Forget the self-promotion concept, since that hasn't answered the question for you. If you are looking for an answer when you don't know what the question is, then you are starting from the wrong end.
You have two options:
1. Find out what questions people are asking that you can answer. What would be useful to other people? It's a bit like giving a presentation. Don't prepare a stack of slides until you know what questions your audience wants answered. Then tell them what they want to know, not what you think they ought to be told. The world would be a better place if most communication followed this principle.
2. Or take the opposite approach, and do it entirely for your own benefit and stop worrying about communicating to other people. What would you find useful/gratifying/amusing to have on your website? My own website consists entirely of what I want on it. I don't care if anyone or no one else visits it and finds it useful or interesting.
One, perhaps overlooked, benefit of fax is that if the paper went through the sending machine successfully, then you can be certain that the fax was received at the other end. (Barring of course schoolboy errors such as faxing the blank side of the paper...)
I've lost count of the number of times I've failed to get a reply to an email, and then wondered whether my message didn't get through, or perhaps the reply was stopped by a spam filter or something, or maybe I should just wait a bit longer...
I think you've misunderstood. Apart from some questions about early trials by BT, the Phorm system inserts customised advertisments only where the site owner has requested them. It won't insert advertisments into pages served up by owners who don't want Phorm advertisments. There won't be any Phorm advertisments (or any other for that matter) appearing on my personal website, or any other websites that I maintain.
No, the real objections most people have to Phorm are:
1. It spies on information that is private to the client and the server.
2. It degrades the web by causing every HTTP request to go through a series of redirects before getting to its final destination.
In fact, even if you do set the Phorm 'opt out' cookie on all browsers/devices/profiles that you use in your house, all of you HTTP requests still go through multiple redirects before getting to the intended destination.
If your ISP implements Phorm, then there is no way of opting out of having your HTTP requests being directed through Phorm's servers before finally redirecting back to the server you wanted in the first place.
All that the 'opt out' cookie does is to stop them serving up customised advertisments. You still have all your HTTP requests going through their servers. There is no way to avoid this, other than to change ISP.
I do hope the above is incorrect. Sadly I'm pretty sure it is accurate.
they take the feature set of the most expensive laptop and start there as a base point... [but] the actress had two requirements: a 17 inch screen and a sub thousand dollar price.
So the MacBook doesn't qualify. But there is a difference between expensive and poor value.
What this review did was perfectly correct - they baselined the specification and compared prices of similar machines. Any other way and you just get into pointless value judgements about whether this feature or that feature is worth the extra spondulicks. Well, is it worth it to you?
No one argues that people can make choices. That would be, at least, "soft free will". Hard free will is that ability to make choices without contraints of the physical laws of the universe.
Well, if you define hard free will as requiring that the choices are made without constraints of the physical laws of the universe, you either beg the question that the universe is non-deterministic, or you declare that hard free will doesn't exist.
But as I argued at the beginning of my post, a non-deterministic or 'hard' free will has severe problems of its own - can 'randomness' really be called either free or a will? I want my free will to be rational; to be determined by my own history and current beliefs. So I'd certainly reject the idea of hard free will, at least as you define it, even if we could find some scientific basis for it.
The freedom that comes from MacKay's Logical Indeterminacy argument is no more than the idea that 'my future is not (logically) inevitable for me', even if it could be proven to be inevitable from someone else's point of view. I quite understand that some people may not find this a strong enough criterion for free will. This of course brings us back to your question: What is free will anyway?
Of course you are right of course that if an external supernatural entity were interacting with the universe in a way that broke the normal pattern of nature that we call physical laws, then the effect would appear to be non-deterministic. This follows because the actions of the supernatural entity would be an external cause rather than an internal cause, and so could not be included in our deterministic model of the universe.
However, I don't see how this helps with the problem of free will. To my way of thinking, my will is free only if I both own and control it. If the 'free' part is attributed to the intervention of a supernatural entity, then it isn't mine anymore.
Even if we attribute the 'free' part to a supernatural thing called a soul that is part of me, then I still don't see how that helps. It just pushes the problem sideways; now we have to answer the question "where does the soul's free will come from"? Is it determined by causes that originated in me and my life history (so it is essentially deterministic), or does it come from something external that is not part of me (so I don't own it), or is it random (so I don't control it)?
Implicit in your argument is the assertion that the Mind is deterministic.
No, not at all.
I'm making two separate arguments.
The first was about the difficulty of using non-determinacy as an explanation/model of free will.
The second is saying that in a kind of 'worst case' universe in which there is nothing but pure determinacy, then this so-called logical indeterminacy makes it possible to see how there could nevertheless be something we could call free will. Specifically, an agent is not logically compelled to accept the truth of a prediction of his future, even if it does in fact turn out to be true. If you can accept this as a sufficient criterion of free will, then it follows that free will is possible even in a completely deterministic universe. (It doesn't follow that our universe is deterministic.)
Fascinating stuff. I've recently become interested in Calvinism, which holds (among other things) that we do NOT have a choice in the matter of whether or not to become a Christian...
The practical side of this is, while Christians are still called to proclaim the Gospel because doing so brings glory to God, it's no use trying to convert people to Christianity. Forcing one's religious beliefs on others cannot work, and should never be attempted.
Not trying to convert people definitely doesn't follow from predestination. God may predestine someone to become a Christian through the influence of another Christian that they might meet. In fact I think that is pretty much the rule of how it works. God does the actual converting, but does it by acting through people a great deal of the time.
I have to argue with what seems to me to be a non-sequitur on your last sentence. I don't understand how you jump from trying to convert people to a religion to forcing religious beliefs on people. I'm quite sure that no one can be forced to become a Christian. If becoming a Christian is a matter of the heart, then no form of coercion could possibly work. You could make someone sign a declaration of the Christian faith, but it wouldn't mean a thing if it wasn't backed up by a genuine and willing decision to become a Christian.
Anyway, that's a side issue. My main point is that it doesn't make sense to say that predestination or determinism rules out trying to do X or Y, because the 'trying to do X or Y' might be the very thing that is predestined. What's more, the Logical Indeterminacy argument demonstrates that just because it is predetermined, it doesn't mean that the agent logically has to accept that it will happen.
Whether the universe is deterministic or not does not really have a great deal to say to the free will debate.
The usual argument runs something like this: If the universe is deterministic, then we cannot have free will, because our actions are determined.
The trouble is with this view is that it equates free will with indeterminacy.
By this argument, to have free will there must be some fundamentally unpredictable element that contributes to your will in order to make it free. (If it were predictable then it would not be free, goes the argument.) But saying that something is fundamentally unpredictable is the same as saying that it has no deterministic cause. If that is the case, then the 'free' part of your will must be something that you - your mind - doesn't determine. But if so, then can it really be called your will?
On the other hand, in a purely deterministic universe, some kind of free will could be possible. Donald MacKay came up with a logical argument that demonstrates that there is no prediciton of an agent's future behaviour that could be given to that agent that the agent would be logically compelled to believe.
I think you are spot on comparing computers to appliances several decades ago. My hope is that computers will become much faster booting in the future, just like radio sets etc did.
Having 'instant on' can make a huge difference to the way that we use computers. My laptop has a pretty bullet-proof sleep mode, which means that I can lift the lid, check if I have any email, and close it again in the space of less than ten seconds. That still isn't as good as the half a second it takes to see if the red light on my answerphone is flashing, but it is definitely progress from my previous desktop computer that wouldn't sleep reliably and took at least a minute to become usable. With that machine, I switched it on only when I anticipated using it for the next half hour minimum.
Sleep mode is actually pretty good, but even then you are wasting a small amount of power.
My XP box that I'm using now at work (2 core 2.33 GHz Xeon) boot Windows REALLY fast. It is under 30 seconds to get to the "Ctrl-Alt-Del to login" screen. It's great.
How long does it take your transistor radio to switch on? What about your television? (Unless it is decades old, it is probably two seconds or less.) When you turn on your kitchen tap, how long is it before water starts coming out? What about when you turn the ignition key in your car? Does it churn for 30 seconds before it is ready to drive off? (Well I know some cars do...)
If you think that 30 seconds is fast just because it is a computer, then I think you have really low standards.
but the actual claim is 'up to 30 times faster' which means that for some function it's 30 times faster...
Whenever I see the words up to I always mentally substitute no more than. For example: "No more than 30 times faster", "No more than 25% off", etc. You get the idea.
If more people would do this then the silliness might stop.
he's trying to equalize everyone by lowering the wealthy
No he's not.
First, he didn't release the mosquitoes (although you wouldn't realise that from the summary). Second, they were mosquitoes bred in a laboratory, so were not carriers of malaria.
But that is all completely beside the point.
The point that he demonstrated, rather well it seems, is that we in the west find the idea of us being subjected to the risk of malaria extremely offensive. On the other hand, how many of us are raising a protest about people in developing nations being subject to exactly the same disease?
The real reason that PNG took off on the web is that it supports alpha transparency. Most web developers don't care two hoots about patents; the patent on GIF ran out around five years ago. But alpha transparancy is a big deal.
To persuade me to rip my CDs in Ogg rather than mp3 format, there would have to be some practical advantage. When I first started ripping my CD collection I did some blind listening tests and, much to my surprise, I found that I preferred the sound of tracks encoded as mp3 (LAME --preset standard).
If the data also was encrypted it will probably be impossible to re-create since there always is a level of loss even at recovery. For unencrypted data this may not be a big problem and it can be rectified by hand, but for encrypted data it will upset the whole packet that was encrypted.
which is of course a double-edged sword. I hope you keep good backups...
Two particular things that I noticed is that it is no-longer a peer-to-peer application, and there are plans to increase the quality to 1500Kbps H.264.
If you are seriously interested in freelance web development, there is a great community of like-minded people on A List Apart, quite apart from a vast repository of well-written articles that go way beyond what you've so far asked.
OK, I get it. Given that the event is a natural event, then the natural explanation is much more plausible than the supernatural explanation. I don't have a problem with that, obviously.
Anything observable and measurable is by definition natural and thus can be scientifically tested.
You also need repeatability for something to be scientifically testable.
Assume for the sake of argument that the event related in the Christian Bible in John 2:1-11 (Jesus changes water into wine) actually happened. If so, then it was both clearly observable and measurable. But was it a natural event?
I think most people would agree that if it could not be repeated and if there was no possibility either of trickery or any other explanation in terms of our current scientific knowledge, then we cannot accept it into the body of what we call science. To do so would be pointless anyway, because it would add nothing to our understanding of the patterns that describe the normal operation of the natural world. The best we can do is make a note of what we thought happened and keep watching to see if it ever happens again, and try to spot a pattern.
Of course you can avoid the question in the first place by simply refusing to believe that anything inexplicable and unrepeatable ever happens, but, rather ironcially, that would be unscientific, would it not?
Doesn't "restricted to the realm of science" by definition exclude the supernatural? I thought 'supernatural' was that which is beyond the scope of science.
Anyway, I don't think you can even in-principle prove that something is supernatural. The best you can do is show that our current scientific knowledge cannot be applied to whatever it is.
OK, perhaps if you could somehow show that the 'whatever' is not subject to cause and effect that we could even in-principle observe in any repeatable way, and neither could any statistical analysis be applied to it, then, just then, maybe you could reasonably claim that the 'whatever' is forever outside the scope of science. Would this amount to proof? I doubt it.
The 9 dB figure quoted is the signal to noise margin. With adaptive rate ADSL (maxDSL) the DSLAM and modem negotiate a target noise margin, and sync at whatever speed is necessary to achieve this.
The target noise margin starts off at 6 dB. If this results in an unstable connection then the target gets increased, first to 9 dB, and then to 12 dB, and finally to 15 dB.
So 9 dB is really not that bad. It means that the quality of your line varies a bit, but not too much. The more your line quality varies, the higher the target noise margin that is automatically set.
The point of having a higher target noise margin is that when the line quality deteriorates after the modems have synced and the noise margin drops, it wont drop as far - that is - it starts from a higher value.
As the noise margin drops, first of all error correction kicks in. That can correct a certain amount of data corruption. As the noise margin drops further the error correction becomes inadequate and some packets get dropped because they contain uncorrectable errors.
Once the line starts dropping packets then the data transfer speed plummets because those packets have to be requested again. Soon you reach the point where even a simple text-only web page takes several minutes to load, or just times out.
Eventually as the noise margin approaches zero, the modem loses sync. At this point it will probably resync automatically, but this time at a much lower rate in order to re-establish the original target noise margin. If this happens regularly then BT's systems will automatically increase your target noise margin to try to prevent this happening as often.
The final insult is that when the modem resyncs at a slower speed, BT's systems reset your 'IP Profile' to match your new sync speed. The IP Profile is effectively a cap on the data rate (not the sync speed).
Note that this adjustment to your IP Profile happens immediately when your modem resyncs slower, but not when your modem resyncs faster. In the latter case your line has to remain stable at the higher speed for five days before BT will put your IP Profile back up.
With fixed-rate ADSL it is a little different. There is no target noise margin - the modem just connects at the fixed speed and the noise margin you get is just whatever it happens to be. Fixed rate doesn't do error connection so it generally needs a higher noise margin than adaptive rate to avoid retransmissions. But the good news is that there is no IP profile rate cap, so when a period of poor line performance ends your download speeds will recover immediately.
One penalty per 10000 drivers is near 100 per cent compliance in my book.
And what was the compliance rate before hand?
My point is that 1 penalty in 10000 drivers is near 100 per cent compliance. To be specific, it is 99.99 per cent. Thus the evidence backs up my previous assertion, which was questioned.
Given this, it is easy to believe that the cameras are not a generator of revenue for the authorities. The final quote I took from the Times article also confirms this.
It's not often that I have such clear evidence to back up something I wrote on Slashdot. Make the most of it;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Forget the self-promotion concept, since that hasn't answered the question for you. If you are looking for an answer when you don't know what the question is, then you are starting from the wrong end.
You have two options:
1. Find out what questions people are asking that you can answer. What would be useful to other people? It's a bit like giving a presentation. Don't prepare a stack of slides until you know what questions your audience wants answered. Then tell them what they want to know, not what you think they ought to be told. The world would be a better place if most communication followed this principle.
2. Or take the opposite approach, and do it entirely for your own benefit and stop worrying about communicating to other people. What would you find useful/gratifying/amusing to have on your website? My own website consists entirely of what I want on it. I don't care if anyone or no one else visits it and finds it useful or interesting.
One, perhaps overlooked, benefit of fax is that if the paper went through the sending machine successfully, then you can be certain that the fax was received at the other end. (Barring of course schoolboy errors such as faxing the blank side of the paper...)
I've lost count of the number of times I've failed to get a reply to an email, and then wondered whether my message didn't get through, or perhaps the reply was stopped by a spam filter or something, or maybe I should just wait a bit longer...
You're joking right? Where do you think most spam comes from, distributed denial of service attacks, identity theft, etc? hint
I think you've misunderstood. Apart from some questions about early trials by BT, the Phorm system inserts customised advertisments only where the site owner has requested them. It won't insert advertisments into pages served up by owners who don't want Phorm advertisments. There won't be any Phorm advertisments (or any other for that matter) appearing on my personal website, or any other websites that I maintain.
No, the real objections most people have to Phorm are:
1. It spies on information that is private to the client and the server.
2. It degrades the web by causing every HTTP request to go through a series of redirects before getting to its final destination.
3. It spoofs cookies on the client's machine.
In fact, even if you do set the Phorm 'opt out' cookie on all browsers/devices/profiles that you use in your house, all of you HTTP requests still go through multiple redirects before getting to the intended destination.
If your ISP implements Phorm, then there is no way of opting out of having your HTTP requests being directed through Phorm's servers before finally redirecting back to the server you wanted in the first place.
All that the 'opt out' cookie does is to stop them serving up customised advertisments. You still have all your HTTP requests going through their servers. There is no way to avoid this, other than to change ISP.
I do hope the above is incorrect. Sadly I'm pretty sure it is accurate.
So the MacBook doesn't qualify. But there is a difference between expensive and poor value.
What this review did was perfectly correct - they baselined the specification and compared prices of similar machines. Any other way and you just get into pointless value judgements about whether this feature or that feature is worth the extra spondulicks. Well, is it worth it to you?
Exactly - although whether this is an 'illusion' or not depends very much on your definition of free will.
Well, if you define hard free will as requiring that the choices are made without constraints of the physical laws of the universe, you either beg the question that the universe is non-deterministic, or you declare that hard free will doesn't exist.
But as I argued at the beginning of my post, a non-deterministic or 'hard' free will has severe problems of its own - can 'randomness' really be called either free or a will? I want my free will to be rational; to be determined by my own history and current beliefs. So I'd certainly reject the idea of hard free will, at least as you define it, even if we could find some scientific basis for it.
The freedom that comes from MacKay's Logical Indeterminacy argument is no more than the idea that 'my future is not (logically) inevitable for me', even if it could be proven to be inevitable from someone else's point of view. I quite understand that some people may not find this a strong enough criterion for free will. This of course brings us back to your question: What is free will anyway?
Of course you are right of course that if an external supernatural entity were interacting with the universe in a way that broke the normal pattern of nature that we call physical laws, then the effect would appear to be non-deterministic. This follows because the actions of the supernatural entity would be an external cause rather than an internal cause, and so could not be included in our deterministic model of the universe.
However, I don't see how this helps with the problem of free will. To my way of thinking, my will is free only if I both own and control it. If the 'free' part is attributed to the intervention of a supernatural entity, then it isn't mine anymore.
Even if we attribute the 'free' part to a supernatural thing called a soul that is part of me, then I still don't see how that helps. It just pushes the problem sideways; now we have to answer the question "where does the soul's free will come from"? Is it determined by causes that originated in me and my life history (so it is essentially deterministic), or does it come from something external that is not part of me (so I don't own it), or is it random (so I don't control it)?
No, not at all.
I'm making two separate arguments.
The first was about the difficulty of using non-determinacy as an explanation/model of free will.
The second is saying that in a kind of 'worst case' universe in which there is nothing but pure determinacy, then this so-called logical indeterminacy makes it possible to see how there could nevertheless be something we could call free will. Specifically, an agent is not logically compelled to accept the truth of a prediction of his future, even if it does in fact turn out to be true. If you can accept this as a sufficient criterion of free will, then it follows that free will is possible even in a completely deterministic universe. (It doesn't follow that our universe is deterministic.)
Not trying to convert people definitely doesn't follow from predestination. God may predestine someone to become a Christian through the influence of another Christian that they might meet. In fact I think that is pretty much the rule of how it works. God does the actual converting, but does it by acting through people a great deal of the time.
I have to argue with what seems to me to be a non-sequitur on your last sentence. I don't understand how you jump from trying to convert people to a religion to forcing religious beliefs on people. I'm quite sure that no one can be forced to become a Christian. If becoming a Christian is a matter of the heart, then no form of coercion could possibly work. You could make someone sign a declaration of the Christian faith, but it wouldn't mean a thing if it wasn't backed up by a genuine and willing decision to become a Christian.
Anyway, that's a side issue. My main point is that it doesn't make sense to say that predestination or determinism rules out trying to do X or Y, because the 'trying to do X or Y' might be the very thing that is predestined. What's more, the Logical Indeterminacy argument demonstrates that just because it is predetermined, it doesn't mean that the agent logically has to accept that it will happen.
Whether the universe is deterministic or not does not really have a great deal to say to the free will debate.
The usual argument runs something like this: If the universe is deterministic, then we cannot have free will, because our actions are determined.
The trouble is with this view is that it equates free will with indeterminacy.
By this argument, to have free will there must be some fundamentally unpredictable element that contributes to your will in order to make it free. (If it were predictable then it would not be free, goes the argument.) But saying that something is fundamentally unpredictable is the same as saying that it has no deterministic cause. If that is the case, then the 'free' part of your will must be something that you - your mind - doesn't determine. But if so, then can it really be called your will?
On the other hand, in a purely deterministic universe, some kind of free will could be possible. Donald MacKay came up with a logical argument that demonstrates that there is no prediciton of an agent's future behaviour that could be given to that agent that the agent would be logically compelled to believe.
There's a reasonable explanation by Dennis l Feucht that Google has just thrown up for me.
I think you are spot on comparing computers to appliances several decades ago. My hope is that computers will become much faster booting in the future, just like radio sets etc did.
Having 'instant on' can make a huge difference to the way that we use computers. My laptop has a pretty bullet-proof sleep mode, which means that I can lift the lid, check if I have any email, and close it again in the space of less than ten seconds. That still isn't as good as the half a second it takes to see if the red light on my answerphone is flashing, but it is definitely progress from my previous desktop computer that wouldn't sleep reliably and took at least a minute to become usable. With that machine, I switched it on only when I anticipated using it for the next half hour minimum.
Sleep mode is actually pretty good, but even then you are wasting a small amount of power.
How long does it take your transistor radio to switch on? What about your television? (Unless it is decades old, it is probably two seconds or less.) When you turn on your kitchen tap, how long is it before water starts coming out? What about when you turn the ignition key in your car? Does it churn for 30 seconds before it is ready to drive off? (Well I know some cars do...)
If you think that 30 seconds is fast just because it is a computer, then I think you have really low standards.
(I know this wasn't the main point of your post.)
Whenever I see the words up to I always mentally substitute no more than . For example: "No more than 30 times faster", "No more than 25% off", etc. You get the idea.
If more people would do this then the silliness might stop.
No he's not.
First, he didn't release the mosquitoes (although you wouldn't realise that from the summary). Second, they were mosquitoes bred in a laboratory, so were not carriers of malaria.
But that is all completely beside the point.
The point that he demonstrated, rather well it seems, is that we in the west find the idea of us being subjected to the risk of malaria extremely offensive. On the other hand, how many of us are raising a protest about people in developing nations being subject to exactly the same disease?
Hypocrites, all of us. Shame on us.
The real reason that PNG took off on the web is that it supports alpha transparency. Most web developers don't care two hoots about patents; the patent on GIF ran out around five years ago. But alpha transparancy is a big deal.
To persuade me to rip my CDs in Ogg rather than mp3 format, there would have to be some practical advantage. When I first started ripping my CD collection I did some blind listening tests and, much to my surprise, I found that I preferred the sound of tracks encoded as mp3 (LAME --preset standard).
which is of course a double-edged sword. I hope you keep good backups...
There is much more information on the BBC Internet Blog.
Two particular things that I noticed is that it is no-longer a peer-to-peer application, and there are plans to increase the quality to 1500Kbps H.264.
If you are seriously interested in freelance web development, there is a great community of like-minded people on A List Apart, quite apart from a vast repository of well-written articles that go way beyond what you've so far asked.
OK, I get it. Given that the event is a natural event, then the natural explanation is much more plausible than the supernatural explanation. I don't have a problem with that, obviously.
You also need repeatability for something to be scientifically testable.
Assume for the sake of argument that the event related in the Christian Bible in John 2:1-11 (Jesus changes water into wine) actually happened. If so, then it was both clearly observable and measurable. But was it a natural event?
I think most people would agree that if it could not be repeated and if there was no possibility either of trickery or any other explanation in terms of our current scientific knowledge, then we cannot accept it into the body of what we call science. To do so would be pointless anyway, because it would add nothing to our understanding of the patterns that describe the normal operation of the natural world. The best we can do is make a note of what we thought happened and keep watching to see if it ever happens again, and try to spot a pattern.
Of course you can avoid the question in the first place by simply refusing to believe that anything inexplicable and unrepeatable ever happens, but, rather ironcially, that would be unscientific, would it not?
Doesn't "restricted to the realm of science" by definition exclude the supernatural? I thought 'supernatural' was that which is beyond the scope of science.
Anyway, I don't think you can even in-principle prove that something is supernatural. The best you can do is show that our current scientific knowledge cannot be applied to whatever it is.
OK, perhaps if you could somehow show that the 'whatever' is not subject to cause and effect that we could even in-principle observe in any repeatable way, and neither could any statistical analysis be applied to it, then, just then, maybe you could reasonably claim that the 'whatever' is forever outside the scope of science. Would this amount to proof? I doubt it.
The 9 dB figure quoted is the signal to noise margin. With adaptive rate ADSL (maxDSL) the DSLAM and modem negotiate a target noise margin, and sync at whatever speed is necessary to achieve this.
The target noise margin starts off at 6 dB. If this results in an unstable connection then the target gets increased, first to 9 dB, and then to 12 dB, and finally to 15 dB.
So 9 dB is really not that bad. It means that the quality of your line varies a bit, but not too much. The more your line quality varies, the higher the target noise margin that is automatically set.
The point of having a higher target noise margin is that when the line quality deteriorates after the modems have synced and the noise margin drops, it wont drop as far - that is - it starts from a higher value.
As the noise margin drops, first of all error correction kicks in. That can correct a certain amount of data corruption. As the noise margin drops further the error correction becomes inadequate and some packets get dropped because they contain uncorrectable errors.
Once the line starts dropping packets then the data transfer speed plummets because those packets have to be requested again. Soon you reach the point where even a simple text-only web page takes several minutes to load, or just times out.
Eventually as the noise margin approaches zero, the modem loses sync. At this point it will probably resync automatically, but this time at a much lower rate in order to re-establish the original target noise margin. If this happens regularly then BT's systems will automatically increase your target noise margin to try to prevent this happening as often.
The final insult is that when the modem resyncs at a slower speed, BT's systems reset your 'IP Profile' to match your new sync speed. The IP Profile is effectively a cap on the data rate (not the sync speed).
Note that this adjustment to your IP Profile happens immediately when your modem resyncs slower, but not when your modem resyncs faster. In the latter case your line has to remain stable at the higher speed for five days before BT will put your IP Profile back up.
With fixed-rate ADSL it is a little different. There is no target noise margin - the modem just connects at the fixed speed and the noise margin you get is just whatever it happens to be. Fixed rate doesn't do error connection so it generally needs a higher noise margin than adaptive rate to avoid retransmissions. But the good news is that there is no IP profile rate cap, so when a period of poor line performance ends your download speeds will recover immediately.
Now, what was the question?...
My point is that 1 penalty in 10000 drivers is near 100 per cent compliance. To be specific, it is 99.99 per cent. Thus the evidence backs up my previous assertion, which was questioned.
Given this, it is easy to believe that the cameras are not a generator of revenue for the authorities. The final quote I took from the Times article also confirms this.
It's not often that I have such clear evidence to back up something I wrote on Slashdot. Make the most of it ;-)