Posts by Bebu

That position you just applied for might be a 'ghost job' that'll never be filled

Re: USA

Is the situation here in the UK different?

Good question. For products or services in AU we have the Trade Practices Act (1974) which became the Competition and Consumer Act (2010) which prohibits the advertising or offering a product or service when there is clearly an intent not to supply. It's not to great a stretch to imagine that applying the same strictures to invitations or offers of employment or contractual provision of skilled labour, could be subject to similar legislative framework.

I am guessing the legislative terrain in the UK is not too different from AU. In the US the Reconstruction Amendments don't seem to be all that effective. :(

I suppose if you were to scent a fake job posting and determined that the party was a chronic offender you might enlist ChatGPT etc to generate 1000s of fake applications* for each of the positions the offender was advertising. The idea being to render any actual recruitment activities in which they might engage as futile as they have your employment search.

An apropos slightly paraphrased observation of Terry Pratchett's Archchancellor Ridcully:

Cannot look at a sign sayin' 'Human Resources Department' without detecting a whiff of brimstone.

The whole tribe including the 19% too thick to engage in this malpractice are probably marginally more popular than serial killers or kiddie fiddlers (although not a coincidence that the US appears to glory in a surfeit of all three.)

_{* AI should excel at hallucinating large numbers of distinct but plausible applicants even with a little light identity larceny and produce convincing, but not too convincing, applications.}

NASA narrows Artemis III landing target list to nine

Mons Olympus quite nice at that time of year too.

Perhaps a greater likelihood of my skiing on the slopes of Mons Olympus at the Club Méditerranée de Karen spatiale and in my designer Prada extravehicular mobility unit (space suit.)

Contemporary US politics cast a rather dark shadow over any American manned space exploration unless the likes of Bezos and Musk were prepared to take up the baton which is impossibly unlikely as apart from Space Karen's Martian (wet) dreams there is no obvious short term payoff for them.

Anyway there is never any snow on Mons Olympus. :)

Re: Impossible

If the Moon is a disc, how come you don't see the other side of the coin if it doesn't spin?

Lunar nutation (nodding) means that something like 4/7 of the lunar sphere (lunoid?) is visible from the Earth which leaves the flat mooners with an embarrassing 1/14 of a non existent sphere to explain.

Clearly all a joke but unfortunately there are a terrifyingly large number of mental defectives for whom this type of nonsense is in deadly earnest.

Dropbox to shed another 500 staff, CEO takes 'full responsibility'

Dropbox dropped.

Quite a few years ago Dropbox stopped supporting their Linux client on RHEL7 and/or NFS mounted home directories which pretty much killed it locally and a little later the institution (being mostly MS and lesser extent Apple) migrated to MS OneDrive dropping its Dropbox subscription.

One sorry Sad Sack had built some emacs etc automation around Dropbox folders and was frantic until we discovered Rclone for him. Because his new OneDrive folders, Dropbox and various other remote resources (davs?) could be accessed with Rclone, he was as happy as a pig in mud.

Even with Rclone I personally found Dropbox quite flaky compared with the MS, Google and other providers, at least under Linux. So would not be too surprised that the company might be a death spiral but they would not be alone.

Reaction Engines' hypersonic hopes stall as funding fizzles out

Cat...Pigeons

Someone will get a bargain with the IP, maybe they will be able to do something with it.*

Should that someone were to turn out to be a PRC Corporation with clear connections to the CCP and PLA the shemozzle might become rather more interesting (as in those proverbial times.:)

* There might be an "interesting" hypersonic weapon angle with a single use SABRE engine.

GCC 15 to keep Itanium support for now, after all

Re: Very Long Indeterminate Wait

"the assumption that instruction scheduling, reordering, allocation et al would- and, more importantly, *could*- be done better in advance by the compiler, rather than in hardware at runtime.

And it turned out that this assumption was wrong and that- as Donald Knuth himself later noted (and I mentioned here) "the "Itanium" approach [was] supposed to be so terrific—until it turned out that the wished-for compilers were basically impossible to write".

This interesting in itself viz that run time resource allocation scheduling can access a much large problem space than any static algorithm unless "impossible to write" means impracticably difficult for human compiler constructors rather than "possible to write" is provably false (in all models.)

Probably simplistic but I could imagine a compiler that uses the hardware's dynamic algorithms to perform simulation execution on some intermediate representation before generating optimised code.

At least we won't have to face the consequences of dodgy AI written ia64 compilers generating hallucinating binaries.

Microsoft tries out wooden bit barns to cut construction emissions

laminated timber...

I don't imagine laminated timber is going to be much of a Faraday cage nor much of conductor so I imagine some sort of foil shielding and lightening conductors are on the books.

Otherwise I could imagine some "citizen" not entirely enamored of MS Corp nor of AI generally, directing their army surplus radar onto one of these bit barns. :)

Why not go full hippy and use adobe (sun dried bricks = straw, muck and dirt ~ very MS I would have thought) or wattle and daub, or rammed earth? Compressed straw bales with concrete render are a thing. Given the unmanageable tsunami of discarded automobile tyres* why not use those in construction? (Has been done elsewhere.)

I don't imagine MS is fooling anyone with more than half a brain but then its probably only those deficient in the brains department that voluntarily purchase MS tat.

_{* even EVs use the same tyres whose production requires a considerable quantity of oil and energy without even considering the energy, oil, steel, concrete etc that is involved in the construction of roadways, bridges, tunnels etc}

We know what Musk will probably dress up as this year: A victim

Re: If he does show up,

He should do so as a CLOWN!

The image that came to mind was Stephen King's clown Pennnywise (with red balloon on a string) but definitely not a victim.

I hasten to add that from early childhood I could not and can not abide clowns in any way, shape or form.

I think traditionally a clown's face is unique to the clown and doesn't change but I noticed looking for an image of Pennywise's clown face that it was quite varied - so possibly even more appropriate considering Space Karen's buffoonery.

Re: Hmm

kingship presidential immunity

Magna Carta, Oliver Cromwell and the Convention nationale (National Convention) pretty much scuppered that for kings. :)

We have better and sharper steel these days so there is still hope for limiting presidential immunity. ;)

Windows 10 given an extra year of supported life, for $30

Re: $30 ... how to be paid?

"...we do need to know what brand of car you drive and what washing powder you use..."

Stop right there! Who in the 21st century uses powder?

Ah, it is MS asking - figures.

Anyway I wouldn't pay MS USD30/yr but then I don't run W10.* I recall W7 had some hack which enabled your oem or retail W7 to grab and install extended support patches from MS gratis.

So I imagine some intrepid chap beyond the reach of the long arm of the DMCA might oblige with the same for W10.

_{* only a Win98 vm for an ancient version of dictionary application which went all web years ago.}

An awful lot of FOSS should thank the Academy

Interested in which *EL8 version dominates.

I would punt that AL8 might reverse the share with Rocky 8.

I settled on AL8 moving my personal systems from RHEL8 (still used in a couple of VMs) after looking at Rocky, Alma etc and non *EL distros. I chose AL mostly because Cloudlinux was supporting/sponsoring AL which was more likely to be around in a few years. Second choice was opensuse.

In the event didn't really make a difference for me. I run Proxmox which has a debian (bookworm) based OS but could easily have used SmartOS (illumos based.) When AL8 is EOL, if I am still around, I would probably migrate to a variety of OS and distros but as VMs. The only downside is keeping everything patched. Currently just mirror AL8, ZFS, EPEL8 etc updates and patch from my mirror.

It would be interesting to know why this user community chose Rocky but possibly the applications they use were only supported on Rocky.

Hide the keyboard – it's the only way to keep this software running

Wondering about the platform?

Given Turbopascal was mentioned I am wondering whether CP/M (80, 86) was involved. The 1980s also covers MSDOS 1.1 - 4.0 but I would have thought MSDOS' keyboard interrupt handling wasn't that fragile.

I suppose Turbopascal could have been used for embedded development which might make sense if you were dealing with a lot of sensors that used interrupts to get the processor's attention rather than polling.

I could imagine if the system had a fairly large interrupt load that a race condition in the keyboard interrupt handler might be exposed by mashing the keyboard eg if the ISR didn't immediately mask further interrupts before processing.

I vaguely recall MSDOS device drivers had interrupt and strategy parts but were basically a charade as the two parts weren't asynchronous.

Back then I thought minicomputer hardware like DEC's PDP8 and PDP11 rule that space (industrial control and monitoring.)

Fired Disney staffer accused of hacking menu to add profanity, wingdings, removes allergen info

Re: What kind of Mickey Mouse outfit

in some countries "Pukka" means "good" and in others it means "utterly fucked"

Curious in which countries pukka means "utterly fucked."

Not really part of AU English and only heard in period dramas or from pretentious poms like Jamie Oliver.

Apparently the particular sense of pukka used is 'solid' but also meant 'cooked' I believe. So in the sense of ones goose being cooked I can see the "utterly fucked."

This chap apart from having lost the plot, has decisively incinerated his goose.

China refreshes crew of its 'Celestial Palace' space station

Re: travel in deep space and wave at the stars

“And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” Neitzche

Given his life history one might suspect: he did and the abyss obliged.

The poor bugger really was away with the pixies and completely gaga at the end.

There is something Lovecraftian about mindless eyes gazing out of the abyss...

Must have been looking the other way

First time I have encountered taikonaut for a PRC astronaut. Seems a peculiar coinage: the taiko part is apparently Chinese (Mandarin) for "space" and the nauta part from the Greek for "sailor." Given that astro and cosmo are also both from Greek and I would also hazard that Mandarin has a word for a sailor, I wonder why not use a fully Mandarin coinage?

I also note that India have vyomanauts but probably less discordant as Sanskrit probably has some prototypical form of naut given Greek and Sanskrit are members of the same language family.

Despite Bill Nelson's sabre rattling I don't think that any nation in the foreseeable future and much longer, could build a lunar facility that could forcibly maintain a territorial claim to the moon. A lunar base is just too vulnerable to the forces of nature let alone the hostile actions of an adversary. You would need to maintain superiority above the moon from a fleet of orbiting stations and if you could do that then you could just as easily do the same above the earth to blockade your adversaries.

Tower PC case allegedly used as 'creative cavity' by drug importer

Creative Cavity?

I was picturing a street mime requiring a cavity search.

Sketchy financials send Supermicro auditors running for the hills

It's how many or who...

you screw

"Sam Bankman Fried (FTX) [how many] or Elizabeth Holmes (Theranos) [who]"

So if you don't want to end up in the clink just screw a lot of, (but not a politically significant number of), nobodies.

Definitely don't steal a nickel from american oligarchs who like dragons generally know their hoard to the least bauble.

US Army should ditch tanks for AI drones, says Eric Schmidt

Still useful...

to keep (mostly) unarmed civilians in line.

If I recall correctly the extremely long line of Russian tanks stretching from Byelorussia to Kiev was largely dealt with by enthusiastic Ukrainian lads' being able to get close enough, in the absence of effective Russian infantry support, to use their portable anti tank weapons.

I think that fiasco was before drones were used as offensively as now. I think those tanks also weren't able to leave the road and spread out over the country (terrain, wet boggy land?) and were sitting ducks. (The sunken lanes in WW2 Normandy might have been a clue.)

I can picture Heinz Guderian shaking his head dismayed.

LISP and Prolog, and in concepts like "fuzzy logic".

You must have been around for the first installment of the AI saga?

I think LISP in many forms (eg SCHEME) is still pretty much alive but I haven't really seen much Prolog (on a par with SmallTalk) but might have niche uses. At the time I was quite interested in clausal form logic (CFL) and thought ii could be useful for proving code correctness. I still have a copy of Tom Richards' textbook.

I know one washing machine manufacturer's controller uses fuzzy logic in sensing the laundry load so fuzzy logic may be sufficiently common in some domains that it is not noticed.

I clearly recall as an undergrad. picking up a text on fuzzy logic by Lofti Zadeh - phonetically his name seem so appropriate to the subject that I never forgot it. I suppose long gone now.

No Circle in Hell...

Human operators obviously get it wrong all the time

Humans can earn eternal damnation in their afterlife for the misdeeds in this life but unless AI were to acquire a soul I cannot see where in Hell you would punish its misdeeds.

Combustion engines grind Linus Torvalds' gears

That Linus' new motor is a Volvo...

is slightly amusing in these parts (AU) as the stereotypical Volvo driver is older (elderly even), not always the fastest on the uptake which, with the Volvo's headlights being always on, gave rise to "Volvo drivers: the lights are on but nobody is home."

The Volvo had a reputation for safety which was in part due to other drivers carefully avoiding the vehicle - doubly so if a lawn bowlers hat were visable through the rear window.

Should be amusing should Linus is ever on a longer journey and is forced wait an hour or two to recharge. I would have imagined he might have opted for a plug-in hybrid given his position on ECC ram. ;)

Russian court fines Google $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Re: Obligatory HHTG reference

"I am sure that our friends in Moscow are aiming to get enough money together to aquire one Trigantic Pu or 3 Ningis."

They can have the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation but I suppose if they were to get Alphabet it amounts to the same thing. ;)

Curious that the £IG (IGP?) mentioned in article was clearly predecimal* - appears that UK Reform, Faredge and fellow travellers hold the reins of the intergalactic banking system which supports the conclusion that the GFB is bunk.

_{* for septics and the young: before HHGTTG the British pound was divided into 20 shillings which were further subdivided into 12 pennies, a derangement that also applied in many of the colonies but was generally remedied in those earlier than in the UK.}

I suspect even the TARDIS might have trouble translating Russian

'You seem to have misspelt "invasion of Ukraine" as "special military operation".'

My theory is that Russian is actually English transcribed by a vodka soaked dyslexic (cyrillic) and spoken by an equally intoxicated dolt attempting to pronounce the transliteration.

Don't suppose the USSR was too taken by the special military operation Barbarossa? No?

Re: Google are hypocrites

"The deadliest genocide since WWII?"

I'd reckon Pol Pot might be in the running there. :(

The "Cultural Revolution" wasn't to shabby an effort either.

But I agree with the ghastly assymetrical treatment meted out by the US to various other offending states and the encouragement Israel has received for equivalent atrocities.

What goes around come around and history is not notable for its kindness.

Re: I have

Wasn't the googol invented especially just for this type of insanity?

10 days ~ ×1000 (2¹⁰)

In one year (365 days) that's 2³⁶⁵ ~ 10¹¹⁰ so with the usual interminable litigation typical of US corporations they will need googolplexes (or is it googolplices?)

At some point if the respondent were to drop the accumulated fine in nickels and dimes on Moscow it would probably cover that part of the Russian Federation to a depth of several metres. A worthwhile result all round - if only!

Google reportedly developing an AI agent that can control your browser

Re: Dark patterns!

"Mom, why is there a box of handguns with their serial numbers filed off sitting on our porch?"

"Your father and some of our neighbours are going to have a friendly chat with that Mr Google later tonight."

(If only! But they are more likely off to the Capitol (v2.) Or they screw up and off Mr Magoo.)

Re: google ai

"alexa, how do you spell 'hor d'oeuvre."

Next time try "horse's doovers." ;)

Of course Alexa did get it right: o-r-d-e-r-s is how she spells it.

Perhaps "Alexa, how is the French culinary phrase 'hors d'œuvre' spelt when used in English instead of appetizer?"

Although talking to machines is the thin end of the wedge and then you are on the slippery slope to skating on thin ice.

"at least one girl with an abundance of cleavage doing something unrelated"

Perhaps better than searching for "reverse cow girl" then getting Stoney Burke and fully clad women in a rodeo clown act.

Google is really only channeling a long history of tabloid page 3 girls.

Puzzling in as much as probably marginally more females use google than males to locate information but then women did read tabloid newspapers too.

Pretty obvious what goes through (what passes for) the male brain when presented with an image of an attractive, scantily attired woman but it is beyond me how the female brain processes such images given their prevalence.*

One of life's remaining mysterious I suppose.

_{* images not female brains.}

Potentially a bit deeper.

looking for porn when I ask for egg recipes,

When you a step back (well... a good few steps) and think what pron is - in a way, a parody of and how "eggs" come into the whole activity you might see a how a poor naive large language model might be confused.

Just don't ask how to bake a bun in the oven - you will have thermometers, elements of candy making (thread stage), a diary and graph paper. :)

iFixit to the rescue: McDonald's workers can rescue their own ice cream machines

Re: It's not "ice cream"

I always wondered why it was called soft serve in McDs, in others just ice cream. So a bit like what is chocolate in the EU and what passed for chocolate in pre brexit UK.

If its %milk fat in the US I wonder if gelato passes for ice cream there? Sorbets clearly not.

Years ago a McD sold a soft serve for AUD 0.45 - the cheapest item on the menu so probably a loss leader but inevitably lead to snarky remarks about the versatility of pig fat but the reality was there is a lot of air whipped in with lashings of sugar (corn syrup?) and the middle of the serve was invariably hollow to some extent.

Re: "Could Cause Serious Human Injury"

The screwdriver slipped, jabbed them in the forehead

Really cannot quite picture how you unsuccessfully apply (excessive?) force with a screwdriver and have the blade stuck in your forehead. Obviously a chap that was prepared to go that extra mile.

"Squeaky" Fromme, a mentally unstable person who was a member of the Manson Family cult

And the mentally stable Manson Family members were?

I imagine the human injury part includes a gormless but grubby golden arches employee attempting to service the soft serve machine accidentally including some E.coli from their current quarter pounder promotion.

Five Eyes nations tell tech startups to take infosec seriously. Again

The Subtle Art of Not Trying Too Hard?

From what I have seen of most startups' dismal "products" I wouldn't be too averse to my adversaries drinking their fill from those poisoned chalices. Clownstrike not so long ago a startup and at the "quality" end of spectrum and in the infosec space - what hope for the rest of the circus?

At best I suspect it would be lipstick on a pig. Even if a startup finagles ISO 27000 accreditation I would not read to much into that as it often doesn't translate to any practical l long term security improvement.

To be honest most startups can barely be distinguished from old school cons - the "founders" from the outset being focused on the "exit" phase (where they a take their loot and toddle off to their next con startup.) I cannot imagine security being front and centre in their thinking or even on the horizon.

GenAI's dirty secret: It's set to create a mountainous increase in e-waste

Re: Profits/bonuses/dividends from layoffs/outsourcing attributed to AI.

"The Immanence of Nothingness: Buddhist Metaphysics and Pynchon's "Against the Day".... ad nauseaum..."

We need to trash and burn the planet to produce this codswallop with AI when the products of existing liberal arts colleges can supply this tripe wholesale and at a very low fraction of the cost?

Chinese engineers wire Raspberry Pi into 600-meter railway tunnel to find any holes

Empty void?

Everyone knows what is meant but still seems a little redundant.

A filled void presumably would no longer be a void.

The authors suggest machine learning could be applied to the collected sensor data, or even to build digital twins of tunnels and allow real-time decision support. They would say that wouldn't they. :) Grant application to follow..

I wouldn't have imagined concrete would be sufficiently conductive to detect an air filled cavity in it. I would have punted on ultrasonics where air/concrete interfaces should strongly image.

Tardigrade genes may hold secret to radiation treatments for humans

Re: "that speed up the generation of adenosine triphosphate (ATP),"

I am now pretty vague about the biochemistry (after four decades) but I don't think the rate of ATP production was the rate limiting step in muscular (actin/myosin) contraction. I think dealing with the lactic acid produced was more of a problem.

I suspect the tardigrades produce more ATP, in part, to produce the other nucleotides (GTP, CTP, TTP) required for DNA repair.

I wouldn't put it past these miniature equivalents of honey badgers to have a RAID based genome.

Wanted. Top infosec pros willing to defend Britain on shabby salaries

Re: Salary

It is a plant. These senior civil service types are all oxbridge graduates (or would pretend to be) and could never say:

"earn yourself proper income without us knowing."

What is a first in classics if one doesn't know that the gerund takes the genitive (or somesuch nonsense.)

viz "without our knowing."

If GBP42,000 is going rate for GCHQ infospec specialist I hate to think what the civil service pays its system administrators (BoFHs.) Explains a lot I suppose. Peanuts and Monkeys. We wouldn't want our spooks to be competent, would we?

The Australian public service has the same problem over a wide range of IT and other skill sets which has lead to a heavy dependence on external contractors and consultants paid far above public service pay scales which has attrited the remaining public service staff who can have a salary bump of up to AUD200,000 for the same roles outside. The inflexible public service structures and corresponding relative pay scales set in concrete pretty much ensure there isn't any real possibility of change.

Skyscraper-high sewage plume erupts in Moscow

Re: Confirmed.

exceeded the max BS throughput, and the excess had to be routed through Pravda's headquarters.

And that's The Truth :)

No puns on the chief poobah for life?

Poo t'in Vlad in the air. (Lord of the Shitshower.)

Given the state of US infrastructure I don't think americans can be too smug. The Whitehouse doesn't need such a shitstorm to fill the building with sewerage. Another Trump administration could do that without any assistance whatsoever.

UK sleep experts say it's time to kill daylight saving for good

Re: DSThesia

_{Most proprietary Unixes didn't ship with the zoneinfo utilities}

I've used various Unixes since the 1990s and have never seen one that didn't.

You may well be right. Quite possible that the zic utility wasn't installed by default as I vaguely recall zdump was. SunOS did have both I think. I am pretty sure Irix didn't have either as zoneinfo wasn't officially supported. Our Decosf boxes didn't and setld was so slow that fishing out the right CD and locating and installing a package wasn't an attractive proposition. (Setld packaging wasn't a bundle of joy either.)

Re: DSThesia

operating systems to patch, one had to update Java, etc.

I recall in the noughties the West Australian altered the DST date (or abolished it) at with very short notice.

Most proprietary Unixes didn't ship with the zoneinfo utilities but Linux had the packages and praising St AD Olsen for the architecture independance of the binary zone files all the Unix boxen were updated in time from files generated on the Linux box. Even SGI Irix had zoneinfo support builtin (if unofficially) only HPUX 10.20 had its own nasty but fairly simple file that had to be manually updated every year if I recall correctly. Never did discover why Java had its own version but for us Java wasn't in much use at the time.

Hint: If you fiddle with zone files remember to restart or reload the cron daemon. :)

Clock Embuggerance Day

"Clock Embuggerance Day is a relic from 1914, when THEY thought that WE should be made to get up earlier to get to work. They also stopped us drinking at all hours."

One Terry Pratchett's favourite words if not his own coinage.

The peoples of the Disc did live on a flatish earth but their tiny "sun" orbited close the Disc but as the Disc also rotated very slowly (1rpy) they did have seasons and variation in day length.

I could neither imagine the Patrician, Vetinari countenancing DST for a moment nor the diverse citizens of Ankh-Morpork not drinking at all hours.

What a world we live in where the fictious leaders and inhabitants of an impossibly daft world look positvely sane by comparision with ours?

Re: Old proverb

a wise old Indian* Chief said, "Only the government would believe you can cut a foot off one end of a blanket, sew it onto the other end, and end up with a longer blanket."

I don't suppose this chap is available as write in on Tuesday November 5?

_{* amerind (native american) arguably the other sort is in the offing.}

Getting slow in my dotage...

The only person who would complain about that is Dolly Parton.

I couldn't for the life of me work how why someone well endowed in brassiere department would be fussed about shifting the core working hour back one hour.

The penny eventually dropped... the lady also sings... songs... :)

Re: There's no such thing as "daylight saving time" in the UK

"Nah, can't be correct."

I recall in the early noughties an expat pom pointing out the notable occurence of the previous day's max temp in London that day in midsummer was actually higher than the forecast daily max temp in Sydney at that time (being midwinter.)

Not being brilliantly warm in Sydney I couldn't help thinking what must winters in blighty be like?

Re: There's no such thing as "daylight saving time" in the UK

Because "British Summer Time" sounds like sarcasm

Or wishful thinking.

Scots Summer Time entering the realms of fiction?

Re: cross border data collection nightmare.

what do you do with the extra hour for which there is no data? Or, the reverse,what do you with the data for the hour now gone?

I had a purely informational environmental graph that one data source (outside temp) was local time and twice a year the graph went backwards (0300->0200) or forwards (0200->0300) one hour. My cunning plan (Copyr. Balderick) was from the preceding midnight to "speed up" time time on the graph for (0200->0300) so when it was plotting 0159 the real time was 0300 and conversely slowing down the time on the graph for (0300->0200) so when 0259 was being plotted the real time was 0300.

(I think I used something simple like T_graph = 2 - 0.25×(T - 3)² [1 < T < 3])

Doing this only on two days each year with gnuplot turned out to be more of a PITA than anticipated so basically "sod this for a game of soldiers" and who gives a rat's what the various temperatures and humidities, inside and outside the facility, were at 2am?

Re: Seems a bit specious

give farmers more daylight hours during the longer summer days to work in the fields

I don't know about Pommieland but antipodean farmers pay scant regard to clocks at the best of times. I would imagine farmers everywhere work to "solar time" - when the sun is up they have already been puting in a few hours of hard yakka and when the sun has set why do you imagine their tractors have headlights? :)

Having lived next to* 200+ ha. of sugar cane I can attest that cane is harvested 24 hrs/day.

_{* hint: don't. Even though the cane cockies don't now burn off the cane before harvesting it is still very dusty.}

DST = Don't Stop to Think?

Stuff like CCTV I don't even bother with the changes. The DVR/NVRs stay on GMT all year.

I once lived in a unit complex with clock controlled (on at 1800/off at 0100) nightime lighting of the common areas *and* at the onset of DST every year a longtime resident would set the clock back one hour.* (Restored it at DST end.)

The sun sets in Sydney ca 5pm (0700UTC) midwinter and ca 8pm (0900UTC) midsummer.

_{* for the equally challenged the lights came on in broad daylight (and off) an hour earlier.}

Re: Leave the clocks alone

I'm now living in Australia and the southern states have daylight saving and it is a waste of time, The state of Victoria maps to North Africa in the northern hemisphere and daylight saving is a complete waste of time.

Of the east coast states (all in the same UTC+10 zone) Tas, Vic, NSW (incl ACT) have the same DST but Qld doesn't (not half a joke about the cows and curtains either) - it is said that it's not Qld's being one hour behind the rest that is the sticking point but rather the other twenty years in arrears. :)

Having mostly worked in DST states - its rubbish and we don't really have twilight on the mainland (but perhaps Tas.) The onset of DST used to knock me about for several weeks.

Ministry of Funny Walks?

For some reason all the other countries in Europe switched to Berlin time during the early 1940s. Portugal opted out

The portuguese were rubbish at that decade's funny march styles so I guess they weren't invited to the party.

WordPress forces user conf organizers to share social media credentials, arousing suspicions

Re: The Community Team...

WordPress Trailerpark - Alabama

The event held next to the Mullenweg campervan? :)

All the the grace and poise of a trailerpark denizen evident in this spat.