Posts by Jonathan Richards 1 1108 posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
I took a trip on an RAF VC10 to and from Brize Norton and Washington DC sometime around 1990. The co-pilot showed us the INS (ring laser gyroscope-based, IIRC) and said that the usual drift they experienced was measured in a few metres rather than miles after the journey Brize-Washington-Central America and back. There was a very precisely located point on the apron at Brize where the INS would be set before each mission, and checked on return.
I'm from the exact other end of GB, but spent several years living in Scotland. At least in the Glasgow area, "haud yer wheesht" with a definite 't' on the end was still widely used in the late 80's. Also "awa and bile yer heid" which never seemed quite as confrontational as it was clearly intended to be.
Maybe the ice-shell is almost free-floating, but pinned in place by high spots on the rocky interior... Or it was so pinned until relatively recently, when the pin points let go and the ice shell re-oriented itself to a minimum energy position. I can't begin to calculate the forces that would be unleashed - the entire moon would be some sort of precessing spherical gyroscope with viscous coupling between the ice shell and the rocky core, and the released energy would be dumped as heat, melting even more of the shell. Then there's the fact that humans are quite familiar with the mechanical properties of ice... at Earth planetary temperatures. Does anyone have values for the hardness and toughness of ice as cold as the surface of Europa? What do all those impurities do to those values? Can I have another go around at life and be a europologist, please?
Excellent removal of the specific to focus on the philosophical questions. I would add one word to the setup, to read "secretly and illegally" intercepting". Alright, two words. I'm considering that the UK government, for instance, undertakes massive surveillance in secret, but there are no UK laws that make that illegal, AFAIK, and the Stasi certainly didn't operate illegally in the GDR legal context. Perhaps that makes it a qualitatively different scenario?
>When it comes to paying for the groceries, [the app] has a feature to help people find the right bank notes to hand to a cashier.
Ahh, I remember when you could reach into a wallet and pay for goods by handing over an intricately-fabricated slip of polymer material. Back in those days, the checkout operator would not recoil as if offered to have a fondle of Cleopatra's asp.
In my supermarket, even the automated checkouts won't accept banknotes.
"Yellow Peril", a term which is just as racist as other designations that are now beyond the pale, is much older than the Vietnam War. It appeared in a book title in 1911 and is apparently a translation into English of an original German neologism.
Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Peril#cite_note-13
> Hacking in 2020
To be fair, it's been the simplest way to defeat security since forever. Break open the clay tablet, borrow and copy the key, gift the city with a really cool horse, bribe the portcullis guard, blackmail the bank manager, email spoof the security admin, rubber-hose decrypt the bitcoin wallet.
>I baled out of his rant
I stayed with the 'plane after you took the only parachute, you demon. In fact, Mr Bogost, the journalist, only self-describes as a twitter obsessive to establish his standing. His point, in a nutshell, is that the original (as in ARPANet) USP for an internetwork which will survive bits of it being melted (packet switching, OSPF and all that), is compromised or made irrelevant when the things being linked together are massive monopolies with fragile security. This was not quite so in the early days of weB LOGging, when people used their own web sites to log their (possibly vacuous) news, thoughts and opinions.
Yep, had exactly this happen with a specialist accounting system which had a fairly expensive per-seat license, and a pain-in-the-arse installation and update mechanism. Of course, PHBs couldn't bear actual workers to have system access that they themselves didn't have, and would tell me that they used it all the time... until I quoted back their most recent login time with last year's date on it. Luckily, I had support from my own bosses for taking it away despite protests.
Ditto, although I think my Gateway 486DX66 (with a CD-ROM drive, gasp) would have been purchased in early 1994. As you say, form factors dictate much obsolescence so that the only thing that remains, 26 years later, is the keyboard on which I am typing this, an Anykey labelled "Gateway 2000".
Cheers! I am a big fan of Ken, and I read his post carefully, and while I am prepared to believe that I might be wrong about the First Amendment, I am not wrong in either of the ways he mentions. My point was only that a lawyer (I guess) said that the First Amendment gave people rights, and... it just doesn't. It gives them protection from laws which would take away those rights, one of which is free, and as Carlie points out, anonymously free, speech.
in re McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission
Thanks for that, I think it is an example of the law being extended and interpreted for changing conditions, as I said. It still doesn't get us as far as Ms Gillens' statement, though.
In a 7–2 decision authored by Justice John Paul Stevens, the Court found that the First Amendment protects the decision of an author to remain anonymous.
So clearly by this precedent an author can be anonymous, but it says nothing about readers.
"People have a First Amendment right to browse the Internet anonymously, ..." [Naomi Gilens, EFF Legal Fellow]
The full text of the First Amendment to the US Constitution reads
Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
So in fact the First Amendment confers no rights whatsoever. It explicitly and solely limits the ability of Congress to legislate limitations to certain specified rights and freedoms which the framers clearly think are conferred by the Constitution itself. Now, I understand that law is interpreted for situations that the framers did not envisage, and that Thos Jefferson et al had not clearly foreseen the Internet, but, since IANAL (unlike Ms Gilens), I struggle to see how one reasons from Amdt I to the opening quote.
Edit: source for Amdt I Cornell Law School LII
>wired up to a car battery inside
Yes, I guess that would work, if the earth path was not too resistive, yer piss-artist would get ten or eleven volts through the nether regions - not too pleasant. However, a cattle fence is a different kettle of worms - although typically battery powered, the voltage put on the wire is stepped up to around 8,000 volts, but the current is pulsed, and limited to around 100 mA. It gives you a nasty jolt, and then another a couple of seconds later if you're dim enough to have kept contact. The learning curve is not steep.
> Not where I go walking they don't. Sometimes they don't have many of those little warning signs either.
Aye, and not where the cows are illiterate, either. The point of an electric fence is to keep the cattle (works for horses, too) away from the "physical fence", which may be damaged by a casual half-ton bovine nudge, or in fact absent, e.g. if you're trying to keep a herd in one half of a grazing area. Protecting the electric fence from contact is totally pointless, unless you're actually trying to exclude humans. That's pointless, too, because everyone who has grown up in the country knows how to disable an electric fence for long enough to pass over or under it.
Yes, and as I read TFA right now it says "...estimated to mass something in the order of five to ten earth-sized-planets."
That's not solar masses. The range covers about one-third to one-half of the mass of Neptune.
Source: Planetary Factsheet
I don't know if AT&T promised and didn't deliver, but I will observe that if my entire life savings were even a fraction of $24m then I wouldn't be entrusting it to a repository the ownership of which depended on control of a single mobile telephone account. Sod 2FA, I would want an order of magnitude better than that. Why is it all in any one place in any event?
This was exactly what I was speculating about in my earlier post, not knowing about the AI project you mention - do you have a link?
I'm sure that the US AI trainers must have done things like eliminate the height marker along the wall behind the face image. Didn't they...?
It might very well be that the AI got good at distinguishing mugshots taken for police purposes from whatever the authors used for their "non-criminal" set. And there's a thing: how do you know that random face images do *not* represent a criminal? Maybe the AI can distinguish photos of criminals that get caught...
...is indeed a thousand paces (2000 steps) - it's right there in the name. On a long walk in Wiltshire several years ago along the still-straight footpath which follows the Fosse Way, I used GPS to measure the distance covered by 1000 paces at marching speed, and it was *very* close to 1.609 km/1 statute mile.
> Where did you get that from?
THE PROPERTY PRESS (HOLDINGS) LIMITED Company number 10058355. Mrs Bulley ceased to be a 'person with significant control' on 13 Mar 2018, and the company was wound up by extraordinary resolution (i.e. voluntarily) on 9 Aug 2018.
Letterbox Productions was incorporated on 30 Apr 2018, i.e. a little more than 3 months before Property Press was wound up.
Is the win condition the destruction of the opposing aircraft (which would be required to chalk up a win in the war combat situation). If so, when the Natural Intelligence pilot makes it back to the ground, can s|he call it a win? I don't know that I'd volunteer to be that pilot. Youtube video "Take a shufti... don't come back..."
> you want him sacked because it may have infringed some guidance
No. One wants him to be relieved of giving advice to [1] the Prime Minister, because of a demonstrable failure of judgement. He didn't say he "[went] for a drive with his family", because of what the PR people call 'optics'. Maybe that's why he ascribed the outing to being an eye test. <sfx>rimshot</sfx>. So, that's either a lie, or a demonstrable failure of judgement: "Jeez, I don't think I can see well enough to drive. Let's load up the wife and bairn, and take a trip to Barnard Castle to find out".
[1] Or operating the PM with his hand up Mr Johnson's back, depending on who you believe.
BioShield Distribution Ltd was incorporated in January 2020 [1]. Both directors list their correspondence address as 7 Albion Parade, London, England, N16 9LD, which was a rather unprepossessing newsagents emporium in Stoke Newington, that's been shuttered every time the Google Street View car has been past in the last dozen years.
[1] https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/12411850/officers
> It would also be particularly stupid of the Argentinian military to assume that a major NATO military, that you were about to start a war with, wouldn't be spying on you
Ah, but the Argentinian state (led by a military junta) didn't think it was starting a war, because it was interpreting actions of the UK Foreign Office with respect to the Falkland Islands in a particular way, and thus thought there would be diplomatic protests, disputed declarations in the UN, yadda yadda, but that they'd end up with de facto sovereignty over Las Malvinas in addition to the de jure sovereignty that they claimed, and still claim to this day. Even the dimmest General (and you don't get promoted to General by being dim) would know that Argentina couldn't win a war with the UK.
And indeed, Argentina didn't lose one. As I've said before, it wasn't a war in 1982, it was (as ex-RAF Egghead & Boffin, above) correctly describes it, a "conflict", a military Operation codenamed Corporate by the UK MOD. 75 years after VE Day isn't a good time to forget the difference between limited military conflict and total war.
Well, novel infectious diseases in general might. I shall probably be going near London in the future, for family reasons, but what is becoming increasingly unclear to me is why London goes anywhere near London. Too many people paying way too much to live, travel, and work unhealthily too close to each other! Run away!!
Obvs, this isn't going to happen in a year, or a parliamentary term, but I wouldn't be surprised if big cities cease to grow, or even start to decline in population, over the next generation or two. The grand-sweep-of-human-history reason for cities is almost itself history.
From TFA sub-head: "Google says it cannot identify a user from the ID"
It's an ID, isn't it? It IDENTIFIES (reduces count of possible identities to 1) a user. Just because Google can't match it to the user's legal name, SSN|NI number, post|zip code (it says...) does not mean that the user is any less identified with the advertising ID. If what they mean is they cannot de-anonymize the advertising ID, then (a) that's different and (b) I'm not sure I believe it.
Post-rant musing: I wonder what happens if I change my legal name to the same string as my Google Ad ID...?
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