Posts by Doctor Syntax 42409 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
How much printing is being done in the home offices?
In our home printing has dropped sharply. SWMBO runs a pachhwork course. I used to print out all her handouts to take to class. Now the handouts are prepared as PDFs and emailed out so now the attendees are printing them out at home. They have to print them as they include the templates.
As another reply said, if there wasn't a demand for the wood something else would probably be grown there instead so it's not an even choice. Where commercial tree planting is concerned in respect of the carbon cycle the tree has to be considered as storage in its own right and as a mechanism for sequestering carbon for transfer to other storage.
"Why did they have to be so obstinate and waste so much time?"
It's the mentality that keeps showing up when governments throw monay about shouting "This will make the UK the leader in ....". It always ends up in failure. Basically it's people who don't know the details and reality of what it would take to do it (and this is a government particularly light in seating the details). They just need to promote something (largely themselves) and their Dunning Krugger abilities make them think they can achieve it.
My one and only experience of a court martial was that it was a strange mixture of formal and informal. After the morning's session the court adjourned for lunch - not quite an officer's mess AFAICR* - but somewhat formal and I was invited along. I, as a witness, found myself sitting next to the judge. That never happened in a civil court.
* Which isn't very much given the events of the previous evening. Top tip: be very careful when drinking with army sergeants. Especially MPs. And very especially SIB, the military equivalent of CID.
Not just corporate users. I sometimes get emails from my history group members which contain invisible photographs. I have to switch to View Message body as Original HTML.
Maybe I need an add-on that bounces all HTML messages. Cut out the corporate crap and teach the Mac users to send plain text emails.
"including name, address, telephone or fax number and some pre-defined text"
And quite often the pre-defined text includes an instruction not to read this email is it wasn't intended for you, placed, of course, at the end where you only see it after you've read the entire message.
This is true but it's still a drag and drop if the client doesn't also support adding something like a right click option or a "File this in pending" option. Personally I'd like to see clients not only providing this but also not allowing a message to stay in the inbox after it's been read. Provide at least some form of filing even if it's only "All emails from year yyyy". And delete all messages from Trash after a few days.
"getting the ball rolling again on developing new email innovations"
Mandate a phase -n of PGP. By default the MX record also points to the public key server with an option to have a separate public key server. User can keep their private key(s) on their mail clients.
Oh, no, that wouldn't work. The webmail services wouldn't be able to read their customers' users' mail. I suppose they'd offer to hold the keys for them.
"If you're told you've been in contact with an infected person, you're supposed to isolate yourself for two weeks so you don't pass the disease on. Regardless of whether you have symptoms. That's what it does (supposedly), and if it worked it's very relevant."
The first thing we need to know about whether it's relevant is the number of false positives that will be generated.
Without testing it's quite possible that either:
- Large numbers of people will be self-isolating needlessly
- The system rapidly loses public trust and is ignored
or
- In order to avoid the above the threshold is set so high that it generates large numbers of false negatives instead.
"This week saw the the Norwegian coronavirus-tracing app pulled and all the information gathered deleted after its data regulator, Datatilsynet, found it was not adequately protecting personal records."
No fear of that happening in the UK. Not because it'll have better protection, of course, just that nobody in charge cares. After all things can't go wrong twice, can they? Well, certainly not three times.
"There's just idiots with money who reuse their password."
Are you sure about that? If was just a matter of reused IDs and passwords it seems unlikely that there'd be a sudden spate of logins. It's not as if Wiggle even make it hard to guess user IDs - a quick look at their login screen indicates that they're email addresses.
And it's not a thought exclusive to non-native speakers. For avoidance of doubt "native" refers to those born into an Anglophone culture and has no racial connotations. Also for avoidance of doubt "speakers" refers to users of a language, not to electro-mechanical acoustic devices. One has to be so careful these days to avoid being misunderstood. For avoidance of doubt "one" in the last sentence was being used as a pronoun, not as a numeral. For avoidance of doubt "sentence" in this post was being used as a grammatical construct, not as the pronouncement of a court on evil-doers, no matter how tempting the latter might be.
"You were doing so well until you missed the real nub of the issue namely, the deliberate use of a word with negative connotations to describe - in a handwaving manner - people of colour,"
Now here's another of the techniques used by the dedicated umbrage seekers: changing the choice of demonised word. Is it "black" or "colour" or something else that's offensive today - and perhaps all this week? By this means anyone who's done their base to adopt what they thought was the correct term can be wrong-footed in an attempt to make them feel guilty. But if you're correct here has MOBO changed to MOPOCO?
"Are we going to have people rejected from open source projects because they felt that censoring said doubleplusungood words is rather daft, but the Thought Police whose function has by then been enshrined in the Code of Conduct lacks any sense of humour or capacity for rational thought?"
People can be rejected from the open source project but the nature of open source means that they can choose to take the source with them and fork the project. That would quickly clarify who was doing the work and who was playing games.
"People are actively seeking other words to sanitize, as you would know if you had both read and comprehended the article."
As someone who is naturally lazy I can't fail to be amazed at the amount of mental energy devoted to this but I can't help thinking it would be better directed to something more productive.
master with main across its services
Yes, our culture goes through these periods of puritanism. They always get looked back on with incredulity. Unfortunately those swept up in it seem to have such little grasp of history that they're unable to realise how they'll be regarded. It would be nice to think the pendulum will swing swiftly enough for them to find themselves being laughed at in their own lifetimes; usually it takes a bit longer.
"I'm reminded of talking, long ago, to someone who said that you could tell that the people who wrote Unix didn't have children, because the terminology of parent processes killing and reaping their children was just horrible to someone who was a parent."
As a Unix user and a parent I've never even thought about conflating the two sets of meanings. I suppose I'm just not diligent enough in seeking out offence to take.
"more attempts at early diagnosis of people with no or mild symptoms"
I've been having a rethink about this. Is there a genetic element on the viral side to asymptomatic infections? Killing the host is a poor strategy for a virus. This particular virus is endemic to bats. Presumably it has adapted to the bat environment to be able to propagate without causing significant damage to the bats so the ground isn't littered with bats falling out of the sky. It isn't. however, similarly adapted to the human environment, or not completely so, but like all viruses it does mutate. Darwinian thinking suggests that it should evolve to become harmless like the coronaviruses that cause common colds.
If there is a spectrum of harmfulness in the various viral strains then we'll already have been exerting a selection pressure in favour of the milder varieties by isolating those with symptoms and their households and segregating those with the worst symptoms in hospital for treatment. Track and trace based only on the symptomatic cases would increase that pressure. Does the variability needed for this to work exist? It's one of the things I'd expect virologists to be looking at because its such an obvious issue but I haven't read anything about it.
Nevertheless tracing of contacts should be followed up with testing; there's no point in isolating those who didn't catch anything.
"Why not just go somewhere that does news in the first place?"
Because the websites have dire search facilities (it's easier to search for a Beeb news item on Google than on their own site) or are just plain dire. We used to have a local paper delivered. Then the local newsagent couldn't get anyone to do deliveries so i turned to their website. It was mostly OK but gradually became more eccentric so I gave up. One annoyance was the 100 plus opt-outs introduced with GDPR. Since then it's got worse as the publishers seem to have reached a little further in their efforts to scrape the bottom of the barrel and appear to have only one site for all their local news. If I go there now it's lost all its original branding and wants to throw news from the all over the UK at me.