Posts by DavCrav 3894 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Nov 2007
"Pay less if charging in the wee hours overnight?"
Since that would be when all the electric vehicles would be charging, that becomes a peak...
Think: even 1kW chargers for 10m vehicles becomes 10GW. From GridWatch, we see that UK demand at 1am is about 23GW, demand at 10am is 40GW, so those vehicles easily turn the dead of night into a Wednesday morning.
"The Internet is an independent territory. It does not exist in a physical place. Nobody has the right (or ability) to control what happens there. The only way to stop it is to turn it all off."
This was a popular notion back in the early 2000s, and I'm surprised that anyone has kept it this long. The reality is that the Internet is not an independent territory, it is like the international telephone system. Bits of it lie in different countries, and those bits fall under those countries' jurisdiction. If they want to filter what happens on their bits of the network then they can.
"Reprehensible though that is, it is still a case of the Russian Government (probably) [a public enquiry concluded that this was true, beyond reasonable doubt, stop FUDding] taking action against a Russian Citizen, albeit extra-territorially. I'm not defending that in any way, but it is markedly different to abducting a German citizen in Macedonia and torturing him in Afghanistan.
...
When you have an example of the FSB snatching a Frenchman with no connection to Russia off the streets of Lisbon and secretly flying him to a Syrian air force base and torturing him, then you'll have an equivalence to American lawlessness, not before."
I gave several examples of the Chinese government doing exactly that. And if you think the death of Matthew Puncher (who investigated Litvinenko's murder) of multiple stab wounds was suicide, as it was ruled, then I have a bridge to sell you. It's amazing how many people commit suicide around the Russian government's actions, isn't it?
Give it up. The Russian government murders dozens of people abroad, just accept that they and China are the worst major governments in the world. The US, UK, etc., aren't shining beacons of glory, but to pretend that Russia and China aren't beyond the pale is just ridiculous.
"Anything an elected government does to its own citizens (like lethal injections) has some potential cover of democracy and legality; extra-territorial actions against citizens of foreign countries have none."
Not really. You shouldn't get to run around the UK killing people. It's just not cricket. We have laws too.
"That's the position in Russian. If you're sitting in Smolensk and decide to pen-test the Pentagon the only relevant law is that passed by the Duma of the Russian Federation. American law is an irrelevance to Russian Courts because it is a basic pillar of democracy that you have a say (a vote) regarding the laws you are subject to. Pretensions of extra-territorial jurisdiction are fundamentally anti-democratic."
Ah, so what about killing people in London? Is that a nice thing to do? Shouldn't Britain get its justice too?
"but last time I checked those organisations weren't firing off extradition requests all over the planet, kidnapping people off Italian streets or asserting that Chinese court orders supercede Irish data protection laws."
Are you actually serious? The man accused of killing Alexander Litvinenko in London, Lugovoy, actually sits in the Russian parliament. China has been documented kidnapping people in Thailand, not to mention the leaned-on deportations of Taiwanese citizens in Kenya that look an awful lot like kidnap.
So I don't know when you last checked, but you didn't do a very good job of it.
"or an obscure woman from Scotland making over a billion writing about wizards."
Who's that then? J. Rowling (the K. is fake news!) is from Gloucestershire. According to Wikipedia (yes, I know), she had already written three chapters of Harry Potter when she moved to Scotland in 1993, aged 28.
"developed by the British Elizabethan cryptographer Sir Francis Bacon"
I think that's doing rather a disservice to Bacon, who was the originator of the scientific method, was the Attorney General and also Lord Chancellor of England, wrote a dozen books, somehow found time to be an MP for seven different constituencies at various stages, and produced the foundations of the Napoleonic Code.
It's rather like saying that Isaac Newton was a British Master of the Royal Mint. True, but somewhat misleading.
"Ditto Torx screwdriver bits that are needed when removing hard disk platters for physical destruction. "Near enough" doesn't work - so a set with all the small increments is essential. Beware the market stall ones - the splines will strip off as soon as there is any strain."
The way I destroy hard disk platters, they can stay in the hard drive for all the good it will do them.
"What.....??? No Allen-Keys (Hex sets)...."
I have an entire tub full of Allen keys, but found the need to buy a three-pack of Swiss-army-knife-style Allen key sets (one Imperial, one metric, one hex), that now sit in the same clear plastic tool box, next to the tub of Allen keys.
"60% accuracy is not very accurate at all. When the vast majority of people don't commit crimes, it means that almost everyone who is identified by a system with this level of accuracy, or even a system that is 99% accurate, isn't actually a criminal."
Erm, that doesn't really apply because this is a piece of software for deciding if prisoners will reoffend. Some of them won't have committed a crime, this is true, but I think 'vast majority' might be pushing it, even in the US legal system.
"If your freedom, or the length of your sentence for a crime, was in question, would 50% seem like a reasonable threshold to you?"
Evidently I didn't make myself clear. I claim that you will likely never be able to do with, no matter what system you use, with more than a 60-70% accuracy. Therefore untrained people, algorithms, whatever, won't be able to guess this stuff.
I made no judgment on whether you should or not, just that they said the results are disappointing, and I think they did fairly well for something that is random. Personally I don't like the idea of using guesswork as to whether you will reoffend to decide if you will be put away either.
My point was, if you are trying to guess based on percentages, you need to turn percentages into yes/no, and that is always inherently inaccurate for individuals. For example, given actuarial tables, tell me when each member of a group of 100 people will die. You won't do well for each person, but will for the group. It's exactly the same thing.
"Dressel reckoned the disappointing accuracy results for both man and machine stems from racial bias."
OK, are these results disappointing? I would have thought that a 60-70% accuracy rate for a random event is pretty good.
Here's the initial guess for a system, based on n variables:
Given a person with variables a1,a2,...,an, look in your dataset and find all matching people. If recidivism rate is higher than 50% in that subset, click 'reoffend'. Otherwise, click 'safe'.
You can get a bit better than that if some of the a_i are more important than others, but that's the same effect as having a larger dataset. Once you have more than, say, 20 people in each subset, you will have a good guess as to whether recidivism is higher than 50%. And once it is, you can only guess 'offend', any other system cannot perform better.
Of course, this is entirely separate from the issue that this only tests whether you reoffend and get caught within two years. Actually, it only tests whether you are found guilty of another offence, not whether you did it either, come to think of it.
"Rockwell Automation revealed that the same patch had caused issues with Studio 5000, FactoryTalk View SE, and RSLinx Classic (a widely used product in the manufacturing sector)."
But does it affect the retro encabulator?
"That said, maybe FB did blacklist the image did but the miscreant was especially persistent and repeatedly cropped/flipped/modified the image so it's hash didn't match the hashes in the blacklist..."
Surely the blacklist is cleverer than that? Or else the watch list is more or less useless, no? Just chop a line off the top and you are free and clear?
"Is this particularly FB's fault? Yes they could do with making sure the image doesnt go back up within reasonable grounds of making sure they dont bugger up FB. But whoever posted it up in the first place is surely to blame and the police seem to have failed on that one."
Is it FB's fault that they were hosting child porn, knowingly, and repeatedly? Yes, according to the law, in which child pornography is a strict liability offence. So why are we not carting FB server monkeys off to jail, hmm?
"I would imagine this xmas, google managed to kill of belief in santa in millions of kids in the UK, if not the world...old enough to type 'is' into a browser - your childhood is over."
If you are old enough to search Google unsupervised you shouldn't be believing in Father Christmas, and if you are doing that, there's a lot worse things you could be finding out about other than the fact that your parents buy you presents. I knew that he didn't exist at about the age of 4, because I worked out that he couldn't possibly visit every house with children in it in one night. Guess what: my childhood continued.
"So each country receives back exactly the amount of grants to match their payment - even though the applications are all judged competitively on their technical merits?"
Not quite. The funding is 'broadly' apportioned according to size of country, otherwise the UK would dominate it. For example, it's much easier to get H2020 funding, for Marie Curie grants for example, if you are at an Italian university than a UK one. However, the UK is close to, if not the, top recipient of funding (depends on the year) despite not putting in the most.
"Time will tell of course, but my money, if I had any, would be on the autonomous cars. Imagine this, you go to work in your car. When you get there you go into work, then your car goes to work as an autonomous taxi, returning later to take you home. After dropping you at home the car works the taxi night shift. I don't think The Holborn Effect will stand in the way of that."
1) Not with your golf clubs in the back and child seat in it it won't.
2) How much taxi work do you think you can pick up if everyone's car is doing that?
3) He's saying you won't get an autonomous urban car any time soon, so what it does while you're at work isn't the problem. Mixed-mode car (autonomous on motorways/major trunk roads, manual off them) is much easier, but of course few taxis operate like this, and most journeys are urban.
"Possibly but you are not including assets, while the poorest citizens may be in debt most of them will own assets (cars, white goods, phones etc) that exceed their liabilities so they have a positive nett wealth."
No. All of the poorest people in the UK are 21 year old university students, who have -£50k (roughly) in assets thanks to student loans. Throw in the couple of years either side, and there's well over a million people with negative assets there. I should point out that UK student loans aren't quite debts, since they get written off, but so can other debt be written off.
"OK, I'm confused. I thought it was generally accepted now that Wikileaks had selectively leaked information to damage the Democrat campaign and and held onto stuff that might have damaged the Trump/Republican campaign. In which case wouldn't they be rather pleased with him?"
To quote Sir Humphrey, "gratitude is merely the lively expectation of favours to come". He's played his part, so throw him to the wolves, might well be their opinion.
"The embassy utilises apartments on the ground floor. The only floor below it is the basement. The embassy isn't the only tenant of the building and all floors are accessible to all by using the stairwell or lift.
If you read the news article here, you'll see that the police guarded the stairwells and lift in the early days to stop him making a dash up to the roof."
Then how did he appear on the first floor balcony?
"The fact that he wrapped it up in so much prosaic verbiage just shows he knew what he was saying was bigoted."
So, in your opinion, someone who writes 'statistically speaking, males under the age of 40 make up a disproportionate number of the offenders for violent crimes such as murder, with the subset of black males again being disproportionately represented' really means 'men are murdering bastards, black men especially so' but they don't have the balls to say it? Maybe nuance is there because things are nuanced.
Technically, a prime is an integer p such that 1) p is not a unit (i.e., 1 or -1), and 2) whenever p divides ab, then p divides a or p divides b (or both). What is described here are irreducibles, not primes. That primes and irreducibles are the same thing is the definition of a unique factorization domain. (All primes are irreducible, but not all irreducibles are prime.)
"You guys always miss out the third option.
Hire qualified women and pay them as per the job. Go to bed early and have an untroubled nights sleep. Wake up refreshed."
Only an option if they actually exist. Which they don't, statistically. We get very few women apply for jobs in our department, and they are even more rarely the best candidate, so we have <30% women working here. I cannot see how this is somehow our fault.
"they are already locked into LibreOffice, etc and are paying the price to switch to an alternative."
Don't be dense. The cost is for buying a new thing. Lock in generally refers to the difficulty in moving away from one to another, not the cost of that. For example, proprietary formats such as MS Office that you cannot read on other packages.
"That's utter testicles so far as I can see. If it's yours, you may sell it for whatever price you can get"
A ticket isn't a good. The physical ticket is, and you can sell it for whatever price you want, but what the ticket represents is a contract to provide a service. If you contract a plumber to fix your house for a fixed price, can you substitute your house for someone else's? What if there were no free slots for plumbers and you had an emergency? Could you sell someone else your plumbing slot?
In a contract, you cannot just scribble out one person's name and put another in. The good (which is the concert, not the ticket) hasn't been provided yet, so there's no first sale doctrine.
"Yep, the award for worst human rights abuser in the Middle East is generally won by Israel. And they are up against some pretty stiff competition!"
Is it really? Is it won by Israel in any competition run by people who aren't anti-Semitic? Because I'm pretty sure Syria would win.
"But I admit I woul have preferred to see Senator Roy Moore rather than "that other guy" simply because "that other guy" is going to be a pain in the ass obstructionist for the next 2 years..."
Yes, because Republicans have not been obstructionist for nearly a year now.
"But yes, there is a significant convenience factor to allowing and disallowing access to people at your whim. Once you've given someone a set of keys you've given them full access and the only way to revoke it is to replace the lock and deny access to everyone else until they get a new set of "credentials"."
This is true. But you give people unattended access to your house very rarely. These sorts of things are useful in hotels, but if I saw one on a residential property then I would assume the owner is (illegally) using it as an AirBnB place. And replacing the lock is cheap compared with the cost of this, so you can afford to do that several times.
This isn't a Luddite problem. Maybe we see that the technology isn't there yet for this type of thing, and there are far too many security issues with this hardware/software for it to be worth it. IoT in general is a technology looking for problems to solve, and then making them up when they cannot find them.
"Don't be silly, of course not (probably). The value of selling your marketing data to unspecified third party affiliates is what subsidizes the price of junk like this at an affordable level."
It was supposed to have cost $700. What would it have cost without that?
This is such a massive pain in the arse. My bedroom door (not security related, just annoying) fits at the top but is at least 1/2" out at the bottom, my utility room door only fits because the door is as warped as the frame it sits in, and the glass door into the living room only closes properly in the morning. The only reason the outside doors work is that they come inside their own frame as one big uPVC bundle.
"Not a solid scrap of evidence to say that no god exists either. Of course there's lots and lots of circumstantial, hear-say and personal non-revelations, not to mention fingers-in-ears 'I can't hear you' arguments that get repeated often enough that they're assumed to be incontrovertible fact."
I'm not sure what you are trying to say at this point. You cannot prove that unicorns don't exist either.
So, there are a few different categories of noun:
1) Elephants. Lots of physical evidence, many people say they have seen them, I have seen them.
2) Dreams. No physical evidence, many people say they have seen them, I have seen them. (Dots on an MRI is proof of something, not proof of dreams.)
3) Tigers. Lots of physical evidence, many people say they have seen them, I have not seen them.
4) Bigfoot. No physical evidence, many people say they have seen them, I have not seen them.
5) Unicorns. No physical evidence, many people do not say they have seen them, I have not seen them.
So in this sort of classification, God fits somewhere between dreams and bigfoot, which is fair enough.
"So far as I know there is nothing happening whatsoever, and so Perens [sic] statement is for the moment incorrect. And therefore, currently, garbage."
No, that is not true. An absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Perens's statement is not known to be correct, but not known to be incorrect either. In fact, the only one to make a provably incorrect statement is you, just now; better ring your lawyer?
"Reporting daily is crazy and smacks of micromanagement for a project expected to last months. The idea that reporting daily versus every two days makes a 30% productivity difference can only come from someone who has never worked in a real job. A lot of time will simply be sent collecting, checking, presenting and reviewing figures daily. If this was real then reporting twice daily would give even higher productivity, perhaps they should report the numbers hourly or perhaps every 30 minutes? If they reported evey minute perhaps they could get the whole project done in a couple of days?"
Sorry, bollocks. "How many did you fix today?" "Two" is not an onerous responsibility. And sometimes people need to be micromanaged, because they will slack off if you don't. As evidenced by the fact that asking them three times a week led to a drop in work done.
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