Posts by Insert sadsack pun here

UK schools slap a hold on facial scanning of children amid fierce criticism

Re: "intended to speed up the delivery of lunches from an average of 25 seconds to five"

I'm not assuming anything - I specifically said they should be healthy!

Re: Paraphrase

Downvote for sarcasm tag. If people don't get irony, that's their problem.

Re: "intended to speed up the delivery of lunches from an average of 25 seconds to five"

I said this the first time around when this story emerged but: let's delete this whole silliness around payments by funding state schools to provide healthy meals for all schoolkids at no charge. We have an epidemic of childhood obesity because kids buy cheap crap outside the school gates and because a lot of school meals are poisonous shite. French adults love fast food as much as Brits, but their kids eat like kings in school.

Amazon warehouse workers in New York to labor watchdog: We want our union vote

You must have skipped over the bit in the article that mentioned...

"In August, the NLRB concluded that Amazon had interfered with the voting process and recommended that another election be held"

...and the linked El Reg article that explained how Amazon had interfered with the NLRB's administration of the vote (by setting up its own anti-union slogan festooned, CCTV-surveilled "drop your vote here" mailbox, and by attempting to interfere with union campaigning on street corners) as well as generally acting like petulant teenage bullies with something to hide (mandatory anti-union training and hiring cops to skulk around the facility).

I heard that Bezos is trying to build a time machine so be can bring back some of those old school Pinkerton private dicks...

Re: union membership must be optional

"Employees can, should and already do engage constructively with management."

How am I meant to engage constructively with management about eg health and safety concerns at work when a) I've just worked a 12 hour shift and need to take care of my kids, b) I don't have h&so expertise, and c) my line manager isn't allowed to change anything anyway?

"30% (just, scraping the barrel) are in favour. "

There's no point in collecting more signatures once you've hit the trigger for a vote, so the union stopped. If 70% if the workforce were really against unionisation, the forthcoming vote will fail miserably (without Amazon nobbling it like they did in Alabama), and no-one has anything to worry about.

Twitter's machine learning algorithms amplify tweets from right-wing politicians over those on the left

Re: Tweet Bias

The answer is simple: right wingers are better at creating engaging content. Enraging people engages them - so do simple slogans. In the last couple of years the right has been better than the left in both: lock them up / build the wall / get Brexit done / leave means leave / make America great again / stop the steal... "For the many, not the few" was impossibly twee and woolly by comparison, and who even remembers what Biden's slogan was?

Nobody cares about DAB radio – so let's force it onto smart speakers, suggests UK govt review

Re: Sorry, why is this about DAB?

"all they’ll need to do is stream internet radio, which most if not all stations broadcasting on DAB do anyway"

My family has 4 Alexa devices in two houses. 2 of them will stream BBC radio, 2 of them won't. 1 of the ones that won't had a software update and broke - now we won't update the other ones for fear it will "break" them too. Streaming radio is 90% of what we use them for anyway, not least because they were cheaper than "proper" DAB radios!

The BBC Sounds skill doesn't work...

Windows 11 Paint: Oh look – rounded corners. And it is prettier... but slightly worse

MS Paint is the epitome of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". Im glad Paint 3D has gone (it was far too much for 99% of users and not enough for the rest), but there was really no need to fluff around with MS Paint.

Give us your biometric data to get your lunch in 5 seconds, UK schools tell children

Re: Nutshell

"In the real world, parents could stick £15 on a school meal card at the beginning of the week..."

Call me Leon Trotsky, but seeing as almost everyone in the UK is or has been a schoolkid, and most people have or will have kids that go to school, and we have a childhood obesity crisis aggravated by schoolkids buying junk food at lunchtime...why don't we just skip this payment-and-facial-recognition-at-point-of-sale nightmare and pay for healthy school lunches through taxation?

What do you mean you gave the boss THAT version of the report? Oh, ****ing ****balls

Our system (c 1992) gave a print job delay error message of "eat shit and hold your horses" for much the same reasons.

LinkedIn shutting down in China after mounting government pressure to censor social media content

Re: to sunset

You can't adjective nouns if they sound too verby.

Apple beat Epic Games 9-1 in court. Now it's appealed the one point it lost

Re: Is it going to matter ?

If they don't take a smaller fee, they'll lose business to their cheaper competitors. If they had competitors, I bet they'd miraculously find their way to charging less.

Learning app Duolingo sets its sights on the language of numbers

"I'm learning French and I get loads of adds to Learn English from French - because their ad server is so lame as it sees a French IP address"

TBF they're right that you'd probably do really well if you did some of their English lessons.

BOFH: You. Wouldn't. Put. A. Test. Machine. Into. Production. Without. Telling. Us.

"As my dad used to say, many things actually go well."

Wow, that's a coincidence, my granddad actually used to say something similar right up to the day he was squashed by an elephant. RIP, Lucky.

Russian spies reportedly used SolarWinds hack to steal US counterintelligence details

"Russia attempted to deny involvement...though there was little room for doubt in the emphatic statements issued by the UK and US"

I'm not a conspiracy theorist but there was only "little room for doubt" if you accept that what the UK and US says is gospel.

EU readies 'antitrust charges' against Apple Pay for locking rivals out of iPhone NFC chip

Re: I agree

"Apple’s practices on their own hardware is surely their own business..."

The iPhone and Apple Pay are two separate products. Apple is forcing consumers to use only Apple Pay as the payment product if they want the iPhone product. This restricts the consumer's choice of payment products and prevents competition among payments providers.

Chocgate: The fallout. Partially taxpayer-funded £6k+ staff luxury treats land ICO in lukewarm water

"is the issue just that this particular company card holder bought said gifts outside of the allotted budget?"

Well, yeah. If an employee can go off and spend a few grand on something that is obviously not an incidental business expense at the worst possible value and no-one hits the brakes and no-one had to repay the money...what other financial shenanigans could have happened?

BOFH: You'll find there's a company asset tag right here, underneath the monstrously heavy arcade machine

Re: PAT

Or it belongs to Pat. Either way, it's staying.

Re: Toaster Smoke Alarm

We hired a new researcher. 11am on the first day, 500 people evacuated because she'd jammed a bagel in the toaster and it started to burn. A bit embarrassing but these things happen. One week later - same person, same toaster, same bloody thing!!!

Facebook overpaid FTC fine by up to $4.9bn to protect Zuckerberg, lawsuits allege

Re: "transparency is essential for social media platforms"

"I suspect if FB hadn't been around, we'd be disgusted with MySpace...."

Let it go, Tom, it just didn't work out for you. You spent too much time being everyone's friend and not enough time selling personal data to shady operators.

Two Northern Irish cops face Computer Misuse Act charges over Twitter trolling campaign

From the linked article: "Two police officers have been suspended since late 2017 as a result of investigations..."

That's a cosy little 4 years sitting around doing sod all at public expense!

Nothing works any more. Who decided that redundant systems should become redundant?

Don't anthropomorphise the devices! They don't like it!

Unable to test every tourist and unable to turn them away, Greece used ML to pick visitors for COVID-19 checks

Re: Ahhhh, keeping the myth of the “asymptomatic super-spreaders” alive!

"When somebody tells you that a red basketball fits through the hoop, but the same ball in yellow doesn't, you know that he's taking a shit on you. ;-)"

Don't shame my kink, bro

3.4 billion people live within range of a mobile network but lack a device to make the connection

Re: Time to revive the old OLPC concept?

"Don't neglect voice - it's still a pretty big thing for those who can't read and write."

Quite so - including voice notes sent by WhatsApp.

Electron-to-joule conversion formulae? Cute. Welcome to the school of hard knocks

If Col hadn't found the solution the client would've been in a right jamb.

So I’ve scripted a life-saving routine. Pah. What really matters is the icon I give it

Re: who was world-famous throughout France

"Not to be confused with USA Word Series sports."

I think they're called spelling bees, mate

Forget that Loon's balloon burst, we just fired 700TB of laser broadband between two cities, says Alphabet

Re: Why?

You also need to have a dry, power-fed, secure, vacant landing site on each bank of the river, and then a way to connect each landing site with the comms infrastructure in that country.

Re: Standards of measure

"And don't forget - a quarter has two sides! :-)"

I think you'll find it has three.

Businesses put robots to work when human workers are hard to find, argue econo-boffins

"Very soon afterwards MacDonalds rolled out their automated ordering screens as these were now cheaper than the people that used to do the job."

If you read the article, it betrays its own premise. If the (location-specific) $15 minimum wage was the cause of the kiosk rollout in 2016 - then why were the screens rolled out nationwide? Why did the lower wage overseas McD's do it first? Why had McDonald's been working on self serve kiosks for a decade before then? The answer is nothing to do with labour costs in cities and states that pay $15 min wage - it's because kiosks increase spend, increase space for kitchen equipment and labour to speed up service, and reduce the amount of counter space required. The opinion piece (NB not news - in the US newspaper tradition, opinion pieces are subject to lower fact checking standards) is partisan hackery.

https://burgerlad.com/mcdonalds-touch-screen-ordering/amp/

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/money/nation-now/2018/06/07/mcdonalds-add-kiosks-citing-better-sales-over-face-face-orders/681196002/

https://www.lamasatech.com/blog/what-mcdonalds-self-order-kiosk-mean-for-fast-food/

CityFibre scores extra £1bn+ of funding to plumb in up to 8 million British homes by 2025

"Interogo Holding, a private equity investor best known for owning flat-packed furniture maker Ikea."

Interogo Holding AG doesn't own IKEA. Interogo Holding AG is a Swiss company that is owned by a Luxembourgish foundation called Interogo Foundation. Interogo Foundation also owns Inter Ikea Group.

This is not the tech unicorn you are looking for... and other stories

Re: Get me some drone footage of that alligator...

Travel blogger kills an alligator and dumps some e-waste in a swamp. They should be made to jump in and fish it out for safe disposal.

Why tell the doctor where it hurts, when you could use emoji instead?

Re: History repeats itself

"And since more and more people are illiterate (to some extent)..."

This is horseshít. The global literacy rate has never been higher.

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/WLD/world/literacy-rate

Elizabeth Holmes' Theranos fraud trial begins: Defense claims all she did was fail – and that's not a crime

Re: What a feel-good story!

"A lot of rich investors lost their money, because they were greedy and didn't understand science."

You're gonna shit when you realise who owns Walgreens, Safeway and the rest (your pension fund/401k, that's who).

More than half of companies rethinking back-to-office plans amid variant uncertainty and vaccine mandates – survey

Re: Office half full or office half empty?

"The biggest rail investments in the past 20 years have all put in better train services to London in for people who already have a train service to London (HS1, Crossrail, HS2) but want to get to London 10 minutes quicker...But the real problem is capacity."

Aww, Jeez, not this shit again! HS2 is not about getting to London 10 minutes earlier: it's about separating high speed through trains from stopping trains between Birmingham and London. That increases capacity because you can have more stopping services once you don't have to block off sections of track for the through trains.

Equally, Crossrail is not about getting to London 10 minutes earlier - it's about taking pressure off Central London stations by obviating the need to change 2-3 times in Central London if you want to cross from East to West (or vice versa).

Oh the humanity: McDonald's out of milkshakes across Great Britain

Re: Border Bureaucracy?

"which specifically impacts McDonald's "milkshakes" (see below) as well as other goods..."

And, of course, even if the milkshake goo is manufactured in the UK, its supply chain (dairy, flavouring, colouring, sugar, squid guts, bags, boxes) is almost certainly crossborder.

Re: A number of sound decisions?

"Workers who left didn't leave because they couldn't work. They all have settled status..."

Yeah but many left during Covid because there wasn't much of a safety net (state or family) for people in the gig economy, many others left simply because they wanted to go home or somewhere else - and now that the market is heating up there's no-one coming to take their place.

Apple extends live-at-work to at least January 2022

"all smartphones are made in Taiwan, sometimes with child labor."

Not all smartphones are made in Taiwan, and there is very little child labour there. Just ask the International Trade Union Confederation:

"in general the [Taiwan] government enforces the law effectively on issues of child labour, and although child labour and forced labour occur, they are not serious problems in Chinese Taipei."

https://www.ituc-csi.org/workers-rights-in-taiwan

UK's Newport Wafer Fab now under Chinese ownership

Re: A fortune for pennies

"The UK has had its post-colonial guilt trip of being super nice to anyone 'foreign'"

God, yes, ask any Iraqi and Yemeni on the street what they think of the UK, and they'll say "it's unbearable, they've just so super nice to us all the time, it's a constant stream of cream cakes and cuddly toys falling from the sky, when will they stop being so nice and start being a bit more cynical?"

1) Companies House just makes available whatever documents the company uploads. It doesn't actively review, approve or (in practice) audit filings by companies.

2) the Government can scrutinise and review whatever it wants but unless they have the power to do something about it, it's irrelevant. Johnson said “Thanks to ... the National Security and Investment Bill, we are able to take action", but

- it's now an Act, not a Bill, because it has been passed by Parliament

- the relevant powers under the act don't come into force until 01 Jan 2022

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2021/25/contents/enacted

COVID-19 cases surge as do sales of fake vaccination cards – around $100 for something you could get free

Re: Forgery

"I think it should count as attempted manslaughter"

There is no such thing as attempted manslaughter.

I was fired for telling ICO of Serco track and trace data breach, claims sacked worker

Re: Companies House

They're all microcontractors supposedly controlled by people in the Philippines to "avoid" NI contributions for the reasons set out at the foot of the article. Private Eye and the Guardian have been covering this.

Re: Whistleblower protection

Yes. The point of the case is that the company that fired her was not the company engaged in wrongdoing, and she is not therefore protected from adverse action by her employer. Whistleblowing laws in this country are rubbish.

UK's Vodafone network runs trials on standalone 5G in London, Manchester and Cardiff

This is good news for mobile workers and those with poor broadband connections. I imagine the signal strength and reliability will only improve the more people are vaccinated too.

Google gets into the international money transfer business, one-way out of the USA

Re: Why does Google need Western Union?

Google doesn't want to be in the regulated financial sector and doesn't have any of the incredibly expensive and complicated back office functions that it would need to run a money transfer business.

UK prime minister Boris Johnson reluctant to reveal his involvement in the OneWeb deal

Re: Clueless

"The old style Conservatives were at least reasonably sensible, and also listened to business, and people who could advise them properly..."

You're romanticising the past. The Tories have always had swivel-eyed loons like Harvey Proctor and Norman Tebbit, and shameless opportunist bullshitters like Ian Hamilton and Jonathan Aitken.

To be fair, the Lord is my shepherd, not Boris "£50m on Joanne Lumley's Bridge is fine, but child abuse inquiries is spunking money up the wall" Johnson.

UK Department of Health's joint venture with Sopra Steria names 19 vendors to epic £1bn hardware framework

Sopra Steria is the same bunch of moneygrabbing wankers that runs the outsourced document scanning and biometrics capture service for the Home Office. "Well, Sir, we understand you'd like to renew your visa to stay with your children and job in the UK. Would you like an ultra-premium appointment with a coffee near where you live for £700, or would you like a free appointment in six weeks' time at 2am in Belfast? That's on top of the £2000 you just paid the Home Office, obviously..."

Global tat supply line clogged as Suez Canal authorities come to aid of wedged 18-brontosaurus container ship

Re: What a relief!

Only wankers love flags.

"How much does the fattest one weigh ?"

A bit more than 1 StBgr (standard badger).