Posts by Thomas Steven 1 60 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Dec 2010
Given that the owners of most BMWs, Mercedes can't get down a Cornish lane wide enough for two cars without leaving a 1 metre gap between them and the vegetation on the left hand side, I don't think it's an American car problem it's a can't drive problem.
Imagine if your oppressive government could hoover up all of your data and all of your phone calls all of the time, have AI process it and send the nice gentlemen round to put a black bag for your head to get you off to the gulags. It would save so much manpower.
I took my current vehicle (transit connect 2012) for a service near work and was given an electric courtesy car. I drove it home and back, a round trip of 80 miles. The electric car started out saying it had 220 miles of range, and finished back at the garage claiming 60 miles of range. I handed the vehicle back and mentioned it, and the garage kind of looked uncomfortable and said 'yeah, it does that'.
Clearly when a trip of 80 miles uses 140 miles of range, these things can't be trusted. My 12 year old diesel vehicle is accurate within about 1 mile in 50 as to how much range it has left, so yeah it appears that range claims are a real concern, and that electric vehicle manufacturer's vehicles are lying about their available range. As far as I can make out there's no means of holding manufacturer's feet to the fire about this problem, so I'll be avoiding electric vehicles until there's some real world testing that's required to ensure that what your car is telling you vis a vis range is accurate.
Dave, for that is certainly not his name was working in a power plant in Taiwan on the fateful morning in question As early mornings in a nuclear power plant are quiet, the crew's management had instituted a cleaning regimen, ostensibly in the name of building team morale and keeping everyone awake. The crew suspected that much of the cleaning effort was also aimed at keeping the reactor control room looking as new as possible because the operators wanted to get their operating license, which was due to expire in 2023, extended for a further five years, and were running a PR campaign to achieve just that.
Of course what was really happening was that a bunch of tired control room operators were lacklusterly going through the motions when the inevitable happened...
Used to love my Marble FX. Had 2, then Logitech stopped making them and never produced as good a trackball since. I used to love the way you could flick the mouse across multiple screens and stop it at exactly the spot you wanted. Also awesome for FPS gaming as you could spin round much quicker than most other players and aim precisely with it. All the subsequent thumb operated trackballs produced a far less satisfactory experience IMO.
I'm a trackball evangelist too, just the best trackball ever made stopped being made a long time ago.
Unfortunately if your rottie grabs a burglar and hangs on to him by the leg for 3 hours, doing minimal damage to the burglar, the law seems to take the view that your dog is dangerous and should be put down, and the burglar gets off scot free because of his 'ordeal'. Of course your family pet being murdered in the course of its duties doesn't count as an 'ordeal'. Best to have a plan for disposing of burglars properly.
I reckon that we would have abandoned nuclear fusion research decades ago, if it wasn't for the giant fusion ball in the sky that keeps telling everyone that this technology does work. All science has to do is miniaturise it a little bit. Apparently miniaturizing what the sun does is not as simple as shrinking transistors.
Trying to disentangle the hellscape of nested selects and correlated subqueries that EF creates to figure out what it's actually trying to do, and turn it from a 4000ms horror that requires 30% of the system's entire resources to a sub millisecond query that you can show to a developer and say 'make it do that', only to be told it can't makes EF the bane of the lives of anyone who has to tend a database that's been around for more than a couple of years. EF looks like not merely a marketing tool for SQL Server, but a means of ensuring that the number of licenses required to run a given database is increased by orders of magnitude, and the costs of running a database with more licenses than it needs for years is likely to outstrip the cost of teaching developers how to write a decently optimized bit of SQL.
I suspect that the developers who use EF are long gone by the time someone operations realizes that the business is being bankrupted by their database and some poor DBA is told it needs to be looked into.
Are all the other banks equally awful, and the TSB is just the first to properly fall over?
For all anyone knows, most banking systems are held together with gaffer tape and bailer twine. TSB has had issues doing upgrades, are they just the first to try to modernize their systems, and at some point all the banks are going to have similar issues.
Politicians look at company profits
Politicians see big numbers
Politicians want to get hands on company money
Politicians can't because of the laws only politicians can change
Politicians tell company it's doing it wrong
Politicians leave law alone because they are all doing the same as big company, they're just not as good at running their affairs as big company, which is why they're in politics.
Those who can't go into politics where they shout loudly that those who can shouldn't or something
Yeah, I'm waiting for self driving vehicles. I want mine with no windows, and certainly not to front or rear, as I presume they will be millimeters apart. I want a toilet, shower, kitchen, couch and TV, and I intend to use one or all of them on the way to work. I expect that once out of urban areas nothing other than gentle braking or acceleration will be required because there won't be any idiots either pedestrian or other drivers.
I expect my commute to work, should I choose to accept it to be quite pleasant, of course, with a few other additions, I might seriously consider not needing the house.
I also expect that it will go off and get itself serviced while I'm at work, otherwise, why the hell is it autonomous. Perhaps if it can pick stuff up from B&Q and the supermarket while I'm at work as well...
Is it possible that a FRB could be an Alcubierre-White warp drive equipped spacecraft skipping through space/time and taking breaks every 15 minutes to make minimally destructive progress around a galaxy.
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/140635-the-downside-of-warp-drives-annihilating-whole-star-systems-when-you-arrive
I take issue with '...albeit against opponents whose position on diversity is to insist there be none'
Nazis love diversity.
There's the Nazis (they call themselves us)
and then there's:
There's everybody who is black
There's everybody who is Jewish
There's the Communists
There's everybody who is Gay
There's the gypsies
There's the Catholics
There's the Freemasons
There's everybody who disagrees with them
There's everybody who isn't white
I want a shower, a toilet and a sofa/bed and TV and a wardrobe.
I don't want windows.
Make my journey to work perfect.
Fall out of bed and into the car. Perform 3 Ss in car. Get dressed in car. Arrive at work.
Drive me with no heavy braking or acceleration to allow the above to happen.
On way home catch up on TV/internet
Sleep in car if necessary/fallen out with wife/car's better than my house
No, its not trivial, its their job.
If what is happening in the video isn't a crime then why are they whining about it? If it is a crime then they should be doing their job. My guess is that there is very little glory in doing your job and a whole lot of looking like you're doing something while achieving virtually nothing in pointing fingers at YouTube in press conferences.
If they did their job and then demanded the video was taken down after the miscreants were behind bars, then all well and good, or even better demanded it was taken down and replaced with a re-edited version, perhaps highlighting the characters and their fates.
'Sean Dickwad, seen here making gun gestures at Petey Arsehole, 10 years for dickwaddery',
'Petey Arsehole, here recorded saying he is going to kill Dickwad and his gang, 5 years for aggravated arsehole'
Pour encourager les autres.
Ditto extremist/sexist/racist/homophobic inciting violence blah blah blah video.
Like identifying these people from the video
Like identifying the crimes of these people from the video
Like using the video as evidence to arrest these people
Like using the video as evidence to convict these people
Perhaps showing how they use the video to identify these people, identify their crimes, secure an arrest and conviction, perhaps even in their own video. Instead of whining about videos glamorizing gang violence that they want taken down, how about leaving them up with a counter video showing how the police are doing their fricking job and rounding up and arresting the kind of idiot that makes a Youtube video like that.
Oh, that's right, the above looks like work and a proper job, whereas bitching at YT about the video being up in the first place just involves firing off a couple of emails and a press conference, about how they can't protect the children unless censorship.
I find most musicians (around 99.99999%) produce 0 things I ever care about hearing ever.
Of the rest, I believe that most will make 1-3 tracks I would care for.
I have tried Spotify and will never move off their free tier because their discovery algorithm is pants. You liked something by artist X. Other users liked something by artist X. Those users also liked Y. You will like Y. Complete tosh. I spend my entire time trying to vote off the shit tracks by artist X that seem to be the primary handle for feeding me more dreadful shite by artist Y.
If their algo worked closer to track level it might help, but I've never seen any evidence, and 6 downvotes a day may not be enough to benchmark with, but I'm not prepared to even think of paying for a crap algo.
I used to spend a fair amount of time tuning Nokia's Mixradio so it didn't produce crap, but at least it could be tuned.
Youtube can't be tuned at all, but it's about as good as Spotify without the frustration because at least it's honest and doesn't make any grandiose algorithmic claims that are clearly BS.
When I was at school 'computer whatever' wastaught by maths teachers. Unfortunately most of the time software development is about problem solving not maths (not directly). Unfortunately if you give teaching computing to maths teachers they tend to teach mostly maths'n'computers. When I was 11 I wanted to do software, so I didA levels in history, politics and english lit and a philosophy degree. Still developing software 30 years later because I didn't let some arse spoil it for me.
If I need maths I can read, and I still read more than most of my colleagues on a daily basis..
I was on £15pcm tariff with unlimited data (no idea about calls and texts as I don't use them) and they have just sent me a letter saying they're going to put me on a £30pcm tariff based on my usage. There's a £20 tariff with unlimited data and less calls and texts (which I don't use anyway).
The old plan had unlimited tethering and the new one has tethering capped at 12Gb. Not happy about that either, even if I wasn't hitting anywhere near the cap. Personally I think this seems diametrically at odds with their current advertising campaign.
My workplace already has a MiTM attack vs HTTPS installed. Blue Coat https://bto.bluecoat.com/webguides/proxysg/65/acceleration/Content/01Concepts/ssl_proxy_co.htm.
'One of the functions of the SSL proxy is to emulate server certificates; that is, present a certificate that appears to come from the origin content server (OCS). '. Oh dear.
Ironically these clowns call themselves a security company and my employer appears to have lapped it up. I guess whatever passes through this can be 'requested' by the security services and they don't have to do any work at all.
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