Posts by I ain't Spartacus

Re: Tee hee. Trump is to Putin as --

Palpy,

I don't think Trump is controlled by anybody. Including Trump. I think he just says the first thing that comes into his head. Which can make you popular for a bit as a "straight talker" - particularly against politicians who are trying to use measured language and hold consistent positions, who can be made to look shifty.

But in foreign policy none of that really works. Foreign policy is often about tiny details of nuance and repeating the same position consistently for years on end, to convince other actors to move towards your position.

Given how little of his own money Trump has in any of his ventures, which are all legally separated, if someone calls in a loan on a big project - he can just let it go bust and let the creditors suffer all the pain. If Trump owes you $100m, you're in trouble, not him. As he can just abandon the project, leaving you holding the baby.

Whether he took direct help from Russian hackers during the election is another matter.

However, in practise, Trump has said he wants closer relations with Russia but has so far failed to get them. Sanctions are slightly tougher than when he took office - and the very fact that Russia were so unsuble in their election meddling means that Trump will find it incredibly hard to move closer to Russia. Even if he really wants to. Which personally I doubt. I rather suspect he said nice things about Putin because it pissed off Clinton and made a nice point of difference between them. Which a small side order of seeing himself as a big scary alpha male like old Vlad.

I don't think there's much of a Putin masterplan either. Like Trump he seems to be all about short-term tactics. The idea isn't to get a specific person into power. It's to justify Putin's dictatorship by trying to show that democracy is equally bad. But Churchill was right. Democracy is the worst system, except for all the others.

Re: Hasn't halon been banned or something in the '90s?

CO2 is heavier than air, and is designed to displace the oxygen and starve the fire. So if you're a giraffe you should still find breathable air above the CO2 layer.

Halon is designed to bond with all the free oxygen it can find, and so should mean that there's nothing to breath anywhere - either for you or the fire.

So CO2 sort of might be safter, ish, maybe. Except that you can become unconsious when you're breathing air with more than 4% of it, if memory serves. It's definitely safer to be down the pub...

Re: Never do this

Sebastian P.,

You do need to have had some training. As you can make things worse with fire extinguishers if you don't know what you're doing. And you also need to raise the alarm beforehand - unless you're sure you can put the fire out in a couple of seconds (e.g. smothering a small one with a fire blanket).

But if you've got a small fire in a contained server area, that has fire-suppression gear installed - then there's a small window of time when you can try less drastic measures before hitting the big red switch.

You can put out a small petrol fire with a water extinguisher - temporarily - if you know what you're doing. But don't try. CO2 isn't much better for liquid fires, but foam, powder and blankets are good.

You should always look to your own safety, and the safety of others, first. That means getting the alarm raised, people out, and the professionals called in straight away. But with a small fire, you can often tackle it perfectly safely - but if you're not sure then by all means run for the hills and wait for the cavalry. They're trained for it, after all.

Re: If something looks like it's about to catch fire...

Depends. If it looks like it's a small fire, you might want to try and fight it with a hand extinguisher first? Depending on what's near it. A bit of dry powder can come in very handy now and again for little fires - as that makes a mess in a well defined area. Whereas foam, water and CO2 have downsides and often spread the mess. I remember watching someone try to put out an alcohol fire with a CO2 extinguisher, and basically spread it all round the room.

Re: Buncefield

Living 20 miles away I heard a really loud sharp metallic ringing noise, that sounded exactly like hitting the degauss button on one of those chunky old 19" monitors. As they'd been replaced with LCDs, it was only the telly downstairs was still old-school. So I zoomed down to the sitting room, wondering if it had exploded or something.

An impressively loud noise.

Re: Reverting to type?

Who left a ladder precariously propped by the door (plus emergency buttons)?

Re: Hasn't halon been banned or something in the '90s?

You would have thought that the BOfH would have used up all his halon by now, and have been forced to recharge his systems with something a bit more ozone friendly. Though he's probably got a source down the pub for getting hold of illegal halon. Everyone likes a drop of the hard stuff, now and then...

Re: What's Cheaper

Computers would be cheaper. Much cheaper. If you're testing on animals you have to buy them, then buy their cages and food, keep them healthy (so as not to bugger up your data) and fill out loads of paperwork to prove you're using them ethically.

the reason we don't use computers instead of animal testing is the same reason that we don't go straight from testing drugs on tissue samples in test tubes. We don't fully understand all the interactions of all the processes we're studying, and we keep finding that reality differs slightly from out models. Therefore we have to test on animals to learn what we don't know - even though some substances have different effects on different animals.

That's why after testing on animals, we usually test on healthy humans in tiny doses, so that we can then learn yet again where our models don't fit reality.

This is why it now costs tens to hundreds of milllions of dollars to get a new drug approved for sale. It's a very long, multi-stage process, and drugs are failing at animal or initial human trials all the time - either because it turns out they don't work as well as theorised, or because they're too dangerous.

We simply don't have the knowledge to automate this process, until we understand the underlying science better.

Re: Local Expertise

The ICANN board only do output nowadays. They're sitting on a huge pile of cash from the .names sale, and a steady regular income. Nobody has oversight of them, and they know it's too much of a ballache to try and move their role to the UN.

So they can just sit their commissioning reports and then ignoring them when they don't like the results. Listening is something that happens to other people. The rest of their time is spent in first-class and 5 star accommodation, increasing their bonuses every year and pissing about. It's the perfect job. Nothing changes that fast anyway, and all roads to appeal lead to a random sub-committee of the board, usually with the same people on it who made the original shit decision. See reports passim of the dot.africa clusterfuck for details.

I think people are overestimating how much the EU care about ICANN. They're not going to destroy it, and they don't need to. All registrars in Europe will just come up with their own GDPR policies and submit whatever info they see fit to the DNS records. ICANN can't enforce their contracts, because they directly violate the law and so those clauses on DNS info become invalid.

So there are 3 basic options here. 1. ICANN then refuse to allow those registries to keep their contracts, and blow a massive amount of their revenue stream out of the water, in hopes they can find non-EU companies willing to do the job (which they won't) because then the EU can either block credit card payments to them, fine them, or set up its own version of ICANN for Europe.

Option 2 is that the EU launches a power grab over DNS. But what's the point? They're getting what they want from GDPR already. This info will no longer be submitted by the registrars, and they'll comply. DNS records will be less useful - but do you think legislators care about that?

Option 3 is therefore the most likely. Nothing much of anything will happen. The Registrars will comply with the law. ICANN will continue to flail for another few years, then eventually accept the inevitable. Grumpily, and possibly after having been hit with the fine stick. The board will continue to be smug, useless wankers, continue to increase the size of their bonuses, and when the money starts to run out will consider selling some more .name domains to raise cash.

Re: Google Chrome

#HastagsAreBloodyAnnoying

#ThisAin'tTwitter

Not that I'm a fan of Chrome. Or sometimes disgusted with Google. Here they're using their ill-gotten monopoly power to control the internet for everyone, but with nobody's permission.

Worse, they're doing it in a stupid way. False positives in security warnings absolutely destroy security. And that idiot security researcher quotes as saying people should be able to trust all websites unless told otherwise fails to understand both people and the internet.

Re: Attention to detail

It's why good animation takes bloody ages.

I liked the admission from the guys behind Dangermouse (a work of true genius), that they did all those bits in dark rooms where all you can see is the eyes, because it was so much quicker and cheaper to animate.

Cosgrove Hall also did Chorlton and the Wheelies, which I loved as a kid, but nobody else seems to remember. And I think they also did Jamie and his Magic Torch - which is equally bonkers.

Re: Notch isn't so bad

The screen thing really pisses me off! Sure they're going to break. It's inevitable. And you need big screens, as that's what the market is after.

But modern phone design is absolutely pisspoor.

Firstly too many phones are made out of horribly slippery materials. Remember the brilliant HTC Desire with the rubberised back? And the equally lovely and tactile Wildfire (though a less impressive phone). Or at least make the damned things matte not gloss!

Secondly many are designed to look all pretty, but really need to be cased. So why don't they ship with a fucking case? Rather than having to buy horrible bulky third-party ones... Or do what Nokia (then MS) did with the cheaper Lumia range. The phone itself has no back, but the whole thing fits into a rubberised plastic back which protects the sides of the screen and can deform in order to reduce the force of an impact. Sure it ain't so pretty, but it's much more practical.

Thirdly, why must the screen be so naked? Why can't we have bezels that protect the screen? Or there was a great case a few years ago that was basically 4 bouncy balls at the corners, so the phone couldn't land with the screen touching the ground - unless it fell on the very edge of something. Also the original iPad had a little rubber insert between the screen and the casing, which didn't look so pretty but meant that shocks to the case would have less impact on the screens. Which saved the screen from cracking in lots of cases.

The whole industry has gone form over function crazy, and it's really bloody annoying.

Re: Charge by wire

I don't see the point of wireless charging either, and the inefficiency sort of pains me too. So I want cables, as sometimes that's just the easiest way.

However I have seen phone connectors break. We had a batch of work iPhone 5s, and had 50% of the connectors fail, but I presume (hope!) that was just a duff batch. Although a bunch of them also had weird hardware failures within 2 years, mostly involving the battery charging / power level system.

Fluff can be annoying too. My Lumia 735 is great, because you can get the back off to clean it. But I've had to defluff various friends' badly designed phones - with a torch, magnifying glass and jewellers screwdrivers (as they were the only thing small enough to get into the gaps).

Re: Looking at the wrong thing

Then you want the British Crime Survey. Which is the official government stat on the matter. Which shows that violent crime has been falling since the 90s, and theft has also been falling. Partly because there's a lot less point in stealing a £20 DVD player (as it's worth nothing down the pub), and a 50" telly is worth more (I guess £350 new now?) - but is much harder to carry away.

Car crime has also fallen, partly because of more security and partly because car stereos are so cheap.

Re: We need gunlaws like in the US to fight crime

Another thing about the lack of general guns in society is that ammo is harder to come by. Determined criminals will probably always be able to get guns. But ammo is rarer, and the guy who sells you that automatic down the pub, probably doesn't have the full warehousing and supply chain to offer you spare parts and ammo.

There's also some argument that the recent rising trend in knife carrying is from young people who are worried about being assaulted, and so foolishly arm themselves. Often not knowing what they're doing so both increasing the chance that the crims may use a knife on them, as well as risking having someone stab them with their own knife.

So a better solution to this might actually be an education campaign to show that violent crime rates are falling, and have been for decades. Thus persuading them to stop carrying knives for self-protection. Sadly nobody ever seems to believe the stats - but maybe if we could beat journalists with them, every time they publish shit misleading articles about rising crime it might help?

Re: We need gunlaws like in the US to fight crime

naive,

You entirely failed to read the article. Or if you read it, you failed to understand it.

UK statistics do not ignore petty crime. Even though the police do. That is in fact one of the reasons that the police generated crime statistics lost their ranking as an official government statistic - due to poor quality of data collection.

So we do the British Crime Survey instead, to pick up on crimes that either the police don't record as crimes, or the victims don't even bother to report.

Similarly this is why we use a large survey to determine unemployment levels. Not everyone claims unemployment benefit - and that also doesn't capture part time people who want more hours. Which the employment survey does. So we report the claimant count, which is always lower, as well as an official unemployment figure.

So we know that petty crime is falling. And thus we don't need to introduce new gun laws to deal with the horrific unreported rise in crime, because there isn't one. Once we've stopped being hysterical, and looked at the available data, we can know this.

You're also wrong about easy access to guns. Yes, some criminals can get them. But the current small rise (or flattening off of the continuous fall in) knife crime - is down to more people carrying knives. Maybe because the penalties are lower than for gun carrying, or maybe because they're easier to get hold of. If we arm up the citizenry to shoot knife criminals, then those knife criminals will also have easy access to guns, and may well arm up too. It's harder to kill someone with a knife than a gun, so if we have to make a choice, knife crime is probably better than gun crime.

I guess if we did want to routinely arm the populace, tasers would be the better option. Not only are they much less dangerous, they're also not so bad if the crims have them. Actually perhaps we should give criminals free tasers in some sort of knife/gun amnesty swapathon?

What do people think. Would the election slogan Free Tasers for Criminals! win many votes?

Re: No wireless charging?

Fair enough, but I don't really get it. So long as your phone has around a 2 day battery life, that's enough to cover heavy use. And you have to sleep, so it can get charged up then, by the bed. The problem, at least in my opinion, is phones that can't reasonably manage 2 days of use. i.e. they've made them too thin to manage a decent battery.

Of course once you've invested in all those wireless chargers, you may as well use them. Although this phone seems reasonably unique, so if you want a keyboard phone, you probably won't get one with wireless charging too. I've never yet seen a wireless charging mat outside a shop, so suspect it's a pretty low priority when it comes to design decisions.

Re: Remember the Great Vowel Shift

In my days it was called a core dump...

Fair enough, Old Timer. Just don't ask any of us young folk to inspect your logs.

[I don't know who I'm kidding here with this us young folk? I'm at least slalomming down the final slope to middle age, if even assuming that's still ahead of me doesn't count as wishful thinking.]

How are we violating his human rights? Doctors can go in and see him. I don't know why Ecuador (or he) can't stump up for a mobile dentist. I'll do the work for free if he likes - string -> door handle -> slam! That should do the trick. Obviously he'd struggle to get an MRI machine through the door...

But if he pops out and gets arrested, he'll get proper medical treatment. Either in the prison hospital, or taken under guard to a normal hospital if he requires specialist treatment. As is normal.

He has human rights. But so do the people who he allegedly raped. And their human rights require that he face trial. Sadly Sweden has a 10 year statute of limitations on rape, so he may well be able to dodge his trial if he waits long enough, but until then we have a duty to both treat him and also to ship him off to Sweden to face trial.

Re: Story

Are you sure? I thought spooks had just been generalised slang for anyone vaguely involved with intelligence for decades. I remember it from Edge of Darkness (the brilliant 1980s BBC TV show - not the rubbish film from a few years ago).

I take your point about people mixing up terms though. It's a specialist area, with much arcane jargon - but which carries very meaningful differences. Spies get locked up or shot, intelligence officers under diplomatic cover get a week to pack their bags and bugger off out of the country with all gin and tonic privileges at the Foreign Ministry building cancelled.