Posts by Sherrie Ludwig 545 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Nov 2013
I wonder if I can get the Ring of Finger Un-amputation reshaped and re-sized?
Silversmith here: It's an easy fix, if the ring is just sterling silver without any stones mounted. Just heat the ring to annealing temp (cherry red). I let it cool down naturally (in case it's Argentium silver, which can go brittle if quenched) then take a rawhide mallet and a steel ring mandrel and shape/stretch to size. Ask around, it shouldn't be a long or expensive job.
When John McCain ran for president against Barack Obama, there was some question as to whether he was eligible due to having been born outside the borders of the USA:
From Wikipedia:
John Sidney McCain III was an American statesman and naval officer who represented the state of Arizona in Congress for over 35 years, first as a Representative from 1983 to 1987, and then as a U.S. senator from 1987 until his death in 2018. He was the Republican Party's nominee in the 2008 U.S. presidential election. Wikipedia
Born: August 29, 1936, Coco Solo, Panama
He was born to US citizens, and was granted citizenship at eleven months of age.
Incidentally, that was the last U.S. presidential election in which I thought, "no matter who wins, we'll be OK."
As above, my car also picks up speed limits from road signs, but also from the built-in satnav. It does not affect the cruise control settings. And while it usually picks up painted temporary speed limit signs, it's (so far) never picked up a limit from a sign on the back of a lorry or, and a bit concerning, from the LED matrix signs either above the lanes or the old style ones in the central reservation.
If my navigation software is similar to self-driving systems, I do not want any self driving cars anywhere near me. I have experienced being told the speed limit is 35mph on a country road where the (unposted) limit is 55. I have also been told on one stretch of country road near me that the limit is 65, illegal for any road in the state except certain freeways. And the camera-based systems would be utterly useless here where the fog line (the stripe painted to delineate the edge of the pavement) is worn through.
did they see Bidens situation when the politicians and the media were lying to cover for him?
Two problems with your whataboutism: 1. It isn't true. A stutter does not mean cognitive decline, thanks for giving us the opportunity to say that AGAIN. and 2. There were a Cabinet of actual experts, not inexperienced buddies and sycophants from media who advised the president, and he took their opinions into consideration.
Your pronounced admiration for authoritarian leadership begs the question of your ability to spout anything but bollocks.
@Thought About IT,
Thank you for the enlightening article. I am a never-T****er who has a Pritzker (J.B.) as my state's governor. I was suspicious of J.B., and preferred another candidate the first time he ran, but have been very pleasantly surprised by his governance, especially in financially improving a state (wrecked by both parties, to be fair) that was junk bond status. If J.B. harbors presidential ambitions I would be sorry to lose him as governor but think he would do well as a president.
Americans voted to preserve the jobs and for national security.
Other countries don't have any right to preach.
Look, I'll grant that my fellow USAians are dumber than a box of rocks. I knew of the DonOLD in the eighties, and he was a NYC joke then, too.
The Apprentice show took the turd, polished it and the moronic tv-addicted masses thought it was a diamond. But whatever they claim, national security and jobs were way down on the list. The real reason I have heard (I live in a red area in a blue state) is the hatred of new immigrants, who they seem to believe are ALL undocumented, even if they have refugee or other legal status, and the irrational belief that T**** can wave a wand and the 1950s will magically appear, when every woman was June Cleaver and vacuumed (hoovered) wearing heels and pearls, and men looked like the Marlboro Man. That factory jobs will be plentiful and well-paid (without pesky unions, of course!). That Latinos will all go away south except when they come back to mow lawns and pick vegetables, blacks will go back to shining shoes and not be president, women will be barefoot and repeatedly pregnant, and gays, unless they can play piano like Liberace and Elton, will go back in the closet.
The MAGAts near me are still trying to pretend they are "winning", and are genuinely astonished that liberals are not crying, except with laughter at their rage. If they were actual winners, why aren't they happier?
Did Brexit "winners" look and sound this sour when they "won"?
What other way to be featured in The Register (which sometimes gets picked-up by other news operations) with just a day+ of private labor? Easily ten thousand bucks of exposure.
Yep, and you can die from exposure. The only thing I know about the cybertruck is that the window is not sledge hammer proof, courtesy of a failed demo.
@Blazde, thank you for drawing attention to this. I don't like this guy, but his actions deserve the award, and I'm glad he is getting it.
In other news, as a fairly news-conscious USAian, your comment in The Reg was the first I'd heard of it. Had to go searching AP's website specifically to verify (no knock on you personally, but I have grown skeptical of information in the current USA).
(these places with 'return to office' mandate without enough space for everyone they demand to come in.)"
Every day that RTW is universally enforced the staff should make sure that they have a grand party (Excuse me, "conference on workflow"). No work gets done, all processes stop.
"Sorry, when I can find a place to work, I'll start. Every desk is full, all the chairs are taken, and there isn't even an open plug to charge my laptop. Oh, and wireless speed here, when I did find a spot to work two days ago. was less than half that at my house, so I didn't get much done....." Rinse, repeat until lesson is learned.
I wonder to what extent those coming up for re-election might be starting to wonder what state the economy will be in by then and starting to think that blind support might not make them re-electable.
There are YouTube videos of "town hall" meetings in Republican House of Representatives members' districts. After the questions and booing get contentious, the Representative usually beats a hasty retreat. We're calling it Bidenfreude here, and the source of the constituent's ire the Trumpflation, and impending Trumpcession. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bwU09564Y4
Not in the US, just been curious as to what the heck is happening over there.
Born and raised USAian. I'm wondering the same thing. Never seen such dysfunction and corruption in government, and I lived in Chicago. Rational people are saying WTF all day, every day. The only consolation is that I'm old, and not likely to see what happened to my rather nice country in a few years.
Pournelle wasn't the only well-lubricated SF author. At the WorldCon in Boston (1980-ish?) I went to see an author panel on world-building. Marion Zimmer Bradley was someone I particularly wanted to hear, I do not remember who else was on the panel, but we heard only Phillip Jose Farmer, who got a death hold on the microphone and blathered on, not allowing a word from anyone else. If he had been an interesting speaker, OK. But he was a mean, sloppy drunk with a superiority complex. That made me vow to never read a single word he ever wrote.
All 43 pounds of it?
From CNN: Federal statistics show US border authorities seized 21,889 pounds of fentanyl in the 2024 fiscal year. Of that amount, 43 pounds were seized at the Canadian border — about 0.2% — compared with 21,148 pounds at the Mexican border, about 96.6%.
I am past disgusted by president Musk and his cofeve boy, have not voted for a Republican for maybe twenty years. (we used to have a really competent County Clerk, but when she retired, it's been a clown show). I don't recognize my country anymore.
Sounds like time for everyone with a malicious sense of humor to call HP service.lines with the most inane questions, since most of us can just go on about our day in the comforting knowledge that "I'm on hold" is an excuse to not entertain boring coworkers or other interruptions. Tie up the lines and give the actual customer support people a bunch of easy and fast support ticket cleared metrics. Win win!
Well, if you as a client had paid for legal representation by a qualified lawyer, and you did not in fact get legal representation by a qualified lawyer, but instead were given generative slop from some bullshit machine, then it would be fraud. But here, it is the judge who has been presented with slop, so it is contempt.
Could also be construed as perjury, since the lawyer must attest to the filing, sign that it is a true setting out of the facts as known to the attestor.
@Omnipresent: Is there a nice country, that would take two old folk who have enough to live modestly on their own? We're no bother, honestly....I am only a second generation American citizen. My crime is voting for the prosecutor not the felon, and I expect to be deported at a moment's notice.
"This was due to a technical issue at a third-party service provider that delayed timely processing of some banking transactions and impacted your ability to bank online with us. Rest assured, it was not related to fraud or the work of bad actors attempting to access our system. Your Capital One Bank accounts remain secure."
Nice to know, but you are just as dead from friendly fire as from the perceived enemy.
Every person holding a Capitol One account in the US should file a formal complaint with the Comptroller of the Currency. I once received a very large check in settlement of a real estate sale, deposited it in my then bank, and proceeded to pay the IRS, car payment, credit card payments, etc. A week later, I start to get notices of non-payment, bounced check, or delinquency! My bank (now defunct) held the check "because of suspicious activity" but did not notify me or explain why. I went to the issuing bank of the large check and complained, where they told me this wasn't the first time they had heard of such with the bank in question, and to contact this Comptroller of the Currency, a federal office I did not know existed. I called them, they faxed (yeah, it was a while ago) a complaint form, which I completed and faxed back.
WOW!! Couple of days later, the offending bank sent a letter stating "they had now cleared the check, and what could they do to persuade the Comptroller to close the case?" I said I wanted them to write a letter of explanation and apology to every one of my creditors, stating that I paid the creditors in good faith that the funds were available and to ask each of them to waive any penalty that I had incurred. I wanted a separate letter to each creditor, and a copy sent to me for my files, all sent by certified letter with a signature required for delivery (I didn't trust my cell phone provider any better than this bank, heh). When I received proof of delivery of each of the letters, I would deem my case closed, not before. They complied with alacrity, so I closed the case.
The CPFB should require Capitol One to credit $200. per account (not per customer, PER ACCOUNT) to every account they hold. It has to HURT to make them take notice. The big companies won't notice the money, but individuals who got dinged late fees or such will need it.
Insurance companies are basically unsueable. They have all the $$$ and all the lawyers. That he continued to go and live like a normal human being will be dragged mercilessly into court as "recklessly endangering himself" and that "he might have further exacerbated any remaining injury, which no one can prove ever existed (because there's no MRI scan - duh!) by continuing to act as though he had no injury, which proves he did it to himself". Welcome to post-corporatist USA.
The FAA, like most of the federal regulatory bodies and in fact, much of the federal government, has been starved of resources and losing staff positions due to the Republican ongoing "shrink the federal government and drown it in a bathtub" philosophy handed down by Saint Reagan and expanded by subsequent corporate-run regimes (by both parties, to be fair).
I have a cat who loves to do the tech version of sprawling on the newspaper you are reading by getting between me and the computer on my lap (currently so positioned, pardon the typos). I was baffled by the occasional inability to scroll, or the odd spacing in a message I was typing. Then I realized my orange bowling ball of a feline was nudging the (in)appropriate key to cause that. I could set him down, but he will get back up immediately with claws like ice axes into my legs, and he's old and I'm a softie anyway, so....
If you have 50,000 employees going bust and starting again is not as easy as if you have 50.
More like: If you have stockholders screaming for your head at any dip in profits, it is hard to justify spending anything on (not immediately) profitable R & D.
Can some person familiar with databases figure out a way to "salt" the data with a computer version of a land mine? A record looking like any other innocuous entry that could be activated either by reading without some special code or routine buried in the legitimate data user's programs to deactivate it, or is time-set to "detonate" without receiving regular "not yet" signals from that legitimate data user? The result to be either the deletion or scrambling of all the records to render them useless, or for maximum effect, wiping any programs that tried to access the data?
I am thinking of the dye packs that sometimes foil bank robbers, which could be set to deliver nastier things than pink dye if one really wanted to discourage crime...
Amazon Prime also includes Prime Video, so it's getting a streaming service as well as package delivery. And, since delivering even a small package in the USA is $10 and up, using Prime just once a month is a wash, especially if you are ordering heavy or bulky items like diapers, pet food, canned goods, etc. So all you whining Winnies whinging about spending $139 for "luxury" can volunteer to shop and deliver for people who don't live where the stores are, or are elderly and can't hoist a bag of dog food for their sole companion up the bus steps.
@Jamie Jones, yes, I do remember Clippy. And Siri, when I needed to get an Apple iPad Mini for a specific business use case. After less than a week, I throttled the bitch permanently, which made the i-thing more useful, and marginally more pleasant to use. As soon as the business use played well with other operating systems was happy to lose the i-thing.
it's not a "good tool", it's an "idiot assistant".
Clippy? Is that you again?
I have said this before: I don't want AI to write for me, I want a Roomba like thing that will clean my bathroom. Or, at least a Roomba that recognizes when the puppy made a mess: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2016/08/15/pooptastrophe-man-details-night-his-roomba-ran-over-dog-poop/88667704/
Urgh. Followed the link to the article on Tate, No wonder he grew the beard, what a chinless wonder. I'm an old lady, who knew posers like him in high school, and got a laugh out of them then. With the 4B movement in high gear, maybe some of his followers will make enough money to pay for s3x, otherwise, classic incel.
There will usually be a nurse that's tasked with keeping track of instruments used. Definitely worth the expense.
A friend was that nurse, especially for the long (fourteen hour or more) orthopedic operations, that sometimes entailed a shift change among the support staff of nurses and techs. She scrubbed in as the second shift on one of these marathons. The first shift had made a proper mess of the sponge count. These little items are very easy to miss, once they are blood soaked and deep in the patient. They are brought to the ER in bags of ten, and the count is frequently updated, as more are used. The used ones are supposed to be counted as removed, and noted in groups of ten as well. SOMEHOW the first shift person had screwed up the count.
My friend could not make the count of sponges in and sponges out come out equal, but could not find the error, or where it had occurred (in the requisitioning of new packs? In the counts of used ones?) After the surgery, the head surgeon and she re-counted all the used sponges, ripping open the many used sponge bags to see if the miscount was there, a disagreeable and difficult task, as they stuck together and were hard to separate. They both signed off when they thought they had the right count, best efforts and all.
Long story short, at least one sponge was missed, the patient died, and as usual in US malpractice lawsuits, everyone who was anywhere near gets named in the suit, out to the guy mopping the corridor. That's when I found out that getting a metal instrument, a clamp, a needle, is bad but not always fatal, the body walls it off and continues on. A sponge is a focus for infection and much more likely to kill you before it can be found.
I don't think she was held liable, but it haunts her still, into retirement.
I really want to buy or rent AI Daisy, for the interminable months that are the "Medicare enrollment period" in the US, when every slimy *$(#$*# wants to tell you which supplemental old folks' insurance to sign up for. Twenty to thirty calls a day are not unusual, some spoofing numbers to try to get you to pick up thinking it's your neighbor.
I'm surprised that America allows tax-funded research to be kept behind paywalls. Isn't this why so much of NASA's work in freely available?
With the rise of corporatism in the US government from around Reagan's terms, I would not be surprised if the air itself will be regulated and sold. Any El Reg readers in other countries want to sponsor an old Assembler-language programmer and his wife? We're quiet and have the means to support ourselves, promise.
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