Posts by Equitas

Re: I'd read the contract terms carefully

@Dan 55

"Lets face it TT are a bunch of cowboys "

Did you perchance mean cowgirls?

Re: Presumably

And the domestic abuse is not always by women against men, dsepite what the feminist lobby would have you believe.

Non-subjuncitivist feminists

"as if they are equal" -- well, AC is certainly not literate. "as if" requires to be followed by the subjunctive, so it should have read "as if they were equal". But then AC claims to be a feminist, and I've never found feminists to be particularly hot on logic.

Re: In the news over the weekend...

Smart meters COULD be in the interests of the customer, in situations where the meter is in a lockfast location and it is difficult or inconvenient for the customer to arrange access for meter reading. But in the present set-up, if the customer changes supplier, the former supplier can -- and British Gas does -- refuse remote access to the data.

Re: W00h00

Apparently the credit card companies charge retailers considerably more if they don't use 3Dsecure. On the other hand, the customer is more likely to avoid a retailer who does put the customer through the nuisance value of those bizarre credit card "security" setups. I still think that a pass number being sent by SMS each transaction is a far better way of doing things.

Re: With you on this

Neither, thank you!

Re: 2G - 20 years on

"Not to mention actually using a mobile phone in a mobile environment (hands-free) without having a call drop evey 2-3 minutes when the network fails to handover between cells."

If you have a half-decent car with a built-in GSM transceiver and a mobile that can use the rsap bluetooth profiile, then you won't have significant black spots even in the most remote parts of the country. Most of the upmarket cars in the VW, Audi, BMW, Mercedes, Bentley and a number of other ranges have such "premium" audio systems. The sad thing is, of course, that iPhones and Windows phones can't use rsap and so can use only the handsfree feature of such audio systems -- they can't use the powerful transceiver circuits and efficient car aerial of the GSM transceiver

Re: Number ranges

Not only do Canada and the US share a numbering plan, in Canada some provinces share an area code -- 902 covers both the province of Nova Scotia and the province of Prince Edward Island. Different provincial legislatures, different tax systems, but the same area code.

Re: Morals, ethics, principles...

WW 2, to almost everyone but American revisionists, started on September 1, 1939.

The bombing of Pearl Harbor was on December 7, 1941, or December 8 Japanese time.

So if IBM didn't cease supplying the Nazis by the end of August 1939, they must have been supplying the Nazis during WW 2.

Re: @h4rm0ny - I would argue the situation was even worse

Nuke wrote "The EU banned creosote for example. Fine for sunny climates like Spain and Italy, but I have about 500 yards of fencing to maintain in the damp Welsh hills and must now do so without creosote, and the alternatives are significantly more expensive and less effective (they are "safe", you see). OK, if you want the economics - did the EU consider the extra time it takes me to earn that extra expense (time lost from my life) compared with, probabilistically, the average shortening of my life due to creosote poisoning (assuming for the sake of argument I *can* somehow be poisoned by it?) Of course not."

I think the restrictions on creosote sales are crazy. But it doesn't mean that you can't get or use creosote. Sales of creosote are restricted, not banned. I haven't found any difficulty in buying it -- usually in 25 litre drums. And if you're not unduly worried about complying with regulations, old engine oil diluted with kerosene does much the same job. Don't drink it. Wear gloves and protective clothing so that it doesn't end up over your skin.But anyone without enough sense to take sensible precautions isn't fit to let loose in the community anyway.

Incidentally, Royal Mail have taken to opening packages containing new engine oil (perfectly legal to send by mail, though it's illegal to send old engine oil by post) and disposing of them as illegal. Did you ever hear of anyone sending OLD engine oil by post?

Re: I'd have one but...

Battery boost -- just pop into Asda :-)

Re: About time.....but

Matt Bryant has made well the points that Turing, for all his brilliant contributions to computer science, acted very naively in calling in the police with regard to alleged actions of a homosexual lover; further that he'd have lost his security clearance anyway had he been known to be associating with female prostitutes.

There are aspects of the laws of our time which we may not like -- but if we make clear that we've been breaking them, surely we should realise that such a fact will place us in a very dangerous situation.

There's a further aspect to the Turing matter that's very strange. He was an intelligent man. He chose chemical castration. He surely had the intellect to ascertain that a known and relatively common side-effect is the development of female breasts? Every male undergoing even milder forms of hormone treatment for prostate cancer is warned that the development of breasts is a side-effect they should be aware of. Strange, then, that he should have been so upset by a predictable effect of the treatment he chose.

Re: I really don’t understand?????

"If you look at a British Five Pound note today it still says "I promise to pay the bearer the sum of five pounds" (or words to that effect) and that is signed by the chief cashier of the Bank of England."

British? It's English and not legal tender in Scotland :-). Nor, of course, are any Scottish banknotes.

Re: Florida1920 The whole truth

It's very true that much of what's written on this subject is rubbish.

Yes, Turing was brilliant and a foundational figure in the development of computer science.

Yes, Turing was working during the war and thereafter on matters which related to national security.

Yes Turing was a practising homosexual.

But there's where most of what's being written goes off the rails.

* Turing was knowingly breaking the law of the time and therefore taking a risk. The fact that he was taking a risk with his sexual partners would have been equally real had he been heterosexual and associating with known prostitutes or others who might be a risk to his security clearance.

* At least on Turing's homosexual partners was a burglar

* Turing himself called the police in to act against his burglar partner

* Turing was given the choice of a nominal one-year prison sentence or a one year chemical castration. He chose a year of chemical castration. He was presumably intelligent enough to know or at least ascertain the probable short-term effects and the probability of any of these remaining after treatment stopped

* Turing's death was a considerable time after the end of his treatment

* Although the official verdict was suicide there is very considerable doubt as to whether it was actually so -- he was certainly known to be very careless about his use of poisons.

Re: People are stupid as a whole.

The US is a fairly large country and most East-coast US residents are not familiar with life on the West Coast and vice versa. And neither group are familiar with life in large parts of what exists in between. Most parts of the US outside the cities have no mains water supply, far less a gas supply and it's not at all unusual to find houses using electrical installations from the 1920s, done in "post and wire." In quite a few parts of the rural US it's a case of a kettle sitting on a woodburning stove, sometimes with a Kemac oil burner to cut in when the wood runs out. In the 1970s it wasn't uncommon to have magneto telephones and the whole community -- up to 99 homes on the SAME party line.

Re: Another info/access grab lurks in your Paypa account

Give them the number of an account with only a nominal amount of money in it.

Re: Whilst I can see the value.....

So Ledswinger says

"One other common misconception - normal credit tariff customers can't be forced to have a smart meter. If you say no, then that's (currently) final. "

British Gas didn't ask. They simply sent some operative from Eastern Europe, with very little English, to "change the meter." That particular supply was a domestic-rate supply.

Re: Shock horror

Par for the course!

Re: more info please

More info indeed required! How are we expected to know what "over here" means to big_D, who gives no indication of location?

Re: Agree

Many of us have indeed been bitten by PayPal. However it has got better over the years and nowadays usually works fairly smoothly and is reasonably understandable.

There should have been no room for such a company -- but the banks still have no way of transferring money across international borders simply, quickly and cheaply. Credit cards have become dramatically expensive where international transactions are concerned.

Convoluted "security" questions, passwords, passcodes and who knows what do nothing to endure the credit cards' online systems to the user. And who would trust a bank, anyway?

I'm still waiting for someone to come up with a really cheap and meaningful system to allow microbusinesses to receive payment by card on a face-to-face basis. It isn't there. And aren't banks the ones with whom the most up-to-date method of communication they'll accept is the fax -- invented in the century for last by one Alexander Bain, a clockmaker from Wick, Scotland?