Posts by Andy The Hat 2091 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Oct 2010
Love to see what happened when they blew the arse out of the eht supply ... or started generating X-rays ... Have to say that in my experience with CRT design this approach would be a very bad idea.
We used to deliberately leave long legs on stressed components to allow a bit more cooling instead of using more expensive items. But clipping willy-nilly on high voltage equipment would be plain stupid..
"Interesting that you seem to define stupidity as someone having a different opinion to you, in which case you'll probably find this report stupid as well.
Canadian Medical Association Journal: Exposing medical fraud: “one of the last taboos in society”. It even mentions the UK specifically.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3537775/"
You did actually read that article? For your information it didn't say anything about benefit claimants but did specify several general types of fraudster including patients, consultants and doctors ... or are those the types of lifestyle you disagree with?
you misunderstand, blockchain is so old hat! All they have to do is get loads of cash to pump into AI and quantum to make it work - cash baby cash! Then, with the aid of lots more "targeted investment", they hope to be able to use whatever they produce to see if it comes up with an idea of how to make fusion work. By the time this all unfolds as a house of cash-cards, the CEOs will be done and dusted, the huge "targeted investments" will be long funneled through the Cayman Islands/multiple yachts and the populous will be pinning their hopes on something still 20 years away ...
It will be called IQ and have 42 apple cores so be designated "IQ: 42" and will be the biggliest and expensiviest computator ever built. Because we're great at building com..pu-tors ... yes we are ... ours will be the bestiest ... and solid gold because the goldier the better ... and I will have have my name "President D J Trump" above it's designation in blue vinyl ... we found that peeling off another job to save the people money ... see we're saving money already ... It's fully funded and paid for by private individuals ... private people, organised by the OMB - from their donations sloshing around from a small group called "taxpayers" ... I've not heard of them, are they popular?
I don't think we need big tax hikes or targeted tax. We need the greasy-backhander loopholes in tax law closed so that a corner shop selling balloons is paying the same, proportionately, on profits as Amazon. By weedling the definition of profit (eg by claiming "IP licensing" payments to sister-companies in a tax-haven via their sister company in Luxemburg (that also pays the "IP licensing ...) are tax deductable costs) they avoid tax ... close these holes in our tax law. This initially at least is a local tax policy (isn't that what Brexit was supposed to do?) Rip up the tens of volumes of tax law-fiddles and replace them with relatively straight forward systems that were in place when Maggie arrived (she doubled tax law, Blair/Brown doubled it again ...) Fundamentally, the *people* are mandated to pay the correct tax to HMRC, if we can't understand the process it's deliberately too complicated
Speed not an issue? I'm not so sure. My machine is very sluggish and I've only got 37 tabs open ... :-)
The real issue is the crap loading behind what you need. Why have a line of text saying "done" instead of 3 concurrent animations, ten ads, five sliding backgrounds and a floating pop-up dialogue box ...?
Perhaps I'm just too old?
Assume network correctly taken down because of whatever intrusion. Fine and dandy.
We can open the barriers (that are card controlled over the network) manually ... chalk that one up. Lower security but we'll cope if a car bomber attacks us ... or whatever the expensive barriers are for.
The electronic door locks will work for a while for most people, GREAT! Unless the ones that are network linked, but you can wedge the doors open ... the fire doors ... err ... let's ignore that bit.
No network resources. In the meantime let's use good old pencil and paper! Where are the text books? Online ... Arghhh!
Ok teachers, produce something by hand on "paper" using a "pen" and hand it out. Away we go! Can you just copy this 300 times for year 10 please using the copiers that are controlled via network authentication ... bugger
Ok we'll chalk and talk, that'll definitely work. Yes even where there are no whiteboards because they've been replaced with screens ...
BTW, if there's an emergency how do we make a phone call as the school phone system is network controlled, the emergency link to the fire brigade is now down and the mobile signal is patchy at best?
What's that noise? Oh that's the expensive site-wide automatic lockdown alarm that goes off when we're being attacked by rogue agents of the "Prevention of Cruelty to Avacados" wielding mushy bananas or something. It's normally controlled by the network but we can't turn it off ... the battery will run down in an hour ... meanwhile, according to protocol, can everyone hide under the desks and lock the doors ... the doors with locks that we have sketchy control over.
Anyway, given the current Government mantra, how on earth can we do all this without access to AI?
No, it's not easy.
Can't stream video on a train ... "The on-board service also used older standards, typically Wi-Fi 4 or 5."
Wi-fi 5 is now "an old standard"? Try telling that to most wi-fi routers ...
Hell I can't stream stuff at home without a landline ... although I admit to not knowing what the actual bandwidth is of phone semaphore at the bottom of the garden to try to grab any any-G signal to send a text ...
But without someone with almost outrageous ambitions, little would happen. Just look at ESA's attitude when Musky started - reusability is a myth, overhyped and will never work, let's build another disposable launcher. It could have failed spectacularly but the point is it didn't. Now we are in the reality of Buck Rogers/Thunderbirds (pick your sci-fi age group!) style landings every week, with ESA and the rest of the world (apart from China) sucking their knuckles whilst trying to catch this idiot upstart ...
The consultancy over continuation of the UK broadcast tv service has just started. People will not realise what value it was until the aerials go quiet and they have to watch a swirly buffery thing followed by "enter your credit card details and Government ID to watch this content". Bye bye channel surfing ...
"...avoid installing apps from unofficial sources, and keep software up to date."
So google, MS, github are all ok then? At least you could tell average Joe in less than several chapters of security spiel how to recognise an "official" source from an "unofficial" one ... isn't it easier to say probably "less dodgy" and "more dodgy"?
At least we have a massive multinational producing security patches for Win10 ... but refusing to release them to the majority of those 400M remaining users after October ...
Can't help thinking that if SpaceX as a firm is fully commercialised and run on purely economic grounds to satisfy shareholders it may actually end up ruining the whole ethos of the company (say what you like, it has a vision) and take with it what is massively successful - the Falcon launch system. Over reliance on that system by those requiring launches may result in prices per launch increasing not driven downwards as has been the trend ... Great for a monopolistic launch provider but not for space launch capability as a whole.
The Government are looking to ban VPNs ... but "VPNs help protect users' location, reduce tracking and avoid IP-based profiling."
The Government want all of these things hence the reason to ... err ... "protect the children", not to do anything nefarious.
And I'm sure no future Government would do anything nefarious either.
The Government understand exactly what they're doing and why they're doing it, they just don't now how to do it politically.
"The NHS England Programme Team work with trusts and integrated care boards to understand their plans to maximise the benefits of the NHS FDP for their patients and staff, ..."
That expressly does not say "work to assess needs and produce a package to provide maximum benefit to patients and staff". It actually says "here's the FDP to use, even if it's rubbish, get what you can out of it".
... and you must not be an elected representative ... apart from the Ministers introducing this who, I presume, were not elected?
... and no journos as the job you do obviously has negative bearing on your views of this subject.
Who do these people think they are? Randomly selecting individuals after they've been sorted into the correct type ...
"As it happened it was painless for me (credit card already on file therefore assumed >18) but given there was no forewarning and the potential for restrictions if not validated, it struck me as Apple (unsurprisingly) looking after their own interests and not necessary their captive customers."
It has been mandated by the UK Government that holding a valid credit card or other over-18 system is not good enough to show that you are actually over 18. The full identity is required and that is why companies are either capitulating (Apple) or backing out (Reddit). This is nothing to do with age verification and everything to do with identity tracking and the assumption that everyone is guilty so we better get their data just in case ...
Next I predict they'll suddenly realise that biometric data being spread to the four winds without security is not ideal and suggest a way around this complete mess could be a "secure" national digital id database with age verification that could be accessed by providers ... (I can feel Tony Blair's fingers as I say it ...)
AI is not the looming Big Brother, simple age verification is.
Why is this seen as a particular issue with gov.uk? There are millions of sites that archive or deprecate pages daily, often leaving them available as reference or archive, but still expect viewers to have the common sense to read the page that's in front of them before they dig down into historic material.
As we all should know, data is not information, even if AI says it is.
Anybody who blindly trusts AI to validate what it spits out as truth deserves all they get ...
There is a similarity with art - a good artist knows when to stop.
If I asked someone to "Paint me a dog" I expect a picture of a dog with some background. Perhaps he comes in to repair it or give it a new securing coat of varnish every few years.
What I don't expect is a picture of next door's cat with my dog in the background. Then I don't expect a mandatory visit from the artist every six months to update the painting with a random collection of gerbils and have my dog mostly painted over with "AI-Robo-Mutt". Then the artist refuses to apply a new coat of securing varnish, despite Gerbil Two's tail being very flaky, because the underlying painting is a bit old ...
I may have a different view on this.
If a newspaper published this material they would be liable as they are the source of the material.
If I published false information I would be liable as I was the source of the material.
The problem for meta et al and the Government is that if I publish material on Google's site, who is liable?
There have been arguments about this for years.
If the Government had the balls to issue a decree and *either* go after the media companies or go after the individuals producing the material there would be recourse.
At the moment we're in no man's land where the government doesn't want to scare the big social media companies (think of the post-politics directorships ...) but think it's too hard to chase those actually producing the material so are just staring at oncoming headlights and doing nothing significant.
We need a middle road - the media companies should be legally mandated to take down material, not at the simple request of one individual but through a system to prevent vociferous removal claims, and then those media companies need to be providing user data to the authorities *by warrant* to facilitate court proceedings against those individuals posting false materials. If the companies claim not to be the source publishers then there are no journalistic restrictions on source data ...
I believe you can shout instructions into an AI attached smart watch ...
"Fly me to the moon"
"No, not that one, actually get me from here to there ..."
"Now land me on the moon"
"Pump, why do you need an air pump?"
"Needing an inflatable rescue dingy to ensure a soft touchdown on unknown terrain is not a general requirement for a moon landing even though Indiana Jones did it in the Himalayas."
"Yes I'm aware that there are few remaining examples of soft landings on unknown terrain so you'll have to guess ..."
"No we don't have a cheese slice."
"... or a copy of Moon Landing for Dogs ..."
"Please emulate Scott's ZX Spectrum ..."
And the Lord spaketh saying
"Praise AI for AI will make us money without providing benefit to the customer"
"but the Government will bestow us with gifts and grants to build datacenters upon the lands."
And then he whispered
"and lo, we will be paid a second time to use a real person to fix the problems the AI leaves behind."
"In the UK, at least, the government wants to get the country off its dependence on volatile fossil fuel markets that have driven up fuel prices,"
No, they want to force everyone to use increasingly cheaper to produce electricity whilst insisting on the price being pegged to an inevitably rising price of gas.
This maximises fat-cat-class profit for little effort ...
The day they remove that price constraint is the day I consider that they may be doing something sensible rather than simply greasing their own palms.
"Data in Copilot Health is protected ... including encryption at rest and in transit, ... strict access controls ... Your information in Copilot Health is not used for model training."
So it's encrypted at all times - except whilst being processed in the cloud in some country, somewhere.
Strict access controls - only those who pay us have access to your data.
The data is not used blah blah - so who's data are MS using, in an ongoing fashion, to assess and modify accuracy of the model?
Isn't this the scenario, if not the company, that most of the political classes of the world are investing in?
Citizens mandated to communicate with AI interfaces controlled by centralised AI systems and that all orchestrated by one (eg UK-KierBot Plc) AI?
As suggested, any company just providing a service (in whatever form) should run under AI as there is no physical production, just data flow. You don't even need money as it's figures on an AI's spreadsheet. Thus I believe such a company can be modelled simply as an algorithm or a data function element.
"If it works" is not the start of the problem - who controls the orchestrating AI(s) is the main issue. This is a vision of Big Brother under construction.
