Posts by Robert Carnegie

Which nuclear weapons? Do you mean the ones that weren't in Iraq, or the ones that weren't in Iran?

Or do you mean chemical weapons from Iraq or from Syria or from Edinburgh Airport or...

Re: It was my fault - I took the blame...

Well done, thou good and faithful master.

Re: This kind of shenanigans affected comic book history

Robin 2, whose name temporarily escapes me, later was brought back to life, adult size, and has a chip on his shoulder over it. So he may have found time to get payback...

On the other hand

"Space: 1999", currently re-running, has a radioactive industrial accident on the Moon leading to it being flung off into space to have many rather grim adventures. The Earth is portrayed as having a grim time of it as well.

It is or was quite ordinary for a British business or personal bank current-account to provide overdraft authorisation up to a certain amount; easy borrowing by a more-or-less trusted customer - with interest charged, of course. I think my information is from journalist Alistair Cooke's radio broadcasts from America - he died in 2004 though - that this basically doesn't exist in the U.S. and is considered perverted. More formal loans with regular repayments also exist. And credit cards.

Since some time in the 1980s, I think, most British personal bank accounts don't charge for your individual transactions when the account is in credit, which means basically that your bank earns money from the relationship by selling other services or by charging the customers whose account is in overdraft. That's often an unwelcome surprise. The fairness of overdraft fees has recently been scrutinised.

Re: TightVNC development is active AFAIK

It's implied that TightVNC 1.x has continued in use although unsupported. This must be partly because you have to pay (pay again ?) forTightVNC 2.x, which declares as not containing GPL program code and seems to be not covered by this testing. The question then... were users told that TightVNC 1 would be unsupported from date x, and were they told that before date x? Well... it's entirely credible, of course, that many users went on running the old product after they knew in good time that the guarantee of maintenance, such as it was, was withdrawn. However, when it was supported, evidently bugs were in it dating from 1999, the whole time.

Re: La Guillotine

I'm not better informed, but I surmise that if I steal the results of your colonoscopy examination, for instance, the value of that on the open market isn't much. Where I could get money is by denying you and your doctor's access to your own life-and-death data. Maybe your life insurer would also be interested, but moderately well regulated companies won't go around buying illegal access to customers' medical records... well, maybe out of petty cash.

Another customer for stolen patient data would be people or groups who are morally outraged by some medical procedures, such as abortion, gender reassignment, circumcision reversal, assisted reproduction for racial minorities. Specifically they would like to know where you live so that they can come round and let you and your neighbours know that they're praying for you, or against you, and why. I'm sort of assuming praying, it goes with the subject. And they've got money.

Re: Not an IT problem

We have that rule. So I shut down the PC at end of day, then restart it. System updates get installed automatically mid morning though :-)

Re: The guys...

Has he still got that bloody submarine? Or am I thinking of Dr. Evil.

For curiosity, would a fatberg float? I'm in an argument elsewhere about defining "a raft".

Re: 20 years ago,...

When that happens in "Doctor Who", you're basically going to die, unless you -are- Doctor Who.

Re: Gnome vs Troll

You want the public domain to sue Tolkien's estate? What a tro… I see what you did. :-)

Re: Not news

Even an administrator shouldn't be able to log in to Microsoft SQL Server without a previously issued password or account, and without the connection event being recorded in the server's log. That is what this does, if I'm following.

Re: 3g phones still available

3G phones will also do 2G surely?

Re: Umm - yet another poorly thought out idea

You can use the self check out till at the supermarket. It already has a screen, a speaker, and software to prompt for an age check if you're buying adult drinks or cutlery - it automatically summons a shop worker to help you complete your transaction. Some of them also have a, well, I hope not a web cam...

Re: Nice christian values

One gotcha is when a nice trustworthy little app is bought up by an apparently reputable company but then updated to include doing less nice things on users' devices.

Re: Always boggled my mind

Specifically late comers...

Oh all right, specifically "Late arrivals at the (Insert Profession) Ball". In the style of, Mr and Mrs Matrix-Printer and their daughter, Dot Matrix-Printer. (I don't doubt that you can do better.)

Re: At Doctor Syntax, re: email accounts.

It's complicated, there is a thing, it might be fixed now.... I forget what exactly it is but something like, I'm robertcarnegie@gmail.com (actually I'm not) and e-mail to robert.carnegie@gmail.com will reach me... until a real robert.carnegie@gmail.com signs up, then they get it.

Re: Low tech tape solution

Trying to remember the story, I think it was an old News Quiz newspaper clipping, from when a fifth British national TV channel was brought in, that mostly used the same frequency as a VCR communicating with the TV by RF modulator i.e, imitating a TV channel. This meant they had to send a technician to try to retune any affected householder's equipment and check reception.

One of the engineers found no antenna (aerial) connected, but a sausage stuck into socket on the back of the VCR or TV.

Householder explained that they'd found that they got reception when they stuck their finger in the socket, but they got tired.

Re: HTML is hard

You don't want the Government redirecting citizens to express opinions to zanystuff.surveywibble.ru though - although it's happened before.

It crossed my mind that a survey on paper forms also has a limitation of not preventing more than one viewpoint being chosen on the page. For instance, at an election, or a referendum. Maybe that's how we got to the current situation?

Re: Documentation

Yes. This was somewhat covered already, but, writing your best documentation needs to be tested by having someone use the documentation to do the job, under supervision. Then you find out what was poorly explained, or not at all, just assumed. You can't tell, yourself, because you know what you meant.

Re: And how do you show a space

It is not used in the bible. https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/lo-and-behold.html

As quoted, the closest that you get: "And Abram said, Behold, to me thou hast given no seed: and, lo, one born in my house is mine heir."

The bible has a lot of things said twice. It's religious.

It isn't quite the same thing, I suppose. Sherlock Holmes told John Watson, "You see, but you do not observe." And indeed, you can look and not see. You search your desk for something that sits in the middle of it the whole time. Maybe not everyone does this...

Re: Potentially Useless Program?

I might be mixed up, but it seems that the review on the blog said that Enigma's product is s useless piece of crap. In which case, a respectable security tool is entitled to say so. Also there's an overlap between software that performs a function very poorly, and software that only exists as an excuse to throw adverts at you or to mine crypto currency on your PC for their brnefit using your electricity. So are we looking at s case of that?

Re: They are cyclers not cyclists

So they are. In American English. Still keen?