Posts by Charlie Clark 13458 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007
Just regarding litter: some studies show that people tend to litter more if they expect bins, hence bins are often overflowing in popular locations, but tend to take their rubbish with them if they know they are none: this is somewhat culturally dependent but it's why they've been removed from some beauty spots as they also tend to attract vermin.
Yes, neither the winter storm in Texas nor the Suez blockage were sufficient to disrupt supplies for long.
You're right to point out the massive demand for plastics from new areas. Add to this the various economic stimuli and their unintended quantities causing a squeeze on key commodities, especially but not only in the building industry, and shortages and higher prices at the factory gate are inevitable.
But, whatever the cause, if companies do finally start moving away from a direct dependency on oil then the that's a good thing.
Radioactivity != radiation. Yes, plants do require light of a particular wavelength to photosynthesise but there are few reports of anything that like to bathe in high intensity X or gamma rays, let alone be zapped by beta and alpha.
Then you can throw in the effects of all that seething magnetism and variable gravity, as can be observed in some of the moons. True, this is providing enough energy to warm things up, but that's at a distance with a different atmosphere and the occasional respite. Jupiter's own clouds really are pretty inimical!
Still, it's an interesting idea and I guess we'll learn more with the next set of probes.
That was the smoke to justify the ban. Back then, there was no video acceleration for available to Flash and video decoding in software chews cycles. Flash itself was just a container for the codec and performance was not significantly to any "native" codecs. Since then Apple has been very careful when it comes to allowing hardware acceleration so that it can trumpet the performance of its own apps.
You can open up the app store without compromising the integrity of the OS: the two issues are not at all related. You can sideload on Android but this core OS is untouchable because the OS runs in a separte read-only partition. This is why you have to jump through several hoops to install different versions of Android.
The problems with app store and the ban on sideloading are entirely commercial: Apple dictates the terms because there are no alternatives. This is pretty much the definition of abuse of a monopoly.
Quite a lot unjusified assumptions there starting with the reason for dropping Flash. This was quite clearly done to stop Adobe selling video services before I-Tunes was able to do so. Yes, it did have performance issues, memory mainly, but that and the security were really red herrings.
I'm not sad to see the back of Flash, but this was as much due to the work of Google and others on the HTML video side and relevant codecs as anything else.
Tracking vulnerabilities is currently a PITA and it shouldn't be. Google deserves a lot of credit for the work they've put into not just into highlighting but also into fixing and standardising security. A good example of enlightended self-interest. Computer security is already hard enough and due to get harder so that we could do with as few informational silos as possible.
Whichever source you use, producing hydrogen is still extremely wasteful when compared with the alternative such as synthetic hydrocarbons. Currently, the only -ve energy step there is the reduction of CO2 to CO. It's chemically pretty easy, safe and provides immediate storage facilities at the source of the energy. If we make enough of the stuff we can start pumping it back into the oil and gas wells…
But if you really want hydrogen, you can also obtain it from hydrocarbons, again pretty energy intensive but less than electrolysis which is why it's used for industrial production. Large scale electrolysis requires large amounts of clean water, which isn't easily available in many places.
Alright then: "Won't someone think of the children?" Please, with your personal medical data we can target paedophisles (sic) and other perverts and get them banged up for life. And we'll cure baby cancer. Only terrorists, neerdowells and the Welsh won't agree.
It's not the organisations, which may for very good reasons need to change, per se that matter, but the purposes for which the data will be used, the conditions under which it will be provided, the form in which it will be shared and the oversight that will be in place.
There really isn't much need for anything other than NHS England, as opposed to agency dreamt up by Hancock which has NHS in its name but is not part of the NHS, to have access to complete data sets. The rest can probably be provided by cohorts.
The Chinese government already tracks its subjects all the time anyway. And, as recent events have shown, any kind of digital currency can be tracked until it enters the banking system, which is why banks all over the world are being told to comply with account holder requests or risk being thrown out of the clearing and transfer systems. The Chinese government is worried about credit growth in the various shadow banking systems, which is why it is introducing its own digital currency and imposing controls on the various payment systems.
Crypto currencies are yet another example of tech solutionists praising something almost entirely because it's unregulated. Presumably, this is based on the idea that whatever is unregulated is just waiting to have its price discovered and exploited: low orbit internet service providers would be another example.
The containers approach is appealing if you want to be able to run lots of copies of the same software in isolation, for example content filters on a network. As soon as you start composing your containers you're effectively configuring VMs.
The microservices approach is what will trip a lot of people up. It sounds so good, and generally is too good to be true: you end up with a heap of difficult to maintain config files and containers using quite a lot more resources than you thought: if you're not Google you probably want as many components of your applications to run as close to each other as possible as sharing data down the wire, potentially between disparate data centres, rarely makes sense.
This is a legal defence in some countries: the ip address itself does not necessarily tie the infringement to a particular device and, hence, user. However, it can also be argued that providing wifi access, without any kind of precautions, could make you an accessory. This certainly was the case until a few years ago in Germany but was revised, I think, for being too broad.
Still, even with guest networks, it's worth taking a few precautions such as ensuring devices are isolated from each other by default, because you don't want to be accused of letting people hack each other…
It's the value proposition that Apple makes and that many are happy to go along with. Apple has carefully manicured the brand so that people trust it implicitly. Only last weel my brother was crowing about his home camera system using "Apple secure video" (PSK encrypted). Whatever, it means that Apple gets to charge manufacturers so they can slap some kind of label on the packaging and charge a bit more.
FrontPage was awful but I found some versions of Dreamweaver to be pretty okay for round tripping even with server templates like ZPT. But the major change was the widescale adoption of CSS for layout and the subsequent shift to responsive design, meaning you really only need to play around with the CSS.
1968 has just called and wants its slogans back…
I've always been against the politicisation of software. The first real open source was the Berkley Software Distribution and it was treated very much like a scientific thesis. Then along came Stallman and the FSF and tried to ruin it for everyone.
I agree that Stallman's comments about Minsky, etc. are not relevant. Stallman has been criticised by his peers for years for his actions, including a complete lack of tolerance of different opinions regarding what is and is not open source.
There is no doubt that he made a considerable contribution both in terms of code and advocacy. But the world has moved on the since the turn of the millenium and we're no longer fighting battles with AT&T, SCO, etc.
I just mute any conversations that get too noisy and SWMBO got me to mute all the apps. That largely solves the problem of the interruptions. You're right about the effects on the brain but muting is pretty easy.
People have been leaving WhatsApp here in Germany in droves because of the badly managed planned data grab. I guess that's progress of a sort.
Add to that that GDPR would make opt-in for such a scheme compulsory. I think that's still on the UK statutes which means that this new scheme can be challenged in the court and any instutions or companies that want to use the data must sign the relevant contracts covering the scope.
Given the current climate of resentment the need to listen first should have been obvious. Unfortunately, particularly under Corbin the Labour Party doubled down on marginal issues. Starmer got a post-Corbin bounce but is currently having to sit out Boris' own post-Boris vaccine boost. That won't last, of course, because the economy is a train wreck and the Cabinet a bunch of fools just desperate to fuck things up.
Now would be the time to go out into the country, talk to people, take the flak and develop policies like Blair's "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime", which meld the party's philosophy with what the electorate wants to hear. Oh, and politics is a dirty business, but if the ad hominem isn't working against Johnson, then find something else like heartwrenching stories of victims of government policy. The bigger the list the better.
Well, yes, I'd love a return of politics of conviction. But we also need to learn from the last 20 years where many people have seen their living standards eroded, while being told how good everything is. I'm a mild-mannered liberal and I'm getting really fed up of being told of what's good for me. I could stamp my foot, I really could!
As for your list: it's too abstract for many.
For many people EU projects seem like expensive white elelphants. The peace it's brougt to many might be a better approach but you also need to find a way of engaging people's self-interest.
Making sure everyone gets heard is more important than a boring discussion of electoral systems.
Personally, I don't think lockdowns can be demonstrated to have been particularly effective, though this depends a bit of the definition. Boosting spending on primary care with some of that mythical bus money would have done more. As would have the earlier introduced of quick tests, especially in care environments, after their approval over a year ago… Okay, details. Whatever the policy, the message could have been simpler.
I suspect vaccination suffers like all prevention mechanisms from the lack of immediacy: warnings on fag packets are known to be understood but the threat is too remote – not today. Shock therapy of people dying or becoming disfigured or disabled is much more effective but, largely thanks to the effectiveness of vaccination, the images of people with diptheria, polio, etc. have faded from the collective consciousness…
Politics is rarely about facts and almost always about sentiment. The Labour Party took northern working class voters for granted for too long and, as some wag recently put it, have taken to telling people that they're wrong for not voting for them.
I don't expect the recently converted Tory voters to stick with them once they realise they've been sold a dummy, but that might not happen for a while and even then might simply be a return to not voting. This is what Cummings, et al. understood: people want a sense of being listened to. As long as that's the case they don't care what Trump, Johnson, etc. get up to.
But that would unfairly lump companies with beautiful but meaningless logos in with the Silicon Valley also rans, which obviously includes this Doodle clone. It looks like they wanted to merge a pictogram for a link with the C in a textbook failure of combining different visual languages.
The website is nicely awful with a cringeworthy video featuring, for no good reason, a band. You'll thank me for having watched this shit so you don't have to!
What you have to remember is that many of the early European settlers of America were religious extremists who left Europe to start a new life where the could be as kooky as they liked. It's a bit of a pity that the natives helped the Pilgrim Fathers survive their first winter because this helped stoke the myth of American Exceptionalism…
Conspiracy theory is, of course, a big business in America, and the coat tail riders are not limited to the Republican Party: it was only a few years ago that the pampered, very Democrat middle classes of California decided that vaccinations against measles were the stuff of the devil. Whatever you believe, someone is willing you to sell you just the right kind of snake oil. And, if you want to sue someone, then there will always be a lawyer willing to represent you. For the right price™.
This doesn't mean that medical malpractice doesn't go on. Nor does it discount the potentially fatal side effects of some vaccinations: the flu vaccine can cause meningitis; causing magnetism is probably less likely than predicting next week's lottery numbers…
I seem to remember that someone decided, after running the numbers, it seems that Microsoft makes a loss from Windows over time. But it's considered to be a useful loss leader for that MS Office which is very profitable. The move to the subscription model, makes this somewhat moot. It was Office 365, now its Microsoft 365, and you will have Teams forcibly installed and you will use it!
Hence, I think the real reason for the change will be to limit any liability claims for holdouts when Microsoft stop providing updates to all users.
I think it's reasonable to assume they already have. The announcements serve several purposes: let the public know how good police tech is; force the low-hanging fruit to look for another solution and make them worry that it's been compromised.
A-list gangs probably already use a-list encryption tools…
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