If it's returned without a) a court order saying the evidence was removed by order of the court or b) the evidence, then the evidence has been improperly recorded.
In the circumstances discussed, it's rarely about evidence preservation or even victim protection. In both those cases, there are laws against deleting the evidence from your devices without the correct permission from the court. If you say you filmed something, the officer confiscated your device but the device contains NO trace of that evidence and forensics even hints that it was cleared or deleted, that's destruction of evidence. Courts can/will/should come down extremely harshly on that. It's basically evidence-tampering, perverting the course of justice, etc.
You can't stop your device being confiscated. But you cannot be asked to delete your evidence or have it deleted without a court order.
It comes under similar rules to paedophiles having their computer equipment returned. It has to be properly recorded, tagged, booked in, untampered, forensically analysed, recorded, presented to court, and the order made to remove or destroy only those infringing parts (and/or they ask if you object to just destruction of all the data on it to save time).
It's still your hardware, but it's held in evidence. It can't be tampered with (legally), and it can't be held indefinitely.
In the UK, the police officer would have to give you written confiscation records etc. and you'd be entitled to have details specifically noted about the last file you recorded on there, if you asked for it.
It's all a case of where the crime gets too stupid for an officer to be found guilty of. Asking you to stop recording, the worst that happens is - not much, actually. Asking you to move on from the area, again not much so long as it's done for a vaguely plausible reason. Arresting you? That requires a charge that isn't made up just to harass you. Confiscating your equipment? That requires a) a valid reason b) all reasonable evidence preservation, c) written records of that confiscation and reasons (and, as far as I know, "because he was filming me" isn't a reasonable reason but victim protection may be but even that's dubious in the case of something like a road accident or plain "filming an arrest" scenario).
This has come up in the UK several times and the police commissioners have had to announce that, actually, no they cannot delete your files without a specific, and requested, court order. They can't ask you to do it (except voluntarily), they can't do it for you, and certainly can't do it without treating it as evidence (in which case it's destruction of evidence, which is infinitely more serious than just taking a dislike to someone filming you).
But then, I live in a vaguely civilised country. Your local interpretation of the law may be different.
That happens WITH people nowadays. If one friend can't join in, for whatever reason, you can't really politely play that game together.
And if you have to buy one-per-person for gaming, you better be damn sure the people you're buying it for can use it. I wouldn't buy my parents one (whereas they are a mad gaming family that have collectively completed every Mario game in existence and owned pretty much every console), purely because it's likely they won't be able to enjoy and share it together.
I used to live smack bang on the delivery border of my local pizza delivery. I lived above a shop opposite the railway bridge, and they would never deliver past the railway bridge.
When you told them the road name, they asked if you were past the railway bridge or not. Say yes, you get no pizza. Seriously. And there was no other takeaway that would deliver to you in the area. Say no, however, and they come and deliver no questions asked even if the driver rings to ask where you are.
One time the driver turned out to be an old guy who'd lived in the same house previously and had the same problems. He never ratted us out, though.
Short-sighted business practice, as it was literally 20 feet or so difference and they had no competitors in that area.
If you work in an emergency call centre, most of the calls you get will be genuine emergencies. Though you might get the odd crank, when they start continuing on but acknowledging you ("Ma'am, this is an emergency line", "Yes, please", "Ma'am, we're not a pizza delivery", "No, no anchovies, thanks my husband hates them", "Ma'am, do you have an emergency?", "Yes, how long will it be?" etc.) it doesn't take a genius to work out what's happening.
Sure, you still get drunks, timewasters, etc. but if you even think for a second that there is a problem, you send out units anyway, even if just to avoid a repeat incident.
People are inherently skilled in conveying meaning without saying those particular words. It's a fabulous human skill. Even more fabulous when you can do it without alerting someone else listening in to one half of the conversation as to what's happening.
I have to say, one of the things I've always tried to pre-arrange is the "I'm in trouble call". If you call and use a certain keyword, that's me coming running. If you call and I ask if you're okay and you say "No, dur, I'm being taken hostage", then you're probably fine. If I say "Honestly, are you okay?" and you say "Yes, I'm fine", that's my cue to come running.
Pre-arrange such things with your family. Get a keyword between you. Or a private joke that you can deliberately ruin when you're actually in trouble. Something that others won't notice. Because the guy kidnapping your daughter might actually be that boyfriend she trusted and knows her well and that she has to phone daddy every Monday or he'll get suspicious, so he lets her but listens in. She might need that way to make herself known without anyone else noticing.
VR is one of the faddy things that, once a generation, some bright spark thinks they can do "properly this time", picks it up, makes some demos of it, realises that it's expensive stuff that needs high-end and portable equipment sold for a reasonable price to lots and lots of people to succeed, slips away into a corner somewhere until people forget about it, and then reinvents itself with the next bright spark.
In the early days of VRML, the same happened. Quake was around. A full, 3D, accelerated environment that could run on commercial PC's, benefit from full 3D vision, and the VR hardware was "the thing" to look at your new architect's idea for the local council buildings or whatever. Never did the two get put together.
Now we have ubiquitous and extraordinarily powerful and realistic 3D graphics. Still, explicit support is required because our 3D is really 3D-cheats dependent on the single-viewport way of drawing things. So you have to design the hardware, mass-produce it, get people to buy it, redesign the games to take account of it, then put it all together for a price people are willing to pay for a gaming gimmick that makes them sit at home with a silly hat on.
I have no doubt that we could get a console going with it, and sell a handful of games, and cost a bomb, and people would play it and go "Yeah, it's okay, but you wouldn't play every game like that", and then it'll be on the dustheap again for a while until the next generation pick it up again.
The 3D power is there. We all have cards capable of running at stupid resolutions at stupid framerate that we could easily have "two of" or a "special" card to do VR.
The screens are there. We all have smartphones and high-res displays.
The human interface still isn't. We're still strapping things to our head and hoping our eyes are roughly aligned like everyone else's and presuming that all people have two healthy eyes in relative sync that they can use such things (my girlfriend can't see 3D movies, several of my friends can't see 3D movies, so why would you pay to go to a 3D movie over a normal one? Same problem). We're still dangling screens in front of our eyes and then wondering why they aren't as impressive in resolution and why they have to be so carefully synched and why it costs twice as much as just buying a decent monitor and why we have to drive two cards (or one powerful card) to drive two displays. We're still having to have one-per-person specialist hardware, that's fragile and expensive and cumbersome and hard to mass-produce until we get literally millions of users.
And all for a game. Now games are worth billions nowdays, but at the end of the game it's just a game. All the potential research / medical / whatever uses DO NOT use this kind of technology, even though they could and could probably afford to do so as a one-off. For decades we've had medical-operation-by-remote-control, but we still don't have that or anything approaching 3D vision coming into common use.
Because, at the end of the day, the use-cases are limited of fanciful, and the cost is prohibitive, and the setup is an awful lot of faffing about.
Standardised VR has been suggested several times - never happened. VR headsets have been around since the 80's - never took off even as part of a Nintendo offerings (maybe a slight wart, but even so - nobody was interested in bettering it). The capability to even put 3D environments into web pages has been around as long as I've been involved in websites, everything from VRML upwards. We still don't use it or enjoy global browser support for it. Accelerometers and other sensors have PLUNGED in price since this was first tried - there's still no accurate way to model your head movements.
It's just a fad each time it comes around and the same problems hit. Even with millions in Kickstarter funding, etc. it's hard to produce a handful of working units that developers will rewrite their games for. It's hard to convince people to part with the price of a t
I can't even get a device - of any power - to recognise my voice beyond the very slow, pronounced basics and I have to train myself to it (not the other way around).
Would love to know how the NSA have access to technology that the top voice-recognition specialists and software can't manage, let alone dealing with noisy backgrounds, masked keywords, variety of languages, etc.
"Acres of datacentres" don't help for the simplest of obscurations in the phone call and guess who has a reason to mask their intentions behind innocent words? Terrorists.
The problem here is not lack of schools, lack of teachers (though they are problems, that's not the driver behind poor education), it's LACK OF PARENTING.
If you're kid is not learning because they're on Facebook (or Xbox, or the iPad, or whatever) all the time, you've FAILED as a parent. For some reason, that's accepted nowadays.
I work in schools. I work in "elementary" schools (we don't call them that, but similar age range). I work in private "elementary" schools.
The kids there don't learn because the teachers are infinitely better, or because the school buys a thousand iPads. They learn because they are ENCOURAGED to. They have to perform or they fall behind and, if they fall too far behind, the school will ask them to leave.
The schedule for a child is - to my state-educated mind - insanely busy and active. They are literally doing two things at once at all times and barely stop all day.
Because they are given a work ethic, and the parents have the incentive (money) to enforce that work ethic, they achieve much, much more.
I've done back-end and end-user support for 15 years.
For at least five of those years, the machines I used myself only had Open/LibreOffice on them.
It wasn't a hindrance.
As I say to my users all the time: No, I only manage this stuff. I don't know how to use every obscure feature of every random bit of junk that you've made me install, nor what your working practice usually involves. I'll help and advise, sure, but that rarely consists of more than a Google for "where the hell is the X button in the new versions of Office?" for most things.
Finance, especially, are lost by this. I know how to install their software, manage it, connect it to the banks, authorise the smartcards with the bank and everything else. I do the annual rollovers and the reporting and lots of other stuff. But I don't even understand what the terms mean for the rest of the stuff. I have no idea what code you should be using for that purchase. No, I don't know why your figures don't tally.
Almost certainly I can work out and dig into things and get the answer. I've never not been able to when it matters. But, it's not my job to know the ins and outs of every single detail of HOW the software should be used, every feature it has, and automatically know every click necessary to do every task. (This is my bug-bear with rote learning of things like Windows Server on courses... no... just no.)
As such... MS Office features? Basics, I'll show you. One-offs, I'll help you Google (basically, I'm Google-by-proxy for those users who want to do something quite simple that they've never done before). Everything else, I'll either know, or we'll have to find out. If you're doing it regularly, I suggest a training course or learning yourself.
MS Office isn't on my radar. At home I use LibreOffice. At my previous workplace - in the same position - I used Open/LibreOffice throughout their 2000->2003->2013 transitions.
Sure, I'll help. But it's Office. Unless it isn't activating or you need a normal.dotm reset or similar (Outlook profile reset etc.), chances are it's not high on my list.
The energy of the thrust effect is basically lost in the measurement error. Hell, the device measuring it could be affecting the measured thrust.
The problem is that there's a TINY, TINY effect and we're not sure of the origin. It's therefore useless for propulsion, for decades at least, and certainly until we know where it's coming from and why. Because it might not be something that can ever be scaled, and that amount of thrust is absolutely minuscule.
We're used to dealing with tiny thrusts - you can "push" a satellite with nothing more than light and we have measured that effect in some of our own objects in space. But we can explain that bit, because we know about the interaction that it undergoes.
However, this is barely out of the measurement error. It's nothing more than a blip at the moment. As such, it's infinitely more important to put this through the wringer of "what the hell is doing that" - which requires independent testing, and that's not being done.
Fact is, this may never be more powerful than it is, and we can barely know it IS there, even in a vacuum. Until we know more, any headline about its origin or potential usage is PR bollocks.
It doesn't imply the power range to be infinite. Everything has a working range. But, although the claim that it's a necessity is dubious, it's pretty well universal. If you supply an LED with less power, it will light less. We tend to PWM them in order to do this digitally with only one voltage on a digital circuit, but - for a certain range - their brightness correlates to the power supplied to even LED's, yes.
I'm British. That's in Europe. The above is true of Britain at the very least, and it's not alone.
And, every time I drive through Europe (including France), that's the only time you see things quite so blatant as huge pink neon signs declaring "Sex Shop" from miles away. Even in tiny, sleepy little villages, miles from anything else.
And, sorry, but sometimes the models in fashion magazines and men's magazines are showing more than the full Lena image, and on the front cover.
It may not be true in every town/city (Paris relies a lot on tourism), true. But we're a damn sight more open about it than the US.
The Venus de Milo is showing her breasts. Michaelangelo's David has his cock out.
Countless renaissance works depict nudes.
When they excavated Pompei they found everything from dildos to pornography.
Hell, I was in the National Gallery a while back and it had a famous exhibit of a sculpted goat being penetrated by a man. Just there, in the museum. There was a warning sign that that gallery contains such works, but that was about it. Kids were roaming freely through it and past it and looking at it. No parent did anything more than "Yes, it's very funny, keep moving" and a sly smile between them all.
Nudity is slowly being outlawed, which is ridiculous, given that sex is just as much at the front of the agenda as it ever has been. I'm not naturist and I don't want to go around showing my body (especially not my body, actually) but, fuck, it's a breast or a leg or even a cock, get over it.
There's a line of obscenity, but it's not the very existence or a bare depiction of a nude body. And certainly not the Lena image which isn't pornographic in any way (the others in the series, possibly). You see worse in any historical painting, on TV adverts, and let's not actually get into the dramas, and movies, and videogames, and what they contain because, fuck, we'll be here forever.
I agree it's probably not the best thing to KEEP using but it's used because it has certain properties that aid in the judgement of imagery. Sure there are other images. But you're an adult. It's an adult woman, barely nude. Grow up.
And in any European country you see worse on the top shelf of every single newsagent, and not even in the "pornographic" section. Just things like the men's magazine's front covers.
We can never outgrow wanting to look at beautiful people, male or female, but we can sure as hell outgrow trying to ban it.
Fuck, there was a public protest in London the other month over the banning of depiction of face-sitting, so thousands gathered outside the Houses of Parliament and demonstrated what was about to be banned. We have bigger issues than a picture of a woman.
If PC gaming has taught me anything, it's "never be on the cutting edge". It's expensive, very expensive, and very fleeting.
A $2000 four-card SLI setup will be two-card setup next year. And a one-card setup the year after. And mainstream the year after.
It's going to TAKE you three years to produce any game of value with this level of model quality anyway.
It's not wasted in that sense. But it is a bit pointless. Stop focussing on the graphics, because I don't want a $100m animation of any level of detail. I played through GTA V and skipped EVERY cutscene. I literally did not care about the pre-rendered or even engine-rendered bits over which I had no control, I just wanted to play the damn game.
Hopefully we'll reach a point where the level of detail is the same wherever you go, and all that differs is the actual gameplay. The AI in GTA V, for example, is still absolute crap. Want to evade the cops? Turn corners lot, get yourself into a point they can't sneak up on you. Pretty much you can last out from a 5-star wanted level until you run out of ammo.
Now go online. Even a couple of people actively hunting you is certain death in a short time unless you are kitted out to the absolute hilt.
We need to stop focusing on graphics, fuck even my old laptop ran GTA V at enough speed that I could complete the game without going blind, and focus on all those other areas of gaming that we're still just completely ignoring.
Tells and the "psychology" of poker are about supplying misleading as to the content of your hand. That's it.
The computer doesn't need to take any notice of you, misleading or otherwise. It knows what the chances of any particular card in your hand are. It therefore knows exactly the odds of whether its hand is likely to outmatch all the other hands on the table.
The problem is not in playing the game, it's in betting (especially with no-limits, which gives too many avenues for recursion so it just has to "guess" with a heuristic - if that heuristic is wrong, it might "win" more hands but still lose much more money than all the other players).
It's easy to know the probability that you will win the hand. It's hard to get more than small gains from that unless you bluff your opponents into betting more than they should. If everyone bet like the computer, the game would peter out to boredom.
The "misleading" is in the bets, and the computer doesn't care what you're TRYING to make it think you have in your hard. It knows whether or not there's a higher probability of winning cards in its hand or any other the other players. It just has to determine what's the best betting strategy. If it has 1000 chips, that's 1000 options. Next move if might have 1000 options, 2000 options or none at all. The game tree for THAT is fucking huge.
But remove the money and this computer will win more hands. Just do the betting, no-limits, on the flip of a coin and it will struggle without a programmed heuristic. Determine the heuristic and you win against it and there's nothing it can do about it.
And players can collude to make it hard for the computer to bet at the ideal level. In short, the computer will win the most hands in the long run. It might be a very boring game but it will. The cards in your hand cannot change and everyone can know the exact chance of what you have, what's coming up, and what's in their hand. Those odds don't change because you try to bluff or not.
It may not, however, take away most money and that money is a rule in the game, it may not win.
Statistics, however, is completely misunderstood in such things. First, it only applies IN THE LONG RUN. Second, it will lose almost as much too - it has to. Third, the game is designed for humans... thus the blinds and betting are put in to complicate things and MAKE the game more about your opponents than the cards (because humans who card-count and bet by the odds are boring and just end in stalemates and random wins), so they remove the possibility of card-counting and complicate the betting to make things "interesting". It's a CAPTCHA, in effect.
Play blind-tests where they don't know it's a computer. Where they don't know who to collude against. See how well it does then. That's interesting.
And they wouldn't play against it if you just said "see who wins the most hands, and folds the least".
If you have noexec/tmp, it can't even start. That's been the default in almost every distro for years.
And it's a random third-party binary. It's not like it got into package repositories or a major piece of software. Some cock downloaded a piece of malware, of his own accord, outside of package management on a Linux machine. And so few people did that, it wasn't even showing up on the radar.
God, if I had a penny for every spam email sent from a compromised Windows computer that I've had brought to me and been asked to clean, I'd have earned more than a year's wages already.
You can be insecure on any machine, same as you can be a dick in any language.
If you have a non-package binary installed on your system, it's user-error. You have decided to run that, and done that with privileges enough to run it.
This isn't packaged with any software, except for a spam-generating (mass mailing) software anyway. Just that those spammers didn't know they were being used to spam for others too.
Same as if you just run a program on a Windows machine. It's got FUCK ALL to do with open-source, but don't let that stop you.
And packaged open-source software is hash-checked and signed by the distributors. This has not been found in ANY repository of distribution packages. It's a random program that someone has decided to install, and is bundled with spam-generating software, so that's how it "kept quiet"... the people installing didn't give a shit about what they were installing, or the mass-mailing they were already doing. It's like getting a virus from a game crack.
But, please, continue to think you're superior because "lol OS is insecure". I don't actually see any difference between your unrelated argument and, say, "lol Xbox sucks because".
UK standard is 100A to the board, I think (and we're on 220v).
I have a single appliance that can pull 20A @220v on it's own, another that can pull 18A @ 220v. One of those is the oven, the other is a (completely optional, I agree) electric kiln.
But I am shocked that I haven't overloaded a circuit yet.
I have 32A just going out to the garden shed / for mowing the lawn / tools etc. and that's more than you could pull ever (maybe twice as much if you're on 110v). I intend to use it if ever I switch to an electric car, which might be in 20 years time given the rate the tech moves at.
I don't do a lot of toolwork or serious stuff, so it's not a huge draw. I don't have A/C (it's a UK semi-detached right in the suburbs!). I don't have a huge house, buckets of lights, ponds or anything high-power running 24/7. The heating is gas. I have one of each appliance, and small ones at that because of limited kitchen space. I don't have a power shower or anything remotely luxurious.
Not saying I couldn't dial down to 30A if necessary but, damn, that's not a lot at all. Most of my MCB's are 32A rated, the others are 16A and my consumer unit has a dozen of them.
Your whole house wouldn't blow one of my circuits, most likely. And the whole house was rewired only a couple of years ago just before I bought it.
Is it me that's unusual here (I don't think so, looking at my parent's house, old houses I've lived in, etc.)?
A lease is nothing more than renting, which not only has to cover all the costs of the batteries, but also reasonable replacements over the life of the lease, plus people to manage the lease, plus some profit (usually).
Leasing doesn't make things more affordable (just the opposite). It just breaks it into monthly payments without needing a lump-sum, and takes the hassle off your hands. It's a big difference.
But a five-fold increase in cost would cost with that easily, wouldn't it? And you can do it piecemeal as they ACTUALLY stop holding a decent charge, etc.
Not saying it's unfathomable, but just don't see the advantage.
However much you hate it, the bottom-line finance number gives you an idea of the materials, work, availability, etc. involved.
A system that is not economically viable is taking MORE product out of the earth, and rarer products, that need more refinement and processing, etc. in order to create it in the first place than it is replacing other power-generation methods and their costs.
It's quite simple. The market price changes to reflect the difficult, cost, legislation, rarity, etc. of the materials and labour involved. If something is more expensive it's because it COSTS MORE to give it to you. If something can't pay that cost back (at least, in a reasonable time) you've taken out MORE from the earth including shipping the thing to yourself and paying for machines to modify it, and paying for the companies mass-production plans, etc. than you've stopped being taken out elsewhere.
It's not perfect. It's not entirely accurate. But the monetary cost of something is a pretty good indicator. This is why lithium batteries are more expensive than lead-acid equivalents, why oil products are being taxed, why discovery of shale gas can drop the gas price, etc.
Also, as you're moving the burden from government and entire countries to individual users here, cost matters more than most other things. You're asking ME to take the effort, research, purchase, maybe pay for planning and electrical works, etc. this product that you're SELLING in order for me to help the earth. There's a cost involved in that no matter what. Some of that cost is a "donation" because you want to live in a friendly way. Some of that cost is because of the convenience to you if the power blips for a moment. Some of that cost is for your peace of mind.
At the end of the day, cost is a pretty good measure of all kinds of things to do with a system. This is why energy companies are complaining about the "payback" electricity schemes from solar users... the costs they incur to put their pittance of electricity back into the grid far outweigh anything else. The government has to subsidise those costs, or the electricity companies have to raise their prices. And, suddenly, it's actually more expensive to run "off-grid" than you thought and you end up going back "on-grid" because the cost isn't worth the convenience any more.
I could UPS all my appliances today. I could just buy a tiny UPS, or save up towards a bigger one, each month and stick them on batteries that survive power outages for whatever length of time I choose to do it for. But I don't because it costs. And that cost does not compare to the cost of the power going off every now and then, or the electricity company raising its prices by 10% a year.
If an off-grid system does not return money for you, the money you pay would have been better off just buying a generator and some fuel for it for the rare occasions the power does go off, and forgetting about all these fancy gadgets that help you live off-grid. In which case, both the green-ness and the user suffer.
That's why governments are subsidising PV etc. installs. They have to bring the price down or people will just look and think "Sod it, I'll just buy a genny and keep a tank of petrol in the garage for if anything happens" rather than go off-grid.
Things have to be profitable, and everything has a cost.
My old stove alone is rated at 18KW. It's not particular huge or anything, just a double-oven.
Although you can go "self-powered", you have to make just as many sacrifices on what you power as you do on how much you can physically generate anyway.
And some things need a lot more power than you might imagine - anything with a motor, e.g. refrigerator, washer, dryer, etc.
This is the problem at the moment. You either have gas for some things, or burn wood for some things, and forgo electric for them, or you don't and have to cut them out entirely or generate a LOT more power. Sure, you can do that. But neither option is saving the planet.
Reducing consumption is step 1. Then decide whether you have low enough consumption to justify self-powering. Unfortunately, it's just not sold that way.
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Evidence requires preservation.
If it's returned without a) a court order saying the evidence was removed by order of the court or b) the evidence, then the evidence has been improperly recorded.
In the circumstances discussed, it's rarely about evidence preservation or even victim protection. In both those cases, there are laws against deleting the evidence from your devices without the correct permission from the court. If you say you filmed something, the officer confiscated your device but the device contains NO trace of that evidence and forensics even hints that it was cleared or deleted, that's destruction of evidence. Courts can/will/should come down extremely harshly on that. It's basically evidence-tampering, perverting the course of justice, etc.
You can't stop your device being confiscated. But you cannot be asked to delete your evidence or have it deleted without a court order.
It comes under similar rules to paedophiles having their computer equipment returned. It has to be properly recorded, tagged, booked in, untampered, forensically analysed, recorded, presented to court, and the order made to remove or destroy only those infringing parts (and/or they ask if you object to just destruction of all the data on it to save time).
It's still your hardware, but it's held in evidence. It can't be tampered with (legally), and it can't be held indefinitely.
In the UK, the police officer would have to give you written confiscation records etc. and you'd be entitled to have details specifically noted about the last file you recorded on there, if you asked for it.
It's all a case of where the crime gets too stupid for an officer to be found guilty of. Asking you to stop recording, the worst that happens is - not much, actually. Asking you to move on from the area, again not much so long as it's done for a vaguely plausible reason. Arresting you? That requires a charge that isn't made up just to harass you. Confiscating your equipment? That requires a) a valid reason b) all reasonable evidence preservation, c) written records of that confiscation and reasons (and, as far as I know, "because he was filming me" isn't a reasonable reason but victim protection may be but even that's dubious in the case of something like a road accident or plain "filming an arrest" scenario).
This has come up in the UK several times and the police commissioners have had to announce that, actually, no they cannot delete your files without a specific, and requested, court order. They can't ask you to do it (except voluntarily), they can't do it for you, and certainly can't do it without treating it as evidence (in which case it's destruction of evidence, which is infinitely more serious than just taking a dislike to someone filming you).
But then, I live in a vaguely civilised country. Your local interpretation of the law may be different.
What the hell kind of sadist is going to manage their machines from a Linux machine running PowerShell?
"Unsupported configuration" is the first hurdle that I'd foresee, followed by just being plain, unnecessarily painful.
You're playing games.
That happens WITH people nowadays. If one friend can't join in, for whatever reason, you can't really politely play that game together.
And if you have to buy one-per-person for gaming, you better be damn sure the people you're buying it for can use it. I wouldn't buy my parents one (whereas they are a mad gaming family that have collectively completed every Mario game in existence and owned pretty much every console), purely because it's likely they won't be able to enjoy and share it together.
Or have higher standards and identify their ugly hacks where others don't?
I used to live smack bang on the delivery border of my local pizza delivery. I lived above a shop opposite the railway bridge, and they would never deliver past the railway bridge.
When you told them the road name, they asked if you were past the railway bridge or not. Say yes, you get no pizza. Seriously. And there was no other takeaway that would deliver to you in the area. Say no, however, and they come and deliver no questions asked even if the driver rings to ask where you are.
One time the driver turned out to be an old guy who'd lived in the same house previously and had the same problems. He never ratted us out, though.
Short-sighted business practice, as it was literally 20 feet or so difference and they had no competitors in that area.
If you work in an emergency call centre, most of the calls you get will be genuine emergencies. Though you might get the odd crank, when they start continuing on but acknowledging you ("Ma'am, this is an emergency line", "Yes, please", "Ma'am, we're not a pizza delivery", "No, no anchovies, thanks my husband hates them", "Ma'am, do you have an emergency?", "Yes, how long will it be?" etc.) it doesn't take a genius to work out what's happening.
Sure, you still get drunks, timewasters, etc. but if you even think for a second that there is a problem, you send out units anyway, even if just to avoid a repeat incident.
People are inherently skilled in conveying meaning without saying those particular words. It's a fabulous human skill. Even more fabulous when you can do it without alerting someone else listening in to one half of the conversation as to what's happening.
I have to say, one of the things I've always tried to pre-arrange is the "I'm in trouble call". If you call and use a certain keyword, that's me coming running. If you call and I ask if you're okay and you say "No, dur, I'm being taken hostage", then you're probably fine. If I say "Honestly, are you okay?" and you say "Yes, I'm fine", that's my cue to come running.
Pre-arrange such things with your family. Get a keyword between you. Or a private joke that you can deliberately ruin when you're actually in trouble. Something that others won't notice. Because the guy kidnapping your daughter might actually be that boyfriend she trusted and knows her well and that she has to phone daddy every Monday or he'll get suspicious, so he lets her but listens in. She might need that way to make herself known without anyone else noticing.
VR is one of the faddy things that, once a generation, some bright spark thinks they can do "properly this time", picks it up, makes some demos of it, realises that it's expensive stuff that needs high-end and portable equipment sold for a reasonable price to lots and lots of people to succeed, slips away into a corner somewhere until people forget about it, and then reinvents itself with the next bright spark.
In the early days of VRML, the same happened. Quake was around. A full, 3D, accelerated environment that could run on commercial PC's, benefit from full 3D vision, and the VR hardware was "the thing" to look at your new architect's idea for the local council buildings or whatever. Never did the two get put together.
Now we have ubiquitous and extraordinarily powerful and realistic 3D graphics. Still, explicit support is required because our 3D is really 3D-cheats dependent on the single-viewport way of drawing things. So you have to design the hardware, mass-produce it, get people to buy it, redesign the games to take account of it, then put it all together for a price people are willing to pay for a gaming gimmick that makes them sit at home with a silly hat on.
I have no doubt that we could get a console going with it, and sell a handful of games, and cost a bomb, and people would play it and go "Yeah, it's okay, but you wouldn't play every game like that", and then it'll be on the dustheap again for a while until the next generation pick it up again.
The 3D power is there. We all have cards capable of running at stupid resolutions at stupid framerate that we could easily have "two of" or a "special" card to do VR.
The screens are there. We all have smartphones and high-res displays.
The human interface still isn't. We're still strapping things to our head and hoping our eyes are roughly aligned like everyone else's and presuming that all people have two healthy eyes in relative sync that they can use such things (my girlfriend can't see 3D movies, several of my friends can't see 3D movies, so why would you pay to go to a 3D movie over a normal one? Same problem). We're still dangling screens in front of our eyes and then wondering why they aren't as impressive in resolution and why they have to be so carefully synched and why it costs twice as much as just buying a decent monitor and why we have to drive two cards (or one powerful card) to drive two displays. We're still having to have one-per-person specialist hardware, that's fragile and expensive and cumbersome and hard to mass-produce until we get literally millions of users.
And all for a game. Now games are worth billions nowdays, but at the end of the game it's just a game. All the potential research / medical / whatever uses DO NOT use this kind of technology, even though they could and could probably afford to do so as a one-off. For decades we've had medical-operation-by-remote-control, but we still don't have that or anything approaching 3D vision coming into common use.
Because, at the end of the day, the use-cases are limited of fanciful, and the cost is prohibitive, and the setup is an awful lot of faffing about.
Standardised VR has been suggested several times - never happened.
VR headsets have been around since the 80's - never took off even as part of a Nintendo offerings (maybe a slight wart, but even so - nobody was interested in bettering it).
The capability to even put 3D environments into web pages has been around as long as I've been involved in websites, everything from VRML upwards. We still don't use it or enjoy global browser support for it.
Accelerometers and other sensors have PLUNGED in price since this was first tried - there's still no accurate way to model your head movements.
It's just a fad each time it comes around and the same problems hit. Even with millions in Kickstarter funding, etc. it's hard to produce a handful of working units that developers will rewrite their games for. It's hard to convince people to part with the price of a t
I can't even get a device - of any power - to recognise my voice beyond the very slow, pronounced basics and I have to train myself to it (not the other way around).
Would love to know how the NSA have access to technology that the top voice-recognition specialists and software can't manage, let alone dealing with noisy backgrounds, masked keywords, variety of languages, etc.
"Acres of datacentres" don't help for the simplest of obscurations in the phone call and guess who has a reason to mask their intentions behind innocent words? Terrorists.
Why the hell should that be Facebook's job?
The problem here is not lack of schools, lack of teachers (though they are problems, that's not the driver behind poor education), it's LACK OF PARENTING.
If you're kid is not learning because they're on Facebook (or Xbox, or the iPad, or whatever) all the time, you've FAILED as a parent. For some reason, that's accepted nowadays.
I work in schools.
I work in "elementary" schools (we don't call them that, but similar age range).
I work in private "elementary" schools.
The kids there don't learn because the teachers are infinitely better, or because the school buys a thousand iPads. They learn because they are ENCOURAGED to. They have to perform or they fall behind and, if they fall too far behind, the school will ask them to leave.
The schedule for a child is - to my state-educated mind - insanely busy and active. They are literally doing two things at once at all times and barely stop all day.
Because they are given a work ethic, and the parents have the incentive (money) to enforce that work ethic, they achieve much, much more.
I've done back-end and end-user support for 15 years.
For at least five of those years, the machines I used myself only had Open/LibreOffice on them.
It wasn't a hindrance.
As I say to my users all the time: No, I only manage this stuff. I don't know how to use every obscure feature of every random bit of junk that you've made me install, nor what your working practice usually involves. I'll help and advise, sure, but that rarely consists of more than a Google for "where the hell is the X button in the new versions of Office?" for most things.
Finance, especially, are lost by this. I know how to install their software, manage it, connect it to the banks, authorise the smartcards with the bank and everything else. I do the annual rollovers and the reporting and lots of other stuff. But I don't even understand what the terms mean for the rest of the stuff. I have no idea what code you should be using for that purchase. No, I don't know why your figures don't tally.
Almost certainly I can work out and dig into things and get the answer. I've never not been able to when it matters. But, it's not my job to know the ins and outs of every single detail of HOW the software should be used, every feature it has, and automatically know every click necessary to do every task. (This is my bug-bear with rote learning of things like Windows Server on courses... no... just no.)
As such... MS Office features? Basics, I'll show you. One-offs, I'll help you Google (basically, I'm Google-by-proxy for those users who want to do something quite simple that they've never done before). Everything else, I'll either know, or we'll have to find out. If you're doing it regularly, I suggest a training course or learning yourself.
MS Office isn't on my radar. At home I use LibreOffice. At my previous workplace - in the same position - I used Open/LibreOffice throughout their 2000->2003->2013 transitions.
Sure, I'll help. But it's Office. Unless it isn't activating or you need a normal.dotm reset or similar (Outlook profile reset etc.), chances are it's not high on my list.
The energy of the thrust effect is basically lost in the measurement error. Hell, the device measuring it could be affecting the measured thrust.
The problem is that there's a TINY, TINY effect and we're not sure of the origin. It's therefore useless for propulsion, for decades at least, and certainly until we know where it's coming from and why. Because it might not be something that can ever be scaled, and that amount of thrust is absolutely minuscule.
We're used to dealing with tiny thrusts - you can "push" a satellite with nothing more than light and we have measured that effect in some of our own objects in space. But we can explain that bit, because we know about the interaction that it undergoes.
However, this is barely out of the measurement error. It's nothing more than a blip at the moment. As such, it's infinitely more important to put this through the wringer of "what the hell is doing that" - which requires independent testing, and that's not being done.
Fact is, this may never be more powerful than it is, and we can barely know it IS there, even in a vacuum. Until we know more, any headline about its origin or potential usage is PR bollocks.
It doesn't imply the power range to be infinite. Everything has a working range. But, although the claim that it's a necessity is dubious, it's pretty well universal. If you supply an LED with less power, it will light less. We tend to PWM them in order to do this digitally with only one voltage on a digital circuit, but - for a certain range - their brightness correlates to the power supplied to even LED's, yes.
I'm British. That's in Europe. The above is true of Britain at the very least, and it's not alone.
And, every time I drive through Europe (including France), that's the only time you see things quite so blatant as huge pink neon signs declaring "Sex Shop" from miles away. Even in tiny, sleepy little villages, miles from anything else.
And, sorry, but sometimes the models in fashion magazines and men's magazines are showing more than the full Lena image, and on the front cover.
It may not be true in every town/city (Paris relies a lot on tourism), true. But we're a damn sight more open about it than the US.
The Venus de Milo is showing her breasts. Michaelangelo's David has his cock out.
Countless renaissance works depict nudes.
When they excavated Pompei they found everything from dildos to pornography.
Hell, I was in the National Gallery a while back and it had a famous exhibit of a sculpted goat being penetrated by a man. Just there, in the museum. There was a warning sign that that gallery contains such works, but that was about it. Kids were roaming freely through it and past it and looking at it. No parent did anything more than "Yes, it's very funny, keep moving" and a sly smile between them all.
Nudity is slowly being outlawed, which is ridiculous, given that sex is just as much at the front of the agenda as it ever has been. I'm not naturist and I don't want to go around showing my body (especially not my body, actually) but, fuck, it's a breast or a leg or even a cock, get over it.
There's a line of obscenity, but it's not the very existence or a bare depiction of a nude body. And certainly not the Lena image which isn't pornographic in any way (the others in the series, possibly). You see worse in any historical painting, on TV adverts, and let's not actually get into the dramas, and movies, and videogames, and what they contain because, fuck, we'll be here forever.
I agree it's probably not the best thing to KEEP using but it's used because it has certain properties that aid in the judgement of imagery. Sure there are other images. But you're an adult. It's an adult woman, barely nude. Grow up.
And in any European country you see worse on the top shelf of every single newsagent, and not even in the "pornographic" section. Just things like the men's magazine's front covers.
We can never outgrow wanting to look at beautiful people, male or female, but we can sure as hell outgrow trying to ban it.
Fuck, there was a public protest in London the other month over the banning of depiction of face-sitting, so thousands gathered outside the Houses of Parliament and demonstrated what was about to be banned. We have bigger issues than a picture of a woman.
If PC gaming has taught me anything, it's "never be on the cutting edge". It's expensive, very expensive, and very fleeting.
A $2000 four-card SLI setup will be two-card setup next year. And a one-card setup the year after. And mainstream the year after.
It's going to TAKE you three years to produce any game of value with this level of model quality anyway.
It's not wasted in that sense. But it is a bit pointless. Stop focussing on the graphics, because I don't want a $100m animation of any level of detail. I played through GTA V and skipped EVERY cutscene. I literally did not care about the pre-rendered or even engine-rendered bits over which I had no control, I just wanted to play the damn game.
Hopefully we'll reach a point where the level of detail is the same wherever you go, and all that differs is the actual gameplay. The AI in GTA V, for example, is still absolute crap. Want to evade the cops? Turn corners lot, get yourself into a point they can't sneak up on you. Pretty much you can last out from a 5-star wanted level until you run out of ammo.
Now go online. Even a couple of people actively hunting you is certain death in a short time unless you are kitted out to the absolute hilt.
We need to stop focusing on graphics, fuck even my old laptop ran GTA V at enough speed that I could complete the game without going blind, and focus on all those other areas of gaming that we're still just completely ignoring.
Is it just me that worries more that they are releasing a sequel to something so sequel-ed already that you have to resort to Roman numerals?
Tells and the "psychology" of poker are about supplying misleading as to the content of your hand. That's it.
The computer doesn't need to take any notice of you, misleading or otherwise. It knows what the chances of any particular card in your hand are. It therefore knows exactly the odds of whether its hand is likely to outmatch all the other hands on the table.
The problem is not in playing the game, it's in betting (especially with no-limits, which gives too many avenues for recursion so it just has to "guess" with a heuristic - if that heuristic is wrong, it might "win" more hands but still lose much more money than all the other players).
It's easy to know the probability that you will win the hand. It's hard to get more than small gains from that unless you bluff your opponents into betting more than they should. If everyone bet like the computer, the game would peter out to boredom.
The "misleading" is in the bets, and the computer doesn't care what you're TRYING to make it think you have in your hard. It knows whether or not there's a higher probability of winning cards in its hand or any other the other players. It just has to determine what's the best betting strategy. If it has 1000 chips, that's 1000 options. Next move if might have 1000 options, 2000 options or none at all. The game tree for THAT is fucking huge.
But remove the money and this computer will win more hands. Just do the betting, no-limits, on the flip of a coin and it will struggle without a programmed heuristic. Determine the heuristic and you win against it and there's nothing it can do about it.
And players can collude to make it hard for the computer to bet at the ideal level. In short, the computer will win the most hands in the long run. It might be a very boring game but it will. The cards in your hand cannot change and everyone can know the exact chance of what you have, what's coming up, and what's in their hand. Those odds don't change because you try to bluff or not.
It may not, however, take away most money and that money is a rule in the game, it may not win.
Statistics, however, is completely misunderstood in such things. First, it only applies IN THE LONG RUN. Second, it will lose almost as much too - it has to. Third, the game is designed for humans... thus the blinds and betting are put in to complicate things and MAKE the game more about your opponents than the cards (because humans who card-count and bet by the odds are boring and just end in stalemates and random wins), so they remove the possibility of card-counting and complicate the betting to make things "interesting". It's a CAPTCHA, in effect.
Play blind-tests where they don't know it's a computer. Where they don't know who to collude against. See how well it does then. That's interesting.
And they wouldn't play against it if you just said "see who wins the most hands, and folds the least".
It's not even very good.
If you have noexec /tmp, it can't even start. That's been the default in almost every distro for years.
And it's a random third-party binary. It's not like it got into package repositories or a major piece of software. Some cock downloaded a piece of malware, of his own accord, outside of package management on a Linux machine. And so few people did that, it wasn't even showing up on the radar.
God, if I had a penny for every spam email sent from a compromised Windows computer that I've had brought to me and been asked to clean, I'd have earned more than a year's wages already.
You can be insecure on any machine, same as you can be a dick in any language.
If you have a non-package binary installed on your system, it's user-error. You have decided to run that, and done that with privileges enough to run it.
This isn't packaged with any software, except for a spam-generating (mass mailing) software anyway. Just that those spammers didn't know they were being used to spam for others too.
Same as if you just run a program on a Windows machine. It's got FUCK ALL to do with open-source, but don't let that stop you.
And packaged open-source software is hash-checked and signed by the distributors. This has not been found in ANY repository of distribution packages. It's a random program that someone has decided to install, and is bundled with spam-generating software, so that's how it "kept quiet"... the people installing didn't give a shit about what they were installing, or the mass-mailing they were already doing. It's like getting a virus from a game crack.
But, please, continue to think you're superior because "lol OS is insecure". I don't actually see any difference between your unrelated argument and, say, "lol Xbox sucks because".
UK standard is 100A to the board, I think (and we're on 220v).
I have a single appliance that can pull 20A @220v on it's own, another that can pull 18A @ 220v. One of those is the oven, the other is a (completely optional, I agree) electric kiln.
But I am shocked that I haven't overloaded a circuit yet.
I have 32A just going out to the garden shed / for mowing the lawn / tools etc. and that's more than you could pull ever (maybe twice as much if you're on 110v). I intend to use it if ever I switch to an electric car, which might be in 20 years time given the rate the tech moves at.
I don't do a lot of toolwork or serious stuff, so it's not a huge draw. I don't have A/C (it's a UK semi-detached right in the suburbs!). I don't have a huge house, buckets of lights, ponds or anything high-power running 24/7. The heating is gas. I have one of each appliance, and small ones at that because of limited kitchen space. I don't have a power shower or anything remotely luxurious.
Not saying I couldn't dial down to 30A if necessary but, damn, that's not a lot at all. Most of my MCB's are 32A rated, the others are 16A and my consumer unit has a dozen of them.
Your whole house wouldn't blow one of my circuits, most likely. And the whole house was rewired only a couple of years ago just before I bought it.
Is it me that's unusual here (I don't think so, looking at my parent's house, old houses I've lived in, etc.)?
Not really.
A lease is nothing more than renting, which not only has to cover all the costs of the batteries, but also reasonable replacements over the life of the lease, plus people to manage the lease, plus some profit (usually).
Leasing doesn't make things more affordable (just the opposite). It just breaks it into monthly payments without needing a lump-sum, and takes the hassle off your hands. It's a big difference.
But a five-fold increase in cost would cost with that easily, wouldn't it? And you can do it piecemeal as they ACTUALLY stop holding a decent charge, etc.
Not saying it's unfathomable, but just don't see the advantage.
However much you hate it, the bottom-line finance number gives you an idea of the materials, work, availability, etc. involved.
A system that is not economically viable is taking MORE product out of the earth, and rarer products, that need more refinement and processing, etc. in order to create it in the first place than it is replacing other power-generation methods and their costs.
It's quite simple. The market price changes to reflect the difficult, cost, legislation, rarity, etc. of the materials and labour involved. If something is more expensive it's because it COSTS MORE to give it to you. If something can't pay that cost back (at least, in a reasonable time) you've taken out MORE from the earth including shipping the thing to yourself and paying for machines to modify it, and paying for the companies mass-production plans, etc. than you've stopped being taken out elsewhere.
It's not perfect. It's not entirely accurate. But the monetary cost of something is a pretty good indicator. This is why lithium batteries are more expensive than lead-acid equivalents, why oil products are being taxed, why discovery of shale gas can drop the gas price, etc.
Also, as you're moving the burden from government and entire countries to individual users here, cost matters more than most other things. You're asking ME to take the effort, research, purchase, maybe pay for planning and electrical works, etc. this product that you're SELLING in order for me to help the earth. There's a cost involved in that no matter what. Some of that cost is a "donation" because you want to live in a friendly way. Some of that cost is because of the convenience to you if the power blips for a moment. Some of that cost is for your peace of mind.
At the end of the day, cost is a pretty good measure of all kinds of things to do with a system. This is why energy companies are complaining about the "payback" electricity schemes from solar users... the costs they incur to put their pittance of electricity back into the grid far outweigh anything else. The government has to subsidise those costs, or the electricity companies have to raise their prices. And, suddenly, it's actually more expensive to run "off-grid" than you thought and you end up going back "on-grid" because the cost isn't worth the convenience any more.
I could UPS all my appliances today. I could just buy a tiny UPS, or save up towards a bigger one, each month and stick them on batteries that survive power outages for whatever length of time I choose to do it for. But I don't because it costs. And that cost does not compare to the cost of the power going off every now and then, or the electricity company raising its prices by 10% a year.
If an off-grid system does not return money for you, the money you pay would have been better off just buying a generator and some fuel for it for the rare occasions the power does go off, and forgetting about all these fancy gadgets that help you live off-grid. In which case, both the green-ness and the user suffer.
That's why governments are subsidising PV etc. installs. They have to bring the price down or people will just look and think "Sod it, I'll just buy a genny and keep a tank of petrol in the garage for if anything happens" rather than go off-grid.
Things have to be profitable, and everything has a cost.
My bank manager.
My old stove alone is rated at 18KW. It's not particular huge or anything, just a double-oven.
Although you can go "self-powered", you have to make just as many sacrifices on what you power as you do on how much you can physically generate anyway.
And some things need a lot more power than you might imagine - anything with a motor, e.g. refrigerator, washer, dryer, etc.
This is the problem at the moment. You either have gas for some things, or burn wood for some things, and forgo electric for them, or you don't and have to cut them out entirely or generate a LOT more power. Sure, you can do that. But neither option is saving the planet.
Reducing consumption is step 1. Then decide whether you have low enough consumption to justify self-powering. Unfortunately, it's just not sold that way.