Re: Idiot marketing people at work again
Their marketing looks nice but I'm wondering how their OLEDs are producing black wingtips on the butterfly. I suspect you'll need Samsung's "Black Background" shade of paint to make this work.
390 posts • joined 23 Jun 2009
Exactly. Until there is a solution for number spoofing, none of these solutions are solutions at all.
I spent last monday playing dumb with a multitude of scammers trying to convince me my internet was about to be disconnected due to "hackers" (my favourite moment was when I asked whether I should plug my internet back in because the plug had fallen out) - the calls were relentless on monday although seem to have stopped now.
But every call came from a different, presumably randomly generated, UK number. If crowdsourced number blocking grows in popularity, eventually the chances are some legitimate numbers will start getting blocked and people will have a hard time why their phone seems not to be working although there is still a dial tone.
It can't possibly by that hard for telephone service providers to eliminate number spoofing.
The PDF list of sites linked in the article is all over the place in terms of sorting. If you're looking for specific sites, use the search facility rather than looking manually through the list or you may miss them. The list looks to be alphabetical at the beginning, but goes haywire in the second column.
Indeed! It's like the argument that scam emails are deliberately written with terrible grammar and spelling because the types of people who wouldn't notice are also the types more likely to believe they've won an email lottery they never entered, so the scammer receives fewer replies but with better chances of getting some cash out of them - it improves the efficiency of the scam.
(Sorry for going offtopic, but I'll mention this in case someone finds it useful...)
In the UK, credit cards are covered by Section 75 protection, which is a very powerful legal right. (It basically makes the card issuer equally liable as the goods/service provider so if something goes wrong and the provider doesn't deal with it adequately, the card issuer is equally liable to put it right.) Debit cards are (usually) covered by chargeback, but that is just a feature which card issuers offer, not a legal right and they don't have to honour it. S.75 protection is much stronger, which is why it's usually recommended to use a credit card over a debit card for big ticket items.
In the spirit of the multitude of "is it..." websites, would someone please build isit737max.com, so you put in a flight number and it comes back with "YES, you might die" or "NO, you're probably alright". It can't be too difficult, seeing that sites like SeatGuru are already able to identify the plane type by flight number and present the seating configuration.
I for one am in no hurry to fly any route that uses 737MAX, and will be checking before booking in future.
They fixed http://natwest.co.uk, which now redirects to https://personal.natwest.com. But they haven't fixed any of these:
https://natwest.co.uk still has the dodgy certificate and doesn't redirect anywhere else.
https://www.natwest.co.uk is the same.
http://www.natwest.co.uk redirects to https://www.natwest.co.uk, which has the dodgy certificate.
They clearly must own all of these names; I can't understand why they haven't fixed all of them. They're not even getting rid of 15% of their workforce.
Nano-batteries to go with those nanoparticles. At first, that's what I assumed. Now I'm thinking something along the lines of the mechanism of a self-winding watch. When the IR starts fading, you sweep your eyes side to side a few times to recharge. In the heat of battle there's enough action to keep it going all night.
"As the A/C said, the [root] cause was cheap credit so why is cheap credit the answer?"
And as Tom 38 answered, cheap credit wasn't the cause, inappropriate lending was. Mortgages being given to people who were at very high risk of not paying them back, then the lenders would take all their high-risk mortgages, package them together into the CDOs that Tom 38 talked about and sell them on to other banks, who treated them as less risky without looking at the contents.
You could argue that the cause of the problem was the CDOs being incorrectly (or fraudulently) rated less risky than reality. Or you could argue that the cause of the problem was the fact that such risky mortgages were being offered in the first place. You can't argue that cheap credit was the cause of the problem. Even if the credit was cheap, these people still couldn't afford to pay it back so never should it have been given to them.
Yes, overpriced goods, product range and mistakes in online are usually what everyone talks about whenever Maplin comes up, but what I got from this article is that this author asserts it was problems at the corporate finance level that actually (or additionally) led to the death-spiral. The balance sheet numbers showed increasing sales every year up to 2014 and gross profit being maintained at around 50% which means they were still selling stuff and making a profit from what they sold despite being "expensive", but the whole time corporate debt and increasing liability for interest on the debt were catching up with them.
The buyout by Rutland in 2015 enabled them to reset some of the debt and interest liability, albeit with lower sales and gross profits (though still around 50%), but the years following showed exactly the same pattern - sales and profits going up but debt and interest going up much faster. The debt scared their suppliers into withdrawing credit supply arrangements, and if you have nothing to sell you have no business. So actually, customers were still going in and buying stuff, but the author's contention is that spiralling corporate debt killed them.
I get the idea of testing slightly altered signs to see whether they might be misinterpreted by an autonomous vehicle, but calling a lenticular sign an "attack" is not much different from hanging an actual stop sign over another road sign and calling that an attack. That's not an attack, that's just showing a different sign and having it classified correctly.
CPC are pretty good at sending a multitude of thick catalogues, most of which are more or less identical from one week to the next.
Bolsover Cruise Club are incredible. You don't even need to have gone on a cruise, you just need to have walked past their shop or something and you'll be on the receiving end of all manner of letters, postcards and booklets, multiple times per week.
You may be overthinking this. Rather than kneejerk-reacting to the possibility that loyalty scheme costs might be added to shelf prices, just look at the prices. If they're cheaper somewhere else, go somewhere else. MySupermarket.co.uk is good for comparing before you leave home.
No, terrible idea. If you have poor network coverage in your home/office/commute/etc, you can't switch to another network with better coverage. The monopolistic network provider is in no hurry to improve coverage because their customers are billing agents, not end users, and they're not losing any customers over this.
I just wonder what all those million people out there will do. Not initially, obviously, as I'm sure they will be building and sciencing and exploring and, well, populating. But after a while I'd imagine a lot of them would get terribly bored. I mean, here on Earth we can go to the beach, climb a mountain, visit beautiful and exotic locations, play golf, do gardening, whatever, literally thousands of different things we can do outdoors and in. On Mars, you're basically stuck indoors all day watching TV. Oh sure you can put on a suit and go explore the planet but it's all basically the same wherever you go and, whereas a holiday to the Namib desert might be exhilarating the first time, if that's the only holiday you can ever have you're going to get tired of it pretty quickly.
I guess a million is a large enough group that there will be incredible diversity of people and skills, and over time they will come up with all manner of entertainment and pastimes, probably even some that cannot be done on Earth, but you're going to have to choose a million indoors-type people because most, I would think, would still occasionally enjoy being able to look out over a different landscape.
Long term I don't worry so much. If they and succeeding generations make it, they could in time build huge structures to contain enough of an atmosphere to replicate some of the outdoor activities we take for granted, but I doubt that could happen for several decades at least. It's those first few decades before you can get the big stuff in place, that I wonder about.
So I trimmed a hefty piece of slate to fit the reply-paid envelope. About a week later, the barrage (which had been ceaseless for months) stopped completely.
Did you write your name and address on it, or are you telling us they abandoned their entire marketing strategy and pulled their outgoing mail pipeline, in the space of a week, on the back of a single piece of slate? Nice story, but I call porkies.
A lot of South African expats now living in South Australia must have had a big skrik thinking they had woken up in the wrong SA again. I wonder which is worse, load shedding due to not starting up the quick reaction generator station, or load shedding due to the govenment having forgotten they needed to build one in the first place.
£12 gets you a doorbell that you can only respond to while you're at home. I understand the main novelty of this device is that you can respond to a caller when you're not at home - either it makes it look like you are at home and just too lazy to come to the door (maybe it might dissuade a burglar, maybe), or you can let a trusted visitor in without having to be there yourself. Personally I'm not interested in either of those usage cases so I'd be there with you and the £12 bell, but there are probably a few people for whom those novel uses would be appealing.
A "premise" is a proposition that forms the basis of an argument.
A "premises" is a piece of land and the buildings on it.
"Premises" can also mean multiple propositions that form the basis of arguments, but a "premise" never has anything to do with land and buildings unless you're arguing about them.
Go on, I used the icon and everything.
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