Posts by Alan Brown 15079 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008
"Pence finally stepped in and called out the National Guard. He did that only after the mob called for Pence to be killed and after the coup had clearly failed"
In other areas, people have commented how this is reminiscent of the Munich Putsch of 1923 and what it set in motion (was the Putsch a failure, or did it lay groundwork for future action?)
"What motivation in trying to keep power at all costs, even at peril of spending the last days of his life in jail?"
The factor that out of power, he is quite likely to spend a large chunk of the rest of his life in jail and stripped of whatever wealth he has left will have played into it
His past is catching up with him and he's trying deperately to avoid it
The best thing anyone can take along to antitrump protests these days are a set of handcuffs to jangle at him
"Experience is an dear teacher"
Only if people are willing to be taught
Hint: 1918.
Philadelphia (no lockdown),
St Louis (Lockdown),
San francisco (relaxed too soon),
Apia (worst case scenario)
Pago Pago (proved quarantines work)
The effect of "Spanish flu" was so horrible that americans erased it from their collective cultural memory and only the little things about it leak through, like 1920s movie orphan tropes (guess how their parents died?)
"Continental North America has over 300 years of unconventional oil reserves available,"
Take a look at what's happening in the Laptev sea and then decide if you think that continuing to burn that oil is a good idea.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/oct/27/sleeping-giant-arctic-methane-deposits-starting-to-release-scientists-find
This has been increasingly on climate scientists' radar since 2004 when the first "impossible" methane seeps were found and the consequences of runaway methane clathrate releases (assuming it doesn't just stop with Laptev) are....... permian extinction-level
I'm reminded of a friend who'd been a preprint specialist and worked on web pages going to a presentation at his new employer (an insurance company where he was doing graphics in the marketing department) where they breathlessly talked up this thing called the "world wide web" and the "wonderful" web pages they'd just paid $2million to get setup
The entire staff present burst out laughing at the presenter and the managers then showed them the much nicer (and standards compliant) web pages they'd knocked up a couple of weeks earlier for a cost of about $20k if the hours were chargeable (which they weren't) for a pitch they were preparing about taking the company online
By all accounts the expensive pages were awfull, looked like they'd been coded by a 5 year old andwould have damaged the company's reputation if they'd seen light of day
"It looked at the road and rail networks there and said 'this is illogical' which it was."
Yup.
There's an old saying in NGO circles: "Africa isn't poor, just poorly managed" - China's helped break down a lot of old colonial barriers and does't actually seem to be erecting any new ones
I believe they're working on the basis that as a supplier they do better if all the customers are doing better, vs old colonial exploitation/extraction mindsets
"Doesn't the ECC check slow things down a little bit? "
Yes and no.
If you're using buffered ram (which you should!) then the access latency is a little longer (one cycle)
Unbuffered ram has "other issues" including being touchier about disturbances to supply voltages or system noise and you can't put as much into the machine
Apart from that, there's no penalty in normal operation
I'd argue that we should have gotten away from dram a long time ago. Random access latency has become the single biggest bottleneck in systems and is why there's caching/branch prediction/etc all over the place. lower latency ram would remove most of the necessity for it.
"I would like to have ECC on my home-brew FreeNAS"
ECC ram is almost the same price as non-ECC (seriously, it's about 3-4% different, if that)
The cost difference is in the Intel ECC supporting boards and CPUs vis non-ECC ones - the solution is not to use Intel CPUs
"there are games being played over vacuum cleaner and kettle power consumption in the name of 'greenness' within the EU standards-setting forums"
The standards there have bloody good reasons to exist:
Cleaners were getting stupidly large motors with quite poor air-power inefficiency and you DON'T need to boil 2 litres of water to make a cup of coffee (my Brevillle boiler does a cup in 20 seconds, Fast enough and I've had it 20 years)
BRITISH patents for vacuum cleaners which can be extremely effective whilst reducing power over older designs by 80% AND reduce the spray of 10-micron particles had been utterly ignored by UK makers for over 20 years (I had a lot of discussion with the holder, telling him to stop being "patriotic"/sentimental and start being pragmatic, which paid off for him)
Those air recicrulating deisgns started hitting mainstream in the mid 2010s instead of being DIY mods (the original design took the exhaust of a standard upright vacuum cleaner and dumped it into the carpet just in front of the beater brush, This simple mod dropped power consumption by aboout 30% by reduciing total motor load and blasted dust out of the carpet at the same time resulting in more effective cleaning - obvious when you thinkg about it but more patents are - AFTER the event.)
IF the UK standard is "better" then it beats the EU standard so there isn't an issue
The only time you "need" to diverge in the ways described is if you wish to go below what the EU regards as acceotable for its imports
Then again this is the country that brought the world BSE, cars that had ex-factory perforation rust and turd flotillas off Blackpool beach whilst proclaiming itself to be world-beating
It just never specified what it was beating
" Ok, so UK kettles are better than French ones, but only because 240V vs 110V. "
Only since 1947. Before that it was a mix of voltages and frequencies (240VAC 50Hz dates to the late 1920s, parts of London were 200VAC (West Ham), parts were 200VDC (Bow), Lynmouth had 100V@100Hz, some areas had 60Hz, some had 50Hz, some had 40Hz, some had 110V)
DC 110-250V, AC 110-250V 40-100Hz
The UK was one of the last countries to standardise its national voltage and frequency. 240V (like ring mains) meant lighter gauge coppper could be used in the post war shortage area
" I can't see the EU adding Finance & Banking to the trade deal when the UK was already in default over Channel Is, IoM, Cayman, Bermuda and British Virgin Islands etc."
Cayman, BVI, Bermuda and Bahamas are all getting out of the tax havening/shell company games
Something about American sanctions being applied to their oil supplies if they didn't....
The issue isn't the chlorine wash but that it needs washing AT ALL due to wildly unsanitary animal husbandry with amazingly high levels of both camplyobacter and salmonella along with slaughterhouse conditions that allow fecal matter to come into contact with meat (yes really), so the wash pushes e.coli into deeper crevices than it would otherwise be in
The rates of chicken-related food posoning on each side of the atlantic underscore differences in food standards
the primary school I was at had a number of such buildings added in the 1970s, intended to be removed by 1980. Several were dropped on playing areas (tennis courts, etc)
come 2021, They're all still there - and extensions added.
I just hope the coal-burning pot belly stoves have been removed. Then again they were bloody cold in winter even with those
As long as you ship the items separately and merge them on the final system, CDDL and GPL are ok (if uneasy) bedfellows
if you ship a premerged system, that's when you're setting yourself up as a target
CDDL was deliberately written to be incompatible with GPL at the insistentce of Sun engineers who didn't want to see their product incorporated into Linux. It works fine with BSD, which is where IxSystems got their start
"To state the obvious here, its not just the telescope that wasn't maintained, its a symptom of a much wider problem."
Ignoring the rest of the rant, the USA has _major_ infrastructure woes. The Interstate highway system deferred maintenance budget is now in excess of $4.5 TRILLION - that's why we occasionally see major bridges falling down
The recent harvest of idiots at 1600 Pennsylvania are a SYMPTOM of the problem, not the cause - the people behind the cause have had the upper hand since 5 March 1980 (That's when Reagan broke the Air Traffic Contoller strike and declared their union illegal), after campaigning hard since the 1940s to breack the New Deal (recruiting evangelical america for the ride)
"The absolutely absurd military spending has been going on for so long, it feels strange & uncomfortable for officials to even *think* about suggesting we curb it."
It's not just that - even just holding it steady would be an achievement.
The US military budget has increased about 40% in the last decade. It's one of the few areas of expenditure the US government opens its pocketbook without question - and that $950 million/year is only the KNOWN spending. Recall this very website once reported on an IT-related accounting fraud in the US army which was 3 times higher than the army's official annual budget
" if you could make an AI bird flock like that but take away the fun and replace it with protect this point here then you would have an almost impenetrable moving wall of (explosive) birds that would fill in any holes you made in it."
A point made sometime back in the book Swarm Troopers
http://www.swarm-troopers.com/scenario-a-queen-in-trouble/
"The timing is the worst bit."
Yes, but.... it's been impossible to GET one of these addresses for years and they HAVE actually had the decency to warn customers for several years that it was going to go away
Giving 1 month notice on an actual drop dead is bad practice but they've been telling people to move for at least 5 years and to be honest in my experience people would scream loudly when given the 30 day notice even if told a year in advance that 1/1/2021 is drop dead date
In that respect, British business operators are just like the British government's preparations for Brexit - ignore the warnings/looming deadline, then make it all someone else's fault when it doesn't go away
This kind of attitude is WHY foreign buyers have tended to avoid "British" products for decades
"Did you contact them on talktalk@talktalkbusiness.net?"
They probably waited the requisite 30 minutes between sending the enquiry and publishing the story, then because the response came in after that, ignored it.
That's my PERSONAL and repeated experience of such "theregister" claims about having "contacted the organisation" - it's their version of "being economical with the truth"
"I just can't believe that businesses that depend upon email use a third party email service (and put up with the whims of such)."
You would be completely gobsmacked how many use the email@domain provided by their broadband ISP and end up being vendor-locked as a result
Utterly self-inflicted
"to be fair most people are experts in something you and I are not"
Showing a seven-digit local number which plainly WILL NOT WORK if dialled as-is shows a pretty fucking braindead approach to doing business
You start wondering how such companies STAY in business
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