davecb

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• Commented on The coming storm
  Canada is looking at a likely election this year as well. The centrist Liberals are trailing in the polls to a now hard-right "Conservative" party The former centrist Conservatives suffered a takeover from the rabid-right "Reform" party some years ago....
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  It's a tradeoff, and it also depends in which country you're in. I got to grow up with Princess Elizabeth, but now I get her idiot kid. Other countries elect their head of state, and you get fun folks like...
• Commented on Place your bets
  I work in ML/Ops, and no-one I know thinks this is AI. More like an unexpected side-effect of machine learning... Maybe being used by the less ethical to attract attention and funding (;-))...
• Commented on The gathering crisis
  I almost recommend moving to Canada. The worst thing we have is the Ontario premier cutting nurses' salaries and using staffing losses to justify shifting work to private clinics... who are allowed to pay higher salaries to their nurses (;-))...
• Commented on So you say you want a revolution
  Jamesface writes: And in fact Joe Biden has signalled very strongly that he won't put up with comedy capers involving the GFA and infractions of international law. And Canada, politely as always, says "we're going to want at least a...
• Commented on Dead plots
  Leapfrog... What do we have in place of cell phones in the future? When I was younger, I wanted a 2400 baud half-duplex modem in my mastoid. so I could both phone to humans and voice-type to machines. A little...
• Commented on "It'll all be over by Christmas" (Part 2)
  The CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Company) is reporting that the CanSino Biologics proposed vaccine is now approved for human testing here and in China, and that China is making it available and/or requiring its use by their military. https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/covid-vaccine-approved-military-use-china-1.5630947 I have...
• Commented on "It'll all be over by Christmas"
  NERVARestarted said "Part of me wonders whether hospitals, not shops, workplaces or parks, are going to be the major transmission route." That's what happened in Toronto, with it being one of the first transmission routes, then one that caused an...
• Commented on "It'll all be over by Christmas"
  You've described SARS in Toronto, writ large. We had a second outbreak, just as you describe, substantially from asymptomatic transmission inside hospital. We beat it with what I'd consider a defense in depth. Not just isolation, but a new kind...
• Commented on Empire Games gets a price cut in the UK
  Good for folks in the UK: In Canada the non-kindle price is C$ 13.99, several bucks worse than the £5.69 ::= C$ 9.84 British price. There is an audio edition out, for C$ 30.39, but I don't know if it...
• Commented on Attention Conservation Notice
  I'm finally to the point where I'd pay premium prices for an e-book, if I could get it the same day the hardcover comes out. That's not true of technical books yet, as they end up full of my scribbled...
• Commented on Confessions of a (half-assed) news avoider
  I wonder if the news companies have stumbled onto a U-shaped curve... Imaging plotting annoyance/avoidance against bad news: at no bad news, annoyance is high and I don't read the paper: it's pap. At a little bad news, it attracts...
• Commented on Things I would make if I had a 3D printer ...
  Chernobyl Reindeer. As a running joke, we've been planting amazingly ugly plastic reindeer on each others' lawns for some years. You don't want to be away at christmas, for fear the chernobyl will show up. They got the name because...
• Commented on Vacation
  Belated pointer: James Fallows has a mildly complimentary post from a happy CD publisher, about Amazon. This is in response to Mr Fallows' previous critical review. See http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/JamesFallows/~3/Idsb4L4tq6o/story01.htm...
• Commented on The myth of heroism
  Side comment: "The News - a User's Manual" may be a counter-agent to the media's brayings....
• Commented on Heartbleed note
  In general, I'd like to see strong security as a default. SSL, alas, is neither strong, default nor particularly secure. It's also a pain to set up. Amusingly, there is a proposal in draft for an EU prohibition on dangerously...
• Commented on Dear Google, am I pregnant?
  Returning to the topic at hand, it makes some sense to have the data available under stringent controls to small, trustworthy groups of researchers. It's hard to anonymize large data-sets, and de-anonymizing them is frighteningly easy. Using Google BigQuery would...
• Commented on Dear Google, am I pregnant?
  May I niggle off-topic? "Identity theft" used to be "impersonation", which I prefer. (Banks are on the hook if someone impersonates you, but will try to argue "you had your ID stolen, it's your fault" now that identity theft is...
• Commented on The Importance of Being Geek
  I don't have a woman badge, but I had to take "girl lessons" from my wife as I became more involved in management. Sometime I can see the differences, especially in dialect, but often it's just subtle, non-obvious differences, like...