How about when I say "Don't show me things like this", you don't show me things like that.
Like when I cross out every sports ads, I'm probably NOT interested in Sports.
Like when I hide every fucking Timehop page and friend post that includes it, you stop fucking showing them to me.
Does it really need that much of an algorithm to do what your own options say? Why would you WANT to show me more things that I'm deliberately going out of my way to remove (and not the others that I'm not)?
Our switches cost 2000 GBP each, and we have a firewall that costs on the same order. They have features you cannot get on anything cheaper (RADIUS, et al are "freebie" features nowadays - we're talking direct MDM on the switch and all kinds of security).
The question is not "was the $10 switch to blame?" but "why would you ever use a $10 switch anyway?" These people are storing money thousands of times more than anything we ever have to deal with, for thousands more customers than we will ever have, with thousands of times more budgets than I will ever see.
And their stuff isn't even from the "19" rack networking" section of the catalogue. It's from the "bargain buys for home uses to 'double up' their network cables" section.
Additionally, I'm bound by PCI DSS standards which demand things like firewalls and antivirus EVEN IF there's no need for them. I promise you. And IDS and IPS and separated networks and all kinds of security. That's just to TAKE a credit card payment to pass onto the bank. The banks themselves aren't then doing more?
It's got nothing to do with what could be true at the bank. It's about not even trying to follow industry best practices, let alone actually getting close to them.
Make one half of the population stitch fishing nets for 8 hours a day, then make the other half unpick them and coil them back up.
At least then you know there are no layabouts getting "free money", everyone's busy, and there's some incentive to go and get a real job as soon as possible ("If I ever see another fishing net..."), and you aren't creating jobs that someone properly trained could actually do for a proper wage. Short of severe disability that would make you unable to work anyway, you'd be able to do the job sitting down.
But it means you have to get up, report somewhere, stay there for a full working day to be eligible for free money, do something, and clock in and out. People genuinely between jobs will jump at the chance to cover the gap. The layabouts will die of boredom or have to go get a real job. The crime rate won't increase significantly because you have to be occupied or employed by crime as you would be anyway. And everyone else gets a "free job" (much better than free money) whenever they are down on their luck or unable to work.
Hell, make it six hours, and make them apply for jobs in the other 2 hours a day.
Apparently, though, being perceived as actually making people WORK for their money is backward and old-fashioned.
I have on my lap a device capable of playing every game I've ever bought, right through to GTA V and things released just now. It fits on my lap. It can go to my mate's house. It can connect to wireless controllers. It has HDMI out. It can download ALL my games and keep them all on the same device. It can emulate - or directly play - all my old games too.
And it costs no more than I'd normally pay for a laptop, which is about what everyone else would pay for a laptop, and a games console. Oh, and it does all my work, contains all my movies, connects to the net, and all the usual stuff you'd expect a computer to do.
And I bought it years ago, and it's still going.
Honestly? Consoles are dead. There is no sufficiently compelling reason to do anything on a console compared to just using the laptop that you probably already have anyway, or a very slightly upgraded version of the same.
I'm a mathematician. I have a degree from a London university in mathematical and computational sciences. That doesn't make me an astrophysicist or an expert. Never claimed that. In fact, it makes me really crap at arithmetic, spreadsheets and quite a lot of shit (like modern voting, which I refuse to partake in).
As a mathematician, the maths is infallible. What you're mistaking is the assumptions you plug into the numbers that you put into the maths, their source, accuracy, reliability, variability, and that they reflect any kind of reality or that the equations will give you an answer that's useful. Welcome to maths.
The Drake equation IS the maths. It's that simple. What's not simple is the numbers you plug into it.
Drake says, if you plug in what are in my opinion reasonably accurate numbers from the observable universe, that there's life out there to a virtual certainty. But, actually, it also plops out of the equations that the chances of ever coinciding with them in a universe in our entire existence is incredibly miniscule.
The Fermi paradox is really that if you plug in other numbers, you can get a conclusion that we should have ALREADY been visited and then jumps to a second conclusion that this can't be true (which is a bizarre thing to assume given the timescales that come out of such things).
Both the same. Different assumptions. Produce differing results. That, through the haze of personal interpretation, can be taken to be anything from absolute bollocks to virtual certainty. But there's a reason that the Fermi "paradox" doesn't get quite as much press as simple Drake equations.
Find your most reliable set of numbers from sources you believe. Plug them into Drake. See what you get out. Fermi lies almost at the extreme of estimates for the variables. And makes several other assumptions (i.e. that aliens haven't visited us ever since we turned up, which has varying definitions of "visited", "us" and "turned up").
Hint: A mathematician doesn't dig out the equations and source data until he's dead certain. I'm not, as pointed out. But the maths is there for you to read and Fermi is basically "Ner, ner, we think you're wrong cos, look, we can fiddle the numbers to mean they should have knocked on the door last Wednesday". It doesn't mean that you can prove either wrong or right (proof is a HUGE word in mathematics), they're both mathematically-correct given the assumptions taken. Whether those assumptions are reasonable or bullshit is a matter of personal choice, but run the numbers yourself and convince yourself:
If you're not beyond warrantless actions that you could apply for legitimate warrants for, or lying to courts, or ignoring court orders, who's to say you're beyond falsifying evidence?
It's honestly that simple. Play the rules, or don't. But if you don't, you can then point at others and say "They weren't playing by the rules either".
Unreliable witnesses before court should be dismissed out of hand. Whether FBI, Joe Bloggs, known mass-criminal or best-guy-in-the-world innocent.
It's no different to saying you won't reveal how you got your evidence, or how you analysed it to come to a certain conclusion, or where you got it from, or what standards of accuracy and preservation you used to bring it to court.
If your method of obtaining evidence was illegal, that evidence isn't evidence at all as it was not obtained or preserved to the necessary requirements of law. The FBI just gave a PROBABLE PAEDOPHILE a free pass, because they deliberately interfered with legal methods in gathering reliable evidence against him.
Not even the entire truth. The Google one will translate text in a moving image or camera feed too. Literally point your phone over a menu and it replaces parts of the image it recognises as text with same-colour translated text in real-time.
Different estimates of variables plugged into the same equation.
You still end up with "life out there". Just not life you're ever going to meet, by chance, in our lifetime.
And we're talking probability. For the exact reason I say it's VIRTUALLY certain, I can't say it's certain. But to claim that out of billions of galaxies there's one tiny speck of a star for one tiny fraction of an era that produces one tiny planet on which starts life, and it can't happen again.
Fermi and Drake are the same equations with different values plugged in for variables. I just don't "believe" in the most pessimistic values of the variables. And maths doesn't help you there.
Oh, God, the nutters really are out in force today.
A pair of birds. Or possibly insects (dragonflies, etc.) Many such animals fly close in pairs, especially when mating. And they fly and move and are small enough to need zooming in and have a silhouette that changes constantly.
Again, you tick ALL the boxes. Two small blurry dots, of indeterminate size, at indeterminate distances, comprising basically a handful of pixels on a CMOS camera element (no matter how much the optics zoom in) poorly recorded, at speed, in a compressed format, from an anonymous "source" (Does homeland security often allow people to copy their footage around?). Short of analysing JPEG artifacts, you're basically getting a full five-nutters-out-of-five there.
And it's honestly, truly, really, an animal of some kind. Or possibly even insects. It's really that impossible to gauge size, distance, speed, that it could be anything that covers vaguely the same angular coverage and velocity. Draw a cone from the camera CCD. Stick an ant on the covering of the gimballed sphere that planes/helicopters with cameras use to film in 360, then extrapolate the full range of possible coverage back to the known background (houses etc.). Could be anything.
If they're cloaked, they're cloaked badly. If they're cloaked badly, we'd see a lot more of them and a lot more suspicious things than this. If they're not cloaked, your argument is a nonsense.
And this one isn't cloaked because you can see it. Presumably in IR but it's hard to tell the optical range on monochrome imagery, it could be IR, near-IR or some cheap webcam at night (which will pick up all kinds of things). And given that the background is white, and this thing is black, that probably means it's warm and/or visible. Like a bird.
All the spectrum in the world doesn't explain why they're so crap at actually staying hidden while also never quite managing to be larger than a couple of pixels on any camera in the world, ever.
Honestly, be scientific, play Devil's Advocate, think "how could I fake that if I wanted to". I can think of a thousand ways but probably the easiest is just film things a lot until something like that happens by chance. I could get a better hit-ratio just by random chance, so long as I remember to delete the things that obviously WEREN'T UFO's (like when the birds wings are clearly visible, etc.).
I'll be honest... I'd probably lay money on a SINGLE bird of prey, with a camera as crap as that. Constantly moving at speed, over the top of a town, flies down to land/make home towards the end, while twisting and turning in the air drafts.
But I have a reproducible test case, and have tried many alternate idio - I mean humans.
If you could at least consider not putting this tripe into the next release, due anywhere from 9 months from now to the next million years, I'd be really grateful.
- It's impossible to gauge distance to any accuracy (but your logic is quite good to narrow the range down quite considerably).
- It does nothing. In fact, technically, to be "an object" there it would have to be in a partnered orbit, which would mean it would have to have GOT THERE. Are we suggesting cloaking devices too?
- Incomplete footage. It doesn't appear out of nowhere, it's just there when the footage starts DESPITE it probably being quite easy for whoever captured it to include 30 seconds more at the beginning (where you'll see that reflection / lens flare quite obviously start to come in).
- It's indeterminate in size, shape. Thus it's probably not an object. And the only thing it doesn't have indeterminate (but which is because of the above) is "speed", which is actually more working against it being anything interesting .
- It's then zoomed into to "see more detail". Please, please, stop doing this. We're not in Bladerunner.
Honestly, guys, I would love to witness such a thing. I firmly believe in the Drake equation. I virtually guarantee you there's "something" out there. I also mathematically virtually-guarantee you (I'm a mathematician, certainty is a big word) that we'll never be in the same time/space/evolution that we'd ever be able to communicate usefully.
I would love to see such a thing in my lifetime. That's a truly ground-breaking thing to be witness to (Where were you when Kennedy was shot, who cares? Where were you when we found out about the aliens? Much more interesting to tell your grandchildren).
But this sort of shite just makes me shake my head, and I've never seen anything EXCEPT this sort of shite. And so my above beliefs label me - by proxy - as some kind of nutter if expressed poorly.
Would love to see an alien. This isn't it. It's precisely what all the others are. An unidentified "something" (I can't even call it an object, I think it's lens flare thus an optical effect). And the vast, vast, vast, vast balance of probability is that I could set up a camera and replicate this effect almost perfectly in minutes with an innocent setup (e.g. lens flare, object behind the camera and glass window in front, etc.).
Go there in the summer, at the height of tourist season.
I'm not talking physical damage (it's a loch), I'm talking making a place you wouldn't want to be in longer than it takes to start the car and fight through the traffic to get out of there.
Technically, if they say it's "all-new", is it able to legally contain flashback or be a "best-of" revisited episode in any part?
I'd love to be a millionaire just to spent time suing things into oblivion when they are inaccurate like this. Shampoo adverts I'd target first, followed by any commercial use of the phrase "Unlimited".
Apart from the obvious all-encompassing bollocks that is Nessie (including destroying quite a nice loch with crap tourism shite):
This kind of calls in question all the viability, and highlights the pointlessness, of all the previous "Nessie searches" that didn't even find a 45-foot prop that we knew roughly where it was.
I have a Mitel 5000 and it... just works. It's been in the 100's of days uptimes and only ever rebooted for maintenance. I have analogue, digital and IP handsets, and analogue, ISDN and SIP trunks.
I also have a Mitel cordless wifi handset (which is cordless IP that piggybacks on the normal Wifi networks, in case you've not seen one). Apart from the fact that the idiot that programmed it put it in the wrong timezone and I no longer have a programmer for it, it works fine across the site. The menus aren't that convoluted on it at all. It boots in about 10 seconds, and that includes joining the network and talking to the ICP.
And, pretty much, the whole thing runs quite smoothly. It's even survived a couple of lightning strikes that hit cables and any number of power surges. And the admin tools are software, and it again just works and pulls off the stats and logs and one click gets you - admittedly after a long connection process - into the admin side to do anything. The desktop client (Xarios?) is also another "just-works" thing.
Admittedly we don't do Bluetooth at all, so I can't comment on that, but we have it VLAN'ed and QoS'd as you'd expect and it just works.
It's quite finicky putting SIP trunks over NAT, but that's par for the course.
The only thing I've seen that comes close was a Samsung OfficeServ many years ago, and even this one is quite old - the 5000 is about 10 years old I think, now.
The only thing that really bugs me is that the voicemail menu structure is so damn convoluted and long-winded, so I just made myself a quick-reference sheet.
In my country, you are legally obliged to provide attendance and visa and financial data for between four and ten years. No "Oh, but we lost the backup". You're legally obliged. Can't do it? No school.
You're legally obliged to hold enough work to prove these kids can pass the exam coursework the teachers say they can. No ifs, buts, maybes, you lose it, they lose their qualifications forever.
Add on testing, pupil tracking, MIS databases (including medical records, records of dealing with child abuse, etc. staff CRB checks, parental complaints, legal issues, etc.), staff salaries, pensions, decades of teacher planning, always-on web resources, VLE's, staff VPN's, mail, etc. and it quickly escalates.
I've worked in London primary schools for the last 20 years. Backups like this (shadow copies aren't really backups, but still, it takes two seconds to turn the option on) are standard. There was a time when you physically separated admin and curriculum networks to prevent data transfer - twice the servers and cabling and switching (but now you VLAN and/or just permission properly).
Secondary servers are the norm. Grandfather-father-son backups are the norm. Off-site backups are the norm. Every school I've ever worked in has them, with proper tape rotation already in place before I even walk in the door. And we're talking state schools with a couple of hundred kids below age 11.
Some small schools ask the Boroughs to help them out and they have somewhat centralised services. Which all do this too. But most primary handle their own IT. And probably have at least one IT suite, several class sets of tablet computers, and quite possibly interactive whiteboards or touchscreens in every classroom. It's the norm for teacher interviews to expect to be able to turn up with Smartboard files and get started immediately.
Now consider what that means in terms of daily expectations, and actually the stuff I've listed just about keeps you running.
The school I *actually* work for now, a large private boarding school, has IBM BladeCenters, iSCSI storage, off-site VM replication, MDM, Cisco Meraki networking and wireless throughout and double-redundant fibre backbones on leased lines. I don't expect everything school to have those.
But I assure you that every school I've ever worked in cycles tapes religiously and keeps several offsite, and has kit supplied which backs up and emails backup logs which school policy states must be checked and that the governors verify is taking place. And some of those literally didn't have enough money to buy exercise books.
The cost of data loss like that far outweighs anything to do with the education of your child, even if it doesn't actually make it into the public domain.
Own one for two seconds and I defy you not to realise this.
See that damp stain on the wall underneath? And the puddle on the floor? Yeah, you washed your hands about five times, and it looks like you've been having water fights in front of the thing.
And then there was me who was always told that, actually, washing your hands (the process of wetting them) does little anyway. It's the drying / wiping that actually scrapes the crap off. Otherwise you literally just have a slightly damper environment for the bacteria on your hands anyway.
There's a reason that surgeons "scrub" up. It has little to do with the water itself, which just acts as a lubricant to assist the soap (which sticks to dirt and water) in sticking to the dirt and then providing a way to know where you've washed and to remove those parts that might have captured the dirt. It's the wiping / scrubbing / vigorous rub-down that actually removes that crap from you (and onto the floor / towel / soap / sink, obviously).
Like the Romans - who bathed in oil and then scraped it off, knowing the OIL took the dirt with it, not that smelling like a pizza for the rest of the day actually did anything in itself.
The reason we have hand-driers is because such scrubbing in public is considered... "wrong" somehow. You can't share a towel without transfer of bacteria, and people think individual paper towel is somehow killing the planet. Like blowing your nose - don't put it in a handkerchief and carry it around with you. Wipe it off on a tissue and throw the fucking thing away.
But, to be honest, it barely matters. Bacteria don't last long in those kinds of environments so long as they're cleaned occasionally, you can't really avoid spreading them anyway (it's not a question of some precisely contained particles - watch one of the slow-mo videos of a sneeze, it doesn't matter what you do it's like someone sneezing a handful of flour - it goes fecking everywhere, but, yes, put your hand up because it does stop quite a lot of your snot landing on someone else), and gadgets like this are quick and convenient which means more people might bother to wash their hands just to try it out.
But if you ever used one of these, I defy you to not have seen the crap and water on the floor underneath and around it that gets blasted off everyone else's hands.
Like all things Dyson (and Apple), half-decent idea, pretty aesthetics, fucking terrible design, but add a premium and be different and people buy it.
Man ALLOWS his entire company to be wiped out in one command.
Man DESIGNS his entire company to be wiped out in one command.
Man SETS UP his entire company to be wiped out in one command.
Hint: I work in schools. Once I had a teacher delete their entire planning folder. Then (and DO NOT ask me why, because I don't understand it either), they emptied that folder from Recycle Bin. They rang up in the more embarrassed panic.
And then it was explained that we still had copies of that folder in:
a) Shadow Copies of the profile on the client. b) Network Copies of the profile that they were logged in as (and which fortunately hadn't logged off once they realised what they did). c) Shadow Copies of the profile folder on the server. d) Copies of the profile folder on all the other servers. e) Copies of all the servers on replica servers. f) Copies of the server VM's and storage in a primary backup location. g) Copies of the server VM's and storage in a secondary backup location. h) Copies of the server VM's and storage in a tertiary backup location. i) Several off-line and off-site copies of the server VM's and storage . k) Random, casual backups all over the place.
And that's just for the crap that teachers think is important (i.e. a lesson plan they have to write every two weeks and which they can't re-use anyway).
Fuck knows what this guy was thinking, but there's no one one command ANYWHERE should be able to do that many actions, let alone dangerous actions that you haven't evaluated properly. Honestly, some of those machines don't even TURN ON until the backup window, and even the backup devices have rollback and shadow-copy-like functionality on top of whatever the backup software gives (incrementals, etc.). And several are DELIBERATELY offline for almost their entire lives and have entirely disparate credentials so no one command could ever affect them.
Not being funny, but we're talking a small school of 400 5-14 year olds here. He actually has more customers than I have users. And you just can't fuck about like that, so if he thinks he can, I honestly have zero sympathy and can only laugh.
You can't legally VM Mac OS. It just doesn't have compatible licensing.
So to make apps for these old versions, you REQUIRE specific versions to test with, which means a physical machine each, which means lots of Macs just to test and each has to be managed, updated and imaged separately.
And, no, you can't just use the latest XCode to compile and expect it to work on older MacOS, and nor can you use the latest XCode on an old MacOS, etc. And, pretty much, if you're targeting MacOS, you need XCode and utilities at some stage.
As a scientist (i.e. someone of a scientific mind with a BSc, even if not in this area), and especially as a mathematician, I can assume any possible single fact and then extrapolate the logic from there.
Let's assume, whether people believe it or not, that the levels are rising, it's us causing that, and we're all going to die if we don't do something.
Now... let's get a list of things we can do. That list is great. Now, let's put our best guesses for the IMPACT of those changes, worldwide, instantaneously, with complete co-operation (when assuming, always assume the extreme so you get a feel for the maximum error). Now let's extrapolate quite what happens, if they WORK absolutely perfectly and beyond expectations, or if they do nothing at all.
You just killed off vast portions of the third world. Everyone ditches their car but building a house becomes more expensive. You've lost affordable housing and maybe killed the building industry through loss of profit. You've lowered birth rates dramatically. You've billed the third world into oblivion, and potentially caused anarchy in certain regions. You've deployed uncertain capture technology and now have a stock of CO2 that you can never allow release of and must pay to maintain forever more.
You've also - weirdly - put a lot of onus on electricity, especially peak demand, which is almost unsatisfiable in many regions (not just third-world, but also places that don't get much sun or are deep inland, etc. or don't have the infrastructure already in place). You've used up an awful lot of raw material - some of it non-renewable - over an incredibly short period of time, but somehow reduced industrial energy usage? Or added greatly to peak demand again. You've cured the politicians of greed, and found world peace amid the anarchy and poverty. And so on.
I... honestly can't see the logic there at all. You have DRASTICALLY changed the way everyone lives and works and finds food and survives and has children while simultaneously creating vast industrial processes to allow that to happen inefficiently, on the basis of guesses.
The impact of the changes, even if they work and save the planet, is so drastic as to be questionably loss-making. And that's if everyone immediately co-operates fully and it all works perfectly. If it doesn't, we've just made things more expensive, put a lot of money into things that could never stem the tide anyway, 99% died of whatever dire consequence of global warming anyway, and there's almost zero accountability.
As I always say in this. I BELIEVE YOU. What now? And what's the impact? And what's the impact if that DOESN'T work or if it only partly works? And if that's true, is it honestly worth bothering (not sarcasm, honest question - if we put Armageddon off for 10 years, and those 10 years are in poverty and wasted technology and we throw away infrastructure that DID work to do that, was it worth it?) And what if it works perfectly? Are we actually going to kill no-one (unlikely) millions (possible) or billions (still possible) getting there?
I realise it's a selfish human question, but if half the world dies trying to get there, did we "save the planet"? Technically, yes. Practically? I'd be hard-pushed to say yes if we're pushed back 10,000 years only to repeat it again and kill off everything else in between anyway.
And that's assuming that - having caused the problem - our solutions have ANY IMPACT WHATSOEVER. I mean, honestly, it takes nothing to cook an egg but uncooking it is an entirely different matter.
And, again honest question, would we not be better moving to another planet? Admit defeat, learn the lesson, move on because we've obviously broken this one? That seems a perfectly viable answer if some of the assumptions above turn out right.
I'm playing devil's advocate, but it really worries me that people think that banning plastic bags, driving electric cars, putting wind tu
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How about when I say "Don't show me things like this", you don't show me things like that.
Like when I cross out every sports ads, I'm probably NOT interested in Sports.
Like when I hide every fucking Timehop page and friend post that includes it, you stop fucking showing them to me.
Does it really need that much of an algorithm to do what your own options say? Why would you WANT to show me more things that I'm deliberately going out of my way to remove (and not the others that I'm not)?
I work in a school.
Our switches cost 2000 GBP each, and we have a firewall that costs on the same order. They have features you cannot get on anything cheaper (RADIUS, et al are "freebie" features nowadays - we're talking direct MDM on the switch and all kinds of security).
The question is not "was the $10 switch to blame?" but "why would you ever use a $10 switch anyway?" These people are storing money thousands of times more than anything we ever have to deal with, for thousands more customers than we will ever have, with thousands of times more budgets than I will ever see.
And their stuff isn't even from the "19" rack networking" section of the catalogue. It's from the "bargain buys for home uses to 'double up' their network cables" section.
Additionally, I'm bound by PCI DSS standards which demand things like firewalls and antivirus EVEN IF there's no need for them. I promise you. And IDS and IPS and separated networks and all kinds of security. That's just to TAKE a credit card payment to pass onto the bank. The banks themselves aren't then doing more?
It's got nothing to do with what could be true at the bank. It's about not even trying to follow industry best practices, let alone actually getting close to them.
Absolutely. Start with contempt of court, and go on from there.
Doesn't even have to be productive work.
Make one half of the population stitch fishing nets for 8 hours a day, then make the other half unpick them and coil them back up.
At least then you know there are no layabouts getting "free money", everyone's busy, and there's some incentive to go and get a real job as soon as possible ("If I ever see another fishing net..."), and you aren't creating jobs that someone properly trained could actually do for a proper wage. Short of severe disability that would make you unable to work anyway, you'd be able to do the job sitting down.
But it means you have to get up, report somewhere, stay there for a full working day to be eligible for free money, do something, and clock in and out. People genuinely between jobs will jump at the chance to cover the gap. The layabouts will die of boredom or have to go get a real job. The crime rate won't increase significantly because you have to be occupied or employed by crime as you would be anyway. And everyone else gets a "free job" (much better than free money) whenever they are down on their luck or unable to work.
Hell, make it six hours, and make them apply for jobs in the other 2 hours a day.
Apparently, though, being perceived as actually making people WORK for their money is backward and old-fashioned.
What's a console?
I have on my lap a device capable of playing every game I've ever bought, right through to GTA V and things released just now. It fits on my lap. It can go to my mate's house. It can connect to wireless controllers. It has HDMI out. It can download ALL my games and keep them all on the same device. It can emulate - or directly play - all my old games too.
And it costs no more than I'd normally pay for a laptop, which is about what everyone else would pay for a laptop, and a games console. Oh, and it does all my work, contains all my movies, connects to the net, and all the usual stuff you'd expect a computer to do.
And I bought it years ago, and it's still going.
Honestly? Consoles are dead. There is no sufficiently compelling reason to do anything on a console compared to just using the laptop that you probably already have anyway, or a very slightly upgraded version of the same.
I'm a mathematician. I have a degree from a London university in mathematical and computational sciences. That doesn't make me an astrophysicist or an expert. Never claimed that. In fact, it makes me really crap at arithmetic, spreadsheets and quite a lot of shit (like modern voting, which I refuse to partake in).
As a mathematician, the maths is infallible. What you're mistaking is the assumptions you plug into the numbers that you put into the maths, their source, accuracy, reliability, variability, and that they reflect any kind of reality or that the equations will give you an answer that's useful. Welcome to maths.
The Drake equation IS the maths. It's that simple. What's not simple is the numbers you plug into it.
Drake says, if you plug in what are in my opinion reasonably accurate numbers from the observable universe, that there's life out there to a virtual certainty. But, actually, it also plops out of the equations that the chances of ever coinciding with them in a universe in our entire existence is incredibly miniscule.
The Fermi paradox is really that if you plug in other numbers, you can get a conclusion that we should have ALREADY been visited and then jumps to a second conclusion that this can't be true (which is a bizarre thing to assume given the timescales that come out of such things).
Both the same. Different assumptions. Produce differing results. That, through the haze of personal interpretation, can be taken to be anything from absolute bollocks to virtual certainty. But there's a reason that the Fermi "paradox" doesn't get quite as much press as simple Drake equations.
Find your most reliable set of numbers from sources you believe. Plug them into Drake. See what you get out. Fermi lies almost at the extreme of estimates for the variables. And makes several other assumptions (i.e. that aliens haven't visited us ever since we turned up, which has varying definitions of "visited", "us" and "turned up").
Hint: A mathematician doesn't dig out the equations and source data until he's dead certain. I'm not, as pointed out. But the maths is there for you to read and Fermi is basically "Ner, ner, we think you're wrong cos, look, we can fiddle the numbers to mean they should have knocked on the door last Wednesday". It doesn't mean that you can prove either wrong or right (proof is a HUGE word in mathematics), they're both mathematically-correct given the assumptions taken. Whether those assumptions are reasonable or bullshit is a matter of personal choice, but run the numbers yourself and convince yourself:
http://www.classbrain.com/artm...
If you're not beyond warrantless actions that you could apply for legitimate warrants for, or lying to courts, or ignoring court orders, who's to say you're beyond falsifying evidence?
It's honestly that simple. Play the rules, or don't. But if you don't, you can then point at others and say "They weren't playing by the rules either".
Unreliable witnesses before court should be dismissed out of hand. Whether FBI, Joe Bloggs, known mass-criminal or best-guy-in-the-world innocent.
It's no different to saying you won't reveal how you got your evidence, or how you analysed it to come to a certain conclusion, or where you got it from, or what standards of accuracy and preservation you used to bring it to court.
If your method of obtaining evidence was illegal, that evidence isn't evidence at all as it was not obtained or preserved to the necessary requirements of law. The FBI just gave a PROBABLE PAEDOPHILE a free pass, because they deliberately interfered with legal methods in gathering reliable evidence against him.
Not even the entire truth. The Google one will translate text in a moving image or camera feed too. Literally point your phone over a menu and it replaces parts of the image it recognises as text with same-colour translated text in real-time.
Different estimates of variables plugged into the same equation.
You still end up with "life out there". Just not life you're ever going to meet, by chance, in our lifetime.
And we're talking probability. For the exact reason I say it's VIRTUALLY certain, I can't say it's certain. But to claim that out of billions of galaxies there's one tiny speck of a star for one tiny fraction of an era that produces one tiny planet on which starts life, and it can't happen again.
Fermi and Drake are the same equations with different values plugged in for variables. I just don't "believe" in the most pessimistic values of the variables. And maths doesn't help you there.
Oh, God, the nutters really are out in force today.
A pair of birds. Or possibly insects (dragonflies, etc.) Many such animals fly close in pairs, especially when mating. And they fly and move and are small enough to need zooming in and have a silhouette that changes constantly.
Again, you tick ALL the boxes. Two small blurry dots, of indeterminate size, at indeterminate distances, comprising basically a handful of pixels on a CMOS camera element (no matter how much the optics zoom in) poorly recorded, at speed, in a compressed format, from an anonymous "source" (Does homeland security often allow people to copy their footage around?). Short of analysing JPEG artifacts, you're basically getting a full five-nutters-out-of-five there.
And it's honestly, truly, really, an animal of some kind. Or possibly even insects. It's really that impossible to gauge size, distance, speed, that it could be anything that covers vaguely the same angular coverage and velocity. Draw a cone from the camera CCD. Stick an ant on the covering of the gimballed sphere that planes/helicopters with cameras use to film in 360, then extrapolate the full range of possible coverage back to the known background (houses etc.). Could be anything.
If they're cloaked, they're cloaked badly.
If they're cloaked badly, we'd see a lot more of them and a lot more suspicious things than this.
If they're not cloaked, your argument is a nonsense.
And this one isn't cloaked because you can see it. Presumably in IR but it's hard to tell the optical range on monochrome imagery, it could be IR, near-IR or some cheap webcam at night (which will pick up all kinds of things). And given that the background is white, and this thing is black, that probably means it's warm and/or visible. Like a bird.
All the spectrum in the world doesn't explain why they're so crap at actually staying hidden while also never quite managing to be larger than a couple of pixels on any camera in the world, ever.
Honestly, be scientific, play Devil's Advocate, think "how could I fake that if I wanted to". I can think of a thousand ways but probably the easiest is just film things a lot until something like that happens by chance. I could get a better hit-ratio just by random chance, so long as I remember to delete the things that obviously WEREN'T UFO's (like when the birds wings are clearly visible, etc.).
I'll be honest... I'd probably lay money on a SINGLE bird of prey, with a camera as crap as that. Constantly moving at speed, over the top of a town, flies down to land/make home towards the end, while twisting and turning in the air drafts.
No.
An FO, by definition, is flying (not established here) and an object (also not established here).
Optical effects are not classed as UFO's in any way, shape or form. Otherwise every rainbow would be a UFO, even lens flare, every glint of sun.
But I have a reproducible test case, and have tried many alternate idio - I mean humans.
If you could at least consider not putting this tripe into the next release, due anywhere from 9 months from now to the next million years, I'd be really grateful.
It has all the classic hallmarks
- It's blurry.
- It's impossible to gauge distance to any accuracy (but your logic is quite good to narrow the range down quite considerably).
- It does nothing. In fact, technically, to be "an object" there it would have to be in a partnered orbit, which would mean it would have to have GOT THERE. Are we suggesting cloaking devices too?
- Incomplete footage. It doesn't appear out of nowhere, it's just there when the footage starts DESPITE it probably being quite easy for whoever captured it to include 30 seconds more at the beginning (where you'll see that reflection / lens flare quite obviously start to come in).
- It's indeterminate in size, shape. Thus it's probably not an object. And the only thing it doesn't have indeterminate (but which is because of the above) is "speed", which is actually more working against it being anything interesting .
- It's then zoomed into to "see more detail". Please, please, stop doing this. We're not in Bladerunner.
Honestly, guys, I would love to witness such a thing. I firmly believe in the Drake equation. I virtually guarantee you there's "something" out there. I also mathematically virtually-guarantee you (I'm a mathematician, certainty is a big word) that we'll never be in the same time/space/evolution that we'd ever be able to communicate usefully.
I would love to see such a thing in my lifetime. That's a truly ground-breaking thing to be witness to (Where were you when Kennedy was shot, who cares? Where were you when we found out about the aliens? Much more interesting to tell your grandchildren).
But this sort of shite just makes me shake my head, and I've never seen anything EXCEPT this sort of shite. And so my above beliefs label me - by proxy - as some kind of nutter if expressed poorly.
Would love to see an alien. This isn't it. It's precisely what all the others are. An unidentified "something" (I can't even call it an object, I think it's lens flare thus an optical effect). And the vast, vast, vast, vast balance of probability is that I could set up a camera and replicate this effect almost perfectly in minutes with an innocent setup (e.g. lens flare, object behind the camera and glass window in front, etc.).
Nutters, the lot of you.
Dear God,
I'd like to file a bug report.
Go there in the summer, at the height of tourist season.
I'm not talking physical damage (it's a loch), I'm talking making a place you wouldn't want to be in longer than it takes to start the car and fight through the traffic to get out of there.
Technically, if they say it's "all-new", is it able to legally contain flashback or be a "best-of" revisited episode in any part?
I'd love to be a millionaire just to spent time suing things into oblivion when they are inaccurate like this. Shampoo adverts I'd target first, followed by any commercial use of the phrase "Unlimited".
Apart from the obvious all-encompassing bollocks that is Nessie (including destroying quite a nice loch with crap tourism shite):
This kind of calls in question all the viability, and highlights the pointlessness, of all the previous "Nessie searches" that didn't even find a 45-foot prop that we knew roughly where it was.
"at once" - I take to mean "immediately".
"all at once" - I take to mean "simultaneously".
Like a lot of Slashdot-edited articles - close, but no cigar.
Not being funny, but not being an American:
Do you not already have rules about discharging a firearm needlessly and without regard for persons or property?
Such a funny country.
It probably depends on your system.
I have a Mitel 5000 and it... just works. It's been in the 100's of days uptimes and only ever rebooted for maintenance. I have analogue, digital and IP handsets, and analogue, ISDN and SIP trunks.
I also have a Mitel cordless wifi handset (which is cordless IP that piggybacks on the normal Wifi networks, in case you've not seen one). Apart from the fact that the idiot that programmed it put it in the wrong timezone and I no longer have a programmer for it, it works fine across the site. The menus aren't that convoluted on it at all. It boots in about 10 seconds, and that includes joining the network and talking to the ICP.
And, pretty much, the whole thing runs quite smoothly. It's even survived a couple of lightning strikes that hit cables and any number of power surges. And the admin tools are software, and it again just works and pulls off the stats and logs and one click gets you - admittedly after a long connection process - into the admin side to do anything. The desktop client (Xarios?) is also another "just-works" thing.
Admittedly we don't do Bluetooth at all, so I can't comment on that, but we have it VLAN'ed and QoS'd as you'd expect and it just works.
It's quite finicky putting SIP trunks over NAT, but that's par for the course.
The only thing I've seen that comes close was a Samsung OfficeServ many years ago, and even this one is quite old - the 5000 is about 10 years old I think, now.
The only thing that really bugs me is that the voicemail menu structure is so damn convoluted and long-winded, so I just made myself a quick-reference sheet.
You might want to go ask some IT guy somewhere.
In my country, you are legally obliged to provide attendance and visa and financial data for between four and ten years. No "Oh, but we lost the backup". You're legally obliged. Can't do it? No school.
You're legally obliged to hold enough work to prove these kids can pass the exam coursework the teachers say they can. No ifs, buts, maybes, you lose it, they lose their qualifications forever.
Add on testing, pupil tracking, MIS databases (including medical records, records of dealing with child abuse, etc. staff CRB checks, parental complaints, legal issues, etc.), staff salaries, pensions, decades of teacher planning, always-on web resources, VLE's, staff VPN's, mail, etc. and it quickly escalates.
I've worked in London primary schools for the last 20 years. Backups like this (shadow copies aren't really backups, but still, it takes two seconds to turn the option on) are standard. There was a time when you physically separated admin and curriculum networks to prevent data transfer - twice the servers and cabling and switching (but now you VLAN and/or just permission properly).
Secondary servers are the norm. Grandfather-father-son backups are the norm. Off-site backups are the norm. Every school I've ever worked in has them, with proper tape rotation already in place before I even walk in the door. And we're talking state schools with a couple of hundred kids below age 11.
Some small schools ask the Boroughs to help them out and they have somewhat centralised services. Which all do this too. But most primary handle their own IT. And probably have at least one IT suite, several class sets of tablet computers, and quite possibly interactive whiteboards or touchscreens in every classroom. It's the norm for teacher interviews to expect to be able to turn up with Smartboard files and get started immediately.
Now consider what that means in terms of daily expectations, and actually the stuff I've listed just about keeps you running.
The school I *actually* work for now, a large private boarding school, has IBM BladeCenters, iSCSI storage, off-site VM replication, MDM, Cisco Meraki networking and wireless throughout and double-redundant fibre backbones on leased lines. I don't expect everything school to have those.
But I assure you that every school I've ever worked in cycles tapes religiously and keeps several offsite, and has kit supplied which backs up and emails backup logs which school policy states must be checked and that the governors verify is taking place. And some of those literally didn't have enough money to buy exercise books.
The cost of data loss like that far outweighs anything to do with the education of your child, even if it doesn't actually make it into the public domain.
Own one for two seconds and I defy you not to realise this.
See that damp stain on the wall underneath? And the puddle on the floor? Yeah, you washed your hands about five times, and it looks like you've been having water fights in front of the thing.
And then there was me who was always told that, actually, washing your hands (the process of wetting them) does little anyway. It's the drying / wiping that actually scrapes the crap off. Otherwise you literally just have a slightly damper environment for the bacteria on your hands anyway.
There's a reason that surgeons "scrub" up. It has little to do with the water itself, which just acts as a lubricant to assist the soap (which sticks to dirt and water) in sticking to the dirt and then providing a way to know where you've washed and to remove those parts that might have captured the dirt. It's the wiping / scrubbing / vigorous rub-down that actually removes that crap from you (and onto the floor / towel / soap / sink, obviously).
Like the Romans - who bathed in oil and then scraped it off, knowing the OIL took the dirt with it, not that smelling like a pizza for the rest of the day actually did anything in itself.
The reason we have hand-driers is because such scrubbing in public is considered... "wrong" somehow. You can't share a towel without transfer of bacteria, and people think individual paper towel is somehow killing the planet. Like blowing your nose - don't put it in a handkerchief and carry it around with you. Wipe it off on a tissue and throw the fucking thing away.
But, to be honest, it barely matters. Bacteria don't last long in those kinds of environments so long as they're cleaned occasionally, you can't really avoid spreading them anyway (it's not a question of some precisely contained particles - watch one of the slow-mo videos of a sneeze, it doesn't matter what you do it's like someone sneezing a handful of flour - it goes fecking everywhere, but, yes, put your hand up because it does stop quite a lot of your snot landing on someone else), and gadgets like this are quick and convenient which means more people might bother to wash their hands just to try it out.
But if you ever used one of these, I defy you to not have seen the crap and water on the floor underneath and around it that gets blasted off everyone else's hands.
Like all things Dyson (and Apple), half-decent idea, pretty aesthetics, fucking terrible design, but add a premium and be different and people buy it.
Man ALLOWS his entire company to be wiped out in one command.
Man DESIGNS his entire company to be wiped out in one command.
Man SETS UP his entire company to be wiped out in one command.
Hint: I work in schools. Once I had a teacher delete their entire planning folder. Then (and DO NOT ask me why, because I don't understand it either), they emptied that folder from Recycle Bin. They rang up in the more embarrassed panic.
And then it was explained that we still had copies of that folder in:
a) Shadow Copies of the profile on the client.
b) Network Copies of the profile that they were logged in as (and which fortunately hadn't logged off once they realised what they did).
c) Shadow Copies of the profile folder on the server.
d) Copies of the profile folder on all the other servers.
e) Copies of all the servers on replica servers.
f) Copies of the server VM's and storage in a primary backup location.
g) Copies of the server VM's and storage in a secondary backup location.
h) Copies of the server VM's and storage in a tertiary backup location.
i) Several off-line and off-site copies of the server VM's and storage .
k) Random, casual backups all over the place.
And that's just for the crap that teachers think is important (i.e. a lesson plan they have to write every two weeks and which they can't re-use anyway).
Fuck knows what this guy was thinking, but there's no one one command ANYWHERE should be able to do that many actions, let alone dangerous actions that you haven't evaluated properly. Honestly, some of those machines don't even TURN ON until the backup window, and even the backup devices have rollback and shadow-copy-like functionality on top of whatever the backup software gives (incrementals, etc.). And several are DELIBERATELY offline for almost their entire lives and have entirely disparate credentials so no one command could ever affect them.
Not being funny, but we're talking a small school of 400 5-14 year olds here. He actually has more customers than I have users. And you just can't fuck about like that, so if he thinks he can, I honestly have zero sympathy and can only laugh.
It's more to do with development.
You can't legally VM Mac OS. It just doesn't have compatible licensing.
So to make apps for these old versions, you REQUIRE specific versions to test with, which means a physical machine each, which means lots of Macs just to test and each has to be managed, updated and imaged separately.
And, no, you can't just use the latest XCode to compile and expect it to work on older MacOS, and nor can you use the latest XCode on an old MacOS, etc. And, pretty much, if you're targeting MacOS, you need XCode and utilities at some stage.
I never got why people like development on Mac.
I know.
Again - I will fall back to my usual question.
As a scientist (i.e. someone of a scientific mind with a BSc, even if not in this area), and especially as a mathematician, I can assume any possible single fact and then extrapolate the logic from there.
Let's assume, whether people believe it or not, that the levels are rising, it's us causing that, and we're all going to die if we don't do something.
Now... let's get a list of things we can do. That list is great. Now, let's put our best guesses for the IMPACT of those changes, worldwide, instantaneously, with complete co-operation (when assuming, always assume the extreme so you get a feel for the maximum error). Now let's extrapolate quite what happens, if they WORK absolutely perfectly and beyond expectations, or if they do nothing at all.
You just killed off vast portions of the third world. Everyone ditches their car but building a house becomes more expensive. You've lost affordable housing and maybe killed the building industry through loss of profit. You've lowered birth rates dramatically. You've billed the third world into oblivion, and potentially caused anarchy in certain regions. You've deployed uncertain capture technology and now have a stock of CO2 that you can never allow release of and must pay to maintain forever more.
You've also - weirdly - put a lot of onus on electricity, especially peak demand, which is almost unsatisfiable in many regions (not just third-world, but also places that don't get much sun or are deep inland, etc. or don't have the infrastructure already in place). You've used up an awful lot of raw material - some of it non-renewable - over an incredibly short period of time, but somehow reduced industrial energy usage? Or added greatly to peak demand again. You've cured the politicians of greed, and found world peace amid the anarchy and poverty. And so on.
I... honestly can't see the logic there at all. You have DRASTICALLY changed the way everyone lives and works and finds food and survives and has children while simultaneously creating vast industrial processes to allow that to happen inefficiently, on the basis of guesses.
The impact of the changes, even if they work and save the planet, is so drastic as to be questionably loss-making. And that's if everyone immediately co-operates fully and it all works perfectly. If it doesn't, we've just made things more expensive, put a lot of money into things that could never stem the tide anyway, 99% died of whatever dire consequence of global warming anyway, and there's almost zero accountability.
As I always say in this. I BELIEVE YOU. What now? And what's the impact? And what's the impact if that DOESN'T work or if it only partly works? And if that's true, is it honestly worth bothering (not sarcasm, honest question - if we put Armageddon off for 10 years, and those 10 years are in poverty and wasted technology and we throw away infrastructure that DID work to do that, was it worth it?) And what if it works perfectly? Are we actually going to kill no-one (unlikely) millions (possible) or billions (still possible) getting there?
I realise it's a selfish human question, but if half the world dies trying to get there, did we "save the planet"? Technically, yes. Practically? I'd be hard-pushed to say yes if we're pushed back 10,000 years only to repeat it again and kill off everything else in between anyway.
And that's assuming that - having caused the problem - our solutions have ANY IMPACT WHATSOEVER. I mean, honestly, it takes nothing to cook an egg but uncooking it is an entirely different matter.
And, again honest question, would we not be better moving to another planet? Admit defeat, learn the lesson, move on because we've obviously broken this one? That seems a perfectly viable answer if some of the assumptions above turn out right.
I'm playing devil's advocate, but it really worries me that people think that banning plastic bags, driving electric cars, putting wind tu