Posts by anothercynic

Re: Aaaarrghh

There are three large battery storage sites being built in Scotland at the moment, and there's a lot of upset in Suffolk at the moment because of plans to build similar sites there to capture excess energy from the North Sea wind farms. They're also looking at upgrading the Cruachan pumped storage site in Scotland to give it even more capacity.

National Grid believes that this is a better way to handle unexpected loads. Of course, it goes without saying that they'll have to upgrade the power grid too (which also upsets a lot of Suffolk residents).

Re: How about favouring British suppliers ?

Ironically, the shipyard in Turkey that got recent orders (not *these*) now *also* has delays, albeit not as bad as Ferguson's. Apparently their ferries are delayed by 8 months.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crknx1lp80mo

Re: Mark Klien

Simple, because no-one in recent years has had the experience of having their privacy invaded in the most egregious of ways. These days it's all electronic and it doesn't feel like privacy being invaded.

Those who lived in the old Warsaw Pact bloc may still recognise it, those currently living in Russia know it, but most of the West wouldn't have the slightest clue what it feels like. And quite frankly, that's what's led to the mess we have.

Re: It's the US, you don't need AI..

More like "does the health insurance cover it? Yes. But find *any* reason to deny it. Sorry die bitch".

See my comment on the US health insurance industry further up.

Re: From an article by Professor Mohan Dutta, Dean's Chair Professor of Communication, Massey Uni

Ahhhh, like its namesake in the UK then. That one's just as full of self-serving bovine excrement.

Re: Hang on...

Nvidia is a US-registered company. The contracts are likely to be in US Dollars.

Both of which mean that you fall within the sphere of influence of the US judiciary, as much as you never touched US soil, you touched US 'things', so you're busted.

Re: This isn't what happened: it's an LGBTQ purge

Agreed. Anything that Ruto posted/leaked should be considered fruit from the poisonous tree. There's no guarantee that stuff hasn't been misconstrued or edited.

ERG groups in government departments are all under fire, although I would have to say that there is probably stuff there that probably would've been best posted outside the NSA (or the CIA, or any other of the secretive 3-letter agencies). But given how DEI is the shorthand equivalent for "blacks, gays and women" (for some reason the Latinos are ok, but even they're not safe) in the Trumpet administration, *anything*, and I do mean *anything* to do with any of the not-cisgender-white-male people is fair game, especially under Gabbard.

And this is just month one. There are still so many people who are in shock and claim "surely the Trump administration won't..." when what they claim will never be reversed/undone is just still coming... It's going to get a *lot* worse, folks, a *LOT* worse.

Re: This is how it usually is...

I don't labour under the illusion that the private sector has it any easier... but at least in the private sector, you tend to have lawyers involved who make sure that the terms of the contract don't shaft you twice to Sunday while you have practically zero recourse... Public sector, not so much (there'll still be lawyers, but not the ones you have on retainer from a large law firm specialising in corporate and contract law).

For me, the big difference here is that in the public sector, it's money that *you* and many others paid in that you spaff up the wall, whereas in the private sector, it's shareholders (you might be one, you're most likely not). The private sector can by all means be dog-eat-dog, but the public sector is there for the good of everyone, including you, so ripping off a department with excessive fees and whatnot is you cutting your nose off to spite your face.

But then again, Britain does have form with that these days...

Yep. This is why things are wired, cotter pinned, screwed and glued and and and... vibration is an enemy on aerospace vehicles.

Re: Jesus

Don't dis Bananarama. They were good in their own way in their time. And they're still good today.

Re: Value

The Survivors are a *brilliant* stick. Everything breakable sits inside the tube. You have to unscrew the tube to get the stick out.

:-)

Re: "no inheritance at all seems to be an explicit choice"

The poster you're responding to is correct.

Calling a message box was never a 'hello world' example.

If you look at the documentation of the time period (and I specifically refer here to the Windows 3.1/Windows 95 era when Delphi first made its appearance), I recall 'hello world' examples instantiating a form/window, and outputting a string onto that, *not* making a WinAPI call to MessageBox. There *were* examples of writing to the command-line too, but those were specifically referred to as 'console applications'.

And yes, I have extensive Delphi/C++Builder/C/C++/CSharp/VB experience too. And comparing 1970s examples of code to 1990s examples of code that used a different presentation layer to prove your point is just lazy.

Give Elon McMuskface a call... his DOdGEy team will be *all over that*

;-)

Re: Fishy

You don't need to imagine. There are people like that... And it's not just federal employees doing this, but the Wayback Machine and countless scientists are desperately trying to preserve data and also frozen samples that are at risk of being lost.

It boggles the mind how much is at risk right now. It's like the modern equivalent of the Library of Alexandria being ransacked and burnt, just quite a few magnitudes bigger.

Re: Before boiling

In some hot climates you want your eggs not boiling/aging out quickly, so in those climates, the eggs go in the fridge.

Re: The middle kingdom does like a bit of IP

Downvoting only on the first line. The West is so utterly dependent on China that it'll take absolute *decades* to wean itself off China, its 'cheap' manpower (cheap being a relative term based on the cost of manpower in some Western countries) and its raw materials. There's too much profit margin to be made to boycott China, or any of the other countries it would simply shift its manufacturing/selling to...

The majority of the second-last sentence could as well apply to the US too... or some other countries with tech manufacturing. The US ignores the UN constantly... they have a veto on anything, and if something doesn't advance the US narrative or interests, they exercise it or ignore the UN's views.

We in the West happily ignore the big bump in the carpet where whatever's been brushed under it collects... and point fingers at countries like China without any shame. Let's clean up our own acts first, shall we? We want cheap tat. We don't ask questions as to why the tat is cheap... we know it's quasi-slavery conditions in Foxconn's 'factories', we know it's child labour in places like Vietnam or Malaysia, we know it's men and women working in dangerous conditions in Bangladesh. But yet we still continue to buy the cheap tat. We continue to buy the latest shiny-shiny the minute Brand X releases one. We are *just as guilty* as a government that will whore its population out to whoever wants to make stuff there.

Re: Dual SIM phone

Same here, albeit not a dual-SIM phone. I've kept my mobile number private from colleagues for yonks, and my current manglement and direct colleague know not to bother me unless the world (for us) is literally ending. So far it's worked; except last year where I made the mistake of looking in my email and seeing a clusterfuck of epic proportions forming whilst I was seeing the sites in a European capital. My colleagues didn't say anything to me, which is much appreciated, but the fact something impacted my area of responsibility with me unable to do anything but watch ruined the rest of my holiday.

If our organisation were to insist on on-call, my reaction would be identical to others in this comment section: a) you pay for a work phone issued to me, and b) you pay me double overtime for any periods on call or appropriate time off in lieu. You do *not* mess with my private life... my job is stressful as it is, I don't need more stress when I'm away on holiday.

Re: Ironically...

The firefighters would know where their drone is, and they'd keep it out of the path of a firefighting aircraft.

But doughboy here didn't use the brain he had... and damaged an aircraft (and endangered not just the crew on board, but also the firefighters on the ground).

That in itself should be instant jail time... and maybe some time on the firefighting line along with those prisoners who end up doing that hard work alongside career firefighters.

Ditto... I had several opportunities to experience Concorde betwixt Paris and New York thanks to a relationship I had with Air France, but silly hubris of youth, like "Concorde flies to New York, and I'd have to change there to fly to Chicago" stopped me from ever paying for a flight, even though it would've been a first class return by normal standards.

It used to be enormous fun and a great thrill to arrive into CDG early enough to deplane and do the bus tour from one side of CDG to the other via the Concorde gate... watching her get prepped and then, around 25 minutes later, see her taxi to the runway and roar off towards New York. I kick myself every time I see the sad BA Concorde parked at the maintenance hangar at LHR. She deserves so much better than growing algae and lichen and moss on her skin, and then getting the occasional wash from some sympathetic BA engineers.

Re: VMware waz a rare beast in software dev...

It was so much fun to beta test the early releases of Workstation. They didn't have EPP on their parallel port emulation, so it took a little while to get it. But once it was there, it was a breeze to use my old Logitech PP scanner with Windows 3.11 to scan things whilst running everything on Windows NT.

Fusion was also fabulous (especially because it meant I could switch to Mac at home whilst hanging around Windows in the daytime), but I agree that Broadcom *really* screwed the pooch, and I'll see how long I'll last on the last version(s) of Fusion Pro I am licensed for. If Parallels manages to make it possible to run Intel x64 on ARM, I'm switching!

Re: The new Boeing Air Force One

The airframes for the new presidential transport were completed ages ago... They were some of the last 747-8i frames built.

So that's not going to be the problem... I suspect there'll be other things, like... ohhhh... the orange one's obsession with McDonalds?

Re: While I'm asking questions ...

*EVERY* historian so far with expertise in the National Socialist era and inter- and post-war politics has branded it a Nazi gesture. If the people who actually *study* this stuff say it's a Nazi gesture, it most likely is.

Any claims of "Roman gesture" or "awkward gesture" are just dodging the elephant in the room. The ADL especially should be ashamed, given their purpose to call this kind of crap out.

Re: Their mistake was...

I like to use 10 or 11 Downing Street, Westminster, SW1A 2AA.

Good luck to any wayward bayliffs wishing to speak to Mr Bob Builder about goods ordered and not paid for.

;-)