Re: looping elevators

Yeah, like I want a 30 minute ride on an enclosed claustrophobic Big Wheel when I get to work every morning.

Re: Any rope is the problem

You have an "UP" shaft and a "DOWN" shaft.

But lifts can still break, and one stuck lift could mean a whole series of lift cars behind it being blocked. This means you need a bypass mechanism - points, sidings, etc.

Effectly you turn (for example) 8 lift shafts with one car into two lift shafts up, two down, each with multiple cars. The space for the other shafts is used for "turbo" to high floors and bypass shafts. It would look like a vertical railway.

But the points would be interesting to implement ... maybe four up, four down and if a lift sticks, bad luck.

Re: Where exactly is the warming happening?

Of course you can't use single data points as arguments for or against climate change. Just as a single record sea ice retreat can't be used, a single bad winter can't be used. However you can use multiple record sea ice retreats in a decade or two, and you could use multiple unusually cold winters (not explained by other things, e.g., volcanoes) as well.

In general, climate change is meant to make the UK wetter - not everywhere gets hotter. Indeed many places will get colder because of shifting climates.

Re: Understandable

I find the worst drivers on the road are middle aged men in Audis or BMWs, followed by old people tootling along in their pristine grannymobile at half the speed limit in otherwise good driving conditions.

But if you're being quoted thousands for insurance, and a device like this would cut the cost in half, any sane person would jump at it, unless they had enough money that it didn't matter to them one way or the other (and the number of people who can afford to give up thousands of pounds every year are very few and far between).

Re: Theft

Are there any tools being written that will update the metadata on images on your internet accounts?

I.e., automatically download, add metadata (both alongside the image, and embedded in the image via steganography and similar techniques), reupload to overwrite.

This metadata would contain ownership information, image licensing details, etc.

And which sites disallow overwriting images that have been uploaded, as they need to be avoided. Facebook is a bit of code away from being a massive source of "orphaned" images (no metadata, despite the fact they'll be connected to an account on their system).

Also, digital cameras need the capability to set owner information on all images at the point of capture.

Re: Does this £1/day include energy costs ?

You could always burn your own dung for heat and cooking!

Re: What did you fry the eggs in?

How much did the pan cost, and what is the expected lifespan, and thus the contribution of your weekly budget that you put towards it?

Okay, okay, it's not meant to simulate living on the breadline quite so accurately!

Re: Dozen eggs for a euro?

Yeah, a dozen eggs is around £2 over here. Then again, he doesn't get cheap noodles or Tesco Value Sliced Foam, err, Bread. Also there's learning the time the supermarket puts out the damaged food for cheap and going there everyday to try and pick up a bargain. And lastly, for a long term plan, grow your own veg using cheap veg seeds (lidl, etc) - not that many UK people on the breadline seem to do this.

The bones are a good idea for flavour, but not easy to get in many places in the UK. Chick peas and Rice is a good idea, again he can't get vast bags of value pasta shapes it appears. Dried lentils? Dried beans?

Re: When my mother died

You are aware that these bills are never seen by a human being, they're created, printed and posted by an automated system.

That system applies fines for missing a payment automatically.

The system can only deal with what it knows. It hadn't been programmed to check direct debit refused due to death reasons - perhaps it's a new bank feature to include that text in the direct debit failure message. Integration of many many different systems run by different companies is not easy.

And the DD would have failed after his death, and the contract ends at the point of death, the fine would have been reversed anyway, coming after the date of death. One phone call and it's resolved unless the customer service agent is inept.

Re: A debt is still a debt.

I believe the debt can come from the deceased's estate, but it can't go any further than that.

So if you sold someone who died something, then you get the payment from their estate, or maybe you get the thing back.

I guess that for rolling contracts the company will get the phone/tablet/whatever back, as death is a reasonable reason for contract termination at any point (or the company should suck up the loss due to their subsidised device sales model). But I can believe that scummy companies will still try to apply termination fees in such a case. However the internet says: "I can confirm that upon receipt of the death certificate the contract is terminated immediately and all charges credited from the date of death."

Re: What are they sorry for?

It appears so.

For all we know the entity at fault is the bank for changing what they respond with when a direct debit is cancelled. So any prior checks that were in place, e.g. "if decline_reason contains 'dead' then escalate_to_bereavement_team" were flummoxed because the bank using "deceased" all of a sudden, rather than "dead". I wouldn't be surprised with the IT cowboys working in banks if these systems didn't include an infallible error code so string matching could be avoided.

You can't blame an automated system doing what it was programmed to do, when something not under its control changes. OTOH I would presume the bank would have notified its clients of the API change well in advance, so it's a management failure within Virgin Media that failed to get their processing systems updated at the correct time.

Re: This was really stupid

Yeah, but it quite clearly isn't 10gbps if it can't even stream 1080p HDMI, which is under 5gbps.

Indeed it looks like it can't even stream 1080p H.264 (although this might be an issue with the iDevice's video encoder rather than Lightning itself).

Clearly Apple's use case is iDevice -> TV via an AppleTV over AirPlay. How dare you deviate from that.

Re: ....

Ah, a "Wall of Fail" - all good fun isn't it?

Until it becomes workplace bullying. Such a thing would automatically make the company lose any employment tribunal an (ex) employee pulled.

You must point out these failures in person, quietly, and reasonably.

A company I know of has an internal IRC server. It has a "rape" plugin, for lolz when someone does something wrong (!rape username with a jackhammer for introducing bug). All very good, until a person joins the company that has gone through such a thing, and sues the company. And wins. In this case, it's bullying, it's intimidation, it's misogyny. It had been reported as such before, as well.

Re: Is this an Autobot or Decepticon Transgender

Sex and gender are different things.

You may physically be male (male sex), but your gender can be different.

If you are a female in the head, and you have the male bits chopped off to become female on the outside, what does that make you?

People who have gone through this very stressful, traumatic reassignment don't do it for giggles. They do it to become physically what they are mentally.

Re: What are they on?

And in terms of free relational databases, e.g., MySQL, the clustering and replication issues are terrible, especially when you require ACID across the full set of databases (in a master-master setup). Modern users of databases are beyond using them in a single point of data access mode, they need massive geographical scaling, they need data in many places at once, and often they need that data to be globally consistent.

Of course Facebook don't require global consistency, hence Cassandra is good at ensuring data is eventually written to all cluster members, but doesn't guarantee consistency or offer transactions.

There are different use cases for databases other than very traditional uses.

I do take issue with the guy's assertion that software developers can't handle relational data however.

Re: What the flying fuck Ofcom?!?!

Most likely there will still be DVB-T multiplexes (~24mbps each - QAM64) after 2018, as well as three or four DVB-T2 multiplexes (~40mbps each, QAM256). Your old TV that you haven't replaced by 2018 will still work, and it isn't like a DVB-T2 receiver won't be available for a tenner by then either.

Of course soon after that I would hope the DVB-T would be dead, simply so that we are making more efficient use of the limited terrestrial spectrum for multiple shopping channels trying to sell cranky looking exercise machines and knives.

Maybe those businesses should be registered as Not For Profit entities then...

Fact is, Starbucks, globally, is making a massive profit once it reconciles all the money that it has moved around the globe avoiding tax.

Problem is, all that money is in bank accounts in the final resting place of that moving, e.g., Bermuda. They can't move it back without incurring corporation tax on it! This is why Apple is trying to press for a reduced rate for repatriation of money into the US!

Re: A tax on a sale...

I think his point is that you can drop corporation tax (maybe for certain classes of businesses - let's argue that Coffee Shops is a class of UK business) and introduce a final sale tax (fixed percentage of final sale price, e.g., 10%, in addition to VAT) to all business -> consumer transactions.

Starbucks: Doesn't benefit from the drop in corporation tax, has to raise price of coffee to compensate for additional sales tax, because they are tied to paying 20% over market price for coffee from their profit-offshoring subsidiary.

£3.00 ("zero profit") -> £3.00 -> £3.30 customer price

Costa, Nero, Nanny Tea Shoppe, etc: Benefits from drop in corporation tax (24% -> 10%), and can use that drop to reduce their pre-sales-tax price of their coffees.

£3.00 (100p profit, 24p of which goes in corporation tax = 76p net) -> £2.85 (85p profit, 8.5p corporation tax, 76.5p net) -> £3.14 customer price

Therefore making the tax avoiding scummy immoral company less competitive compared to the moral companies...