Posts by Piro

I think it's general despair at the choices that were available.

Re: Trussed Up

It's funny that everyone's experience with cheese is the same.

I buy mature Cheddar from the UK, which I can fortunately find in the local supermarket, because most of the local cheese here seems to be rather rubbery and bland, designed for easy slicing. Still, there is some reasonable stuff available, so it's worth trying a few before throwing in the towel.

Re: It does suck

I have an old Pentium III-M tablet running XP Tablet edition that still works. Classic. The handwriting recognition was not totally awful, but of course the overall experience was just XP with a stylus.

Re: It does suck

Yeah, Windows 7 was peak Windows design. I enjoy it every time I go back to it, compared to 10. Oh well.

Re: Does this apply to everyone?

We all know the answer to that.

Re: Pointless laws are pointless

No, the MMR autism thing was literal baseless fraud.

Re: Pointless laws are pointless

It's frustrating being a nuclear supporter. Try to explain that there's more radioactive fallout from coal-fired plants than properly operating nuclear ones. People don't seem to comprehend it.

We should have been honing our skills and building better designs decades ago. The problems of both Chernobyl and Fukushima are common in a sense: design flaws that people flagged, but were ignored, and then a bloody mindedness to sweep it all under the rug.

High positive void coefficient, lack of containment, graphite tipped control rods, and an incredible lack of regard for safety during a test for the first, inappropriate design for the backup power for the second, and it was also an old design. I read the Japanese left the diesels in the basement because it was in the American plans, despite some voicing their concerns. But the later units had their backup gennys installed uphill from the plant, as far as I recall.

There needs to be some way for engineers to voice their concerns in a way that forces the hand of the company building and running these plants.

It's also a general issue that the fleets are getting older without enough new installed capacity to take over, so we just extend and extend. If we extend indefinitely, we're going to encounter problems.

My car has one small improvement over basic cruise control, it's not adaptive, and it doesn't automatically brake, but if I've got cruise on and the computer reckons I might hit something, it disables cruise. It rarely ever happens, but why not, it's a worthwhile improvement without a disadvantage.

Re: As soon as I saw this

Then it'll only roll over them at 5.6 mph.

Re: Waste to energy

@Korev - Yeah, and that I disagree with. Reduce, reuse, recycle, of course, but then the step after that shouldn't primarily be landfill, especially as leaving open rotting pits of rubbish generates far more in the way of harmful gasses than incinerating the stuff before it has a chance to rot.

Re: DDG's obfuscating spokesperson

My guess is he's implying that the ads are not targeted to the user, but rather related to the search results, as opposed to storing a bunch of information about the user's past search results and clicked links (and in the case of Google, all that juicy analytics data they have cross-site) to target ads.

I haven't read the ToS though, but that, in my mind, would be the logical difference.

Re: Who can you trust?

The biggest problem in search is that the better it is (Google), the less trustworthy it is.

There are some open projects with their own crawlers that don't blend search results (mojeek, amongst others), which may not always yield the results you want, but luckily most of them make it easy to search using another engine in that case.

There are several that allow 'anonymous' Google (startpage, amongst others) or Bing (swisscows, amongst others) results, and there are also some that blend results.

Brave has their own crawler, and optionally blends search results as far as I understand, similarly to Qwant.

Try a few of them and see what you like best.

Re: So, why isn't Microsoft getting it in the neck?

Can't blame a dog for barking. Nobody expects Microsoft to respect your privacy.

However, when a new and hip company springs up saying they're different and don't track you.. Well, expectations were different. I'm sure many weren't entirely naïve, but false advertising is false advertising.

Re: In other words...

Most people can only pony up a few grand for a car. It's really normal. Most people don't buy new cars.

Re: And the UK ?

But the CEE 7/7 combined plug works in Type E and F, covering Europe as a whole. Doesn't earth in Type G Danish sockets though, and two pin sockets (large round ones that accept normal plugs, not flat Europlugs, they're fine) without earth need to be removed from the earth asap.