Re: Hills
"For your Devon bonus, pronounce the name of the small town spelt Woolfardisworthy."
Isn't that one of those with several correct pronunciations?
32773 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"You're confusing the Julian calendar with the Julian Day."
Oh no I'm not.
"The calendar is extinct"
Not if you're dealing with historical material. Just because you don't it doesn't mean that nobody else does. It's building in assumptions like that that lead to failures.
If you have a Unix-like system with TZ set to one of those for "England and its colonies" (to quote the original man entry) run
cal 1752
Unix counts seconds since the epoch, hence the approaching Unix Time "Apocalypse"
From then link: "On January 19, 2038 03:14:08 GMT all computers that still use 32 bit Unix Time will overflow."
In 20 years time will there be anything outside of museums still using 32-bit Unix time?
Get into historical dates and you have more complications. Julian or Gregorian? Different countries switched at different times and the start of the year isn't necessarily the first of January. (Unix cal always starts with January. man cal, at least back in V7 days, listed that as a bug.)
Then you get documents with the year given as regnal years and/or the rest of the date relative to a church feast or saint's day. Such documents may relate to property.
"those standards mostly say: think about what you're doing, do it consistently"
I'm not sure low level customer service agents are allowed to think what they're doing but consistency seems to matter, even if it's done badly. Once something goes wrong any complaint leads to the same wrong being repeated.
Newspapers often have a weekly column where a journalist manages to sort out various customer issues with big companies. Inevitably the problem has gone round a C/S loop several times without success, gets fixed as soon as it gets tackled out of loop and turns out to be some combination of "unique" and "computer" issue. The only thing unique was that it got handled by the company's press desk who needed a sensible answer. Up to then it had probably been handled strictly according to the C/S scripts with all the consistency that ISO 9000 and the like dictate. A few decades back the talk was of "empowering" C/S. That's been killed in the name of consistency.
"The Home Office has been contacted for comment."
I'd like to see their comments as to whether this spreadsheet was the actual tool used for day-to-day management of their operations, why nobody checked to see if it was the appropriate form of this data for release and what in-house IT expertise they have for supporting staff.
It looks suspiciously like the consequence of the "if the only thing you have is a hammer..." approach to using spreadsheets for everything.
"I'll bet they won't use it themselves."
Don't be too sure. Taking a whole archive home to run on a PC. Using gmail for Company business. The people whose job it is to break into other people's stuff don't seem that interested in protecting themselves. Is it any wonder they don't see what's wrong with their idea of the public running back-doored devices?
"There are various screwheads around that are claimed to be tamperproof, but really they're just mildly inconvenient."
We had a new HP tape drive with a shipping bar secured by Torx screws back when they were new and supposedly uncommon. The engineers who came to set it up were a bit taken aback to find it already being used. My cheap screwdriver set already included a range of Torx bits.
"I'll stick to my (not quite quite as easy to compromise) padlocks that I paid $20 dollars for"
I'll stick to the ancient Yale monster securing my shed. It's older than I am. Probably considerably older. It looks more like something built in a shipyard than a lock factory. OTOH it wouldn't be that hard to break through the side of the shed...
"try living with out...Google Maps"
Google maps is, as far as I'm concerned, not the first choice for mapping. Their actual maps, even at small scale, are just street maps. Ironically it's streetmap.co.uk that has the real Ordnance Survey maps. Oh, and Bing has them too. No Google is not the sole provider of good stuff; in fact it can be the provider of somewhat less good stuff.
"How did you open a bank account? How did you get a credit card?"
So you have a bank account and a credit card? Have you looked at their T&Cs? Does it say anything about keeping your access credentials secret? Yes?
No tell us; if your phone allows - encourages even - apps to take information from unrelated bits of the system how do you know one of those apps isn't slurping those credentials when you use them? How do you know it's not aiding abetting your breaking of those contractual obligations?
You think you've nothing to hide? Wrong!! You've got plenty to hide, not only out of self interest but also because you're contractually obliged to.
"However, if I'm running a calculator app, it doesn't need to know where I live, and I have no reason to give it that. If it goes about getting it anyway, there is reason for me to dislike that"
I'd go a step beyond that. If it wants access to something it doesn't need I'd suspect it of being up to no good and the reaction to that is a bit stringer than dislike.
"the ad companies have been taking the piss - in order to be able to extract more money from you, they gather all sort of shit."
The ad companies do not extract more money from you, at least not directly. The advertising industry only sells one product, advertising. They sell it to advertisers. The shit they gather is part of the product. The reason you see the pointless ads for what you bought is that the advertising industry has conned their mugs into believing that you're interested in buying 200 toilet seats and 100 new cars - or at least they've conned them into believing that their analytics indicate that you're in the market for one of these even if you're not.
They do, however, extract money from you indirectly because that advertising adds to the vendors' costs and all of us, whether we saw the adverts or not, pay the advertising tax.
"Consequently the benefits that people have often paid years of national insurance for are unfairly denied."
National Insurance was an exercise in getting rid of the difficult bit in the title. What you pay in doesn't go into insuring you against anything nor into a fund for your pension. It's just a form of tax. The benefits are paid out of current taxation.
There seems to have been a campaign against ring-fencing it recently with the H word being paraded round. The Treasury must be getting worried that there'll be pressure for ring-fencing NI. You can tell how much the Treasury hates ring-fenced by the fact that they coined the alarming-sounding word "hypothecated" to describe them. What's actually wrong with them, in the Treasury's eyes, is that it's money the Treasury doesn't get to control.
I suppose in the case of NI they do have a point but that's only because the DWP would be controlling it instead.
Years ago a client of mine dealt with several govt. departments including DWP. A colleagues considered opinion? "Not the sharpest knives in the box." Nothing has changed.
In fact nothing has changed since the days when I was a "client" when I was redeployed* and the erk behind the counter had difficulty understanding that not being able to sign on because I had a job interview at the other end of the country was incompatible with the notion of "not being available for work".
* HMG's then current jargon, back in that weasel Harold Wilson's time.
"The computer would eliminate accidents through inattention. inc drink/drugs."
They'd eliminate a sub-set of those accidents - those that arise from things they're programmed to deal with such as keeping lane. The drunk, drugged or over-tired driver will find accident opportunities other than those they've been spared.
"Just have two seconds between you and the car in front."
When I learned to drive (an probably for a long time before that) the rule was a car length per 10 miles an hour. That turned out to be a reasonable approximation for 1 second. Given that brakes and tyres were less efficient than nowadays it seems that the advice then was a good deal more optimistic.
"I wonder what would happen to Apple's policy if their executives were hauled before the courts for aiding and abetting criminal and terrorist activities."
That would require going to court to prove that such activities did actually depend on the phones being lockable. The risk would be failure to prove that to a court's satisfaction, blowing up all the PTB's arguments in their face. That's a risk they're unlikely to take.