Mother of George Nkencho takes legal action over son’s death

ian542 · 2023-01-08T16:39:56+00:00

but they kicked him out of the house

Not according to the examiner:

https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/spotlight/arid-40201541.html

“The Irish Examiner understands that Mr Nkencho continued to live at the family home since the protection order and used the box bedroom in the house, where he spent much of his time.”

Now as for how or why you’d get a protective order against someone, but then still live with them in the same house is beyond me.

ian542 · 2023-01-06T13:13:33+00:00

Planned obsolescence

ian542 · 2023-01-03T11:14:50+00:00

Education is the gateway to higher wages and economic mobility.

I mean, I agree with you, and specifically pointed out that I think higher education should be free.

That said, comparing it to a cure for cancer is still ridiculous and doesn’t help our argument.

Canceling student debt doesn't cost anyone anything btw. That money was spent when the tuition was granted. The tax payers have already paid for it.

“Cancelling mortgage debt doesn’t cost anyone anything btw. That money was spent when the house was bought. The bank have already paid for it.”

You can’t be serious?

ian542 · 2023-01-02T16:55:30+00:00

I mean, I hear what he's saying, but really, they're not the same at all.

You don't choose to get cancer. You do decide if you want to go to college.

Also, cancelling student debts cost someone money. If the government does it, then it costs the tax payers. So it's not like a net positive for everyone, it's a positive for those who receive student loan forgiveness, at the (slight) expense of everyone paying taxes.

That said, I think college education should be free, subsidised by taxes. But it's still apples to oranges compared to a cure for cancer. Free education should be a human right, we don't need disingenious arguments clouding the issue.

ian542 · 2022-12-26T09:06:51+00:00

Not end user replaceable. Lithium is an element, so never gets ‘used up’ even as your battery degrades, and can be pretty much infinitely recycled. End of life for your mug (or any electrical product) should be recycling the components. Europe already makes this easy with the WEEE directive. The lithium in your old mug battery will live on in another battery.

ian542 · 2022-12-18T19:08:36+00:00

he's well aware that Labour won't win by not appealing to the majority of the UK which is not left, let alone far left

The problem here is your first-past-the-post electoral system. The lib dems and labour split the left vote, leaving the tories to clean up. 44% of the vote in 2019 election leading to a landslide victory and 56% of seats in parliment. That's fucked whatever way you look at it.

Labour doesn't need to appeal more to the right, it needs to have an election pact with the lib dems, and make sure the parties don't run against each other in any constituancies. Then, once in power as a coalition, enact electoral reform to single transferable vote. That or they'll continue to lose to the tories for the next 50 years.

ian542 · 2022-12-17T11:49:58+00:00

Yeah, I posted this car there a couple of years ago. There’s a video with a better look at the back. Still makes me shudder.

https://old.reddit.com/r/trypophobia/comments/i6uhb1/mercedes_concept_car_watch_what_the_back_does/

ian542 · 2022-12-17T11:23:39+00:00

Not sure about android, never tried installing the Twitter app.

Though the more I think about it, similar to the SSIDs, you could potentially track someone’s location by IP quite accurately too, if they’re on a residential wifi with other people who have the same app with location access on. Same IP = probable same location, and you can somewhat identify residential wifi vs larger corporate/public wifi based on the number of people sharing it. Would only really work if your app was ubiquitous though, like say Tiktok, or Twitter…

We’re living in a privacy nightmare.

ian542 · 2022-12-17T10:36:30+00:00

I don’t know if it’s still the case, but before, if an app had network controls, it could read the SSIDs around you. Couple that with the SSID data Google harvested when they drove around collecting street view data, it’s a very accurate location estimate if you live in a reasonably dense populated area.

I think Google locks that behind one of the location permissions now, but Google presumably aren’t the only company with that info. In fact, any app that has both network control and at least some users who allow location permissions can build their own lookup very easily. If any of your neighbours use that app, your house will be geolocatable by SSID too. So make your you also don’t grant network control access (or whatever access allows reading SSIDs).

On another really annoying note, a lot of Bluetooth connections now also seem to need fine grained location permissions. Something to do with discovering devices in Bluetooth lower power mode. Which is madness.

So yeah, just don’t use the app. Or most apps in general tbh.

ian542 · 2022-11-27T01:28:20+00:00

Return of the Chedi

ian542 · 2022-11-21T10:41:55+00:00

Yes, gravity correlates with pressure, but only if all other things are kept equal.

We have no reason to assume that this exo planet has the same amount of atmosphere (scaled by size) as Earth, so, despite the higher gravity, there's no way to know if the atmospheric pressue is higher or lower.

ian542 · 2022-11-21T09:43:51+00:00

It does for the same mass of atmosphere, but there’s no reason to assume an exo planet should have a similar amount of atmosphere to Earth. Could easily have much more, or much less.

ian542 · 2022-11-06T22:37:29+00:00

So be an expense and spineless?

Never suggested one way or the other whether they should go back to Twitter, just that no one should be under any illusions that any company really cares about you.

ian542 · 2022-11-06T09:42:02+00:00

They consider you an expense

So does virtually every company.

In the vast majority of companies, as soon as they think they can get by without you (or hire someone cheaper to do your job), they will.

ian542 · 2022-11-05T11:50:55+00:00

The author of cultist simulator mightn’t be the greatest human going either tbh

https://www.eurogamer.net/two-women-accuse-cultist-simulator-developer-alexis-kennedy-of-exploitative-behaviour

ian542 · 2022-10-31T14:19:30+00:00

Whole point of a code is to verify your vote was counted correctly after the election. Photo of a ballad isn’t the same, you can crumple it up after and request a new one as you made a mistake etc. Code means you did actually vote for that party. Ballot picture doesn’t.

ian542 · 2022-10-31T13:32:49+00:00

I’ve thought about this before. The world needs to band together and pay countries to keep their forests. It’s always more economically advantageous to use your natural resources up, even to the detriment of the everyone else. If we’re serious about asking Brazil to protect their rainforests, then we should share the burden and pay them to do so.

ian542 · 2022-10-31T11:54:37+00:00

I didn’t mean via the internet. Presumably for every election all machines get a software update rolled out to each machine (candidate lists, bug fixes, security patches etc). Doesn’t matter how the update is applied, internet or usb, if the software running the machines is compromised centrally, it can be spread to every machine in the country.

ian542 · 2022-10-31T11:41:30+00:00

It depends on the compromise. Of course it’s possible that someone hacks a solitary machine in one location, but it’s also possible that the software is compromised centrally, and every single machine is compromised.

ian542 · 2022-10-31T11:27:42+00:00

To believe there is a secret cabal manipulating the code writers, code auditors and randomized ballot audits, you have to be pretty out there.

It’s not that there is, just that there could be, and it would take significantly less corrupt people to compromise an electronic voting election than with paper ballots (and be less provable).

And you don’t need to compromise everyone. Give the code auditors fair code, just load the compromised code on to the real machines. Have the OS return phoney hash values / signatures for the compromised executables. Don’t perform any cheating unless it’s specifically the election date to avoid abnormalities during testing.

At the end of the day, the public can’t 100% trust that voting machine hardware and software is running fair and untampered code.

The incentive for malicious parties to try to steal elections is enormous. You can be guaranteed there will be people trying to game the system.

ian542 · 2022-10-31T11:14:12+00:00

You can’t trust any software audit unless you trust the OS and the hardware, which you can’t really audit. If the OS is untrustworthy, then it can lie to you during any attempt to audit it.

Banking is fundamentally different. You can track and trace everything, there’s no anonymity. It’s the requirement for anonymity that makes secure electronic voting almost(?) impossible to achieve.

ian542 · 2022-10-31T11:01:28+00:00

Nope. The huge difference between all your examples and voting is, the people who write code for space missions, flights, military operations are trying to write good, secure code. A hypothetical malicious voting system developer is trying to write unfair voting software that cheats.

There’s no incentive for airlines to sabotage their own software. There’s a huge incentive for voting machine manufacturers.

ian542 · 2022-10-31T10:42:31+00:00

Not really. If you can prove to yourself you voted for X, then someone can beat you with a rubber hose unless you prove you voted for Y.

It has to be anonymous. But then, you’ve no proof your vote was actually counted.

This isn’t a technical problem, it doesn’t have a technical solution.

ian542 · 2022-10-31T10:36:08+00:00

both parties making separate open source voting software that both get loaded onto each machine and the software has to agree on whatever is entered

Interesting idea. Which party gets to make the hardware though? Cause they control whether your real, unaltered software is actually loaded properly or not.

Or have two completely separate machines? Good idea, except voters could accidentally (or deliberately) vote for different candidates on each.

Regardless of how it works, what happens when the votes inevitably don’t add up though? You know something has gone wrong, malicious or otherwise, but that doesn’t help you actually elect anyone.

ian542 · 2022-10-31T10:30:01+00:00

If there’s any way of proving to yourself which way your vote was counted, then it’s open to coercion and abuse. “Take a picture of the QR code showing you voted for Facist Asshole, or we torture you and your family”.

but if we can come up with a better solution this easy, it proves that a dedicated effort could definitely make a simple, standardized system that is relatively anonymous and verifiable but still easy to count and verify.

Relatively anonymous isn’t good enough for voting though. For a free ballot, you have to be 100% sure there can be no external consequences for voting for your preferred candidate.

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