Posts by LucreLout 3203 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Jun 2014
On that basis (destroying UKIP as a viable force in UK politics) Brexit has been a resounding success.
And the main beneficiary of that has been labour. Had UKIP continued as a force, labour would have been wiped out at the last election. They were literally saved as a party by the country voting for Brexit.
England/Britain is not exceptional, it is just another middling sized country, relatively very wealthy, but with significant internal problems of social justice.
It's the 5th or 6th (depending on point in the cycle) economy in the world. That on its own is pretty exceptional. It had the greatest empire the world will ever know - that too is exceptional (and either good/bad depending on your own perspective). It has the global centre for finance, which again is completely exceptional.
Sorry, but we're more than our square mileage and population graph. We just are. Historically, as well as today, we're punching well above our weight globally. For better or worse we've had a greater impact on the world than almost any other nation in history.
Social justice problems are, in comparison to the rest of the world, largely illusory or ideological. We have free health care, free housing (if needed), free money (if needed), free childcare, free education, free transport/telly/prescriptions/money for the elderly, and we have one of the consistently highest rated justice systems in the world. The rest of the world has poverty, real poverty, rather than some arbitrary relative measure. Some of it has war. Some of it has famine. Some of it is French ;-)
We're not perfect, but we as close to it as almost any other nation on earth. Just by virtue of being British you have won lifes lottery. There are so many worse places to be born, and so few better.
The argument you should be making is why leaving the large trade bloc we are already in (and have influence over)
We don't have any influence over the EU.
We, as in the UK, sent the Prime Minister, of the worlds 5th biggest economy at the time, to negotiate piddling little changes and tinker around the edges of the current setup, and the EU sent him home empty handed like some naughty school boy. That, I'm afraid, is not influence. It just isn't.
Sure, the EU regret behaving that way towards us now, but that's only because we're leaving and they can't afford to replace the funding withhout triggering more referendums in other places.
It's taken the EU 7 years to negotiate a FTA with Canada. Canada, FFS. The world is moving faster and faster and the EU slower and slower, which is why its importance on the world stage, economically, reduces year on year on year.
We need to be free of the dead hand of the EU and forward outward looking - there's a whole world out there, and we need to be able to sign FTAs with it a lot faster than 7+ years with one of the easiest going nations on Earth.
Ultimately, that's why I voted leave. If they'd sent DC home with something, anything, it might have been enough to persuade me to stay. But they sent him home with nothing but a slap in the face. We're better than that.
Enforcement will still be lelft solely up to the ICO, which seems primarily to exist in order to protect companies from lawsuits for breaching the DPA. Certainly they rarely, if ever, use the teeth they already have - its difficult to believe they'll be any more assertive or forceful in the use of their new powers post GDPR / Whatever Brexit bring as a replacement.
Okay, but the quid pro quo is we we keep "workplaces" out of politics; i.e. no corporate funding of political parties and lobbyists.
Congratualtions you just bankrupted the labour party. Unions are, after all, just corporations. For member, read customer. For dues, read price. I'll readily agree that is not how they portray themselves, but that's just marketing.
I have a vague recollection of a live-action film version from the 80s maybe. Based on the recollection I won't be googling for more details from work though
1999 - Allegedly Prompted by the sucess of 'Babe' - Even more divergent from the book than the 1954 animated version though...
Rumour has it that may not be the film the original author was thinking about... it was a little more.... adult/gross/possibly illegal. Allegedly.
Good to see the register is unbiased, the actual quote was....
Quite. While El Reg was always left leaning, it's lately swung so far to the left its in danger of competing with the Groan. I'm increasingly wondering why they're pushing this anti-Damore agenda based upon things they're fully well aware that he didn't actually say.
Agree with what Damore said, or disagree with it; either way is fine if you use facts. Deliberate misrepresentation of what was said in order to argue against it, is I believe, known as a strawman. Knock it on the head Reg. you're better than that..... or at least you were once.
The main benefit of keeping cash as a thing within the economy is that it prevents the imposition by government/quango of negative interest rates. The ability to impose such would allow them to tax the principal sum in a bank rather than only the interest.
Whatever your thoughts on wealth distribution, even a cursory glance as cold war inflation in Russia or present day Zimbabwe should illuminate why having people rush out to convert any income into none currency assets leads to a self reinforcing hyper inflationary death spiral.
I like pay wave etc and I'm comforatble with tap n pay from a mobile, but I wouldn't want to lose cash, because you never know what the next government will do, and they may not be as benign as the last.
I can't really think of any use-cases which aren't either creepy or criminal.
Sat navs. As well as choosing voice gender, it will become trivial (eventually) to choose the accent too.
Cortana/Siri/Whoever. Replacing their accent with a favoured grandchilds will put granny at ease when using them (not todays granny, but tomorrows).
Accent prejudice is a thing, at least according to The Economist [1], so the ability to change accent as well as language could become an important feature in AI adoption.
1 - https://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2015/01/johnson-accents
almost all the use cases are creepy - the genie however is out of the bottle...
For same gender triplets, twins etc that ship sailed the day they were born. Theres already someone that looks & sounds like them, knows all their "secret" financial info - DOB, Moms maiden name etc.
The M1-A1 link road doesn't count as a new motorway. It's an extension road to join existing road networks to create capacity by reducing demand on the M18. No different to widneing the M18 then. Widening existing motorways doesn't count as building new motorways. We've always widened or extended the ones we had AND built new ones at the same time.
We have 1/3rd of the motorway capacity of France.... We're going to have to put this anti-car nonsense behind us and start building the capacity we need, or our whole economy is finished.
M25 - planned in the 60's, built in the very early 70s.
M18 - built 1967 so 50+ years ago.
M60 - opened in 1960 as the M62, renumbering it doesn't make it new.
M6 - built in 1958 so 50+ years ago.
The key here, is we don't have any planned new motorways, so there won't be any before the M25s 50 year time horizon expires. Your defence amounts to 40+ years isn't 50 even though it will be. Well, erm, how many more people are here now than 50 years ago? 10 million more, and with many families now owning multiple cars. That's between 10 and say 20 million more vehicles with nothing new to drive on.
The point stands - we need more roads and we haven't built any new ones for as close as makes no difference 50 years.
I don't suppose, now there's soon to be no environmental case to answer for the car (Solar powered Telsas for all), we could spend some of that infrastructure money on roads?
The ones we have are 3rd world standard, and as we haven't built any for 50 years, we've completely exhausted their existing capacity.
Encryption without key escrow will end up getting outlawed
Ok, so how will that get policed do you think? How exactly is it you expect to make a terrorist hand over their encryption keys into escrow?
Yes, you will be able to legislate for main stream use such as WhatsApp, but they’ll just resort to their own side loaded messaging system. Or book codes. Or something else. What they won’t do is forget they’ve given you the decryption keys and chatter away about planned operations allowing you to repeatedly foil them, while never cottoning on to how you’re doing it.
it is undeniable that encryption is just as powerful a tool for baddies as it it can (with difficulty) be a tool for goodies.
So what?
I have a hunting knife I use for camping. In an emergency I can use it to help me build a shelter, start a fire, hunt for food, dig to make an oven, chop firewood for warmth etc etc etc Its a very useful tool. Innercity yoot scumbags seem to be able to find nothing better to do with that tool than gut each other.
So what does the law do? Criminalise everyone with such a knife unless they can pass a vague and arbitrary spot decision by a single police officer that they have a reason to be carrying it. I don't carry mine when I go to work, obviously, but if it falls out of the bag into the boot of my car, I can be convicted of having it without reason when I'm driving home from Tesco.
We've legislated for the lowest available denominator and left most of the country, who would never dream of shoving a knife into someone else, at risk of a serious criminal record (and jail time) for making a mistake. Or for misunderstanding the precise length of nonlocking blade their Leatherman is allowed to have. Meanwhile, the criminal scum carry on shanking each other because they carried on taking knives with them every day.
Banning strong encryption will achieve the same thing. Ordinary citizens will be at greater risk of fraud, blackmail, etc and the terrorists will carry on using the pre-existing strong encryption.
Linux Mint is free
Avoid Microsoft.
Every summer I install the latest version of Mint on an old laptop to see if its consumer ready yet. I'm not saying it isn't fast. I'm not saying it isn't stable. And I'm not saying it isn't good. But it isn't a consumer ready Windows replacement.
My plumber wouldn't be able to use it if I took away his Win 7 lappy and handed it back to him with Mint installed - I'd be taking support calls from him for the next 4+ years.
We find technology is usually simple and straightforward, but for the non-techies out there, it isn't. It's complicated, confusing, and difficult. And that's just email.
Blame ..... and a broken political system.
Why is it broken? Is it because the referendum didn't go your way, depsite the government making up lie after lie about the economic problems that would befall us on day one if we voted to leave? Problems which, much like the punishment budget, simply never came to pass.
I was on the fence until about 3 days before the referendum, eventually voting leave, but lets not pretend that one side of the debate was playing straight and the other lying through their teeth. To do so is transparently stupid and wrong headed at best.
Leave lied to us. Remain lied to us. Nobody really knew what was going to happen, but economically at least, my semi-educated guesses enjoyed greater accuracy than either sides experts. Nobody really knows what happens to the rEU after we leave, or us after we leave it. The future has always been a little like that.......
There is also no amount of trade on Earth with other countries that can replace being shut out of Single Market
Utter nonsense. Utter nonsense for which I shall ask for a citation, knowing already that you don't have one.
Here's mine:
http://ec.europa.eu/trade/policy/eu-position-in-world-trade/index_en.htm
Their own graph shows you clearly why you've erred in making up such a rediculous premise, and their graph includes our part of that trade, which is substantial. Remove us from it and literally any two of the nations on there have the same trade weight globally as the rEU.
Eu will NOT allow a non-Eu country to run the core Eu financial services. This is not negotiable, not subject to change and not subject to any rabbits out of a hat.
But we will continue to provide the capital and run the services either way. Passporting ending is going to massively increase the cost of borrowing for rEU states, states which can ill afford to further sink into deficit.
The City isn't leaving London. It just isn't. A few desks may move and some Euro trading will move, but all the FX needed in order to borrow from China/USA/Elsewhere in EUR will still be routed through London, because it will have to be.
If the EU aren't our partners anymore then they are our competition. And we will compete. That has rarely ended well for Europe.
It has been clear from the very first day that you cannot have the same advantage outside the EU as inside. That's hardly hard to understand and it's all there is to understand.
The main problem that causes for rEU is that they'll already have lost 1/3rd of their net contributions to the budget and will have committed something like 15-20% of what remains to pay the net WTO trade tariffs their trade surplus with us generates.
The more Europe tries to harm us, the deeper they'll have to dig into their own pockets (only Germany runs a large enough surplus) or the harder they'll have to cut back on the free money heading east. Neither will be very popular with countries already grappling with their own freedom movements.
While they grapple with that, they need to reach the Trump target of 2% of defence spending, which in Denmark is the cost equivalent of abolishing free university education and free childcare. It's not going to be an easy sell, but if we announce that we won't defend anyone not meeting their NATO agreement, they either go begging to Trump or they run the risk that Putin annexes more states.
That is not to say the UK won't also take an economic hit, but we'll be able to recover far quicker than rEU due to signing new FTAs with the ROTW. We simply need to make clear to the rEU that they're at the front of the queue for an FTA this year, thereafter, the back.
No reasonable FTA, and we drop corporate tax rates to pull in the global corporations from elsewhere in the rEU, which will further dent their domestic budgets while bolstering our own. Either the UK and rEU take a little pain and have a civilised fair agreement, or we hurt the hell out of eachother instead - remainers seem to think only the rEU can inflict pain, and that is simply not the case.
Otherwise it's border controls in Ireland followed by a resumption of IRA bombing campaigns.
No it isn't. The border in Ireland we'd leave open and let the rEU force Ireland to build one, which they would have to do.
The IRA are finished at this point. America can't and won't fund them - seriously, nobody there now thinks it was a good idea to pay the IRA to bomb their best (and at this point damn near only) friends. There would be no softly softly approach from the security services now, and anyone playing shennanigans would find themselves on the receiving end of a drone strike or a ticket to Cuba.
At this point I'm about as worried about the IRA as I am about Musks Tesla getting lost and landing on my roof.
A hard border may be difficult for Ireland, but they always have the Irexit option to consider. Irexit is really the only option left on the table that would avoid a hard land border. Its politically impossible for the UK to agree to a united Republic of Ireland, so if we're out of the rEU and they're in it, well, hard border it shall be. It may not be popular, but there are no better solutions on the table.
That, and the rEU could, you know, stop being so childish and sign up to a meaningful FTA that reduced the inconvenience at said border.
Until the technology exists for robots to build habitats in advance of humans arriving I don't think that we will be going anywhere. Unless of course you don't mind being irradiated and peppered with micro meteorites etc.
I'd rather that than rotting in a care home. Sign me up for the one way ride in about another 35 years and I'll get something built before I croak - the next codger along can continue the work. Space Codgers.... I'm sure there's a movie about that......
In terms of US goverment funding it is not even a rounding error.
Quite. Just mandate that all government & state employees will have tap water available rather than bottled water in meetings etc would probably save more money each year than they're talking about here.... while they're dooing thay, they have a car, on Mars.
One of the things they have to balance is what they expect to learn if the launch, transit, and landing succeed for whatever they do next; against the continued learning opportunities for having a whole bunch of scientific instruments successfully deployed on Mars already.
I can't imagine we've learned all we can about Mars witht he currently deployed configuration. We've only covered a few miles. Who knows what we'll discover over the next ridge.
Sure, you can apply the tax if you've purchased it from an Israel-based exchange. Considering you can buy it anonymously pretty much anywhere in the world, they would actually have to prove you have it first.
Not dissimilar to physical gold or gems then. Or masterpiece paintings. I'll not pretend to have indepth knowledge of the processes of detecting the fraud that nondeclarationw ould almost certainly be, but you can google the penalties for yourself if you'd like.
Something can't be a currency AND an investment.
Krugerrand's.
You get the currency value of a rand, and the commodity value of the gold. Granted, the commodity value is likely to always outweight the currency part, but it's the only exception to what you've said that I can think of.
Increasing the limit would decrease congestion and thus reduce chaos. Dropping the limit would cause congestion, thus increasing the chaos.
Most people ignore most speed limits most of the time. Seriously, try driving rigidly to the limit and watch everyone else come sailing past, or stack up behind nose to tail. I tried sticking to 75mph on the GPS, so about 80-85 on the speedo on the A1 the other night and I was still overtaken constantly mile after mile.
If AI sticks to the limits rigidly, they'll have to rise, or utter carnage will result. The obvious problem that causes is for the none automated or low skilled road users - cyclists, pedestrians, OAP drivers who aren't really safe at any speed etc. There are solutions, just not popular ones.....
When the car has no option but to crash does it place the lives of the car occupants above those on the street.
Ultimately, yes. Even if that is not the default behaviour, people will produce modifications that will allow such decisions to be predetermined.
That's no different to a human driving though, is it? It requires truly selfless reasoning and balls that'd shame Superman to crash into a tree instead of a person in the road, if doing so is likely to kill you. Maybe I could bring myself to do it if its a child in the road and my child is not in the car, but if my child is in the car, then whoever or whatever is in the road is shit outta luck. Sorry. You'll not find any parent make any other decision either, despite the howls of protest that will doubtless follow.
I don't see why society expects AI to behave better than they would themselves - even if it did, they'd start changing it because they wouldn't like the outcomes - does your smart home dob you into the police because it can detect weed being smoked? Perhaps your smart home could tell your GP the truth about how much you eat, drink (alcohol), smoke, and your fitbit can explain just how little exercise you really do? Any limitations on such behaviours won't be technical.
Why would autonomous cars (when they arrive in 2080) need to read road signs?
Well, two obvious reasons.
Firstly because they convey mandatory information to which the vehicle must adhere immediately, not once someone gets around to updating the map. Getting a dozen speeding tickets because what was a 30mph limit on Friday is now a 20mph limit on Monday and your map hasn't been updated yet, is going to be annoying, and expensive.
Secondly because non-automated road users (other cars, trucks, vans, pedestrians, cyclists etc) will be using the signs to inform their decisions - understanding what those road users are likely / supposed to do next will be a key part in not running them over.
The problem seems readily solvable - use a better image set for road signs, and make sure the car understands that not everything at the side of a road is a mandatory road sign - some are just adverts for the village fete, or hangover food.
Some signs cover a wide, changeable, and semi-unpredictable area. "Wild ponies or horses" being a good example, or riding schools. Many horses apparently confuse plastic bags stuck in hedges to be a vortex to another universe, and are likely to misbehave. It'd be best for all if the AI doesn't assume the horses will be in the fields, or moving slowly at the side of the road.
Temporary road closures for say road races (running etc) won't always be known about in advance in CA. or wherever the update is done, and if you're relying on humans to ensure the maps are correct at the time of use, then you're going to get human error. Anyone having lived in Newcastle-under-Lyme will be very familiar with truckers getting lost looking for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, at least in the days before GPS. People make mistakes, so cars relying on maps updated or created by humans are going to need to drive to the conditions in play on the road at the time of arrival, not what they should be according to the map.
Far easier to dress her in pink and give her puppies to play with?
She likes pink. And blue. And green. etc So pink is verbotten why, exactly? And who doesn't like puppies?
She plays with whatever toys she chooses - I usually let her pick her toys when we buy them. There's no point in my insisting she play scalextric just because daddy wants to. It's not like I grew up envisionining a future where I play teddy bears picnic, but as she's 5, its more important that we play what she wants than what I want.
She'll code, when she's old enough. If only to give her fall back options in case her chosen career doesn't work out. She'll service her own car. And she'll kick ass in self defence. These things are far more important to me than what colour she chooses to wear this month, or what toy she plays with.
Sorry, but its her life and her happiness is so much more important than your demented social engineering experiment. You'll understand that when you grow up. And you'll understand why.
Do you really have such low opinion of your mothers, wives/girlfriends, sisters, daughters?
Not in the slightest. But I'm also not going to force my daughter to become a programmer to fulfill someone elses half baked notion of fairness.
If she chooses a career in technology then I'll support that and aid it as much as I am able, which will be rather a lot.
If she chooses a career in medicine, I'll support that and aid it as much as I am able, which will not be a lot.
If she chooses a career as an artist or musician, then her mother will be furious.
It's not my choice to control what my daughter chooses as a profession. And it certainly isn't yours. Whatever she does she'll be more than capable of standing on her own two feet and not relying on some artificial quota or selection list. Why on earth would she need such things?
And then, it does absolutely nothing to explain why black people are so rare in engineering.
Quite obviously because they choose to be.
There is not one single avenue to education, in Europe at least, that discriminates against black people becoming engineers. There's nothing against oriental folk ..... or hispanic, etc. And there's nothing in favour of white people there either. Loans for education or free education, are available to all irrespective of skin colour.
If some predominantly white continents, such as Europe & North America, prioritise higher education more than predominantly black continents, such Africa, you may get a racial disparity in educated professions. I doubt that is the key reason here, which is why I suggest it is because they choose other professions, because I meet a lot of black people that have chosen the medical profession rather than engineering, IT, legal, or accountancy.
Why are there fewer women in IT? Because fewer of them choose to continue their education in the subject than do men. Nothing, certainly not 'positive' discrimination, will do anything to redress a perceived or actual problematic imbalance until the education component is first addressed. Hiring someone because of their gender or race over a better educated candidate with more experience is the height of stupidity. If you're not capable of hiring the best person before you because of your own racism or mysoginy then you shouldn't be hiring people at all. So far this year none of the candidates I've recommended hiring have been white men, but that's not because I'm trying to tick diveristy criteria, it's just because the best candidates that applied this round weren't white guys. Go figure.
You want to level the numbers, then make IT compulsory up to at least GCSE level. Real IT, not a word processing course - programming, devops, networks etc.
7. Go For A Shit.
I am secretly impressed at someone having to be told off by the captain for farting. That's some kind of achievment, which will almost certainly be told many times at his wake. To have landed a flight because of it...... surely that's tombstone material right there.
Here lies Lucra Lout.
Devoted husband and father.
Born 19?? Died 20??
He once farted badly enough to cause a plane to land.
If they can't learn to move on and experience new things, they deserve exactly what they get.
'They' don't get anything. Your business doesn't get profits because your productivity fell off a cliff. Your shareholders don't get dividends. Your share price drops and you don't get your financing rolled over. Your company goes bust.
If they'd always used OpenOffice it wouldn't be a problem, but they haven't. And it is.
also not certain why you had to go looking for it to write this article?
Probably the first thing that came into his head when the Mrs caught him watching Pammy's sex tape again.
"This isn't what it looks like.... I was erm, er, er, er.... just researching an article on celeb porn for El Reg. Honest."
If the seat is configured to recline, it is acceptable to recline it, and common courtesy to accept that the people around you will so recline.
Wrong! It is common courtesy not to recline your seat if it impacts upon the knees of the person behind. It is also a health hazard because the risks of DVT rise sharply when you can't move your legs. If you want to lie down to fly, then 1st class may be found towards the front of the plane.
The leg room is configured to the minimum space an average(ish) person can squeeze into. They're entitled to that space - they paid for it.
There's some little wedges that you can buy that stops the seat in front reclining. The occupier just thinks the mechanism's broken or non-existent.
I'd assumed they were some massive horrible thing bolted to the arm rests. Google says not. They're small enough to go in a pocket and they don't fasten to the arm rests. Great, that's my knees saved from the transatlantic tyranny of small men!
Crime should primarily be prosecuted in whatever country the perpetrator was at the time.
Just wondering how would that work if I'm on a boat in the middle of the Atlantic? International waters don't, as far as I know, have any laws regarding hacking of computers in Utah?
How would it work if one of the astronauts on the ISS gets bored and uses their data connection to hack something here on earth, or out there in low orbit or deep space?
How does that work if I hack Voyager from Earth, say in international waters? The crime is then either committed in deep space where there is no law, or in international waters where there doesn't seem to be a computer misues act equivalent?
I'm not suggesting the verdict is right or wrong, only that I am genuinely puzzled by some apparent edge cases of where the law now takes us. Any ideas?
The CPS are an incompetent shower of utter stupididty. At least they were under Kier Starmer, the last time I was forced to have dealings with them, and I don't suppose they've improved in the interim. It's time they were scrapped - cleared out top to bottom, and replaced with something fit for purpose.
And, no, I've never even been the accused, let alone the guilty.
Maybe this will also set a precedent where an alleged offence is deemed to have taken place where the alleged offender is physically located, not where the remote system is located.
I was wondering the same thing, but in a much wider context.
Can someone with any legal knowledge explain to me how this verdict works?
If I understand it correctly (and I may not) the premise is that because he was sat at his computer in the UK operating (ok, hacking) a computer in the USA, he is considered to have comitted the crime here and not in the USA. That is the exact reversal of how major banks etc get around the EU data protection laws, where they have people sat in India operating a computer within the EU (usually some sort of virt). The idea being the data has then not left the EU.
They seem like mutually exclusive interpretations of essentially the same situation, and I'm not sure how both can persist? Does this not mean that my data is now being processed in India because that is where the operator sits?
And should their spouses and kids be made to suffer for the sins of the breadwinners?
You've not thought this through, have you?
If I murder someone and go to jail, my spouse and kids suffer too.
If I drive drunk and get banned from driving, my spouse and kids suffer too.
If I curl on out on my bosses desk and get sacked, my spouse and kids suffer too.
How on earth do you perceive this as any different? Your post amounts to no more thought through a reply than "Won't someone think of the children?".
This makes me very resentful. If there is no justice in how the system works it loses its credibility.
In the UK there is no justice in speed enforcement.
At the outset of this post let me say I have never been charged with or convicted of any offence, including motoring offences. I've not even had a speed awareness course. That, however, does not imply I obeyed the law....... I've also got 20 years no claims bonus despite never protecting it.
There's lots of arguments about the dangers of speed, which are usually simplistic and most often miss the point about safe driving and accident avoidance (almost all accidents are caused by lack of obervation, anticipation, and correct & timely reaction). A point routinely missed by the anti-speed lobby is that often perfectly sensible limits are reduced for political reasons, leading to an inevitable uptick in non-compliance, which in turn leads to the deployment of cameras, which leads to the resentment & disdain in which the law is held. In the case of this article, it has literally been used as a tax and not as law enforcement.
I've never been caught speeding, despite speeding for decades - though I rarely speed now. I'd keep my speeding to out of town areas and motorways, but when I was younger, and before it was an instant ban, I'd regularly be doing 100mph on quiet motorways (overnight). Fast reflexes and good observation kept my licence clean. And yet, during that period I watched as older drivers such as parents of my friends, my dad etc amassed points as though they made prizes, and usually for far lower speeds than mine. I presume they were getting caught because they lacked the reflexes or observational skills to avoid cameras. Where's the justice in that?
