Posts by Tom 38

Re: Hate to be pragmatic but

Public Health England (an agency of the Department of Health) commissioned a meta-study that determined that vaping is around 95% less harmful than smoking.

The three key findings:

1) the current best estimate is that e-cigarettes are around 95% less harmful than smoking

2) nearly half the population (44.8%) don’t realise e-cigarettes are much less harmful than smoking

3) there is no evidence so far that e-cigarettes are acting as a route into smoking for children or non-smokers

Re: Optional

So what you're saying is that 110,000 non doms paid 4% of the total income tax received and 31,000,000 paid 96% of the total income tax received.

Re: I'm not so pessimistic

Anyone seen any stats on people who would want a driverless car? I mean other than Uber etc.

Not saying I'd use automated on every trip, but sure - stumble out of the pub at 11pm and hop in to my own waiting car that ferries me to my house via the takeaway? Driving to go on holiday, 8 hour kip on the back seat while Johnny Cab delivers me to the Alps overnight? Yes please, where do I sign?

Re: you can get some diseases even if you don't drink at all.

There is plenty of evidence (which HMG studiously chooses to ignore) that moderate alcohol consumption is, in fact, better for you than teetotalism.

I thought this was explained by the fact that the set of teetotal people include not just those who are teetotal by choice, but also those who are teetotal because they are very sick already, and have poor outcomes.

Similarly, outcomes for BMI groups are better for the "Overweight" group than the "Healthy" group, because the "Healthy" group actually includes a bunch of very sick people.

Everything in moderation. Except bacon. Eat as much bacon as you can, because life.

Re: Cant see where he lied

It was made clear at the time that there were spaces in 1st class - but Corbyn chose not to upgrade (because most people can't afford to, and the taxpayer is paying for it).

There were clearly no seats available, despite Virgin's claims, because Corbyn joined several other people already sitting on the floor.

That train was not even slightly close to packed. I'm certain there were no regular commuters sitting on the floor, we would be in those reserved seats, or sitting in any empty seat without a bag on it, not walking the carriages looking for 4 empty table seats. So many non regular commuters will walk through a carriage with empty seats without saying a word - "Excuse me, is this seat taken?" is not that tricky.

45 minutes into the journey a family did get an upgrade to 1st class, enabling Corbyn to take one of their seats.

They moved people to first class so that Jezza could sit next to his aide at a table, not because there were no seats to sit on at all. If you are so precious that you cannot be separated from your travel companions, book seats - unless you are trying to manufacture an outrage to suit your own political agenda.

Re: Fat chance

Not to sound like an advert, but uniqlo do jeans in 28"-36" waist in 1" increments, and 32" or 34" length, with free 1 day length adjustment. Plus they have some sort of magic system where they manage to keep them in size order, rather than the apparently random order in other stores, that have you checking every single pair of jeans in the fucking store for the one size that you think might fit.

Re: "They are fully trained as to what an autopilot actually does" - and what it doesn't.

In most people imagination, "autopilot" means some kind of sci-fi AI fully able to control a vehicle flawlessly.

I think of Otto from "Airplane!"

Re: Bambi meets Hyperloop

Bambi is the wife of the good guy in this story, not the un-named PR lady who figured $200k for 5 months of bad sex was probably worth it.

Re: Tsk

if it's not tupperware, you're better off with a reclosable bag.

Tupperware is so 80s, all the cool kids these days either have Sistema or Nude Food Movers, neither of which I'd describe as an off brand.

Bear in mind when ever somebody loses money, it doesn't disappear, just ends up somewhere else.

Good news, our money turned up, its now in Germany. It's also staying there.

Re: Police would ordinarily access such a file less than 50 times

<insert crude "Australia/convicts" joke here>

Re: Did UK make ever something positive to make EU stronger?

For the Euro, as a European citizen, I enjoy having the same currency than our neighbors: no more banks taking their parts when converting money, no more harsh conversion to calculate the price of an item, no more unchangeable coins when getting back home...

"Lets all be in a currency union because it makes it easier to buy things when travelling" is a ridiculous argument because it ignores the fact that currency union implies a lack of control over the levers of the economy, like currency and interest rates. See how Spain, Greece and Portugal have faired when they are forced to operate within what German industry wants. It is utterly simplistic and childish to think of the Eurozone in terms of buying pizza and beer on holiday.

Similarly, Schengen makes absolutely no sense for UK travellers, it's a big fucking island. You will be checked coming in by boat, plane or train regardless of UK's participation in Schengen, the current border controls being a minuscule part of that process. There is no facility gained in our participation.

A vote to "Remain" is not a vote to join either of those two barmy schemes, whilst voting to "Leave" will have us at best end up in EFTA with FSM knows what tariffs on our goods and services. Norway is a member of EFTA, they have to obey all the EU rules and regulations with no say on how they are implemented, and they still have massive tariffs on one of their largest exports (fisheries), are required to be in Schengen and have free movement of people.

Friday cannot arrive quick enough, thoroughly sick of all this.

At first I thought, "Hmm, GPS data on a bobby, that will be handy for the neighbourhood scamp dealers", but then quickly realized it will actually mean "PC Dobbins is doing paperwork" updates on twitter.

I get what you're saying, but PCIe = 7.8 Gbps per lane, or 126 Gbps for a 16x link.

Re: This is so self evident it is ridiculous

The only real issue I have is with things like the GPL. The 'we own everything' management mindset tends to extend to things like the Linux kernel -- the "we modified a driver so its obviously company property" sort of thing.

If your company modifies a GPL driver, then they do in fact own the modifications. They don't even have to share the modifications with anyone or push it upstream*, provided that the driver is not distributed in binary form.

* But they should, it gets the modifications checked by a wider audience, and stops the new functionality bitrotting in a private repo when the driver is updated upstream, plus it's good to not be a dick

The way I understand what was announced by Canonical, containers will share identical libraries, so the storage overhead will be greatly reduced. At the same time, different versions of libraries will be used by the appropriate applications, so there will be fewer problems with library updates.

It's still dynamically linked static linkage. If you have the same library at the same version with the same patches built with the same options in multiple snaps, then the storage overhead is managed, but if one snap uses different functionality/build options, you don't.

One snap gets updated because a library has a security vulnerability, whilst the other snaps don't, and then you have multiple copies of the library, plus apps that run but are still vulnerable. I think I'd prefer apps that don't run to apps that are vulnerable.

You can't really have both everything being isolated and distinct and continues to work after updates, and security holes fixed by updating one package.

PS: PC-BSD PBI. Just saying.

Re: Except...

When no-body bothers to fully peer review the software, or the lone developer pulls the code from a repository because everyone's messing him about, or hell.. even just gets downright abusive, then I can't help but feel compelled to disagree.

The biggest "except" is that none of your three listed projects (OpenSSL, lpad and Linux) are remotely developed using the Agile methodology.

Re: Noise?

A quiet time for a version control system means that there have been few/no commits. Noise is the opposite of quiet.

I also have Three and wanted this to go through for the same reasons, however I live and work in London... it gets annoying when you have to go outside the pub in order to get phone signal, and its tedious as hell not having any signal in the office.

The whole "no other choices" argument is bollocks anyway, there are no shortage of MVNOs offering wildly different pricing to their parent MNO, eg Lebara contracts do not compare to Vodafone, nor does GiffGaff to O2.

Most pension funds are in deficit at the moment because interest rates are so historically low and so larger funds are required to cover the same liability. Its maybe fine for a while for larger firms for a while, but yeah, either interest rates need to rise soon or these holes need to be plugged.

Re: FFS - it is NOT fibre.

Virgin Fibre is the same as well, HFC is fibre to the local headend whereafter it's all coax to the home.

<smug>I have true FTTH, and it's very nice indeed, symmetric gigabit, sub ms ping</smug>. To think we could all have had that, instead of a really fast choo choo to Leeds...

Sure you can. The set of locations where you get data signal is definitely a proper subset of the set of locations where you get phone signal.

...the US Agency for International Development has a $35bn budget

Problem is, that barely covers the annual fixing bill for the bits of the world they blew up last year, and probably has to go to neo-con Military-Industrial-Complex companies that assisted in the blowing up in the first place</tinfoilhatapplied>

Re: Apologies in advance to all Christians......

The book never made the claim to December. I think the word didn't even exist when the book was written.

What have the Romans ever done for us, except give us the name for the tenth month of the year (Roman years started in March)

Re: Obvious

Where I work (private sector, not security), we have display screens showing us motivational slides, news, internal job adverts etc all around the office. After Star Wars 7 came out, they put up a slide asking for us to deliver to HR talented people we knew at other companies, and they chose to have a picture of Darth Vader reprising the famous "Kitchener WANTS YOU" recruiting poster.

It's like ".... so that means we're the Empire, right?"

Re: @Tom 38

Ad hominem == winning I see.

If you deploy software to a linux stack, develop on a linux stack. Linux syscalls translated in to windows syscalls is not linux. I really don't care what UI you or text editor they use, but develop and test things on the platform that you are going to run it on.

I don't want to debug failed jenkins builds from my junior devs that are a result of something they should have caught before they even committed it because they aren't developing on the platform that they should be.

Put another way, would you write an app for windows using Linux and WINE as your primary development environment? If you would, thanks for coming, next CV please.

Re: counterfeit pound coins

The old-old 10Fr piece in France in the 80s/early 90s was almost the same shape and weight as a British 2p. The 10Fr was worth about a quid, and gave 5 goes on the arcade machines in the cafe in our campsite until someone noticed when they came to empty the coin hoppers... blatantly unfair to claim it was me, even if I was the only adolescent British male in the campsite...

Re: Who uses FreeBSD in preference to Linux and why?

That's one way to spin it. Another is that Sun intentionally released it under a sketchy assed licence to ensure GPL incompatibility.

It's a sketchy assed license that is compatible with 3 clause BSD...