Posts by Phil O'Sophical 7408 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Oct 2011
Talkie toaster style it insists on doing a full rinse cycle (no point in telling it that the load is already f*ing wet and just do your spinny thing to make it less so.).
I have an LG which seems to have a similar setup, no "just do a spin" programme, but...
If you push the "on" button, and then touch the "spin speed" setting to pick a speed without selecting any programme, and then press 'start" - it just spins!
Might be worth a try.
And the downside of the udm14 approach, effective though it is at the moment, is that you're just asking Google nicely not to return AI results. If enough people use it, Google will either remove the option, or repurpose it to return the results they want you to see. No matter what any politicians try and do, companies like Google will always find a loophole to work around it, it's just a giant game of whac-a-mole.
Look at how well Reform (in the UK) continues to do
But how much of that is from people who actually want to see Farage in No. 10, rather than just using him as a protest? Look at his past efforts in UKIP and the Brexit party, once they'd achieved their protest aims their votes vanished at the next election.
Starmer won his "landslide" at the last election despite having fewer total votes than Corbyn managed against Boris, and yet Boris got an 80-seat majority in that election. The big Reform votes recently have been much more a reaction against Sunak and Starmer than any real desire to vote for Farage. In the general election many Tory voters either stayed at home, or voted LibDem/Reform to give Sunak a kicking, knowing fine well that nothing would stop Starmer winning however they voted.
This big problem now is that the longer the Tories take to get the message, and return to the more traditional moderate-right values that have won them elections in the past, the more chance there is that they'll fade away and Reform will be the only right-wing (or just non left/centre) game in town.
Trump didn't win in the US because people wanted him, he won because the Democrats couldn't find a believeable opposition candidate, people weren't prepared to vote for an invisible woman, or a doddery geriatric, so they gave up. Trump would have stood little chance against an opponent like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama at their peak. The same is true of Farage, he's scoring today as the "the rest are useless, might as well try something different" candidate. Of course, if the rest remain useless, he might just win by default.
I'm unlikely to even consider its level of cyber security unless it comes with some kind of official rating or warning label.
Most people will ignore such a label anyway, if the product is trendy or cheap.
Look at the farce of "nutrition" labels on food, or "units" on wine, do you know anyone who even reads those, let alone uses them to make a purchasing decision?
Realistically, what you want are open source solutions that are not dependent upon the whims of manufacturers or governments.
You have about as much realistic chance of that as you have of world peace or a cure for all cancers.
development, maintenance, documentation, support should all be things we should be prepared to pay for in one way or another.
Absolutely, but the only people with the money to pay for it, or the power to force such payments (from tax, for example), are the manufacturers and governments. They are always going to be in the loop.
Of course, but that means that no matter how perfect Rust is claimed to be, it is still exposed to many of the same bugs that exist with any language. Just because you've written your program in Rust doesn't mean that you don't have buffer overflows or stack corruption somewhere in the environment as a whole.
Me too. I started in this industry in the early 80s. The first 30 years were fun, a chance to be creative, solve real problems, travel, and generally enjoy myself.
The next 10 years gradually gor more & more boring, many of them being a misery of being unable to design new stuff (manglement considered it too expensive to "re-invent the wheel") and having to just glue together crap FOSS to "create products", and eventually acting as security policeman for badly-designed crap that I was ashamed to see customers buying. Fortunately I'd taken advantage of the good years to save, and retirement is so much more fun. I got out before AI really started to have much impact, so now I can sit on the sidelines with the popcorn.
As a student I remember dumping the whole VMS 2.x "HELP" output to the DECWriter in our lab (we didn't have a set of VMS docs there). That gave us a nice 2" deep pile of fanfold reference material.
A few days later the DECWriter stopped working, apparently the dot-matrix printhead had burned out... We never owned up.
Everything dotted about in no particular order.
It was all shelved in publisher order, rather than the more usual alphabetical author order. It was always impressive how you could ask a member of staff for a title, and after brief pause & vacant stare while they dredged up the info, they would direct you to the exact aisle & shelf. A bit like a cabbie's "knowledge", but for book locations.
Costa is predictable. If you don't know the town you don't know if the independent is coffee nirvana, or a scruffy dump where the staff think that an espresso is just a tiny cup of drip coffee.
Costa's coffee is adequate and always the same, and their sweet things are reasonably priced and not American-sized portions. It's the safe bet.
The problem is not the informality or even the command, but that it didn't tell the user what they did wrong or what they should do differently
I've never seen a Microsoft error message that did this, so it won't surprise anyone if a product error message follows the same guidelines.
We had a QA/test lab full of workstations, each of which had an associated monitor. Being back in the days of 24" CRTs these had the usual degaussing coil which made a pronounced "thunnnggg" noise on power-on. No UPS on the lab.
We soon learned to leave all the monitors switched off when not actually viewing the screen, because if a power outage happened the total degaussing surge when they all came back on at once would trip the main breakers.
In open air it will blow away long before it can get to that concentration. The danger, as with most gases, is when it's used in closed spaces.
A bigger problem with H2-powered cars is what you do when you get back to the carpark after your 2-week vacation & discover that the fuel you need to get home has all escaped/evaporated.
making the eurocrats a tad nervous that many EU nations might fragment into an unmanageable patchwork
I doubt that would have bothered them, divide & conquer has always been a good political move.
What politicians generally don't want is for their opponents to be able to build a solid single front that can oppose them, lots of little independent blocs each with their own mini-agenda is easier to manage.
When someone in the Netherlands buys something for $1 off Ebay USA, it will cost in the end: $1 + E. 34 admin costs + 10% import duties + 21% VAT = 0.90 + 0.09 + 0.21 + 34 = E 35.20.
And what exactly are these "admin costs", something special charged by eBay USA for exports? Hardly an EU problem. If someone in the Netherlands buys something from eBay NL they'll pay the same (including the VAT) except for the 10% import tarifs.
Friends living in North-Carolina paid 4% on top of the purchase price when they buy something from Europe
Well, plus the postage charges and "admin costs". Good of you to choose a state with such low sales taxes, though. In CA they'll have to add 7.5%.
A Chevrolet Corvette costs in the USA around $ 85,000, in the Netherlands over E 250,000
Nonsense. GM don't sell much in the EU, they have no significant dealer networks, but even so there are companies that will provide an entry-level corvette for €130k or so, and in the UK it's 'only' £100k. If people actually wanted to buy them they would probably sell for less, but most people in the EU want well-made cars that don't have gas-guzzling 5 litre engines, so things like Corvettes are niche purchases which command higher prices. The various middlemen probably account for most of the extra costs.
The 21% VAT in Europe gives European manufacturers an advantage when it comes to pricing, since they are able to recover VAT.
You clearly don't understand how VAT works. It's paid to the government by the final purchaser, so doesn't matter if the manufacturer is in EU, UK, USA or Timbuctoo, the same VAT is paid by the purchaser and it has no impact on the manufacturer.
Head of the European commission is accountable to the commission, which is accountable to the European parliament, which is accountable to European citizens
Well, on paper at least.
If you remember the Edith Cresson scandal the parliament can't actually fire individual commissioners, all it can do it dismiss the whole commission en bloc, which is a pretty nuclear option. It means that the commission is largely a power unto itself, the whole commission would have to behave really badly to be actually held accountable.
I'd also be extremely surprised if enough citizens among the 27 member states would ever be able to reach a majority agreement to influence the parliament.
membership was taken from me against my will
At least you got a vote on the issue, we didn't get a say in it's creation or on our membership You still have the option of becoming a citizen of another member country, if it's really that important to you.
