Posts by Voland's right hand 5759 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Aug 2011
Alternative Facts?
It has never recovered from £1/€1.31
It is a BrExiter colored post-truth, please do not try to repaint and fix it. Leave it as it is so we can observe idiotism in all of its glory.
Like it or not what a GoveNocchio or Boris says, a BrExiter relays. Regardless of its veracity.
So realistically the biggest difference is with the EU servers
Let me fix that for you: The biggest difference is with EU GROCERIES for which staff has to pay. You, then, have to pay the staff.
Last time I checked groceries could not be located remotely and connected to over the Internet.
I do most of the shopping in our household and based on our supermarket bills the cost of basic groceries has gone up by ~ 20% since BrExit. This is a number off the top of my head. I can pull the actual numbers from my account, they will be of that order or worse.
What we should be ranting on about is all the prices of goods from say MS and Apple (and others) that went up quite sharply after the USD/GBP rate went south after the vote and why they have not revised
It is the cost of other goods. Basic groceries have gone up > 10% (or that is what the plot of my bills say). We have reached the point where you have to reflect this in the salaries or face a staff revolt. The inflation numbers for this year will not be pretty.
maybe FB is a front company
You are repeating Vladimir Vladimirovich. Literally. Which is Bullshit.
While F-Book, Google, etc have been connected at the hip with USA government agencies since GW Bush, they are not fronts. They are businesses in their own right which sell your data and productize YOU to the highest bidder. That highest bidder are usually commercial interests. Unless it is an election year...
Maybe we should have each "contributor's" name stencilled by the potholes their residue fills
Applause.
However, on a more serious note - it is an indicator that the council has f*** all money. It does not matter how many times the government robs Peter to pay Paul or how many pound notes undergo a pocket tennis movement from one pocket to the other. The economy does not look good and the potholes are one of the best indicators I know. I have survived through some seriously deep recessions outside Britain and you could literally get the real (not fictional presented by the government) economic metrics by the pothole size and more importantly depth.
First of all - do they have the pennies?
The amount of potholes at the moment reminds me of the worst years of Eastern Europe recession in the late 90-es and the failing local municipalities post-recession in the 2000-2007 or thereabouts.
The situation screams "no money" with a loudhailer.
All we need is to make the cars produce the same clouds of acrid fumes as the Mad Max rusty abominations Germany, Austria and France dumped into Eastern Europe during the same 1995-2005 period instead of recycling. Just do that and the picture will be complete.
Now, why there is no money and who is lying about it - you just need to listen to PM questions a couple of times.
Nobody is forced to have a Facebook account. If you do, accept the consequences of your choice.
I have never chosen to do it and I bet that there are several gigs of data on me.
Same as a lot of other people, I have been isolated by their algos from material posted by the users, analysed, categorized, named, correlated to postal addresses and GPS coordinates of my properties and made ready for consumption in their data feed.
They know where I live, they know where my kids go (despite none of them having a f***book account), they know what car I drive including its registration number, they know where I go on holidays, they know what I eat, they know what are my dietary requirements... Shall I continue?
If they have dumped less when you have given them a subject access request they were lying because this means that they have not dumped the full data which they can relate to you and only "your" data.
Take your pick as to which outcome you think more likely.
Azimov covers some of the possible outcomes in some of his stories. So it is actually "standoff according to Azimov". An example here will be the "Runaround" which explores a variety of the second scenario. I believe some of the others were covered as well.
No noticeable difference then.
There is a major difference.
You cannot court martial the AI, put it on the bench in Hague and kick the step from under its feet on the Nuremberg gallows.
While some countries have gone to extreme steps to ensure that their "own" murderers and war criminals never get step 2 and 3, as far as humans are concerned those steps are still out there. It is a pity we fail to apply them as often as we should. It is a pity we also make sure that any "fact collection" missions do not produce the material necessary for any of these steps.
When the AI will develop a neck for a noose to be applied, then there will be "no major difference". That is clearly not the case for now as nobody is responsible and it is a case of "Ai dunnit"
The current crop of AI or to be more exact machine learning/neural network stuff has a major issue for use in combat. It is guaranteed to just go "stupid" occasionally. Attaching it to anything that can fire is guaranteed to provide both blue on blue and civilian slaughter. It will only get worse and not better as "it improves" - it is mathematically guaranteed to throw an outlier once in a while.
When an image recognition algorithm calls black people gorillas it is offensive, but fixable. When the image recognition algorithm marks suntanned children and a parent with a beard as terrorists and exterminates them there is no fix for that.
IMHO it should be prohibited for combat military uses. Same as biological and chemical weapons.
My account got disabled too. I am Belgian with no links to Russia. I often criticise US wars which is probably enough to be classified as 'Russian propaganda'. The net result of Russia phobia is censorship and thought police.
Do not worry, it is coming here too. After all, even the "enlightened" El Reg readership refused to believe the fact that Boris and the USA government have known all along that Russia has lost the control of its chemical weapons tech and it is in mob's hands since 1996. It took 500 downvotes, 14 days after the original publication and a publication in the guardian* of a severely abridged and censored material for people to see the reality which is very simple: Do not seek Malice where Corruption will suffice. That is what describes modern Russia as a state best of all.
(*) 12 Days for the guardian - I sent it to them 2 days after the original print and they have not published the full original documents till this day. You have to read them in Russian on Scribd.
That sentence is interesting if we think of Brexit, truth did not help remain much at all while simple propaganda and slogans won.
That is actually a song from the same song-sheet. If you look at it, the a series of governments clusterf*cked itself lying constantly the preceding 15 years. Bliar (I believe that should be the correct spelling), Brown, Cameron +/- Cleggie. Every single one of them. Weapons of mass destruction, 45 minutes, Libya, the student fee promises, you name it.
So the fact that population stopped believing a single word when given facts was not to be unexpected. Same way as in Eastern Europe towards the end.
They also lied in the campaign too. Being honest and telling the whole Nissan factory in Sunderland: "You vote for it, your jobs will go to Pitesti and we will not have money in the budget to pay for your out-of-work benefits" would have gone a long way compared to the softy-softy waffle the Remain campaign produced for the referendum.
They are state-sponsored messages from a hostile country, aimed at sowing discontent and division. They are not open to debate or reason, and they are not "real" views.
1. We do that too. If you cannot stand the heat get out of the kitchen. For every one troll they have we have a million of Faux News viewers and Daily Beobachter readers to relay "our" message.
2. By banning them you create the perception that you are afraid of it and they may be saying something valuable. I have watched this one for nearly 20 years on the other side of the curtain. The population in the Soviet Block believed messages from abroad more than the local media because:
A) The veil of secrecy. You had to have access to classified material to know the truth - we are going full steam ahead in that direction. We see on average 3+ examples of lunacies in this direction on the Register per week. 2 so far this week - the fake cell towers in Washington and the secrecy requirements on drone takedown.
B) The fact that they are mostly spot on and the propaganda is clearly lying - we are going full steam ahead in that direction too. Do not even get me started on Boris or GoveNocchio lies per minute metrics. I will not even quote as just the last 7 days will make me run out of the rather generous Register post limit.
As I have said many times - we "have become" and Brezhnev and Suslov are giggling like lunatics from under their granite plates in the Kremlin wall. You can probably hear them on the other side of the Red Square by now.
I know where this leads and trust me - it ain't pretty. Been there. Seen that.
There are still, in every thread on any remotely contentious political topic, blatant Russian posts.
So? Censor anyone who does not spout blatant pro-Boris/May/Trump or god forbid Nuke-Head John Bolton trash? Sure. That is how dictatorships start.
Posts like that are HARMLESS· First of all, you can clearly identify them. Second, you cannot combat propaganda without seeing the material you are supposed to combat. Let them lay their cards on the table. Just like this rubbish about Western sponsored oligarchs in the post you linked to. Western sponsored my arse. Retired KGB, Army and Milicia uniting with organized crime - that is more like it.
The right way to combat propaganda is not to censor it - USSR tried that and we know the result. The right way to combat propaganda is with Truth. Every time we tried that it works. Every time we try to do a Boris instead it ends up as a clusterf*ck.
...and that its still 50 times less than you will get from prostate cancer treatment.
Who said you cannot overdose that. There are also next-generation "pin-point" radiation treatments like that one which resulted in the European arrest warrant for the couple which took their kid out of NHS hospital to take him to Czech republic to undergo it.
Those work in a similar manner to a CT - scan. Preprogrammed sequence of "points" which are hit by higher power radiation than you can manage using what NHS uses in most cases today(*). Program the step motors differently and you have a patient without vision or speech for the rest of their lives. Or just whack one of the deeper "ancestral" areas in the brain and terminate them altogether.
(*)After the really bad publicity they got that time NHS was negotiating to buy a couple of those
If they come back with anything, you request its deletion and confirmation that they have done so, and acknowledging that you specifically prohibit them from collecting or retaining data about you in future.
Sure. At which point they ignore you. I have a list of 47 (some of them major) recruitment agencies which have ignored this request waiting in my "todo list" for 25th May. GDPR Cometh. Prior to that, they will just smile and continue regardless while receiving a pat on the back for being good boys from the ICO.
With London to Sydney non-stop by twin motor possible in the next few years,
That is the exact driver here. I do not see a way of surviving a direct London-Sydney without with.
While you are not likely to see this arrangement on Eu-USA transatlantic, it will most likely sell very well on Eu-LatAm, Eu-Australia, USA-LatAm, USA-Austrlia and TransPacific which are becoming posisble with the extra-long range 350.
What's unreasonable about the flights?
Air France being Air France of course is the primary issue.
The secondary is that it requires a sleepover in either Paris or Amsterdam on the way out. The flight is too early to get there and connect. As a result the whole thing becomes astronomical in price for a family of 4.
That place got the equivalent of a nuclear strike courtesy of Hurricane Irma last year. There is no way in hell the government offices look like this only half a year after that.
More like this: https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/hurricane-irma/3/
Pretty bad run of bad luck for a very nice spot in the Carribean. It has been on my "radar" for a long time, unfortunately the only reasonable flights from Europe are Air France/KLM where "reasonable" is a definitive oxymoron.
I have said it time and again and I will say it once more. We have become. We have reached the point where the Moscow mayor needs to keep an exorcist on the payroll to deal with the constant giggles coming out of the Kremlin wall and Novodevichie cemetery.
One of the most prominent features of USSR was that anything and everything was classified and secret. People participating in meetings between USSR and USA at the time remember cases where USSR had to REMOVE members of its delegation out of the room because they did not have the correct access to material ABOUT the USSR brought in by the USA side. Well, what goes around comes around.
USA is practically there now and its most prominent ally (or should we say client state) policies are giving trouble to another mayor - the Berlin one. He is having to send a repair team to the grave of Comrade Honeker on a regular basis to fix the damage to the marble plate from him having a boner.
According to unreleased legislative text, terrorists have been using drones overseas to drop explosives overseas,
Should have thought twice before training Syrian Islamists to build drones to attack Russian bases. Time and again USA and the West in general fails to learn that the enemy of my enemy is NOT my friend. Doubly so if they are fighting on religious ground. Or as they say it in the Middle East: "Do not feed the rabid pariah dog, it will turn around and bite you anyway".
Though to be fair, it was only a matter of time until this genie would have come out of the bottle anyway. This still does not excuse the idiot who decided it is a good idea to uncork it.
Not to mention Northerners.
You forgot the sarcasm tags. Next time make sure you put them in for the humour deprived.
The best British software developers I have worked for have been from the North. While Maggie did an excellent job trying to eradicate the culture there, they can be relied upon to get a job done till this day.
If there is an issue it is with Southerners. It is Kent where there are state schools where half of the children do not know their father, the other half occasionally go to visit him in jail. Not the North. By the way - do not shoot the messenger - I am literally repeating a quote from a teacher there.
the rest can go cause trouble elsewhere and stop turning our schools into danger zones of gang warfare.
That just makes the warfare worse. I suggest you do some reading on the dispossessed/orphans after WW1 and the steps which countries in Europe had to take to prevent them from being gang child soldiers. In fact, half of modern pedagogic has been developed in that environment. Well run state schools have proven to be the best instrument in taking these kids off the streets and making them normal members of society.
get free healthcare and education?
Healthcare - not a chance. We have had to take guests from abroad into a local hospital or GP Practice. The amount of pestering you get until you show up an Eu passport or other means which entitle you to free healthcare border on obnoxiousness at the moment.
Education - I do not quite see what is the advantage in attending what is one of the worst primary school education systems in Europe. Due to mine and my parents' travel I have seen 4 different education systems. Out of them the British one is clearly the worst. The lowest level of achievement by completion of primary and secondary school. The highest level of stress to children throughout. The highest possible inconvenience to parents. And last, but not least - the highest cost of additional expenses to get your offspring to some resemblance of a proper education standard. By the way - do not shoot the messenger here - in addition to my rather biased opinion this is the official rating British School Education gets from several independent comparisons run across Europe by various international organizations. In fact, their opinions are way more scathing than mine.
It's not as if Google doesn't scrub even more..
Sure it does. It, however, supplies a different delivery system as part of the package.
In theory, you can do with Google ads what you do with Facebook. In practice it is not used because it is very clear for the user that it is ads. Now... if... Google... agrees to deliver per-user targeted search adjustment based on political terms. That's a thought...
will any Politicians finally realize just how insidious 'internet tracking' really is,
Nope.
They still do not realize the level of tracking. They still do not realize all of the consequences. What they love is the result of it for them - the amount of leverage and precision in targeting it gives them during elections. Like it or not, Zuk has become indispensable for them.
None of them will risk a "total nuclear disarmament" so they will look for "half a Zuk", "limited arsenal of Zuk", "no intermediate range Zuk" or at least a "deterrent Zuk". Any one of these is still more than enough to exterminate the democracy as we know it and facilitate the rigging of any election.
I would be more worried that they were being operated by the US government.
Which is the case.
In order to operate an IMSI catcher and not trigger a whole raft of alerts on the phone you have to integrate into the network. You have to have the correct crypto keys. These in 2G and 3G use symmetric encryption and you have to talk to the mobile network core to fetch them. I forgot what 4G does, but I suspect it is even stricter.
If a foreign power is successfully operating cell tower infrastructure this means that the networks of one or more mobile operators are hacked completely. The possibility that this has happened is significantly more worrying than the idea of mythical cell towers.
have no automatic right to stay.
Do you realize that the reciprocity of this means the whole Daily Mail reading pensioner brigade from Costa Del Crime and Costa Del Swamp (Fuerteventura) and Costa Brava (Lansarote) and Costa Whatever (it is called in Paphos) being shipped home? On average, they have 2+ conditions per head which need permanent care from the NHS. We are currently paying Spanish, Portugese, Cypriots and Bulgarians to do that and there it is CHEAP or RIDICULOUSLY CHEAP.
Do you think that the UK economy is capable of absorbing 800K+ of such pensioners from warmer climes while at the same time losing the tax revenue from 3M of productive population we send them back?
Personally, from an utterly selfish standpoint, I should applaud your idea - I can leverage the fact that I hold a whole "royal flush" of passports (and so does my entire family), use the fact that the demand here will recover, sell the house and buy a nice 5 bedroom villa with a pool overlooking the sea somewhere warm leveraging the fact that the demand there will tank and so will the prices. What not to like in such a scenario :)
However, while I am selfish, I am not a scumbag as the result of this scenario will be something akeen to what happened in USSR and Eastern Europe in the 1990-es. People DEAD. Dying in the corridors of hospitals with no resources to care for them.
That is clearly not a problem for the whole real-estate gang sponsoring key BrExit politicians which is trying their best for EXACTLY that scenario with the minor addition of buying and selling at profit at both ends (here and overseas). There are plenty of companies and directorships taken by some of them by the way (including MPs) in anticipation of that. I found some of them by chance when trawling the Spanish and Bulgarian business registers for this. So I am not joking about them wanting exactly this scenario and the selfish rationale for it.
Just to be clear - the ones which have not invested in Real Estate have invested in Healtcare providers in anticipation of the same. That scum with Vlad The Welfare Vampire being a prime example is even worse than the real estate scum.
we need to make sure as much care goes into supporting the users than will no doubt go into developing a good app
Really? That is getting perilously close to making the environment not hostile to immigrants. Your thinking is subversive, the black van will transport you to Lark Hill shortly.
In any case - looking at who is involved, it will be something abominable that will score between 1 and 1.5 on Google Apps. If it scores above 1.7 I promise to print this page and eat it without mustard.
US$2,579.00???
Two and half grand??? For a non-workstation class laptop??? With an Intel IGP (where is the holy water and the crucifix)???
This has a specific type of corporate purchaser written on it - Windows only corp where the hoy polloy serfs are given different laptops to specifically differentiate them from the upper floor private office dwelling demi-gods.
I do not see how anybody else will fit what is for all practical purposes a "all-day typewriter" into the budget.
Uncovering != Any result from it.
Sure. For example Internet publications have dug up and cross referenced the facts to show that Boris and Lavrov are competing for the title of Pinocchio of the year. The first places to take BOTH of them to the cleaners for lying were Internet publications.
Does it matter? F*ck no. As they say in several countries around the Eastern part of the Mediterranean Sea: "The dogs continue barking. So what, the caravan continues to move regardless".
As correctly noted by a lot of people we live in the days of post truth. Even if someone digs out the truth, a few weeks of feeding edited info to everyone using the appropriate confirmation bias and voila - like it did not happen. From a tool of discovering and reporting the truth despite the best efforts of the power to be the Internet and especially the so called "social" part of it has become a tool for post-truth delivery.
By the way, as far as preposterous ideas, suing privately an Internet platform in a civil lawsuit should win the "delusional suggestion of the year" award.
It is not Telegram:Sam it is Telegram:Irina.
This Irina. From one of the long-legged dollies carted out by Nemtsov in the 90-es when he was the leader of the opposition, this bimbo has gone a few parsecs to the right of Attila the Hun.
Her creation mandates escrow of all keys without capture of any data + data retention for periods same as in Eu. Thus, if the FSB needs to decrypt the data at a later date it applies for a standard court order, gets it and decrypts it. While technically workable (big difference compared to the lunacies of Rudd, FBI, etc), it is one of those things which are in the "I am not even going to start on what can go wrong here".
Procedurally, the request to Telegram is illegal by the way - it was filed a day early before the law has taken effect. Someone in FSB was trigger happy to test their new key storage supplied by one well known provider of mechanical calculators to the Nazis. However, even if Telegram wins the legal review on this technicality, it will simply have to comply the next day with an amended request (similar to Microsoft and the CLOUD act).
After re-reading it the chances of this being repealed in the Russian constitutional court are pretty slim too. Keys without the data are not the conversation and hence cannot be protected by the clause mandating the privacy of communications in their constitution.
All in all, there are lots of people watching this in both FBI and Home office. Expect a copycat law any day.
One of the things that I find strange about the whole case is that the Skripals are still alive. When I did my basic training in the '70s, we were told about NBC, nerve agents being the C(hemical) and that micrograms of nerve gas were sufficient to cause death in three minutes.
It just hit me.
What if D1980 (aka Novichok-4) is so specific that it does not affect Nicotinic Receptors and only the Muscarinic ones. The typical picture of Nicotinic receptor inhibition as for example by Sarin or VX gas is exactly that - 3 minute death. They however can be slowed down by atropine as an antidote. While they also hit Muscarinic receptors, that is usually not part of the equation because the subject is already 6 feet under.
One thing in the stuff so far published by Russian opposition press (which is all so far confirmed) and specifically the interview with one of the real guys to design this sh*t (from a numbered town near Nizhny Novgorod) is that there is no antidote. It is repeated by UK press so far too, so it might as well be true. That means a Muscarinic receptor type specific inhibitor. That fits.
1. It is slow. It is not 3 minutes. It may take up to half an hour to act.
2. It has no antidote - atropine does not work. It has, however an easy way to counteract it which the doctors in Salisbury hit unintentionally. Just put the subject into an artificial coma. As long as there is little or no nerve activity trying to go down via the blocked pathways the nerves cannot damage themselves by "short-circuiting" and breaking the glia. Over time the body synthesizes replacement receptors and voila - the subject which should have been long six feet under is now talking, coherent and may in fact be OK after that.
Like that jet fighter that shot down MH17 was?
FFS, they even have form,
The file on the 1996 novichok murder and the mob involvement as well as the fact that both cia and MI5 had access to it is finally on the front page of the guardian.
Only 14 days after it was published by the Russian press. Only 11 days after I send it to them. And after a total of around 500 down votes on the register for daring to mention it.
Damn... Why is it so difficult for people to admit that a liar ten times called Boris is most likely lying the 11th.
So excuse me for taking this news with a vat of salt the size of Argentina
Just reading the news. More like the size of South America.
The cat freely roaming the house while the cops had it sealed survived and was only severely malnourished. At which point Porton Down put it down conveniently erasing the evidence. After the Russians asked for it at the United Nations Security Council.
This breaks even the boris mark on the Pinocchio meter.
A cat surviving in a nerve gas attack site? Utter ratshit. Can boris and Co stop lying and can we see some evidence that was not tampered with please.
One of the things that I find strange about the whole case is that the Skripals are still alive. When I did my basic training in the '70s, we were told about NBC, nerve agents being the C(hemical) and that micrograms of nerve gas were sufficient to cause death in three minutes.
Concur. We had the same training.
There is a possible explanation. It also doubles up for an explanation for why the max concentration is in the entrance hall.
Just to be clear - this is just me hyphothesizing, no evidence for this, just a set of interesting coincidences :)
The target was never them. The target was the late brother (for whatever reason) who was snuffed a few months ago under suspicious circumstances in St Petersburgh, the attack was there - most likely by Russians but on Russian soil against a Russian there. All we are seeing is collateral damage from microscopic traces in a bag of clothes and personal artefacts brought by Julia back the day before they were found slumped. What supports this:
1. Times and survival rates (as you noted).
2. The discovery of traces on the car which brought her from the airport and the search for traces (though very late ones) on the aircraft.
3. The maximum of the concentration in the entrance hall. That is where a Slavic woman keeps her laundry bin (it is not kept in the bathroom as in the average British house).
4. The lack of any further criminology evidence - it all went into the washing machine.
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