Re: vegans
Your belief in science does not change the empirical fact that science is wrong, most of the time.
483 publicly visible posts • joined 8 May 2020
Your belief in science does not change the empirical fact that science is wrong, most of the time.
Similar experience in Birmingham. I was asked to provide on-call services over a week in Birmingham and they'd put me up in a hotel so I could respond quickly. The same week as a trade show / exhibition in the NEC. As a result all the hotels were booked up with visitors to that, so they put me up in a serviced apartment for the week, top floor with a balcony overlooking the city centre. Certainly not £5000 a night, but probably £2-300. It was quite nice too, 3 floors, loungers in the lounge etc. With it being an apartment and not a hotel there was no food, but the company did pick they tabs I racked up eating down at the local eateries and bars in the city.
One thing I didn't tell anyone was that I took my girlfriend with me, and when I wasn't working we strolled round the city. I got some strange looks when eating out when I asked that the bills be split into mine and hers (so I could claim back my receipt).
Actual work done was about an hour a day, but overall it was a nice week in Birmingham (and I can't believe I said that).
I thought Americans were allowed to own guns? Are there laws against shooting down drones surveilling your property, especially ones acting like a peeping tom. "I shot it down because was loitering in front of my daughter's bedroom window at the same time as she was coming out of the shower and I noticed it had what looked like a telescopic lens protruding"
“Once you've used up your in-hand cash reserves, how do you replenish them? ”
The same way we have for as long as people have been running shops. You start with a float suitable for the days trade.
30 ish years ago when I pumped petrol (gas) as a student the day started with a float of £50 in change. That was enough to get you through a days takings. At the end of the day you would count out another float from your cash pile for the next days trade.
Young ‘uns of today, trying to come up with problems that were solved milenia ago!
Yeah, in the 10 years we've been here, it's the first time both have gone down at the same time. This weekend was supposedly the weekend they start to roll out the FTTP upgrades at the exchanges in our town. Judging by the 4 BT vans at the top of the street this morning still, and all my neighbours having no internet since Friday midnight, it looks like the upgrades didn't go as smoothly as planned.
I'm able to work comfortably on the wireless, I'm getting a nice 30mb down so it's not laggy.
The biggest problem in the UK is the complete lack of alternative providers. We're at the end of a mile long road going out in the fields, there's 38 units here. Only BT provide service to the estate, so going with BT Business for the main line, and an LLU provider for the second is pretty much as good as we'll ever get, and like I said, one total outage in 10 years has been fine. Having the ability to use the 4g has been invaluable for the last 2 days, and it's not something I was paying extra for or will be billed for. Had I been on holiday, I can imagine it would have been an arse to get the 4g working, and I would have probably just told whoever was in the office, to tether to their phone, and I'd pay the bill when I got back.
I can't believe I have something positive to say about BT :p
I had to reply on the failover 4G service built into my BT Business SmartHub 2 today. I have 2 ADSLs from 2 providers, and following this weekends upgrade to national infrastructure both were dead this morning. The failover wasn't seamless, because the SmartHub was configured in Bridge mode, and the 4g failover only works in NAT mode. Took me about 10 minutes to plug into the SmartHub with my laptop, manually configure the IP, re-set up NAT, unplug my main VPN concentrator firewall and plug the Smarthub back into it's place and let it pretend nothing had changed. Apart from I wasn't bothering to open up ports to allow incoming services, it worked great all day.
Now if only they had made the failover work seamlessly in Bridge mode.
I have BT coming in hopefully tomorrow to fix the "DIS in Infrastructure" problem, then it's another 10 mins to re configure it in Bridge mode, and plug everything back in where it's supposed to be.
If... Nasa was to get no budget for Hubble, and they decided to let it just drift into orbital decay with the intention of it burning up in the atmosphere, could a private organization or a mad man with a volcano lair, and the means to launch into space, do so, and claim salvage, repair it, stick a logo on it, fit a newer camera in it and send it back up into a long term orbit and change it's name?
Ideas like this keep me up at night!
My problem with OneDrive is that it doesn't handle the same characters that the windows file structure does, so it refuses to back up files containing certain characters. At the very least include an option in windows to disable these characters, because no amount of user training will get Doris in admin to save her filenames differently.
"How big is the Apple gift card scam market now"
Weekly I get an email from "Dad" asking me to go buy him 5 x £50 apple gift cards and reply back with the codes when I have. For me the first request was not out of the ordinary, I'm his tech son and he often relies on me for his tech purchases. The dead giveaway was that he'd changed his name to webmaster@topunigirls.com without telling me (NFSW site, don't visit it).
My thoughts are that a blade fatigued causing rotor imbalance and the fatigued blade damaged all the other blades before being hurled off at high speed. YouTube has videos of blade fatigue on wind turbines, one second it’s there, the next it isn’t and the turbine usually shakes itself to bits in another second or so.
"The changes Apple is planning, he said, mean that in the EU, Apple will delete user data associated with PWAs without notice,"
This would fall foul of the Computer Misuse Act in the UK. However private individuals would need to take Apple to court, if they care. It's unlikely that the Government would.
Not sure what the legal status is in the EU, but I can see the EU taking retaliatory actions, they don't like to be given the finger, and by breaking working existing functionality within the EU Apple are sticking up a pretty big finger.
Similar happened years ago when Apple lost a court case in the UK, and they went on the offensive on their website sticking up a finger to the court and attacking it. The court started fining them daily for contempt until they retracted the offending pages on the website, and replaced it with a court approved webpage admitting wrong-doing all along.
I think that pretty much backs up what I am saying. If the work procedure states.
1) fit frame
2) ...
3) ...
4) ...
.......
25) fit bolts
.......
51) take picture of the finished job and file with work sheet XYZ-123.
The unskilled worker doesn't realized he hasn't fitted the bolts. The picture is there for reference at a later date if something requires it, this report required it so it was dragged out of filing, then a skilled worker looked at it and spotted the error. I bet nowhere is there a procedure that says "All pictures must be inspected by a skilled worker before filing". The picture is a replacement for a sheet full of tick boxes, to save yet more money.
I had my tongue firmly in my cheek when I posted the above, but it turns out Nasa already have form!
https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/duct-tape-auto-repair-moon
I'm having major issues with Illustrator at the moment. It's just so damn slow that our artwork dept is going nuts. Saving files can take literally hours, flattening files, you may as well go for lunch, followed by an afternoons shopping while you wait. You look at the task manager, full memory?, nope, thrashing hard disk?, nope, maxed out CPU?, 5% max, nope. Tried running the same task through Ghostscript, 15 seconds. Look on the forums, lots of people having the same issue going back to 2016. It just sits there doing nothing for so many people. It really is a dogs dinner.
Rant over, feel better now.
It's not really a GDPR issue, as someone has said unless your tabs contain peoples names, DOB, social security numbers etc.
The UK Act that covers this is the Computer Misuse Act 1990, specifically the section starting "Unauthorised, or malicious, access to material stored on a computer.".
Getting the authorities to act on this though is another thing. I believe the last event that prompted the government to act, was Prince Phillip's Prestel account being hacked by journalists. "Prestel" I hear you say. "What's that?". Exactly!
Have a search around this site and you’ll find articles going back almost 2 decades that quote database owners as saying they have enough data stored to identify your fathers surname from any DNA sample uploaded. Think about it, surnames tend not to be changed in the west, father to son. If you have the same surname as your long dead grandparent, you’re identifiable and probably already have been linked.
If your based in the uk, you can use services such as the 192.com website to trawl electoral register records going back decades. Tracking people in that is incredibly easy. If you are registered to vote or you pay council tax, you’re identifiable.
I'm guessing one of the "games" they are playing right now, would be "what would we now do if we had people on board", and they are probably using this as an opportunity to practice things that rarely get the opportunity to be practiced outside of a lab.
Glass raised because they will probably learn some stuff from this.
"So why is it that networks are so Swiss cheese that these guys can actually take advantage of this swiss cheese?"
In my experience, it's users convincing the higher-up-than-mes that they absolutely cannot do their job without admin rights. I'm fighting 2 battles right now, one with a marketing team, and another with the design team, both of which get the CEOs direct attention, cos, ooh, shiny and buzzwords. I've written a report to my superiors why I am refusing to let anyone including myself work with realtime admin rights ( they don't want to have to go through the bother of elevating privs during a task ), and have given them the option to follow my Expert Advice™*, or sack me. I'm getting too old for this same old same old, and I've already retired twice, and changed professions completely.
*I was headhunted out of retirement, so someone thought I knew what I was doing.
Not working with admin privs out of the box stops 99.999% of malware intrusion.
Can you really gift digital media? I was recently chatting to a 60 something work friend who fronts an Iggy Pop / Status Quo tribute band. I was telling him how I played rock organ in my youth, and my favourite thing to perform back then was Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds. What followed was an incredulous 15 minute "What's War of the Worlds - You've never heard of War of the Worlds - You know the film, with the tripods, NO??, The HG wells broadcast?, the book?, the Jeff Wayne Musical version?". Long story short, I gave him a CD copy. He was over the moon. A couple of days later he sent me a picture, he'd mounted the CD case on the wall in his recording studio. It was now his favourite thing in the world, and was the top of his play list. I don't really think that you could get that kind of response from digital media.
"It's just another easily identified risk for which HMG is woefully unprepared."
Sounds an awful lot like Brexit, We voted for that in 2016 I believe it was, but in 2021 I had a phone call from HMRC telling me that they would not be enforcing their penalising me for my inability to conform to the new rules, because they still couldn't figure out themselves what the new rules were, they then followed that up with a letter offering me £100 compensation for their previous aggressive enforcement of the UK rules because the UK rules were perhaps-maybe-almost-certainly-were in error.
2023 and I'm still having almost monthly back and fro's about this with HMRC. As a business it's a shitshow. Ordinary consumers (i.e. voters) have no idea that my workload has increased 10-fold because of their vote. I may as well just sack my staff, and go tend to my allotment and live a much simpler life.
Because prior to brexit, records were not kept about trade with Europe. I didn’t fill in one piece of paper declaring anything I sold or bought from Europe. Jan 1st 2021, everything is declared in triplicate followed by a non-sensical declaration of estimate of taxes owed if we didn’t have a brexit deal, then we have to pay it and claim it back in the same transaction, and to top it off, once every month the government sends us a PVA certificate of what they believe the tax figure should have been, and we have to change the declared figures to the new approved government figures and re-declare. Funnily enough it’s always a higher value we’re told to declare.
Trade isn’t up, it’s just documented since 2021. Anything before that date is an estimate.