Posts by Doctor Syntax 42649 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"This shipyard has mega yachts before"
This is the root of the problem. Nice as it would be to simply tell Bezos "Nice boat, but you'll just have to sail it up and down the canal because it can't go any further" reality is that they probably want to keep the shipyard in business contributing to the city's economy. Longer term they should maybe look at relocating the shipyard as being preferable to keeping dismantling the bridge or losing the business.
Of course they could replace the bridge with something equally iconic but designed to open. If all else fails a sightseeing visit to the Tower of London might help.
Probably a few other incentives in play.
Reputedly the IR has tried this on for years and been rebuffed. Their PAYE system is a system designed by employees on a payroll for employees on a payroll. Payrolls are what they understand.
Also the Paymaster General of the time, AKA Red Dawn, was from the left of the party. She would be unlikely to look favourably on workers who weren't unionised.
"(also, significant CO2 reduction from less cow-farting, double win!)"
The cow-farting issue is CH4 which is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. The solution to this, of course, is instead of feeding plant material to cows it can be fed to vegetarians so they can produce the CH4 instead. Vegetarian produced CH4 is good for the planet - or something like that.
However, I did not vote to be able to buy and eat "Frankenstein" food.
But you did. You voted to give HMG powers to remove any or all of the protections that the EU provided.
You should really have asked yourself what would be the point of a government seeking that power if they didn't intend to use it, why would they intend to use it other than removing regulations intended to protect the public, whether removing such protections would harm the public and whether you were, in fact, a member of that public.
You're obviously not alone in having failed to ask yourself those questions. If it were only yourselves lumbered with the consequences I wouldn't be concerned. Unfortunately the rest of us are also affected.
"80%+ of development is handling things going wrong"
It should be. It seems to be less and less the case. Sometimes just working out that things have gone wrong would be a start. Simple things like run a report at 5 mins past the hour to list everything that should have been in that hour's shipment but is still unshipped. It's just easier to let the customer complain.
"we won't have real democracy until the populace sets the agenda that is to be voted on"
The bad news is that we're now more or less there. [Anti-]Social media allows the populace, or at least a large gobbet of it, to raise an issue and some party or other picks it up. The consequence is apt to be the results of single issue campaigns and aspirational targets set for a date safely in the future where it becomes SEP and hard problems don't get tackled, let alone solved.
Be careful what you ask for.
"I don't think about the children"
I do. I used to think about my children. Now I think about my grandchildren. And I think it's wrong of the government to deny them the legal use of secure forms of communication which criminals will continue to use.
Criminals will continue to use them. One thing my experience has taught me is that if a criminal is setting out to commit some offence, say a robbery, which needs some other law to be broken, say stealing a vehicle to use as a getaway car, in support of the main objective, that secondary offence will not inhibit them in the least.
I wonder if the downvote is from one of our local estate agents who things everyone should sell their house and hasn't realised that (a) I don't want to and (b) if I did they've just ensured that they're the last of our many local alternatives that I'd give the job to.
"And how do you keep Sgt Jones from buying his batallion's paperclips and toilet paper from his brother-in-law who marks supplies for the government up 500%?"
All supplies to be purchased at no more than manufacturer's list price.
"a Z80 CPU, a few hundred K of memory"
The Z80 can only address 64K so unless you have some clever bank-switching H/W it would have been limiting.
But the basic issue here is that DoD desk wallahs' desks aren't going to be suddenly deployed to the field. In fact no rank is quoted in the article so it seems likely he was a civilian.
"To be fair, I wouldn't be surprised if half the DoD only needed to reboot their boxes."
According to the article he restarts his PC several times a day although it doesn't actually say whether this is a reboot.
"personal Linux laptop with uptime of more than 86 days"
True, for a server 86 days is nothing. But I don't see the point of not switching off my Linux laptop when it''s not in use.
"Did you enjoy leaving the European Union"
No. I was in the half of those who voted who voted against it. I voted against it for several reasons one of which was that it blatantly ignored the blatant incompatibility between Brexit, NI being in the UK and the Good Friday agreement.
