Posts by Doctor Syntax 40471 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"Not until we work out a better way to manufacture hydrogen at scale"
OTOH there's a very effective means of abstracting the hydrogen from water and combining it with carbon from CO2.* It's called photosynthesis. We need more of it. It's a pity there's a fashion for shading out the photosynthesis sites with panels of solar cells.
* Yes, I know it ends up back there, but it's a closed cycle.
I knew someone who did better than that. I first met him in London when he was visiting from his own Uni; his girlfriend was a flatmate of my then girlfriend. I hae vague memories of a mob of us round a table with several packs of cards playing Cheat.
Some years when I arrived in Belfast he was an archaeologist & I was a palaeoecologist. Subsequently he called me to look at a site that was later to become one of the more troublesome housing estates of West Belfast & whilst we were examining it confided that he was going to leave and study for the Church, later turning up in a CofI parish just across the border from Strabane. Later I'd heard he'd become a Bishop. Much later I read that he'd ended up as Archbishop of Armagh. So I've played Cheat with a successor of St Patrick.
He was also, of course, a successor of Archbishop Ussher. As a sometime archaeologist it's a pity he never issued an ex-cathedra statement contradicting him.
"look at real outcomes from real data."
I've been looking at real life for a lot of decades now. I've seen a lot of politicians come and go, some from closer quarters than others.
About the most reassuring thing is that the current government is looking towards the EU again because, frankly, it feels even more stupid to be outside it than it did one of those decades ago.
I also remember the Brownomics years - perhaps you don't. I also remember the Winter of Discontent - perhaps you didn't. And Harold Wilson's "pound in your pocket" speech, exchange controls and the "gnomes of Zurich" - again, perhaps you don't. The thing is, the long term is usually muddling through in the UK.
I think the US has problems of an entirely different kind which is essentially the topic everyone else is addressing. Is that outside your brief?
"Now it's a contract issue, that's much easier to manage."
That's what the salesman said.
"For managers who've been dealing with wannabe BOFHs for the past 30 years, you can see how that would appeal."
Now they need those BOFHs but the other side has them. Other side? Yes, didn't you know a contract is between two sides?
"The CLOUD Act pre-dated Trump and was a few years in the making, so boards and governments had plenty of time to consider the implications."
Absolutely. It's not the time that matters, it's the inclination as the Leaning Tower of Pisa said to Big Ben.
A smart move for Microsoft might be to turn over the Irish DCs to an Irish or EU company owned and managed by EU nationals run as a franchise with a contract under Irish or other EU state law that prevents any access by Microsoft but with Microsoft branding licenced to them. Ditto AWS. I wonder if there are any corporate lawyers in their homee state who have experience of international franchising of brands and other IP.
how does that work when "cloud" is also the processing mechanism?
It seems it is becoming feasible in terms of "the cloud" being the provider of a platform for an RDBMS. I found this paper https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/60876 which gives some indication. I don't know how routine it is in practice.
Could you explain in more detail how everything is going to be taken away (by whom) from the OP (I take it you can explain how you're aware of his circumstances so that that could happen) and how this is dependent on how the economy (the economy of what) works.
Otherwise we just have to treat your comment as a collection of loosely associated words that don't make sense.
"Everything is being taken from ordinary people little by little each year."
Tell ordinary people in the Ukraine that things are only being taken "little by little".
EU & UK don't want to continue war with Russia. They have a war on their doorstep which they don't want, didn't start but presents a real threat to their existence. "Wanting" doesn't come into it. They have no choice. They have to respond. The US has a long and ignominious history of ignoring of such threats until the threat reaches them; they tend to think WWI started in 1917 & WWII in 1941.
Take your head out of the sand, your arse or wherever else it's buried.
"You keep company money in someone else's bank"
There have been strict rules for a very long time about bankers not helping themselves to your cash and on the whole banks have a long record in looking after money. In the case of individual investors there's further backing in the form of compensation rules. Even so, if any European country were keeping its money solely in a US-controlled bank I'd expect them to be looking at moving it out.
The equivalent doesn't apply to keeping information in somebody else's computer. Rules are recent and not yet sufficiently well enforced where they exist (GDPR). On the contrary there are rules enabling governments to force the owner of the computer to break any agreements as to confidentiality.
Information and money work differently. Either the money is in your bank or it it not. Although information is spoken of as stolen it usually isn't - it's copied or illegally accessed but still there with no absence visible to the legitimate owner so that "theft" is not readily noticeable.
Going back to banking, there is one aspect which should be looked at for risks arising from actions of the USG: card transactions. To what extent could these be frozen at whim, disrupting the RotW's day-to-day retail transactions?
I think MX actually installes systemd but doesn't run it. Devuan has a shim but essentially it's over 99% Debian. Synaptic tells me I have 4445 packages installed which includes some from other repositories. Just 12 have Devuan as either part of the package name or included in the description on my laptop. An icon theme, popcon and reportbug could be removed. There are probably a few things that have been removed from Debian - no special tool to look at logs, for instance because more, view or grep will do fine. It's just what you'd have expected doing upgrades from the last SysV version of Debian if it had kept going without systemd. I really don't see anything that takes more maintenance than Debian.
Devuan on a Pi runs Nextcloud headless and such maintenance as it gets is through ssh or, for Nextcloud itself, the browser but really just chugs away ignored because it Just Works.
Maybe it's an aesthetic judgement but I found Debian & then Devuan to be simpler. All I ask of an OS is that it facilitates what needs to be done and otherwise stays out the way. Ubuntu seemed to be too much NIH & "Look at me". The shouty colour scheme probably didn't help. Nor a progress indicator that isn't a progress indicator, just a "something's happening" indicator. After using Ubuntu for a while and also taking a look at Mint I turned to Debian and found it a lot easier.
I have put Zorin on a couple of relatives' PCs, one still in use the other is Time expired and to be honest I'm not sue that there's anything to be gained from it vs Devuan.
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