Posts by Jason Bloomberg

Three days feels arbitrary

I imagine it's often a case of 'three days in the office and we win' versus 'three days at home and they've won' pettiness.

Pat is not for turning! Win or not, she's got her seat and it's her constituents' problem! ...local democracy in action! Your vote really does matter...unless it doesn't.

My understanding of UK election law is that the declared winner is deemed the winner with the route to correct any errors being through the High Court.

Your presentation of the situation in Nelson seems rather hyperbolic to me.

Re: 200mb/s for "10minutes or so" = ~15GB

"Fair use" to me means allowing users to download however much they want without capping in the dead of night when there are few or no other users on their 'network spur' if it would be possible to deliver it at those speeds were it not for capping being imposed.

If the T&Cs do say "15GB then it gets capped" fair enough.

Yes, but that's the "number that buyers usually acquire in a single month" - 800K x 12 = 9.6 million a year.

Re: A welcome change!

I like boring

Me too but I do seem to keep running into problems of other people coding for what they consider old versions of compilers and tools which are bleeding edge from my being boring perspective.

I have contributed to that problem myself, have upgraded to run something, then developed with that, forgetting others won't actually be able to use it.

Re: Nothing to see?

I was surprised anyone was even interested in cracking activation. I thought everyone just used a mate's XP install CD and one of the keys written on it, which used to be all over the net. Perhaps they have bit-rotted away or there was something special about those keys or install CD. I don't recall anyone I have known having been troubled by 'actual activation'.

The challenge I found, and this was a few years ago, was finding hardware which plays nicely with XP and its drivers, having to remember whatever needs to be done to make modern PCs work with XP. I can only imagine it's got harder.

When my XP system finally gave up the ghost last year I simply moved my chair sideways, continued with a Windows 10 system which was already set-up.

Re: So, always update, even if it works

Screwed if you don't and screwed if you do - It's not surprising the average user has no idea what to do, and even techies struggle with that.

but let's say the UK were the only hold-out?

If the US approves the deal I can't see the UK holding out as it comes under increasing pressure from Washington to not stand in the way of what America will have decided is a good thing.

Not that we're lapdogs or puppets, or the 51st state.

Re: With two-faced "friends" like Dyson, Britain doesn't need enemies

If we had a presidential election now, the top 3 most likely candidates would probably be BoJo, Tony Blair, and Harry Windsor.

And perhaps me if I can get my name deed poll changed to President McPresidentFace quickly enough.

Re: 2FA ?

There are some fucking stupid people out there.

Where "some" seems to be some fucking huge number.

Re: Misdirection!! Lawmakers "doing something"........

Initial reports said they had "blocked" the site but I have no idea how, not my field of expertise. I would imagine they used DNS redirection or whatever is used to ban prohibited and proscribed sites elsewhere.

Re: And I had just bought some more Xeons, too…

Maybe checking the real inflation (i.e. price of bread) will open everybody's eyes about "low" inflation...

In the UK the official year-on-year inflation rate is said to be around 10.4%. In reality it seems to have been a weekly 10% increase on food, sometimes 50% overnight. I can't find any food which isn't at least twice what it was a year ago.

Supermarkets say it's because of inflation. I am more inclined to believe it's their price gouging which is driving inflation. The greedy capitalist bastards say they are doing all they can to keep prices low but it looks more like they are doing everything possible to maximise profit, removing own and 'no-name' brands, keeping shelf stock low, limiting choice, consolidating fixed prices across a range of alternatives, over-inflating the price of smaller quantity items compared to larger.

The few 'corner shops' we have, which have historically been much more expensive than the supermarkets, are now considerably cheaper but don't stock a wide range.

Re: British Citizenship Test

How will it fare?

It will almost certainly be able to prove it's more British than I actually am, and I'll be the one on the next plane to Rwanda - which might be doing me favour seeing how this country is going.

The whole notion that 'these are things a Brit would or should know, must be known to be considered truly British' is deeply flawed.

I would expect it to beat almost everyone in any exam - it's not a level playing field. Give human candidates access to the web, time to look things up and formulate an answer, and they would do much better.

Where I have found Chat AI excels is in producing convincing bullshit and lies as quick as the guy I know down the local who always has the answer for everything, and every politician I have known.

Re: Comparison to OPEC

I thought it was a well documented move towards the Petro-Euro rather than the Petro-Yuan which sealed Saddam's fate, but "piss America off and reap the rewards" would seem to cover it.

Not really, when you get your polling card they write the cards serial number down next to your name, and when counting the votes they write down the cards serial number and it's vote, this is all then stored in a database. So the electoral commission know who you voted for.

Not quite to not at all.

A ballot paper has two parts; a receipt part which is kept by officials which gets the voter's registration number written upon it. The part you are handed to express your vote. Both parts have the ballot paper's number encoded on it as a sequence of punched holes.

The receipt part which officials retain and the part with the vote are both kept but never married-up unless there needs to be an investigation into the vote. They not only need to be married-up but need to be matched to the registration list to determine who actually cast that vote. All three things are needed to identify a vote, just two isn't enough.

While it can be done it is not done by rote, rarely done at all. There is no correlating data stored in any database so political parties, the council, and electoral commission, do not know who you voted for.

It would be possible to undertake such a task to determine who voted for a particular candidate being recalled but it's an awful lot of work and would identify who voted for whom, worse, it would be easy to tell who voted for the candidate if only those received recall voting invites.

You would need to send invites to everyone, with either a 'can' or 'cannot' vote card, or have to marry-up this and previous votes to only count those entitled to recall. It may also encourage those not entitled to vote to commit fraud to do so.

It's much easier and cheaper to just allow everyone to vote in a recall and, as those elected are meant to represent everyone, including those who didn't vote for them, plus those who made some kind of protest vote safe in the knowledge they would be elected anyway, it's not unreasonable everyone should get a say on whether they are doing a good job or should be recalled..

Re: Assets? What kind of assets?

I don't know how smart one needs to be to rally a mob of torch-waving pitchfork-totting, conspiracy theory prone, bigots who have never heard the term "critical thinking", rattle their cages and tell them they are right, to have them hail you as the one and true leader, the one they should get behind.

Of course Trump knew what he was doing. No, he's not stupid, but he's no brighter, smarter nor more skilled than anyone else. He simply decided to jump on the populist bandwagon while most decent folk wouldn't touch it with a barge pole.

Re: Not entirely fair to lambast industrial new towns.

They were rolled out with good intentions by well-meaning dissenters

And then there's Musk.

The issue is of course whether those providing for workers are doing it in the worker's interests or their own, interests less worthy than having done a good deed, or just doing the right thing.

Genuine philanthropy seems to me to require empathy and I have seen precious few signs of that from Musk.

So Arm or probably Softbank didn't want transparency then? Interesting.

But is that unreasonable?

You could say the same for everyone who chose to list other than here.

And, even if you have nothing to hide, would you choose the regime which continually forces you to prove you have nothing hidden or the regime which doesn't, with all the costs of that which hands your competitors choosing that regime an advantage?

Many of us avoid America and go elsewhere to avoid unwanted and unnecessary inspection of our social media, will choose a restaurant which doesn't strip search before letting us in.

What is the point of spending all that money to train an AI to be wrong?

You and I would say "wrong", others would say "alternative fact", and consider those to be just as valid as what we consider "genuine fact".

I am not agreeing with that but that's the way some see it. They believe their version of "truth" is just as true as anyone else's "truth".

The $64K question is - should they be pandered to?

Re: Ok... I have to ask

Exactly that. Why design a board when you can buy someone else's and take advantage of their economies of scale?

If it's just a case of writing an app and running it on a bought in board which runs Android or Linux, so long as it makes a profit, job done.

All of the 'dementia clocks' I have seen appear to be repurposed digital picture frames running alternative firmware. I even found one with multiple USB, SD, HDMI, audio and AV sockets, IR sensors and stereo speakers. All doing nothing of course.

Makes perfect sense to me.

Re: Idiots

I happened to stumble across this Mark II product a month or so ago and it seemed to be a Raspberry Pi, perhaps 4B, a touch screen, nice case, and not sure what else. Seemed an entirely reasonable offering except for the staggeringly high cost.

I hate patent trolls as much as the next man but am not convinced they can be blamed for its demise.

Edit : https://github.com/MycroftAI/hardware-mycroft-mark-II/tree/master/mark-II-Rpi-devkit

Re: Read this yesterday

I really do sympathise with the guy, but he needs to walk away and start making some real money.. he doesn't owe those companies anything. So it'll break? That's on them.

It's depressing isn't it. I do wonder how many have thrown in the towel and given up on trying to improve the world with "fuck it, I'm out", have had no choice but to do so.

Re: Enough with the conspiracy theories...

To be honest, I understood their decision then and I'd understand it again now.

If I were Cloudfare and had a customer effectively DDoSing the service I'd probably pull the plug on them until the issue is sorted; the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or something like that.

Where things seem to have fallen below expectations is in liaising with the customer and Cloudfare having perhaps not known what had been done to mitigate the issue until the customer started bitching.

So, all-in, a case of the engineer having done the right thing, but not having checked with the higher-ups that it's the right thing to do first.

Re: Who on earth buys an Apple Watch?

her main use is viewing notifications for texts etc. when she doesn't have her phone in hand

That and being able to tell the time would be the main use for me but I'm not going to spend more than a couple of tenners on such a thing. I would like a watch which could pop-up reminders but I'm not convinced it would be better than the watch I have which does its job for many years before needing a battery replacement.

Re: Only if China pushes hard

The main driving force behind RISC-V is China's need to wean itself off dependence ...

It's not just China doing that but India too, and others who wish to have 'sovereignty', not be beholden to Uncle Sam's diktats and whims as self-proclaimed global policeman.

It was utter stupidity of Trump to try and isolate and disadvantage China. It is utter stupidity for Biden to continue on the same path. All it's done is give China and others their wake-up call and provoked a response which will ultimately disadvantage the US long-term.