Posts by Zimmer 278 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Feb 2009
We did have dogs in this race. I remember Linear motors demonstrated on Tomorrow's World in the late '60s/70s and Birmingham had a train running to the airport between @1985 and 1995..
Looks like the it all went to the dogs, though..... as usual..
>>>>> it's the flying jacket, with the Nedym..neodimi...neodimy..... magnets in the pocket..
"He added: "We hear from a lot of women who say they feel a lot safer at night riding home in a car without someone in it that they don't know.""
And when the women realise they don't know who might be able to control or divert the driver-less car, or if it suddenly fails to proceed / chooses a not so well-known route and an operator is being sent to sort it out ?? How safe will they feel then ?
A quote from Lewis Caroll: “When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”
To answer that briefly....
The regs in the UK post 2nd World War were such that you could pass a test for a Motorcycle and then were also licensed to drive a Tricycle weighing less than 8cwt and also a motorcycle and sidecar. Plenty of ex army surplus m/cs at the time and cars were expensive. Annual road tax was also cheaper than a car and fuel consumption a lot better.. The Reliant company(amongst others) built 3-wheeled fibreglass-bodied cars which met the 'Tricycle' requirements... so motorcyclists could now drive the family in the dry without studying for, and passing, a motor car driving test.
Mrs Zimm convinced me to sell my Triumph 500 T100SS to buy a Reliant Regal saloon in order that she could buy a dog!! (Regrets, I have a few..)
** The Reliant Regal van (yellow) shot to fame as the transport of Trotter's Independent Trading , in the TV comedy series 'Only Fools and Horses'.
Reminds me of a visit to a Little Chef some years ago, only wanted the pancakes...
'Sorry, we don't have any pancakes. Would you like an All-Day-Breakfast ?'
'No, but you have eggs for the breakfast, milk for the cereal and maybe some flour ?'
'Yes'
'But no pancakes ? Can't you MAKE some?'
'No'
(Exit...stage left never to go again...)
"The miracle is Firefox's market share has held up so well."
Quite possibly the reason for that could be that Firefox seems to be the default browser for most Linux distributions.
(sometimes accompanied by Chromium, but you are free to uninstall either or both).
As for 'Browser Wars' .. most wars are won by the biggest armies with the deepest pockets...
I can't remember the reason I dumped IE for Firefox sometime around the beginning of the century; might have been features, might have been security concerns - but having switched to Linux as my main OS in 2004 you get curious and try the new names you find in the repositories or stumble across Opera and subsequently , Vivaldi etc.
Chrome is baked into Android phones so market share is assured... so, yes, a miracle indeed.
Your comment has disturbed the 'force' around here...
Also the traffic in places like Delhi and Bangalore make it almost impossible to go at more than 40 km/h, why have a gas guzzler? For info, last time I was in India (pre-covid) fuel was about £1.00/ litre, but a typical IT graduate salary was about £6-7k p.a.
For Delhi read 'London', for Bangalore read 'Birmingham' and for IT Graduate read 'Old Age Pensioner'..
The coup de grace ? Read £1.40/ litre..
(Yes, I have a bus pass but would you ride on one these days without PPE 3 mask (or whatever they're actually called, you know, the ones that are supposed to keep the germs out).
--An NHS Digital spokesperson told The Register: "Data saves lives and has huge potential to rapidly improve care and outcomes, as the response to the COVID-19 pandemic has shown. The vaccine rollout could not have been delivered without effective use of data to ensure it reached the whole population.--
Mrs Zimmer received a second letter from the NHS TODAY urging her to get her first vaccination and to ignore the letter if she already had it since the NHS would contact her when she needed a second jab.
However, Mrs Zimmer had her 2nd jab in April, having been contacted via letter, email and SMS, both by the hospital trust and her GP, as she was on the 'vulnerable' list.
We only opted out last week, so I can't blame that for this unnecessary letter.. how many more unnecessary letters are circulating?
If this is the level of their data then what 's going to happen when we all apply online for our double jab Covid passports ?
We have our hand-written cards ;but note that Mrs. Zimmer's is a single card with both doses and dates recorded whereas I was instructed to write my name at the top of the cards - two of them, one for each dose.. bearing a sticker with the batch no. , type and date . They look SO official and totally NOT suspect forgeries at all.../sarcasm...
The thought that we could be refused/allowed entry to some event/holiday destination (Scotland? the adjoining counties?) in the future based on two bits of cardboard or a lack of effective data on a database is a genuine concern.. as is the NHS Digital's reliance on this data to 'save lives'.
Control is what 'they' want.. along with the transaction fees..
My paranoia started in the 60's with an SF story concerning state control where people paid for things with a plastic card that contained their 'credits'. When the card was refused, credits available or not, you were stuffed.. and a whole under-class of people had formed who survived by barter and devious criminal means...
My memory of that story may be hazy but I think it developed into the protaganist discovering an anonymous helper who could hack the state's systems... but that could have been a different book...
..hmm, it's beginning to sound too familiar...
Edit; PS
When everyone can accept card payments for those used items we often sell on, privately or at a car boot sale, jumble sale etc. how long before Govt. of the day introduces a second-hand Value Added Tax ? (deducted directly from your on-line cashless account, of course.)
Looking forward to your totally cashless society now?
You missed one..
>The paper talked about stripping out "unnecessary red tape", introducing rules that are less "onerous" for people and organisations,<
For that, read 'Avoiding oversight and public tendering for contracts.' Which, I am led to believe , is what the current Govt. 'special measures' are all about..
Transcript of a Scott Adams 'Dilbert' strip , @ Jan 2019
The Self-Driving Car named Carl.
Dilbert: Carl, take me to the grocery sore
Carl: Do you know that if I drive you off a cliff you will die, whereas I will re-spawn in a new body?
Dilbert: Maybe I'll walk..
Carl: Maybe you should..
+1
I've said it before (a few times) in comments on similar articles. The self-driving car (in the UK at least) does not fulfil the desires of the majority of those in enthusing at the prospect ; i.e. those people who cannot drive , for one reason or another.
The OP said it for me "The clue is when they say you must be ready to take control at anytime".
To take control one must be a qualified driver.
Should my licence not be renewed when I reach 70 (years, not MPH !) then I would have to submit to visiting distant relations via public transport.
Perhaps the money being thrown at self-driving 'personal' transport could be better spent improving public transport outside of Greater London and the other large cities of the UK!
After all, the developers have been given virtually a free hand in building more and more houses in villages and remote towns with hardly a parking space to be had outside them, so they must be assuming these householders will not be needing a couple of vehicles to commute anywhere in the near future... (I'd thought of a joke icon there, but it's really no joking matter).
The problem for those in charge is that we plebs have enjoyed the fruits of freedom of movement over large distances for a long time now and it's going to be difficult to put that particular genie back in its bottle.
Generally the people that see autonomous vehicles as a boon are those who would like private transport but cannot drive.
Currently the world is being offered part-time self-driving with, oops apocalypse, over to you Mr.* Licensed Driver, I'm not taking responsibility for this cluster**** of a situation we're now in... and, 'When did you last read your insurance policy?'
The point being that Mr.* Licensed Driver is still required to babysit the robot, so no private transport for Mr.* Cannot Drive.... so I personally do not see the point of the rush to push a half-baked 'solution' onto the roads of the world when Mr.* Licensed Driver should be happy to have control of his own destination rather than being a passenger effectively taking the role of driving instructor and concentrating on when to step in when something goes wrong (a driving instructor might want to comment here on 'how' stressful that can be).
I reckon most drivers would also (like me) consider themselves to be 'bad' passengers, unable to detach themselves from the traffic situation about them when being chauffeured.
(Mr.* other gender pronouns are available)...
You may have perfectly sound reasons for not applying a patch at a particular moment in time.. may I suggest that if this situation actually comes to pass that you right click on the Update Manager icon and select 'Quit' until you are good and ready? It's what you would do with Windows - turn off updates.
As for the memory leak, yes, problems with Operating Systems are, indeed, normal; things change, things break, devs go looking for the problem. I've had to remove Pulseaudio in Kubuntu in order to get sound - perhaps I should rant at the devs? No, a bug has been reported and somewhere,
Linux Mint on laptop uses the church wifi perfectly - Windows 10 on the same machine refuses to see the routers SSID - should I rant at the devs (in this case I paid good money to have the OS on the machine but I seriously doubt they'd be bothered.!)
If you are so distraught why not switch to a different Desktop (MATE?) or another Distro ,? I believe the choice is quite extensive in the free OS market.. ;)
"Most don't care.
Most don't give a stuff about the environmental impact their tech has.
Having the newest/biggest is more important.
People have too much disposable income/credit."
You missed one..
Smart TVs are not so smart if the manufacturer fails to upgrade the software and viewers lose some of the inbuilt 'apps' / features they have gotten used to.
Managed to pass on a flat screen to a friend a couple of years ago but BBC iPlayer and YouTube had both ceased to function following tech changes at the source and no upgrade/patch from Sony..
Current TV is showing signs of falling behind as iPlayer works from the APPS section, but not from the TV's built-in catch-up feature... (National Panasonic, in case you were wondering)
Personally, I'm ready with a laptop or a Raspberry Pi to take over as and when the inevitable occurs - the other 90% of viewers are probably not ..
"So it can only reproduce (person-specifically) what is currently being presented to the visual field."
Interesting that the image produced had good construction of the face but almost ignored the hair. Further studies may point to how the brain prioritises elements of what we "actually" see (or are concentrated on) and how much is "inferred" by our peripheral vision...
"Having just noticed that the US DOJ tries really really hard not to prosecute rich people the stockholders should be suing the members of the board at that time.."
Looks suspiciously to me like they're hoping to try and convict a foreigner in America in order to deflect any blame from the 'board' and convince the stockholders it was ALL his fault.
...it's already happened this side of the pond, for goodness sake! Have you not heard of Wimbledon moving to Milton Keynes? ( I reckon a lot of people living in Wimbledon at the time didn't notice until they got off the train from work to find themselves in Bedfordshire, surrounded by concrete cows .)
..were there an extra 'coat' icon mine would be the one with the AFC Wimbledon badge... :)
... it's not a public forum, so not much different to the sending of SMS text messages to the contacts on your phone. In fact (correct me if I'm wrong) the only contacts I can see are Telegram users who are on my cellphone's Contact list..
Is his next lawsuit aimed at carriers offering SMS ?
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