Posts by Rol

Shirley...

..they'll want to wait until all the evidence has been sent to China to be recycled before they open an investigation. Otherwise, how would it be like the 9/11 investigation.

I can see a more efficient way of coding the problem and that is by rotating the board by 45 degrees to also generate diagonal co-ordinates.

Then we would only need four one dimension arrays:- two arrays of length n and two arrays of length 2n-1

So in an 8x8 board, if we placed a queen at 3,4 we can make x(3)=true y(4)=true and diagx(6)=true diagy(9)=true.

Subsequent queens need only check one element of each array to confirm a position is valid.

I had a go at creating the formula to generate diagonal co-ordinates for an n x n board, but I ran out of beer mats and ciggie packets, and whiskey and ciggies, and I'm sure someone did it several centuries ago.

It's a done deal.

Murdoch will get what he wants, and those who could have stood in his way will either get what he was offering, or not get what he was threatening.

We're damned to hell.

It's not too late though, Trump and Kim could save us all the bother.

He was contracted to help develop the network by The United States Naval Research Laboratory, who among other things specialise in tactical electronic warfare.

The only reason us plebs get to have a go on it, is because they need a forest of users to hide the trees that are busily doing the governments work of undermining nation states around the world.

To think information gathering agencies haven't got a means of analysing their own network is asking too much.

Of course, now that several of the big illegal operators have perished and their user base been either arrested or awoken from their ignorance with a fright, the forest is thinning out a bit, hence a need to reassure everyone it's safe to go back into the water.

Now he may genuinely believe every word he says, but what's the betting there are elements of the network he knows nothing about, as his security clearance isn't Satanic Monster level

I see an opportunity

Donald Trump branded binoculars.

Let's see them find the polling station after that little caper.

Argos. Shop and vote with ease.

"Hello sir. How may I help you today?"

"Ah, yes. I'm here to vote and the..."

"Certainly sir. We have 24 terminals around the store, and you can use any one of them to vote or make a purchase from our extensive range of high quality goods"

"Yes I know. I've just tried to vote and it tells me:- That item is current;y out of stock"

"And what was it you were trying to purchase?"

"I wasn't trying to purchase anything. I just want to vote"

"Sorry about that sir. Would you mind pressing your first finger against this terminal and I'll investigate further.....Thank you"

clickety click click

"I'm sorry sir but that item is out of stock"

"What item is out of stock!!!"

"Your vote. It seems you have already voted"

"Well I assure you I haven't"

"I will raise a query and the Election team will contact you shortly"

"And that's it?"

"Well I'm afraid so sir"

......................

The following morning the country awoke to the news Breville Sandwich Toaster had won the election and voters could collect their purchase in-store.

Betting on breakfast

many years ago, I used to rent a room in my mates house, who being veggie, insisted the whole house was veggie.

No problem, as just down the road was a brilliant cafe.

Full breakfast was a feast:- thick cut bacon and black pudding, with everything else in similarly, go large, quantities. After eating, it was arguable whether I was affixed to the planet or the planet was affixed to me.

Well such a feast didn't come quick, so with time to spare I amused myself on one of the many poker machines or pinball machines they had. By the time the meal turned up, I had usually clocked up about a tenners profit which they duly paid out. (Obviously not always, but on sufficient enough occasions for me to have eaten there for years at no cost)

Years later a friend mentioned the place had featured in the Guardian's good food guide, and I thought I'd make an effort to call back....What a disappointment. The gambling machines had gone, the ethos of service had been replaced with some perverse take on profit maximisation and the food no longer satisfied at any level, be that quality, quantity or value.

How is it that we're told the world is moving forward, when experience suggests the opposite is true?

Last life standing?

That'll be the one with the technical ability, not biological fortitude.

It may seem odd that a human would want to stick around when all around is turning nasty, but never underestimate the madness that underlies our species.

I assume in a few billion years we will have developed materials and mechanisms that would allow us to colonise the surface of the Sun if we so wished, so continuing to live on Earth once it has turned toxic to all life isn't so far fetched.

"Whoa! What's that you got there Agrippa?"

"It's a gun"

"A what?"

"A gun. If throws small arrow heads out like a ballista, and you don't even need to wind it. You just put this magic black powder in this hole here and then your arrowhead and then you point this end at what you're trying to kill, and then smash this bit of flint on this bit of iron here and..."

"Is it supposed to do that?"

"Err, I don't think so. Does it look as bad as it feels?"

"Err, Are you in excruciating agony and wish you were dead?"

"Yes"

"Then yes it is a bad as it feels. You appear to have lost half of your face"

"I think we should wait a millennium or two until they've ironed out the flaws"

There was a time.....

After the latest carnage on the road, government ministers are revisiting lowering the speed limit and looking too, to boost employment, as the man with a red flag walking in front of your vehicle is touted as the only solution.

back to basics?

With limited functionality for users comes limited opportunity for hackers.

Why did the NHS fall over itself to accommodate every whim and fancy, of what is predominately an IT illiterate gaggle of muppets.

It was chaos, as midwives and managers GP's and gynaecologists, queued round the block to have their input on how the system should work, and look what we've got. An all singing all dancing system that has more potential points of attack than a Cruft's show in North Korea.

"What!!? You're entering my diagnosis onto the same PC you've just been reading your emails on? Are you absolutely without compassion or did you win your license to practice at a gurning contest?"

Humanity Optional

If we look at our current economic model, we can see that many millions are employed to meet the desires of the few.

That those many millions are rewarded sufficiently to also have their desires met is only a passing phase, as AI will replace a large majority of them, just as engines replaced millions of horses, containers replaced millions of dockers, and deodorant replaced soap.

When you have land, capital, and an AI workforce, do you really need the hard work of enterprise too?

Your AI bots using the resources you have coveted can conjure up your hearts desire. Why go to all the bother of trading, you already have all you need and may ever want.

Well, I'm saying you, but odds are, you, like me, will be displaced.

In the short term, the poor unfortunates will have a very short career in the Soylent Green factory and a population equilibrium will be established.

Then again, we could send those bots out to mine the shit out of the Solar system and manage to fully resource every citizen on the planet, but that's socialism, and where's the fun, when sadistic capitalism is off the menu.

The Million Pound Page?

Remember that kiddie, who some years ago sold a page full of pixel space for a million pound, or was it dollars?

The thing is, none of that page ran scripts. All the advertising was embedded in the page and not served up by some ad-flinging server.

See where I'm going?

If the pages you are browsing have the adverts coded into the page, then ad blockers can't see them, but more importantly the creepy desire to track your every click so that adverts can be targeted at you via the page will be a non-runner.

I don't mind ads. I do mind that I am surreptitiously interrogated every time I visit a website so that I can have "donkeys looking to marry a feeble minded westerner" thrown at me.

The way I see it. This new adblocker could welcome back old school adverts. Controlled by the site and not tailored at the individual.

A little off topic, but....

Just been reading about how our old age pensioners are being shafted on telephone rental charges and thought I'd throw an idea at you all.

I transferred my landline telephone number to a voip service and now use my phone as normal, but at a third of the cost. And along with several other benefits such as free calls 24/7, free 0800, free 0345, free hidden caller blocking, I have never looked back.

Sure I need a broadband service to connect it, but I could just as easily have negotiated with a friendly neighbour to borrow a smidgeon of their bandwidth every now and again.

Well, my suggestion is to adopt a pensioner, or indeed any deserving soul who lives near you, and help them stay connected to friends and family, at a vastly reduced cost to what the usual telephony companies are offering.

All they need, apart from a phone, of course, is a wifi with lan, which are available at about £15. The voip provider I'm with charges a one off fee of £15 for their gubbins and set-up and then £8 a month.

So for about £30 the hard done to pensioner across the road can stay in touch for a quarter, if not a third of the price.

And let's not forget, until that incy wincy phone in your back pocket gets ten times larger and ten times simpler, mobile phones will not be an option for squinty eyed, arthritic folk.

Go on. I know you're all a nice bunch of people and spreading some kindness every now and again is good for the soul.

BT and Virgin Media claim 'broadband' tax will cost £1.3bn

Several million users and me claim 'broadband' tax will cost them £2.6bn

Aiding and abetting!!

Just take these feckless gimmick pushers to court and charge them with aiding and abetting paedo's.

Time in jail, or bludgeoned into liquidation with a sledgehammer fine, would have them rethinking their ill-thought-out stumble into connected devices.

It is a crime to assist criminals. We don't need any clarifying legislation. We just need the authorities to use the tools society have allowed them to just get on with the job of punishing every firm for implementing inadequate security and thus leaving their customers open to all manner of criminal attack.

Crowd Fund

I honestly believe that a contract killer could raise far more than £120,000 if they pledged to kill the entire board of directors.

In fact if everyone who wished that to happen pledged just £1, the fund would cover the extermination of every rogue company for the next couple of decades.

Now that's what I call taking back control.

I'm waiting..

..for the 3310 smarti to come out, before I dip my toe into buying a smartphone.

It will look exactly the same, and have the exact same interface, in fact the only external difference will be the torch doubles as a projector, or projectIT as my fat elbowing so cleverly called it.

This will enable my tired old eyes to see an enlarged GUI and my fumbling fingers to swipe and prod their way to blissful engagement with the world.

The tech exists, they just need to get it to fit in my pocket.

Here's an idea

Every year you send the farmer a bar-coded, A4 laminated submission docket.

This docket is then fixed to a post or the like on the fields in question and becomes like a clapper board start and finish to a short video that pans across the fields showing their status.

Upload the video with all the necessary forms completed and job's done.

just had a search on Google

And Google offers a step by step guide on how to install the add-ons that have so upset the authorities.

Go figure.

If you're prepared to plead guilty, then does it really matter what the offence is?

No one is suggesting you can't have your day in court to plead your innocence,but if you accept the charge then should it really be necessary for all the pomp and ceremony, along with the breathtaking costs that circus comes with?

Once the punishment has been delivered, everyone still has the automatic right to challenge its severity and hence access to a human gavel waver to perhaps throw in some IT lacking perspective.

Otherwise, how is Lord and Lady Muck supposed to get their version of punishment from an egalitarian computer, when being dragged away from murdering foxes all day, is clearly punishment enough.

Chips not optional

I'd argue for legislation that put an ethics chip between the AI processor and it's output.

Yes I understand the impracticalities of such a set up, as in that scenario, the ethics chip would itself need to be a fully functioning AI, in order for it to consider the ramifications of allowing or not allowing the instruction to proceed, but I did oversimplify things slightly.

In practice the ethics chip would be embedded in the AI chip, and it would be the de facto weighting algorithm for all risks analysis, stopping dead the branches that exceeded internationally agreed parameters.

Allowing companies to set their own safety standards should be non-negotiable. Everyone must operate under the same rules, whether it's managing a Formula 1 car, granny's mobility scooter or Trump's tanning machine.

Trumpisms we're waiting to hear

"What a pathetic country, this England place is. Just look at their airport runway. Hell, my table knife is bigger"

"Sorry sir, The runway is far away. The knife is near. Far away. Near. Far away. Near"