
Re: They are blocked in France
Those used books had better contain all the latest updates to the German language.
1370 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Sep 2012
If the phone isn't receiving any signal it's likely to only be emitting a polling signal for a short burst every 15 seconds or so, so as to be assigned a cell tower. Once a call begins or data starts being transferred between the phone and a cell tower, that's when the radiation starts continuously. The radiation level will depend on the strength of signal/distance from the tower. It'll further depend on whether 3g, 4g, 5g or even WiFi is the transmission method. Finally the radiation level could be directional, depending on the antenna design.
Testing this to pass EU regs, and then France's special interpretation will IMO be a very variable matter.
This smells of some sort of politically motivated move by France.
"Overall older BMWs were decent cars, and most of the engineering was good, but maybe BMWs Bavarian workers should have kept their hands off the beer when designing some of these things."
When I worked in Bavaria, the works canteen had draft lager on tap just before the payment point. I asked about this and apparently it was due to a Bavarian law that classed beer as a food, and had to be available wherever food was served.
", what is the impact on your available range when using heated seats?"
From a designer's perspective, positive in Winter. The idea of a heated seat and steering wheel is that the driver can turn down the more energy hungry cabin heating a bit and extend the range. Which still leaves me unconvinced as you get complicated car electrics, more to go wrong, and that weight.
"raising the price artificially merely serves to make previously uneconomic deposits, economic"
Assuming this Lithium find is viably real, then we'll see China first wait for competitor plants to come onstream, then dump cheap lithium onto the world markets. That's the trouble with having a single source of manipulation.
"they were defending their country and Putin's Puppet intentionally scuppered that"
Musk stated that he was concerned that a successful sinking of a chunk of the Russian fleet would have given Putin an excuse for a (possibly nuclear) escalation. That at least is plausible even if you don't want to believe it.
"actors and video game workers form guilds and strike, protecting their (easier?) jobs, instead of doing more in-demand IT or medical jobs"
Haven't we been here before?
Government scraps ballet dancer reskilling ad criticised as 'crass'
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/oct/12/ballet-dancer-could-reskill-with-job-in-cyber-security-suggests-uk-government-ad
With landlines, the emergency service can look you up in a database and instantly know the exact address of the caller. No-one was complaining about lack of privacy. Mind you, your address wasn't broadcast with your call. It had to be cross-referenced via a resource only available to the emergency services.
Now for the modern equivalent: Surely smartphones can embed the GPS data in the call metadata except... privacy. So how about an encrypted system where the GPS data does not exist in the 'clear' but as a key or token that can be looked up on a database or tool that only the emergency services have access to? The encryption could be periodically refreshed so an old static database does not provide a lookup. Yes, something could get hacked yada yada. But that's always a risk anyway.
I once lived in a German city, population 100,000 where every imaginable facility was within a comfortable 15 minute cycle ride. The only days of the year that I didn't cycle were when the roads were sheet ice in places. The city didn't salt to protect the trees. On those days the only vehicles moving were emergency vehicles and buses. In this city there were no restrictions on car travel, parking outside your apartment was easy and free. But everyone had the freedom of the extensive cycle path network that was entirely and safely independent of the road system. The cycling was so safe that I taught an adult friend to cycle when he visited from the UK. When he saw how safe the cycling was, he demanded to learn.
So I've had the privilege to live in a 15 minute city and see how it works. It has nothing whatsoever to do with traffic cameras, 'street calming', laws or fines as in the useless rent-seeking Oxford or Canterbury examples. It's about deep infrastructure and civil design.
For the purposes of occasional digital nomading, I've been looking for a 24" type monitor that's made for travelling. Specs:
1920 x 1080 pixels.
Slim and light.
Stable fold out stand to hold it vertically like a home monitor.
A snug protective case so it can be stashed in a normal suitcase or just chucked in the car boot.
Seems too much to ask - no one offers such a thing, you get directed to expensive travel monitors barely larger than a laptop's. This LG looks like a lurch in the right direction as a start but not at $1,000 of course.
Reminds me of when my lawyer sent me a bunch of legal documents to me@gmail.co or something similar. Only found out when said documents failed to arrive - and since lawyers aren't exactly prompt anyway it caused a week's delay till I found out. In a bit of a mild panic I tried to research who actually owned gmail.co - and couldn't confirm it either way.
There was a paper a few years ago where it was shown to be possible to decipher obfuscated characters - and I think number plates may have been used as a case in point - based on only a few pixels per character. The reason was simple: Common photo blurring algorithms, where you select an area on an image with sensitive info and blur it, tend to resolve the same letters to the same set of pixels arranged the same way, every time. You only needed to build a look up table.
Elsewhere I believe there are techniques to accurately de-blur faces in videos by taking advantage of time interpolation to produce a sharper still image.
If you lose and cancel a regular credit card, all outstanding debit balance transfers automatically to the replacement one. Not sure I'd trust what happens with subscriptions. Pro tip: have all your subs on PayPal. That's how I do mobiles, online newspaper, YouTube, Netflix, Now TV. It's delightfully simple to review all subs in one place, plus get an app notification every time a sub payment goes out. Can also cancel out any payee easily.
"Are we now just a few more years away from being to tell an AI to "create me a 3-hour historical epic based on the journeys of Aeneas after the fall of Troy"?"
Truer than you think. Pop music had a revolution where some self taught artists managed to create successful chart hits in their bedrooms using software on a laptop and maybe a couple of instruments. Self published eBooks are now a thing. I can see many of the stars with some cash in their back pockets bypassing the big studios and distributors altogether, and the best movies may be a matter of a tiny tight team of human talent plus modern AI tech.
The current strike may seem socially just, however will the strikers eventually go the way of the Luddites?
I reckon that about a third of my work could be done by an AI assistant - and I'd love it to happen. The delay is management anguishing about leaking of confidential data back to an AI as it learns. Solution must be a private cloud hosting your own pre-trained AI model that learns further as it goes, no worse than your cloud hosted CRM system.
Meanwhile, about the story - very suspect, probably just a self-promotional publicity play.
"It has been established, beyond reasonable doubt, that [Brexit] has caused UK food prices to rise more than global food prices"
Food inflation in the UK was significantly lower than Germany, Portugal or Sweden till April this year. There's been a sharp falling back for the EU group in year to May/June. You'll be seeing a lot of people quoting the June and later figures now.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-65962497
So, flawlessly passing a Turing test was always x years away. Now that an LLM can trounce the test, the goalposts have naturally been moved.
And as commented, LLMs can be a bit of a distraction as they're kind of cul-de-sac just left on their own.
We are now seeing rapid advances in robotics and sensor tech where a robot will be able to learn not inside a virtual model, but using real physical exploration plus feedback from 3D vision, sound and feel. Its AI will be trained based on this input-output loop. Then throw in some physics engines of the types used in GCI and game creation and a dollop of Wolfram Alpha.
IMO there will be strong claims to have created AGI well within 10 years. Upon which the goalposts will be moved...
This reminds me of the confusion that can happen when you do remote assist to a PC that's set for a different language region, never mind its attached keyboard at the user end. Them furriners are happy to create passwords with accented letters in them, these usually store and work fine. We've had some hilarious times when I was using a UK keyboard to attempt to enter a foreign language password that was being read out to me over the meeting's audio.
The best workaround is to bring up the full virtual keyboard (for Windows) as here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/use-the-on-screen-keyboard-osk-to-type-ecbb5e08-5b4e-d8c8-f794-81dbf896267a
You can then click on the characters, WYGIWYS style.