Posts by DavCrav 3894 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Nov 2007
"You think the leader of the Opposition is going to influence that very much?"
I'm not going to get into this one here, but note that someone would only have to convince 500,000 people to change their minds. Since the Labour vote was in the region of 10m (I made a typo in a first version of this that said 0m...), he'd only have to convince around a sixth of the Labour voters who voted Leave.
"The only real solution is to bite the bullet and start rolling FTTH, and if you're doing that, you might as well run it as gigabit - there's no technical reason you wouldn't. Of course business considerations demand that you choke it down to 10Mb/s and charge through the nose for the "upgrade" to 70Mb/s on a line which could trivially link at gigabit, but that's by the by. The only sane upgrade that leaves you overhead for tomorrow's demands is fibre - and you're going to run fibre at gigabit as a baseline."
As you said, the idea that anyone would install copper on newbuild now, especially at $4500/tonne, is crazy. Retrofitting FTTH will be expensive, none of this £25bn that's tossed around. But the point is 30Mb, 100Mb, 1Gb, it'll all look pretty shit in twenty years time. 1Gb is only about 30 times faster than 'standard' 30Mb, so by my earlier rough guesstimate, just using current growth we'd be looking at needing to upgrade that again in ten-fifteen years time.
One thing I can see that's going to need the next round of upgrades is deep learning. If we start using deep learning on lots of things, for example robots in houses and so on, they might well be transmitting and receiving large amounts of data: if a standard robot has ten cameras, each filming at UltraHD rates to send somewhere for analysis, that'll need a reasonable bandwidth.
"I have the cheapest available DSL where I live, which gives me 1.7 MB/s.
I can download films 10 times faster than I can watch them.
Does the average person *really* need 2MB/s, let alone GB/s ?"
Coming to the defence of the downvoted person, all people afterwards seem to miss that he wrote MB/s, not Mb/s. So he has around 15Mb/s, and that's easily enough for SD and even HD programming.
I personally think about 30Mb/s, so around 4MB/s, is easily enough for almost everybody right now, and perhaps we should be looking at getting more people onto 30Mb/s rather than upgrading my broadband speed in Birmingham *again* (with concomitant price increases, naturally) to something like 100Mb/s (I just tested and get 76Mb/s on WiFi, never mind wired).
Of course, one problem is that we will probably only get to do this once, so we should produce a network with room for improvement. The trouble is, this technology has changed a lot, and it's not like electricity, gas, water and telephone, where the original rollouts are more or less still fine. A 'broadband' rollout in 1996, so just 20 years ago, would have been on the 'gold standard' of ISDN, delivering a whopping 128kb/s download. We are now looking at speeds 300 times faster or more, so how rusty is this broadband network going to look in 2036?
"pretty much anybody with "agent" in their title , cos that pretty much means "middleman skimming off some money before passing the work on""
Some jobs that might still not be replaced by robots in the near future:
Secret agent
Agent provocateur (more of a role than a job)
Special agent
Agent orange.
""slick and effective propaganda machine being run by Daesh"
I must have missed that. The only propoganda [sic] I've seen has been along the lines of "Join us and you get to rape and murder innocent foreigners (fellow Muslims mainly, but don't worry, they aren't *proper* ones) for a year or so before being bludgeoned yourself by the armed forces of the countries you've chosen to attack.".
The evidence is that this appeals to at most a few hundred disaffected teenagers out of a population of millions, who are resistant to the counter-propoganda [sic] not only of their own age group but also their parents and wider family. So yeah, they're really going to sit up and take notice if The Government starts telling them what to do.
So did the whole select committe [sic] sign up to this verdict, or are some of them *not* utter cretins?"
The problem with this viewpoint, and it's not just your viewpoint but held by a lot of people in the UK, is that more or less every fact and piece of information in it is false. Let's start with this:
"I must have missed that. The only propoganda [sic] I've seen has been along the lines of "Join us and you get to rape and murder innocent foreigners (fellow Muslims mainly, but don't worry, they aren't *proper* ones) for a year or so before being bludgeoned yourself by the armed forces of the countries you've chosen to attack."."
I thought it was well known that Daesh has a large social media presence with many audio and video releases of high quality, but it appears not. They are very good at it, and strangely enough don't mention any of the downsides when asking people to sign up.
"The evidence is that this appeals to at most a few hundred disaffected teenagers out of a population of millions, who are resistant to the counter-propoganda [sic] not only of their own age group but also their parents and wider family. So yeah, they're really going to sit up and take notice if The Government starts telling them what to do."
No. The UK, despite having many more Muslims of a background that would suggest susceptibility to propaganda, sends fewer fighters to Syria than Germany, per head of population, and half as many as France. The evidence is there that Prevent, working alongside the other three strands of the strategy (Pursue, Protect and Prepare), succeeded in lowering the terrorism and extremism threat that faces the UK.
"So did the whole select committe [sic] sign up to this verdict, or are some of them *not* utter cretins?"
You've been reading about this for at least ten minutes, and read the whole of this article, so of course you know more than the people in the Select Committee about this, who only had these boring briefing papers and reams of documents to leaf through.
I really do fail to see why the general population, who normally have no particular knowledge of an area, think that they are equally qualified to voice an opinion about a topic as those whose job it is to work in the area, and furthermore to brand them as 'utter cretins' on the basis of the flimsiest of evidence. This anti-expertise-ism lay at the heart of Michael Gove's 'Britain has had enough of experts' statement. What do experts know, with their education, years and experience and knowledge of the area? You can prove anything with facts.
"As for "Prevent" -- it is toxic and needs to be very publicly killed."
It is toxic, but this appears to be at least partially down to lies, half-truths, misunderstandings and propaganda in the discussion of it. Statistically Prevent has been a reasonable, but not a runaway, success, resulting in for example significantly fewer Daesh fanatical runaway children than in similar countries like France and Germany. It is currently being Sellafielded/Accentured, having its name (but nothing else) changed to remove previous stains.
"Foreign policy, by which I mean invading foreign nations, is surely as much to blame. Greed is behind a lot of our bad policy desicions [sic].
How would you feel if another country's military arrived and destroyed our government? What steps would seem reasonable in retaliation?"
Attacking the citizens of a country that hasn't done anything (Germany)? Seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
"As for "plac[ing] the blame for young Muslims being “radicalised” on those operating social media sites" - this precludes the idea that anyone can actually think for themselves and come to their own conclusions."
I somehow feel that nobody sane would "think for themselves" and come to the conclusion that what they really should do is drive a lorry through crowds of people. So either, of all crazy people, it just happens to be mostly Muslim crazy people who do this type of mass killing (although not always, see for example the Germanwings pilot, Breivik, etc., but Muslims are massively over-represented in the crazy mass killings stakes here), or someone somewhere is radicalizing them, helping the mildly crazy people move on to the proper unhinged level they need to be at to think that machine gunning a bunch of people is all OK.
Since it isn't a sane response to US military policy to attack people with an axe on a train in Germany, I think you are wrong, at least about most of the people committing terrorist acts in Europe.
"and in particular “should refrain from using the term ‘so-called Islamic State’, and should instead refer to ‘Daesh’." - Oh yes, calling people names is both very grown-up and proven to be an effective deterrent."
What are you on about? Daesh is the Arabic acronym for ISIS/ISIL/IS. I think the reason he wants to move from those and towards Daesh is to dissociate in people's mind the organization Daesh and 'Islam' as a concept. So the opposite of calling people names.
"but I don't support politicians who treat me like an idiot either."
And yet you think using the term Daesh instead of IS is somehow calling people names.
"Dont think this BLM is two sided as they are notoriously quiet when blacks (persons of colour or whatver PC moniker fits) shoot other blacks. Or whites. You wont see BLM protesting then."
What exactly would they be protesting against though? You cannot reasonably protest against the existence of Steve, who shot someone. And generally if Steve shoots someone (and he is caught) there's one of these trial things that the West seems to love to have when crimes are committed. I think one reason BLM protests is not because cops shoot innocent people, it's that cops shoot innocent people and then nothing happens.
"It was made clear at the time that there were spaces in 1st class - but Corbyn chose not to upgrade (because most people can't afford to, and the taxpayer is paying for it)."
The taxpayer had better have not been paying for it, which he did I think imply at some point. This was a Labour Party hustings and not government business, so if he claimed it off the taxpayer he should be up in front of the beak.
"BBC interviewed a woman where she stated that unlike what the CCTV seemed to imply, there were no vacant seats. Sounds like the author is a tad biased?"
Woman on BBC who swears it really really happened vs CCTV footage. Hmm, which can we believe?
It's like when black guys are shot in the US when "reaching for a gun", and the CCTV footage "seems to imply" they did nothing of the sort.
"This article continues a trend of Brexist articles in The Reg"
Aw, diddums, did the nasty man with the facts make you upset again?
"and like the others it makes out that minor issues are major problems."
Minor issues like immigration? I thought that was pretty important to most of the people who voted to leave.
"Any argument that free trade requires open borders is simply untrue. Consider any non-EU country with whom we currently have trade tariffs and immigration controls. If the trade tariff is gradually reduced to zero, the relationship with that country does not change in any way that would now require free movement of people. Claiming that free movement of people is a prerequisite for free trade is an outright lie."
Blah blah blah. It is not a logical requirement to have free movement of people, money, goods and services (the four freedoms) in order to have freedom of movement of one of them, but the EU has made it a political requirement. It's not that they can't give you tariff-free access to the Single Market, it's that they won't.
Let's use an analogy: in the Scottish referendum, the SNP claimed that after independence England would continue to act as lender of last resort to Scottish banks. The rest of the UK told them to stuff off. It's not that it was physically impossible to act as such, they just refused.
Damn people and their free will.
"PS. Don't smarter password systems detect the "just append something to the old password" approach?"
I remember mentioning this the last time there was an article here about password stupidity. If you are only storing a hash of the previous password, you could maybe check a couple of characters added or subtracted, so see password1 from password or password2, but other than that it would take a very long time to check the hashes. Now, I've never set up a password checking system, but are the passwords hashed on the client side or the server side? If it's the client side, you cannot even do what I said above.
"We're disappointed that ad blocking companies are punishing people on Facebook, as these new attempts don't just block ads but also posts from friends and Pages,"
Hold on, isn't this like a hostage taker shooting someone and then saying that the police really did it by not giving him what he wanted?
The weird thing about BHS is everybody talks about the £600m odd that Green took out of it over the course of his ownership, noting how similar it sounds to the pension deficit of about £600m (not any more thanks to Brexit lowering gilt yields) but forget to mention the £600m-odd that Green spent on BHS, in terms of buying it, writing off loans and injections of capital. (He sold BHS for £1 with £64m in cash in its accounts, and over £100m in property, bought BHS for £200m, wrote off £210m in loans, etc.)
"A few good whacks with a hammer (or a brick if you cannot risk getting lifted for going equipped) and the whole thing breaks apart."
Out of interest, if plod catches you with half a housebrick in your pocket at 1am, do you think the excuse "I'm a builder" is going to work any more than it would if you were caught with a hammer?
"There's nothing petty about it . Britons seem to fundamentally misunderstand the consequences of their actions . It's not business as usual until brexit formalities are done . Try telling your workplace you've specifically planned to leave at some future time that you intend to negotiate to your benefit. You'll be excluded from every future project, regardless of the lack of any plan to leave right away."
Except, the UK is still paying for it, so if we are out, you can stuff your bill up your arse, Brussels. I personally voted Remain, but if the EU wants to half throw us out before we are out then we should stop paying half of the bill.
"So, Twitter is not the reason Don is pulling ahead of HRC in the polls?"
Ah, good old Republicans. It might not be actually, you know, true, but facts aren't all that important when you have rock-solid beliefs.
Clinton leads Trump by 6 points after Democratic confab: Reuters/Ipsos poll.
"Could the real reason the donkeys are getting hacked is that they badly botched their server security? There seems to be an overly quick assumption that Ivan's spooks must be doing this when it is quite possible a combination of donkey stupidity and moderately competent hackers did this."
So people with first-hand knowledge of the attack are saying it's Russian, but you prefer the version in which people who have experience and knowledge are ignored because you have a gut feeling that you know better than the experts, sorry the 'so-called' experts?
Are you a Republican, by any chance?
""I imagine if we had a look at RNC emails we'd see a lot of the same sort of stuff when they were scrambling trying to stop Trump."
Yes we would, but they lost, didn't they? The People won in the Republican case, while the entrenched power base won in the Democrat case."
Ah, now I get you. It's only successful unethical behaviour you care about, not unsuccessful unethical behaviour. You should maybe go and look up the word 'hypocrite' in the dictionary, if you like looking at pictures of yourself.
"Hillary, for the last two years: "There is nothing sensitive or classified on my personal email server, and no emails were missing."
Democrats, today: "Ohmigod, there's SO much classified material on that server and in the missing emails!""
Citation needed? Democrats seem to be saying "Russia has hacked into the official DNC server, and Trump is encouraging them to do it some more." Where was classified material mentioned anywhere? Confidential, maybe.
"The word aluminum has been around since 1807 when Sir Humphrey Davy proposed it as a replacement for his previous attempt of alumium.
Both aluminium and aluminum were used in the US but [um] was preferred from 1820 when Websters dictionary used it as the acceptable American spelling. By the time aluminium became a common material, um was already the fashion in America."
It appears to be slightly more complicated than this. Here's a write-up from World Wide Words:
http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/aluminium.htm
By the way, as a compromise, the correct name for aluminium is 'aluminium', and the correct name for sulphur is 'sulfur', as decided by IUPAC. Americans can carry on calling it 'aluminum' though, because there is no way in hell I'm calling it 'sulfur'.
"If the shoe was on the other foot.
And this was the RNC database you just KNOW the left leaning prick of an author wouldn't be fucked one bit."
It might come as a shock to you, but some people have opinions that aren't solely formed through the prism of which political party they support.
"Churches don't perform legal functions with regard to marriage. If you get married in a church it isn't legally recognized unless you have applied for a marriage license beforehand and then file the paperwork after the ceremony actually takes place."
Really? I assumed it was the same in the US as the UK, where churches are registered to perform ceremonies and you complete the forms there. That sounds more like Germany, where the church is just used for a fun ceremony, which has no legal basis at all, and the legal parts are done somewhere else.
"I have a modest collection of books on the Apollo missions, only about 2m of shelf space. Six of the books are signed by a Moonwalking author."
I didn't know Michael Jackson even wrote any books. But I'm sure they are worth a good bit of money with his signature.
"Mars and other missions, so far, do not contain actual "transformational technologies" but "cynical, incrementalist" innovation (bigger robot, cooler landing, better mechanics). From the perspective of spaceflight economics and reliability these increments and modes revolutions do make sense. Curiosity was a big step actually considering the many new technologies involved. But Thiel is from a crowd which aims higher and more ambitious."
Thiel, I would hazard a guess, has no idea what he's talking about when it comes to space travel, and doesn't quite appreciate the difficulties in manned missions to Mars.
I'm just fed up, as a scientist, of doing stuff nobody else really understands and then being told by some little shit that he's unhappy with the speed of scientific advancement. These people are rich beyond the dreams of avarice and are moaning because scientists who are paid a small fraction of his income aren't developing cool shit for his personal use quickly enough for his liking.
"The government has no business telling churches what types of marriages they should perform or recognize."
Quite right. It's not like churches are performing legal functions, is it? Oh, wait, you say that churches want to have their cake -- be able to perform legal functions -- and eat it as well -- deny people they don't like on religious grounds? No. Choose: you can be perform a legal function, and don't discriminate, or discriminate, and have your legal functions stripped from you. Religious objections are irrelevant; if you can't marry any two people who walk through the door, stop being in the marriage game.
"I love how the author implies that acceptance of gay marriage is a prerequisite for acceptance of gays period. They are different issues, regardless of what the Gaystapo says. It is possible to accept gays, and still consider the ancient institution of Marriage to be intended for the raising of children and not just a societal label that all have rights to."
Yep, because when it became unacceptable to think homosexuality is illegal, people like you -- you know, bigots -- had to move their goalposts. You might as well have said
"Now that I can't demand that the gays be chemically castrated or even just imprisoned, I'm going to fight tooth and nail against them having each and every societal right and make it as difficult as possible for them. Because God dammit if I'm not a complete pigfucker who loves seeing people miserable. Of course it doesn't affect me if two gay people are married or not, but I want my divine right to interfere in other people's business and impose my own stupid ignorance on them. Because I'm white and so I'm right."
I'm guessing you were also against interracial marriage until that became unfashionable. (1967, by the way, when the Supreme Court had to intervene in that one.)
"Most cultures in this world are in agreement with Republicans on this issue, regardless of how the press tries to make it appear the opposite."
I think if you set the bar of acceptability as "what most cultures in the world do" then democracy is out, as probably is the right of women not to be raped by their husband. (I cannot be bothered to check if this is the majority of countries, but you're a fuckwit and I've spent enough time on you.)
""We" didn't go to Mars yet, we sent a couple of probes/robots. I think the point he wanted to make was that there hasn't been a manned mission yet. You know, planting flags and stuff."
Great, let's do that. We'll need a visionary to go first: how about Peter Thiel? Unfortunately it's a one-way trip, but I'm sure everyone else will be glad to be shot of the windbag honour the guy in such a way.
"And the other doozy coming from Auntie Beeb is you'll need a TV licence for Iplayer from 1st September 2016.
Amazing how they can retain your data on the one hand, and on the other are incapable of tying a username/password to your TV licence account."
The suggestion is that you will need to use your TV licence details to access iPlayer so yes, they will know everything about you.
"Not all power has to come from "the grid", which at this point seems more inefficient every day. But I guess it's all the rage to ignore the possibility of new developments."
1) All this new power generation still has to be moved around though, so the grid stays regardless, unless we can somehow generate lots of power for almost no money anywhere, in which case we are already in a utopia.
2) Talking about real-world issues and putting <insert new technology here> when deciding on policy isn't a good plan.
"For contractors, it's a big world
Plenty of opportunities outside of the U.K., and a long way from HMRC."
OK, well bye then. If you leave when asked to pay tax, I don't really want you here in the first place. And you might find that other countries are often not quite as accommodating of tax avoidance as the UK.
"However, if someone's main income is derived from driving around picking up and dropping off Uber clients, then they are acting as an employee."
I don't think that's clear. Someone who makes stuff and sells them on eBay, and makes a living doing that, isn't an employee of eBay. You might be right, but you need a more concrete argument than that.
"In addition, in the latter case, they are clearly using their car "for the purposes of hire or reward", and therefore a normal car insurance policy won't cover them, and they should have a commercial insurance."
Yep, they have to. I think this is well known.
"The difference is that Uber tells you "go to this location and take this person somewhere else" and if you don't do it, Uber will stop hiring you."
Don't Uber offer jobs and you decide if you want to take them? That's how my local minicab company works: I've seen them accepting or declining the next job while they are finishing driving me somewhere.
In this case, if you agree to drive someone somewhere and then don't, that's the same in your analogy to offering the eBay item, taking the money, then sending nothing, then refunding the person. Doesn't take too long before eBay would suspend your account doing that either, I guess.
"Due to the recent changes, she can no longer claim the Ca £450/month extra accommodation cost (legitimate business expense, she's working away from home) "
Fucking diddums. As an employee, I cannot claim diddly squat for the fact that my partner and I ork 78 miles apart from one another so have long commutes.
"This is due to the Tories deciding that as an employee wouldn't get it, nor should she (despite the fact that an employee wouldn't live 200 Miles from their place of work)."
One of my colleagues' family lives in Germany and he rents a small flat near work and flies home every weekend. So stop your 'employees wouldn't do whatever' bullshit. People who work in highly skilled areas have to locate where the jobs are, and that can lead to long commutes. When I worked in Oxford someone was working there who lived in Devon, another works there and lives in Bristol, another in Southampton. It's called the two-body problem, and it means I and many others have a lot of expenses that we cannot claim back.
A lot of people here like being contractors because of the freedom, blah blah, but the reality is that most people like it because of the tax avoidance opportunities.
"2000: IR35 came into force.
2007: Philip Hammond as Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury said Tories will abolish IR35. link
2011: Recommendation by Office of Tax Simplification to suspend IR35 or compel HM Revenue & Customs to make changes to its implementation. link
2016: Now. Philip Hammond in charge of Treasury."
And you are commenting on an article about proposals to make changes to the implementation of IR35.
'Still some value there'
The point is that someone, somewhere, is giving it money, although I can't imagine why. If that bit can be saved, and the rest junked, maybe it's a viable business.
They've written down half of the money they bought Tumblr for, so they are halfway to appraising that part of the business correctly, at least.
"Any idiot can achieve revenue of $1,300m if they're prepared to lose $400m doing so. It seems perfectly reasonable to sneer at that as an achievement - or a business, for that matter."
Indeed. I cannot remember who said that the easiest way to become a millionaire is to be a billionaire and buy a football club.
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