If you read the reliability reports (like you seemingly have not) then you will discover that Tesla cars sit right at the top of the unreliability index. They are even less reliable than known bad vehicles such as the modern Landrover and Rangerover series, and lag far, far behind Honda, Toyota and Mazda internal combustion vehicles.
Even modern diesel vehicles are much, much more reliable than are Tesla electric vehicles, despite being a nightmarish blend of anti-pollution systems.
So, though your point on the simplicity of modern electric vehicles is well made and I acknowledge that they are much simpler than ICE vehicles, the actual reliability index does not bear out your point.
These comments from Goldman Sachs are as good an example of overt evil in the name of profit as can be imagined. I define evil as the infliction or prolongation of suffering in the name of some other gain, and this fits the definition exactly.
At least these monsters are not arguing for the cessation of general vaccination in the name of selling treatments for preventable disease.
No, I don't think that this will occur. What is more likely is that several major governments will buy the research instead and simply give away the treatment.
The reason I say this is that a person with Alzheimer's Disease costs money to look after. Even if the state isn't paying, then the person is still going to be a drag on the State since people who are looking after the dementia sufferer are not doing other things which would be producing tax revenue. Whichever way you slice it, demented people are a drain on the resources of a State.
However, if a government subsidises a partial cure or prevention system for Alzheimer's Disease, then several things happen. Firstly, fewer people get dementia before they die of old age, so the costs of caring for the elderly are reduced. Secondly, the government acquires an air of beneficence, which is politically good for them. Thirdly, research like this also ties into other research into other diseases.
By way of illustration of point three, there has over the last fifty years or so been a great reduction in heart and vascular disease. Part of this can be attributed to reduction of smoking (and switching from smoking tobacco to vapes), but by no means all the reduction. Some of the reduction is down to removing various toxins from the environment, such as coal smoke and lead in petrol (gasoline). However, what if living conditions have reduced the incidence of a background infection which was also contributing to the problem? Shouldn't we be on the look-out for things like this?
The UK Government have recently decided, in their great, mighty and beneficent wisdom, that they shall do something to "protect children from internet pornography". Their Cunning Plan is to force all adult-themed websites to verify that users are of adult age, using one of a number of age verification services, some of which may well be UK government-sponsored. Needless to say, very few people actually care to self-register on what amounts to a register of masturbators, nor would many people care to have a list of which sites they visit available for a vast array of Government agencies, prodnoses and tabloid journalists to see. UK civil servants have a long-standing record for being quite incredibly bad at keeping sensitive information under wraps. Tricks such as encrypting data on a CD (because regulations say they must) and writing the password on the CD (because whoever wrote the regulations did not foresee such creative stupidity) have been seen in the past.
Furthermore, the age-clade of 13-18 year olds (mostly males) will also wish to view such sites and will for the most part be unable to do so, not being able to lay hands on hacked age verification credentials. So, both people who value their privacy, and adolescents who cannot obtain the age verification tokens, will be looking to use VPNs to get at the, err, reading materials.
People are for the most part cheapskates. A free VPN would seem like a wonderful gift to them, but a logged Chinese VPN is very much a poisoned chalice, especially when those doing the logging realise what a wonderful source of blackmail material they have on their hands.
Protein synthesis works by translating DNA to RNA, then feeding the RNA through a cell structure called a ribosome. Three nucleotide bases code for one amino acid, so the RNA steps through the ribosome three bases at a time (each trio is called a codon), adding one amino acid to the protein chain each time.
There are more different codons than there are amino acids in nature, but here Life does something clever; the extra codons code for the same or similar amino acids.
Theoretically it should be possible to repurpose the extra codons to represent new amino acids; this team look to have chickened out on this one and instead introduced new nucleotides to give entirely new codons, and to use these entirely new codons to add on new amino acids.
If I recall correctly, this isn't a new thing at all. I vaguely remember these sorts of emails being sent out several years ago.
However, this sounds a lot more like some Johnny-come-latey has heard of the fabulous sums being reaped by the porn extortion racket (yeah, right) and has decided to try a new angle on the scam. Given how sensitive the powers that be are to terrorism these days, and given how brutal the likes of China and Russia can be if they have a point to make and a worthless moron to make it with, I would really not like to be the poor schmo who is trying this one. I wouldn't even want to be the owner of that particular Bitcoin wallet.
Oh to work in a company that rewards long-term employees like this!
I currently work in the IT department of a UK university. Employees are classified into pay grades, and once a person reaches the top pay of any particular grade, there they stay until they either change jobs inside the university, or leave entirely. Around here, the peak grade for IT workers as opposed to managers is generally Grade 7; this has the unpleasant effect that as soon as people start hitting top of grade and becoming superstar workers, they depart for pastures greener to get more money. Those that stay either fossilise into a role, or switch to management. Ace techies rarely make good managers.
I would rather beg to differ on this point. At the moment personal automotive transport is sticking with hydrocarbon fuels because they are so convenient, and because batteries are slow to charge, hold too little power and worst of all, are hideously expensive.
Once battery costs are reduced somewhat, possibly by the development of effective flow batteries or possibly by some other innovation, then personal EVs will start to become more commonplace.
Nukes are useful, necessary even for a number of reasons. First and foremost nukes deliver power and lots of it all the time, which heavy industry absolutely requires; batteries are not yet capacious or cheap enough to store power in sufficient quantity to make up for the patchiness of renewables.
Secondly, the world still has a lot of high-level nuclear waste that really needs destroying in fast-neutron reactors; it also has a lot of plutonium which ought really to be classified as "Really dangerous high-level waste". Plutonium is useful mostly for making bombs, so the less of it about the better.
Finally, apart from vehicle fuel much of the world's energy requirement is heat, rather than electrical or chemical power. Small, sealed-for-life nuclear reactors powering district steam heating would go a long way towards replacing gas as a heating fuel.
She comes off as a twit bureaucrat whose knowledge of computers is spoon-fed to her by lower ranking twit bureaucrats
Her argument doesn't even make sense!
If, for example, WhatsApp or iMessage were to remove encryption tomorrow - they wouldn't be any more (or any less) user-friendly than they are today. From a user's point of view, what they need to do to use the app wouldn't change one iota, because the end-to-end encryption is basically frictionless.
Her argument makes sense only when you look at the context it is made in. She is the leader of a party which held an election recently, thinking that their main opponent was so utterly useless that the result would be a massively increased majority for them. In this assumption, she and her party were wrong, because the opposition rightly surmised that telling outright lies and promising untold riches stolen from "the rich" via tax, borrowing and printing more money would increase their vote share by persuading the younger and stupider voters to vote for them.
This technique worked.
Mrs May is now working with a greatly reduced majority, and cannot steamroller through unpopular or just plain wrong-headed legislation at will.
This is why we are seeing this transparent pleading and attempts at persuasion; any attempt to impose legislation against companies who will in the main simply ignore her and her stupid laws is going to fail. Britain is also in the process of leaving the European Union, and once it has done so will drop down to "nowhere very much" in terms of economic clout when it comes to negotiating with technology giants.
So, mindless drivel from now on will be the order of the day, and indeed has always been so with politicians and encryption. Ever since the written source code to Phil Zimmermann's PGP was smuggled out of the US, the public has had access to strong end to end encryption, and the laws of physics and mathematics thus trump the laws that can be dreamed up by politicians.
If you pay the ransom in secret, then the guys who set you up this time now know a three of useful things:
1) You are stupid enough to pay ransoms. 2) You are stupid enough to run vulnerable systems which make setting up the demand possible. 3) You have the money to pay these ransoms.
In short, you just lit up an enormous great SUCKER sign right up above your heads, but only for the criminal group that ran the fiddle.
These utter idiots have however publicly said that they paid the ransom. Now every script kiddie on the planet knows those three facts, and they are ALL going to be gunning for the known-rich suckers.
This company can be counted as dead and gone right now. If you own stock in it, get rid soonest, before it becomes worthless.
To be honest VAT has always been a disaster waiting to happen, and inside the European Union it is an unmitigated nuisance to enforce.
VAT, you see, isn't a sales tax. When one company sells stuff to another one, it charges VAT on the deal which the other company can then claim back. In a chain of businesses, this carries on until the end user gets stung with the final VAT charge. This therefore lends its self to a criminal activity called Carousel Fraud, whereby VAT-liable goods are moved around, with VAT being fraudulently claimed back repeatedly. Carbon credits are the current favourite target here, since they are intangible and thus shipping costs are minimal.
Carousel fraud costs the EU thousands of millions of Euros per annum in lost revenue, and probably the same again in administration costs. As taxes go, it is a fraudster's wet-dream and a tax enforcer's nightmare and yet, as with much of the EU, it is a bad idea that is effectively here to stay.
Simply ignoring VAT, as is going on here, is another downside to it; it is simply near-impossible to catch all the fraudsters doing this, since almost no customers will trouble to report people for giving them a good cheap deal.
what sort of monster uses Bittorrent on shared Wifi?!
What sort of network admin isn't familiar with QoS and rate limiting?
The Network Unit where i currently work, a UK University, used to have a rather nifty network appliance which sat on the network segments that student halls of residence occupied and listened for Bittorrent connections. When it detected one, it sent a hang-up to each end neatly closing the connection. We never publicly announced what was going on here, but instead let the students run into the blockage by themselves. It worked better that way, fewer complaints.
These days network security appliances do the same job, more or less. It saves time and money and hassle receiving copyright take-down notices and then tracking down the culprits, and giving them an appropriate telling off. This is especially irritating with students because IT Services isn't technically part of the academic structure, and bollocking naughty students is an academic job, so the relevant academics have to be in the communications loop. Network-level blocks are such very much easier all round...
For four billion years, life on Earth was microscopic blobs of goo.
Then 600 million years ago - BAM - complex life emerged pretty much in the blink of an eye.
We have no idea how likely that transition to complex life 600 million years ago was - we have a sample size of ONE.
Now go back an read my first sentence: For four billion years, life on Earth was microscopic blobs of goo.
That four billion years was about half the expected lifetime of the Earth. The probability that complex life evolves may very well be infinitesimally small. WE DON'T KNOW.
Believing the universe must be teeming with intelligence is based on nothing more than faith.
Actually, the odds are worse than that. Mass extinctions have happened with monotonous regularity in the history of the world, and only comparatively recently have life forms evolved with internal skeletons that enabled them to get to be quite big. Insects and arthropods probably don't get big enough to carry large enough brains to become intelligent, but arthropods seem to evolve a lot more easily than do vertebrates.
Even when you look at vertebrates, a tendency to evolve big brains seems to be exclusively a mammal thing. Dinosaurs seem to have been ancestrally warm-blooded, ditto crocodilians and so on, but dinosaurs plot right on the expected brain to body size ratio that reptiles have. Throughout the entire age of dinosaurs there never seems to have been any sort of intelligence arms-race developed. Early in the post-dinosaur age, just such an arms race developed with mammals, forcing quite a lot to become smarter over quite a short period of time.
There's two reasons to doubt the inevitability of intelligence developing on alien worlds. There may well be plenty of life, but life more advanced than bacteria will be rare, and intelligent life vanishingly so.
One thing to bear in mind is that life here existed in the form of anaerobic bacteria for a staggeringly long time. Photosynthesis began as a way to split hydrogen sulphide into useful hydrogen ions and a useless waste product of elemental sulphur, which was also usefully inert. Early photosynthesis therefore didn't require much in the way of biochemical sophistication to operate; the waste sulphur is where some large sulphur deposits originated.
That changed with a mutation which let the photosynthesis split not hydrogen sulphide, but water into useful hydrogen and (to anaerobic bacteria) highly toxic and dangerous oxygen. That initially wasn't all that big a problem to early water-splitters; the oceans they were in were rich in iron-II salts which readily absorbed oxygen to become insoluble iron-III salts (this is where the banded iron rock formations come from).
Everything changed when most of the iron-II in solution in the early earth's oceans was used up. Oxygen levels slowly rose, and virtually all bacterial species either adapted or went extinct. Oxygen is toxic to most bacteria.
I would hypothesise that most alien worlds either never make the switch from anaerobic atmosphere to aerobic one, or fail to establish a homeostatic oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere quickly enough and effectively enough to become self-regulating.
In Britain, this sort of thing would probably be dealt with in a Small Claims Court, and would cost next to nothing for the defendant to represent himself. The outrageous damages would be viewed by a judge as outright silliness and dismissed; even were the defendant to lose, the most that would happen would be the cost of his printer plus the other part's costs (which he could apply to the court to "tax" if he felt them unreasonable).
This sort of thing would also likely get the serial litigant declared to be a Vexatious Litigant. the Uk Government keeps a public list of these people, who must seek a court's permission before embarking on any litigation whatsoever, because they have shown themselves to be time-wasters in the past.
Most young people tend to work on emotions instead of reason; wisdom does come with age through brain development. Then there is the fact that most young people do not have very much money, and a system wherein they gain at the expense of people who are far, far richer than they are does tend to appeal somewhat.
As soon as these people have started earning money, and started paying taxes then the prospect of becoming rich off one's own efforts starts to appeal, and the notion of having one's own money confiscated for the use of those who did not earn it starts to hurt quite a bit.
I would therefore be interested to see how the views of these people changes over time.
Assume that the income provided by the State is tax-free, but income earned above this level is taxed. If this is the case, working for cash in hand is a very effective way of making sure the State never sees the extra income and thus never gets the benefit of this work.
It is also a very, very good idea to issue identity documents to citizens eligible for this benefit, and to tie these in to a biometric of some sort, to prevent multiple identities and thus multiple claims being made.
ANPR in the UK works on a very heavily regulated target: UK vehicle licence plates. The size, font and spacing of the letters on these plates is legislated for, and non-standard plates are hunted down by the police.
By contrast, a human face is a very much more difficult target to recognise. Generally speaking, most systems up to now (notable examples being purported terrorist-spotting systems at airports) have suffered from such huge false positive rates that they were useless. I would strongly suspect that the system that the police here are employing would suffer from similar levels of false positives.
Repeatedly arresting a person on the basis of unproven technology would, if done frequently enough, count as harassment and it is for a court of law to decide (based on previous precedent) what frequency of false arrest would constitute such harassment. UK courts have not looked particularly kindly on police conducting trawls like this in the past, so I therefore suspect an ulterior motive for this surveillance.
I think this is not intended to catch criminals, but rather to frighten them out of the area.
UK criminals are typically rather stupid individuals in the main, and are also already used to pervasive CCTV and how to evade it (the standard chav uniform of baseball cap and hooded top is intended to conceal the face from overhead CCTV), and are well versed in what powers police have as well. As a result, I rather think that most criminals here would just go to the festival anyway, and trust police incompetence and the inherent uselessness of the technology to keep them unmolested.
No, if you go and chase down the original article the electrolyte is NOT unknown, but an anhydrous aluminium chloride/organic chemical. The cells the researchers are producing are putting out around 1.9 to 2 volts, and the cells are resilient over at least 7500 charge/discharge cycles. The cathode is graphite foam built on a nickel foam substrate, the anode is aluminium foil.
To be honest, the only real kicker about the entire battery is the fact that water in the electrolyte severely reduces the performance, but this could at least be mitigated in production by adding in a water absorbing chemical of some sort to the system. Apart from that it all seems very promising indeed, and as aluminium and carbon are both extremely common (as opposed to lithium, where the resources are limited) then commercialising this battery would seem to be an eminently sensible thing to do.
The basic problem with power we have at the moment is not that we don't have enough, but that all the easy sources are diffuse and low density, or are bursty in nature. Solar cells, for instance, produce no power at night. Tidal generators also produce power only at set though predictable times. We already have good storage batteries, but the problem with them is that they are expensive.
These cells have the potential (*ahem*) to be cheap. Cheap power storage solves a very great many problems, since we can then concentrate on developing cheap, efficient and durable solar cells knowing that there will be a market for the power and that this power can then be stored efficiently; if you lack power storage, then the effective momentary market price of solar electricity drops to almost nothing when the sun shines, and rises astronomically as the sun sets.
Britain is currently about to have a general election, at the start of May. We apologise for the loss of sanity and indeed coherence from our political classes; they are currently competing to see who can be the most entertainingly inventive liars.
I worked for a company like that for a while; complete and utter bastards to work for. What that sort of behaviour towards their employees got them was a complete lack of any loyalty whatsoever. Since they were also a bunch of idiots who never planned anything, and always bodged things to run until the next last minute bodge, then however motivated a saboteur might have been, it would have been rather difficult to think up any action which would show up against the background level of incompetence, malevolence and managerial stupidity.
Most people simply got out of the door quickly, and took care never to work for them ever again, figuring that the company would come to an eventual bad end. It did, as things turned out, and the UK law would still like to have a long, comfortable chat with the company directors in the unlikely event of them ever setting foot in the EU again.
My take on easter eggs and sabotage like this is simple: DON'T DO IT! You never know when you might need a reference or a job involving some of the people in that last job, and it helps to have maintained a professional aspect and outlook throughout whatever shenanigans led to your departure. People tend to appreciate that sort of thing, and it also gives you the moral (and legal) high ground subsequently. It also means that you're not forever after worrying about whether the law are after you for unspecified crimes, and if you're the worrying sort like myself, it helps not to give yourself anything much to worry about in future.
A couple of hours of no power input from solar power is not, and never has been a problem for the European power grid. This sort of thing happens extremely regularly, every night. We're used to it, and can cope. Thanks for worrying about us, though; it really was extremely kind of you.
I would contend that a person's freedom to be an idiot starts and ends with themselves, and does not extend to endangering the life of their child, or indeed the lives of other children damaged in an epidemic of a preventable disease.
This is one of those cases where science and state really do know better than a Bronze Age religion. One of the many, many cases.
The most obvious reason for an attack here is to commit insurance fraud. At present, an insurance company is forced to base an insurance premium on all the meta-data they can possibly gather about the prospective client, excepting their sex if they are in the EU (although this may well lead to a quite astonishing number of men called "Sue", if insurance companies attempt to bypass this and link first names to insurance risk).
A data-gathering dongle would seem to offer a much better deal, allowing the company to charge more if the user indulges in risky behaviour of some description.
A possible reason for hacking into the module would therefore be to falsify the data sent back to the company; a boy racer who regularly breaks speed limits, corners absurdly fast and brakes late if at all would gain substantially from a fraudulent data recording which portrayed him as someone with the driving habits of an octogenarian grandmother; such a person might also think that the gamble of sending such phoney data was well worth the savings when set against the fairly low risk of getting caught.
It therefore worries me that companies are this lazy when building such equipment. It really doesn't take all that much to keep out the majority of crackers right from the start, and as the skilled ones are in the minority, taking a little care initially would pay dividends down the line.
Slashdot Mirror
If you read the reliability reports (like you seemingly have not) then you will discover that Tesla cars sit right at the top of the unreliability index. They are even less reliable than known bad vehicles such as the modern Landrover and Rangerover series, and lag far, far behind Honda, Toyota and Mazda internal combustion vehicles.
Even modern diesel vehicles are much, much more reliable than are Tesla electric vehicles, despite being a nightmarish blend of anti-pollution systems.
So, though your point on the simplicity of modern electric vehicles is well made and I acknowledge that they are much simpler than ICE vehicles, the actual reliability index does not bear out your point.
Sorry.
These comments from Goldman Sachs are as good an example of overt evil in the name of profit as can be imagined. I define evil as the infliction or prolongation of suffering in the name of some other gain, and this fits the definition exactly.
At least these monsters are not arguing for the cessation of general vaccination in the name of selling treatments for preventable disease.
No, I don't think that this will occur. What is more likely is that several major governments will buy the research instead and simply give away the treatment.
The reason I say this is that a person with Alzheimer's Disease costs money to look after. Even if the state isn't paying, then the person is still going to be a drag on the State since people who are looking after the dementia sufferer are not doing other things which would be producing tax revenue. Whichever way you slice it, demented people are a drain on the resources of a State.
However, if a government subsidises a partial cure or prevention system for Alzheimer's Disease, then several things happen. Firstly, fewer people get dementia before they die of old age, so the costs of caring for the elderly are reduced. Secondly, the government acquires an air of beneficence, which is politically good for them. Thirdly, research like this also ties into other research into other diseases.
By way of illustration of point three, there has over the last fifty years or so been a great reduction in heart and vascular disease. Part of this can be attributed to reduction of smoking (and switching from smoking tobacco to vapes), but by no means all the reduction. Some of the reduction is down to removing various toxins from the environment, such as coal smoke and lead in petrol (gasoline). However, what if living conditions have reduced the incidence of a background infection which was also contributing to the problem? Shouldn't we be on the look-out for things like this?
The UK Government have recently decided, in their great, mighty and beneficent wisdom, that they shall do something to "protect children from internet pornography". Their Cunning Plan is to force all adult-themed websites to verify that users are of adult age, using one of a number of age verification services, some of which may well be UK government-sponsored. Needless to say, very few people actually care to self-register on what amounts to a register of masturbators, nor would many people care to have a list of which sites they visit available for a vast array of Government agencies, prodnoses and tabloid journalists to see. UK civil servants have a long-standing record for being quite incredibly bad at keeping sensitive information under wraps. Tricks such as encrypting data on a CD (because regulations say they must) and writing the password on the CD (because whoever wrote the regulations did not foresee such creative stupidity) have been seen in the past.
Furthermore, the age-clade of 13-18 year olds (mostly males) will also wish to view such sites and will for the most part be unable to do so, not being able to lay hands on hacked age verification credentials. So, both people who value their privacy, and adolescents who cannot obtain the age verification tokens, will be looking to use VPNs to get at the, err, reading materials.
People are for the most part cheapskates. A free VPN would seem like a wonderful gift to them, but a logged Chinese VPN is very much a poisoned chalice, especially when those doing the logging realise what a wonderful source of blackmail material they have on their hands.
Protein synthesis works by translating DNA to RNA, then feeding the RNA through a cell structure called a ribosome. Three nucleotide bases code for one amino acid, so the RNA steps through the ribosome three bases at a time (each trio is called a codon), adding one amino acid to the protein chain each time.
There are more different codons than there are amino acids in nature, but here Life does something clever; the extra codons code for the same or similar amino acids.
Theoretically it should be possible to repurpose the extra codons to represent new amino acids; this team look to have chickened out on this one and instead introduced new nucleotides to give entirely new codons, and to use these entirely new codons to add on new amino acids.
If I recall correctly, this isn't a new thing at all. I vaguely remember these sorts of emails being sent out several years ago.
However, this sounds a lot more like some Johnny-come-latey has heard of the fabulous sums being reaped by the porn extortion racket (yeah, right) and has decided to try a new angle on the scam. Given how sensitive the powers that be are to terrorism these days, and given how brutal the likes of China and Russia can be if they have a point to make and a worthless moron to make it with, I would really not like to be the poor schmo who is trying this one. I wouldn't even want to be the owner of that particular Bitcoin wallet.
Oh to work in a company that rewards long-term employees like this!
I currently work in the IT department of a UK university. Employees are classified into pay grades, and once a person reaches the top pay of any particular grade, there they stay until they either change jobs inside the university, or leave entirely. Around here, the peak grade for IT workers as opposed to managers is generally Grade 7; this has the unpleasant effect that as soon as people start hitting top of grade and becoming superstar workers, they depart for pastures greener to get more money. Those that stay either fossilise into a role, or switch to management. Ace techies rarely make good managers.
I would rather beg to differ on this point. At the moment personal automotive transport is sticking with hydrocarbon fuels because they are so convenient, and because batteries are slow to charge, hold too little power and worst of all, are hideously expensive.
Once battery costs are reduced somewhat, possibly by the development of effective flow batteries or possibly by some other innovation, then personal EVs will start to become more commonplace.
Nukes are useful, necessary even for a number of reasons. First and foremost nukes deliver power and lots of it all the time, which heavy industry absolutely requires; batteries are not yet capacious or cheap enough to store power in sufficient quantity to make up for the patchiness of renewables.
Secondly, the world still has a lot of high-level nuclear waste that really needs destroying in fast-neutron reactors; it also has a lot of plutonium which ought really to be classified as "Really dangerous high-level waste". Plutonium is useful mostly for making bombs, so the less of it about the better.
Finally, apart from vehicle fuel much of the world's energy requirement is heat, rather than electrical or chemical power. Small, sealed-for-life nuclear reactors powering district steam heating would go a long way towards replacing gas as a heating fuel.
She comes off as a twit bureaucrat whose knowledge of computers is spoon-fed to her by lower ranking twit bureaucrats
Her argument doesn't even make sense!
If, for example, WhatsApp or iMessage were to remove encryption tomorrow - they wouldn't be any more (or any less) user-friendly than they are today. From a user's point of view, what they need to do to use the app wouldn't change one iota, because the end-to-end encryption is basically frictionless.
Her argument makes sense only when you look at the context it is made in. She is the leader of a party which held an election recently, thinking that their main opponent was so utterly useless that the result would be a massively increased majority for them. In this assumption, she and her party were wrong, because the opposition rightly surmised that telling outright lies and promising untold riches stolen from "the rich" via tax, borrowing and printing more money would increase their vote share by persuading the younger and stupider voters to vote for them.
This technique worked.
Mrs May is now working with a greatly reduced majority, and cannot steamroller through unpopular or just plain wrong-headed legislation at will.
This is why we are seeing this transparent pleading and attempts at persuasion; any attempt to impose legislation against companies who will in the main simply ignore her and her stupid laws is going to fail. Britain is also in the process of leaving the European Union, and once it has done so will drop down to "nowhere very much" in terms of economic clout when it comes to negotiating with technology giants.
So, mindless drivel from now on will be the order of the day, and indeed has always been so with politicians and encryption. Ever since the written source code to Phil Zimmermann's PGP was smuggled out of the US, the public has had access to strong end to end encryption, and the laws of physics and mathematics thus trump the laws that can be dreamed up by politicians.
If you pay the ransom in secret, then the guys who set you up this time now know a three of useful things:
1) You are stupid enough to pay ransoms.
2) You are stupid enough to run vulnerable systems which make setting up the demand possible.
3) You have the money to pay these ransoms.
In short, you just lit up an enormous great SUCKER sign right up above your heads, but only for the criminal group that ran the fiddle.
These utter idiots have however publicly said that they paid the ransom. Now every script kiddie on the planet knows those three facts, and they are ALL going to be gunning for the known-rich suckers.
This company can be counted as dead and gone right now. If you own stock in it, get rid soonest, before it becomes worthless.
To be honest VAT has always been a disaster waiting to happen, and inside the European Union it is an unmitigated nuisance to enforce.
VAT, you see, isn't a sales tax. When one company sells stuff to another one, it charges VAT on the deal which the other company can then claim back. In a chain of businesses, this carries on until the end user gets stung with the final VAT charge. This therefore lends its self to a criminal activity called Carousel Fraud, whereby VAT-liable goods are moved around, with VAT being fraudulently claimed back repeatedly. Carbon credits are the current favourite target here, since they are intangible and thus shipping costs are minimal.
Carousel fraud costs the EU thousands of millions of Euros per annum in lost revenue, and probably the same again in administration costs. As taxes go, it is a fraudster's wet-dream and a tax enforcer's nightmare and yet, as with much of the EU, it is a bad idea that is effectively here to stay.
Simply ignoring VAT, as is going on here, is another downside to it; it is simply near-impossible to catch all the fraudsters doing this, since almost no customers will trouble to report people for giving them a good cheap deal.
what sort of monster uses Bittorrent on shared Wifi?!
What sort of network admin isn't familiar with QoS and rate limiting?
The Network Unit where i currently work, a UK University, used to have a rather nifty network appliance which sat on the network segments that student halls of residence occupied and listened for Bittorrent connections. When it detected one, it sent a hang-up to each end neatly closing the connection. We never publicly announced what was going on here, but instead let the students run into the blockage by themselves. It worked better that way, fewer complaints.
These days network security appliances do the same job, more or less. It saves time and money and hassle receiving copyright take-down notices and then tracking down the culprits, and giving them an appropriate telling off. This is especially irritating with students because IT Services isn't technically part of the academic structure, and bollocking naughty students is an academic job, so the relevant academics have to be in the communications loop. Network-level blocks are such very much easier all round...
For four billion years, life on Earth was microscopic blobs of goo.
Then 600 million years ago - BAM - complex life emerged pretty much in the blink of an eye.
We have no idea how likely that transition to complex life 600 million years ago was - we have a sample size of ONE.
Now go back an read my first sentence: For four billion years, life on Earth was microscopic blobs of goo.
That four billion years was about half the expected lifetime of the Earth. The probability that complex life evolves may very well be infinitesimally small. WE DON'T KNOW.
Believing the universe must be teeming with intelligence is based on nothing more than faith.
Actually, the odds are worse than that. Mass extinctions have happened with monotonous regularity in the history of the world, and only comparatively recently have life forms evolved with internal skeletons that enabled them to get to be quite big. Insects and arthropods probably don't get big enough to carry large enough brains to become intelligent, but arthropods seem to evolve a lot more easily than do vertebrates.
Even when you look at vertebrates, a tendency to evolve big brains seems to be exclusively a mammal thing. Dinosaurs seem to have been ancestrally warm-blooded, ditto crocodilians and so on, but dinosaurs plot right on the expected brain to body size ratio that reptiles have. Throughout the entire age of dinosaurs there never seems to have been any sort of intelligence arms-race developed. Early in the post-dinosaur age, just such an arms race developed with mammals, forcing quite a lot to become smarter over quite a short period of time.
There's two reasons to doubt the inevitability of intelligence developing on alien worlds. There may well be plenty of life, but life more advanced than bacteria will be rare, and intelligent life vanishingly so.
One thing to bear in mind is that life here existed in the form of anaerobic bacteria for a staggeringly long time. Photosynthesis began as a way to split hydrogen sulphide into useful hydrogen ions and a useless waste product of elemental sulphur, which was also usefully inert. Early photosynthesis therefore didn't require much in the way of biochemical sophistication to operate; the waste sulphur is where some large sulphur deposits originated.
That changed with a mutation which let the photosynthesis split not hydrogen sulphide, but water into useful hydrogen and (to anaerobic bacteria) highly toxic and dangerous oxygen. That initially wasn't all that big a problem to early water-splitters; the oceans they were in were rich in iron-II salts which readily absorbed oxygen to become insoluble iron-III salts (this is where the banded iron rock formations come from).
Everything changed when most of the iron-II in solution in the early earth's oceans was used up. Oxygen levels slowly rose, and virtually all bacterial species either adapted or went extinct. Oxygen is toxic to most bacteria.
I would hypothesise that most alien worlds either never make the switch from anaerobic atmosphere to aerobic one, or fail to establish a homeostatic oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere quickly enough and effectively enough to become self-regulating.
In Britain, this sort of thing would probably be dealt with in a Small Claims Court, and would cost next to nothing for the defendant to represent himself. The outrageous damages would be viewed by a judge as outright silliness and dismissed; even were the defendant to lose, the most that would happen would be the cost of his printer plus the other part's costs (which he could apply to the court to "tax" if he felt them unreasonable).
This sort of thing would also likely get the serial litigant declared to be a Vexatious Litigant. the Uk Government keeps a public list of these people, who must seek a court's permission before embarking on any litigation whatsoever, because they have shown themselves to be time-wasters in the past.
Most young people tend to work on emotions instead of reason; wisdom does come with age through brain development. Then there is the fact that most young people do not have very much money, and a system wherein they gain at the expense of people who are far, far richer than they are does tend to appeal somewhat.
As soon as these people have started earning money, and started paying taxes then the prospect of becoming rich off one's own efforts starts to appeal, and the notion of having one's own money confiscated for the use of those who did not earn it starts to hurt quite a bit.
I would therefore be interested to see how the views of these people changes over time.
Assume that the income provided by the State is tax-free, but income earned above this level is taxed. If this is the case, working for cash in hand is a very effective way of making sure the State never sees the extra income and thus never gets the benefit of this work.
It is also a very, very good idea to issue identity documents to citizens eligible for this benefit, and to tie these in to a biometric of some sort, to prevent multiple identities and thus multiple claims being made.
ANPR in the UK works on a very heavily regulated target: UK vehicle licence plates. The size, font and spacing of the letters on these plates is legislated for, and non-standard plates are hunted down by the police.
By contrast, a human face is a very much more difficult target to recognise. Generally speaking, most systems up to now (notable examples being purported terrorist-spotting systems at airports) have suffered from such huge false positive rates that they were useless. I would strongly suspect that the system that the police here are employing would suffer from similar levels of false positives.
Repeatedly arresting a person on the basis of unproven technology would, if done frequently enough, count as harassment and it is for a court of law to decide (based on previous precedent) what frequency of false arrest would constitute such harassment. UK courts have not looked particularly kindly on police conducting trawls like this in the past, so I therefore suspect an ulterior motive for this surveillance.
I think this is not intended to catch criminals, but rather to frighten them out of the area.
UK criminals are typically rather stupid individuals in the main, and are also already used to pervasive CCTV and how to evade it (the standard chav uniform of baseball cap and hooded top is intended to conceal the face from overhead CCTV), and are well versed in what powers police have as well. As a result, I rather think that most criminals here would just go to the festival anyway, and trust police incompetence and the inherent uselessness of the technology to keep them unmolested.
No, if you go and chase down the original article the electrolyte is NOT unknown, but an anhydrous aluminium chloride/organic chemical. The cells the researchers are producing are putting out around 1.9 to 2 volts, and the cells are resilient over at least 7500 charge/discharge cycles. The cathode is graphite foam built on a nickel foam substrate, the anode is aluminium foil.
To be honest, the only real kicker about the entire battery is the fact that water in the electrolyte severely reduces the performance, but this could at least be mitigated in production by adding in a water absorbing chemical of some sort to the system. Apart from that it all seems very promising indeed, and as aluminium and carbon are both extremely common (as opposed to lithium, where the resources are limited) then commercialising this battery would seem to be an eminently sensible thing to do.
The basic problem with power we have at the moment is not that we don't have enough, but that all the easy sources are diffuse and low density, or are bursty in nature. Solar cells, for instance, produce no power at night. Tidal generators also produce power only at set though predictable times. We already have good storage batteries, but the problem with them is that they are expensive.
These cells have the potential (*ahem*) to be cheap. Cheap power storage solves a very great many problems, since we can then concentrate on developing cheap, efficient and durable solar cells knowing that there will be a market for the power and that this power can then be stored efficiently; if you lack power storage, then the effective momentary market price of solar electricity drops to almost nothing when the sun shines, and rises astronomically as the sun sets.
Britain is currently about to have a general election, at the start of May. We apologise for the loss of sanity and indeed coherence from our political classes; they are currently competing to see who can be the most entertainingly inventive liars.
Normal service will be resumed mid-May.
I worked for a company like that for a while; complete and utter bastards to work for. What that sort of behaviour towards their employees got them was a complete lack of any loyalty whatsoever. Since they were also a bunch of idiots who never planned anything, and always bodged things to run until the next last minute bodge, then however motivated a saboteur might have been, it would have been rather difficult to think up any action which would show up against the background level of incompetence, malevolence and managerial stupidity.
Most people simply got out of the door quickly, and took care never to work for them ever again, figuring that the company would come to an eventual bad end. It did, as things turned out, and the UK law would still like to have a long, comfortable chat with the company directors in the unlikely event of them ever setting foot in the EU again.
My take on easter eggs and sabotage like this is simple: DON'T DO IT! You never know when you might need a reference or a job involving some of the people in that last job, and it helps to have maintained a professional aspect and outlook throughout whatever shenanigans led to your departure. People tend to appreciate that sort of thing, and it also gives you the moral (and legal) high ground subsequently. It also means that you're not forever after worrying about whether the law are after you for unspecified crimes, and if you're the worrying sort like myself, it helps not to give yourself anything much to worry about in future.
A couple of hours of no power input from solar power is not, and never has been a problem for the European power grid. This sort of thing happens extremely regularly, every night. We're used to it, and can cope. Thanks for worrying about us, though; it really was extremely kind of you.
I would contend that a person's freedom to be an idiot starts and ends with themselves, and does not extend to endangering the life of their child, or indeed the lives of other children damaged in an epidemic of a preventable disease.
This is one of those cases where science and state really do know better than a Bronze Age religion. One of the many, many cases.
The most obvious reason for an attack here is to commit insurance fraud. At present, an insurance company is forced to base an insurance premium on all the meta-data they can possibly gather about the prospective client, excepting their sex if they are in the EU (although this may well lead to a quite astonishing number of men called "Sue", if insurance companies attempt to bypass this and link first names to insurance risk).
A data-gathering dongle would seem to offer a much better deal, allowing the company to charge more if the user indulges in risky behaviour of some description.
A possible reason for hacking into the module would therefore be to falsify the data sent back to the company; a boy racer who regularly breaks speed limits, corners absurdly fast and brakes late if at all would gain substantially from a fraudulent data recording which portrayed him as someone with the driving habits of an octogenarian grandmother; such a person might also think that the gamble of sending such phoney data was well worth the savings when set against the fairly low risk of getting caught.
It therefore worries me that companies are this lazy when building such equipment. It really doesn't take all that much to keep out the majority of crackers right from the start, and as the skilled ones are in the minority, taking a little care initially would pay dividends down the line.