Posts by Pascal Monett 19252 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
Yes, in France at least, it is the case. Just not only for young men. It's a fact that young people have the worst accidents, statistically speaking, so it costs more to insure them.
They get around any discrimination cases by simply charging more for anyone who hasn't been insured for, I think, five years. Given the drive to have a car, people typically get their license at around 18, but if you wait until you're 40, you'll be paying the high price until you're 45.
Of course, I fully expect Google to lead the way by implementing those disclosures in its own products.
Now, if only I could get rid of some of those infernal un-stoppable Google apps, I'd just might start being happy about having a smartphone.
You send me a mail, it becomes mine to do with as I please, and the fact that you're the one who sent it is not and never will be deniable.
What kind of stupid idea is that anyway ? The right to be forgotten concerns news articles on people who didn't them and would like the article to be removed from search engine results.
That is a far cry from an email situation. I know you sent it, you know you sent it. You might regret sending it, but you did. No use denying it five years later.
I lost my job in 2009, it took me three years to get another one.
During that time, I quickly got fed up with the news. In France, it's full of disasters, catastrophes, horrible things and political grandstanding. It is just depressing, there's never anything good and they never actually explain anything (especially when it's economic). News on the radio is almost worst - it's shorter, but it repeats every hour, so you hear the same horrible things several times per day.
So, since that time, I got into the habit of only turning on the TV for the shows I wanted to watch. Except that, they've shifted the start of everning programs to later and later hours. It used to be that the first film started at half past eight, now it starts around ten past nine. My wife started complaining that she wasn't getting enough sleep, so we adopted a 24-hour shift. I'd record what we wanted to watch, and we'd watch it the next day at 7:30 - on our schedule.
Now, I have found the ideal solution. It's called CapTVty. It's a utility that peruses the Replay section of French TV channels and allows you to download the show, whatever it is. And, cherry on the cake, Replay does not include commercials.
So now I can peruse yesterday's broadcasts at leisure, convert the downloads to DVD format, bung them on a USB key and we can all watch ad-free shows on our time schedule.
Bliss.
I'm sorry, but I followed Windows since DOS 1.0 (still have the manuals).
Windows was a revolution for the user. Sure, technically it might well have been a mess, however as far as maintenance is concerned, the ini and sys files were a blessing. It has never been easier to "reinstall" Windows - all you needed was a backup of you .sys and .ini files and you were done.
The abomination that is the Registry blew that out of the water. Curiously, Linux is still based on ini files. I wonder why ?
In any case, I remember fondly those days where any problem with Windows could be resolved by exiting Windows, grabbing your trusty 5.25" floppy backup and overwriting the existing *.sys and *.ini files, and relaunching Windows.
Ever since Windows 95, resolving issues meant wiping the disk, reinstalling the OS, finding back all the required drivers and reconfiguring everything. A full day's work.
Windows 3 was a breeze to maintain.
The same way you turn on your flashlight : swipe down from the top to get the system apps. The mobile data icon (two vertical arrows in opposite directions) should not be far from the wifi icon.
Tap to turn it off.
Given that my mobile phone is a work phone, I go one step further : outside of work hours, I put it in airplane mode. That saves power.
That being said from the comfortable leather chairs of high-level banking officials who are probably pissed that they can't have lunch at their regular five-star restaurant at the moment, so they pass their anger on us.
Taxing people because they're working from home, great idea. We're being taxed on revenue, so where we work has little to do with it. Sure, the restaurants and sandwich shops are taking a hit at the moment, everyone can understand that, but there are a lot of people who bring their lunch to work every day. Nothing changes for them except, in your scheme, they would now get taxed for not doing something they never did anyway. How's that for social justice ?
I propose something different : instead of taxing workers, tax companies that force workers to work from home - but only banks.
They have the money, they can pay.
Um, there is quite a difference between nothing and a 30% commission.
If Apple were anything but a multi-billion dollar behemoth, that commission should be of proper size, i.e. 10%. And that would already be a lot for a service that sells the same virtual bytes repeatedly, without having had any work to do to create them.
Also, Apple has some cheek talking about breach of contract. There are no contracts on the Internet, there are only Terms of Service. Terms of Service can be unilaterally changed, contracts cannot.
Last night at somewhere past eleven, I was playing a game and watching YouTube and suddenly everything froze, the sound went all weird and the computer locked up.
I was convinced I was going to get a BSOD, so I rebooted, got everything running again and thought no more of it.
Now I wonder : was it the game that froze first, or was it the video ? And why did one have any impact on the other ?
"Google justified the changes by saying its users were consuming tons of digital storage space in its cloud "
Well duh, you gave them the space, don't come complaining that they are using it. If I had availed myself of that cloud platform, I would currently have 61.6GB stored up there (the total of all my family picture data on my Photo disk) and I would be wondering just how much this change would impact me.
As usual, something offered up as free is now being taken advantage of to tie users into paying. A despicable move, even if it had been forewarned.
Honestly, people should stop falling for all that free crap - it's just a bait and switch.
And you most likely won't now.
Trump has spent his entire presidency avoiding actually answering questions - or making important decisions. The few decisions that he has actually taken were mostly terrible, and he's avoided answering for that as well.
Unfortunately for him, he will be held responsible for them, because he is.
Trump knows very well that anything he does now can and likely will be overturned come January. He's never been a hard worker, why start now ?
Yeah, well, you have to start somewhere.
Now, is China on the bad list ? Because it should be.
As far as I'm concerned, it is just not compatible with Google.
Huawei has now been baselessly accused of handing over data to Beijing for the past four years. Google is a US company and everyone knows that an National Security letter will get any data on Google servers anywhere in the world.
So if you want to enforce European Data Sovereignty, the sine qua non condition is to have nothing to do with a US company.
It's simple.
Um, the contracts are already signed, no ? So you have the deal, no one can back out on that just because sanctions are loosened against a competitor.
Now, in the longer term, it would obviously mean that, for the next round of contracts, maybe Huawei equipment would be on the table again and thus, you'd have more competition, but right now it won't make a difference.
So Amazon did test the things, saw the issue and provided a warning, yet people still installed it wrong.
I was all ready to blame Amazon for not having tested, but it would seem that it's more the idiots who don't pay attention that should be blamed.
I don't know how clear the instructions were, but if I open an electrical appliance and there is a clear warning sign about something, I read it. The warning telling me about being careful with the screws means I'll pay more attention to the instructions.
Um, I think that, if you miss your launch window by a month, you've definitely missed it and will have to wait another 640 days before you can launch again.
Ouch. Given that NASA is continually strapped for cash, from what other project is NASA going to take those funds ?
Because this mission is under way, and everyone is saying "full steam ahead". That'll only be possible if the cash is there, and the US Government, even the upcoming one, is not necessarily going to pour billions into NASA just because they need it. US Gov has been cutting NASA funding for decades now, that trend is not going to change.
Especially now that a private company has proved capable of making a launcher. Okay, not without taxpayer dollars, not entirely on their own either, but still, the few billion given to SpaceX were a lot cheaper than having to create a new launcher entirely on NASA funding. The Apollo program on its own cost $152 billion, and to get Apollo, they had to do the Mercury series before, because there was so much to test before we could actually think of going to the Moon.
The final cost of human spaceflight to the American taxpayer seems to pegged at $486 billion.
A few billion to a private company for the same result is a bargain by any measure.
“Affected customers will experience elevated frequency of Host Maintenance events ”
Saying the word downtime does not make you less professional.
This culture of avoiding saying specific words, or wrapping their meaning up in other words, is not good.
There isn't a single recipient of that email that did not immediately translate Host Maintenance = downtime, so just bloody well spell it out already.
Look, I'm a gamer. I like powerful processors (and GPUs). I like high framerates. I like a responsive computer, ie one that does not make me wait for a second every time I click the mouse.
So it seems that I'm going to need an Internet-connected computer for my browsing, and a unsecure but non-connected computer for my playing.
That's going to wreak havoc with multiplayer, but multiplayer is not all that exists.
We'll find a solution.
Meaning the thing will snitch on you and report every aspect of your driving habits.
You went 1km/h over the limit ? Report sent. You didn't actually stop at the stop sign (there was nobody around) ? Report sent.
Constantly updateable means constantly connected. What could possibly go wrong with that ?
Well, that's Hyundai, Kia and Genesis off my choice list for a new car.
I disagree with private companies taking shares in national telecoms infrastructure.
On top of that, it's Google, the single, most connected entity there is tracking your online behavior.
Now, Google is using its vast financial power to put its claws directly into the carriers themselves. What could possibly go wrong ?
Good. I will welcome every idea that improves the privacy of my data.
Now tell me how that impacts Google's data hoovering, because I don't see that it changes anything there.
And if Google doesn't adopt it, well let's just say that it won't have much impact.
It will change.
That said, Huawei is obviously able to increase focus on its local market and should probably devote some effort in that direction.
But one thing is certain : Biden & Harris are going to point the USA in a better direction, to the relief of all.
