Posts by Loyal Commenter

I'd put my washing machine on at night, except for two things: I have downstairs neighbours who almost certainly wouldn't appreciate it, and I don't fancy having my clothes go all smelly when I leave them in there for six hours before hanging them out.

Smart meters? Well, they don't do anything for energy efficiency (they don't magically make your fridge draw less power), and whilst they might allow you to see how much energy you are using, you can also do the same with cheap plug-in meters for your sockets. If you’re serious about actually saving energy, rather than just seeing the display (as a gimmick), just turn things off when you're not using them, and when it comes to replacing your appliances at the end of their life, look at the energy efficiency ratings of the new ones when deciding which to buy.

All the smart meters actually do is allow the energy companies to take readings (which takes five minutes to do yourself) and turn your power off remotely when it comes to winter brownouts. I may be being selfish, but I'd rather see my power stay on, so I don't end up having to throw away the milk in my fridge when the power goes off for four hours every night.

I'm basically deeply suspicious of smart meters when those promoting them claim they save you energy, or somehow make the energy you are using "greener", rather than being honest about what they do and are for.

Re: Is this Nvidia's pentium P4 moment

Since you can actually buy 500W fan heaters, 600W does seem a bit on the ridiculous side.

Even if they chose to undervolt these things and make the TDP a little less, they'd still blow the previous gen cards out of the water, so why they chose to make them this power-hungry is a bit of a question...

Re: Talking points

Yes, if you go far back enough, everyone came from Africa...

If you look at population movement on a more recent timescale than before the last ice age, such as the last couple of thousand years, you can see that some populations have pretty much stayed put, but most have mixed it up pretty well (Half of Asia being descended from Genghis Khan, for example). The UK is variously populated with Anglo-Saxons (from Northern Europe), Romans (from pretty much everywhere in the Roman Empire), Celts (from North-Western Europe), and so-on. There is no such thing as "Native British," especially if you look back to the last ice-age, when the most of the land mass here was covered in ice-sheet, so fairly slim pickings...

When it comes down to it, being "from" somewhere depends on where you draw a cut-off. Moved here? Born here? One parent born here? Both? Grandparents? Five generations? Ten? A hundred? They're all artificial distinctions, used to draw a line between "us" and "them". Just because we evolved to form tribes of a few hundred individuals, doesn't mean we need to carry that mindset through into the future. I've met enough people from various different cultures to observe that people are people wherever they're from, and to also observe that those most likely to be fearful or distrustful of "the other" are also likely to be those who have met the fewest of them, such as people from tiny villages that are 100% white and where there are only two surnames, being shit-scared of immigrants, even though the only ones they've ever met are their cleaners.

Recent polls put Labour with a supermajority and the Liberal Democrats as His Majesty's Loyal Opposition.

Close, but the most recent calculations from Electoral Calculus actually makes the SNP the Opposition, which would be interesting, to say the least. This is due to the inherent unsuitability of FTPT as an electoral mechanism...

It's worth noting that, if the last election had been run using PR, we'd probably currently have a Lab/Lib/SNP coalition government, because between them, they got more votes than the Tories, but FPTP, being an "all-or-nothing" mechanism disproportionately favours the party that can get one more vote than all the others in a constituency, and the rest get no say or representation.

Re: Talking points

I hate to break it to you, but there is no such thing as a "native" in the UK. Every single person who lives here either immigrated, or their ancestors did, at some point in history (or prehistory). We actually are, literally, a nation of immigrants.

The US, on the other hand, does have indigenous people. Not that you treat them very well...

If you mean "born here", then the new PM was.

Anyway, there's no reason to care about the colour of his skin, or his "ethnic origin". There are plenty of genuine reasons to hate him, based on his political views, and actions, such as, to pick a random example, boasting about taking money from poor communities and diverting it to rich ones.

Hmmm, splash out several hundred quid on a VR headset to get more monitor space, or... Press Alt + Tab?

Re: an eye-watering $177 billion has been invested in the metaverse since 2021

If you're talking about AR, there might be a use for it (HUD while driving, for instance). That's not Zuckerberg's "metaverse" though, which seems to be a pointless VR exercise.

Re: So it really was the next 3DTV?

If you're spending an hour a day (one sixteenth of your waking life) *ahem* "enjoying the merits of pornography," you may have a problem, and I can assure you, this is not even remotely normal, even for a teenage boy (who is unlikely to have the several hundred quid available to, err, "splash out" on this).

Re: Gartner

... and attending a concert virtually would be fun...

What form would that take, though? Detail rendering of other people at the concert? Virtual tall bloke blocking your view? Or just a render of the band on stage? Because I can assure you, the computing power needed to do that convincingly far exceeds that which can be found, and is ever likely to be found, in a head-worn sweat box.

The basis for comparison that I am using is the "holographic" ABBA show in London. The rendering for the *cough* "Abbatars" *cough* is very impressive, but not entirely convincing (still in the "uncanny valley"), and that very obviously took an expensive rendering farm some time to generate, at a fixed angle of projection.

Unless you're happy to settle for being in a virtual version of the Dire Straits' "Money for Nothing" video, I'd move along...

Re: Gartner

Exactly, and how many people do you know who might possibly be interested in VR porn? In an age when pretty much anything you can think of is freely available, often for free, on the internet, who is going to make the "investment" on a VR headset for the occasional five minutes of "alone time" in their bedroom? Not even teenage boys are going to buy into this bullshit. And if rule 34 doesn't apply, it doesn't belong on the internet.

Re: Obvious solution

The man had a lot of political wisdom:

“On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."

"Odd," said Arthur. "I thought you said it was a democracy."

"I did," said Ford. "It is."

"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't the people get rid of the lizards?"

"It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."

"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"

"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."

"But," said Arthur, going in for the big one again, "why?"

"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in.”

Re: Obvious solution

Not really, Johnson took advantage of the myriad weaknesses of the current system, primary amongst them is that the system is based on unwritten rules, trust and honour

It's primary flaws are that it is elected by FPTP and not PR, so is not representative, artificially amplifying small majorities, and failing to represent significant minorities, that the rules are either based on convention, or are arcane (such as not being able to call another member a liar even when they are clearly lying), and that it is fundamentally an adversarial system, and not one of cooperative government, as you would get in a coalition of parties in a PR-elected system. This leads to the system of Whips where MPs are expected to vote along party lines, and not in the interests of their constituents, or the country, so there's no real representation at all of public opinion in parliamentary votes, with the results pretty much dictated by the leader of the party in power.

Let's not get onto the "upper house" and how anti-democratic that is.

There are plenty of parliamentary systems around the world that do not suffer the same problems as ours. It is only our own insular parochialism that prevents us from learning from them.

Re: If a mistake is bad enough ...

You may be surprised to hear it, but lettuces do very well as a winter crop, as long as they're protected from a hard frost and the ground isn't frozen, and if you'd planted a seedling a month ago, it would be doing much better than any Tory MP right now...

Which reminds me, I really do need to sow some for this winter...

Re: If a mistake is bad enough ...

The current neologism is "Trussterfuck"

Re: If a mistake is bad enough ...

We'd be lucky to be on deck, it's predicted that this winter, metaphorically speaking (as I often do), about half of the population will be the ones locked down in steerage, drowning.

Re: If a mistake is bad enough ...

Is he though? Raving fruit loops like Doris and Re-smog and whoever that guy who was hanging around in the lobby of The House yesterday might be very vocally supporting him, but he needs the support of 100 MPs to get on the ballot, and the word is (or so I have read) that he may well have fewer than 25 MPs supporting him.

Of course, if he does get on the ballot, and somehow get re-elected, there are also rumours that there is a group of MPs who would split from the Conservative Party if this were to happen. That would lose the Conservatives their majority in the House of Commons, so they'd be trying to operate as a minority government. I can't see any path there that doesn't lead to a general election, and the Tories are currently polling at 30 or more points behind Labour, the latest poll to be published puts them on 14% to Labour's 53%.

Of course there are always provisions; that poll was commissioned by GB news, which is hardly a reliable and unbiased outfit, so it could well be open to people gaming it, and Labour historically have been over-represented in opinion polls compared to the result when votes are actually cast. However, the meta-polling is more reliable, and almost as damning, and that would be one hell of a new-leader bounce for the Tories not to be all but wiped out in the next election. The most recent predictions from Electoral Calculus have the SNP as the party in opposition, with the Tories in third place. This is, of course, an artefact of the appalling first-past-the-post system, but the Tories only have themselves to blame for continuing to support (and promote) that anti-democratic system.

Truss's approval ratings might have been in the drain, but Johnson's weren't exactly positive when he was forced out. The public reaction is much more likely to be "once bitten, twice shy," than "oh goody, more Boris please".

Of course, there are still some crazies about parroting "bring Boris back". You see them pop up on the comments on YouGov polls (themselves a right-wing venture, created by a Tory MP), to a flurry of downvotes and very sparse up-votes. Shouting it loudly doesn't make it public opinion, just like chanting "high growth economy" doesn't make one appear from thin air, as Truss has discovered. Time to put away the magical thinking, methinks, and follow the examples of what works; grow an economy by strategically investing during a recession, not by cutting taxes for the rich, and swiping the ground out from under the feet of the working poor, who are the actual foundation of a functioning economy (because they spend their earnings on essentials, and don't extract the money from the economy by squirrelling it away in tax havens).

We're due a Labour government soon. Probably not soon enough, and they'll have a hell of a job to repair the damage 12 years of Tory austerity cuts, pork barrels, corruption and incompetence have done, but hopefully things will stop getting worse.

The only glint of light here, is that those who have screwed up so badly are the hardcore brexiters, and with any luck their demise will also signal the end of that shit-show as well.

Re: The National Health Service

And that's not the fault of the NHS, which would provide those services if adequately funded, and, averaged out over the population, at a lower cost than it would cost privately, because no profit is being extracted.

Put simply, x + profit > x

Something is ALWAYS going to cost more if profit is added on top, because if profit ever becomes negative on an essential service, there is always a tax-payer bailout.

Don't blame the NHS, blame the greedy so-and-sos who want to extract that profit, and who are trying to force the NHS into such a model by starving it of funding (per-capita funding of the NHS is going down, along with pretty much all other public services, taxes are going up, something doesn't add up, but by observation, the number of billionaires is also going up...)

Re: The "half click" and related moves

...even the "beige box" PC I owned in the '90s had a case made from powder-coated steel...

Re: The "half click" and related moves

The last computer I owned of any sort (games consoles aside) that had a plastic case was an Amstrad CPC 464*. Every single desktop PC I have ever owned, including the current one, which was built into a brand-new full-height case about 18 months ago (water cooling heat-sinks and fans take up quite a lot of space), has had a metal case.

Laptops might be considered somewhat differently, as they often have a plastic shell, but this is almost always screwed onto a metal chassis that holds the internal components in place.They don't even really have a case, to speak of.

*The closest modern piece of kit to this that I own is a Raspberry Pi 400, which, admittedly, is in a plastic case. It's also smaller than an average keyboard, and it would be a silly thing to make from metal...

Re: "a black hole does it"

Yes, yes, of course, you are the expert here, and Professor Brian Cox is an idiot. For saying something I'm pretty sure he didn't say anyway. Show me on the naked singularity where the bad man touched you.

Let's not even start with the contradiction in terms you have in your first sentence, eh? I'm not sure how something can pass by if it has been swallowed...

Re: point of order

sQL dOEsN't CARe abOUt YOuR keYwOrD CApitALiSaTIOn

Midnight? Must be a school night then, I guess.

Re: Queuing at midnight...

Anything tech-related that is released at midnight, in limited numbers, so that people have to queue for it, is subject to artificial scarcity, and price-gouging. I've yet to see an example of this where waiting a month wouldn't have either got you one cheaper, or not at all, in which case it is almost certainly something you don't need.

If you're a magpie and simply must have the latest "shiny" then more fool you.

You spelt Ticketbastard wrong.

Re: If people in the 1960s knew what computers and the Internet did to our freedom

The "C" in "CPS" is indeed well known to stand for "Clown".

"Doubleplusungoodspeak," I believe.

Re: End-to-end-encryption (aka E2EE).....but citizens do not have to rely on service providers!!!

If the source is open source, it can be inspected. Vulnerabilities can be found, It's about as much trust as we can expect.

The "Ken Thomson Hack" (which is what that link was to, for those who didn't want to follow random links), is, thankfully, targeted. In the classic case, it replaces the Unix login command. It does nothing if you amend your kernel source sufficiently to use a completely different named command to log in; well, the "worst case" is that it adds the back-doored login command, which shouldn't be there, and would stand out.

The point here, is that the attacker in this case must know something about the target (the attacker being Ken Thompson, and the target being the Unix kernel).

If you take a reference implementation of an encryption cipher, change function names, refactor bits here and there, and so on, to mix the code around enough so that it still does the same thing, but looks different, then the "hack" must be able to identify the right bit of code to modify. In practice, being able to pull this off is vanishingly unlikely.

So we are left with, "do we trust reference implementations." I guess the answer here is that you have to learn enough about the code that you can at least identify what each part of it is doing, and how it does it. Any back-door should stand out like a sore thumb. In practice, if this was happening, the odds are it would already have been found.

Re: End-to-end-encryption (aka E2EE).....but citizens do not have to rely on service providers!!!

Why not just use some reference implementations (for which you have the source code), using certified pairs of public/private keys to encrypt your communications.

Sure, doing encryption properly is hard, but it's not so hard you can't copy a reference implementation.

Of course, you have to trust your compiler.

If your argument is that CP shouldn't be illegal if it has been copied from other CP, then you might have a bit of a logic flaw there. It doesn't matter what generation that copy is, if the original image is of actual child abuse that has actually happened. There is a victim at the end of that chain you are holding; it doesn't matter how long the chain is, the victim is still there.

As I said, if there is no victim at then end, then the arguments about sponsoring abuse don't hold, up in the same way, and I think there is an argument that people seeking out such images aren't necessarily causing harm in the same way, although I also think that they need psychiatric treatment. Whether or not you consider such thoughts and desires as a mental illness comes down, I suppose, as to whether you think child abuse is socially acceptable.

There is an argument that, in possessing such images, the possessor is creating a "market" for their creation, and is thus also responsible for the abuse, in the same way that wanting to buy a lampshade made of human skin would necessitate the procurement of such skin.

Personally, I would subscribe to such an argument. Records or products of illegal actions should, themselves, be illegal goods.

Where the line is less clear, is where (thanks to one T. May), images that are entirely synthetic (such as cartoon images) depicting such abuse are also illegal to possess. I would suggest that psychiatric treatment, rather than criminalisation, of individuals who seek these out, might be a better societal good, although the whole discussion is, to be fair, not one I really want to have, or advocate for on either side.

Re: Much more difficult for abusers to get away with it nowadays

And we abolished the very serious problem with racism in the 1950s and 1960s.

Spoken as a true white person.

FWIW, I'm white too, but I can listen when I hear friends with different skin tones to my own relate tales of the very real and systemic racism that still goes on today. If anything, it’s on the rise again. I think you might be a little premature in using the word "abolished" there.

Re: If people in the 1960s knew what computers and the Internet did to our freedom

I've been to the STASI museum in Berlin (in the well-preserved STASI headquarters), and seen the production-line of industrial-grade steamers used for opening pretty much everyone's mail. The story is as old as time, only the medium is new.

Re: If people in the 1960s knew what computers and the Internet did to our freedom

...I'll just add to that, that I reckon most "volunteers" here have no interest in seeing things through to court. If you've ever had any sort of contact with the court system, you'll know what an absolute ball-ache it is. If you go after a paedophile, and by some chance, manage to gather enough evidence for it to be taken seriously by the police, and for the case to get a positive charging decision by the CPS (the bar here is a for it to have a realistic prospect of conviction based on the evidence), the next thing that is going to happen is for you to give your "inconvenient dates" for the next 18 months or so, whilst they try to arrange a court date where all the witnesses, barristers, police, etc. etc. can attend.

Once a date is agreed, you will have to make yourself available, probably for several days.

You will probably have to travel (travel costs reimbursed, and lost earnings up to only a certain level). Any work commitments you might have, are moot to the court, if you don't want to go to court, you will be summonsed, even as a witness. Depending on where the crime was committed, you could be travelling across the country to spend several days in a Travelodge in the arse-end of nowhere. Of course, you won't be able to while away any free time talking about the case to anyone. That is explicitly forbidden. You are going to be very bored.

The odds are that the trial will last several days. You might not be needed for all of those days, but you probably won't know which days until the trial starts, so you'll probably have to make yourself available for a whole week. Possibly more.

Then there's a fair chance, with the backlog and overwork in the courts system, that the trial will get adjourned due to sickness, other trials overrunning, or unavailability of other witnesses, and you'll have to go through the whole process again, possibly multiple times. At some point, the whole thing might fall through and the CPS will make a choice to drop the case.

I know all of this, because I know someone whose job it is to try and coordinate witnesses for trials, and get to hear exactly how much of a pain in the arse the whole system is, largely due to chronic underfunding.

Re: Illegal speech???

Would the person who down-voted that like to explain to me why they think threats of violence, fraud, and slander are free speech? Alex Jones has just found out, to his great expense, that you are wrong.

What is notable about the US constitution is that it enshrines free speech in constitutional law, so that a citizen of the US knows that is they say something that isn't explicitly forbidden by law they won't be done for it. To be fair, that is kind-of stating the obvious, because in most democracies that is a given, as is, by extension, the right to protest.

We are a long way from the old French system of law, where only those things that are explicitly permitted are allowed.

Every time she opens her mouth, the air in the room starts rushing into the void inside her head, but not quite loudly enough so that you can't make out her cry of, "I am genuinely unclear"...