Posts by DavCrav 3894 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Nov 2007
"Why not posit that (in any given big bang) there will be some excess of one or the other polarity of matter, as a result of Quantum Uncertainty?
I know I know, not very rigourous. Just my 'gut' feeling, really."
The obvious cheat solution is the anthropic principle. We cannot see all the universes where matter and antimatter annihilate each other, only ones that don't have this property.
I'm not sure this antiparticles moving backwards in time makes much sense, to be honest. First, both particles and antiparticles have positive spin, because spin is a magnitude. If electrons are paired, one has spin 1/2 and one has spin -1/2, but that just means that one is a 'vector' in the opposite direction to the other, there is no sense in which one is negative and one positive.
Second, when a neutron decays, a proton, electron and antineutrino are created. How does that antineutrino know to be there if it's going back in time? (One solution is that there are antineutrinoes everywhere, just itching to be part of a neutron decay, but that is a bit of a cop out, as although there are lots of antineutrinoes, they aren't everywhere.)
I think what is meant is that the laws of interaction work the same for anitparticles with negative time as particles with positive time. But that doesn't mean to say that antiparticles travel backwards through time, any more than since I was somewhere else yesterday I will travel backwards to there through time. Antiparticles cannot send information to the past.
"The fact is that Microsoft U.S. could tell its Irish office to send over the data, and the Irish office could hardly refuse to obey an instruction from head office."
I'm sorry? So if head office says "go out and kill a bunch of people", you could hardly refuse it? If it is a crime in Irish law, I would imagine that excuse won't go down well in their court.
"That's assuming that nobody in Microsoft U.S. has admin access to the Irish servers and so could just help themselves if they were so inclined."
If they want to commit a crime in Ireland then that's their business. Accessing a computer to perform illegal acts is still a crime. Whether the US would extradite is one thing, but local Microsoft employees would be in the dock for abetting a crime.
"All of this will be seriously disruptive to the traditional banking system: The days of fractional reserve banking (and sanctions) are numbered. Currency is far too important to trust to any one entity."
Uh huh. So let's hope you never have to pay any taxes. The country you are in generally gets to decide the currency in which you pay them. That's why there's always a demand for each currency. As for your pretend stuff, there's no intrinsic demand for it. It really is only of value because it's convertible into something useful. If you really think that the international community is going to let you and your IT project threaten the entire global economy, think again.
"In common with many of the dear readers of this website I have worked at many a company where senior managers and the like have given their logins and passwords to their PA to enable them to handle all the stuff which is encrypted to save them the effort. Since each of those companies very clearly stated that such activity was forbidden and a disciplinary offence, I presume those managers/Execs in the US offices will now go to jail?"
No, the PAs would. Unauthorized access is illegal, not giving away your password.
"If Facebook and Twitter refuse, stick their proverbial middle finger up and just operate from outside the country then what would the government do? Ban them?"
It's far easier than that. If Facebook operates from outside the country and against UK law, and hence it's illegal for UK companies to deal with them, how exactly are they going to get paid for the advertising they want to show people?
"Long term future does not look good for recharge from the mains - I suspect within a few years we'll either see standardised batteries so they can be swapped or feasible Hydrogen cars."
I used to think standardised makes sense, except at one point I remembered that the batteries are about half the car at the moment, and replacing them in a hot swap would be difficult. You might as well just change cars at that point. And that makes a lot of sense if you as doing CaaS (car as a service) at that point.
"If I were running a safari and was concerned about poachers, I'd fit GPS jammer into all my vehicles. That way, even if a camera has built-in GPS or a poacher insider fitted a secret GPS logger in the vehicle, I'm still covered."
You're worried mainly about poachers as keyboard warriors, not poachers as super-spies, I guess.
"but on the 2nd test there will be 5 days (assumign 5 working day week) less surely - not 1x less? (and dont get me started on how we work out how many green/how many red we need to take out)"
I think I convinced myself that summing over all possibilities for removing n balls at random for varying n gives you the same answer as if you just remove a single green ball. I didn't prove it, but that's because I couldn't be bothered.
"If one of my employees shows up obviously under the influence, I'll show them the door. It's that simple, and they know it. They have the option of taking a blood test immediately after being fired, and I'll deal with the consequences if I'm wrong."
If you are in the lovely US in one of those at will states then fine, but in the UK you would be in court pretty quickly with that kind of approach.
"No, it gets you exactly the right answer."
It gets you the right answer, but to a different question. It gets you the right answer to the question "what is the chance of getting caught given that each day has a fixed probability of you being drunk", whereas the question was that in a given year there are exactly twelve drunk days, so it becomes a finite problem which needs finite methods rather than a continuous probability.
The quick way is to do 1-(0.95)^52=0.93 (2 sig figs), which gets you almost exactly the right answer. That's how we were taught to do it in school for continuous events and adding probabilities. The extra accuracy you get by withdrawing balls gives you the correct answer, but the short form above works well, if the testing is still relatively infrequently.
"For that you need a valid ID which is a choice of Eu biometric ID or passport (which has biometrics). Rest if Europe (except UK which continues with "utility bill idiocy") is the same."
In the UK, you need a utility bill or something similar to establish your address, and a photographic piece of identification (passport or driving licence) to establish your identity. I'm glad my passport doesn't have my address on it, or otherwise it would be even more costly to move when a student. Driving licences do have your address on them, so they can form the second piece of ID, but you still need two.
"Men and women are different mostly due to acculturation rather than biology (excepting the obvious physical differences). There are no 'men's brains / women's brains' type of differences. Put a number of brains under the microscope and you couldn't tell which ones came from men and which ones from women."
Well, first men's brains are on average slightly larger than women's, so there are men's brains/women's brains differences. Second here is a link (National Institute for Health) to a scientific paper proving you wrong. In it, it is noted that Down syndrome is more likely to affect males than females.
So, now that your sweeping general statement has been debunked, we now should ask whether there are any genetic conditions (hello, autism spectrum) that are not balanced between the sexes and that increase/decrease ability in some jobs.
For example, if there were a genetic mutation affecting one in 100000 men and one in 200000 women, that massively improved distance judging and hand-eye coordination, then almost every top archer and snooker player in the world would be male. On the other hand, the average man and average woman would be almost exactly the same at archery, and so you'd see news reports asking where all the top female archers were, and what is holding them back (and 99.999% of all men as well, but, and here's the important bit, we are comparing two different populations).
You of course don't see news reports asking why top female basketball players can't mix it up with the men because we all know that men are taller than women, but the tallest men are massively taller than the tallest women. (Tallest living man, 251cm, tallest living women, 221cm. But the average height difference is about 10-15cm.)
I'm not saying that sexism doesn't exist (although it depresses me that every time someone states actual, reliable facts, certain people have to shout 'sexist'), but there are alternative explanations for the distribution in certain niche professions than sexism.
"What you are saying by down voting is that it's ok for the press to go for him without evidence or before evidence is presented so that he can then deflect by saying the press is out to get him where I'm saying they need to be a little more intelligent in their presentation of the facts and not give him the chance to deflect."
I don't know about anyone else, but I downvoted you because I think that Trump is going to ignore every shred of evidence he doesn't agree with, such as actual photographs of crowd sizes, if it doesn't agree with what he wants to do, and then smear everybody else with fake news when they point out that he's a complete bumbling fool. And you just don't see it.
"Since it was all US Money that paid the development and deployment costs for what developed into the "World Wide Web" it's only natural that US Companies staked out the choicest territory."
Ooh, I wonder if that applies to other things? I think the whole of the US either belongs to the UK or to the native Americans (you know, the real ones) under that argument. And anyway, if these companies are in California, aren't they Mexican? Oh, you mean the US stole California from Mexico? Is that natural too?
"Brazil's complaining is why it's difficult for the world to have "nice toys" for very long."
Well, no. The world didn't have the nice toy, it was the US that had it, and it didn't want to share. It even didn't want to share when it had stolen a toy (in this case, the name Amazon) from the rest of the world in the first place.
"According to the highway code, it's not "the fast lane", it's "the overtaking lane" and you are perfectly allowed to do any speed you wish under the limit provided that a) it's safe to do so and b) you are overtaking someone in the middle lane."
False. You are not allowed to go more than 20 mph under the limit without good reason.
"Monopoly my fat hairy arse. You have Apple, Amazon and various app stores outside of the US. You'd also have Microsoft, Nokia and Blackberry, but they were too fucking incompetent to stay in the game. The alt-wrong are welcome to set up their own App Store, but that would involve a little something called work."
That's great. Now if only you knew the legal definition of monopoly, you'd be home free. Instead, you just stand their looking like an argumentative fool.
"Do you have an ISA or similar tax free savings vehicles? I trust not, since those are all tax loopholes that exercise those practising numpty-nomics"
Oh behave. There is a difference between unintended loopholes and very specific rules designed to encourage something. You know they are different things, stop being silly.
"Google would increase the prices of its advertising, the advertisers would increase the price of their products to cover their extra costs, and the consumers will have to pay higher prices. Where else could the money come from, if you assume that Google doesn't want to take a cut in profits, which is a given."
It might be a given, but Google are still subject to supply and demand.
To see why your argument can't possibly be right, suppose that the tax rate were 99.9999% of profit. Now Google needs to charge billions per advertisement, and nobody will pay that, so they go bust.
No you know your argument doesn't work when tested against hypothetical values, you have to decide to what extent your argument works when prsented with more realistic numbers. A rise in their taxes will lead them to put prices up, but their demand isn't perfectly inelastic and so there will be a drop. They will have to eat some of the costs themselves, because they can't all be passed on.
Meanwhile, consumers benefit from having reduced taxes themselves (or not having increased taxes, which is the same thing) to the value of 100% of the incerased tax take, more than balancing out the resultant inflation.
TLDR version: this 'taxes are passed onto the consumer' wheeze is bullshit. People pay in the end, absolutely, but shareholders are people too.
"Another libtard who doesn't seem to understand tax tax is paid by the buyer"
If only it were true. This is only true in a single-country market with perfect competition. If Google paid more tax, how exactly would that be passed onto the consumer? And if US companies are taxed, how does that affect the EU consumer?
Answers on a postcard slipped into an economics textbook, please.
"If companies such as Apple, Google et al in all good faith and with a duty to their shareholders to take advantage of all legal systems present in the EU to minimise their tax payments, however "unfair" that may seem to the rest of us, then it isn't those companies at fault but the EU."
Just because you used boldface doesn't mean it's actually true. There is no duty for companies to maximise their short-term profit, merely to act in the interests of their shareholders. One might very cogently argue that paying more tax now to avoid being slaughtered with a turnover tax later is definitely in the long-term interests of their shareholders.
"Ah, Mr O, the go to guy for an article to slag off Apple. Like Apple, El Reg does not change much over the years Glad to see you are on the ball as usual. Keep it up."
It's 1000 notes for a bloody phone. Anyone who buys this needs their sodding head examined.
"Was Osama Bin Laden brought before a court, found guilty and sentenced to death? Executive actions often have no trial or jury. So, maybe killing one of these animals is simply an executive action?"
Killing Osama bin Laden was almost certainly a crime. That doesn't mean people don't feel happy about it, and doesn't mean anyone will be tried for it, but it's a crime in the sense that it's against the law. And before you say "when the President does it, that makes it legal", it might have been legal under US law, but I very much doubt it was under Pakistani law. Or international law, such that it is.
"Now, is this not effectively finding it guilty of killing a human (murder) and then exacting a punishment (death row) just like if it was a human being?"
No. It's more akin to redesigning a bad junction, callous as that sounds. There's no trial, no jury, etc. Instead it's a safety issue: there's a threat to human safety and that threat is removed.
"All of which are gone. Sustainable?"
How sustainable do you want something to be? If we are looking at more than 500 years into the future then a lot of things are not going to be sustainable. For example, energy production, which will boil the oceans long before then at our current rate of energy consumption expansion.
(This is not anything to do with global warming, or hyperbole. Plugging in our increase in energy production, and treating the Earth as a black body, you find that you get a significant increase in temperatures just because of entropy, enough to boil the Earth long before half a millennium's time.)
It's also not true, unless you are happy counting Harvard graduates with massive college debt as the poorest people in the world. (Which of course Oxfam is, as it gets a bigger number.) And, of course, if you have very narrow definitions of wealth designed to maximize apparent inequality. (Which of course Oxfam is, as it gets a bigger number.)
"That's a standard clause you will find in almost any software license (and similar in a huge amount of other contracts)
Basically, if you loose a stack of cash due to a fault, we will only pay for the cost of replacing the hardware / software.
You have to prove deliberate negligence to sue for more."
At least under UK law, since you haven't paid for free software, no contract at all has been formed (no consideration), so negligence would be very hard to prove. Especially if you signed something saying 'use at your own risk'.
"Well, this is a step in the right direction. Cultural imperialism of Japan and South Korea (and the US) is a big deal. Time will tell if China can produce some nice export worthy "pop culture" media."
China exporting its own media is also surely cultural imperialism, to go along with its actual imperialism, you know, like Tibet, Bhutan, Taiwan, the dodgy deals in Africa, the nine dash line, and so on.
In fact, since China is one of the most powerful nations on Earth, I don't see how South Korea could possibly be accused of cultural imperialism towards China. But then, I'm not a blithering idiot.
no wait, entirely normal for commentards.
I don't agree with Andrew Orlowski on a few things, but I thought we could all get behind changing the law so that actual cases of forced child prostitution and trafficking (which, back in my day, was called kidnapping) that have been thrown out of court on a technicality are no longer thrown out.
But no, it's all 'I disagree with Andrew so everything he says must be wrong' utter bullshit. Also on this site was the recent story that a Google-funded think tank parrots Google lines and throws its employees under the bus if they go against it, so the fact that the EFF derives a significant portion of its revenue from Google is a pertinent fact when it gives its clearly completely impartial view on this issue. And again, just because you agree with the EFF on a lot of things does not mean they are also right when they say that paedophiles should get away with it because S230 is inviolable.
"She acknowledges that think tanks are not analogous to universities in that there is less institutional independence to funders."
So in other words, the head of a think tank is directly admitting that you should treat every word out of a think tank's mouth as a press release from whoever is keeping the lights on?
Well, we knew that already, but I'm surprised that she would be so brazen as to say that.
That gives you a solution, which is great, but already known. But the problems are 1) how many different solutions are there? (that's #P-complete) and given some number of queens already placed, can that partial solution be part of a complete solution (that's NP-complete).
"Therefore I'm not sure what the actual problem under discussion is here - I wish El Reg would write clearly. Or indeed which prize they are talking about. If it's the Clay Mathematics Institute "Millenium Prizes", then N-queens is not one of them:"
This is the NP-complete problem, as it isn't the n-queens problem per se: given an n x n board, with m queens placed on it already, for some 1<m<n, can it be extended to a solution to the n-queens problem? Obviously none of the m queens can be able to take each other, but apart from that trivial restriction, getting good other restrictions is hard.
NP-complete talks about testing whether something is true or false, or in other words is or is not a solution to a problem.
#P-complete talks about how to compute a function, for example computing the number of solutions to a problem, rather than just finding one. Often NP-complete problems have corresponding #P-complete functions, simply by asking to find how many different solutions there are to the NP-complete problem.
"But anyone that bought a set of suspect glasses were emailed rather swiftly, the product was recalled (told to destroy) and all users reimbursed.
You cannot expect Amazon to call each and every person detailing this.
The recall was in the news around the world, all over facebook and twitter.
If you didn't see the media advice on this then the onus is on you."
Oh, don't talk stupid. You saw that some glasses were being recalled. You had glasses, therefore you should have known they were rubbish? That's ridiculous. I have a car, some cars were recalled, therefore if anything is wrong with mine I am to blame? If Amazon e-mailed them to recall it and they used it afterwards then sure, but they said they weren't notified.
"Amazon whilst a retailer, is also a market place. If they were sold by a 3rd party on Amazon, then I don't believe they can be held liable - Its akin to buying something from a market stool, then sueing the location owner."
No it isn't, as the money is given to Amazon, who then pay someone else. It's more like a subcontractor, and you don't have to sue the guy the construction company brought in to do the painting, you sue your construction company.
"I do not, however, think that Amazon can be liable for failures of every single product they sell, especially since much of what they sell is listed by third-party resellers through the Amazon Marketplace."
This is starting to become a bit of a theme, trying to dodge consumer law because it's only a marketplace. Is a department store responsible for what it sells? Yes. In the UK, certainly, you take defects up with the retailer, and then they can sort it out with the manufacturer. I guess the US doesn't have very much in the way of consumer law, but here the person that sold you it is legally responsible, and that person is Amazon. You bought it from Amazon, they can write 'sold by somebody else' on it, but that, I would guess, is bullshit from a legal point of view. Amazon takes my money, the contract is formed with Amazon.
"Would it be possible for technology companies with the necessary clout to expand the infrastructure in ways that are protected from government interference?"
How exactly do you protect it from this?
"Employees of ISPs and mobile phone companies reported troops turning up at their homes and pointing guns at their families in order to enforce the shutdown."
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