Re: Isn't this... Hercules?
so, to further explain your comment, why were the Hercules references removed?
1848 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Oct 2010
"The situation in practice isn't much different with US-owned companies ..."
But you fail to see the basic problem. China - bad, pseudo-democratic, spies on the rest of world and its own citizens. US - good, pseudo-democratic, spies on the rest of world and its own ... I guess my argument fails ...
As for the UK - like a good cat, we just work for whoever feeds those with noses in the trough, whichever autocracy they run.
Is any web application legally allowed to interrogate a users machine to identify running software, potentially report back and store that information and then take actions based on that report?
That feels like a basic invasion of privacy unless the user has given express consent for that application to perform such a search.
I feel if I wrote an app that interrogates you machine and reported its content to www.an.other.com there would be a crowd with pitchforks outside my door ... and rightly so. It feels wrong that YT, as a delivery service, should even be able to identify such apps running downstream, however close they are to the browser ...
In the UK, as I read the rules, Youtube is subject to OfCom's rules on advertising.
Watch advert lengths compared to the "programme" lengths. The maximum time according to OfCom rule 1.1.2B is 12 minutes per hour of delivery (15 seconds per minute of actual video). Any more than that and they can be reported for violation of broadcasting rules. As they are basically insisting on advertising ("monetisation") during the video to keep the algorithm happy, this could be argued to be part of that 12 minutes per hour so should be added to the obvious advertising streams ... get your stopwatches out!
ITV X streaming is currently getting reported over this as (for instance) their "news service" may often deliver 1.5minutes of advert before a 1 minute article ...
Reporting may or may not be a waste of effort but it feels like putting a dent in their armour ...
Two possibilities for a mission (excluding one involving potatoes):
1) send a ship with a rover which trundles around and takes samples which it drops on the floor as it goes. Send a second mission with a rover that trundles around searching for, collecting and stowing these samples, returns full driven journey to a launch vehicle ... Or
2) send a mission which trundles around and collects samples. Send a second mission to collect the sample container (human or machine) from wherever the rover finished up, return via a launch vehicle.
It always seemed to me that the requirement to land and operate a second autonomous collector rover immediately increased costs and complexity massively for no good reason.
There was far more than a passing comment concerning Autonomy's accounts (allegedly).
The world of stock markets is based on statistics, opinions and whispers and, occasionally, facts. That's why there are laws concerning financial declarations that obfuscate the facts.
I thought that but it appeared that the trajectory of the vehicle (what was left of it) took it a good distance from the pad, yet the pad infrastructure was well alight. My guess is that the significant "anomaly" occurred almost at launch rather than after liftoff, probably with the 2nd stage liquid fuel system. Perhaps a few tons of fuel dumped on the pad and a major imbalance of the vehicle would be less than optimal ...
If there was only a way of installing security/driver updates in Win 7 (or even win10 in the future) so many of us would be happy ...
If MS charged $15pa it would make them as much money as their average os lifetime ($100 over 7years perhaps), would be ongoing income and they wouldn't have to employ "coders" to produce awful new crapware ...
How long do you spend in the loo? And no, I don't associate stopping at Waitrose for 30l of fuel with that sort of convenience.
Nozzle selection issues? Been driving for long enough to realise what size and colour my nozzle is.
Much cleaner and safer to refuel - that's a tick. But paying three times the market price for the same electrons as feed my house is not reasonable (before you say it, that includes their charges for that infrastructure too). And just wait for the screams when the 65%(ish) fuel duties currently levied on petrol and diesel is transferred to charger stations ...! This does unfairly hit the less well off, those who live in rented properties, above the ground floor or with no off-road parking who physically or economically can't have chargers fitted to their homes.
People don't realise running a hybrid on stale fuel isn't a good idea. "I haven't filled up for a year" means I'm running of fuel with an no ethanol left, throwing more crap into the atmosphere than a normal engine because of incomplete combustion and varnishing up the internals of the engine ...
Refill a hybrid little and often ...
I failed to notice reference to frogs in the article ...
Were there frogs? Are there frogs? Will there be frogs in future? Did the frogs (if any) formally object to the plan or are they amphibious about it?
What is the total size of the facility in frog leaps?
So little information ...
I could not understand why the designers intentionally collected samples using a rover and left them like breadcrumbs on the surface which necessarily requires a second rover to follow the trail to collect them up for return. The only extra mass to move about is the content of the sample tubes which is not significant. Why not collect, store and recover from the final location of the rover with no requirement for a second rover which would have to travel between 1x and 2x the distance covered by the original ...?
Not exactly an office application though. Will it stop the rotating blue wheel of annoyance or let me type faster, I think not. I agree that for many office applications a 10 year old i3 is more than enough.
It's all the adver-crap piled on top and the insistence that everything heads up a shared piece of wet string that slows stuff down ...
"could potentially be exploited to turn them all on at the same time, causing a sudden drain on the power grid."
This would only be an issue if vehicles were plugged in and actually required charging (otherwise there would be no load). Heaven forbid that owners would actually need to go to work in the morning ...
To be honest, if the grid is that susceptible to load variation I'd not be looking at the chargers but the National Grid resilience plans.
No.
"... lasting years longer meant that extra staff and budget had to be allocated to them" is incorrect.
The beancounters always have the option to kill the mission on the due date. They never "had to" increase the budget or continue to fund the project, the budgetary decision was made to do so.
The only thing to consider is the pressure of a functioning multi-million/billion dollar project being shut down simply for the want of relatively little funding ...
I can't argue against a big company being one of many on a framework for competitive tendering - if it wasn't there you could ask why.
The question, which hasn't been answered, is whether any contracts awarded have *not* be awarded in the economic and professional interest of the taxpayer. If that was to be shown there would be a massive issue to answer for (which they wouldn't do but that's another issue). Otherwise, every politician seemingly has a snout in a trough somewhere ... It's only when the pigman gives them extra feed or obstructs access to the trough that it becomes a problem ...
But we'll end up with the hundreds of auto reloads of the page, pop-unders and pop-ups (from the days when dodgy websites did that) which auto close to not hassle the user ... Each one makes a small amount but a hundred from each visitor soon makes money. And what happens if the page references material on another page - does the live link get charged too? So many holes, so much profit ...
The issue is that it "still could be on the right track" - as it was 20 years ago! 2035 onwards will indicate whether that's still the case or whether we'll be waiting until 2045 to see whether we can both produce commercial quantities of energy and produce it economically, then 2065 before we have half a dozen plants in Europe the with the output of Sizewell ... Can't help feeling that it's an incredible science experiment but will not have a commercial future ...
At the moment, we should be ploughing government money into a bucketload of solar farms where it's sunny, a bucketload of windfarms where it's windy, a bucketload of tidal plants where it's err tidally and some massive interconnects to distribute it across political boundaries.
Assuming good intentions, how this will operate?
Intrinsically repairable products, like portable drills and saws, where manufacturers such as Milwaukee, Dewalt and Hilti did supply *all* parts as spares, are starting to become uneconomic to repair due to supply of only large "modules" which basically make something economically unrepairable. Eg, instead of supplying a battery connector, motor controller, switch and a field winding as individual spares, the entire unit is homologated into a single, expensive spare part (even if the items are physically joined by spade connectors) so, if you only need a £5 switch, you have to buy a £150 "motor assembly" to repair your £99 drill ... I've just replaced an off-the-shelf diode in an LED lighting control unit - about £30 of parts and labour - to fix what is otherwise only available as a £250+vat replacement board from the supplier ...
Where does a consumer's "right to repair" get obstructed by manufacturers "working the system"?
At what point does the license agreement for the suspected update (perpetrator of this behaviour) state that this is a valid thing to do - not only where in the agreement but at what point in time is it presented to the user? Would that be a "fair" or legitimate clause in law? After all, if I wrote a clause for a package that, half way through the "essential security update" said in paragraph 7.6 of a linked license agreement "I will take any data I want from any apps on your machine and save it to my remote server" I believe (and hope) it would be thrown out of court as "unfair terms and conditions" at the very least, a potential violation of the Computer Misuse Act, or GDPR at worst (as I wasn't clearly consenting to that behaviour).
Be an interesting one ... do I feel a visit to an Irish Court coming on?
"all the safety framework"
Since when were crappy plastic trims and decoration safety related? They are small because they've always been small, and smaller now because of all the fluff that Ford will tell you "the customers demand". And yes I can still drive a Fiesta and no, I still can't get my knees under the steering wheel.
"So no, this is not "the holy grail" of anything. If it works, it's just a novel way of doing something, that is already possible, because prosthetics attached to remaining motoric nerves already exist."
I don't think you have *any* idea how significant being able to move an electronic pointer on a screen or move a single physical digit via a brain implant could be to some people ... (which has been attempted in the past but never with long term success). This is not about controlling a prosthetic so you can "fist pump" someone by tapping off existing motoric nerves (your Wiki reference), this is about the fundamental ability to communicate with the outside world or exhibit any physical control at a very basic level.
This is scary technology and has been part of science fiction for decades yet is also the holy grail of human-computer interface design.
Instead of pointlessly criticising Musk because his name is Musk (which I admit is the base line here) why not critique the potential of the technology - all the way from utterly life changing for a paraplegic or someone with MND up to scary when it becomes a cosmetic system so that Taylor Swift can interface with her flock of pet hamsters ...
If it doesn't work it's just another experiment that's failed but if it works it will be a step on the way to the biggest "advance" in computing since the on button was invented.
'... "a resilient and highly accurate system" to search all databases of images the police can access.'
The great bastion of democracy, China, has been doing this successfully for ages with no issues so why shouldn't we? I'm sure Hikvision have a few camera systems they can sell off cheaply.