Posts by Elongated Muskrat 2812 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Nov 2022
It does seem like an odd statement to make: if they've not identified the cause, how can they definitively eliminate that as one.
It may be that they have done controls where some "patients" had wires implanted, and others just had the same procedures take place, but no implantation. If both developed granulomas, it would point to the wires not being the cause, however, it would cast a lot of shade on the actual surgical procedures.
The problem is that most sources of "facts" are going to be biased in some way. If you want to uncritically read a press release from one of Elon's companies, be sure to take into account the corporate spin, exaggerations, half-truths and omissions. On the flip side, if you are reading a report of something horrible that happened to someone as a result of one of Elon's projects going sideways, expect it to be written from the perspective of someone with an axe to grind.
There will be elements of truth in both, and unbiased reporting is actually pretty hard to do. You'll find that publications that seriously attempt to produce that sort of dry, academic discourse, concerned only with statement of observable and recorded facts don't get a lot of readers, not to mention the fact that Elsevier keeps them behind a paywall.
Although, despite popular belief, axons and neurons don't communicate between each other via electrical impulses; whilst these might be intracellular, i.e. a potential difference along the length of an axon, the intercellular transmission is chemical (which is why serotonin is a thing). Wires interfacing with brain cells in this way are presumably using electrical pulses of some sort, and there is an argument to be had that such technology won't be truly dependable until it properly emulates the natural interactions of brain cells through the release and absorption of various neurotransmitters. That sort of technology is going to be much harder to implement than a tiny wire with a number of electrodes along its length, but probably not impossible.
Yeah, well, I'm using a work laptop on which it is installed, I have no control over installation / uninstallation of software, due to corporate policies (despite being perfectly capable of circumventing such measures if I felt the need). If corporate has decided to give over control of my laptop to Microsoft, so be it. There's no chance of it being installed on my own PC, which doesn't have a camera anyway.
I'll take having to very occasionally kill and restart Teams (and to be fair, it's not often) over having to travel into an office on expensive, slow, and disgusting public transport to sit in a room to sit through a meeting where perhaps ten percent of it is of any relevance to me, if we're lucky.
If that's a large number of people (over something like 6-10 people), I would question whether it is effective management, because either those people don't need managing, or the manager will not have enough time to devote to each reporting employee.
Also, I have yet to hear a convincing argument as to why such meetings can't be done remotely, over e.g. Teams, and have to be done in person.
Ok, I can possibly accept large team meeting might benefit (somehow) by everyone being present in person, but unless there's a definite business need it's just a crazy requirement and I'm not surprised in the slightest that staff have jumped ship.
Nah, physical presence in a large group of people for a meeting, apart from not being productive (because such meetings are always some C-level spouting meaningless business jargon to underlings who don't care), represents an infection risk. Anecdotally, there has been a recent up-tick in covid infection rates (our government no longer collects official figures because sweeping a problem under the carpet makes it go away, right?), and, as a home worker, I have been very glad that I've not been in the firing line for another round of that, thank you very much. I also very much do not miss the constant infection with every cold virus doing the rounds. Now, the main vector is other people's children coughing and sneezing in supermarkets, which is a somewhat more controlled risk.
Something that can be configured to carry 100 colonists and their support gear to the Moon or Mars may have room enough to accommodate the Hubble.
Anything is indeed possible in science fiction, and any sort of space vessel that can carry 100 people plus equipment is still exactly that.
We'll see how well those weather the oncoming solar maximum. My understanding is that the solar storm this weekend is only a taster of what we might experience over the next year or so, as the solar cycle passes its maximum, and sunspots migrate towards the sun's equator, putting solar flares closer into the plane of the ecliptic, where Earth orbits. It would be terribly sad if, for example, Elon Musk's light-polluting Starlink satellites were to experience failures due to massively increased charged particle flux, or increased atmospheric drag. I can't imagine them (or many other unhardened satellites) faring well in the path of another Carrington Event. It would be terribly sad indeed...
UK rental e-scooters carry insurance and are registered (and tested) to be safe on our roads, just like all other powered vehicles here and require at least a Provisional Drivers license and a credit card to rent them.
In theory, yes. In practice, tell that to the four kids in school uniforms I saw clinging onto each other on the back of one a couple of weeks ago. It's obvious that the rental companies don't want to enforce the rules (and cut into profits) and that the police have no resources to do so. It is apparently trivial to circumvent the checks on licenses and credit cards if groups of schoolkids can defeat them.
It's not legal to ride a motorbike in a cycle lane, so if they are licensed and insured as a motorbike, they couldn't be ridden in a bike lane either. I think this is literally a category error on your part (in this case, driving licence category A).
More importantly, why aren't they legal?
Good question. Why aren't they treated like motorbikes - requiring a visible and legible registration plate, minimum third party insurance, a CBT for the rider to demonstrate basic competence, mandatory head protection, L-plates if no full driving licence is held, and taxed for road use? Maybe they should be a new licence category related to a category A licence - A3 perhaps?
A lot of the problems of them being ridden recklessly, or used in the commissioning of crimes would be mitigated by them being easily identifiable via their registration plate. If I were to rob someone while riding a moped or motorbike, which I have had to take a test to prove I am competent to do (riding the bike that is, not robbing), I'd expect a knock on the door from plod enquiring about whether my vehicle has been reported stolen, whether I was riding it at the time, and would I mind awfully accompanying them to the station for a nice little chat and a cup of tea.
There are a couple of reasons this doesn't happen; firstly, the police in this country are woefully under-resourced because $politics, and secondly, if they pursue someone who is not wearing protective gear, such as a helmet, and the rider has an accident, they are on the hook for it. this is exemplified by the relatively recent case of the kids in Cardiff who were going round on e-bikes, got pursued by the cops, and then ended up getting killed; cue riots and a lot of anti-police sentiment, so they really can't do the right thing here.
I believe the unofficial policy, at least around here, is that if the scooter is involved in an accident, or other incident, the police will take it away and destroy, but they won't otherwise pursue the rider. Of course, as well as having their scrote-wagon confiscated, the riders will be done for driving an uninsured vehicle too, because it is not possible to insure these things on the road, due to them being illegal to ride on the road (or pavement). The rental ones you see in many cities have a special license from the government and insurance for use; personally, I think these should go in the crusher too, as they are most often seen begin ridden on pavements, the wrong way up one-way streets, with two or more riders on the, or by school kids, or indeed any combination of the above (like the one I saw a few weeks ago just after school kicking-out-time with 4 kids on it, going down the pavement). They are essentially unpolicable, so in IMHO, should be done away with.
The police / DVLA do have a habit of going round and clamping / seizing vehicles without an MOT, and how long do you think it would be before you got pulled over if you drove round without licence plates?
It's relatively cheap and easy for tehm to detect lack of MOT and insurance, because of the ubiquity of ANPR, and an ability to check DVLA records in real time.
Did you suffer from a bit of a reading comprehension fail, because I quoted directly from the article where it mentions "X-formerly-Twitter"?
The level of intelligence on the Register forums seems to have really dropped in recent years.
For what it is worth, and for those who apparently need my comment explained, X/Twitter has (in)famously responded to most contact, particularly from journalists, simply with the "poop" emoji, since being taken over by Musk.
Isn't that what your Russian brethren are supposedly doing, protecting it from Nazis or some such bullshit?
Russian agitprop is just getting boring at this point.
edit - and to be clear, there is a world of difference between legitimate discourse between genuine people, and targeted political misinformation done via paid-for advertising. An advert is not discourse.
In December last year, X-formerly-Twitter became the first online platform to have formal DSA proceedings launched against it. An official said the investigation is ongoing and it has had "quite intense contacts with X."
I wonder how many poop emojis are required before it is classed as "intense"?
Really? Pretty much every email client I have ever used (Outlook, and the long lamented Outlook Express included) has allowed the creation of arbitrary client-side (and usually server side too) folders. I make extensive use of these on my work laptop, alongside email rules to filter the array of emails I receive into some sort of sensible selection of "buckets" for me to deal with on a daily basis.
To be fair, a 9GB file is almost five times the size that a lot of programs will choke on, many of which are coded, in their programmers' infinite wisdom, using signed 32 bit integers as file pointers.
Try opening a text file that is one byte over 2GB in Notepad...
"Can I call you" is absolutely the right thing to do. My "Teams" status often shows as "green" when I am working, because the damn thing keeps resetting the "busy" status if you set it manually.
Anyone who calls me out of the blue, without asking first, and who is not someone I am currently working closely with, gets no response.
The other thing they're trying to push at us, apart from unwanted adverts, is unwanted "AI" "copilot" bollocks. No, thank you, I don't want something sending constant telemetry of what I'm doing off to "the cloud" so a data centre somewhere can run a LLM to either tell me what I already know, or, tell me something I didn't already know, because it's wrong. IMHO, "AI" of this sort is the new "3D TV" or "metaverse" - i.e. something useless that suckers will buy and then never use, that the coke-fiends in the marketing department think will drum up loads of business because they are so deeply engaged in magical thinking.
WhatsApp is a great example of why I've never used the MS store to install anything, and never will. Principally, because it is (or certainly WAS, last time I tried to install it on a PC), a single-device per user application. That is, if I want to see messages on my desktop PC (which I mostly don't), I can no longer see them on my phone, and vice-versa.
I use it all the time on my phone, pretty much as a default messaging app, and not at all on my desktop PC or any of my laptops, or other devices. Putting it in the MS Store will have zero impact.
The EU ruling something out, or indeed, any other hard restriction caused by a clash with basic reality, such as the availability of unicorns, had absolutely no bearing on whether or not the brexiters promised it. The campaigning was never based on truth, or deliverability, but on telling whatever lies could be used to convince people to vote one way over another, in order to get the result that was desired. The promises that were being made were clearly mutually contradictory at times, but those telling them didn't care whether their statements were logically consistent, because they didn't care whether they were being truthful, so like CJ, they weren't bound by the constraints of telling the truth or making sense. The ends justified the means.
“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”
Brexit did make the difference for no reason other than making it politically difficult for the gov to order through the EU. Thankfully.
I'll keep my answer to that particular untruth concise:
Bollocks, did it.
The UK government was invited to join the EU vaccine programme, as if we were still an EU member and explicitly turned it down.
For me, the reasoning wasn't just about economics, but, from a selfish point of view, my ability to travel freely throughout Europe, to visit friends, and have them visit me, without unnecessary costs, paperwork, and restrictions, and generally about our country being part of something bigger, rather than a nasty little insular nation on the edge of civilisation, ruled by psychopathic plutocrats.
I think it boils down to whether you see other people as other people, with whom you can live, love, and cooperate, or some sort of dirty foreigners coming over here to steal our jobs / women / housing / benefits / whatever. Too many fell victim to the hate speech in the right-wing press and fell into the latter camp, but the important thing to remember is that whilst they have engaged in the politics of division and culture wars, they are still people, and can still be brought back into the fold of rational compassionate human beings.
Whilst the poster you are replying to is engaging in a certain amount of hyperbole there, there are clear links between the brexit campaigning and the likes of Steve Bannon, and other members of the American far right, as well as some possible links to Russian money (Hi there, Arron Banks!). Can you draw a line from Macron and Sholz to the remain campaign, or any of the main groups campaigning for remain (the official vote leave campaign wasn't necessarily the only major "leave" campaigning group here, if you care to remember)?
There's some definite links between prominent brexiters and Trump, too; did we have any photos of David Cameron in Macron's golden lift, alongside other prominent remain campaigners? No. no, we didn't, did we?
There was always a deep degree of connectedness between the likes of Johnson and Farage and political interests in the US, to think otherwise is naïveté at its worst, and to try to discredit these links by reductio ad absurdum, as you have attempted, falls flat.
At this point, they really don't care about blame. With the current trajectory of the polls, "Reform" will have the same predicted vote share as the Tories before the expected date of the next election.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_United_Kingdom_general_election
https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/united-kingdom
Even the current predictions, if there were to be an election tomorrow, are dire for them:
https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/prediction_main.html
The logical conclusion is that they know they cannot win the next election (which is why so many Tory MPs have decided not to even contest their own seats - 63 of them at the least count), and that they are actively engaged in stealing the silverware, stripping the lead from the roof, and pulling the copper wires out of the walls. It should be pretty obvious that putting a bunch of people who have got rich from asset stripping activities, and other "finance jobs" in charge of the country would always result in the country's assets being stripped, but people really are that stupid that they still voted for them.
To be fair to Starmer (and I do have some strong doubts about him), if he were to say, in the year of an election that he intends to seize the ill-gotten billions from various bad actors, how quickly do you think that they would decide to spend a small fraction of those billions on a disinformation campaign to discredit him?
His primary task, at the moment, is to unseat the Tory government. Major policies are not going to be made public until manifestos are published, to do otherwise would literally be giving ammunition to the opposition, as it gives them time to prepare attack lines. Expect not to hear any major policy announcements until an election campaign is underway.
I still have the creeping feeling that Starmer will disappoint us, however, this is due to the fact that our electoral system is fatally flawed with FPTP, so we are stuck with politicians who can win FPTP elections, not ones who can actually solve our country's myriad problems. It is saddening, yet completely understandable, that Starmer is also opposed to us moving to a system of PR, despite the majority of Labour members, delegates, and unions supporting it.
There's an element of this, and an element of the Tories deliberately making the NHS both more expensive and more difficult to access in order to justify pushing people onto private healthcare, in which a number of them have financial interests. It's the age-old story of "follow the money".
Examples include repeated management reorganisations, creation of QUANGOs to manage it ("NHS England" being the most recent incarnation), and policies around GP appointments such that GPs have to implement a system where you call them at 8am to maybe get an appointment in the next two weeks, but nothing today, unless it's an emergency, in which case you have to call again in the afternoon, and no appointments are "open" beyond that moving window. This is done in the name of "convenience" so that "everyone can get an appointment", but this is clearly not the purpose of that system.
Yes, there is genuinely a problem with an ageing population, and the obvious answer to this is preventative healthcare, which is the exact opposite of what the Tories want, because it is cheaper and more effective than the sort of privatised healthcare where they can charge a fortune for diagnostic tests, and lifelong treatments. Those snouts need to keep their trough filled.
I suspect that these are the sort of people who do not know the difference between authentication and authorisation, and in practice, anyone who is authenticated, which probably includes everyone in the building, cleaners and all, will end up with authorisation.
The problem is, that they do not define criteria for authorisation, or whether such authorisation will be granular, and time limited. How will they deal with bad actors who gain authorisation but then abuse it? How will such data breaches be handled? How will they determine the scope of any breach, and what remedial action can or will be taken to protect the people whose data is leaked? What powers will they have to go after perpetrators of a breach, and endure leaked data is deleted? Not only within UK jurisdiction, but also US jurisdiction, and jurisdiction in other territories, including those of hostile governments, or where adequate data protection law or relevant treaties are not in place?
I can imagine a cheap camera being put into the side of the cabinet so that the perps can be prosecuted when they try to demolish the things. A brief stay for a few individuals at His Majesty's pleasure, alongside recoupment of costs through the courts, and this problem solves itself, along with possibly a few others.
Tell them that the unauthorised device has flagged as a security risk on your monitoring system, and it needs to be taken away for security screening and risk management, and that any other electronic devices they have with them will also need the same treatment, because the security process required for ISO certification has now been triggered.
Collect up all their laptops, phones (personal, and work), "smart watches", non-smart, but expensive looking Veblen Good watches (just in case), PDAs, key-fob-push-button-car-start "keys", Tamagotchis, etc., and take them away. After about an hour or so, return those that you have established have little or no resale vale, and report back that all the rest have been found to be a security risk and need to be safely disposed of.
On eBay.
edit - then invoice them, individually, for "emergency remediation work" at an appropriate rate (I'd suggest £1,000 per item)
