Re: Clueless users
Shirley you mean "wwong".
825 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Apr 2015
"While these latest sanctions won't be a serious roadblock for the Iranian regime's online army, they do provide another avenue to go after American companies seeking to do business in the theocracy. ® ®"
is the concluding paragraph. My issue, by comparison, is a trivial one. They call the Iranian agency MOIS, an acronym of four or five English words. English is not Iran's national language. Back in my day, scary foreign agencies had acronyms in their own tongue, such as NKVD and KGB. Is using an English acronym a way of belittling the opposition? A sub-issue is that intelligence agencies are prodigious liars. It's part of the job. "That was then, this is now." don't cut it no more. "We are aware of these Mandiant-associated claims. At this point, we do not have any evidence to support their claims. We will continue to monitor the situation as it develops." , to slightly edit a statement from one of Mandiant's own press releases.
It's not clear to me why a US internal gov't department is meddling.
Near the end of WW II, USA leaned upon neutral Ireland not to accept ex-NAZI immigrants. Telling Ireland what to do, given the history, was not a classy move. Or maybe it was a class move, but of the wrong sort. Of course, USA did welcome ex-NAZIs, as immortalized by Tom Lehrer in the lyrics of his song "Wernher von Braun"
... "Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department!" says Wernher von Braun
... In German, und Englisch, I know how to count down
Und I'm learning Chinese!" says Wernher von Braun "
which sound curiously apt for this story.
36 downvotes to only 4 ups? Sure, it's offensive. But it isn't that offensive. If Boris were President of Europe, this never could have happened.
I'll tell you the solution, though. Run all the ocean water in the world through a picofabric filter. You'll get millions of tons of microplastic fibre. Then burn it as fuel, without compounding the fossil problem. Sure, you might find other stuff in the ocean. Be flexible. And who wouldn't like a tasty Crevettes-à-l'Orange-brûlées-avec-des-microplastiques?
When I was a kid, circa 1970, fusion power was 15 years away. So that's real progress. By 2074, fusion power should be 3-7 years away.
Let's see, we've got dog years, cat years, pandemic years, fusion power years. Those are real. Stuff like sidereal years, that's made up.
Here, let me prove that the Universe will keep expanding forever. "A parsec is the distance from the Sun to an astronomical object that has a parallax angle of one arcsecond." But in a while, it probably won't be soon, but the actual amount of time doesn't matter, it will happen, the sun will expand to swallow up the orbit of the earth and there will be no parallax because the earth will be inside the sun. The rest is simples. You do the math. I love to say that. I think there should be a special club for people like me. The Parsehole Club. Because we understand parsecs. And the Universe. We're even capable of understanding the Universes. Nudge nudge, wink wink. Nothings get past you, sir. Now, where's my membership card?
Sports fan, do you belong to that elite group of .000001 % of people whose actions are not predictable? If so, you are suffering from "I'm-the-only-person-everybody-else-is-a-bot Mania". We can help you. Just sit where you are. Thank you. You will soon be a disCERNing but amenable host.
In days of yore
EinstHeisen did abhor
That their Physics score
Would be nulled by Niels Bohr.
Heat a good round tunnel
While air above is warm and fresh?
It need not thee amaze
Your brain's in a runnel
Next you will be plannin fission
Not outside to catch de rishi'n.
Foam address to Di Johnnehs.
Twonnihilate the cows go moo
They farty like it's 1922
Give me an Exclusion Principle
Or give me Entro pee.
Give me a <br>
Fork Jeavons' sake
Bosons up in 23.
Heat it when you need it
Funnel waste heat to the poor
If it's charged go speed it
There will always be one mooer.
Thanks for finding those rules, Glen 1. I remember having a badge, but see that my bronze must have been taken away, and fully deserved of course, for relative inactivity in a recent year. But even then I would have been up the creek because of lack of imagination. pre is a perfectly good stand-in for br.
I guess I got five downvotes for allowing a blank line to appear where anyone would want to get rid of it, and five downvotes because as an uppity no-badger I was asking for too much.
Their song is:
Keep your password list furled
'Cause it's a Stasi kind of world.
If they were working for me, I'd say, "Great marketing idea for the Work-at-Home paradigm, but why didn't you deploy it weeks ago?" More importantly, does El Reg support an equivalent for <br>, which doesn't work? I can't get my comments to look the way I want them to. Yes, these are the words that might have spewed from the mouth of a t()tAl n0ob. I've put that, so nobody else needs to.
Maybe it should be difficult to install an extension. Another advantage of Opera and Vivaldi over Chrome. With Opera and Vivaldi, you're not 100% sure where to get extensions. Or at least, in my extended noob-hood (copyright pending ha ha), I am not 100% sure. There's also a role for reviews, and the cordon sanitaire of installing an extension only once it has a century of widespread acceptance.
"Americans are dumb
..and Trump will still be re-elected !"
has so far attracted zero upvotes and two down. I wonder if the down votes are because the headline is insulting to the hearing-impaired, or because Americans are smart and Trump will be re-elected or because .... is there a third option?
After being away for a couple of weeks, I've noticed that the number of comments on El Reg posts is much lower than it used to be. Did I miss something? When I did upvote a post about Putin and Trump, I was asked to log-in again and told:
Thanks. Your vote will be recorded, and totals updated, shortly.
which gave me a tiny frisson. I mean, to whom could my vote be recorded? Didn't Mr. Putin already fix that voting problem?
"I'm sorry to inform you that little Timmy's mind wandered during a lesson about fruit when we were discussing bananas and he's now on a register for life."
Sounds like what the kindergarten teacher said about your ob'nt s'rv't "I'm sorry, Mrs. Bunch, your child is retarded. He drools on the toys."
At least, that's been my excuse for six decades. Released from pressure to achieve, I've been free to over-achieve or under-achieve. But why bother? It's too much effort to remember what it is you're supposed not to know. That's a joke, son.
Mother, seeing that there was no point discussing the matter with Mrs. Argue (deliciously named), made a short statement which is not recorded in History, and swept out of the meeting.
In Canada, smart meters are mandatory. And there are no savings to consumers. The (publicly-owned) power companies save money by laying off (= making redundant) the meter-readers, but electricity rates continue to rise, to pay for boondoggles and executive bonuses (in grateful thanks to the genius execs, who may also have received support from the manufacturers and marketers of the smart equipment, in appreciation of the non-existent savings predicted by smart meter proponents. Predict savings, receive bonus, don't revisit matter when savings fail to materialize). I don't have proof of allegations, just that the publicly-owned power companies, in the most populous provinces, went for smart meters while say in Britain and other places it's taken longer or not gone forward--for the obvious reason that a) it doesn't save money and/or b) insufficient incentives were provided. The utilities commission in New Brunswick (population 776,000) denied in 2018 as an unjustifiable expense smart meters to NB Power, but in bigger provinces the utilities commissions either lack that say or are already smart.
In some jurisdictions, you can get a smart meter with the transmitter turned off, but you have to pay $65 bi-monthly for Hydro to read the meter (even though they were typically estimating or interpolating the bills even before smart meters). In Canada, the electric company is called "Hydro". Oh yes, you see on the digital readout that the transmitter is turned off. I am reminded of an old Irish song.
Yes, I am peeved. Call me a dingbat, but smart meters have not been demonstrated to be safe. They are assumed to be safe because the levels involved do not ionize or cook you. It's a bit like in the 19th century industrial revolution, cigarettes could be deemed to be safe because the air was full of bronchial baddies from the burning of coal anyway. A bit like that. I agree, it's not a precise analogy.
Kate originated as a Linux editor, but a Windows version exists. Always keen to emulate my intellectual superiors here at El Reg, I installed 64-bit Kate on a Windows 7 laptop. I tried two ways of changing the display from black text on white background. But nothing would change. So I tried to uninstall, and was told that the uninstall did not have permission to access the program files directory. These could be different facets of the same bug. Kate, my eternal companion.
For day-to-day text editing, I use ConTEXT v 0.98.3. A later version 0.98.6 was never stable on my machines. The editor seems to have been abandoned. But it works great. My secondary editor (for those times when you want two editor icons active on the task bar) was plain old Notepad. I guess it's time to free the Uyghurs. Let the downvotes resume!
IANAL, and I'm afraid that IP and copyright matters bid fair to become impossible to figure out. Maybe the gov't dep'ts are issuing directives because that's what's expected of them, but their directives may have no more rightness than a smelly fart. I'm sure that some people voted Leave because of the level of cussedness implicit in Euro rule, not expecting that their own Brit bureaucrats would invoke the same level of cussedness, or even worse. Blame that on short collective memories?
I do have a question, though. "Fair use" of IP might involve "educational purposes". So, let's say a person has a collection of old VHS tapes, programmes time-shifted from an earlier age of television. If the person then gives the collection to a College or University, for their "Media Studies" department, what happens next? I do understand that the next step might vary between jurisdictions. Feel free to state the jurisdiction(s) that apply. Implicit is that the material has value to the recipient, or to the recipient's students. I'm hoping that will suppress any "bin as worthless" replies.
£Metoo.
Maybe they also futzed around with pensions. If you get a pension after x years, then letting employees go after x-1 years for whatever made-up reason is a real magnet to slimy bean-counters. No insult intended towards aquafaba. That's a reason to like national voluntary pension systems, such as Canada's RRSP.
Phosphorus is the 15th Element, but Phosphorous is also a perfectly good word, and in many instances refers to the Element, say, in the manner of Phosphorus. Neither word is wrong. Now, phos off.
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Wouldn't SOP be to make the e-mails sanitary, and have the real policy discussions at a cocktail party or by the water cooler? Or just a wink and a handshake? Politicians ought to be thoroughly conversant with such safety measures. Surely only the 99% put anything interesting and true in writing. This goes back to letters on paper. I remember paper. And watermarked paper. HPE - Autonomy case notwithstanding.
I think that another potential reason for a "let's not sweat the shillings" full-list-price barter [bad joke alert: why did the musician go to New Zealand? A: to play in an Auckestra] transaction process would be to establish a high cash value for the product, a ballpark figure. Which cup is the pea under? You can never win, but when you see somebody win, you might be inclined to join in. The difference is that the product (presumably) works, so the process would not be a fraud, it would be Marketing. Why did the customer pay 800 quid for pantaloons? Because he saw a well-dressed man do exactly that, and because the sales rep made him feel appreciated. Regardless of whether an equal or better pantaloon was on sale down the road for 8 quid. Fair game, in the society we have. I am not saying it is a Good Thing.
That makes three reasons for this sort of activity: to inflate bonuses, to make the company look more attractive to a potential buyer, and to make the product itself more attractive to a potential licensee. Do I hear four?
Even the most rudimentary sort of diligence on the part of a potential buyer should reveal this, and allow them to temper their bid accordingly. IANAL. Of course, this is not a legal opinion!
This article is the first reference I've noticed to the mysterious Bidco. Maybe HPE should be suing Bidco, not the rump of Autonomy, except that HPE's contract with Bidco probably excludes that, and Bidco probably doesn't have assets. Or "enough" assets.
Inspired by the semi-existence of Bidco, I suggest adapting the "Eric The Half-A-Bee" skit.
Definitely true in Canada. The major ISPs have ridiculously rich published rates. They want you to haggle. One of the majors had a "no contract" policy, every deal was month-to-month. That just made the haggling more intense. That major has since changed their policy to 2-year deals. Haggling is still a big thing. By contrast, if you tried to haggle the price of an item at a store (unless "price-matching"), you'd be politely laughed at.
I think that the underlying reason for the haggling (which, as Quakers confirmed, is a terribly wasteful endeavour for society) is that ISP majors are required to rent space on their networks to the ISP minors. If the published rates are way high, they can pass along enough costs that the ISP minors cannot compete on price. The ISP majors probably have additional ways to discourage the minors.