Posts by Stevie

Re: Adam 1 clearly this much more evil than

My memory of the SubPrime Fiasco is slightly different:

The dodgy loans from many, many sources (including Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac but not by any means limited to them) were bundled by banks into instruments that were then fraudulently represented as solid investment vehicles by colluding with the SEC in a blatantly illegal fixing of the system.

Then said banks colluded to work an insurance scam under the blanket term Credit Default Swap. Not illegal mostly, on account of the deregulation begun under Reagan and continued by every President since having created holes you could drive a bus through.

No, those in charge of the banks did nothing illegal (at least, nothing that can be proved) when they bet against themselves, but what they did was unethical and downright stupid, bringing the nation's (and eventually the world's) economic engine to the brink of absolute failure. Treason might be a word to be tossed about here, given that the officers of the nation's superbanks are supposed to understand they have the stewardship of the economy, and that includes protecting it as well as exploiting it for personal gain.

But if you want me to believe that "President" Bush (does anyone believe he was the one running the country rather than the old guy with the oversized safe in his office?) had a grasp of the financial situation his ship of state was sailing, I'm going to need to be administered some very strong drugs of the hypnotic/psychedelic family before being locked in the machine from The Ipcress File for a week.

Re: Good one !

The US regulators are worried that people will have too much privacy.

Re: Do we want to advance or not? 4 checkri

Tesla safety risk: a soundbite answer to a question involving dozens of complex variables. It completey evades the driver's risk of adopting a more relaxed attitude to situational awareness because "the autopilot has it covered".

The comment regarding accident stats connecting seat belt usage with increased accident rates is also overly simplistic and a clear example of correlation rather than causation. I could, for example, point out that in the same time period cars began shipping with all-round disc brakes as standard, resulting in drivers using them more agressively in traffic, and turbocharging became ecconomically viable and mechanically reliable, resulting in drivers using accelleration more agressively. I know this because I Was There.

And there is a difference between a Luddite and someone who would rather their kid, raised carefully and dutifully to all the proper standards espoused by SINKS and DINKS posting on El Reg forums these days, not be killed as collateral damage when some fucktard with more money than sense doesn't RTFM or does and fails to recognize the gap between designer hyperbole and engineering reality.

The Tesla is being developed in this case as one would develop software in a post-www world when it should be being developed more traditionally with the knowledge that even fancy expensive cars can kill people, just like the conventional auto industry does. A bad driver for a flatbed scanner will ruin your day. A bad driver for the Tesla "autopilot" will ruin someone else's life.

Also: naming the feature "autopilot" invites stupid people to act stupidly. We live in a world where I dig about a car a year out of my front lawn because young people equate cruise control and automatic gearbox with "I can fiddle with center console gui stereo controls while exceeding the speed limit in perfect safety".

Re: @Jimmy2Cows 4TeaLeaf

Newspapers?

I don't "do" Facebook, but I'd be very surprised if they didn't have a "want to work for us?" link on, you know, Facebook.

If so, job done. Links are colorblind.

Re: Cheques???

And yet in Starbucks and Barnes & Noble and IHoP and any NY diner and any NY restaurant you'll see cash, and credit cards and debit cards being used to pay. Can't remember the last time I saw anyone so much as *try* and pass a check for their lunch or their books or their posh yuppie coffee.

Re: Bah!

Oh John, you impetuous boy, I was born and raised in The Heart of England, and lived and worked there for 30 years. Even had my own consultancy when that was considered a low-class form of IT employment. Belive me, I know how The Sytem works.

Re: Bah! 4 BlitheringBob

TAKE YOUR MEDS!

Re: "I think I'll just leave this link from Not the Nine O'clock News here."

"Our government has become indistinguishable from parody"

*Looks gluimly at current presidential candidate field and the records of the Do Nothing Congress and Do Nothing Senate*

Tell me about it.

Re: Die Java Die

In the same way, JavaScript has no right to even exist (I think Lovecraft wrote about that language in "the thing on the doorstep")

You are thinking of Ambrose Bierce's The Damned Thing.

Re: Bah!

Genders? Not if you are talking about impersonal nouns. You can call people "miss" or "sir" using a modification of the same root. Not really the same thing. Finding this out yourself would have been very easy, certainly less onerous than making sense of the average man page.

I only really suggested it to see how fast people would see the shiny and start waffling about needing yet another new artificial language.

As for cultural baggage, I think there's some confusion between that brought to the table by the language and that being touted by certain loud parties speaking it.

The language has no baggage. I quit the local Esperanto club largely because of people who were attempting to hijack the term "samideano" to much the same effect as some of the comments here. That and the claque on the other end of the scale who were denying the local culture at all costs.

The point of the language and the reason it was invented was to provide an auxillary way of communicating to the people of Warsaw, whose population had six distinct cultures each with it's own language. The idea was't original, but it was the best implementation of it to appear at that time and more people speak it today than any of the other alternatives, inclding Klingon (which steals liberally from Esperanto grammar).

Amusing aside: the Encyclopedia Britannia once had an article on Esperanto in which it stated that the language would never be adopted in the East because Chinese and Japanese people couldn't pronounce some of the letters. Which would come as a surprise to the large community of Japanese Esperantists, some of whom I've met and spoken with (they didn't speak English and I don't speak Japanese)

Bah! (4 Eddy Ito)

The perceived wisdom *before* any "new rules" were enacted was to keep SEVEN years worth of tax records.

Re: “tea before milk”.

Lapsang Souchong tea drinkers! Don't waste money on expensive swank tea; simply stir your PG Tips with a sliver of old railway sleeper for that smoked creosote flavour you crave!

Re: Bah!

But it was done sans internet, which was the point.