Re: In related news
D™A™M™N™
6899 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jan 2007
"The first ERNIE was built at the Post Office Research Station by a team led by Sidney Broadhurst.The designers were Tommy Flowers[14] and Harry Fensom and it is based on Colossus, the world's first digital computer.[15][16] It was introduced in 1957,[1] and generated bond numbers based on the signal noise created by neon tubes."
[...]
"ERNIE 4 uses thermal noise in transistors as its source of entropy for generating true random numbers; the original ERNIE used a gas neon diode. Pseudorandom numbers, often called simply random, can be recreated by anybody who knows the algorithm used to generate them as they are produced in a deterministic way; true random numbers can not. The randomness of ERNIE's numbers derives from random statistical fluctuations in the physical processes involved. ERNIE's output is independently tested each month by an actuary appointed by the government, and the draw is only valid if it is statistically random."
Which, surely, has benefits too...
"I arrest you for the crime of..."
"... you can't arrest me, I'm dead!"
"Ok, then we'll bury you."
"Nope, you can't do that either because a Doctor can't declare Life Extinct as there's no medical cause of death."
"Err..."
Dave Langford's version...
1) A robot will not harm authorized Government personnel but will terminate intruders with extreme prejudice.
2) A robot will obey the orders of authorized personnel except where such orders conflict with the Third Law.
3) A robot will guard its own existence with lethal antipersonnel weaponry, because a robot is bloody expensive.
"...if that collaboration had been permitted," [This section possibly contains original research. Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding inline citations. Statements consisting only of original research should be removed.]
> Nicely ripped out of context.
>> Also told them that that has nothing to do with what you actually do with the opposite sex. After all, porn is just for perverts and the insane.
If he'd left it as just the first sentence, I wouldn't have commented. Adding the second sentence, however, makes a big difference.
Unfortunately you also seem to have missed the point with your ridiculous Straw Man arguments of "Hands up who wants a 12-yo watching them get it on... anyone? As for the insane - well maybe those who think putting porn in the hands of a twelve-yo is a good idea?"
The "sex education" children get here in the UK is mostly useless nonsense, more designed to placate Middle England than actually helping children learn about sex and (more importantly) relationships.
Consequently they *don't know* that porn "has nothing to do with what you actually do with the opposite sex", so they try to replicate that (with all the deleterious emotional consequences that follow) and, because they don't know better, results in increased levels of teenage pregnancies and STIs.
We need to teach children what they need to know *before* they know it and not with the coy and embarrassed "education" they get at the moment. Compare this with countries like the Netherlands which start to teach children about sexuality from about the age of 6 (cue the Mail frothing at the mouth about our children being "corrupted"!) and you might start to understand the situation.
... my first reaction of this was "WTF?" because it seemed to be a definite case of using a sledgehammer (or maybe a piledriver) to crack a nut, but as I read further and the reason for using this method to "print" a tablet, ie fast delivery of amounts of the drug which would normally take multiple tablets, I realised that actually it's a bloody neat idea.
Well done for some creative thinking guys!
> I like very much the idea of only targeted surveillance with judicial approval; but sometimes shit goes down too quickly for that.
And then, six months *after* the "shit goes down", we find out that the Security Services had the information all along, but it was buried in such a huge pile of other crap that it was overlooked or discounted.
> When you sign up to such a service, you engage in a contract.
Which AIUI is unenforceable in many places because, for a contract to be binding, *both* parties should have the right to negotiate terms, instead of being told "this is how it is, take it or leave it".
"Kids should be allowed to run around and shout and scream and scribble on the walls without any supervision from their parents and then get off scot free and not have to take responsibility for what they've done or the mess they've left behind them."
FTFY.
Whereas the ones of the England Football Team saluting Hitler on the orders of the Foreign Office will remain...?
Which (if they don't already exist, I haven't checked) will simply result in people creating browser extensions that will send spoof data back to the trackers...
Oh and as for "an advertising-based revenue model that works much better – for readers and advertisers – when ads are tailored to users' interests" it may work better for the advertisers, but if I'm looking for something I don't want recommendations based on who has paid the most to the ad slingers to get their stuff in front of my face, I want ones based on whether the product is any good!
That was exactly what I was thinking when I read this. I don't want to "feel" that my data is protected, I want to KNOW that my data is protected!
There are already too many organisations and businesses and governments who think that they should have free and unfettered access to everyone's data and, of course, then be able to sell it off to anyone they want (possibly with some sort of lip-service paid to "anonymisation"), but it is *our* data and *we* should have the right to decide who can get their hands on it.
And that's not simply "if you use this app you consent to us troughing your data, so if you don't like it, don't use it"!