Posts by Charlie Clark

Re: How much does FB benefit from nonFB users ?

That's not quite right. As I said, the contract is initially between your contact and Facebook. Certainly, they are then contractually obliged to store and process that data only in accordance with… and maybe they do: it's all hashed and used only to provide the services to the user…, or as many of us suspect, they're using the data to build their own shadow networks. Personally, I don't trust them, have never used any of their services, and have them blacklisted on most devices,

Have you been in contact with them to see what data they have on you? Somehow I suspect the conversations might be similar to those the FBI had with Philip K. Dick.

Re: Delusional narcissist

I certainly agree that his personality traits quickly come to the fore: he loves to attack, makes insincere apologies only when he thinks he has to, and quickly goes back on them.

What investors should worry about is that the companies who are withdrawing their accounts now, are the ones with the beancounters telling them to do so. Those with a conscience left a long time ago. Those who stayed, stayed because they thought it was still good business. Having seen a couple of commercial presentations from Twitter I at least understand the pitch they were trying to make. It was sketchy then and that was, for better or worse, when it had a near monopoly in some areas: politics, fashion, music. Fashion and music have left, leaving pretty much only the politicians and lazy journos. Difficult to see Disney's or IBM's target audience being there.

For a while Google was threatened with being regulated as a bank because it was so cash rich.

Re: Postal Service

It does say this: The Swedish Transport Agency has now received an interim decision from the Norrköping district court to consent within 7 days to Tesla collecting license plates directly from our sign manufacturer. It appears from the decision that our sign manufacturer has announced that it is prepared to provide the signs directly to Tesla.

ESA in one of its regular, but fortunately not frequent, spats about politics and money.

Re: Mmmmm

It sounds like you still don't understand that the OpenAI company is a subsidiary of a non-profit. This is why Microsoft never got a seat on the board.

Re: What about sites that force you to make it easier?

Note, the new authentication methods are not necessarily any better (and biometrics is particularly tricky) but they do change liability, almost invariably meaning that the provider of the service is never liable.

Re: Great work!

Just copying what the original article says doesn't make it right, including the moon-earth comparison, multiple of AU would have been better (about 9, I think).

And this isn't just dogmatic metric versus imperial; it's what's used in the field.

Re: David Cameron and those sunny coalition years

If you look at the actual economics, there never really was much austerity as the % of GDP spent on government services hardly changed. Not that many services didn't suffer from the lack of investment, because they did. But austerity was just never what it was supposed to be.

Philip Coggan wrote extensively and interestginly about this while he was at The Economist. Here's one example. Might be behind a paywall but well worth the read if you can get past it.

Re: Who?

Legend has been around for over 20 years. Hasn't Dylan already sold his back catalogue: he wants to live in the here and now, yeah baby!

Of course, it's more expensive but the beancounters think it means they can do without all those difficult techies who manage systems! This is debatable but largely driven by accounting practices.

However, I think the "cloud" contains too fundamental risks to businesses: data sovereignty and the risk of being locked in; but security, especially the increasing risks of whole cloud systems becoming compromised, really ought to be sufficient for companies to say know.

I can imagine that it's possible to outsource some data-processing using cryptograhically secure VMs that get up and downloaded but there's obviously currently not sufficient interest in customers to do this, in addition to providers wanting to offer a service that would have to properly priced.

Re: Beware of tail risks

The degree of improved accuracy does not entail risks.

FWIW the BBC doesn't get it's forecasts any more from the Met Office, which runs its own simulations, I think it now gets them from a German company that uses the European models. And differences are to be expected. We don't have the granularity for proper surveys and chaos theory tells us we'll never be able to run all the possible different simulations. But that's why statistics are so important.

I suspect, at least for some potential customers, this kind of artificial scarcity just adds to their perception of the great deal they're getting. Plus, it keeps Tesla in the headlines, which is essential for the direct to customer sales model.

The real risk is customers turning their backs on what will be largely out of date and inappropriate technology by the time they get they're vehicles.

Re: Himself as Himself

And shades of Austin Powers in Goldmember!

I'd love to see Musk trying to act, even himself. Probably the closest thing to Tommy Wiseau from The Room if he isn't available to do it!

Re: who would very much prefer their payloads to be launched on European rockets.

You're technically and legally correct. But it's also complete fiction to suggest that Ariane is in anyway independent of ESA and the political dumbfuckery of the last decade.

You know a company has hit the skids when they start coming up with this kind of crap. Meanwhile the bottomless pit for Project Supernova is still open for jollies for the C-suite and their consultants and hangers on…

Re: Another parasite gone ?

The parasites almost never die. Either they move to a different exchange or get bought by another company.