Re: not particularly useful at night.
Turn on a light? That effete modern rubbish? We had to make do with an oil lamp, burning fat rendered down from our food, and we had to light it with a flint and steel...
6221 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Apr 2007
Thanks also for that. I shall have to investigate further; my German us still not as good as I would like but I see no mention of useful information such as battery life, any requirements to register to use it, and compatibility with Calibre. All of my books (except one, bought to see how it worked) are already unencrypted epubs and I have no intention of changing that.
But it does definitely look worth further investigation.
Um... apparently not. The option to use a separate search box still - on this machine - does not stop the address bar calling up the default search engine if you type a random word/phrase in it.
Or have I misunderstood you?
I would like the address bar to return either a valid web page, or a 404 not found.
I'm not sure stupid is the word. Ill-informed, or ill-advised, perhaps? The whole online marketing thing is designed to make it absolutely painless to purchase online - Amazon, Ebay and no doubt others want you to just click and go.
There's a psychological block, I think, about handing over five pound notes. Using plastic doesn't tend to trigger the same thoughtful response, and click to buy is an absolute menace.
A true engineer, even though it wasn't him who fixed the computer. Every engineer, irrespective of his field, owns multiple hammers.
(mine range from one weighing less than an ounce (for initial threats to clocks and watches) to a fourteen pound lump hammer (for threatening walls and/or car parts)).
Photos or any other data - if it's not on a storage device owned by you, entirely under your control, and in an open format that can be read by non-proprietory software... it's not your data.
Full stop.
(And for safety, copied in multiple places, ideally in different cities. Or planets).
And?
They're saying that they can't operate profitably without giving their employees the rights and benefits to which they are entitled by law, and that the only way they can continue to work is to continue to deny those rights?
I'm sure slave-owners had the same concerns... and the same amount of sympathy from me.
The light begins to dawn. Insulated as I am by the NHS it had not occurred to me that basic life-saving inoculation was so expensive in the USA.
Nonetheless, I don't really believe that antivaxxers at the (not going to be) consumer level are necessarily making that judgement, attractive though the logic is: I think instead a lack of knowledge of the relative risks and a serious belief in 'if it wasn't true, they wouldn't be allowed to say it' is equally a driver. What I don't know and can't figure is what the people leading the campaign are getting from this... Donations? Flogging their own snake oil?
Your < bill hasn't been paid / license has expired / device is no longer supported / provider has been sold > and we're cutting off your service.
"Oh, and by the way, here's a product or two you've recently bought and therefore would be interested in replacing. And a nice lady whose rich husband was killed who needs your help to get the money out of a war zone. And would you like some Viagra? And you may already have won..."
That's because you aren't sufficiently numerous to be considered the consumer. Neither am I. Neither are probably most of the commenter on here.
The consumer is the person obsessed with documenting every aspect of their life with their phone. They are the ones who use the front camera; who don't care about replacing the battery when it dies after a couple of years because they'll just get a new phone; who are driven by feature count and fashion rather than function.
And there's billions of them out there...
How many times I've gone into a car showroom and asked them to sell me something that reports my every move to some indeterminate server.
Now I don't buy new cars very often, but lemme see... ah, yes, that would be none.
The only ways this sort of rubbish is ever going to stop is if Joe Public refuses to have anything to do with companies and products that do it, or the advertisers - and believe me, the majority of this information will go to advertisers - are nuked from orbit.
One day soon, someone will work out how to put noise into the gaps between words/phrases that matches the noise generated when the robot speaks. I reckon those silences are one of the biggest giveaways at present.
But it's a bloody good impersonation, bar one or two odd pronunciations.
A 64kbs downlink in the early days of satellite comms to remote studios: many but not all afternoons the link would die in the Delhi office. Spent several days out there testing and trying... and eventually discovered a vulture liked to roost on the satellite dish LNB support arm, pushing it out of the focal point.
Broadcast video cassettes - Sony Umatics, mostly - used dozens of optical sensors around the lacing path. When some poor neophyte was first exposed to a broken unit, it was common to 'help him get some light on the subject' with an anglepoise lamp strategically placed. The poor little Umatic would generally decide to have some very strange behaviour, often (but not always) completely unrelated to the original fault.
If you really must have one, stick a camera on the back and show that...
But really, WTF? The idea of a TV is to show an image, not to show an image cluttered up with whatever is behind it. Maybe it works in some (theoretical) CEO's enormous and sparsely decorated office, if it's perched in the middle miles from anything which might be close to the focal plane - but to be honest, this sounds as useful as transparent panels on a computer desktop. Let's not see what we popped the window up to see, but with added blur, confusion, and general visual noise from whatever's behind it.