Re: Just another reason to not visit the US for me then
It's not just the fares. Adding travel insurance is eye-watering
15045 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008
"but it takes 2/3 of the states to bring a proposal forward and 3/4 to pass it."
It's a good idea to read "It can't happen here" - and reflect upon the thought that it very nearly DID both in the late 1930s and in the late 2010s
When the novel was turned into a teleplay in the 1970s, the producers felt that audiences would find the idea of a fascist takeover eagerly assisted by wide swathes of the American public to be so outlandish that they turned the sedtionists into flesh-eating lizard alien invaders. In reality the USA Nazi party was _larger_ than the German one and had Nuremburg-style rallies (complete with swastika flags) at Madison Square gardens as late as 1940.
American fascists didn't go away after WW2 and the USA didn't actively denazify like other countries did. Instead the people involved rebranded themselves as anticommunists and carried on. What we're seeing is 80 years of failure to deal with a problem that's resulted in a resurgence of an old problem (Nazis loved the American south, Hitler raved about Jim Crow policies and Eugenics in Mein Kampf). The gun issue is merely a symptom of much deeper problems that need dealing with
A well regulated militia would be better than the current crop of chaos monkeys currently flinging shit in all directions whilst screaming something about freedums
The NRA used to teach gun safety and sensible behaviour. It got turned into a political pressure group a long time ago. There are other firearms groups which have stepped into the shoes it used to occupy and most of them have little tolerance for the kind of twat who thinks you need a semi-auto carbine with huge magazine to go target or varmit shooting
"only to find the cleaner had unplugged something important."
Rule #1 of IT: Get friendly with the cleaning staff. They can be your greatest allies or foes
Once they understand that unplugging computer equipment is a "really bad idea" they won't do it (especially if they have the idea that it can lead to them looking for another job and you have ways of knowing who unplugged what and when)
write up exactly what's discovered and what actions were taken
The fastest way for lessons to be learned is for it to hit the customer financially. Everything else is "water off a duck's back"
I'm quite serious about this. The moment we started charging hourly fees for callout issues which turned out to be "not our fault" was the moment a number of repeat offenders suddenly had their "come to jesus" revelations (They got one warning first, most ignored it)
One case which springs to mind is a customer who insisted on a callout (2 hour drive) for our staff to un-minimise the icon for the program she was using, claiming that we must be causing it to shrink remotely. Her husband eventually admitted he was doing it to play solitaire whilst she was out.
"Because if not they not only claw it back, but reduce the following year's budge too."
This can be solved by finding out who the responsible beaqncounter is and introducing their face to their desk. Repeatedly
Failing that, ensuring said beancounter's department gets shafted in the IT stakes has an eye openeing effect on their outlook
I think there are few (if any) greybearded *nix admins who haven't at some point trashed a system by accidentally removing /etc /usr, or /bin via various misadvantures (like having something unlinking "dead" directories and having it discover .. )
The question becomes how quickly you recovered and how old the backups were
this starts rubbing at the core of the issue
Most software ISN'T written by professionals, but by bumbling amateurs whose code happens to do what's needed at the time
Couple that with a "If it works, ship it!" mindset from the moneybags and you have a disaster waiting to happen at some point down the line
"Much more interesting were the dropped wrenches stories."
When I was an apprentice (more years ago than I care to think about), using wrenches whilst hanging at odd angles 20-30 metres in the air up a towers came with a requirement to have them attached to a "piece of string" so that they didn't damage anything (or ANYONE) if dropped
Even a 10mm bolt can kill someone from that height, let alone something bigger and I've seen a dropped nut punch neatly through a car windscreen far below on the ground and embed itself deeply into the instrument cluster (which gets expensive, fast)
"and this was from being crushed by a falling crane, or something similar"
He had a heart attack in the cab of the crane and they couldn't get to him because it had fallen.
On the other hand ~1500 people died in the panic of the evacuation, including patients abandoned on operating tables amongst other things
Fukushima province is still less radioative than the Yorkshire Dales or downtown Helsinki (both due to the local rocks)
"And if we're talking about reactors that leak?"
We should be asking "why?" - especially given that Alvin Weinberg built one which doesn't all the way back in 1965, and being unpressurised & hot enough to make supercritical steam it's got a bunch of advantages over the first laboratory glassware prototype he made (the Nautilus/Shippingport design which is the basis for most in use today)
Our own El Reg was pushing the tech back in the 2000s (RIP Lester), and one is currently under test in China at Wuwei
"Twitter's bot percentage figure is based on a published methodology"
So are ISP "unlimited data" accounts that get throttled when they pass a threshold - or more prosaically, user counts that include people who've been DEAD for years
Just because it's "published" doesn't make it ethical or "right"
you may jest but I've seen rounding errors in serious astrophysics work throw results completely out the window
The funny part is that it got picked up because "The new 64-bit systems are giving wrong answers" - as it turned out the old 32-bit systems weren't right either, just different. If you're evolving stars and galaxies don't use your intermediate results as imputs for the next calculations unless you _really_ understand what compounded rounding achieves
Thatcherism didn't even thrive as a by-product of that
Mostly what saved the UK's bacon last time around was North Sea gas and oil - which sucessive British governments spent 50 years partying on without bothering to put anything aside (a lot went into "associates' pockets")
That safety net isn't there this time around and so far the only people doing any semblence of "well" out of Brexit are New Zealand+Australian farmers (widely regarded in both countries as payback for being tossed under a bus when Britain joined the EEC)
Murphy's law states that if an aircraft part can be fitted two ways and one of them is the wrong way, then someone will fit it the wrong way
Murphy's wife's law says Murphy was an optimist
I'm never sure if he took things like the fitter above into account, or the russian who managed to install a g-sensor upside down on a recent proton launcher despite the mounts being explicitly designed to make it impossible to install upside down... (the Proton did the predictable thing and crashed almost as soon as it cleared the tower)
"this is the company that damaged the FPU on the 486 (486SX) "
Mostly they sold 486s with faulty FPUs as 486SXs rather than throwing them out.
It was another form of component binning. Other makers did it with RAM and various other silicon. 4116s were one of the more infamous items that got binned this way, as were 2708 2kB eproms (sold as A or B versions depending which half of the die was disabled)
Towards the end of 486 manufacture they were disabling working FPUs that operated slowly (low clock speeds compared with the integer parts of the die) but mostly 486SXs just disappeared from the supply chain and anyone looking for a 487 was told to buy a 486DX because it was cheaper to do so (not much use if you had a soldered-in CPU but by that stage you may as well buy new hardware anway)
You need to remember that back in the late 80s-early 90s, wafer yields weren't wonderful (IIRC Intel was getting ~10-15% on the initial 386/486 runs) and large wafers were still a glimmer in fab engineers' eyes. Selling something that was only "half" broken at a discount was a reasonable way of recovering what would otherwise be a dead loss
"The only exception to this is if the IoT device uses UPnP to knock holes in the firewall and NAT protection that the router provides. But they would be NUTS to open port 22 via UPnP, even if it were possible"
Consider them NUTS then, because that (and opening via a tunnel ) is more or less what happens to most IOT embedded linux DVR CCTV systems using Xaomai software - aka XM Eye (which is almost every unit shipped out of China using Huawei SoCs regardless of branding or UI)
Their Sophia binary is spectacularly awful and appears to breach GPL, but it just won't die