Posts by Thesheep 106 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Oct 2011
The amount of effort spent on this is astounding. There was 1 (one) conviction following the general election in 2017. Of the eight cautions given out, 2 were about postal voting, four were about registration, and the other two were about candidates. So twice as many candidates as actual cases of voting fraud at the polling station.
https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/239973/Fraud-allegations-data-report-2017.pdf
Frankly if they put as much effort into things where a real number of people were involved (for example Universal Payments) or if they REALLY need to focus on democracy then there is a whole question about how referenda are conducted...
Yes, only a few people could change the result of the election. After the election you can see where they are. Before the election? Much much harder.
Most of the effort in canvassing isn't about persuading. People are incredibly difficult to persuade. In all my years of canvassing I can't honestly say I got anyone to change their mind. As you indicated it's about differential turnout. Find out who your supporters are and get the buggers to vote. That is why people sit on polling stations, and collect the data.
If you're worried about the influence of Facebook or big data on that then there is an incredibly easy solution. Make voting compulsory.
As far as I can see there isn't a way of Trump undoing this. The President has the ability to commute a sentence (or grant a pardon - and yes, even in cases where no charges have yet been brought), but he doesn't have the power to extend a sentence or to impose one. That resides with the courts.
Even if it was possible legally, there is the political reality that no President would really want to mess with one of the few absolute powers of the Presidency. After all, if Trump does it to Obama, what's to stop Kang* doing it to Trump?
* Although to be fair, President Kang will have other priorities**
** Like building a death ray to destroy a planet we haven't heard of***
*** Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos.
Well the Russian and US (and UK) arsenals will be pretty good at nuking it when it has landed. Less good at hitting anything off the surface (or near surface) of the planet.
It does seem a bit harsh to nuke a city that's already had a 25m rock hit it from orbit, but hey, at least we will all get to join in the fun...
To be honest the petition has just as much validity in our constitution as a bloody referendum.
As for the idea that the petition has been hacked. Well if I saw 1Bn+ signatures then I would assume that. 100k extra? Not exactly the LOIC now, is it? FFS hackers, show some mettle!
"There is a lot of money that the regulators are essentially transferring from mobile operators to consumers"
Not really. What they are doing is reducing the amount of money that consumers transfer to operators. There is a very important difference. Yes that means that operators will make lower profits, but frankly they've been milking consumers for years...
Firstly it depends on when you lose the engines - takeoff becomes challenging (though not impossible). Landing becomes interesting - but actually we've seen 777s land without any engines. Cruise? Well we've seen engineless glides to safe landings...
As for the probabilities of losing engines, well it looks like you're assuming that the probabilities are independent - I'd suggest that in most cases of multiple failure they aren't.
Well you're a pretty dumb socialist then. Have a look at Apple's Irish HQ building. See the hundreds of floors in that gleaming tower in Cork? Perhaps we should quote from Fortune (the Trotskyist's bible): "From the front, Apple HQ could well be mistaken for a high school, bland and modern, and just three stories high. And foot traffic is thin enough that when Fortune wandered up to the entrance on Tuesday morning, security guards quickly took notice. Was there anyone we could say hello to, we asked? No, the nearest public-relations staffer was in London."
At first I wondered why the 'big' in this report. After all they firstly talk about aggregated data...
Then I realised that what they really mean is that people are very good at ignoring the things they are taught about - especially being aware of, and avoiding, biases. There are whole book shelves on this stuff. There are even pop-science books on it (Thinking Fast and Slow springs to mind).
This isn't a problem with data, 'big' or otherwise, it's a problem with dumb people doing things in a dumb way, drawing dumb conclusions, and taking dumb actions. And then forgetting to monitor the outcomes. It applies to pretty much every form of human action since the first inference was drawn.
So Rush get it almost right:
Six Stars of the Northern Cross
In mourning for their sister's loss
In a final flash of glory
Nevermore to grace the night...
Then drop the ball entirely:
Invisible to telescopic eye
Although to be fair, using 1970s rock as a physics primer isn't the best idea.
Because kidnapping high visibility people off the street of an ally with whom you have an extradition treaty is going to cause a huge international crisis. Which means that (for example) you would put at risk, at least in the short term, all of those nice information sharing agreements you have. And all those trade deals. You can't really send him to Gitmo because he's clearly a US citizen charged with a crime in the US, so you'll have to take him into the official system.
is not how accurate big data/data science could be (because surely the use of it will include errors), it is about the improvement over existing decision making processes. Because lets face facts, most politicians who make decisions have no evidence base for making them (which is kind of OK as they also don't have the analytical understanding to use the evidence base if it existed).
So do you want to try and answer 'business questions' - which exist aplenty in Government - with data, big or otherwise, or do you want to answer them with opinion, voodoo, or whatever other technique happens to spring to mind?
...it doesn't give you the right (ethically or legally) to use it. I predict a metric shitstorm of legal challenges in a variety of jurisdictions, unless he can clearly demonstrate the consent of the end user and the agreement of the owners of the scraped websites.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
