Posts by W.S.Gosset 1040 posts • joined 18 Nov 2016
"Just re-read the post prope....oh crap."
I left a bit out.
My fault. I was essentially re-typing a post elsewhere; missed a key linkage. My apologies, I'm just way past sick & tired of the relentless politicising combined with the errant fictionalisation to "support" same. Had the response in my mind, didn't all come out my fingers.
To save retyping: copy-paste of the linkage
> I am just so far past patience with the hysteria. And the deliberate lying to "prove" virtue memes. I mean, check (the most recent) Lancet-gate. Deliberate falsification of data just to try to make Trump look silly. Used to take YEARS for the memesters to get the confidence/arrogance to do that [sort of thing] ; now, what, 3 months? Luckily this one was caught out early and loudly, and in fact that treatment (HCQ+AZM) is being rolled out. _Centenarians_ ("with several co-morbidities") in intensive care routinely surviving.Remember, up till now, just being an octogenarian 20yrs younger and reaching intensive care, COVID-19 was [almost] a death sentence.
Or to put it another way: the TDS psycho anti-Trumpsters are responsible for the bulk of the USA COVID-19 deaths. Since their political campaign quashed every [USA] medical group's willingness to risk their entire career by going with the experimental data rather than the meme.
THIS sort of thing is what gets me angry.
Upvote for bringing my cockup to my attention -- thank you.
Point taken, in the general case of casual conversation.
But in _context_, of this chap explicitly varying paradigm assumptions left right & centre, to suddenly drop in as a major point something so jarringly stationary and so based on default assumptions...
Well, that's why I posted the actual.
Christ. Here's another one.
OK, in this instance, "Christoph" has put his own name to it. That's almost a little bit like taking some responsibility for the deaths unnecessarily caused. Well done, you, Christoph; well done.
>TDS. Trump Derangement SyndromeChrist, is there NOWHERE you can go to get away from these psychos.
Do please be aware that the later research which was loudly screamed globally, contradicting and destroying the early experimental data referenced by Trump, has subsequently been exposed as scientific fraud. Google variations on Lancet-gate etc. The initial results were valid and have been subsequently profoundly enhanced by combining HCQ with AZM, such that even 100yos+ in intensive care with multiple co-morbidities are now routinely recovering.
To put another way: the psycho anti-Trumpsters are responsible for the bulk of the USA's COVID-19 deaths. That means YOU, "anonymous coward".
This post has been deleted by a moderator
That "expand forever" idea evaporates if light loses energy as it travels. Which would be seen as a red-shift. At which point much of astronomy gets tipped upsidedown and the necessary extrapolation (which is all it is; people keep forgetting that) of the Big Bang goes away as a theoretical fiction as valid as Phlogiston. Which was equally well supported by the limited facts to hand at the time.
Everything you raised is roughly correct. Re nerve impulses becoming effectively one-way, eg, roughly same as the simple tidal strains which tear objects apart eg planets, stars. Your brain (if diving headfirst) would feel your limbs thrashing around at increasingly lunatic speed, whilst your limbs would be moving slower and slower as the brain's signals came slower and slower. (V.sharp gradient implied to have this effect over ~6ft...)
Further to your gut reactions, Einstein had pretty much precisely the same problems, when he looked at the limit of his theory.
Depends on the speed of light, too.
Which is not a constant (swirl a Bose-Einstein condensate faster than IIRC 4mph: Look! A black hole!).
(which has some verrrrrry interesting mathematical consequences. A là Dirac's 30s prediction of half the universe, only discovered empirically in the 50s 60s+ . Spin too fast: you exit "now".)
OK, technically and precisely, FM is not realtime, due to the speed of light delay between the broadcast station and your radio.
Give me a break: I was just trying to find an example readily understandable to non-CS types which would provide that zen-like enlightenment moment re the underlying core concept.
Actually, technically, in computer science it does.
That's in fact PRECISELY what it means.
RTP & RTSP, for example, are explicitly not real time, in a CS context, despite their names. All they do is provide to a human the illusion of realtime via non-interruption of stream on average. Dig down to the jitter handling if you initially disagree. Note the time-averaging, too. Likewise, by definition, Unix is not nor can ever be a realtime system. Google realtime systems.
If you can't be arsed crawling through the specs (which I whole-heartedly understand; not everyone is as anal as me), you can get a 2second total grokking of the concept by putting 2 radios next to each other: 1 DAB, 1 FM, both tuned to the same simulcast station. Note the DAB radio is always audibly "behind" the FM radio. Usually just a split-second but sometimes longer.
FM is realtime; DAB is not.
OP is talking realtime ("FM"); the downvoters are talking pseudo-realtime ("DAB").
OP cosymart made a joke based on this correct knowledge.
Oh but yes, that downvote was mine. Then thought to do a quick webcheck of your numbers and realised that regardless of facts your post was valid based on what you'd looked at. Problem: no way to remove the downvote. So, sorry about that.
Apologies. I am just so far past patience with the hysteria. And the deliberate lying to "prove" virtue memes. I mean, check (the most recent) Lancet-gate. Deliberate falsification of data just to try to make Trump look silly. Used to take YEARS for the memesters to get the confidence/arrogance to do that; now, what, 3 months? Luckily this one was caught out early and loudly, and in fact that treatment (HCQ+AZM) is being rolled out. _Centenarians_ ("with several co-morbidities") in intensive care routinely surviving.
Remember, up till now, just being an octogenarian 20yrs younger and reaching intensive care, COVID-19 was basically a death sentence.
Or to put it another way: the TDS psycho anti-Trumpsters are responsible for the bulk of the USA COVID-19 deaths. Since their political campaign quashed every medical group's willingness to risk their entire career by going with the experimental data rather than the meme.
THIS sort of thing is what gets me angry.
But yes, you're right: that's no excuse for me getting sloppy. I continue to hunt for my source document.
Still rummaging through bins and my piles of KeepThis tear-outs looking for the article quoting numbers, which itself cited its sources, which seemed valid to me at the time of reading. And I'm fussy about that sort of thing. Ex-researcher.
Interrupted massively by the irritations of ordinary life requirements.
I remember folding over the corner of the page for later tear-out but don't remember tearing it out. Nasty feeling it's in a recycling dump by now.
Can't hit the library for old copies like I've had to do before because they're all effectively closed.
I did do a quick web scan on seeing your comment and saw the same numbers. I *have* seen that syndrome before on high-meme items and they were false (eg, NHS announcements of stats&numbers falsified by their own deep low-level data that they assume noone's thorough enough to dig for), but without the original source I'm not willing for something so trivial to put in the time required to re-establish the reality baseline. I continue to hunt for the hard-copy.
The key point, hammered by epidemiologist after epidemiologist, is that the hysteria is massively overdone.
Sweden being the blindingly obvious categorically empirical and heuristic example.
Re your apples& oranges point, I agree with you in general (I just put the quick large-scale comparo point in because it's also valid, as a lot of epidemiologists have tried to say, and as Sweden has proved: they stated 2wks ago they'd returned to normal population death rates).
That's why I started with the low-level medical reports and research, which I've been following since early March. Which all say max 0.5% mortality (0.1% for flu), ~0 for under-60yos (opposite pattern to flu), and that's based on garbage testing. Any time they do a blind wholesale testing of a population, they discover the virus has already smashed thru and is continuing, without symptoms (so not picked up in the normal testing/formal infection rates, so the 0.5% is over-inflated due to incorrectly low denominator).
And the measures are a bad fit for this virus. Eg, don't wash your hands/surfaces, wash your feet/floors. Even in COVID-19 Isolation Wards, ~0 virus on hands, doorknobs, or surfaces, but the floors and feet are soaked in virus (the original WHO report on disinfection pointed out you were better off rubbing your dry hands together than using sanitizer). Eg, open the schools and pubs but isolate the old & ill (heart & diabetes). 87% of Italy's deaths over 80yo, UK's deaths massively inflated due to the panic emergency evacuation of old & ill people out of the hospitals predicted to be swamped, into old people's homes etc, taking the infection with them right into the heart of the most at-risk. Etc.etc.
Herman, it's even sillier than that.
Example that I just saw the epidemiological numbers on this morning and did some back-calcs to confirm:
If Australia had had the "catastrophic" COVID-19 death rates of the USA, we would so far be looking at a "catastrophic!sackTrump!" fatality count of around 10,000.
All countries routinely have "bad flu seasons". A routine term routinely used by the doctors and hospitals.
Australia's last bad flu season was 2017/2018, and 49,000 people died over and above the usual routine flu deaths. "Excess Deaths".
Bad flu: +49,000.
COVID-19: +10,000 and the screaming hysterical end of the world as we know it.
Speaking as one of those colonials, who's lived and worked with a lot of others, I call fie on that "UK = criminals on parole" thing. Some ranters will go on like that, yes. But the vast majority look on the British Empire as fundamentally a bonus for their culture and economy. Introduced the idea of the rule of law, of non corruption, of cracking on with a job, of poor people being allowed to get ahead. You'll note eg in India that yes a heap of English parasites hooked money out of the Moghuls, but they'd themselves parasitically hooked it out of the Indians, the poor, who were savagely held down. At the same time, those poor were suddenly offered opportunities and jobs and trade and allowed to keep their money rather than give it all up to the rulers. So there was a rotation of India's internal wealth ownership, away from the privileged and towards the poor. Do the remnants of that top 1% still bitch today? Yes. Talk to the Rajputs or Brahmins. But the lower castes? Only heard mostly positive things.
Partition was a complete fkup, of course.But hold all the dark muttering conspiracy evil theories close to your heart, and read Mountbatten's autobiography. He was a very blunt man and when he cocked up, he said so. And discover to your surprise that his actions were entirely driven by genuinely trying to get the best results for both sides. He steps thru what he was seeing and being told, and the headoffice imperative and urgency to get the best results for India. Just, as he acknowledges, an incomplete understanding of the sheer depth at the time of the Mughal/Indian, Muslim/Hindu hatred.
Re Brexit: I don't know what planet you're on mate, but every Commonwealth country I've looked at is banging on Britain's door, waving a trade agreement.
I did the same in a 727 as a pup -- my dad was the check captain.
There were only a dozen or so passengers so my dad went into the cabin and explained the pilot was going for his captain's bars and asked if it was OK if they chucked the plane around a bit.
"Hell yeah" essentially.
Great memories of, eg, belting along just above the water just off the beach, up the Queensland coast. Must have been a surreal sight for the surfers etc.
Top Tip for Brits:
Because of the gamekeepers still keeping them under control in the south, you can hit up the country farmers markets and buy mass quantities of their overflowing venison for less than the price of Tesco's 3-star mince.
Also, pheasant for £2 a pop. Because of their nutrition density, each tiny bird will feed you well for 3 days. That's 70p a meal.
Look for the wiry types in battered heavy warm flat-caps standing behind quotidian polystyrene boxes. Sometimes a gun in the cab of the white van beside them. Vans typically full of meat -- they'll look favorably on any offer to buy bulk, they have trouble getting rid of it all.
Example: (sorry, missed the edit window)
I'm getting >25Mbs here on my phone over a kilometre away from the nearest antenna. At local peak time. I routinely get over 100, closer.
5G's spectra would struggle to get that (25Mbs) at 100m at 4am. Just simple physics.
If nothing else, think of the colossal infrastructure costs just to regain in suburbia the coverage you currently take for granted with 4G. That money doesn't just rain from the sky like in Magic Pudding Land: if they spend it, they'll charge it back to you, over time, via your contracts. They _have to_. So you'll be paying more, for more-restricted service. Walk outside the cities/suburbs/towns'centres... oh, no data.
IoT(meme) aside, wtf?
Other than ShinyShiny hysteria, I don't get the urgency nor the drama.
In retrospect:
* the simplistic backquoting does not competently handle filenames with internal spaces. I knew they had none by the mailserver's design, but, still, looking back, I get a gut-clench.
* woulda been MUCH better if I'd grepped between ls and head for characteristics of the originating website. Excuse: panic. 400+ websites just on the one upstream burgled VM. Lots of other stuff and people upstream. Centralisation is brilliant, until it's not. And this machine was LOCKED. In retrospect: idiocy, fail vs potential risk.
[EDIT: wait, hang on, there weren't any. Due to the chaining/structure, the filenames etc had by that point no source-identifying info.
OK, I feel a bit better about #2
But still, if YOU'RE in the same situation, take 1sec to think if you can carve out anything non-relevant. Go go gadget grep -v!
]
Your mailserver can get jammed before you have time to react, if a dedicated spambot injection is kicking off hard on a connected webserver This leaves exim etc incapable of responding usefully, if at all.
We got stuck in this situation at an ISP+MgdSvcs company a few years ago. No response from anything but shell built-ins or nearly-so primitives, and even THEY were sluggish (!). (Unix, to be clear.) We went from fine to fkd in less than 60secs from the alarm, terabytes tempdir jammed while we were trying to work out what was happening.
Finally decided to risk wiping some client emails and just wipe enough of recent tempdir to allow server load to drop enough for us to get some control.
Problem: rm crashed. Too many files.
Problem: even piping ls -t to it crashed for the same reason.
Solution: take advantage of oldskool lowlevel unix shell design intelligence of a pipe being a parent, which closes all its children as soon as the terminal process throws an exit value. Combined with intrapipe interprocess streaming, ie character by character. So despite ls still running like a loony, it's not hitting capacity limits because it's just vomiting what it reads, and as soon as head hits its parameter (streaming-from-0 rather than read-all-and-count-back like tail), it terminates, so pipe terminates, so pipe terminates all children --> shell can continue.
while true
do
FILELIST=`ls -t | head -1000`
rm -f $FILELIST
done
ls|wc on another terminal showed the numbers dropping. Race Condition, and we were winning.
4-5hrs later we regained control, sorted it.
We'd contacted clients to warn them. As luck would have it (it was right on Close-Of-Business), no-one had to resend anything.
Yee. Haw. And. Phew.
.
Stern words the next day with the culprit website owner company, then their devs.
Errr....
You're right about the power deriving to the US from the USD being used as the default international currency. But:
You're wildly wrong about OPEC vs US. Put it this way: you're saying the US dances to the tune of Venezuela, Iran, Iraq, Angola, Equatorial Guinea, etc. (US imports only 6% from Saudi Arabia).
.
Worth pointing out too, that US exports about as much oil as it imports. Oils ain't oils. It's an economic optimisation thing, not a hard need thing. But if it chose, it could build custom refineries, suck up perhaps a 2-5% hit on wholesale prices (maybe half to 1% at the retail pumps), and eliminate imports.
Ah! The reverse-weasel! A canny tactic.
We have enough fact-dissociated people on this site without a new one going out of his way to play status games.
Or to put it another way: if you don't know what you're talking about, dont try to piss all over someone asking a question. Shut up. Learn. Find out. That's what I do, that's what all grownups do.
Mate, you kicked off waving your dick at OP, playing the sacerdotal superiority game re Special Learnèdness Correcting The Unlettered. "Term of art" was just the icing on the cake. Your actual attempts were bathetic (sic) so I would have corrected you anyway (OP was bang on).
But your dick-waving stank.
You then waved your dick at me.
Even down to a snotty-nosed allusion to your vastly skilled and learnèd technical terms of art being just too far above me for me to possibly comprehend. "Word salad", ffs.
Go look up Appeal To Authority, as a standard fallacious rhetorical device. Your tactics are neither new nor viewed highly.
You'd now doubly annoyed me so I just smacked you down. Not hard, to be clear -- I _could_ have explained at length the vast chasm between your understanding and reality.
My dick is NOT bigger than yours, because in this field you quite simply don't have one.
You demonstrated knowledge/understanding levels which would have you struggling to pass the first assignment in first semester of first year. In any reputable uni.
Trying subsequently to clasp around yourself the cloak of wounded but cleverer innocence just makes you look like even more of a gamester. If you're going to try to turn things into a separate game then up the ante as a bluff, you can't complain if someone ups the ante again AND has the cards to back it up.
OP is correct. You are not.
Reminds me of when I was teaching at uni and we sprung a whole bunch of people cheating on an assignment. Turned out they'd impersonated the senior lecturer to the textbook publisher and got a bunch of instructor guides sent out to a PO Box (paid for by cash). We'd got lazy and set the assignment off a worked answer; they all copied it out. 0% all round, guys.
We'd been marking off student numbers, decided to look up their names.
A-aaaaand 100% of them were Chinese.
And 100% of them came in to protest.
Many got loud, some got abusive, couple attempted physical intimidation (of my female tutors). Fortunately re the latters, I walked in on them mid threats.
But ALL of them were angry.
And stop and think about the attitude and dedication necessarily underpinning the weaselling of the instructor guides via impersonation....
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