In 20 year's time, when they're making Toy Story 26 or The Expendables: Resurrected Again (where Sly Stallone is a re-animated corpse for the third outing), you'll get sick and tired of the shit too.
Though I haven't yet found anything on there that's "killer", I have to say that just the idea of Amazon Originals (i.e. independently funded, non-Hollywood crap) is appealing.
Let's be honest, if you resurrected any trilogy from the 70's (were there others? Possible Alien technically?) and just keep piling on the shit, then people are going to get pissed. Especially if they've been going to the cinema since they were a kid and all they ever see when they go is yet-another-Star-Wars.
I like the originals. The sequels did nothing for me. I wouldn't even try to watch the spin-off shite, director's cuts, Disneyfications, etc. Like everything that plays on the name, just because it's "Star Wars" or "Doctor Who" or "iPhone" or whatever other brand, it doesn't mean it's actually any good, just because a previous incarnation was in it's time.
Fuck, they've just announced their resurrecting the fucking ZX Spectrum. I'm a MAD Spectrum fan - I still own three. But I'll be damned if I'll pay for a portable Spectrum 25 years later just because it's "been approved" by Sir Clive.
"Update may break things"? Er... yep. "Someone in charge of server didn't bother to properly account for potential downtime for an upgrade, didn't keep the old kernels around for booting into, didn't diagnose past 'it doesn't work', etc.?" Er... nope.
Then at minimum you'd expect removal of the check (not a comment), or a history of patches which indicate that it was actually a deliberate omission after testing.
I'm far and away not an engine guy, but I always thought the reason was limited lifespan of solenoids.
A cam is just a spinning part. A solenoid would have to electrically activate perfectly every time, thousands of times a minutes, for 15-odd years of usage. To match that kind of usage, you're talking some serious solenoid. Probably they do exist but they're not exactly standard hardware, as far as I know.
And even the article suggests you tinker with models where the pistons can't crash into the valves. When you're tinkering, maybe that's okay. When you're designing engines it's not really okay.
Like all things, it's not that it can't be done. It's that the investment to make it work, work right, work first time every time, and prototype it to oblivion so you know that, probably far outweighs what you'll get back in any kind of efficiency saving on a non-trivial engine. Even rotary engines are comparatively rare compared to other types.
Things are most certainly heading all-electronic. But if you're going that way, almost certainly your investment is better of in electric drive, rather than huge investment into a critical piece of technology that - if it goes wrong - means a new car, for the sake of an slight efficiency increase.
But I'd really much prefer a GPS that can work indoors, in cities with tall buildings, near hills and mountains etc.
That seems to have much more uses than getting something from a handful of inches down to fractions of an inch.
My car and phone sometimes get confused about precisely where I am and which turn-off I've taken. And in Belgium (where there are a LOT of underground roads), it barely works at all - by the time it locks on, I've had to go down another tunnel. In Central London, it can lose accuracy just at critical points. But everywhere else it's okay.
Improve the reception and time-to-first-fix. Then worry about sub-meter accuracy. Nobody really uses it for that level of accuracy anyway.
And why can you not list with BT what your DID's can be, and what your internal numbers are? So when your DID is linked to crank calls, they can shut you down or notify you? In fact, the link is ALREADY there. BT know exactly what number you're claiming to be when you ring out, and which one you actually rang from.
But why should I have to deal with people able to fake YOUR DID (and thus your company's reputation) or a random or invalid DID, without any traceability?
Why should I only have that DID number as the ID I can block on? Why should someone be able to send me text from a number that doesn't exist? Or even, in some cases, from a NAME that doesn't exist (and which, thus, you cannot respond to or block), as I've seen on UK mobile phone networks?
I run a school telephony network, I understand DID usage. What I don't get is why that's not restricted (i.e. CANNOT BE FAKED), so that only YOUR numbers can advertise your DID. Wouldn't this stop me making crank calls to your customers and claiming to come from your 0800 number? Because there is ZERO protection for that at the moment, and never has been.
And that's all moot if you can't block that number. Number blocking has always been a pay-for service with BT historically, unless you wanted to block all numbers (then why have a phone?). It wasn't cheap either.
And try and report a crank call. Unless it's criminal, BT will NOT go through their records and find the originating lines. They will ask to intercept your line and see if they can't capture a repeat call live, rather than look in their history. Only when the police are involved will they discover the ACTUAL source of messages or phone calls. The user is helpless here.
(P.S. I once had a bank send 400 fax calls an hour to my parent's residential phone - that had no fax. We reported it to BT. There was no CallerID. Now they KNOW who sent those calls. They have records they could investigate, but they WILL NOT. Until you make a criminal complaint. What they did was - when we could finally get through to them - intercept the line for over an hour, meaning we were without service, and waited for the next fax - but by this time they'd died down.
It turned out to be a bank internal system on auto-send without retry-protection with a mistyped phone number. But it took DAYS to resolve. DAYS of the phone ringing uncontrollably throughout working hours all day long. You can say "You could have put a fax machine on it", but this was my parent's line, we had no fax machine, and this is BT's job to do something about. They couldn't because they do not access originator information, the CallerID was withheld, and they cannot block a number without it, unless there's a criminal complaint. And this wasn't last century.)
DID spoofing is fine. My employer does it. But there's NOTHING to say who can or can't spoof, or what they can spoof, or anything protecting users from malicious spoofing.
I should not be able to get a text message from "801" or "Insurance" (literally, not a contact name, but the originating name of the text), or a phone call from a number that I've blocked (even if they later try to call with number withheld, so employee at company who gets pissed off and wants to spam me can't just use the same line after dialling the number to withhold the CallerID), or a phone call from several thousand spoofed or unregistered numbers over extended periods of time (this should trigger so many alerts, that BT just shut the line down like an ISP would shut down an email spammer).
None of what I'm suggesting stops your employer advertising their main switchboard number for all outgoing calls.
Science is much more interesting to a scientist when you're proven wrong. And no scientists minds that. Not really.
And doubting your own science is exactly how you reject those millions of private hypotheses that couldn't have led to anything as they were wrong, and drove you to work out why the maths still pointed that way, and didn't lead you down the garden path of easy assumptions.
For scientists "being wrong" is merely a pathway to "being right". But sometimes they overshoot and it takes 100 years to prove them right. If it took me 100 years to prove you right, that's 99 years of everyone else thinking you could still be wrong.
30 years too late, could have been done at ANY point, but they are no longer making money from such calls so they promote a service AGAINST them to increase their product value.
Fuck off.
We got rid of landlines because of this shit.
Mobiles all have caller blocking.
Everything past that is your fucking responsibility anyway, to trace these "withheld numbers" and shut them down. But you have ZERO interest in doing so.
Why is it even possible to fake Caller-ID anyway? You are charging a provider to make the call, you know exactly who it's come from. Even if I can't SEE the number, I should be able to block the fucker with one button. And should have always been able to. And you should spot the pattern in who gets blocked and chuck them off your service.
You didn't care when it mattered. Now it doesn't matter. Nobody really "needs" a landline any more. Nobody even needs a mobile number. They certainly no longer need to have one they advertise. You can buy front-numbers that just forward to your phone for a pittance. And that's exactly the problem you introduced and refused to combat. And that's exactly why nobody gets my mobile phone number, or my landline.
And yet, somehow, I still get occasional junk calls. There's only a few sources of such information. My providers and/or the numbering authorities. Who should be combating this shit all the time for me anyway.
The day my phone rings with too much spam, I enable the "reject calls from unknown callers" options on my phone, or people will only get my WhatsApp or Skype and unless you're on my contact list, then fuck you.
What stopped you doing this sort of thing even before CallerID existed? Nothing.
That everything is so very precise with regards to timing and distance. 5 yards back. 0.4 seconds. It's a load of crap.
The game is over when the person in charge decides it's over and provides a signal that ends the game at that point and/or when the last point has been scored. Not when some arbitrary timer expires, and really annoyingly, not when the ball thrown before that arbitrary time is given any time it needs to land in the basket after that (because, if you are going to have a hard time limit, have a hard time limit!).
It's what bores me about a lot of sport - arbitrary rules that make no sense and rely on all kinds of unnecessary technology to play, rather than just being a sport. Even down to "did the ball cross this line" or whatever. If the judge says it did, it did. If he's sure, by all means check. But when you're into millimetre analysis, it's just boring and no longer a sport but one long replay.
Same thing with Formula One. If you need 0.00001th of a second to determine the winner, it's too close and too boring. Similarly, "batting averages" - it's nonsense to state these to so many decimal places.
Sport turned into commercial gain by the ever-shrinking boundary of error isn't actually fun, to play or to spectate.
Black holes warp space to the point that countless billions of planets can fit into a fairly normal "size" black hole.
Therefore the concept of "measuring" a black hole can be a nonsense. Inside it is billions of large things. Outside it, it might be a fraction of a light year across. And yet all that matter is crushed under its gravity and becomes nearly a point mass.
When your measuring system is reliant on getting a ruler and putting it somewhere, it all becomes a nonsense under space-time itself warping to the point of galaxies of objects fitting on the head of a pin, which from a distance just looks like a black hole in the middle of a galaxy.
Actual scale here is variable, indeterminate, dependent on the observer, and - in a lot of cases - unknown.
Use a tool like an idiot, and it won't work as you expect.
I regularly do things like 100 mile drives into the middle of nowhere, then just turn on the sat nav knowing that it will get me back. My girlfriend and I find it a nice way to discover new places, new pubs, new routes, new towns, new countryside.
What bugs me more than anything is short, temporary roadworks, restrictions, road closures, etc. that are never announced on RDS-TMC or similar traffic services and so you have to manually re-route. The one bit of a journey that pisses me off is when I *can't* let the satnav do its job.
Otherwise, I have never got lost, drove hundreds of km's out of my way "by accident" (moron!), driven through a ford I didn't know was coming up or into a low bridge that was too low for my vehicle (morons!), or anything else along those lines. Hell, it's been years since I typed in a postcode that the computer couldn't recognise first time.
Seriously, people, just get a life and check the overview map before you accept route. There are millions of places which share names with things that aren't what you intended. Check which one you meant first rather than blindly pressing OK.
And then your satnav-led journeys will be pretty much uneventful.
Oh, and I use a GBP20 Copilot app on an Android phone. It's not like I spent a fortune, and I don't even have to pay for map updates.
Then you can run your Windows-only app, have a built-in firewall in the hypervisor that can do whatever you need, you can use your original hardware, you can run other systems that are more privacy-respecting for your day-to-day activities, your licences almost certainly already cover such use, and everything from 8 Pro upwards allows you to use Hyper-V to do just this.
Think of a giant rubber sheet with a ball bearing in every square inch. Squish the sheet and the balls in that part get closer together. Stretch it and they get further apart. Do both to the same sheet and you have a wave and the distance between them is half a wavelength. Repeat it regularly and you have a full, repeating wave of a certain wavelength.
The ball bearings are sound-carrying particles in audio terms, and mass-bearing particles in gravity terms.
Neither of them has "positive" or "negative" anything. They just further apart or closer together to each other.
That we sometimes represent them as a line on a graph that goes below zero (closer than without the presence of sound / gravity) or above it (further apart than without the presence of sound / gravity) is a matter of interpretation, nothing to do with anything "negative" at all.
Any science you can explain in a few sentences to a layman will be so full of holes as to be nothing more than hearsay and astrology.
A big event, that would have created ripples that would arrive here roughly at the time of the experiment, happened. As we listened, at that time, we saw inconsistencies representative of just such a gravitational wave hitting the experiment. It's tiny, but above background noise and experimental error (it's mentioned elsewhere that this basically means 6-sigma certainty), and coincides with a particular event that we were able to "observe" (not literally) in other ways.
The source of the wave barely matters. We detected gravitational fluxes that would otherwise be unexplained. That we are able to correlate them to one single event, that's just of the type of rare event that we predict might be able to cause such signals "loud" enough to be "heard" by us, and match up the timing means that it's the most likely explanation too.
But more importantly - 100-year-old mathematics predicts some absolutely insane, bonkers things that - when we are finally able to look for them - turn out to be true. That's all science cares about. You can't just make up shit and then - in 100 years - several people invent an instrument that correlates perfectly to the shit you made up, several times, to the satisfaction of major scientific institutions unless - basically - you were absolutely spot-on correct all along.
That's pretty much what happened. The Einstein field equations are fucking bonkers to understand, let alone try and solve the implications of them. And I'm a mathematician. But they predict stuff like this that we then find. When it came from barely matters. A simplification of the definition of "size" in a mass-media article doesn't matter at all (tell people black holes have no size, and they look at you like you're an idiot).
But his point about "if the guy had let the connections go out - especially HTTP which you can just sniff - we might know for certain what it was actually trying to send out" is more than spot-on enough to compensate.
And if you're worried, block port 80 to those ranges of IPs.
If someone gets hold of your wallet enough to try passcodes, it's game over anyway.
It's like saying that credit cards are insecure because they only have 10,000 possible 4-digit PINs. Well, yes. But the general idea is to stop them getting the card in the first place, and to use other security measures to protect the card.
The stupid idea of having such emphemeral wallets that are vulnerable to these kinds of attacks was ridiculous before it started. That's not "normal" Bitcoin.
For normal Bitcoin, you make a wallet file on your machine, encrypt the wallet file with a strong passphrase, perform transactions, then store it in a safe place. You only get it back out on a secure machine where you're required to enter the passphrase again to do anything useful with it.
If someone is on the machine that you perform BitCoin transactions on, to the point that they can read your wallet file and try to enter passphrases, that's game over anyway. They could just as easily just sniff your keyboard for the passphrase.
Again - stupid security "attack" that wouldn't happen in real life unless you were a complete dope anyway, is taken as "bad news" for an unrelated technology which people like you jump on the bandwagon of disparaging without checking facts.
Hint: Word.doc passwords aren't secure either. Or old (pre-AES) ZIP file passwords. You can easily check just as many of those in the same time as this "attack" on something like EC2. The idea is that you don't let people get a file full of expensive information in the first place, or rely on such naff security if that's what you want to do. And that's exactly what BitCoin does too.
The wallet decryption is only valid if someone can copy your wallet. And that's, quite literally, like someone taking your wallet in real life. The problem is already there. That they might be able to use it to cost you money is entirely logical from that point onwards.
"that Morocco may eventually start exporting the clean energy to the European market."
Question:
If Morocco is just across from Spain, why would Spain pay for the energy (i.e. cost of production, plus payoff of initial outlay, plus transportation, plus the company profits) rather than just build their own?
It's not like the two are on hugely different latitudes which greatly affect the amount of solar available, and the transportation losses, especially under 50km of ocean at best, must be quite substantial.
And... they're at the same longitude, so they have the same solar peaks and thus power-demand peaks, so it's not like they can supply power during the night when Spain's solar would be dead, or similar. And Europe is only a couple of timezones wide, so considering Spain is probably the least-cost option when it comes to transportation etc.
Not sure I understand that at all. Maybe they'd exchange a bit of power, for emergencies and peak-demand and backup and switchover and things, but are Morocco really ever going to be able to sell their excess to any country far enough way that they couldn't generate it themselves, or to a nearby country that could just do the same and probably have the same kind of excess power at the same times of day?
In the UK, most tiny karate clubs have a GBP 1m public liability insurance, and it costs a pittance each year.
The fact of the number makes no difference, it's what's covered. I imagine they have to cover a lot more, but even the WORST of these may be better than human drivers on average, so it will quickly re-balance once the risk statistics are apparent, even if companies only pay at first for their testing cars.
Honestly, $100k+ liability insurance is pretty low. Even a school will have GBP 5-10 million and it get claimed on all the time and they handle care of children, including activities, trips, sports, staffing, etc.
Wonder how much Google public liability insurance premium just increased by.
Because, sorry, but the "AI" is really just a set of rules still. A set of rules that can't take account of every situation. Sure, it can drive more carefully than a human driver, but it can also make just the same kind of dumb mistakes as a human driver too.
But with the consequence that the first accident of note will result in all kinds of problems for EVERY instance of that model running in EVERY model of that self-driving car, rather than just a single driver being an idiot.
And if "the car" is the driver, then driving points and bans means almost nothing OR they mean the end of a self-driving car when they happen.
Aren't we still at the stage where a self-driving car knows the speed limit only by traffic-sign recognition and/or GPS lookup of a database of streets? One slightly muddy sign on a back road, and the car gets a ticket that Google will pay, or sweep under the rug until someone notices thousands of tickets issued to Google-cars over the years that are conveniently just being paid off rather than resulting in more permanent consequences as they would with a human driver.
Will the impact of whatever we do be more or less than the impact of doing nothing?
Because nobody's really accounted for that yet. Sure, if we cut power, move to renewables, make cars compliant, etc. then we will reduce emissions. But what effect could that have? And if the sea is still going to rise anyway, displacing pretty much the same people as it would have, was it worth doing all that?
I've said all along the answer to "Is it human-caused?" is just trivia. The answer to "Is it happening?" is easily measured. The answer to "What can we do about it that is less worse than the predicted effects anyway?" has never been properly found.
Honestly, if we have to cut all the coal-burning and move to renewables and live more efficient lives and whatever else... how many people is that going to kill, put out of work, push into poverty, etc.? And how certain are we that our fixes will do what we think, and that the effects won't hit us as bad if we do all this?
Because otherwise, it's like arguing about who's fault the car crash is going to be as you drive head-long into another car. And nobody has considered whether going round (left or right?!), or slamming the brakes on, or sounding the horn is actually going to work best. And nobody has considered that the accident might be unavoidable anyway, or that our actions might make it worse (e.g. skidding onto the pavement and taking out a few pedestrians AFTER hitting the other car anyway).
No, we're all too focused on "Who's fault is it?" and nobody has properly considered "What do we do about it?" Maybe because that's a difficult question without a simple answer, that requires lot of science and research and money to answer sensibly.
But, hey, at least our scientists LOOK busy and are on the news predicting doom every night...
So you already buy no-name drives instead of the big-brands?
And no-name SD Cards?
When people's data is on the line, price isn't the primary consideration.
However, for desktop use, you'll notice that manufacturer's are giving the option. For the same price as a 1Tb HD, they'll give you a 128Gb SSD. The speed is, for the majority of users (we're probably power users on here, at minimum), much more important than being able to store EVERYTHING on the hard drive. Because they probably don't even fill up a 128Gb. This is why Windows tablets with only 32Gb storage are commonplace - most people don't even notice.
So price isn't the factor that will kill SSDs. Now consider volume - as volume starts to move from selling HDD to selling SSD (which is helped by things like Dell etc. offering SSDs as standard options on their desktops), HDD is going to lose out and become much more expensive. There will soon be a point where the HDD manufacturers say "You know what? To sell this 12Tb drive to the masses, it has to be so cheap that we can't afford to make it or invest in the infrastructure for the next model... and so few people will buy it anyway. Let's just start moving into SSD", which is what a lot of them are already doing.
In the last few years, SSD has caught up, and is already surpassing, HDD in virtually every area, despite HDD being around for decades. HDD has a death knell ahead of it. Hell, they're trying to sell helium drives because they just can't beat the physics any more. But SSD? It's still shrinking without an end in sight (there will be an end, but it's just not in sight).
Price is merely a factor of popularity, volume sales, and mass production. All three are moving towards SSD.
I work IT in schools, state and private, primary and secondary. I was one of first-batchers for the original RPi.
Few resources are actually advertised and available to teachers. The only educational-focused content offered is some random tutorials on websites, or third-party stuff from people that have nothing to do with the RPi. Most RPi's are bought, used a couple of times, then sit in a cupboard. Like a lot of other cool technology, I'd like to point out, but there it is.
The BETT exhibition is the UK's educational IT expo. For a few years it was "all about the RPi". People selling the units. Few resources. No teaching resources for those places that need it most (chances are that if the kids need teaching how to code, so do the teaching staff!), no training, nothing. I haven't see the foundation at the BETT ever (despite being run by a UK guy who claims the purpose is education?).
This year it was "all about"... well, not much. Some of those BBC Bit things were on a display board but you couldn't buy them. And, same thing, no resources or information about how to teach with them or the educational value.
I work in a prep school at the moment. We were beta-testers for the.NET Gadgeteer kit. We have kids working at secondary-school levels and beyond. We build and fly home-built drones with the boarding kids. We STOP teaching crap like Scratch in Year 3 but we go up to Year 8.
The RPis I found in a drawer when I started there. I wasn't surprised, as mine was in the attic by then too. We never bought the Model B's. We won't be touching the BBC things either.
To be honest, it's easier just to let the kids (rich kids!) buy their own gadgets and then integrate them into the lesson. All the kids have iPads (not my choice, but I have to make the best I can of them), if they program they do it on those or on the PC's in the school. The geeks turn up every Friday evening for "the geek club" where we do things like C programming, machine code, building drones and kitting up Arduino kits.
I've yet to see what the actual educational value is in the Pi - I'm sure a REALLY good teacher can use them, as ours did, but that's to do with the teacher, not the device. They do just as good a lesson with pen-and-paper, an iPad, a lego-kit, or some $5 Arduinos and a soldering iron.
And with almost zero teaching resources sold with them, most teachers who aren't up to speed (which is sold as being half the point of pushing IT in schools, that the teachers are behind the pupils themselves) won't touch them as they see them as "just a gadget" with no educational value or help in their teaching.
15 years in IT in schools, story has been the same in all the schools I work in. It used to be QX3 microscopes, then visualisers, then Raspberry Pi's (and Scratch at the same time), next week it'll be something else.
You just missed this year's BETT. The only RPi's I saw were running Lego kits and things that ANY device could be running. And nobody was really selling the RPi or associated resources... I think I saw one stall selling RPi cases that were twice the price of the same thing on Amazon.
Slashdot Mirror
Why the venom?
In 20 year's time, when they're making Toy Story 26 or The Expendables: Resurrected Again (where Sly Stallone is a re-animated corpse for the third outing), you'll get sick and tired of the shit too.
Though I haven't yet found anything on there that's "killer", I have to say that just the idea of Amazon Originals (i.e. independently funded, non-Hollywood crap) is appealing.
Let's be honest, if you resurrected any trilogy from the 70's (were there others? Possible Alien technically?) and just keep piling on the shit, then people are going to get pissed. Especially if they've been going to the cinema since they were a kid and all they ever see when they go is yet-another-Star-Wars.
I like the originals. The sequels did nothing for me. I wouldn't even try to watch the spin-off shite, director's cuts, Disneyfications, etc. Like everything that plays on the name, just because it's "Star Wars" or "Doctor Who" or "iPhone" or whatever other brand, it doesn't mean it's actually any good, just because a previous incarnation was in it's time.
Fuck, they've just announced their resurrecting the fucking ZX Spectrum. I'm a MAD Spectrum fan - I still own three. But I'll be damned if I'll pay for a portable Spectrum 25 years later just because it's "been approved" by Sir Clive.
Gosh.
"Update may break things"? Er... yep.
"Someone in charge of server didn't bother to properly account for potential downtime for an upgrade, didn't keep the old kernels around for booting into, didn't diagnose past 'it doesn't work', etc.?" Er... nope.
Then at minimum you'd expect removal of the check (not a comment), or a history of patches which indicate that it was actually a deliberate omission after testing.
I'm far and away not an engine guy, but I always thought the reason was limited lifespan of solenoids.
A cam is just a spinning part. A solenoid would have to electrically activate perfectly every time, thousands of times a minutes, for 15-odd years of usage. To match that kind of usage, you're talking some serious solenoid. Probably they do exist but they're not exactly standard hardware, as far as I know.
And even the article suggests you tinker with models where the pistons can't crash into the valves. When you're tinkering, maybe that's okay. When you're designing engines it's not really okay.
Like all things, it's not that it can't be done. It's that the investment to make it work, work right, work first time every time, and prototype it to oblivion so you know that, probably far outweighs what you'll get back in any kind of efficiency saving on a non-trivial engine. Even rotary engines are comparatively rare compared to other types.
Things are most certainly heading all-electronic. But if you're going that way, almost certainly your investment is better of in electric drive, rather than huge investment into a critical piece of technology that - if it goes wrong - means a new car, for the sake of an slight efficiency increase.
Accurate GPS is good.
But I'd really much prefer a GPS that can work indoors, in cities with tall buildings, near hills and mountains etc.
That seems to have much more uses than getting something from a handful of inches down to fractions of an inch.
My car and phone sometimes get confused about precisely where I am and which turn-off I've taken. And in Belgium (where there are a LOT of underground roads), it barely works at all - by the time it locks on, I've had to go down another tunnel. In Central London, it can lose accuracy just at critical points. But everywhere else it's okay.
Improve the reception and time-to-first-fix. Then worry about sub-meter accuracy. Nobody really uses it for that level of accuracy anyway.
Most great science begins with the words:
"No, that can't be right. Or can it?"
Einstein was no different.
And why can you not list with BT what your DID's can be, and what your internal numbers are? So when your DID is linked to crank calls, they can shut you down or notify you? In fact, the link is ALREADY there. BT know exactly what number you're claiming to be when you ring out, and which one you actually rang from.
But why should I have to deal with people able to fake YOUR DID (and thus your company's reputation) or a random or invalid DID, without any traceability?
Why should I only have that DID number as the ID I can block on? Why should someone be able to send me text from a number that doesn't exist? Or even, in some cases, from a NAME that doesn't exist (and which, thus, you cannot respond to or block), as I've seen on UK mobile phone networks?
I run a school telephony network, I understand DID usage. What I don't get is why that's not restricted (i.e. CANNOT BE FAKED), so that only YOUR numbers can advertise your DID. Wouldn't this stop me making crank calls to your customers and claiming to come from your 0800 number? Because there is ZERO protection for that at the moment, and never has been.
And that's all moot if you can't block that number. Number blocking has always been a pay-for service with BT historically, unless you wanted to block all numbers (then why have a phone?). It wasn't cheap either.
And try and report a crank call. Unless it's criminal, BT will NOT go through their records and find the originating lines. They will ask to intercept your line and see if they can't capture a repeat call live, rather than look in their history. Only when the police are involved will they discover the ACTUAL source of messages or phone calls. The user is helpless here.
(P.S. I once had a bank send 400 fax calls an hour to my parent's residential phone - that had no fax. We reported it to BT. There was no CallerID. Now they KNOW who sent those calls. They have records they could investigate, but they WILL NOT. Until you make a criminal complaint. What they did was - when we could finally get through to them - intercept the line for over an hour, meaning we were without service, and waited for the next fax - but by this time they'd died down.
It turned out to be a bank internal system on auto-send without retry-protection with a mistyped phone number. But it took DAYS to resolve. DAYS of the phone ringing uncontrollably throughout working hours all day long. You can say "You could have put a fax machine on it", but this was my parent's line, we had no fax machine, and this is BT's job to do something about. They couldn't because they do not access originator information, the CallerID was withheld, and they cannot block a number without it, unless there's a criminal complaint. And this wasn't last century.)
DID spoofing is fine. My employer does it. But there's NOTHING to say who can or can't spoof, or what they can spoof, or anything protecting users from malicious spoofing.
I should not be able to get a text message from "801" or "Insurance" (literally, not a contact name, but the originating name of the text), or a phone call from a number that I've blocked (even if they later try to call with number withheld, so employee at company who gets pissed off and wants to spam me can't just use the same line after dialling the number to withhold the CallerID), or a phone call from several thousand spoofed or unregistered numbers over extended periods of time (this should trigger so many alerts, that BT just shut the line down like an ISP would shut down an email spammer).
None of what I'm suggesting stops your employer advertising their main switchboard number for all outgoing calls.
Science is much more interesting to a scientist when you're proven wrong. And no scientists minds that. Not really.
And doubting your own science is exactly how you reject those millions of private hypotheses that couldn't have led to anything as they were wrong, and drove you to work out why the maths still pointed that way, and didn't lead you down the garden path of easy assumptions.
For scientists "being wrong" is merely a pathway to "being right". But sometimes they overshoot and it takes 100 years to prove them right. If it took me 100 years to prove you right, that's 99 years of everyone else thinking you could still be wrong.
30 years too late, could have been done at ANY point, but they are no longer making money from such calls so they promote a service AGAINST them to increase their product value.
Fuck off.
We got rid of landlines because of this shit.
Mobiles all have caller blocking.
Everything past that is your fucking responsibility anyway, to trace these "withheld numbers" and shut them down. But you have ZERO interest in doing so.
Why is it even possible to fake Caller-ID anyway? You are charging a provider to make the call, you know exactly who it's come from. Even if I can't SEE the number, I should be able to block the fucker with one button. And should have always been able to. And you should spot the pattern in who gets blocked and chuck them off your service.
You didn't care when it mattered. Now it doesn't matter. Nobody really "needs" a landline any more. Nobody even needs a mobile number. They certainly no longer need to have one they advertise. You can buy front-numbers that just forward to your phone for a pittance. And that's exactly the problem you introduced and refused to combat. And that's exactly why nobody gets my mobile phone number, or my landline.
And yet, somehow, I still get occasional junk calls. There's only a few sources of such information. My providers and/or the numbering authorities. Who should be combating this shit all the time for me anyway.
The day my phone rings with too much spam, I enable the "reject calls from unknown callers" options on my phone, or people will only get my WhatsApp or Skype and unless you're on my contact list, then fuck you.
What stopped you doing this sort of thing even before CallerID existed? Nothing.
That everything is so very precise with regards to timing and distance. 5 yards back. 0.4 seconds. It's a load of crap.
The game is over when the person in charge decides it's over and provides a signal that ends the game at that point and/or when the last point has been scored. Not when some arbitrary timer expires, and really annoyingly, not when the ball thrown before that arbitrary time is given any time it needs to land in the basket after that (because, if you are going to have a hard time limit, have a hard time limit!).
It's what bores me about a lot of sport - arbitrary rules that make no sense and rely on all kinds of unnecessary technology to play, rather than just being a sport. Even down to "did the ball cross this line" or whatever. If the judge says it did, it did. If he's sure, by all means check. But when you're into millimetre analysis, it's just boring and no longer a sport but one long replay.
Same thing with Formula One. If you need 0.00001th of a second to determine the winner, it's too close and too boring. Similarly, "batting averages" - it's nonsense to state these to so many decimal places.
Sport turned into commercial gain by the ever-shrinking boundary of error isn't actually fun, to play or to spectate.
Black holes warp space to the point that countless billions of planets can fit into a fairly normal "size" black hole.
Therefore the concept of "measuring" a black hole can be a nonsense. Inside it is billions of large things. Outside it, it might be a fraction of a light year across. And yet all that matter is crushed under its gravity and becomes nearly a point mass.
When your measuring system is reliant on getting a ruler and putting it somewhere, it all becomes a nonsense under space-time itself warping to the point of galaxies of objects fitting on the head of a pin, which from a distance just looks like a black hole in the middle of a galaxy.
Actual scale here is variable, indeterminate, dependent on the observer, and - in a lot of cases - unknown.
Use a tool like an idiot, and it won't work as you expect.
I regularly do things like 100 mile drives into the middle of nowhere, then just turn on the sat nav knowing that it will get me back. My girlfriend and I find it a nice way to discover new places, new pubs, new routes, new towns, new countryside.
What bugs me more than anything is short, temporary roadworks, restrictions, road closures, etc. that are never announced on RDS-TMC or similar traffic services and so you have to manually re-route. The one bit of a journey that pisses me off is when I *can't* let the satnav do its job.
Otherwise, I have never got lost, drove hundreds of km's out of my way "by accident" (moron!), driven through a ford I didn't know was coming up or into a low bridge that was too low for my vehicle (morons!), or anything else along those lines. Hell, it's been years since I typed in a postcode that the computer couldn't recognise first time.
Seriously, people, just get a life and check the overview map before you accept route. There are millions of places which share names with things that aren't what you intended. Check which one you meant first rather than blindly pressing OK.
And then your satnav-led journeys will be pretty much uneventful.
Oh, and I use a GBP20 Copilot app on an Android phone. It's not like I spent a fortune, and I don't even have to pay for map updates.
Just VM it and stop pissing about.
Then you can run your Windows-only app, have a built-in firewall in the hypervisor that can do whatever you need, you can use your original hardware, you can run other systems that are more privacy-respecting for your day-to-day activities, your licences almost certainly already cover such use, and everything from 8 Pro upwards allows you to use Hyper-V to do just this.
Wikipedia's gravitational wave page does.
Nope, sound waves don't either.
Think of a giant rubber sheet with a ball bearing in every square inch. Squish the sheet and the balls in that part get closer together. Stretch it and they get further apart. Do both to the same sheet and you have a wave and the distance between them is half a wavelength. Repeat it regularly and you have a full, repeating wave of a certain wavelength.
The ball bearings are sound-carrying particles in audio terms, and mass-bearing particles in gravity terms.
Neither of them has "positive" or "negative" anything. They just further apart or closer together to each other.
That we sometimes represent them as a line on a graph that goes below zero (closer than without the presence of sound / gravity) or above it (further apart than without the presence of sound / gravity) is a matter of interpretation, nothing to do with anything "negative" at all.
Any science you can explain in a few sentences to a layman will be so full of holes as to be nothing more than hearsay and astrology.
A big event, that would have created ripples that would arrive here roughly at the time of the experiment, happened. As we listened, at that time, we saw inconsistencies representative of just such a gravitational wave hitting the experiment. It's tiny, but above background noise and experimental error (it's mentioned elsewhere that this basically means 6-sigma certainty), and coincides with a particular event that we were able to "observe" (not literally) in other ways.
The source of the wave barely matters. We detected gravitational fluxes that would otherwise be unexplained. That we are able to correlate them to one single event, that's just of the type of rare event that we predict might be able to cause such signals "loud" enough to be "heard" by us, and match up the timing means that it's the most likely explanation too.
But more importantly - 100-year-old mathematics predicts some absolutely insane, bonkers things that - when we are finally able to look for them - turn out to be true. That's all science cares about.
You can't just make up shit and then - in 100 years - several people invent an instrument that correlates perfectly to the shit you made up, several times, to the satisfaction of major scientific institutions unless - basically - you were absolutely spot-on correct all along.
That's pretty much what happened. The Einstein field equations are fucking bonkers to understand, let alone try and solve the implications of them. And I'm a mathematician. But they predict stuff like this that we then find. When it came from barely matters. A simplification of the definition of "size" in a mass-media article doesn't matter at all (tell people black holes have no size, and they look at you like you're an idiot).
So, no, it's not as bad as you make out.
But his point about "if the guy had let the connections go out - especially HTTP which you can just sniff - we might know for certain what it was actually trying to send out" is more than spot-on enough to compensate.
And if you're worried, block port 80 to those ranges of IPs.
Not really.
If someone gets hold of your wallet enough to try passcodes, it's game over anyway.
It's like saying that credit cards are insecure because they only have 10,000 possible 4-digit PINs. Well, yes. But the general idea is to stop them getting the card in the first place, and to use other security measures to protect the card.
The stupid idea of having such emphemeral wallets that are vulnerable to these kinds of attacks was ridiculous before it started. That's not "normal" Bitcoin.
For normal Bitcoin, you make a wallet file on your machine, encrypt the wallet file with a strong passphrase, perform transactions, then store it in a safe place. You only get it back out on a secure machine where you're required to enter the passphrase again to do anything useful with it.
If someone is on the machine that you perform BitCoin transactions on, to the point that they can read your wallet file and try to enter passphrases, that's game over anyway. They could just as easily just sniff your keyboard for the passphrase.
Again - stupid security "attack" that wouldn't happen in real life unless you were a complete dope anyway, is taken as "bad news" for an unrelated technology which people like you jump on the bandwagon of disparaging without checking facts.
Hint: Word .doc passwords aren't secure either. Or old (pre-AES) ZIP file passwords. You can easily check just as many of those in the same time as this "attack" on something like EC2. The idea is that you don't let people get a file full of expensive information in the first place, or rely on such naff security if that's what you want to do. And that's exactly what BitCoin does too.
The wallet decryption is only valid if someone can copy your wallet. And that's, quite literally, like someone taking your wallet in real life. The problem is already there. That they might be able to use it to cost you money is entirely logical from that point onwards.
"that Morocco may eventually start exporting the clean energy to the European market."
Question:
If Morocco is just across from Spain, why would Spain pay for the energy (i.e. cost of production, plus payoff of initial outlay, plus transportation, plus the company profits) rather than just build their own?
It's not like the two are on hugely different latitudes which greatly affect the amount of solar available, and the transportation losses, especially under 50km of ocean at best, must be quite substantial.
And... they're at the same longitude, so they have the same solar peaks and thus power-demand peaks, so it's not like they can supply power during the night when Spain's solar would be dead, or similar. And Europe is only a couple of timezones wide, so considering Spain is probably the least-cost option when it comes to transportation etc.
Not sure I understand that at all. Maybe they'd exchange a bit of power, for emergencies and peak-demand and backup and switchover and things, but are Morocco really ever going to be able to sell their excess to any country far enough way that they couldn't generate it themselves, or to a nearby country that could just do the same and probably have the same kind of excess power at the same times of day?
In the UK, most tiny karate clubs have a GBP 1m public liability insurance, and it costs a pittance each year.
The fact of the number makes no difference, it's what's covered. I imagine they have to cover a lot more, but even the WORST of these may be better than human drivers on average, so it will quickly re-balance once the risk statistics are apparent, even if companies only pay at first for their testing cars.
Honestly, $100k+ liability insurance is pretty low. Even a school will have GBP 5-10 million and it get claimed on all the time and they handle care of children, including activities, trips, sports, staffing, etc.
Wonder how much Google public liability insurance premium just increased by.
Because, sorry, but the "AI" is really just a set of rules still. A set of rules that can't take account of every situation. Sure, it can drive more carefully than a human driver, but it can also make just the same kind of dumb mistakes as a human driver too.
But with the consequence that the first accident of note will result in all kinds of problems for EVERY instance of that model running in EVERY model of that self-driving car, rather than just a single driver being an idiot.
And if "the car" is the driver, then driving points and bans means almost nothing OR they mean the end of a self-driving car when they happen.
Aren't we still at the stage where a self-driving car knows the speed limit only by traffic-sign recognition and/or GPS lookup of a database of streets? One slightly muddy sign on a back road, and the car gets a ticket that Google will pay, or sweep under the rug until someone notices thousands of tickets issued to Google-cars over the years that are conveniently just being paid off rather than resulting in more permanent consequences as they would with a human driver.
Try and light a matchbox.
Most importantly:
Will the impact of whatever we do be more or less than the impact of doing nothing?
Because nobody's really accounted for that yet. Sure, if we cut power, move to renewables, make cars compliant, etc. then we will reduce emissions. But what effect could that have? And if the sea is still going to rise anyway, displacing pretty much the same people as it would have, was it worth doing all that?
I've said all along the answer to "Is it human-caused?" is just trivia. The answer to "Is it happening?" is easily measured. The answer to "What can we do about it that is less worse than the predicted effects anyway?" has never been properly found.
Honestly, if we have to cut all the coal-burning and move to renewables and live more efficient lives and whatever else... how many people is that going to kill, put out of work, push into poverty, etc.? And how certain are we that our fixes will do what we think, and that the effects won't hit us as bad if we do all this?
Because otherwise, it's like arguing about who's fault the car crash is going to be as you drive head-long into another car. And nobody has considered whether going round (left or right?!), or slamming the brakes on, or sounding the horn is actually going to work best. And nobody has considered that the accident might be unavoidable anyway, or that our actions might make it worse (e.g. skidding onto the pavement and taking out a few pedestrians AFTER hitting the other car anyway).
No, we're all too focused on "Who's fault is it?" and nobody has properly considered "What do we do about it?" Maybe because that's a difficult question without a simple answer, that requires lot of science and research and money to answer sensibly.
But, hey, at least our scientists LOOK busy and are on the news predicting doom every night...
So you already buy no-name drives instead of the big-brands?
And no-name SD Cards?
When people's data is on the line, price isn't the primary consideration.
However, for desktop use, you'll notice that manufacturer's are giving the option. For the same price as a 1Tb HD, they'll give you a 128Gb SSD. The speed is, for the majority of users (we're probably power users on here, at minimum), much more important than being able to store EVERYTHING on the hard drive. Because they probably don't even fill up a 128Gb. This is why Windows tablets with only 32Gb storage are commonplace - most people don't even notice.
So price isn't the factor that will kill SSDs. Now consider volume - as volume starts to move from selling HDD to selling SSD (which is helped by things like Dell etc. offering SSDs as standard options on their desktops), HDD is going to lose out and become much more expensive. There will soon be a point where the HDD manufacturers say "You know what? To sell this 12Tb drive to the masses, it has to be so cheap that we can't afford to make it or invest in the infrastructure for the next model... and so few people will buy it anyway. Let's just start moving into SSD", which is what a lot of them are already doing.
In the last few years, SSD has caught up, and is already surpassing, HDD in virtually every area, despite HDD being around for decades. HDD has a death knell ahead of it. Hell, they're trying to sell helium drives because they just can't beat the physics any more. But SSD? It's still shrinking without an end in sight (there will be an end, but it's just not in sight).
Price is merely a factor of popularity, volume sales, and mass production. All three are moving towards SSD.
I work IT in schools, state and private, primary and secondary. I was one of first-batchers for the original RPi.
Few resources are actually advertised and available to teachers. The only educational-focused content offered is some random tutorials on websites, or third-party stuff from people that have nothing to do with the RPi. Most RPi's are bought, used a couple of times, then sit in a cupboard. Like a lot of other cool technology, I'd like to point out, but there it is.
The BETT exhibition is the UK's educational IT expo. For a few years it was "all about the RPi". People selling the units. Few resources. No teaching resources for those places that need it most (chances are that if the kids need teaching how to code, so do the teaching staff!), no training, nothing. I haven't see the foundation at the BETT ever (despite being run by a UK guy who claims the purpose is education?).
This year it was "all about"... well, not much. Some of those BBC Bit things were on a display board but you couldn't buy them. And, same thing, no resources or information about how to teach with them or the educational value.
I work in a prep school at the moment. We were beta-testers for the .NET Gadgeteer kit. We have kids working at secondary-school levels and beyond. We build and fly home-built drones with the boarding kids. We STOP teaching crap like Scratch in Year 3 but we go up to Year 8.
The RPis I found in a drawer when I started there. I wasn't surprised, as mine was in the attic by then too. We never bought the Model B's. We won't be touching the BBC things either.
To be honest, it's easier just to let the kids (rich kids!) buy their own gadgets and then integrate them into the lesson. All the kids have iPads (not my choice, but I have to make the best I can of them), if they program they do it on those or on the PC's in the school. The geeks turn up every Friday evening for "the geek club" where we do things like C programming, machine code, building drones and kitting up Arduino kits.
I've yet to see what the actual educational value is in the Pi - I'm sure a REALLY good teacher can use them, as ours did, but that's to do with the teacher, not the device. They do just as good a lesson with pen-and-paper, an iPad, a lego-kit, or some $5 Arduinos and a soldering iron.
And with almost zero teaching resources sold with them, most teachers who aren't up to speed (which is sold as being half the point of pushing IT in schools, that the teachers are behind the pupils themselves) won't touch them as they see them as "just a gadget" with no educational value or help in their teaching.
15 years in IT in schools, story has been the same in all the schools I work in. It used to be QX3 microscopes, then visualisers, then Raspberry Pi's (and Scratch at the same time), next week it'll be something else.
You just missed this year's BETT. The only RPi's I saw were running Lego kits and things that ANY device could be running. And nobody was really selling the RPi or associated resources... I think I saw one stall selling RPi cases that were twice the price of the same thing on Amazon.