Posts by phuzz 6734 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Feb 2010
"without any clarity on funding"
There was clarity on the funding. The Prime Minister has said that the extra funding for the NHS will come from the money we'll be saving after brexit.
The widely agreed (including by the government itself) prediction that there will be less money after brexit has nothing to do with it, the PM was still very clear...
elReg, maybe it's time we had a 'magic money tree' icon?
"I view work as an exchange of services for money"
Exactly this.
I'll work overtime as long as I'm being paid. I'll be on-call if I'm getting paid.
What I won't do is work for free.
The other side of it is that working more than 40 hours a week is unproductive. (eg)
"I think what most affects which network you go with depends on coverage in your local area."
Same here. The only network that covered my home was Vodafone (provided you stood by a window on the right side of the house), so I got a contract with them.
These days I live about 500m from a mast, so all the networks work equally well, but every time I've tried to leave Voda they've offered me an even better deal, and as yet they've not messed anything up bad enough to make me want to leave.
"its real aim was to get as many claimants off benefits as possible"
Well, with tens of thousands of people* dying as a result, I'd say they've achieved their aim.
* 45,000 between 2011 and 2014. Not a typo.
"Do they know the people they're supposed to be helping?"
Of course they do, it's those poor, downtrodden rich people.
Did you know that (on the rare occasion they pay some tax), some of that money is just given to poor people? And it's not like these poor people have even bothered to be born to a well-off family, or be not-disabled. If people can't be bothered to help themselves, why should the government help them?
Sarcasm aside, the 'hostile environment' isn't just aimed at immigrants, it's designed to make life as uncomfortable as possible for people on benefits as well.
It's always fun goading someone into a lie, and then running with it.
Ideally you should end up at the point where they have to admit to the lie in front of their boss. Oh, and keeping them guessing as to is your really know they're lying helps keep them on edge.
Salespeople are my usual marks.
The Labour party may or may not be likeable, but they really should have managed to capitalise on the sheer incompetence the tories have been displaying for the past year or so. When you're the opposition to a party with a leader who no one likes and who doesn't really want to be there, while the rest of her cabinet fight with each other, you'd expect the opposition to make a little more headway.
"Replace cmd with powershell on your system and see how it runs."
There's an option in Win10 to do just this for the start menu. It works just fine.
(Powershell will execute valid cmd commands, plus all of it's own, so it's a drop-in replacement)
Throwing things into the sun is a lot harder than you might think. You have to counter out (most of) the Earth's orbital speed around the sun, which is 30km/s. As a comparison, a Falcon 9 has about 5km/s of delta V, but it needs 3km/s just to get off the Earth.
It's probably just within our reach as a species to send a small satellite into the sun, but it'll have to be a small satellite either using a very efficient propulsion method (ion drive?), or some clever gravity assists.
(eg Use a close flyby of Jupiter or Saturn to send your aphelion right out to the outer solar system, and then reduce your perihelion out there where the delta V requirements are low).
"I still don't know why they're doing 'forced updates' like that."
Because otherwise they get slated for everyone never installing patches and getting pwnd by every bit of malware that comes along.
Think back to the days when everyone ran Windows XP and most people/companies didn't patch, and Microsoft got their (deserved) reputation for having terrible security. That's what they're trying to avoid, by making sure everyone is running the latest security patches.
They've probably over-reacted, but at least now you know why.
Where's Bombastic Bob? He's usually all over any thread that mentions the 't' word.
Surely there's some sympathetic reason that trump has done this that us filthy libtards aren't getting?
In fact, it's probably because our feeble minds can't keep up with the greatness that is trump. I'm sure he's actually getting the best deal ('the BEST') from China, right?
That's right isn't it Bob?
Bob?
To be fair, since Vista (when Microsoft changed the way drivers were allowed to interact with the kernel), the only BSoD's I've seen have been either bad hardware, or bad drivers/software.
I've still probably seen more BSoDs than kernel panics, but that's partly because most of the linux machines I interact with are servers, with the higher grade of hardware that implies.
"he should push for MS and people like CERT to issue official statements that any device that defaults to SMB1 is [...] not safe to connect to a network"
Well, Ned works for Microsoft, and regularly tells people in his official capacity to stop using SMBv1 (eg), and US-CERT say the same. That's about as emphatic as warnings get.
I was up at lake Windermere a few weeks ago and was treated to Typhoon flyover, and while it's obviously not in the same league as a Vulcan, they don't half make a racket when they're coming down the lake at minimum altitude! :)
I'm pretty sure they were below whatever minimum altitude they're supposed to be sticking to as well, it felt like they were about 50m above our heads, which was bloody great :) The planes might have changed, but the pilots are still cut from the same cloth.
All this worrying about daughter boards when you should have just bought a computer built with expandability in mind, like my Amiga with it's internal expansion port that lets me plug a board with a faster CPU and and FPU on the same board!
(Or these days you'd whack in a Vampire accelerator, which uses an FPGA to emulate a 68060 faster than anything Motorola ever built, along with all the gubbins necessary for hi-res output via HDMI. Shame they're almost impossible to find in stock.)
From a relative of mine who works offshore, yes, they often have consoles set up for gaming. There's also often a thriving film/tv piracy scene going on, where crew members swap videos back and forth to keep themselves occupied.
As for internet access, it depends. Usually these days they get enough for text based communications, and the odd picture. Some of the really fancy new boats have enough bandwidth to do VoIP (with a huge and almost unusable latency). For online gaming though you're pretty much limited to play-by-email.
I assume ships in places like the Channel can probably pick up on-shore mobile networks and get 3/4G coverage though.
"have you seen the ridiculous prices the NHS pays for stuff"
Compared to the cost in the free market of the US?
Plus, they only get a choice of suppliers for some things (eg aspirin), some drugs/equipment will only have a single supplier.
"For some goods, being able to physically try them out in a shop is important, but phones are not one of them"
I disagree. A phone is something that spends a lot of time in your hands, so personally I want to know about size and weight before I commit. A volume button that's uncomfortably out of reach (for example) would annoy me every day for the few years I own the phone.
I'll go buy it online after checking it out in store though, I'm not daft.
(Mice and keyboards are the other objects I'd put in this category)
The NHS isn't a monopoly (because you don't have to pay at the point of treatment), but it is a monopsony (ie a single buyer with many suppliers), which is not great for the suppliers (because they don't get to set the prices), but great for the NHS, and therefore, us.
I've been trying to work out what I get paying £500-600 on a top of the range phone, vs spending £100-150 on a mid range phone but I can't work it out.
Sure, all the numbers (cores, core speed, memory, storage etc.) are all bigger for the more expensive phone, but I don't notice any difference in actual day to day usability. Plus, the cheaper end of the market has more competition, so you're more likely to see features you don't get at the high end, such as a ruggidised/waterproof design, or dual SIM slots.
Buy an unlocked phone for £100, and get a sim-only contract for £15/month or pay £50 for the phone and £50/month for the contract? Your choice.
I'm pretty sure those electric scooters would be illegal on the road, and on the pavement in the UK, which would limit them to private property.
I did see someone on an electric bike recently which at first glance looked like a chunky mountain bike, but went like a greased whippet. The rider didn't have a helmet on of course, but still, it looked much more useable (and fun) than the usual pedals+motor setup of a normal electric bike.
"No, sorry, there had to have been other options"
With that amount of money, you're looking at:
Amazon
Apple
IBM (maybe)
Oracle
Microsoft
Which would you have chosen?
Amazon might pony up, but it doesn't really fit into their core business. Apple only occasionally care about open source. Google have their own in-house version control system. IBM probably don't have the cash. Oracle, well they'd probably love to buy Github, but lets face it, they'd fuck it up more and faster than MS ever could. Facebook aren't into development really, which just leaves Microsoft, who have a a business that depends on developers making software for their platforms.
And as for "it would still have been better to just close up shop"; the owners of GitHub have already taken $350 million from venture capitalists, what on earth makes you think they care about anything except making good on that investment?
Is there any launch vehicle of spacecraft that has actually launched on schedule?
IIRC the first manned launch of Soyuz was delayed well over a year, and still ended up being a failure (RIP Vladimir Komarov). Various parts of the Apollo program also slipped by years (eg the first flight of the LM was supposed to be in 1965, but didn't end up occurring until '68).
Space is hard, perhaps Musk should just be a bit quieter about when he hopes things will happen.
If we're going that far back, in 1833 the British government paid out twenty million pounds to compensate slave owners who were now forced to free their slaves.
This money of course was paid by the British taxpayer, but fortunately we finished paying that debt off a whole three years ago. Yes, if you paid UK taxes in 2015, you were helping pay off money that was used to compensate those poor, hard done to, slave owners.
If you'd like to know exactly who that money was paid to, you can look through the records here. Here's David Cameron's great grand-uncle for example.
"It needs to be able to ask the network for encryption keys. Otherwise there will be alerts all over the phone that the network is insecure and some phones may refuse to use the network without an end-user confirmation (OS/Customization dependent)."
Nope. You do have to make sure your fake cell tower is 'louder' than all the legitimate ones, so that the targets phone opts to use it, but your tower claims to only support 2G (which is trivial to crack), and you can now snoop on the contents of communications to and from the phone.
As far as I can tell, no current phones warn when they roam to a cell that only has 2G. You can get applications on Android that will warn you, but it's not standard.
(example)
"landing on a flight deck already a-gaggle with birds swilling with fuel and laden with ordnance"
I'm pretty sure they only park them on the flight deck fuelled and armed when they're in fully working order, so I doubt this is a situation the F-35 will encounter all that often.
Plus all the military equipment is designed to detect things like ships, and submarines, not to detect the transitory impact of an aircraft.
Chances are that even if it was picked up, the sound of the impact was (automatically) discarded as being noise, and clearly not a sub/ship/etc.
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