Posts by Brewster's Angle Grinder 3278 publicly visible posts • joined 23 May 2011
Did Meta not notice the Brexit thing? They should have. A lot of people spent a lot of money on their platform making it happen. They also siphoned off a lot of data so they could figure out who to target and Facebook had to slap them on the wrists.
Well, the whole point of the Brexit thing they enabled was so we could become sovereign. That means ignoring treaties our current government signed two years ago and generally not giving a fig and doing what the hell we like. So they shouldn't be surprised when we go against international law. Whatever it is, we'd willingly leave it.
And anyway, it pales into significance compared to what US agencies and courts do.
I really wasn't wading into the open source/closed source debate. I'm only willing to take the field in the paid/unpaid open source debate: you can use an open source project developed by lots of salaried devs working at foundations or commercial ventures, but still end up depending on a library that one volunteer hacks on alternate Sunday afternoons...
"Now there is an urban legend that open-source developers don't get paid. Please. We came out of the basement a long, long time ago."
This is not a phrase I use often, but the correct response to that is "check your privilege". There's still plenty that doesn't get paid for. That's "free" as in "exploitative".
The fail may be not reading the article; to wit:
"This architecture is implemented on a tiny piece of silicon so that it has minimal impact to the supply of current products,"I'm guessing that most of the silicon on a GPU is superfluous for mining. So using General Purpose GPUs for mining is far more wasteful of capacity than a line of custom ASICs.
It's the other way around; Google forked part of Webkit to build Blink. Although, prior to starting work on Blink, Google had become the biggest contributor to Webkit.
Like everybody else, I despair over the winnowing of browser engines. But they are such a huge investment and require such a lot of work. I suspect it's more pride than economic sense that stops Apple doing a Microsoft; I'm sure they could layer their privacy tweaks and architectural adaptions on top of Blink at less cost. (And with Mozilla struggling for cash, it's easy to imagine that in five years we find just wrappers round Blink... *sigh*)
We don't know how much fusion will cost to build and to run. We don't know it's characteristics. (Will it be easily "turn off and onable" or will it, in practice, be more suited to base load?) And we don't know how much the alternatives will have advanced. (Supercaps to the rescue!)
The one thing you can say is sunk costs will likely prevent us replacing what we have already built. We will sweat the existing assets and when they retire then we might consider fusion. My original comment was tongue in cheek, but it could be the Betamax of energy generation.
"And rather than lumping more tax on gas, we should be incentivising gas exploration and production in and around the UK."
Nobody is stopping the energy firms re-investing their windfall dividends. But it appears they are only going to hand it out to shareholders.
In that sense, a tax on profits might make them consider whether ploughing the money back into the business and accruing future profits would be a better investment than giving it to the taxman. So I would argue a windfall tax is more likely to drive investment than letting them siphon off the cash. But truth be told, they'd probably just grumble a lot and take the hit - in which case a windfall tax allows us to put the money to better use than a fifth home and a second yacht .
"The construction of a prototype fusion energy plant, producing net energy, is expected to be complete in the 2040 timeframe"
That's cutting it a bit fine if we're going to be carbon neutral by 2050.
Wouldn't it be funny if we finally get fusion working and everybody goes, "Nah, we've got it covered. Wind. Solar. Hydro. Tidal. Geothermal. HV lines from the Sahara, lots of batteries and these fission reactors we're locked into paying for to 2099. We don't actually need fusion now. Thanks, all the same..."
The sun is about 1% CNO and 99% PP chains. And the carbon is a catalyst; it's not going to turn it into a giant lump of coal.
Whereas, if it was heavy enough, it would use triple alpha to create a carbon core. That's how you end up a lump of carbon supported by electron degeneracy.
Are we transmuting every atom in the sun to carbon? Or are we replacing it with an equivalent mass of carbon?
The former probably guarantees an instant detonation lasting milliseconds (a "carbon flash") blowing off the outer shell into a planetary nebular and leaving us with an inert white dwarf that's lacking much carbon.
In the latter case, you have a carbon white dwarf. But where are you getting the oxygen for combustion? Actually, carbon-oxygen white dwarfs form in nature, but electron degeneracy would prevent combustion (the formation of carbon oxides) and the oxygen and the carbon are unlikely to be mixed in a way that would allow it.
Google Fonts can be self-hosted to avoid running afoul of EU rules and the ruling explicitly cites this possibility to assert that relying on Google-hosted Google Fonts is not defensible under the law.
(My emphasis.)
I didn't read the judgement. But that's hinting the problem only occurs where there is a choice to self host and you don't. If the data MUST be served from a third party, then that might be a reasonable defence. (Especially as a video is obvious in the way a font isn't.)
I often see films or TV shows where one of the octets its greater than 255. So Lets do that for real. Let's allow each octet to range to 999 (a 10 bit field). You now have a trillion addresses in four dotted quads. If every value is an octet then it's IPv4. If one of them is above 255 it's next gen.
Now, write the spec around that human side.
This is walnut vs sledgehammer territory. It's reasonable to want to get into a walnut. But you don't want to pulverise it.
Likewise here, the aim seems fair - and most consumers and businesses would love Google's ad bar to be banned - but a success under this legal theory would break the web.
I've done some digging: the original C Programming Language First Edition (1978) - i.e K&R C - doesn't define time_t and associated functions. They seem to arrive in ANSI C (C89) fully spec'd.
But, yeah, back in the day I used to treat time_t as long. And all DOS C compilers I used adhered to Unix standards. However there are probably some embedded systems where that wasn't true.
I'm glad you eventually get round to pointing out it's not a uniquely unix problem. Most (all?) implementations of C uses the "POSIX epoch" of Jan 1st 1970 so any C compiler with a 32 bit signed int for time_t is in the shit. Although I've just checked the spec and neither the width nor the epoch are mandated in modern C standard. (I've not looked backwards to see if it ever was.)
The real problem is not application but filesystems and file formats which have used a 32 bit signed time_t in the format. That's more of a unix problem.
Anyway, it looks like this will pay for my retirement!
But nor do institutional shareholders go broke if a private company goes to the wall. They continue to throw more money at badly run companies. Maybe some of the company's C-suite have to live off their savings. Maybe a few auditors are struck off. And maybe a few retail investors loose their homes. But if you think the private sector learns hard lesson, they don't. Government is just another risk pool - but for services society sees as essential. Because most of us don't want our health provide going bankrupt halfway through chemo.
I was about to have the same rant about solid earth tides. One of the groups they're hugely important to is....astronomers (using earth-based observatories to do detailed measurements).
"I'm developing away, and I need to clear the cookies for my development site so I can test logging in. Now... I can'.t"
Yes you can. You open up the dev console (F12) select "Application -> cookies" and delete it from there. What they've done is changed this from a luser level feature to a power user feature.
I can't make up my mind whether this is a good change or not. It makes it more likely sites won't cope when cookies are selectively deleted. But if that issue is widespread already, then it makes it less likely ordinary users will trigger it.
The smoking gun for panspermia would be finding bacteria on other planets or star systems that share evolutionary heritage with those on earth.
But there's about 0.7 billion years during which nothing can concretely be proved to be alive on earth. (There's sketchy evidence for earlier life but it's not cast iron.) So you could argue earth didn't have the conditions necessary to evolve life and that we were a barren rock until some Venusians or Martians hitch-hiked their way here. There's a bit of tangential support for the former in the Faint Young Sun paradox, if you hand wave away the existence of liquid water on Mars.
Or you could just argue that the processes that gestate life are hard and rare and took a long time to happen. Or they just had to wait for the earth to warm up. And until there is better evidence I think that's what Occam's razor demands. Panspermia is an uncalled for complication.
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