Posts by mantavani 81 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jan 2010
Part of the reason why Concorde made its way from the drawing board was that the contract penalty provisions were sufficiently tight to prevent either the French from Francing or the British from Britishing. We chose to throw our domestic rocketry into the scrapheap to compensate, somehow the French kept theirs.
I profoundly disagree with 'big brother' gatekeeping of the variety being rolled out in Aus, but you're absolutely right that these platforms have grown to think of themselves as above the law, exploit everyone by design, and are sorely in need of regulation. The 'think of the kids' approach is just shuffling the deckchairs on the Titanic.
Given that these companies are bigger and more well funded than your average nation state, and the US has gone completely Tonto, is any regime agile enough to bring the sector to heel?
In Aus 16 year olds can register to vote, though voting is a right that can only be exercised at 18. This social media ban blocks under 16s. Mature political discourse isn't something that happens magically - so there is an argument that first-time voters will be disadvantaged by a lack of exposure to the national debate if that debate is largely taking place online. Of course, you can also correctly argue that many adults aren't capable of engaging in mature political discourse either.
“The report cites National Institute of Standards and Technology research that fewer than one percent of recognition attempts produced a false positive or false negative - considerably better than many biometric identifiers.”
You’re assuming that the bounds on the statistics are composed fairly rather than in an attempt to flatter the system (what is the case definition and what counts as pass:fail), and you’re not comparing like with like - in the TSA’s use case they already know who you’re supposed to be.
Even then, if they’re quoting ‘less than 1%’, it’s probably around 1% otherwise they’d say so. A 777-300 seats almost 300 passengers. Assuming 1% for both false positives and false negatives, they’re misidentifying 3 people on one flight alone. How many passenger movements are there through the likes of JFK? That system has to be failing hundreds to thousands of times per day.
And God forbid you’re one of the poor souls subject to a false positive.
Union are not alone in pulling the shrinkflation trick (you think it’s a 1kg bag but actually it’s 700g), which is annoying but the coffee’s not bad.
Big fan of Divine up in York, reasonably priced and good quality (though all coffee prices seem through the roof recently). Try their ‘darkside’ if you like a darker roast.
https://divinecoffee.co.uk/
I have a personal policy of avoiding reliance on Google for anything, given their toddler-like propensity to get bored of something and wander off. I had a Nest system before it was absorbed into the chocolate factory and was very happy with it, but when I last moved house there was no way post-buyout that I was going to go the same route - and lo, I was vindicated…
If you’re travelling in from the US, you are very much throwing stones in a glass house, there.
“The Supreme Court ruled in 2014 that warrantless searches of people’s cell phones violated the Fourth Amendment. But there’s one exception to that rule: searches that happen at the border. The courts have held that border searches “are reasonable simply because they occur at the border,” meaning in most cases, CBP and Border Patrol don’t need a warrant to look through travelers’ belongings — including their phones. That exception applies far beyond the US’s literal borders, since airports are considered border zones, too.”
https://www.theverge.com/policy/634264/customs-border-protection-search-phone-airport-rights
If GCHQ are interested in you enough to want to eavesdrop on your comms, and you don't have the resources of a nation state behind you, you are essentially f***ed. This is about catching things in the dragnet rather than highly targeted, people-heavy surveillance and intelligence work.
And who is to say that at least one of the big agencies around the world hasn't already fatally compromised your encryption method of choice? It wouldn't be the first time. There's a reason the likes of NSA and GCHQ employ so many mathematicians and practical physicists. RSA had already been invented by GCHQ in 1973 years before Rivest, Shamir & Adleman got around to it, a fact which only became public knowledge in 1997.
I would agree that we shouldn't use radical words when they're not called for as it devalues them to some extent. I was struggling with what label to apply, but I think Ian Dunt has it right in his latest Substack:
The F-word is always difficult. It has two meanings.
The first is objective, on the basis of certain attributes. These are hard to pin down because fascism has no intellectual substance, but generally speaking it would have most of these qualities: a love of violence, a hatred of the out-group, a narrative of victimhood which usually takes the form of a conspiracy theory, a myth of national renewal, contempt for socialism and to a lesser extent liberalism, a belief in totalitarianism, total obedience to the leader, conformity, and the complete submission of the individual to the group identity.
Obviously many of these qualities are not present in the rioters. There's no particular reason to think they want totalitarianism, or total obedience to the leader. Indeed, there is no one leader to conform to really, it's all very diffuse. But enough qualities are there to authorise the use of the word fascism. And honestly, that's not even a particularly controversial view. If you see skinheads doing the Nazi salute while conducting racist attacks, that's a fascist you're looking at right there. No point wasting brain energy on settled disputes.
The other meaning is subjective. It's about the extent to which we need to hit the emergency alarm and say that we're seeing something particularly dangerous happening on the right. It's a word to wake people up, shake them by the collar, and shout: pay attention to what is going on out there because it's some pretty dark shit. This criteria was also satisfied this week.
You don't have to call it fascism. But if you want to, that is a perfectly accurate word to use.
https://iandunt.substack.com/p/putting-the-far-right-back-in-the
Really amazing that STS-93 made it to orbit, and Chandra along with it, at all. A billion-to-one coincidence that a serious electrical short occurred at the same as the engine issue, accidentally mitigating it and preventing what should have been a squeaky-bum-time contingency abort. Worth reading about!
You're assuming this system is idiot-proof, which is to underestimate the ingenuity of idiots. I have auto cruise on my car now, and occasionally despite being set at the correct motorway limit trundling along quite happily at 70, I'll pass something the upsets it - my favourite being a truck with Euro km/h speed limits, and as my car has a lot of pickup NOW YOU'RE DOING 90 MPH. Best bit is it tells you this on the dash with a graphic flash, and as we're visual creatures that's what pulls your attention first. Now I expect it every now and again I can catch it but it'd frighten the life out of my mum.
The adaptive cruise makes a reasonable stab, but using it on country roads results in my wife telling me I'm driving too fast (although it knows what's coming - hills, bends, roundabouts - I find it overestimates safe or at least comfortable cornering speeds) and occasionally misses posted limits. And I think lane assist hates cyclists and parked cars. But at least if you brake in your ID you know you're charging the battery rather than wearing out the brakes. Don't you drive in single-pedal/regen/B mode? In any case with all these assist features making our lives easier the main hazard I find on very long drives these days is the possibility of falling asleep due to complete boredom.
I remain to be convinced, because the signposted limit is not necessary the safe limit, and people who were 'just doing the limit' quite often get themselves and/or others killed. I suspect that people of the OP's mindset are the kind of people that I frequently follow doing 40 in a 60, and continue doing 40 through the 30, and yep, still doing 40 out the other side.
In any case, my current VW - which has the detection kit if not the annoying beeping - is not apparently capable of recognising the 4 miles of national speed limit on the way in to town, thus pissing off everyone following if I try to use the 'smart' cruise (its useful on motorways, but surely no-one is ignorant of the limit there). Meanwhile, the lane assist frequently tries to get me to turn in to parked cars or other obstacles that I'm passing courteously. It's the opposite of helpful. I've yet to have it properly correct my road position, yet if you turn it off, it's back on again the next time you start the car.
> Tesla CEO Elon Musk says his truck will one day be able to cross bodies of water, including rivers, lakes, and even seas, as long as they aren't "too choppy."
It’s probably not the look he was going for, but I’m picturing Jeremy Clarkson trying to cross the English Channel that time in a Toyota Hilux.
Here on planet Earth, sales of ICE cars peaked in 2018, and globally BEV and PHEV sales are more than healthy with EVs accounting for around 1 in 5 cars sold. In the US alone, to the end of 2023 the market grew by just under 52% compared to the previous year.
The challenge for US and European car makers is indeed their profit margins, but in the sense that the sunk costs in their ICE programs mean easy money in the short term. They make plenty on EV sales, just not quite so much, however they also know that if they don’t pull their fingers out they’ll have their long term market share lunch eaten by the Chinese. That’s why the US administration is talking of 100% import tarifs. In the domestic Chinese market, most EVs are currently cheaper than their ICE counterparts.
The Hertz sell-off was as much about pie-eyed provisioning and more importantly serious management issues with the Tesla fleet (that lack of model-year consistency really bit them hard), and even then only represents less than half of the overall Hertz EV fleet, which was previously 80% Tesla. Their stated aim is to continue, perhaps slightly more cautiously, with other brands.
Your infrastructure issue is going to be heavily dependent on where you live and what you think a long journey is of course, but around these parts that hasn’t really been the case since the early adopter wilderness c. 2016 (I take my hat off to those of you who have been doing it longer than that). We didn’t start off with gas stations on every corner either.
Sources:
https://www.spglobal.com/mobility/en/research-analysis/us-ev-sales-grew-nearly-52-in-2023.html
https://ourworldindata.org/electric-car-sales
https://electrek.co/2024/04/22/global-ev-sales-are-robust-more-than-1-in-5-cars-sold-in-2024-will-be-electric/
https://www.motortrend.com/news/hertz-ev-fleet-sale-tesla-report/
It’s a tale as old as Microsoft.
WhatsApp is really the ‘good enough’ Meta kingpin, in the UK & much of Europe at least. Hardly anyone under 35 bothers with a Facebook account these days. It will be interesting to see how the space develops, hard enough to prise my kids away from Snapchat. Perhaps these natural generational firewalls are good things.
It’s not and never has been a horse tranquilliser. It’s a dissociative anaesthetic. It’s used for induction of anaesthesia in vet medicine because its cardiovascular side effects - or lack thereof - are beneficial when you’re knocking out 600kg of horse. You might have it yourself if you’re involved in major trauma for the same reasons. But that’s not the same as no side effects, and as people who have used it recreationally might be able to testify there can be psychological implications. This is beyond Michael Jackson territory (who was misusing propofol, another anaesthetic).
Although Serif lost their way for a while I’ve had nothing but positive experiences with Affinity, and their reluctance to adopt the SaaS model is to me an absolute breath of fresh air. The discount offered to v1 users for the full v2 suite cross-platform license was IIRC 40%, which isn’t bad, and there are pretty regular 25% discount offers, but I’ve yet to upgrade from v1 as it still works fine for my needs.
You mean this letter of the law, Apple being the gatekeeper?
"The gatekeeper shall not degrade the conditions or quality of any of the core platform services provided to business users or end users who avail themselves of the rights or choices laid down in Articles 5, 6 and 7, or make the exercise of those rights or choices unduly difficult, including by offering choices to the end-user in a non-neutral manner, or by subverting end users’ or business users' autonomy, decision-making, or free choice via the structure, design, function or manner of operation of a user interface or a part thereof."
https://www.eu-digital-markets-act.com/Digital_Markets_Act_Article_13.html
No, it was Nokia they killed stone dead, in handset terms at least, and while I've considered Sailfish (and even Ubuntu Touch when it was still a thing), without that critical hardware and app ecosystem it's always going to be more niche than niche. Apple and Google's bipartisan stranglehold seems inevitable now but it was surely as much accident as investment. Parachuting an MS exec in to Nokia to kill of anything that wasn't Windows Phone was a huge tactical error even before it was clear Windows Mobile was unlovable, and who would have thought Blackberry would drop the ball as catastrophically as they did.
The common cold viral complex has hundreds of representatives of various species, many of which are poorly understood. Four principle coronavirus species were previously known to infect humans, hence 'novel coronavirus', then 'Severe acute respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus SARS-CoV-2'. It's misleading to group it/the subsequent variants together with the common cold viruses. Whales and kangaroos* are both mammals, but a marine biologist isn't going to be all that interested in the latter. Well, maybe if one unexpectedly turned up at sea.
I should be very careful with the blanket claim that infectious agents tend to evolve towards reduced virulence. It was a reasonable hypothesis when suggested in the early 1900s, and it has been shown to be so in a limited number of cases such as myxomatosis in wild rabbits, but it rests on a number of assumptions that either don't at all, or don't necessarily hold true for covid-19. Rather than me drone on, have a look at the open access paper below.
Essentially, 'endemic' doesn't mean what people would very much like it to mean.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10066022/
Kun Á, Hubai AG, Král A, Mokos J, Mikulecz BÁ, Radványi Á. Do pathogens always evolve to be less virulent? The virulence-transmission trade-off in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Biol Futur. 2023 Jun;74(1-2):69-80. doi: 10.1007/s42977-023-00159-2. Epub 2023 Mar 31. PMID: 37002448; PMCID: PMC10066022.
*despite what Stephen Fry said in that episode of QI, grrr.
Apollo Applications was one of the most innovative, forward-thinking, what-can-achieve-on-a-shoestring programmes of the whole period. What else are you going to do with a spare S-IVB, stick it in a museum? ;) still, it's amazing that any science was done given the damage inflicted during launch.
The landing queue was quite a sight this morning, lights as far out as you could see as soon as the noise restrictions relaxed, even for Heathrow it seemed busy. Fortunately we arrived from the US bang on time courtesy of Delta, the equivalent BA flight was four hours late departing, I assume because of the knock-on from inbound flights being delayed - not that BA can moan too loudly, given their own recent IT track record!
He didn't say he trusted Apple, just that he trusted them more than Google. I make the same judgement. Admittedly the spectrum of insitutions more trustworthy than Google is vast. It's unfortunate that it's essentially a binary choice between the two if you want to be able to use things like e.g. banking apps.
Colour me completely unsuprised that a civil aviation administrator operates in a (small-C) conservative, risk averse manner. Given that we don't have an easy several thousand km of sea East of us to soak up prograde launch failures without too much trouble, and that airspace access has to be co-ordinated with multiple countries, I honestly think the CAA has done its job pretty well. Still, moaning about the local regulator works for SpaceX so why not everyone else too; Space Forge knowingly put all its eggs in VO's basket despite it being an essentially unproven launch option - increased rapid uplanned disassembly risk is therefore part of what they had to have accepted prior to launch.
Personally, I can't wait for Orbex and especially Skyrora to get their act together. The engine powering the latter's XL has much more successor-to-Black-Arrow feel about it; though if you want some John Scott-Scott love*, his influence lives on through Reaction Engines Ltd and the Skylon spaceplane.
* as a boy Scott-Scott carried bell jars of peroxide home on the school bus to build model rocket engines using bic biro tubes as injectors - when he joined Armstrong-Siddeley's rocket dept they worried there had been a security leak. He was part of the Black Arrow brains trust. What we could have had if people like him had been allowed to achieve their potential.
Apply the same logic to Apollo, which was also science fiction until it wasn’t anymore. Musk is the mouthpiece and the funds, but the quiet engineering skill at SpaceX is breathtaking.
The UK remains the only country to develop and then voluntarily relinquish an autonomous space access capability. That programme was for its day every bit as impressive as Falcon. For all the problems with his Muskness, the engineers need someone to facilitate rather than squander their genius, as happened here. Perhaps he has a place after all.
Where would Reaction Engines be now, if we were a country that could actually nurture and grow science and engineering talent, rather than just pay lip service to it?
That’s easy to answer - humans. Greater than 75% of emerging infectious diseases are of zoonotic origin, but it’s human interference in animal ecosystems (deforestation, intensive & factory farming, population growth) that exposes us to these threats, and we’re but we’re the only species capable of bridging them them into a pandemic.
Car companies & their heavy machinery compatriots do sadly do a lot of those things. Google 'right to repair' together with John Deere, or Tesla, or the the Alliance for Automotive Innovation (an industry ground backed by Ford, Honda, Hyundai, and GM that spent $26million in Massachusetts alone trying to gerrymander that state's proposed RtR legislation) - it's not just an IT problem, it's a problem of shortsighted narrowly-focussed corporates who know the price of everything and the value of nothing, jealously guarding their fiefdoms within regulatory environments that do little or nothing to contain them let alone protect the consumer.
It's a really obtuse toggle, too. When it's on, the hint text is 'Ask when a site wants to know when you're actively using this device', when it's off this changes to 'Block sites from knowing when you're actively using this device'.
In other words, you could easily hit the toggle because you think you are turning the block on.
And thus comes the whole right to repair argument. We bought a used Audi some years ago - it did not come with satnav installed, but installing it took approximately ten seconds on the dealer's computer. BMW are experimenting with renting out features now, while Tesla do all they legally can to stop you modding your own car, bordering on extortion (it'd be a shame if you lost access to the Supercharger network, right...).
