Re: It's my motto
He didn't say what they were pints of........
9436 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Oct 2007
Well that has to be the dumbest idea in the history of dumb ideas.
What Could Possibly Go Wrong? Ah yes, I know. 90+% of people wouldn't know their car had a serious, even life-threatening, fault unless the car said; "I have a serious, even life-threatening, fault" as they approached it (and even then, they'd probably drive it anyway). The sort of people who are trying to scrounge a few extra quid by moonlighting as a fake taxi are by definition not the sort who will drop the necessary quiddage to keep their car professionally maintained and in top-top condition. You'd need your bumps felt to use this system.
Most countries with any degree of common sense force licensed taxis to be inspected rather more frequently and seriously than the cursory[1] once-over most vehicles get for this reason.
[1] I've seen a few things with a new MOT that have "Death Trap" written all over them. Likewise I've seen failures for no good reason. It's Lucky Lotto out there.
In a word, money.
As soon as 5G turns up, 5G phones will be on the market within minutes. The Sheep will go "ooooo, must have new shiny" and want one, at which point any network not offering 5G will lose customers like it's going out of fashion[1].
So 4G buildout goes hang while perfectly well serviced areas with gobs of customers (i.e. cities) get pointlessly upgraded to avoid this.
[1] This is seen as "demand for 5G", even though less than one percent of buyers will actually use the capabilities for anything constructive (i.e. something other than faster access to cat pix).
A quick search on "Gliese"[1] reveals it was Bebo[2] and Gliese 581.
Now if they were out when it arrived at 581 and it got left at 436 by the postman......
[1] Yes, there is a search facility here.
[2] A week may well be a long time in politics, but a couple of years is an entire lifetime on the internet.
According to him the most efficient way to run a modern boiler is to use thermostatic valves on all the radiators.
I have to second that. Some time ago I did just that in my well-insulated modern house. Total cost of valves - 300 EUR (some rads already had 'em).
Payback time was under a year and manifested itself as a 450 EUR refund after the following winter. I have to admit to being somewhat gobsmacked at the time.
Obvious really. The way you waste money is by heating rooms more than is necessary. No central thermostatic control on earth is ever going to be able to vary usage by room. So, if you're thinking of lashing out a few hundred on shiny wall-mounted toys and you haven't already got thermostatic valves, don't bother. Insulate first, then valves, then and only then get the shiny.
Lifetime warranties
pledged to replace a PC's hard drive and CPU after two years
Aha! That's Gordon Brown economics that is, borrowing money from the good times in the future to generate sales / public goodwill now. The idea being you'll have cashed in your shares / brownie points / made enough to retire / whatever and be off doing something more lucrative before the good times fail to turn up and the company / country / whatever goes inevitably titsup when those liabilities you've stored up for your successors really bite.
Say what you like about Microsoft, but with strategies like that the management should get the lion's share of the blame for it all going pear-shaped.
I thought this whole "cloud" idea's biggest selling point was the combination of scalability and redundancy?
We seem to have got the first bit, but the second continues to elude us. Now we have these "hybrid", multi-cloud, clouds attempting to ensure continuity. Presumably we need more than one of those too......
Of course being a Parrott unit, it'll be the absolute dog's bollocks at Bluetooth handsfree phone and audio streaming, unlike the Alpine system as theirs are usually pig-awful in this area.
A far more useful feature than bloody DAB, which is to in-car music what welding gloves are to brain surgeons.
As stupid as someone who sends all their money to a 419 scammer?
As stupid as someone who answers "Yes" when their O/S asks for permission to install that "FREE!!11!! Antiviruz scanner"?
As stupid as someone who takes it seriously when their Android phone tells them it's been taken over by US hackers and needs them to install this app quickly to fix it?
As stupid as someone who believes it when their MOT bloke tells them that surface rust on the wiper arms is a failure and sells them a new pair plus fitting at an exorbitant rate[1]?
As stupid as a woman of 50 on holiday alone who believes that young Turkish barman just fell in love with them and not their passport/money at all?
Etc ad nauseum........
Stupidity. Making scumbags richer since the dawn of time.
[1] I had a good laugh at that one.
I don't know which likelihood is worse here:
1) He genuinely believes that and people still listen to him.
2) He's a piece of shit-stirring scum and people still listen to him.
Next week: Having realised that this makes him look even more of a twat than usual, he claims that Mossad hacked his Faceberk account and posted that to discredit him....
so they surely haven't emailed everyone
You amaze me. Maybe they like to think that their user base has more sense than to respond to: "Dear Lastpass user. It is now important to update your account details. Please login at the following link: https://wecantbelieveyoufellforthisyoutwat.moodyhost.com.".
Other possibility. They did, but messages like that go straight to your spam bucket....
I was standing next to that the other day when some chap came up to me and said it was the loudest thing he'd ever heard.
He was on base for a test, back in the day. He said at "go" time, the thing just vanished to all intents and purposes. By the time his eyes found it again, it was several miles away and at about that moment the godawful noise of it departing on rockets hit. Having just got used to that, the fact that it had fired its ramjets and gone supersonic as it cleared the airfield perimeter fence made itself felt and heard.
Acceleration figures of 0-->holyshitthat'squick in nothing flat. I take it that the car comes second best as it is incapable of achieving supersonic speeds in a standing quarter mile drag?
In one interview I saw, he said that his doctor had told him in no uncertain terms that he should not fly to NZ for the filming of LotR, as the stress of flying long-haul could kill him.
He decided he wasn't going to pass up the opportunity, especially not because of someone else's opinion of how well he felt at the time.
Some time ago I summed up BB's current state and opined that their best move would be to ditch hardware (low-margin, competing with world+dog) and concentrate on software (high-margin, market leading, etc).
I also opined that the daft move would be to provide their services on other platforms without ditching the hardware business.
I never even dreamed they'd be this bloody stupid.
Presumably the share recommendation on BB has just moved from "sell" to "GTFON!".
Range Rover and their cars don't care at all.
But their customers are mostly the sort of bling-obsessed rich twats who feel the overwhelming urge to fire a twat-o-tronic outburst at the local council if their backsides are faced with a less than cosseted ride and that's who this system is aimed at.
The lack of a convenient large ocean in the middle of Asia means that the Russians have always taken the somewhat less comfortable version of a soft landing. Then again, if anything goes seriously wrong with the braking process it makes bugger all difference which surface material causes that umpty-hundred gee stop at the end of re-entry.
A hangover from the Soviet days. Presumably they were worried that any Cosmonauts landing in the sea would quickly whittle a pair of paddles from the available material on board and row their capsule off to America.
Not at the DVLA, at the fucking British in general!
1) All countries in the EU use the same Driving licence format.
2) Britain is the only country that ever had a ruddy paper bit.
3) It's never caused any problem to any other European license holder anywhere in the world to hire a car with only the placcy bit. No codes, no online site, no nothing.
4) The only place on the entire bleedin' planet that I've ever been asked for the paper section when hiring a car with a UK license is, er, the UK. (This was slightly embarrassing as, since I'd never needed it before, I didn't bloody have it with me in the country!).
Why the fuck do we always have to overcomplicate everything?
The diesel smell thing only works on a motorcycle anyway. Impossible to smell through a charcoal-impregnated pollen filter and damned difficult even in a car without one, as you're just nowhere near as up-close-and-personal with the air around the vehicle.
The Googlebots are no worse off than the rest of us (when on four wheels rather than two) here.
Personally I reckon that, when on two wheels, I'd be far happier if cars were autonomous than not. The autobots are never going to do the not-seeing-me-even-when-looking-straight-at-me thing that meatsack drivers are so fond of and if I do fuck up and miss spotting one, it's far more likely to react immediately to cater for my stupidity than the meatsack is. I also suspect it's infinitely less likely to suddenly turn right without indicating.....
He's got beeelions of dollars[1].
He's a tycoon of industry (auto manufacturing).
He's got his own spaceships.
He's even called Elon Musk FFS! Come on, let's face it; If you were reading a book and it had a billionaire tycoon character called "Elon Musk" in it, you'd be pretty bloody sure you'd worked out who it was behind the plot to take over the world using humungous space-based laser weapons.
You just know there's an island sporting fetching volcanic secret base accessories somewhere in his property portfolio.
[1] The maniacal laugh is implicit in that.
Oh, I dunno. It probably takes at least that long to go all the way up and down the chain of command to get an OK to twat the place.
One of the major problems with fighting a war-that-isn't-a-war-honest is that by the time you get permission to shoot back, what you wanted to shoot back at has usually buggered off.
Do you mean SR71?
That had the interesting feature that after takeoff and climb to altitude it then went through in-flight refuelling.
The fuel was kept in the wings without the benefit of tanks to save weight. Until the skin warmed up due to air friction and expanded, sealing the joints, it leaked like a sieve. Thus the drill was to get it up to the maximum altitude of a laden tanker aircraft, losing most of its fuel on the way due to leakage, refill and then immediately wind the thing up to full chat to get its outside nice 'n hot and keep the second lot of fuel where it belonged.
Presumably smoking in the hangers of Area 51 was frowned upon......
Next week: Sony implicated in assassination of Kim Jong Un.
World fails to give a shit....
Eventually the big corporates will grow tired of the failure of their governments to protect them in an environment where international borders mean sod all and take action to solve these problems their own way.
We're sleepwalking into the demise of national governments as meaningful entities, as pan-national enforcement (regardless of treaties, jurisdiction, diplomacy and other such cruft beloved of politicians) slowly becomes a "must have".
Probably as a featureless, black rectangle.
Of the Teslas I have seen to date in the wild, around half have been broken down at the side[1] of the road. Even if I won the lottery and came over all leaf-munchy for some reason, I'd be buying something else.
[1] A common saying which doesn't seem to apply to Teslas as they're more usually abandoned in the middle. Judging by the antics of those around and having watched someone try and fail to get one on a recovery truck, I guess they cannot be moved (transmission lock???) when stuffed.
Jamming devices are illegal because they can prevent people from calling emergency services, posing a public safety hazard.
Make jammers legal and tell anyone too mind-numbingly stupid to work it out for themselves to move out of jamming range if they really, really need to make a call.
Really?
That paper that respects free speech so much that they roll over to have their tummy tickled when so much as threatened with a bullshit libel suit?
I detect a botnet in the voting process. It's difficult to think of a news site that didn't cover Snowden in exhaustive and mind-numbingly tedious detail. It was one of the biggest stories of the year....