Posts by Dave314159ggggdffsdds

Re: It is not left wing extremists

Could your bias be any clearer? Responsibility has been claimed, while actual culpability remains up in the air, but you know for a fact it wasn't left wing terrorists and that's just [insert conspiracy theory here].

The irony is that you far left nutters are basically indistinguishable from the far right types you claim to be opposed to.

Re: It's a shame

I find it hard to believe that a weed habit alone would have run up sufficient debts (let alone with nasty-enough types) that anyone holding down even a basic job couldn't pay them off at a rate that would satisfy the pusherman. Bit of nose candy, though, and it's a whole different story.

Re: After booting for the second time

The worse smell is a result of prohibition. Making it illegal favours strains and growing methods which give a less-fragrant product.

Personally, I quite like the smell of the good stuff. Even the worst of it isn't nearly as bad as chicken shops and other fast food outlets; smelling bad isn't a reason for prohibition, obviously, as you seem to agree. If we do decriminalise, though, it would (perhaps counterintuitively) make it easier to have some social rules about where it's acceptable to smoke the stuff.

Re: Magnetic storage

A hard disk that hasn't been spun up in a few years is likely to be toast for mechanical reasons like bearings seizing. The platters may still be readable with specialist equipment. However, bit-rot is also significant even over relatively short timescales unless the data is very robustly stored. Things like jpegs are _extremely_ flaky in that regard, where a single bit flipping can significantly alter the image; other formats, like ascii text, are much more robust, since a single bit flipping will usually be obvious, and only lead to corruption of a single character. But, you can't rely on the data stored that way to be absolutely correct.

So, if you want to store data on magnetic hard disks, extensive error correction and multiple copies are necessary, and so is powering the disks up fairly often.

Re: Simple solution?

Rubbish. You tell them it's not working, and they issue a refund - send them a message instead of using chat, if you really find the five minutes on text chat to be too long. They very rarely want to pay to get things back so they can throw them away - unless, of course, you've repeatedly scammed them.

Re: Quality, schmality

If you buy from the Kingston store on Amazon, you're buying from Kingston, but with Amazon's CS and delivery mechanisms. If you can't tell the difference between Kingston's store and other sellers, I don't think any of the advice here will help.

Not buying Kingston at all is defensible.

Re: Quality, schmality

"claiming warranty on them is slightly less pleasant than nailing your eyelids to a table."

If you buy them via Kingston's Amazon store, the process is painless, IME. You send them a message (through Amazon) describing the problem and they refund your money.

I bought a 128gb Kingston one recently, well aware it was incredibly slow. Wrote to it once, leaving it going in the background for however many hours it took to fill it up; reading is a bit slow, but once it's indexed (by my car's audio player) it's fine for the purpose.

Thing is, it cost about 6 quid. Really, nothing to complain about at that price. If you want fast ones, they cost much more - but they are available for those who so choose. For what I'm using it for, I'd rather have a super-cheap slow one, and I suspect most people are happy with that trade-off.

Re: Simple solution?

They make it incredibly easy to claim. You send them a message, they send you a refund. One and done, almost every time.

Re: Simple solution?

Make them liable? They voluntarily accept liability. Conspiracy nuts will conspiracy, though.

Re: We need more articles like this one

The answer is really very simple: no-one who's any good at this stuff wants to work for clients who will bugger them around, and no-one buggers you around like governments. So, there's a special ecosystem in which only the people who will work for the government only work for the government.

Re: It's still happening

It was cheaper to keep making manual corrections than to fix the software, which is fine, if not as good as writing the code properly in the first place. The bit where loony bosses managed to conclude that data errors were evidence of criminality is the scandal.

I have mentioned here before that what actually appears to have happened is that Fujitsu reported to the PO brass that they were having to correct lots of errors, totaling to some very large sum, and the idiots at the PO managed to conclude that if they stopped correcting the errors, they'd have that much more money. Everything else followed: lots of lower-level PO employees were given directions on that basis, and had no idea that the errors existed.

Re: Sounds like an "Oil Company" sponsored story

Oh look, a climate science denier. Well done destroying any credibility you might have had.

Re: article might be missing something

Oh, the irony. A Tesla fanboy, with the delusion field operating at full power, says that other people need to 'educate themselves'.

Back in realityland, this is a Tesla-only problem.

Re: "the answer is simply not to drive during a deep freeze"

No, it's fact. But you're too dedicated to tonguing Elon's musky bits to be open to dealing in reality.

Teslas have laughably poor build quality, and the engineering is even worse. The average lifespan, not including those written off in crashes, is approx 5 years. Five years! That's about a third to a quarter of what every other car averages. They're junk, sold to the unwary and the delusional fanboys.

Re: "the answer is simply not to drive during a deep freeze"

People who have Teslas are used to not driving, what with the cars having worse build quality than a 70s Fiat. The cult of Elon is working overtime to obscure the fact that the average newly purchased Tesla spends a month per year with Tesla being repaired, and this continues until the warranty ends and the cars get scrapped.

Re: EVs sitting idle on lots?

The more enterprising scammers are offering 'battery conditioning' and other similar 'services' now.

Re: EVs not selling?

Have you seen a recent Tesla? Still the same issues with panel gaps from the 80s. If they can't fix that, despite being a company that puts appearance first, what are they fixing?

Re: Profits or the planet ?

Greta and you are on the same side, she's just more subtle about her aims.

Re: Mehbe

Windows basically has that. It's some wording that means ask again later.

Generally when people say something is patentable they mean usefully so. There is no point paying patent fees for a patent you can't even troll with.

Re: Why?

Current, grossly inadequate technology is _already_ safer per mile than the global average. About on a par with the US average. Still some way behind the average in countries with decent levels of driver training.

It really isn't that hard to be better than the bad drivers out there. Problem is, everyone thinks they're one of the good drivers.

Re: Scepticism

I really don't understand why so many people, including you, are so totally confused about what are the easy parts of autonomy, and what the hard.

The bits about eye contact and making intentions clear are largely irrelevant - autonomous cars will be entirely predictable and very cautious and patient compared to human drivers. But it's a fair point to suggest we might want some additional signals added to autonomous vehicles for communicating with other road users.

The stuff about noting hazards and motorway driving are the (relatively) really easy bits. Sticking to rules instead of driving dangerously due to impatience is not an issue for computers.

The stuff that is hard for autonomous vehicles is things like unconventional road layouts, cones round roadworks, and similar stuff humans find very easy - basically, like Captchas, where we are much better at certain kinds of image recognition.

Re: It's so fucking simple

Passing a driving test is utterly trivial. Current cars on the roads are capable of it, to the extent that any car would ever be - they can't be seen to check mirrors, eg, so the test isn't actually applicable.

We're way beyond that stage already. The hard stuff is basically untouched, but urban driving well enough to meet driving test standards is easy.

Re: So, shoot the messenger is still well and alive

£12? Oddly specific number. You can get one for a quid or two that will do the basic job, or pay more for a decent one that can read the model-specific codes. Depending on age you can also connect a couple of pins in the OBD port and the car will flash the codes using the dashboard lights.

Re: Unwanted fall out from Israel/Hamas conflict

Oh look, a neo-Nazi who hates Jews and wants to exterminate them. What a surprise.

Re: Unwanted fall out from Israel/Hamas conflict

Bloody wannabe camp guard. Have the balls to say what you really mean: the Jews must be exterminated, and when that's finished, you can start on the Palestinians. Vile, vile, vile.