Posts by Phil O'Sophical 7402 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Oct 2011
only *government* can be fascist, as fascism is *goverment* control of *society*
Not really. Fascism is a political philosophy involving extreme nationalism and military-style control, but it can be associated with non-government movements like Mosley's 'blackshirts'. Such movements sometimes make it to government, but by no means always.
Has that been proven to actually work though?
It does work when traffic is at saturation level, and the physics involved gets complicated. It's the main reason that the variable speed limits were introduced on the M25 around the M3/M4 junctions, and it has been shown to work there.
I take it you're not Irish. :)
I'm not sure I see the connection?
Not if your vehicle takes care of speed and lateral control. I'm glad that you see the advantages of automated driving.
I most certainly do not, all these gadgets which try to do the driver's job for them tend to reduce the level of attention they pay to their driving, and make them less safe. On the narrow country roads around where I live the lateral 'lane assist' control is actively dangerous. It will attempt to tug the car back towards the centre of a narrow lane, perfectly placed to be sideswiped by the bus or HGV coming the other way. It's only a matter of time before someone is killed, and that will make for an interesting court case.
One example I've witnessed, out of many, was someone completely ignoring a 60 km/h electronic speed limit indication only to crash into the traffic jam around the bend. I wonder if he thought speed limits were dumb / money making schemes / etc.
That's just bad driving, no matter what the gadget says you should always drive at a speed which allows you to stop within the distance you can see to be clear.
You have not tried it and therefore you haven't got enough information upon which to make a sensible decision.
I haven't tried taking cocaine, or free-climbing a skyscraper, either, but I have a pretty good handle on whether they would be a good idea.
there is also the enabling factor of allowing those who are too old or infirm to drive to move freely as they please without having to depend on someone else, amongst other opportunities that it opens.
Take a taxi, not only does it create a job for the driver it can also ensure that the elderly or infirm person will have help with getting in and out and moving any luggage.
If there is a speed limit it's there for a reason
It's also almost universally wrong. Roads are very variable, both in layout and in behaviour under different conditions of traffic and weather. It isn't feasible to change speed limits every 10m or every 30 minutes, as conditions change, so inevitably any speed limit is a compromise.
As a consequence speed limits aim low out of an excess of caution. It used to be the case that they were enforced by competent, trained police who could make a judgement call and ignore technical infringements if they were seen to be safe. These have now been replaced by purely mechanical systems which do not take conditions into account, and blindly issue fines for 1 kmh over the designated limit.
The obvious consequence of that is that drivers now pay more attention to their speedometer than their surroundings, and we are seeing the effect of that in the way that casualty figures have started to tread upwards again, after years of decline. More speed limits and more mechanical enforcement will only make that trend worse.
I have a car because I enjoy driving. As an adult I recognise that there are risks involved in that activity, and I'm willing to accept those risks (with mitigations like seat belts and not driving after I've been drinking) in order to enjoy the activity.
If I just want to get from A to B I'll take a train or a taxi. I have no interest in the pointless and flawed compromise of a car that drives itself. It is a flawed solution to a non-existent problem.
The Conservative party hasn't been right-wing since the 1990s. David 'heir to Blair' Cameron dragged them to the centre in search of the undecided voters, where they've just become another version of New Labour. Reform is just a mix of moderate right and populism, calling them 'far-right' is dangerous. The real, unpleasant, far right is the likes of the BNP with Tommy Robinson, and equating the BNP to a populist loudmouth like Farage risks giving them a dangerous credibility.
Badenoch is making up policy on the fly to score points at PMQ, but she's still way out of touch with the ordinary moderate right electorate, and it's probably too late for her to convince people that she could be a viable Tory PM. In office I fear that she'd just revert to the Cameron/Sunak wet centrism.
No wonder the country is bankrupt, with government wasting vast amounts of taxpayer money trying ever-harder to control every aspect of our lives.
Government should stick to the basics of setting up the economy for business, and looking after security and defence, and it should leave parenting to parents. Those lazy parents who want to abdicate responsibility for their kids to someone else need a boot up the arse and a lecture on personal responsibility.
"bomb proof" is an interesting choice of words...
We had an office in Belfast with many VT200-series terminals. A car bomb left outside the front door blew in all the windows. When the staff were allowed back in they found all the terminals still on, still displaying whatever work had been in progress when the evacuation was ordered, but not a single keyboard still worked. No smashed screens, though, even among those chipped by flying glass.
Which "other customers" are impacted? Cloudflare can block the originating IP to keep its proxies clean.
As the article points out, in these days of CG NAT one IP address could have hundeds of different, independent, users behind it. Having a regulator throw a tantrum and say "Block address A.B.C.D, and do it right now or else" doesn't give them much time to work out what actual traffic is causing the problem, and develop a more selective block.
Tax the rich and clamp down on their tax dodging
Ah yes, "the rich", that magical bottomless well of tax money which can be raided until everyone else gets everything for free.
Unfortunately most tax income these days is paid by ordinary working people with decent jobs, and who have no choice but to pay up. The really high-earners are the ones who have the option to pack up & bugger off, as Rachel Reeves is discovering.
whilst offering up simple solutions which have little to no effect.
What, like "tax the rich" ?
I’m sure there’s a “tube amp” noise filter that you can play mp3s through.
Yes, just add some extra harmonic distortion, mainly around the 3rd harmonic. That's where the "warm tube sound" comes from, which is mostly due to the design of the amp and the feedback circuit.
you are looking for ones that can withstand overvolting the filament to 6.5 or even 7 volts.
Why? The purpose of heating the cathode is to release enough electrons to carry the required current. Once you have that, overheating the filament to generate an excess of free electrons will do nothing other than burn out the valve/tube more quickly.
That will never work. As the linked article notes, the unions will only accept it if it offers more worker protection than any of the individual countries has, which is exactly why no company would ever choose it. The same would be true of data protection, and taxation, big companies will always shop around for the lowest rates (cf Apple in Ireland). This XKCD comes to mind.
It's all very well recommending FOSS as a panacea for US control of much commercial software but as XKCD noted, the big issue with that is ongoing support. Since most governments now prefer to outsource IT, the chances are that any FOSS infrastructure will end up being supported by Crapita, Accenture, Wipro etc. which is unlikely to improve anything.
Wasn't there a supply issue after rumours of residual carcinogenic compounds from the smoking process? I remember that it suddenly became hard to find real Lapsang Souchong anywhere for a while.
I agree on the smoke flavouring, it's like that abomination of "apple smoked' cheese in some supermarkets, the genuine smoked stuff is good, but when the small print says "smoke flavoured" you know it's going to be bitter and acrid.
Government departments, like so many businesses, still haven't worked out that the only reason people are willing to endure the misery of trying to call them by phone is because they haven't been able to get the information they need through the automated website or chatbot. Hanging AI on the end of the phone isn't going to fix that.
I don't agree with what the US has just done in Venezuela but it's going to piss off Putin
I think it's unlikely that Putin will be upset. Despite Trump's claims, it seems unlikely that the invasion of Venezuela and kidnapping of Maduro and his wife are legal under international law. I'd say that Putin, Xi and Kim are busy having fun working out how to drag Trump in front of the international court.
He won't go, of course, any more than Putin will for his actions in Ukraine, but Starmer and the various EU leaders will have to come off the fence and either back the law, or back Trump out of fear of economic punishment. Lose-lose for them, but Trump won't care.
Whenever they have to learn something past univeristy, they will look for ways to avoid it.
That, frankly, is just offensive nonsense. The system admins I've worked with for my entire working life have been professionals who spend most of their working days making sure that things work correctly. Indeed, it's more often been a problem stopping them adding the latest cutting-edge technology because they're having too much fun learning it to realise that it might be unnecessarily disruptive.
most users don't see the amount of effort wasted by developers, support people, volunteers on the internet, wherever) in working around the breakage caused by NAT.
Which is as it should be. The technical professionals deal with the complications, so that the ordinary non-technical users don't need to care.
