Posts by Apriori

No it was definitely nearer 99%, all the parts got back to Earth. Just not necessarily in the right order.

Homeopathic Persuasion!

What you mean things like the government's £9 million pro-EU leaflet campaign, the BBC's endless denigration of the Leave campaign, or the FT / Guardian/ Economist / HM Treasury / LibDem / most MPs / Bob Geldof / Tony Blair / Ken Clarke continuous forecasts of instant economic collapse and World War 3?

No the Russians / Cambridge Analytica / Underwear Gnomes have got a much more effective method than that. They plant secret messages on Facebook and Twitter which make people who haven't got Facebook and Twitter accounts vote in one way or another.

Yes, the Russians / Cambridge Analytica have perfected ... Homeopathic Persuasion - the less of it there is, the more effective it is! Cunning swine! And, like homeopathy, it's most effective if it isn't actually there at all.

Re: That probably explains..

I am sure that when the focus groups were asked What do you want most in a smartphone?", they all replied "A very thin phone" -NOT! Actually most iPhones from the 6 onwards are not actually 7mm, but something like 15 or 20mm, because if you want the thing to run for for a business day (that's about 10-12 hours) you will need an external battery case which more than doubles the thickness (and adds several layers).

And don't forget the "wet bar of soap" finish, which virtually guarantees the thing gets dropped regularly - unless you put a case on it.

A decent iPhone would be something like 12mm thick with a decent, non-slippery, scratch resistant finish. The battery would last something like 36 hours with reasonable use.

Re: Pushing the envelope too hard

Or you could go for crap, slow, expensive, and buy an iphone

Re: Interesting

Google in a femtosecond? Not if BT Openreach are providing the "wet string to the fibre" connection.

Re: birth rates

... and the decline of religion and increase in the education of girls.

Re: Could you jam optical computers ..

it's like, how much more black could this be? and the answer is none. None more black.

Re: IT Angle

We could have had "It's a Windows 8.1 system, anyone got a clue how to find the applications?"

Re: Consensus is not science

There is a consensus - the best human minds on the subject of demonic possession are unanimous that man can be possessed by devils and that this will cause many people to be cast into a fiery pit for eternity. They are best placed to analyse the evidence and have been convinced by that evidence. This is a strong indicator that the idea has merit.

Certainly, the priest of 1500s Spain were the smartest guys around. Schizophrenics and similar certainly act as though they are possessed by devils (sometimes). And the priests examned them and found the signs which were taken to prove demonic possession.

Sadly neither group could produce actual evidence. And quite a few people died/are dying horribly as a result

Re: Not so fast

This is exactly the kind of thinking that gave us such triumphs as the French mercantilist economic system and Soviet (and post war Labour) economic planning. If I value gold and you value oil an I am sitting on a pile of oil which is good for nothing but poisoning my crops, and you come and offer me gold, I shall be delighted. I will use the gold to buy other things which I want but don't or cannot produce.

Nothing has intrinsic value, value is constructed entirely in markets.

Of course, you can get the situation where you have to buy things that no-one would want, like sub standard education and health care, but that's where taxation comes it.

Re: So this capitalism thing @The Tick

Yeah, all those happy North Koreans (you know, the not-dead-from-socialist-induced-starvation ones). Or Venezuela, with its mass poverty and huge murder rates, or Cuba, where any kind do independent thought gets you banged up. Or 1930s Ukraine. Or the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot's Cambodia.

Your stupidity insults the victims of that hideous and murderous system.

Re: ha ha what pension fund

Nothing to do with a one eyed idiot former chancellor / prime minister.

"Let's have an enormous, harmful public sector and spend money on subsidies to windmills which produce no power. While we are at it we can sling a few billion a year over to Brussels to pay for even more unelected, unaccountable unwanted rubbish. PS now we can overpay NHS staff to keep on murdering, can't we?"

Politicians, is there anything they don't know?

Re: Erm... really?

Actually it is usually some idiot ideology dating from hundreds to thousands of years old which has "all the answers", and usually involves large scale death for those who don't agree which is responsible for most disasters of any duration.

Natural disasters, which appear to be getting fewer in number - can now be addressed by well organised outfits such as the US Navy (our ships will be along soon if we can get them back from the scrapyard) and transport of food can be arranged by air to anywhere on the planet in around 24 hours.

Re: "realised the capital cost of paying for the existing ATMs"

Oh come on! The retail banks do nothing for the "convenience of their customers". ATMs are a dirt cheap alternative to tellers and would never have been installed in the first place if it here had not been a bomb proof financial case.

Banking is essentially a very simple business, and current accounts are the simplest bit of all (finding vast fields in the west of Ireland which you can value at the same as Canary Wharf or lower Manhattan is a skill only idiots in Scottish banks mastered).

Annual cost of teller in bank, salary, pension, benefits, training, desk, building, heating, lighting other overheads, maybe 100,000gbp, cost or ATM electricity, gbp 200, maintenance, Gbp500, depreciation, let's be really generous, 5000.

Yeah, it's all about "customer convenience"

Re: Study A, then comment on B?

It is of the essence of a working capitalist society that engineering and scientific progress will move automatically towards less energy intensive and the use of less and less rare and expensive and heavy materials. Because that's how you improve profits. Think: planes, computers, phone systems (from handset to transmission methods), cars, warn clothes (compare Mallory's rubbish kit for Everest with what you can buy at Millets for walking the dog).

Ideologically driven "progress" tends to produce things like windmills which are, quite simply, rubbish. Without the East German subsidised CND and Russian backed TUC in this country we would probably have had a proper nuclear energy based economy, which might well even have had us driving round in efficient electric cars on roads which take over driving.

Just think, if the morons of Brussels/Brighton get their way, there will be no cheap, clean fuel (fracked gas), all crops will need regular saturation with genuinely nasty chemicals (which will kill most of the pollinating insects) because we know that GM is Frankenfood, all medical statistics will be accessed only by their subjects - so don't bother with your Big Data epidemiological and genomic analysis developments. The good thing is that the Chinese and Indians may eventually send us aid and anthropologists who will be able to study how a once thriving civilization was reduced to a mud hut starvation where anyone who couldn't survive the winter with no heating died off.

Re: They almost laughed him out of the boardroom...

The only problem is that Imperial Airways with lots of space, plenty of stops and smoking anywhere has turned into RyanAir. The main virtue of RyanAir is the same as tooth extraction or execution by firing squad. The pain doesn't last all that long.

Imagine a 'budget airline' version of a blimp doing 90mph all the way to New York...

Re: A beelion users can't be wrong (can they?)

OH MY GOD!!!! They know my phone number and maybe even my address. This means that they can control me, all my actions, what I spend, how I vote, they can take my children into slavery and start a world war of they want.

Frankly, SO WHAT? I could not begin to count the number of web sites I have signed up to which have all sorts of unimportant, low level data about me. And exactly what benefit do you think they will get from learning I phone my wife when I am working abroad. (Actually, mostly I use Skype because UK mobile phone networks charge so much I just rip the SIM out of the phone when I get on a plane)

And as for medical records, please give them away. If my records, Hadoop and R and Bioconstructor can come up with a cure for some cancer, some element of heart disease or Parkinson's or something, I am delighted and would not expect to get any reward more than a footnote in Cell or Nature.

Re: if it could have happened

Look you stupid bunch of nerds, don't you realise that only lawyers know anything and always get everything right especially when they are not very good lawyers and become politicians instead. Just think, Clinton was a lawyer, Blair was a lawyer, Gore is a lawyer, Obama is a lawyer, Parliament and Congress are full of lawyers. They never ever get anything wrong and every decision they make is done with the deepest moral reflection.

... Actually I forgot, climate scientists never get anything wrong either.

Re: Abolish the EU

Or alternatively we could restore democracy, accountability, the rule of law and a legal system which does not assume guilt and where governments are subservient to peoples, and where countries can freely negotiate terms of trade with any country they choose, maybe even stop turning the seas into deserts and making large payments to various Mafias.