Posts by Doctor Syntax 42029 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"But the fear of multi-million or even billion dollar jury verdicts will help keep them in line. Even with government regulation, such threats are the only reason they even obey the law any ways."
Proper says that the vehicle model has to meet safety standards to be offered for sale. Failure to take the money in the first place is an even more effective reason to obey they law than fearing it being taken away again.
"This is why:"
Hmmm. And you think an autonomous car will do better? I think the real reason why is lobbying by companies that want to sell autonomous cars. There'll be an awful lot of profit sales to be made before there's a real handle on whether they really are safer and if the final decision is that they aren't then the companies still get to keep the money.
"One is the reduction in accidents as most accidents are really due to some form of operator error/stupidity."
As human drivers generally drive very safely (I don't know about US figures but as far as I can make out the fatalities in the UK must be of the order of one per 100 million* miles). This is a pretty tough target to set for an autonomous vehicle. In fact, the figure suggests that accidents are corner cases, the driver failing to cope with an out of the ordinary situation. Experience suggests that dealing with corner cases is something S/W isn't particularly good at. In addition inexperienced drivers are more likely to have accidents than experienced drivers. One should reasonably expect experienced and sober drivers to be somewhat better than the average. If I were to trust my life to an autonomous vehicle I'd want it to be at least as good as an experienced and sober driver; I have no confidence that this will be achieved for a long time if ever. Meanwhile I'm quite happy for an experiment like this to take place somewhere where I have no intention of ever being so the US fits that quite nicely.
*I base this on there being c 30 million vehicles in the UK and c 3,000 accidents and assuming 10,000 as the average mileage to get an order of magnitude figure.
I'm not clear as to exactly what Dave was recommending here. If he's suggesting - or it gets interpreted as suggesting - that the business just sign up for a bunch of gmail or outlook or (let's really go for it) TalkTalk or Yahoo addresses then it's not particularly a good idea. Because that looks so professional. At the very least go with a mail provider who can provide you with email addresses on your own domain.
Isn't it amazing that all these allegedly net-savvy SEO specialists don't have their own company domain but spam from gamail.
" We have provided plausible physical and chemical information about the conditions under which life could have originated. Now it’s the experimentalists turn to find out how life could indeed have emerged under these very specific early conditions.”
Translation: We've done the easy bit. Can someone put it together?
In reality we don't have separate DNA, protein and energy handling chemistries. They form an interactive whole. Once the thing is up and working it's easy to see how advantageous chance changes can be preserved. Discovering how a sufficient collection of apparently unlikely changes came together it assemble a self-reproducing system is a different matter.
"The meteorites and large asteroids of the early solar system were probably important for delivering water to ancient earth"
Why suppose that meteorites and large asteroids would have had water and the early Earth wouldn't? They might have added water but if was around in the early solar system for them to incorporate it was also available for the early Earth.
"I don't need to understand how encryption works to understand how it's helping – end-to-end encryption – the criminals."
What needs to be fed back against this is that it's simply a tool and like any other tool, has its good and bad uses. In this case its good use is the securing of everyday commercial transactions. In trying to destroy it you are helping criminals Home Secretary.
"I am not suggesting you give us the code,"
Which only adds to her display of ignorance. Some encryption code is readily available if you want it and even for proprietary code either it will use publicly available algorithms or the TLAs will be with home-grown alternatives. It's the keys that matter and for real end-to-end not even the vendor will have those. But the thing that matters most of all is the extent to which encryption is essential to the security of everyday commercial life and that the damage she can wreak there vastly exceeds what terrorists are attempting to do. It is she that is trying to help the criminals and everyone else who is trying to stop her.
"At what point in our society did it become acceptable to declare your own ignorance and be proud not to know something so fundamental."
A very long time ago. In fact, I'm not sure there ever was a time this side of the middle ages where knowledge other than legal knowledge was essential. In the middle ages a talent for violence was also handy.
Has she not asked anyone to explain to her how "it works"? Is there nobody there that understands it?
I've explained this before.
There are people at the HO who do understand it. They need someone who doesn't to front things for them because such a person will be able to spout the bollocks they tell her with complete sincerity as she doesn't know any better.
You'll only give the Treasury ideas. They'll call it a hypothecated tax. Who would want such a tax with such a nasty name? So much nicer to just take it into general taxation and then HMG can fund the Beeb directly....
The licence may not be an ideal way of funding the Beeb, especially when operated by Crapita, but the alternatives - ads or direct government control - are much, much worse.
"OT: Oi, El Reg! The wavy red line of disapproval appears beneath the word when I write kilometer, but disappears if I swap the last two letters. Please load a proper English dictionary! (Or in this particular case, a French one, I guess)."
Assuming you're not actually joking:
(a) The dictionary is supplied by you via your browser. In my case, using Seamonkey which is the same program for both browser and mail, I get exactly the same underlining in both the browser and the mail composing windows.
(b) Kilometre is the original French spelling and hence is correct unless you live in a country that also thinks that colour and theatre are also incorrect.
If you wish to persist in using the spellings currently in vogue in the colonies load the en_us dictionary or right-click on the word and add your misspelling to your dictionary.
"There's observer effect and faster than speed of light communication between entangled particles, how much more obvious easter egg you need ?"
Not Easter eggs. The whole of quantum physics and relativity are just bugs that haven't been sorted out yet. Newtonian mechanics was all that was intended.
e) If I (and this has to be expressed in 1st person terms) exist in a simulation then none of you, el Reg or anyone else exist except as inputs presented to me. That includes the papers you write which I'd have no way of verifying as I have no access to the observatories that don't exist. So if one were to consider oneself as living in a simulation one doesn't have to believe that everything an entire universe is being simulated all the time because nothing outside one's immediate experience needs to be simulated all the time; it can just be instantiated as needed.
"the hypothesis we're talking about depends so strongly upon something we can't prove to be true"
Or prove to be false?
It used to be the case that science proceeded by making empirically testable hypotheses and testing them, discarding the duds and retaining the not-yet-proven-to-be-duds. Now we seem to be proceeding by only hypothetically testing hypotheses.
It's the white one with a big ferric chloride stain.
"it is too difficult for police to solve most simple theft in modern cities."
Simple theft is apt to leave few clues. You stand more chance of getting the culprits when they do something stupid. That doesn't, however, mean that there shouldn't be a preliminary investigation otherwise the opportunities will be missed.
"Not everyone needs to get from A to B in as short a time as possible ALL OF THE TIME."
But some of the people you're holding up need to get from A to Z and the accumulation of time spent behind those who don't means that they end up driving the latter part of their journey much more tired than they need to be.
"It took a heck of a lot to kill those DEC terminals."
And maybe other DEC kit. Back in the '80s of Big Bang London there was the story of DEC being asked by a non-customer if they could supply a copy of the OS. They asked what it was for. Someone had found a presumably surplus Micro-VAX tossed into a skip.
"I say just do it.
Then all the companies running DNS servers and not maintaining them will get an in-flood of angry customers some will leave and the company will learn it's lesson to not leave stale infrastructure out there."
Maybe a half-way house. Roll it out for a short period then roll back (they did have a roll back facility in their plans, didn't they? Then announce "Did you have a problem? If so you've got a month to fix it, then it's permanent."
