Posts by Jason Bloomberg 2910 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Mar 2008
Nettos used to do a 1% beer which was absolutely bloody excellent on days with temperatures like this week, was only 25p a can and actually tasted decent, not like many more expensive metallic tasting chemical liquids in a can.
One could drink that all day long and not end up on the park bench with the Red Stripe brigade :-)
But, yes, for an on-the-lash beer, it wasn't what I would choose nor recommend.
In most cases, it's just a rubber stamping exercise. Very little gets rejected that doesn't come back awhile later only this time to pass.
That's not necessarily a bad thing if the laws being passed are the laws the majority of MEPs want, tweaks being made to overcome previous objections.
In fact, I think it's a good thing. Rather than trying to push through law which only has a small majority in favour, a significant minority against, it is better to produce law which has a minimal minority against, sort the issues out before bringing it to a vote.
I think the problem for Brits is we are used to two party adversarial politics rather than cooperative politics, we try to advantage one group at the expense of others, where the EU cannot get away with that.
Humans are very well known as seeing patterns where none exist
In the "Look closely" example I could clearly 'see' two eyes and a nose in the left image when I first looked. We take what clues there are and extrapolate from there and I expect that is also what 'fools the algorithm'. I can however check further; an algorithm cannot unless designed to do so.
Unfortunately, their primary sensor was offline for maintenance, so they were running off their backup sensors:
But the article shows graphs of four sensors which seem to correlate with each other apart from the anomalous single sensor reading.
There seems to have been enough data available for them to be able to determine that the reading was actually anomalous.
Noting the troll icon: Reports elsewhere say Corbyn did not upgrade to 1st class, he declined that offer, took the seats of others who had accepted that upgrade offer. Though other reports suggest 1st class had been 'suspended', was open to all travellers, so it's not clear if there was any 1st class upgrade even available.
the fact that the leader of the Labour party apparently doesn't know how seat reservations work on trains is rather disconcerting
How many people know how seat reservations work entirely, what bylaws and penalties may apply when occupying a reserved seat when not the person who reserved it?
I would imagine only a few know the entire rules and I don't see why Corbyn would or should be more knowledgeable than anyone else as most times he probably has a reserved seat, takes it, end of.
If seat reservations are no longer valid, because the person reserving them hasn't taken up their seat, then perhaps train staff could remove those reservation slips so it is clear the seat is available to passengers who don't know the rules and don't wish to commit some offence.
But those who campaigned and voted for immigration control?"
The only question in the referendum was whether we should "leave the EU" or not and that is all which was voted on.
Brexiteers may have presented it as a vote to "Take Back Control", as if a political party who could deliver that, but the vote was only about leaving and they had and have no power to deliver on what they were suggesting they could.
We don't definitively know why people voted to stay or remain, don't know how many want tighter immigration control or not, don't know if that's a minority or majority of people or not.
We have had the vote on what people would like to do. We now need a second vote on how we want it done.
Systemd is far more friendly with modern hardware compared to sysv. Perhaps SystemD is not the best replacement but it's still a superior one to sysvinit.
Systemd seems to have noble aims, is fine on paper, and, when it works well and one never needs to alter anything, it does seem to be better.
When things don't work or one wants to change how things work it often turns out to be a whole different story.
There seems to be parallels with the move from IPv4 to IPV6; rather than just fix what was lacking, get everyone on-board with 'that makes sense', there was a jump to something quite different.
Pedometers usually use button cell batteries which only support rather low current draws.
Adding a LED would increase current draw and potentially quite a lot if they skimped on the current limiting resistor to get a short but bright flash.
A lot of sustained activity (hopefully not the kind adults would engage in to get the wrist working) could lead to the battery over heating.
Labour are in total chaos so the Tories will just take the hit with impunity at the next election.
Except, if we do not Brexit, there is a large enough faction within the Tory party to plunge it into chaos.
This whole mess came about through Cameron trying to defend against members of his own party and the risk of members and supporters defecting to UKIP.
I would love for the vote to be forgotten about but there are plenty of people who will ensure it won't be.
We have jumped out the plane and now have to figure out where we will get parachutes from.
Let's hope he hasn't pissed off the kind of people who would have him drinking those pints through a straw.
As great as it is to see scum like this get their just rewards; engaging with them can be a dangerous game to play. Even just giving them abuse if they call can lead to endless silent phone calls which can quickly make lives a misery.
Take care and think twice before getting involved in something which can easily escalate. These bastards do need nuking from space and we need to keep pressuring the authorities to take steps against them.
“There’s a risk of online vigilantism, where people who are offended by the least thing will have a licence to report it to the police.”
Everyone has a license to do that already.
Vigilantes are those who decide what is a crime and deliver punishment. In this case it is more 'nark', 'grass', or 'informant' than 'vigilante'. Those recruited will simply be providing information and the police will decide if there is an offence and, with the CPS, whether that should be pursued. No one seems to be proposing that Mr Angry can hit the Dislike button and the target will go straight to jail.
This looks all set to be the next Middle Eastern mess. The relationship between the west and Turkey seems entirely artificial and doomed to collapse sooner or later.
NATO and the EU want Turkey as a strategic ally, a buffer zone for refugees we don't want, don't want her falling into Russian hands, pivoting to the Middle East. But the west doesn't actually like Turkey and how she is, and wouldn't embrace her if it were not for that self-interest.
For Turkey's part it is much the same. She wants to be a part of NATO and the EU but only to serve her own interests and doesn't want to change how she is.
It seems more "an enemy of my enemy is my friend" relationship and those frequently wax and wane. Particularly as there's that underlying feeling that the west and Turkey may actually be enemies as much as they like to pretend to be friends.
Given that we had only three TV channels and the analogue audio was perfectly consistent between them...
That's not my recollection. We may not have had quite the problem of dynamic range during a show; it was the disparity of perceived volume between shows and adverts which was the problem back then.
And not getting up to push a button on the TV to change channel was something I believe most appreciated, just like not having to get up and answer the door or the land line. We might not have needed it, but it was a great convenience to have.
Was anyone actually expecting IBM, ABS or anyone else to come out, put their hands up, and admit they'd fucked things up in the worst way possible and it was all their fault?
No one is going to accept responsibility for something they don't believe they are responsible for, no one is going to apologise for anything they don't feel the need to apologise for, especially when doing so could be read as accepting blame and being responsible.
Expecting anything meaningful to be said by any party in the midst of a shit-storm and blame game which could prove very costly all round is really just wishful thinking or naivety.
Even if it was 90% mortality (which I doubt) the human race would survive. While it would take decades, perhaps even a century, humanity would be back on our feet.
It is hard to say. It will likely be the more advanced societies, those who have lost the skills and knowledge of their ancestors, have become reliant on others and technology providing for them, who will have the greatest survival problems and will perhaps succumb within months.
There will be some survivalists and a fortunate few who struggle through while those who don't see much change post-Armageddon will carry on much as before. It really comes down to whether the devastation is so bad that even those used to living off dirt cannot survive.
"Insurance companies are very good at assessing risk. If anyone can figure out what the value of 1,000 man hours of cybersecurity vulnerability testing is worth, it’s them"
I would venture the answer is "bugger all" or so low as to make no difference. At least at present.
Just like we have 'a gazillion Android devices' out there exposed to vulnerabilities we don't have that many people falling foul of them; there is a significant gap between being exploitable and being exploited.
If we get to the stage where oiks can stand on motorway bridges, press a button on their Pi-powered gizmo, can crash a stream of cars into each other, can do it time after time at any time of their choosing, we will indeed have a problem. But we are a long way from that.
You seem to imagine the BBC / TVL has a habit of dragging people into court. In practice the only time it will get to court is when the accused has admitted the offence.
They know that everyone 'watching TV' without a licence has at the back of their mind that there could be a knock on the door one day and a finger pointing asking, "What's that?", "Where's your licence?".
Determined individuals can get by without a licence when they should have one because it is not about getting any particular individual to pay or having them punished, it's about getting everyone else to comply with having a licence.
Mind games and low-hanging fruit does that job and that's the game they are playing.
What kind of tech person still uses XP on the internet? Or at all?
People like me who have a perfectly adequate PC to do the work and whatever they want to and did not want to pay to upgrade either hardware or OS.
I imagine there are a fair few who worried they might be missing the boat in not upgrading to Vista, felt they had dodged a bullet there and, in seeing Windows move ever further from what they were happy with, decided to just sit it out until they needed to buy a new PC with whatever comes pre-installed. The money saved on Windows OS will offset the cost of doing that.
If ground-based robot delivery systems just barged past cars parked on the pavement*, ripped their entire sides off in the process, shredded their tyres, then I might be inclined to welcome them.
In fact, when I finish my own fridge-styled 'harbinger of death and destruction', I might be inclined to stick an Amazon logo on it and let it loose.
* Sidewalk for our American friends, because I believe "pavement" over there means "road", and I might otherwise seem 'a little extreme' without explaining that. I am not however going to explain "sticky buns" nor "having a fag".
in any case the doors of a stage model can be made of cardboard made to look like thick steel.
I do wonder why they went to all the effort and cost of building this door which turned out to be pretty dangerous. I watched the film - really enjoyed it (including the plot holes and other nonsense) - but I don't recall even noticing it. If it was there I guess I thought it was CGI.
I am still shocked and horrified. It feels like being on a plane when 52% of the passengers vote to turn off the engines having been promised it will be okay if they do.
If people want to be part of a suicide death cult then that's their choice. I am less than happy about being forcibly co-opted into one when I voted against that.
This whole pokemon thing sounds like the premise for a great doctor who story: get the planet hooked on some mindless thing, then use it to control their minds.
"Gotta catch 'em all" - I am still not sure if that means Pokemon or players.
Have you ever looked into Niantic's Ingress game? That's far more frightening when one considers what is actually being encouraged, or perhaps "tested".
Hopefully Pokemon Go will just be a short-lived fad and won't do too much harm.
Normally, when something crashes, people know where it's going to crash *before* it happens. Coming up with the idea of where it crashed *after* the crash happens is very suspicious.
What I mean is that it was suggested MH370 had gone down off the coast of Australia, and then the Inmarsat analysis conveniently confirmed that narrative when there was no other evidence to support such a claim.
But you do raise a good point. A plane heading in one direction would be expected to crash in the direction it was heading if it were going to crash. Rather than turn round for no explained reason and then crash in the entirely opposite direction.
If American police said they believed a criminal was hiding out in Mexico when last seen fleeing north to Canada; would that not seem suspicious, at least raise questions as to how they arrived at their conclusion?
Does pulling a friendly Fed out the bag who claims they were going south not sound purely convenient when there is no other supporting evidence?
Inmarsat may have delivered what those looking for the plane call the best theory as to where it went down but it looks to others that it is rather flimsy and convenient 'evidence', produced after the fact to put MH370 where the official narrative wants it to be put, and placing the investigation firmly under control of five eyes nations.
Whenever someone suggests the official narrative is wrong, the very fact they seem to immediately retract that and fall in line with the official narrative, should raise eyebrows. It is as if someone had gone and had a quiet word with them, explained what would be best for them.
When debris washed up other than where the ocean current models predicted it would it seemed the ocean current models were likewise changed to suit the narrative.
And there is no escaping the glaring reality that MH370 has not been found where they said it would be found, are adamant that it will be found.
One has to wonder why they are so stubbornly sticking to a narrative which does not seem to be holding up, why they are so opposed to considering other alternatives? One has to wonder if it being something else is just so damaging that it cannot be allowed to be otherwise.
I do not believe the wilder conspiracy theories but I do not believe we are being told the truth either, nor ever will be. I do not expect they will ever find MH370 because I don't believe they are looking in the right place. And I think that was intended.
So what do you recommend as a solution?
Good question; and the answer would seem to require compromise.
Perhaps rules on the amount of foreign ownership of a native company which is allowed, so they can benefit from investment, we can benefit from that investment, but we reduce the risk of having the rug pulled from under our feet.
We do that anyway with rules which prevent single companies taking control of an entire sector and governments will often retain 51% control of critical industries.
"Better" probably depends on how thick your tin foil boiler suit and chain mail underpants are.
The Pi isn't Open Source Hardware and requires Closed Source Software to get it booted, so I guess that's a problem right there. I expect most of the cost comes in achieving desired performance.
Just because 90% of the audience laughs when Frankie Boyle says something pretty f***ing outrageous, doesn't invalidate the feelings of anyone who may be hurt by that.
I don't think there's a problem with having concern over what concerns others may have; it's all part and parcel of wanting to do the right thing and having the right thing done, empathising with others.
But I think we have to be careful when it comes to restraint over concern something might add to someone's grief. I can remember bawling my eyes out over a Bilko show that touched a raw nerve at the time so I do understand such concerns. Many who have suffered tragedy, bereavement, loss or separation will be acutely aware of how the entire universe seems to conspire to make pain and suffering infinitely worse at such times.
We should recognise that, understand that, have sympathy for those going through it. But we should not overly constrain ourselves for that, because there will always be someone who finds something adding to their pain and we would end up allowing nothing.
It doesn't have to be one or the other.
His statements do fit with leavers' views that this was some sort of war which they have won and a belief that we now get to set the rules everyone will play by.
Leavers seem to be expecting Merkel and friends to admit they were wrong, Brits are right, the EU project was all a huge mistake, they are ever so sorry about that, and will now do everything Britain asks.
The Empire may have gone but our arrogance and supremacism never left us.
[i]Never let non coders near an editor or compiler![/i]
I have to admit, back in the days when a 286 with 4MB was the best one had, I had to convert a huge stock database with new part codes and a new format, each entry a line of text. Had it all done bar sorting it and that was proving a challenge at the time. Up popped a sales droid, who imported it into Excel which had it sorted and done before I even blinked.
The US police seem to think they live in some form of an immunity reality distortion cloud.
It does sometimes seem that every case of police abuse follows the same pattern -
The police department say everything was done by the book, the officers have no case to answer.
If it goes before a Grand Jury that will decide there was no case to answer.
If it makes it to court there will be an acquittal
If there is a conviction the punishment will be mild.
That is pretty close to immunity so it's not surprising cops engage in abuse when they know they will most likely get away with it.
"32bits can not ever use all of 4gigs of memory"
Of course it can; native data word size does not limit maximum memory size. Even a 32-bit address bus can support more than a 32-bit address space with latching.
A data word size able to hold the maximum address is advantageous but not essential.
“There’s now more reason than ever before to use the Internet as a force for social cohesion and community building.”
And there I was thinking the Internet was simply the means to send death and rape threats to anyone who didn't happen to share one's own opinion on a subject.
Joke Alert icon in case anyone should think I see it that way. I don't but it does seem a fair few do; and that's not funny.
My family 'voted' to go to Glastonbury.
In the face of horrendous weather, ridiculous travel problems, other issues I won't bore anyone with, we 'voted' to change our minds, decided we no longer wanted to go.
Leavers would have it that we were bound by our initial decision, that we had no choice but to go. The decision not to go was wrong, outrageous and impossible to accept, and we should not even have been allowed to make it. We said we would go so we would have to. They would have forced us to go even if it would have killed us.
That's not democracy as I know it.
It was a bloody stupid idea to hold a referendum when the electorate were split 50-50 and it could have gone either way. A vote today would likely give a different result and possibly do so for every vote held subsequently.
This isn't the way to decide on the most fundamental matters which affect not just Brits but Europe and the wider world. It was always clear that half would not be happy no matter which way the vote went. All it has done is polarise people and create division.
In some cases such can be the trigger for civil war. I hope we will be lucky and escape that. Will only have to suffer the break up of Britain, the collapse of the EU, and decades of global instability.
I am not happy with what has been done. And it seems many of those who brought us this result are no longer happy either. I believe we should have another referendum or we are in danger of following a path we don't want to follow any more.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-25539843
I remember that. And remember applauding him for that. But it was just a day later, when he realised what he had said or became aware UKIP members were not at all happy with what he was saying, that he clarified what he meant, that he was only talking about saving Christian refugees.
Is the status quo - with the possibility of it getting better and the option of leaving if it does get worse - better than abandoning ship with no idea if things will be better or worse and being stuck with having done that?
I don't play Russian Roulette, aren't willing to gamble "all or nothing" on something so important as the future of Britain. In that respect I admit I am 'risk adverse' and the status quo seems to be less risky and has better options if that turns out to be wrong.
I like the concept of the EU but I would jump ship if I truly believed that was in the best interests of Britain. I don't buy the nonsense that if we stay now we could never leave. I'm voting Remain because I see that as offering me the best options for the future.
If there was even the slightest indication the EU was genuinely reformable it might be worth a shot but even then .. What if it doesn't work ? What is plan B ?
We leave! That's a reasonable Plan B; it's just not a good Plan A.
I know; "Cameron tried and failed". But that's because he's an arsehole who only got himself and everyone else into this mess because he was trying to save his own skin and that has remained his priority.
Boris was probably right, waking the EU up, with the real threat of leaving if nothing changes, would have been the best way forward, but that wasn't what was on the cards when Cameron went to the EU to seek reforms. He had put himself in a very weak position.
And let's not forget that Leave doesn't even have a Plan B.
130 billion imports from the EU vs 78 billion exports to the EU. So in any tariff war the EU would be the loser.
The EU collectively, yes, but individual countries will be better able to handle it. Spread amongst EU countries it's not a lot for each of them and they may well see it as a price worth paying to give the UK a post-exit kicking.
When we analyse impact on individual countries of the EU, and how they would be able to cope and adjust to tariffs and trade wars, things look a lot more riskier for the UK than when we consider the EU only as a bloc.
Beyond taste and texture; how is eating one edible animal different to eating any other?
There are plenty of things which can be eaten which turn my stomach at the mere thought, and it wouldn't surprise me if I eat some things which disgust others. But I am pretty sure there would be things I would eat if I didn't suspect they weren't something I couldn't.
Each to his own. Live and let live. Though perhaps not entirely appropriate when we are talking of animal slaughter.
We sometimes fail to remember this vote will have the most profound impact on Britain's relationship with Europe and the rest of the world. It can be easy to forget what damage has been done in pitting Brit against Brit and the toxic legacy which will endure.
One may even sometimes forget that this is not simply a vote on whether Conservatives should be a right wing or an even further to the right party.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
