Posts by Flocke Kroes

Re: Pearl Mackie is a British actress, dancer

I am suffering from Poe's law. Is this satire or genuine? Her character in Dr Who had far more experience of cyber than she wanted

Re: watch lists

Years ago typing 'tails' into a search engine put you on a watch list. I am sure downloading the software for a pi-hole and using a VPN do the same today.

Re: An analogy

Argument by analogy.

Step 1A: decide what you what to prove

Step 1B: select an analogy that that supports (1A)

Step 1C: declare victory

Someone who disagrees with you:

Step 2A: Decide to prove the opposite of (1A)

Step 2B: Select an analogy the supports the opposite of (1A)

Step 2C: Declare voictory.

Please can everyone throw these analogies in the bin and spend the time that would otherwise been wasted in pointless argument actually trying to understand the real problem? Judge William Alsup did exactly that. He took the time to learn how to write simple programs so he could quickly spot argument by false analogy and sided with Google. It is unfortunate that actually trying to understand the problem is as rare among judges as it is in the population at large.

Re: Truth and fiction

Years ago according to Microsoft selling a blank PC was illegal. There were probably threats to distributors who thought of doing so. The result was PCs with FreeDOS pre-installed. They cost extra because of the lack of crapware available for FreeDOS but there was enough software to confirm the computer could boot up, display something and respond to the keyboard. It was all you needed before wiping the disk and installing whatever you wanted.

To be fair to Microsoft there was a licensing issue. Buying a complete Windows license was hard work. Although you could install Windows on a FreeDOS PC the license would be invalid because what you had almost certainly bought was an upgrade to the copy of Windows that was assumed to be bundled with the PC.

Re: The big problem however...

Electricity distribution infrastructure is actually good, can cope with more power and can do even better if we even out usage. Connecting the 50% of cars that do have a designated parking space and charging them when demand would otherwise be low closes the distribution problem.

Changing gas central heating to electricity is not a 1:1 trade. With an air sourced heat pump 1kWH of electricity replaces 3kWH of gas. If a ground source heat pump is practical for your home you can upgrade that to 3½:1.

Replacing all the smart meters with smart meters that can communicate electricity prices to cars is a problem that will take time but if the government can delay until after the deadline and contract the work out to Serco then the project can go spectacularly over budget. At least they haven't threatened to use Nikola's unicorn fart powered hydrogen production technology or Dyson's UK government funded electric car.

Re: Alternative?

For something approximately single user I use CSV edited with a text editor for the data and python for report generation (reportlab) and emails. There are a mixture of costs and benefits.

The source data will probably arrive in multiple spreadsheets with fields in inconsistent columns. This can be converted to CSV an run through some python regexes to spot bad data, data in the wrong column, floating point phone numbers, duplicate records and all the usual mistakes caused by data entry into a spread sheet.

Update requires discipline to deal with commas inside fields and adding the correct number of commas when there are a few blank fields in a row but you can recycle your initial data correction tool to report these problems. (Update turned out to be completely beyond the ability of one trying-to-be-helpful Mac user who did not have/could not find a text editor or get a word processor to output in any format usable without whatever strange software she was using. [ended up with pdftotext and a script to get to CSV]) The good news is that problems are easily visible, machine detectable and human correctable without arcane knowledge of the guts of excel.

Next comes your first big payoff: automatically generated documents can have a consistently spelled names, addresses, emails and phone numbers for each job title. The entire document set can be automatically regenerated when any contact detail changes or when a different person takes responsibility for a job.

Basic queries can be done with awk | wc -l.

Mass snail mail can be handled with a PDF for the documents, a PDF with one envelope sized page per recipient and one of a number of companies that can combine the two and sort out postage.

Python has the libraries required to send emails with attachments. It is easy to add non-trivial logic to handle who prefers snail mail, who has expressed interest, who has already paid, output a list of who would receive what so you can check you got it right and send only to yourself so you can proof the output.

Python has excellent documentation but requires troublesome thinking skills. Reportlab has a barrier to entry but the PDF output will not display differently because someone has a different version of Word with the wrong printer driver selected. Taking the time and effort gives you valuable skills not tied to technological lock-in, spyware and adverts.

Finally on project handover some computer illiterate can import the CSV data into Excel and think they can do what you were doing because Excel is expensive software used by business professionals.

Re: Who has been training the AI?

Sounds like they skipped the training all together. From the headline I expected that they had cropped a few thousand images by hand and used the original + cropped images as training data. Obviously that requires some effort so the decided to aim for the detailed parts of the image instead.

For thousands of years women who want to draw attention to a particular part of their bodies have worn a pendant. This creates eye (and algorithm) catching detail at the exact point required to embarrass Twitter.

Re: T minus 7s?

One of the NROL-44 aborts happened at T0. The two side boosters started fine but the middle one didn't because it did not get a burst of high pressure helium needed to spin up the turbo pumps. The side boosters had to shut down really fast because the engines are designed for a single use and when they were still in production cost something like $10M to $20M each. I expect the cost of two more would start with "How much can you afford?"

Re: £5M

Enough to send a politician to New Zealand, put him in a space suit and launch him into sun synchronous orbit. The return journey would take a few hundred years but there would be a free cremation bundled with the service.

I used to think voting on a politician to send into orbit would motivate them all to act in the country's best interests. Now I think it would result all of them blaming each other for their own mistakes.

And further back in the chain...

Mouse config should be done in the window manager / desktop environment so it works the same way for any mouse not just those badged by a particular wholesaler.

Re: satellite

Here are some radar maps of Venus. The first ones were made using the Arecibo radio telescope and later ones were made by orbiters. The Russians got landers to the surface to last long enough to send back pictures. The surface of Venus is too hot for silicon chips and thermal insulation does not keep the heat out for long. Last time I looked silicon carbide chips (which can operate at high temperatures) had been manufactured with three transistors. Multiply that by a thousand and you can make a simple CPU.

Venus orbiters have been done and I am sure people will work out clever ways to do more with them but then next big step would be something like an airship floating in the upper atmosphere. Pick the right altitude and you can have temperature, pressure and gravity close to what humans are used to along with the solar power equivalent to a cloudy day. If there is life on Venus this is the place to start looking.

Re: Slag of Bing...

I noticed the lack of everything with javascript disabled. Bye bye google image search.

Re: Looks good to me

Aviation fuel usage is about 1.4E13 BTU(/year? the source is particularly unclear). If I guessed correctly what the badly labelled graph shows that works out at less that 30kg/s of water vapour if all aviation switches to hydrogen.

Cars do not have the severe weight constraints of aircraft so are fine with batteries and do not need hydrogen. Trains have overhead power lines and do not need hydrogen. I could not quickly find how much fuel the world's ships use. Even if it is a hundred times as much as air travel no-one is going to notice as over 1.5E10kg/s of rain falls on Earth.

This has nothing to do with where data is stored

It is about all the empty seats at Trump's rally in Tulsa and a big pile of money to re-educate children so they do not spoil the key purpose of the presidency ever again: stadiums full of adoring fans cheering for Trump.

Re: accomplish this in the time frame

What makes you think there is the slightest intention of delivering anything useful to the UK on time?

Re: Dystopian future

You may have been thinking of Dark Angel. Although the TV series almost pre-dates mobile phones (they appear in series 2) it has aged well.

Re: Is there really doubt that that is the case?

I am sure there is very little doubt. About 40% are completely certain the social media platforms are censoring conservative viewpoints. About 40% are equally certain they aren't. For the sake of less argument let's pretend they are.

People are (somewhat) protected from government censorship by the first amendment. As social media platforms are not (yet) the government the first amendment does not stop them censoring anything anyone tries to put on their websites. Part of the terms of service for such web sites probably include that by using the service you 'agree' to allow the service provider to delete, modify and distribute any content you provide in any way they choose. If you do not like that use a different service.

The fact that something is on the website gives some kind of implication that the web site's owner endorses it. Requiring a news outlet to distribute content they do not want is clearly interfering with freedom of the press.

Republicans are pretending to introduce a law requiring companies to distribute content they find offensive. The first amendment explicitly prevents the government from creating laws that interfere with freedom of speech, freedom of the press and the right for pastafarians to wear a colander on their heads. Competent politicians are certain that this kind of law cannot be enforced until the rule of law no longer applies to them at all (Is America that great yet?). They go along with this farce because it plays well with their voters, provides fuel for deep-state conspiracy theory nutters and it makes the libs scream.

Words and actions

Trump publicly denies climate change while spending his own money defending his golf courses from rising sea levels. More republicans think climate change is real than think it is a hoax but they will still vote for someone utterly delusional or a coal mine operator if he also promises to hurt brown people.

Welcome to the stupid ages.

Re: Firefox is losing the plot full stop

The baby started growing and toddled of to pop ants with a magnifying glass. It is now playing with matches. Emptying the bath is no longer a problem. Firefox has become increasing more irritating over the years and convinced me to go elsewhere. If it is doing what you want, fine but otherwise I recommend trying out the competition.

Re: Time to up the level of smuggling.

Mainland EU -> Republic of Ireland -> Northern Ireland -> Cardiff ?

Re: Competence? We've heard of it.

I noticed a part of this a few years ago. Instead of a few politicians with powerful departments there were many politicians with their own department, each with overlapping responsibilities. On the plus side, none of them can do anything without the agreement of at least three others. That might reduce the amount of damage any one of them can do. The down side is that each can try really hard to out-stupid the rest and when the train wreck hits the news there will be at least three others they can blame.

Re: 15kg for the return chute?

An extra 15kg in stage 2 would reduce the payload by 15kg. The the parachutes go in stage 1 so they can be considerably heavier and only reduce the payload by 15kg.

Re: 20 years ago

The EU got us the option to chose which browser we wanted to use (but the price of Internet Explorer was still included in the price of Windows) and the option to chose which media player we wanted to use (but the price of Microsoft's media player was still included in the price of Windows). Getting that far took about a decade, with Microsoft eventually paying ever increasing fines until the fines exceeded the benefits of breaking the law - because Netscape had already starved to death.

The world is a better place when competition laws are enforced - even five years too late but the real change that will one day push Google into second or third place will be unrelated to the activities of politicians just like it was when Microsoft failed to extend their desktop operating system near monopoly into mobile phones.

Credit where credit is due

Will anyone thank President Trump for making poor Americans so poor and desperate that they can underbid poor people from the rest of the world?

Re: 16Gb, 16GB

It looks like both on Samsung's site. The photo is a 16GB package containing 8x 16Gb chips.

Have you considered...

#! /bin/bash -xe

# Prints each line of what will be executed after expansion but before execution

# Exit on any error outside a condition

# -x -e will not work: Everything after the second space is considered a single word

Re: Just a reminder

"The Art of the Deal" was written by Tony Schwartz who considers it his "greatest regret in life, without question". He said he "put lipstick on a pig" and thinks the book should be "recategorized as fiction".

4 bankruptcies were in the news before Trump was elected. He boasted about how he had made money from those bankruptcies (One of Trump's few accurate statements). Back when I was young and (more) foolish I worked for a company that went bankrupt. First payment was delayed, then they declared bankruptcy, then money did not arrive at all and finally there was nothing left to pay the money they legally no longer owed. (Get your contract checked by a lawyer. When payment is overdue warn that you will take the matter to the small claims court - fill out the forms ready. File the forms at the first opportunity (assuming there are that many opportunities) and do not take any excuses. You will not get a second chance.)

Frederic Trump could provide evidence that he payed to the cent the correct amount of tax. Donald points at a haphazard pile of papers and says: prove I got something wrong. His tax affairs did get into the news before he was elected. He lost such an enormous amount of money years ago that he did not need to pay any tax until his companies got back in the black.

Owe the bank a million and your in trouble. Owe the bank a billion and the bank is in trouble. The bank in question was Deutsche Bank - famous at the time for getting caught laundering Russian money. Donald was saved by Alfa Bank (bank of Putin).

Some of Trump's core voters may actually know all this. If you somehow told all of them and they believed you it still would not matter. Trump is the racist candidate (with multiple convictions) and that is the only thing that matters to his base.

Re: Humanity

1 billion years ago life was single celled. The Cambrian explosion was 500 million years ago. If humans have descendants a billion years from now evolution will make them very unlike us - and that is ignoring genetic engineering. If anything remotely human exists that far in the future it will be because archaeologists digging up something like a future Jurassic Park get raided by time travellers.

Re: the circle completes

Don't hide being evil, just gaslight afterwards.

Re: Let's back up a lot

The ancient Greeks worked out that democracy led to career politicians about bad as the ones we have today so they tried sortition instead.