Posts by Persona 1127 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jul 2018
One could hope that it would be a single table, yet when you look at one persons details you find the name on the passport is spelt differently from the one associated with the UTR and the address on the driving license is completely different. The date of birth for the NHS number is different too, but that's probably just a typo. They might all relate to one person, but perhaps it's five different people.
I've probably heard of it but as "media" has never been my thing I'm not familiar enough with it to be able to go from a description of what it does to what it's called. The same applies to audio processing. I had no idea what the audio equivalent of FFmpeg was till I looked it up, yet people into sound processing would be aghast that others didn't know it. I'm purposely not naming it as that would make it too easy for people to remember they had heard of it.
Switzerland has National Service and hence a lot of well trained part time soldiers.
A BOFH colleague of mine from the Zurich office was responsible for commanding a missile system in the event of war. He did refresher training every few months.
A BOFH in charge of missiles ..... what could go wrong.
I never got approached by China, but back in the late 90's I got a call from Moscow and was offered a "banking" job. The salary mentioned was many times what I was currently being paid. I also got the firm impression that it would be on top of what I was getting from the bank where I was working at the time, as staying working there was a key part of the role. I declined after weighing the plus of the money with the minus of a future that could well involve me floating face down in a Russian canal.
That's the least of your problems. If you were standing in the aisle when the train started, to all intents and purposes you would remain stationary till the door at the end of the aisle moved forward to meet you. If you were 10m from that door it would meet you at about 50mph.
conflate the value of an AI that's right or useful only some of the time with a human who could be right a lot more of the time
We have all worked with some humans who were wrong almost almost all of the time. e.g. Tony, who was otherwise a really nice chap, always had out by one errors in his code. He simply could not write any form of loop that iterated the correct number of times. When you pointed them out he would "fix" them and the resultant code would then be out by two! Tony was be a prime example of a coder that "should" be replaced by AI or even just A.
A 7 cm change in average heights for 5 year olds over that period would be massive, so obviously dodgy data as that would be a sustained 7mm per year! Average heights of children do bounce up and down a bit. The numbers show a fairly consistent 1mm a year increase over that period till 2020 when there was a sharp 8mm surge apparently "linked" to obesity. Since that peak it's fallen quite a bit but still above what it was when Cameron became PM.
There are lots of potential reasons, but as heights increased during the days of "austerity" it's not credible to cite it as "the" reason for their decline.
TLDR; citation needed
Especially in Texas. Solar is (literally) brilliant in low latitudes. Doubly so as peak demand is often for air con so supply and demand are in sync.
It's when you get to the high latitudes like the UK, where solar output in winter is ~6% of that on a nice sunny day, that solar becomes a really bad idea. Coal or nuclear looks cheap by comparison because you would need a vast amount of solar to meet winter demand.
It's not going to be easy to stop. Every step of the way our legal professionals are cashing in. Every asylum tribunal and appeal is a three way money spinner. The claimant's team gets paid, the Home Office team get paid and so does the presiding judge.
Note, I'm not saying that they should work from free: just making the observation that the more time consuming and complex they make the process the more money they earn from it.
I used to do something not dissimilar to this 25 years ago entering into the US. I recall their INSPASS system used hand geometry though the enrolment process also involved my finger prints too. It was reserved for very frequent flyers as the enrollment took time. Once enrolled it was great to get to a full immigration hall at JFK airport and walk straight past the queues to the empty machines.
I had a colleague who deleted our web server two or maybe three days in a row. At first we had no idea what was going on, then I found the cron job he had set up to do something very different. He had forgotten that when his job was run by cron it would be running in '/' and not the directory he was intending to clean up. Whilst embarrassed by his mistake he was more than a little relieved to have found out why his cron script had been failing to clean up the intended directory.
Mr Mulvihill used to bring me my morning cup of tea. It was vile stuff that I suspected got most of its metallic taste from dissolved tea spoons. I manage to drink it for the first couple of weeks to spare his feelings but after that it went untouched. After a few months more he thankfully stopped bringing me tea.
Many modern hard disk drives and especially SSD's contain encryption hardware, particularly those from major manufacturers like Seagate and Western Digital. This is typically implemented as self-encrypting drive (SED) capability, which uses built-in hardware to automatically encrypt data at rest. The encryption key (typically keys) are stored on the drive and implemented so they can not be extracted. They can however be overwritten with a new random value. This is a close to instant way of securely erasing the drive.
It makes no sense to disclose "all such meetings". They are just people having a chat about something. Where do you draw the line: is someone delivering an "elevator pitch" in errm a lift a "meeting" that should be publicly disclosed? Public disclosure is only needed when the public purse is being opened.
Corbyn's shadow cabinet had about 30 members/positions and 21 of them resigned. [Note - this doesn't mean 9 didn't resign as at least two resigned twice!]
He might well have been honest and decent, but that's a pretty damming statistic about his leadership skills.
I like that video of the robot getting pieces of yellow plastic out of the blue crate and the chap with the hockey stick interfering to make it "harder", yet the robot is still able to cope. We will know robot AI has arrived when it takes the hockey stick off him to stop him interfering. For the next level of "reasoning" the robot would take the hockey stick off him and beat him around the head with it to ensure that he would neve interfere again, ever.
My wife uses a local account on her PC, and has done so for as long as there have been Microsoft accounts. I expected problems when it went from Windows 10 to 11 the other month, but no, local account usage followed on. The only time the Microsoft account ever gets used was possibly when the old hardware from my PC became her "fast new" PC. It "might" have been used to allow the license to go onto the new hardware. Not unreasonable and certainly nothing to shout about.
This may not have been the case here but one advantage of buying a business once it folds is that their commercial property lease can be torn up and renegotiated on more favorable terms that don't include annual inflation plus a fixed percentage rent increases that drowned the firms ability to compete.
Sad to see them go. I've used them a lot over the years but not so much recently. Last time I "directly" used them I got a really good price on a bunch of stuff for a friends PC only to have them cancel the motherboard from the order a few days later because apparently it was out of stock. They only had compatible motherboards at twice the price available so I cancelled it all. It was annoying as I had expected it all to arrive imminently but I was back to square one. Consequently I ordered it all from Amazon for next day delivery.
I did however recently get two short coloured network patch cables from them via Ebay. They were £2.16 for the pair with free delivery. I trusted the Ebuyer name so I chose them over more expensive offerings. They were delivered by DPD the next day and I would imagine that they paid DPD more for the delivery service than I paid them. They had clearly fallen apart, so their demise came as no surprise.
It's not good, though neither are human attempts at many or even most things. It always worries me that the minimum pass mark for UK university final exams is typically 40%. Three years of expensive schooling and "success" is rated as getting less than 60% of a few hours exam wrong.
Apollo 10 is owned by the Smithsonian and currently on long term loan to the London Science museum. It has done tours around Europe. NASA could conceivably ask the Smithsonian to return it in exchange for some other coveted item. Being in London and on loan it wouldn't cause the interstate friction of taking a US based asset. The Apollo 10 command module went round the moon 31 times. It's lunar module went down to 9 miles from the moons surface and was capable of performing the Apollo 11 moon landing mission.
I would hate to see it go, but it has always been in London on loan.
NASA still owns Atlantis but not the other surviving shuttles which were given away a long time ago. They do however have the wreckage of Challenger and Colombia. An AI query suggests that ~47% Challenger and ~38% of Columbia were recovered and are still in storage. These have to be the "easy" options, even if they also add in the still unrecovered piece of Challenger that was discovered on the ocean floor in 2022.
Humans can be monumentally bad at booking travel too, with flights booked for the wrong days, two taxis sent for me and none for my colleague and a hotel chosen that was over an hour taxi ride from the office in preference to the one next door to the office I was visiting because it was ~£20 per night cheaper, so within guidelines. It was always exciting in a bad way when Kate booked my travel as no matter how long in advance she had the instructions the bookings were always a last minute struggle.
No you didn't top it up for free between 2PM and 4PM. You were using electricity that is surplus to demand and the suppliers are getting paid for what they can supply not what they deliver. Come the winter when we need far more power than we do in a warm summer those solar panels that are over producing at the moment will be putting out about 5-10% a day of what they are currently doing and the gas powered generators will be fired up to keep up warm and give us light. That bill will be higher because as well as the cost of gas it needs to recover its capital an operating costs both for the winter when it was well used plus the summer when it was sitting idle making no money but still accumulating its fixed cost.
You might think you are getting free power but you aren't you and all of us will pay for it later.
Good news about your car, do bear in mind that as ownership of electric cars grow and there are a few million more people wanting to charge EV's at night it will cease to be a low demand time with an 8p tariff designed to encourage people to use the base load. Use it while you can: it's not going to last.
I updated my wife's old PC to Windows 11 the other day. It was very quick and painless because I'd already refreshed the hardware six months ago swapping in the 7 year old motherboard freed up from my PC when I did a long overdue upgrade. So painless in fact I was initially concerned that it hadn't done the update so I had to check twice to confirm it was on the new version. It then took a minute to turn off anything "new" my wife would not recognize so now she has no idea that she is even using a different version of Windows. Painless, but also rather pointless and only done to continue getting patches. On the plus side I can't complain about the price as I think the last time I paid MS was for a cheap "Academic Upgrade" from Windows XP to Windows 7 back in 2009.
The November 21 1960 Mercury Redstone 1 has to be the most comical rocket launch failure. It got 4 inches off the pad before settling back onto the pad thanks to a connection being the wrong length. After that things started going strange
https://youtu.be/p0w_xyePC_0?si=6tNPPJsOuPJid6J0
Decades back the US tax authorities marched into the US branch of a Swiss bank and demanded details of customer accounts held in Switzerland. To comply they would be breaking Swiss banking law. Not to comply would be non compliance with the warrant so a US offence. They complied because local law supersedes foreign law in as much as the local authorities were already there with cuffs ready.
The only solution is to make it impossible to access the data. This was done and the next time it happened the folks in the US protested they were not physically able to comply. It was accepted as a valid personal defense but the bank was still fined daily for non compliance.
Slightly typod that! What I should have typed was:
The Starlink beam targets an area of the earths surface and covers a large number of user devices rather than forming beams for individual users. Additional beams "probably" target Starlink ground stations which need higher bandwidth. End used devices do steer and aim at the satellites as this improves both their receive and transmit "gain".
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