Posts by David 132 3856 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Mar 2010
Or to conflate the scenarios - the situation where people leave their guns in an unlocked car, and then drop it off for servicing... and yes, every word of that is a separate linked example, just from a cursory search of Reddit. I'm not anti-gun by any means, but I definitely feel there should be at least a basic IQ or social competency test before ownership...
FTFA: "Both governments and insurance companies are now suggesting that paying off these extortionists is cheaper than dealing with fixing the issue. The report, and a host of others, suggests that paying off criminals is a long-term losing strategy."
The icon could not be more appropriate. We learned this lesson - or I thought we had - in the 70s/80s against plane hijackers. Give in to their demands, pay them the money, free their fellow terrorists - it makes for an easy life. Well, guess what. You demonstrate that crime pays - you get more crime.
"B-b-b-but this time it's a totally different situation and not comparable at all, because it's crime on Teh Internet!!1!"
I think the facepalm icon would have been a good choice, too.
I'm so confused. Did you mean to type "Kardashian", as in those talentless famous-for-being-famous squillionaire-trailer-trash types, or Cardassian, as in those brutish and looming aliens from Deep Space Nine - known for being pitiless, sadistic, and totalitarian? Because unless there's a plotline somewhere that I've missed, there wasn't a whole lot of DS9 devoted to the Cardassian's underwear arrangements. Tighty-whities or thongs, or some weird alien alternative? *shudder*
I used to have an awesome plugin for WinAmp that simulated vinyl - you could choose the speed (33, 45, etc), simulate dust and scratches, a warped disc, and so on. Yes it was almost entirely frivolous (“Hey look, I can make my clean pristine digital audio files sound like crap!”) but as someone who grew up with record players, I rather wish it was available for VLC.
Similar arrangement here in Oregon. In fact I just recently replaced a 50 gallon water heater (1x 30A dual-pole 230V breaker) with a tankless heater (2x 40A DP, added new uprated 8AWG wiring at the same time).
Like a lot of houses though, mine is seriously running out of space in the breaker panels. I plan to replace another tank heater with a higher-capacity tankless, so somehow I'm going to have to find space for a pair of 50A DP breakers. Fun. At least I have 200A line breakers on my panels.
You're a greedy rapacious plutocrat growing fat on the sweat and toil of the labouring classes. I hereby offer to do the job of running IBM into the ground, for the bargain basement rate of only £49 million. It'll mean personal sacrifices, but it's a noble cause and I'm a good person.
Well, hang on a mo. The actual story is a little more nuanced than "the government has given £37bn to its mates in Serco".
Just to ensure that everyone is cognisant of the facts about T&T before they pile on to criticize it...
This is a good explanation of the story.
To quote from that link, emphasis mine:
"First it’s worth noting that £37bn is the total spending envelope for two years of the programme – £22bn in 20/21 and another £15bn in the coming financial year, not what has been spent so far.
Indeed, a recent National Audit Office report found that the Government had only spent £4bn up to October of last year (those figures will be updated soon in its spring report). That doesn’t mean the Government won’t end up spending all that money, but NHST&T as it stands is not £37bn-worth of a programme. Again it’s worth pointing this out when influential figures like former FT editor Lionel Barber are claiming that “the cost of Covid test and trace is to date a staggering £37bn”, because that’s not true.
The way the spending is divvied out is also important. The Government has not done a good job of communicating how much of the spend is on testing, as opposed to tracing. Indeed, while the problems with tracing have been all too apparent, over 80% of the total spend is on testing, where the UK is actually doing pretty well – we’ve done around 100 million tests in total and can now do over 1 million in a single day. Again, it’s worth repeating this point because some people still seem to think the Government has spent tens of billions on nothing more than a misfiring app and some call centres."
Before anyone thinks the article author is just a lickspittle apologist for the Tories, please understand that there's also strong criticism:
"None of this is to exculpate ministers. The fact that the tracing system did not stop lockdowns is clearly a grave, expensive failure – not just of the system itself but of other policies like opening up foreign travel last summer, encouraging people back to work and university campuses and not locking down earlier when cases were on the rise."
Back about 10-15 years ago when there was a vogue for liquid-cooling of gaming PCs, a good friend of mine came over to my house one evening, watched me working on my desktop system, which happened to have the case lid off - and wordlessly poured a glass of water straight onto it.
After my heart had resumed its normal cadence, and perplexed by the lack of sparks/fizzing and the fact that the PC was quite happily ticking along like it was no big deal, my friend sniggeringly admitted that the glass had actually contained one of the inert, non-conductive cooling liquids. Sapphire, I think it was called.
And yes, we're still friends.
Oregon checking in here. In pretty much the entire state, we have gas station employees to pump the fuel for us, by law. Very nice on a cold winter day. Not so nice when I drive across the state line to WA or CA and absent-mindedly sit in my car at the pump for 5 minutes until I remember that I have to *shudder* get out and pump my own fuel like a medieval peasant. Oh, the humanity!
(and before we re-hash the usual arguments: no, we don't pay any more for our fuel than neighboring self-serve states, and no, I've never been noticeably inconvenienced by having to wait maybe 30 seconds for the attendant to wander over to my car. And we do have trigger latches on the pumps, so the poor attendant doesn't have to stand there holding the trigger the whole time.)
I do hope you're not a white middle-class male, Jake, because if so you have no right to comment on this, or indeed anything, and should stay silent while those lower (or is it higher?) than you in the Hierarchy Of Oppression tell us Their Truth(™ , may not actually contain objective truth or even facts, recollections may vary)
I upvoted you on the tacit understanding that you are being (very) dryly sarcastic. You are... right?
Heaven help us all if you actually believe that textual slurry you just vomited from your keyboard. Tell me it ain't so...?
Not to out-Yorkshireman you, but my first hard drive was 20 Megabytes. A Seagate unit in a Commodore A590 sidecar. It clattered and clunked like a cement-mixer full of nails, but made my Amiga 500's Workbench fly. "What am I going to do with all this leftover space??? How on earth will I fill 17 megabytes??"
Today's answer: 4 MP3s, or one very short YouTube clip of a cat doing something funny.
That's progress, right?
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