Posts by John Brown (no body) 25376 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010
"The problem anyway is not your age - but how you approached technology."
This. In conversation with a lady the other day, taking about tech and the 'net in general, her attitude was "well, I'm 60, how am I supposed to know about all this stuff". I pointed out I was only a year younger than her, did O level and A level Computer studies at school and have worked with computers all my life. She was shocked and spluttered something along the lines of "did they have computers back then?"
It suspect, for my age group, it very much depends on what jobs we have done over the last 40 years. There's many jobs that don't use computers at all and people never come into contact with them. At least not knowingly. Many deal with computers on a daily basis but don't realise it because they use "appliances", eg cash registers, stock look ups, bar code scanners or any of the many other computing items that people get shown how to use but never really associate with computers and technology.
"No one is required to use Facebook,"
No, but it's heading that way in some case. Sometimes it's the only feasible way to contact a company or some parts or services of the local Council. You can, of course, still phone them and wait for hours in a queue before having the call dropped, or go really old school and write them a letter, crossing your fingers that it's a) delivered at all, b) gets to the correct department and c) they don't just chuck it in the bin and pretend they never even got it.
Having said that, I don't have any social meeja accounts and never have. My wife does use Facebook and has used Twitter in the past and haven;t, as yet, reached in impasse with organisations insisting we use Facebook to contact them.
"Incidentally, can someone please explain exactly what 'Wire Fraud' is as it seems to be used to pad out any white collar case as a way to shove extra years on the sentence."
IIRC, it's to do with committing fraud "remotely" over the telegraph system rather than in person. It now seems to cover the use of any type of communication system, so unless you plan to defraud someone purely by standing in front of them and convincing them of something, pretty much all fraud is "wire fraud" in some form or another. A single related email or SMS could be enough to add the charge of "wire fraud" to normal, run-of-the-mill fraud. Somehow, to the general public, it "bigs up" the charges and makes it seem like a worse crime. Similar happens in the UK where it's common to add "conspiracy" charges, eg theft and conspiracy to steal. Again, it sounds worse, especially to a jury, although in this case, conspiracy is actually the lower charge since conspiring to commit a crime and then not doing it isn't actually a crime in most cases and very difficult to prove unless things have been written down and/or equipment and materials gathered to enact the crime.
On the other hand, here in the UK, the CPS will usually throw away most or all of the lessor charges as a waste of time since sentences are usually served concurrently making it a waste of the courts time to examine 15 different charges and all that relevant extra evidence when the one or two main charges are likely to be enough. The US seems to prefer the idea of consecutive sentences and punishment rather than rehabilitation, so multiple charges and multiple counts of the same charge is what they tend to go for resulting in longer sentences, sometimes far in excess of any human lifespan, let alone the likely lifespan of the person being incarcerated.
I wonder if a large part of keeping it going isn't so much their embarrassment, but NOT pursuing Lynch would be an admission of their own lack of due diligence thus opening them up to being sued by the shareholders. It's all about the money and in particular, who shoulders the blame.
"Do we actually import disguised trash, so countries that manufacture it and put on Amazon don't have to use up domestic landfills?"
Reggie Perrin made his fortune with that business model back in the 80's
"It is unlikely that an 80s BBC chat show was regularly interviewing celebrities in Hollywood two hops away. Most of the time they'd be elsewhere in the UK, where it would be a single hop up and a single hop back."
In the 80s, it's not very likely they'd be using a sat link inside the UK. Far more likely to be bonded phone lines specially set up for the "event".
"There was no video encoding in the 80's. The world was analogue back then, live and immediate. Double hop satellite feeds were often needed, ie. Europe to right coast US, then another hop to left coast, then another two hops to come back again. So, yes, easily upto a couple of seconds on a broadcast video feed."
Not to mention standards and framerate conversion. Depending on the time period, which end did the conversion, and which technology they used, it could easily have added another second or so in each direction,, eg scanlines going via delay buffers used as "memory" and then read back into the destination frequencies etc.
"Can anyone remember if fully wired NTL even came with a router?"
Yes, they a;ways supplied a cable modem right from the start. No security built in, no router facilities included. As for your own security, if this was your first ever internet connection, then yes, you may have no security at all. But if you were upgrading from dial-up, surely you had some sort of defences already on your PC.
"As he was... I'm struggling to feel what the appropriate amount of time is - it feels too short at a gut level, but he's age being under the responsibility threshold should count towards some mitigation"
"Last April", he was a minor, when the crime was committed. But he's since turned 18. He's bloody lucky, in that respect. On the other hand, he's old enough to drive, old enough to enlist in the military (but not be sent to fight until over 18), but he's still legally a minor with little to no sense of right and wrong in the eyes of the judiciary.
Maybe there needs to be a sliding scale for mid to late teens in terms of judicial punishment rather than a hard and fast cut off point between child and adult. After all, it's just an arbitrary point set in law anyway. People are different and mature at different rates. Gangs in particular are aware of the age 18 cut-offf and deliberately use their younger members where the risk of being caught is high.
On the other hand, because people mature at different rates/ages, can even a sliding scale work? It's more likely need someone independent to carefully judge the maturity levels and awareness of reasonability in the convicted offender.
"Celebrate them all - I just struggle to see what blue origin have been doing - they have been around two years longer than SpaceX and are yet to send anything to orbit.""
The difference between BO and SpaceX seems to be methodology. BO are more NASA like in going slow, testing everything and making sure they are ready for a successful launch. Bare in mind they are scaling up New Shepherd to make the orbital launcher New Glenn. Although New Shepherd, in and of itself, seems to be a dead end, purely for sub-orbital tourism jaunts and science missions.
SpaceX have gone the alternative route of build it and see if it works. Fill it full of telemetry instruments and when (not if!) it fails, learn from what failed and build another one and do it fast on a production line. They appear, on the face of it and from current evidence, to be the most successful so far.
Yebbut....producing that amount of liquid hydrogen and oxygen takes lots of energy. Even if it's done with wind and solar power, those windmills needs lots of fibreglass and concrete, solar panels use highly pollutant generating materials production.
(Yeah, I know, amortisation of pollution if the windmills and solar panels last long enough, the point is few people actually look at the entire chain of events to produce "clean" fuel)
Under EU and UK legislation, it is. Well, maybe not a felony as such, but it can incur some massive fines if they can't come up with a very, very good reason for not disclosing it.
"What happens if we fail to notify the ICO of all notifiable breaches?
Failing to notify the ICO of a breach when required to do so can result in a heavy fine of up to £8.7 million or 2 per cent of your global turnover. The fine can be combined with the ICO’s other corrective powers under Article 58."
I wonder what kind of capacitors they use? Standard electrolytics can dry out and fail over time here on Earth in normal atmospheric pressure. I wonder what happens in near as dammit zero pressure? I'd expect a standard electrolytic would just explode, or at least leak very early on. I'm guessing the boards are encapsulated at the least.
"The only thing discarded in a shuttle launch was the fuel tank. The solid boosters were recovered and re-used."
The problem was the amount of effort and cost of refurbishing the boosters and shuttle for another launch. Musks launchers appear to need minimal cost and refurbishment (if any!) to make ready for another launch which is the vast majority of the cost savings.
"The governments of Cymru, Scotland and (amazingly) even NI seem to have a natural aversion to killing their citizens."
I've found it particularly informative to watch Nicola Sturgeons announcements, almost always a day or so after Johnsons, and almost always, just that little bit different so as to show she's her own woman and "independent" while basically doing the same thing.
Spot on. But that's why the graphs showing death rates normally have a line showing the "expected" number of deaths based on previous years averages. The excess deaths above that line are the concerning ones. It has peaked, multiple times, at alarmingly high levels.
For those still in denial, suppose a normal week you expect 1000 people die and that equivalent week during COVID, 9000 die, then yes, 1000 of them would have died anyway but there's still 8000 more people who dies who would not otherwise have dies that week. They may have underlying issues that would cause them to die next week, next month, next year, or maybe they'd just die at the "expected" average age. Once COVID is "over", we might expect the average death rate to drop because so many people ill with other things died much sooner than expected.
"But where there's low risk or very mild symptoms in a population, then science should ask pointed questions about relative risk. So vaccination benefit/risk in a population that's at very low risk from the actual disease you're trying to protect against.. Especially if that 'cure' is also risky. So we have people with weak immune systems at risk from the virus, and strong immune systems potentially from the vaccine. One of the rules of medicine is 'first do no harm'.
The risk getting the virus is orders of magnitude higher than the risk of debilitating side effects from the vaccines. That's the relevant question about "relative risk". Asked and answered. By scientists.
"So a scientific approach would be to wonder if 'case' actually has any real meaning.. Especially given the longer a virus is in the wild, the more infections you'd expect to see, so the more 'cases' you'd get. If those aren't translating into admissions.. what does that suggest?"
"Case" does not equal "admissions". Never has. Here in the UK, "cases" have been ramping up significantly these last few weeks. Luckily, thanks to high rates of vaccinations, the hospital admission rates have, while showing a similar shaped curve, is lagging and much, much lower than the equivalent pre-vaccine waves. The death rate is even lower because the vast majority of "at risk" people have been vaccinated. But, there are still 10% of hospital admissions ending up in ITU, better than the pre-vaccine days of 20% going there. Luckily, 10% of a much lower number.
My neighbours daughter is a senior nurse in the local hospital. She's watched people die of this. It's getting busy there again now. They are worried. More so now that almost all restrictions have been lifted. They are hoping the peak will be reached soon because so many are vaccinated already, and fall as sharply as last time, reducing the rate of admissions and hopefully, because of vaccines and new treatments, hospital stays will be shorter.
"Then read what you wrote again and ask yourself why."
Two main reasons. Little was know at that point and few if any places had stocks of masks and the last thing needed was for large portions of the public to be ordering masks that the hospitals needed.
Medical advice can change based on circumstances and changing knowledge. That's how science works.
Sorry Facebook, but I don't care your response in unprecedented or not. Clearly it's not enough. If you can't manage your own systems and userbase through lack of resources, then you need top spend some of your $billions on more "resources". Setting your techs to tweak some algorithms isn't working. You need more people actually responding to complaints and actively monitoring known disinformation spreads. After all, Facebook claims to know so much about their users (and everyone else), surely Facebook knows who the prolific misinformation spreaders are.
"And finally, there are people out there that cant be vaccinated, not out of some stupid belief, but because medically they're either allergic to something in the vaccine, or their immune systems are already damaged and cant withstand the vaccine."
Living in the most infected part of the UK, cases still rising rapidly, on so-called "freedom day", I know people who until recently have been cautiously venturing out but now are terrified of going out for exactly the reasons you stated. They *can't* be vaccinated and *DO *NOT* want to be near people crowding together without masks.
"I call that Darwinism: if some are too stupid to believe some nuts theories, then Mother Nature found a way to clean the pool of their genes. If people refuse to gezt vaccinated and die, that's now their own problem, not the one of the collectivity."
I work with someone who's entire job is diagnosing and rectifying faults. Something that requires a logical mind and decent thought processes. He's good at it, so it's not just luck. And yet he's down the "conspiracy theory" rabbit hole, with no signs of surfacing any time soon. No amount of persuasion or facts will counteract all the "facts" he's found online.
He did point me at one site, so I had look. It referenced other sites. which referenced more sites, sometimes back to the first site. I actually tried to find the reference source material, and for most of the routes I followed, I ended up in circular references. "Everybody" is saying the same thing because they are all using each other as references, sometimes three or four steps away from each other. You simply can't find the start of a circle. No matter where you start travelling, you always end up where you started.
"But the more tests, or overly sensitive tests, the more contacts, the more pings telling fully vaccinated people to quarantine themselves.. Which doesn't really make much sense."
You raised far too many points for me to waste my time refuting all of the poor ones (the majority IMO) but no one has ever said that any vaccine is 100% effective in protecting the recipient from catching a disease. Some are highly effective, but not 100%. Most will reduce the risk, often significantly, of catching the disease and more so, will reduce the symptoms for most vaccinated people, but again, there's no 100% guarantee.
"Once goes off the rails due to a problem (broken wheel or track?) and the 2 others slam into it because they couldn't detect the other robot being in their way?"
I don't remember what caused the previous, bigger Ocado fire, but maybe their insurance will now mandate retrofitting of collision sensors to all of their robots. After all, they should be able to re-route around a broken down robots,, minimising the effect on production.
"The drives will probably still be intact and the data read pretty easily."
Assuming they even had hard drives, did you click the image for the larger version of the pic showing the final result? They looked pretty damn flat to me. Even disk-on-a-chip type SSDs quite probably got flattened or crushed by other components or the case being flattened on top of them. It looks like they spent quite a lot more time than the short video clip making sure everything was flattened as much as possible.
"Stupid publicity stunt."
If they had just sold them on, would anyone else have heard of the action taken? Probably not, IMHO. Police are supposed to try to prevent crime, not just deal with it after it's happened. This has driven the message home around the world, not just to the locals.
Of course, it's just drive the remaining miners further underground :-)
It's rather annoying that every fucking app that needs updating thinks it's OK to put a bloody great window over the top of whatever else is running to remind you that you simply MUST spend some more money with them. I'm sure there must be some less intrusive methods available. In particular, this is an instance of a corporate app so it's probably expired across their estate. There's no need whatsoever for the users to be informed. There's nothing they can do about it. The responsibility (and the blame!) lies with whoever is responsible for maintaining the corporate licencing.
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