Posts by Dale 3 419 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Jun 2009
It may destroy the AI industry, but as always when one industry dies another will likely rise up to take its place. Just like making people pay for stuff before they remove it from shops completely destroyed the "not having to work and getting everything for free" industry, but it opened the way for a thriving shoplifting industry to emerge. Win-win.
No Icon so I can't tell if you're being serious or funny.
A week ago I went to the equivalent of a "public notary" in my country to get a copy of a document certified (they stamp and sign to say it is a faithful copy of the original). I didn't even show the original, he just stamped whatever I put in front of him.
I'm afraid your idea is more than "not fool proof", it is completely ineffectual.
I would value a browser which could help reduce manual steps. I don't mind whether it is powered by "AI" or an algorithm labelled so. For example, last week I wasn't able to find an existing site or tool that could "tell me what cheap advance rail tickets are available to buy from XXX station to YYY station between 8am and 10am during the months of April and May". All the rail ticketing sites required exact dates to be put in and no option to filter only advance tickets, so I had to do each day one at a time. (Answer: there were some still available toward the end of April.) Now if my browser had an AI that could take that prompt and do the necessary scraping, that would be useful. Or alternately if it knows there is already a tool someone has built to do the job it could just send me there.
Law enforcement needs strong, uncompromised encryption. Look what a success it was when they managed to infiltrate Encrochat. Criminal networks only used Encrochat because it was believed to be unbreakable. If it was known that there were weaknesses and backdoors they would have used something else. Or at least they wouldn't have talked so freely on it. When law enforcement infiltrated, it wasn't because of weaknesses or backdoors, they used other classic means, which I'm sure was much harder, riskier work, but it paid off for them bigly.
I followed the Salehpour testimony with interest, and consequently I will not be travelling on any flight that uses a Boeing ever again. It was frightening.
On the one hand you have Sam Salehpour, Boeing Quality Engineer, trained and qualified expressly to ensure quality on the planes Boeing makes. Who saw how an industry friend who was involved in the Challenger space shuttle accident struggled to live with the consequences, and vowed never to let anything like that happen on his watch. If he had any vested interest at all, which I don't think he did, it might have been to keep drawing a salary from Boeing and overlook a few minor deviations. This guy says the planes are unsafe.
On the other hand, the response from Boeing comes from their executives, who aren't quality engineers, don't build the planes, don't even see the people who do the building. Who have a vested interest in upholding shareholder value, and are probably shareholders themselves. These guys say the quality engineer is wrong, or lying.
Guess who I am listening to?
Exactly. The cheapest country supposedly is Syria ($2.15). Their average monthly broadband package is 5500 in their local currency, against an annual average salary of 149000 (according to SalaryExplorer), giving 3.7% of annual salary. In the UK the monthly average is 29.66 against annual average salary of 71000, which is 0.4% of annual salary. Even putting aside arguments about how representative the various averages may be in real life, there is still an order of magnitude difference.
The only time this list is beneficial is if you are a global traveller who earns in one currency and pays local rates for access as you go.
So their days seemed numbered yet investors hand over 105 million to keep paying the bills that their lack of revenue cannot, and this is called a turnaround? I get that the new money shows investors are optimistic, along the lines of "if we just keep them going another 12 months they will surely start producing renevue". No wonder they call it double-unicorn.
Obviously the natural progression would be for humans to simply deposit their bot representatives into the metaverse to take care of work now that our jobs are all going to be in meta-offices, freeing us from having to wear funny glasses and leaving us more time to lie on a sunny beach.
Slightly off-topic but I've always been curious about what happens to these satellites when they "burn up"? Where do they go? As in - stuff doesn't just burn away to nothing, but usually leaves some residue or ash and often exhausts toxic gases into the air. A few little cooking fires a few centuries ago didn't make much of a mark on the planet's atmosphere but after the industrial revolution so much pollution was dumping into the air that Beijing 2008 almost wasn't visible. So at the moment there are relatively few old satellites "burning up" but when the space revolution comes what's going to happen to all the metal and other exotic materials "burning up" as the latest Starlink fleet starts approaching its end-of-life?
Ah Teams... it reduces my workload... mainly because I can never find anything in it, and the time it would take to find the thing is more valuable than the thing I wanted to find, and the other guy who added the thing can't find it either so that job just goes away.
I hope the seat in front at least has something the iPad can slot into. On the one hand having it loose gives more options to avoid glare from the neighbour's window, but on the other hand I wouldn't want to have to hold it up for three hours straight given the cramped space available. And where to put it when the "food" comes?
Those numbers are likely for the current model of filling up to the top and then running down to almost empty, which we do because of the relative inconvenience of having to go to a petrol station every so often. But the electric charging model doesn't have to be like that. With charging points able to be so much more ubiquitous, cars could be topped-up just about every time and everywhere you park. Perhaps even automatically with wireless charging in parking bays (even at traffic lights?) It doesn't always need to be high-capacity high-speed empty-to-full charging.
Of course this doesn't suit every use. Long distance trips benefit from fast charges - the faster the better, but a 10 minute break every 800km seems reasonable.
I wouldn't mind a bit of lateral thinking - how about a Eurotunnel-like roll-on-roll-off train that gets you most of the way to your long-distance destination, faster than a motorway, and charges your car while you take a nap, grab a snack from the restaurant upstairs or watch the scenery go by? Eurotunnel is remarkably efficient once you get past the whole check-in and queuing bit, while at the other end you're off and on the A16 in minutes.
It is obviously not intended for public benefit, or they would have had Boris or Matt bleating about it at every possible opportunity. Not even a peep in the mainstream media, that I noticed, and the first I heard was the previous Reg article at which point I immediately went and opted out (both ways - paper and "digital", not that I should have needed to). On principle, since if they're trying this hard to not inform people, it can't be good.
Although TV "detector" vans may still exist, I doubt they are anything more than a PR exercise trading on the (diminishing) fear that it once was possible to detect emissions from TVs, maybe 30 years ago. I bet it won't be some nondescript white van trawling the neighbourhood in secret, but emblazoned with large colourful logos and driving around in the middle of the day to maximize exposure.
There could be some faintly detectable signal emanating from your TV, if only it could be separated from the myriad other devices with screens which aren't watching TV, and dozens of ways to watch TV which don't involve having a set at all. I suspect the only "detecting" being done nowadays is a bloke listening out for the Pointless countdown blaring out the soundbar or peering through your Windows to see what you're watching.
Exactly. Until there is a solution for number spoofing, none of these solutions are solutions at all.
I spent last monday playing dumb with a multitude of scammers trying to convince me my internet was about to be disconnected due to "hackers" (my favourite moment was when I asked whether I should plug my internet back in because the plug had fallen out) - the calls were relentless on monday although seem to have stopped now.
But every call came from a different, presumably randomly generated, UK number. If crowdsourced number blocking grows in popularity, eventually the chances are some legitimate numbers will start getting blocked and people will have a hard time why their phone seems not to be working although there is still a dial tone.
It can't possibly by that hard for telephone service providers to eliminate number spoofing.
The PDF list of sites linked in the article is all over the place in terms of sorting. If you're looking for specific sites, use the search facility rather than looking manually through the list or you may miss them. The list looks to be alphabetical at the beginning, but goes haywire in the second column.
Indeed! It's like the argument that scam emails are deliberately written with terrible grammar and spelling because the types of people who wouldn't notice are also the types more likely to believe they've won an email lottery they never entered, so the scammer receives fewer replies but with better chances of getting some cash out of them - it improves the efficiency of the scam.
(Sorry for going offtopic, but I'll mention this in case someone finds it useful...)
In the UK, credit cards are covered by Section 75 protection, which is a very powerful legal right. (It basically makes the card issuer equally liable as the goods/service provider so if something goes wrong and the provider doesn't deal with it adequately, the card issuer is equally liable to put it right.) Debit cards are (usually) covered by chargeback, but that is just a feature which card issuers offer, not a legal right and they don't have to honour it. S.75 protection is much stronger, which is why it's usually recommended to use a credit card over a debit card for big ticket items.
In the spirit of the multitude of "is it..." websites, would someone please build isit737max.com, so you put in a flight number and it comes back with "YES, you might die" or "NO, you're probably alright". It can't be too difficult, seeing that sites like SeatGuru are already able to identify the plane type by flight number and present the seating configuration.
I for one am in no hurry to fly any route that uses 737MAX, and will be checking before booking in future.
They fixed http://natwest.co.uk, which now redirects to https://personal.natwest.com. But they haven't fixed any of these:
https://natwest.co.uk still has the dodgy certificate and doesn't redirect anywhere else.
https://www.natwest.co.uk is the same.
http://www.natwest.co.uk redirects to https://www.natwest.co.uk, which has the dodgy certificate.
They clearly must own all of these names; I can't understand why they haven't fixed all of them. They're not even getting rid of 15% of their workforce.
Nano-batteries to go with those nanoparticles. At first, that's what I assumed. Now I'm thinking something along the lines of the mechanism of a self-winding watch. When the IR starts fading, you sweep your eyes side to side a few times to recharge. In the heat of battle there's enough action to keep it going all night.
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