Posts by h4rm0ny 4560 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jul 2008
>>"You're right, and it ought to be transparent to everyone but it won't be"
It is pretty transparent, but few politicians have found a good way of replying "but I don't agree" without sounding weak or tolerant of Evil(tm) when their opponent plays the terrorist-paedophile card.
"You think computers in the NHS are anything new?"
To quote a hero of mine: "Did IQ's just drop sharply while I was away?"
I worked in the NHS for years so yes, I am aware there have been computers for a long time. The point is about the way New Labour started pulling data out of the surgeries and flinging it around in every direction without regard for privacy. CfH and the Spine aren't just computers in surgeries. They're programs of data extraction and circulation. Moron.
Well New Labour led the way on demolishing privacy in the NHS. The "Spine", "Connecting for Health" and the rest was all their baby. So there's that whole area. Honestly, I thought I could smell hypocrisy when I opened the browser, and then I saw the headline.
Seriously, there are few good reasons to vote Tory, but the Labour party is right there at the top of the list.
>>"That container would be heavier than the envelope used to contain the gas at atmospheric pressure."
Like I wrote: if you install a pump to compress the helium, it will reduce lift. What part of what I posted was confusing? ;)
But seriously, it depends on how light you can make the equipment and how big a volume it is offset against and how fast you need it to work. 80kg of equipment on a little balloon means it may never get off the ground. The same equipment on a massive airship might be fine. Similarly if you want pumps that can compress it in ten minutes, that might take a lot of equipment. If it starts on approach an hour before landing, that might take much less. Keep in mind an airship doesn't need to descend like a plane. Furthermore, keep in mind that the times you may want to descend fastest are when you're dropping off a load. In my example, passengers. That means less compression needed because you're already weighed down. It's when you're not loaded, i.e. you're picking up, that it will take longer to compress enough that you sink. At which point hopefully, due to the lack of impatient passengers, you can simply start earlier.
>>"If you put a compressor in helium airship and compress some of the helium into a tank, will that drop the amount of lift generated?"
Yes. Try this experiment - pick up a tank of liquid oxygen or helium. Is it heavy (more specifically is it heavier than an empty tank)? The answer is yes. Compress a gas and it reduces the lift, you would get.
If you could fit a pump inside the air ship which compressed the helium, it would reduce lift.
Furthermore, I think there could be a market for transporting people with these things. Whilst obviously slower than a plane, they're much cheaper to run and provide a lot more comfortable space. As fuel costs rise, people look at cheaper options and if that cheaper option is more like a ship (walk around an open space, some tables to sit at, a bar, even a personal cabin) than like a plane (cramped little seat and tiny little aisle you're contorted into for seven hours), then there're plenty of people who'd prefer to take the "cruise" approach to getting there. Especially in an age where if it had decent Internet access, you could still work.
I've been in love with these things ever since Indiana Jones threw someone off one ("No ticket!"). Planes have had decades of refinement and advancement. I'd love to see what we could do with airships.
"I would suggest that they have a lot of catching up to do with the millions of people "exterminated" on the original journey to the promised land."
Not to detract from your general point (which is that the Old Testament is filled with horrendous crimes and glorification of the invasion of other people's lands), but the evidence that modern Jewish people are any more descended from the ancient Israelites than most non-Jewish people is mixed. There was a large wave of conversions to Judaism prior to the Fourth Century. So some groups of Jewish people are barely related to other groups at all -- at least no more so statistically than any other group -- and evidence that the main body of Jewish people trace their ancestory back to exiles from Egypt is pretty much non-existent. Or rather they just as much can as any non-Jewish group in Europe (and several other parts). That area of the world churned out wave after wave of settlers to other parts in ancient days.
Not that it really matters. Race is pretty much irrelevant in intrinsic terms. Barring the odd thing more prevalent in one ethnic group than another such as diabetes or sickle cell anaemia, we're pretty much identical. It's culture that matters. But the racial connection (or rather lack of) is important to building a narrative about a "diaspora," of being driven out of Israel. A narrative which is very important to many Zionists who want to justify ownership of the area along ethnic lines. (N.b. to the simple minded, Zionist =/= Jewish. There are a very large number of Christian Zionists in the United States and a massive number of non-Zionist Jews all over the place).
Queue incoming protests about Y chromasomes on people called Cohen in 3..2..1...
A lot of flawed attacks here. Microsoft's OOXML is also open to anyone to implement and in addition to copy right restrictions, MS have committed to not asserting any patent rights on parties for implementation of it. A lot of people are still repeating things that were true of the first rushed attempt at OOXML which contained binary blobs and was poorly documented. The current OOXML is free to use, free to implement and protected against lawsuits.
Certainly governments should use a standard implementable by anyone and MS are not stupid and didn't know things were moving that way. That's why MS created a format that fulfils those criteria. The debate between using ODF and OOXML should be based on technical merits and expectations of the format's long-term development, not hate.
>>"I think what the author is pointing to is that the richer, better equipped, minority are likely to fair better when things start getting really tough and the growing number of disenfranchised, less well of folk, will be fighting tooth and nail, *between themselves*, "
That's not at all what the author of the paper is "pointing to". Just read the actual abstract linked in the very article you are replying to. In the entire time it took you to write what you imagined the author was saying, you could have checked. They basically studied crime statistics and correlated them with changes in temperature and found that more of these crimes happen in hot weather than cold. They then concluded that if average temperature rises, so will such crimes.
They included more numbers and statistics in their paper, but that's the basic principle. When did reading go out of fashion and become replaced with trying to sound authoritative?
>>"Good point. It is hard to see why anyone would pay for Office Online instead of using Libreoffice."
Office Online is an online, web-based office program. LibreOffice is installable. If you want to do comparisons, you compare LibreOffice to MS's installable MS Office products. LibreOffice doesn't have a web-based version equivalent to Office Online.
>>Neither of the definitions provide any limits on the type of infinite +1/-1 sequence, which would make the problem trivially false: with a sequence of all -1s, it would never be possible to create a positive discrepancy at all."
That's not an arbitrary pattern. That's a case of looking at the data first and then constructing a pattern to fit. The pattern must be independent of the random sequence. So you choose, e.g. every third number, and then apply it to a random string. Not study the string and construct a pattern.
Actually, in this instance they are not confused. The mathematicians ran a SAT algorithm solver. Essentially "proving" it statistically. This is not a proof by induction. That's why the proof is so large.
(n.b. I think by analytically, they meant a proof by deduction).
>>"Empirical testing? As in run a test on a random selection of data and assume if it gives a decent p value then the hypothesis can be considered correct? That sort of thing doesn't cut it as mathemetical proof."
Well I agree. But look up what a SAT attack is. Unless I've misunderstood the article, they ran a SAT algorithm solver on a sufficiently large data set and "proved" it statistically. Hence my question about the randomness of the source data. Even if one accepts a proof by demonstration rather than induction (which you do not and I am reluctant to do), that remains a potentially serious flaw in the proof.
I am not a mathematician, hence my asking the question.
>>"My understanding is that you can't pick any old pattern. It has to be every number, or every second number, or every third, etc. But that's just from Wikipedia."
I think that's the classic version of the problem and is good because it is illustrative. But in theory the problem should apply to ANY pattern you come up with, so long as that pattern does not depend on foreknowledge of the numbers. I mean however complex your criteria for selection, there ought to be a subset that has greater discrepancy than it in an infinite sequence. No?
Serious question - where did they get (how did they generate) this sequence of +1's and -1's ?
I.e. assuming that their proof works by empirical testing rather than induction (which raises its own questions), how did they prove that the sequence they analysed was random.
If this little bit of coverage reaches any of the people involved, I'd love a quick reply clarifying.
(icon because that's me right now)
Thanks. I'll check that out. I really enjoyed Sapphire and Steel, loved the old Quatermass films. Where are the stories these days with a brave scientist in the lead? :(
(n.b. by scientist, I mean one who actually uses science to solve a problem, not someone who is called a scientist and then punches their way to victory).
I remember reading about photonic holographic memory over a decade ago in New Scientist. Someone had built / was building / was thinking of building a cube where you'd have two lasers able to target in x,y and z dimensions of it and where the lasers intersected, it would flip the state of the atom / molecule. Thus you had writable memory that wasn't a thin wafer, but a three dimensional block. Enormous data density was supposed to be possible along with staggering access times. They had some clever way of reading that state back by using one laser, or a lower-energy laser, I forget.
At the time, it sounded fantastic. Anyone know whatever happened to that?
"Overvaluation is NOT the same as a pyramid scheme."
Indeed it is not. What makes BitCoin like a Ponzi scheme is that people are currently putting money in because doing so encourages others to put money in and the first party hopes to cash out while their ahead with their gains having come from the others buying in after them. That's where the image of a Pyramid comes from. A small number at the top (the initial investors), followed by a larger number of secondary investors, followed by a larger number of tertiary investors and so forth with ever larger waves whilst those at each higher, smaller level find the value of what they already have increasing. So yes, it's very much like a Ponzi or Pyramid scheme. Not because of overvaluation (which you seem to think is the argument), but because of this migration of money from the newcomers to those earlier. The earlier you got in, the easier Bitcoins were to mine, and this reduction in generative ability as more and more people come in is very much a Ponzi / Pyramid scheme because it's not accompanied by a proportional reduction in investment.
The only saving graces that affords some differentiation from a pyramid scheme is that (a) many of the early players do not have the motivation of 'build it up and get out before the collapse'. They want to genuinely see BitCoin establish itself. And (b), there's a slim chance it actually might. However, there is a massive number of people who are treating it exactly like a pyramid scheme buying in now whilst the value is increasing and hoping to cash out ahead of the majority. The more people think and behave like that, the more it becomes a genuine pyramid scheme because that's exactly how it will behave. And is currently behaving.
Whether the number of people acting like that is, as a proportion, high enough to overwhelm the good intentions of others, I have no hard numbers. And it's a definition with no hard lines anyway. However, reading online and forums, my strong impression is that the largest wave of people in BitCoin at the moment are the get in and cash out ahead of everyone else after you've gained enough from the increasing value of them. Which means pyramid or Ponzi scheme to me - she who leaves the restaurant last, pays the bill.
Do you like the feeling of being inspected or judged? Do you like the feeling of being on assessment or unable to relax or make mistakes? Do you like feeling that if you say anything controversial to a few people, or which might upset some other people, that it will be immediately passed along to them? Do you like where you go and who you go with to be readily available? In a world with pervasive surveillance and recording, there's little escape from these things for most of us. If you trip, if you say something others will not approve of, if you're angry and behave in an angry way, these are all the moments that someone is there ready to catch and pass along in a far more efficient and widespread and long-lasting way than has ever come close to existing before.
You're not doing the joined up thinking, either - facial recognition is increasing all the time making it easy to identify someone in a recording and join it up with their other information online.
The usual statements to people who feel this way (which is a huge proportion of people) are that no-one is going to be interested in that person, just celebrities or similar, and that people should get over themselves and be able to laugh at themselves or accept that they make mistakes or similar.
But there are very many of us who do NOT think that no-one will be interested in us. And out there, there's always some people who will be. And those who think people should be okay with being made fun of don't really appreciate just how mean-spirited and hurtful such attacks can be. Even if you think that no-one is interested in you now, it creates a chilling effect knowing that all those times you lost your temper or had a row with a partner in public, someone was filming you, ready to be found if you do dare to be a taller blade of grass. Or even if it's simply funny enough that it gets passed around even if you're unheard of.
I know of one person who got into an argument with someone over parking, and that person started filming her. She got really angry at that point and started insisting that they stop and they didn't and she got really angry and so the film got passed around and she was made an absolute mockery of online. Who knows what she's really like? Who knows what her day had been like up until that point? And quite frankly, who's to even say that she's not right to be angry that someone pulled out a camera and started recording her shouting and red in the face. All anyone ever saw was a long clip of a really angry person who was trying to stop someone filming her and who was telling her "this is going online". She lost her business over that. The tirade of abuse she got was huge.
That's everyone if you have pervasive recording. We all become Star Wars kid. Except for those of us who react by clamming up and not doing or saying anything interesting anymore because we're permanently being monitored. Of course the same critics come back insisting that everyone should have saint-like levels of not caring what others think. But that's not true or any of us really. Just a handful of nutters. The rest do not like the endless feeling of being watched, judged, assessed. That's my best shot at explaining it to you and why if you walk around recording people in their every day lives, you're going to get a lot of anger heading your way for ignoring how people feel.
I mean, look at the non-rush to buy .info domains or .me.uk. They're still trying to squeeze out a few more pennies by making another redundant domain?
And anyway - geography based domains on the Internet? Country makes sense because countries come with a lot of language, legal and cultural commonality. When you get down to county or city level, there's far less point.
I don't really see the point in mocking. For a start, you're an idiot because GNU/Linux is all over the place. It doesn't have a large share of the desktop market but I use it daily for servers and so do legions of other people. (I did use it very happily for several years as my primary desktop, btw).
But aside from your overlooking that GNU/Linux has been enormously successful, we should be wishing it the best. It is a shame that Red Flag Linux appears to be shutting down. One of the chief things that has held GNU/Linux back on the Desktop is the Chicken and Egg problem of people not using it until it is popular. Much as I dislike the state mandating things, at least it was a shot at establishing GNU/Linux on the desktop. And that would be good because (a) choice is good and (b) competition is good. That big overhaul to the Windows security model that began with Vista? Motivated in large part because MS was scared of GNU/Linux. That we now have an open document format for MS Office that others can interoperate with? Because MS saw the writing on the wall and feared Open Office and its open standards taking off. (I'd also add that many of the improvements in Office 2010 and 2013 are a response to this threat of real competition, but the neo-phobic infants go into spasm when you talk of the improvements in Office 2013 because change is baaaad).
Even if you don't use GNU/Linux personally, it is great that it exists both because it stimulates improvements in what you do use, keeps costs down through competition and because many of the sites you like to visit are running on GNU/Linux.
One more time for the hard of thinking: Software Companies Are Not Football Teams. Just buy a scarf and go to a match. It will suit your mindset better.
>>"No that is obviously NOT what I said. Pretending that the person you're arguing with has said something he hasn't sure makes his argument easier to knock down, but it's still dishonest debating tactics. Fuck you right back"
No strawman - you deliberately cut off the second part of what I wrote immediately after asking "Is it your contention that..." which was "No? Then how is what you wrote a rebuttal to what was actually said". My post is right above yours for anyone to check.
But the thing is, YOU raised the argument that "Norway lacks the resources to attack" so now that you're agreeing with me that it's irrelevant, can we discard that? I mean it only really does lead to the argument which I hypothetically raised and then dismissed (myself) and which you agree is academic because Norway don't want to attack anyone else.
>>"Maybe that's why I said Afghanistan and not Iraq?"
The person you were replying to and arguing with talked about Iraq.
"Oh , and btw - its easy to have a low crime rate with a lot of happy smiley citizens when you're sitting on a trillion dollars worth of oil."
America is sitting on a lot more oil than Norway. (Both their own and other people's). And the crime rate in the USA is?
"And Norway doesn't have the resources to attack any other country even if it wanted to. So, not exactly equivalent situations."
Is it your contention then that Norway wants to attack an unrelated country (as Iraq was unrelated to 9/11) and that the difference is simply that it lacks resources? No? Then in what way is your comment an actual rebuttal of what the GP said? Just accept that not every nation is like the USA.
>>"You could say the same about maths."
No I couldn't because I don't think for maths it is the case. Okay, you can explore maths more thoroughly at University level than at school level. But the difference is that maths breaks down into useful stuff even at school level. If a pupil learns trigonometry, that's still all valid and good as a basis for other things. If a child learns the a dribble of HTML, they're just going to produce crap websites with it.
Sure, but when the experiment is to further understanding into whether or not unicorns exist, concern about unicorn gouging becomes more valid, does it not? Can one dismiss the risks unicorns due to their non-existence whilst at the same time conducting research into the properties of unicorns?
>>"Across the vastness of the universe, you can safely assume that anything that could go wrong has already gone wrong somewhere."
An assumption that would resolve the Fermii Paradox and explain why in a galaxy of half a trillion stars that has lasted for ten billion years, we appear to be alone. A simple catastrophic event lying in the path of the advancement of Physics with almost no warning signs until a species says: "why don't we bang these particles together really fast?" and their planet goes boom.
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