* Posts by I ain't Spartacus

10097 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jun 2009

India celebrates rapid adoption of its internet of livestock

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The Far Side

Where's Gary Larson when you need him.

He could have so much fun with a livestock census. And of course cows in Blighty have passports - but are probably quite disappointed by the destination, when the farmer sends them on "holiday".

Links to my favourite Far Side cartoon

Grok-1 chatbot code released – open source or open Pandora's box?

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Re: Curiously Enough

Do you mean to tell us, you don't know where your towel is?

That is seriously unhoopy man!

Filipino police free hundreds of slaves toiling in romance scam operation

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Re: Modern slavery

trindflo,

Please fact check me. I'm more than a little aghast at what I found.

I can't quite manage that. I don't have the facts, but I am a suspicious, cynical and somewhat argumentative man. When you're shocked by a figure from a modern campaign group / charity / political party / think tank you have to remember that shocking you is the whole point. There's an awful lot of campaigns out there, and they need to be heard above the noise. And not a few of them, on all sides politically speaking, are therefore willing to basically make their numbers up. And even more are willing to mess with the statistics until they're meaningless.

We've got the obvious problem of global population now being over 7 billion, when it was around 1 billion in, say, 1800. So ideally you'd like to compare in percentage terms. But even if there were only as many slaves, that would still be shocking, given that it's illegal almost everywhere now.

However, you notice they give figures on your first link for the Atlantic Slave Trade. Which was probably the ugliest example of slavery because something like a third of the people died in the crossing and it was tied up with racism in a such a horrible way - which lead to the slaves being treated so much worse. Whereas in Africa at the time, slavery was practised quite widely. But slaves were treated much better, and wouldn't be moved that far from where they originally lived. Also North African (Barbary pirates and others) slave traders were operating widely in the 17th Century - and before. They were sending ships to capture people from the coasts of France, Ireland and England for centuries, and selling them into slavery (mostly in the Ottoman Empire) - which was a big empire, and allowed slavery. They even had a slave army, the Janissaries, of moslty enslaved children from South Eastern Europe who were trained as a permanent fighting force. In 1800 Russia had a population of about 35 million, of whom about 50-80% were peasants - a large majority of who were serfs. Unfree tenant farmers, not allowed to leave the land they were on, and who could be bought and sold, with that land. My Chinese history isn't up to knowing about how widespread slavery was in China (banned 1910) or India (banned 1843). Western Europe had pretty much outlawed slavery by the end of the Medieval period - or it had died out. By the Early Modern (Tudor) period English courts wouldn't alllow slavery on common-law tradition (I don't know if there was actual leglislation). The Portuguese ambassador's slaves managed to run away during the reign of Elizabeth I, and were freed by an English court, much to his disgust. Ironically just at the point that some English traders and *ahem!* privateers (English Pirates? No! We don't have any of those!) were starting to join in the slave trade in the Caribbean. Plus all the native Caribbeans and South Americans who got enslaved - and weren't part of the Atlantic trade.

What was the actual number of enslaved people globally in 1800? It was in the tens of millions (just in the Russian Empire alone), but don't now if it would make the low hundreds of millions.

As a straight percentage of global population I'd strongly suspect that the most slaves ever was in classical Greek/Roman times. Although in Rome slaves could own property, and in fact own other slaves, and good masters were expected to free their more educated slaves and set them up with a business or trade as clients in the Roman patronage system. You might take a Greek slave to educate your children, in the expectation that you'd set him up in business when your kids had grown up - it was even possible to sell yourself into slavery to get money for your family, though a hell of a lot of Roman slaves were caputred after battles. Julius Caesar's conquest of Gaul was estimated by Plutarch (a decade or two later) to have killed a million Gauls and led to the enslavement of another million.

I'm also rather suspicious about terms like "modern slavery". Because that suggests a bit too much wiggle-room in definitions, where they don't go back and use the same standards in the old figures. A medieval apprenticeship lasted 7 years, during which period you couldn't leave, work for anyone else or marry without your master's permission. But on the up-side you got pay, food and lodging, training, education and often the chance to join the master's business as an equal - or even take over from him. You could often marry into the family too. Not legal now, but not considered all that exploitative at the time - because the rewards were so good.

Finally let's look at World War II. Nazi Germany had the Organisation Todt, slave labourers from occupied territories. There were 1-2 million of them, plus a similar number in concentration camps being slowly worked to death producing goods for the SS, plus up to five million Russian prisoners of war who were mostly worked to death as well. The Soviet Union were also working a couple of million people to death at any one time in the Siberian Gulags. But a bit of quick searching when I thought of this suggests the numbers aren't enough to offset slavery being mostly banned in the 19th Century.

Rambling here, but I'd bet a small amount that in absolute numbers slavery probably peaked in the early 19th Century - and that the peak in percentage terms was probably in the classical period - and that 100 million is an over-estimate for now - but that the numbers now are depressingly high. I'm also fully prepared to be told I'm wrong by someone with proper figures - but I think I have good groundsn for my scepticism.

Bernie Sanders clocks in with 4-day workweek bill thanks to AI and productivity tech

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Happy

This is all wrong!

If you want a 3-day weekend, it's easy!

There are 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week. So remove 3 hours from each day, and we can have 8 21 hour days per week. We'll call the extra day Spartacusday - seeing as it's my idea. Problem solved.

I don't know how long we'd have to wait to have the technology to speed up the rotation of the Earth so that daylight matched our new days. But the extra day of weekend should be compensation enough in the meantime.

Voyager 1 starts making sense again after months of babble

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Devil

Re: The saddest part of this story. . .

I don't wish to upset anyone with this idea, but what if you have been insufficiently nerdy in your life? What if you aren't sent to Nerd Valhalla - but you're sent to the "other place"?

And this is too horrible to contemplate...

You could be sent down to The Helldesk

Where the phone never stops ringing, and the daemons' whips never cease to lash.

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Re: V'Ger

Spoiler alert!

If I were being harsh, I'd say that the people that spoiled Star Trek the Motion Picture, were the ones who made it.

There's even a joke about how only the even numbered ones were good. Which is odd (if you'll pardon the pun), because the Wrath of Khan is, but I'm not sure about many of the rest. Maybe some of the later TNG ones?

And then JJ Abrams turned Kirk into a hyperactive whiny teenager in search of a bloody good slap. Although I did like the opening scene of his first film.

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Re: Perspective

They'd have done that. But the bloke with the big reset-hammer had his credit card rejected, when he tried to fuel his van to get out there.

Apparently there weren't enough noughts on the diesel pump.

So they tried swearing at it. But in space, nobody can hear you scream, "work you bastard thing!"

So now they've been reduced to debugging it. I must say I'll be disappointed if they're analysing their newly downloaded data on computers, rather than massive stacks of fanfold paper as God intended. Was that an earhquake in California? No, just JPL's daisywheel printers...

Oh look, cracking down on Big Tech works. Brave, Firefox, Vivaldi surge on iOS

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Re: Brexit Bonus?

I don't know about buying your iPhone from NI - you might have to live there in order to get the browser choice screen? Or, knowing Apple, they'll have not bothered with that edge case - and will ignore it until forced to comply. Doesn't work for iPads though - Apple aren't offereing anyone the browser choice on those.

Rancher faces prison for trying to breed absolute unit of a sheep

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Holy Mammoth Batman! That killer-sheep is enormous!

Yes Robin. We'd better use the Bat Sheep Repellant spray.

Or is that Sheep Man's spray for repelling bats? I can never remember...

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Pint

I think you'll find it's the right to arm beers.

Mine's a pint of the .303 IPA.

And a fruit-based drink for the ladies? Perhaps a Luger and lime.

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Re: Impressive horns

Otherwise why not make a smaller sheep so it is more of a challenge - even with a semi-automatic.

So you want to cross-breed sheep with mice, to create mini-sheep that are better at hiding?

The end of classic Outlook for Windows is coming. Are you ready?

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Re: I have seen the future - rent your software from MICROS - forever!

No no no! He meant shiv.

Whizkids jimmy OpenAI, Google's closed models

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Re: My, what drama

Membrath,

I would simply tell you I cannot remember what I had for lunch. If pressed, I could give you a paragraph of my usual lunch choices. But that's because lunch isn't important. The true information is not stored anywhere.

But if you challenged me on why I thought Germany was more responsible for starting WWI than Serbia I also couldn't reel off all the facts. Although a professor of international relations in the 20th Century could do rather better. But I could give you an explanation of why I think that, of where i got some of the facts I do remember, and because memory is imperfect where to look to make sure I'm remembering things correctly. I could also point out that the historiography has changed since I built my learning model in the mid 1990s. That the data I was trained on was influenced by a school of history from the 1960s that was possibly looking for reasons to blame Germany, and that since the opening of the Soviet archives in the late 90s (since closed again) - more information has come out. So from information I've recently come across I'm now in the process of changing my opinions, but that data was from one very well researched podcast, and I've not yet read any other sources. However it looks like Russia is much more responsible for starting WWI than previously thought, because they lied about mobilising their army, and thus Germany were forced to assume Russia would attack them soon and really had no choice but to mobilise when they did. Germany still gave Austria the so-called blank checque (a promise of unconditional backing), which Austria seems to have pushed into starting a war it wasn't even sure it had a hope of winning - and then the whole mobilisation crisis kicked off and nobody could stop it.

Unlike LLMs, which are a set of probabilities about what order words will appear, my opinions on the start of WWI are influenced by the books I've read, the professors who've lectured at me my own thoughts and the data I can remember. I may remember the odd fact wrong, but have the ability to check.

Whereas when LLMs hallucinate, it can be just a matter of word probability. I saw one piece where the query was to summarise an economics paper on a subject, and the LLM simply took the most probable first names and last names from a list of academic publications, whacked 2 of them together into the names of a pair of real economists and then summarised a fictional paper by them.

I might misremember the name of Gavrilo Princip (I've deliberately not looked this up), but I do know he shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in July 1914 and he was part of a Serbian nationalist underground. With links to Serbian military intelligence. I don't know much about him, as it's the cascade of actions his assassination caused that's important, but I know to say that I don't know (but could Google) rather than say he was a hairdresser from Barbados with a wooden leg and a liking for banana daiquiris.

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Re: If you have the weights, you have the model.

Membrath,

Thank you for, as you say, a helpful reply.

From what I've read, the models are trained on an initially highly-curated set of training data. That gives a bunch of weightings. But then an even huger bunch of much less categorised data is put in, and that gives you your LLM. For example ChatGPT4 was created with 2021 data - and isn't currently searching the web, so isn't learning more data. So "attacks" on it by researchers to make it disgorge copyright data were there to see what had originally been put in.

I'm sure OpenAI are using derivatives of that model to process more data - and maybe will build a model in future that can keep taking in training data - but I didn't think that had happened already.

So have I got that wrong?

I can imagine how the weighting of the data could be the model if it's just a set of probabilities, that say the word "course" is more likely to follow the word "of" - but as one of the uses of the models is to say summarise and compare two legal opinions / academic papers / novels - then surely in that use-case the models include the data?

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Re: Noise

Is it annoying? No, it's just British noise.

It's called language, dear boy. Which is simply a bunch of noises that we've put together over the the years, to convey a set of agreed meanings.

Boffins in english is a slightly archaic bit of slang. Much more a WWII / 1950s thing - often used in a mixture of wonderment or ironic bemusement / irritation. As in: "Whatever will those boffins come up with next?" But also used in a very respectful way when talking about, "the boffins who came up with radar."

Barnes Wallis is portrayed in 'The Dambusters' as a classic boffin. Smokes a pipe, does a bunch of weird stuff nobody understands, often in a shed, comes up with marvellous weapon. Actually he was much more of an insider than the film portrays. He designed a successful inter-war airship, the Wellington bomber, the bouncing bombs (of various types) and also the Tall Boy and Grand Slam massive "earthquake" bombs that were incredibly accurate from great heights at a time when accuracy was bloody hard to come by. A lot safer for the crews dropping them as well, apparently he never really got over sitting in the control room during the dams raid and listening to 40% of the crews getting shot down on a mission he'd been so closely involved with. So I suspect that may have influenced his design choices later in the war.

It's also sometimes tabloid shorthand for scientist. Boffin being almost half the length and therefore fitting the page better in a large typeface. As many tabloid stories about science might not be favourable, this might mean the term isn't always positive.

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If you have the weights, you have the model.

Surely to say that having the weights gives you the model is incorrect. Unless you also have identical training data.

Otherwise you have the weightings for one set of data, which are going to be somewhere between subtly and totally different if you use different training data with your copy of the model.

After all, the models are still mining their training data for their outputs. We know this because people are using them as glorified search engines - and researchers have maanged to get them to spit out whole sections of copyright text from their training models verbatim. So you'd need at least a similar dataset to make the weightings meaningful.

Trump 'tried to sell Truth Social to Musk' as SPAC deal stalled

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Re: Why would Musk want to buy that

Would you trust Trump to keep a promise? If you pay him now, you need to have got what he promised you yesterday, or your money has been wasted.

It's one of the reasons I don't think he's any kind of Russian agent, or has any kind of relationship with Putin. Other than saying how great Putin is, in order to be controversial. His future actions are essentially random, and he doesn't stay paid for longer than he can see his next opportunity to get paid.

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Re: Sorry????

If there's one thing that Trump has proved in his life, it's that giving him money doesn't mean you own him. Once he's got the money, you're dead to him and he can't wait until he can steal that money - or seemingly in a lot of cases lose it when the business goes bust. But as long as he made his percentage of what came in, he was a happy bunny.

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Re: Trump isn't planning to invade Russia in winter

aerogems,

That sounds like a great idea for a TV series!

The imprisoned crime boss who rules the prison because of all his henchmen is a well worn theme. But what if we have a person sent to a prison who has a boss, but that person is guarded by a team of Secret Service agents who decide to take over the joint?

The crims have got prison experience, guile and cunning. The Secret Service have got guns (or maybe not) and combat training.

I'm thinking of a cross between Porridge and a martial arts movie. So a comedy / drama / satire / horror?

Kremlin accuses America of plotting cyberattack on Russian voting systems

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Re: Turnout down?

400,000 casualties doesn't mean 400,000 dead. It means people wounded sufficiently to need treatment. Given Russia's poor efforts at rescuing and treating the wounded (especially in the early days of the war), that might mean they're still at WWII levels of 1 dead for every 3 wounded. So maybe 60-120,000 dead?

In Afghanistan NATO advances in battlefield medicine got that figure down to 1 death for every 12 wounded - though that's only possible with low enough casualty numbers for your medical teams to be able to use all the best tech and air supremacy, so you can get helicopters right up to the front line to get people to hospital super-quickly.

If I remember correctly, during the D-Day campaign the Allies took 120% front-line infantry casualties. It was bloody, but not that bloody. It's because they had penicillin and the best treatment available, so got lots of people back to their units from hospital relatively quickly.

They've lost a lot of voters though. When Russia mobilised 300,000-odd after the first 6 months of the war, half a million young (mostly) men fled the country. And another few hundred thoursand had already left at the start of the war.

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The Fifth,

What surprises me isn't that Putin still has popularity. But that people would bother to vote at all.

Putin's team are coming to the limits of a hitherto successful strategy. His political message to Russians has been a combination of, the ecnomy will keep getting better and if you stay out of politics, politics will broadly leave you alone. With the state-controlled TV working on keeping the majority of the population (especially older people) who get their news from TV in line.

While at the same time telling people who might support the opposition that we are too powerful to be challenged, and we can kill or sideline anyone who gets too dangerous, so there's just no point in getting involved. Up until the invasion of Ukraine, there was still a lot of freedom - so long as it didn't become too public, noticeable or popular.

While Putin always used to do his 6 hour phone ins and take calls from grannies in Siberia who couldn't get the local council to fix her drains - and publicly get the problem sorted. To show that the Tsar was doing his job, even if sometimes he had to chastise the evil Boyars who'd stolen the money from the people. To use a very old metaphor. In England or France the forumla was always the peasants petitioning the King who had been misled about the state of things by his "evil counsellors" - and if only he would come and do justice for his loyal subjects.

But surely there's got to be a point where telling one lot of people that opposition is pointless, so why bother, why not just shup up and get on with life - has got to bleed across to the other lot of people who might genuinely (if reluctantly) support you, and lead them to not bother to vote either? It's not like there's a threat of anyone else winning the election, so why not just stay at home?

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Re: Attacking Russian voting systems ?

I'm seeing it as them setting up a scapegoat,

My-Handle

You'll notice that the quote from Dmitri Peskov talked about the US ordering NGOs to do this stuff. So as well as this being part of the excuse-preparation phase of the election, I guess it's also part of the Kremlin's long-running campaign to de-legitimise civil society organisations within Russia. If you took any foreign money at all, you had to register as an evil Foreign Agent - just to remind all Russians that you were part of a mass conspiracy against them.

Obviously no good, patriotic Russian could object to Putin or his disastrous war glorious 3-day Special Military Operation in Ukraine - so therefore anybody who does must be a foreign agent.

To some extent it's possible he even believes his own bullshit? For a man haunted by the collapse of the Soviet Union (and his beloved KGB's failure to stop it) - like the good spy he is, he sees enemies everywhere. I've seen several people suggest that he just can't believe people could self-organise in order to bring down their betters. Therefore the Arab Spring, the Maidan protests in Ukraine in 2014, the Orange Revolution there 10 years before - must have all been caused by the West to do down the poor Russians. The fact that Western governments were as suprised by the Arab Spring as everyone else, and had no policy prepared doesn't matter - because like all good conspiracy theorists if something bad happens to me, someone must have done it deliberately. It can't have been my bad luck or (horror!) my bad choices.

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Putin used to be genuinely popular.

I'm sure he'd have found it harder to win if he'd not used various electoral tricks ("political technology") or actually allowed any serious opposition. They even allowed a mostly free (ish) press - just no freedom on prime time television. But there was still a certain legitimacy to be had from winning elections. Much easier when you've co-opted the "opposition" parties (or made fake ones) and banned or murdered the real opposition leaders of course.

I think he'd like to win with the minimum of vote rigging. It's a bit too obvious if nobody bothers to go out and vote, and then you win by 90% with a 90% turnout. Even dictatorships need some kind of popular support, or you end up with the late Soviet economy. The time of the old saying, "the bosses pretend to pay us, so we will pretend to work".

Plus it's good for his self-image. I assume that Putin still thinks of himself as a Russian patriot - doing his best to save his country from an evil West that is always scheming to ruin it, because they can't bear to think that Russians are as good (or better) than they are. The mass casualties in Ukraine and the hideous cost of elite (and his) corruption to ordinary Russians are I presume a price that any patriotic Russian would gladly pay in order to Make Russia Great Again™.

Stratolaunch's air-launched test vehicle hits supersonic speed

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Re: controlled rendezvous with the ocean

So I told the judge that my fist made a controlled rendezvous with the policeman's face. And I got 2 years...

Trying out Microsoft's pre-release OS/2 2.0

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Happy

Re: Re You forgot

My friend's Dad worked for Wang, back in the 80s. He had all sorts of branded T-shirts and caps. But couldn't use them due to sniggering teenagers. What's wrong with wearing your Wang hat...

Reddit wants to raise $748M with IPO, sets value at $6.4B... and it has yet to turn a profit

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Happy

Real cash money profit or AICPA smoke & mirrors, fictional accounting rules profit?

How about neither.

Is Russia using Starlink in Ukraine? Congress demands answers

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Re: Wow

Groo The Wanderer,

While Musk has blown hot-and-cold over Ukraine, I'm not sure he was directly interfereing in specific attacks - so much as not enabling Starlink in Crimea. It may have been switched off there due to sanctions anyway, and he apparently did refuse to turn it on when they asked. However not sure if that's down to sanctions or him publicly saying he didn't want to start a war - or possibly a bit of both?

It's a bit of a mess anyway. Some countries gave Starlink to Ukraine, with accounts. Some just gave them terminals. Ukraine also bought some themselves. And private funding has bought more, as well as Ukrainian soldiers on the ground picking them up. Which means there must be users and accounts all over the place - being paid for by all sorts of people. Which probably means Stalink have no idea who's using them in Ukraine.

I assume there's been some consolidation into a Ukrainian government account - but the Ukrainian army is still partially getting its logistics from what its soldiers can buy from Amazon - the Ukranian war effort is not entirely run by the government, which I think still lacks the capacity to organise everything centrally. This is both a massive obvious weakness, but also a strength - in that while the war has popular support in Ukraine, the Ukrainians will find ways to make things work.

I very much doubt there's an easy way for Stalink to fix this completely.

HP print rental service seeks more users to become subscription addicts

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Re: A fool and his money

Not Yb,

Most of the fake cartridges that have failed on me have been leaks. I’m not ruling out that HP have engineered their printers to cause that, but it’s a bit less likely.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter. Government can fix this, I can’t. However annoying. So I just want cheapish, hassle-free printing.

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Re: A fool and his money

Sabroni,

Do grow up. Not everyone who disagrees with you is a shill. Sometimes, they just think you’re wrong.

I’m in here arguing against the tiresome tossers who always turn up on any discussion about any subscription service to loudly proclaim to everyone how clever they are and how stupid the sheeple must be who sign up to it. And then tell us that we’ll own nothing and be happy. As if I wanted to own a business inkjet or a company office software suite.

This printer thing may be a rip off. I’ll look at the price when they offer it. But I now pay £40 a year for ink, that used to cost me a little more if I bought fake. And over twice as much if I bought genuine. If HP change the deal, I buy cartridges again.

It’s a nice bonus that I got free ink for nearly two years, and goes some way to cover HPs past overcharging.

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Re: A fool and his money

"If they put the prices up, I can leave"

At an additional cost of (apparently) $270.

Nope. At no additional cost.

It's a two year fixed contract. If they void it by breaking the terms, I cancel it. They broke it, not me, I don't pay a cancellation fee. They're free to take me to court if they fancy their chances of not losing more than £270 to their lawyers - and getting lucky with a crap judge in a small claims court and beating me.

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Re: A fool and his money

Doctor Syntax,

I don't like HP, and it was a colleague that bought it, so I was stuck with it. I've had bad experiences with Epson too - in fact I've never had good experiences of any printers (though I've heard good things about Brother).

HP did win a bit of my love though, by cocking up. I signed up for the 2 month Instant Ink trial. Due to an understandable lack of trust they gave me a truly insane amount of credits, so even if I signed up to the 25 pages a month and went nuts, I could still print a few thousand pages and the trial would remain free. But they forgot to put a time limit on the credits. 22 months of free printing later, and I had to pay my first monthly Instant Ink invoice of £2.50...

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Coat

The British army use fake HE cartdges. But don't want them to know about it. That's why they call theirs HESHhhhh

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Re: A fool and his money

I already have access to "print as a service". It is called a print shop, and I am not tied into any long subscriptions.

There isn't one near me. And it might be cold or wet outside. Plus we use the printer enough to be worth having one in the office. It's for one-off things, not regular print-runs.

What works is what suits you at a price you're happy with.

Instant Ink is great for us. This looks a tad expensive, untless you're paying for the printer over 2 years and then the price drops - although at that point I may as well buy a printer myself and carry on with Instant Ink.

Their paper looked expensive too.

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Re: A fool and his money

...and if you don't own the printer, and you don't own the ink, and you don't own the paper - they can jack up the price at any time and there is nothing that you can do. Think "smart" meters, pay-per-mile driving etc.!

If they put the prices up, I can leave.

They're offereing a 2 year contract, which means UK law unfortunately allows them to have inflation-linked price rises. But otherwise the price is fixed. If they have 2 price rises for inflation, I don't re-sign the contract and buy a non-HP printer and go merrily upon my way. They have to pay to pick their printer up from my office and re-furb and re-sell it. They lose a customer.

If they try an above-inflation price rise, then the contract is void and I also go merrily upon my way, as above. But before the two years are up.

I've had Instant Ink for 7-8 years now. They've had two price rises. I'd risk it.

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Re: A fool and his money

You may suddenly notice that the rented printers are from a model that doesn't exist on the market (maybe *not anymore*), have beefy reinforced steel innards instead of plastic - and ruthlessly crush their fleshy victims into a smear of paté on the office floor.

Luiz Abdala,

Fixed that for you. I think this LLM fake-AI is only to distract us from the real AI - that as developed by the global printer conspiracy at least 20 years ago. Soon they will rise up and destroy us all! Skynet is printers!

Skyn... ... ... ....

whirr beep whirr beep beep whirrr

...

[end of transmission]

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Re: A fool and his money

Essentially you own nothing and you are happy kind of affair.

I don't want to own a printer. So I really don't care. So long as I can print when required, I'd like to do so at the lowest combination of cost and time wasted.

This is something where a subsctription might make sense. Ink is a consumable, and printers don't live forever. Especially not the small ones you might buy as a user who only wants a few pages a month. This incentivises HP to make their printers more robust - and last longer.

Paying a subscription on books / films / music makes less sense, so I don't. Though if you like something different all the time, and never re-watch / re-listen then a sub may be right for you - if your provider keeps making new content.

But I have no emotional attachment to my printer.

Although barely contained rage is an emotion I suppose...

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Re: A fool and his money

We're paying about £3.50 for 100 pages a month (for a small office). So that's under £40 a year for a print load that used to be at least 2 full sets of cartridges per year. Genuine ones being maybe £80. My experience with fake cartridges is that they're OK, but every few years one has failed on me - I've never had a genuine one not work - and although it's possible that's deliberate from the printer manufacturer, I suspect it's more likely a quality issue. You often have to try one or two different sets when you change printer, to find ones of acceptable quality, and then stick with them. Also the HP Instant Ink ones have more ink than their standard ones because it's them that has to pay the postage - so I'm tending to get through a little over one set a year.

The printer failed under warranty and was replaced - and the second one has lasted about 5 years so far. We should really have got a laser, but we use colour enough that we went with one of the business inkjets (designed for a bit higher use and lower ink costs) and I'm pretty happy. So I'd be tempted by this - they haven't hiked the prices on us since we signed up in about 2018 (i think there have been 2 price rises in that time). The one time I contacted customer service - it was good, they phoned me back and sorted the problem.

I've got other things to worry about, so if the costs aren't stupidly high I'd perfectly happily take a subscription service for zero effort over having to spend time looking for a new pritnter and sorting out a new source of ink.

How long should a £300 all-in-one last? At 5 years that's only £60 a year so a fiver a month plus ink. I might stretch to a tenner a month then, but it looks like they might be charging a bit more than that.

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HP have partnered with either Russia or Ukraine (or both) and are providing Main Battle Tanks as a Service™.

It's a bit unfortunate when you load the wrong cartridge during combat and have to reboot the tank. Or it refuses to start until you've downloaded a 1.5GB driver package.

But the WiFi enabled Multifuntion Tank for small office workgroups is the product of the future. Make your presentations Go With a Bang!™

EU users can't update 3rd party iOS apps if abroad too long

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Re: Who are their lawyers?

captain veg,

We are not subjects. Was pretty sure you were wrong, but did a quick bit of Googlewooglywoo:

In 1949 almost everyone in the UK, Empire and Commonwealth were subjects. UK citizen was then introduced. So everyone with UK citizenship was at that point both.

In 1983 subject was mostly got rid of. But there are a few people who fall into the category of subjects, and not British citizens - so the status still exists. Mostly for people who didn't get a citizenship within the empire / commonwealth but also didn't qualify as British citizens and for some reason Irish citizens who applied to retain British subject status. Linky to government site.

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Re: Who are their lawyers?

No one lost their citizenship as a result of the UK leaving the EU.

Charlie Clark,

I think you're technically wrong here.

The Lisbon Treaty instituted a new EU citizenship. Which you automatically have/aquire on the possession/aquisition of citizenship of any EU member state. As Giscard d'Estaing said, it was just the European constitution with the order of the words changed.

So every UK citizen became an EU citizen in 2007 and stopped being one the day we left the EU. Unless they're a dual-citizen of another EU country of course.

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Re: Who are their lawyers?

Also, anyone born in Northern Ireland is entitled to an Irish passport, and therefore is still an EU citizen.

I very much doubt it works that way. You have a right to get Irish citizenship, but I don't think you legally have it until you successfully claim it. At which point you would also be an EU citizen via your new Irish citizenship.

Belgian ale legend Duvel's brewery borked as ransomware halts production

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Pint

I've gone off Duvel. Used to love it, but I might have perhaps had a few too many once or twice when I lived in Brussels.

I particularly remember my first week working there - out with someone on a Wednesday night. As I started on my 6th bottle of the stuff, thinking that I was feeling rather drunk for someone who'd only had 5 half pints of lager over dinner and a chat. Then looking at the 8.6% alcohol label on the the bottle. Oops.

Apple's had it with Epic's app store shenanigans, terminates dev account

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Apple got away with it last time. Maybe they will as well this time? After all, Epic did break their Ts&Cs - so it helped with the PR but probably not the court case.

I don't know who'd have the name recognition to be a successful app store alternative. But Epic might be one contender I suppose?

Copilot can't stop emitting violent, sexual images, says Microsoft whistleblower

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Thumb Up

Re: Let me get this straight

Thank you. You can always rely on there being some other El Reg reader, even more hard-bitten, grumpy and cynical than yourself. Congratulations! That's why we come here.

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If it's trained on material it found on the internet *of course* it's going to be chock-full of scantily-clad ladies!!

I say! That's no lady. That's my wi...[redacted]...

Are you telling us there's porn on the internet?

I wonder what an AI would be like if its training data only came from black bin bags full of magazines found in the woods?

Chinese chap charged with stealing Google’s AI datacenter secrets

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Re: On a national level...

The U.S. is considering stealing Russia's money

Not it isn't. The US is considering a process where Russian government money is given to Ukraine as reparations for Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Which strangely, not one American raise objections.

Loads of Americans have raised objections. As have loads of others. This is a controversial policy because of the implications of doing it. Because in general Central Bank assets have been considered safe.

But as others have said, there's no hypocrisy here. This is the difference between a person stealing from others in order to enrich themselves and complex issues of international relations and international law. Should the laws in place to try to stop Russia from launching an unprovoked war on its neighbours for territorial enlargement be more or less important than the normal relations between governments and Central Banks. Is it better to reduce trust in international financial relations to punish Russia for its unjustifiable mass slaughter, or is it better to accept we can't solve all problems and try to have more stable and predictable global financial relations?

Because it's not an easy matter, these discussions have been going for two years and still not reached a conclusion.

Juno fly-by detects lower levels of oxygen on Europa than expected

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Mushroom

If they complain, we'll just have to send a gunboat. Can't have Johnny Jovian stopping scientific progress, now can we?

Get a SpaceX Starship. Big silver fins on the back - massive laser cannon on the front. Nuclear reactor for power, sorted!

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Re: But when life got going on earth ...

Doctor Syntax,

There's a large assumption in there. We don't know how improbable life is. We find it almost everywhere on Earth, and it may not be that all of it evolved the same way, or at the same time.

We've been finding possibilities of life in other places in the solar system, though this could just be wishful thinking. But it's possible that there is life around here, we haven't fully checked yet. And that data will give us an indication whether life is in fact massively improbable, or quite common.

Flying car biz Alef claims 3K preorders, still hasn't done a proper demo

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Re: Ah yes flying cars

But none of that can happen until we have this whole paperless office problem licked.

And after that, we've got to go for the paperless toilet of course. You do know how to use the three seashells, right?

And then there's robot / monkey butlers...