Posts by SAdams 75 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Aug 2017
Yes maybe, and the UK and Europe is fast spirally towards these extremes as successive governments ignore the will of the people and implement the will of different elite cliques instead. So I’m not sure why I picked on the US, other than it being the source of the neo-puritan and neo-fascist forms of the radicalisation at war, and the author clearly being from there.
Nonetheless, I’ll go to something like Unherd if I want politics. They have authors qualified / able to write on the subject.
The Register used to reliably neutral on political stuff 10-15 year ago. How did it become so radicalised such that articles like this are seen by the editor as appropriate?
I appreciate that the US is ridiculously polarised between far right and far left as the only options, but there are some readers not in the US and not yet radicalised one way or the other.
I wish we had more politicians who had studied history. If you want to go down the repression route, then you will have to go all the way to gulags, special police units specialised in thought crimes etc. As people push back against the controls, you need to ramp up the threat of state violence to prevent uprisings etc.
It never works well long term. It really is like we’re ruled by children whose only books they have read are marvel comics.
There have been a few big ISP outages as well, notably virgin but also others. Maybe just a coincidence and they are different issues, or maybe some systemic issue with multiple companies trying to cut costs, making the people who know how it all works redundant, outsourcing to the cheapest provider etc. I guess it could also be probing cyber attacks as geopolitical ‘games’ start heating up…
I expect they will nonetheless. I’d give my money to whichever can give me a reliable 4G service, which in my area is a joke.
Also depending on how long it takes Ofcom to get their act together. Starlink’s Direct to Cell will not be fast to start with, but they can’t do much worse in terms of coverage. No one really needs more than 20mbs to their phone, so whilst I get the cases like stadiums where sheer bandwidth capacity is the issue, network companies could make themself far more appealing by providing 100% coverage, than by providing faster top speed. Yes there are some using 5G for broadband, but how much are people going to pay for that in cities where they already have FTC/FTP broadband?
Amen! So many of the comments here slagging off Musk etc before the even start. It’s not as if the US, UK or EU governments spend money effectively. I was recently involved in reporting potholes to the local council. Three potholes within a couple metres of road. One was classified as small, one medium, and one large. The large one was declared to large to fix, so that was put on hold for a road resurface. The guys came out to fix the medium one, which had been prioritised, within a few weeks. They closed the road and went to work, but left the small one right next to it. Why? Because they were only authorised to fix the critical one. In effect the same team will need to visit the same 2 metre stretch of road three times. When this was escalated to the council, they saw no problem with the process.
Multiply that issue hundreds of thousands of times across hundreds of departments, and across many countries, and you have the reality of modern government.
I too hope they succeed, and that Britain gets a different government next time around that is also interested in getting stuff done in the real world, rather than entertaining their pet ideologies from university.
“ Learn some history yourself.
During Operation Barbarossa, from 1941 onwards, Finland was an ally of Nazi Germany.”
That’s only nominally correct. It was the USSR that had invaded Finland in 1939. When Germany decided to attack Russia, Finland understandably took the opportunity of a distracted USSR to regain some of it’s lost territory. Yes there was some co-ordination between Germany and Finland at that time, but purely on the basis of “my enemies enemy”. The history of Russian invading Finland goes back a lot further than WW2, and a big part of Finnish life is geared around the next one. I think that’s the real point.
But anyway, arguments about who did what 80 years ago are a bit pointless here. The current Russia is a bully and has brutally invaded Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea and now the rest of Ukraine for no reason other than Putin’s megalomania. Many brave people in Russia have tried to stand up to him and have either been imprisoned on trumped up charges or paid with their lives. If anyone is going to get all prissy about the creator of Linux following the trivial restrictions which are the rest of the moderately sane worlds response, with his own OS, them arguing about who sided with Nazi Germany 80 years ago is at least a touch ironic.
It’s very easy to do legally - the situation is usually along the lines:
“The legal requirement is for us to pay you [very small amount]. However we are offering you a special redundancy package of [somewhat larger amount] if you agree to X and Y conditions.”
So “forced” is probably the wrong word. Strongly encouraged?
It would be interesting to know how they tested it. Was it a Loadrunner type test with injector agents at multiple locations, emulating real users with full authentication etc that tests all components, or was it some engineer who knows nothing about load testing and just wrote a script to play a live stream with concurrent sessions?
I suspect the latter, and that there was no DOS attack at all.
The first thing I do when setting up a new laptop for family etc is replacing Bing with Google, and Microsoft are making the process increasingly arcane. Even Google are going backwards in terms of how easy it is to find things, but Bing is demonstrably rubbish. Surely the focus should be on making Bing better than Google?
Exactly right. However in that sense, there cannot ever be AI, as silicon logic gates cannot become self aware. No one has ever proposed even an idea of how it *could* be possible (other than ontologies like pansychism where your teapot become self aware).
Of course that leaves a big reality in term of how we (cats, dogs, dolphins etc) are self aware. However that is just reality, anyone who tells you that we understand how first person conscious awareness works is lying.
So you think it’s normal to sign your daughter up to a coding summer camp with a company that claims to be encouraging coding for women, and for her to then receive a load of emails from that company about her sexuality, and more specifically questioning whether she is actually a woman?
Is there some reason to assume that girls interested in coding must actually be boys?
What the media don’t report much is that large oil and gas reserves have been found in Ukraine / off the Crimea coast. Russia gets a big wad of it’s income from selling oil and gas to Europe. Ukraine/Crimea suddenly became a threat to Russia economically, which has added to Putin’s “make Russia great again” megalomania…
I can’t see why the EU made this law apply to all sites. If a site only uses cookies for defined essentials, no cross site, no adds etc, why should it be law to have a consent button?
The consent button requirement I could live with if it was associated with ‘bad’ behaviour, it would make sense. As it stands it’s just a badly drawn up law, which I bet 99% of people click “agree to all”…
My family has been living in England since 1560 at least, and I ‘converted’ to Catholicism (essentially from atheism). I’m not the only one to do this, and am part of a busy parish that is mostly British but also people from all over the world.
The church will outlast the Jedis, just as it has all gnostic heresies!
They say they need to be able to scale quickly, which is not surprising given that when there is a big news event, a fair portion of the UK (as well as the rest of the planet) go to the BBC site. The cost difference of only paying for the necessary resources when you need them at that scale will be massive.
The BBC is not in the business of web hosting. If there is not already a serious British cloud hosting vendor, that suggests Amazon and Microsoft are doing a better job.
If you think you can do a better job, then do it. But what the BBC chose to use is about what is available that meets their hosting requirements.
Is it just me, or have all these weather forecasting apps using big data going backwards?
Five years ago, there were apps like Meteo’s “Weather Pro” that were about 80% accurate, and you could reasonably rely on the forecast for the next 3-5 days. Over the past year or so, none of them are reliable. The only one that you seem to be able to have any confidence in is the next 120 minutes from AccuWeather. I’ve started using satellite radar as the best way to predict whether it will rain, which seems crazy...
People should of course backup. But I am continually surprised that Adobe are seen as the gold standard for photo and video editing. I bought Adobe Premier for videos based on this, and it’s terrible, clunky software that fills your hard disk with multiple copies of junk. They then force you to fork out another huge wad of cash every time they update it and make it slightly less clunky...
It must be an age thing - I’m assuming you’re younger than, say, 40?
I’ve been using email systems since the 80s, and I find Gmail’s web interface a complete mess. Its very slightly less turgid when you disable the threading, but still a mess even for simple tasks like replying to messages.
I suspect the phoenix was a victim of a round of cost cutting where the business was cunningly trimmed of all the capabilities needed to actually do stuff, whilst at the same time the senior executives found new ways to pay themselves more.
You don’t need to be left wing to be cynical about the mess that is western capitalism.
Presumably it would not be difficult for ISP’s to have a group on their proxy which they put infected sources into. That then redirects them to a landing page, and restricts access to everything but Malware/AV vendor domains. The landing page could have a message directing them to resources to clean/check their devices, and a way of confirming that they’re clean.
Each time they are put in this group, it takes a bit longer before they can get access to the internet again. That should quickly encourage them to deal with infected / vulnerable device. It would also stop people selling vulnerable IOT devices eventually, if this was enforced by law on all ISPs...
Fox news - if only :)
SARS Cov 1 is very different - it could be contained because of the low infection rate, and late symptoms. There are a few studies I could link to which strongly suggest all populations will get to a point where most people have been infected. The only exception is a vaccine or treatment, which are both very unlikely (sadly). If so, then as long as you keep it below hospital capacity and isolate the high risk groups as much as possible, the only thing you can change is how ling it takes you to get through it (and the damage to the economy). The final death rate is not changed, just how much its spread out.
There is a repeat of a fundamental misunderstanding of many journalists on Covid 19 here;
“... it is likely to be a repeat of the disastrous "herd immunity" approach the government initially backed as a way to explain why it didn't need to go into a national lockdown. That policy was also well-reasoned and well-explained by a small number of very competent doctors and scientists who just happened to be wrong.“
Immunity is not “wrong”. All coronaviruses impart a level of immunity, via antibodies or T cells. In some cases its not full immunity and usually only lasts 1-2 years. Its unlikely SARS Cov 2 is very different.
With the Covid 19 disease, it has an R0>3 (probably >5) and pre symptom viral shedding. So you don’t just stop it by isolation etc. A vaccine is a wild shot, unlikely to be ready in less than a year if at all. Likewise an effective treatment is a lottery. The most likely outcome is that restrictions of some form stay in place until there is a level of immunity in the population such that outbreaks are few and far between. In other words - “herd immunity”.
The government have it already ... when they need to they can find out where you are and who you’ve been in contact with. I’m not too worried about that living in a relatively open and accountable country like the UK. If I lived in Russia or Turkey or China etc that would of course be a different matter, but then I wouldn’t have much choice...
I’m piloting Teams with a team of ~15 spread around the world, and it seems to be pretty stable. Also the call quality is far better than Skype which is our standard (yes we’re a bit behind). When do the reliability issues come in? Is it when you reach a certain number of participants on the call?
I also don’t think Zoom is like for like in terms of all the collaboration functionality?
“ Despite these missteps, Windows 8 was not all bad.”
Really? It was a big mess. So much so that I ended up replacing my Windows laptop with a Macbook. I’ve now come to appreciate some aspects of the Macbook and may even replace it with another, even though I’m more comfortable with Windows 10. VMware fusion is finally good enough to give you a full Windows experience, so you get the best of both.
All because Windows 8 was so bad.
It is going downhill, but all the other searches seem to have issues too. I always scroll past the adds anyway, so my biggest complaint is AMP which destroys the whole search experience on mobile phones.
If only Alta Vista had carried on and developed as a feasible alternative. I may switch to DockDuckGo, but its algorithms can be flakey...
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