Posts by John Brown (no body) 24186 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010
Either the vehicles are "autonomous" or they aren't. Personally, I'd rather way more testing to happen before the :autonomous" tag is allowed for a vehicle."
Agreed. And I think that's pretty much the point of wanting some form of regulation or law mandating "safety drivers", ie to prove the system over time.
"and the simple part is handled by computers."
You raise some interesting points. Although at the current and foreseeable state of "self-driving", I wonder how they will handle an Aussie road train needing to overtake, or contend with 'roos or camels suddenly veering into the road? Or change a wheel or three on a long trip driving over washboards etc while 500K from the nearest town?
I suspect the sort of long distance trucking you are talking about might actually be the last to go "self-driving". Shorter stuff on decent roads with a proper mettled surface might work, but even there, there's still tyre blow-outs to consider, especially it hotter climes.
"and it's not yet time to reread Stranger in a Strange Land again."
Quoting Heinlein is like quoting the Bible. He changed his politics and attitude towards society so many times over his life, there probably a quote for every situation, even for opposing viewpoints :-)
Oh, full disclose, I still enjoy his books and re-read Stranger just a couple of years ago :-)
"I don't give a fuck if autonomous vehicles are hijacked and robbed."
Even the one delivering something you need? Or the prices go up because others think like you?
Or do you already have everything you need in your bunker for the foreseeable future?
"Thermite burn the doors open and grab what you can before the authorities arrive."
Thermite? Really? Any evidence that that is a common method? Most trucks are so flimsy, they can be opened up far more easily, safely and without risk of setting the cargo you are after on fire.
I did one of those company mandated health and safety courses the other day and the cartoon video had a text-to-speech audio track and apart from the "uncanny valley" of the stillted speech and unusual pause probably caused by punctuation in the original text, kept "talking" about P90's in various parts of the course and annoyingly pronounced as "Pee 90 Ess" every fucking time. It was annoying to such an extent that I wandered off and made a cup of coffee, came back and did the "exam" without watching most of the video and still passed since it's designed to be hard to fail anyway :-)
And that's not even AI, it's just following a set rules that have been poorly programmed in.
"The use cases of cabled hardware for domestic / small business are getting less and less every day."
I already have clients that have switched entirely to WiFi in the offices for the users. It's much cheaper to just put WAPs everywhere in both new build and existing offices, especially where everyone has gone open plan. No need to pay for all those extra wall and floor points to be installed that may never get used, no need to run extra cat5 all over the place when the desk layout is changed yet again etc. I'm not sure I agree, but the Beancounters are happy and Infrastructure/Facilities are happy since it's much easier for people to be moved around without expensive change requests or extra switches being hung of a wall point in an office. And all those WAPs just go in the suspended ceiling space, out of sight and out of mind :-)
It probably matters what frequencies the local mobile phone tower is using.
From what I just read, in Germany 4G ranges from 700MHz up to 2600MHz. 5G is at 3700MHz. The higher the frequency, the worse wall penetration is. Maybe you lucked out and the local tower is on the lower bands, hence the acceptable mobile signal bu no WiFi.
Chicken Song by Spitting Image. (If you don’t know what this is do not search YouTube for it.)*
Apart from it being a funny parody of the "silly summer" chart hits we used to get every year, that Top Of The Pops video is the only time you'll see Ronny Reagan on Drums and Maggie Thatcher on keyboards :-)
But since you hate it so much, I shall just leave you with a couple of hints towards some different ear-worms. Agadoo doo doo, push pineapple, shake the tree...because...There's Klingons on the Starboard Bow, Starboard Bow, Starboard Bow...
I saw that sort of thing many times back in those days, and I never could work out why they put "office" kit into that sort of environment. They spent lots of money on machines and control equipment designed to cope with or exclude those sort of containments, but almost without fail, cheaped out on the PCs. At least in the short term. When they failed, we charged for repairs, even if they were on contract because they were exceeding the normal environmental conditions. And this is the days when PCs were still usually classed a capital purchase. I did once suggest to a factory foreman that he'd not go down to the local DIY shop to buy consumer grade power tools, so why would he use consumer grade/office grade expensive computers costing 1-2 thousand with no mitigations?
I actually, did that once. I was setting up the networking and router for a company moving into the area and were going to rent an office in a shared building for the project team while their new place was being built. Except they'd not yet sent the relevant details/credentials etc to set the router up. Mobile data was still horrendously expensive or possibly non-existent at the time, not sure if I was still on an actual mobile phone or had a feature phone by then, so being stuck there most of the day awaiting the info and no external data access, pretty much had a choice between Solitaire and Minesweeper or twiddling my thumbs to keep me entertained. :-)
"Maybe a mincomputer is still down there waiting to be re-booted (after receiving its "once-in-a millenium clean").
...and possibly a quick "Millennium Bug" test too, just in case. We do all still have our testing kit/software, don't we? And a copy of the OS on 8" floppies or tapes as appropriate.
"The worst environment I encountered computer equipment was a tyre factory. Absolutely everything in a layer a black dust. Miracle anything functioned at all."
Yeah, rubber dust is an insulator, so at worst, you had cooling issue. Now, the black dust covering everything, including the insides of the PCs in an iron foundry...well, that's a very different matter :-)
Or the paper mill that despite looking all white and pristine is actually "filthy" with paper dust where I saw a printer that appeared to have some sort of carefully machined sound insulation block inside with a perfect "slot" for the dot matrix printhead to travel along. Until I realised it was absolutely rammed with compressed paper dust, the only gaps being where moving parts needed to move.
"The Weather Company is fully committed to user privacy. We comply with all applicable privacy laws and regulations,"
If they were "fully committed to user privacy", they'd go above any beyond the pitiful "applicable privacy laws and regulations" in place across most/all US jurisdictions.
The FAA only have jurisdiction over USA companies, US launches and some non-US companies who mostly or partly operate from the USA. I doubt Russia will be taking too much notice of this and China certainly don't seem too bothered at the moment and the Norks don't give a rats ass.. Some others likely will agree with the principle though, eg launches from allied/friendly nations such as EU[*], India, Japan, New Zealand, maybe even the UK if we ever get a successful orbital launch site operational.
It's nice that FAA is thinking about the topic and trying to take a lead in standards, but we've known about this issue for quite some time now so it'd have been nice to do this 10 years or more ago.
* Yeah, the EU isn't a "nation", but ESA doesn't belong to any one nation.
Let's hope it stays that way too. I remember when Usenet was hosted on servers everywhere, pretty much every University, every ISP and many, many individuals were hosting servers and peering with pretty much anyone who requested to do so and, in many cases, only hosting the newsgroups they wanted to host, eg no binaries when they became a problem. It's an open protocol, plenty of free open source servers and clients, and yet it's on life support these days, There's a few islands of sanity still hosting "text only" servers and few "big boys" running full feed subscription services.
Then again, it took many years before Usenet went from 1000's of independents to a few big commercial operators, so even of Mastodon evolves to a few "super servers" it should be a good few years down the line. Unless some "genius" finds a way to monetise it.
"The telco has records of at least who it took the call from."
The scam calls coming from out of country are commonly routed through multiple and varying systems, so all the receiving Telco knows is which telco handed the call to them and bills them or logs against reciprocal agreements. Depending on how it was routed, the originating number may no longer be attached to the incoming call, or it's injected into the local recipient telco from a VOIP system with no idea where the call originated. On the other hand, I notice the scam calls randomly come from "UK" numbers where the STD code doesn't even exist or from "local" numbers in my STD code, but on the rare times I tried calling it back, got a "number unobtainable" tone. So blocking invalid number might be an option, except where genuine overseas calls come into the UK from systems that don't present CID or calls from organisations that have broken PABXs not presenting a number, eg Hospitals and Doctors surgeries, as sometime gets reported here.
I think the only real solution is your suggestion of blocking, but it would have to be blocking the previous telco or VOIP system down the line until they clean up their act, ie forcing them to be better partners. But again, it's going to be Whack-a-Mole and BT and others are unlikely to want to block a major foreign telco.
"Sadly the spam calls"
I think it's important to distinguish between spam and scam. Most of the companies in the article are shady in their practices and have rightly been fined, but are actually offering a service. Just not a service that would be viable without the illegal spam calls. If the service itself was a scam and therefore illegal, I think we'd be hearing a bit more about that in the article and the in the fines and/or charges levelled at them.
The calls coming from the Indian sub-continent and certain countries in Africa (primarily, other countries scammers are available) claiming to be the "bank security" or "Amazon security" etc are outright illegal scams trying to get access to your bank account and steal your money. There's very little point in reporting them to the ICO because they all use fake caller ID so at best, it would just be a statistics gathering game with zero chance of any real outcome. I suppose, in theory, if EVERY scam call was reported, it might actually produce some "big scary" numbers showing the actual scale of the problem and could lead to pressure on the phone companies to block the incoming sources, but even that would likely be a Whack-a-Mole event.
True. On the other hand, there are many people out there "collecting" all sorts of shit, gambling that in the future it will be in demand and they have "originals", in unopened packaging. Same with crypto currency. Some of those few early adopters probably made a fortune out of mining Bitcoin and hanging onto it instead of selling up early. I think you are probably right about NFTs, but really, there was a chance some may have taken off in some form and that's the gamble people are prepared to take. The sensible ones will look at risk and returns and only spend what they can afford to lose.
I still upvoted you though since, yeah, the odds of NFTs being anything other than a very short term investment at the height of the hype were obviously incredibly low to almost anyone with two or more brain cells to rub together :-)
"So all local residents , and presumably his friends, were fully aware of the collapsed bridge and nobody bothered to erect a barrier or warning sign, after the failure of the local authorities and land-owner to do so?"
Possibly because they knew about bridge being gone, the posted barriers/cones/whatever had been put there, so never, ever drove down there and were unaware the barriers had been vandalised/stolen. Assuming you have a closed/blocked road in your area, how often do you drive down to check it's all still properly blocked off?
"Yes, terribly, terribly sad but honestly, would anyone be trying to blame a physical map publisher if their atlas or A to Z was wrong?"
True. I remember referring to my road atlas many years ago and it showed a dotted/ghosted road junction onto a new motorway being built in the direction I was heading. IIRC it was marked "Penning 1998" and since it was 2001 now, I head off in that direction only to find an enormous mound of sand where the new motorway junction was supposed to be. The originally mapped road was still there, but now turned off in a direction I didn't really want to go and would not have chosen if I'd know the new junction was at least 3 years late in opening. Another was the "new" road into the North end of Hull. Every road atlas for at least 10 years showed the new road as "opening nnnn" where nnnn was the year after the map was published.
Could be. The article states:
"The complaint also lists James Tarlton, Tarde LLC, and Hinckley Gauvain LLC as "Bridge Defendants" which it alleges "owned, controlled, and/or were otherwise responsible for the land" where the bridge is located, claiming that they "had a duty and responsibility to maintain" the bridge, not limited to "erecting and maintaining proper barricades and/or warning signs identifying any hazards particular to the land." These entities have also been accused of gross negligence."
But it does seem to be a a public road, or at least publicly accessible.
Your are right, but only in a small way. Google directed him down that road, that much is true, and after being closed for 9 years, Google Maps should have been updated properly, even if only to show a "temporary closure" since it's entirely possible that the bridge may one day be replaced and the road re-opened. On the other hand, the local council/authority/whatever have had NINE YEARS to properly deal with that situation by placing proper barriers there, not a few plastic cones that can be and have been removed multiple times. I'm sure even the most hard up and financially stretch rural small town council could have asked a local farmer or construction company to dump a few truckloads of "waste", eg rocks, hard core etc to block access for free or very little cost.
"Ello Tosh Got a Toshiba !"
Funnily enough, yes, I have. An ancient Tecra M11, still going strong. Annoyingly the S and Ctrl keys recently failed, but I bought a "spares or repair" one for a few quid and swapped out the perfectly good keyboard from that one. Unlike many modern laptops, it's quite easy to pull apart and replace bits, the keyboard being a 5 minute job.
"If what you say was true no one would be stealing brand new iPhones - there was even a smash and grab at an Apple Store a couple years ago. Apple knows the serial numbers of those phones, so they will never be able to be activated as a new phone. They don't have any personal data on them to steal. The only reason they would do that is to part them out. If they can't do that, that greatly reduces the incentive to steal iPhones."
You are making two assumptions there.
One, the criminals actually know they can't be activated and didn't just think it might be a good wheeze to go steal a load of very expensive and highly sought after phones because they are too dumb to realise they can't be activated.
Two, they actually DO know they can't be activated, and don't care a jot because they can still easily sell "brand new, still sealed in the box" iPhones at a knock down price to buyers who can't exactly demand their money back when they get them home and can't use them.
According to various sites, a B5 reboot is in pre-production, eg here but there's been pretty much nothing heard since, especially since the Warner/Discovery merger, which saw a lot of cancellations even of high profile already running projects, so I'm not holding my breath.
On the other hand, if it does come to pass, then I hope to be pleasantly surprised since "Series creator J. Michael Straczynski is writing the pilot and will return as showrunner and executive producer"
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