* Posts by Loyal Commenter

5761 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jul 2010

Tech ambitions said to lie at heart of Britain’s bonkers crash-and-burn Brexit plan

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...and that film was supposed to be a parody. Somebody had better tell Ripper Johnson.

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And our precious vital bodily fluids.

Remember kids, drink only rainwater and grain alcohol!

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Alien

Re: Typing error in the article

Ack! Ack ack ack! Pew pew pew!

Sorted.

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Re: Well it's kind of a good idea but...

There's also the argument that certain industries have high start-up costs because they need massive infrastructure investments. Things such as large-scale manufacturing of commodities like steel, mining, bulk chemical refining and processing, stuff like that. Not anything IT-related, which at best needs data centres.

India flies Mach 6 scramjet for 20 whole seconds

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To be fair, the Bhopal tragedy would be best described as corporate manslaughter, rather than murder. This is not to diminish it, just to give it its rightful name. Those responsible should have been held to account. Whether it is still possible to do so 36 years later, or to even trace the lines of accountability, is another matter. I suspect a complex web of accountability, both in India, and the US, shrouded in secrecy and cover-ups.

...not to mention that the guy at the top of the chain at the time, is now dead...

edit - worth nothing that if you read the wiki article on it, "not paid for" presumably doesn't include the $470M out of court settlement made by UCC. Arguably not enough, yes, but also not, "not paid for".

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Gang rape was a tool used by higher castes to keep lower castes in check. Rapes of lower-caste women have occurred with impunity for centuries.

I'm not claiming that it's not a problem, it obviously is. The caste system is obviously wrong, to the eyes of an outsider. For an Indian, they may be able to make strong arguments for it (I've not heard any).

But do you know what? Other countries have, or have had in recent history, equivalents by other names. Apartheid, class systems, religious and ethnic segregations of all sorts. You only have to look at the Balkan conflict in the '90s to see the near equivalent, with widescale gang-rape of minority Bosnian Kurd women used as part of the "ethnic cleansing". I think it's fair to say that it goes on in pretty much every conflict zone throughout history. It doesn't make it right, of course not, but it also doesn't make it a uniquely Indian problem in either nature or scale. It could be argued that the real issue here is actually of lawlessness, and not the acceptability of such actions.

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To add a little to my initial response in this thread, and take the criticisms of the OP point by point:

incapable of educating, housing and feeding the masses

Here in the UK, we have a growing homeless population, and increasing number of people reliant on food banks to feed themselves. We have a "benefits" system with "sanctions" that has resulted in vulnerable adults starving to death in recent years. Yes indeed, this may not be on the scale of the problems in India, but we are supposedly a developed nation, and India are developing.

protecting females from mass gang rapes

I really don't want to minimise this problem, I actually feel quite strongly that it is something that should be tackled as robustly as possible (needless to say this doesn't include mob violence as an answer as has happened in some instances). It is, however, not uniquely an Indian problem, although it sounds like the scale of the problem there may be incomparable to that elsewhere. This is, of course, the sort of thing that international development can help with.

female infanticide

Again, this is a serious cultural problem, but let's not kid ourselves that it only occurs in India. There's this other big country right next door with a similar, if not greater, problem.

widespread police and political corruption

Well, you could say this about many, many countries. What about political corruption in the UK? Police corruption (and racism) in the US? Russia? Belarus? China? It's very easy to pint the finger at elsewhere, and say, "look how corrupt their politicians are" whilst not noticing corruption at home, because one of the things the corrupt do effectively is to suppress domestic opposition, through control of the media, and silencing of opposition. What is, to our eyes, obvious corruption elsewhere may not even be visible to the people living in that country.

wide scale sectarian and religious prejudice

Without even getting into the history of Christianity in Europe (and even the foundation of the good old tea-and-biscuits CofE is soaked in blood), you'd have to be blind to think this is unique to India. How about the fact that it is next-to-impossible to enter politics in the US without openly professing belief in some deity? How about ethnic cleansing of Uighur Muslims in China? I won't list all the places where religious conflict is actively taking place today, because it's a significant part of the planet.

Of course, the ever closer fusion between state and state religion in India is concerning, just as it is in Turkey, or in Russia. As a secular Humanist, it's worrying prevalent across the world. But again, not just India, is it?

My point wasn't that India doesn't have issues - it does - it was that many of the criticisms that are being levelled at India apply equally elsewhere, and India is a big ol' country - so criticism of one part shouldn't be used as an argument against the country as a whole. FWIW, I think there are many legitimate criticisms of India's government, and without getting drawn into foreign politics, I think Modi is an arsehole. But then again, so is Johnson, so is Trump, so is Putin, so is Xi, so is Bolsanaro, so is Erdoğan, et al. Criticism against India on those grounds is no more valid than criticism of almost any country.

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Actually, I'm pointing out that, for instance, the US has a long standing and widespread serious problem with racism, and that, when raising the issue of political corruption, those in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. Just today, for example, we have a senior civil servant resigning because our government wants to break international law by reneging on an international treaty that is less than a year old, and the civil service code prevents him from being party to this.

I'm not trying to minimise the issues that India has, but at the same time, we should be putting our own house in order before we go about casting criticism about those overseas. It's probably worth noting as well, that whilst the term "widespread gang rape problem" is alarming, and is indeed something that should be tackled, it is not unique to India, any more than widespread racist violence, or police brutality is unique to the US. Flippantly casting aspersions on a whole nation of well over a billion people because of various social, cultural, and political problems that exist in that country is at best counterproductive.

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Re: Amazing.

Shock horror - a country with a population of 1.3Bn can afford a space program, and one with a pop of 65M can't. What do you mean we could join up with the other 450M people in the EU and take part in the ESA but sheer pig-headedness stops us from doing so (any more)?

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The astute amongst us might notice that several, if not all, of those criticisms could be equally well levelled at supposedly "civilised" countries.

"What do I think of Western civilisation? I think it would be a very good idea." - Mahatma Gandhi (possibly apocryphal)

I'm not saying that India doesn't have problems that are uniquely Indian (the caste system and "untouchables" springs to mind), but at the same time, Britain has uniquely British problems (such as political corruption and undue influence of tax-exiles who control the right-wing press), and the US has uniquely American problems (race riots, widespread and almost comic-book political corruption, late-stage capitalism funnelling all the money into the hands of a tiny minority, etc.)

As Amazon pulls union-buster job ads, workers describe a 'Mad Max' atmosphere – unsafe, bullying, abusive

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Re: Well the

It's worth noting that most chocolate manufacturers at the time, for various reasons, were Quakers. They were effectively socialists, the sort of people that Trump would be trying to classify as terrorists today.

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Re: Well the

If you know of people who are doing that, I would strongly encourage you to report them to the authorities. I'm pretty sure docking people's wages for food and lodging, without their consent, or ability to choose otherwise, is an offence under the Modern Slavery Act 2015

edit - I'll just add that if the accommodation provided does not have the degree of privacy that normal rented accommodation would have, i.e. its own front door, separate from the business, and consists of a sleeping area shared with others, then an offence is almost certainly being committed.

Brexit border-line issues: Would you want to still be 'testing' software designed to stop Kent becoming a massive lorry park come 31 December?

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Trollface

Re: Phantom Brexit Downvoter

Oh no, you looked into the mirror and said his name five times!

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Re: Phantom Brexit Downvoter

I think he has two accounts, so he can downvote you twice. If he gets your number, you get mysterious downvotes on comments that are nothing to do with the 'B' word at all.

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Re: Err...

To be fair, despite all the misinformation flying around, those touting the leave campaign were pretty clear that we wound;t be getting a "no deal" exit. What people was sold was pretty much business-as-usual. Really all you can tell from the 59:41 result in Kent is that 59% of the people in Kent didn't realise that they were being lied to.

It's a bit unfair to blame the people who swallowed the lies - that's a bit like blaming a domestic abuse victim for getting beaten up because the guy was charming and nice to start with. As with domestic abuse, the perpetrator is the one in the wrong. We should be aiming the blame firmly at the liars and cheats who got us into this mess, who, like the proverbial DV perp have already run off with the money.

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Re: re: Change Freeze?

Don't worry, there's plenty of opportunity to fit a few new months in between November and December.

Boristebruary?

Vladimarch?

Donaldtember?

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Re: Time to stockpile tar and feathers. There'll be a need for them on Jan 1st.

If recent history is anything to go by, the government will spaff another £100M of taxpayer's money into a propaganda public information campaign telling us exactly whose fault it is. We should open a sweepstakes on the likley target now.

Who will it be? "Lefties"? "Remoaners"? The EU? Maybe that old favourite, "illegal immigrants"? Or perhaps single mothers? They've not had a good go at them since the '90s (and if you've been paying attention, some of those same far-right faces keep turning up, eh John Redwood).

Never underestimate the Tory party's ability to turn the people against each other while running off with the cash.

Everything's falling apart. The Moon is slowly rusting up – and it's probably Earth's fault

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Re: "1.5x10^27 oxygen particles [..] annually"

Well, yes, possibly ozone, but the thing is that O3 isn't terribly stable stuff, and any sort of appreciable knock (like being hit by a solar particle hard enough to spang* you out of orbit) will almost certainly cause it to decompose to O2 and the O. radical.

Also, ozone only makes up 0.00006% of the Earth's atmosphere, compared to O2's 20%

*once again, I'm certain this is the technical term.

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Coat

Re: But...

Yes, but as any fule kno, the moon is just a flat dish that $deity dangles around on a really long bit of string above the flat surface of the Earth. (s)he could just have put a bit of rust on there to test your faith...

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Re: "1.5x10^27 oxygen particles [..] annually"

Why didn't they say molecules? Is the word not hip any more?

Technically, they would most likely be molecular ions. I'm not sure whether the solar wind would knock an electron off O2, or slap one on (I'm sure those are the technical terms), but my guess is that they're either free O2+ or O2- ions being carried in the Earth's magnetic tail.

Edit - They may have used the term "particles" because there could also be a mix of other oxygen species in there, including neutral O2 molecules, O. radicals, and O- and O2- ions in varying amounts. It all depends on exactly how much of a battering those poor oxygen molecules are getting up there.

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Re: It's 2020

I thought that was supposed to happen in 2019, or did Netflix get it wrong again?

Mate, it's the '90s. You don't need to be reachable every minute of every hour. Your operating system can't cope

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Re: Perhaps

I don't know about others, but if my boss has an urgent email that needs my attention in a less-than-a-day timescale, he will have made sure I know about it via a more immediate means. Like I'm sure many organisations do, we have IP telephony and IM though both Skype and Teams (which as far as I can tell appears to be a re-badged dumbed-down version of Skype formulated purely so that Microsoft can sell the same thing twice to unwary businesses).

For the same reason you wouldn't hammer in a nail with a screwdriver, or drive in a screw with a lump-hammer, you shouldn't be using email for things that you want to be immediate. It's not the right tool for the job.

You *bang* will never *smash* humiliate me *whack* in front of *clang* the teen computer whizz *crunch* EVER AGAIN

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Gimp

For a moment there, I thought your reference was to Aleister Crowley. He would probably have tried to have sex with it before smashing it up though...

Gimp icon, because we don't seem to have a Great Beast one...

We've heard some made-up stories but this is ridiculous: Microsoft Flight Simulator, Bing erect huge skyscraper out of bad data

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Alien

I heard a rumour that the planes in the game could spray chemtrails IN REAL LIFE!!11!!1eleventyone!

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Coat

Re: Roof

I heard he was dead.

Oracle and Salesforce targeted in €10bn GDPR lawsuit backed by profit-making litigation fund

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Re: #insert princess_bride_clip014.jpg

Whenever I see "unctious" I immediately feel the need to start reciting random priest names...

Fr Spodo Comodo?

Fr Johnny Hellsapoppin?

Fr Stig Bubblecard?

etc. etc.

You had one job... Just two lines of code, and now the customer's Inventory Master File has bitten the biscuit

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Ah yes, bosses who have never heard of source control history, so think littering the codebase with dead code that shows up in code searches is a grand idea.

I got 99 problems, and all of them are your fault

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Re: "I removed the metal plate of the disk," said Luuk, "and pushed that in the diskette station."

Sounds to me like Luuk bullied the user

Sounds to me to be very much the other way round.

First rule of Ransomware Club is do not pay the ransom, but it looks like Carlson Wagonlit Travel didn't get the memo

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Just to add: I'm no Bitcoin evangelist, but they are a thing that exists (and they do kind-of have a purpose, although it's not one that will replace money in any meaningful way).

That genie is out of the bottle, and they are a tool that criminals can use, because although their value fluctuates wildly, they can be passed on for cash, and they are a lot easier to use for ransom than a suitcase of unmarked non-sequential bills, or bearer bonds, or diamonds, or whatever.

Getting rid of the means of payment won't get rid of the crime they are used in. if you go down that line of thinking, you might as well end up with the Dark Judges from 2000AD. All crime is committed by the living, the crime is life, the sentence is death.

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Care to point out anyone who actually does claim that cryptocurrencies are actually "legitimate currencies"?

Even if they were considered as such, I think your suggestion would have about as much effect as trying to stop football violence by declaring that football isn't a sport.

edit - I'll also point out that Bitcoin transactions are technically less anonymous than cash, since every transaction is recorded for posterity in the blockchain along with the sender and recipient's IDs. If you bother to google it, you'll discover that these have, in the past, been linked to people's identities and used in police operations to trace the movement of cryptocurrency. It's just that until you work out who those wallet IDs correspond to, they are anonymous.

Cash, on the other hand... Well, there's a reason there’s such a thing as money laundering, and there are many, many forms it can come in. If you found £20 on the street, could you tell where it had come from? And before that? Back to the point in time it was minted? Because you can with bitcoin. It's all there in the blockchain.

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Facepalm

A well thought-through bit of victim blaming you've come up with there. What have you got for a follow-up? Rape victims shouldn't dress so slutty?

Once considered lost, ESA and NASA's SOHO came back from the brink of death to work even better than it did before

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Fleck has spent nearly 28 years with SOHO and became emotional when discussing the eventual deactivation and safe disposal of the spacecraft, which will consist of a final uploaded command sequence.

I wonder if there is enough fuel left in those tanks such that, when the day comes, it can be pushed away from L1 and into the sun. It seems that it would be a fitting burial.

If the Solar System's 'Planet Nine' is actually a small black hole, here's how we could detect it... wait, what?

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Re: The thing about a black hole...

Because they accrete stuff, and that process is anything but black.

This we all know, but it's also worth pointing out that there is nothing particularly special about a black hole, in terms of its potential to accrete things, beyond its mass. For something planet sized, it's not going to accrete things any faster, or energetically, than anything else of the same mass, so it won't have any more of an accretion disk than, say, Neptune. Neptune, of course, was discovered because its gravitational effects suggested there was something there, and it could be seen, unlike something that is black...

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Re: Five to ten EARTH masses

Infalling stuff also needs to shed angular momentum, and I'm not sure how this happens.

Isn't that why black holes are not actually supposed to be 0-dimensional point singularities, but actually are hypothesised to end up as essentially 2-dimensional (very rapidly) spinning discs?

Of course, they could be anything inside the Schwarzchild radius. They could be entirely made of bees, and we'd never know, because none of the bees, or the information about their existence, could escape. Not even the increasingly frantic buzzing...

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Re: Five to ten EARTH masses

IIRC, the time dilation happens from the perspective of the black hole, not of the observer, so from the perspective of someone at the Schwartzchild radius, ignoring the fact that they would be strung out like spaghetti by the tidal forces and spat out as X-rays, they would never quite see themselves "fall in".

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Alien

"Well, the thing about a black hole - its main distinguishing feature - is it's black. And the thing about space, the colour of space, your basic space colour, is black.

So how are you supposed to see 'em?"

Alien icon, because we don't have (and really need) a Holly one.

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Re: Great just what I need in 2020

Careful now, you'll wake CJ

The reluctant log trawler: The buck stops with the back-end

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They should have been summarily sacked after the "Not important, it works." line. In many professions, the equivalent attitude would be considered to be criminally negligent.

ANY competent programmer who works with something that talks to a database knows about SQL injection flaws, and anyone who has ever learned anything at all about security knows that injection flaws are consistently number one in the OWASP top ten.

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Re: Fault at both sides

If you write a back-end that trusts input from the front-end, then you might as well just let your users type directly into your database. Actively assuming that untrusted input is hostile should be the default. Untrusted input being anything coming from anywhere that you do not have complete control over yourself (and which is properly encrypted if any sort of comms layer is involved).

Cool IT support drones never look at explosions: Time to resolution for misbehaving mouse? Three seconds

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That's why so many of them were made with rounded tops or, as seems to be the preferred design now, to stand upright.

I'm sure this leads to the problem of them being put on bookshelves with books blocking the vents on either side.

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Re: Switching on the "monitor stand"

Back in the days of CRT monitors in offices I Was once warned against Christmas tinsel bedecking monitors.

Something about static charge being gathered by metallic tinsel

I reckon the reason for that is the tendency for small metallic ribbons making their way into the monitor casing through the ventilation slots, and despite being plastic-coated, not being sufficiently so to prevent a high voltage short...

Faxing hell: The cops say they would very much like us to stop calling them all the time

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Re: I called the cops

Four! I mean five! I mean fire!

Health Sec Hancock says UK will use Apple-Google API for virus contact-tracing app after all (even though Apple were right rotters)

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The UK government last night confirmed it has aborted its ill-conceived coronavirus contact-tracing phone app – blaming protections and battery-saving restrictions in Apple’s iOS for its failure.

So basically, they're blaming Apple because Apple has built in safeguards into its OS to prevent apps hoovering up personal data about our movements and sending it to a bucket somewhere in AWS to be retained for 20 years by the data-harvesting companies behind the brexit fraud?

Now, I'm no fan of Apple, but to me it sounds like they are protecting us all from the very worst of unaccountable data fetishists.

Spending watchdog doubts UK is capable of managing Brexit and coronavirus info campaigns at the same time

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Re: Combined

Covfefe19?

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Abolition of slavery, trouncing the socialists in 2 world wars to the great benefit of the rest of the world and at heavy cost to ourselves.

For those who study history, those who successfully campaigned for an end to slavery in this country sat decidedly to the left of the political spectrum (The Whig party). You know, those socialists you (falsely) criticise in the very same sentence.

It's worth noting as well, that those we were fighting in the first world war were not socialists (and it was in large part a socialist rebellion within Germany that brought them defeat), and in the second world war, the National Socialist Party were not socialists, using the word in their party name in much the same way that the D in DPRK stands for Democratic. This is not in any way a disputed fact. We were also not the only combatants fighting the Nazis in WW2, and their defeat was arguably more down to the Soviet forces, people who originally actually did practise a form of socialism, but by that point had been mutated into Stalinism. Let us also not forget the millions of people from continental Europe who fought against fascism, and paid with their lives, after British forces were routed and sent packing at Dunkirk.

Basically, your historical revisionism displays not only your own ignorance, but a stunning lack of respect for those people who fought and died in those wars. You should be ashamed.

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You spelled Scotland wrong.

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Is that Tim Worstall the climate change denier, or is there another person who (unfortunately for them) has the same name?

I wonder if he's doing a nifty line in flat-earthism these days?

Legal complaint lodged with UK data watchdog over claims coronavirus Test and Trace programme flouts GDPR

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Re: So what's the problem?

There's a reason any sane person disables as many ad-trackers and cookies as possible, and that reason is to provide as little personal data as possible to the likes of Google and Facebook. Compared to governments, ad-spewers are relatively benign as they are only interested in profit. Governments have the power to legislate against their own people, and the thought of being tracked by the sort of people linked to Johnson, Cummings, Cambridge Analytica et al sends a shiver up my spine. Their interests almost certainly do not align with mine, in the same way that those of a reef shark do not.

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Re: Conspiracy time?

You missed:

5. Contracting the work out to a private company with no open tender process. A company which just happens to be linked with Cummings and his mates*.

6. Retaining data on people's movements for ten years with no clear rationale.

*The link between DC and the owner of this company, who is the brother of DC's other non-scientist mate who sits with him on the SAGE committee is publicly available information - I'm going on memory for the details here, so I'd encourage readers to look it up themselves.