Posts by Spanners 1666 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Sep 2009
The exemption for beef is only for beef that meets our standards, most of theirs doesn't. And is also only of practical benefit if it is price-competitive with our beef, which it isn't. That also amounts to nothing.
I read a news article about this recently. Apparently, their ranchers see our dislike of BGH in our food as protectionist and were lobbying their Philanderer in Chief to punish us for it.
I got a call from a user on the support number. I could barely hear what they said because a keyboard buffer was making its complaint. I interrupted them and asked them to remove whatever was lying on their keyboard so I could hear them.
The noise stopped.
"Thank you for fixing that"
They hung up
Three seconds?
I use Alexa to play Scala Radio to my dog overnight.
I use Alexa to set timers for cooking.
I use Alexa to do lights but SWMBO doesn't like it.
The only other use she gets is making animal noises when our daughter comes around.
I may be unimaginative but I don't want much else
... just certain members....
Does that show their absolute ignorance or does it give away how they want to divide it up?
At some point, the UK will be back and we will be even better integrated than we were allowed before. You can't limit internal trade. It would be like someone in Houston being told they were not allowed to do business with New York. You do business with one and you are doing business with all of it, no matter how different they are!
I frequently dealt with people who were proud of this sort of inability.
I remember one place where their management felt superior to their secretary because she could type, and they couldn't.
They felt superior to their factory floor staff because they could use lathes and the managers couldn't.
They tried to feel superior to be in the same way. They felt it was because they had a classical education. The trouble was, so did I! My rusty Latin was better than theirs. My knowledge of all sorts of irrelevant junk was far better than theirs too.
This was years ago. I suspect that such attitudes are less common.
When people see how useless AI is, people will work to find out how to remove such rubbish from their computers. Security will somehow be a concern.
When I retire in 14 months, my home PC will no longer need to run Windows and will be upgraded to Linux. I am not aware of anyone planning to infect it with AI.
Again, the USA does not have a political left!
Just because someone is a huge distance to your left does not mean that they are "lefties". They may be in the middle ground - that's what "liberal" means.
If the, rational, middle ground is far to someone's left, where does that show them to be?
Please investigate the story of Typhoid Mary and see how disease carriers were treated in the past!
I reach the UK retirement age in January 2026. I am already working part-time. My 2 day week starts tomorrow, and my NHS pension pays me for the other 3.
I imagine we will be spending plenty of money on new kit that we shouldn't really need but, as of my 66th birthday, that is not my real problem!
I have a PC at home that probably doesn't run Win11 but It does run Linux - probably Ubuntu. It has a separate data drive so I shouldn't lose much stuff either.
I can leave that with people, mostly no older than my kids,
My understanding that the reason it didn't work was that they decided to try permanent BST rather than permanent GMT.
The story I heard, in Orkney, was that the people in charge of this test were in the remote South East of England and like so many there don't really believe that anyone actually lives in the north part of the UK!
Get rid of this change. Just don't dump an unsuitable one on us so that sunrise is after 10am!
Full time RTO is irrational for a number of reasons, including
1. It is less productive
2. It is more expensive for the employer
So what are the real reasons behind it? The first reasons suspected were that empowering workers disempowers low quality middle managers and lowers the cost of office space which makes the landlord friends of some CEOs marginally less rich.
I see it as somewhat of a "CEO fashion trend". They can't see how it will affect their $Xmillion bonuses so it is just a game. When some companies make increased profits by allowing WFH this may change in the future!
In the meantime, we can all enjoy watching C-level stupidities harming big corporations.
Whenever I hear one group of politicians say that the other lot are doing "X" I tend to suspect that the complainers would like to, or already do, "X".
This sounds like this was the case with Huawei. Many of us wondered if this was the real reason instead of protectionism. After all, if I can't get Huawei, I most definitely don't want a US equivalent!
I had wondered why someone would spend so much (of other people's money" on Twitter and then manage it so badly.
I can now see that he needed to make it less significant or useful to avoid being a monopolist,
So, instead of being a "free speech"* absolutist, he is a responsibility avoider
.
*Like most people in the USA, he does not understand the concept of free speech!
I imagine we all have had a call like this...
"...of course I plugged it in. I'm not stupid!"
On entering the office
"What's that plug lead hanging down the front of your monitor for?" looks and plugs it in. Computer starts.
..."how the f%%k would I know what that was for? I'm not a computer whiz!"
Patents were originally to allow the inventors of a device or idea to benefit from it for a while. A good example was obstetric forceps,
Over the 20th century, this changed into something that stopped other people using an idea at all. An example is how oil companies used them to prevent Electric Vehicles from catching on.
By the end of the 20th century, This moved into a mobile telephone manufacturer using them to cut down competition (don't innovate, litigate).
This only ever delayed progress. The forceps are now available to whoever needs them, EVs are selling in ever increasing numbers and, outside the USA, that brand of smartphone is mainly used by the uninformed with too much money (expect downvotes from iFans here)
What should be done? Firstly, patents should be returned to their initial length - was that 17 years?
Secondly, that period should only be patents still owned by the individuals who created them. Any patent that is owned by a corporation should automatically be halved in length. Any that were owned from their start should never even get to the full length.
Finally, any patent troll that loses an attempt should automatically be fined 100 times what they were suing for as a minimum or a minimum % of their annual turnover - whichever is greater,
I think a lot of us in user support have seen things that you can's see from home.
"Of course the computer is plugged in! I'm not stupid!
What's that plug having down in front of your screen?
"I don't know. I'm not a computer expert!"
It is much less common now but there used to be people who were proud of being handless with computers. There are still those who really are...
Working in IT support, a lot of my job can not be done from home. Simply put, I can't give you a new keyboard if I am not there.
Apparently, it is really annoying to poor managers that their staff are more productive when somewhere away from them. I have noticed that people do longer hours when they don't spend 30 minutes each way commuting. Businesses benefit from people having fewer distractions and lower costs. The only people who lose out are office landlords!
However, poor quality managers feel insecure because people work better without them messing things up. Senior managers read this as things not working and try and "fix" it by mandating a 100% RTO.
Heating bills etc go up, productivity goes down, commute times and associated pollution increase. Everyone loses!
If you believe the stories, US car & oil companies kept buying up patents any burying them from the 1950s onwards.
Ford could be carrying on the tradition.
1. Think of an appallingly bad idea.
2. Develop it
3. Patent it so nobody else can do it
4. Sit secure in the knowledge that you have saved lives and sanities!
As a late baby boomer, I am still hopeful for the future
The range is fine. My commute to work etc is 11 miles. A range over 200 miles would be very adequate.
The relevant one is the excessive cost. People in houses around me can afford the poor build quality of Teslas but I can't!
Give me something well built for a decent price and I will be fine on a 65 mile range, I can charge it every few days! So it might be expensive to replace a battery. 666,000 miles divided by a few hundred per week will outlast any petrol powered one by a good margin
"Freedom loving corporations"
That must be the most counter intuitive oxymoron I have seen this year!
The USA has got to where it is today in spite of corporations and corporate lawyers and the insane idea of IP which is the most likely reason for this incompatibility,
The real reason behind the US assault on Chinese technology has absolutely nothing to do with security.
It was entirely about stopping companies like Huawei from racing ahead of anything the US can produce. It is pretty pathetic that the UK joined that sham. "We don't want Chinese companies evolved in 5g because we are sure that companies from the land of the (very un)free could get rich from it instead.
Perhaps the US can't make enough laptops of that standard and they know that this protectionism will be even more obvious?
I expect China to do do some DNS fiddling and traffic control, in the same way I expect Musk to. Both are hugely intolerant of ideas they disagree with. It will be easy enough to note where the traffic comes from so everyone can limit locations etc just like he does but I would always want what I am doing - ie criticise fascists - to be hidden from them.
Actually I do so little political stuff that they probably wouldn't care but I would want the ability to use a VPN of my choice as a basic.
Before smarphoines appeared, phones were getting smaller and less useable all the time. Now they get thinner instead and the first thing I do when I get a new one is to order a wallet/case for it.
I do have an unusually small laptop - a Lenovo Duet Chromebook but the battery standby is well over a week and usage is almost 8 hours.
The worst damage I have seen done with a screwdriver was to themselves.
the second worst was to the person they were working with.
Screwdrivers, jewellers, normal little electrical and even woodworking-like ones have very small ends that become quite good at stabbing!
Because there were sharp edges in many PCs, I bet many people are very up-to-date with their tetanus shots but lots of people stab themselves when misusing them.
Life probably became safer with the introduction of electric ones. I never harmed myself with a screwdriver. I did drop an electric one on my foot though!
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