No it is not still within the laws of cricket since the late 1930s.
You might notice the law changes section in that article, that amongst other things you can't have loads of fielders behind square on leg side now.
I would also suggest it is not considered unsportsmanlike to bowl short and aim for the head any more, but rather something people look foster's
forward to seeing.
I was about to post the same thing when I noticed this comment.
For those who might not want to go through the article:
> ...designed to combat the extraordinary batting skill of Australia's leading batsman, Don Bradman... aimed at the body of the batsman in the expectation that when he defended himself with his bat, a resulting deflection could be caught by one of several fielders deliberately placed nearby on the leg side. At the time, no helmets or other upper-body protective gear was worn, and critics of the tactic considered it intimidating, and physically threatening in a game traditionally supposed to uphold conventions of sportsmanship.
This transmitter doesn't really have the range for reliable global communication, it's optimised for covering the UK. For the global communication usecase, there are other networks of military transmitters (DHFCS) that are much better suited for the job, and they aren't being shut down any time soon.
What it did provide was a simple but reliable way to maintain emergency broadcast to general public within Britain. And it probably should have been kept online just for that reason.
Except nobody has a radio any more, certainly not one that receives LF. People have cellphones, and cellphones have a mandatory feature that lets the government display a message on everyone's screen, usually accompanied by loud and scary beeping. That's the new emergency broadcast mechanism. It's not as simple, but at least people actually see it.
I got my RTL-SDR to see what I could listen to, and by the time I tuned in, nearly all the short wave stations I could tune to were just broadcasting evangelical religious stuff, or other crazy conspiracy stuff. It's remarkable that these powerful stations spend most of their broadcast day transmitting that content.
Most international broadcasters have left the shortwave band quite some time ago, unfortunately. I think it is still easy to find BBC, China Radio International, Romanian radio, Radio Havana Cuba, but the list is relatively short (compared to 20 years ago).
In the US, WRMI sells its air time to anyone at low prices. It's mostly religious stuff but there are some regular music shows too, I think.
It's like the moon rocket. At any time we could have restarted that program from scratch and run it again, but what would the point be? We don't have the direct ability to make one but we have the ability to gain the ability to make one.
If we did regain the capability it would probably be solid-state.
I don't think it's like that at all. I bet you could build a perfectly serviceable replacement at home without needing to spin up any special manufacturing equipment, using off-the-shelf components.
For that matter I'd be somewhat surprised if you can't simply buy a ready-made replacement.
We do spend out quite a lot here in the UK for the BBC. They could easily dump a couple of expensive presenters and use the savings for vacuum tubes, if that is what is needed.
No idea where vacuum tubes were invented but I'm sure the BBC could find someone to make them.
> No idea where vacuum tubes were invented but I'm sure the BBC could find someone to make them.
The BBC has just cut its budget by £500 million, in an apparent attempt to limit the damage from the latest charter renewal process - which determines its funding. The new director general (ie ceo) is an ex-Google person, and they seem to be pivoting to become a social media content provider. So I'm pretty sure that spending licence fee money on making vacuum tubes to broadcast a signal that nobody under forty listens to wouldnt get past a value for money test.
(I like the BBC and its radio output, and I'm one of those weirdos who still pays the licence fee despite never watching tv or any of the stuff that the licence fee is required for. But it is becoming increasingly lost to me: focussed on triviality and politically cowed. Sadly, I no longer expect it to last.)
I thought the license fee was a tax. You have to pay it, except in extremely specific scenarios that are basically just the bureaucracy's way of saying it's technically optional even though it isn't. AFAIK you have to own no devices capable of receiving BBC broadcasts - this includes most phones and computers since they broadcast on the internet.
Technically the rule never changed. If a licence inspector sees a TV connected to an ariel socket then you're breaking the law.
But there's virtually no inspections any more. There were a lot of bad newspaper headlines about poor single mothers going to prison for getting caught (and refusing to pay the fine, but that bit usually got left out), so enforcement basically ended.
I'm sure they could, but sourcing people willing to manufacture heavily equipment/processing intensive speciality products for tiny runs will be MINDBLOWINGLY expensive.
This isn't about the little tubes that go in a guitar amp... we're talking about tubes that may well be too large for a single person to lift.
What's more, everyone who knew how to build things is either dead or in a retirement home. You'd have to re-engineer much of it from scratch.
Exactly - and look what those cost despite being produced in relative quantity. Now scale up to something that's 1000 times the size with 1/1000th the production volume. Wouldn't surprise me if the per-tube cost was in the millions.
Nixies are also cold cathode, low current devices. Radio broadcast tubes can be handling tens or even hundreds of thousands of watts.
One of the things I've noticed here in Britain is that journalists don't even try to make sense of events, and instead the 'analysis' is just the opinions of uninformed bystanders.
> Those A pillars are MASSIVE liabilities in the UK where people just hop right out onto "zebra crossings" expecting the right-of-way to be yielded to them.
Those pedestrians do have the right of way; you need to have another look at the Highway Code.
Yes, I agree with both of those statements. If you read the original statement before the "tut tut" response, you will note that I was only suggesting the A pillars introduce dangerous blind spots. I understand how that could be confused on other platforms, but I expected folks on HN to extend the benefit of the doubt that posters are not generally oblivious to the law. So the conversation derailed.
You led with "people just hop right out onto zebra crossings expecting the right-of-way to be yielded to them." I think framing it this way was a mistake and the cause of your frustration. People in zebra crossings do have the right of way, regardless of whether they hopped there or what there expectations are, full stop.
Your point about modern A pillars is right on the money.
Yes, that's right. The folks in this thread just got really worked up thinking that I disagreed with that point, which distracted from my message which was about the A pillar.
You chose to buy the car with the big blind spots. You’re responsible for checking your blind spots, by moving your head as necessary. This is part of the driving test.
Your poor consumer choices do not absolve you of your responsibilities and obligations.
the sad thing, in a way, is that the law entitles the pedestrian here but doesn't protect them. One could make an argument that cars which take the "visual" away from the driver should simply be illegal. Why can they even be sold ?
(ok ... trying to be pointy. As a rarely-driver and not-car-owner I do not feel much sympathy for drivers-of-hazards; because you can't care since you drive a car that makes it impossible to
care means others should "do your job" ? That's victim inversion)
> Sorry. You can refuse the covid vaccine, but that won't stop everyone else from blithly accepting it.
I agree with this part, but then, I personally don't have a problem with everyone else giving up their privacy.
> Then once the critical mass is reached, your ability to buy groceries can just be terminated. The 20% of the population that refuses just isn't important enough to matter.
Wut? Can you provide any information about a supermarket chain (or law affecting supermarket chains) anywhere in the world that prevents (or prevented) people who weren't vaccinated against COVID-19 to enter or buy groceries from those supermarkets?
Taking these age-assurance laws at face value, I don't have a problem with them, because I think algorithmically-personalised social media feeds are an intrinsically bad product and I don't see anything that any society would lose if they went away. My concern about these laws is how far politicians are willing to go to close loopholes like VPNs, because I think that's where the potential is to cause inadvertent collateral damage to systems that really matter.
Eh, for most people it's simpler to just use a cash ISA which can provide almost the same rates. Most people don't want or need to carry a huge cash float as opposed to other kinds of investment.
As the government wants to encourage people to be invested and not hold cash, from '27 you'll only be able to add 12k in Cash ISA. They are planning to also change the limit on cash held on S&S ISAs to avoid an easy workaround for this limit
That only works if the capital is already in an ISA or you want to invest less than £20k (soon to be 12k) though. It is common to use gilts to build a gilt ladder to have some level of guaranteed income for older/retired people. This allows you to build your own cheap annuity.
To be (slightly) more charitable to the genre and to AI, self-help books are a blog post's worth of content padded out to look worthy of the sticker price, so LLMs provide a fair bit of value in extracting the signal from the noise (assuming they do it accurately).
Of course, it'll be possible to circumvent this with a VPN or a proxy. So what this will achieve is it will reduce the number of British muggles on social media, thus bringing us a bit closer to the Good Old Days when only nerds were online. I'm fine with this.
This comment was brought to you by the British Class System: Making Nanny Proud.
Which is why the UK Government is currently discussing restricting VPNs behind real-ID style verification too.
So all of the legit providers will be required to collect ID, and anyone not willing to will be funnelled onto the sketchy providers; which I'm sure won't backfire at all...
I think it's worth mentioning the likes of tor, lokinet, yggdrasil, i2p, freenet and maybe other "esoteric" forms of networking like vless or v2ray. If they really do put significant barriers in the way of nerd-to-nerd communication, other metrics will only grow really.
At the moment, it's network effects that are the biggest deterrent to using these technologies -- at the moment I don't want to browse eepsites or .loki domains at the moment although I think the technology is interesting -- because the use cases are "normal" consensual porn, horrific illegal porn / CSAM, illegal drugs, and organised crime, none of which are me. If they manage to drive even 0.1% of the population towards talking about, say, cat pictures, unreal tournament matches (gamer-to-gamer communication is itself banned under these proposals without age verification!), or something that normal nerds would like, then (a) the popularity of these methods would explode; (b) the ability of law enforcement to surveil them as proxies for genuinely bad stuff would be significantly hampered; and (c) I think the net result is that more people would be exposed tangentially at least to criminality than before.
It's a shockingly short-sighted proposal. I wrote to my MP about it; her response was basically "We have a difference of opinion".
So every VPS provider as well. Thankfully, these restrictive measures only lead to wider adoption of VPN technology among the general population. You end up with people who know how and are willing to use these circumvention tools, which is a very good thing for society in general. In Russia, for example, every slightly tech-oriented teenager knows Amnezia, VLESS, MTProto, etc., which leads to virtually everyone having a working VPN. Aside from turning the Internet completely off, the government has very few options left; it basically can’t restrict anything anymore.
> So what this will achieve is it will reduce the number of British muggles on social media, thus bringing us a bit closer to the Good Old Days when only nerds were online. I'm fine with this.
I think you have a skewed and inaccurate understanding.
Why would "British muggles" be so up in arms over an ID check that they swear off social media if they can't "circumvent this with a VPN or a proxy"? It's not like everyone has the same attitudes as your stereotypical computer geek, but with less computer skills.
I think underestimate how suspicious the British people are of carrying ID. You don't have to have your driving licence with you when driving a car. Having to show ID to vote was controversial when introduced, remains controversial, and backfired on the party that introduced it. We don't even have a proper ID system here; you need to use utility bills to provide proof of identity for a surprising number of government services. This is a crowded little archipelago; we're fiercely protective of our privacy, in ways that would surprise someone who hasn't lived here.
I'm in a state that PornHub and most of the other adult sites will block due to age restriction laws. I'm not going to make a login, or give them my ID, and I'm not motivated enough to use a VPN or otherwise work around the restrictions... so I guess the law achieved its goals. I don't think I'd bend over backwards to keep access to social media either. It's really not that important.
I would say yes. I would not give Ycombinator my ID to be able to post here.
If they decided this site was for 16+ or whatever, and there was some privacy-preserving way to prove that, I might consider it. But not by sending them my driver's license.
I mean, even in China, Apple users can still use VPN to get around the great firewall. And that's despite the fact that their government already imposed quite a few extra requirements on Apple in terms of iPhones sold in the country + any China-based accounts. I also don't think that any of it really applies to general purpose computers at all there (as opposed to smartphones).
So I don't see VPNs going away with that recent UK requirement. To be clear, I am 100% fully opposed to the ID verification requirement from the UK, for plenty of reasons that were discussed on HN and elsewhere to death by now. My only point is that even if China didn't get to forbid Apple from allowing VPN, I don't see UK succeeding at this either.
P.S. For those curious about what "extra requirements" for Apple look like in China (only listing the directly relevant ones to this discussion, as there are more of them that aren't):
* iCloud is operated by GCBD/AIPO Cloud, a Guizhou-based Chinese cloud operator, rather than directly under Apple’s standard global iCloud entity.
* Apple also moved the relevant iCloud encryption keys into China. This means Chinese authorities can pursue access through Chinese legal procedures without needing to go through US courts or obtain data from US-based servers.
* App Store is much more heavily censored, but that's not really relevant. VPN apps aren't as easily available, but nothing is stopping a person from just connecting to the same VPN providers through the iPhone VPN settings (they just get to type info in a few fields, as opposed to a one-click-app solution).
It’s very difficult to setup a VPN from inside China. I had to use a China specific VPN provider when I visited a few weeks ago as all the main providers are blocked. You can still get an eSIM from Hong Kong that bypasses the firewall
This would only work for anyone foolish enough to attempt to access content and services with their phone. You don't own your phone. It might has well be a company-owned device.
"But everyone uses their phone all the time!" Yes, and everyone will be worse off for making the obviously worse choice.
> I am willing to be educated; does the average schoolkid carry such a device?
Yes.
On at least Android phones, and I'm pretty sure also on iOS, location access is a user-controlled permission that's not necessarily granted to any given app. There always leaks, but are you going to require commercial software to play cat-and-mouse games to get around system security settings?
And some, possibly most, "social media" can also be used without apps.
I thought this was going to be about LLM-generated conspiracy theories, but the website was funny anyway.
There's a technical documentation link at the bottom of the page that documents an actual working hand-crank-powered Raspberry Pi that runs a local model.
Oh that's a fun idea... I've been poking at a "ghost phone" that synthesizes a personality and matching voice, which rings at random times on an old candlestick rotodial handset.
"Conspiracy call-in" on a CB radio would be a good variation!
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