Refuse to use a carrier that attempts to lock you to their network (anti-competitive practice - they should only be doing it to ensure that you are still paying your debt to them for your financed phone, but even that's dubious).
Anyway, I thought we were all going to have eSIMs soon?
To be honest, at this point, my phone is a tablet on a data connection. I couldn't care less about the telecoms company behind it, and don't use it for classical telephony.
I would actually rather carry around a Wifi-4G (*) box on a month-to-month or PAYG basis and change it if they started messing me about. Then they wouldn't even see my "phone", just a data connection over Wifi / 4G.
But for sure, I've never owned a network-locked phone and don't ever intend to start with one. Buy phone from phone manufacturer via retail website. Buy SIM from a shop on a network of my choice. The second I can't just change that SIM for another, I'll find another way to connect. If that means a mini-Wifi box for each carrier, I'll take that into account as regards paying them money.
(*) I have a little Huawei box. It's the size and shape of a half-used bar of soap. It charges by USB. It works for 8 hours at full whack but can also be constantly plugged in. It offers out a 4G SIM connection over Wifi including NAT, firewall, SIP-NAT, etc. I can slip it in my pocket alongside my phone and, because it has a big data allowance, use all the data on it via my phone without having to even take it out of my pocket.
It travels with me. It's relatively secure (unlike, say, an open Wifi in a pub). It works throughout Europe. I can connect it to a cheap antenna and boost the signal when at home (when it's powered all the time) and the Wifi covers my entire two-storey home.
Friends can press a button and join it via WPS if they like. It can even piggy-back off another Wifi so you don't have to change your network settings once you'd used up all your data.
That's my "connection". Yes, it has a SIM card. Yes, it could be "locked" to the network (it's not - I bought it entirely separately to the multiple SIMs inside it that I switch to if I burn through the data). But it's cheap enough to be throwaway even if they did lock it. One of those and then change the whole thing for another network if they start locking me in and I want to move.
And then they never get on my phone, my phone doesn't even need a SIM inside it, I can use any phone I like, and I've got that barrier between what they are capable of running code on (even via a SIM smartcard) and what they are not.
I'd honestly rather do that - both my phone and that box slip lovely into a single pocket with room to spare and can "charge" off each other's cables - than carry a locked phone.
Hell, I'd carry a USB dongle and you could probably power a USB-4G dongle direct off a phone nowadays (USB-C and all that) and cut out the Wifi and charging portion. New network, new dongle, off you go.
Conversion. Storage. Conversion. Tranmission (in the case of the Orkney's over a huge undersea cable back to the mainland). Conversion. Transmission. Conversion.
Renewables are NOT as easily integrated into the grid.
That's why Tesla sold millions of dollars of batteries to the Australian grid - it's used to control and level demand.
Compare and contrast with, say, gas/coal - heat water, spin turbine, get AC out of it. Conversions are much less, and there are no DC->AC conversions at all.
Conversions = loss. Tranmissions = loss.
In the case of renewables, the fluctuating generation also requires huge amounts of smoothing (and therefore storage/conversion).
Otherwise, you'd just put all your power generation in one empty, non-populated state and run cables. It's just not that simple.
The UK is only 800-something miles long. And yet we have power generation all over the place. By the time you got that Orkney power to even proper civilisation in Scotland (i.e. major city like Glasgow or Edinburgh), it's basically useless.
Which is a nearly 1% of their revenue. That's not "nothing". In terms of profit, it may well hurt a lot more - they still have to have planes sitting around doing nothing, and maybe pay pilots. But their REVENUE was hit by at least 1% in doing so, but their costs now.
Delta reported $1.3bn profit a quarter. That means that 1% revenue hit likely means a multi-percent hit to profits, if not more. That's not "nothing". Sure, they're all big numbers, but not nothing. You'd have to declare that to shareholders, for instance.
And when the recent hurricanes cost them more than that, you can literally compare the money lost from the shutdown to that of a natural disaster.
Meanwhile, in civilised countries, if a budget approval isn't given, the previous authorised budget is automatically continued until such time as a new budget is approved.
Nobody goes unpaid. Government doesn't get shutdown. Nobody has to implement emergency measures. Everything carries on as it did before until someone can get changes approved and sign off on the new budget. At no point does anything go any more unfunded/underfunded than it already was before the new budget was proposed.
It's almost like those other countries spotted what a stupid idea "shut down the government", including using it as blackmail, was many, many, many centuries ago and worked around it.
The tidal / water places, don't have the majority of the population.
And let's not forget that all three are HARSH conditions - requiring more maintenance, repairs, tougher materials, longer service times, more shutdowns (especially with wind - you can blow a turbine to pieces if you don't put the brakes on when it's really blowing), more difficult access etc.
What kills renewable energy isn't that you can't use it in the permanent-gale-force that is the Orkneys, but that you can't easily transport it back to anywhere useful where there's a populace.
And everywhere there's a populace, you don't have the square-meters of open air to power the number of people who live under that square meter.
Which means conversion, storage, conversion, transport, conversion. Which means it quickly becomes an expensive exercise in "where not to get your energy from".
Even then... the costs associated with it are often subsidised and understated (I'm not yet sure that any large solar plant has reached "lifetime" yet, because they are all just too new... so we have no idea if the lifetime estimates / associated costs are even accurate). If the lifetime of a plant is 25 years - and it gets that - we're still replacing every 25 years. Without subsidy next time. Of course the companies are afloat and profitable at the moment. In 25 years, it will be a very different picture. Even traditional energy suppliers are going bankrupt, and many of them are citing the carbon taxes and associated costs of deploying a mandatory amount of renewables as one of the reasons.
This stuff "works". So long as you put it in the worst possible place to maintain, supply that energy to the end-user, and people pay you to do it.
The oldest solar plant in the US started in 1983/4. The equipment there bears no resemblance to what was installed in 1984, and the first deployments are now generating half what they were in 1984. Same for the 1986 deployment. And that's just the raw numbers. Who knows how many 1984 panels were replaced with "new" 1984 panels. In 2017, they replaced those systems.
And the original manufacturers went bankrupt in the 90's.
And they generate only 19% of what their supposed capacity states. And they cancelled any number of planned expansions and sold off any number of units to investors as they couldn't sustain them otherwise.
That's the single, longest running project for solar... in the desert, basically.
Things aren't as rosy as "just use renewable, it solves everything", because it doesn't. By a long shot. Even "in theory", things like solar, wind, tidal, etc. can't keep up with human demands for power if we were to blanket the world in them. They have a set physical limit above which it's not possible to make them more efficient or smaller.
The same is not true of things like nuclear power - uranium deposits could run the world and all it's power demands for the next millennia on *current* technology alone.
Renewables have an awful long way to go, not much wiggle room, and hardly any testing, and spurious claims.
"the sheer number of times scientists consider something to be 'scientifically impossible', are badly disproven by some kind of new finding or discovery a few years later, and then express 'surprise' that 'X is indeed possible"
Name three such times.
I can't think, off the top of my head, of a reputable scientist who a) said something was impossible that b) was speaking for the community as a whole where c) it was then proven to be possible, and c) they were then surprised that it was possible.
Maybe over 50-100 years (i.e it's impossible "with current science", but overall?).
Even things like cold fusion (which we suspect to be impossible) is stated as being "unlikely", "improbable", etc. rather than concretely impossible.
There are extremely few absolutes in the scientific world, and they are the most-open-minded group of people (don't confuse this with the naivety of being "open-minded" about psychic phenomena, etc.... those kinds of things are stated to be as close to impossible as they can be, and proven by double-blind trials which prove they are nonsense).
And there's also a problem of interpretation. It's *not possible* for information to travel faster than the speed of light in any of the current scientific models, for instance. But we not only know that they are possibly incomplete or inaccurate, but that people mis-state, mis-interpret, and mis-understand quite what it is that the scientists say is impossible.
You get idiots - like the E-Cat guy - who claim to be scientists, may even have some qualifications, but come up with nonsense that's absolutely 100% bullshit and roundly condemned by the rest of the community. But that's like having the vegan nutter interviewed on the news somehow "representing" all the vegans in the world, or similar.
Scientists are rarely surprised, though it is fascinating when something unexpected happens (that doesn't mean we ever thought it was "impossible", just that we hadn't imagined that it was possible... which is very different*).
Really, it's just the reporting that's the hyperbolic thing. Scientists don't write press releases like that.
(* if you told a scientist from the 1800s that we'd all be driving computer-controlled electric cars, he wouldn't have said it was *impossible*. He just may not have imagined that it would be so well harnessed, prevalent, and considered mainstream, and that we had managed to store enough energy, control it with energy itself, etc. Impossible is a big word)
In my last house (in quite a respectable area of London, famous for very posh schools etc.), the local high street was dead. There were a handful of shops.
What happened is that betting shops moved in. Dozens of them. At one point, six in the same street (which was only short).
The people going in are pissing away their money to fund an addiction. They've now had to introduce laws to reduce the maximum bet on a "fixed odds betting terminal" (fruit machine to you and me) to £2, because it was getting up to £100 for one spin in some instances.
To generalise, the clientele are generally unwanted - dozens and dozens of people who crowd the ATMs on the day when benefits (social security) are paid, draw it out instantly, and spend all day in the betting shops and drinking.
It's not everyone. I have what the British call "a flutter" occasionally, and I'm a mathematician too, so I can do the maths to tell you that you'll never win on average. But you don't really want your population gambling away money unless you own and tax the casinos so heavily that it's beneficial - even then, the social cost is enormous because the people who gamble the most are those that can't afford to.
Las Vegas is tainted because of this for me - I get that it's a part of the US culture in that area, and casinos are different to grubby betting shops, but the clientele are the same.
You'd think you could just tax it to oblivion to counteract any effect, but it does more than just encourage people to get into debt. It's an addiction. There are "gamble aware" programs, where anything advertising gambling has to offer certain functions (i.e. to let people "lock" themselves out of their account for a period of time, to encourage them to "gamble responsibility", and so on). In Italy and other places in Europe, cruise ships (which used to be seen as luxury liners for the rich) are now just regarded with condemnation because they are just used as offshore gambling and drinking dens, usually for British tourists!
The TV is full of adverts for bingo and casinos (online and offline). It's become "the norm" to be swamped in gambling advertising.
There's a big difference between someone playing a lottery once a month (what I'd say was analogous to, say, a village fete tombola) and high-level gambling establishments. Online can be dangerous - it's just a number on a screen.
Gambling will always exist. But it can lead to a degeneration if it's unchecked. I don't get the online/offline distinction but certainly controls need to be in place. The UK ditched most of the legislation about what can apply to be a casino or gambling establishment, and all it means is that the whole high street is just full of gambling places, and websites full of gambling ads.
I've gambled in Las Vegas. I've gambled on cruise ships (but the QE2 was the last of the luxury liners and wasn't gambling-focused at all, it was just a fancy evening dressed up). I know the odds and play games for a living. Hell I have a felt card table, card shoe and poker chips in my lounge as I speak... but even to me, unrestricted or lax gambling legislation has lead to an easily observable phenomenon and every-day news story headline... "My boyfriend stole our benefits to gamble away all our money, and now we're homeless".
I can understand them wanting to limit it. The ruling is a bit arbitrary, but gambling isn't as victimless as you might think. It's not the people losing the money they need to live that are hurt... they are suffering for their own stupidity. It's the knock-on effect on society.
If your other goods or services (e.g. broadband) went up by 13-18%, I'm sure you'd complain too.
"It's only $2" is the refuge of a person with $2 to spare and expecting everyone else to ALWAYS have $2 to spare, on top of whatever they are paying for everything else. That's $2 a month, which is worse. You're now inching towards cable/satellite bills.
I stopped my Netflix. It was my only "TV" for about a year. But then I realised that all the "unique" content I didn't really care about, all the existing content I could just buy or watch for free on broadcast, and then they started getting finicky over how many devices, talking about adverts, etc.
I refuse to pay more than a token, throwaway payment for something that is just visual entertainment. I have Amazon Prime because it actually saves me money on delivery enough to justify itself, and then I get "free TV" on there too. I had Netflix because it was cheap and I could watch a lot of things. Once I'd watched those things, I didn't really care to pay for them continuously, and a lot of them came on Amazon Prime anyway.
Now my TV is actually a Raspberry Pi with a DVB adaptor. It costs me nothing, streams to my laptop, my phone, etc. and I can VPN in to watch it too (which bypasses a load of regional nonsense when I go on holiday). And I don't have a big box on the wall wanting to talk to everything.
It takes a lot to make me cut a service that I'm already signed up to. But I did it before Netflix raised prices in my country. They're going to struggle if they keep doing that.
In rise with inflation, or give me something more for the money.
So it statistically correlated randomly-grouped information over millions of trials?
Still not AI. Still just statistics. Bad statistics. With complete lack of inference. With shady, if not downright dishonest, assertions made about its capabilities.
You did what "AI" has had done to it for decades now... flip a bit to indicate success in some fashion, and throw millions of trials at it until it trains itself to activate "bit" more than a handful of times.
It could be flipping because it's majority green. Because the top-left pixel is green. Because there's watermark on the image. Because some frequency curve (if you have those, it's highly unlikely to form those itself in even a billion attempts / generations / evolutions / trainings) hits on a certain colour.
The fact is: You have NO idea what it's correlating on. It's almost superstition on the part of the AI (if it wasn't completely lacking in any intelligence).
Did you know that if you feed a pigeon in a box at random times it starts to associate feeding time with whatever it happened to be doing, and so repeat that? Whether that's bobbing its head, pecking at the floor, or looking a certain direction.
It then spends most of its time trying to replicate that convinced that it's "just not doing it quite right", like someone with a superstition about their team winning because they were wearing their lucky underpants - no amount of negative correlation will convince them they are wrong and get them to change their ways.
And that's exactly the problem with "AI" / neural networks. Of course you can train them to a statistical correlation - you know why? Because you're eliminating / training out / not breeding from those that don't correlate somewhat. It doesn't mean that what they are working from has anything to do with what you were after. And, most importantly, it does not mean you can trust them further on new data, nor that you can "untrain" them when they get it wrong, nor that you can perpetually improve them by more and more training.
All that happens is that it plateaus before it ever really gets useful (usually within the range of a PhD study - write your thesis up quick!), people release rubbishy apps "to show what it can do" and then it's never touched again because it can't be used for anything else and isn't particularly good or useful at what it does do.
We don't have AI, stop trying to pretend that we do. When you get a machine that can infer, that can actually reason its answer (not just "well it matches shape 22%, colour 17% and overall pattern roughness 19.4%", but "I can see branches here, here and here. They are connected. The connection grow and increase in width. The thickness part, which looks trunk-like, ends in a solid base which resembles soil", etc.)
Until then, this is all just a waste of time, and heuristics (YOU told it when it got the tree right).
Of course you can. I do it all the time (HyperV tools to emulate an existing MAC from another server for failover etc.). I've been able to - and have done - it since kernel 2.0 at least... I actually use MAC address as part of things like RADIUS authentication, though. Because 99.999% of people would never be able to work out how to do it.
They've even already eliminated the modern feature of "disposable" MAC addresses given to each Wifi network you probe to prevent such tracking... they know his MAC stayed the same all those days as they correlated several things together.
The chances that he did this are absolutely minimal.
I can change a car number plate in about 5 minutes, tops, to any other valid one that I see on the road. But police still call out those for incidents where a suspect car was spotted too.
It's not about "this is convictable in a court of law". It's a correlative piece of evidence that may well lead to chance correlations which can lead to REAL evidence (i.e. seeing the same guy walking around town, on his phone at a certain location and time (which will give them his number and calls) and so on.
But they can't link the MAC address directly to IMEI or SIM or phone number, most likely, or they'd have already done it.
Stop thinking "A jury would never convict on that basis" and think "That's a clue that may well lead to a suspect".
The guy planted actual, viable bombs that would kill people.
The MAC address is believed to be genuine.
It's no different to saying "We are trying to trace the vehicle the bomber drove off in, with the registration X374 HFU" (or whatever). It's not like they are giving out a personal detail (e.g. a phone number, or an address), but they have given out names and hometowns since forever.
Happens EVERY DAY if you follow any police Twitter account, watch anything like Crimewatch (UK TV programme which is used for reconstructing crimes and appeal for help), etc.
It's a very different piece of information. And it's ABSOLUTELY linked to someone proven to have already endangered life, not just "we'd like to speak to the guy in the red hat who went by the name of Steve in connection with a fight outside the club last night" (which is, in fact, more information).
Because I watch all my TV via VLC, broadcast and recorded, all my video library, anything off the net, and anything locally saved or created, plus all the work stuff.
It depends on what you want. A doorbell that shows you who's at the door?
Literally anything.
If you can get an RTSP stream (which virtually all cameras, and even the cheapest of NVRs will do, even if they have custom apps), you can make your own, and better.
The cheapest NVR off Amazon will give you a bunch of cameras, a RTSP stream address to access each, network connectivity, H264 recording, and an "alarm" interface (which you literally wire to the doorbell so when it's pushed the "alarm" activates which can be used to alert you / send a text/email / etc. to your phone, trigger recording.
If you want to talk-back... you just buy a GSM door entry panel with voice. When they press the button it rings a phone number. You answer and talk to them. Or if someone has rung your doorbell, you ring it and speak to the guy. Press # (or whatever) and you can configure it to activate a relay / maglock to open the door if you like.
Commodity stuff, available everywhere, dirt cheap, used by businesses the world over.
The "glue" to make it all work nicely together isn't complex at all, and that's really all these companies are selling you, for an ongoing monthly payment, with all kinds of privacy and data issues (think: If these guys can monitor your cameras, they can disable them too... especially if they have a friend in the area, know which house is the rich guys, and can see everything and everyone coming and going into the house... turn off camera, phone your friend, keep an eye out for the fuzz... maybe it's in an audit log somewhere but you and I both know that such logs will miss a lot, and could be rendered useless by someone just using the new-guy's PC / login when he's having a day off).
But any aliens will be able to see what we see too.
Who's to say that it's not an galactic standard that such easily-visible, obviously stand-out, and naturally-occurring phenomena aren't used as waypoints for navigation, and maybe even naturally become meeting points and the "service stations" of the galaxy? Not because someone is deliberately making them (they'd be patterned and obvious and everywhere and have more information inside their blinking than just a blinking light), but because they are nice natural milestones.
But something blinking regularly across the entire galaxy is probably NOT a specific sign of intelligent life in any way, shape or form. Intelligent life doesn't advertise itself in such simple ways, the same way that we don't blast out Morse Code into the abyss for more than a fraction of a fraction of a tiny percent of a fraction of our existence, and certainly don't do it in all directions so powerfully.
If we wanted to attract people, we wouldn't just put out a bright light on a regular pulse. We'd cram it full of things to entice intelligent life in - maybe with a pulse to gain your attention, and then inside that pulse, or nearby, or having the pulses in a pattern with each other, etc. etc.
Same way that on Earth, a blinking light moving overhead isn't going to be an alien trying to attract attention or communicate. It's going to be an airplane, or a drone. If they wanted to attract our attention and had the power to make such things, they'd do it better.
All that ever happens is you get a student loan that - on average - never gets paid off, so the universities still charge fees anyway.
What you do is pay people's tuition, but only if they're actually progressing and keeping up and not failing their tests. Or what, in my day, was called a "grant".
My uni tuition was entirely paid for by grant. I had to pay only living expenses (but I lived at home with my parents). If I'd hadn't lived at home, I could claim more money for living expenses but I would have to prove that I didn't have any support or income. I also had the option for a student loan at any time (no payback until earning GBP25,000 or over, and then only a pittance) but I never exercised it. I was in the last year of students being offered a full grant.
Now I have a university degree. 20 years of industry experience. The wages (and thus taxes) to go with it. And no debt (except for a car I bought).
By comparison, all my friends who used their student loans STILL have them and are STILL paying them off... which cripples their life choices even though they got better jobs than they would have without them. All the younger kids have no option but to utilise a student loan and thus start adult life in huge debt.
And the government is some GBP 100 billion in debt now because they were hiding the cost of unpaid student loans on the finances and now they have to include them in the usual accounting manner (because of a lawsuit) and it just shows you that it would have been easier to just give free tuition and some support in the first place, made people have to work to be able to live, and thus stopped the debt thing altogether.
"The Department for Education estimates that 45% of the value of loans to undergraduates will not be repaid. Outstanding loans to students in England totalled more than £100bn this year, with £15bn borrowed last year alone. By 2022-23 annual loans are forecast to rise to £20bn."
"the best" phone experience right after opening the box...
would include "Do you want me to install Facebook for you? Yes/No" and if I click No then it doesn't do anything at all and leaves no traces or processes around whatsoever.
Hell, "Would you like me to install a bunch of common apps (e.g. Facebook, Snapchat, Whatsapp, etc.) for you now?" would be absolutely fine - user-friendly, helpful for newbies, and not obstructive to power users.
If Samsung did that, instead of forcing apps that I will NEVER use on my phone (including all the Samsung apps, not to mention things like Flipboard or whatever it is, Office suites and all kinds), I'd actually like them MORE and recommend them MORE and get them MORE customers and money than they will ever get in goodwill gestures from Facebook etc. for doing so.
Honestly, it's not your phone Samsung. Feel free to suggest things, but let me even turn off suggestions.
If you're big enough to care or be of interest to Microsoft, you're big enough to run "apt-get install git" and configure it yourself on your own server.
If you're a hobbyist programmer, writing open-source, etc, want to pull in "unofficial" patches to projects, but don't want to embarrass yourself to the world, a free, unlimited and private repo isn't something to be sniffed at.
No different to Google Code (which I think is dead now?). I used to host all my own code - that nobody would ever care about, contains nothing secret, is highly-specialised to my preferences, etc. - on Google Code because it was cheaper and "safer" than renting a server to do so.
If you just want a server to push patches to, that you can access from anyway, and don't want to have it publicly searchable, in full view of everyone, or don't want to work under an OS licence, or you just want a backup of your own repos, something like this is fine. And literally doesn't affect their core customers - such people wouldn't pay for external hosting either. But if you can accustom them to your product then when they *do* decide to turn their hobby code into a business app, they may well pay you just to keep things simple.
The self-driving stuff is nothing more than a handful of cameras and stuff that's included in modern basic models of other manufacturer's vehicles (e.g. lane-guidance, etc.), and some software that's basically cost-spread over everything they sell.
The expensive bit is all the batteries and electric motors, which is why other electric cars are also expensive.
Tesla without the auto-driving is just an expensive car that you can buy already, for cheaper, from a name that's been around in the industry for a century.
In my European country (which may not be true in a few month's time, which kinda gives away which one it is), claiming or even implying that homeopathy - or indeed any non-medical treatment - cures cancer is actually illegal without proper peer-reviewed science behind it.
We also have laws that psychics and other charlatans must only advertise if they have a visible clause that it's "for entertainment purposes only".
Neither are generally accepted anywhere, except by morons.
Someone somewhere is being paid to take water, sell it to others, claim it's curing them, being funded to the hilt to continue to do so, and has no comeback from "unsatisfied customers".
Though an ideal business model, it's also a scam that shouldn't be allowed to proliferate, especially with any kind of "medical" claim behind it.
I don't give a damn about the people paying, or the people stupid enough to rely on this stuff. I do give a damn about people making a business from fraud and potentially enticing the weak-of-mind, vulnerable, desperate and soon-to-depart to part with their money, or stop real medical treatment, on the basis of a lie.
People give millions every year to TV evangelists, conmen, conspiracy theory pushers... what's the difference?
I'm much more concerned at the billions given to churches and the Vatican to polish their gold-and-diamond-encrusted religious items, than some nutter funding another's own willing death.
Literally, I stopped pressing the HD channels as they do nothing. I never bought films in HD (unless they were the same price as the SD version), because they do nothing. I watch Netflix, Amazon Prime, DVB-T2, and everything else in SD.
At the distances involved, even at a huge screen size, it makes no difference. None. Sure, if you projected my Windows desktop there, I'd notice straight away if it wasn't even in the original rez, and I could spot a stray dot on the screen at 20 paces.
But watching moving video content, even animations? No. I can't notice it. Nor can most people.
I've literally challenged people who give me this shit at parties to tell me whether the screen is on BBC One or BBC One HD, etc. They can't, no more than random chance.
P.S. I've watched 2001 in both formats. a) It's a dire movie filled with nothing but music and endless slow-motion space scenes with no dialogue - you have all the time in the world to spot a pixel, so any encoding of it is going to have a real easy time removing edges and anything you do spot will be MPEG artifacts. b) I wouldn't be able to tell the difference, unless challenged, and allowed to get right up close to the screen.
Play it under VLC, with the right aliasing and deinterlacing options etc. and I guarantee you can't tell the difference. In which case, I'd rather pay for the SD version and turn on such options.
Slashdot Mirror
Buy phone outright.
Refuse to use a carrier that attempts to lock you to their network (anti-competitive practice - they should only be doing it to ensure that you are still paying your debt to them for your financed phone, but even that's dubious).
Anyway, I thought we were all going to have eSIMs soon?
To be honest, at this point, my phone is a tablet on a data connection. I couldn't care less about the telecoms company behind it, and don't use it for classical telephony.
I would actually rather carry around a Wifi-4G (*) box on a month-to-month or PAYG basis and change it if they started messing me about. Then they wouldn't even see my "phone", just a data connection over Wifi / 4G.
But for sure, I've never owned a network-locked phone and don't ever intend to start with one. Buy phone from phone manufacturer via retail website. Buy SIM from a shop on a network of my choice. The second I can't just change that SIM for another, I'll find another way to connect. If that means a mini-Wifi box for each carrier, I'll take that into account as regards paying them money.
(*) I have a little Huawei box. It's the size and shape of a half-used bar of soap. It charges by USB. It works for 8 hours at full whack but can also be constantly plugged in. It offers out a 4G SIM connection over Wifi including NAT, firewall, SIP-NAT, etc. I can slip it in my pocket alongside my phone and, because it has a big data allowance, use all the data on it via my phone without having to even take it out of my pocket.
It travels with me. It's relatively secure (unlike, say, an open Wifi in a pub). It works throughout Europe. I can connect it to a cheap antenna and boost the signal when at home (when it's powered all the time) and the Wifi covers my entire two-storey home.
Friends can press a button and join it via WPS if they like. It can even piggy-back off another Wifi so you don't have to change your network settings once you'd used up all your data.
That's my "connection". Yes, it has a SIM card. Yes, it could be "locked" to the network (it's not - I bought it entirely separately to the multiple SIMs inside it that I switch to if I burn through the data). But it's cheap enough to be throwaway even if they did lock it. One of those and then change the whole thing for another network if they start locking me in and I want to move.
And then they never get on my phone, my phone doesn't even need a SIM inside it, I can use any phone I like, and I've got that barrier between what they are capable of running code on (even via a SIM smartcard) and what they are not.
I'd honestly rather do that - both my phone and that box slip lovely into a single pocket with room to spare and can "charge" off each other's cables - than carry a locked phone.
Hell, I'd carry a USB dongle and you could probably power a USB-4G dongle direct off a phone nowadays (USB-C and all that) and cut out the Wifi and charging portion. New network, new dongle, off you go.
Conversion.
Storage.
Conversion.
Tranmission (in the case of the Orkney's over a huge undersea cable back to the mainland).
Conversion.
Transmission.
Conversion.
Renewables are NOT as easily integrated into the grid.
That's why Tesla sold millions of dollars of batteries to the Australian grid - it's used to control and level demand.
Compare and contrast with, say, gas/coal - heat water, spin turbine, get AC out of it. Conversions are much less, and there are no DC->AC conversions at all.
Conversions = loss.
Tranmissions = loss.
In the case of renewables, the fluctuating generation also requires huge amounts of smoothing (and therefore storage/conversion).
Otherwise, you'd just put all your power generation in one empty, non-populated state and run cables. It's just not that simple.
The UK is only 800-something miles long. And yet we have power generation all over the place. By the time you got that Orkney power to even proper civilisation in Scotland (i.e. major city like Glasgow or Edinburgh), it's basically useless.
Scotland alone has DOZENS of power-generation plants of all kinds:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
England has nearly ten times as many:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
And the UK isn't the size of a single US state.
It's not been a month yet.
$25m x 12 = $300m.
Which is a nearly 1% of their revenue. That's not "nothing". In terms of profit, it may well hurt a lot more - they still have to have planes sitting around doing nothing, and maybe pay pilots. But their REVENUE was hit by at least 1% in doing so, but their costs now.
Delta reported $1.3bn profit a quarter. That means that 1% revenue hit likely means a multi-percent hit to profits, if not more. That's not "nothing". Sure, they're all big numbers, but not nothing. You'd have to declare that to shareholders, for instance.
And when the recent hurricanes cost them more than that, you can literally compare the money lost from the shutdown to that of a natural disaster.
Meanwhile, in civilised countries, if a budget approval isn't given, the previous authorised budget is automatically continued until such time as a new budget is approved.
Nobody goes unpaid.
Government doesn't get shutdown.
Nobody has to implement emergency measures.
Everything carries on as it did before until someone can get changes approved and sign off on the new budget.
At no point does anything go any more unfunded/underfunded than it already was before the new budget was proposed.
It's almost like those other countries spotted what a stupid idea "shut down the government", including using it as blackmail, was many, many, many centuries ago and worked around it.
The windy places, almost nobody lives in.
The sunny places, people need aircon.
The tidal / water places, don't have the majority of the population.
And let's not forget that all three are HARSH conditions - requiring more maintenance, repairs, tougher materials, longer service times, more shutdowns (especially with wind - you can blow a turbine to pieces if you don't put the brakes on when it's really blowing), more difficult access etc.
What kills renewable energy isn't that you can't use it in the permanent-gale-force that is the Orkneys, but that you can't easily transport it back to anywhere useful where there's a populace.
And everywhere there's a populace, you don't have the square-meters of open air to power the number of people who live under that square meter.
Which means conversion, storage, conversion, transport, conversion. Which means it quickly becomes an expensive exercise in "where not to get your energy from".
Even then... the costs associated with it are often subsidised and understated (I'm not yet sure that any large solar plant has reached "lifetime" yet, because they are all just too new... so we have no idea if the lifetime estimates / associated costs are even accurate). If the lifetime of a plant is 25 years - and it gets that - we're still replacing every 25 years. Without subsidy next time. Of course the companies are afloat and profitable at the moment. In 25 years, it will be a very different picture. Even traditional energy suppliers are going bankrupt, and many of them are citing the carbon taxes and associated costs of deploying a mandatory amount of renewables as one of the reasons.
This stuff "works". So long as you put it in the worst possible place to maintain, supply that energy to the end-user, and people pay you to do it.
The oldest solar plant in the US started in 1983/4. The equipment there bears no resemblance to what was installed in 1984, and the first deployments are now generating half what they were in 1984. Same for the 1986 deployment. And that's just the raw numbers. Who knows how many 1984 panels were replaced with "new" 1984 panels. In 2017, they replaced those systems.
And the original manufacturers went bankrupt in the 90's.
And they generate only 19% of what their supposed capacity states. And they cancelled any number of planned expansions and sold off any number of units to investors as they couldn't sustain them otherwise.
That's the single, longest running project for solar... in the desert, basically.
Things aren't as rosy as "just use renewable, it solves everything", because it doesn't. By a long shot. Even "in theory", things like solar, wind, tidal, etc. can't keep up with human demands for power if we were to blanket the world in them. They have a set physical limit above which it's not possible to make them more efficient or smaller.
The same is not true of things like nuclear power - uranium deposits could run the world and all it's power demands for the next millennia on *current* technology alone.
Renewables have an awful long way to go, not much wiggle room, and hardly any testing, and spurious claims.
"the sheer number of times scientists consider something to be 'scientifically impossible', are badly disproven by some kind of new finding or discovery a few years later, and then express 'surprise' that 'X is indeed possible"
Name three such times.
I can't think, off the top of my head, of a reputable scientist who a) said something was impossible that b) was speaking for the community as a whole where c) it was then proven to be possible, and c) they were then surprised that it was possible.
Maybe over 50-100 years (i.e it's impossible "with current science", but overall?).
Even things like cold fusion (which we suspect to be impossible) is stated as being "unlikely", "improbable", etc. rather than concretely impossible.
There are extremely few absolutes in the scientific world, and they are the most-open-minded group of people (don't confuse this with the naivety of being "open-minded" about psychic phenomena, etc.... those kinds of things are stated to be as close to impossible as they can be, and proven by double-blind trials which prove they are nonsense).
And there's also a problem of interpretation. It's *not possible* for information to travel faster than the speed of light in any of the current scientific models, for instance. But we not only know that they are possibly incomplete or inaccurate, but that people mis-state, mis-interpret, and mis-understand quite what it is that the scientists say is impossible.
You get idiots - like the E-Cat guy - who claim to be scientists, may even have some qualifications, but come up with nonsense that's absolutely 100% bullshit and roundly condemned by the rest of the community. But that's like having the vegan nutter interviewed on the news somehow "representing" all the vegans in the world, or similar.
Scientists are rarely surprised, though it is fascinating when something unexpected happens (that doesn't mean we ever thought it was "impossible", just that we hadn't imagined that it was possible... which is very different*).
Really, it's just the reporting that's the hyperbolic thing. Scientists don't write press releases like that.
(* if you told a scientist from the 1800s that we'd all be driving computer-controlled electric cars, he wouldn't have said it was *impossible*. He just may not have imagined that it would be so well harnessed, prevalent, and considered mainstream, and that we had managed to store enough energy, control it with energy itself, etc. Impossible is a big word)
https://pastebin.com/UsxU4gXA
was a link I took from an article linked to below.
Mostly mom'n'pop shops and random Korean/Russian websites.
I live in the UK.
In my last house (in quite a respectable area of London, famous for very posh schools etc.), the local high street was dead. There were a handful of shops.
What happened is that betting shops moved in. Dozens of them. At one point, six in the same street (which was only short).
The people going in are pissing away their money to fund an addiction. They've now had to introduce laws to reduce the maximum bet on a "fixed odds betting terminal" (fruit machine to you and me) to £2, because it was getting up to £100 for one spin in some instances.
To generalise, the clientele are generally unwanted - dozens and dozens of people who crowd the ATMs on the day when benefits (social security) are paid, draw it out instantly, and spend all day in the betting shops and drinking.
It's not everyone. I have what the British call "a flutter" occasionally, and I'm a mathematician too, so I can do the maths to tell you that you'll never win on average. But you don't really want your population gambling away money unless you own and tax the casinos so heavily that it's beneficial - even then, the social cost is enormous because the people who gamble the most are those that can't afford to.
Las Vegas is tainted because of this for me - I get that it's a part of the US culture in that area, and casinos are different to grubby betting shops, but the clientele are the same.
You'd think you could just tax it to oblivion to counteract any effect, but it does more than just encourage people to get into debt. It's an addiction. There are "gamble aware" programs, where anything advertising gambling has to offer certain functions (i.e. to let people "lock" themselves out of their account for a period of time, to encourage them to "gamble responsibility", and so on). In Italy and other places in Europe, cruise ships (which used to be seen as luxury liners for the rich) are now just regarded with condemnation because they are just used as offshore gambling and drinking dens, usually for British tourists!
The TV is full of adverts for bingo and casinos (online and offline). It's become "the norm" to be swamped in gambling advertising.
There's a big difference between someone playing a lottery once a month (what I'd say was analogous to, say, a village fete tombola) and high-level gambling establishments. Online can be dangerous - it's just a number on a screen.
Gambling will always exist. But it can lead to a degeneration if it's unchecked. I don't get the online/offline distinction but certainly controls need to be in place. The UK ditched most of the legislation about what can apply to be a casino or gambling establishment, and all it means is that the whole high street is just full of gambling places, and websites full of gambling ads.
I've gambled in Las Vegas. I've gambled on cruise ships (but the QE2 was the last of the luxury liners and wasn't gambling-focused at all, it was just a fancy evening dressed up). I know the odds and play games for a living. Hell I have a felt card table, card shoe and poker chips in my lounge as I speak... but even to me, unrestricted or lax gambling legislation has lead to an easily observable phenomenon and every-day news story headline... "My boyfriend stole our benefits to gamble away all our money, and now we're homeless".
I can understand them wanting to limit it. The ruling is a bit arbitrary, but gambling isn't as victimless as you might think. It's not the people losing the money they need to live that are hurt... they are suffering for their own stupidity. It's the knock-on effect on society.
If your other goods or services (e.g. broadband) went up by 13-18%, I'm sure you'd complain too.
"It's only $2" is the refuge of a person with $2 to spare and expecting everyone else to ALWAYS have $2 to spare, on top of whatever they are paying for everything else. That's $2 a month, which is worse. You're now inching towards cable/satellite bills.
I stopped my Netflix. It was my only "TV" for about a year. But then I realised that all the "unique" content I didn't really care about, all the existing content I could just buy or watch for free on broadcast, and then they started getting finicky over how many devices, talking about adverts, etc.
I refuse to pay more than a token, throwaway payment for something that is just visual entertainment. I have Amazon Prime because it actually saves me money on delivery enough to justify itself, and then I get "free TV" on there too. I had Netflix because it was cheap and I could watch a lot of things. Once I'd watched those things, I didn't really care to pay for them continuously, and a lot of them came on Amazon Prime anyway.
Now my TV is actually a Raspberry Pi with a DVB adaptor. It costs me nothing, streams to my laptop, my phone, etc. and I can VPN in to watch it too (which bypasses a load of regional nonsense when I go on holiday). And I don't have a big box on the wall wanting to talk to everything.
It takes a lot to make me cut a service that I'm already signed up to. But I did it before Netflix raised prices in my country. They're going to struggle if they keep doing that.
In rise with inflation, or give me something more for the money.
You don't want your Tesla to change lanes because "it's Sagittarius and has a good feeling about this full moon".
You want it to use intelligence. Slightly more intelligence than a pigeon.
So it statistically correlated randomly-grouped information over millions of trials?
Still not AI. Still just statistics. Bad statistics. With complete lack of inference. With shady, if not downright dishonest, assertions made about its capabilities.
You did what "AI" has had done to it for decades now... flip a bit to indicate success in some fashion, and throw millions of trials at it until it trains itself to activate "bit" more than a handful of times.
It could be flipping because it's majority green. Because the top-left pixel is green. Because there's watermark on the image. Because some frequency curve (if you have those, it's highly unlikely to form those itself in even a billion attempts / generations / evolutions / trainings) hits on a certain colour.
The fact is: You have NO idea what it's correlating on. It's almost superstition on the part of the AI (if it wasn't completely lacking in any intelligence).
Did you know that if you feed a pigeon in a box at random times it starts to associate feeding time with whatever it happened to be doing, and so repeat that? Whether that's bobbing its head, pecking at the floor, or looking a certain direction.
It then spends most of its time trying to replicate that convinced that it's "just not doing it quite right", like someone with a superstition about their team winning because they were wearing their lucky underpants - no amount of negative correlation will convince them they are wrong and get them to change their ways.
And that's exactly the problem with "AI" / neural networks. Of course you can train them to a statistical correlation - you know why? Because you're eliminating / training out / not breeding from those that don't correlate somewhat. It doesn't mean that what they are working from has anything to do with what you were after. And, most importantly, it does not mean you can trust them further on new data, nor that you can "untrain" them when they get it wrong, nor that you can perpetually improve them by more and more training.
All that happens is that it plateaus before it ever really gets useful (usually within the range of a PhD study - write your thesis up quick!), people release rubbishy apps "to show what it can do" and then it's never touched again because it can't be used for anything else and isn't particularly good or useful at what it does do.
We don't have AI, stop trying to pretend that we do. When you get a machine that can infer, that can actually reason its answer (not just "well it matches shape 22%, colour 17% and overall pattern roughness 19.4%", but "I can see branches here, here and here. They are connected. The connection grow and increase in width. The thickness part, which looks trunk-like, ends in a solid base which resembles soil", etc.)
Until then, this is all just a waste of time, and heuristics (YOU told it when it got the tree right).
Of course you can. I do it all the time (HyperV tools to emulate an existing MAC from another server for failover etc.). I've been able to - and have done - it since kernel 2.0 at least... I actually use MAC address as part of things like RADIUS authentication, though. Because 99.999% of people would never be able to work out how to do it.
They've even already eliminated the modern feature of "disposable" MAC addresses given to each Wifi network you probe to prevent such tracking... they know his MAC stayed the same all those days as they correlated several things together.
The chances that he did this are absolutely minimal.
I can change a car number plate in about 5 minutes, tops, to any other valid one that I see on the road. But police still call out those for incidents where a suspect car was spotted too.
It's not about "this is convictable in a court of law". It's a correlative piece of evidence that may well lead to chance correlations which can lead to REAL evidence (i.e. seeing the same guy walking around town, on his phone at a certain location and time (which will give them his number and calls) and so on.
But they can't link the MAC address directly to IMEI or SIM or phone number, most likely, or they'd have already done it.
Stop thinking "A jury would never convict on that basis" and think "That's a clue that may well lead to a suspect".
The guy planted actual, viable bombs that would kill people.
The MAC address is believed to be genuine.
It's no different to saying "We are trying to trace the vehicle the bomber drove off in, with the registration X374 HFU" (or whatever). It's not like they are giving out a personal detail (e.g. a phone number, or an address), but they have given out names and hometowns since forever.
Happens EVERY DAY if you follow any police Twitter account, watch anything like Crimewatch (UK TV programme which is used for reconstructing crimes and appeal for help), etc.
It's a very different piece of information. And it's ABSOLUTELY linked to someone proven to have already endangered life, not just "we'd like to speak to the guy in the red hat who went by the name of Steve in connection with a fight outside the club last night" (which is, in fact, more information).
Screenshot it.
Because I watch all my TV via VLC, broadcast and recorded, all my video library, anything off the net, and anything locally saved or created, plus all the work stuff.
Literally never had an issue.
And the organisation is French.
Almost like it's an international collaborative software project...
It depends on what you want. A doorbell that shows you who's at the door?
Literally anything.
If you can get an RTSP stream (which virtually all cameras, and even the cheapest of NVRs will do, even if they have custom apps), you can make your own, and better.
The cheapest NVR off Amazon will give you a bunch of cameras, a RTSP stream address to access each, network connectivity, H264 recording, and an "alarm" interface (which you literally wire to the doorbell so when it's pushed the "alarm" activates which can be used to alert you / send a text/email / etc. to your phone, trigger recording.
If you want to talk-back... you just buy a GSM door entry panel with voice. When they press the button it rings a phone number. You answer and talk to them. Or if someone has rung your doorbell, you ring it and speak to the guy. Press # (or whatever) and you can configure it to activate a relay / maglock to open the door if you like.
Commodity stuff, available everywhere, dirt cheap, used by businesses the world over.
The "glue" to make it all work nicely together isn't complex at all, and that's really all these companies are selling you, for an ongoing monthly payment, with all kinds of privacy and data issues (think: If these guys can monitor your cameras, they can disable them too... especially if they have a friend in the area, know which house is the rich guys, and can see everything and everyone coming and going into the house... turn off camera, phone your friend, keep an eye out for the fuzz... maybe it's in an audit log somewhere but you and I both know that such logs will miss a lot, and could be rendered useless by someone just using the new-guy's PC / login when he's having a day off).
Rule #1: It's not aliens.
But any aliens will be able to see what we see too.
Who's to say that it's not an galactic standard that such easily-visible, obviously stand-out, and naturally-occurring phenomena aren't used as waypoints for navigation, and maybe even naturally become meeting points and the "service stations" of the galaxy? Not because someone is deliberately making them (they'd be patterned and obvious and everywhere and have more information inside their blinking than just a blinking light), but because they are nice natural milestones.
But something blinking regularly across the entire galaxy is probably NOT a specific sign of intelligent life in any way, shape or form. Intelligent life doesn't advertise itself in such simple ways, the same way that we don't blast out Morse Code into the abyss for more than a fraction of a fraction of a tiny percent of a fraction of our existence, and certainly don't do it in all directions so powerfully.
If we wanted to attract people, we wouldn't just put out a bright light on a regular pulse. We'd cram it full of things to entice intelligent life in - maybe with a pulse to gain your attention, and then inside that pulse, or nearby, or having the pulses in a pattern with each other, etc. etc.
Same way that on Earth, a blinking light moving overhead isn't going to be an alien trying to attract attention or communicate. It's going to be an airplane, or a drone. If they wanted to attract our attention and had the power to make such things, they'd do it better.
It's called a student loan.
All that ever happens is you get a student loan that - on average - never gets paid off, so the universities still charge fees anyway.
What you do is pay people's tuition, but only if they're actually progressing and keeping up and not failing their tests. Or what, in my day, was called a "grant".
My uni tuition was entirely paid for by grant. I had to pay only living expenses (but I lived at home with my parents). If I'd hadn't lived at home, I could claim more money for living expenses but I would have to prove that I didn't have any support or income. I also had the option for a student loan at any time (no payback until earning GBP25,000 or over, and then only a pittance) but I never exercised it. I was in the last year of students being offered a full grant.
Now I have a university degree. 20 years of industry experience. The wages (and thus taxes) to go with it. And no debt (except for a car I bought).
By comparison, all my friends who used their student loans STILL have them and are STILL paying them off... which cripples their life choices even though they got better jobs than they would have without them. All the younger kids have no option but to utilise a student loan and thus start adult life in huge debt.
And the government is some GBP 100 billion in debt now because they were hiding the cost of unpaid student loans on the finances and now they have to include them in the usual accounting manner (because of a lawsuit) and it just shows you that it would have been easier to just give free tuition and some support in the first place, made people have to work to be able to live, and thus stopped the debt thing altogether.
"The Department for Education estimates that 45% of the value of loans to undergraduates will not be repaid. Outstanding loans to students in England totalled more than £100bn this year, with £15bn borrowed last year alone. By 2022-23 annual loans are forecast to rise to £20bn."
"the best" phone experience right after opening the box...
would include "Do you want me to install Facebook for you? Yes/No" and if I click No then it doesn't do anything at all and leaves no traces or processes around whatsoever.
Hell, "Would you like me to install a bunch of common apps (e.g. Facebook, Snapchat, Whatsapp, etc.) for you now?" would be absolutely fine - user-friendly, helpful for newbies, and not obstructive to power users.
If Samsung did that, instead of forcing apps that I will NEVER use on my phone (including all the Samsung apps, not to mention things like Flipboard or whatever it is, Office suites and all kinds), I'd actually like them MORE and recommend them MORE and get them MORE customers and money than they will ever get in goodwill gestures from Facebook etc. for doing so.
Honestly, it's not your phone Samsung. Feel free to suggest things, but let me even turn off suggestions.
If you're big enough to care or be of interest to Microsoft, you're big enough to run "apt-get install git" and configure it yourself on your own server.
If you're a hobbyist programmer, writing open-source, etc, want to pull in "unofficial" patches to projects, but don't want to embarrass yourself to the world, a free, unlimited and private repo isn't something to be sniffed at.
No different to Google Code (which I think is dead now?). I used to host all my own code - that nobody would ever care about, contains nothing secret, is highly-specialised to my preferences, etc. - on Google Code because it was cheaper and "safer" than renting a server to do so.
If you just want a server to push patches to, that you can access from anyway, and don't want to have it publicly searchable, in full view of everyone, or don't want to work under an OS licence, or you just want a backup of your own repos, something like this is fine. And literally doesn't affect their core customers - such people wouldn't pay for external hosting either. But if you can accustom them to your product then when they *do* decide to turn their hobby code into a business app, they may well pay you just to keep things simple.
The self-driving stuff is nothing more than a handful of cameras and stuff that's included in modern basic models of other manufacturer's vehicles (e.g. lane-guidance, etc.), and some software that's basically cost-spread over everything they sell.
The expensive bit is all the batteries and electric motors, which is why other electric cars are also expensive.
Tesla without the auto-driving is just an expensive car that you can buy already, for cheaper, from a name that's been around in the industry for a century.
In my European country (which may not be true in a few month's time, which kinda gives away which one it is), claiming or even implying that homeopathy - or indeed any non-medical treatment - cures cancer is actually illegal without proper peer-reviewed science behind it.
We also have laws that psychics and other charlatans must only advertise if they have a visible clause that it's "for entertainment purposes only".
Neither are generally accepted anywhere, except by morons.
Someone somewhere is being paid to take water, sell it to others, claim it's curing them, being funded to the hilt to continue to do so, and has no comeback from "unsatisfied customers".
Though an ideal business model, it's also a scam that shouldn't be allowed to proliferate, especially with any kind of "medical" claim behind it.
I don't give a damn about the people paying, or the people stupid enough to rely on this stuff. I do give a damn about people making a business from fraud and potentially enticing the weak-of-mind, vulnerable, desperate and soon-to-depart to part with their money, or stop real medical treatment, on the basis of a lie.
People give millions every year to TV evangelists, conmen, conspiracy theory pushers... what's the difference?
I'm much more concerned at the billions given to churches and the Vatican to polish their gold-and-diamond-encrusted religious items, than some nutter funding another's own willing death.
Vision checked regularly.
95" diagonal projected display, capable of 1080p.
Literally, I stopped pressing the HD channels as they do nothing. I never bought films in HD (unless they were the same price as the SD version), because they do nothing. I watch Netflix, Amazon Prime, DVB-T2, and everything else in SD.
At the distances involved, even at a huge screen size, it makes no difference. None. Sure, if you projected my Windows desktop there, I'd notice straight away if it wasn't even in the original rez, and I could spot a stray dot on the screen at 20 paces.
But watching moving video content, even animations? No. I can't notice it. Nor can most people.
I've literally challenged people who give me this shit at parties to tell me whether the screen is on BBC One or BBC One HD, etc. They can't, no more than random chance.
P.S. I've watched 2001 in both formats. a) It's a dire movie filled with nothing but music and endless slow-motion space scenes with no dialogue - you have all the time in the world to spot a pixel, so any encoding of it is going to have a real easy time removing edges and anything you do spot will be MPEG artifacts. b) I wouldn't be able to tell the difference, unless challenged, and allowed to get right up close to the screen.
Play it under VLC, with the right aliasing and deinterlacing options etc. and I guarantee you can't tell the difference. In which case, I'd rather pay for the SD version and turn on such options.