Posts by YARR

Most countries in which Uber operates have laws to regulate their markets, they are not anarchic. Whether people agree with their local law enforcement and consider their actions to always be in the right is another matter. Vice versa the actions of some companies may be lawful but not necessarily moral.

Re: Sounds rather flawed to me

The idea that someone has to maintain their car (including software) properly is just extending the MOT process to include software and patching.

Wrong analogy. Software does not degrade through use like hardware. Network connected devices need software updates to guard against network-borne attacks. Non-networked devices only need software updates to fix bugs that affect their operation (or changes to their operating environment).

If software updates are legally required for non-networked devices, that would be a legal admission that the old code was not fit for purpose - the software equivalent of a product recall. In this case, the software vendor would then become liable for past accidents involving vehicles that ran the old code. To avoid such liability, the software vendor cannot admit that the old code is unsafe, just less efficient or less functional.

If vehicles had to run the latest code by law, your car would not allow you to start a journey until it had checked for updates. Also it would have to maintain constant network access while driving to stay up to date. The moment a bug is reported in the code, to avoid liability they would have to transmit a network message to halt all vehicles until a fix has been produced, and downloaded to your vehicle.

To maximise road safety, computers must control the whole environment - i.e. human drivers, cyclists, and maybe pedestrians are prevented from using the road. To attain this they may use soft methods like artificially increased insurance premiums for human drivers, despite there being no inherent reason why human drivers should be more dangerous (write off more value + cause more injuries / fatalities) than than at present. A free market for insurers would keep premiums for human drivers comparable to what they are now.

However when accidents occur between human drivers v self-driving vehicles, drivers will be in opposition with corporate lawyers so are more likely to lose legal cases. That said, corporate lawyers may deliberately accept liability at first to win public support, then turn up the pressure when there are few human drivers left on the road.

Re: In the spirit of unit-y...

Another possibility could be the computation required to complete the Human Genome Project.

However a unit should ideally be a determinate amount of processing as opposed to a expected / estimated amount of processing that usually applies to code-cracking algorithms.

Re: Press' Responsibility

Should they? You claim their responsibility is to uphold truth - is that just your opinion or can you cite some evidence to support your statement? Where does the profit motive feature in their relative list of priorities?

You can often tell the origins by the language of comments embedded in the attack code

Gosh, so the real attacker would never think of impersonating the language / localisation of the nation / target they are attempting to frame?

I have not forgiven whoever it was that removed the model from the roundabout at the end of the Heathrow-M4 spur and replaced it with some modern tat

'tis now the gate guardian at Brooklands (where they also have a full-size one).

51.347768, -0.472033

Re: Classic Trump supporters?

Spelling mistakes... check.

Insisting that their ignorant strawman viewpoint is just as deserving of consideration as one that has been well thought out and considered... check

Remember who started the petition after the Brexit vote? This petition could well have been created by false-opposition to reinforce their own sterotypes and divert from valid arguments. There was an attempt to submit another petition but it was rejected as a duplicate (though technically it was not).

The list of countries facing immigration restrictions looks more like those least co-operative with the US, rather than where most terrorists come from.

Mariana seems to be confusing the innovator who created the idea with who owns the intellectual property rights. The Soviet Union owned Tetris but they acknowledged that Alexey Pajitnov invented it.

States and corporations represent the people who own them: shareholders or taxpayers respectively. Funding innovation gives you ownership rights but doesn't make you the innovator.

Truth is truth and lies are lies wherever they originate.

Another article quoting Julian Assange and Craig Murray:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/10/cia-concludes-russia-interfered-to-help-trump-win-election-report

Craig Murray, the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, who is a close associate of Assange, called the CIA claims “bullshit”, adding: “They are absolutely making it up.”

“America has not been shy about arresting whistleblowers and it’s not been shy about extraditing hackers. They plainly have no knowledge whatsoever.”

So we can all rest assured that the new "Countering Disinformation And Propaganda Act” and "fake-news" filtering wont be mis-used to cover inconvenient truths.

Re: Trumpity Trump

@ A/C 1

You don't get to "believe" in science or not. It's not a fucking belief system, like politics or religion.

Science is an unbiased search for truth based on evidence, always open to new ideas. But most modern scientific research is funded by governments and corporations so the areas of research are directed by the motives of people with political agendas or the self-interest of a wealthy few. Working scientists depend on this funding for their living so are disinclined to oppose those funding their research. Surveys of scientific opinion can be easily biased using techniques like loaded questions, limited choice answers, ignoring responses that don't answer certain questions etc. to present a false impression of scientific consensus. If climate change was established Science they wouldn't need to conduct any surveys. Science-ism is when an agenda is presented as scientific, when it isn't established Science.

The few who speak out are usually those who are no longer dependent on this centralised funding. Here Johnny Ball presents a viewpoint which is opposed to the climate change fear being pushed through the education system.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3d23B-R2-qw

Re: Utterly shameful

'hate' is rather overused, but in the case of the Daily Heil, I think 'hate' is a mild word. The foul acidic, lying bile that spews out of the Mail can't be described any other way

It's not my intention to defend the DM, but when I look at it I just see an unexceptional but top-selling paper targeted at a particular segment of the population. It's news stories seem distinctly ordinary to me, with the odd alarmist story for sensationalism. I can think of many things more deserving of being labelled "hate", for example the endless commenters spreading their seemingly unjustified hatred towards the DM on these forums. I guess everyone has to have their own oppositional 'hate' target to validate the moral righteousness of their own opinion, though it be a fictional construct of their own mind.

then what's the right word to use for a 'newspaper' which goes to absurd lengths to vilify people whose only sin is to have been born on a patch of land across a body of water?

Are you sure they vilify all foreigners just for being foreign, or do they justifiably vilify people who are harming the future of our country?

Illegal immigrants (who by definition have no right to come here) but arrogantly assume they can, should rightly be called imperialist invaders / occupiers who disrespect that our ancestors fought for our respective countries and not for the rights of others to take our country from us. Most foreigners respect our independence but a few (like the EU) want to dictate our laws and undermine our country.

We've started wars against whole nations of people who never invaded us (but our government just invent a reason to fight them), so when people do invade our country, we are entirely justified to be angry and want to defend our country. This isn't "hate" it's righteous defiance.

So the government had a choice, keep a load of scrap iron afloat for dubious propaganda purposes at a high cost, or flog it off and be done with it

It wasn't scrap iron before they spent a lot of money removing various systems. It was a functioning warship which could have been kept in reserve at minimal cost until it's replacement ships were commissioned. Historically foreign nations have bought our old ships and kept them operational for decades, so there's plenty of life left in them.

If the majority of the country disagrees with you, perhaps the problem is with you, not them

Perhaps. The proof is in whether their views are founded on facts and reason. Often the majority are opinionated but not well informed and not capable of good reasoning - hence democracy can result in poor decision making.

I think you must be confusing USB 3 with 3.1 (or C connectors ?). My motherboard is from circa 2010 and has blue SuperSpeed USB3 ports.

I don't dispute your general point, but specifically Windows 10 Mobile has a flashlight built in to quick actions. There are plenty of distraction apps in the app store, but if you need a specific utility you're less likely to find it than on other platforms. In hindsight, perhaps Project Astoria would have made the task of supporting Windows Phone apps easier and resulted in fewer apps quitting the Windows apps store?

Re: Brexploitation

"The fault is 100% the Brexit vote because everyone else on the planet, apart from extreme Leavers, now appreciates that the UK's economics prospects are now diminished as a result of that vote"

I can't speak for the rest of the planet, but if I want to buy something from abroad, my concern is what it costs to buy which is a function of real productivity and tariffs, not where laws are made. I don't refuse to buy something from abroad because their government isn't part of a supranational political block.

"Pegging one currency to another has a history of ending in tears"

Locking or pegging? The Yuan is periodically revalued, but clearly it's change in value does not reflect the very different growth rates of the two economies. Isn't it remarkable how they pull that off when we couldn't keep the Pound tied to the Deutshmark even when our growth rates were similar.