Posts by Fonant 287 posts • joined 20 Mar 2014
That's actually more of an identifier than a key. It tells Google which account to charge the maps API usage to.
The identifier is also linked to the page domain, in the developer's Google account settings, so you can't use someone else's API key on your own website.
You can still, if you want, keep reloading the map page to trigger payments to Google by the site owner. But only Google benefits from that.
This is one answer to the question: "How risky should self-driving motor vehicles be?" - the answer being "As risky as human drivers, we've gotta get those parcels delivered as fast as possible!".
And the answer to "Should computer-driven motor vehicles always obey road laws?" - the answer being "Doh! Of course not!".
The biggest issue will be Reputation Management for the owners and manufacturers of these things. If they ever manage to get them into production.
And the human drivers won't be best pleased with the spotlight being shone on their safety record, either.
If what you say is true, why did Boris Johnson and his government make this agreement with the EU?
He signed it, and proclaimed it an excellent deal.
The status of Northern Ireland within the UK has not changed. However it is interesting that in the latest election parties wanting a united Ireland won more votes than UK Unionist parties.
Northern Ireland is doing very nicely, being both in the UK and the EU Customs Union and Single Market. That is what the real problem is for the Tories.
Russia Today would probably be happy to publish private communications of UK government ministers. Or perhaps Al Jazeera. Or WikiLeaks (is that still a Thing?). Or any one of millions of anti-UK internet forums. Or somewhere on the Dark Web, leaked to "baddies" around the world.
Ideas:
a) Send them a plain-text email containing your Book Club's latest reading list?
b) Send them a plain-text email containing the first book, phone them and tell them the second book by voice, send an SMS with the name of the third book, send a letter in the post with the fourth book, etc.
c) Communicate via a non-government approved connection, tunnelled over SSH or HTTPS. Are they going to try to make TLS illegal?
It's impossible to prevent people from encrypting messages to each other. Even if you make mathematics illegal.
Yes, you can force the most popular private messaging apps to remove their privacy, but that just forces people to a wider variety of privacy solutions. Much harder to track baddies, then.
What about internet banking? Online shopping?
Don't shoot the messenger!
I use Vivaldi, with trackers and adverts blocked by default, and no third party cookies saved. I also have uBlock Origin installed, which handles some more stuff that Vivaldi misses. And the "I don't care about cookies" plugin that removes most popups.
Global (works for all sites not white-listed by me) and fully under my control.
The EU cookie legislation is pointless, extremely annoying, and most probably makes the problem worse by people actively "accepting" dodgy cookies without thought.
Where on the risk-speed curve do societies want autonomous vehicles to be? How many deaths caused by AVs is acceptable? How fast should we allow them to drive?
Who is responsible when things go wrong? Things will go wrong, and humans will die as a result if we expect them to behave like normal heavy road vehicles.
* Self-hosted client-side analysis like Matomo (will miss some people who block such things, but otherwise interesting).
* Server-side log analysis like AWstats (can't tell you about client-side stuff, but logs every request).
* Custom server-side activity logging (customised to tell you what you want to know).
* Relax, talk to your customers, etc. Analytics can't tell you everything.
I remember "a friend" "accidentally" plugging a PC keyboard back into a Dixons demo machine, and "accidentally" deleting autoexec.bat so that the machine would not start the demo next time it was powered on.
Back in the early 1980s when "Dixons Reject!" was a powerful term of abuse for someone who was completely stupid. Sorry Dixons, RIP.
Surely the L2 point from the Earth takes exactly a year to orbit the sun?
Aha, they mean the telescope completes its tiny orbit of the L2 point every 180 days. "Utilizing thrust every three weeks or so from small rocket engines aboard Webb will keep it orbiting L2, looping around it in a halo orbit once every six months." https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/01/21/webbs-journey-to-l2-is-nearly-complete/
We risk missing the root cause of the problem: cars are intrinsically dangerous, whether driven by human beings or computers.
The questions are all effectively "where on the risk<->performance spectrum do we want cars to be?".
If you want safety, you need to have much more control over the environment. See: railways.
At last someone is moving in the right direction, away from space-hogging two-tonne SUVs that need HUGE batteries, and towards light-weight space-efficient urban vehicles.
This would be a good companion to an electric bike (for local trips) for longer "to the next town" journeys. And handy for when it's very wet, too. I'd buy one in an instant, and quickly add a cello carrying rack to it!
Trackside signals are very difficult to see in time at high speeds. And the fixed block sizes needed would mean huge gaps between trains to be safe.
In-cab signals create moving blocks, with the signals always being just in front of the train, whatever speed it's travelling at. More trains per line, almost zero feedback between a signal changing state and the driver/train being aware of that.
Autonomous cars would be a lot easier to make fast AND safe if they ran on tracks, had some sort of network-wide signalling system that knew where they all were, and could be coupled together to form "trains" that could carry hundreds of passengers in one "vehicle".
If they're not 3D-graphics-intensive they may well work fine under a copy of Windows as a virtual machine. No good for 3D games, though.
I found replacements the few Windows-only Apps I used to use. Joplin is a nice replacement for Evernote, and I've always used LibreOffice here anyway.
I made the jump about a year ago, to Fedora. I use Virtual Machine Manager to fire up my old Windows copy as a virtual machine when needed (usually to play along with a scammer to waste their time).
The trigger was finding that Win10 had got corrupted somehow, and nothing I could do would get it to boot. Installed Linux, and re-installed Win10 from scratch as another boot option.
My PC still dual-boots into native Windows 10 if needed, but I rarely use that and only ever for playing games that aren't yet ported to Linux.
Since I'm a Linux sysadmin Linux was an obvious choice, and it's lovely having the same tools on my desktop as I have on my servers :)
Exactly.
Perhaps it's a coincidence that major donors to government have been Russian Oligarchs and Disaster Capitalists. Both groups benefit hugely from a collapsing UK economy, society, rule of law, etc.
I fear we've lost a war that we didn't even know we were involved in.
Ah, so that's why my wife's primary school is unable to print anything out at the moment. Their IT support people said it was a Microsoft problem, but I thought they were joking.
Of course UK schools don't have enough money to buy glue sticks at the moment, so their IT infrastructure is, of course, decades old and held together with sellotape.
Please can we get a new government, that will reverse the Tory cuts? Soon?
And also often omitted that EVs can be ready with a "full tank of fuel" every morning, automatically.
Yes, many people don't have driveways, but solutions to that are already being put in place (e.g. lamp-post chargers, trailing lead channels, workplace charging, carpark charging, etc).
We have 4.2kWhp installed and generate an average of 13 units per day averaged over a year. Our household usage is 12 units per day averaged over a year.
To be free of having to buy mains electricity we just need storage. Hey, if we got an EV with a 40kWh battery and an inverter we could easily survive the summer months without importing any power at all. We could even survive a few days with no solar generation at all, assuming no long car trips needed.
Multiply by, say 50% of the car-owning households and you have a very useful distributed energy generation and storage system, just what the National Grid needs.
When we get an EV with car-to-house capabilities, we'll be able to charge it from our solar PV during the daytime and then run the house off the car battery in the mornings and evenings. In the summer months we'll rarely need to use grid electricity at all. In the winter we'll use some, but at a nice steady base load - perfect for big power stations to provide.
LESS load on the grid. Massively distributed energy storage, even LESS demands on the Grid.
Indeed. EVs will normally have "a full tank of fuel" automatically every morning, ready for the commute. Not many fossil-fuelled cars can do that!
There is already battery-to-grid technology working and it won't be long until vehicle-to-grid will work too. The availability of tens of thousands of high-capacity high-charge-rate high-discharge-rate batteries connected in a highly distributed way to the National Grid reduces Grid loads and power generation costs massively.
But we're going to need to forget using SUVs for every trip. Lightweight, efficient, electric bikes and the like will use much less power and need smaller batteries.
Lack of public charge points is an issue, but not the biggest issue.
We also need to increase our UK battery manufacture by a factor of infinity, or a factor of 8 once the new Nissan battery factory is up and running.
In fact we're all going to need to re-think transport (way overdue anyway, just from a traffic congestion point of view). The concept that we each take 2 tonnes of vehicle with us on every trip is going to have to change. It's already changing, sales of electric bikes and electric cargo bikes are booming - demand outstripping supply. For local trips smaller and lighter vehicles are much more sensible, and have no charging problems: take the battery off and re-charge indoors from a 13A socket at any time.
Climate Emergency = less energy required for transport = lighter and more efficient vehicles = e-scooters, electric bicycles, trams, trolleybuses, trains.
My favourite pseudonym to use when talking to scammers when they ask for my name is "Jim Browning".
My favourite moment was when, towards the end of a scam-baiting session I asked to talk to Chanden Bharti, and (as far as I could tell) actually spoke to the scammer himself!
There are many, many, underpaid workers calling people, but only a few people controlling these things. Jim has done much good work uncovering how these operations work, and who is in charge.
Given that the employer holds almost all the cards in an employment relationship, the most important part of the interview process is for the candidate to decide whether or not they've be happy working for that employer.
The employer needs to make sure the candidate is competent for the job, and, hopefully, whether they'd fit in with their potential colleagues. Since every job is different, an ability to think, learn, and adapt is often more important than some particular technical ability or experience on their CV.
As the article says, the employer needs to avoid anyone who is applying solely because they're desperate for a job.
A good interview should be a pleasurable experience for everyone involved. Whatever the outcome.
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