Posts by Version 1.0 5411 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2009
I wonder if there is the potential to dig a deep hole down to allow a controllable amount of heat to to be released from the Earth's core to generate power? But the risk would be that eventually we might chill the core and cancel the magnetic field.
It looks like the wind, sea, and sunlight energy is the most efficient and would work well if we simply became much more efficient in our energy use.
And a "reply" on Sunday after writing that comment and thinking about my adaption of Brendan Behan's quote - in the days before Social Media virtually everyone had the same social environment on a Sunday when they went to Church and talked happily with everyone after listening to the service. And then we spent lunchtime, or the evening after the service, in the village pub with our friends.
I remember a friend who was learning to fly and taking a training course for about a year before he finally passed the test and was allowed to fly with regular people ... I was the first non-pilot sitting next to him as we flew over Melbourne, and as we were heading into the runway after an hour he told me what he'd been taught;
"What's a good landing? It's one that you can walk away from."
If you are providing services online then you need to assume that they will be hacked like this, so maintain complete backups that are regularly maintained offline. That can help you restore services after you are hacked but it don't stop anything daily. When the Internet was created it was designed to be universally accessible ... these days we can see that this was a wonderful design feature originally, but nowadays it's a problem - restricted access would solve nothing but it could make the daily hacking attempts a bit harder and the defenses better.
But if you describe an "undocumented requirement" in social media then it's often seen as a complaint by the original creators and they will downgrade all conversations that you create to try and solve the problems. Another side of this is that often apps are updated in a way that "works" but illustrates that the new app doesn't understand how the old app was written to work.
I see attack attempts almost every hour of so, 365 days a year so I'm reasonably confident that my corporate defenses are functional, I am only concerned when we have days when the attack efforts are virtually never seen - if the mail server doesn't report any virus deliveries then I check everything to make sure that we haven't been eaten. We've been OK for about 20 years now but we started seeing daily phishing and virus deliveries after our first sales to China - I'm not accusing China, I just think that our customers there were all hacked easily in the early days.
Malware deliveries are normal everyday now aren't they?
What about all the other issues out there? Continuous spam phone calls, continuous spam texts, daily emails with malware, daily phishing attempts - all these are everywhere these days with virtually nothing being done to stop it, we're just told that everyone needs to be careful reading their emails and replying to phone calls that ask you to give them your credit card details so that they can deposit your prize winnings.
Hiring security people has done nothing to stop the hourly IT attacks for years now.
If he had been just sending the data to Google, Microsoft, Facebook etc., then his employers might have just purchased everything from the databases or done lots of "searches" on the internet. That would have resulted in only a single data prosecution and maybe just a fine that he could have paid by selling his watch on ebay.
This has the potential to be excellent for both students and industry, let's return to the days of actually getting things done ourselves instead of buying solutions on Amazon or other sources. This means that we can develop the stuff we actually need ourselves instead of just searching the internet to find it in some foreign country which has taken us into today's issues.
Lets work with, and educate, our own people to get our needs sorted out!!!!
So the Tesla code is written to avoid cats and dogs hopefully but they didn't check the code with kids in the videos? This is just a typical code writing environment - the programmers were give a task which they achieved (the Tesla drives in a straight line) but were not coding in the universal environment. It sounds like the functionality was verified in testing with adults but not in the world. I wonder how this will work in the countryside when you drive around a corner and meet a flock of sheep?
Essentially Tesla helps you drive but doesn't drive 100% without a sober human holding the wheel.
U-turns teach you a lot about what people know about but are not talking about. A "U-turn" is always presented as a "solution" ( unless you are a Brexiter, LOL) even if you are announcing other U-turns all the time to get new votes.
U-turns are not a solution or a problem, they simply give us clues about what's "going on" but not happening.
As a kid all I ever did was jump on a bus to get to school and home again afterwards everyday. If we returned to the original decent bus service days then everything would be much easier and greener, the only upgrades nice to the old bus services would be to give everyone WiFi access.
"Each new generation of technology needs fewer people to operate it" and this results in fewer people understanding the new generation technical details. So we are losing our technical experts when the products move to other countries. Once upon a time when someone needed a little amplification in a device you could get a transistor and a couple of resistors, then we started replacing then with an op-amp ... and nowadays people go to Amazon etc to buy a device because they have no clues how to create one themselves.
So much stuff has been created in the West and then companies have moved the production to China because it's more profitable. And the Chinese workers generally do a very good job but they are making everything work in their environment without any detailed knowledge how different the Western World is from the Asian World. It's not "better" or "worse" ... it's just different so when the new items get back into the Western environment after built to work in the Asian environment we see the problems difference.
There are always two sides to all these "privacy" monitoring systems ... so if this becomes used everywhere will our privacy be maintained? And for some people this will mean that if they want to have a fight or steal your wallet then the privacy protection documentation will tell them where it can be done "safely" ... so your privacy is safe where? And if your privacy is preserved, then your safety is not guaranteed.
Lets create a UK equivalent of TikTok (maybe called DingDong) that parliament could use to report everything that is currently posted on TikTok, Fakebook etc, etc, this would be something that we could have complete control over so you can bet that it would not be used in China. The security risks would be lower.
These days, "Nurse! the smelling salts! ... I need to go asleep ..." - LOL, I'm not complaining, when you have something like that which helps you then it's good to do if it helps you sleep although I remember when I was a student 50 years ago my friend always slept much better after snorting a little line.
Sadly we see crappy behavior like this described in IBM everywhere internationally and locally these days.
I'm sure that Microsoft will fix this problem, it probably only needs a minor and quick code rewrite to skip part of the processing ... and that might make phishing and other deliveries a little easier.
I always see "problems" like this as educational - how secure the world would be it we just supported text emails - LOL, it's not going to happen.
In the 1950's Russia was busy promoting its "left-wing" advocates in all Western countries, including spying that was frequently uncovered - because it was very suspicious to see left-wingers promoting left-wing ideas.. After 30 years of these efforts failing all the time Russia decided to stop the political influencing because it was clearly failing, so their efforts were changed to attack the Western cultures by promoting "right-wingers" - it's worked because the western governments still see Russia as communistic and don't believe that left-wingers would ever promote their "right-wing 'enemies'" - we haven't noticed that the right-wing views are pushing our economies off the cliff.
Sure, Conservative and Republican attitudes back in the 60's and earlier were "right-wing" but they were busy supporting their inhabitants of each country, not just the politicians - they were generally just good people describing their views back then. Russian political financing under the table has changed that.
I don't work in this field but I've been watching events happening where "talking" and "discussions" in the media have promoted events that appear to have supported the Russian continuation of the Cold War ... the West declared that it was over but never noticed that Russia (icon) had moved it to media influencing. Not just against America but also playing with Europe and the UK ... they have been very successful in achieving their "fighting" and we've lost and are currently seeing the effects in our economies and political systems every day.
That's a good example, but often those kind of "repairs" were done as part of the original manufacture process to get the boards working. Back in those days I was having to work with boards like that - not Apple boards but other devices. Often created as a result of design and layout issues that were "fixed" with a few extra wires.
It showed you how the companies were being run - when I started my first job I was doing test and setup for Dolby A boards out of production in London and never saw it happen there because Dolby wanted quality, not just the quick sales which my next job (medical devices) did with a few extra wires soldered onto all the boards.
So if this was a business making an investment in bitcoin last year and selling it now, is this a loss? Or does this mean that their tax return this year will show a loss and will reduce their taxation payments for a few years?
Maybe if they sold the bitcoin (making a loss) and Musk has bought it personally at current price levels then he'll see a nice profit in a few years if the price goes back to last years levels. For many years now "maybe" has defined bitcoin.
Originally when employees were working for a company they were working to build the company, making it larger and more efficient in the future. But these days everyone is only working to bill the company and make more money in the future. Product functionality is irrelevant these days, the only important factor nowadays is more advertising.
This is not just a criticism of Microsoft, I see this happening everywhere. The icon describes Pascal Monett's title, not what's happening ... this is how it goes now.
"AI algorithms detect and analyse things like a person's eye movement, facial expression ..." it's documented extremely well in Blade Runner, you can see how well it works and how it tried to figure out if Rachel is a Replicant or a Lesbian ... in the movie AI is just Alien Intelligence.
It took more than 100 questions and they were only able to guess - watch the whole movie and you can imagine that you can figure out the answer at the end. Essentially AI chatbots seem to have all the same issues that Blade Runner illustrates for Replicants.
You are a whole lot safer if you can put your currency in your jacket pocket.
But cryptocurrency is ideal for both scams and theft even if it's stored on your phone ... it seems to be easier to steal it than protect it so we need to stop pretending it's worth anything. Like so many things these day, cryptocurrency was designed to be easy to make, and easy to use, that was every design effort.
Sure, it's fraud these days although when bitcoin and other crypto was first created it was just something interesting and an easy way to pay via the internet. In those days all bank based payments resulted in banks and credit card companies making money. Bitcoin was very low priced until the US started to consider it a legal "coin" - once the investors could legally play with it then we saw the value shoot up from $8k to $64k ... and now fraud and malware appear everywhere because it's so much easier to pay.
Fraud is nothing new, crypto has just created a better environment for it.
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