Posts by Dale 3 414 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Jun 2009
I get the idea of testing slightly altered signs to see whether they might be misinterpreted by an autonomous vehicle, but calling a lenticular sign an "attack" is not much different from hanging an actual stop sign over another road sign and calling that an attack. That's not an attack, that's just showing a different sign and having it classified correctly.
CPC are pretty good at sending a multitude of thick catalogues, most of which are more or less identical from one week to the next.
Bolsover Cruise Club are incredible. You don't even need to have gone on a cruise, you just need to have walked past their shop or something and you'll be on the receiving end of all manner of letters, postcards and booklets, multiple times per week.
You may be overthinking this. Rather than kneejerk-reacting to the possibility that loyalty scheme costs might be added to shelf prices, just look at the prices. If they're cheaper somewhere else, go somewhere else. MySupermarket.co.uk is good for comparing before you leave home.
No, terrible idea. If you have poor network coverage in your home/office/commute/etc, you can't switch to another network with better coverage. The monopolistic network provider is in no hurry to improve coverage because their customers are billing agents, not end users, and they're not losing any customers over this.
I just wonder what all those million people out there will do. Not initially, obviously, as I'm sure they will be building and sciencing and exploring and, well, populating. But after a while I'd imagine a lot of them would get terribly bored. I mean, here on Earth we can go to the beach, climb a mountain, visit beautiful and exotic locations, play golf, do gardening, whatever, literally thousands of different things we can do outdoors and in. On Mars, you're basically stuck indoors all day watching TV. Oh sure you can put on a suit and go explore the planet but it's all basically the same wherever you go and, whereas a holiday to the Namib desert might be exhilarating the first time, if that's the only holiday you can ever have you're going to get tired of it pretty quickly.
I guess a million is a large enough group that there will be incredible diversity of people and skills, and over time they will come up with all manner of entertainment and pastimes, probably even some that cannot be done on Earth, but you're going to have to choose a million indoors-type people because most, I would think, would still occasionally enjoy being able to look out over a different landscape.
Long term I don't worry so much. If they and succeeding generations make it, they could in time build huge structures to contain enough of an atmosphere to replicate some of the outdoor activities we take for granted, but I doubt that could happen for several decades at least. It's those first few decades before you can get the big stuff in place, that I wonder about.
So I trimmed a hefty piece of slate to fit the reply-paid envelope. About a week later, the barrage (which had been ceaseless for months) stopped completely.
Did you write your name and address on it, or are you telling us they abandoned their entire marketing strategy and pulled their outgoing mail pipeline, in the space of a week, on the back of a single piece of slate? Nice story, but I call porkies.
A lot of South African expats now living in South Australia must have had a big skrik thinking they had woken up in the wrong SA again. I wonder which is worse, load shedding due to not starting up the quick reaction generator station, or load shedding due to the govenment having forgotten they needed to build one in the first place.
£12 gets you a doorbell that you can only respond to while you're at home. I understand the main novelty of this device is that you can respond to a caller when you're not at home - either it makes it look like you are at home and just too lazy to come to the door (maybe it might dissuade a burglar, maybe), or you can let a trusted visitor in without having to be there yourself. Personally I'm not interested in either of those usage cases so I'd be there with you and the £12 bell, but there are probably a few people for whom those novel uses would be appealing.
A "premise" is a proposition that forms the basis of an argument.
A "premises" is a piece of land and the buildings on it.
"Premises" can also mean multiple propositions that form the basis of arguments, but a "premise" never has anything to do with land and buildings unless you're arguing about them.
Go on, I used the icon and everything.
Indeed. Our fire trainer always refers to it as toxic fumes rather than smoke, because people generally are conditioned not to worry so much about smoke until they also see flames, but if they think the smoke is toxic (which it is) then that bothers them greatly enough to take action sooner.
"Guys, you know all that code you commented out a couple of years ago? Well we need it back in NOW"
Indeed, although I doubt they will be uncommenting all of it, just some now, some in the next release, and so on. They're finding it hard to get people to upgrade desktop Windows now because people can't see the need. Better make sure they don't end up in the same position on mobile, by drip feeding the improvements.
but how are the telcos supposed to survive without the price gouging?
The EU is also allowing/encouraging all the networks to merge into each other so there's less competition between them and contract rates go up. In other words, the telcos will survive because cost-per-month goes up faster than cost-per-minute goes down.
I can see how this would be useful. I would love to be able to play some of the modern games that people talk about, but unfortunately I'm not a gamer, my PC is too slow, my reactions slower, and I generally get killed within the first 15 seconds. I wouldn't mind having a bot which could play the games for me and just send me an email every so often telling me how often I had won. Then I could go back to reading Reddit or something.
Truck was turning across traffic (car hit at 90 degrees) Assuming worst case it had started from stationary due to waiting for oncoming traffic, a big heavy truck with low acceleration could easily take 30 seconds to complete the turn. A car going at 74 mph will cover over half a mile in 30s. The road may have looked clear for half a mile when the truck driver started his turn. If not starting from stationary the distances will be smaller, but still the point is that cars going at 74mph cover a lot more distance per unit of time than many people realise.
Our IT guys stopped a ransomware infection in the act (by pulling the network cable on the victim machine). They detected it by one of their monitoring systems noticing high volumes of files being changed on the network by the same PC in a short space of time. Network files were restored from backup within a couple of hours. The victim PC got re-imaged and lost everything local, but we're encouraged to avoid keeping things locally for just this sort of reason. I suppose it might have gone unnoticed longer if the malware had trickled its network activity. It's always going to be an arms race between malware and anti-malware, but being able to analyse and monitor the types of changes being made to files sounds like a good supplement to volume and rate statistics when defending against attacks.
We're going to need to dramatically change the meaning of work and the rewards given to displaced workers if the future is a relative few entrepreneurs and people handling those parts of design and software-writing that cannot be automated, and a huge mass of people who are otherwise underemployed.
Apart from some of the terminology, this is probably a statement that has been uttered by every generation since the industrial revolution.
You didn't use an icon so I'm not sure if you were serious or being sarcastic. In case you were serious... you do understand how warrant canaries work, don't you? It's a statement affirming that they haven't (yet) received any secret warrants which they aren't allowed to reveal publicly. If they subsequently receive one, they "yank" the warrant canary. It's not done "on a whim" as you say, it's the entire point. If they say "business reasons", well maybe that's because they're not allowed to say the real reason.
If your tablet weighs 65kg, it must be full of the wiruses and malwares. Don't worry though, because "David" from the Microsofts Customer Technical department will be calling you shortly. To save some time you could get your event viewer open now and have a look at all the errors. Keep your credit card handy.
unimpressed with the ability to control devices through an app, possibly preferring to stride over and flip the switch themselves
I don't mind in principle controlling things from my phone, it's just too much of a bother to have to unlock the phone every time I want to turn a light on. Or use one app to turn the lights down, another to start the movie player, and another to adjust the volume on the telly (then have to unlock it again every time the volume needs adjustment).
My explorer.exe on WIndows 10 also need regular killing and restarting, though not because of the Start Menu which continues to work fine (so far)... my explorer.exe leaks memory and generally doesn't last more than 2-3 days because it's consumed all 16GB of the available RAM. (Probably it isn't the Windows exe itself, but some other add-on which is leaking, but I haven't found out which one(s) yet.) When I get a moment I'll be writing myself a little utility to automatically kill and restart explorer.exe.
How to do it correctly: Improve process (+£); find redundant people; make them redundant (-££).
How government/large organisations do it: Make arbitrary number of people redundant (-££); change process (+££); find out how many of them really were redundant; get contractors to deal with the backlog (+£££).
Ok lets assume someone could get into my account. What good could they do with it
Jeremy Clarkson had a similar thought when he published his bank account number and sort code in his newspaper column. Some joker quickly signed him up for a direct debit to a charity. Just because you can't think of something another person might do, doesn't mean they can't either. There's a lot more information than just account numbers available to someone who can get into your account.
Virgin now operate the B787 London to South Africa, and the environmental conditions are just as you say, significantly quieter inside, higher humidity and generally a more comfortable atmosphere. Also, the onboard entertainment screens are vastly improved - more of an Ipad experience than what used to be reminiscent of watching a VHS tape on EP. (You still have to fast forward through Richard Branson's tedious waffle at the start of every programme.)
I was a volunteer engineer for a community radio station. Was on standby but at a new year party on 31 Dec 1999. It hit midnight and our main on-air system went down (i.e. silence). So my story is the exact opposite - I wasn't paid, millenium bug did hit us, and I had to leave the party to respond.
Turns out the UPS monitoring software couldn't cope and shut down the UPS. Line power and everything else was fine, so I just pulled the monitoring cable and restarted, then went back to the party (and later fixed it up properly).
You think that was a waste of bandwidth? My Win10 clean install (on a new PC) downloads the equivalent of itself *every day*.
Previously my monthly usage was around 30GB (some might consider that low in this modern era, but I don't do a lot of video watching). I was a bit miffed I had chosen my ISP's "unlimited" package over their cheaper capped option because I really struggled to get anywhere near the 40GB cap. Since installing the new PC with Win10 in February, last month's usage was 97GB without me even trying. This month I'm already at 96GB with a week to go until my next billing date. And that's *after* I switched off the peer-to-peer Windows Updates sharing which is on by default.
Next thing is to install something like ZoneAlam to try to find out where 4GB went in a 24 hour period when all I did was check email. Anyway who gets their Win10 by accident (I'm thinking grandparents who got the cheapest capped broadband because all they're doing is email and occasional Skype), is going to get horribly burned when they blow their cap in the first week.
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