Posts by Oliver Mayes

My mother died last January, gas company served the estate a bill for £40,000. This was in spite of there being no functioning gas appliances in the house for 3 years. Seems their agent had misread one of the digits on the meter 4 years back and when I provided the final reading it was lower than that previous one. They deduced that the meter must have hit 999999 and looped back around to reach the "lower" number. Took 2 months to get them to correct that.

While I despise the man himself, I think his reaction was entirely appropriate. You throw something at someone you have to expect that something's going to come back in your direction, whether an egg or a fist.

I laugh, but I also preordered Star Citizen a few years back...

Re: Just when you think UK politics can't get any weirder or messier.

Now more than ever, we need Lord Buckethead in charge.

Free bicycles for all, legalisation of the hunting of fox hunters, and nationalising Adele.

Re: Amazon Response

10% is the maximum amount of child workers permitted by law. They're just saying that they'll keep as many of them as they can legally get away with.

Re: Try a Lathe

I worked in McDonalds when I was a teenager. Got punched by a drunk customer who then dragged the store manager over the counter by her (non clip-on) tie.

Re: Incremental improvements.

Anyone who's played Kerbal Space Program knows that putting one set of struts across a weak point rarely helps it to remain stable.

Re: Missing detail

It's private, you'll know it's there because they will tell you that it's there and you will be satisfied or else.

Re: you could do that, but...

Sorry grandpa, the world has changed. Every developer here (me included) refers to online documentation, it's far more efficient than expecting everyone to just remember thousands of function names and exactly how every one works.

Re: Here is a first

The guy is senile, he probably read the letters several times then got distracted shouting at a plant.

Re: Fibre?

Virgin run coax into homes and call it fibre, marketing is the death of truth.

Re: $30 ? A *month* ????? Fuck that.

People at that level don't read their own email, they pay an assistant to summarise it and only show them the important stuff.

Pfft, you still believe in the moon?

Re: OK, I'll bite

They have a built-in virus scanner (that apparently won't just run on a schedule by itself?). The video in the tweet went through about a dozen menus to get to the option to run it manually.

Re: Well, black was Steve Jobs' favorite color

How much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black.

Re: Luxury!

Error 812: Packet eaten by fox.

Only when they're reporting on crimes committed by the lizard in charge.

Re: National Emergency

And there was the time he played against another golfer and his 10 year old son. Trump lost his ball into a pond and claimed the 10 year olds ball as his own, with his caddy backing him up.

Utter twat.

Re: Not being an American

They don't have to use a third party, it's just complicated and arduous to work it all out on your own so the majority of people either hire an accountant to do theirs or use these software options instead.

Re: Yes it effing is!

I voted yesterday, I could only choose between red, blue, or yellow. Hard to have any say in politics when there's no option but to choose the colour of tie the shit in power wears.

the USA has made it very clear that reporting crimes committed by your superiors is frowned upon, usually starting with jail time.

Re: Prison for the execs

Pretty sure their Ts&Cs can't override the law about losing private information.

Re: So legally speaking

That battle was lost when marketeers defined a gigabyte as 1000 megabytes.

Re: It's 2019

Virgin recently tried to upsell me from their "upto" 200Mb product, onto their "upto" 300Mb one. Since the actual speed has been sitting firmly at 80Mb since I moved into the house almost 3 years ago, I don't think I'm going to pay them any more. (They don't offer a product lower then 200Mb here, sadly. So I'm stuck paying full price for 40% of the "upto" speed)

I've never had a problem with the McDonalds system, but I tried to use one at a Burger King a couple of weeks ago.

You select the meal you want and it asks if you want to add [RANDOM UPSELL ITEM] to the meal, the only two buttons are Yes, or Cancel. You literally have to press Cancel to progress to the next step of the order. This happens repeatedly with almost every step of the order. It was thoroughly confusing, I accidentally cancelled my order twice because I thought I was meant to be pressing cancel to move forward, instead of the other stupidly named button offered.

Re: Opportunity---NNNNOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!

Humans are sentimental creatures. If we ever make it to Mars I'm confident that all of the robots we sent will have monuments constructed around them.

Re: Unlike others I can actually see the point.

None of that requires an online component, or even an electronic component. You can buy taps right now that heat water on demand without needing all of this stuff built into it.

Re: She didn't smell a rat...

Rats are clean, intelligent, and show great empathy for others. There's absolutely no comparison.

Re: If only

Skype used to be P2P, but that was too difficult for the government to spy on so Microsoft changed it to route everything through their HQ for logging.

I'm using the UK one, you can bypass the 2-factor bit and just use your old password. The HSBC app takes about 45 seconds to load on my phone for some reason, I can't be arsed with waiting that long every time I want to log into my account.

Re: I expect to be flamed

No employee should be able to fully export their payroll data and take it out of the building. The company should be liable for not securing that data at the very least.

Re: I'm still amazed

They mostly do it at night, mostly.

I set up a Pi-Hole a couple of weeks ago. 10 minute setup, and it's sat there silently filtering all of that crap from my home network every since.

Was she holding the phone, or the stick? Like a modern take on opera-glasses.