescent bulb strings that work, but once they lose more than a couple of bulbs and there's no equivalent strings to "steal" from, they get binned so I guess eventually the last string will be replaced with LEDs to match the newer ones. Although I'll be sad when the 20m 4 colour, 4 channel rope light fails. It does proper "chase" patterns, unlike the vast majority of modern ones which seem to be only two channel so all you get is alternate flashing, not a "chase" pattern. I suppose I should start shopping around for one this year or next. That good one must be at least 20 years old now!

Re: Easy or Expensive?

"None of the charities would accept electrical goods."

Yep. Yet another result of laws having unintended consequences. Re-sale of electrical goods make the seller responsible for said safety of those second hand goods. Not one charity I know will touch anything electrical with a barge pole. They won't do PAT on them, primarily because their insurers won't let them, even when one of the volunteers in the shop is a fully qualified sparky and is legally competent to do PAT.

If you ever watch any of the US retro computing youtube channels, they get some amazing finds at the various "thrift", "goodwill" and charity shops while all our old IT kits goes to landfill/WEEE recycling. Even donating old but decent IT kit to a school involves jumping through hoops, at a cost to us, if you can find one that will take it. The mantra is supposed to be REDUCE, RE-USE, RE-CYCLE. Only the first and last are viable options for most electricals in the UK, unless you can re-use it internally.

Re: "a trip to your local tip"

I'd forgotten ours was doing that the last time I went down. Got refused entry. Turned around, parked up a few 100yds away, went to the website and found a slot available in 15 mins booked it and then joined the back of the queue again :-)

Maybe I was lucky, or maybe they aren't actually all that busy. I just checked, and the system is that you enter your vehicle details etc before you even get to see what, if any, slots are available, so I didn't bother. They record your car reg and postcode and limit you to 2 visits per month or something like that, so didn't want to take the chance a "failed" booking might take up a possible future visit I may need.

Re: "financed by the hardware producers rather than the taxpayer"

"Take strings to the local primary school's repair cafe to see if someone can make them work again."

That seems to be the take Austria has on it, sort of. The government will pay you, thus subsidising the cost of having your items repaired. I read this the other day, after having had a few drinks, so my memory may be hazy, but IIRC (I prob. don't), you take your item to the repair centre and pay up front for the repair and then claim a voucher which will pay you back half the repair cost up to €100 in "a few weeks". A "carrot" to get stuff repaired, but the "stick" is applied to all tax payers, even those who look after their kit and are less likely to need repairs.

I can see the point in encouraging repairs, but as we have all seen on all government subsidy schemes, it encourages the providers to put their prices up. A €50 repair suddenly costs €65 but the customer doesn't complain because they still get paid €32.50 back from the incentive scheme, so they still got it "cheaper" than before.

And, of course, there's the "fashion" trends. A lot of kitchen small electricals get binned because they don't match this years colour scheme :-(

Re: Frankenchip ?

CPU+GPU=APU

I thought the Arithmetic Processing Unit was a sub-part of the CPU, not a CPU+GPU :-)

Re: I'm shocked!

"the naming matters."

Yep. It's another "Tesla AutoPilot" moment. We see it in advertising quite a lot, but never more so than when it's a US corporation, at least in my experience. They use words in the primary adverts to mislead and then try to disclaim it all in the small print.

Re: This is the straw that will make me quit

You must be pretty high in the pecking order to spend that much via Amazon. I hope that includes staff discounts!

Re: Ooer missus, fnar fnar, etc

Yeah, I think he was looking for the word "spunk", but that usage seems to have declined over the last decade or so in favour of the more NSFW meaning and may offend some snowflakes :-)

I'll see your Life of Pi and Raise you The Old Man and the Sea! :-)

Re: Question

"The typical Prime viewing experience is wading through that garbage to try and find something interesting."

Yes, a 1000 time yes. That's why we almost never watch Prime, and even then only when my wife has signed up for yet another free trial, always cancelled within minutes of signing up so we don't have to remember to cancel when the month trial runs out. It's ok if you know the name of what you want to watch and can use the search function, but it's utter shite for browsing because they are constantly trying to up-sell you at every stage. If a real salesperson tried that with me in a physical shop, I'd either have walked out long since or punched the bugger in the face!!

Re: Cancelled Prime 12 months ago, hardly noticed, next Netflix, NOW...

I thought Sky, at least in the UK, was pushing Sky Glass and "dishless" Sky services hard this last year or so? It looks to me like they are thinking they can use the internet as a much cheaper delivery medium than buying/renting satellites and may eventually do away with the sats and transition into a "broadcast" streaming service.

Re: Cancelled Prime 12 months ago, hardly noticed, next Netflix, NOW...

"So for AMZN to show meaningful fewer ads than this won't be too terribly hard..."

When Amazon say "meaningfully fewer ads", they are comparing with US broadcast TV, which is why cable and then streaming took off so well in the US. Too many ads. Waaaay too many ads. Ad break after the titles, ad breaks every 10-12 minutes and then another one just before the credits roll. A one hour show, when stripped of all the ads, is often only 40 mins, give a or take a few mins.

I remember being very surprised to find full colour advert pages, 2 or 3 of them, double sided, in paperback SF books I picked up at the local second book shop 40 or 50 years ago and the books themselves were probably at least 10 years old when I bought them. This was in the UK, but on closer inspection, the books had been published in the USA and somehow wended their way over here. So yeah, the US advertising industry has already tried (and maybe still are?) pasting adverts into actual dead tree books.

Re: No comment on how this has been received by Prime members?

If you are getting "from China" that quickly, it's because the Chinese supplier has locally warehoused stock. There's no way they are flying that over at the P&P prices they charge :-)

My personal experience with Amazon is that if it's in stock, it's rare for it take more than 2 days to arrive, often next day, without a Prime subscription. It probably helps that the nearest Amazon warehouse is only a couple of miles away and I can think of at least three others within a 40 mile radius, at least one of which is an enormous regional hub warehouse. We've had a same day delivery, again without Prime. On the other hand, we do try to minimise our Amazon purchases where possible, because, well, Amazon :-)

Re: Three point one pints please

He's talking about normal wine glasses, not those enormous things you get in pubs which take nearly half a bottle to fill. Why else do you think they "offer" to sell you the whole bottle when ordering two glasses? :-)

Re: I guess the truth hurts.

"Or a record-limited in-memory database."

This biggest elephant in the room is the gaping hole in MSOffice where a small, easy to use database form designer should be, to make it easy for the average user to create a database and a front end for it. And no, I don't mean Access :-)

Back in the DOS days, most database packages came with a forms designer and a report generator. Maybe it's because I'm not in that part of the IT business any more, but it seems like there are many database engines out there, and everything else is left to the devs to create with whatever tools they happen to have laying around.