Posts by Toltec

Re: Spawn Of Satan

"Genuinely I'm intrigued."

Land tax could come to half my net income now (or when they brought it in), care charges would only come in at the end of our lives assuming we even needed it and that will be many elections away.

Self interest, definitely. Given last year we paid IHT (her parents were not rich, they had just owned the house since the fifties and it is in the SE) equivalent to well over a decade of our combined income taxes I think we have contributed enough of our assets for now. My wife gave up work to look after her mum for the last two years of her life, she could do this because we are both careful with money and have been mortgage free for over a decade.

Re: There is a well known saying

"Don't fuck with Mother Nature or Mother Nature will fuck you."

Which begs the question, which way around did the terrier malamute cross happen?

Re: Off-topic but...

"Seriously? You can buy a house for under £200k in the Midlands?!??"

Am I missing something? Looks like you can get a 3 bed semi-detached from around £105K in Lincoln.

Re: mutations will adapt to look like real crops

"The same way that antibiotics encouraged resistant bacteria to evolve much faster than they would have normally."

It is the misuse of antibiotics that have caused the problem really, though I suppose if we didn't use them and just let people die the bacteria would not have needed to evolve so much so I suppose you are right on that count.

Re: "last three decades trying to vote for the lesser evil"

So I'm not the only one to think there are signs of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN beginning.

We should move over to encypted channels to dis - oh bugger

Re: future displays are rubbish

"Do future-people really care so much more about 3d representation than image quality?"

Well people now seem to care more about the number of pixels than how good the picture actually looks, it killed plasma displays which are arguably better than anything produced now. AFAIK a 4K plasma could not meet the EU power requirements to prevent climate change so they just died a death.

OLED tvs do look pretty good though.

Re: So to get zero stars

"But then they'd be getting zero stars by default, because nobody would be able to give them any, so that would be cheating."

Not so, as there would be no one to observe the number of stars the quantity would be in a state of uncertainty.

Re: J-curve probably not real

"Which the drinker in me thinks is a shame. Sigh."

I'd curse you for shattering my delusions, but I don't drink enough to get the 'benefit' anyway. What I liked about the article I linked was that it clearly stated that there are better ways to improve your heart health than drinking. Many of the 'Stuffing Bingon Berries ip your nose reduces cancer' stories fail to mention that doing so may cause other problem such as upper respiritory tract inflammation etc.

Re: Rutherford Advanced Computing Society.

"sitting at the top of the pyramid collecting most of the money until he retires"

That sounds lovely, except we all know that 'retires' means both certainties of life have been attained and the HMRC will only get its final cut.

"If they were from up North, they probably just chewed the meat direct from the bones. Did they also find the giant Yorkshire pudding trays to go with the meat?"

At least that means they were cooked, otherwise where would the gravy for the puds have come from?

Re: @ Tim Seventh (was Displaced not redundant)

"Ask Hans Rosling. Even though he's dead."

I've watched some of his presentations, as one of the few people that get get air time that are not all doom and gloom he is a real loss.

Re: Lightswitches...

"That it is not part of France? If pressed, almost all people I would have thought."

What have the Normans ever done for us?

Re: You forgot one important(sic) catagory

"Most advertising boards are and displays are widescreen, take note DSLR manufacturers 35mm is out of date."

Given the optics produce a circular image a 16:9 sensor cannot be any wider physically than a 35mm sensor. If anything a 1:1 sensor would give you maximum flexibility to crop the image as required, no more rotating the camera 90 degrees to take portraits...

A rectangular sensor will affect the mechanics of the TTL mirror so a 16:9 sensor might be able to let you reduce the external height of the camera body.

Re: Better than having none I guess

"the offender did look around more before returning to their BMW."

They are probably paying so much a month on a car they hope makes them look afluent they cannot afford to go to poundsavers and buy the bags.

I just hope they can afford the calories to make the effort to use the bags and put them in a bin.

The new Moto G5 appears to use the fingerprint sensor similarly.

Re: Karen Bradley CV

"Digital skills and knowledge should surely not be impossible to find in this day and age?"

Finding someone with the right skills willing to take the job probably is.

Re: "unauthorised alterations" eh?

Who wants to bet that there will be a hack that makes the car think it is driving when in reality you are?

As cars become more automated they will become something else in the same way that horseless carriages became something unlike a carriage without horses. What do you think, Pods, (trans)Porters, Autos? I like the latter as it emphasizes the auto in automobile as re-uses part of an obsolete name as the aforementioned horseless carriages became car.

At some point obtaining a drivers license will be a preserve of the military, emergency services or the very rich.

@ Mr Dogshit

That is a florist remark and I take offence (on behalf of all Violets, not that I am one you understand), it doesn't matter how little proportion of blue is in a violet it is always blue.

Re: persistently scrapped good and useful projects

"Inmos Transputer"

I remember those well, first came across them at university then an instrumentation R&D company I worked used them in a number of projects.

Re: One rule for you, another for me

"Several weeks later I get a letter to advise he had been given a caution."

Cautions are an interesting thing in of themselves, while they are usually considered spent immediately they do remain on your permanent record so can have an effect on employment or any later offences. If you accept a caution because you think it is less hassle than possibly being arrested on the spot then going to court to prove your innocence you may have a nasty surprise later. A caution can turn up in a DBS check and it will not look good if you ticked the 'no' box on the application even if it was a decade ago and you had accepted the caution because it was all just a misunderstanding.

Re: Ahhhh....

Dabo!

Re: Not AI?

If they really need AI for marketing purposes may I suggest-

AIs - Artificial Idiot savant

SF supplies some variants too, Synthetic Intelligence or Synthetic Consciousness

Just go straight to Number of the Beast, Friday or Glory Road if you want to film a Heinlein book. Have Spacesuit Will Travel could be a big pre-teen hit.

Better going for Neal Asher's Gridlinked though.

There is an independant author called Peter Cawdron that has written some novels that would make good real SF films too. Xenophobia, Feedback and Mars Endeavour for example.

Re: Saddening

One of the problems is you only hear and read about the noisy minority, that May is now playing to the crowd for her own reasons does not help.

Most leave voters I know are not anti-Europe or anti European, but do not want to be in the EU anymore, many feel that it is a wall isolating us from the rest of the world. That it has repeatedly failed to balance its books in a way that would see any company under investigation for fraud does not help. The EU has and continues to do good work, however it is also a bloated self serving bureaucracy with political and economic goals that we do not agree with and for some of us the balance has tipped.

Immigration is fine, people that want to come to the UK to work and contribute, the majority, are welcome, the ones fleeing oppresion and war need our help, the ones that just want to take advantage or cause trouble, the minority, are not welcome.

"Well, actually it would. By mathematical identity, it would double their wealth. Most people would call that a big difference."

If you distribute it by doubling their wealth then those with more wealth will become much better off than the very poorest. Those just above the upper threshold for this largess would then drop down in wealth ranking towards the bottom quarter. As pointed out in another post many of the poorest are in debt so much of this money would then be transferred straight to people with more money and so end up trickling back upwards anyway.

Getting the very rich to engage in humanitarian works and use their wealth improve the quality of life for those less fortunate would be a much better goal rather than just complaining about how much of the world's money they have.

Re: Can they please clarify

I like the way you think, I just thought, do they mean turn the power of or erase the program/storage.

Re: Funny turns

I see plenty of humans driving like that, especially the repeated braking for no reasonable cause. Then of course most humans appear to lack the processing power to look much past the end of their bonnet.

Re: Nothing to do with brexit/remaining

"We shouldn't rely on some magic third party to save us, because (whatever your political beliefs) sometimes it won't."

I do wonder where the idea that all of our politicians are self serving idiots, but European ones are trustworthy comes from? The only difference seems to be that we have a notional power to change ours. In some respects how difficult and punitive the EU makes it for us to leave will tell me if we are correct in doing so.

In this article http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/29/investigatory_powers_act_2016/ it is mentioned that this was also being challenged in our courts, is it just that the EUCoJ has come to a decision first?