* Posts by Loyal Commenter

5761 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jul 2010

VC's paper claims cost of cloud is twice as much as running on-premises. Let's have a look at that

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: This Is My Shocked Face

You have to do the cost/benefit analysis on that. A hybrid solution brings with it complexity. Complexity brings points of failure and potentially additional vulnerabilities which need to be analysed and managed. Sometimes the simpler solution, although more costly, is more resilient (and sometimes it isn't). I wouldn't like to say, in all honesty, which is the better solution, and having this as a simple example of a use case for "cloud" is necessarily simplifying things somewhat.

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Re: This Is My Shocked Face

Indeed. The key here is unpredicatble spikes in workload. If you are asking for x100 resources from your cloud supplier on the same day everyone else is, then you are, if you'll pardon the expression, shit out of luck.

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Re: This Is My Shocked Face

The "cloud" has its use cases - the main plus, as others have pointed out, is if you have wildly fluctuating demands for processing / storage. The archetypical example is a public-facing web site that usually gets a low level of traffic, but for one or two days a year, this goes up by orders of magnitude. Being able to scale this on demand, without having to invest in a lot of redundant infrastructure to cope with peak demand means that most of the time, you'd just be paying for the low usage. Of course, the cloud providers will have a formula for how much they can get away with charging you before this no longer becomes cost-effective, and will probably charge you a high percentage of that level, way above their true costs, because $capitalism.

The other common use case I can think of is software testing. When you are going through a dev cycle, it is often very useful to be able to spin up a number of VMs in parallel when you need them, and turn them off the rest of the time. Dedicating your own hardware to this would basically mean having a server room full of unpowered racks a lot of the time.

For anything where you have no reason to put your data on "someone else's computer", the simple answer is "don't". Things with a predictable, steady load, such as accounting, or POS systems. HR systems, and to be honest, most business software, has no purpose being under someone else's control. After all, even data centres burn down sometimes.

Just make sure that your in-house solution has appropriate redundancy and backups, and you employ experienced staff who know what they are doing to maintain it. If you're on a cost-savings spree, short-sightedness can cost you dearly. "Yes, we do need that DR site".

European Parliament's data adequacy objection: Doubts cast on UK's commitment to privacy protection

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Re: Just

[...]it's hardly a EU specific thing to be opposed to the idea of denying immigrants something viewed as a fundamental right.

Indeed, one of the founding principles of the EU is human rights, because it was formulated in the shadow of the second world war (when Churchill himself advocated for a "United States of Europe"). The whole idea is to prevent the atrocities that happened then, which was, in very general terms, about some people being denied the rights that others enjoy, because they are "untermenschen". The far-right government, and right-wing press, in this country, seem to like to portray asylum seekers in very much the same way the far-right government in post-Weimar Republic Germany* viewed "undesirables". They didn't start by rounding people up and executing them in concentration camps, they started by rounding up disabled people and sterilising them, before moving onto "euthanising" them, and then widening their gaze to others they decided were subhuman. We would do well to recognise the pattern here, as soon as one group of humans is decreed to be less human than you or I, you have already set a precedent.

No person is illegal, only a person's actions - once you start talking about "illegal immigrants" you are talking about "illegal humans". Once you derogate the rights of one group on these grounds, you leave a mile-wide path for a right-wing government to start designating others as "illegal". With the "you-know-who"s in the 1930s and '40s, it started with disabled people, then homosexuals, Jews, the Roma and Sinti, Slavic peoples, and so on. Read that Martin Niemöller quote again if you must. I'm not convinced we don't have people in power here and now that wouldn't share some of the same attitudes, and they make themselves known by attacking human rights.

*You all know who I'm talking about, right? No need to invoke Godwin's Law here.

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Re: Just

I love the way, that, in your mind, a deeply divided island nation of circa 70 million people off the coast of a continental bloc with a population of circa 450 million, and facing down a continental superpower on the opposite side of the Atlantic with a population of circa 330 million is somehow the "big fish".

You do know the British Empire is no longer a thing, right? Queen Victoria is long dead, and India decided they didn't want to be owned by a foreign power some while ago?

We would do well to remember that the modern world is divided between progressive modern democracies and international pariahs. We should tread carefully lest we become the latter, especially with our current government which is the most insular and idiotic in living memory.

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Trollface

Re: Just

The thing that puzzles me is why you posted your opinion here, rather than getting paid for it as a column in the Daily Mail.

Need some chips? The Raspberry Pi Pico's RP2040 is heading to a channel near you

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Re: Expensive part

That's £0.38 for the chip, and £6 for the massive plastic casing and pins you can perforate plywood with.

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Re: No competition

A quick google shows the dual-core ESP32 going for about $2.80 a unit and the single-core at $2.40, although a like-for-like comparison would take the dual-core one as the RP2040 is dual-core.

That's $2.80, after volume discounts and economies of scale are taken into account, vs $1 before production has been ramped up, and volume duscoutns applied.

Is the ESP32 therefore 2.8+ times better in terms of specs, or are you comparing apples with watermelons? Which is the right tool for the job? For instance, would you use a ESP32 board as a debug probe, or the $4 cheaper Pi Pico?

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Boffin

Re: Expensive part

If my memory serves me correctly, (it's a couple of months since I perused the specs), two 32-bit processors, 8 state machines (2 banks of 4), a bunch of 16 bit ADCs and various interrupt channels that can be wired together with the aforementioned.

Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes-Benz? Detroit waits for my order, you'd better make amends

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Re: OK, I'll take one for the team

What, are you doollally, you flaming galah?

UK data regulator fines American Express up to 0.021p per email after opted-out folk spammed 4.1 million times

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There's probably individual account-holders who have paid them more than that in interest payments.

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Re: Ah, Amex.

I got statements/bills from BT for several years in the early '00s after I was no longer a customer of theirs (and didn't even have a connected land-line). An equally quality organisation, I'm sure my fellow commenteriat will agree.

New IETF draft reveals Egyptians invented pyramids to sharpen razor blades

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Re: Patent 91304

It was quite a big thing until people realised it didn't do much.

This didn't stop homeopathy / crystal healing / reiki / insert new-age woo of choice.

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RFC is "rough draft"?

I thought it stood for "Request for Comments" - i.e. "here is my proposal, please shoot it down before it becomes a de-facto standard"

The future is now, old man: Let the young guns show how to properly cock things up

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Joke

Re: Police Computer

another reason why Management and Marketing should have absolutely no hand whatsoever in purchasing new networking kit anything.

There you go, FTFY.

If you cut their hands off, they'll find it a lot harder to get themselves in all sorts of trouble!

(icon, just in case any readers think I'm a firm believer in the Saudi justice system)

Blessed are the cryptographers, labelling them criminal enablers is just foolish

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Re: [serious and organised crime]?

In this case, the opposite of organised is non-organised, not disorganised.

i.e. not involving an organisation.

There's every potential for organised crime to also be disorganised. Al Capone forgot to pay his taxes...

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Re: Kinda covers it all, no?

This is true. The courts do, however, need definitions of offences, and sentencing guidelines, otherwise you just end up with "hanging judges" who make it up as they go along.

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Re: [serious and organised crime]?

IANAL, but I think the distinctions here are:

Organised crime = crime committed by members of a criminal organisation (such as a modern slavery ring, people smugglers or various "Mafia" organisations)

Serious crime = anything listed as such in the Serious Crime Act of 2015. I think the basic definition is anything where the perpetrator could be considered a risk to the public at large. As with politically defined things, it's a bit fuzzy, but I don't think it actually covers things like physical assault, which, sadly, are common and widespread, and not treated as seriously as they should be.

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Re: [serious and organised crime]?

Not my definition Jake. But basically anything involving violence gets treated much more seriously than without.

Unless it's violence against women for some reason. Hence the UK government's provisions in the Policing Bill for ten year sentences for attacking a statue, but much lesser sentences for rape.

Everyone should be angry about this sort of disproportionality.

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Re: Really ????

I think the pertinent subtlety here is the use of:

are used almost exclusively by

rather than

are almost exclusively used by

They might sound like the same thing to the untrained ear, but the difference here is the difference between saying "X only uses Y" and, "only X uses Y". For example, "The Yorkshire Ripper only drinks Carling Black Label" vs "Only the Yorkshire Ripper drinks Carling Black Label".

In short, those disingenuous fucks in the Aussie government have dressed up one thing to look like another, purely with the intent to mislead.

Now, about that writing on the side of that bus...

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Lastly, your mother's tactic is called "security by obscurity" and it's more effective than a lot of people would think.

On an individual level, yes.

In the world of computer science, where companies like to say, "our products are protected by proprietary security, the details of which are secret," this doesn't hold true.

Unlike your mother's bed-stand, crackers can get hold of "secure" software, and, in their own time, work on cracking that "bespoke" security. They can find the mathematical weaknesses, the flawed implementations, the loopholes, the timing attacks, the rainbow attacks, and all the other vulnerabilities, all without having to hide in your mother's bedroom the whole time. Once they break the security in that product (and if it's a worthwhile target, they will), nobody other than the crackers will ever know. The vendors will keep on touting how clever and secure it is, claiming it is because of that "security by obscurity", little aware that this is its very weakness.

Security, and especially cryptography, is hard. As the author of this article discovered, "roll-your-own" security will almost certainly have flaws you didn't even consider. The advantage of open peer-reviewed security, such as the standards that HTTPS operates over, is that when flaws are found, they are made public, and fixed. If you're relying on those technologies, you'll know if they have been found wanting, and be able to take appropriate measures, rather than being in the dark whilst hackers steal all your business secrets.

For those interested in the subject of security, I can't recommend Bruce Schneier's blog highly enough. He has been over this same ground, in various guises, many times.

JET engine flaws can crash Microsoft's IIS, SQL Server, say Palo Alto researchers

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IIRC, in this scenario, our solution was to "chunk" the query; rather than have the overhead of transport and execution of thousands of individual queries, we'd query for 1000 IDs at a time. Not ideal, but the rework of the code in question to move the selection logic onto the SQL Server was too much change to consume.

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I've not read the fine print, but it sounds like this is only an issue if you do something foolish involving linking SQL Server to Access.

Nobody in their right mind should be using Access as anything beyond a toy database, and the idea of creating a Frankenstein's monster of Access and SS gives me the shivers.

That said, it used to be possible to bring down the SQL Server process (I think it was SS 2005) simply by executing a query with too many discrete items in an IN clause (more than a couple of thousand IIRC) over ODBC, so something like the following:

SELECT * FROM Customers WHERE CustomerId IN (1, 2, ... 99999, 100000)

Of course it's a code smell to be writing a query like that anyway, but we had a need to do so due to a load of technical debt we couldn't do away with, and it took a while to work out why the connection to the database kept getting dropped in the middle of some heavy processing.

My money's on this issue being that old chestnut of an unchecked buffer overflow.

WTH are NFTs? Here is the token, there is the Beeple....

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My understanding is that the block, whilst existing on the blockchain, is essentially encrypted, and it is the key that is being sold. In my mind, if that block contains something illegal, then the illegal act would be owning, and using, the key

This is based on a rudimentary understanding of how Ethereum works, and IANAL, etc.

UK government resists pressure to hold statutory inquiry into Post Office Horizon scandal

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Re: Best way to start speeding this up

You weren't the one being pandered to then. You didn't vote for it, presumably because you're not a racist.

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Re: Statutory inquiry

Not all trials happen in front of juries. Some just have a judge, others have magistrates. It depends on the court, the severity and type of the case involved, and so on.

Here is what looks like a good explanation of when and how a jury is used:

https://www.inbrief.co.uk/legal-system/when-are-juries-used/

It is my understanding, that due to the complexity and perceived seriousness of these cases, they were all heard as "summary cases" in front of a judge, not a jury. IANAL, and I stand to be corrected, etc.

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Re: Statutory inquiry

On the other hand the barest research anybody would known a bug free system is virtually non existent unless done to military/nasa levels of definition and validation.

I wouldn't place too much faith in NASA's ability to verify software; in this case from a subcontractor, Lockheed Martin:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter

The primary cause of this discrepancy was that one piece of ground software supplied by Lockheed Martin produced results in a United States customary unit, contrary to its Software Interface Specification (SIS), while a second system, supplied by NASA, expected those results to be in SI units, in accordance with the SIS. Specifically, software that calculated the total impulse produced by thruster firings produced results in pound-force seconds. The trajectory calculation software then used these results – expected to be in newton seconds (incorrect by a factor of 4.45) – to update the predicted position of the spacecraft

Does the boss want those 2 hours of your free time back? A study says fighting through crowds to office each day hurts productivity

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Re: Who got the extra time?

Not having to commute doesn't necessarily mean you can't get that exercise. It just means you don't have to do it in a stressful environment, in traffic fumes.

Describing people who don't share your point of view as "zealots" is more than a tad polarising as well. Maybe dial that back a bit? Nobody is donning robes and marching with firebrands and pitchforks over the issue.

Yes, some people may enjoy their commute. I don't actually mind mine, since it is a 15 minute walk through not very busy streets. I recognise, however, that my situation is far from the norm. Most of my colleagues have to commute by bus, train, or cycle, through noisy, polluting and dangerous traffic. I seriously doubt many of them actually enjoy it. The buses here are expensive and overcrowded. The trains moreso, and the station is a good 30 minutes walk from the office. If you wanted to drive your own car in, you'd be looking at a queue for a car park and £20 for the privilege. None of this sounds like fun to me.

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Re: Who got the extra time?

I was with you, until you started talking about dual / treble 28" monitors. When I'm at work, I have to make do with the laptop monitor, which, whilst having a decent resolution, is pretty tiny, plus two 24" standard HD monitors. I would guess that if you're getting 28" monitors at work, they're going to be QHD or 4K, and you must be fairly high-up in the IT food chain to justify them. This means, you're likely to have more than enough space to have a decent set-up at home.

Personally, my monitors at home are better than the ones at work (2 x 24" QHD), and are shared with my own PC. I couldn't fit anything bigger onto my desk anyway, although I suppose I could stick another two on top if I could justify a need for them. I couldn't, and I doubt my work laptop could drive 4 external monitors, and even the somewhat overpowered graphics card in my own PC might struggle to feed 4 high-res displays.

As for "loss of productivity" from working from home, the studies I have read about have shown an increase in productivity. I've certainly been more productive without the distractions of an office environment (there's always that one guy who likes to make calls at a volume suited to calling sheep home from the next valley, right?). My wife's work (which is not in IT) has seen an increase in efficiency, despite the difficulties imposed by remote working. I guess it depends on what sort of business you are in as to whether being in the office is more productive or not. The cynic in me thinks that maybe those higher-ups who think offices are more productive are the ones who like to arrange a lot of meetings that could have been emails.

And this doesn't even take the commute into account; both my wife and I work about 15 minutes walking distance from our respective offices, and even that small commute has made a big difference to how we can plan our days, and given us back the time and energy to have a bit of our own lives back in the evenings.

Something went wrong but we won't tell you what it is. Now, would you like to take out a premium subscription?

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Re: Liar, liar, pants on fire

The bit of the network that goes into the pile of ash probably has a problem...

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It's not the programming language's fault that the "golden path" through your code (i.e. the one you want) is often swamped by handling of error conditions. There are just a lot of things that can go wrong.

For instance, take the simple case of calling a simple web service to get a piece of data, and writing it to disk. Here are just some of the things that can go wrong, that you really should have some way of dealing with, from start to finish...

- You have no network device available to make the HTTP request

- The web service host cannot be found

- The host is not responding

- The web service returns something other than 200 OK

- The reply is not formatted as expected

- The reply is truncated

- The target location in the file system is unavailable or does not exist

- The file cannot be created (disk full or permissions problem)

- The file cannot be written to

- The program runs out of allocated memory (perhaps the response was larger than your buffer. You did guard against a buffer overflow, right?)

Modern software often has to seamlessly coordinate between many services, remote and local, invisibly to the user, and handle it as gracefully as possible when something goes wrong. Quite frankly, if you aren't writing more error handling than actual code, then you're doing something wrong. OK, you might be able to gain some efficiency by extracting well error-wrapped functions and calling them repeatedly, so the calling code doesn't have to explicitly handle all the errors, but usually it still needs to do something different if that function fails.

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How sensible that approach is depends entirely on where those errors are coming from.

If, as has been my past experience, they are coming from some third-party PoS from a provider you are contractually obliged to work with, with no documentation, and various possible errors that mayor may not be descriptive, may include random chunks of JSON detailing at a technical level what was wrong (but embedded in a plain text error message), or entire call stacks, perhaps with a numeric error code, perhaps not, with no indication of how many different errors it is possible to experience, then there is approximately bugger fuck all you can do to handle them gracefully beyond your two choices of (1) tell the user an error has occurred or (2) scare the typical user shitless with a call-stack to the face.

I can think of two particularly egregious examples of this sort of error-spewing, in things I have had the misfortune to have worked with, in the last couple of years, off the top of my head.

UK.gov wants mobile makers to declare death dates for their new devices from launch

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Re: yet a great number still run older software with holes in their security systems

not in the broadband fashion of 'up to 5 years'

Don't even get me started on that particular egregious abuse of the English language for the purposes of marketing. Suffice it to point out that "up to" means any number less than, including zero.

So, "removes up to 100% of flakes" means "may do nothing", "up to 1GBPS" means "may have a transmission rate of zero", "up to 80% of correspondents loved it" means "everyone might have hated it", and so on.

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Poor Marketroids

The plans are likely to meet stiff opposition from device makers as end-of-life dates for devices are usually an open secret among the tech-savvy but stating them at the launch of a brand new bit of hardware is unlikely to be popular with manufacturers' marketing teams.

Somehow I'm failing to muster any sympathy for a group of people whose job involves being as wilfully misleading as humanly possible being forced to explore the concept of honesty.

God bless this mess: Study says UK's Christian beliefs had 'important' role in Brexit

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Re: Christian denominations in the country are now more likely to vote Conservative

And you believed they would get it, despite (A) the weasel words ("we could" == "we won't" in politician speak) and (B) the fact that the figures on the bus were easily debunked, and had been challenged publicly.

That sounds like wilful self-delusion to me. There may well be a correlation between that and religiosity...

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Re: Christian denominations in the country are now more likely to vote Conservative

Could it be that whichever firewall you are behind blocks Witter? Probably sensibly so, given the typical quality of "content" there.

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Re: I'm a leaver

Do you realise that you put both of the words "democracy" and "revolution" in the same sentence, apparently unaware of the irony inherent in doing so?

Revolutions may well be a way of getting rid of very corrupt, or dictatorial governments. Madame Guillotine springs to mind. One feature is that they are very rarely non-violent, and never democratic, and usually end up by replacing one regime with another that is equally abhorrent. They seldom end well for their instigators either, just ask Robespierre. If you can find his head.

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Re: I'm a leaver

Obvious to everyone else is how there seems to be plenty, even for Australia and New Zealand, who are COVID approx. nil.

The reason that Aus and NZ have very low COVID infection rates has absolutely fuck all to do with vaccination rates.

They locked down fast, and hard, and stopped the initial infection in its tracks. They closed their borders to all but essential travel, imposed proper quarantines and didn't downplay the seriousness of the situation. Lo-and-behold, by doing the exact opposite of right-wing libertarian governments, such as those in the US, UK, Brazil and India, they got the exact opposite result.

The fact that you are now trying to spin this into some point about the EU being bad because "vaccines" shows that you either have absolutely no grasp of the topic whatsoever, or, worse, are deliberately trying to mislead to bolster your own political agenda.

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Re: I'm a leaver

Because unless the people of europe can actually get rid of the people in charge then theres no point in having an EU, we may as well go back to what the boomers signed upto in 1975.... a cooperative trading organisation.

That's a bit of a strange argument, given that there's no system of representative democracy that I can think of where the public at large can arbitrarily get rid of their leaders, except by voting them out.

Think for a moment about the situation in this country, where we currently have an evolving scandal surrounding blatant cronyism and corruption, and the only person who can authorise a proper investigation into that corruption is the person in charge, who is refusing to do so. While we have a system where it is a combination of FPTP and politicians marking their own homework, I'd say that we as a country are far less democratic than the EU as a whole, where the parliament is elected by a system of proportional representation and operates on cooperation amongst a coalition of parties, rather than an elective dictatorship of winner-takes-all.

The Conservatives polled around 40% in the last general election, and as a result have absolute power to overrule the wishes of the other 60% of the voting population. If Labour had won the election, it would be no better. Unless we have a system where all groups are represented to some degree (including the odd seat for the right-right and far-left whackos) then we have a system where large swathes of people are disenfranchised.

The root of this problem is that British politics is in its nature adversarial, whereas to have proper government in the interests of all requires cooperation.

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Re: Christian denominations in the country are now more likely to vote Conservative

The problem with a lot of the graphs that were seen is that the age groups were quite large, especially dumping everyone at the top -end into "65+". The raw data is out there if you look hard enough, but there are few easy-to-find graphs of that data on google, which tends to be swamped with the most popular results.

The following, for instance, shows the dip of leave voting in the WW2 generation:

https://twitter.com/simonjhix/status/1062031782839758849/photo/1

I'm not sure how much I'd trust fitting a quadratic curve to the data, so it would be better to see the scatter plot as well, but there's only so much time in one day to go looking for these things...

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...followed by rage-induced downvoting...

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Re: Christian denominations in the country are now more likely to vote Conservative

People who go to church tend to skew older. [...] As did people who voted for Brexit.

Not strictly true, the "peak" brexit voting age was in the "baby boomer" generation. Those who were old enough to have actually experienced the horrors of war tended to vote against leaving the institution that was founded on the principle of cooperation to prevent the recurrence of those horrors.

It was the "me first" generation that grew up with full employment, affordable housing and upward mobility that chose to pull up the ladder behind them. They're also the same ones who like to go on about young people not trying hard enough when the only jobs available are zero-hours contracts and the gig economy, and the price of a house has gone up from 4 times the average person's salary to 20 times.

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Re: ... and the stunning victory for Boris Johnson's Conservative Party in the 2019 General Election

Johnson hasn't quite managed to rack up as many wives as Henry VIII, but he's certainly working on it. I dare say he has had more mistresses, with an unknown number of FitzJohnsons running around out there.

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Re: Lies, damned lies, and statistics...

It depends on how the figures are balanced. The Christian community in the UK isn't a 50:50 mix of Catholic and Protestant, is actually about 5:3 in favour of Anglicans.

Of course, the thing you have to remember, is that there are "lies, damn lies and statistics", and the figures quoted in this article probably come from some sort of opinion poll with a small sample size, uncorrected for selection bias, and a question along the lines of "which of the following did you consider when deciding how to vote" which has been massaged into these figures. The confidence interval is probably bigger than the actual figure.

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"rage-induced brexit"

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Re: I find myself saying...

Well, we could have stuck with a system that worked (the common market), but idiotic jingoism won the day on that one, and out political overlords decided to hoist an agreement on us that our own politicians didn't even get time to read properly before it got voted on. Is it hardly surprising that this agreement turns out to be a bad one, when it was personally negotiated at the eleventh hour by someone as dishonest and untrustworthy as Johnson?

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Re: I find myself saying...

Which is daft, and just shows that the new rules are designed solely to punish the UK, not to benefit people in the EU.

Which leads to the obvious question - why did we allow Johnson et al to negotiate such bad rules? Why did we allow May to dictate that we have to leave the common market and customs union? I didn't vote to quit, but many who did were told that we would get "business as usual" and remain in those institutions. The moment our politicians decided we had to leave them, they were signing us up to those rules, which were only new in the respect that they already existed but had previously not applied to us, as we weren't a "third country".

It's a fine example of the quitling "doublethink" whereby they wanted to leave the EU but retain all the benefits of being in the EU, and also "take control" of our borders, but also allow unchecked transmission of goods though those borders. The whole thing collapses in a nonsense of contradictions the moment you actually think about it rationally, but the decision to leave was an emotive one, not a rational one.

Won't somebody please think of the children!!! UK to mount fresh assault on end-to-end encryption in Facebook

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Re: One obvious problem with backdoors in end-to-end encryption......

You're thinking of the way Plod broke Encrochat.

They didn't decrypt the messages "in flight", they got them between being entered and encrypted by back-dooring the software (or similar, IIRC, it's "secret" how they did it). The court determined that the warrant they had for "data at rest" was sufficient.

https://www.theregister.com/2021/02/08/encrochat_court_appeal_ruling/

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Re: She's popular with Boris Johnson

One wonders why that might be.

When you're trudging around in a sewer, nobody is going to notice if you've got a bit of your own shit on you.

The degree of corruption in our current government means that if they were to single one minister out for special treatment correct oversight, they'd have to start applying it to all.

What's this about a muon experiment potentially upending Standard Model of physics? We speak to one of the scientists involved

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Re: Particle physicist touting for funding

We just need to crank the power up a bit before we get Vortigaunts and headcrabs.

Where did I put my crowbar?