Posts by John H Woods 3532 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Nov 2007
... is less the threat to us (mediated by limiting its access to weaponry, manufacturing, etc) and more the concern that we will have created an enslaved sentient being.
I don't think there's anything magical happening in an animal brain, it's just enough neurons, well enough connected, for consciousness to arise. So sooner or later, with enough farting around with neural nets, we're going to create conscious beings.
I'm always saying it, but accountants who work in the IT sector should at least have an actuarial bent, if not be actual actuaries. So much of IT cost is about accurately assessing (or at least somewhat accounting for) risk. There is literally no other way to justify a back-up or business continuity system: on the bottom line it just looks like wasted money. And there's no way to properly cost a project without considering risk, either.
Absolutely with you. I have an Arabic keyboard in my T14 because it was a cheap way of getting a backlit kb. No Idea what any of the symbols on the keys mean, but at least I can see where to put my fingers when I open it in the dark. I type Dvorak anyway so almost none of the keyboards I possess have the "correct" tops on the keys.
I may be weird, but the nice clear syntax of Smalltalk beats everything else I have ever seen for readability. Although it is possible, as with anything, to write it badly, the syntax would fit on a postcard. The only gotcha is left to right (no-precedence) of binary expressions but the only problem that has ever caused me is making me think twice about "Facebook maths test" problems.
If you want to have a quick play, I heartily recommend pharo
Herd immunity is inevitable in the end as long as there's vaccination.
We didn't know what 'anything like Covid' actually was.
Being run over by a truck is rare. UK mortality rate is low. Anyone who tested positive and then died shortly afterwards was much more likely to have died of Covid than anything else. Of course this counted non-Covid deaths: but an insignificant number and possibly less than actual Covid deaths that were missed.
I couldn't be arsed reading the rest of your conspiracy fantasy drivel.
I think this is the essential problem with the Tesla approach. If you are trying to do it with visual spectrum cameras you are almost already trying to build a better than human brain to interpret the images, when (albeit more expensive) sensors are available that can literally measure the difference to an object in millimetres.
Here's something else obvious.
A lot more people know the term "autopilot" than fly planes or know what it really does. There's even a colloquial use of the term "on autopilot" and I CBA right now but I'm sure a quick search would suggest the colloquial use is actually far more common than the aeronautical one. Hardly anyone knows what the autopilot in a plane does, hence the joke in Airplane!
I'll tell you what Tesla DID know --- what most people understand by the term 'autopilot' --- even if they are technically wrong. Whatever Tesla do or don't claim about the technology, they had already started the deceit by using that name.
Same with the National Cyber Security Centre in the UK.
Don't enforce regular password expiry
Regular password changing harms rather than improves security. Many systems will force users to change their password at regular intervals, typically every 30, 60 or 90 days. This imposes burdens on the user and there are costs associated with recovering accounts.
Forcing password expiry carries no real benefits because:
* the user is likely to choose new passwords that are only minor variations of the old
* stolen passwords are generally exploited immediately
* resetting the password gives you no information about whether a compromise has occurred
* an attacker with access to the account will probably also receive the request to reset the password
* if compromised via insecure storage, the attacker will be able to find the new password in the same place
Absolutely. He's doing what NASA would never be allowed to do, rapidly progressing launch technology through testing prototypes. It's only politics that means this has to be down by a private company, the actual individuals doing the work would be the same talented Tefal-heads whoever employs them.
... have a look at BSD's linuxulator
... I thought it was astonishingly disrespectful to a head of state (and therefore to the state in question) for Musk to stride out leaving him scurrying behind.
NB: Yes, I know C III is THE head of state, but Sunak's the one who wrote the letters of last resort.
I personally find it more believable that PowerPoint is responsible: https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard. I realize the example is Columbia, but I'm pretty sure that the lesson is the same.
... of the portable monitor. I've got a fairly cheap 4k that is almost the same form factor as my Stinkpad, and you get a lot of extra screen estate (not to mention two screens).
I'm struggling to think of too many situations where you could unfold a big screen like this but not use a portable monitor ...
>presumably because they don't want their nefarious data-sharing practices revealed
Hanlon's razor suggests perhaps their webdevs don't know about RFC 5233 and they consider "+" an invalid character. I've even had companies where you can use + to register but it kills their billing system :-)
Exactly my thoughts. It's not quite as bad as the style:content ratio that PowerPoint encourages but I want my clients, employers and other organizations to dictate the layout, I just want to write content.
It doesn't have to be LaTeX, I'm quite happy to write markdown. But I think that word processors, which have always tried to unite content creation and document preparation aren't particularly good at either. I've been in IT for 30 years and I've very rarely seen nice looking documents produced entirely in Word.
... and it still usually produces the fugliest documents imaginable. I know how to turn off all the annoying "you changed this so let me quickly alter the whole document for you" stuff but I really wish there was an authoring mode with sensible defaults and templates that was almost completely locked down. I miss using LaTeX as part of my job.
More secure is something that has no microprocessors, no wireless and ideally no USB - it just plugs into the mic and ear jack(s). If you're more paranoid, push to talk is probably also good.
There may be a good argument for equipment like this, but I'm sure security isn't it. Or parsimony, for that matter!
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