Posts by I ain't Spartacus

Bots don't spread fake news on Twitter, people do, say MIT eggheads

Re: The truth is usually complex

Compared to the newspapers of a hundred years ago todays all news is an utter disgrace.

You cannot hope to bribe or twist,

Thank God! The British journalist.

But, seeing what the man will do

Unbribed, there's no occasion to.

There is no mythical golden era. The press has always had good bits and bad bits - and now is no different. Journalism has pretty much always been under financial pressure too. I'd say it's always been true that people are more interested in human interest and sensation than they are in boring old politics. So if politics can be reported to have human interest and sensation, then it will be more popular. But I think that only lasts a bit - and then people get sick of it and decide they're all corrupt unprincipled bastards. Because now all they're reading about is scandal, because they're still not reading the boring stuff about policy - they're just reading politics reported as star gossip. Politics as showbusiness for ugly people...

I think the internet has done quite a bit of damage to journalism. Firstly in that it's bollocksed up the income stream even more than normal. Hence doing less expensive journalism and more cheap churnalism (lightly re-writing PR and putting it out as your own stories). But also in the complete metrics editors can see of what sells. Before the editor could tell the money-men that although a picture of Dianna would put 50-100k on the Sunday paper's circulation - there still needed to be real news in it too, or sales would plummet like the Express. But now the money-men can tell exactly which stories get the most clicks and can delude themselves that they don't need an editor.

An "alt-left" type like The Canary actually pays its journalists by the number of clicks they get on their articles. So if you write a boring political story with a headline that says what's in it - you'll go hungry that night. So it's full of the worst clickbait type bollocks - or at least was the last time I looked at it.

Re: Choosing to believe...

The odd thing is, I have always maintained that I can't choose what to believe, rather I am either convinced by the evidence or other persuasion, or I am not. That's not a choice.

David Nash,

Confirmation bias isn't a conscious process.

We all weight facts for reliability to some extent. And if you think the facts on the other side of the argument are less reliable, you're move likely to discount them. Unless you're spending serious time on trying to research something - in which case you're hopefully doing a lot more of your reasoning consciously.

So if I don't like some evidence, and it happens to be sourced from the Mail, the Torygraph, or increasingly, the Guardian - I'm much more likely to dismiss it with minimal consideration. Of course I should go and look up the provenance of said "facts", but life is short and so I often don't.

I'm willing to change my opinions, although I'm not perfect and so am rather more likely to wait a few weeks to do so, even if I'm convinced by someone in an argument. Who likes publicly admitting they're wrong? Although it's partly also that I try to be slow to take on opinions in the first place - and not go with my gut feeling - so at least I've got an excuse to be slow changing my mind.

Target practise...

Retweet or I start playing the banjo again

Feel free. I'm armed.

FTFY

Does Parliament or Google decide when your criminal past is forgotten?

Re: Didn't CRB/DBS blow the RoA away anyway ?

Also DBS can come with advice.

I know of a case of someone who was on the sex offenders register, not for offenses against children, and so the police official advice was therefore to still allow them access to children under the normal chaperoning rules that are already in place for theatrical productions using kids. As that person wasn't deemed a risk to children.

I'm not sure whether they had to ask for that advice specifically, or whether it came with the DBS results - though I believe that to be the case.

But at least with the DBS system there's the opportunity for responsible disclosure and an attempt to use reasonable risk assessment. With Google you can just avoid all wrong-uns. At which point we get no chance at rehabilitation and higher re-offending rates.

Re: thoughts

The internet does not forget currently, due to its design. Because Google choose to show spent convictions. The information exists and nobody is suggesting changing that. This is all an argument about the ease of access to that data.

Basically Google have become a monopoly and a vital public utility. That means they're going to suffer regulation of what they do - as what they do becomes increasinly important.

To make up for that pain, they made nearly $17 billion last year - almost all of it from selling adverts against search results. That profitability will fall a bit. I'm sure they'll cope.

Enough to find the miscreant

That's why they do it. The press all whined about super-injunctions, but it was entirely their fault. Judges would put on reporting restrictions for perfectly good reasons in cases. So the press would loudly shout enough info that you could just go and look stuff up, then when the info was all over the internet go back to the judge and say, "look guv everyone knows anyway, why can't we publish now?"

Hence the reporting restrictions get more and more onerous.

This is in some ways a similar situation to the right to be forgotten thing. The info on spent convictions has always been around if you needed to search for it specifically. But wasn't generally available to everyone without effort. Similarly there's always a certain number of people with connections in the media/law/politics who know this sort of stuff from gossip. So if you drank with those people, then you also knew lots of juicy gossip/scandal that didn't make the papers for weeks/at all. The internet makes it easy for the press to drop a hint, and people can go off for a quick google and find stuff out.

Where there's public interest, like the Guardian outing Trafigura I'm fine with it. But in this case there's an ongoing court case to decide the very fucking issue - and so it's rather distasteful.

It'll be interesting to see what the judge will do. As business fraud might not count as private life. But I don't see why people shouldn't have a right to have a go at the courts in relative anonymity, and we can all shout how they're a wrong-un if they lose. A bit like giving alleged victims of blackmail anonymity, as otherwise the blackmailer wins even when they lose.

ESA builds air-breathing engine that works in space

Re: Imagine speccing that "wind tunnel".

A chickpea and baked bean vindaloo, 15 pints of real ale, and a kebab chaser should do it.

Re: Imagine speccing that "wind tunnel".

And the real landscape gardeners have to keep shouting at the engineers-turned-landscape gardners, "Green side up!"

"And stop laying that turf with a bloody hammer!"

British military spends more on computers than weapons and ammo

Huh? £1.2 billion still buys an awful lot of practice ammo.

The MoD employs between 100-200k people. You'd expect them to have a lot of IT to do that. And that's just the general stuff to do payroll, accounts, HR, email, spreadsheets and the like. Espeically as this bollocks number is for IT services - so includes the salaries and leccy to run the servers, as well as the replacements. Presumably we also have to include some computing for more nefarious uses - and expensive communications stuff.

Meanwhile they only spend £1.2bn on weapons. And yet spend more than that on "shipbuilding". Excuse me, but doesn't spending £6bn on 2 aircraft carriers count as new weapons?

Also they spend more on aircraft than IT or weapons. But what is a fighter plane?

So we could say the MoD spend more on computing than ammo. But then we're not in a major war, only using limited airstrikes on ISIS.

Were I feeling malicious I might describe the piece as a bit clickbaity, telling us little that's meaningful.

Half the world warned 'Chinese space station will fall on you'

Re: I live in the northern US

Seller feedback:

**

Item was delivered on time and matched description. But caused me to grow a second head and develop x-ray vision.

Re: Just an idea

Well they stopped using it 3 years before they lost control of it. So they could have de-orbited it earlier. Assuming it had the fuel of course.

Re: Hit the US?

I doubt we have a missile that can do much to it. The US have used an SM3 to kill a malfunctioning satellite, but that is a big box of bits. This space station is basically a big empty tube. So a small warhead designed to fragment and hit anything it gets near to, is just going to make holes in it. Like shooting a big rubbish bin with a shotgun. It'll let the air out, if the thing's still pressurised, but might not do much more.

The Chinese have also blown up a satellite. But the bigger the warhead you carry the smaller or slower your SAM is going to be. So as you don't need a big warhead at those speeds, you're unlikely to want to design a SAM that needs to be the size of an ICBM in order to lift its own warhead.

'A sledgehammer to crack a nut': Charities slam UK voter ID trials

You don't need a policeman if you've got counters from either party, watching each other. But sadly party membership is down - and so they don't have the people to do this anymore. Will be interesting to see if Labour can maintain the Corbyn surge in membership, and whether this might start to have an effect on Conservative membership. The SNP got a big membership boost too, after losing the indy referendum.

Also, when was this day of policemen at every polling station? I don't ever remember seeing the police when I've voted. Though I've only been voting since the early 90s.

I read a new thing about the Italian system yesterday. They have a constitutional backup for when an election goes wrong, such as this one, and leaves them with little reaslistic chance of a coalition forming. The numbers are wrong - without some very strange bedfellows. Re-running the election is expected to yield the same result. In Germany they re-formed the grand coalition for the same reason.

But in Italy they have another option. The termporary government. Often lead by technocrats it's there to keep the lights on, pass a budget through Parliament and do as little else as possible. But it's often expected to one other job, pass a new electoral law in order to come up with a new voting system that hopefully will give a different result at the next election so they can actually form a political government.

Of course the last government lost its PM (Renzi) and its popularity holding a referendum on chaning the electoral system. After it had already abolished the previous one - so they couldn't resign and hold an election as there was no law in place to run it under. It took 18 months to agree.

I think the Italians may have changed their electoral system in the last 20 years as many times as the UK has held elections...

Beebs,

It's a feature of constituency size. Labour's are on average smaller.

Because we have a first-past-the-post system that can play very differently on overall population votes per seat. Labour under Blair got a 60 seat overall majority on 36% of the vote in 2005 (with the Tories 1% behind), Cameron in 2010 missed a majority by 15 seats on 37% of the vote (with Labour 7% behind). Those figures are from memory (I'm lazy) but they're broadly correct.

Obviously if we had a proportional system we wouldn't have these problems. Although they create their own little wrinkles themselves. Such as say the German FDP having I don't think ever got more than 10% of the vote, but having been in government solidly from the 50s to the 90s - in coalition with either the SPD or CDU. FPP makes it easier to get rid of people you don't like, to "kick the bums out". PR gives a fairer chance to smaller parties, and leads to more coalitions. Pick your poison...

Re: Democracy

As Churchill said. Democracy is the worst system in the world, apart from all those others that have been tried over the years.

Clearly if we could make Vetinari tyrant - we'd all be reasonably happy. Apart from mime artists...

Are we talking smaller in size, or in population?

Smaller in population.

Labour get more seats on fewer votes - on average.

The effect has reduced over recent years because of the electoral disaster in Scotland. Where Labour were regularly winning most of the seats until the SNP took a dramatic lead. But is also true of their English seats. I think recently it's been because suburban seat (more Tory) population was rising faster than city centre (more Labour) population.

As part of England trying not to dominate everything quite so much, Scotland and Wales had many fewer voters per constituency in the past. Getting them a disproportionate number of MPs for their population. Though this was corrected somewhat after devolution. Which is why Scotland has dropped from returning 70-odd seats to the mid-50s.

It's not hard to fake a utility bill. I remember in my first days sharing a student house, having to knock up a fake bill - because we'd been in the house for too short a time for any to come yet.

Clearly though we couldn't live without a telly and video, and so had to rent one by day 2. And they needed that bill. I think it was an insurance company that I chose to be...

I wonder if you can still rent TVs?

Re: 44 allegations

Check both lists, is the name crossed off on both? Yes or no. If yes, voted twice. There is only a single case of this having happened. 1 case.

Well there's only asingle case of it being shown to have happened maybe, but that doesn't prove anything. As it's a check that's not normally made.

Not that I suspect it's happened all that much, as it would mean travelling to two polling stations in different towns on the same day. Or going to the trouble of getting a postal voting form for one (or both) of them.

But given we don't run regular checks on this, you wouldn't expect many cases to show up.

If there is wide scale electoral fraud, it's much more likely to happen with the postal voting system. Where it's much easier to carry out. Relatively easy to steal all the votes of people sharing a house for example (as well as some that have since moved on).

News lobsters demand to be let back into the Facebook boiling pot

Re: "...inadequate, commercially, socially and journalistically," said Murdoch

He's taking a swing at altmedia, not "fake news" per se. And it's hardly surprising: Breitbart is by far the biggest, most professional example and they are in direct competition with Fox News. If it weren't for them, I doubt he'd care.

Carpet Deal 'em,

I'm not sure that's true. Murdoch's been complaining about Google and FB hoovering up all the money from news organisations for ages. Plus trying to fight the idea that news online must be free. OK, self-interested of course. But self-interested in the sense of all his media properties surviving, rather than just an interest in protecting Fox News from Breitbart.

Fox News is the bogeyman, but he still does plough money into his papers that make losses - and when they were hived off out of Fox into a separate publishing group - he set it up with lots of cash to keep it going. Literally billions of dollars he could have used on say, buying his own island.

So, as I said, he's willing to spend serious amounts of money on journalism. Some of it even proper (non-tabloid) journalism. And people who no longer work for him say that he's still an old newspaper-man at heart.

Re: Rupert Murdoch says?

Murdoch actually pays proper journalists, to do proper stories. As well as his tabloid stuff and Fox News. So while you might not like him he's above Facebook in the pecking order of decency.

Then again, so's amoebic dysentery...

People sometimes click on the links, even though they might think it's bollocks, in case the story is true.

My new year's resolution (made in about August last year) was to stop clicking on obvious click-bait. In that case it was Brexit stories in the Guardian, where they'd just sourced a quote from Guy Verhofstadt (who's been trolling the UK media ever since he became an MEP at least a decade ago) - and ran it as a story with a PANIC BREXIT DOOM headline to get the clicks and comments rolling in.

I've since stopped clicking on any Brexit stories in the Guardian, and follow it elsewhere - because I no longer trust them on the subject. Which is a shame, because the Telegraph is over 90% bollocks at this point, the Times is behind a paywall and the last time I looked at the Independent website my eyes started bleeding. Where did they get that font from?

Re: "...inadequate, commercially, socially and journalistically," said Murdoch

I fully understand disliking Murdoch. And he does a lot of shit. But he also does pay good money for proper journalism as well. I think because he started out as an old-school newspaper man. So he funds the loss-making Times for example. Probably out of sentiment. That's real money (£10s of millions a year) that he could be spending on monkey glands, yachts or trophy wives).

So just dismissing what he says because he's Murdoch isn't a good way to argue - or even sensible.

This is a problem with dismissing ones political opponents as evil, without considering that sometimes they may have a point.

[Hmmm. Better put the flame-proof trousers on after this post I think.]

Re: Leave it

Wasn't it Ford who pulled their ads on Facebook for that very reason a few years ago? They said that it was low value advertising for them anyway, given it was just brand advertising and unlikely to lead to purchases. And they worried they were damaging their brand by sticking ads for it next to the shit ads that Facebook still populate themselves with when they can't get better.

Apple's new 'spaceship' HQ brings the pane for unobservant workers

You can get IR-blocking glass. Lots of modern buildings have it - because the architects do just love glass.

Heaven forfend you should be able to actually read your screen when the sun's out. Far better to have uninterrupted views of the cityscape!

Relatives were in a rather posh bar in Hong Kong. It had just been re-done by some funky designer. Low lighting of course, as any self-respecting penthouse bar should be.

Meaning that the hotel have to employ staff to guide you out of the lift, as you can't see what's going on when you first get there. And more staff because there's a diagonal step running the whole length of the floor, which can't be seen as the floor is shiny black on shiny black.

I'm presuming Disaster Area's ship-designer just keeps on winning commissions...

10 PRINT "ZX81 at 37" 20 GOTO 10

Re: Burn-In

I went from the ZX-81 to a Vic-20

My mate's Dad had bought a ZX81 to play around with. But my older brothers pooled some birthday money to get a Vic-20 - so that was my first real experience of regular computing. Their next was an Amstrad CPC464. Happy days.

The great thing about the Vic-20 was you could get some games in cartridge form and just plug them into the back, so you didn't have to wait for tape loading. Luxury!

Re: The best thing about the ZX81...

I got the Amstrad PCW8256 in the late 80s. It came with two spiral bound manuals, each an inch thick. One was just for Mallard Basic and how to code it. The other was a sort of general how to use the computer and the Locoscript word processing and (basic) spreadsheet software that also came with it. So it started you off with how to turn the thing on and reboot, then how to creat "start of day" discs so that it would boot into the software you needed with the right data/templates/setup - and also so you didn't wear out your original media. Then how to operate the software, and what other stuff you could do with it, and how to operate the printer.

Amazingly good resources compared to what you get nowadays. And far superior to be able to look stuff up when something's going wrong - although nowadays you can fix so many problems by whipping out a tablet/phone and google an answer if your PC isn't cooperating.

I'm told that I wasn't so respectful of this great material as a teenager. I remember fixing a family friend's in his office. He was desperate because he'd hit print on a document he hadn't saved. Oh noes! Something I'm lazy about now, but wouldn't have dared do then. It was a 37 page (why do I still remember that from nearly 30 years ago?) quote for a £100k job - that he really didn't want to have to re-type and re-calculate. He tells me I walked into the office, he gave me the manual to help me, and I chucked it into the bin and said something I probably thought was witty about that being useless.

Ha! Teenagers! I remember reading the manual when I got mine, so maybe that was my teenaged self being an arrogant arse, rather than an ungrateful arse?

Yes, I remember those RAM packs - and they got very toasty warm. As well as being wobbly.

I'm deeply insulted by the comment about only simple games. I remember playing a whole Harrier Jumpjet simulator. The graphics were amazing.

Future supers pop up on $636m cash wishlist to get exascale beasts prowling on US soil

My poor caffeine-starved brain

I clicked on this article first-thing this morning, before ingesting caffeine or engaging brain.

Firstly I read "future supers pop up" - And immediately my thoughts were on some new scientific process to create superheroes.

Then I read, "$636m cash wishlist to get exascale breasts" - and went through all kinds of mental gyrations.

Before the sanity chip kicked in and I was able to parse the headline properly.

Just how many Bulgarian airbags can one purchase for $636m anyway? And how large is an exascale one? Just how many flops can it peform?

...ah the wonders of the human mind...

Boffins discover chemistry that could have produced building blocks of life in space

Re: DNA

Does it have flavoured flowers that you can suck on when feeling hungry?

Facebook regrets asking whether it's OK to let adult men ask underage girls for smut pix

It's the favourite of Google and Facebook et al. A nasty algorithm did it, and ran away.

Re: how would "the real internet" handle the following

I thought all the girls on the internet were either 14 year-old boys or FBI Agents...

Or as the saying goes, "On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog."

Re: A,B,C,D? Surely the answer is always E:

...unless of course you were unaware that you can't commit an act of violence based on a suspicion that the person you just attacked might have committed a crime

Dredd wasn't a documentary?

Reddit 'fesses up to just a little Russian reaming

Re: "Trade wars are good, and easy to win"

Well trade wars are easy to "win". For a given value of win. Push tariffs up high enough and your companies survive and employ lots of people. Course they might not export very much, and their products might be shit and over-priced - but that doesn't stop you calling it a win...

Sysadmin left finger on power button for an hour to avert SAP outage

I suspect they were foolish enough to be honest. "Person has made error is holding button we must reboot." So people act slowly. And argue.

If they'd said, [clickety excuse-o-matic clickety] "NASA has reported an incoming solar flare - we expect to lose computer performance in 8 minutes emergency shutdown and reboot to solar-wind hardened crisis mode." Maybe they'd have had more luck.

Or they could have just said they had to reboot to reverse the polarity of the neutron flux...

Fancy owning a two-seat Second World War Messerschmitt fighter?

Re: question

Jemma,

Do the Secret Service read this august publication? Jemma. Jemma?

Re: 1969 film

I believe the huge airforce thing is true.

They used a bunch of contemporary planes for fliming purposes, becauase they were the same speed as the fighters / bombers.

They had a couple of B17s, because they were the right speed and also because they had lots of gunports that you could mount cameras in. And there was space for equipment and people - and they could be in the middle of the action.

For the ultimate shots though (two fighters closing head-on), a B17 wasn't suitable. As it would be in the way, and crashes are bad.

So they built themselves a gimballed steadycam equivalent. And slung it on a long line dangling from a helicopter above the fighters. With cameran dangling of course...

So he hung there, in mid-air, with a fighter flying straight towards him at several hundred miles an hour. Filming and dangling and swaying and waiting for the pilot to fly round him.

Balls of steel...

Another day, another meeting, another £191bn down the pan

Re: Sports Direct had a point :-)

Was it Shell who removed all the chairs from their meeting rooms and got stand-up tables?

Sure you make people attend a 4 hour meeting, but good luck getting them to stay all that time if they have to stand.

I suggest a further wrinkle to this plan. Power the projector with a running machine. That way nobody will have the breath to speak for more than 15 minutes while boring you to death with slides.

It's like Dilbert. When I were but a callow youth, someone introduced me to it and I found them only mildly amusing.

Then I went to work for a US multi-national - and suddenly agreed that Dilbert was incredibly funny.

His first job was working for (pre-CA) Computer Associates. Who definitely had Catbert as their HR director. Which is why he found it funny first.

Re: Missing the point

Wrong! Meetings are also an excellent way to get a free lunch. If scheduled correctly. The really good ones even have doughnuts...

Flee for your lives!

Did anyone notice that there is now a thing called:

Meeting governance technology

Turn to item 4 on the agenda. You have 20 seconds to comply!

Surely the Rolling Stones gag was worth the entry price alone?

Particularly as the entry price was £0.00.

Re: The simple rule of corporate meetings...

Am I allowed to sleep instead? Those projectors don't half make the room cosy, and what with the fact the curtains have been closed...

I'll be in the corner over there. Nudge me if I start snoring...

Hypersonic nukes! Nuclear-powered drone subs! Putin unwraps his new (propaganda) toys

Re: Mutually Assured Destruction - MAD @ I ain't Spartacus

I think you have forgotten about Grenada. An ex-British colony which suffered a coup by communists.

Don't think so. Again, did the US annex the territory of Grenada? Nope. They set up the old government which held elections and then left.

Notice how the Iraqi government told the Americans to leave, and they did. They then invited them back again later after losing all that territory to ISIS.

I didn't praise US foreign policy in my post, sometimes they get it right, sometimes they get it wrong. But the point is they aren't doing it to annex territory.

The post below yours reminds me that NATO annexed Kosovo. Which is odd because they... erm... Didn't.

Note how Germany are still happy to have US forces based there, 70 years after they were part of the post-war occupying force. But nobody wants Russian forces there.

Not many countries do. I suppose the Syrian government do - but then they use nerve gas on their own people.

Re: Penetration

Appropriate, as Putin likes blowing his own trumpet...

Re: Great CGI show, I must admit - but how credible is all that?

How do you pull a 100G turn without the missile breaking in half?

If you're in your final approach and the warhead has separated, then that's a different matter. Assuming they're planning for warhead separation of course.

Re: Oh you guys!

Archtech,

Laughing at Putin is exactly the right response.

Partly because it pisses him off.

Also because he's the one who's deliberately trying to be scary. And he's the one sulking because he was on the losing side of the Cold War. Because his system was both evil and rubbish.

Worrying about the threat Russia may or may not pose is something that's worth doing. Panicking, not so much. We're in NATO, so we're obliged by treaty to protect the Baltic States and Poland. We should either pull out of NATO (or kick them out) and admit we don't want to do that, or we should take our obligations seriously and so deal with the perceived threat.

Putin's problem is that he seems to want Russia to be perceived as a threat (as important) - but then whines pathetically when people do see Russia as a threat. Well ya can't have it both ways. And that's another good reason to laugh at him.

Re: Bond Villain

That can't be true. Otherwise one of these announced projects would be a monorail...

Spotify wants to go public but can't find Ed Sheeran (to pay him)

No. Blame Spotify. And Google. They're the ones making the revenue based on other peoples' work - and doing their best not to pass any of it on.