Re: Locks.
"Is it bad that I first worked out how to rake a lock in Scouts with a paperclip when we couldn't open the door in the scout hut?"
Be Prepared? :-)
25427 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010
"If I am not mistaken, deep space kind of refers to stuff well out beyond the Earth/Moon orbital distance, or even further, beyond the Earth’s gravitational well something like arbitrarily 1,000,000 miles or 2,000,000 km or something like that."
IIRC, A.C.Clarke said something along the lines of in the future, the word ship will mean space ship and only for a short time near the start of human history did ship mean something floating on the water. In a similar vain, I suspect "deep space" will change over time to mean at least beyond the solar system, anything inside the Kuiper Belt or maybe the Oort cloud being "local space" :-)
That'll be the same users that complain and "can't do work" every time that MS changes and "upgrades" things, including entire look and feel, never mind swapping menu items around and relatively regular basis. Personally, I don't actually see a great deal of difference between switching from one GUI based OS to another and having a supposedly consistent GUI based OS changed from under me by updates and upgrades.
"Now, if schools exposed pupils to different systems in an attempt to provide generic 'IT' and not just 'MS' then the training issue would largely go away over time, they're already using Android/IOS for most personal computing these days."
Those same Android and iOS devices people are using for personal computing is what many, many schools are already using day to day because both have a large fleet management ecosystem in place and education devs are targetting both with their wares. Many schools have deployed Chromebooks and iPads to their staff and pupils across the U. I've been peripherally involved in a couple of massive rollouts of both, each of which numbered in the 10's of 1000's of devices.
All bundles of goods, whether physical or virtual, are for the benefit of the manufacture/supplier, never for the benefit for the end user. Some end users may benefit in the short term, but long term, the majority lose out. Bundle almost always include stuff you don't want and while putatively cheaper initially, will only ever have more bits added, prices go up for the added bits and more people find the bundles overpriced, full of stuff they don't want and no longer any way to buy the individual items they do want.
Sales and marketing work on the principle that the customer, sales area, region etc "owe" them money and their job is to grab as much of that money as possible.
"Those who took what I believe the professionals say is the best route, of assuming the identity of a child who died very young, will not need to fear the impersonated turning up at the bank or Social Security Administration office."
Until an unsuspecting family member, especially descendants, start taking "family history" into account and send off DNA samples to any of the genealogy companies out there and get "weird" matches back. A situation that has already happened numerous times and something the people "living the lie" never considered back in the day.
"One curious thing about the most common British surnames is that five of the top ten most common are characteristically (albeit not uniquely) Welsh - Jones, Williams, Davies, Evans, Thomas. Not sure what to make of that."
The Welsh males are hung like donkeys? There's not much else to do in the valleys? Sheep are in decline?
"LLMs can't "invent" new stuff, only re-purpose existing material."
FWIW, we've already seem that the CAN make stuff up. We've also seen instances of LLMs producing dangerous outcomes when asked for innocuous things such as recipies, which make one wonder just howe safe and accurate were the results Grok provided. Clearly it's not working as intended and the safety protocols are broken, but would you trust it for a drug or explosive recipe and procedure?
As for parents teaching their children how to be safe, yes, some do, but sadly it seems more and more are relying on the school system to all the teaching and parenting for them these days. A friend who recently retired as a Reception Class teacher relates how the number of kids starting school still wearing nappies (diapers) and/or can't use a knife and fork has gone from almost zero when she started to significant numbers nowadays.
"As its the bigger projects that tend to get the most attention and therefore money such Gnome, GIMP, Firefox, office suites etc."
Maybe those projects, as well as the commercial distributors ought to be taking some time to look at some of the upstream code they incorporate and checking that it's doing what is says on the tin. Not everything and not all at once, but maybe put a bit of resource into a rolling program and examining upstream code and project dependencies, especially the more unloved but vital "lone person" projects. We already know that some "tried and tested" code ended up having bugs leaving a gaping hole for over a decade and that PolKit one wasn't the only instance. If I had the skills and time, I'd help, but I don't so I donate where I can.
I never did own a car with a Nav system, overnight it went from "too expensive to be worth it" to "I am always carrying something with me that's better".
I guess that depends on the person. There was a significant period of time where portable SatNavs, significantly cheaper, better and updatable than the OEM car built-in ones where on the market, and voice directions were in the mid to later stages of the period.
For me, the straw that broke the camels back was when Tucows redirect all their downloads through their ad server. Blocked them, never went back and started blocking anyone being shitty, intrusive, obnoxious etc.
As for El Reg, this site is fully white listed but I don't see any ads because the ad slingers are blocked separately. I don't see how I could unblock them on only this one site without unblocking them everywhere. Likewise, google-analytics, googletagmanager and googlesyndication. The article itself puts Google pretty much at the top of the list for intrusion and tracking, so yeah, they stay blocked. If El Reg are running their own tracking scripts from their own domain, or choose to inject "safe" ads from their own domain, then they will get through and I suppose that's ok since it's their content I'm accessing. But that also make El Reg responsible for what they server from their domain. 3rd parties, not so much.
I think what will shake up the industry the most would be a successful case against a website for serving up malware. The current "defence" is that it's a 3rd party sending the ads via a contracted ad broker. But as with other areas of life, the supplier is responsible for the "goods" they deliver to the user and they don't get to hide behind "the big boys did it" excuse. If I buy something and the seller sends me a broken piece of shit, the seller is on the hook to sort it out for me, not some 3rd party wholesaler or OEM who I have no connection with.
"And nothing was learned by the big money in 20 years."
Because they are still a growing market making more and more money year on year. There's still growth in the numbers of people on the internet so even if 50% are using ad blockers, it's almost certainly still a growing number of victims. Maybe when the market reaches saturation and ad slingers start to see a levelling off, things may start to change.
Coming from the same lot who run witchhunts on places like wetcanvas over such sins as daring to draw the same location as someone else (the same location thousands flock to every year) or using the same publicly available stock image as it's "plagiarism"
They'd probably have apoplexy if forced to sit through Irwin Allens full back catalogue :-) He not only reused props and even entire sets, he even slipped in film from previous shows and films, all to save money :-)
Yeah, supposedly, Disney is only buying distribution rights for the "rest of the world", hence the new series being series 1 on Disney+ and series 14 on the BBC. But it's blindingly obvious that Disney will be taking more and more control over it. I wonder how they'll manage to to fit Doctor Who into the Marvel and/or Star Wars franchises?
Most boards still have a rescue or emergency method. Usually by putting a firmware file with a specific name into the root of a FAT32 device, USB sticks mostly these days. The clever ones will usually keep two copies of the firmware and switch to the new one when it's successfully installed but can revert back to the older one if anything goes pear shaped.
"What it wasn't - and, thankfully, isn't - is garish, over-designed, spread out over too many subdialogues or needing to use a search box just to find the option you *hope* is still available."
I hope no one from MS is reading this!!! Once they realise, there will be different and incompatible shiny new GUIs for each different type of device that you want to format, probably two of each, one in Control Panel and another in Settings, which will have different settings layouts and the settings you most need to use will be hidden and only show up in advanced mode, entered by clicking on a pale grey ... menu drawn on a slightly paler grey background.
...I know a ready cleared "industrial site" that might still be available as it looks less and less likely to be a new battery "giga-factory".
"who do the put in as new CEO? Yep, the bean counter who was made up to COO."
Came here to make a point on that very promotion, but from a different angle. Isn't the COO the one who actually does the work while the CEO pretty much just chairs the meetings? So in effect, no real change.
"We're not even getting into the psychological stresses of being confined to a tin can hurtling through the void for 6+ months, unable to get away from the other people onboard, which is just one more way he'd fail miserably in the attempt."
While I agree with most of what you posted, I'd just like to point out how big Starship is and that Musk would be entirely capable of fitting one out as a "private space yacht", just for him and his family and/or staff to make the journey :-) No need to put up with the cramped conditions of with the 99 other people on the "cattle class" ships.
"With certain exceptions, non-disclosure and non-disparagement clauses are still legal and not just in relation to SpaceX"
I think you'll find that even in the US, it's the exact opposite. Non-disclosure and non-disparagement clauses or illegal and unenforceable, with certain exceptions.
"So even if technically speaking the clauses are unenforceable, US companies know that the threat of getting sued for breach of (illegal) contract is enough to keep people in line anyway."
So the I suppose the real question is which law enforcement department is responsible for enforcing those laws. Why should an individual need to pay for a lawyer and sue instead of reporting the breach of law to the right department and they then take it up? Just hand over a copy of the offending documentation that demonstrates, in writing, the illegal acts. In proper and well run, "perfect" systems, that's how it should, work. I know it doesn't and I know why. Cost.
"In most EEOC cases they do win because in most case the employer settles as it is less costly to settle than to fight, no matter the merits of the claim."
For some values of "win". Settling always involves the accused "paying to make it go away" and never results in a real or proper win of the accused being legally punished and being stopped from further breaking of the law and demonstrating to other companies that the relevant practice is illegal.
I often feel that "settling out of court" is not just the easy route, but part of the US social norm, ie looking after ones self, first and foremost, being "independent" etc. all part of the "American Dream" of if you work harder you will succeed. That's not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, but there are consequences. And it's somewhat balanced by US charitable giving that seems to be quite a strong thing.