Posts by Doctor Syntax 42665 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
Check the seals. I had one that became internally pressurised - the rubber moulding that covers the switches swelled up and when I unscrewed it there was a loud bang. I suspect water got in and became electrolysed - it wasn't the battery swelling up that was the problem. There have been reports of these exploding.
The benefits of this, if any, should come form improvements in quality. Does it bring things to court faster ("justice delayed is justice denied")? Does it reduce the risk of a miscarriage of justice? Does it avoid the waste of time in bringing witnesses, counsel and defendants to court and then sending them back again because for one reason or another the court can't go ahead that day?
My objection based on the following argument:
The research that lead to the idea of software patterns showed that although the code might differ people presented with the same problem would come up with fundamentally similar solutions leading to the conclusion that most software solutions to problems are fairly obvious to people "skilled in the art". A novel piece of software might be no more than the result of a problem's first being posed to such a skilled person who does no more than what would be expected in solving it.
It follows from that that it should be a requirement to demonstrate that the proposed patent isn't obvious rather than assume that it isn't. The only such clearly non-obvious solutions, therefore, are those to problems which are well known in the literature but hitherto unsolved. Before a patent is granted the prospective patentors should be able to show the existence of such literature (and not straw-man articles of their own) well known in the field.
This makes the bar considerably higher even if it cuts the income of the US Patent Office. In fact the best example I can think of is HTTP/HTML in that Vannevar Bush & Ted Nelson's ideas had been floating about for years without any successful implementation. But what made them take off in the way they did wasn't being patented, just the reverse. It was their release with open source, unencumbered, working code; the very antithesis of patenting.
"time flies"
But keep them away from the food.
And it must have been at least 35 years ago I was playing about with real microspectroscopy - albeit in the visible spectrum.
Actually at the same time we were also doing something approaching microspectroscopy with IR. Take the standard Perkin Elmer job, add a couple of lenses (made from KCl IIRC) and a special specimen mount. The latter was made from a couple of industrial diamonds to squeeze the specimens, small fibre, flat. The diamonds were cut as truncated pyramids, rather like a Tudor gem cut and under pressure if they were misaligned there was a risk of bits of diamond spalling off (diamond might be hard to scratch but can fracture).
My mate had to ring up the presumably very small, specialist US supplier for some reason and the guy he had to speak to wasn't there - he only worked there part time. "I suppose he works for de Beers the rest of the time." Oh dear. Americans don't do Irish humour.
"But a number of experts have pointed out there is a shortage in the number of skilled engineers – particularly if the government is to meet its ambitious target of full fibre for everyone by 2025."
Stop that! Introducing reality into a consideration of government targets! What will you get up to next?
"the case was won primarily on mutuality of obligation"
In fact it sounds as if there was a straightforward commercial risk element. His company took the risk that a project would restart and continued to work on it, a risk that didn't pay off as it turned out. Is that in CEST? I doubt it.
I think the OP's point was that this was a straightforward contractor-owned company doing some combination of standard salary and dividends, not some strange financial engineering scheme involving non-repayable loans or the like.
The latter deserve to die; unfortunately the brunt of their dying will be borne by the contractors and the agencies or whoever designed and sold them and made their money on commissions will probably escape and keep their profits unless their victims sue.
Oddly enough '99 was a relatively thin time. I did get one contract doing some Y2K testing during the summer. I had a few days between getting the contract, which was supposed to be to cover paternity leave, and doing it. The contract was only 3 days - I suspect if I'd worked it out it might have been at a loss but it kept things ticking over. It seemed rather odd that someone couldn't fit 3 days to test their new box for Y2K compatibility around a mere 3 days paternity leave.
In retrospect it seems likely that that they wanted a fall-guy at minimum cost (Scottish client) if things went bad. OTOH I knew that both aspects of the platform - up-to-date Unix and Informix - was unlikely to have any problems. I also had time in that few days to Google an official-sounding test regime I could point back to if needed and tailor a schedule based on it. I also had years and years experience of writing reports that would stand up to close legal scrutiny by being explicit in what they did and didn't cover.
So basically, apart from the overheads, money for old rope. Their then new box will be unlikely to survive to Y2K38 if, indeed, it's still running now but that's SEP.
One from my more distant past, my forensic science days. We definitely weren't police but the police were inevitably our biggest "customer". One way or another* the local station got to know my address, or at least that I lived in their area and my phone number was in the book. Late one Saturday evening I got a somewhat apologetic call. It wasn't anything to do with my work but would I come into the station because they wanted an independent witness.
They'd arrested a drunk. You may have heard the expression "feeling no pain" as a euphemism for being drunk. For this guy it wasn't a euphemism, more like the literal truth; he must have been well anaesthetised. He was head-butting the cell door and shouting. By the time I got there he'd damaged one cell door - two layers of wood interleaved with a steel sheet and had to be put in another cell. They thought he'd broken his nose in the process and he'd bled all over the first cell. He was continuing to hit the cell door. There was no way I could actually go into the cell to see inside but there was a continuous racket coming from it: bang, bang, bang, "I want my solicitor", bang, bang, bang, "I want my MP", bang, bang, bang, "I want my solicitor"... Never heard anything more about it.
* It may have been because the station sergeant was a former senior SOCO. We came across him once off-duty in the local supermarket following the store detective. He suspected she was on a bonus for each case brought to court and was slipping merchandise into unsuspecting victims' shopping bags. He eventually caught her.
"And there was the situation in the US some years ago when some electricity companies were giving out free low-power light-bulbs."
The same thing happened here but it was some sort of requirement of HMG but that was back in the days of compact fluorescents. Out of one box of 6 one arrived broken. Out of another box one went pop immediately it was switched on. LEDs overtook them before I used them all.
The last things I assembled from IKEA - two identical corner desks for the grandkids - both had a component with half the holes drilled 180° out of alignment with the other half, presumably either a half turn missed in the programming or an extra one inserted. One duff desk might have been an accident, two suggests a whole batch were out. That's the thing about consistency based quality - you swap the occasional rogue error for a job-lot of junk.
From observation the newbies who might make the junior role will be impressed. Those who've been round the block enough times to wualify for the senior role will know the warning signs when they see them. However, it's very considerate of IKEA to put up the "Danger, Wanker Management" signs so obviously.
A Ministry of Justice spokesman said: "More than 250,000 people have used our online services in the past year, with more than 80 per cent satisfied with their experience."
I wonder if the spokesman has tried calculating how many were dissatisfied and considered whether that's a number they should be prepared to live with.
"So it got me thinking it ought to be possible to upload harmless but misleading photos to social media and let the hackers and spammers get on with it."
I doubt they check much - just fire off emails. All of which reminds me I must change my very obviously eBay-specific email address and set the old one to bounce. After all, the real eBay aren't going to email me to click on some link to fill in a customer survey and offer to reward me with an Amazon voucher.
"The actual landline number is given to business & officialdom then shunted directly to voicemail without causing my phone to ring."
Just wait until you need hospital appointments. Or even better, have a hospital appointment that's cancelled on the day because of an emergency.
Look at the number of cars in a motorway car service station car park. Assume that 90% of those are going to want charging if EVs are the norm and they're going to want a charge in no more than 30 minutes that's going to last them for 3 hours at motorway speeds.
Installing that infrastructure in a service station isn't going to be done overnight but it's not going to be done gradually either. It''s be a fair sized project to bring in the supply and dig up the tarmac to lay the cables.
