Posts by Phil O'Sophical 7402 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Oct 2011
Strictly speaking there's no such thing as 8-bit ASCII, by definition ASCII is a 7-bit code.
IIRC it's officially not allowed to use $£ and similar symbols to represent financial information because they do change/move between variants of code tables, and so might be misleading when displayed or printed on different devices. It's why banks always use standard abbreviations like USD and GBP.
When the initial trials of Concorde were taking place, I remember going out into the garden to listen for the sonic boom. It was never more than a muffled "baboom". I have often wondered how much of the resistance to Concorde flying over the US was because it was an Anglo-French boom, not a Boeing one. Perhaps less of a problem now, with a NASA boom and Boeing not exactly being flavor of the month.
Explain this comment.
Because the only hysterical mentions of "the transes" is coming from right wingers.
Yet when someone tries to politely put a different point of view in a debate, to have a civil discussion, the result from the left is disruption and violence intended to prevent anyone who disagrees with them from having a say. They are only interested in shutting down debate and discussion, effectively putting their fingers in their ears and hysterically shouting "Ya Ya Ya I can't hear you" to stop anyone else from contributing. See https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/may/30/trans-activists-disrupt-kathleen-stock-speech-at-oxford-union as just one example.
Both sides can be intolerant of anyone who disagrees with them, but the left are the ones determined to block free and open discussion on the issues.
Unfortunately, that means blocking most of the right wing these days
And the left. Look at the "debates" in things like trans or LGBTQ issues, where anyone mildly disagreeing with the prevailing orthodoxy from the left is screamed out of the room.
Best to avoid social media altogether, it's just toxic.
countries where speed camera warnings are not allowed though. (France?)
France is a strange one. Specific alerts about camera positions are illegal, but the government insists that cameras are only installed in areas with a high risk of accidents. GPS systems therefore warn you when you're entering a high-risk "danger" area, usually 200m or so before the camera, on the basis that it can't possibly be wrong to warn people if they're entering a potential danger zone.
AFAIK it hasn't been tested in the courts yet, probably because the government didn't want the embarassment of losing.
considerably higher for an ICE than for an EV.
But does that take into account the relative numbers and ages of the vehicles? There are many more ICE cars than EVs, and most ICE cars that suffer fires are older, poorly maintained ones. EVs haven't been around long enough to get figures for old ones. I don't think the figures are clear either way at the moment.
From the EU's site europa.eu:
Regulation (EU) 2019/2144 of the European Parliament and of the Council 1 mandates motor vehicles of categories M and N to be equipped with intelligent speed assistance (ISA) systems from 6 July 2022 for new vehicle types and from 7 July 2024 for all new vehicles.
and it gets even worse:
Article 4
Information on the use of intelligent speed assistance systems
1. Vehicle manufacturers shall provide the approval authorities with the following information:
(a)ratios of the time driven or the distances that are travelled with the intelligent speed assistance systems switched on and switched off;
(b)ratios of the time driven or the distances that are travelled with the perceived speed limits being observed and being overridden, respectively;
(c)the average time elapsed between the switch-on and the switch-off of the intelligent speed assistance system by the driver, when applicable;
(d)The information referred to in the first subparagraph for the cascaded acoustic warning function, the cascaded vibrating warning function and the haptic feedback function shall be provided separately from the information for the speed control function.
2. The approval authorities shall aggregate the information received in accordance with paragraph 1 and provide it to the Commission on 7 July 2024 and every 6 months thereafter.
It notes that Without prejudice to the provisions in Article 4 of this Regulation, the ISA system shall not continuously record nor retain or transmit any data related to specific incidents of exceeding the speed limit other than what is necessary for performance of the required ISA functionality or to comply with other Union acts regarding vehicle type-approval (e.g. event data recorder). so in theory this information will be anonymised and not used to track any individual driver, or affect their insurance, etc. I'm sure we all trust them completely...
I have a plug-in hybrid, which I do plug in regularly (proper charger in the garage). It's cheaper to run on domestic electricity, even at normal rates, than on petrol but running it on petrol for longer journeys is much cheaper than using public chargers. Despite the extra weight I still get good fuel consumption figures on pure petrol for long journeys, and of course it's much cheaper for local trips. For my use pattern of mostly 20-50 mile local trips, plus regular 400 mile trips and occasional 2000+ holidays it's almost perfect.
Sadly, when I replace it in a few years I'll probably go back to ICE to avoid the driver "aids" and crappy infotainment systems in all modern cars, including my current one.
Although this gov has managed to be less popular than the last lot somehow.
The last lot got chucked out because they kept raising taxes by stealth, and doing nothing useful with the money. What did the current lot do as soon as they got in? Raised taxes on workers even more (despite promising not to) and used the result to give juicy pay rises to their pals in the public services, getting nothing in return.
Both lots need to learn that you can't tax yourself into growth, nor borrow yourself out of debt, you need to spend less. Mr. Micawber explained the basic economic rule some 170 years ago.
The tenets of pretty much every religion came from a bunch of middle-aged men collecting all the stories about their respective god and collating those which best fitted the dialogue they wanted to present. It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that an LLM-based AI is as good (and as bad) at doing the same thing.
I started with Algol, briefly, then moved to FORTRAN. My early BASIC experience was with the "street BASIC" on early micros, and it was so primitive it never really seemed useful. Eventually I found VAX BASIC, which was full compiled ANSI BASIC and was a real revelation. Fast, complete, really useful for string handling, it made me realise that it wasn't just a toy language for toy computers. RIP guys.
I highlighly doubt they would be able to even pick and grip a human adult leg let alone attempt to carry or walk them anywhere.
Typical NASA, they spend millions on a special recovery system, the ̶R̶u̶s̶s̶i̶a̶n̶s̶ Chinese just put a handle on the back of each space suit...
Pop up its sidebar in Loop or Teams, and it can auto-summarize what has been said.
Presumably by sending the discussion to some central cloud-based server for analysis, something which almost certainly violates the security rules of every big company (ceryainly those I've worked for). How long before we see Copilot being banned in such environments?
but the EV itself still knows how much charge it's had and when
But it doesn't know where that elecricity came from, so won't know if it has already been taxed, or was generated tax-free by your own personal solar panel or wind power, or came 'free' from a charger in a company car park. You also need to allow for possible V2G return of power to the grid, which would have to trigger a reimbursement of any tax paid (but would not necessarily know what that tax rate was).
My bill for this month should be £65. They are trying to bill me nearer £200.
Bizarrely, British Gas have just told me that they are reducing my monthly DD by £40 because I'm overpaying, even though my current DD was carefully set (by me) to exactly cover my annual use, and is still accurate according to the "smart" meter that sends BG the readings.
Still, if they want to leave the money in my account earning interest I'm fine with that. I'll pay the excess at the end of the year.
Meanwhile, banks closing accounts of EU nationals when they leave the EU to live in countries deemed "high risk" by said banks.
Not even when they leave the EU. Pre-Brexit there were many cases of banks in the UK simply closing accounts of people living in other EU countries, because the workload of complying with all the new EU anti-money-laundering rules was not worth the hassle for the few accounts concerned.
For true freedom of movement/services/goods, the EU would have to be treated in the same way as a single country is treated today. A British subscription doesn’t care what county you are in, and an EU subscription shouldn’t care what EU country you are in.
The problem is that rights holders in non-EU countries don't care what EU law says. The US owner of rights to a TV show may want to sell the French broadcast rights to, say, Canal+ for $x million, and the same rights for Italian broadcasts to, say, Sky Italia, for another $x million, making $2x million in total. If Canal+ comes back & says "EU law doesn't allow that restriction, we have to be able to provide that broadcast to anyone in the single market who asks" the US rights holder can just say "OK, EU population is 7x that of France, you can have EU-wide rights for $7x million", which Canal+ would never accept.
Things obviously get tricky with the language issue. Arguably Canal+ would only require French-language rights, but there are many French speakers in the EU outside of France, and if English-language rights are considered the pool of potential viewers is even bigger, even in countries where English isn't an official language.
It's possible that streaming services will allow suppliers to charge based on actual subscriber numbers, but that's still far from easy to manage, so many non-EU rights holders won't see it as worth the effort when the current model works for them. The EU could just ban them, I suppose, but there might be a sizeable consumer backlash from the many people who don't travel & see the current system as OK. The EU might see this as an idealogical issue, but in purely practical, pragmatic, terms, how many people from the EU actually move countries often enough for it to be a problem for more than a minority of the 450m people in the EU?
Sure, but a French Sky subscription will give you access to French content in Germany.
Not in my experience. Even pre-Brexit you couldn't subscribe to French TV from any country outside France, nor could you even get a free card for the French equivalent of "Freeview" if you couldn't give a French address for shipping. The same was true in reverse, if Sky UK found that you were in France, your subscription was cancelled.
Or just sit it out, as there will another government and a change in taxation in a few years.
For stocks, who knows what the price will be in a few years, especially with government changes in the US & UK. So far the markets have gained after Trump's win, but will that last?
less than the 15.5% Rishi raised it to for April 2022, yet there was a much smaller outcry at Rishi than we have seen with Reeves…
2022 also saw an increase of the threshold for employee contributions to align with income tax, which limited the net effect for the lower-paid. Reeves reduced the employer threshold from 9000 to 5000, meaning that not only do employers pay a higher rate, they also pay it on more of their employees salaries. No wonder they're worried.
I had a car some years ago, I think it was a Mazda 6, where the official instructions for changing a headlight bulb started with "remove the front bumper assembly". It was just possible to do it without that, given small fingers and some forceps, and a willingness to shed blood. Makes a mockery of the legal requirement to carry spare bulbs in the car.
the tapered nose to be half the plane even when scaling up. MIght work, but the passenger capacity in relation to the dead weight of the hardware would be ridiculously low
The nose doesn't have to be empty, or even windowless. Weight distribution is always an issue, but is there any reason the nose couldn't be used for storage, fuel for example? Or maybe limited seating, either very luxurious for 1st class, or cramped and windowless for cattle class? Beds?
