Re: Lucky
Who knew you could get so much custard from one cat/sales rep?
Capt.E Blackadder
Posts by CountCadaver
1292 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Sep 2018
BOFH: What physics defines as impossible, sales calls a challenge
Tuesday 17th March 2026 03:53 GMT 
Re: Sales
Army would have been another option - Royal Logistics Corp or the Royal Tank Regiment - both have all- terrain arctics capable of hauling well over 70 tonnes on or off road in all conditions.
If the track was beyond those....I'm sure a challenger 2 could be fitted with a tow hitch...and little or nothing is going to stop one of those...
White House activates Yu-Gi-Oh's trap card by using anime clip for war comms
Ig Nobel Prize flees US for Switzerland after 35 years over safety concerns
Musk admits Starship V3 launch date has slipped as Super Heavy booster rolls into place
Anthropic to Pentagon: Autonomous weapons could hurt US troops and civilians
Altman: You think AI is wasted energy? Try raising 100 billion humans
Monday 23rd February 2026 14:34 GMT
20 years?
Many people are held back due to parental, community and societal attitudes on learning, where schools are not designed to educate but instead to contain and condition it's "inmates" to produce unquestioning, compliant worker drones
Otherwise you could skip much of the dead time (which the Simpsons parodied so well with "magazine time" and Skinner's justification that he can't challenge intelligent students as the "stupider kids would be sitting there furrowing their brows, trying in vain to understand"), bin all the "rote learning" so beloved of right wing politicians and pub bores and replace it with giving kids problem solving strategies, alongside more practical skills and real life examples to get them
1) moving, 30+ hours of sitting still a week and we wonder why kids look like beach balls.....
2) working in teams Vs the obsolete "sit in silence, no talking, no discussion with others, keep your books closed" attitudes created when schools were there to provide church sponsored minimal education to young factory and mill.workers, where the church told the mill and factory owners they could have "their" workers from noon onwards. All so you know kids ACTUALLY know HOW to work in teams,.something employers have been complaining about for decades now that young folk have no idea how to work in a team
3) encourage them to ask questions, think of their own solutions
4) expose them to the real world concept that it's ok and often desirable to fail at something to foster innovation and understanding of the problem
Hard drives already sold out for this year – AI to blame
Saturday 21st February 2026 16:25 GMT
Re: And people thought the egg shortage was bad in the US
Well unless of course the AI bubble bursts suddenly - perhaps due to the outbreak of global war, a severe spike in interest rates, another great recession/depression, rioting, societal hostility towards ai turning into outright direct action whether mass boycotts or more kinetic, an outbreak of internal conflict/civil war in a large nation......or even development of a more effective alternative that causes a mass pivot or the markets lose faith in ai
Any of that happens......all bets are off frankly
Desktop tech sent to prison for an education on strange places to put tattoos
Friday 20th February 2026 18:32 GMT
Re: So let me get this straight
That or boredom leads to extreme behaviour - military bunkrooms with names like "the zoo" where outrageous bs was positively encouraged and this at an obstensibly upstanding British military officer training college.....
Anyone who has served may well know which branch of the UK armed forces I am talking about here....
You can jailbreak an F-35 just like an iPhone, says Dutch defense chief
Thursday 19th February 2026 20:15 GMT
Re: Europe is definitely going to get together on this
I seem to recall the 1950s zeitgeist was manned aircraft would be obsolete before the early to mid 1960s - leading to cancellation of the TSR2 and the avro Arrow....
Yet 70+ years later we are still building, flying and designing manned jets
Europe's 5G Standalone stall risks falling behind US, Asia
Amazon's $200 billion capex plan: How I learned to stop worrying and love negative free cash flow
BBC bumps telly tax to £180 as Netflix lurks with cheaper tiers
Monday 9th February 2026 16:16 GMT
The BBC litters its daytime schedules with utter dirge like faked "antiques hunt shows", umpteen various flavours of property shows "Hi this is Bob and Sue, Bob works part time in a pub and Sue is a retired part time cleaner in a supermarket, their budget is £3 Million but they can stretch to £5.5 Million for their dream home" and various other shows to make hospital waiting rooms even more tortuous.
They could turn off their daytime output and it might well improve the country
Monday 9th February 2026 16:08 GMT
TVL Crapita Contractors != Enforcement "Officers"
TV Licencing like to name their outsourced heavies from Crapita as "Enforcement Officers" to imply they are police empowered professional investigators, they are nothing of the sort. They are just whoever Crapita can find this week to go knock on doors and try induce people to incriminate themselves.
They have no powers of entry and can (and many would say should) be told to go away.
New hire fixed a problem so fast, their boss left to become a yoga instructor
Friday 6th February 2026 15:48 GMT
Re: Posher
My current (and not top of the range) 27" 4K Coolermaster IPS with MiniLED HDR1200 backlighting (576 dimming zones vs 1100+ on the higher end ones) was £750 and that was an ouch purchase but it has a fantastic image quality with minimal blooming. Shame the firmware onboard still has quite a few bugs around switching sources where coming out of a fullscreen game can at times result in a black screen (something I believe to do with HDR particularly in windows)
Friday 6th February 2026 15:42 GMT
Re: "I did a spot of Artexing"
somehow my maternal grandfather has made it through growing up in poverty, working 60 years with plaster, asbestos, ripping down ceilings and being covered with bird shit, rat droppings and worse, much of this being before ppe and masks were a thing and is only slightly out of breath with no signs of asbestosis or mesothelioma. He's now 90 years old and *hopefully* will be 91 in late spring.
Summer in Australia means beers, beaches, and bork
DWP considers chatbot work coaches as AI-fueled job losses loom
Friday 6th February 2026 15:30 GMT
Re: What's the joke about regexes ?
People said the same thing about the NHS, People said the same thing about providing social security (which the right attempt to destroy by cutting taxes and thus wilfully undermining it so they can brand it "unsustainable")
The biggest problem is that politicians are a parcel of rogues in a nation, bought and sold for billionaire's gold (paraphrasing Rabbie Burns)
If the techbillionaire's faced 1950s levels of taxation (you know the time period so many wax lyrical about, where everything was "milk and honey") then society and public services would be far better off and their tax contributions would be far higher.
Friday 6th February 2026 15:24 GMT
Mass Dickensian destitution inbound?
As I cannot see big business tolerating the threat of having to pay even a minor modicum of taxes nor the religious right in both the UK and the USA nor the DWP itself (who sees poverty as a mortal sin to be punished) ever allowing something so eminently sensible as UBI which would lead to people leading better and more fulfilling lives
Where people will be denied support, charged with "vagrancy" after being homeless is criminalised, then given the "opportunity" to enter an AI controlled modern day "workhouse" (so something worse than a Chinese factory dormitory) or jailed and subjected to modern day hard labour - perhaps refuelling a (data centre powering) nuclear reactor minus protective clothing as prisoners are expendable and the AI has been trained to see them as "valueless"
Ghost gun legislation casts shadow over 3D printing
Thursday 5th February 2026 15:24 GMT
Re: Maybe...
Or side step the constitution - it says keep or bear arms, it says nothing about ammunition nor about propellant charges. If the courts can ignore "as part of a well regulated militia" then this just a sensible response to conservative judges meddling with semantics.
So just ban possession of ammunition or institute a $500 per round tax on all ammunition in our your possession (whether purchased in or out of state)
Then tack on a very large fine /.jail time for tax evasion / making false declarations on an ammunition possession form.
British military to get legal OK to swat drones near bases
Uncle Sam dangles nuclear campuses for states while watering down safety rules
Musk distracts from struggling car biz with fantastical promise to make 1 million humanoid robots a year
France to replace US videoconferencing wares with unfortunately named sovereign alternative
Tuesday 27th January 2026 15:33 GMT
The french govt 20+ years ago tried to mandate people use the french term instead of email, which worked to a degree for civil servants but a french friend of mine put it succinctly - everyone else just calls it email, same as Spain where email is easier to say than correo electronico and well...everyone knows what you mean worldwide when you say email.
Tuesday 27th January 2026 15:27 GMT
Re: Deja vue all over again
According to an grey beard university lecture of mine circa turn of the millennium - It's why the Americans pronounce SQL (which Brits pronounce as S Q L) as sequel as that was apparently the original name for it, until it came to light there was an existing language or product called sequel and the name was then changed, however the Americans love their pronounceables.....
Marching orders delayed: Veterans' Digital ID off to a slow start
Friday 23rd January 2026 20:23 GMT
Re: What do they expect?
Like the Scottish civil.service who have a hard on/damp spot for the concept of a "universal citizen reference number" assigned at birth and to pull in the already living - pilfering the NHS database.
Which then opens the threat of random depts/staff building disturbing profiles on you and perusing your private medical information under some bullshit reason
Trump promises nuclear datacenter permits in 3 weeks, calls Greenland 'big beautiful ice'
Thursday 22nd January 2026 23:08 GMT
Re: Truth is a malleable thing :o
I'm reminded of "Solomon Gursky was here" by Mordecai Richler. Trump very much reminds me of the titular character's older brother Bernard, who desperately wants to be everything his younger brother is and lies, cheats and swindles to try and get there.
Its a good read
Thursday 22nd January 2026 22:52 GMT
Re: (The UK is) sitting on top of the North Sea
yet people say "no no no he would NEVER invade Scotland, your just being silly and delusional now" - ignoring Prestwick is effectively leased to the US military (so already air strip at the US disposal), his 2 golf courses, north sea oil, chance to rip down all the wind turbines etc....
Biting the hand that feeds IT
