Posts by John Brown (no body)

Re: Problem of evil?

"Would a post-human society capable of creating a simulated universe be as unethical as to allow all this suffering?"

You never played Sim City? Introducing "natural disaster" or conjuring up Godzilla to help clear some old buildings for redevelopment was a useful and "fun" part of it.

Re: All Hail

Maybe our simulation overlords are running Seti@home on the spare processing cycles.

Re: Launch, test, destroy

"I hope all their future sats will also be deorbitable"

That is a license requirement these days. De-orbit or move to a "graveyard" orbit if it's a high flyer. This applies to most sat launches, Russia and China possibly excepted since they tend to ignore "inconvenient" rules. Certainly anyone requiring FCC licenses due to launching from the USA or having a presence in the USA and I'd be surprised if most other launches didn't abide by the same rules or be required to by the host country they launch from.

Re: Fun with magnets.

Reading through the comments, and the reference to the degaussing being used to clear the persistent letters on the display, I was starting to imaging some sort of Etch-a-Sketch display and the "DUNGGggg!" noise was to shake the display and spread the dust properly again :-)

Yeah, those built-in degaussers were scary the first time you came across them. I never saw a display like that, but did come across many 19" or larger colour CRTs used in CAD and process control rooms[*] over the years.

* control room screens were the ones most likely to have screen burn, since they invariably showed, 24/7, a mostly static schematic of the factory/refinery/chemical plant systems with things like kettle temperatures and valve positions.

Re: This is why I'm missing out on a lot of stuff

That's an interesting summary, thanks. It looks like they are all simply "middle-men" buying wholesale and selling retail, with a very few who may some some solar capacity of their own, but the biggest takeaway from that list is that almost all of the regulator-imposed customer transfers from bust retailers is to sellers who are actually in the energy generating business.

Re: This is why I'm missing out on a lot of stuff

If you are referring to the recent ones going bust in the UK, I don't think any of them were actual energy companies. They were little more than marketing and bill collecting agencies. :-)

Re: Device no longer working as sold

"All Amazon is responsible for is delivering the product. Almost nothing they sell is actually made by Amazon, so they aren't on the hook for post sale support any more than Walmart is for the jeans you buy. Are you saying that you think Amazon should be on the hook for stuff they sell but someone else makes?"

If the poster is in the UK or the EU, then yes, the retailer is the one on the hook if they supply faulty goods, so Amazon is responsible for the the stuff they sell as Amazon, but not the other sellers using Amazon as a "fullfilment agent". I'm not sure I can remember[*] the last time I bought something that came with a "manufacturers warranty card" since almost no one ever filled them in and returned them because of the decent consumer protections in place.

* It's entirely possibly I have had some more recently, but since it's basically just waste paper in the package, it would go in the bin/recycling with everything else not required and that info would not be committed to long term memory :-)

Re: Device no longer working as sold

"But, alas, who wants the cost (money, time, stress) of taking them to court over it? And what would you get if you won?"

In the UK, it's the retailer who is on the hook. Most large reputable retailers will refund or replace for an obvious fault in my experience. I'd probably expect them to be less aware of "software faults" such as home automation remoter/cloud server no longer existing and be more reluctant to refund or replace because they don't understand the nature of the fault. Worst case is to go to small claims court, which is fairly cheap and easy to do and in many cases, the defendant won't even turn up and you'll win by default. At that point, the legal system it completely on your side and will enforce payment, even if that requires sending the bailiffs to their HQ.

Re: Someone else's computer

"Something over your head"?

"Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans."

Douglas Adams

Re: Someone else's computer

"Magellan SatNavs with "lifetime" map updates define "lifetime" as three years in the fine print."

Funny you should mention that. I just updated the maps on my Garmin SatNav yesterday. The "lifetime map updates" was included in the price and it was so long ago I can't remember when I bought it. It's at least 10 years old now, possibly as much as 15. Oh, and there was also a firmware update too, so I suppose that must be quite impressive in terms of long term support :-) It did get "confused" a while back due the GPS roll-over so it didn't automatically switch into night mode at the right time and IIRC there were two firmware updates before some sort of s/w workaround came through. When it fails/dies, my experience with Garmin will strongly point me at another Garmin device :-)

Re: Someone else's computer

The problem with the subscription model, in my opinion, is no one has yet managed to come up with a viable and workable micropayments system. There's too many middlemen wanting a percentage cut with a minimum "floor level", so you can't take out a subscription for, say 20p per month, or 1p per usage and similar things we were told would be happening Real Soon Now^(R), or at least that's what I read in the tech press about 20 years ago, and repeated every other year or so since. Those middlemen all want a couple of quid/dollars for processing the payment. Interestingly, I believe the processing charge for using my debit card is 5p per transaction, and that almost certainly includes a profit margin, so ultra-low cost subscription models clearly are possible.

Re: Someone else's computer

You seem to be assuming that a "smart" house of any kind must be controllable remotely by a smartphone while out and about. For many, many people, that simply is not an essential use case. For some it's actually undesirable. If the system running your house is "smart", why do you need to be able to control it? It should be clever enough to work out what you want based on normal activities, whether you are at home or not, how many people are present and in which rooms. There should be no need for remote control except in rare circumstances and especially no need for control by some company hosting a back-end.

Re: "the sudden imposition of subscription fees"

"An essential smart meter install"...very carefully worded to imply that it's compulsory without actually saying so.

I think they are under pressure from Government to deploy them in customers homes and get fined for not meeting targets, so despite them not being compulsory for the end users, they are effectively compulsory from the point of view of the energy suppliers, putting them in an awkward position of having to be lying bastards[*] to meet some random Government target.

And yes, I've had almost the identical experience about once per year for the last few years, including the phone call ending fairly abruptly when I say no thank you :-)

* well, more so than usual, anyway :-)

Re: "the sudden imposition of subscription fees"

"so whatever system they are using to calculate it isn't very accurate!"

Wow! In my experience, whenever they get around to re-assessing my monthly payment, without fail the automated systems over-estimate my usage by a significant margin. Every single time I phone up and suggest the future payments are too high, the person on the phone has a look, agrees and puts it back down to something close to the current payments.

I see from todays news that collectively, the energy supply companies are sitting on over £8B of customers over-payments and some of them, despite the law, are seeming quite reluctant to pay the customers their own money back on request. I've not personally had that issue, but with that amount of free money sitting in energy companies banks, there's probably a fair bit of interest they are making on it too.

Re: Not Google's job here...

In the UK at least, large consumer of energy are usually on contracts whereby they get a discount on their bill in exchange for the energy supplier being able to cut them off or enforce reduced consumption under condition of heavy load.

And while I see your point re. Google, it could depend on what the data centre provides. Just pulling the plug might have much further reaching effects than most people imagine if it's a regional "cloud" supplier for Google Docs etc. That might be cutting off business resources over a multi-State or, in the EU, multi-country customer base, possibly even including those providing emergency or disaster services. We already know from various headlines that Google cloud, AWS and O365 are not as resilient as they would have us believe but still business and government use the services.

You;re right about there being a space junk problem. But there are companies and agencies already spending money on possible solution. What ESA are going ro do is try to get more data on the behaviour of that debris and how it's affected b y space weather so as to better be able to clean it up when the relevant technology is ready. After all, when there's an oil spill, you don't just in and start clean up attempts without getting the best weath forecast you ca, taking note of the shape of the sea floor if it's shallow water and being observant of the water current. The more you know, the more you can adapt your techniques to the prevailing conditions, and whether it's oil spills or space junk, there are multiple different solutions that work better or worse in different conditions.

Re: Answering the Rhetorical Question

"studios promise not to use an actor's work in AI training without the actor's explicit consent."

...and the consent will be given by signing a contract, because it will be a clause in every actors contract unless you are big enough to refuse and they still want you. The vast majority of actors are interchangeable if they are "difficult" and can be easily replaced if they don't consent. After all, that's what actors do. They become different people, that's the whole point of the job, so collective bargaining is pretty much the only power most of them have, so long as they all stick together.

Re: Crazy 1980s movie plot alert!

Oh, the most recent re-make. I thought you meant the original 1914 film :-)

1914, 1921, 1935, 1945. 1985, all the same Brewster name and premise with varying amounts and periods to blow the smaller amount to get the larger amount, generally an amount sounding outrageous to the audience of the time and growing larger with each new remake. But yeah, another re-make would almost certainly be the first to make the leap from millions to billions :-)

Re: Making Twitter less useful every day

"Force people to have copy/paste the URL into a browser"

If I highlight some text with my mouse in firefox and right-click it, I get a context menu which has on option to search the highlighted test on the default (DDG) search engine or, if it's enough like to a URI or FQDN, to open it in a new tab. No need to copy and paste. It's barely more complex than clicking a live link :-)

"T series Thinkpads used to be some of the most repairable laptops around. Not only were parts available, but the repair and maintenance manuals were in the Internet, and for free."

That's still the case, on the whole. I only see enterprise class kit, and most of it is pretty easily repairable, full parts/repair manuals available to all, plenty of Lenvo created videos on YouTube demonstrating the parts replacement process. Where things have changed from the IBM days is primarily in the consumer grade kit and to an extent in the enterprise kir where, for example, on some of the cheaper models the RAM is on the system board, possibly with no expansion SODIMM socket, but most will at least have one SODIMM socket for expansion or all the RAM is SODIMM. Other than that, it's all on the system board except the WLAN, the SSD and maybe, the WiFI card. A few, for design reasons rather than repairability, may have small expansion boards for, eg USB and/or Ethernet. Primarily cost-cutting measures in term of manufacture which, to be fair, they ALL do, so to stay competatve, an OEM pretty much has to follow the crowd whether they want to or not. As for parts repair, when new parts are sent out from Lenov, sometimes they are marked up as factory repairs, so those where it's economic to re-work the board, they already do that. I've never seen Dell or HP parts sent out marked as repaired, but maybe they are just less transparent about that.

Having said that, I'm fairly confident they will not be releasing board schematics and/or any board level components as sparers. Consumer repairs will be pretty much as they are now, replace entire modules, eg system board, battery, LCD panel, SSD, keyboard, maybe RAM and not much else, the assumption being that 99% of consumers will have neither the skills nor kit to replace a broken USB port on a system board. That will remain the job of repair centres. On the other hand, if we are going back to easily replaceable batteries in their phones and tablets, that's good news :-)