Posts by Persona 879 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jul 2018
There are two distinct death rate, one for intensive care hospital treatment with ventilators, and one without. Current estimates put these two numbers at about 1% and 4% of the people who are infected. There is speculation that the death rate may be lower due to undiagnosed cases, however the evidence of the "Diamond Princess" cruse ship, where I think everyone was tested, is along these lines. Out of roughly 700 cases there have been 7 deaths and 14 people are still in a serious/critical condition. I recall that at its peak there were 32 serious/critical presumably many if not all of which would have died without treatment.
Whilst Larry Brilliant is an expert in this field and makes the case that testing is like turning on the light in the dark room, testing has it's limitations. Due to the slow incubation time infected people can have several negative tests before testing positive. Secondly, asymptomatic carriers tend not to get tested unless they infect someone who does get symptoms and the infection is traced back to them. Given that the virus can survive on a plastic or stainless steel surface for 2 days a great deal of contagion is untraceable. South Korea is attempting to tackle this by making public everywhere anyone with the virus has been: home, work, shops, relatives houses, bars, restaurants, love hotels (yes these are quite common in Korea). It must make for interesting consumption that makes all known GDPR breaches seem quite trivial.
Testing has its uses but it's not going to make this virus go away. Sufficient deaths to make people wary and keep a healthy distance from one another and get in the behavioural habit of not touching anything (especially their face) isn't going to eliminate it either, but it's certainly going to limit the speed of its spread.
The best time to panic is long past. I did my panic buying back in January. The checkout girl was surprised by the number tins of soup I had bought. When she asked why and I told her I was panic buying she just said "really?" and gave me a confused look.
There is a significant difference. People are receiving bills for their PSTN lines which are far more related to the service they are receiving than the TV licence. Big red writing over the bill saying "This line will be disconnected in 2024" will grab peoples attention far more that the TV Digital Switch Over campaign, just as final demand bills are overlooked less than regular utility bills.
In some respects the security services may be quite happy with this. As the browser is forcing the choice of DNS resolver it will be much easier for the US security services to assert control over the resolvers it points at rather than having to pull the data from the ones controlled by the ISP's. This will let them see in real time the sites people are looking at. Should someone decide to point their DNS at another site I'm sure a browser update could be "arranged" to reset the configuration, and very few would notice.
I was working that night for a financial firm that had spent a large fortune on being Y2K ready. On the stoke of midnight I looked around to see if anyone looked surprised. No one was. But the digital wall clock that showed the time in multiple cites around the world didn't look right. It had grown an extra digit. It didn't really matter but it was a little embarrassing. About 30 minutes later a chap came round with a ladder and stuck a piece of black card over the offending digit. The issue had been fixed for the cost of a piece of black carboard.
You are concentrating on the goal, not how it could be implemented. To make it work you would need total cooperation between nations (I probably don't need to add anything else). Next you need an end to state sponsored cyber crime, but given the prerequisite of all nations being cooperatively friendly this shouldn't be a problem. Finally you need the raw data for investigating the crime which works best with total surveillance of both ends of the connection i.e. everything.
There is another way of looking at it. What they call the "hero's" are just normal competent programmers. The "not hero's" are in the group that contain those truly awful programmers who never test for an error condition, possibly because they can't work out what to do if the test finds one. Also when they bother to test the functionality of their code (or more often it is pointed out by someone else) and discover out by one errors on every loop they "fix" them and introduce out by 2 errors. Hero is a relative term.
If your aim is to look for particular wanted people what you need is a low false negative result. The false positive result goes up as a result. Even with a 98% false positive result it's still effective.
The low false negative rate removes some of the clutter and allows a human operator to look at the potential match.
It would be truly interesting for a similar email deep dive to be done on a plane with a perfect safety record. It worries me that we would still see emails like these. Certainly the "designed by clowns managed by monkeys" type comment sounds damming yet in a different context it would be seen as banter.
Please note I'm not excusing Boeing in any way. What I want is some assurance that this isn't the norm for the industry ..... particularly so as I will be flying on an Airbus A320m, an Airbus 321neo and a Boeing 787-9 in the next few weeks.
"If you don’t give a shit about your privacy, best of luck to you..."
Thanks, but no I still don't care about any of those things you mentioned. I came to the opinion at least 15 years ago that the direction of technology made erosion of privacy inevitable, and I planned accordingly. The fact that people are falling over themselves to put "Alexa" in their living rooms tells me that privacy really is dead.
"the common factor that those ads industry who harvested your data often leak your data to hackers"
That makes no tangible difference. Your data has already been leaked countless times by everyone you have given it to including HMRC (who have leaked mine twice to my knowledge). You must always assume that people who want to drain your accounts already have data on you. Actually what they really want is a list of gullible people as that makes draining your account so much easier, and it's very easy to get a list of gullible people with a couple of SPAM emails.
I'm in the minority here but I just don't care. People are harvesting my data, and building a profile of me. If they are any good their research will tell them they are wasting their time. Throwing adverts at me tailored or otherwise isn't go to influence my behaviour. My personal data probably gets traded for good money. Somebody is making a profit out of it but the people who buy it are making a loss. It doesn't cost me anything. I just don't care.
Everywhere I have been you could only interview candidates once HR signed off there was a position to fill.
Also you could only interview candidates put forward by agencies on HR's preferred services list. These were ones that had a contract in place and who's commission was within acceptable bounds. Some non preferred agencies would bombard hiring managers with CV's. If they persisted HR would get their email addresses blacklisted and their website blocked for access within the firm. Whilst this sounds extreme it was necessary to avoid the instances of an unscrupulous agency demanding payment on the grounds that they had forwarded a CV to a manager who ended up hiring that candidate even though the hiring process was through another agency.
I have to agree with you there.
I once employed a chap that was unemployed, multi skilled and outstanding. He wasn't even being interviewed for the role I employed him for as he had already given up ever finding that type of job. The interviewing manager thought that I could make use him as he was too skilled for the first role. Fortunately I had 20 minutes spare for a quick chat.
I'm ashamed to say I started that interview determined not to hire him, and only changed my mind when he gave great answers to my toughest questions. He was very lucky not to remain unemployed.
The mat need plugging in ... once, when help is to hand, and is positioned somewhere convenient where the cable length permits. The person I had in mind has trouble gripping and manipulating things, not seeing them. As USB-C cables fit either way round why are you suggesting putting blobs of nail varnish on one side of them?
I loved the first Star Wars film when I watched it a few days after it was released in 1977. Since then I have struggled more and more to be able to watch them. Even "The Empire Strikes Back" which most people regard as the best of the franchise had me disillusioned from the start. Why would anyone design something like an AT-AT? Whilst it makes a good merchandising toy, a weapon system it is not. We saw in the first film from Luke's Landspeeder which hovered above the ground when parked, that "a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away" anti-gravity was easy and low powered, yet the AT-AT's walked slowly on legs and could be tripped easily with a piece of string. Following that we had "Return of the Jedi" which heavily featured soft toys (great for merchandising) and not much else. After a lull of several years a new lot of films were made and things went further downhill.
On the plus side with the extras to the final films, "Rogue One" (fragile AT-AT's again) did at least explain why the first Death Star was so easy to destroy. Sadly it didn't explain why no on had ever bothered to program R2D2 to speak a human language.
Before we converted to "North Sea Gas" our homes were powered with Town Gas that was a mix of C0 and H2. We managed to store and transport it down pipes without too many problems. From time to time people did succeed in quickly ending their lives by CO poisoning by sticking their heads in a gas oven. With natural gas it's much harder as they have to rely on asphyxiation ..... as long as the gas isn't ignited.
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