Posts by Phil O'Sophical 7402 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Oct 2011
It doesn't matter where you get it from. Download it once, check it, and use only the version you've checked, supplied from your own server. Rinse and repeat for updates. That was rightly an unbreakable rule at the companies I worked for.
If you blindly use code downloaded from the internet you're an idiot. If you provide a service to customers which blindly uses such code you deserve to be sued into bankruptcy.
The only thing that started heavily shifting polls in Labour's direction
The polls never shifted in Labour's direction, they got fewer votes in 2024 than they did in 2019.
What actually happened is that moderate Tory voters got fed up with the succession of useless Tory governments who abandoned moderate Conservative policies to keep plodding along in the Blairite centrist middle ground, constantly increasing taxes & spending, and doing SFA to actually address the problems, while being convinced that everyone would soon "see the light". Sunak's idiocy in calling an election when everyone told him he'd get absolutely stuffed is a case in point.
Labour lost some "red wall" types to Reform, the Tories lost half their votes (7m+) to Reform and the LDs, not necessarily because they wanted either of them (neither was ever going to get enough seats to form a government) but simply to give Sunak a kicking in the hope that someone better would replace him. Since Badenoch is largely invisible apart from a bit of sniping at PMQs there isn't much sign of that happening.
Rachel Reeves seems to think that she can tax her way into growth, which never works, she needs to cut spending and taxes before all the people who actually earn money for the country get up and leave.
But hey, it's OK, 70% of people voted to keep FPTP two referendums ago, so we're all screwed.
Interestingly, if the 2024 election had been run on PR with seats proportional to votes, Labour would only have had 219 (instead of 411), the Tories 154 (not 121), LDs 79 (not 72) and Reform 93 (instead of 5). I don't see any likely way to make a workable coalition with a majority out of that (maybe Lab+LD+Greens? can't see that lasting) so we'd be in the same position as France is today. Still screwed.
The paragraph immediately before the one you quoted says "By 2023, the United Kingdom had over 11,000 wind turbines with a total installed capacity of 30 gigawatts (GW): 15 GW onshore and 15 GW offshore,"
30GW is not "equivalent to three times the electricity needs of the nation at current rates of electricity consumption" if "peak winter demand was 59.3 GW,[5] in summer it drops to about 45 GW"
That article is using nonsensical statistics. Statements like "Africa has 39% of global potential" completely ignores the fact that most of the demand isn't in Africa. Sure, total solar energy arriving on Earth far exceeds our energy requirements, but building solar farms in the Sahara or the Australian outback and then getting the energy to where it's needed is impractical.
Likewise the original referendum - if each kind of Brexit had been spelt out, remain would have been the winner because the rest would have got something like 7-8% each.
Yes, politicians love that sort of rigged vote. Give the plebs one option for how you want them to vote, and 5 choices for the one you don't want, and you can be sure the outcome will be the one you'd like. I think even the least attentive voters would have picked up on that.
If only we'd had a vote on creating the EU from the EEC in the first place, all this would be moot.
Since they have proof that Matthew Terry did this deliberately he should not be allowed to hide behind the protections of limited companies. He should have been personally fined, required to pay compensation to every scammed customer, and banned from ever being a company director again on penalty of jail time. UK courts seem to have completely lost the plot on the concept of deterrence.
That concept works well in a domestic environment but not in a data centre
True, but the OP did say "think of people wiring or re-wiring houses". It's an ideal setup when you want the flexibility of many relatively high-power outlets but few in use at any one time and a low overall load, which is typical in a domestic environment.
The other thing ring mains have to have is a fuse in every plug. You can't rely on the big breaker in the consumer unit.
They are there to protect different things. The fuse in the plug protects the low-current appliance cable, the breaker on the consumer unit protects the ring.
Not in the UK. As long as you're over the free delivery threshold (recently upped to £35) you still have the free option. Often gets delivered next day anyway, despite the "delivery within 2-3 days" note (which can be annoying when I know I won't be in tomorrow, and actually prefer delivery on, say, a Saturday).
Landing and stabilizing a far taller vehicle under similar conditions will be tricky.
So the problem isn't "landing a man on the Moon", but the "returning him safely to the Earth" bit? The normal SpaceX approach would seem to be to get the first bit working, and then worry about the rest. No problem.
The company said that using Agentforce internally led to a decline in the number of support cases
Probably because the internal customers got so fed up with the crap responses that they stopped filing support cases, and just worked-around the problems. By the time the company notices that productivity has dropped it will be too late.
Labour have gone from a landslide victory to unelectable in just over a year. The OSA is a big part of that.
Not so much a Labour landslide victory as a Tory landslide loss. Labour 'won' the election with 500,000 fewer votes than they had in 2019, but the Tories lost 7m votes.
However, the touch screen control had over 4 pages of options, each page having about 6 items and some with variations on them.
Still better than the old vending machines where you had to key in a 2-digit code to select tea, coffee, chocolate, soup etc. Someone with too much time on his hands drew up a matrix and worked out that the numbers corresponded to drink+extras, with bits set for sugar, milk, etc.
He demonstrated this by having the machine dispense chicken soup with milk and sugar.
We had a teacher in school who used to confiscate any sweets he found on kids in class. He would return them later, but reserved the right to eat as many as he wanted during the lesson.
One day we refilled a bag with hot sweets from the local joke shop, and one of the class chancers agreed to "get caught" with them. Teacher made his usual snarky comments, left the bag on his desk, and popped a couple in his mouth. A few minutes later he pulled out a hanky and made a show of blowing his nose, so he could surreptitously spit them out. He looked most discomfited for the rest of the lesson, but nothing was said. Sweets were never confiscated again...
rather like custard in France
The French have custard but don't like to admit it, so they call it crème anglaise (English cream).
The world of food names is dangerous, as anyone choosing crème fraîche in France, thinking that it might match its literal translation of "fresh cream", will have learned. Goodness knows what they'd make of "spotted dick", perhaps something a pharmacist could help with? Then there's "jambon cru", which I've seen translated on menus as "raw ham", which may be linguistically correct but not culinarily so. Of course, a menu isn't the menu in France anyway, that's "la carte".
Bon appetit!
It's also extremely culture-specific. Anyone who has travelled abroad much will know that our age-estimation cues are based on subconscious cultural signals. Ask a British man to guess the age of a French or Italian woman, and he'll likely to be way out. If they want to use this to guesstimate the age of travellers at the border they'll need to train it on accurate multicultural data. Good luck with getting that.
Most people want a society that is fair for everyone, socialists and capitalists just disagree on how to get there (and, to a lesser extent, how to define "fair").
These days, though, we no longer get a simple choice at an election because today's politicians treat the whole process as if it's a business, where all that matters is scoring the most votes.
Principles went out of the window with Tony Bliar, and are showing few signs of returning. Ironically it's the so-called extremists like Corbyn and Farage who seem to have a genuine idea of where the country should go, and how to get there. As expected, not everyone agrees with them or likes them, but it feels like an improvement after the Blair/Cameron/Sunak/Starmer blob.
Most (and quite possibly 'all') of the needed source materials are available in parts of the US, they're just not economically viable if China can continue to provide the rare earths as cheaply as they do.
It's not just a question of being economically viable, but environmentaly viable. Processing rare earths is a highly-polluting process, but a dictatorship like China doesn't care about poisoning its citizens. It's only a matter of time before the orange clown abolishes the US environmental agencies, thus allowing MAGA peasants to poison their children in the same way, while believing their Great Leader when he says it's harmless.
Not so. Mine gives me cheap motoring for local journeys, all-electric, but still decent fuel economy (450 miles/tank) on longer journeys. It's a parallel hybrid, so has the unnecessary extra weight & complexity of a fancy transmission, true, a series hybrid (range extender) would be a better design. Looks like 2026 might well be the year of such vehicles.
A simple fix would be to build them by the sea, which has extra costs for longer links, but that isn't a big hairy deal.
Stick them in Scotland, lots of cold water & air and a surplus of electricity from all the wind farms which would not then have to be given constraint payments to not generate. They could ship the data to/fro via longer fibres, which as you say is rarely an issue. Such fibres could be easily buried, so a better option than lots of pylons to get the electricity to where the data is.
I think it was BT who had pre-paid charge cards for the canteen. Since I was visiting the DHSS lot, I paid cash, which worked out cheaper.
The DEC training centre in Reading was in the Shire Hall council offices. A DEC badge, or a visitor/trainee badge, got cheaper cafeteria prices than the council employees, to their considerable annoyance.
