Posts by Peter2

Re: The court also claimed some material promoted extremism and/or terrorism

. . .

Ofcom launched a separate investigation to determine whether ANO TV Novosti is fit and proper to retain its licence to broadcast and took into account several factors including that RT is is funded by the Russian state and new laws in Russia which criminalize any independent journalism that departs from the Russian state’s own news narrative, in particular in relation to the invasion of Ukraine.

We consider that given these constraints it appears impossible for RT to comply with the due impartiality rules of our Broadcasting Code in the circumstances,” Ofcom stated.

So broadcasters have requirements; you fail to comply with them and you lose the license.

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and think that you might think that your going to a great degree of effort in reading "alternative news" to try and come to truth being supressed in our media by reading the Russian point of view.

"The Russian strategy, both at home and abroad, is to say there is no such thing as truth," he says.

"I mean, you know, 'The Americans are bad, we're bad, and everyone's bad, so what's the big deal about us being a bit corrupt? You know our democracy's a sham, their democracy's a sham.'

"It's a sort of cynicism that actually resonates very powerfully in the West nowadays with this lack of self-confidence after the Iraq War, after the financial crash - and that's what the Russians are hoping for, just to take that cynicism and then use that in a military environment."

You might find this interesting:-

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b050674y

It might also be worth reviewing the concepts of "the grey fallacy" and "false equivalence".

Or you might be a Russian troll on the FSB payroll and deliberately wasting my time, but even if so that might get read by somebody who's accidentally being a useful idiot, so it's hardly wasted time. ;)

Re: The court also claimed some material promoted extremism and/or terrorism

We don't do it deliberately, and if people are found to have murdered unarmed civilians then it's investigated and the people responsible end up in court charged with murder.

The Russians deliberately commit genocide and the units responsible are awarded high Russian commendations (eg Guards status) for executing both their orders and unarmed civilians.

If you can't see the difference then I would suggest that your moral compass is defective.

Re: Gosh, really ?

But trolls are so tasty. For those interested in things more closely approximating truth than the garbage the MSM hands out, have a read of this-

Ok, I read it just out of curiosity.

The second mission has concluded that international human rights law (IHRL) has been extensively violated in the conflict in Ukraine. Some of the most serious violations include targeted killing of civilians, including journalists, human rights defenders, or local mayors; unlawful detentions, abductions and enforced disappearances of such persons; large-scale deportations of Ukrainian civilians to Russia; various forms of mistreatment, including torture,inflicted on detained civilians and prisoners of war; the failure to respect fair trial guarantees; and the imposition of the death penalty. Most, albeit not all, violations have been committed in the territories under the effective control of the Russian Federation, including the territories of the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, and are largely attributable to the Russian Federation

My emphasis. Your own link just cluster bombed, if not nuked your argument.

And go on, just point out that ill trained Ukrainian conscripts who counter attack and take back their town and find huge numbers of dead bodies of their friends and families lying rotting in the streets occasionally shoot the people responsible when they capture them.

Yes, this is a violation of the laws and customs of warfare, but it's also unsurprising; people can only be pushed so far and if you walk back through your own town with your neighbours, friends and family lying dead in the streets because Russians are more concerned with looting, murdering and genocide than gathering their victims for burial then even an saint is going to consider offing the people responsible instead of sending them to a POW camp where they might end up back in Russia alive as part of a prisoner exchange.

While I suppose it shouldn't happen, It wouldn't happen at all if the Russians weren't being genocidal maniacs in the first place.

I would suggest with the greatest of respect that you have your moral compass serviced; it's defective.

Most people tool 3/4 years doing the course and worked for the company while qualifying so that'd be over 6 or 7 years, and houses were relatively cheaper in 2000 than they are now. But, yes.

We didn't get upset that they were leaving; if you read the paragraph on from the table then I specifically note that everybody concerned was happy with the old arrangement.

The current arrangement is that only people who already have well off families can afford to finance the training which structurally embeds inequality, and this appears the opposite of what we say we are intending to do as a society.

China has cheap energy, and literal slave labour from people who are ideologically defective and need retraining.

It's difficult to compete with that when your energy and labour costs are higher; everything down the supply chain costs a lot more.

Quite right.

Now only people with well off families can get training to progress in their career because they can afford to pay for it, and the poor can be kept in their rightful place, thereby keeping the higher up positions available for the right sort of people.

[/sarcasm]

Are you really arguing for that?

Thought piece. Companies that need electrical and electronic engineers should sponsor promising students through college/university; in return for a contract of service of X years to discourage poaching.

Leave early; and you repay the costs.

The company I work for used to sponsor people for training in their industry with this:-

Leave within 1 year of qualification = pay 100% of the training costs

Leave after 2 years of qualification = pay 66% of the training costs

Leave after 3 years of qualification = pay 33% of the training costs

Leave after 4 years of qualification = pay 0% of the training costs

We did far more training than other companies in the area, and other companies in our region were always delighted to hire our staff and were generally quite willing to pay the training costs as a hire bonus to get people to move, which suited everybody concerned. The staff member got to move to pastures green, the poaching company got their staff member trained and mentored generally for one or two years (because why poach them in year one when you get a 33% discount if you wait?) and the company recouped a reasonably fair percentage of the costs of people leaving which could go to pay for somebody else to be trained.

Then somebody came out with some employment court ruling that this form of requirement was a form of indentured servitude and illegal. Staff were happy with the employer paying out an amount that in 2000 was enough to buy a low end house, and then qualifying and quitting shortly afterwards and getting a job elseware with the benefit of the qualification leaving the company having paid the money and not getting any benefit of the training.

Wonderful for the staff though, right? No, actually. The relatively companies doing training decided that spending the money for the training was a high risk activity under these circumstances, and stopped offering training on this basis. A few years later, nobody was doing any training for anybody other than long term staff members and people were expected to pay for their own training if they wanted to move up the career ladder. Which of course only people well off already can afford, so it completely screws people who don't have wealthy families and structurally embeds inequality.

I know people who didn't have wealthy families who our company trained who now run their own companies who must be making millions a year. There are precisely zero avenues today in our industry for somebody to do the same from the same background.

Whatever the flaws of the old system I would think that they would have been better managed through some form of watchdog with the power to eliminate the contract in case of abuse than utter abolition of the system.

Re: Click

Also encourages EV charging, cooking, and any other high power stuff outside of peak times if possible.

Because naturally everybody is willing to wait until after 9PM to start cooking their dinner.

Re: If they can do why do they not tell us how?

Ok, i'll bite.

There is already a child abuse image content list available which includes hashes of child porn images. To be compliant, all you'd have to do pn the client end when somebody attaches or receives an encrypted image is to check the image hash against a list of known child porn hashes, and if a match is found then flag it up to the police.

That would be totally compliant with this law, it could only inconvenience people attaching images on the child abuse image content list to encrypted messages and it leaves end to end encryption intact.

In fact the only possible potential this has for scope creep that I can see would be the police asking if they could keep a list of hashes attached to messages so after they've raided a paedophile and got an extra few hundred/thousand images to go on the list that they could retrospectively check to pick up anybody else sharing the same material. Even if this was done, a list of MD5 hashes presents quite a limited threat to privacy, or freedom of expression.

Re: Check you can complete before you start

. . .

It's not a joke. It's not intended to be funny.

This sort of test has one purpose; it's designed to filter out people who read, comprehend and follow instructions from those who ignore obvious printed operating instructions and warnings and proceed to do things "that are obvious" despite instructions specifically saying "don't do this".

Presumably people doing things "that were obvious" had proven expensive when working with expensive and easily breakable equipment, or things like explosives.

Re: running around threatening your betters with a sword

Police? What is this modern concept you refer to? (The first police to exist was 1830 and only covered London. This was also long after wearing swords had fell out of fashion since the Napoleonic wars ended ~1815.)

Prior to that, the upkeep of law and order was the job of a Magistrate, usually a minor member of the local gentry, who would put a town watch in place so he didn't have to personally wander the streets at all hours in search of miscreants, such as for instance people wandering around the streets armed without lawful purpose.

Wandering around armed and making people nervous of you? Look up "footpad". That's how you'd have been seen at the time, and you'd be dealt with as such.

Re: I approve

It's only just over a couple of hundred years since men in England mostly wore swords around town so they could stick anyone who annoyed them enough.

Wearing swords was fashionable just over 200 years ago to demonstrate how patriotic you were, and suggest just how ready you were to leap into battle with the French who were being stopped from invading at the time only by the Royal Navy blockade of the invasion fleet.

Contrary to popular belief, people did not just get insulted and whip out a sword and go for somebody. That would have been considerably more socially unacceptable 200 years ago than doing so would be today, and would have met with far more of an immediate and adverse response than is readily comprehensible today.

Today in the UK you'd get dozens of police try and arrest you without hurting you. The Police Standards people would worry about having deployed batons or tasers and the courts might give them maybe a year in prison if that.

Then? They'd kill you. The town watch would say "uh, no." and call out the militia, yeomanry or army and you have been hunted down and summarily killed like a dangerous animal at the slightest resistance, and "yeah, we shot him with a few .70 calibre musket balls" would have been perfectly accepted by everybody involved without question. If you surrendered? They'd be a trial, they'd be sentenced to death and hung. Being out at night with a blackened face was punishable by death, let alone running around threatening your betters with a sword.

You'd have ended up buried in an unmarked and unconsecrated grave as a symbol that even the Church and God who would nominally forgive anything wanted nothing to do with you. You'd forfeited the Church's protection both in this world and the next; being left to face God (or the Devil) alone. To people who believed in both, that was rather a big thing. This si why they didn't have much of a problem with mass

If you were challenging somebody to a duel as a result of some form of mortal insult then you also didn't whip out swords and go for it, you appointed a friend to enquire of one of his friends if he wished to make a public apology and withdraw his insulting remarks etc or if it needed to make some form of challenge, with lots of back and forth about discussing the finer points of exactly what form of apology needed to be made.

Long before duelling was eradicated (and duelling was never legally accepted; killing somebody was still murder) the "some form of challenge" had been supplemented with the libel laws we have today, which is why even today admitting that you were wrong and apologising at an early stage makes it effectively impossible to sue you.

Re: I approve

People on the Internet say things they would never dare saying face-to-face. Maybe that's something for the psychiatrists, I don't know, but it is time to clamp down on that.

Because if they said it face to face then they'd run the list of loosing their teeth, or getting a good slapping, as well as becoming a social pariah.

If they say it online (especially anonymous) then they have total freedom of consequences.

Removing the total freedom of consequences is not a bad thing.

Re: I approve

Insulting by definition would be deliberately attempting to reduce somebodies sense of self worth.

If your "jokes" can be shown to be amusing to a court then i'm sure that they'd take them in the spirit they were intended. In any case, adding a prison sentence to the list of available punishments doesn't mean that you will end up in prison. In the UK you'd get a fine and community service on the first offense, a fine and a suspended sentence on the second offence and then in prison on the third.

Unless somebody does something like bullying somebody to the point they commit suicide, at which point they'd probably end up in jail on the first offence. But since your just "joking" then there is no chance of this, is there?

And we'd still have freedom of speech. What you wouldn't have is freedom from consequences.

Re: "taxing e-commerce the same way that [..] physical goods traded internationally"

I suspect that the issue comes down to Microsoft stating that everybody in the world will no longer own licenses, but will pay a monthly rental to Microsoft 365 so the local company South African company that was selling the licenses and paying tax has ceased to exist in favour of paying Microsoft USA sums of money constantly.

Similar with Netflix subscriptions displacing retail CD/DVD sales and presumably countless other examples that have moved to a subscription basis.

I can see why taxing those sort of constant ongoing revenue streams would be attractive and I also can't see a reason why companies shouldn't pay reasonable taxes where the users are based, although I can see that they will scream blue murder about being required to do so.

It's worse than that.

https://www.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/technology/logic/l_3nm

TSMC’s 3nm technology (N3) will be another full node stride from our 5nm technology (N5), and offer the most advanced foundry technology in both PPA and transistor technology when it is introduced. N3 technology will offer up to 70% logic density gain, up to 15% speed improvement at the same power and up to 30% power reduction at the same speed as compared with N5 technology. N3 technology development is on track with good progress. N3 technology will offer complete platform support for both mobile and HPC applications, which is expected to receive multiple customer product tape-outs in 2021. In addition, volume production is targeted in second half of 2022.

So AMD is potentially capable of deploying 3nm chips from second half 2022; ie within the next few months, well before Intel deploys their 7nm process. Personally, i'd hold those back and deploy them in volume the day that Intel produces a comparable product to the existing lineup.

Either Intel gets their processes working, or they are going to be forced to go to TSMC so they are able to compete, which would mean competing on chip design instead of manufacturing process.

That's be disastrous for Intel; they have a terrible track record of managing that since the days when the AM386 chips turned out the same level of performance as the Intel 486.

Re: In other words...

Unless they're planning on banning the sale of actual petrol and diesel, it seems far more likely to me that this is just going to create massive upward pressure on used ICE vehicles.

Which use the same batteries as used in most IT equipment, which after a thousand full charge/discharge cycles lose the substantial majority of their capacity. And strangely, the price of a second hand battery replacement is £6k - £7.5k on ebay at the moment which would appear to make a second hand EV needing a battery replacement a liability rather than an asset; You can get very nice used cars for ~£2k needing nothing but fuel.

Looking for the prices of EV batteries on eBay is perhaps a bit unscientific, but it's more accurate than any figures that will be provided by the manufacturers, and I have no faith that 20 years down the line the manufacturer will be making and selling the spare parts for their EV's at anything like a sensible price. (if at all)

Re: And the UK ?

And during the same time period, we're expecting to decommission gas heating, gas cooking as well as switching to electric vehicles.

It's a good job that none of these things are going to consume any electricity. It's really fortunate, since as we aren't building enough generation capacity to replace the 1970's nuclear & coal plants being decommissioned over the next few years, if we did expect to transfer all of this to the national grid then demand would exceed supply hugely and this would cause prices to spike.

Fortunately, that's not going to happen.

:/

I take it that you've been reading 1421?

You might want to cast your eye over this:-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavin_Menzies

Re: Party Line

Webservers, offices, houses etc already share IP's.

When it comes to attracting suitable talent to the UK, I see no sense in limiting the candidate pool to a few select universities.

It's not. There's already a points based system in place and it's set up so that anybody with a specific job offer being paid more than the industry average wage will get in, but they had to pay for the visa up front, as well as a "healthcare surcharge" which is obviously there to remove the possibility of freeloading on the NHS.

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/new-immigration-system-what-you-need-to-know#skilled-workers

Presumably this new avenue eliminates the requirement for the specific job offer, on the not unreasonable expectation that anybody from a handful of top level universities will be paid more than the average industry wage anyway.

I'm not really sure whom (other than major employers) wants the requirement for "must be paid more than the average industry wage" to be deleted more generally, since it would simply enable employers to force our wages down.