TheGrumpyBrit

The infrastructure requirements for electric cars are completely different to traditional fuel stations. Instead of a splash-and-dash when the gauge starts touching the red, people will want to add 10-15 minutes whenever they get the chance. So you'll start seeing charge points cropping up in McDonalds, Costa, and anywhere else where people are parking up anyway.

The simplified infrastructure also makes it an industry where anybody can make money selling electricity. As soon as electric vehicles start becoming suitable replacements for current fleet/company cars, companies will snap them up, because now they can fit charge points for all company cars at the office, and make a little extra money from their employees by charging their cars while they work.

When fleet vehicles are all-electric, demand for petrol will drop by 50% or more within 3-5 years. The reasons above will mean it's not viable for smaller fuel stations to add electric charging, so they'll just die out. Just like we had with 4-Star, petrol will only be available at large supermarkets and motorway services, and the pumps will gradually be replaced with electric charge points.

At that point, even the petrolheads will be taking the electric cars for their day-to-day journeys because it's cheaper and easier. The guzzler will be saved for special occasions, and petrol will move to a delivery model, where you can order a 20l jerry can for £5-10 a litre if you're planning a trip. You'd better hope you don't break down though, because the recovery companies will only carry laptops by this point.

If it goes as planned (which I doubt) then this would destroy basically every outdoor hobby I have. I like to ride vintage motorcycles, and have got my eye on a 30 year old camper van. Most of my weekends are spent camping in some field or other making new friends and socialising with like minded people.

Sure, petrol might still be legal, but with no demand from new vehicles, how long will it continue to be available. It certainly won't be affordable - as soon as a decent proportion of voters are no longer affected by petrol prices, duty will skyrocket.

My personal feeling is that if this is the direction we're going in, we might as well just go the whole hog and outlaw human drivers too. At least that way you get the safety and traffic flow benefits that come with every vehicle on the road knowing what every other vehicle is doing.

Whatever they do, they'll take my bike when they prise it from my cold dead fingers.

OpenTTD is basically Transport Tycoon, with added support for plugins/mods etc. Its actively maintained with a good community following.

Not quite a modern refresh, but theres enough new stuff to keep you going if you haven't played it yet.

It certainly raises an interesting question. The go-to response when anybody discusses brute forcing bitcoin is that the sheer number of possibilities makes finding a collision infinitesimally small. And that's true. Same for .onion certificates.

But Google certainly haven't been attacking this for the last 6,500 years. With a sufficiently obscene amount of resources, it IS feasible to create an index of every possible public/private keypair. It's not profitable to do so just for the purpose of plundering bitcoin wallets, but if you're a government doing it for other reasons, it might be worthwhile.

That comes with all the additional requirements of a technological solution - power, maintenance, reliability etc. A simple barrier will continue to work even after the local kids have tagged it.

It depends on the arrangement too. If you're on a flat rate for being on call, being called out is the worst part. If you only get paid if you get called, being called out kind of makes it worth changing your plans.

I get a small amount for each day I'm on call, plus an extra payment if I'm actually called. That seems a fair balance - I'm compensated reasonably for making myself available, and the actual callout payment makes it worth getting up at 3am a couple of times a year.

In this case, failing to cooperate would almost certainly have led to him being detained as a potential runaway, and returned to his parents, or if he refused to provide any information at all, taken to the police station and turned over to Child Protective Services. In this particular scenario, it seems that cooperating was the best approach.

By all means enforce your rights, but make sure you know your opponents rights too, and choose your battles carefully.

If you're starting from a position where the police can't take any action against you without more evidence, and they need you to provide that evidence, sure. In that case, there may be no benefit to you to cooperating. But that's not where the parent post was.

He was a juvenile, carrying a rucksack, walking alone at 5am. He is already starting from a position of being detained as a potential runaway. His encounter can get better (proving that he's just a birdwatcher and being allowed on his way) or worse (if he's carrying anything he can be arrested for). If he's just carrying a camera and a pair of binoculars, it seems like its worth the risk. The officer has better things to do with his day than ferry around kids who clearly aren't runaways.

The fact that it's a port makes me approach it from the other side.

Since the original code was designed to run on NES, I wonder if these were hacks to work around issues with NES code running on GBA rather than a deliberate consideration to stop people from porting your port.

He didn't search his backpack without consent - he asked for, and was presumably given, consent.

There are certainly scenarios where you should consider the police to be your adversary and enforce every right you have to its fullest extent, but choosing your battles is just as important. The police have far more rights to detain a juvenile compared to an adult, and an unaccompanied 13 year old with a backpack at 5am is out of the ordinary. The officer was already starting from a place with a reasonable assumption that the child may be lost or a runaway, in which case he can probably already take him back home (or to the station for CPS to talk to if he's completely uncooperative).

Allowing a quick search to confirm that you're just pursuing a harmless hobby and are not putting yourself in any danger or likely to be reported missing a couple of hours later, seems like the easiest and fastest way to deal with that particular encounter.

I mean, Trump is UK slang for fart anyway. Between this and his first wife, I'm pretty sure he's doing it on purpose at this point.

Every mail client I've used, including webmail, has blocked external images by default for at least the last decade.

There's a counter argument that in a situation where your wife is in labour and you're stuck at a red light, you made a conscious analysis of the risks and decided that a $100 ticket was an acceptable price to pay to get your wife to hospital in time. You elected to break the law and so the ticket should stand.

There is a statutory defence if you can't identify the driver "using reasonable diligence", but it's a very tough sell. It's certainly not as simple as "Well it could have been me or my wife, but neither of us can remember which." - you'd have to be able to demonstrate what attempts you had made to identify the driver and why these had all been unsuccessful. You are expected to know who is driving your car at a given time.

There was a case which was successfully defended, where the defendant asserted that the "reasonable diligence" requirement only applied after the request was received, and that there was no such requirement for you to retrospectively exercise such diligence. In other words, you must do everything you can to find out who was driving when you receive the notice, but that doesn't mean you have an obligation to keep records of who was driving in anticipation of such a request.

Indeed. There are actually two offences one could commit in such a case: The underlying offence (say, speeding) and failing to provide information requested under S.172 of the Road Traffic Act. The two offences are unrelated in law, being committed at entirely different times (the s.172 offence is committed 30 days after you receive the notice requesting the information) and possibly by different people.

Failure to respond to the request will often lead to a summons to court for both offences, although a successful prosecution for the underlying offence is fairly unlikely as the prosecution will usually be unable to prove who was driving. Additionally, the penalty for failure to provide information is higher than most standard traffic offences, partly as a deterrent and partly to avoid refusing to identify the driver from being the "better" option in all but the worst of circumstances.

There was a loophole for a while whereby you could return the form, correctly filled in but not signed, meaning that you have provided the information, but it is not admissible as evidence in court. This is currently still effective in Scotland. In England, case law has been established such that the form is not valid unless signed, and would usually result in the police placing the defendant firmly in the "smartass" pile and proceeding with a prosecution for failing to provide information. Just lately, police have been increasingly taking the more pragmatic approach of calling the motorists bluff in cases where he nominates himself and the case can be dealt with by way of a training course or a simple fixed penalty. They will often now offer the course or the penalty, and still charge for both offences if the driver elects for the case to progress to court.

I used to really enjoy Adams' blog - he used to be fairly easy to read, conversational, and just controversial enough to be entertaining.

Over the last couple of years though, it seems that he's become obsessed with this whole "master persuader" idea. It made for interesting reading for the first month or so, but it's slowly taken over all of his other content to the point that he now seems afraid to actually express an opinion of his own, instead trying to angle his posts as a "persuasion". He actually seems to be spiralling into madness.

I just checked back and at least he's re-enabled comments now, so maybe there will be some entertaining reading there again (the comments were always the best part).

Netflix/Prime/etc aren't even comparable to a local media library to me. Legal issues aside, a local library can be configured to download the latest episodes of programs I like automatically, and keep an eye out for movies I like the look of, which I can then watch offline at my leisure. Streaming services allows me to browse programs I haven't considered adding to my library, or maybe haven't even heard of, and watch them immediately without having to wait for them to download. They're different use cases for different purposes, and with a few exceptions for hard-to-find stuff that I mostly keep around for nostalgic purposes, streaming is winning. I can't store the programs I want to watch for the cost of a Netflix subscription (a quick calculation shows that it would cost £10 per month in disks alone to fill a 4-bay NAS with 8TB disks, without considering Usenet subscriptions and electricity costs)

I don't believe that's the case here. However, the order given by the Judge in Michaud's case predates the classification of the source code. That gives the prosecutors three choices:

1) Produce the source code. They clearly don't want to do that.

2) Ask the judge to reconsider. While that seems sensible on the face of it, it's not without risk. It's pretty obvious that they've classified the code to prevent it being requested, and judges don't like it when you undermine their authority in such a blatant way.

3) Quietly drop the charges and back away. They can do this with Michaud without impacting other cases, because no other judge can order them to produce the source code.

He was proven guilty. Once you're proven guilty, you're guilty until proven innocent.

I don't find that particularly hard to believe. There's easily 20x more firearms per capita in the US than the UK. US police are routinely armed, while UK armed police are only deployed where a firearm is believed to be involved. The abundance of firearms in the US means that police need to be ready for a potential firearms incident in every encounter with the public.

Of course, the number of unjustified deaths will likely be disproportionately higher simply because all US police have the ability to react to a situation with lethal force. Sadly, as long as guns are as abundant as they are in the US, you'll never reduce that to the same level as the UK.

There's a good reason for that. The NSA don't consider data to be "collected" until it is presented to an employee or processed into a human readable form[1]. This allows them to gloss over all the data they gather in the normal, dictionary definition of the word "collect", as well as ignoring any automated analysis of that data before it's presented to a human.

As far as I can tell, the NSA don't have a term to properly describe gathering and analysis of data which isn't presented to a human for analysis.

[1]: https://fas.org/irp/doddir/dod/d5240_1_r.pdf (Page 15, 2.2.1)

So will just searching for the email while you're logged in. I believe that's expected behaviour.

"This man died of starvation"

"But how is that possible? He's surrounded by fruit!"

But the section of the CCA Ivey is accused of breaching makes no allowance for whether or not any specific game was affected. It requires that the behaviour tends to affect the game, and given that the casino was happy to accommodate all requests and didn't see card rotation as anything more than superstition, I would argue that rotating a card would not tend to affect the game.

Even if it does, there is a specific penalty defined for breaching that section of the CCA, so it's not comparable to the Golden Nugget case.

I would assume it's something like the difference between visiting "facebook.com" and "api.facebook.com"

The actual quote from the judgment is "allowing a player to unilaterally adjust the odds of a casino game in his favor – to any degree - would violate the essential purpose of legalized gambling." - which presumably refers to N.J.S.A 5:12-1(4) [1], which says that legalized gambling is a "tool of urban redevelopment" to "facilitate the redevelopment of existing blighted areas and the refurbishing and expansion of existing hotel, convention, tourist, and entertainment facilities." - In other words, "legalized gambling is supposed to bring money in, not let it out."

[1] http://www.nj.gov/casinos/actreg/act/docs/cca-article01.pdf

The problem is that the jugde is trying to read the case two ways at the same time. Golden Nuggets argument was that a non shuffled deck removes the chance element, therefore the game wasn't governed by CCA at all. If you're pointing at a section of CCA and telling somebody they breached it, then by definition you're saying the game falls under the conditions of that act, and the remedy must therefore also be the one defined in that act (CCA 5:12-115(c) specifies for a $50,000 fine for an individual).

In Baccarat, the only variable is the stake - neither player nor dealer can influence the cards which are drawn, so the result is unchanged. Even if it hadn't been a private table, no other players could possibly have been impacted by Ivey's play. The result can't be determined or changed by seeing a single card, although the odds certainly were.

I've made a longer post explaining why I don't believe this judgment was correct, but suffice to say, you can't choose half a sentence of a law and decide that because that bit fits, your case is made.

From the judgment:

"The Court found that Ivey and Sun breached their contract with Borgata to play Baccarat in compliance with the CCA by violating N.J.S.A. 5:12-115(a)(2) and (b) when they knowingly engaged in a scheme to create a set of marked cards and then used those marked cards to place bets based on the markings."

That's the finding I disagree with, and seems to be the point that the entire judgment rests on.

Section 12 of the act [1] falls under "Sanctions", which to me is the first clue that this section is intended to apply to the casino, not the customer. I do concede that the wording "any person" would also include customers.

Let's take a look at 5:12-115(a)(2) and see if we can narrow down exactly what Ivey and Sun are supposed to have done here:

"It shall be unlawful...knowingly to deal, conduct, carry on, operate or expose for play any game or games played with cards, dice or any mechanical device, or any combination of games or devices, which have or tampered with, or placed in a condition, or operated in a manner, the result of which tends to deceive the public or tends to alter the normal random selection of characteristics or the normal chance of the game which could determine or alter the result of the game."

Well they certainly didn't deal, operate or expose the cards to play - the casino did that. There is an argument that without players, the game can't exist, so let's accept that both parties are responsible for "conducting" and "carrying on" the game.

The cards were weren't tampered with - they were imperfect, but is that the same as "marked"? I don't believe so, and I think the judges assertion that they are should be challenged on this. Regardless, "Placed in a condition, or operated in a manner" does seem like a reasonable way to describe the rotation of specific cards. The CCA makes no assumption or distinction about who places or operates them, so we don't need to get into whether it was the casino or the player who did this. It happened and that's enough.

Strip out the bits that Ivey/Sun can't possibly have done and we're left with this:

"It shall be unlawful...knowingly to conduct [or] carry on any game or games played with cards, which have in any manner been marked, or placed in a condition, or operated in a manner, the result of which tends to deceive the public or tends to alter the normal random selection of characteristics or the normal chance of the game which could determine or alter the result of the game."

So, to the result. The use of the words "tends to" means that it doesn't matter that it's a private room with no public to be deceived. The question the law asks as it applies to this case is:

Given that Baccarat has a predetermined result at the time of dealing (there is no option for either player or dealer to influence the cards which will be drawn in the course of the game - the only variable is the stake), does the act of rotating a card, without changing its position in the deck:

- tend to deceive the public? I don't see how it possibly can.

- OR tend to alter the normal random selection of cards? Certainly not.

- OR tend to alter the normal chance of the game which could determine or alter the result of the game? It can't alter the result. It can't determine the result - there are still three to five cards which are entirely chance. It DID alter the normal chance of the game in this case, but does it "tend to"? From the article: "Baccarat is a casino game well known for unique and superstitious rituals," Hillman noted in an October opinion. "Thus, Sun telling the dealer to turn a card in a certain way did not raise any red flags for Borgata." That suggests to me that it does not "tend to" affect the chance, which is the test required by the law.

On the argument above, I would suggest that Ivey and Sun were not in breach of 5:12-115(a)(2) at all. 5:12-115(b) simply says "It shall be unlawful knowingly to use or possess any marked cards, loaded dice, plugged or tampered with machines or devices." They didn't posess them, and I don't believe using the casino's standard cards, which meet the casino's own quality requirements, can be considered to be using "marked" cards. If they are, and the casino are still using the same cards, they're now knowingly in possession of marked cards themselves.

Then we get to 5:12-115(c):

"Any person who violates this section is guilty of a crime of the fourth degree and subject to the penalties therefor, except that the amount of a fine may be up to $50,000, and in the case of a person other than a natural person, the amount of a fine may up to $200,000."

The Golden Nugget case hinged on the point that the deck wasn't shuffled. Since the CCA requires random decks, it has no provision for games played with a non-random deck. The argument is that because the CCA made no provision for the game, it can't have been a legal game under the CCA, and therefore it should be void. This case is completely different - even if we accept that Ivey breached the CCA, the CCA already makes provision for such a breach, and specifies the appropriate remedy should it occur.

There's also the small point that the DGE has investigated the Golden Nugget case and concluded that there was no breach of the CCA [2] - while it may not be a court decision, it should have some weight.

It looks to me like the judge has this very wrong, and any lawyer worth his money should be able to deal with it on appeal.

[1] http://www.nj.gov/casinos/actreg/act/docs/cca-article09.pdf

[2] https://www.casino.org/news/golden-nugget-new-jersey-unshuff...