Strangely, when I was a child, so few people were "intolerant" (which does not have a strict meaning at all) of any food that you'd never heard of it. Kids with REAL allergies couldn't leave home in case they came into contact with a nut.
Nowadays, I work in schools, and the last time I asked the school nurses about 50% of children had notes that they were intolerant or allergic to some food. I asked them how many were ever likely to actually have a reaction in class unless someone shoved something down their throat - the answer was, unofficially, less than 1%. The number of times the epipens were required? Once or twice a year among 400+ children.
And the "intolerant" ones were ones who didn't like milk, and so their parents classed that as intolerant or bothered their doctor until he said that magic word for them. It means precisely zip.
Above and beyond that, even the strictest of severe allergies can be tamed by - guess what - controlled exposure to the substance in question. Give a nut-allergy sufferer sufficiently small injections of nuts and build it up gradually and the allergy goes away. (Oh, and P.S. peanuts are legumes - literally peas - not nuts, and hence someone who has a "nut" allergy to peanuts and other genuine nuts is quite difficult to explain in those terms).
How many people are genuinely lactose-intolerant? Those from cultures who don't consume lactose. For the same reason that Westerners smell of rotten milk to the Eastern cultures where much less dairy is consumed, they are likely to not be able to stomach lactose because it's not been in their diet since their birth. Diet is as much about established gut cultures as it as anything else.
Consume lactose and you won't be lactose intolerant. Scaremonger and we'll ALL be lactose intolerant in a couple of generations. In the same way, that many more people are genuinely allergic to nuts now because mothers refuse to consume them during pregnancy. Why? Scaremongering.
Kiwi is the biggest one now, they say, and that's because - well, who eats a lot of kiwi?
Everything in moderation, and don't impose your diet problems on me and my children. And in return I promise I'll never shove a hamburger down your throat, or ban vegetables, if you're vegan.
"VLC 2.2.0 will feature automatic, GPU-accelerated video rotation support, extension improvements, resume handling, support for new codecs/formats and rewrites to some of the existing formats, VDPAU GPU zero-copy support, x265 encoder support, etc."
I have little interest in this. It seems to be performance improvements. As someone who just rolls out VLC in preference to WMP on all my domain-connected machines, some of them with only Intel-video, I don't actually have any performance problems. I have ten times more problems with just random crashes etc. but fortunately VLC is small enough to just load up again. But performance? What I throw at it, gets rendered to the screen.
So what's new in VLC 3?
"Further out is VLC 3.0.0, which is planned to have Wayland support, GPU zero-copy support for OpenMAX IL, ARIB subtitle support, HEVC / VP9 hardware decoding on Android, a rework of the MP4 and TS demuxers, and browsing improvements."
Again, mostly "performance improvements". The support for other formats is unlikely to ever be used by any of my users but that's the reason I use VLC - just throw stuff at it and without needing codec packs, it just plays what it can.
I'm sure there's someone out there doing 4K on multi-screens and needs a beefy setup and a top-notch bunch of hardware accelerated features. But, to me, I'd rather we didn't have that and instead fixed the crashes in VLC which seem common enough that someone on a VLC team just loading in random web videos all day would hit several a day at least, that they could then start down to road to debug,
If anything, all this passing off to hardware is probably MORE likely to cause me problems than anything else - no doubt the support won't be perfect and it'll put the onus of rendering properly on the graphics driver rather than the VLC software itself.
Retransmission, as you rightly point out, is protocol dependent. But the Ethernet switches are keeping error counters, which is what I'm actually referring to.
Anyone who's ever logged into a managed switch will see protocol-independent error counters like this. These should read zero unless you've just plugged in / unplugged a cable (which is more to do with "debouncing" errors than anything else).
TCP just happens to have its own retransmit functionality built-in but even on "dumb" switches, you get frame error counters.
And do you think printing tons of your own money as a country is also free? Minting of any kind has a massive cost associated with it.
Additionally, the website is bollocks. Creation of an IOU is the basis of all monies (go read what it says on a GBP10 note... "I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of" - it's a promisary note). All money is IOU/promisary money. It doesn't actually exist because money is merely a concept where representative practical items are designed to be representative of an intangible number (what happens if you go to the Bank of England and cash in that promisary note and demand they give you GBP for it? Nothing. Because GBP10 doesn't exist except as a number. This isn't a new thing, since the first coin of the Roman empire, it was used to represent something that didn't actually exist in physical form).
The numbers in your bank account are exactly the same. But they aren't "creating" funds from nowhere. They aren't just increasing your bank account by the price of your mortgage. That number MUST, by law, have come from somewhere - there's a reason that lawyers are involved in mortgage transactions, and a mortgage company will not accept "just a number" from a bank that doesn't have the backing to give that money.
And it make no difference if it did "create" it anyway (which it didn't). Because, somewhere, a debt of equivalent value is owed to them. When that debt is paid, the money is returned. However, trading in debts is complicated economics that ordinary people just don't get. The banks can even sell your debt to other organisations. But the money from your debt doesn't "exist" until you pay it. However, you're in a legal agreement to provide that money, so it will be guaranteed (to an extent) to exist. Similar debts are what enables the banks to provide you money that doesn't exist. This is the way anything banking-wise works, and even governments are basically living off money that doesn't exist as cash, and will only exist in the future because of debt payments. This is where complicated economics take over and the guy in the street goes "Duh, what?" because he doesn't understand it. And it's also the way money has worked since it's inception.
Sorry, but your whole post is just talking bollocks and claiming things that you aren't understanding properly. "Banks are evil", yeah. I get that. But claiming that a cash-based society is more stable (when cash is a promisary note anyway), that numbers in an account can be manufactured without comeback, or that governments aren't creating cash out of thin air at greater expense anyway... it's bollocks.
Strangely, a global economy is more complicated than balancing your chequebook... (where a cheque is nothing more than a legal promise to pay a debt for its entire existence anyway).
(P.S. I have one bank account to store my wages in, I do not earn interest, I do not leave money in the bank at the end of the month, nor do I pay any kind of banking fee. I have no savings, no pensions, no investments, etc. When I had to fill out tax returns, 99.9% of the form was "ZERO" or "N/A" except for the income tab which was a single number. I have no love for banks, whatsoever. But you're talking bollocks).
The code was cracked not by tools alone, but by mathematical insight, luck, sloppiness on the other side and a number of factors.
So while Flowers was undoubtedly the engineer that could build the machine to automate the calculations that were being done, the actual calculations and WHY they worked were the part of Turing and others. And in the process he added a whole new branch to the mathematics of the time (which we now call Computer Science).
Turing dreamed it, Flowers built it, but it's hard to imagine the machine being much use without the maths - the code was broken by complicated mathematical analysis of the mistakes made, basically, and was brought into the realm of the feasible by mathematical shortcuts and spotting of dead-ends. However, the maths could be applied - albeit slowly - to the code even without computers.
Turing made it theoretically possible. Flowers made it practically possible - by building the machine that actual tried to do it, and did it fast enough to be useful.
Ethical concern... parent gets to choose whether or not child is born with a condition, or cleansed of it before the egg is even fertilised.
Now if condition is "terminal cancer at an early age", okay. Down's syndrome (not relevant here, but an example that we're all familiar with)? Slightly less ethical. What about a genetic big nose? Ginger hair?
Where is the line that determines this, and does the current legal and medical ethics framework cover this particular situation?
Others make their living by abiding by licensing, or creating content under licence, and want things legitimately. I know this might be a shock to you, but people WILL pay for legitimate product.
Additionally, when the RIAA rock up to your house, see how far that explanation gets you in court. There's a reason most of the RIAA court cases resulted in settlements... people just decide the time and hassle costs too much to argue, let alone the costs of the music.
However, the same things were said back in my day - you can just record off the radio, you can just copy your friend's cassette, you can just do this or that. Music is still a multi-million dollar business.
Same with software. Same with lots of other things. But some people are honest and pay for things properly even if they're not FORCED to, and others are bright enough to not admit to copyright infringement on a website that will sell your details out in a second if a court asks them to.
Sure... "it'll never happen". And for the most part it won't. But every day some smartass who thought "it'll never happen" finds themselves in court.
P.S. in some IT industries, a personal civil case for copyright infringement would be enough to end a career on the spot for.
Thus, I infer that you did indeed sell out, because why else wouldn't you comment if the accusation was wrong.
Additionally, people use ad-block software so that they don't have to see ads. To then take money to make those people see ads is the antithesis of your existence.
Good luck clawing your customer base back.
I wouldn't touch you from this point onwards (and to be honest, how did people not notice it wasn't blocking those ads?). But, hey, I'm an Opera user moving to Vivaldi soon as Opera sold-out in a similar fashion and got rid of all their interesting features (including built-in adblock before AdBlock even existed).
British houses have a double-brick-wall construction, mostly.
The idea is that the outside wall can get as wet as it likes (and it's Britain, so it gets wet!) but the internal wall is separated by an air gap. Whenever you join the outside wall to the inside (e.g. cables, etc.) you have to be careful how you do so so that water can't transfer between the two.
You still put in vents, etc. to get some kind of airflow from outside to in, however, because without vents (and with modern double-glazing especially) you just end up with condensation everywhere inside and mould in your internal plaster.
And one of the biggest problems with old houses built like this is still damp (there's no such thing as "rising damp" by the way, but that's another matter) and mould.
Having a wall with water in it is not a good idea, certainly not inside a building. We specifically build our houses to account for this and it's still possible to get mould inside if the water breaks through or settles inside.
The only thing that could combat it is a very good airflow so that water can't settle which, shockingly, will cool those kinds of places anyway.
So now you have no benefits that aren't costing you tax from your salary too. So the value of the benefits plummets and thus people just demand a higher salary instead. Which, believe it or not, costs you more - the point of the incentives is that the person couldn't just earn that amount of money extra and get that incentive themselves anyway, it works by having expensive one-offs that mortals couldn't afford, and them remaining company property, etc.
You can't make outsourcing illegal. It's just a legal minefield and there's always a way around it. It would also cripple any modern economy overnight. This is truly a stupid suggestion in its own right.
End visas? No problem. But there aren't many countries in the world that have put a block on visas because they already have enough in-house talent. Believe it or not, this will make immigration drop which, again, will cost you all money.
The numbers may look bigger on the balance sheet, but the costs go up as well and may not be immediately noticeable.
The stock/futures things? Too complicated for me to tell what would happen, to be honest. Chances are there's a way to scam it to make enormous profit and not pay tax on it.
However, if you just tax the companies properly - a fixed portion of their income earned or brought into the country, and a definition of income that excludes any kind of "pay your own subsidiary" shenanigans - the prices for the consumer may well go up. But equally consumers will go elsewhere.
And maybe, just maybe, like Starbucks UK, you'll find that the prices have gone up because NOW they have to pay the right amount of tax. And if that means they can't be profitable, then their competitors who HAVE been paying the right amount of tax all along will win (e.g. Costa Coffee in the UK), because they can compete on a level playing field finally.
Tax isn't complicated. A fixed portion of what you earn. It's that simple. The problem is that to get their own 10% the lawmakers and accountants make things incredibly complicated to define exactly what you've earned. And they wrap it up in a thousand tiny taxes rather than one big tax.
Can someone explain why it wouldn't be better to have a "personal income tax" and a "corporate income tax" and scrap everything else? It's used for disincentives (e.g. tax on smoking in the UK) but, honestly, is that really worth it compared to just banning it or letting the markets speak?
It took 40 years to get to the point where smoking costs us more as a country than it makes in tax, and now we have a huge legacy of health problems ahead of us and STILL we haven't properly banned it but pissed away money on disincentives like plain packaging, hiding them away in the store, stopping their advertising, removing their capability to sponsor, etc.
I can't help but think that just the simplicity of "half what you earned" (which is about right for most first-world countries) would cut out so much red tape, confusion, administration and difficult enforcement that it would actually get you back MORE than all this complicated mess of exclusions and kickbacks that are in place now.
I pay road tax (road fund licence, technically, but it's a tax on road use the proceeds of which go to road maintenance - no different to taxing road use and the government having to maintain the roads generally), income tax, national insurance (healthcare tax), VAT (sales tax), a specific tax on petrol, a tax on pensions, a tax on insurances, a tax on bank interest and god-knows what else.
"How much money did you make from all sources last year? Give me half" seems to be pretty much the same as we have now, but without all this mess of shit to fall foul of and allow companies to scam.
"Untaxed" foreign earnings. Does that mean not taxed at all, or not taxed by the US? (They may well have been taxed in the foreign country they were earned in. If they weren't, I'm sure those foreign countries would love to know about it given that it was earned there and then shipped out of the country.)
What you have here is a problem of a global economy trying to deal with local taxation, and maybe even an attempt to double-tax.
If you're a large company that deals internationally, you have two options. Set up a company in each country and have them pay the tax of the local country, or set up one company and then pay the tax in EITHER those foreign countries or the home country of the company, depending on how you declare it.
For a company to have foreign earnings that are untaxed, they either have a home country that's not being paid tax (Why not? What kind of stupid taxation system is that if they're clearly based there, wherever they do business?), or they're not paying proper taxes in the foreign country (same parenthesised comment applies here).
I'm sure there are a lot of companies not paying proper tax. Starbucks weren't paying millions in tax in the UK because all their profits went to their US division as "payment for intellectual property rights" (i.e. Starbucks US let Starbucks UK use the Starbucks name for the small price of 100% of their profit, thus making them a zero-profit entity in the UK and not liable to UK tax, which is obviously a scam and should be legislated against).
But if you have to do a one-off tax to make things right, that means your everyday tax is slowly cocking things up ALL the time. And how long because the next "one-off" tax?
And the ability to overwrite such a critical file should really be something huge and manual because it's so critical.
I'm also thinking DDoS situations - malware replacing your SSH keys with their own, stopping you logging in at all or adding their public key to all your normal ones granting them a kind of hidden back door.
Sure, they can do all that in other ways, but one way built-into the SSH protocol as an extension is something we can do without.
So, I have to trust a server to automatically replace a trusted key with a new trusted key.
Yeah, this is the type of thing I'll try when it's been in the code for five, ten years.
I'm perfectly sure, as a mathematician, that you can use some kind of secure exchange to make this work but - fuck - I won't be trusting implementations of it for a while.
Isn't this exactly the sort of thing that, half-assed, will generate security problems for years to come and yet still seems to be outside the SSH protocol and has to be a custom extension? Is there an RFC for this?
Sorry but as far as I'm concerned key management shouldn't be a part of the process that's handling connection authentications, etc. Why can't this be an outside protocol entirely? For decades, we've been waiting for some kind of automated decentralised, anonymised key-store and surely the effort going into securing this very dangerous piece of code would have been better put into moving the problem away from SSH and allowing multi-protocol use of such things.
No, I may have mistyped because I'm lazy, but I only work in "Mbps" being bits. When you want to talk bytes, I use "MB/s" like everyone else has does for years. Pedantry over the captialisation only came later. Generally, nobody states in "MBps" and means bytes or "Mb/s" and means bits.
ALL numbers in my post? Mbits. Fuck multiply by 8 if you want and it's still - on average - worse than the 4G on my phone in the same area, but that's NOT the number I'm getting.
And if Gigabit is already commodity hardware at home, and bog-standard small business switches are built with 48 ports of Gigabit plus whatever backbone for a few hundred quid for the last ten years, what do you think serious ISPs and datacentres have been using all that time for, say, leased line and stuff.
Of course it requires upgrades but they would need to have been a generation ahead since the start and kept replacing or they would not be able to handle anything.
BT are a telecoms company. They handle the international fibres for the UK and all kinds of stuff. Internal switching on their networks must be fantastic already, even if our end-user experience is shit.
If you're not on Gigabit already, I'll be surprised.
Even basic cheap laptop wireless, smartphone wireless and wireless routers are in the, what? 300Mbps or so range? Two or three of those and you can flood a Gigabit connection.
You would need a new router with BT anyway, because it's a new protocol. And then you'd need to throw away the BT router and buy a real one after the first week when you read how crap and insecure they are.
But there are £200 routers on the market that have triple WAN failover (including USB 3G/4G) with VoIP, VPN, wireless, and Gigabit switches built-in.
And networks have an even easier problem. Buy one Gigabit port and push all your dozens / hundreds of users over it who almost certainly all have Gigabit ports anyway. Bottleneck before you even start. And if you don't have at least a Gigabit network backbone and 100Mbps to the desktop, you are technically worse than every primary school I've worked in in the last 15 years.
More likely is that your webfilter/VPN will struggle to process that amount of traffic, but it's unlikely if you've bought anything half-decent. The last VPN/Firewall I saw that couldn't handle more than 100Mbps was an old Netgear thing about the size of a pack of cards that was so old it refused almost all modern browsers thinking they were Netscape.
I have a street strewn with telegraph poles. My parents live in a streeet strewn with telegraph poles. So does almost everyone I know. Most of those people live in London, for a start, and it's not limited to just there.
Fuck knows where you live but if you don't have pole at the end of your street with cables going to each house, I'm guessing it's a new build estate (which are in the minority compared to, say, 30's/40's/50's/60's houses).
However, what you might mean is that those poles will feed the cables from each house down to a green box which may have some kind of fibre/copper backbone that goes under the street. But it's still copper... FTTC hasn't arrived in many places.
But if you live in a UK town and are more a few hundred metres from a telegraph pole, I'd be surprised.
Slashdot are posting what The Register posted two days ago, so I'll post the same comment I posted there two days ago:
I work for a UK school.
BT took nearly TWO YEARS to get a leased line to us. They were blocked from completion after we cancelled the contract because they said there was a 20th delay because "there's not enough room in the duct" followed by "there's not enough room at the exchange". You'd have thought someone might notice in two years that you had no room, eh?
We cancelled because, despite wonderful promises, prices and speeds, we never actually managed to get the line into the building.
In the meantime, I'm running a school for 400 kids on a VDSL line with ADSL backup which BT promise me can get "45Mbps" and "20Mbps" at best, respectively. Funny. Because my Smoothwall says we've never pushed more than 10Mbps for a fraction of a second and the average over the working day - with 500 users and 600 devices - is somewhere around 4MBps down and 1MBps up..
BT can make all the "maximum" speed promises they want. If you can't get it installed, or the actual download is so much less than the maximum, it's pointless. Absolutely pointless.
Ironically, I get 32Mbps download on 4G when sitting in the IT Office. If only 4G didn't have such pathetic data allowances.
Criminals gaining entry to an ATM after blasting a huge hole in it? Not really the kind of thing the everyday guy has to worry about.
I mean, you've got to linger by an ATM for a while, cause a huge blast, then get round the back, gather the exploded money, etc. If you're prepared to do that, you'll find any number of ways of going that far anyway.
And in the UK, ATM's are everywhere - in shops, post offices, out in the street, etc. You can't protect them all. There are no really "secure" ATMs here - not in location or design.
You just make it so that they have to do all this to hopefully draw attention. But you can't protect against every attack.
Can anyone ever remember an instance where a company pulled out of something because it went against their ethos? I can't think of one.
Every time it's something like censorship, or threats to pull out of a certain market, etc. it's NEVER happened, and they always end up compromising their principles for the sake of sales.
I get that's what business is supposed to do, but it just means I automatically ignore ANY such attempt at pretending a company can have an ethos at all.
Just for once, I'd love to see a company, especially a tech company that espouses its freedom credentials as a selling point, to say "No, sorry, we can't do that, we'll just have to stop doing business with them". Can you imagine if Facebook just turned itself off in Turkey? Surely the uproar alone would mean that it would come in a less-censored form?
I just can't think of an instance where a company refused business because it was morally right to do so (possible exception - supposedly - of The Co-Operative in the UK but are they are company or a co-operative?).
"update"... I think he means he went from one to the other, I'm assuming MS put out Windows Updates to 10 just the same as anything else? But I could be wrong.
However, even so, in the world of UEFI, GPT, etc. why the fuck does Windows still stomp over the boot sector as if it owns it? Add your partitions, mark yourself as active, put an entry in the UEFI if you find it. Otherwise, stop. You don't need to overwrite the boot sector if you've got that far because it worked well enough to boot your installer! And anyone installing non-standard boot sectors will be smart enough to just add your partition in as an option to boot from.
There is no conclusive evidence that there even exists such a thing as interplanetary travel for a life-form. We've barely touched the moon ourselves.
Now, granted, the acceleration from the beginning of the last century to the Moon-missions was extraordinary. But since then, if anything our acceleration has slowed to an absolute crawl. The expense of a simple one-off mission that we've already done several times just isn't viable any more.
Now, consider, that you could get to Mars. It'd take decades of planning, travel, etc, but you could get there. That's the nearest planet.
Now don't consider distance, etc. necessarily. Consider resources. Now you have to find the time, money, resources, engineering, etc. in order to make fuel to make the next jump. That's not easy at all. Hell, Mars is being talked of as one-way at the moment. And if we got to there, to get to Jupiter would take even more resources, energy, etc. Now there are ways and means to cheat this, but they are slow, and not capable of sustaining human life along the way at the moment.
But let's say, on every planet we visit, we find a ready-built space-base with fuel and oxygen enough to get to the next planet. We land, breed like fuck, and it only takes 20 years - doing nothing else - to plan, fuel, and travel on to the next. That's nearly two centuries before you're heading out of solar system. And you're unlikely to be overtaken at any point, even if Earth finds an energy source 10 times more powerful in that time.
Asteroids - even less resources, even harder to land on, even more difficult to colonise. Let's say we fire out probes all the time we're doing this (ignore where the resources for these probes comes from).
The next star is 8 light years away. Let's assume every star is that far away from the next, every star has the same kind of planetary system, etc. It's going to take several centuries to get to the first. Several millennia to traverse a handful. Meanwhile, all the probes your sending out will barely hit the next star but let's say they hit 10 stars on the way out, and talk back instantly if they find something. We could cover a few hundreds of stars in that time.
Let's go mad... several millennia of this (we'll stick with c as the limit of physics, but that might obviously change - at that point, we'll reconsider Fermi's Paradox anyway!), and the entire race dedicated to populating a planet, building the infrastructure to convert every resource it has to nothing more than space travel "fuel" (of whatever kind), and their sons move on to the next planet, all the while sending out hundreds of probes. Every few centuries, they go to a new star.
That's, rounding UP, (10^4 years / 2 x 10^1) generations, 10^1 stars per millienia in each direction. The orders of magnitude wouldn't get near 10^8 at all.
Do you realise where that gets you? There are a hundred billion stars just in our galaxy. That's 10^11. It'd take thousands of millennia (millions of years) to do this at stupendous speed across the galaxy, stopping to do nothing else.
No doubt there'd be advances and speed-up, but you're still orders of magnitude in debt before you've colonised a galaxy sufficiently. And then you consider the number of galaxies - That's another 10^11 or thereabouts.
And then you add in real-life, where we aren't just able to do nothing but look for aliens. What you're suggesting is that, even if there was a civilisation just a few stars away from us (incredibly unlikely given what we can see), it'll take anywhere from centuries to millennia to discover them. Assuming speed-of-light all the way, and communicating with probes all the way, etc. it'll take longer than man has so far existed in a form capable of doing such things to actually make any kind of contact if only, say, 1% of the galaxy is habitable.
The numbers just get more ridiculous after that.
Now, of course, we're limited by our current knowledge. But that's the point. Our current knowledge says t
Slashdot Mirror
Strangely, when I was a child, so few people were "intolerant" (which does not have a strict meaning at all) of any food that you'd never heard of it. Kids with REAL allergies couldn't leave home in case they came into contact with a nut.
Nowadays, I work in schools, and the last time I asked the school nurses about 50% of children had notes that they were intolerant or allergic to some food. I asked them how many were ever likely to actually have a reaction in class unless someone shoved something down their throat - the answer was, unofficially, less than 1%. The number of times the epipens were required? Once or twice a year among 400+ children.
And the "intolerant" ones were ones who didn't like milk, and so their parents classed that as intolerant or bothered their doctor until he said that magic word for them. It means precisely zip.
Above and beyond that, even the strictest of severe allergies can be tamed by - guess what - controlled exposure to the substance in question. Give a nut-allergy sufferer sufficiently small injections of nuts and build it up gradually and the allergy goes away. (Oh, and P.S. peanuts are legumes - literally peas - not nuts, and hence someone who has a "nut" allergy to peanuts and other genuine nuts is quite difficult to explain in those terms).
How many people are genuinely lactose-intolerant? Those from cultures who don't consume lactose. For the same reason that Westerners smell of rotten milk to the Eastern cultures where much less dairy is consumed, they are likely to not be able to stomach lactose because it's not been in their diet since their birth. Diet is as much about established gut cultures as it as anything else.
Consume lactose and you won't be lactose intolerant. Scaremonger and we'll ALL be lactose intolerant in a couple of generations. In the same way, that many more people are genuinely allergic to nuts now because mothers refuse to consume them during pregnancy. Why? Scaremongering.
Kiwi is the biggest one now, they say, and that's because - well, who eats a lot of kiwi?
Everything in moderation, and don't impose your diet problems on me and my children. And in return I promise I'll never shove a hamburger down your throat, or ban vegetables, if you're vegan.
Is it just me?
"VLC 2.2.0 will feature automatic, GPU-accelerated video rotation support, extension improvements, resume handling, support for new codecs/formats and rewrites to some of the existing formats, VDPAU GPU zero-copy support, x265 encoder support, etc."
I have little interest in this. It seems to be performance improvements. As someone who just rolls out VLC in preference to WMP on all my domain-connected machines, some of them with only Intel-video, I don't actually have any performance problems. I have ten times more problems with just random crashes etc. but fortunately VLC is small enough to just load up again. But performance? What I throw at it, gets rendered to the screen.
So what's new in VLC 3?
"Further out is VLC 3.0.0, which is planned to have Wayland support, GPU zero-copy support for OpenMAX IL, ARIB subtitle support, HEVC / VP9 hardware decoding on Android, a rework of the MP4 and TS demuxers, and browsing improvements."
Again, mostly "performance improvements". The support for other formats is unlikely to ever be used by any of my users but that's the reason I use VLC - just throw stuff at it and without needing codec packs, it just plays what it can.
I'm sure there's someone out there doing 4K on multi-screens and needs a beefy setup and a top-notch bunch of hardware accelerated features. But, to me, I'd rather we didn't have that and instead fixed the crashes in VLC which seem common enough that someone on a VLC team just loading in random web videos all day would hit several a day at least, that they could then start down to road to debug,
If anything, all this passing off to hardware is probably MORE likely to cause me problems than anything else - no doubt the support won't be perfect and it'll put the onus of rendering properly on the graphics driver rather than the VLC software itself.
Frame aborts
Frame check sequence failures.
Retransmission, as you rightly point out, is protocol dependent. But the Ethernet switches are keeping error counters, which is what I'm actually referring to.
Anyone who's ever logged into a managed switch will see protocol-independent error counters like this. These should read zero unless you've just plugged in / unplugged a cable (which is more to do with "debouncing" errors than anything else).
TCP just happens to have its own retransmit functionality built-in but even on "dumb" switches, you get frame error counters.
Your switching gear should be able to pick up on Ethernet re-transmits. Even the oldest managed switches can do that.
If you have a network which has more errors on the cable than those that occur when you physically pull the cable out, then you need to re-wire.
What do you think printing your own money is?
And do you think printing tons of your own money as a country is also free? Minting of any kind has a massive cost associated with it.
Additionally, the website is bollocks. Creation of an IOU is the basis of all monies (go read what it says on a GBP10 note... "I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of" - it's a promisary note). All money is IOU/promisary money. It doesn't actually exist because money is merely a concept where representative practical items are designed to be representative of an intangible number (what happens if you go to the Bank of England and cash in that promisary note and demand they give you GBP for it? Nothing. Because GBP10 doesn't exist except as a number. This isn't a new thing, since the first coin of the Roman empire, it was used to represent something that didn't actually exist in physical form).
The numbers in your bank account are exactly the same. But they aren't "creating" funds from nowhere. They aren't just increasing your bank account by the price of your mortgage. That number MUST, by law, have come from somewhere - there's a reason that lawyers are involved in mortgage transactions, and a mortgage company will not accept "just a number" from a bank that doesn't have the backing to give that money.
And it make no difference if it did "create" it anyway (which it didn't). Because, somewhere, a debt of equivalent value is owed to them. When that debt is paid, the money is returned. However, trading in debts is complicated economics that ordinary people just don't get. The banks can even sell your debt to other organisations. But the money from your debt doesn't "exist" until you pay it. However, you're in a legal agreement to provide that money, so it will be guaranteed (to an extent) to exist. Similar debts are what enables the banks to provide you money that doesn't exist. This is the way anything banking-wise works, and even governments are basically living off money that doesn't exist as cash, and will only exist in the future because of debt payments. This is where complicated economics take over and the guy in the street goes "Duh, what?" because he doesn't understand it. And it's also the way money has worked since it's inception.
Sorry, but your whole post is just talking bollocks and claiming things that you aren't understanding properly. "Banks are evil", yeah. I get that. But claiming that a cash-based society is more stable (when cash is a promisary note anyway), that numbers in an account can be manufactured without comeback, or that governments aren't creating cash out of thin air at greater expense anyway... it's bollocks.
Strangely, a global economy is more complicated than balancing your chequebook... (where a cheque is nothing more than a legal promise to pay a debt for its entire existence anyway).
(P.S. I have one bank account to store my wages in, I do not earn interest, I do not leave money in the bank at the end of the month, nor do I pay any kind of banking fee. I have no savings, no pensions, no investments, etc. When I had to fill out tax returns, 99.9% of the form was "ZERO" or "N/A" except for the income tab which was a single number. I have no love for banks, whatsoever. But you're talking bollocks).
Absolutely no disrespect to Mr Flowers:
The computer was the tool.
The code was cracked not by tools alone, but by mathematical insight, luck, sloppiness on the other side and a number of factors.
So while Flowers was undoubtedly the engineer that could build the machine to automate the calculations that were being done, the actual calculations and WHY they worked were the part of Turing and others. And in the process he added a whole new branch to the mathematics of the time (which we now call Computer Science).
Turing dreamed it, Flowers built it, but it's hard to imagine the machine being much use without the maths - the code was broken by complicated mathematical analysis of the mistakes made, basically, and was brought into the realm of the feasible by mathematical shortcuts and spotting of dead-ends. However, the maths could be applied - albeit slowly - to the code even without computers.
Turing made it theoretically possible. Flowers made it practically possible - by building the machine that actual tried to do it, and did it fast enough to be useful.
Both deserve respect.
Ethical concern... parent gets to choose whether or not child is born with a condition, or cleansed of it before the egg is even fertilised.
Now if condition is "terminal cancer at an early age", okay. Down's syndrome (not relevant here, but an example that we're all familiar with)? Slightly less ethical. What about a genetic big nose? Ginger hair?
Where is the line that determines this, and does the current legal and medical ethics framework cover this particular situation?
And that's fine... for you.
Others make their living by abiding by licensing, or creating content under licence, and want things legitimately. I know this might be a shock to you, but people WILL pay for legitimate product.
Additionally, when the RIAA rock up to your house, see how far that explanation gets you in court. There's a reason most of the RIAA court cases resulted in settlements... people just decide the time and hassle costs too much to argue, let alone the costs of the music.
However, the same things were said back in my day - you can just record off the radio, you can just copy your friend's cassette, you can just do this or that. Music is still a multi-million dollar business.
Same with software. Same with lots of other things. But some people are honest and pay for things properly even if they're not FORCED to, and others are bright enough to not admit to copyright infringement on a website that will sell your details out in a second if a court asks them to.
Sure... "it'll never happen". And for the most part it won't. But every day some smartass who thought "it'll never happen" finds themselves in court.
P.S. in some IT industries, a personal civil case for copyright infringement would be enough to end a career on the spot for.
"said it did not wish to comment"
Thus, I infer that you did indeed sell out, because why else wouldn't you comment if the accusation was wrong.
Additionally, people use ad-block software so that they don't have to see ads. To then take money to make those people see ads is the antithesis of your existence.
Good luck clawing your customer base back.
I wouldn't touch you from this point onwards (and to be honest, how did people not notice it wasn't blocking those ads?). But, hey, I'm an Opera user moving to Vivaldi soon as Opera sold-out in a similar fashion and got rid of all their interesting features (including built-in adblock before AdBlock even existed).
British houses have a double-brick-wall construction, mostly.
The idea is that the outside wall can get as wet as it likes (and it's Britain, so it gets wet!) but the internal wall is separated by an air gap. Whenever you join the outside wall to the inside (e.g. cables, etc.) you have to be careful how you do so so that water can't transfer between the two.
You still put in vents, etc. to get some kind of airflow from outside to in, however, because without vents (and with modern double-glazing especially) you just end up with condensation everywhere inside and mould in your internal plaster.
And one of the biggest problems with old houses built like this is still damp (there's no such thing as "rising damp" by the way, but that's another matter) and mould.
Having a wall with water in it is not a good idea, certainly not inside a building. We specifically build our houses to account for this and it's still possible to get mould inside if the water breaks through or settles inside.
The only thing that could combat it is a very good airflow so that water can't settle which, shockingly, will cool those kinds of places anyway.
So now you have no benefits that aren't costing you tax from your salary too. So the value of the benefits plummets and thus people just demand a higher salary instead. Which, believe it or not, costs you more - the point of the incentives is that the person couldn't just earn that amount of money extra and get that incentive themselves anyway, it works by having expensive one-offs that mortals couldn't afford, and them remaining company property, etc.
You can't make outsourcing illegal. It's just a legal minefield and there's always a way around it. It would also cripple any modern economy overnight. This is truly a stupid suggestion in its own right.
End visas? No problem. But there aren't many countries in the world that have put a block on visas because they already have enough in-house talent. Believe it or not, this will make immigration drop which, again, will cost you all money.
The numbers may look bigger on the balance sheet, but the costs go up as well and may not be immediately noticeable.
The stock/futures things? Too complicated for me to tell what would happen, to be honest. Chances are there's a way to scam it to make enormous profit and not pay tax on it.
However, if you just tax the companies properly - a fixed portion of their income earned or brought into the country, and a definition of income that excludes any kind of "pay your own subsidiary" shenanigans - the prices for the consumer may well go up. But equally consumers will go elsewhere.
And maybe, just maybe, like Starbucks UK, you'll find that the prices have gone up because NOW they have to pay the right amount of tax. And if that means they can't be profitable, then their competitors who HAVE been paying the right amount of tax all along will win (e.g. Costa Coffee in the UK), because they can compete on a level playing field finally.
Tax isn't complicated. A fixed portion of what you earn. It's that simple. The problem is that to get their own 10% the lawmakers and accountants make things incredibly complicated to define exactly what you've earned. And they wrap it up in a thousand tiny taxes rather than one big tax.
Can someone explain why it wouldn't be better to have a "personal income tax" and a "corporate income tax" and scrap everything else? It's used for disincentives (e.g. tax on smoking in the UK) but, honestly, is that really worth it compared to just banning it or letting the markets speak?
It took 40 years to get to the point where smoking costs us more as a country than it makes in tax, and now we have a huge legacy of health problems ahead of us and STILL we haven't properly banned it but pissed away money on disincentives like plain packaging, hiding them away in the store, stopping their advertising, removing their capability to sponsor, etc.
I can't help but think that just the simplicity of "half what you earned" (which is about right for most first-world countries) would cut out so much red tape, confusion, administration and difficult enforcement that it would actually get you back MORE than all this complicated mess of exclusions and kickbacks that are in place now.
I pay road tax (road fund licence, technically, but it's a tax on road use the proceeds of which go to road maintenance - no different to taxing road use and the government having to maintain the roads generally), income tax, national insurance (healthcare tax), VAT (sales tax), a specific tax on petrol, a tax on pensions, a tax on insurances, a tax on bank interest and god-knows what else.
"How much money did you make from all sources last year? Give me half" seems to be pretty much the same as we have now, but without all this mess of shit to fall foul of and allow companies to scam.
"Untaxed" foreign earnings. Does that mean not taxed at all, or not taxed by the US? (They may well have been taxed in the foreign country they were earned in. If they weren't, I'm sure those foreign countries would love to know about it given that it was earned there and then shipped out of the country.)
What you have here is a problem of a global economy trying to deal with local taxation, and maybe even an attempt to double-tax.
If you're a large company that deals internationally, you have two options. Set up a company in each country and have them pay the tax of the local country, or set up one company and then pay the tax in EITHER those foreign countries or the home country of the company, depending on how you declare it.
For a company to have foreign earnings that are untaxed, they either have a home country that's not being paid tax (Why not? What kind of stupid taxation system is that if they're clearly based there, wherever they do business?), or they're not paying proper taxes in the foreign country (same parenthesised comment applies here).
I'm sure there are a lot of companies not paying proper tax. Starbucks weren't paying millions in tax in the UK because all their profits went to their US division as "payment for intellectual property rights" (i.e. Starbucks US let Starbucks UK use the Starbucks name for the small price of 100% of their profit, thus making them a zero-profit entity in the UK and not liable to UK tax, which is obviously a scam and should be legislated against).
But if you have to do a one-off tax to make things right, that means your everyday tax is slowly cocking things up ALL the time. And how long because the next "one-off" tax?
Exactly.
And the ability to overwrite such a critical file should really be something huge and manual because it's so critical.
I'm also thinking DDoS situations - malware replacing your SSH keys with their own, stopping you logging in at all or adding their public key to all your normal ones granting them a kind of hidden back door.
Sure, they can do all that in other ways, but one way built-into the SSH protocol as an extension is something we can do without.
So, I have to trust a server to automatically replace a trusted key with a new trusted key.
Yeah, this is the type of thing I'll try when it's been in the code for five, ten years.
I'm perfectly sure, as a mathematician, that you can use some kind of secure exchange to make this work but - fuck - I won't be trusting implementations of it for a while.
Isn't this exactly the sort of thing that, half-assed, will generate security problems for years to come and yet still seems to be outside the SSH protocol and has to be a custom extension? Is there an RFC for this?
Sorry but as far as I'm concerned key management shouldn't be a part of the process that's handling connection authentications, etc. Why can't this be an outside protocol entirely? For decades, we've been waiting for some kind of automated decentralised, anonymised key-store and surely the effort going into securing this very dangerous piece of code would have been better put into moving the problem away from SSH and allowing multi-protocol use of such things.
No, I may have mistyped because I'm lazy, but I only work in "Mbps" being bits. When you want to talk bytes, I use "MB/s" like everyone else has does for years. Pedantry over the captialisation only came later. Generally, nobody states in "MBps" and means bytes or "Mb/s" and means bits.
ALL numbers in my post? Mbits. Fuck multiply by 8 if you want and it's still - on average - worse than the 4G on my phone in the same area, but that's NOT the number I'm getting.
And if Gigabit is already commodity hardware at home, and bog-standard small business switches are built with 48 ports of Gigabit plus whatever backbone for a few hundred quid for the last ten years, what do you think serious ISPs and datacentres have been using all that time for, say, leased line and stuff.
Of course it requires upgrades but they would need to have been a generation ahead since the start and kept replacing or they would not be able to handle anything.
BT are a telecoms company. They handle the international fibres for the UK and all kinds of stuff. Internal switching on their networks must be fantastic already, even if our end-user experience is shit.
If you're not on Gigabit already, I'll be surprised.
Even basic cheap laptop wireless, smartphone wireless and wireless routers are in the, what? 300Mbps or so range? Two or three of those and you can flood a Gigabit connection.
You would need a new router with BT anyway, because it's a new protocol. And then you'd need to throw away the BT router and buy a real one after the first week when you read how crap and insecure they are.
But there are £200 routers on the market that have triple WAN failover (including USB 3G/4G) with VoIP, VPN, wireless, and Gigabit switches built-in.
And networks have an even easier problem. Buy one Gigabit port and push all your dozens / hundreds of users over it who almost certainly all have Gigabit ports anyway. Bottleneck before you even start. And if you don't have at least a Gigabit network backbone and 100Mbps to the desktop, you are technically worse than every primary school I've worked in in the last 15 years.
More likely is that your webfilter/VPN will struggle to process that amount of traffic, but it's unlikely if you've bought anything half-decent. The last VPN/Firewall I saw that couldn't handle more than 100Mbps was an old Netgear thing about the size of a pack of cards that was so old it refused almost all modern browsers thinking they were Netscape.
Er... crap.
I have a street strewn with telegraph poles. My parents live in a streeet strewn with telegraph poles. So does almost everyone I know. Most of those people live in London, for a start, and it's not limited to just there.
Fuck knows where you live but if you don't have pole at the end of your street with cables going to each house, I'm guessing it's a new build estate (which are in the minority compared to, say, 30's/40's/50's/60's houses).
However, what you might mean is that those poles will feed the cables from each house down to a green box which may have some kind of fibre/copper backbone that goes under the street. But it's still copper... FTTC hasn't arrived in many places.
But if you live in a UK town and are more a few hundred metres from a telegraph pole, I'd be surprised.
Slashdot are posting what The Register posted two days ago, so I'll post the same comment I posted there two days ago:
I work for a UK school.
BT took nearly TWO YEARS to get a leased line to us. They were blocked from completion after we cancelled the contract because they said there was a 20th delay because "there's not enough room in the duct" followed by "there's not enough room at the exchange". You'd have thought someone might notice in two years that you had no room, eh?
We cancelled because, despite wonderful promises, prices and speeds, we never actually managed to get the line into the building.
In the meantime, I'm running a school for 400 kids on a VDSL line with ADSL backup which BT promise me can get "45Mbps" and "20Mbps" at best, respectively. Funny. Because my Smoothwall says we've never pushed more than 10Mbps for a fraction of a second and the average over the working day - with 500 users and 600 devices - is somewhere around 4MBps down and 1MBps up..
BT can make all the "maximum" speed promises they want. If you can't get it installed, or the actual download is so much less than the maximum, it's pointless. Absolutely pointless.
Ironically, I get 32Mbps download on 4G when sitting in the IT Office. If only 4G didn't have such pathetic data allowances.
Ever tried to plug an iPhone into a PC?
Lightning USB connectors only, and you have to install iTunes to do anything like sensible data transfer.
Criminals gaining entry to an ATM after blasting a huge hole in it? Not really the kind of thing the everyday guy has to worry about.
I mean, you've got to linger by an ATM for a while, cause a huge blast, then get round the back, gather the exploded money, etc. If you're prepared to do that, you'll find any number of ways of going that far anyway.
And in the UK, ATM's are everywhere - in shops, post offices, out in the street, etc. You can't protect them all. There are no really "secure" ATMs here - not in location or design.
You just make it so that they have to do all this to hopefully draw attention. But you can't protect against every attack.
I see where you went wrong.
You're trying to apply logic to religion.
Someone needs to signal you a false-start before you go any further than that.
Can anyone ever remember an instance where a company pulled out of something because it went against their ethos? I can't think of one.
Every time it's something like censorship, or threats to pull out of a certain market, etc. it's NEVER happened, and they always end up compromising their principles for the sake of sales.
I get that's what business is supposed to do, but it just means I automatically ignore ANY such attempt at pretending a company can have an ethos at all.
Just for once, I'd love to see a company, especially a tech company that espouses its freedom credentials as a selling point, to say "No, sorry, we can't do that, we'll just have to stop doing business with them". Can you imagine if Facebook just turned itself off in Turkey? Surely the uproar alone would mean that it would come in a less-censored form?
I just can't think of an instance where a company refused business because it was morally right to do so (possible exception - supposedly - of The Co-Operative in the UK but are they are company or a co-operative?).
"update"... I think he means he went from one to the other, I'm assuming MS put out Windows Updates to 10 just the same as anything else? But I could be wrong.
However, even so, in the world of UEFI, GPT, etc. why the fuck does Windows still stomp over the boot sector as if it owns it? Add your partitions, mark yourself as active, put an entry in the UEFI if you find it. Otherwise, stop. You don't need to overwrite the boot sector if you've got that far because it worked well enough to boot your installer! And anyone installing non-standard boot sectors will be smart enough to just add your partition in as an option to boot from.
There is no conclusive evidence that there even exists such a thing as interplanetary travel for a life-form. We've barely touched the moon ourselves.
Now, granted, the acceleration from the beginning of the last century to the Moon-missions was extraordinary. But since then, if anything our acceleration has slowed to an absolute crawl. The expense of a simple one-off mission that we've already done several times just isn't viable any more.
Now, consider, that you could get to Mars. It'd take decades of planning, travel, etc, but you could get there. That's the nearest planet.
Now don't consider distance, etc. necessarily. Consider resources. Now you have to find the time, money, resources, engineering, etc. in order to make fuel to make the next jump. That's not easy at all. Hell, Mars is being talked of as one-way at the moment. And if we got to there, to get to Jupiter would take even more resources, energy, etc. Now there are ways and means to cheat this, but they are slow, and not capable of sustaining human life along the way at the moment.
But let's say, on every planet we visit, we find a ready-built space-base with fuel and oxygen enough to get to the next planet. We land, breed like fuck, and it only takes 20 years - doing nothing else - to plan, fuel, and travel on to the next. That's nearly two centuries before you're heading out of solar system. And you're unlikely to be overtaken at any point, even if Earth finds an energy source 10 times more powerful in that time.
Asteroids - even less resources, even harder to land on, even more difficult to colonise. Let's say we fire out probes all the time we're doing this (ignore where the resources for these probes comes from).
The next star is 8 light years away. Let's assume every star is that far away from the next, every star has the same kind of planetary system, etc. It's going to take several centuries to get to the first. Several millennia to traverse a handful. Meanwhile, all the probes your sending out will barely hit the next star but let's say they hit 10 stars on the way out, and talk back instantly if they find something. We could cover a few hundreds of stars in that time.
Let's go mad... several millennia of this (we'll stick with c as the limit of physics, but that might obviously change - at that point, we'll reconsider Fermi's Paradox anyway!), and the entire race dedicated to populating a planet, building the infrastructure to convert every resource it has to nothing more than space travel "fuel" (of whatever kind), and their sons move on to the next planet, all the while sending out hundreds of probes. Every few centuries, they go to a new star.
That's, rounding UP, (10^4 years / 2 x 10^1) generations, 10^1 stars per millienia in each direction. The orders of magnitude wouldn't get near 10^8 at all.
Do you realise where that gets you? There are a hundred billion stars just in our galaxy. That's 10^11. It'd take thousands of millennia (millions of years) to do this at stupendous speed across the galaxy, stopping to do nothing else.
No doubt there'd be advances and speed-up, but you're still orders of magnitude in debt before you've colonised a galaxy sufficiently. And then you consider the number of galaxies - That's another 10^11 or thereabouts.
And then you add in real-life, where we aren't just able to do nothing but look for aliens. What you're suggesting is that, even if there was a civilisation just a few stars away from us (incredibly unlikely given what we can see), it'll take anywhere from centuries to millennia to discover them. Assuming speed-of-light all the way, and communicating with probes all the way, etc. it'll take longer than man has so far existed in a form capable of doing such things to actually make any kind of contact if only, say, 1% of the galaxy is habitable.
The numbers just get more ridiculous after that.
Now, of course, we're limited by our current knowledge. But that's the point. Our current knowledge says t