Posts by Intractable Potsherd

Biden bans Kaspersky: No more sales, updates in US

More unevidenced garbage from the government allowing men into women's sports, spaces and shortlists. I'd blame Biden, but di don't think he's in control any longer.

Whistleblower cries foul over alleged fuselage gaps in Boeing 787 Dreamliner

I had to read it twice to get it!

Novelty flip phone strips out almost every feature possible to be as boring as possible

Re: Bummer

Similar here, but for the children. They are getting to the age of more independent activity, but there is no way in this world that they are having smartphones.

We never agreed to only buy HP ink, say printer owners

... sideways on.

Virgin Media sets up 'smart poles' next to cabinets to boost mobile network capacity

Re: "digital electricity" technology

The main bit of car maintenance I've had to do over the last few years is removing and replacing batteries. I miss the old days when turning the key to the "0" position meant that there was no electrical draw, so that there was no spark when putting the negative terminal back. Electric clocks used to cause a tiny spark, but with the multitude of electrics/electronics in modern cars, the spark is bug and loud. I hate it!

Underwater cables in Red Sea damaged months after Houthis 'threatened' to do just that

Re: MV Rubymar is dragging an anchor in the Bab-el-Mandeb

That's a very interesting video - thanks for the tip! I've subscribed to the channel because the presenter seems knowledgeable and a good communicator.

Venus has a quasi-moon and it's just been named 'Zoozve' for a sweet reason

Re: Wallace

It would have to have a companion.

Linus Torvalds flames Google kernel contributor over filesystem suggestion

If "You copied that function without understanding why it does what it does, and as a result your code IS GARBAGE.

AGAIN." is what counts as flaming these days, I begin to see why many people think the end of Western civilisation is imminent.

Tesla owners in deep freeze discover the cold, hard truth about EVs

Re: re: Don't make many (preferably no) long trips.

"This isn't much different from planning for gas stops..." Who plans for fuel stops in civilised countries?? I've driven many times from Scotland to the Czech Republic, sometimes doing the trip from which ever ferry-port on the mainland coast in one go, sometimes with one or two overnight stops. Since I know the mpg of my cars, and watch the fuel-gauge, and start thinking "fuel needed" once it gets to about a quarter full, I have never yet had a problem needing to "plan fuel stops" in advance.

Fairphone 5 scores a perfect 10 from iFixit for repairability

Re: Nice! Too bad about the price.

Second hand?

Re: Nice! Too bad about the price.

I'm with you on this. I've had an Ulefone Armor 5 for getting on for 5 years now. Waterproof, rugged, long battery life, SD slot. It cost £100 new, and my only (occasional) gripe is the poor camera module.

Regulator says stranger entered hospital, treated a patient, took a document ... then vanished

Re: Pardon?

Have you never been to Kirkcaldy??

SpaceX celebrates Starship launch as a success – even with the explosion

Re: I can't help but feel....

Why?

X fails to remove hate speech over Israel-Gaza conflict

Re: Xitter has problems policing hate speech ?

My experience is that you are wrong about that.

SpaceX's Starship on the roster for Texas takeoff

Re: Re-use

Isn't it lucky there's one Internet weirdo to think of all the things the very experienced scientists and engineers missed?

Suits ignored IT's warnings, so the tech team went for the neck

Re: One does wonder...

Ah, not just me, then!

US Air Force wants to see some atomic motors for future spacecraft

Re: What could go wrong...

I prefer nerds to catastrophising eco-nuts any day of the week.

Meta decides to Just Say No to Oversight Board requests and allow paid posts for ketamine

Re: "Licenced clinic"

I'm very sorry to hear that. My condolences.

Corner cutting of nuclear proportions as duo admit to falsifying safety tests 29 times

Re: All my sympathy.

No, they can't "go boom at any time". I'd happily live near any of the nuclear power plants in the UK.

Royal College considers no confidence move after Excel recruitment debacle

Re: Experts

Many of us can, but remember that we are talking about *NHS managers* here...

Cat accused of wiping US Veteran Affairs server info after jumping on keyboard

Big Red Switches have Molly Guards, keyboards need Moggy Guards!

Twitter, aka X, tops charts for misinformation, EU official says

While X remains the only platform tat allows me to state the objective reality that transwomen are men, I'll stick with it. Other platforms seem to think stating that obvious fact is "misinformation".

BT confirms it's switching off 3G in UK from Jan next year

Re: Rolled My Own....Yup...Please Decrypt!

... with large, coloured-footed sea birds.

Colleges snub Turnitin's AI-writing detector over fears it'll wrongly accuse students

My favourite is the patchwork of fonts, text sizes etc that come from cutting and pasting from websites!

I've been in discussions about this recently. My position (for my areas) is that we need to back to exams in controlled environments, closed or open book.

Re: Turditin

Yes. Also, front pages with the question/assignment written on them.

Re: If it's as good as their other products...

A point made as expert witness in a research misconduct case a few years back. TurnItIn results requires skill to interpret, especially when the topic is very narrow, such as questions set for a degree or research results in a very specialist area of medicine. Of course there are going to be terms of art, specific phrases, and quotations and references common to the papers. My usual example is to consider a question about the definition of theft - a paper that doesn't have "Theft Act 1968", "Section 4", "dishonest appropriation of goods belonging to another", and at least one of three or four key cases is a failure, yet TII gives each one a really high plagiarism score.

How is this problem mine, techie asked, while cleaning underground computer

Re: Ah, the 80's...

Hailing from that area, and being at school from the late 60s to early 80s, I went on school/6th form college trips down mines, into steelworks, oh, and at around the age of around 10, into Ladybower Dam (that was a lot of climbing that day!) I think RAF Finningley was the most exciting, though, standing coder than the usual airshow flightline whilst a pair of Vulcans took off. I don't know whether I'm more sad that school children would never have the opportunity to do any of those things today because of risk-assessment disorder, or that only one of those things still exist.

Watt's the worst thing you can do to a datacenter? Failing to RTFM, electrically

Re: But surely

What we need is a summary of them all - a condenser of all the puns.

Microsoft to kill off third-party printer drivers in Windows

Re: My first question

I agree. Microsoft doesn't do anything that won't improve its bottom line and/or lock-in.

Mozilla calls cars from 25 automakers 'data privacy nightmares on wheels'

Re: It just keeps getting better

The ultimate reason doesn't matter. Old ICE cars are going to be very valuable assets soon.

Scared of flying? Good news! Software glitches keep aircraft on the ground

Re: More

You usually have more imagination than that @elsergio!

Largest local government body in Europe goes under amid Oracle disaster

Re: Great job!

So let's give them the chance - at least one of them might fail in cocking-up.

What happens when What3Words gets lost in translation?

I'm torn

Overall, I like the idea of a word-based method of giving locations. This is based on my experience of people who cannot remember, nor are able to read out, any number with more than three digits, combined with those who cannot accurately write down/type any number with more than one digit. I absolutely agree that things like AML are probably the best way to give locations, but only as long as there is no transcription needed anywhere in the process - sometimes even 10 metres out is too much. However, any word-based solution has to be done right if it is to be used for emergency situations, and that isn't easy due to things like accents etc.

Until such a system comes along, though, many of the problems can be dealt with by a) getting people to enunciate the dots - dogs DOT toe DOT dearth is clearly different from dog DOT stowed DOT earth - and b) asking for spellings - W3E words aren't long, and can be spelled quite quickly. Again, there are accent problems if the speller doesn't know the phonetic alphabet, but it reduces the error-space quite significantly.

Yep. In my long rallying experience, I've had (and done) many "one square out" errors. Sometimes they're obvious when plotting, other times you only find out when you can see your intended location over that river/valley/railway line...

Right to repair advocates have a new opponent: Scientologists

Re: Expose

In general I agree, but I actually like "Battlefield Earth"!* There is something I find very playful about it, and the utterly mad change of direction from almost extinct, completely uneducated humanity to galactic superstars leaves me breathless every time!!

*The book, not the film, of course!

Re: Expose

Wasn't Robert A Heinlein also supposed to gave been there at the time, the result being the truly awful "Stranger in a Strange Land" as an attempt to start a religion? Or am I mixing up drunken sci-fi author lunches?

We all scream for ice cream – so why are McDonald's machines always broken?

Re: No sh!t Sherlock

There's no risk of that happening at this household* because if you ask for coffee I'll boil the kettle, transfer the brown granules from the jar to the mug, and pour the boiling water onto it. I'll even let you have milk and sugar if you wish :-)

* OK, I suppose there's a small risk depending on what can grow in/on coffee granules after >6 months in the cupboard (no one in the house drinks coffee, so it only gets used for visitors!)

Silicon Valley billionaires secretly buy up land for new California city

Re: Flannery Row.

I'm glad you are able to benefit from it. Just be aware that not everyone is.

India lands Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft on Moon, is the first to lunar south pole

Re: Tell me again

A man with no aspiration whatsoever. How sad.

Re: Milestone moment

Excellent! (Except for the very idea of putting cream in tea - ugh!)

Want tech cred? Learn how to email like a pro

Re: Its all about *efficient* communication...

The thing is, you never know what is going to become "need[ed] records or memorable details" somewhere down the line. Even minuted meetings can become disputed later if (as some employers do) the "official" report gets changed to the benefit of the employer. Contemporaneous records, such as emails, can be very useful.

Re: Its all about *efficient* communication...

No. Emails provide a searchable and all-but-permanent (if one is sensible about backing up) record of who said what and when. Management wants telephone calls so that there is no record of who said what. I'm currently assisting a person with an employment tribunal in which the employer is getting its arse kicked because the employee kept records almost obsessively.

Last rites for the UK's Online Safety Bill, an idea too stupid to notice it's dead

Re: Not holding my breath

To be fair, I live in (what is becoming*) a reasonable sized town. The older bit in which I live is very much a 15-minute town, taking in two supermarkets, what passes for a bus-station, the railway station (two trains an hour in each direction), plus a couple banks (for now), Post Office, library, couple of convenience stores, pubs, cafés etc. However, the nearest (State) schools we could get the children into was a) sink estate huge and just 15 minutes away on foot, or b) proper sized six miles away (10 minutes by car). Sounds heat, until you realise all those new developments are significantly more than 15 minutes from any of the things I've just mentioned. A car is an absolute necessity for people living in them.

*Lots of new develop ments going up around the edges.

How to get a computer get stuck in a lift? Ask an 'illegal engineer'

Re: Getting stuck in a lift is no fun

I think figures show that cows are the most dangerous (to humans) mammal in the British Isles.

The choice: Pay BT megabucks, or do something a bit illegal. OK, that’s no choice

Re: 100m goes a long way

Exactly. Until last year I was a landlord, using a letting agent due to distance from the property. I thought having a local agent would make maintenance easier for everyone. When the last tenant left, I went down to view the house. It was in a terrible state, not as a result of tenant activity, but because of the agent not doing the job I was paying them for. The agent knew very well that my instructions were to tell me if anything needed doing, and I would get it done. However, it was obvious they hadn't actually visited the property in years (even taking into account Covid). In the unlikely event I ever become a landlord again, I will not be using agents.

Judge lets art trio take another crack at suing AI devs over copyright

Re: Whoops ... I Hear Solicitors Getting Rich

"So while I'm all for a world without lawyers... "

That's not even a sensible wish. Every society has/has had lawyers. Sometimes it is just one person (usually a man), such as a tribal chief, or shaman/medicine man/seer; sometimes it is a bunch of the leader's mates; sometimes (rarely) it is a profession with standards and the ability for members to be held to account by the public. Whichever model you choose, lawyers are a) powerful, b) influential and c) rich compared to other members of that society. By and large, we have the final category*, so which other model would you choose (not confining yourself to my examples)?

* I am not arguing that the current system is the best, but that it is one of the best so far.

Douglas Adams was right: Telephone sanitizers are terrible human beings

Re: Agree but...

It's not just me, then! I've never been able to work out the putative link between the term and the meaning ascribed.

Re: Real Sanitizers

I can't remember whether it was radio > books > TV, or books > TV > (recorded) radio. What I do know is that all my Douglas Adams books were destroyed whilst in storage during the most recent move, and I haven't the heart to replace them with ones that don't have the history. I am, though, working a quotation from TRATEOTU into an interview later today!

After Meta hands over DMs, mom pleads guilty to giving daughter abortion pills

Re: It's all fscking insanity - I'm embarrassed for my country

Pro-life positions an come from an entirely non-religious perspective, though in the USA it is predominantly a religious standpoint. For example, the precautionary principle can lead one to such a position, and I've heard arguments based on Kantian ethics. They haven't swayed me, but they are interesting arguments that made me thing how I justify my position in a way that "God says so" hasn't.