Posts by DavCrav 3894 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Nov 2007
"Given other actions against Russia and China"
Would that be where some dastardly British people deliberately threw themselves all over those poor innocent Russians' bottles of deadly toxin? Or where those Chinese soldiers got all lost and accidentally built an airbase on the artificial island they accidentally built?
"I just went along with the biologists."
I believe biologists write 'viruses' as well. 'Viri' would be the Latin plural anyway, not 'virii'. If you are thinking about 'radii', that's the plural of 'radius', not 'radus'. And even more pedantically, the Latin virus, meaning slimy liquid, doesn't have a plural.
"Seem disingenuous to compare prices in a non-native currency for the product."
So why did you? The iPhone is assembled in China, so you should look at yuan-to-pound exchange rates. 2/1/2014: exchange rate 9.4. 4/1/2016, exchange rate 9.6.
At any rate, if you live in the UK you are paying in pounds. And you don't care what the exchange rate with the dollar is, because you are (almost always) being paid in pounds. The fact is, the iPhone costs twice as much now as it did, and that isn't true for other companies' offerings. The laptop I bought last year isn't twice the price for a similar specification as a few years before.
"I thought that was how things were supposed to have been for the past 4 or 5 years "
Yes, but at our house because we've had the same Internet provider for the last eight years, no decision has been made.
Maybe you need to make the choice repeatedly, say every three years or so. It might catch people who stay with one provider and whose circumstances change.
"I know there are many problems having to submit age verification, but it's also not right that children are exposed to this kind of stuff so easily. The Reg seem to be pretty one-sided on this, and I can see it's a tough one, but there is another side."
The point is that a government solution to the problem always seems to consist of building a massive database and using it to spy on everyone's activities. The only reasonable route is to have mandatory content filters set to on by default, and then you ring up your Internet provider to set them to off. That way you know there can be porn in your house, and you know you need to do something about it (or not if you have no children).
But that doesn't build up a dossier on everyone's activities, so that's a non-starter.
"But given he was naming something even he didnt know 'idiot' may well apply."
Not really. He wasn't an idiot, that's the end of it. For a start, he was discussing work of Kelvin (another non-idiot who said one really stupid thing) when he coined the term. Second, just because you end up being wrong (and 100 years later physicists still tend to believe it, but nobody's really sure) doesn't make you an idiot.
What makes you an idiot is the following: given the evidence available to you, did you make a really obvious error? Poincaré was not, therefore, an idiot. Either in general, or about this in particular.
"Erm, no. 27 percent dark plus less than 27 percent baryonic leaves more than 46 percent unaccounted for. I believe that dark matter accounts for nearer 72% than 27%, possibly even more than that."
Erm, yes. Dark matter: 27%. Ordinary matter: 5%. Other: 68%. (Postulated to be dark energy.)
"Okay, everyone have the downvote button ready to go? Then begin!"
I obliged. The guy threatens to sue his critics instead of demonstrating why he's right. Hallmark of a charlatan.
It looks like his work is not compatible with the existence of magnets, which would also be an issue.
"Mlargest. This is a prime number from which the number (2^Mlargest)-1 can be derived. Because this can not be a prime, it should be the product of two or more primes. At least one of its factors is expected to be larger than Mlargest."
Congratulations, you have proved that large numbers exist.
Problems with your proof:
1) All factors could be smaller than Mlargest.
2) The factors need not be Mersenne primes.
There's a reason that some problems are hard. It's not that mathematicians are bumbling idiots.
"correction: 2^(2^n) + 1 3, 5, 17, 257, 65537"
That's not a correction, that's an addendum. You are not correcting what I said, merely adding to it. I didn't feel the need to state that the exponent needed to be a power of 2, because doing the pre-factorization into cyclotomic polynomials isn't necessary to demonstrate the point.
"Experience in UK does not support you. There has been a huge rise in handgun crime since they were largely banned post-Dunblane,"
Ditto with this guy. It's false. Gun crime is low and hasn't exploded. There was a change in statistic recording which made it appear as though crime has risen.
"I can give you many links to dictionaries that define "acronym" "
The dictionary closest to hand doesn't have a definition of 'acronym', going from acrolith to acropolis. That's what you get for having a dictionary from 1925, I guess.
"what is your evidence for the assertion "most people..." "
Hits on Google for acronym: 143m. Hits on Google for initialism: 1.52m. There aren't 100 times as many acronyms as initialisms, so it must be that many people are using acronym for both concepts.
Interesting you mention C.S. Lewis. Hw of course, was a born-again Christian and, like most converts, much more pious than the standard variety. He believed that there was such a thing as universal morality, naturally a Christian morality. Believing in a universal morality is a necessary first step to imposing it on everyone.
"But thats not good enough for the health nazis because with a sort of healthy alternative to smoking, they'll lose their power"
The issue is not that vaping is less lethal than smoking -- it is -- but that you don't want people going from non-smoker to vaper, as that's a retrograde step. Selling vapers with cartoon characters on them and in many different flavours is exactly the old-style cigarette advertising, designed to hook children.
"They just need to make the penalty so outsized
That only a moron would try it. 25 years in prison for operating a drone too close to an airport ought to do the trick. Even if you only catch 1 out of 50, why would anyone take that chance?"
I should point out that the punishment is already life imprisonment. This would fall under endangerment of an airport, and therefore under the Aviation and Maritime Security Act 1990. At the very least, it's 5 years in prison for operating an illegal drone.
"Any society can easily determine its rulers by understanding who they're not allowed to mock. People have been brutally mocking Trump since before he was even elected and nobody's been sent to jail for it, so it's pretty obvious that he's not ruling anybody.
So if not him, who exactly is ruling you?"
Erm, just because he cannot jail you for mocking him, doesn't mean he isn't abusing his power. It's actually the other way round, where he's trying to get people who should be in jail out of it. Like Flynn, and more recently, himself.
"I'm pretty sure we are the most fertile ground for flagship handset prices. I had a smartphone before most people had any type of portable communication device. If we don't see the benefits of the latest model any more, then nobody does."
That means we were the fertile ground, but that's back when new phones did new things. Now they are just slightly larger and with slightly better cameras and denser pixelled screens, no thanks. People who know about technology are customers of good technology, not incremental upgrades.
"Argos had one of the best customer satisfaction ratings on the high street as they didn't have any high pressure sales staff."
I think this is as good a place as any for a rant about high-pressure sales staff. My bloody staff canteen is now trying to upsell people, by asking each and every customer if they want a soup or a dessert with their main. At the till. After I've walked past the dessert and soup stations without stopping. So no, I didn't want one then, and I still don't.
"Arresting a Canadian was just stupid."
Correction, make that 'arresting two Canadians'. The PRC have kidnapped* a second person.
----
*Walk like a duck, talks like a duck, etc. The PRC have two Canadian hostages right now. Meanwhile, it seems at least plausible that this CFO of Huawei was lying through her teeth when she claimed that Skycom and Huawei were separate, and therefore the fraud charge is real. There's a jurisdictional question, which is the very interesting question of 'if I defraud you and I am in a different country to you, can you sue me in your country?' It gets even knottier if my law says I didn't defraud you and your law says I did.
"Is this article a joke? I don't mean what WISPA is advocating for, but the premise that people don't pay more for faster Internet?"
The premise is that it's wrong to redefine 'broadband' for poor people. We wouldn't like a redefinition of a safe medicine to 'really safe if you are rich, but if you are poor, well it's safe enough'. The FCC shouldn't have a sliding scale of the definition of broadband depending on earnings.
"I'm beginning to think the US ISPs have realised that when the next lot of LEO broadband satellites (StarLink, OneWeb etc) come on line, they will be unable to compete. As a result they are trying to milk as much as possible from under-developed infrastructure while they still can."
Except I would guess that the latency (as mentioned in the article) will be quite high for them.
"Quite worrying that the tax payer has been left to pick up the bill. Now it has been proved in court and the precedent set, then any future business can go into liquidation, not pay the staff what they are due, and leave the tax payer to pick up the cost?"
Only if the business has no assets, like in this case. Misco didn't actually own anything, so there's nothing to sell except a few office furnishings.
"Sexism in Google Translation is from biased training data. As the system is trained on millions of text scraped from the web, these sentences carry the historical and social biases humans have over time."
Is this a new definition of bias that I don't know, where something is biased if it's an accurate description of current reality?
"What immediately springs to my mind is the Sklyarov case. Uncle Sam arrests a man for writing software that was perfectly legal in his own country, where he had done the work. Took them quite a long time to decide no crime had been committed."
I didn't know about that, so read the Wikipedia entry. Fun fact: who was the DoJ prosecutor who decided to press ahead despite there being no evidence that a crime had been committed? Step forward, Robert Mueller!
""But Iran has the inherent right to defend itself, and to obtain whatever weapons it needs in order to do this."
False. Iran is a signatory to the nuclear NPT."
OK, apparently this needs explaining. Iran has a right to self-defence, yes. As a non-nuclear signatory to the NPT, it has agreed not to develop nuclear weapons. Therefore from a legal perspective it does not have the right to obtain any weapons, for example NBC weaponry would be banned. Since the original post was about Iran's legal position, I think pointing out that Iran cannot legally acquire nuclear weapons under the NPT was a reasonable statement.
"More like - Imagine western individual being arrested in any of those countries which are presently on Chinese payroll. So much for that lovely holiday to the Maldives you know."
Just so you know, this happens. China has had people arrested in third countries who then magically turn up in China.
"Ignoring a dictate by one country that has no authority over any other country?
Hauwei can legally do what ever kind of business it wants with whomever it wants, as long as they follow Chinese law."
That logic only applies in China, though. Surely you can see that your two sentences are not compatible. If Huawei follow Chinese law, then they have no problem in China. If Canadian and US laws decide that she is guilty of breaking US sanctions, then she is guilty, for precisely the reason you say she isn't guilty: because China's laws don't override Canada's. And look where she is.
Quite a few countries have the notion of universal jurisdiction for certain crimes.
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