Posts by John Brown (no body) 25427 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010
"Better public transport"
The biggest problem is no one wants to run loss-making or low-proft routes. This is what "competition" has brought. You can only ever have a consolidated transport system so that the highly profitable routes can subsidise the remaining routes. Then you have to remember that, even during rush hour, not everyone wants to travel from a suburb to the centre. Buses which don't travel to/from the centre as their only objective tend to wind and wander all over town, taking ages to get from one place to another. Often the ony option is to oin the crowds heading for the city centre, then change to another bus to get to the part of the city you really want to get to, such as office/industrial/shopping parks.
"Tesla can get that kind of "awareness", only the addition of visual sensors is required."
"only"???? Yeah, I'm sure that Tesla owners will be impressed by having to glue extra cameras all over the car, then drill holes and run wires down the insides. No, wireless cameras won't cut it either. Power issues.
"out-of-date limits database."
I don't believe Teslas as they exist today, will ever be self-driving. They rely too much on the surroundings matching the data. Data on road networks is always out of date and Teslas don't have the full 360o "awareness" that will be required. After all, it relied on a database to know the speed limits and not the actual posted signs. My SatNav gets regular mapping updates and it still doesn't know all of the speed limits on all of the roads.
"The fact that not a single UK city has even started looking into such things (whatever they say, it's my job to know what they're doing, and believe me, they're not) speaks volumes about the entire self-driving car project."
Considering the financial position most Councils in the UK, is it any surprise that no one is spending time or money, let alone paying for feasibility studies on something which doesn't exist yet. At least it shows they aren't wasting money on chasing the AI/EV self-driving rainbows. Many are, on the other hand, looking at ways to curb the numbers and type of vehicles in city centres due to pollution concerns and the threat of a big stick from central Gov.
"The scam in the program was that a couple of "likely 'uns" had bought a couple of uniforms and were stopping motorists and "fining" them for various traffic offences."
I just caught an episode of Autobahn on tv the other day. German Police have credit/debit card machines with them to take payment at the roadside. I wonder if there's an issue with fake police there?
"3. Does Hastings get time off his sentence for not being very good at impersonating an officer?"
Judging by the description of the car and colours of the flashing lights, I suspect he knew the law and was attempting to create plausible deniability but once drawn in to conversation by his "victim", fell into the trap of either having to admit to being a private citizen or lie. He chose badly. I would guess that most civilians, on assuming he was a cop, would have slowed down as told and then felt relieved that they "got away with it".
I think the real concern is how well trained the officials are in the likely unreliability of the facial recognition. If a human witness calls in and says they think the saw a person who matches a wanted poster, pretty much every law enforcement official knows to treat it with suspicion. They are taught in basic training that eye witnesses are unreliable so they will go in knowing they probably need further evidence.
But few will have had training on machine facial recognition. They will only have the information produced by the marketing people and what they see on TV, where, of course, it's almost instant and always 100% accurate. This could well lead to going in far more heavy handed because the suspect has "definitely" been identified. And that's before we even start looking at the large numbers of false positives where innocent citizens are stopped and questioned out of all proportion to the numbers of suspects identified.
Here in the UK (and I assume elsewhere) the Police employ a few "super recognisers", people who seem to have an uncanny ability to recognise a face months or years after seeing a photo of them just once. They'd love more people like that on the books. But I wonder what the results would be if they placed one of these people next to one of the Met Police Facial Recog Trial CCTV vans an compared the results, having both got the same "watch list" to check against?
Sometimes monitoring and/or alerts are missed or mis-configured too. I got sent out to a data centre to swap an HDD for, erm, a well known World-wide Payments system. The HDD was obviously part of a RAID. It had two hot spares, one of which had already failed over correctly to replace the faulty drive. All good so far. But when I got there, as instructed, called the admin who flashed the LED on the faulty drive as per procedure to make sure I got the correct drive (obvious anyway as it was the only drive with a red fault LED showing rather than green ready/busy), I mentioned that there was another red flashing LED, this on one of the two redundant PSUs. Cue a short silence followed by the tappity-tappity of a keyboard and a "Are you sure? There's no logs or alerts showing". They sent me back the next day to swap out the PSU and confirmed the logging had reported the swap out correctly.
"somebody had the balls to stand up and get counted, so congrats to him.""
That's one of the prime tenets of the GDPR. Early and honest reporting goes a long way to minimising any potential fines. Not reporting a breach which is later revealed can significantly increase any potential fine.
"So we had to find and buy a caddy type CD-ROM drive. "
Why? Was the caddy glued shut or something? I remember CD drives being introduced. The first one I played with was about the size of a VCR. I never saw one where the CD was permanently installed into a caddy though.
As it happens, I have an IBM branded single speed SCSI CD-ROM drive which takes caddies. It used to be plugged into my Amiga 1200 with the DataFlyer SCSI interface, chained after the Zip-100 drive.
"So my history was pretty narrow. But then I either learned about Pompeii from reading books, telly or latin lessons. OK, that last does make me sound old..."
I learned about the Krakatoa eruption in Maths :-)
The teacher was giving us a mnemonic for trigonometry, SOHCAHTOA, which sounds like Krakatoa but some/many of the class didn't get the reference, so Maths turned into history for about 15 minutes.
"I think I mentioned it on here a couple of weeks ago,"
In that case, it's entirely possible that your post is what I was remembering. In which case I was reposting hearsay as fact and possibly spreading fake news since there's only your recollection of hearing the story as proof! But I do often delve into the more obscure parts of the Beeb news site and may well have come across the story there too.
Anyway, whatever, I read it on The Internet, so it must be true :-)
Don't be so sure about that.
I was reading something the other week, on the Beeb website I think. Not sure, because it wasn't all that important to me, just passing some time. But the takeaway from it was a comment about film reviewers going to see Apollo 13. The older reviewer mentioned that the young Radio One film critic mentioned that she was on the edge of her seat watching the film, wondering how it would turn out.
"somewhere in the deep and dusty corners of UK law there is the presumption of innocent until proven guilty."
I'm sure you know this and it was just a brain-fart, but the operative word is "unless", not "until". "Until" presumes guilt, they just don't what of, yet.
"For machines with more "expensive" looking prizes, it should really be obvious that the pay-out rate will be lower than 1 in (cost of prize) / (cost of go)."
There is (was?) one of those grabber things in the corridor just outside the entrance to the Gents (and on the way to the Ladies) at Wetherby Services that had Mobile phones and handheld console games (Nintendo?). I never saw anyone try it. Ok, I was only ever in there a couple of times a week for 5 mins, but usually happened to be calling in on my past about during the lunch rush. I dread to think what the odds settings must be for a "win" on that machine!
"a couple of lottery tickets is cheaper, for those as don't drink (yes they do exist)"
Of course you can. But the odds are much worse if you didn't stake something on an unrealistic gamble. Not impossible of course. There may well be a rich relative who just karked it and left everything to you but the odds of that are probably worse than winning a lottery jackpot :-)
"At 16 I left school with few qualifications. My first job was as a "key boy" in a large amusement arcade in the seaside town of Morecambe. 80 hours and £20 a week."
You was done over good and proper! I started my first job in 1977 too. Part time, because I stayed on into 6th form. 20 hours over Sat and Sun at the local swimming pool for a take home of £20. Four times what you got for sitting on my arse all day handing out and collecting towels in the Sauna suite :-)
It makes you wonder just what happened though, Since GDPR, data is supposed to be siloed in the EU for EU residents. You'd think FB having issues in one area would only affect users in that area or people requesting the data from that area. But this issue seems to have affected FB and friends worldwide at about the same time. Did they roll out an update across all the bitbarns worldwide? Or is it that everything is actually authenticated, served or routed through some central bitbarn? (Was it actually the NSA that had issues and not FB? </tinfoil hat mode>)
"If my memory serves PageMaker 2.0 even came with Windows bundled."
Almost. If you had Windows already installed, then you just installed Pagemaker. But if you didn't have Windows installed, you had to run the installer from the WindowsRT disc (RT - Run Time). Just enough of Windows to let Pagemaker run.
Ventura Publisher did the same with a GEM run time environment.
"The restoration work on a world record breaking boat has ground to a halt,"
Maybe you just worded it badly, but it didn't exactly grind to a halt. It's finished. Still needs regular maintenance of course, but the no more restoration.
But yeah, trying to refurbish a Vulcan engine just to stop boredom creeping up on them....
"A friend of mine had a grandfather that, as a child, travelled by stage coach to the west coast of the US, and he also saw a man land on the moon."
My own grandad vividly remembered the newspaper headlines announcing the first powered flight by the Wrights. He also saw the moon landings and took a trip on concord.
Yep, this is pure profiteering. Even worse is that this time it's targetted at mainly non-profits and charities.
There's no good reason to remove an existing cap or to increase it beyond the levels need to run and maintain the system. If anything, domain name systems should be getting cheaper. It's mainly an automated system.
"Alas, my boss has banned me from using 'Let me google that for you' links in communications with customers. I suppose I see his point, we do get to charge them good money for me to explain simple things to them."
PAYG customers. Be polite, do anything they want, and charge for everything.
Contract (all you can eat) customers: Spend time educating them so they call less often.
"Ya just gotta love the Old Testament. Blood and guts all the way."
Yep, Yahweh was just one of many gods they worshipped back in the day. Basically the god of war for a bunch of wandering nomads. One day, one of them got a message from Jehova telling them he was now boss god and not to worship any other god., hence all the blood and gore in the rest of the Old Testament. Everything after that is PR.
"Economically he is doing pretty good for the US"
I was looking at some graphs on the Beeb news site the other day. It had pretty graphs showing all the usual metrics for the health of a countries economy and pretty much all of the metrics have carried on steadily in the direction they were moving since Obamas time in office. Which is interesting considering his aim was to destroy everything Obama did. What it looks like at a cursory glance, is that Trump has done nothing but maintain the rises and falls, despite his posturing etc. There's no sudden drops in unemployment or rises in wages that were not already happening. It's almost as if either he's a lot less effective than he portrays, or others, behind the scenes, are keeping things on track in spite of him.
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