Posts by veti 4498 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Mar 2010
I see email like that, and I'm in my fifties. I remember when I looked forward to opening my email box and seeing messages from friends, or sometimes potential friends who'd seen my address via online activity.
But those days are long gone. Now, my mailbox is about one-third business, two-thirds spam. Opening it is a chore, not a pleasure.
That's been, basically, the backstop of every proposal since we started talking about spam. "Over time" people will come to recognise and promote good content.
It hasn't worked yet. I don't see what's changing except for the worse - there is a rapidly rising tide of gunk that will quickly drown out smaller entrants, and eventually even the big players, by sheer volume.
No manual system can hope to keep up for long (and "reputation", like "reporting", is a manual system).
Frankly, at this point I see little hope for the Web as we know it. When we try again, we should learn from this experience. Web 3.0 should eschew paid advertising entirely in favour of direct payment for content. Sad but necessary.
That's actually not that difficult to sort out. The author owns the copyright on the words, that's not controversial. And (I don't know for sure, but I assume) he can buy the voice from Elevenlabs with such terms that he owns the exclusive right to distribute it, which he can then assign to Audible.
Sure it's a hurdle, but it's pretty easy to clear.
Poland couldn't match the German hardware, so the comparison doesn't apply anyway.
It's only in the past decade that drone technology has reached the point where some commanders are starting to dream of bloodless (on their side at least) wars. So far, it hasn't gone great.
"Humans plus drones" beats "just drones". Ask the Ukrainians.
No matter how much and how sophisticated hardware you can throw into a war, you'll still lose to the side that's prepared to throw in all that plus humans.
Drones are part of the arsenal, but they haven't replaced humans. Nor will they, unless we one day reach a stage where nothing a human can do will ever influence the outcome.
"Benefiting tech departments" is not the same as "benefiting people who work in tech departments".
Lower costs, lower budgets, lower headcount - these are all "benefits" from the company's point of view, and from the department's point of view if you're treating the department as a part of the company. But they're not something the people on the ground are likely to feel are doing much good.
Actually, the fourth amendment says "the right... shall not be infringed". That's much broader than the first amendment, which specifically says "Congress shall make no law...", and could be interpreted as meaning that the government has a duty to protect the right from all threats, not just government.
Detritus's accent is not any kind of pastiche German. It's a very uneducated ("fick") British working-class accent.
You can hear a similar accent in some older British movies. Watch these clips from The Ladykillers, listen to "One Round". That's what Detritus sounds like.
What do you suggest Manglement should do instead? - given their budget of approximately $200 for the purpose.
Anything that involves "training", let alone "employing an expert of any description full-time", is completely out of the question. "Hiring an expert for a short time to conduct an audit" might just conceivably be doable, but you'd need another expert to advise you how to get the most out of such an exercise, and it all adds up.
What makes you so sure that "reasoning, logic and intelligence" are any different, qualitatively speaking?
People keep setting standards for "AI" - "we can call it intelligent when it can do this" - only to promptly change their minds when technology blows clean through their standard. But at least those people have the guts to attempt a definition. If you hide behind vague terms like "reasoning" without even trying to define it, of course you can't be proved wrong - but that fact in itself should tell you, your stance is not scientific - it's essentially religious.
If you design and build your own security, unless you're a world-leading expert in security, it won't be secure. Indeed, unless you're in the top 1% of security engineers it probably won't even pretend to work at all.
I have no problem with the government (or anyone else) having a digital means to, metaphorically, kick down a locked door. They've always had that ability anyway, I think it's foolish to try to take it away from them. But I make the proviso, when they do so, it should be obvious that they've done so - there should be some equivalent of a kicked-in door lying in the space to tell everyone, immediately, what's happened.
So if the manufacturer's code has the effect of resetting the passcode to "000000" or whatever, I'm fine with it. It's only really nefarious if you can undo the change and set the whole thing back to its previous configuration, to make it look as if nothing has happened.
Cleopatra was of Greek ancestry, yes, because the royal family of Egypt had been replaced in toto by Alexander. But only the royal family. The rest of the population would have been - probably, not very different from Egyptians today. (And I doubt if anyone knows very clearly who had interbred with whom, in the 12 generations between Alexander and Cleopatra.)
Are you saying that Arabs are white, now? As in not just "not-black", but actually "as white as Nordic or Celtic Europeans"?
Well, no, they specified nothing-but-white-people "for 10,000 years". Certainly not Italy, then - I mentioned Attila and Hannibal, and the big important thing about both of them? - they brought armies. Armies of non-white people. Who... did what armies always do, with the local womenfolk. Not to mention the significant numbers of slaves the Romans imported from North Africa.
As for the Barbary Coast - you really think someone born in Algeria would claim it had 100 centuries of exclusively white history?
Scandinavia is the closest possibility, if you're willing to gloss the Sami as white, which is defensible (although their genetics are still debated, they may or may not be closer related to east Asian populations than other Europeans). But the Vikings did import captives from North Africa (and Moorish Spain), so there would have been a smattering of darker people around.
You were born... where?
Can't be anywhere with a colonial history, all those places imported non-white people by the thousand. (And not just as slaves, many came as free people in one context or another.) That rules out Spain, Portugal, France, the Low Countries, the British Isles. And a select few of those people, in each of those countries, became quite prominent figures.
Can't be anywhere in the Balkans or Eastern Europe, they've been swept over by Ottomans and Mongols, among others. Nor Germany, that was a real melting pot in the late middle ages.
Italy? - nope, Attila and Hannibal weren't white. Sweden? - nope, has its own non-white indigenous people.
Really, I'm at a loss.
And define your requirements. Do you really need to be able to display any date? - because that's a lot of complexity that you probably don't really care about. You can save, probably, some months of work just by setting a starting date and specifying a single calendar.
In a saner time, Elon would be recognised as a classic American robber baron in the mould of Jay Gould. Politics is secondary to him. It's just a means to an end. So "hard right" isn't really a fair description.
But it's a mistake to try to see all rich and powerful people as "the same". They're as different from each other as the rest of us.
Yeah, "access to the source code" does sound like a sticking point. I'm guessing the bill's authors would be willing to take that clause out, if it would result in their bill getting further through the process.
But let's face it, even without that, the level of accountability proposed here would make most software vendors - in just about every business - shit their pants.
If insurance companies lose the right to decide what they will and won't pay for... then you might as well abandon the whole system and go over to state-funded healthcare.
Not saying that's a bad idea. Just that - making insurance companies follow doctors' orders unquestioningly would remove about the only important feature of their agency, and at that point there's really nothing to differentiate one company from another, and no reason to resist a single-payer system.
First off, green energy can absolutely be stored. Batteries are a thing. The standard home solar installation around here includes a battery, which is used day-to-day to offset household consumption from peak to offpeak times.
Second, I doubt if BTC miners pay spot price for their electricity. (Indeed, the story some months ago about them selling back power to the grid in Texas implies that those miners, at least, pay a precontracted rate.) So they will not respond to wholesale prices in the way you suggest.
Maybe other aspects of US energy use have been declining. Screens, lighting, home appliances - all have grown significantly more efficient in that time. Parallel improvements have happened in industry. And then there's the growing vogue for heat pumps.
So why hasn't consumption come down substantially? Well, electric vehicles would be part of that. And BTC would be another part. Don't you think it's worthwhile to be able to quantify these contributions?
OK, well, I can find figures for 2019. Netflix streamed about 60 billion hours of content that year.
Their own energy usage was 451 GWh. To that let's add the energy usage of devices showing that content: if we assume the average viewing device is a laptop, it will be using about 60W, so 60 billion hours translates to about 3,600 GWh, for a total of a bit over 4 TWh.
Bitcoin's energy usage that year was - well, frankly I can't see quite how to read this graph, but the range of estimates seems to be about 50-75 TWh.
Bitcoin wins by more than an order of magnitude.
Also I can't see how you argue that "the world would be better off without Netflix", while also being prepared to defend Bitcoin on the grounds that people who use it clearly do find value in it. Those two positions seem quite unreconcilable to me.
That is highly subjective. It clearly creates value to people who are using it.True. So let's drop the "while accomplishing nothing of value" clause and consider what's left.
Bitcoin mining and use creates demand for power. That demand is probably enough to materially affect the overall electricity market. (We could argue about whether it's "distorting" the market, but that would just lead us back to quibbling about words and value. So let's stick with "affect", it's a nice neutral word I hope we can agree on.)
"Perhaps" energy companies should change their fee structure? - well yes, perhaps they should. And perhaps regulators should change the constraints on those fee structures. And perhaps legislators should consider all this when reviewing their regulations, and also when considering regulations on the use of Bitcoin itself.
But how can any of these people do any of these jobs properly without good information?
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
