Posts by DavCrav

Re: Logarithmic tail

"Maybe the reporting frequency has changed because they knew they wouldn't be able to keep going at the same rate. Much more likely."

And it was just a coincidence it happened the day after a news story about it appeared?

Re: @ Naselus

"> Green's lie came in response to the unwarranted police persecution. If they hadn't leaked, he'd have had nothing to deny.

But the fact is he did lie, and provably so."

After the fact. Or are you claiming they released the information to pre-emptively prove he will lie?

Re: "seriously sexually assaulted"

"But DougS, the ass grab is still assault, and thus serious, no?"

I thought assault like that was a misdemeanor in the US, and hence not serious by definition?

Re: Dang it!

"This guy gets a lot done when he's pissed off. Wonder how things would have gone if he had shown a similar level of effort towards actually doing his job!"

Who do you think made the 625 backups?

"What about Man United? that's a team of expensive players managed by a donkey."

You misspelled 'twat'.

Re: answer:

"The Vega+ however is a case of scenario (2), and backers obviously feel entitled to their cash."

Possibly, but they can only have what exists...

Re: How many battery "breakthroughs" is that this year?

"Somehow "could" never turns into "does"..."

And yet batteries continue to get better in real-world devices. How does that work?

Re: Wikipedia infaillible ? No!

"Britannica contains many inaccuracies, Wikepedia as well, however, studies have confirmed that in general, Wikipedia was better than Britannica."

Technically true (of course, the best kind...) but misleading. In those studies, the number of inaccuracies was comparable, but the type of inaccuracies was not.

"If you think something is incorrect on Wikipedia, BY ALL MEANS, TAKE 5 F'ing MINUTES and CORRECT IT!"

I do not work for free.

Re: Episode 645 of "Have Cake and Eat it"

"Ferstein?"

Verstehen?

Re: Sources?

"I'm thinking that a quality news outlet would, by now, have revealed its sources, or at least explained why it wasn't doing so."

His name's Deep Throat. Good enough for you?

Re: Send in our govt!

"I've got a solution... send in our conservative government. Theresa May and her crack team of expert negotiators will settle it for Amazon, Google AND Apple. They'll come up with a simple, fair and equitable solution that'll keep everyone happy. It'll mean future decades of happiness for everyone."

They can have YouTube and watch it.

Re: Attac is anti-globalisation ?

"So why aren't they demonstrating outside the places where the tax laws are made, instead of outside the businesses that are perfectly legally following those laws?"

You protest wherever you think it will do the most good. An organized boycott and sit in of Apple's nation-wide chain of tat shops would make more impact than sharply worded letters to your Deputies, which will result in nothing.

Re: Confused

"If someone has evidence of a crime, it is his duty to preserve that evidence until someone is available to take proper action based on that evidence. If the superiors of a police officer want to destroy evidence, they're the criminals - not the officer who heroically defies them in order that someday justice can be done."

I highly doubt that the US system would look kindly on his taking a bunch of evidence home 'just in case'.

Re: @ Lysenko

"Any "one man, one vote" referendum in the UK is a de facto English vote. The appropriate criterion in a federation or union is "one country, one vote" or "one country, one veto"."

It's not appropriate. You think it's appropriate because you are in a state that is a tenth of the size of another. If we have majority rule by states, then Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, population about ten million, gang up and outvote England, population about 55 million. The tyranny of the minority seems to be even worse than the tyranny of the majority, no?

There is no 'appropriate' system of voting. There are a variety of administrative areas inside the UK, cities, counties, 'states' (ESWNI) and the whole country. The only appropriate plebiscite for an EU vote (if there should be one) is a national one. If you come from the Highlands you might also complain about Lowland Scots outvoting you, and you want your own veto. London, population greater than Scotland, forms a culturally different area of the UK, so should it not have a veto?

What I don't understand is that anyone in Scotland still supports independence, after seeing what a complete fucking disaster being a weak negotiating partner in divorce proceedings looks like. In Scotland-rUK divorce proceedings, it would be statements like 'you will take on a population-share of the debt, and for that you get the ability to route freight through rUK rather than across the North Sea'. Exactly as the EU is doing with the UK.

Re: 2 Keyboards...

"Oh, and even worse when the second keyboard is connected to the Laptop, and I'm wondering why the PC is not working..."

Or just when your laptop is in front of your desktop monitor. I often type onto my laptop keyboard looking at the desktop monitor, or vice versa, and it takes about five seconds before I realize what is up.

Re: last bank visit

This is exactly it. With ATMs and online banking, more or less the only thing you need to go to a branch for is to pay in cheques (they do still exist) and do more one-off things like mortgage and loan applications. That's not enough business to sustain a national branch network.

Re: High-frequency trading companies = parasites

"High-frequency trading is a perfect example of our financial systems gone completely bonkers. With all their warts, traditional stock markets served a vital role in keeping our society going. HFT on the other hand exists solely to rob other participants in the market, and perform no socially useful function. If we collectively had any sense left, they'd be banned already, and their founders would rot in jail like the common swindlers they are."

OK, no Tim Worstall around any more to tell you why HFTs (of some sort) are needed, so I might as well do it for you.

The main reason that HFTs are useful is liquidity. They will buy an object on Market A for $1, and sell it on Market B for $1.0001. They make the $0.0001/object profit, and for that service you can buy an object on Market B yourself, for $1.0001. Without HFTs you would either have to go to Market A yourself, wait until Market B has an object for sale, or pay someone to bring the object from Market A to Market B.

In other words, HFT, or something like that, engage in arbitrage. Without them it would be a lot harder to buy and sell things, and for that service, they get a profit. Now, this is very much like the tea clippers of yesteryear. The premium is for first to market, so they invest a lot in the latest technology to get that trade a little bit faster. You might think this is money pissed up the wall, but I'd rather people spend billions in low-latency technology than buy massive yachts with it.

Re: Presumably, Danny 14 ...

"Your ignorance is laughable, and most people who are morons seem to be for some form of gun control, probably a belated recognition of their own inability to control themselves and a need to be told what to do."

No offence, but you are a fucking idiot. I'm for gun control not because I don't trust myself around guns, I think I'd be fine with them. I'm for gun control because I don't trust you, and if the price of you not being allowed to have a gun is that I can't have one, then I'm fine with that.

"Are you going to say to every resident, "No sorry, you live along the final approach flightpath so no drone for you"?"

No drone outside their front door, yes. Because the alternative is to allow people to fly drones in flight paths, which is obviously stupid.

Re: Telly Tax or Adverts

"Netflix make better shows than the BBC and don't have adverts so tax or ads is not the only choice."

You pay for Netflix! So it's essentially a tax on Netflix watchers, right?

Re: Bah!

"Also: "Oxbotica". Worst name for a company ever."

Clearly you have never been to the website http://www.ladrape.com/ where La Drape sell you bedspreads.

"Having this address is completely pointless since if they are worth their salt they would have moved them to another unknown address from that one."

I thought the blockchain was meant to record all transactions?

Re: Best solution ...

"Unemployment figures are a scam perpetuated by governments of all sides to hide the true figure. The long term sick and disabled are rightly not classed as unemployed, and rightly so, but not counting stay at home parents of school age children is completely wrong."

I love it when people who don't know what they are talking about opine about things. This is why we are in so much trouble as a society: everyone has an opinion, and people think their opinions should be treated seriously.

There are multiple unemployment figures. Depending on what you are looking at, you want to consider different things. Full employment is defined as 'everyone who wants a job at the current wage rate has one'. It's normally modified slightly to include a small amount of unemployment caused by people changing job, and there's also seasonal unemployment to worry about. Full unemployment means no 'structural unemployment', i.e., long-term unemployed.

Casting the net wider, we can include people who do not want a job at the current wage rate, either because they are currently doing other activity that is not counted as economic activity, usually caring for the young or old or disabled, that would cost more than they would receive in payment at the current wage rate, or because they are able to support themselves without working, usually by taking money off their partner or parents. If you offered them a job at £1m/hour they would probably take it, but nobody is likely to do that, so they are not employed right now. They count as 'economically inactive'. This includes, depending on how you feel, the retired, children, the severely disabled, and so on.

The old example of someone marrying their housekeeper shows why what you are talking about is much more subtle than you seem to think: if someone marries their housekeeper, GDP drops, even though the same activity takes place, and in fact the household is richer as a result. The housekeeper becomes 'economically inactive', although they were just as busy as they were before.

Or it's 'a scam perpetuated by governments of all sides to hide the true figure'. You of course know the real truth.

"If I buy a megaphone and mouth off highly objectionable speech at Speakers Corner, can the megaphone manufacturer be sued? Didn't think so."

Yeah, that would be like the example in the article with printers. What was your point exactly?

Re: No...

"So why are so many vehicles charged zero VED?

Are they not entitled to drive on the roads?

What about the vehicles that are completely exempt (of which there are a surprising number of classes)?"

I have to pay to use a car park. Blue badge holders don't. Therefore my payment isn't for the car park after all. Is that your logic?

"Isn't it funny that those who received their university education for free take great pride in telling generations after them how expensive it all is and that we really all should be paying for it."

(I got my education for free because I was one of the poor ones, going up on the cusp of fees being introduced.) It is perfectly affordable if only a few people go to university. If we go back to universities being gatekeepers to force the working class to know their place, then yes, it can be paid for by general taxation.

Look, I don't want any toast, and he doesn't want any toast. In fact, noone around here wants any toast. Not now, not ever. No toast.

Re: Spineless of them to give in

""Jack the Ripper (British) was apalling. Never give the British a free pass, never.""

Well, your spelling is appalling, but whatever. The point was that she gets five years in prison for being a victim, and this is because the Church is a corrupt institution. See also, massive paedophilia cover-ups.

Not quite sure how Jack the Ripper was a case of institutional corruption on the part of the British.

Re: RE: unwanted infantilism

"Might be worth checking your stats, in UK 2 pedestrians die a year from cycles but 6 a day from cars.

Evidence based approach please!"

Ooh, ooh, can I do that?

You've forgotten to divide by the number of passenger miles. Cars kill 2000/year, roughly, bikes 2/year, roughly. So if there are more than 1000 times as many passenger miles by car than bike, then cars are safer for pedestrians. Here is the data per billion passenger miles. It looks bad for Mr Cyclist, but terrible for Mr Motorcyclist.

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/647923/ras30018.ods

Pedestrians KSI per billion vehicle miles (not even passenger miles, which inflates the car death rate, as average occupancy rate is about 1.6, and of course massively inflates the bus death rate):

By cycle: K 0.9, SI 31

By motocycle: K 6.0, SI 66

By car: K 1.1, SI 16

By bus/coach: K 12, SI 81

By van: K 0.7, SI 6.4

By HGV: K 3.9, SI 5.3

(K = killed, SI = seriously injured)

So what can we learn from this?

1) Carpooling wouldn't change this data, but would reduce absolute numbers of casualties,

2) Two people in a car are safer than two bicycles for K, and one car much safer than one bicycle for KSI in total.

3) Motorcycles are a menace to society and maybe should be banned on safety grounds.

4) Get rid of all bus routes with an occupancy below 12 or so?

"Why if you have made $1 million in crypto currencies would you leave it in the trust of a 3rd party like Parity?"

Because it's not really worth $1m. The same way as if I invented a secret gold-making procedure, and made a million tonnes of gold, if wouldn't be worth quadrillions. It's worth $1m because the trading volumes are low. Try to sell those Ethereum and you'll find the market is nowhere deep enough to handle it and you will get almost nothing back.

Re: @Doug S... I wonder what the Trump apologists' excuse will be this time?

"What Clinton did was to use a personal secret server instead of conducting her business on a .gov email account. This was done with the intent of violating the FOIA."

So secret she told the State Department about it, and offered them every e-mail on it? Loads of the e-mails off that server are in the departmental archive, the rest were deleted after State said they didn't want them.

But, I guess these are actual facts, in the real world, so not of much interest to you.

Re: Horrible green stuff

"Amazingly people once did think it healthy to add radium to a drink."

And put it in toothpaste.

"My response to the Senator would have been something along the lines of:

"For anyone who fails to grasp that distinction, I would question their competence to be on this committee""

Then you would have been an idiot. Free speech is not untrammelled, for example with respect to political speech, where there are rules and regulations. Speech is free amongst yourselves, as a group of individuals, but Facebook is more like an online campaign rally than a chat at the pub, Twitter even more so. There are regulations on this type of speech, that currently do not apply to Twitter. Why?

Re: Need in UK

"Unfortunately death by being hit by a car that's mounted the pavement, or driven dangerously is so common that it's been normalised."

At one point I think I worked this out, and cars and bicycles have a similar pedestrian KSI (killed or seriously injured) per km driven/ridden statistic. It's just that there are lots more cars going much further, so they kill and maim more people.