Posts by John Brown (no body)

"Genetically, what proportion of the UK population is *not* descended from some immigrant?"

Also worth bearing in mind that the USA is barely 250 years old as a nation and from the point of view of the current "owners", barely 500 years old. The vast majority of USA residents are 4th generation or less.

Much of the Middle East as we know it today is the result of boundary drawing by Europe and the USA, splitting up "natural" aggregations and groupings of people into separate nations consisting of conflicting sub-groups. On the other hand, the Middle East is still very insular and tribal in it's outlook with much less sense of any national identity. A bit like the Balkans.

Re: ISIS trio

Yeah, me too! The International Station In Spaaaaaace!

Re: Over here he is facing a long, long prison sentence. Over there he would get....

"Yeah, so you can try him and upon finding him guilty you can give him a fucking ASBO."

Aye, with American justice he's likely to get a sentence for each crime and get to serve them consecutively instead of the wish-washy concurrent sentence serving we seem to dish out. But like people getting banged up for 10 years and also being given a 2 year driving ban, ban to be applied while in prison of course.

Re: photo?

"But what is the relevance of a Weagles player being hit in the nose by an Aussie Rules football?"

Well, it's now an out of order parking meter with the word FAIL on the LCD display which is ever so slightly more relevant, but not by much. Maybe the picture editor has stared Xmas hols early and the YTS trainee has been left in charge? :-)

Re: Basically

"Seriously, why NOT let a Muslim woman walk around masked, as their religion demands? Why not let a Muslim man pray every 6 hours if that's what they believe? It's not like it affects you in the slightest. Rules that prevent people from exercising their religious beliefs are wrong when those religious beliefs don't hurt anyone or affect their ability to do their jobs."

IIRC that may have been one of the prime founding principles of the USA. But that was a long time ago and the Trump is nothing if not modern and forward thinking...oh wait...

Re: Red herring?

"Having said that don't some cars automatically switch on the wipers if they detect rain; perhaps that's special rain that wets the glass but not the road, but it's going to be bloody scarey for the contents of the car if it keeps going in wet conditions without switching the wipers on"

Not forgetting the times you get to a stretch of road where it's recently been raining so you have wet conditions and no rain, so the automatic wipers don't trigger because there windscreen isn't wet.

Re: "...governments can't really stop this kind of thing."

"Which would very quickly lead to "filter possible fares to only those with rep/successful transactions above a certain number" being an option on the app."

Which leads to an ever diminishing market share since there will be no new customers

Re: Who moved my cheese

The McGann Doctor said he was half human on his mothers side.

Re: Shooting themselves in the foot

"It's a shakedown, nothing more."

Granting of planning permission always ends up with "bribes", eg a supermarket wants permission to build so they promise to build a school too, or improve the road junction into the store or some other "socially responsible" add-on which they hope will grease the wheels or is demanded by the planning authority. This is just the locals trying to jump on the same gravy train, especially the "downtrodden native peoples". The religion bit is just extra leverage.

"That's great, and in a way is in a long tradition of american philanthropism."

Yeah, screw everyone and be ruthless till you're so rich you are untouchable then become a philanthropist to "buy your way into heaven". See Carnegie et al.

"So if there is upto £800 million in returns, why the $%^& isn't VM fighting tooth and nail for it?"

It's suggested in the article that a condition pf getting on the gravey train is opening up their network as a wholesaler to competitors in the same way Openreach have to,

"It's not likely that it's too much money for the bearded one's old company surely? Or is it that VM's new American owners can't workout the exchange rate properly?"

Branson never owned VM, he just licensed out the name for £10 mill + his co-operation in some advertising. He probably got some of the £10 mill in shares but he was never a major player in VM

Re: RIPSA

"There are probably few differences but they can matter."

As I understand it, and I could be wrong, the only differences are where inconvenient Scottish laws might prevent certain bits from happening as intended and procedural differences in terms of the job titles referred to, eg people who must get reports or can authorise actions.

Re: IoTageddon

"That made me laugh out loud, reading the long list of absurd and ridiculous things that could go wrong."

Maybe not as absurd as you think. You can guarantee that every IoT designer out there will be working on the assumption that his/her device is the only, or most important, IoT device in the house/building and that it will be spaffing data 24/7 for no good reason other than it can. Multiply that by.... :-(

Re: Floppy drives?

"Simple answer: Set the USB Priority to Low in the BIOS."

Yes, exactly my point. Users desktops especially, and most servers, should be set to boot from their specific boot device as their highest (only?) priority. Only a tech or higher should ever need to boot any other device and it should never "occidentally" attempt to boot some other device. Any tech needing to boot a pendrive or other device probably has bigger problems to deal with and finding the key-press to select the boot device or changing the BIOS config should be part of that process.

"Not quite so straigtforward when you want to use the internal USB socket for booting on a permanent basis. Net booting or a hacked BIOS seem to be the real answer here."

Yes, there's always an exception :-)

Re: Ashildr "me" is the hybrid?

Other than that non-canon abortion of a film to try to break into the US market, has there even been any other reference to The Doctor being half human? I'm also ignoring the Peter Cushing films.

Re: Hee hee.

"ASSet management."

Nice, +1

Or Arsett Management if you're from the posh end of town :-)