Posts by John Brown (no body) 25434 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010
It'd be funny if the only cheap way to launch it and provide a taxi service was to hire SpaceX :-)
Even more fun would be for SpaceX to come up with a 6-way docking hub, launch 4 Starships to form a far bigger space station and still have two docking ports for the cargo ships/space taxies and have it all in place before Jeff makes it to orbit :-)
The lawyers for the class action clearly have only their own interests at heart here. After all, why would anyone affected by this illegal data grab think that their data was worth only $1.86? The lawyers will be creaming millions of the top, Meta/Facebook get a minor slap on the wrist and the punters who had their data illegally used get sweet FA.
There is no need for Meta and their ilk to stop doing this if they don't get punished properly for breaking the law. If it had gone to court and Meta lost, there would almost certainly be punitive damages too since this was almost certainly not an "accident". They can't even blame a "rogue engineer" since that person would have been an employee acting on their behalf at the time. The employer is still responsible for the actions of an employee going about company business.
FWIW, I sometime have issues printing to my network Brother laser printer from Windows. Windows just sits there apparently unable to "wake" the printer from it's slumbers. Just manually pressing a button on the printer to "wake" it doesn't solve the problem. Windows has decided the printer is "Not Ready". Only a power cycle of the printer will allow Windows to then see the printer and start sending the queued job(s) to it.
However, just the other day, it happened to wife, also printing from Windows. I tried sending a job from my FreeBSD laptop and the printer sprang into life, printed my job then continued on with her job from Windows.
Clearly "something" weird is happening in Windows, with the Windows Brother printer driver or the printer itself when Windows is the OS sending the job, and yet printing via CUPS from FreeBSD not only never has the issue but does "something magic" that allows Windows printing to start working again on a different computer.
I have no idea what is going on, but the "magic" seems to happen after the correct incantations are invoked.
I've also seen an issue where no amount of fiddling with driver settings, de-installing-re-installing drivers and playing with BIOS setting could get the onboard sound working again. Except when I booted a live Linux distro, the sound worked perfectly fine. Rebooting back into Windows, suddenly the sound was also working fine. My best theory for that one is that something in the Linux audio driver reset some on-board setting in the sound hardware that the Windows driver wasn't dealing with. Maybe the Windows driver made assumptions about "things that could never happen" while the Linux driver, probably being a reverse engineered bit of code, did everything "by the book" when it came to detecting and initialising the hardware.
Sometime, a different approach might be the fix you are looking for. It may not be the long term answer for some people, or even for most people, but if no other fix is forthcoming, it might be time to think outside the box. :-)
One place | worked at some years ago used to pay us every 4 weeks rather than the more common calendar monthly. Initially, when I started, it felt like I was being paid less than a should be. But then I realised one calendar month out of 12, I got paid twice in the same month! That felt like A once per year bonus!
"Yes, I remember using the old shilling"
I remember finding out on a school exchange visit to Germany that the old, still in use shilling (5p, the new coins had arrived by then, but many old shillings were still around and in use) was an almost exact match for the a German 1DM, as far as coin operated machines were concerned. Quite handy as a poor young schoolboy with not a not of spending money. That old shilling worth 5p, thanks the exchange rate at the time, was worth five times as much when used as a 1dm coin in pinball machines etc :-)
"Actually, we converted to pounds and decimals of pounds, did the arithmetic, and then converted the result back to £sd!"
My mother was a comptometer operator pre-decimal. That was basically a big mechanical calculator. She had to learn and memorise the decimal conversion. She still knew them to the day she died.
I'm not quite that old. Farthing had gone and silver thruppeny bits had been replaced. The closest to a farthing for me was going into a sweetshop where we could still by "Blackjacks" or "Fruit Salads" at four-a-penny to two for a ha'penny :-)
We still had half=crowns, but crowns had gone and apart from some newspaper adverts and the top jackpot prize on The Golden Shit, no one was using Guineas any more.
Apart from anything else an account still in £sd would most likely have accumulated some interest over that time too, so if all they do is round up the pass-book last entry, the customer may be losing out. Back in the early-mid-80's, interest rates were pretty high for a decade or so.
"Nowadays, this money is given to charity, I believe."
It is, but only after an even longer period of dormancy. Not sure of the rules, but I heard a BBC item on the radio a while ago about rule changes and reminding people to check for old account details as the preiod was being reduced.
"But maybe just some boilerplate that applies to everybody, which is essentially meaningless to domestic lines such as mine, but does indeed impact scammers and spammers."
Or maybe they are just being a little more honest than most and setting a "limit" of 750 hrs instead of stating "unlimited" :-)
Thanks to inflation, the penny has no real intrinsic value any more. About the only practical use for it is to be given in change because marketers like to price things ending in 99p for psychological reasons, ie they are trying to fool people that £9.99 is actually cheaper than £10.00 by enough to matter :-)
El Reg have decided to standaize[sic] on "North American English style guides. Although why that means using F in this case I have no idea. A very large part of North America standardised on Celsius some time ago, especially since it works well as a word in both of their main languages, English(Canadian) and French(Canadian) :-)
I never really got on with Symphony. We ended up with Smart (Later SmartWare), an integrated suite of word processor, spreadsheet, database, calender, graphing tool and comms package, all intergraded and interoperable via a scripting language which could also call external programmes too. It took some learning, but it did everything would ever need and then some more.
Back in the DOS days, we standardised our directory structures so anyone could sit fown at any computer and find the stuff they needed.
c:\apps was where you found WordStar, SuperCalc, DBase etc
c:\tools was where you find stuff people might need less frequently, like file conversion tools and the like.
c:\utils would have more esoteric stuff for doing thing the average user would only do rarely or never such as Norton Utilities and the like and things like TSRs loaded by AUTEXEC.BAT
Harry walked into the dungeon in search of clues about his nemesis.
It's dark. There are exits to the North, East and West.
"Illuminati" shouts Harry as he waves his wand in front to light the way.
Unfortunately, Harry wasn't quite as good at spells as he thought and two lizard overlords appeared and spirited him away, sucking the life from all his apps
Game Over.
Yeah, but, unless they have different charging scales in the ladies loos, then there's no discrimination there, is there?
I do get, and support, you point about womens sanitary products, but I also see the points others have raised about the fallacy of comparing them with bog roll. I'm not sure I can even think of something men need and women don't, on any sort of "regular/frequent need" basis. Not even razors, since many women also use razors and both can choose not to shave whichever bodily hair the do choose to shave.
I genuinely can't think of a comparison, which makes it all the more galling that VAT is charged on sanitary items, since the definition of VAT is that it's supposed be applied to non-essentials (they used to call it "luxury tax")
It's amazing how people in power can convince themselves of a particular position when questioned about it and soon after do the exact opposite "because circumstance changed or new information became available, so I changed my mind. I didn't lie at the time, I have simply changed my position since then,"
She's clearly a rank amateur. How did she think she would ever get away with this? The Gucci bags and Rolex watches sound like some incompetents way of hiding the money and keeping it from flowing through her own bank accounts. The cars were a bit obvious too.
To be fair, it's the MS market dominance that has caused that in the first place. After all, WHY should LO be led by the nose through the MS hoops? It's different. 100% compatibility is never going to happen. So why not celebrate the difference and be thankful there is some compatibility? It's not as if WordStar and WordPerfcet were competing on who was the most compatible with the other. They were just different and people learned one or the other. Or both.
When did we stop thinking of computers and software as tools to do a job and start thinking of them as Microsoft computers with Microsoft standards that everyone and everything must aspire to match?
"and the others sent on a long ground handling safety refresher course."
Ideally, yes, but as per the article, staffing levels the post-COVID lay-offs and time for proper training. Sounds more like a bit of corner cutting to get back to profitable operations as quickly as possible. I suspect the people on the ground crew were trained, but not as well as they should be. In less critical training situations, I'm sure we've all had the sort of "training" where you get told something once in a course, written, video, whatever, then move onto the next thing, gaining large numbers of "facts" so quickly there's barely time for them to sink in, compared to a properly structured "learning experience" where facts get repeated in different situations and built on and repeated again as the course progresses.
"If there was something to be seen, it would be on video by now."
It is. There are many, many videos of "odd" things in the sky. Unfortunately, of all those millions, nay billions of cameras out there, many of which are mobile phones capable of taking video at 1080p or better with auto focus, not a single user is capable of holding one steady or resting/leaning against something solid to get anything other than a wildly shaky and out of focus image that could be literally anything which emits light at almost any range imaginable. And they always seem to cut out just as the "object" is about to move past something that might give some perspective and a clue to it's size and speed, eg did it go behind or in front of the tree 20 feet away and was it just another blurred moth or flying insect.
"adding that a cash infusion from a space agency could make the tech mature enough to take to Mars."
In experiments, this looks better than MOXIE but we can't be sure yet as we can't yet even build a proper prototype. If someone will supply the cash, we'll see if we are right or wrong.
That's how science works and is funded :-)
"probably staff rather than customers?"
Doesn't matter. They still only need to keep a record that the data has been verified, eg passport could relate the Right To Work, drivers licence for any employ required to drive a vehicle on behalf of the company, but neither need to be kept in their entirety, especially as scans. Even a driving licence should only really need a record of what classes of vehicle are covered against the named employee.
Being a remote worker, my employer requires an annual driving licence check. I send them a scan, they confirm the details, they delete the file. (I actually send them the same scan each year, since nothing changes and no one ever notices or complains :-))
Although now I come to think of it, it's entirely likely that those scans might still be in some email archive. I must ask about that on Monday. Most of our emails default to auto-delete in 2027/8 or thereabouts (5 years autodelete??)so just deleting it Outlook obviously isn't enough.
And for as long as it's been reported in the news, as far back as I can remember, Thames Water have consistently been at the top of the list. When the customers can't choose the supplier, reputation matters little.
I think I read somewhere that Thames Water was not just top of the list, but b y a large margin, losing over 40% more water through leaks than the company ion 2nd place.
*ONLY* regulation can do anything, but that means a properly funded regulator with real powers. Maybe we could start by freezing the executive pay (up 21% in the last year for CEOs) and freezing shareholders dividends for a couple of years, re-investing it back into the leaking pipes problem. My local water company came out top of the dividend league, paying out over £123m, money that could have gone into repairing the pipes.
Is this for internal employees or is this for your entire customer base? How do you handle it when someone fat fingers something and you have automated emails going to someone who should not be getting them? How does that person raise a ticket?
I had an issue with a bank sending me monthly statement notifications for someone else with enough PII in it to make it a GDPR issue. I had a hell of a time getting this bank to take notice of me as I am not a customer. No email addresses on their site, just a "Contact Us" form that had REQUIRED fields I could not completes, not being a customer and not having account information. The sales people dealing with new customers didn't seem interested enough to respond. I eventually got a response after I spammed various likely email addresses like security@ fraud@ etc suggesting they contact me ASAP or wait for a letter from the Ombudsman, ICO or FCA.
"Only because Russian designers are morons. If you actually wanted a usable vehicle along these lines then i'd start with a mobility scooter and add a half inch of armour, enough that it's bullet proof. Then add a small turret on top with your choice of weapon."
Then add the RC equipment and the servos to operate the steering, replace the wheels with something that won't be stopped by a low kerb or any sort of debris in it's path and you very quickly reach the point where it's cheaper and easier to start from scratch with a purpose built device rather than a Heath Robinson contraption.
And never forget how long it took the Daleks to learn how to "negotiate" stairs!! Even poor K-9 had problems on anything other than a smooth studio floor :-)
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