Viewing profile — pjc50

Propaganda and bribery. Things like the Hungarian funding of CPAC and the NRA holding a July 4 celebration in Russia some years ago. The weak spot was the conservative prediction t…

The end is usually considered to have been the Suez crisis; after exiting India, the UK failed to invade a Middle Eastern country in order to control a narrow waterway. If you want…

"Empire" is really just a large hereditary monarchy with the ability to subordinate nearby ethnic groups into a unified political/military command. They can be remarkably stable. C…

Note this seems to be unrelated to the BBC Micro, and came out some time after its era in 1995! That's after the DOOM (1994) launch. Surely there must have been other computer brid…

Trump, not Biden, started the war with Iran.

> what about empires that actually survived or adapted? Really the Roman Empire did very well on this one, depending on when you date its final end to. But the pattern is there, es…

Germany has its own problems of institutional capture by fossil fuels and reluctance to change. Even culture war and a local Nazi problem. Some of this has the same roots in social…

Signatures are terrible, and especially it's hard to automatically confirm they're correct even if you have a sample on file.

> willfully collapsing nominal GDP What on earth are you talking about? The credit risk was a very real problem; Kaupthing, Anglo Irish, RBS, Lehman etc.

Indeed. The global chain is McDonalds, which is of extremely average beef sold as hamburger rather than steak, but at vast quantities and predictable quality and low price. LLMs ar…

At this size, I think we have to start worrying about a 2008-type default risk. AI companies will have ordered all the RAM and paid some kind of deposit for that, but actually taki…

Are there any of those left? The popular VMs for Java, Javascript and dotnet are all very mature heavily tuned designs.

"Every input is hostile until proven otherwise": you said it yourself. One of those sad things that somebody new learns on the Internet every day.

> between devices that doesn't rely on online services -- no clue why we didn't solve that ages ago Airdrop is a thing, but remember that Android phones are controlled by the onlin…

The power supply issue is very real, though. UK has expensive electricity and high-megawattage data centers are obviously not going to help with that. (The water issue doesn't pass…

You can't just call corruption disagreement.

In 1999 I was the first person I knew to get a TFT flatscreen monitor. It had the awesome capability of 1024x768 resolution at 14". Like OP I got made redundant in the winter of 20…

The power upgrades are required, yes. In some cases people have had their property taken by eminent domain just for power line upgrades. And people wonder why there is so much oppo…

As all the cheating comments are referencing, the students don't necessarily want to get strong (that is a lot of work), but to get the qualification which unlocks the good jobs. W…

> don't know what people are uploading (and have no way of knowing) Hosting CSAM is a strict liability offense in many jurisdictions.

Much of the press is pro-regime or owned by regime oligarchs.

That's an easy one: I don't even have to look at what the facts are to be sure they're lying. Just a question of what about. Although "massive" is a subjective word. Nothing can be…

"Play stupid games, win stupid prizes", international relations edition. America is not happy when it is not at war. There has to be an enemy. The old WOT had finally run out of st…

The fault in the decision process was starting this war in the first place. Everything follows from that.

> We are already very aware that the police overreact and make plenty of mistakes This is the deeper problem. See BLM, and then the backlash against that to create a much less acco…