Posts by Anon the mouse 128 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Aug 2009
I found my old 3310 recently. I tried turning it on expecting a flat battery after 20+ years. It' powered on fine and has still got 3/4 charge.
With the 2G switch off still a few years away I'm tempted to get a charger and use it instead of a smart phone.
I took Toobs headline rate, which is half the price that VM wanted for me as an existing customer. If I needed a fixed IP then even that doesn't suddenly double it to VM money.
Call centres are onshore, and speaking about technical issues with them gets a technical response rather than sticking rigidly to a script. I had an IPv6 issue and took a couple of days to get to the bottom of, and even saying traceroute was enough to get them to drop the have you reset the router, etc nonsense and ask proper technical questions about the network, device, tests I'd ran, etc.
Would love to see criminals arrested... but that involves police actually turning up to deal with crime. Once that starts happening in significant numbers across the UK, then we can move on to methods for detecting crime.
Just detecting crime and doing nothing about it means that it's really for selective policing, either for oppression of the poorer members of society or as is the target de jour protesters protesting things.
"We imagine, though, that the diffusion of responsibility kicks in here, with the net result being that motorists think someone else will already have reported the gaping chasm in the road, thus it doesn't actually get reported."
The main problem I've found is getting a report to the right council, if you report to borough and it's county they tell you to report it to county and vice versa. Each road and path can be either (or even parish), so it gets exhausting trying to report. Even using something like Love Clean Streets to make things quicker results in lots of "not us mate" replies from councils.
That is if the council will even entertain fixing or sorting the issue, I have a rather lengthy "get lost" email from county stating they don't care enough to deal with a problem because residents won't let them and that would mean they'd have to put in effort.
Very little value is not zero value. I don't care if my work is worth 0.003p per use (same as Spotify) to an AI company, I want paying. And if it's illegally acquired then it is the licencing fee for each infringement, which is at least £1k.
When AI companies have to pay for what they've taken they'll soon change their tune to it our creativity being worthless.
>What you can ask for is for a smart meter to be placed into dumb mode. This has to be done if you request it (although you may have to get Ofgem involved), but the problem here is that once the meter is in, there are probably ways to remotely convert it into either smart mode, or even to pre-pay mode without anybody having to enter the property.
There is no such thing as "Dumb mode" for smart meters at present (https://smartenergycodecompany.co.uk/modifications/managing-sec-obligations-and-the-consumer-s-right-to-refuse-a-smart-meter/). Any supplier or fitter that says there is, is lying to get you to accept a smart meter.
They are planning on 2026 for a proper dumb mode for meters, but until at least then you are legally allowed to refuse a smart meter.
Except it's in the welfare budget. 42% (£111b) of the welfare budget to be exact. UC is 1% (£2b) yet that's where all the fury gets directed.*
You have paid for the pension of other people while you worked, and when you retire they will pay your pension. That's the system, you will draw a benefit on retirement that is labelled State Pension. Just because you are upset about benefits claimants doesn't mean you'll not be one at that point.
And this is the real issue, people refuse to admit they draw a benefit from the state and instead get angry about it. Think yourself lucky, state pension is the only benefit that the government gives any sort of (half decent) rise to yearly. The rest are left with the scraps and any rise is incidental.
*ONS stats for How the welfare budget is spent. Though it's slightly outdated so will be more on pensions now.
ND to ND communication at high speed will make those turns in conversation so rapid that the NTs won't have a chance of understanding what's going on after a few seconds.
I'd love to see them struggle to comprehend what's happening when the bandwidth increase allows effective info dumping in seconds instead of 20+ minutes. They'll think matrix "I know kung fu", when in reality it's more like "I know the mating habits of Atlantic deep sea creatures that live near volcanoes"
Ridge Wallet founder posted something on social media in the past couple of days that even with a patent and valid court order for all counterfeit goods to be stopped Amazon does nothing. Amazon even went as far as to demand he stop contacting them regarding illegal products. The kicker is that his patented Ridge Wallet is in a category on Amazon called "Ridge Wallet for Men", so Amazon knows what's happening and just doesn't care as long as they get paid.
They treat laws as optional as they are one of the biggest companies on the planet by capital. First the USB-C requirement, then message interoperability, development for EU apps being ringfenced, now this, amongst many others on that road of minimal compliance that has to be dragged out of them.
I expect apple to back down (again), but in a barely complying kind of way. They'll announce that only the most expensive of the iphone, ipad and mac lines can install apps outside of the store as they have to run extra checks on the device to make sure it's safe and anything but the most expensive can't handle it.
There's proof of concepts already showing that you can drop malware on a machine and exfiltrate the recall DB before the antivirus kicks in a few seconds later and removes the malware. The recall DB isn't that large so it only takes a second to upload to a remote server.
Atos, the same company that has blood on it's hands from the PIP system they were administering by denying as many claims as possible, where most were overturned on appeal. The company that uses the "you'll get it on the 3rd attempt" system to keep disabled people in distress and unable to continue... that application system is Apply(denied), Mandatory reconsideration(denied), Appeal(accepted) usually over a 2+ year period so that the claimant has a chance to die and therefore not count as successful.
What does an LLM bring to the table now? Not in the future, but now. At present they steal as much data as possible and then produce erroneous results.
Oh and you cannot correct the erroneous results, just suppress them for specific prompts. They are in violation of data protection, copyright and other laws in their collection and output of data.
LLMs offer nothing, they are worse than the worst employee because even they can be replaced if they continually make mistakes instead of improve. Yet "AI" brings out the what ifs, and coulds and maybes... there is nothing concrete that they bring to businesses now, other than problems.
Ah yes, my reading comprehension and ability to understand how a server works must have evaporated when my refund came through. I still have an interest in the game, at the moment it seems to be more morbid curiosity as problems pile up. But I still hope that one day it'll come good for those that DO enjoy it.
In this case the database problem was one of those things you find out in the live version, however not leaving any support staff to help customers for 2 weeks just after release. That was poor planning from Frontier, Leaving no updates or anything for customers tends to spiral things out of control, again look at the refund situation that is still ongoing for most two months later.
You would have thought people would've realised what the support was going to be like after the refund problems. Though writing refund quest was very cathartic.
Frontier, seem very, very overwhelmed as usual. But then release a game and announce a two week holiday for a week later was always going to be a clusterf*ck.
Lol, I used to work in a bar back before the reality star explosion of 2000ish.... Had no end of "famous" people going "Do you know who I am?". "Sure, you're the guy* that has to wait like everyone else".
I'd love to work in that Apple store, just to throw the "do you know who I am" card back at you.
*Usually footballers of the local premiership club, trying to impress their dates/partners.
Separating the phone and line rental costs is a side effect of the main purpose of these style contracts.
At present a "subsidised" contract is line rental only and the phone is a "free gift" that forms no part of the contract.
By doing the parts separately you don't actually own the phone until it's fully paid for, it's separate from the service, and therefore stops people from getting a contract which they only pay 6 months of and then selling the phone.
But Apple made the smartphone.... and Nokia started it...honest..... HTC weren't even a blip on the radar.....even though they produced phones with lots more features years before the competition (when they worked right. SPV c500 replaced 4 times to get a useable one).
I still have my HTC Universal somewhere..... such a great phone, the only phone where I wish they would just update the internals (and software) and re-release it.
Looking at this list http://www.windowsfordevices.com/c/a/Windows-For-Devices-Articles/Guide-to-HTCs-Windows-Mobile-smartphones/
there are a few phones there I would love to see updated.....oh and maybe the tytn II for another :D
Had a nose around on Monday when the "sale" started. Prices are still expensive. Another 20% and they would be in line with Dixons/PCWorld.
Maybe if they had stacked em high and solld em cheap (like they said they would) they wouldn't be running back to where there are no national competitors for them.
PC interface is clunky and randomly decides wether you need to use mouse or keys......plugging in a 360 pad solved it for me :)
Still lots of fun to play, and apart from that one bug early on no major problems.
Dragons are fun to kill, and make for the most memorable moments in the game. Nighttime tracking through a forest suddenly the music changes and up ahead an orange glow appears in the distance through the trees..... a dragon is attacking a giant and they are locked in battle......Low level means I run leaving them to fight it out, I haven't saved for a while so don't want to reload into that battle :)
"If we're more rationally earlier in life trained to EXPECT death, how EVER it comes, part of the excessive preoccupation with transformation of some sort is nixed."
Sorry to break it to you but that's utter bollocks.
I lost a child a few years ago (at a few months old), and my older children KNOW what death is because of that. Everything was explained to them at an appropriate level for their ages, and any questions over the years have been answered truthfully. At the time they weren't too bother, now they do worry more over death and dying than other children of comparable age (6-9). They worry more when people are ill that they will die.
I would never have withheld the information from them, but it does change their outlook on life......
