Posts by John Brown (no body) 28765 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010
"Well this deal wouldn't have been allowed by the Eu competition authority - but now free of their red tape we can have British infrastructure owned by the French"
It's got feck all to do with EU or Brexit. French owned water companies for one. EDF nuclear power for another.
"Being fed some superficial buzz-word stuffed flannel to satisfy our 'compliance' auditors". Nobody can master anything in a week.
Employment based training is pretty much exactly that in many areas of work these days. Top-up training in particular can be a as little as a few hours on a new bit of kit with a 10-15 question multi-choice memory test at the end with an 80% pass rate. Suddenly I'm "qualified" by the OEM to go fix their kit now, often without ever seeing the real kit until on a customers site.
Well, to be fair, in a number of the countries US forces operate in, it's not that unusual for there to be many guns fired into the air for all sorts of celebrations, including weddings. I wonder if there's any stats for injuries or deaths from all these stray bullets?
Or even easily inside a A300 Beluga.
According to the wiki of all knowledge
"Cargo hold – volume 1,500 m3 (53,000 cu ft), 37.7 m long × 7.04 m wide × 7.08 m tall"
"It could be an emergency landing site, following some incident after launch that leaves the vehicle to far downrange over the US or the Atlantic to return to California, but unable to reach orbit, so in need of an handy landing site quickly."
Being unmanned and not operated by military or emergency service, won't they need special permissions and exemptions to operate their space going drone above 400' and out of line of sight?
"I did hear a tale that this resulted in the equipment operating London's traffic lights becoming homeless as it required access and attention. One plan at the time was, I gather, to acquire nondescript private premises to accommodate it. I'm assuming that wasn't the full extent of the security measures."
Oh yes. The last thing you want is for some gang of cheeky criminals driving Mini Coopers to have access to the traffic light control systems.
Have been making my own bread for years and was mortified to find so many others suddenly decided to do so too!!! Luckily I always keep a few weeks worth of bread flour in the cupboard and managed to be lucky enough, often enough to get a 2Kg bag or two when they came in before they sold out and at one point early on got a huge sack from a supermarket that kept me and a few neighbours in bread for a month or so :-)
As for the rest of the article, the jist of it seems to be that people spend more in online shopping sessions than at the physical shops, but they spend on different things. Is that even news? I'm not sure why the shops care what people buy, so long as they can sell them more.
On an IT related note, I remember when I first saw a 3D shooter and wondered if it might be possible to do a simulation of the supermarket aisles where people could then buy stuff online by browsing the shelves instead of the clunky search by name and hope it shows what you are looking for in the results or the related items. There could be a version that includes weapon s and looting for release in certain gun-totin' parts of the world :-)
"the California Department of Fish and Wildlife has retrieved one of the downed drones and is seeking a warrant to allow it to be examined, in the hope of identifying its owner."
Surely if it's lost or abandoned property found on California Department of Fish and Wildlife land, then the Department would be within in it's rights to try to identify the rightful owner?
"What's next, a cryptocurrency that relies on huge amounts of RAM to blow up the DRAM market? Maybe one that relies on driving long distances so we can run out of gasoline and tires?"
The only people guaranteed to get rich in a mining boom are the people selling the shovel.
To expand on that, if you happen to have a big shovel manufacturing operation, it might seem like a good idea to "create" mining opportunities.
I wonder who might be instigating all these new "coin mining" schemes?
<Takes tinfoil hat off and slinks away>
"Have I mentioned this before.....but since we all know about "backdoors" (you know....Cisco, NSA, Snowden, etc., etc.).....why are sensible people not encrypting their messaging BEFORE their messages enter ANY public channel?"
For exactly the same reason no one else does. Convenience and lack of knowledge/skills. Crims, like the rest of the \Joe Average world, are not techies. They just want it work and will trust the higher ups/suppliers to have made it easy to use and secure. They make assumptions because they don't have the tech knowledge to know what questions to ask. They assume their criminal techs have done their jobs properly and rely on the fact nothing untoward seems to have happened to other users, therefore it must be safe to use.
"Someone got paid real money for that decision. "
Yeah, the sparky got told to fit the button near the door. That was probably the entirety of the plan. So the sparky, with possibly no idea what the button did or the consequences of an accidental operation of said button, was the most likely person to have made the decision. That decision in turn was probably influenced mostly what whatever building code was in force at the time that the sparky was following.
"One button was small and unlabelled and looked like a light switch. The other was a large six inch square metal button with Door Open on it in large green letters. Easy mistake to make..."
For anyone who's never worked in a place with exit buttons by the doors, yes, it can be an easy mistake to make. Sometimes, when you see something you've never seen before, and at the same time see something you recognise as familiar, both of which could fit the description of what you are looking for, the human brain can simply blank out the unfamiliar thing.
And mime artists. It was a strange aversion, but there you are. Anyone in baggy trousers and a white face who tried to ply their art anywhere within Ankh's crumbling walls would very quickly find themselves in a scorpion pit, on one wall of which was painted the advice: Learn The Words.”
― Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!
Surely by definition there is nothing in a void. A void needs something around it for there be a void in. In this case the "void" can't exists because void has air in it, exactly the same as is surrounding it, ergo there is no void.
Since his "void" is a "container of positive and negative possibilities" it can't be a void because it contains something. But the "somethings" in the void are only possibilities and therefore may not exist, it could be a void. Or not.
Is your head hurting now too?
"Everyone knows that, given the size of the various programmes of the last few years, both interest rates and taxes are going to have to go up at some point. The only real questions are: when and by how much."
Yes, you and I know that. Most people know that. But when it happens, you just KNOW the market traders are going to be "caught unawares" and go into met-down.
...and only a few minutes micro-gravity? That's the ultimate roller-coaster ride and the price is out of this world too. I do hope the plans for these jollies by Bezos and Branson are just the beginning and they are planning to go higher and further.
I know both have plans for orbital launches, but I don't really see these barely-to-space jollies being profitable enough to fund future expansion. They'd need to be significantly profitable to be worthwhile. The further and longer ventures are already funded from other sources, like NASA grants, advance sales of satellite launches and so on.
"disposal of his assets to the betterment of the planet and it's inhabitants, and renounces all wealth and goes off to live as a hermit monk"
Well, apart from the fact that the lions share of his assets is Amazon itself, that ain't going to happen. But his disposable wealth, on the other hand, is still vast enough that he could easily spend the rest of his life distributing it to worthy causes or new projects. It's actually quite difficult to give away that amount of money while making sure it gets to the right people/projects and isn't wasted or skimmed from. (Not speaking from experience here, mind you!)
"I'm assuming they require the owner to supply it which in itself should be a very large flag as in most cases (new battery, screen etc. ) just switching on should be sufficient to validate the repair. Sorry if the question seems to be a silly one but I am genuinely interested whether these repairers routinely seek the unlock code."
One of the strings to the bow of the company I work for is being an Apple dealer/authorised repair centre. Yes, the users access codes are required. Replacing a broken screen and simply confirming it works by turning it on is no substitute for doing a full diag of the system to make sure nothing else broke at the same time. If they refuse (some do) the warranty repair will be completed if possible and returned "as is" if only limited further diags are possible. The vast majority of what we deal with is corporate though, so in most cases a device, Apple or otherwise is either returned with a clean OS image or the customers specified OS image. All firmware is updated by default where applicable and all the hardware is checked so it goes back "as new" (in terms of functionality, case scratches ain't our problem), no unreported faults left unfound and unfixed unless, as above, the customer refuses required access codes or passwords.
And no, the guys in the workshop don't really have time to go rooting around in customers data. Diagnose, fix, test, onto the next one. Anyone caught doing anything untoward with customer data would be marched out of the door. Some of our customers are the type you occasionally see in the press as having left unsecured data on trains, so that's the sort of data that would be on some of the kit we fix. That sort of contract customer is too lucrative to risk.
"a few thousand "high tech" jobs suddenly flushing away?"
I can't find any reference as to how many people Twitter employ in India. As of 2020, Twitter employed a total of 5,500 people. That doesn't really indicate that there are 1000's of high tech Twitter employees in India to be "let go". There may well be a few, but I suspect most Twitter employees in India will be phone drones and "checkers", neither of which are "high tech" or well paid.
I'd more likely believe that Twitter needs the huge market of India than India needs the relatively tiny number of jobs that Twitter brings.
"For everything else, including opening the tray, you need the remote"
Manufactures have jumped on the minimalist design philosophy, so beloved of Jonny Ive and Apple, with gay abandon because it save money on the BOM. Saving a few cents or even whole dollars per unit on millions of units is worth it.
"Every TV manufacturer knows that you switch the TV on by pressing channel button up or down. Or volume up or down."
Oh wow! So it does. My getting on a bit non-smart LG does that. I never even thought of trying that. Why would would I when it has an on/off button? FWIW, it only works with the channel up/down buttons, not the volume buttons.
On the other hand, it has some extra buttons on the bottom of the remote which control my LG BluRay player too. And once it's been on for about 10 minutes, the CEC stuff comes to life and recognise the RasPi with KODI/LibreElec and I can use the TV remote for that too. On the other hand, we don't actually have an aerial and rarely watch BluRays or DVDs and the KODI remote on my phone or tablet is better for that. Everything else we get via VirginMedia, including Netflix (and the free Amazon prime trial) and the VM remote can turn the TV on and off and control the volume too. The TV remote is only needed if I need to manually switch sources, which I can actually do from on e of the 5 actual physical buttons on the top of the TV. (Easily accessible since we didn't hang it 6' up a wall because we hate sore necks!)
"the remote control on the left which almost everyone wants"
I note that like every other TV remote, even that has no brightness or contrast controls. Many's the time I've wished for a simple brightness control on a TV remote. It's all well and good setting it up perfectly for evening viewing and then watching something during the day that has nighttime scenes. So called "adaptive" settings never seem to get it right either.
I must admit, until today, I'd never heard of that image being referred to "tank man" before.
I wonder if it's a regional thing? People in the US have much more of a tendency to invent nicknames for things and see them taken up by many others, more so, it seems, then other parts of the English speaking world. An obvious example was a recent story on El Reg re. NASA logos and nicknames like "meat-ball", which seems many readers had also never heard of before. Likewise I recently became aware that an early Commodore logo is referred to as the "chicken lips" logo. It's all a bit weird IMHO :-)
It seems there has been a lot of knee-jerk reaction to my post. Nothing I said was incorrect.
You think it's embarrassing for China that the rest of the world doesn't recognise Taiwan as an independent country? That is just so wrong and distorted that I'm amazed you actually believe it. What is REALLY embarrassing is that almost no country in the world recognises Taiwan as a country. How could anyone NOT accept Taiwan as a country while trading with them? That's truly mind boggling.
None of this has anything to do with democracy in the way that you imply. I suspect you think that I was advocating for Taiwan to be part of China. Maybe I worded it poorly, or maybe you just didn't read what I wrote.
The territorial claim I was talking about was the "legal" claim in the eyes of the world. If the world won't recognise Taiwan as a legal entity then clearly they also won't recognise any extra-territorial claims either. There are still two other legal claims to the same place, so yes, China should not have sailed in and taken it. That's an illegal occupation and that is what I alluded to.
But, as often happens here, once someone misreads a post and downvotes, others seem to pile in without reading or understanding what they are voting on.
According to the provided link "and is also claimed by the Republic of China (ROC/Taiwan), the Philippines and Vietnam."
So, "disputed" seems to be the operative word here, although having the big bully of the CCP just sail in and take possession still isn't a good result.
Having said that, Taiwans claim doesn't really count since, despite it's world trading links and the sort of informal support of the US, Taiwan is neither a UN member nor recognised as a State by most countries.
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