Posts by Denarius 2180 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jun 2009
Seneca or was it Marcus Aurelius remarked that good laws should be easy to follow. Laws to do the right should be easy and to do wrong made hard. Seems the bureaucrats making taxation laws have it backwards. So user documentation and application design guidelines have old precedent
back in the day, newspaper owners/editors published stories that suited their owners/clients/pet lapdogs. Just electronic and more personal now. Given the average punters preferences for a false dichotomy (two party preferred system to you) I do not see any reason to think much will change until truth in advertising applies to everything and all political advertising is limited to half a page of tabloid maximum. A two week election blackout except for polling stations locations may help also so punters have some silence at crucial time to remember what the various lots have been up to during their whole term.
I doubt fining companies will have any effect. Changing corporate law so the overpaid boards and PHB class, especially at the top have little to no protection from legal action under corporations or company law may. Nothing like jointly and severally liability to drive home that this is serious. Until then, only shareholders bear the costs not the management that created the disaster.
not dealt with Oz state gummints much, have you {S}
The PHB class here love making simple services harder, like paying bills on line. Too easy to use bog standard credit card. Like most of the data slurpers, they have swallowed the techno-utopian vision of every online activity having its own account so we all have multiple accounts and passwords to remember, even if used once or twice a year. Its as if they are in thrall to simple unclued spooks, rapacious snooping firms and politicians. Oh wait...
Matt,
you assume they dont lie/prevaricate/misrepresent or oversell the bulk capacity bought from NBN.
I speed tested multiple "providers" Not much difference. Current ISP winds up at a Telstra router in Sydney. Most satellite providers do not offer unlimited plans. Reasonable as one could not use unlimited data over the offered speeds. I also suspect that no matter how good new satellites are, they will be oversubscribed quickly. Perhaps Musks SpaceX Starlink might apply commercial pressure that Oz archaic minded Ministers of Communications still dont comprehend.
Original ISP bought out by a bigger one, effective speed dropped to 10% of original and new ISP blames NBN. I suspect NBN will drop back to analogue copper and dial up modems soon as it is faster than much of the current mess if one is outside a CBD So X25 and frame relay are the future for NBN.
what power pilots call turbulence, we call lift. Glass and carbon fiber gliders are remarkably strong for their weight. Even the Libelle in illustration would cope with wing strike probably. On tailplane entirely different story. Cruciform are stronger but lower performance slightly. The modern T tails are vulnerable. As for bailing out, rule of thumb is below 4000 feet there is little hope. I know of one recent case where pilot _left_ damaged glider at 1000 approx and hurt ankle on landing as chute had just fully opened. He had started to exit around 4000 feet.
My club had a similar drone prox incident recently. Car numbers will be reported to police.
problem is, AC, that no-one makes a new car that I want. <rant> Capable of long distance towing, able to be slept in comfortably by a tall person, fast enough to keep ahead of the road trains while towing long trailers or a caravan, 700 km range minimum without van or trailer, fuel consumption better than 8.5 l/100km means no modern car is acceptable to me. Choice of a truck or pseudo truck aka CosssOver vehicle is not a choice, Even most of the annoying 4WDs sold to the urban bound Scottish Restaurant customers are too small. Adding in the nightmare of firewalls so the stereo/radio does not allow the car to be remotely hijacked means that zero timed older vehicles from 2000s are only choice while parts can be purchased. The threat of detailed driver and vehicle monitoring is just one more instance of the "built" environment becoming more user hostile. </rant>
May be decent station wagons are made some where, but not affordably in the Antipodes. The dinky Asian ones might suit gnomes, but not traditional male Aussies. So for basic vehicle security, economy and usefulness only the last of the Oz station wagons will do.
FLAME bait: Elons dumping of his electric car set a nearly good example. It wont go into the Sun.
Nope, really did use word hire without a negation symbol. Given IBMs marvelous performance lately, wouldn't want it want competitors to hire its senior management staff ? Oh hang on, executives. At IBM I found there was always room for another process droid to make sure nothing got done, really slowly with much tree felling. Especially as coalface staff evaporated. Probably why government outsourcerer manglement loves them so much. Familiar, similar sort of people.
Bwahahahah, Fantasy. Stored illegally and unsafely more like it. Just ask any 5Eyes, Merkin TLAs and no doubt their Chinese and Russian equivalents along with banks,scammers, those pestiferous companies that want a lot if personal info for no customer business reason and other finance fraudsters. Adding criminals would be redundant. All of them enemies of ordinary people.
IMNSHO deep data mining is something the LHC and similar scientists can use. As for the rest, mostly another run of the Expert Systems failures.
yeah, we might buy less modest plans if we thought Satan was going to buy a fur coat. No point if the end user does not get much better performance than the cable link I had a decade a go which struggled to deliver 1 MB/sec. Even the 25MB/sec package rarely gets into low, low MB/sec speeds. Just did a Debian upgrade which was showing 20KB/sec for a while before crawling up to 300 KB/sec. Acquaintances with fiber to their homes have much better speeds. They live where fiber went in before the scungy Monk stopped a modern system being built.
Tony, only 11 years you say? Explains why the corporates I worked for were so very tardy to upgrade. No wonder so many people are sticking with XP, Win 7 etc. Never heard anything other than cursing when ribbon is mentioned. Anyway, much of my writing is still drafted in vi. IMHO, No Win10, no Office2019 should be regarded as promise, not a threat.
yeah Tony, but its OK for M$ and the corporate PHBs to waste the time of millions just trying to do their jobs when the user interface of a spreadsheet becomes a beeping desktop publishing nightmare that has cells FCOL. Just built a couple of Win8.1 boxes (because I had legit licences) and it was not hard to use ClassicShell to make them appear like Win XP or Win 7 so the non-IT volunteer users could just use them. Not a hope with Win 10 and current M$ products.
Personally I like KingSoft because one can choose the newer abomination interface or something close to traditional and get to work. Mind you, OfficeLibre 6 does look promising.
Then: using generous figures then realising only one chance to do this right. Doubles pipe sizes
Now: what is cheapest solution that might work. And the pipes are too small from start especially if not not containing dirty water. Yes I am on Oz NBN, why do you ask ?
and your evidence for these beliefs ? Just another parrot of current dominant belief system. Dull, old, predictable and not supported by evidence, like the claims of oral tradition made by the current relic of a dead empire. Fundamentalist materialists are the most dogmatic believers I run across, nearly as bad as Xtians who are atheists in all but name but like to use bastardised New Testament jargon. To his credit Dawkins loathes them. Flame away with the latest propaganda from the 18th and 19th century...
Paul, precisely why my kite flying suggestions reduces the power of parties and the chattering classes by slowing the news cycle a bit and reducing the power of administrative control by backroom dealers. Abolishing parties simply drives them underground and gives the illusion of being victims of suppression.
I agree left/right divide is meaningless as are terms conservative and progressive. All they do is allow heated indignation. As for getting involved, this requires voters to care. Of that I see little evidence. Most voters in most countries IMHO, like outsourcing their minds to preferred media mumbler. So what way forward is workable ? An informed skepticism and keeping ones MP admonished with defendable data every time the BS takes flight. Any other ideas that do not involve violence or another poisonous Utopia? Will the collapse of the current House of Cards that is world economics have some influence ?
too complex. How about
All advertising must pass ACCC advertising truth rules, especially political, pressure, religious (including the various materialist cults) and charity groups.
All political and pressure group funding must only come from local citizens who are humans. No businesses, associations, trusts etc.
A return to the rules about misleading parliament used 30 years ago or enforcing them again.
All political advertising limited to two pages of WC3 approved static HTML, which may only be updated weekly.
On election to any level of government, all successful candidates must resign from all advisory bodies, parties, pressure groups, boards etc. Only allowable income is their parliament pay.
Any minister overriding technically competent advice does so on their own head. ie no protection and complete liability for resultant loss of public monies. Finance must have a few bored economic rationalist bean counters left who would love this task.
All legislation to have a plain language statement of goals, costs and method of measuring effectiveness over 5 and 10 years and expected consequences no longer than A4 page using medium font. Exploration of concept of all legislation being reassessed biannually to determine if it is working as required. Consider all legislation having a 5 year sunset clause.
I was thinking a vow of poverty might be a good idea but that would stop the middle classes trying.
I have no idea what Brandflakes or his PHB minders think this list is going to achieve other than more mindless meaningless paperwork that will create a great honeypot as the learned scribe put it. A cynic might suggests that the PHBs will also have no way to verify the accuracy of submitted documents so perhaps the utility companies have some options
wants to sell the NBN to anyone, encourages states to sell off their assets to anyone, gave away its own IT to merkin companies, encourages use of foreign owned cloud with the feeble excuse the bit barn is in Oz, flogged off intellectual property loaded quangos for a song which promptly went up in value 10 times, sold its bank off to allow the others to do as they please and now its pretending having Oz owned by foreigners might be a problem. Question: why do they care or is this another way if finding out if there is anything left to flog to highest lowest bidder ?
Do I detect the lawyers usual PHB inspired belief that anything technical must be easy ?
Ian, true, but 40 years in a vacuum is not a gentle environment. That the hardware worked, valves opened and closed properly suggests really tested and well built hardware that only we of many years can remember. The hardware makers get my upvote. Bit rot might be a fiction but hardware degradation is all too familiar.
Scroticus Canis, precisely the reason Mercury might be a good place to prospect if energy to change orbits was cheap enough. It seems to have lost its crust and maybe mantle due to the energy of impacts. NASA did well with Messenger.
On another suggestion, NASA have chosen an apparently metallic asteroid which may be a core remnant for a mission. Current energy technology makes space mining hopelessly uneconomic for the foreseeable future unless fusion reactors can use He3. Then it might be worth mining the Moon for helium, not metals.
I saw Asus before clicking. Win10 update provided nothing useful and nearly bricked my Asus laptop. Had to remove battery, unplug and hit power button and leave for 5 minutes to get laptop to work again. Another marriage of inconvenience. Never had that experience with Linux, Solaris or BSDs. The irony
Only run Win 10 incase some PHB insists I use software that wont run under Wine. I note many Oz government sites now dont seem to like Linux and insist of Fluash and require not blocking of multiple sites owned by noted invaders of privacy.
Only use I can see for augmented reality is headset VR for inattentive drivers who get visual alarms and loud audio when they are in wrong lane, too fast, across white/yellow lines etc. Maybe block FB, texting and phone calls by default.
>> but it's hard to see a manned aircraft wanting to get that close to an 800ft cliff.
Judging from YouTube, some parts of the pom coast have frequent low level flights by gliders along coastal cliffs riding the incoming wind. My own club has already had some clod park by side of road and send his RC device across landing strip just as plane was on finals. Telephoto lenses can be useful both ways so the fuzz can investigate
Try suffering with satellite. One gets at best 30% of claimed download speed late at night with the wind in ENE, moon in first quarter and so on. Allowances are generally 10% of physical landline of any kind at similar price It still beats Swamp over 3G. The other Oz claimants to title of telco have so little coverage they don't count. Claims of 4G speeds outside major centers or living under local telco mast are works of fiction.
What is it with so many companies demanding "login accounts" now for anything, including service and warranties. Even governments wont let bills be paid by simple online transactions. One needs an "account" to login to. I am beginning to think the ruling glove puppets are fronts for semi-organised crime from the ways crime is assisted by these practices.
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