Posts by Danny 2 2209 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jul 2009
Sorry LogicGate, I wasn't Biden bashing.
I've posted here a lot about how I've been looking after my elderly parents this year, well, last year. And trying to use tech to help them where they will submit to it.
When I mock the elderly it is entirely heartfelt.
[I still say Captain Tom cheated by using a wheeled zimmer on his so called sponsored 'walk'.]
I hope and expect Biden will prioritise hearing aid technology, chair-lifts, motorised zimmer frames and heated, bouncy pavements. This is a president who can be assassinated by a patch of pavement ice - black ice matters!
Plus a new generation of Google Glass, just built into Aviators.
"Joe, that is your daughter, the other one is your wife"
"Exactly how much experience do you have in the commercial cleaning business? "
I haven't had a bath in two months. My mates a head teacher though who is appalled at the waste of money that schools here are wasting on this monthly snake oil treatment.
If you research it, like I have, then you'll find it is bogus. It's shysters exploiting the panic over covid in schools.
"And even if it were, you'd still have to pay someone to spray and wipe it on everything."
Aye. They are called cleaners, and each school has always employed them. They still employ them even as these shysters move in. It's a scam, an obvious scam.
Hiya Graham,
I'm not going to say you are appealing to authority, just that my sources are far more credible than yours. Mine are peer reviewed scientists. Yours are the CDC and the WHO - and I don't rate them at all.
The CDC has been eviscerated by four years of Trump. It has failed it's nation on Covid.
WHO has failed the world on Covid. They refused to even call it a pandemic until mid March - and still haven't investigated the source.
Well similarly soldiers are hired to fight, so why pay them a bonus when they are putting their lives at risk?
The logic is clear, to me at least. Same rules apply. The morality and pragmatism should be clearer still - who is going to care for you when nurses are off sick or deceased? Maybe try clapping for a nurse?
There are billions being paid to friends of Tories for dubious contracts as highlighted here, that should be going to the frontline.
No offence, but you are wrong and mixing up different things.
Exaggerated risk of transmission of COVID-19 by fomites
Low risk of SARS-CoV-2 transmission by fomites in real-life conditions
You don't need to wash surfaces/packages etc. It's even safe to pick yer nose if you thoroughly wash your finger before.
Disclaimer: This research was before the new variants, maybe be precautionary.
As UK school closures force working parents to juggle unfathomable phonics charts with their day jobs, it's time to turn our attention to those who accrue massive financial gain from the pandemic: consultants.
Actually, there are a fair few war-profiteers in this 'war' against Covid. I'll mention a couple, first I have to get this off my chest. Gavin Williamson has the voice and intellect of a three year old girl torturing her goldfish. You are not mature enough to care for a dog, Gavin, have a spider. You are not safe with the MoD, here, have Education.
Schools in Scotland have been paying £995 for a monthly 'treatment/ deep-cleansing' "electrostatically cleaned" that is utter theatrical hygienics. It's an airborne disease, you don't catch it from surfaces. Open the windows.
My cousin who works for NHS Fife complained that their doctors are getting paid a small bonus for each vaccination. Which is nice, except it's the nurses not the doctors giving the vaccine and they don't get paid squat.
It looks like the Scottish polis will be the first to arrest Trump. He has booked a US military flight to Prestwick on the 19th to escape the Biden inauguration. It's currently illegal to travel to Scotland for non-essential reasons. Nobody here likes him, not even his relatives.
That's not very neighbourly of you AMBxx.
Fifers use the word neighbour to mean friend, which is pragmatic and peaceful. They also have a rebuke for anyone acting too mean, competitive or exploitative. "You're being a wee bit English".
And tell me will we never hear the end
Of puir bluidy Charlie at Culloden yet again?
Though he ran like a rabbit down the glen
Leaving better folk than him to be butchered
Or are you sittin in your Council house, dreamin o'er your clan?
Waiting for the Jacobites to come and free the land?
Try going down the broo with your claymore in your hand
And count all the Princes in the queue
For there's no gods and there's precious few heroes
But there's plenty on the dole in the land o' the leal
And it's time now to sweep the future clear
Of the lies of a past that we know was never real
As opposed to Johnson, who won a £10,000 literary award in his employers rag mag for:
There was a young fellow from Ankara,
Who was a terrific wankerer.
Till he sowed his wild oats,
With the help of a goat,
But he didn’t even stop to thankera.
Erdoğan hails from Instabul, not Ankara. I'd expect a young Turk like Johnson to know that - unless Boris is actually French like his dad now claims to be.
Actually, the area had no links to the Pacific. It used to be Plantation Quay, which as you can guess was linked to the slave trade.
One of my favourite trivia points is that the first two occupants were the BBC and MI5.
[Finley Quaye released one hugely successful album, then moved to London in a blaze of alcohol fuelled violence - genuine Glaswegian!]
I'm about to be downvoted for smugness, despite me upvoting you, but you made two mistakes.
1) You should just have reset the BIOS password, it was quicker than explaining it and there were no tamper proof labels.
2) Infanticide, not adoption. Why would they want another brat?
Also, for the folk who got angry at the irrationally angry moronic clients. Bad move. I'd never/rarely react against their irrational emotional outbursts , I'd just sigh, pat them on the shoulder, fix their problem and walk away. If you get angry at the morons or humiliate them then they'll take it out on their colleagues. Never wrestle a pig.
No offence Trist, I just don't get your point or your logic. I'll start with your logic. Add a glass of sewage to a glass of clean water and you have a glass of sewage. 1+0=0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AND_gate
Now I already said I don't get your point, and I guess I didn't make mine clear since it was simple reportage where the irony was implicit. The fact a website would report the first and most important fact about a suspect was they "worked in computers" should scare anyone who works 'in computers'. Our peers consider all of us dangerous freaks.
I also found it odd that the first FBI theory was the guy was a 5G nut. Not many IT folk are 5G nuts, quite the reverse. My first thought for motivation would be poor quality of service from AT&T.
Whatever, it was just the gentlest suicide bombing. He did it at the safest possible time, and blasted out a glorious British '60s pop song as he killed himself - in Nashville!
Personally when I turn up in a caravan full of explosives outside of Virgin Media then I'm tempted by Dusty Springfield, or Kris Kristofferson.
Anthony Quinn Warner Named as Nashville Bombing Person of Interest
Oh, I just remembered Christmas 1994 at Sky TV, but that was a pre-planned job, swapping out mirrored drives in a server. Backup, replace, restore. Easy, right? And it was really easy, just made extra scary.
It wasn't our server, we were sub-contractors or Sky were our clients, whatever. None of the Sky techs would touch it because it was 'mission critical'. None of our staff were 'on call' to offer me support because whoever screwed it up would be sack~rificed. We'd have lost our biggest contract, jobs would have been lost, but I had the jingle balls to pull it off. I'm an old cowhand!
Yippee ki yay!
I had my first Christmas dinner in 15 years thanks to the lockdown. It was also the first Christmas in my lifetime that my dad never got his tinsel on the ceiling, cards on the wall and Christmas tree in the corner. I always volunteered to be on call on Christmas as there was next to no users and no support so basically 'turn it off and on again'.
Lockdown Hogmanay will be harder as it was always the bigger celebration. Christmas Day only became a public holiday here in 1958, Boxing Day in 1974. Christmas in Scotland
One point of interest to the typographically minded here is the defunct letter Ȝ Yogh. It's replacement by a Z due to early print sets explains why so many Scottish place names are pronounced differently from how they are spelled. Indeed that goes for peoples names too. John Menzies - John Minghess! Never trust a zed in Scotland, or an MH or BH combination.
AI has apparently beaten humans at chess, go, shogi, etc. Fairy nuff.
Lately AI is claiming it can beat humanity on an Atari. I don't think so. I am prepared to stand up for humanity on that platform.
I've been emailing Trump with requests for pre-emptive pardons in the hope he's just pardoning wildly. I requested a pardon for CozyBears, El Reg, Boris Johnson, Bill Gates and Stormy Daniels.
Since he's also being all presidential rushing through death penalties I nominated Prince Andrew and my evil sister.
The UK does half the global genomic testing, praiseworthy, but it doesn't matter whether the variant originated here or not, it matters that it is increasingly prevalent here. The vacillating bluster from No.10 has proven incredibly deadly regardless of inevitable mutations.
How a string of failures by the British government helped Covid-19 to mutate
(Apology for a link to a Guardian opinion piece, but it's the opinion of a professor of global health.)
The failures of the government’s pandemic response are legion. An earlier lockdown by just one week in the spring could have halved the death rate, according to Nick Davies, a Sage adviser. Ministers wasted billions on outsourcing an allegedly “world-beating” test-and-trace system to private companies. It has failed to monitor rates of self-isolation and provided scant financial support to those asked to quarantine at home, relying on workers who don’t get sick pay, such as those in the gig economy, to isolate while losing wages. After Britain’s spring lockdown, infection rates fell, but the government again failed to do what was needed in time to suppress the virus.The government’s poor control of Covid-19 has increased the force of the infection and allowed more mutations to happen. On top of the economic costs of lockdown measures, the UK has now been effectively placed in quarantine by the international community. The prime minister’s repeated dithering, delays and seeming inability to make unpopular decisions have led Britain to have one of the worst death rates in the world.
Man wakes up alone in a London hospital, wanders out onto empty streets, is attacked by sickly looking locals searching for food, with the UK cut off from the rest of the world due to a virus. Yep, Danny Boyle made the movie of 2020 back in 2002.
I have a sudden and inexplicable craving for citrus fruit.
I happened to be driving past Lockerbie returning from a job in England the day after. The road was unusually busy and slow, full of "rubber neckers" trying to get a view. I hadn't even heard about it until I turned on my car radio to check if there was a road accident ahead.
Heavy sanctions eventually forced Libya to hand over the top defendants to an international court under Scottish law. I was contracting in Utrecht during the trial, put up in the Hilton. Many witnesses and bereaved relatives stayed there as Den Haag hotels were full. I'd listen to them discuss the case as I sat in the bar reading books, or in the lifts. There was a lot that struck me as dubious. It's awful to report but many of the US relatives were already focussed on how much compensation they could sue Libya for rather than the court proceedings.
One defendant was convicted, one found not guilty.
Over the years various bereaved UK relatives said they weren't convinced by the verdict. There were various theories which can of course be dismissed as "conspiracy theories", but whether correct or false it's a truism that behind most bombings are actual conspiracies, Unabomber excepted.
I ended up trying to organise a convention in Scotland to discuss the bombing, and emailed most of the main figures to get them to attend. That happened, but I dropped out because it was pointed out to me that the organiser had to have gravitas, and I happily admitted I only had 'anti-gravitas'.
People who did attend though included Dr Jim Swire who attended each day of the trial to get justice for his daughter, teaching Professor Robert Black QC who is widely regarded as Scotland's top legal mind and who blogged about this for decades, Edwin Bollier whose electronic timer was supposedly used in the bomb, and numerous other legal experts and witnesses. They don't all agree about everything, just one thing, that the conviction was unsound. Even Margaret Thatcher said Libya's terrorist capabilities had been too diminished to carry out the attack by then.
Occam's razor. Iran promised to down a US jet in revenge and they did through a third party, as witnessed by a Jordanian agent. That was covered up out of political expediency, and a false case was constructed, through evidence tampering and witness bribing. Nothing happens for decades until three weeks ago when the case goes to appeal before the Scottish courts - and all of a sudden Bill Barr suddenly wants to prosecute a 3rd Libyan to cover his arse. It's a blatant attempt to pressure the Scottish appeal, Bill Barr's attempt at a self-pardon before retiring.
I can't be certain about this, I've only looked on from the outside, but it seems pretty obvious. I'm not motivated by animus against Iran, but a lot of the bereaved relatives are dying off without knowing the truth, and a few of the trial fixers are retiring without accountability. When I heard Robert Mueller was investigating Trump - and being cast as a saint - and Bill Barr was AG again, I just rolled my eyes because I remembered their names.
I don't get your logic, Veti. The FBI were on the scene and directing the investigation the day of the attack. The blaming of Libya obviously happened long before the date of indictment.
Here's the timeline:
Iran Air Flight 655, July 1988.
Pan Am Flight 103, December 1988.
Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, July 1990.
Relief of Kuwait, February 1991.
Indictment of the two Libyan suspects in November 1991.
The focus on Libya rather than Iran wasn't due to fear of Iranian military intervention, the US required an international coalition and so military and diplomatic support. Blaming Iran for Pan Am Flight 103 would raise the issue of the USS Vincennes shooting down Iran Air Flight 655 - an attack that not only went unpunished, Captain Will Rogers had already been awarded the Order of Merit for it. Days after that attack a senior member of the Iranian regime promised prompt retaliation.
Plus why bribe witnesses? Why bury testimony from a friendly agent who claimed to have built the bomb?
Bill Barr's last act in his 2nd stint as AG is to charge a Libyan with the Lockerbie bombing, the worst terrorist atrocity in the UK. In his 1st stint as AG he brought the original prosecution, and the FBI lead was Robert Mueller.
The thing is nobody in Scotland believes the Libyans planted the bomb. That was faked by the US for political reasons, it was actually planted by a Palestinian group on behalf of Iran as revenge for the US shooting down an Iranian passenger jet. However at the time the US needed Iranian support for 'liberating' Kuwait from Saddam, so the Libyans were scapegoated. A Jordanian spy in the Palestinian group built the bomb, but his testimony is hidden under an ongoing British order. Mueller paid millions of dollars to a dodgy Maltese shopkeeper to misidentify a Libyan as buying clothes packed around the bomb.
Barr is only prosecuting a second Libyan now because Scottish courts are reviewing whether it was a miscarriage of justice.
It's like a bad movie, right? I'll provide more details if anyone doubts it though.
"Is cats and smokers"
In the early nineties I used to refurbish mainframe VDUs that had been in offices since the seventies, when smoking was permitted de jure.
No cat hair, but sooty as a chimney, with black dustballs shorting circuits. It should have made me give up smoking but I never expected to survive the decade.
What! I got downvoted for that?
True story. Queen Victoria left a huge outstanding debt for laudanum with her Scottish druggist (not chemist, not pharmacist, yes opium) when she died. The drug dealer didn't complain because he'd been awarded a Royal warrant that enabled him to sell far more opium to the masses. We're still suffering from that here.
I kind of feel sorry for her because her huge knickers keep coming up for auction. When I die I want all my pants burned.
Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!
Quoting a line from a movie that spawned a multimillion dollar franchise isn't really what we define as pretentious. Pretentious would be you quoting the French novel that Planet of the Apes was based on.
"grateful for being unemployed. First when I wake up at 7:10am and remember I can have another 4h in bed"
Ah, I remember that, the early weeks when rest was a boon! Later you get used to just getting up when you wake up. First I lived alone on an isolated peninsula on the Western Isles, and I'd wake up early to hear the Radio Scotland traffic forecast for the M8 just to remind myself how bad my life there had been - also to hear a human voice.
I guess that's partly why I read here, one downmanship. IT staff today are paid less than I was, and yet they have to deal with so much more stressful crap than I did. In my day if there had been a hack then I knew it had either been someone I knew messing with me, or me when I was drunk.
The idea that 70+ million bigots will suddenly go "We were wrong, he's an arsehole" is pretty unlikely.
My uncle had a 'doo cot' - a pigeon loft - for his homing race pigeons. When he died my mum asked my cousins what happened to his pigeons. You can't rehome a homing pigeon once it's been conditioned. Even if you destroy their home they will always return to the same place. You just have to wait for them to die off.
[I always get downvoted for doing this but I don't care because young people need to know how great 1986 was]
The Woodentops - Everything Breaks
I took the only girl technician in our class to their first gig, I'd seduced her by playing 'Good Thing'. Her first concert, she grabbed my hand when The Woodentops came on because she was scared. I tried to get in contact with her a few years ago and she'd died from a brain aneurysm.
The worst thing about ageing isn't ageing, it's that everyone else ages too. I apologise to everyone who can't know how great 1986 was.
@Ivan Headache
"Yes but how do I stop the Squirrel(s) from cleaning out my bird feeder."
Spray the nuts with a strong pepper solution. Birds can't sense capsaicin, all mammals (except Italians) are repelled by it.
https://www.humanesociety.org/resources/squirrels-and-bird-feeders
Pastier white than the whitest Brit here, a Scot who'd seen less sun than a veal calf. 18 year old drinkers in California unable to get a drink, and everyone assumed we were junkies. Across a busy business street someone shouted, "Hey man, do you want to buy some smack?"
"No, but could you buy us some alcohol please?"
In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four?
