Posts by Whiskers 220 publicly visible posts • joined 15 May 2014
The 'next door teenager' aspect could be ameliorated by disabling the WiFi completely unless reconfigured via ethernet. That wouldn't apply to routers that have no ethernet connection available, of course, but then whoever gets to those first becomes the owner. A factory reset would give the person holding the device another chance to set it up themselves. Perhaps running the wifi at 'low power' and with a limit of 'one connected device only' until set up would give the purchaser a good chance of being the first one into the setup interface. Staff in shops selling the routers should be trained to be able to help innocent customers get started safely (I know that's unlikely to happen in reality).
Can we defer taking their feelings into account until they can convince us that they have feelings? It's not all that long ago that humans were arguing about this in connection with their treatment of other humans (and I'm not sure that everyone is satisfied that that argument is over).
You'd probably think I'm old. So is my BTInternet email address; it dates back to dial-up days in the last century. When I wanted the internet, I had to get a new-fangled plug-in telephone socket instead of the hard-wired sort 'everyone' had at the time - so I had to get a new telephone too. I waited in all day for the BT engineer to come and do it all - they wouldn't let just anyone mess around with their wires.
I do pay for email. I pay BT/Yahoo! The account was converted to 'premium email' when I gave up BT as my ISP, as I'd used my BTInternet address for so much that it was (is and will be) inconvenient to try to get all those contacts to use some other address.
I have had auto-forwarding to another address in place for all incoming emails to the BTInternet address, and auto-deletion from the BT server, for several years. This worked fine, and I wasn't obliged to use either the appalling webmail interfaces they invented from time to time nor their insecure SMTP. I discovered by accident the other day that although the auto-forward is still working correctly, emails are no longer being deleted from the BT server - and there is no setting interface at all for changing either the auto-forward or the auto-delete. So the 'inbox' is steadily filling up with old messages.
After wasting hours digging around on the BT web pages, I found a 'contact us' web form for problems with email. But it refuses to let me send any messages without being given my BT account number - which I do not have, as I have no account with BT.
You can check out, but you can't leave.
If the medical and psychiatric practitioners believe he is a danger to himself or others, surely their proper course of action is to direct him to a suitable hospital. If he resists he could be 'sectioned'. <http://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/legal-rights/sectioning/#>. Of course that would cost the NHS money and would't titillate any police.
I saw that programme too. What struck me about the experment was that they failed to even mention the obvious way of eliminating any effects due to the external power supply or the rather basic connecting lead; ie to put the power source and the 'engine' into a single structure. I don't know how many AA cells would be required.
Surely even computer geeks must have noticed that you make a teenager by starting with a new-born and taking more than a decade of gentle nurturing by responsible adults. I don't think the technology has existed for that long so Microsoft have tried to take a short cut and released a newly recovered long-term coma patient into the care of teenaged computer geeks. The result should surprise no-one.
Perhaps idiotic public statements such as this are the coded (not encrypted) messages being sent by the politician concerned to ... whoever it is such messages are sent to. The absence of metadata means it will never be known what the messages mean or who they are meant for unless someone in on the secret reveals it.
The geese flew overhead at dawn.
Perhaps the real mistake is in trying to make existing systems fit the new idea. It would be much easier, technically, to abolish all existing state benefits and start a new and entirely separate universal credit system to take over. Politically of course, this would be a very hard sell - not least to the civil servants and local authority staff seeing their careers vanish overnight.
How much of the difference in height measured is due to 'error' and how much to the mountain actually getting taller? I'm sure I read somewhere that the north of Great Britain is still rising after losing the weight of the glaciers at the end of the last ice age. The 1949 surveyors may well have been spot on at the time.
>> Put an extension (underground) to the street with a locked cover on it?
I know it's not perfect, but if someone really wanted an electric car this would make things a lot easier. <<
That presupposes that the resident's car will always be parked in the same place. In many towns and cities one is lucky to be able to park within a few minutes' walk of home, and rarely on the same spot.
Charging points that accept money or smart-card payments would work, but require that more or less all streets where parking is allowed have them installed. That would be a massive capital investment.
Quite apart from the matter of actually generating the electricity to charge all those cars.
qutebrowser
qutebrowser is a keyboard-focused browser with a minimal GUI. It’s based on Python, PyQt5 and QtWebKit and free software, licensed under the GPL.
It was inspired by other browsers/addons like dwb and Vimperator/Pentadactyl.
<http://www.qutebrowser.org/>
It's my usual browser now that dwb seems to have fallen behind. I'm using it right now.
I think it was the latest version of Adobe Reader that intervened when an aged relative recently tried to print out the PDF magazine that was attached to an email. "I've never seen that before. What have I done wrong? How do I 'select PDF file'? Why?" A large part of the screen space was taken up by a lot of stuff totally unrelated to the task of reading or printing a document.
I spent a few minutes gazing at the screen and eventually spotted what looked as though it might be a printer icon and tried clicking on it. A printer settings dialogue appeared. "That never happened before. What is it? I have all my printer settings the way I want already". Poked around a bit and found the settings that would get double-sided colour printing and then thought I'd look at another 'tab' in the dialogue; discovered the paper size settings which were helpfully defaulted to 'English' but didn't list any of the paper sizes normally found in England - a right click offered other measurement options including 'metric' which thankfully included A4 so I selected that.
Had to use the Alt and arrow keys to shift the dialogue box far enough up the screen to see the action buttons at the bottom (relative has the Windows 10 screen text and icons size set to 'maximum' which is a possibility not catered for by some of the people who design dialogue boxes) and finally clicked on 'Print' and actually got a reasonable print-out. "What did you do there? Why? How?"
I'm sure Windows software design is getting worse.
Where computers are used in critical situations, shouldn't it be standard practice to use at least three independent systems (different hardware and different software) to process all the data and then compare results?
A human count of the ballots could be one of the independent systems relied on. I appreciate that this means a delay while the count happens, but how important is speed? Once elected, governments tend to last for years so a delay of a few days isn't significant.
If the prospect of there being no politicians in government for a few days is intolerable then let the change from old to new take place after the election results are confirmed.
> Confirmation Bias IS Normal Human Error. Bias is an inherent human trait based on experience. <
Yes; think canals on Mars. Humans are programmed to see patterns everywhere, real or not. After all, one can survive running away from the monster in the woods that isn't there but probably not from not running away from the tiger that is there. But it's not so healthy to find oneself being hounded as the monster that someone else has imagined.
<http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Confirmation_Bias>
>>did the Doctor forget that she's literally a Viking's daughter, daughter of a raider, who made his living sailing over the water to that which belonged to other people?<<
>That particular historical stereotype is inaccurate. The Vikings were no more warlike than any other peoples of that period of history. Which is to say they were plenty warlike, but they didn't go around raiding villages willy nilly.<
There are some dark-age monks who would like to discuss that assertion.
So Ashildr shows what it might be like to be stuck for eternity as a confused teenager. Perhaps now she's got an irritating older man around he'll act as sand-paper to smooth off some of the raw edges.
Interesting reference to Captain Jack. Hint of more to come from that angle?
I'd be intererested to know where the doddery old 17th century butler got to know about cocktails. I think there could be more to this episode than meets the eye.
As Dr Gabrielle Walker told us last night on BBC 4's "Every Breath We Take: Understanding Our Atmosphere", the oxygen we need to live is inexorably destroying our bodies at the same time.
I suspect the WHO is just being a gravy train in this instance (carcinogenic gravy of course; I'm sure all food is carcinogenic if you try hard enough).
I got that email too. In HTML only - no seperate text-only part - with plenty of 'remote images' and clickable links, all to http:// URLs not https:// so anyone who's looking at their web traffic will now be able to collect even more information about their customers. (Not from me of course - my email client extracts plain text from HTML and ignores the rest).
TalkTalk only provide my landline telephone service, using BT infrastructure not 'LLU' - they aren't my ISP and never have been. Looks as though I'll be changing telco sometime soon ...
Gay people who continue to suffer horrendous persecution are surely the last people who'd want anything at all to do with a .gay TLD. Only those who feel comfortable and safe using sites or services identfied by a .gay TLD will allow such things to appear in the logs of their internet activity.
So is piracy OK so long as the pirate isn't an escaped slave? Or is it black pirates that are objectionable, or male ones?
The costumes look to me like 18th century 'Barbary Coast' fashion, in which case the white female captain is more than likely to have been enslaved at some point after being captured from the west coast of (mostly Christian) Europe or Britain or Ireland by the (mostly Moslem) African pirates (with whom the USA negotiated one of their first foreign treaties after successfully fighting for freedom from the protection of the British Royal Navy they resented helping to pay for).
There's a lot of real and relevant history that could be learned from this kit - if only the adults knew some of it.
My childhood bricks were 'Minibrix'; they were good for building houses. If you got more bricks you could build either more houses or bigger houses. That was more or less all they were good for. But now you can use virtual Minibrix on your computer! <http://www.virtual.minibrix.com/>
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