Posts by Paul Smith 555 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jul 2007
I worked for a major telecom supplier whose CTO had heard about A/B testing at a conference and wanted the company to start shipping near real-time updates from developers laptops to operators live networks. The C-suite genuinely could not understand why that was not a great idea.
LOL!!!
No, my friend, I don't think so. The government *issue* car registration numbers, they don't own them. Once issued, they can't withdraw them, they can't prevent them being used on the roads and they can't re-issue them to anybody else. Even if this wasn't true, do you really want this shower of idiots or their rich sponsors to have the power to decide if you, your parents, siblings, children, friends and acquaintances should be "allowed" to use a phone, or more accurately, be denied the right to use a phone when some unelected individual with no oversight and no fear of consequences decides that some rule has been broken? I am old enough to remember the poll tax riots, and I know that if Thatcher had the power to track IMSI's or IMEI's, she would have used it to punish the protesters and anybody connected with the protesters. Is that really the sort of authority you want to hand over?
That is not democracy, that is a republic. The tyranny of a 'pure' democracy is that if 51% want to speak Latin, then 100% must speak Latin, if 51.9% want to leave the EU, then 100% get shafted. In a republic, all citizens are protected by the rule of law (usually a constitution) that can only be changed by a significant majority. 51% can decide that Latin is the preferred language, but they can't force it on the rest.
B.S!
One copper, one week = £1000 tax payer money.
If a cop nick a scrote who nicked a phone, that is two and a half days of the coppers time between paper work and court time, and the scrote is still back on the street nicking phones the same day. Tell the cops to nick scrotes and the best they can do is two a week.
Nick the bell end who pays scrotes for stolen phones, and you have a whole bunch of scrotes that have to look elsewhere for their drug money, and you have a much better chance of getting a conviction with a custodial sentence that will keep the bell end off the streets.
If you want more cops, then pay more taxes. If you want more safety, then let the cops do their jobs properly instead of letting the red tops tell them what their jobs should be.
Congress make the laws, not the advertisers. If the honourable senators, or anybody else, believes a given web-sites is illegal, it is within their power to do something about it but until such time as due process is completed, advertisers are free to make as much money from these sites as the want.
"It seems that Jastrzebski's case is going to add this to the ever growing list of both financial misconduct and fraud committed by scumbags that exploited the pandemic. It is estimated that £21 billion ($25.96 billion) of public money was lost to fraud, according to the National Audit Office."
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice and you have a display of stunning incompetence and probably significant collusion. Just as long the National Audit Office is not using Horizon software. They aren't, are they?
"Using a chip from China – a nation credibly suspected of using its presence in tech supply chains to enable economic espionage – is an interesting way to establish sovereignty and free users from geopolitical constraints."
Obviously safer than to using chips from the USA, a nation categorically proven to use its presence in tech supply chains to enable economic espionage.
Captain Darling:
So you see, Blackadder, Field Marshall Haig is most anxious to eliminate all these German spies.
General Melchett:
Filthy hun weasels, fighting their dirty underhand war!
Captain Darling:
And fortunately, one of our spies...
General Melchett:
Splendid fellows, brave heroes risking life and limb for Blighty!
The training of the AI is a straw man argument. Using material to train an AI model is not a problem and is *not* a misuse of copyright assuming they have legitimate and legal access to the material in the first place. It is the use of copyrighted material in the output, without permission, payment, or accreditation that is the problem. If openAI can't build a business model that respects other peoples property and rights, then they don't have a business.
If there was any actual evidence that Huawei had done any of the things they are accused of, it would be splashed across every front page on the planet. A decade ago, Snowden proved that US TLA's subverted US companies to do exactly the things Huawei is accused of, and by all appearances, it is still ongoing.
Last time I checked, electricity companies charged me for access to electricity, and charged me for how much I used and charged me at different rates for when I used it. It also charges different rates to the small business next door and the large factory down the road so there is nothing new or original in customer based charging. The toll road doesn't charge based on the contents of the truck but they do charge based on the size and weight of the truck and sometimes on when the truck wants to travel. Telcos are not suggesting charging for the contents of your downloads (cat videos are the same price as pussy videos) but they would like a share based on the size of the download. Why should they have to bare the total cost of upgrading to 1Gig+ fibre to the door just so you can watch an 8K UHD grumble flick? Does it really look much better then 720i?
After over 20 years of this they very clearly do not *need* to change anything. If the need was real, the elected politicians that didn't change would have been replaced by elected politicians that did change.
Regrettably, one of the consequences of democracy is that you get the politicians you deserve. The American public is (en masse) happy with lying, spying, fear and corruption and their politicians reflect that.
The first PC I worked on was a IBM clone ((Olivetti I think) in 1984. It ran an 8086 at 4.77MHz and cost about £1,500 (all in).
Today my home PC is a running a 5800X at 4.7GHz and would cost about £1,500 to build from scratch tomorrow.
Moore's law (double the performance for the same price every 18 months) equates to about 42% per year. 39 years at 42% starting from 1 gives 869,451.64
My current PC is about a million times more powerful then that first one so Moore's law is still holding.
They say you get the politicians you deserve.
There is an apocryphal story of the man on the Clapham omnibus being asked if he would vote for a politician being accused of corruption. "Of course", said the man, "if he can't look after himself, how can I expect him to look after me?"
The Tories may be corrupt, but at least they can look after themselves.
"No reason to assume she was a criminal." If you believe that a stranger is simply someone you haven't met yet, then you are right, she is innocent until proven guilty and all that. If, however, you believe a stranger is a threat, and many people including police training officers do, then you get guilt by association laws and a tendency to shoot first and ask questions later.
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