Posts by Andrew_b65

National survey

My 11 year old brought home a letter a few months back asking permission for him to be included in a national survey into weight trends among the UK population. The weigh-ins would be carried out by an external agency and compiled nationally (presumably to highlight child obesity hot spots).

Not a bad objective in theory, except any nugget can tell if their kid is fat. It's whether you do anything about it that matters.

The worst of it was that the external agency also required the full name, date of birth, full postal address, telephone number, names of parents for each child (referring to it as standard contact information). The reason given was so that they could write to parents with the 'result' of the weigh-in.

Naturally, I refused to allow my child to be included and wrote to the agency carrying out the 'survey' to query why they needed identity theft levels of data for a simple weight survey. They didn't see a problem with it.

The first USB stick-in-a-coat-pocket-on-a-bus comment here says it all for me.

Accept malware

This site uses cookies. Some may have been set already. Read About Managing our cookies. Please click here to unwittingly accept the installation of malware on your machine under the guise of accepting cookies.

This is going to be a dream for botnets!

It will be safer to install a browser extension to automatically accept genuine cookie requests to prevent my 9 & 11 year old users from filing their machine with dross. Are these cookie requests going to be certified?

Double facepalm.

SIM Swap

This Bemilo 'big brother' proposition is worthless. Any sprog of mine will be smart enough to maintain their privacy by carrying two SIMs, one for dopey Mum & Dad and another for mates & dates.

Why bother...

... ripping it up and starting again. Apple now have enough followers who's wealth exceeds their common sense. All they need do is squeeze out a 'new' model each year and it'll be sucked up with last year's shiny tossed into the toy box for the little'uns.

Retina PPI? I don't see any current need to supply more than 1920 horizontal pixels in a device like this. Even a 4:3 device would be capable of displaying full HD video.

You're doing it wrong..

It's the way you're charging it. Other users are not having battery issues. The people with problems are charging it the wrong way. iCustomers don't know what they want, they have to be told what they want. Apple have already made this clear.

This is the battery life you were looking for, you can go about your business, move along.

Outsmarted

We are SO being outsmarted by Russia and Eastern Europe on energy. I predicted this years ago. We'll continue to fudge and stall on nuclear while fossil fuel availability dwindles and prices shoot up over and over.

We'll be buying electricity from them very soon, it's bound to happen. The population of UK are such Luddites and the politicians are cowards.

We needed to be building nuclear big-time over ten years ago, we're so far behind now. And the Severn Barrage, which could produce 5% of our electricity needs day-in, day-out was shelved yet again for the sake of a few birds (which migrate from f***ing Russia to stay here in the winter!).

Paris, because she's got no bloody clue on energy, just like our successive governments.

Time travel

It's clearly what's left of Moonbase Alpha transported back from the, er, past in 1999 after it so cruelly exploded, whilst in some strange time paradox our own version of the Moon still exists.