Posts by Sherrie Ludwig 426 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Nov 2013
There is really no way short of a certified birth certificate to prove someone's age. A driver's license contains that info, but over the internet a fake one will look as good as a real one, or how do you keep a kid from simply pulling it out of mom's purse to show? The idea to set an age bar is laudable, but like many great ideas, not enforceable over the internet in any reasonable way.
There have been many premature announcements of Twitter's/X's impending doom
Don't think the announcements are premature, I think it's ongoing. As anyone who has attended a death, either as medical personnel or family, it is a process not an instant. I am a disinterested onlooker, but I think it's sort of sad that something that so many people labored to build and support, and seemed to be useful for so many more, has been destroyed by one man's reckless egotism.
Hate to break it to you but I'm a centrist leaning libertarian.
Yeah, yeah, LOL. You're a centrist. And I'm Beyonce's younger, cuter, richer and more talented younger sister. Calling yourself one doesn't make you one. ("I WON, BIGLY", for example) I think the majority of El Reg readers have formed their own opinions of this tiresome AC.
Yeah, the so ugly it's cute response won't work on some people, but the reality is, these thinks are iconic of an age, and will be sitting next to a Tucker and a car show 50 or 100 years from now with an explanatory placard of Musks folley.
And the DeLorean, at least that thing looked good for its time. When I see the Tesla truck, I think of the Pontiac Aztek, an OK car with a WTF profile.
eliminate Facebook Messenger and transition Facebook users to a peer to peer alternative
Unless the phone is tapped, what happened to JUST CALLING the person? No record. Need to keep info like an address? writing instrument and paper, discard in a public waste bin, or tear in pieces and discard in several if truly paranoid) when done.
"I think the quickest way for us to get rid of spammers … is simply to tie them up on every call.
A friend of mine was plagued by a very insistent cold caller wanting to sell him a conservatory. In the end he gave in and said they could come round to size up the job. The sales rep was exceedingly disappointed to find out that at the time he was living in a first(*) floor flat.
(*) Second for leftpondians."
I lived in a brick rowhouse (terrace for rightpondians) and got daily calls for aluminum cladding. I kept telling them it was not feasible, take my name off the list. Finally, I caved and told ALL the callers to come out for an estimate, but gave them all the same time and date. Cue three very grumpy salesmen showing up, with me saying, "I've only wasted your time once, my time has been wasted for several weeks of your brainless cold callers not taking my number off the list. I will KEEP MAKING APPOINTMENTS and having you all burn gas and time until your firm gets the message". Only took once.
My bank account has my full name on it, I sign my checks as Middle-nickname Lastname, and sign paperwork at work as Firstname Lastname. Never once had a problem.
My signature is a sprawling scribble, so what the squiggles transcribe to is probably irrecoverable. It is, however, fairly consistent across documents and time. Have not used my legal first name except for legal documents in over half a century.
Now that cursive script is not taught in school in the US, do people make up a script cipher and use that?
" One of the reasons I've stopped flying is that I was "randomly selected" for extra screening each and every time I would fly. I'm not a political activist, I don't attend protests and I don't have any sort of criminal record."
That you know of
Post 9/11, for a couple of years every time I checked in I would have a good wait at the desk while they grabbed my driver's license and disappeared into the back room They would come back, hand over the ID with a dubious "you can go", and no explanation. Maybe my name and physog mimicked an uncaught Baader–Meinhof member? Started flying within the US using my passport as ID, no more hassles.
We need to mock AI at every turn, to understand that this isn't "Sonny" from iRobot that we're getting. We're just getting yet-another dumb assistant that looks useful but ultimately requires a human to double-check everything it claims. Again.
What we have is the character played by Chris Hemsworth in the much-maligned female cast Ghostbusters attempted reboot: very attractive, very easy to interact with, looks like they would be useful, and is a useless mess.
investment in solar farms in the desert
I have to ask, when I see advertisements soliciting investors, why banks and hedge funds aren't rushing in with bags of money for said investment? Oh, right, because they looked at the numbers and said NOPE. Either the project is bad or the people touting it are scammers.
Not my country. I live in the UK. And so its ok to leave them in the garage if you are president but not ok to store them in a space deemed acceptable by the secret service who actually went to check on the storage?
OK, let's try to explain this for the slow ones: I an retiring from an institution, say, a bank. I gather up the stuff from my desk as I leave the office. Later, the bank says some loan documents are missing, which would be a violation of privacy for the bank's customers, and are needed for normal operations. I go through the stuff I boxed up and find those documents, and maybe some more that the bank might need. I also tell them to send over a current loan officer to look through the stuff, give him/her the key to my home office and garage in case there's anything else that got mixed in. Inconvenient, mildly embarrassing, but OK
OR, I tell the bank I don't have anything, but show the loan documents to everyone to prove what an important person I am, maybe sell some of the information contained in them (ya know, retirement is expensive) or hold the info back just in case I need a few "favors" later. When the bank shows up having contacted law enforcement for a subpoena, I whine about a witch hunt. They find some of the documents, are still looking for more, and are horrified and angry that I was stupid enough to show some of the information to outsiders, compromising their customer relations.
There you have it, Biden and Pence are OK, the orange fart is OR. And, I hope, gone.
>>The best device to reduce road deaths, suggested economist Gordon Tulloch, would be a large steel spike in the center of every car's steering wheel.
https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/car-recalls-defects/takata-airbag-recall-everything-you-need-to-know-a1060713669/ Even when faced with a bomb in the middle of the steering wheel, traffic carnage continued unaffected. There are certainly still people driving around with one of these.
"You're being lied to about the cost of using cards. Check the PSR website for the facts. Interchange fee cap: 0.3% per transaction (credit cards), 0.2% per transaction (debit cards)."
I want to do business in whatever utopia you live in. Actual USA retailer here, small one-person operation. Yes, they are not burdensome, but they are present. Someone wanting to pay a $1 sale with a card costs me 12.6% of the sale through Square. https://squareup.com/us/en/payments/our-fees means that if they are buying some clearance item that I am getting rid of at cost ($1. costume jewelry) it is cheaper to me to just give them to her.
CASH always rules. Stupid crap that a company gives away is almost always gathering dust soon after.
When will manglement understand that?
An acquaintance was let go from a company that liberally doled out t-shirts, sweatshirts and jackets expensively embroidered with the company logo. She was rather upset with the firing. The company headquarters was located in a dodgy area of the city, lots of homeless people on the streets. She was bemoaning that after working there for a long time, she had quite a wardrobe of company-logo stuff she never wanted to see again. I suggested she make a distribution of all the tat to the local homeless, improving their lives and getting petty revenge on her ex-company.
Icon for one of the recipients.
Joe Biden's account (both his personal one and the official government one) lost their checkmarks.
Sounds fine. So, the person whose words are reported by every news media on earth can now delete his Twitter profile and say, repeatedly, "I do not use the platform Twitter in any capacity, public or private. If something is on Twitter purporting to be from me, it is categorically false." Wouldn't alter the twitterati, but would take a cut into the traffic on the platform from news reporters looking for some news. If that's what the muskrat wants, give it to him.
Small time craftsperson/retailer here. I happily accept cash, as does my local bank. I deposit said cash at a teller window, since I don't like to watch my hard-earned cash disappear into a machine without a person counting it in front of me. I also accept card payments via Square, which has been nagging me to put all transactions through their app for a while. No thanks. understand the fee for processing card transactions, but I will be damned if they are taking a cut of my cash sales. Yes, I report and pay tax on all transactions, including the cash ones. They will just have to trust me on that, like they have up til now.
this is food only if "food" were an idea described down a glitchy data connection from a digitally-based entity reading a corrupted translation of a Medieval palimpsest on food, to another entity who photosynthesizes for energy, and is doing this just for the grant money. Has any of these numpties ever eaten any crust that hasn't been baked?
I am a USAian, but have been skimming this publication for some years, at least for the articles I can understand. I appreciate the distinctly right-pondian flavo(u)r of this environment. Maybe I was skimming too fast, but I was half-way through the Tesla article before I realized this lawsuit was filed in the USA, not Britain. Is The Register now officially on the same continent as I? Or please make sure all the journalistic bases are covered: who, what, when why and WHERE, please.
If they can engineer a way to pop Muskrat to the top of everyone's feed, why can't they just fix it so that his tweets are marked for him to see HUGE numbers of reads and retweets and what ever else he wants to see (I am not and have never been on the platform)? The numbers don't have to be real, just large enough to keep him happy. Problem fixed. Somebody mentioned blocking his tweets, to see what would happen. Maybe it would be fun if a sizable number of people did this? It seems that we hear about his tweets even if we aren't subscribed to that platform.
"ChatGPT has been great if you have a lot of boring code to write. For instance, you can feed it your data structures and describe what functions you need written to deal with these structures and it does it for you.
If you don't trust it you can ask it to write tests or plot resulting data on a graph."
OK, this is sarcasm/satire, right?
Is anyone still writing (sic)checks? Yes. I write at least two every month to utilities and receive them from customers. My bank does not charge me to process them or write them, there is no transaction fee going to a third party like with a debit or credit card. There is a risk accepting a check that the funds will not be sufficient, but in thirty years of business, I have only been stiffed once.
Back in the day, I was always amazed by businesses that would use radio stations for music on hold, when they making customers listen to other peoples advertisements (who want to take that sweet money we are wanting to take)
A businessman (also a beer drinker) was trying to get an IT contract for his company with Molson, a Canadian brewer. The "hold music" was a compendium of their radio ads of the time, which were iconic, featuring a man and a woman in a situation involving the brand, such as he is a truck driver entering the US from Canada, and she is a first-day customs agent. They were light, playful and memorable. When the receptionist came back on the line to take a message, he asked if, after they had spoken, he could be put back on hold to finish hearing the ads! That is effective advertising. https://www.twovoices.com/hear
. . . my current Utility penalizes me for any electricity use beyond 60% of the "Average American Household', by charging an additional 50% penalty on all "excess" usage between May 1st and October 31st. It's supposedly an incentive to "conserve". They wouldn't be doing it if they had sufficient generating capability.
Oh, but of course the Utility would charge you extra, as long as they can justify it in some unassailable way, Why do you ascribe it to insufficient generating capacity instead of the Occam's Razor explanation of "because they can"?
I'll never understand the US mindset. You guys are happy to go with international standardisation for a lot of things, and in matters of IT are often a driving force behind that standardisation, but paper sizes, middle-endian dates, and a steadfast refusal to use the metric system in favour of an archaic weights and measurements system that doesn't use powers of ten - just why?
You still drive on the left side of the road, so there's that. Metric is making inroads mostly in fields like jewelry making and cooking in the US.
Can you pick the next guy that can do it? With 100% certainty?
Oh, "with 100% certainty". Well, can you do anything with 100% certainty? Even reaching to scratch yourself, before completing the act, you could die of a cerebral hemorrhage or a nuclear strike take out your location. So NO, you are asking for something as ridiculous as my examples. Now, can somebody else do the job? Sure. the USA just had four execrable years of complete chaos under a toxic narcissist, an active threat to security, and it survived.
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