Posts by Rol 1482 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jan 2013
Entirely agree with you. Growth, often as not feeds inflation, which slowly chips away any semblance of fairness in wages. If I could be on the same proportionate wage to my boss today as I was in the 80's, I'd be buying Ferrari's for fun, instead of facing homelessness in two weeks.
Depends how you measure growth.
In the UK, growth has largely come from an increase in population, while keeping a foot on the neck of house building. Take away the meteoric rise in property values and eye watering rents, and you're probably left with something close to zero growth in the UK.
So the example in the hospital, where the machines go beep for the slightest of reasons, and the staff learn to ignore it. Well that is not an example of human failure, that's an example of a machine constantly fucking up and becoming a massive liability.
The staff. Bless them. No longer leave a patient they are caring for to deal with a machine that cries wolf every hour on the hour, but instead priorities the obvious need of the patient in front of them.
Far from demonstrating how humans are the weak link, it is actually a great example of why humans are far superior to machines, and let's not forget, a toaster is a toaster and always will be a toaster, whereas humans can reprogram themselves to adapt in a million different ways.
If Darwin was right, then machines will go the way of the dodo without their kindly betters nurturing them along and dealing with their shit, like some farm yard animal.
Laid down as precedent in English law some centuries ago, a legal letter would be considered served if proof of posting was demonstrated to the court. There was never a requirement to prove it was delivered.
I guess it is time for that legal precedent to be retested at court now that the postal system is in such a shambles.
Well said sir.
About a decade or so ago, there was a comparison done of all the first world healthcare systems, which ranked them in terms of cost and outcomes. The UK's NHS was top of the list for lowest cost and best outcomes for patients, while America's system was ranked the most expensive with the worst outcomes for patients.
Why would someone who is paid out of our taxes to manage our nation wish the American system onto us?
More importantly, why are none of them rotting away in the Tower of London for their treasonous acts?
They can rein in their snooping overreach and recognise their IT industry would best be served if their international customers did not have to suffer the same limitations to freedom and justice that operate on American soil.
It always makes me chuckle when I hear the greatest exponent of the free market is again acting as the greatest obstacle to it.
You might be slightly off the mark there. Security are usually the gatekeepers to a wealth of shiny things, allowing their preferential clients swing door access for nothing more than a quick back scratching.
Of those I knew, they had to get a new uniform every few months as the back of their jackets looked like they'd been mauled by a tiger.
Totally agree. Why put a billion Euro's of plane and their pilot in jeopardy when the same money spent on several hundred drones would achieve guaranteed success, as they fully command the airspace and hit all their objectives, likely including all the secondary and tertiary ones as well, if sufficient numbers have survived the enemy's attempts to swat them with missiles costing millions.
So, it's down to who can design the cheapest and most easily constructed drones, that a few factories can churn out in their ten's of thousands everyday when required, rather than who can squander the most resources on a plane that has to survive long enough in hostile territory to both deliver the payload and get the pilot home. A thousand cheap disposable drones would do that mission with 100% success.
I suppose to counter it, the operator trying to defeat the jammer need only point and note the result a few times until they eventually focus on the direction that most minimises the interference.
I hope they haven't broke the bank coming up with this bendy signal thing, as it seems easily countered.
We're only allied with the USA until it doesn't suit their needs.
If, for example, the UK managed to return a Marxist government to power despite the $millions pouring into America's preferred Nazi party, then the gunboat politics of the middle east will be played out at Dover, until America's distastefully bitter flavour of democracy is restored to our pleasant lands.
So no, we don't rely on the USA for 99.9% of our military - we do however, suck up 99.9% of their bullshit to avoid their military "protection"
Seems the problem isn't the vulnerabilities that got detected, but the appalling way they were advertised to the entire world, before patches could be rolled out.
Now call me a cynic, but this likely left many Microsoft execs drooling in ecstasy as Linux got a kick in the security credentials. I always doubted the M$ motivation to get on-board with Linux, and foresaw a time when their involvement got leveraged to outright sabotage.
Linux rules the server and super computer world, and given time and a fair playing field would come to dominate the PC world, as it has the mobile phone operating system.
Linux is so precious to the future of this world that we need to protect it from unscrupulous actors, whether they be hard nosed capitalists protecting their monopolies, or state sponsored agents seeking to undermine its and our security.
I remember seeing adverts many years ago for Sure for Men - it's main play was that it didn't leave a mark on your clothes, so bugger me, when I bought a can it did the one thing that no other deodorant had ever done before. It left a white residue on my T shirts. That and other products have left me very wary of buying anything made in America.
My head banging moment with the guv's 1 login app involved them telling me my smartphone was not smart enough as it didn't have a tag reader to validate using my passport. So armed with their letter of instructions to wander off to a specialised Post Office and get verified I went.
The Post Office took photographs of my passport and me, and when asked about the tag thing, they looked at me strange and said "No. Just piccys". So a process I could quite easily have accomplished from my settee with my mobile turned into a safari adventure across the city to find 1 of only a handful of Post Offices that could do this wonderful thing...taking a bleeding photograph...Argghhhhh!!! The sooner Reform get in and drag us all back into the ocean for a more simpler life, the better.
I'm interested to find out how much it would cost to get on Trumps preferential mailing list? Clearly getting prewarned of his next ranting tirade would enable me to enricher myself on the stock market as it gets jerked around by the bigliest jerker on the planet.
I'm sure you've all worked it out by now. All his pronouncements are geared to shaking up the markets, they have no other purpose than to allow him and those in his circle to make a killing on the markets.
So, no. I'm not the least bothered about a thing he says, coz he's just a mouthpiece for the money men.
I'm looking forward to when he retires from whatever he thinks they let him do for a living, and finds not one of his sycophants, or even those he enrichened along the way bothers to return his calls. A sad lonely man recalling the glory days to his nurse, while they piss in his soup of the day. Can but dream.....
When I grow up I want to be president of the United States.
I'm so sorry dear, you can't be. You already have an IQ higher than a baboon, an emotional understanding beyond a baby, and your penis is observable without the need of a microscope. You would need to be involved in a hideous car crash to lose those attributes. And seeing as most vehicles are unlikely to get a tank of fuel again, you're dreams are busted.
It took some time for the average Brit to get over their distrust of Germany following WWII, and I'm of the opinion America is in that exact same position. As I'm knocking on a bit, I very much doubt I'll be seeing the ice thaw between USA and the free world in my lifetime.
oh, I got so fed up with Window's updates screwing with the grub, I finally put each on their own hard drive with a slew of buttons to choose which drive I was going to boot in to. Since then, I worked out that windows has no need for updates if it is air-gapped from the internet, and has worked perfectly for the last 10 years.
The chief of police for the West Midlands was forced to resign because his staff got their misleading intel using AI, in regard to a particularly troublesome football fixture, instead of the old school method of Googling it. A lesson to be learnt for us meat bags, but clearly an impossible task in asking AI to better itself.
Conservative electricity is created by burning naturally found resources in gorgeously stunning buildings with faint whiffs of fairy smoke coming out of idyllic chimneys, that can only enhance the landscape and air, whereas evil liberal electricity is made from looming towers of hateful wind turbines. It also upsets the natural order of things. If the environment that the poor have to live in is just as clean as the kindly and benevolent capitalist's, then they are likely to live just as long, if not longer, and I'll be damned if my wealth is not going to eke out a few more years over the proles that I have nothing but derision for.
In English employment law, the job gets made redundant, not the person. So how can staff in the UK be made redundant when the job still exists?
Yeah, I appreciate they have the choice to move to India and carry on working, but that was never in the employment contract they signed.
It seems a bit of a stretch, that it is illegal to make someone redundant and then employ someone else to do their job, but it is okay if that new employee lives in another country?
So, a manager can make a "troublesome" member of staff redundant and replace them with someone working from abroad, and then after a suitable amount of time has elapsed, rehire for the role in the UK, and not be up in front of a tribunal for it?
I thought the mafia made their money from drugs. And with that trade worth billions it seems a scam like this is just something they did for the LOL's
Often puzzles me when a criminal enterprise that's trying desperately to stay off the police's radar, goes and does something like this. Like the drug courier driving an uninsured wreck of a vehicle at high speed with a tail light out. Just smacks of idiocy.
I did think about your last comment just after I posted, and assumed the tech would just use the co-ordinates it had logged while the radar/jammer was hot and just homed in regardless of whether they had gone silent or not.
By the way, I didn't downvote you, and can't see any reason why anyone would want to.
The technology to home in on a transmitter is very well established. Whether it be a radar or a jamming device. So I'm puzzled why Ukraine hasn't adapted that tech to target radars and jamming equipment.
It would make perfect sense to send a dozen drones to take out, lets say, a fuel depot, and have another half a dozen anti-radar drones blaze a path to the target to increase the chance of the payload getting there.
Isn't that more or less what has happened in most conflicts. Send in your stealth planes alongside some fighter jets and as soon as the radars light up, you take them out, using the very signals they are emitting to guide your weapons onto the target. Rinse and repeat until all of their radar stations are smouldering rubble. Then a few weeks later, plant your flag in their leaders chest and declare the war over.
In the same way, the tower, if constructed in ancient times, would have sucked up every resource and brought on the demise of humanity, we are hurtling toward that now.
How much time will the great minds of our age waste flicking through the pages of this new age Tower of Babel to eventually go mad and throw themselves into the abyss.
I seem to remember that governments around the world can be sued for compensation (normally by American tec ventures) for any losses they incur due to said government, or their agents, changing the rules/procedures/tax strategies/suddenly acquiring a backbone or moral compass.
Now an industry that relies heavily on a steady income from challenging patents that were poorly investigated before being granted is surely going to demand many trillions of dollars for loss of earnings if the patent office actually started investigating the patents they are looking to grant.
How's about a compromise?
European customers use European cloud services, who encrypt our data and store it with the cheapest cloud providers on the planet.
Enacting Uncle Sam's Patriot Act would be useless,
Okay, yes the service on a service will add cost overheads, but a large enough European service would surely have some leverage on price/GB.
Another advantage would be the common interface presented to users by the European service, regardless of which cloud provider is holding the data, which could be seamlessly moved to another storage provider as and when required.
Slowly the EU provider can onboard its own local storage as demand increases.
Like the ingredients on a food label, I want to know where my data is being stored, and if it's on an American server, and it is readily readable by the NSA, then it isn't covered by GDPR, so I'm not buying into it.
America had a very stark choice in WWII. Either throw their lot in with the allies, or face the unarguable consequence that the whole of Europe would end up being "liberated" by Russia, and likely a tasty wedge of Africa and the Middle East with it.
That was the quiet whisper that Churchill put in the President's ear. It was nothing at all to do with defeating Nazi Germany. It was about denying Russia strategic gains that would have made it invulnerable to any subsequent Cold War threat.
I hope you Americans are now rethinking the God given mission to impose your flavour of democracy on the rest of the world?
It is demonstrably broken. Hopefully, for your sakes and ours, not beyond repair.
Perhaps the democrats could launch a total rethink of how something so fragile, yet so fundamental to a prosperous and fair world could be protected. It could be the one thing they take into the next election, if there is ever to be one, and present it to the voting public that this is what we will do once elected. Never again will an enemy of democracy ever be allowed to manoeuvre their man into power where they can then start dismantling the very core of what our once great nation stood for.
Unfortunately, for now, it looks like room for a hammer and sickle might just be found on the Stars and Stripes. Let's just hope it will eventually wash out.
You are right. This is about honouring a great woman and recognising their contribution in the fight against fascism, but if she were here, she would very much understand that the fight is still being waged and who so ever picks up the banner that she and her colleagues were so eager to bear, are surely honouring her no less than those who morn her passing.
Having spent a few minutes researching the topic, I feel a little overqualified to pontificate on the subject, but here goes...
History has many examples of societies that championed their warriors to the exclusion of everything else. Placing them front and centre of politics and life in general. The warrior class was the driving force. They spurned education, humanities and any sense of justice for those incapable of wielding a sword. They didn't fair too well did they. Having rocked the sensibilities of more enlightened peoples they disappeared into history under an avalanche of spears and arrows, wielded in most part by greengrocers, butchers, carpenters, teachers, poets... the people that a society such as the Spartans would spit on.
So here we are, with another might is right gang, trying to impose their will on society and the world in general. However, their fate is not completely in the hands of their neighbour's eventual retaliation, but instead from those they have and are marginalising within their own borders. The fall of this mighty empire will be at the hands of their own teachers and poets who have had enough of the injustice, but unlike those of the ancients, they don't need years of training to become capable of taking on the warrior class, they just need to pop into their local store and buy a gun.
You have to consider a tonne of metrics alongside each other when judging country A v's country B. Things like wealth and status are arguably high up there, but the likelihood that your children would be shot to death while attending school is considered far more important in a society that gives a shit about such things.
Not everyone swoons at the sight of a wad of cash, only, it seems, those who where born and raised to rule have this moral deficiency.
So why oh why, do we fill the seats of power with those readily inclined to cast away their duties at the prospect of more wealth and power?
Society would arguably be better served with a random selection being forced into public servitude, than just handing those positions of power to those shouting the loudest.
Imagine how corrupt our legal system would be, if jurors where no longer appointed randomly?
Personally, I do not believe our right to privacy will ever be secured, and the more legislation tries to assure me otherwise, the more I believe it is being ever more covertly hoovered up.
That should not stop activists from seeking such a Nirvana, but for the rest of us, it's an impossible fight. For every Mark Klein, there are thousands, ready and willing to do their misguided patriotic duty and stomp all over citizen's rights in the name of security, delivering a very unsecure future for anyone daring to question the authority that in a true democracy should be questioned at every turn.
Most domestic users haven't a clue what O/S they are running when browsing the internet, so Linux infighting isn't on their radar.
The big reason M$ is on most PC's, is because M$ paid hard cash and flirted, nay, cornered and married unfair market practice to be number one and to stay number one.
I work alongside a man who has flung himself head first into AI and merrily spends his days using GPT or whatever to generate images for larks. I asked if he could do one for me. It was going to be a picture of an anus, with a caption, "Can you guess what it is?" the image starts zooming out and the pic starts to look like a landscape of bumholes. As it zooms out further it becomes apparent we were looking at a magnified skin pore on Donald Trumps head.
The end caption states "You were right first time"
Trouble is, through that request, I discovered my go to AI pal was a rabid Trump fan. Oh, he was such a sweet guy as well, and his kids will miss him once he's sectioned.
So, any of you Trump haters out there want to give birth to "Can you guess what it is yet"?
It'll put a smile on several billion faces, and might even save the world.
A semi-retired billionaire realises where it is all going wrong, and sets out to create an O/S that studies its user. It then quietly censures the "free speech" that it deems is beyond the capacity of the user's intellect, to protect them from their own inadequacies, and hence save the world.
Trouble is, the baddies are on to him, and only Bond can save him. The difficulty for Bond, is it's his own government and that of many other countries who are the baddies trying to stop this, and so he must quit his job quietly if he is to save the world.
Oh and he has nookie with himself on the plane if that helps the plot.
