Posts by John Brown (no body) 28765 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010
"Unelected,"
I agree with everything you said but that. She was elected. Just like every other MP Most PMs are not elected specifically as PM, ie on rare occasions they may be appointed by the Sovreign and not be elected at all. But T May *was* elected. Here in the UK we don't vote for the Dear Leader. The winning party chooses the PM, who is usually the party leader who campaigned, but there's no rule or law that says the winning party leader has to be PM.
"you pay airport taxes and charges in any case, doesnt really make any difference if the fees are included in the ticket price or charged on the ground."
That's the point. You already pay airport taxes/landing fees, so you've already paid to use the airport. You never actually enter the country[1] and certainly don't intend to stay so why any kind of visa?
[1[ Yes. I know the US Gov has their own special and unusual idea of what "entry" means and where and how wide reaching the borders are.
"No shortage of options, if you want to move. Frankly I can't imagine why anyone would try to organise an international event in the USA nowadays."
I wonder if it's a self-reinforcing sense of "the largest delegate contingent are USAians, therefore we must hold it there", except, of course, that's probably a matter of convenience. Hold a similar conference in Europe and you'd almost certainly find that the largest delegate contingent would be Europeans. People only travel long distances if they are being paid to do it or they are important to the conference. Wherever a conference is held, there will be relatively large numbers of "locals" who will attend as much out of curiosity as need when there's little hassle or expense in getting there. It's a lot easier to justify the junket costs if it's relatively cheap/local.
We've already discussed this here a long while ago. It could create a whole new "service" industry which is totally pointless but make s a few people very rich.
Extra points for shooting drivers who choose either Hamsterdance or CrazyFrog.
Having said that, I bet each manufacturer will use a propriety audio codec or design the system in some way that you can only buy one from them.
"There seems to be an epidemic of that in Whitehall and government lately. I wonder if that has anything to do with the current lamentable state of affairs."
No, it's very long term SOP. See the references to Sir Humphrey and the embedded video. You must be very young :-)
When I see CECIL in an IT context, it always reminds me of Computer Education in Schools Instruction Language.
You probably have to be a certain age to get the horror of that!
1) Protest strongly and repeatedly that you're a programmer and "don't do hardware/operating systems"
I did that to a friend once. I said to him, "you work in "transport", don't you, can you fix my car for me". He spluttered a bit and said he was a logistics dispatcher. So I said I fix hardware, why would he expect me to know how to fix windows. He got the point.
"Not switched over to Linux yet*, but still running Win 7 at home and finding I can use the same excuse on anything after that with how much they've changed the interface"
Interesting experience on Win10 the other week on a relatives PC. I thought it best to make sure it had all the latest updates so went looking for the settings and decided to speed to just type "windows update" into the search box. No useful results, just "internet" results. Weird. So I changed the search to "update" and the first result is the link to "check for windows updates". Fscking strange!!
"Just shrink the Windows partition to fit Linux and stick it somewhere such as /mnt/cdrive. LibreOffice will read all their Office files."
Oh, I wish!! Most of my relatives are into hobbies of one sort or another. Genealogy, crafting etc so moving them to a non-Windows system would be an even bigger job, if not downright impossible. File conversions, hardware drivers, apps to drive the hardware etc. is a complete non-starter. I can export Family Tree Maker data to Linux, but lots of data doesn't go because FTM allows for all sorts of data that none of the other formats will take. Cutting machines that look like printers but nothing in Linux will even see it let alone drive it etc.
"On both occasions, it took me over 10 minutes to pay for my parking because the machines are so badly designed."
...and always seem to mange to hide the button to request a receipt in the system so well and that you need to know to press it before you start to make payment or you won't get one.
"Having said that, I personally peg this as more likely a push by the council to get people onto cashless parking to save themselves a small fortune in parking meters and the associated costs of handling cash."
Business expense claims require receipts. Daily parking charges all over the place for some of can add up quite significantly. I avoid "cashless" parking fees as much as humanly possible because it *always* generates queries on every monthly claim. If, instead of requiring registration with a credit/debit card they could just charge it to the phone account or by a "premium" text message on my company mobile phone, then I'd be happy to use them.
"It's the one, single, solitary time when I've had to provide actual evidence via the CCTV."
I was doing a job in a school a little while ago and the CCTV monitor was drawing green boxes around any faces it detected on the camera feed. Not sure if it then went on to make an attempt at facial recognition, but I was quite shocked that they were even going this far. At no stage on entering the school or signing in as a contractor was I informed there was CCTV surveillance and possible face recognition going on. But they did require that I prove my DBS clearance existed, even though the rules don't require I even have DBS clearance unless I'm going to be left alone with the kids on a "frequent basis", ie at least twice in two weeks.
"Not being to petty, but had he worn a Turban to deal with Indian staff, peeps would be outraged, and rightly so But this sort of "soft/jokey" racism is somehow acceptable?"
Ever been in one of the tourist tat shops down Princes Street? They're full of those hats. It's a bit difficult to call it any form of racism when the supposed affected parties are selling them by the truck load.
Yes. The vast majority of those with the purchasing power in large orgs have either forgotten or never knew about it in the first place. Most of our corporate and Local Authority customers are choosing Lenovo over HP or Dell at the moment. (although Local Gov. tend to go for the L series rather than P or X.)
"Not the same - I interpreted the point to be that, rather than license the technology, they redesigned it to not use that technology."
And the fact they have worked around the offending patents means they effectively admit they were wrong to abuse the patents, yet they are still appealing the verdict and fine. That should go down well at the appeal.
If it's so easy to win, why is he trying to avoid it?
"Starting of course with Russia [ Putin and Communism and Czarism ]; Germany [ NAZIS ! ]; Great Britain [ The Auld Enemy and arrogant ruler of the British Empire ]; China [ Communism & Pipsqueak Upstart ]; Cuba [ The Castros and Taking American Sugar away from it's rightful owner ]; Mexico [ Stealing American Land by living there first ]; Old Europe [ Frequent Disobedience and culpable uninterest in Freedom! ] etc. etc., but eventually leading to shunning all nations and living happily without foreign influence: Ourselves Alone !"
Considering your penchant for historical wrongs, you might want to take a look at the USAs wholesale patent and copyright theft that they built their nation on. They only embraced international copyright and patents when they had something of their own to protect.
"You have some reading to do and comprehension to discover about what China has been deliberately and blatantly doing to the world over the last 21 years."
Yes, they've been stealing the historical US playbook contents. The US took absolutely no notice of patents or copyright in Europe for much of their history. China has been doing the same to the US that the US did to the rest of the world.
"This is smelling more and more like a trade dispute, and the US trying to maintain its position of market dominance in networking equipment."
You are almost certainly correct. However, what made US companies think their technical expertise would stay proprietary when they outsourced the manufacture to the "enemy"?
"Except of course that there really are British people, and even if you were born there, that doesn't magically make you one, if you aren't."
You missed the point. All modern humans originated in Africa. There were no Britons until some moved here then after many 1000's of years decided what they should be called (after multiple invasions and merging of many other "ethnic" groups. For that matter, the people called the "Brtons" were invaders displacing the Celts (who in turn displaced Picts etc)
"My guess, not having seen the episode, is that they had some form of stretched car, and were also trying to be funny with a potential mispronunciation of the word "wrong"."
That sounds plausible. Not having watched the show, and based on the comments, my first through was it was a poor pun based on The Long March.
"I've never heard someone use the term "slope" as a racially derogatory term. It must be a regional thing?"
ISTR hearing it as a derogatory term by soldiers in US war movies based in Vietnam (or Korea??). Not sure now, it was a long time a go I don't recall hearing it elsewhere or since then.
"My son has two friends: one has an African and a German parent and the other two (European) Portuguese parents."
Over 40 years ago, am advert on local TV for something I've long forgotten about, had a Geordie lad (James Bolam IIRC) chatting with an old Chinese guy in a takeaway. Only James did the taking until right at the end when he says "So, what part of China are you from?" and the old "Chinese" guy replies, in a broad Geordie accent, "Ahm from Sooth Sheels, Man!".
The moral of the story is you can't really specify someone by their nationality based on colour, eg "German" could mean someone of any ethnicity. South Shields, being a sea port, has had, for example a significant Somali population since the mid-1800's so I'm pretty sure those people descended from those immigrants all see themselves as British by now.
"McD’s App based ordering is also really good they just need to stop hiding the damn QR code check-in."
They're all ok if you know what you want. What they are all shite at is making it easy to browse the menu. In other words, they work for the frequent customers but turn off the occasional customer. To my mind that is short termism thinking because they are pandering to the regulars and reducing customer growth. The regulars will keep coming back anyway. New or occasional customer are more likely to walk out in confusion. Especially with the BK self service system.
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