Re: Ta ta!
(That's me wiping away the single tear that just leaked from my ocular apparatus) ->>
Somehow I'd never pictured you as quite so blonde, but then, that's the internet for you...
4259 publicly visible posts • joined 19 May 2010
AAaaaaaaaaaaaargh!
I thought I'd managed to block that out, but no, you have to remind me!
I've also driven a Landy - in fact many Landies - over many years, and rather than finding them terrifying, they always gave me a certain feeling of invincibility (may not be a good thing).
Once when a eurobox decided to pull out in front of me on a fast A road, the only result on the Landy was a bent front bumper, which I unbolted and hit very hard with a big hammer until it was straight again, the eurobox, conversely, was a total write-off.
According to that unimpeachable fount of all knowledge (Wikipedia) the original name assigned by Humphrey Davy was was 'um, but scientist Thomas Young objected and proposed that it be called 'ium to be consistent with other newly-discovered elements. This was generally accepted worldwide.
Later, in America, that nice Mr Webster and his dictionary used 'um instead.
As Bob says, it is consistent with Latin name endings, where alumina is the oxide and aluminum is the element.
I've never really understood why the Land of the FreeTM are so insistent that it should be aluminum, when they don't do the same for magnesum, titanum, chromum and all the other 'iums in the periodic table.
I suppose it is consistent with platinum, molybdenum, lanthanum and tantalum, but there's a lot more 'iums.
There is of course the well know, although possibly apocryphal tale of the Boss who "didn't do email" but instead his secretary used to intercept incoming emails, print them out, and then take them in to him. Should a reply be required, the Boss would dictate it to the secretary, who would then send it from the Boss's account.
Hopefully the global certification will not be railroaded by the FAA/Boeing alliance by allowing it back into the sky without proper pilot simulator training.
I think it's very unlikely that the various certification authorities outside the US will allow that to happen.
Sophisticated Chinese equipment—which I think includes anything with a CPU and the ability to connect to the internet—absolutely should not feature in UK infrastructure.
Ok then, what about sophisticated American equipment (built in China), or even sophisticated American equipment (built in Mexico)?
I don't see that for the UK there is much choice in the matter, whatever we use, it will (by your reckoning) be open to interference by another nation state.
Ran out of edit time... It was Adrian Thompson, his paper is here:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.50.9691&rep=rep1&type=pdf
There is no qualitative difference between these new AI and ML technologies and the washing-machine-like technologies that have preceded them.
I'm not sure that's the case. Whilst I am the last one to ascribe AI to magical thinking, there have been well documented cases where - for neural networks in particular - the end result has no clearly defined path that even the creators of the device can follow.
I'm thinking in particular of the experiment where a neural net was tasked to design an circuit to discriminate between audio tones using multiple iterations of circuit redesign using FPGAs.
The resulting, (working) circuit had a number of components which were not electrically connected to the rest of the circuit, but whose removal stopped it working.
This non-intuitive and unpredictable result cannot be compared to the well-defined, well-understood mechanisms of washing machines and other such devices.
It's a shame that when it was introduced, the available hardware wasn't really capable of meeting the necessary requirements of a quiet, powerful PC in a form factor that would fit under a TV unless you spent thousands on a custom build.
You certainly wouldn't want the average mini-tower PC of the time, with noisy fans and power hungry CPUs, and even the DVD drive mechanisms fitted to most PCs sounded like a Tornado MRCA on full reheat whilst playing a DVD.
I remember at the time playing with MythTV and MediaPortal as alternatives, but none of them got over that hurdle.
Nowadays, you could shove a Raspberry Pi under your TV and run a virtually silent HTPC.
The absolute worst ... rotating shifts -- days this week, evenings next, early mornings the next, then back to days. That'll reduce anyone to a gibbering wreck in a month or two.
Sounds a bit wimpish...
How on earth do you think emergency services personnel manage then, who do that constantly for years?
Let's not forget that it's not that long ago that the British Science and Technology Facilities Council were going to withdraw their funding for Jodrell Bank, which would have probably led to its closure.
It seems that whether it be the English, Scottish or Welsh governments, they really don't understand the benefits of science and technology, and only look at the short-term costs.
I mean, £338,000. It's a rounding error in an MP's expenses claim, isn't it?
It doesn't sound like the uni really tried hard to find alternative funding.
In this case, System Restore has been the saving grace for us, as the only way back for 20 plus machines.
A symptom of the problem which I've not seen mentioned elsewhere was that on a full boot, after CTRL-ALT-DEL no login box showed up, so users could not get into their machines at all.
Booting in safe mode, and doing a system restore to a restore point prior to the upgrade has been how we've fixed the issue.