Posts by veti 4498 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Mar 2010
That's an illusion. "25p" takes (very, very slightly) longer to say than "five bob", but it's easier to comprehend and less subject to error.
Imagine you're in a noisy environment. The "five" will probably get across, because the listener will be on the lookout for numbers, but the "bob" could take them by surprise. They might be expecting "shillings", "florins", "sovs", "pounds", "guineas". Or you could have said "a crown", for even more brevity and confusion.
"25p" removes a whole layer of potential ambiguity and misunderstanding.
Yeah, there's nothing new here. Countries all over the world have been messing with their DST rules non-stop since - well, since long before Y2K - and people have kept up somehow. Maybe there are a few problems, maybe some people miss meetings or automated emails get sent on the wrong days, whatever, but the world hasn't ended yet.
Apart from all that, we've become aware of how expensive it is, going to an office. Quite apart from travel costs, there's meals and drinks and social events... I would estimate, my last year in an office, I must've spent a couple of thousand dollars over and above what I would have done eating and drinking at home.
Incidentally, has anyone noticed that the loudest voices for return to office work are coming from Subway and Pret?
You're talking about the reported COVID-related deaths. GP was quite explicitly talking about "excess mortality", which is something quite different. It's a way of getting around the subjectivity and variability about how different countries count their "COVID-related" deaths.
See here for a detailed discussion.
I haven't crunched the numbers, I don't know if GP is right. But please, at least argue with the point being made, not with a completely different set of numbers. We're not politicians here.
Okay, that's testing. Now let's discuss tracing.
For every person who tests positive, someone has to phone them up and spend probably a considerable amount of time finding out where they have been and who they've been in contact with, then follow up tracking down those people and telling them to get tested. You could pay a private detective to do work like that for hundreds of pounds per day - per person to be traced.
Yeah well, Android did much more the same thing to me. I couldn't understand why I kept getting notifications inviting me to look at the photos I took 3, 4, 5 or more years ago.
Then I realised every Google app, whether or not I had ever opened or used it, was sending me notifications. Great idea Google. I turned them all off, but for how long until Google decides I need to hear from them again?
The war is controversial in Russia - or it would be if people were allowed to discuss it - but there's certainly a fair level of support for it. That's why Putin went to all the trouble of faking a justification for it - he never expected to fool us, but he wasn't worried about us because he knew we wouldn't do much anyway.
The thing is, once ICANN sets the precedent that it has a role in imposing sanctions on naughty people, how exactly does it resist doing it in future?
Myanmar slaughtered the Rohingya and nobody said ICANN should do anything about it. China is "cleansing" Xinjiang and I haven't heard anyone say ICANN should cut them off. India is fostering hatred and suspicion of all non-Hindus, and nobody argues ICANN should be the ones to do anything about that either. In the modern era we've seen generally-agreed genocides in Darfur, Rwanda and Bosnia, and nobody has ever suggested ICANN should have anything to say about any of them.
Why should Ukraine be defined as the Rubicon that finally makes them abandon their apolitical stance and take a side? That looks like a very slippery slope to step onto.
Thank you for your civil and reasonable reply.
To your first point, about value and governance, others have made eloquent and valid replies about the dread of deflation. I would only add that in the past century we've seen a wide variety of misgovernment in just about every country on earth, and only a handful of times has this resulted in runaway inflation. To borrow an old saw, monetary hawks have correctly predicted about 20 of the last 3 hyperinflations. To put it in more abstract terms: the government controlling the money supply is indeed dangerous, but when you realise that the alternative is the money supply controlling the government, it becomes pretty obvious which is the lesser evil. Nobody wants to play Russian roulette with an automatic.
The "convenience" argument - there are two likely scenarios. Either I'm paying money to an overseas business, or I'm sending it privately to a friend or relative because - reasons that are really no business of anyone else. In the first case (far more common in my experience), the whole thing is trivial - credit card networks solved this decades ago. In the second case, the whole thing used to be fairly straightforward, but has been made steadily more complicated over the past 25 years because of efforts to prevent money laundering. That tells me everything I need to know about where this "convenience" argument is coming from.
The third argument is really only relevant to people who want to keep their transactions secret from the government. Now, obviously there are such things as untrustworthy (in this context) governments, but if you have one of those, it's not clear how useful it would be to keep your finances secret from them. Look at Russia today. If you're a distressed oligarch, you're probably quite thankful for your cryptocoins right now. But if you're an opposition politician or just a regular plumber, it's not clear how they'll help you. If Putin wants you out of the way, Bitcoin won't help you.
You can't compare US sanctions against Iran, opposed and undercut by pretty much everyone else, with what's just been done to Russia. It's a whole other thing.
I can (and do) still buy Iranian dates in the supermarket. Russian vodka, on the other hand, is gone.
It was an independent state uniting multiple southern Slavic peoples, which was exactly what the Black Hand wanted. Fiercely independent - it stood up to the Nazis, the Soviets and Western Europe, alike.
The fact that it may not have been a huge popular success isn't really the point. It was the goal of the assassination. So the assassination itself can be considered a roaring success.
What restrictions is "the west" putting on free speech? (Hint, there's nothing remotely free about RT - but other people are completely free to repeat their talking points, if anyone can be convinced to take them seriously.)
What restrictions has the west put on protest? It's Russia that's arresting eight-year-old girls for the crime of laying flowers outside the Ukrainian embassy.
To the rest of your rant, these are the same tired talking points anti-vaxxers have been using to prolong the pandemic for the past year. I'm pretty sure you already know the detailed rebuttal of each point you make. If by some amazing chance you're not, it shouldn't take more than about four minutes to find them.
I am so sorry. I know Ukrainians are desperate for help, and will spin every story they can to try to draw NATO into the war.
But it's not going to happen. We'll send money, and weapons, we'll take refugees (for now at least), and we won't stop volunteers who want to go - but, ultimately, Ukraine stands alone.
This is the kind of story that builds nations. I pray Ukraine survives to retell it.
Why not? I see no threat. You could maybe make a case for "incitement", but it's pretty mild by the standards of what's batting around the Internet right now.
Over on Reddit, someone dredged up an old (open) letter from Tito to Stalin: "Stop sending people to kill me. [...] If you don't stop sending killers, I'll send one to Moscow, and I won't have to send a second."
Well, only if you ignore geography.
First, as others have pointed out, EU != NATO.
Second, as a direct result of Putin's actions, there are today more NATO troops on Russia's borders than ever before. Thousands of troops, ships and aircraft from Spain, Denmark, the Netherlands, Britain and America, among other countries, have been deployed to Poland, the (formerly Soviet) Baltic states, and the Baltic Sea.
Third, if Putin succeeds in his declared aim of conquering and annexing Ukraine, that will give him new borders with Poland, Slovakia, Romania and Hungary. That simple geographical fact will at a stroke add around 200,000 more NATO troops sitting directly on his border. That's close to the total number of troops he's deployed in and around Ukraine.
Fourth, after decades of undermining western unity by his successful fostering of neo-fascism in places such as Hungary, Poland, the United States and Britain, he has suddenly and vastly reinforced it. The liberal/democratic order of Western Europe looks happier and more secure now than it has done at any time since the EU enlargement of 2004.
If "keeping NATO troops away from his borders" is the aim, it's harder to imagine - short of actually invading a NATO member - how he could have scored a bigger own-goal than this.
If you've a nodding acquaintance with the events of WW2, you'll remember that it was an American embargo on oil and metal to Japan that provoked the Japanese to strike Pearl Harbor, staking everything on a very-long-shot war against a much larger power.
Appeasement doesn't work, okay. But sanctions have a much longer history of not working, going back to the Continental System of 1806-1814. More recently they haven't worked against Cuba, Iraq, Iran or Syria. Maybe this time is different, I don't know. But I don't see why.
Even in Stalin's day, Zhukov trumped Beria. It's not an easy thing to do, to police the army.
The last time the Soviet army attempted a coup was in 1991, but it was closely involved in politics again in 1993 (when it stormed the offices of the Supreme Soviet), and I doubt it's completely forgotten about that.
What exactly would "going nuclear" gain him?
No, Putin made a number of gambles that looked to him like good bets, and they mostly turned bad. That happens to the best of us from time to time, but we usually have more sense than to wager our entire country on them.
I've no doubt that Putin will eventually identify some silver lining, and then he'll pretend that was all he really cared about all along. That's how unprincipled opportunists, like both him and his friend Trump, maintain their reputation for smarts. But so far he's managed to achieve everything he least wanted - including, worst of all, making his own army look incompetent. That's one of the few things that could cost him his job, and quite possibly his life, in a matter of days. Generals tend to have limited tolerance for that particular brand of blunder.
I'm no expert, but something tells me the quartermasters of the Russian army aren't using any version of Windows that can be so simply killed.
The Russians are many things, and yes they are quite often stupid (this whole war, for instance, is an act of almost unbelievable foot-shooting idiocy on Putin's part - joke's on me, all this time I thought he was clever), but if there's one thing they do know it's security.
Putin and his cronies have billions of dollars' worth of assets held in Western countries. UK, EU, USA...
Those governments should make it their priority to identify all that money, and simply trouser it. No "freezing", just grab the lot. It'd be a welcome cash boost for them, and it would hit Putin's henchmen where it hurts - force them to fall back on assets within Russia, thereby making them share in the economic pain of the country.
If his purpose was to register the copyright, that would be true. But it's clear that's not his actual goal. What he wants is for his AI to be acknowledged as creative; this application was a possible way to bolster that claim.
As for the Turing test, bots pass that every day and no one bats an eye. We need a better test.
If it comes to that, humans don't create art unless they've been appropriately educated. I think I'm right in saying that every human work of art was produced by someone raised and educated by other humans. So what exactly is the difference?
It's strange to me that people who insist "machines can't do magic" can, in almost the same breath, argue that some vaguely defined thing that might be called "creativity" can only be produced by magic.
That is extremely expensive, and also very uncertain. Even if legislation made it into the house, it would then be open to lobbying by every other bugger who's interested. And even if it survived that, there's still an excellent chance it will be torpedoed by some grandstanding wanker purely because they hate the people supporting it.
Not a good investment, unless you're already a billionaire - and even then you have to pick your subjects carefully.
You could move to a more open minded country. Here in New Zealand, I've been voting for as long as I've been a resident, regardless of citizenship.
I've been paying taxes even longer than that. And getting all the social benefits that they pay for.
The trouble with "not voting" is that it doesn't send any coherent signal at all. Is there value in knowing how many chose not to vote? What for? - I mean, what exactly do you propose to do with that information? And how do you distinguish between "didn't vote because hated all parties or candidates", "didn't understand issues", "didn't care", "didn't get the chance because of work or life", or simply "didn't know how"?
There is no "backdoor" of the cloud mentioned in this story. It's straightforward spear phishing, which the cloud makes slightly easier but the principle works exactly the same for privately held servers.
As for the rest of your rant, I can't decide if you're actually that deluded, or if you're flying a false flag to make libs look even crazier than they make themselves look. Since you posted anon it's hard to tell. So, good job I guess.
By adding the words "be able", you completely change the meaning of the question. Your version is framed as a mirror image of the question, but it's nothing of the sort.
"Should expect" is an inference based on observed facts. If we "should expect" something, that suggests "the observed facts and known laws point to this conclusion, it is too early to be certain but there is a strong likelihood that this is the case."
"Should be able" is quite different - it's a moral statement. The argument even says this much - yes, we absolutely should be able to expect privacy. But whether we should expect it is a very different question.
For what it's worth, my father told me back in the 1970s always to assume that phone calls and letters were not really secure, they could be spied on in many ways. Some of those ways don't even require much in the way of special resources or tools. I've made that assumption from childhood, and the Internet has done nothing to dispel it.
Presumably the software is different not only for every model and year, but also for every possible combination of build options, as well as any later customisation. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that no two cars in any given city had exactly the same software.
So not much point trying to store the update locally, and most of the time to make the update is spent on diagnostics to determine which of the 14,223 images your particular car needs.
That's bad, but it's a different thing. I remember several outbreaks of CP hysteria, and sometimes it seems like the press's bloodlust needs to be sated. I can see weak police chiefs yielding to that pressure in the sort of way you describe.
But it's not the same as concerted attacks on the regime's political opponents. The main difference being, political opponents have a network of friends and supporters. After two or three incidents to members of the same network, the remainder would start getting a bit curious.
Modi is an evil thug. We knew this.
I like to think that in countries with a freer media, such tactics wouldn't fly - they'd be exposed in fairly short order, and honest judges would not only throw out the evidence but also instigate an inquiry into where it came from. But somehow I'm less sure about that now than I would have been six years ago.
Menu technology was perfected circa 1990, and has only gone downhill since then. But one of the bad things that happened to it, in the late 90s, was when Microsoft made menus editable.
Stupid, stupid idea. It meant users accidentally deleting menu items (including, potentially, the very one they needed to undo the damage). And for expert users who knew about the feature and used it correctly, it meant they could no longer transfer their skills to anyone else's PC.
Reversing that cock-up was perhaps the only redeeming feature of the ribbon.
Everyone agrees that 90% of the features in any advanced application are never used. We all know this.
But the catch is, when you actually burrow into the question, you find that no two people agree precisely which 90% of features they don't need. What looks like useless screen clutter to you, is a small but vital element of someone else's workflow.
That's why all applications acquire cruft over time.
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