Posts by Dr Dan Holdsworth

UK students flock to AI to help them cheat

Re: Glorified calculators

To be strictly honest about this, mental arithmetic when done at speed in a challenging environment is difficult and takes a lot of practice to become good at. It is a really good example of a task that should be farmed out to a computer as rapidly as possible. I speak from experience here having been a bookmaker's clerk in my youth.

Adding up columns of numbers rapidly is very different from school-taught arithmetic. Out in the bookie world you add the big bits first and the smaller bits after and you don't fuss if you slightly over-estimate the take-out figures on any one horse, nor under-estimate the total cash taken on that race (the field money). The idea is to take more money in total than is paid out in any eventuality but to do that you need to know how much you've taken and how much each horse will cost if it wins.

A good clerk going flat out can just about keep up with the take-outs on most horses in a biggish race but will need occasional pauses to tot up the field money and otherwise square things up. A computer with the power of a modern smartwatch will do all of that and run a couple of displays into the bargain, AND trade off money to a remote betting exchange. Computers are GOOD at arithmetic, humans are not, and getting upset at this natural difference is basically stupid.

Salesforce study finds LLM agents flunk CRM and confidentiality tests

Re: LLM-based AI agents fail to undertand....anything!

LLMs are basically just hugely expensive and sophisticated parrots, without the inherent intelligence of the living bird. They work on statistical inferences, nothing more. If the answer is not in the training material, the system is either not going to find it or is going to trot out something that vaguely resembles an answer to a similar question. It cannot understand in the way that we take understanding to exist.

That said it can likely replace a lot of sales staff at the bottom end of the intelligence scale; management as well for that matter.

LLMs will likely trip up badly when dealing with neurodivergent humans, because the neurodivergency won't have been in the training.

Empire of office workers strikes back against RTO mandates

Re: Cuckoo land

That is comparable to my commute.

By car, an hour. By public transport 2 hours twenty minutes and by bike about two and a half hours (assuming ebike power used judiciously). Obviously I drive to work and always have done so.

Some signs of AI model collapse begin to reveal themselves

Re: Human Nature

To follow on from this, a fair number of the coders for AI are likely to be on the autistic spectrum to some degree and a common factor in autism is a dislike of most of the human race. This is quite understandable; the bulk of humanity has a habit of never saying what they want directly and only alluding to something vaguely, and relying on the other person being able to model the first one's inner thoughts in order to fill in the gaps.

Non-autistic people are also hardwired to try to work out what their social status is in relation to other humans and since they lack the brain power to do this for more than about 140 other humans, they use all manner of proxies to try to gauge success. Fashion, for instance, is one of these proxies to the extent that clothing fashion can best be explained by imagining a group of designers sitting in a pub, betting each other that the other cannot make yet another idiotic trend fashionable. Tea-cosy hats, for instance, or heavily damaged trousers for another.

All of this is incomprehensible if you're autistic and after a while you tend to get rather pissed off with much of humanity. This tends to be reinforced by the realisation that promotion in a career is achieved not through hard and good work but from social connections; you can really understand how a devious autistic mind can start thinking of ways to lead these other monkeys right down the garden path and into trouble.

Unending ransomware attacks are a symptom, not the sickness

Re: Make the management legally liable

The basic problem is really how job promotion works versus how people are told and initially think it works.

Most folks start off thinking that doing a good job and working hard will bring rewards and this will, generally. However changing jobs frequently, quoting the latest buzzword bingo on your CV despite not actually knowing much about it and generally spending all your effort on self-promotion as opposed to actual work is much better for increasing one's salary.

And, in the final analysis, that is what this is all about: increasing one's intake of money so that one can do something with said money. Invest it if you're vaguely smart in such ways as legally avoid as much tax as possible. Then, when you hit a predetermined age cease working and devote yourself to enjoying your loot.

Re: What "massive disruption" did Harrods experience?

The difference between Harrods and the Co-op is that the former is a generalist store catering to wealthier clients, whereas the latter is a domestic seller catering to a wider spectrum. Harrods likely keeps a stock ready to keep its shelves looking full, and in any case would not expect to move all that much of the higher end stock anyway. The Co-op on the other hand is a classic "Stack 'em high and sell 'em cheap" store, and relies on moving stock through for profit.

Boffins warn that AI paper mills are swamping science with garbage studies

Climate science is well worth studying, because if the climate records for the last few million years are anything to go by then the one thing the climate will not do is stay the same. Predicting what may happen in the next hundred years or so and preparing for it seems like a pretty good idea to me.

Chinese carmaker Chery using DeepSeek-driven humanoid robots as showroom sales staff

Re: What was the quote from Star Trek?

I think the one from the series Lexx would be more appropriate: "I am a robot that wants to live in your underpants"

Google goes cold on Europe: Stops making smart thermostats for continental conditions

Re: Again

The Veissmann remote controller I got with my current gas combi boiler works as a remote control system; this is basically the bottom level of usability that I would expect from such a thing.

The next level up would be some form of tie-in to my house internet link, to talk to (or be talked to) by an app on my phone. That way I could set up geo-fencing such that when I'm inside a set radius of the house the heating goes from base level heating to the higher "Master is at home" heating level. However to do this I would expect that this functionality would be maintained for the expected lifetime of the device, say about 20 years minimum.

Similarly for "smart" TVs, it would be best were the TV to be manufactured as a simple dumb TV with an add-on box simply plugged into the back of it via USB-C. That way when the smart bits need updating or fixing they can be simply removed from the dumb TV and a replacement unit swapped in. Sadly a set-up like this is expecting far too much from modern electronics suppliers.

Official abuse of state security has always been bad, now it's horrifying

The problem with Brexit is that the two sides of the argument have polarised their positions too much. This combined with the tendency of former UK governments to "gold plate" regulations imported from the EU and to use the EU as a scapegoat for the imposition of necessary but painful regulation tended to aid the side of the Brexiteers.

For instance, the EU regulations on light bulbs merely said "Use something a bit more efficient than old tungsten filament lamps", which given that these were only about 5% efficient at best was fair comment and a very good idea. Tungsten halogen lamps were all that was needed to comply with the EU regulation; gold-plating this regulation and foisting discharge lamps onto an unwilling public was going a bit far.

Then there's the question of negotiation in Brexit; the recriminations about poor deals having been struck presupposes that the EU side were minded to be helpful to the exiting UK; they were not so minded and have remained unhelpful ever since. That the areas that have had the most EU have also fared least well economically is something that the EU member states would prefer not to be reminded of.

Tech support session saved files, but probably ended a marriage

Re: On, off and the other on ...

There's legless and there's clueless.

BOFH: HR's AI hiring tool is perfectly unbiased – as long as you're us

CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN? I suppose that depends entirely on whether Human Resources handle the application, or hand it to Residual Human Resources.

Judge orders Feds rehire workers falsely fired for lousy performance

It would appear that Trump is attempting to walk the same road that King Charles I walked back in the 1640s: back then Charlie had a functional system to work within and completely failed to grasp that to exercise power he had to be part of the system and was not in complete control of the system.

Trump is similarly failing to grasp that he has to work with the governmental system, not try to usurp said system. Yes, he can order a downsizing of headcounts in agencies but this has to be done within existing employment law without lying to try to get around the law. The problem is that Trump didn't learn this last time he was in power and is not likely to learn it now either, and we've got another few years of this idiot to endure.

Energy trio wants to pipe gas from coal mines to keep datacenter lights on

Sell the waste heat

Any operation like this results in lots of waste heat. Heat at about 70 C is just right for being piped into district heating systems (the insulated polypipe needed for such schemes lasts a really long time as long as the input heat is below 80 C), and as such you can reclaim some of the cost of the bitbarn power by selling the waste heat at a discounted rate to suburban householders.

Governments can't seem to stop asking for secret backdoors

Change the law and introduce a closed season, minimal firearm muzzle energy (same as for deer would do) and permit badger control by landowners.

Many argue that cow-to-cow transmission is the main vector of transmission; they are basically wrong.

TB comes in many minor forms called spoligotypes; think of them as colours if you will. Spoligotypes mutate only very, very slowly generating new ones over hundreds of years; at a day to day level the spoligotype identifies where that cow caught TB.

Forty years ago the different spoligotypes in different geographical areas of the country were mapped; over time if cow to cow transmission predominated you'd expect this geographical distribution to change radically and for some spoligotypes to go extinct altogether; we are after all actively trying to find and cull infected cows.

What you actually see is the geographical spoligotype map has stayed static for the last forty years or so. This ties in nicely with what we know of the disease in cows and humans; both species have co-evolved with TB for a very long time and both are highly adept at fighting it. Actually finding TB bacteria in an infected cow is very difficult, and even heavily infected cows are poor TB transmitters.

Badgers, on the other hand, have a stonking great deletion in the genomic region that deals with immune system responses to TB bacteria, and are pretty crap at resisting the disease. They're tough animals and survive with the disease for quite long periods, but they are the primary reservoir and vector of TB.

Yes, this can clearly be seen with other legislation over the years. Tony Blair's government was a very good case in point since Blair and his acolytes seemed all to share the delusion that once you legislated against a thing then that problem was instantly completely solved and didn't need revisiting.

Way back in the 1950s tuberculosis was endemic in UK cattle. A simple immunological test sorted that one out: if a cow was shown to have been exposed to TB it got culled. TB spreads only quite slowly in cattle; culling quickly cleared the cow-to-cow spread. Yet in the south-west of the country, herds stubbornly refused to go clear of TB; there was a wildlife reservoir somewhere. That was identified as badgers; liberal use of cyanide gas sorted that problem.

Fast forward to Blair's time and there's this persistent problem with badger baiting. This is an insanely brutal bloodsport and obsession of a very tiny minority of people; the laws since Victorian times have forbidden it and no new law was really required, only a slight emphasis that the police needed to get onto the problem a bit more effectively. Blair on the other hand thought legislation to be the be-all and end-all of problem solving, and legislated incredible legal protection for badgers.

The few individuals still engaged in badger baiting simply carried on; it was illegal before and it was simply a bit more illegal. They didn't much care and carried on, with the same trickle of prosecutions as before. However with massive protection badger populations expanded and expanded until they were at the land carrying capacity and as a TB reservoir host as well, TB in badgers expanded hugely until the present time when huge number of cattle are culled to contain the cow disease, and similar numbers of badgers are shot by night to do the same thing.

All of this is hugely expensive, entirely self-inflicted and the legislation didn't even solve the initial problem.

The UK government has a problem with repeatedly doing this sort of thing and it really does need sorting out.

Cybersecurity not the hiring-'em-like-hotcakes role it once was

Do try not to exclude neurodiverse candidates

With cyber-security what you're looking for are technical experts, not people who know a lot of people who might or might not know something useful.

However if you go looking for the most networked individuals, what you get are very social folks and very often not actual technical experts. Technical expertise tends to favour the borderline autistic folks and they tend not to be hugely social.

Ergo looking for networked people is quite likely to land you with a load of bullshitters who can talk the talk but not walk the walk.

Signal will withdraw from Sweden if encryption-busting laws take effect

Re: One of many ironies

Simply encrypt using a one-time pad and then you can thumb your nose at law enforcement any time you see fit.

Re: Control freaks

In which case people will start keeping two accounts on their phones: one for use and one for the cops to look at should they need to look at the phone.

Rather than add a backdoor, Apple decides to kill iCloud encryption for UK peeps

Re: Without an understanding

Most cloud hosting systems have an option whereby a portion of the user's cloud storage can be encrypted with a key known only to the user; Apple's storage isn't in any way unusual other than it is ubiquitous.

Experts race to extract intel from Black Basta internal chat leaks

Insulting and lowballing the pay of one of the main administrators would seem to be a pretty stupid way to do things. A transparent pay structure with admins ranked and paid accordingly would seem a much better way of operating since it minimises jealousy in the ranks. Mind you this lot seem to be a fairly loose sort of organisation given that their leadership cannot prevent the members going after local banks and thus bringing down the heat onto them. That also would seem to be another indication of twerps in the organisation.

Anyone fancy running a book on how long these berks last?

BOFH: The USB stick always comes back – until it doesn't

Re: Value

USB sticks are the floppy disks (remember those?) of the modern age. They're universally crap and they universally fail, usually when you least want them to. If you have some files you want to see again then set up something like Dropbox or pCloud or Gods-forbid OneCloud and stick them in there, and you then have a better than sporting chance that you will see them again. On a USB stick, mostly they work and sometimes they don't.

DIMM techies weren’t allowed to leave the building until proven to not be pilferers

A similar thing happened with a family friend who was working on a building site in some capacity. The site was infested with rabbits and it was discovered that some of the building site consumables; something like 5/8" steel nuts or something, made absolutely ideal catapult ammo. This together with lax on-site security and the fact that the bunnies were well fed and good eating meant that pretty soon everyone on the site was taking pot-shots at the rabbits at all hours.

This all came to a grinding halt when someone from Head Office turned up to find out why that one site was getting through double the usual volume of these steel nuts.

It didn't save the rabbits, though. The builders were hooked on poaching by then and simply switched back to pebbles.

US lawmakers press Trump admin to oppose UK's order for Apple iCloud backdoor

Re: As far as anyone is able to tell

During the COVID epidemic, the UK tried creating their very own contact tracking app. The politest way of describing it would be that it really was not very much good. Google and Apple took one look at the Android and IOS versions sent to each respectively and declined to give it admin rights, forcing it to run, badly, in userland.

They then subsequently brought out their own versions, which were exceedingly elegant and not bloated, buggy power-hogs.

The UK has form for producing their own rather crap versions of software; it has the talent to produce masterpieces but simply does not apply this talent.

Why UK Online Safety Act may not be safe for bloggers

Most likely we simply add a VPN terminating in a neutral country to the cost of doing business in the UK.

Usenet?

I strongly suspect that Usenet is something that these legislators have never even heard of, much less encountered.

In this space, in groups like alt.2600 and the monastery, the content is all moderated. There is not however a moderator at all, ever; one simply forges approved headers in order to gain approval for one's message. This is the approved method for posting, so how OFCOM will cope with that is anybody's guess.

I was told to make backups, not test them. Why does that make you look so worried?

Re: Ah, memories...

Possibly the same cereal packet that a UK police station derived their technical knowhow from.

They were backing up data to 3 1/2 floppy disks, and when a new admin went to check on them, he found that the people doing this had no conception of how much data they had or how much would fit on a floppy. They had enough data to fill a stack of 20 or so floppies but somewhere in the backup instructions something had been missed out.

For months these people had been taking one new floppy disk from the pack of new ones, formatting it and then believing that this was their data all backed up.

The admin's name was cursed forever afterwards because he disabused them of the notion that this was a backup, and instead made them do it properly, which took a long, long time to do.

Humans brought the heat. Earth says we pay the price

Re: What I'd like to ridicule is the media who keep quoting "since records began"

The basic problem with ALL climate science is that the accurate data records are without exception either very short or in some other way crap. If you rely on those, you're buggered.

So what you do is use proxies for temperature. Isotope ratios in fossils and in ice cores, other things like that. If you're clever (and a climate scientist looking unemployment in the face can be very clever indeed) then you end up with a temperature record that is excellent recently, pretty decent for the last few hundred years, quite nice for a few thousand and still nice for the last couple of million then tends to tail off a bit as you go back further than that.

You get the same sort of effect when you're looking a atmospheric oxygen for example as well. We know what it is now, and we can guesstimate that during the Carboniferous it was right at the theoretical max of about 35% (any more and forest fires turn into global flash-overs), but after the Carboniferous, when fungi had worked out how to digest lignin and on until a few million years back, it's more stick a finger in the air and speculate (between 25% and 21%). It is important when you're talking about dinosaurs, though not as important as it used to be now that we've realised they had bird-like lungs.

So, right at the moment we're looking at stonking great global warming right about the time we ought to be looking at another Ice Age, and we still don't quite understand how Ice Ages get going (though the last one clobbered the Neanderthals).

Re: I look forward to . . .

To get more out of a bet, you have to find someone who'll take the bet. Best of luck.

Brits must prove their age on adult sites by July, says watchdog

Always be sure that the cure is not worse than the disease

If you actually went looking for Internet users who are most likely to do something extremely stupid online then young (and not so young) teenage boys must come right at the top of the list. They're not worldly wise, they're massively hormone-driven to be extremely interested in sex and everything to do with it and there's this huge reward in the form of porn sites waiting for them, if only they can get at it somehow.

How do you get past a government censor? VPNs.

How do you get onto a VPN if you've got no money? You go looking for a free VPN, of course, and pretty soon you fetch up using a Chinese free VPN that hurls adverts at you, logs your every move and tries its absolute best to infect your device with malware into the bargain.

What is the outcome of this law?

1) No teenager has been prevented from getting at porn.

2) All teenagers have been taught to break inconvenient laws.

3) All teenagers have been taught that the Government is really stupid.

4) Malware spreaders, blackmailers and paedophiles of all stripes have a field day exploiting these naive new porn addicts.

Well done, Government!

UK prepared to throw planning rules out the window for massive datacenters

Possible gains that almost certainly won't happen

Say, for the sake of argument, that you wanted to make a datacentre as "green" as possible. How would you do it?

Datacentres and industry in general generate waste heat; they all do and there's nothing you can do about this. Nuclear power generation (which is where we're going to end up, despite the gibberings of lunatics like Miliband) also generate waste heat because they are fundamentally heat engines. The only way to enhance the green credentials of all of this is to use this waste heat somehow.

District heating systems where the heat is distributed as steam via insulated pipes is probably the best way to go about using the waste heat. Water is chemically innocuous, has huge phase change heat and is relatively easy to deal with, plus the level of heat you get from steam is about the level of heat needed to heat homes and hot water systems, which is where most of the domestic energy use is concentrated. Working from this, datacentres are best placed close to towns where the waste heat can be concentrated then fed into district heating systems in the suburbs.

The only fly in the ointment here is that district heating is something that was pioneered by Soviet Russia, and was thus Not Invented Here and will be anathema to UK civil servants.

Billionaire food app CEO wants you to pay for the privilege of working with him

This is actually a golden opportunity for someone to get into the very top layer of that company. And then, when the man at the top unaccountably falls from a very high window or otherwise exits the scene fatally, the Chief of Staff can simply take over and fill his boss's shoes.

At this point the remuneration of all senior and mid-range staff will rapidly reviewed upwards (and reviewed thereafter on a yearly basis), simply to make certain that all minions who might feel unaccountably aggrieved by this turn of events get their silence bought appropriately.

Why we're still waiting for Canonical's immutable Ubuntu Core Desktop

Re: I’m not a fan of ‘snap’

I'm another non-fan of snap.

The system we use here is to give the users a home directory that is an NFS-4 fileshare mounted off a remote file server. This is for an educational establishment so we would very much like a user's files and desktop modifications to follow them around, hence this solution works very well. Or rather it did, until more and more snaps started to be introduced. Snaps don't work on NFS-4 fileshares.

On a system where the users' home directory is a fileshare, it is very useful to also have a local user with sudo access, so you can get into systems where the network or the fileshare is broken. On these the user with the local home directory cannot have it in /home, so instead we put it in /localhome.

Guess what, Snaps don't like home directories placed anywhere save for /home

Now, you could possibly forgive Snaps for not liking NFS-4 where default permissions prevent anyone save the user whose share it is from looking at it, if you were charitable. If you weren't and took the view that sudo is a very useful command then you'd not forgive that. However even the most charitable person in the world saves a little spot of hatred for morons who hardcode directories in their code, instead of using system variables like everyone else does.

That's why I don't like snaps.

A Kansas pig butchering: CEO who defrauded bank, church, friends gets 24 years

Time was when you had to go to financial free fire zones like the game Eve Online to see old-time scams like this being practised out in the wild. I had frankly thought that this sort of scam had died a richly deserved death back in the days of the Big Con trick.

But alas it seems that in the USA at least the banks and bankers are still daft enough to fall for a scam like this, and have too few safeguards in place to deal with dozy management.

UK government's bank data sharing plan slammed as 'financial snoopers' charter'

Re: What could possibly go wrong...

The magnetic field of the earth is weakening now prior to an overdue magnetic pole shift. The sun is getting more active. We are one Carrington Event away from an entirely cash-based economy.

Re: What could possibly go wrong...

The thing with tax avoidance is that it is completely legal. Were it not legal, folks like myself would be forced to try and maximise our income so that HMRC make the biggest possible amount from Income Tax off us; the fact that doing so would drive me even more insane than I already am [1] in fairly short order is by the bye.

As it stands, there is no rule that says anyone must maximise the amount of tax they pay.

HMRC obviously sees things a little differently, especially in the light of what happened when they tried capping pension contributions. That little silliness resulted in highly skilled, highly paid medical consultants forming the opinion that being taxed to hell and back wasn't a worthy use of their time when they could instead retire and enjoy the fruits of a lifetime's working. The cap was rescinded fairly rapidly when it was discovered how many consultants this was driving out of the NHS.

I therefore predict that we'll see the usual fallout from when overly optimistic Labour tax-dreams meet reality.

[1] Neurodiversity...

Look! About chest high! Is it a pallet? Is it a drone? No, it's a Palletrone

This sounds like another inflatable dartboard invention

This sounds like one of these working but useless sorts of inventions. A much earlier example was the hovercraft wheelbarrow.

https://youtu.be/OmJ-8JMw_l4

This idea came about from the common tendency of builders to erect houses first, then roads afterwards thus ensuring that everything was done in a sea of mud. The hover-barrow solved the problem of shifting things about over liquid mud, but when someone had the completely obvious idea of measuring up an estate before any machinery came onto site, then installing roads, then using these roads as access for building equipment then the sea of mud disappeared and with it the need for the hover-barrow.

Hovercraft remain in this tiny niche of "looks useful, but what do we use it for?" and quad-copters are in the same "Solution looking for a problem" niche.

Lebanon now hit with deadly walkie-talkie blasts as Israel declares ‘new phase’ of war

Re: If an Icom IC-V82

Logically the ideal place to put explosives would be inside the battery casing, since with a non-standard battery it just looks like any other oddly-shaped lithium battery. Obviously you'd need to reduce the capacity of the battery a bit, or increase the volume somewhat but with an old device package like those pagers that shouldn't be noticeable.

Detonation trigger is a different matter. We're seeing two different devices both being detonated remotely, so it is reasonable to assume that the detonation method is the same in both. I would think that the trigger is something in the radio or pager that causes sudden, huge current draw and causes the battery to get very hot, with the heat being the trigger for the detonator.

Re: Long Game

That at least should be easy enough to check up on; go looking for interesting peaks with a gamma spectroscope such as a Radiacode 103 device. Such devices can be linked to mobile phones and used as compact survey devices with the only activity required being for the user to walk around the area to be searched. The distinctive spectrums of both enriched uranium and plutonium can be detected and discerned using such a device.

China claims Starlink signals can reveal stealth aircraft – and what that really means

Re: Cell phone tower signals

Many, many years ago during the first Gulf War the phenomenon of radar reflections from cell phone towers was reported, presumably with the adjunct that Iraqi gunners were insufficiently advanced to be able to do much with the occasional flashes of radar reflected from Allied planes.

Researching the phenomenon for something entirely different, I have found that this phenomenon has been known for almost as long as there have been "stealth" aircraft. Researchers at the secretive Roke Manor site have been using this sort of thing for ages; a modern society creates so much noise in the microwave spectrum that almost anything flying over a modern city will be visible from backscatter. All the Chinese are doing is blowing smoke and reporting a well-known phenomenon from a different source.

AI's thirst for water is alarming, but may solve itself

Green options?

One possibly useful way around this would be to use the waste heat from computing to feed into district heating schemes. In the UK there are as yet very few of these, but I would expect this paucity to change fairly rapidly once the free market gets involved with green matters. Domestic properties are a major user of heat, and if industrial waste heat could be converted into steam and this steam used as a means of transporting heat around a suburb, then a fair amount of energy that otherwise would be wasted could be re-used.

The means to turn low-grade waste heat into higher temperatures already exists with grid-scale heat pumps; AI bit-barns would be an ideal supplier for such industrial heat pump systems.

Woman uses AirTags to nab alleged parcel-pinching scum

Re: "police declined to pursue the matter"

One of the old tricks in this respect is to take a tin of red oxide primer, one of grey and decant some of each into a receptacle, then paint the bike using the poorly-mixed red-grey mixture. The result looks utterly vile, especially if you take care to badly paint parts of the wheels and sprockets and saddle as well. As long as the bike isn't obviously valuable for components then this generally puts off the bike thieves, together with a couple of strong locks.

Before we put half a million broadband satellites in orbit, anyone want to consider environmental effects?

The human population in Australia is very, very strongly concentrated in the coastal cities with very few inland cities of any size. If the internet in these cities is crap, then this is just down to the suppliers also being crap, along with the city regulators similarly being twerps.

This does not surprise me in the least, unfortunately.

BOFH: The true gravity of the Boss and the 3-coffee problem

Re: caffeine intolerance is a real thing

Generally speaking, vertebrates hydrolyse toxins first then oxidise, and invertebrates do the thing the other way around. There's an insecticide, malathion, which exploits this effect. Malathion isn't particularly toxic but when oxidised to maloxon if becomes very toxic to most life forms. Thing is, vertebrates either excrete it or hydrolyse it, so never see maloxon. Invertebrates like insects, on the other hand, synthesise their own toxin-induced deaths in a trick known as lethal synthesis.

CrowdStrike meets Murphy's Law: Anything that can go wrong will

Re: Canary Deployment

The problem with giving users the ability to refuse updates is that a minority will refuse ALL changes to a system on the not-completely-insane basis that if the machine is running OK now, why alter it?

Users generally need to be told that updates will happen, and not ever asked about giving their permission, or this sort of stupidity will occur.

Speed limiters arrive for all new cars in the European Union

I currently drive a Mazda which has an early version of this system installed. It has a GPS-enabled map with speed limits, but also a camera which if it sees a speed limit sign will override the GPS map version. This function cannot be easily turned off (although the translation of what the car thinks is the limit to what the limiter function is set to CAN be made manual).

Thus driving past Gisburn Livestock Auction, the car will generally indicate that the speed limit is 5 MPH, having seen the internal speed limit sing inside the auction mart's carpark. It towns generally, the system very often sees 20 MPH signs on side roads and sets the local limit to this instead of what the actual road limit is. If the EU system is this daft, it will be widely ignored.

This sort of thing could also be gamed very easily: deploy a GPS jammer and a large sign denoting the speed limit as 10 MPH. A percentage of new cars will then try to conform to this new limit, which on a busy motorway would be carnage indeed.

Glastonbury to turn festivalgoer pee into eco-friendly fertilizer

Re: Bring back the long drop

I am told that there's an old military practical joke which involves a long-drop toilet and a thunderflash...

Energy buffs give small modular reactors a gigantic reality check

Re: it's called b̶a̶t̶t̶e̶r̶i̶e̶s̶, f̶l̶y̶w̶h̶e̶e̶l̶s̶, pumped storage...

Pumped storage using water doesn't scale in the UK.

Pumped storage using something a lot denser than water, on the other hand...

Research finds electric cars are silent but violent for pedestrians

Re: Just a thought

If a noise-maker has to be fitted, then I would definitely expand on the range of special effects available.

BOFH after a long night on the curry and cheap lager, for instance; with an extra-special sound effect for accelerating away from the traffic lights; just the thing to light up the faces of small children everywhere.

I would also use the sound of a particularly knackered diesel engine (just for old times' sake), and a synthesised Ferrari engine.

Finally, for use in queuing traffic, simulated Scottish swearing and ranting with an "Och see you... Jimmy!" when I accelerate away from traffic lights.