Posts by bollos 31 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Feb 2015
i highly recommend this:
"The film compares the rise of the neoconservative movement in the United States and the radical Islamist movement, drawing comparisons between their origins, and remarking on similarities between the two groups. More controversially, it argues that radical Islamism as a massive, sinister organisation, specifically in the form of al-Qaeda, is a myth, or noble lie, perpetuated by leaders of many countries—and particularly neoconservatives in the U.S.—in a renewed attempt to unite and inspire their people after the ultimate failure of utopian ideas."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Nightmares
...just as drones start making these incredibly expensive wastes of money pointless.
"A new artificial intelligence flight combat system dubbed ALPHA has taken on one of the Air Force's top tactical experts and won. Retired USAF Colonel Gene Lee — an experienced combat instructor with "considerable fighter aircraft expertise" — was repeatedly shot down during engagements with ALPHA in a high-fidelity air combat simulation. Lee called his computerized opponent "the most aggressive, responsive, dynamic and credible AI I've seen to date."
Even when the researchers placed ALPHA at a severe disadvantage by limiting the speed, turning, and weapons and sensor capabilities of its simulated aircraft, the AI pilot was able to beat out other expert human pilots. According to UC Magazine, ALPHA's AI is fast and robust enough to actually coordinate a tactical plan in a combat situation "over 250 times faster than ALPHA's human opponents could blink." Going beyond current AI-Human combat teams, ALPHA will eventually be able to control a squad of Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles flying in support of a human pilot, constantly learning and adapting to opponents in the heat of battle."
https://www.engadget.com/2016/06/28/combat-ai-beats-air-force-experts/
mate, i'm still p*ssed off they stopped making them! i blame those nobby tablets for that. just as manufacturers started bringing out netbooks with dual-cores they killed them! i have no need for maximum battery life but i would love a nice geared down quad-core 8" netbook running W7 off a nice 500GB Samsung SSD. can someone ask dell to re-issue the dell mini 9 with a decent cpu and SSD? i can fit my own SSD if necessary and even change the cpu if that's possible. the HP2133 i had was a fantastic little machine (great sound and metal keys) but the pony VIA ULV cpu was *soldered* into the damn mb so i couldn't upgrade it!
"Where do you think the heat from your water will end up when it cools down?" - in my bath or cooking pot.
"We could stop most man made climate change given enough effort / desire." - man does not have that power and it would be stupid to even try. we could stop man-made pollution by switching away from using poison for energy but that involves defeating the hydrocarbon mafia amongst other things.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-34800829
yes of course there will be dislocation, i totally agree but that would be because people were not prepared for climate change.
if you put thermal heaters on your roof, to extract heat and heat up your water, are you not taking the heat out of the atmosphere? if every home on the planet had thermal heaters on their rooves, would that not extract heat from the atmosphere and save us a ton of energy at the same time?
you can't stop global climate change. it is changing all the time. what we MUST do is stop poisoning this eden in space. we're crapping on our own doorsteps!
imo home batteries invalidate nuclear energy and with wind turbines and photovoltaic panels and even exercise bikes (seriously!) to top up the battery, along with a low-priority grid trickle charging during low-use periods, we can harvest the clean and free energy that is all around us.
most noise and pollution in cities is due to the infernal combustion engine, so when we all start driving electric cars we can enjoy a cleaner and quieter life with less people getting and asthma from this toxic crap!
worry about TOXICITY not TEMPERATURE.
see also: "According to Donohue and his colleagues' research, climbing levels of CO2 in the air correlated with an 11 per cent increase in foliage cover from 1982 to 2010 across arid areas in Australia, North America, the Middle East and Africa."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/11/co2_greens_the_deserts/
for the record i didn't build the website, the designer did, i just did some work on a dynamic page elsewhere on the site (products loaded from a products table etc) and this was going to be an add on at a later stage but in the meantime they foolishly went with WP.
you couldn't really make a comment like that unless you were involved in the project, certainly not without being accused of making foolish, hasty and ignorant judgements of people!
the point here is one of philosophy or ideology. i like writing code that is as small as possible, using the least amount of code to get the job done. imo this creates lightweight and fast sites. some people load up sites with so much additional code that it slows them right down and they are over weight.
to that end, decrying the use of fifteen tables when one does the job perfectly well is a perfectly valid criticism is not "dumb", it's perfectly logical and sensible. if you approach development from the point of view that less is more, you create nimble and fast sites. the actual differences in speed might not be noticeable in reality but it also makes the site easier to administer and port and obviously uses a smaller footprint so needs less server resources. again, this might not seem like a big deal but once adopted as a development philosophy can add up.
for the record, this was a simple blog without "tags and comments". ID, utime, title, bodycopy and image were the fields, that's all that was needed.
the client chose to do what they wanted, as was their right, they probably thought it was what they needed but it wasn't. the designer that was in charge of the project agreed with me and thought it was ridiculous that fifteen tables were used just to run a small blog, understandably.
i'm amazed that you can't see that less code and smaller footprints make for smaller and faster and easier to administer websites?
you're missing the point, it was just a simple blog. one table with one page to read it and one admin page to logon and add/edit bog entries. you don't need fifteen tables to do that.
the CSS was loaded from an external style sheet, like it should be, stop guessing.
it didn't need to be "versatile", it just needed to show the entries in the blog table.
small code, just doing what needs to be done creates lightweight and fast sites. loading sites up with bloatware slows them down and creates pointless large footprints. imo this is a massive problem on the net.
i had to do a simple blog page for someone a few years ago and i did it with one table and 6 fields and a simple admin script with a login for the site owner to add and edit blog posts and a simple blog page to read the blog table and display them on the page. the site owner decided to go with wordpress and after it was installed i checked the database and it had installed FIFTEEN TABLES!! incredible.
if you want a fat bloated slow website with a large footprint, use wordpress :P
the problem we have had with fractional reserve lending is that they have NOT kept to their side of the equation, bbbbbecause *they are gamblers*! the theory is, that 10% of loans go bad, so you need to keep 10% of your loan book *as liquid assets* (i.e. cash), in case of problems. too often it is the case that these piggy bankers have dipped their grubby little trotters into this reserve and gambled with that as well. sooooo when any call comes on this reserve and it's not there, bingo, liquidity problem. these banks should not be bailed out, they should be allowed to go bust and the insolvency process allowed to pick over the bones and sell off anything decent to new investors. the ONE THING banks have to do is manage risk, if they can't even do that then they have failed in their primary function and should fail and be replaced.
they say "managing risk", but it's *gambling*. we gave something like £320 BILLION of tax payers money to bail out failed gamblers in the city of london. they should have not got one penny of our money. now we have zombie dinosaur banks shuffling along, propped up by tax payers money when they should have gone extinct already and allowed fresh new well run institutions to take their place. this is evolution!!
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