Posts by Bunbury

Re: Here are my ideas to improve politics.

1. I suspect the divide would not be fixed by sitting in a circle.

2. This is the theoretical situation as it stands in the constitution. You vote for an individual. The parties are outside parliament. So I don't see how you would remove them. A free (non whip) vote is sensible on really big issues but how would it work in practice? For example, there's only so much money; how do you try and manage within a budget if everyone has a free vote?

3. Well, it only really happens at PMQs which is a waste of time anyway being just posturing. The work tends to get done with more collaboration.

4. Agreed. The problem with the pay though is that it is difficult to explain to an increasingly jaded public why somene who earns six times their pay should earn ten times it.

5. "imposed" - do we have any jailbird MPs?

6. Disagree. House of Lords is a very good reviewing chamber. Yes, they are unelected. But they act as a counterbalance to the much more powerful Commons, which is elected. And many are very experienced politicians who have less of an axe to grind now they are older. Government works best when there are checks and balances on the elected government, if only to prevent a democracy becoming a tyranny.

Re: Future, what future

"How quicky people forget events like the poll tax being dropped by the effective actions of demonstrators, I miss the old days, when people stood together"

Yes indeed. All those police horses in Trafalgar Square but we stood up to the hated poll tax and cast it down. In other news, I see my Council Tax is due.

Re: So how does this LIDAR work?

I believe it's the latter. The kit seems to work on the basis of chuck out data points like billy-o (1 billy-o = 1bo = 100,000 per second) and then process to discount reflections from foliage. Given that the aeroplane is moving, some will hit leaves and some will hit the ground. Then Mr computer works out which is which and can just display the land underneath the trees, if you want to see the land. Very impressive results. Though I imagine the denser the canopy the more difficult it is to get detail.

Re: Big bang black hole

The thrust of the article is a bit odd isn't it? "how can such an enormous accumulated mass have formed less than a billion years after the entire universe containing mass exploded?" It kind of assumes that the matter in this one came out of the first and then fell back together again. Since the further back in time we go the more ragged our models become it may well be that this BH formed via a different process to the one that occurs today.

could be one of several reasons:

- they've not bothered to develop their systems to do a postcode check or it's broken

- they've realised that a postcode check is less accurate than telephone number so have decided it gives more problems than it's worth

Re: Baffling

""...to think that mains water, power grid and tarmac roads all got rolled out to 'unprofitable' areas of the UK without the big fuss"

The cost was socialised. Urban dwellers subsidised rural ones"

Not the case. Initially, many of these new technologies were charged at the rate the market could bear by private organisations. Electricity, for example, was charge at a higher rate to rural areas pre-WW2 as the line plant etc to deliver it to remote locations was expensive. And at the time, it wasn't viewed as an essential product as people had gas lighting. Turnpike roads were brought up to a good standard by virtue of the charges levied to use them.

It's only in the later phase when a thing gets so commonplace as to be seen as an essential part of life for the great majority that some form of communal model occurs. When that model is run or moderated by a national government they often go with a 'standard charge for all citizens' approach. Which means that those people who are cheaper to serve often subsidise those more expensive to serve.

Re: Tech City Feasibility

I'm not sure that tech City was "considered" at all. All that really occured is that Clerkenwell was the tech start up centre and that overflowed into that Old Street area. Then politicians started calling it "Tech City". I may be wrong, but I don't think there was much of a plan about it

IQ180

You say that individuals with a minimum IQ of 180 will "undoubtably" understand this.

How do you know? Firstly, what is the test that you are using to establish such an IQ? Most standard tests are unable to go above 160 reliably. Groups like Mega Society are somewhat limited in that there is no good test at that level of intelligence.

Then, how many 180+ IQs have you run this past to establish that their understanding is undoubtable. I'm thinking you'd need perhaps 10 of them to all get it to be correct even by the loosest of interpretations of "undoubtably".

Further, what of those with IQs less than 180? Have they a chance of understanding it, just not in the "undoubtably" category? Perhaps the plain Joes in the 150s have a chance?

Or could I perhaps understand your majestic theory by perhaps cribbing from Wikipedia. Oooo - let's say I look at QED Vacuum and find the following quote:

“The quantum theory asserts that a vacuum, even the most perfect vacuum devoid of any matter, is not really empty. Rather the quantum vacuum can be depicted as a sea of continuously appearing and disappearing [pairs of] particles that manifest themselves in the apparent jostling of particles that is quite distinct from their thermal motions. These particles are ‘virtual’, as opposed to real, particles. ...At any given instant, the vacuum is full of such virtual pairs, which leave their signature behind, by affecting the energy levels of atoms.”

-Joseph Silk On the shores of the unknown, p. 62

Plagiarism perhaps?

@Asher

Don't understand. If I get 100s of Mbps without having to dig up my garden and drill a hole through my wall why would I not want to use copper wire to the pole?

If you just want glass for glass's sake, buy a window.

Re: I'm sure that any of these companies could do far better if they just doubled their prices

@Dave126

I suspect people are shopping to some degree by price, it's just that the difficulty of comparing confusing price structures means that you're not sure to make a logical choice.

Though I know some people who used to go with the operator that the rest of their family had to cut down calling costs by phoning within network

If there are several confusing operators that sounds more like a confusoligarchy...

Re: Theoretical limit

Supersonic? Surely, in space nobody can hear your wind?

Re: About time councils put their foot down

Sounds to me that the estate developer has trousered the money from 300 homes - what's that £100m or so? - without paying for any infrastructure upgrade. After all, in a new estate they have to deal with someone to get the telecomms in and sounds like in this case it's Openreach. In that discussion the developer could have put some money on the table to upgrade the network infrastructure but presumably chose not to.

Most developers will happily give information about floor plans, countryside and commuting. But until enough include services in their buying decision developers won't invest in infrastructure.

Holes

Look far too regular for Sand People...

It was the 2000s, not the nineties and they sold Cellnet because the alternative was going broke, being £31Bn in debt at the time

Re: ....Over time....

With our current instruments we would need to wait a long time. However, since our ability to see such things has increased rapidly, and is likely to go on increasing, it is probable that we will be able to see much finer detail in reasonable timescales, and so gain knowledge much more quickly.

Re: Wrong Universe

Nothing quite like politics to get those vote buttons going. What we need is Perrin's uncle Jimmy Anderson and his secret army, who are against "Wreckers of law and order. Communists, Maoists, Trotskyists, neo-Trotskyists, crypto-Trotskyists, union leaders, Communist union leaders, atheists, agnostics, long-haired weirdos, short-haired weirdos, vandals, hooligans, football supporters, namby-pamby probation officers, rapists, papists, papist rapists, foreign surgeons - headshrinkers, who ought to be locked up, Wedgwood Benn, keg bitter, punk rock, glue-sniffers, "Play For Today", Clive Jenkins, Roy Jenkins, Up Jenkins, up everybody's"

Fibre Schmeibre

Why is it that people are so fixated over the substrate their broadband is delivered over? As long as it does what I want I really don't care if the cable is made out of glass, copper or bacon. FTTP may came into your house as glass, but before you get to connect to it the optical is terminated and you're given a metallic connection.

Re: An IT Manager asked me to raise a formal Change Request...

They need the change request so that the organisation knows what config the software has. Otherwise what happens is another helpful chap makes another change relying on the config setting in the official design and we're off into the wilds without a map.

Re: It's not a computer though

"Although to be fair I had always understood the word "computer" to mean something programmable for different tasks"

That is the subset of computers which are programmable.

I believe that the provenance of the modern use of the word 'computer' comes from gunnery. The original 'computers' were people who calculated the correct angle of the guns such that a target could be hit. They might have first done this by experience but by WW1 they used gunnery tables and mathematical tools to assist them. As the calculating tools became more complex, the word transferred to the tool.

Most computers were, effectively single task: calculate a gun angle, multiply figures, etc. However, as they became able to carry out more calculation per hour, it became cost-efficient to use one device to run multiple tasks.