TechnicalVault

The thing is the moment antifa is mentioned it is most definitely politics. Antifa as a single cohesive organisation doesn't exist, the fact they even considered it might do is a political position. What does exist is radical left organisations some of which cross the legal line, and these can be targeted by mutual legal assistance requests. It'll be interesting to see if anything actually comes of this or it's a damp squib, these groups, esp the more militant anti-capitalist lot have learned to practicing opsec the hard way, e.g. getting nicked.

They do have 3 already and they're building 3 more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_high-voltage_transmiss...

The new one going to France will probably have the most impact initially, the French love to sell their Nuke's surplus capacity. The new British ones by the time they're finished should have access to British's big wind energy generation, much of which will be online at that point.

The reason the test and actually knowing who is likely to develop the disease is useful is that we don't know enough about the early pre-symptomatic stages of Alzheimer's. A lot of research has been focused on purging the plaques which form in the late stages of the disease and thus failed because these seem to be symptomatic rather than causative. The false positives are also very interesting from a research point of view because if someone is testing positive for the disease but it's not progressing this may give us a clue about how to control it.

The other slightly sad fact is that is also quite likely that any curative treatment will need to be started before you start to show symptoms, because the brain has already lost a lot of it's resilience by then.

The selective pressure of a .338 Winchester Magnum, is not to be underestimated.

Funny thing is something similar occurs in lab mice. Where a technician is selecting a mouse for cull the more aggressive mice are more likely to be the ones selected. Problem mice who kill their littermates can ruin experiments.

In the London suburbs you see the grocery delivery vans out and about all day every day. It very much depends on the neighbourhood though, mostly the slightly posh mums or elderly ones ordering.

Or if the job is an outsourceable one that can be provided as a service then they will outsource it to a company overseas and still pay peanuts. The only reason they'll raise wages is if they have to, aka the service cannot be done elsewhere or automated.

The stupidity of the whole thing is that by creating these MiTM servers, they're creating a single point of security failure. Anyone who then compromises one of those servers, can with a little care, trick the entire organisation into downloading compromised executables from what they think is a trusted site.

Also when you're snooping on a conversation between myself or one of my servers and one of your employees you are impersonating me and intercepting my communications too! I did not sign your AUP to agree to this. Also if I happen to be in a two-party consent state at the time, and you're intercepting a VoIP call/Teams/Zoom with me, that's a crime.

It doesn't help what we've designed a rather silly academic system where principal investigators are forced to spend a good deal of their time thinking where they'll be applying for their next grant. We also optimise the system for short term thinking rather than long games. There are some exceptions in research institutes but I think young people are the ones who have the clearest minds because of it.

It creates a nasty precedent doesn't it? If Apple can provide the UK government with foreign data, what's to stop Russia or China making them provide data on UK minister's phones, or more likely dissidents in exile? I can't see on what basis the government thinks they're going to get to be exceptional here?

The actual problem is upstream of that at the abiogenesis stage.

For evolutionary selection to occur the machinery for selection must exist. Specifically information storage (DNA/RNA), replication(polymerases) and actioning (transcription) all are needed, and must continue to be able to exist for long enough to matter.

Without selection pressure and inheritance you're just left with requiring a big enough universe and enough time for randomness not to matter.

The whole MITM just makes me deeply uncomfortable, it's introducing a single point of trust with the keys to the kingdom. If I want to log what someone is doing, I do it server side e.g. some kind of rsyslog. That way I can leverage existing log anomaly detection systems to pick up and isolate the server if we detect any bad behaviour.

Less profitable than a comparable gas turbine because it couldn't perform the same grid role of peaker plants. Make no mistake it was gas which killed coal here not wind.

A coal plant even with all of the modern upgrades is and always has been happiest as a baseload generator. It takes about 4-6 hours for a coal plant to come up from cold start, compared to about 5 mins for a gas peaker plant. This means you can use it for planned/predicted grid peaks but you'll have to run during some unprofitable times to do so.

Essentially coal has the same problem as wind, it's producing at the wrong times. If you want it to be really profitable you need pumped storage and batteries to hold that energy for peaks, something we're still short of in the UK.

Swiss banks reject Americans because of US legislation, namely FATCA (https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/tax-policy/foreign-a...) Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act. It's introduced reporting requirements and thus massive costs in having US citizens banking with you, thus it's cheaper to just say no. Rational economic response.

Nah, because the thing is the Russian and US militaries will have their own maps of China anyway. There's a reason the UK's mapping agency retains the historic name of the Ordinance Survey, maps has always been a military thing and they've always retained surveyors.

People confuse a economic recession with what is happening because of how words sometimes change their meaning away from their technical to a more colloquial interpretation. The economy as a whole is doing well, but people aren't because of inflation. Recession is just the word they've learnt to interpret as "I'm feeling poorer".

And the stripper index is down because their market is oversaturated aka "onlyfans overload".

Protectionism buys campaign contributions for your next election. All those companies whose market is protected by a tariff suddenly magically decide to contribute to the politician they asked nicely for it at the next election or they find he flip flops on it.

If you've ever had to organise a scientific study you'll understand why. Privacy and ethics are important but they make recruitment of a large and representative sample for any medical study a nightmare. First you'll need to run your protocol past an ethics board and do back and forth until it's agreed. Once you have that done you'll send out an invite (often blind) in hopes of getting people who fit your study aims and you will get who you get. There are often costs associated with this.

So now you have some willing participants you have to screen your initial group to filter it down to people who actually meet your recruiting criteria and consent them for your study. Finally you actually get to gather your data, if you need people to come in for sampling and have to cover their expenses.

Next you'll look at your data and realise there's some confounding effect which reduces your powers to infer anything (e.g. somehow you overrecruited a particular group and they turn out to do something which correlates with the thing you're studying). You'll cry a little and realise you need to recruit more people to have any statistical power to draw a conclusion.

tldr; medical and scientific studies are hard if you want them to actually have any validity.

Microsoft is pretty pro-Linux these days. I'd say it's some lawyer being overly paranoid.

The irony was that it was a footgun move for them given their demographics. Most young people of voting age are likely to have a driving license, if only so that they can drink. Unfortunately for the Conservatives these folks are unlikely to vote for them. Many old people, on the other hand have no current driving license or passport and are unlikely to carry their expired ID around with them. These were conservative voters, but two trips to the polling both may be a bit much for them.

Depends who your user is. From a desktop side you're probably not going to notice because desktop CPU requirements have been stagnant for years, desktop is all about GPU. On the server side Sapphire Rapids and Emerald Rapids is Intel getting back in the game and the game is power and market share.

See there's only 2 or 3 more obvious generations of obvious die shrinks available. Beyond those generations we'll have to innovate some other way, so whoever grabs the fab market for these modes now gets a longer period to enjoy the fruits of their innovation.

Meanwhile server CPU TDPs are hitting the 400W+ mark and DC owners are looking dubiously at big copper busbars, die shrinks tend to reduce the Watts per Calculation so they're appealing. In the current power market, more efficient computing translates into actual savings on your power bill. There's still demand for better processors, even if we are sweating those assets for 5-7 years now.

Before the 1990's but not anymore. The contaminated blood scandal in the United Kingdom (https://www.infectedbloodinquiry.org.uk/) and a lot of papers showing benefits to avoiding blood loss in the first place have changed practices. We haven't eliminated the use of allogeneic blood transfusions but they're indicated a lot less than they used to be.

Depends what the indication is, for some kinds of trauma the evidence is that transfusions are what will keep the patient alive, e.g. you're dumping pints on the table and it's likely to be contaminated, you can't salvage and reinfuse. However, for pre-planned surgery the evidence suggests avoiding blood loss where you can is the best practice. Studies have also shown that pre-deposit autologous blood donation before surgery is of uncertain benefit so it tends to be contra-indicated in the UK at least.

Before we understood the risks we used to do transfusions a lot more frequently than we do now and this led to a generation of anaesthetists who would basically treat with blood transfusion at the slightest sign of low blood count. More recent studies have suggested that a lower blood count can be tolerated than was previously realised and that you can often get away with guaranteed pathogen free (and much cheaper) volume expanders. There has also been developments in cell salvage to reinfuse suctioned blood and methods to avoid blood loss in the first place.

Medical practice has also changed to reflect this and the changed evidence base, especially given the relative costs (hospital managers love to save money). Hip and knee replacement surgery used to use blood routinely and were almost always done under general anaesthetic, but given we now want to get patients out within a day or two post surgery we do the surgery under spinal block and minimise blood loss as much as we can.

tldr; We still need transfusions for some things but we should be using them less than we do.

Indeed, the quirk of the Westminster system is that parliament can indeed legislate whatever it likes. Parliament can pass a law that the colour orange is now legally the new black.

There is however one detail, what is passed must be internally consistent with other legislation otherwise it will fall at Judicial Review. For example if you want to pass legislation that contravenes the UK's Human Rights Act, you need to include a "notwithstanding" clause to show the courts you intended to override that law.

They could pass a bill to vacate these convictions quite easily but unlike the Buggery Act and Offences Against the Person Act 1828, they still want to be able to prosecute and protect the convictions of a subset of these people who actually did commit false accounting so the legislation is going to need to be more complex.

The funny thing is the increased capacity wasn't necessarily the biggest driver for this upgrade. Part of the selling point to Boris Johnson who was mayor at the time was that he could stick it to the train driver's unions (who were having a big fight with him at the time) by introducing automatic train operation.

The problem with relying on post COVID passenger reductions is that whilst tube numbers are down 20% since COVID that just means they're at the level they were in 2009/10. Even if they don't bounce back fully this year, post COVID working hasn't cut out the peaky nature of tube travel. Even if people work from home Monday and Friday, they'll often all come into the office on Tues-Thurs making peaks on those days.

I agree the demand for capacity on other lines that is even more pressing. Last time I rode the tube regularly was 10 years ago and even then I recall the Victoria line during rush hour was literally cattle class, your face in someone else's armpit. The 2019 numbers put the Northern Central, Jubilee and Victoria lines are well over the 100% mark at peak time. Despite having the highest comparative fares compared to other cities the Tube is still woefully underfunded. There is so much technical debt because much of the system was built in the 1800's and early 20th century. First mover disadvantage, because we got to make all the mistakes.

That is definitely true, we have diaries from folks who lived in the 1600s in London where you have the different reactions to their children dying at different age. They loved and cared for them but with close to a quarter of kids dying in their first year, it was something most families came to expect and experience but that they never completely numb to. When an older child died, it was an even bigger deal because they'd got past that dangerous first few years and you weren't expecting it.

> What you ultimately want is to make sure you're communicating with the correct other party. And the way to achieve this is TLS with certificates, validated via the WebPKI.

The thing is TLS with certificates doesn't always achieve this and we know this because there have been real world successful attacks. E.g. intermediate CA certs being issued to bad actors, certificates for major domains being issued to people who don't control them, etc. The issue with the CA ecosystem is not that they're evil, it's just that they don't validate what regular users expect them to validate and that they are also subject to human error, governmental and commercial pressure.

The more common issue with the validation CA's can perform for DV certs is that it just tells me that you controlled a domain for a given moment in time at some point in the past (pretty much up to a year ago). To fix this we introduced ways to mitigate the vulnerabilities of TLS, watching CT logs for your domains, HSTS, CAA record restrictions. Unfortunately if you do secure your infrastructure in this ways you have added complexity and will likely discover how your infrastructure can break in new and interesting ways too.

Unless they have a power purchase agreement then that would depend entirely on whatever the local grid mix is at the time. Bear in mind researchers aren't usually the ones running the physical facilities in big labs. There will be a whole ops department leading that, folks build a career on that.

One of my favourite reasons for developing on localhost is when I'm curled up in a coffee shop deliberately ignoring the internet so I can finish a specific task. When I do this I don't want to be online, online is full of distractions and context switches. Nobody can message me, nowt can pop up, I can just stay in my hyper focus until this cup of coffee is done and I need refuelling (or to look something up).

If you can understand the equations and engineering needed to build a cruise missile the GPS equations will not daunt you. Getting the final approach to have a useful Circular Error Probable at anything low enough for an assassination would be more of a technical challenge than the coarse guidance. Unless you had someone shining a designator you’d need real-time machine vision. To say nothing of designing an airframe that can perform precision manoeuvres at speed without breaking up.

There is a certain unrealistic arrogance to the US approach to ITAR and software that seems to assume only US Persons could create technology on the list.

GPS receiver systems are the classic there: Russia, China and Europe all have their own GNSS. China runs the semiconductor industry and is quite capable of producing whatever unrestricted GNSS devices they choose. Therefore why restrict US companies?

Same with satellite tech, there may be some US specific tricks but there is a reason ITAR free satellite designs already exist and are multiplying. ITAR tries to protect too much and is killing US market share by being stupidly annoying.