Posts by TRT 9611 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Sep 2009
Office 365. Where the page for downloading a standalone version of the software is accessed by clicking on the words office 365 in the top horizontal bar just next to the cluster of geometric spots that looks like something you should be grabbing a screen wipe to tackle but which is actually a drop down menu to switch applications... and, of course, a cog.
Of course, one way to watch for a leaking dump/drop-valve cistern is to give the inside of the bowl a good old squirt of some colourful under-the-rim agent like Toilet Duck or Harpic-Power. Observe the area at the back of the bowl and see if the colour there fades much more rapidly than an area of similar slope. These valves can leak at a rate below anything perceptible to the eye, often at rates below that recordable by a water meter (around 2.5 litres and hour, I am led to believe). That's a whopping 22,000 litres per year per toilet that could be saved by going back to valveless cisterns.
Unfortunately, since the Water Fitting Regulations 1999 which brought EU regulations and standardisation into the UK market in order to open up more competition from overseas cistern manufacturers, dump valves and flappers can now legally be fitted. Although most flappers tend to leak too much to satisfy the testing required to gain the EU approval mark dump valves, when tested in the lab, appear to have a life of around 30 years. In practice, the presence of corrosion particles, limescale build up, cistern additives and other water contaminants means that a dump valve will fail far, far sooner than a syphon, and it's most common failure mode is open, leading to increased water loss. This is only tolerated because the same regulations limit the water inlet speed (for reasons of noise), and reduce the volume held in the cistern.
Yeah, it does my skin in. And wearing anything with more than about 40% synthetic fibres drives me up the wall by the end of the day.
I dispute that enzymatic washing products are actually any better than synthetic detergents, or even old fashioned oil and lye based soap flakes.
Flatmate: "How comes your laundry comes out smelling alright and actually looks clean?"
Me: "Because I put mine on twice a week at the weekends, separated into colours and whites, for the full-on-dirty-person 4-hour long bastard-cycle with prewash, extended wash, vigorous action, extra rinsing and 60 minute drying cycle, at 60°C and I use a traditional non-bio powder, Vanish in-wash, stain catchers and fabric conditioner whereas you throw all your clothes in with your uniform, regardless of colour, along with a liquid all-in-one capsule in the hour before you have to leave for work, you set it to the ultra-quick wash'n'wear 15 minute cycle with 30 minutes of drying, which means (a) the capsule takes about 5 minutes before it breaks so the detergent is only acting for 5 minutes, (b) the wash is automatically limited to 40°C max and it barely has time to reach that temperature before it needs to start rinsing with cold anyway and (c) the rest of the stuff in the wash which you haven't grabbed and ironed quickly before you head off to work remains sitting, slightly damp, in the washing machine for days on end getting musty until I eventually have to put a load on and pull it all out for you and leave it in a basket in the kitchen until you get sick and tired of tripping over it and decide to move it somewhere, God-knows-where, never to be seen again."
Flatmate: "Ah. That'll be it then."
Err... no, I still don't follow you, druck. end-to-end encryption, to my mind, includes both encrypted point-to-point communication and encrypted store-and-forward communication. And then there's "chat apps" and "social media"? When does "social media" start to carry that nomenclature instead of being a mass group chat app? And surely if "social media" is defined such that messages can be seen by all, then encryption just doesn't come into it. Or are we talking about just the PM/DM side channels on posting timeline/stream?
I just didn't understand that. What? I mean... what are they asking for? It's just.... HUH?
Withhold encryption before posting? Free speech? "chat" apps?
"A discussion I have had with some of the tech companies is whether it is possible..."
Did he actually get a response? Someone understood what he was on about?
Never liked the TV adaptations. No-one has found a good way of doing footnotes* on TV really, nor of the linguistic punning that Pratchett excelled at.
*Well, apart from maybe the 80s version of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but that lent itself to the concept of "Guide Entries". I don't know how Disc World would take to having some sort of narrator character.
"Don't think of it as a loan repayment... consider it to be more of a guaranteed health insurance premium. Pay the premium to ensure your good health."
"Where does the guarantee bit fit in?"
"We guarantee that you will suffer a deterioration in your health if you fail to pay. I think we understand each other now, yes?"
I believe the term is "depucelated", from the word "puce", a shade of brownish red which may be described as that of the blood spots left on bed linen after washing, "puce" being the French term for "flea" and the origin of the blood spots in the bed linen! So you can see where the term "to depucelate" comes from. Thank the gods for modern detergents.
There was a warehouse in a large town to the northwest of London where ATMs of all make, size and model were simply dumped outside at the back. I used to walk past it on the way to the train station every day and every night. No security to speak of, just a sensor light.
I wrote to the company pointing out how easy it would be to obtain a genuine machine front for doctoring for nefarious purposes and asked if they felt any responsibility for the wave of ATM crime at the time. No response.
So I wrote to the council. No response.
So I wrote to the police and enclosed a photograph of the area, of the whole in the chainlink fence made with bolt croppers by the look of the cut ends and of a broken machine front where someone had unsuccessfully tried to remove one. Within a month the yard was cleared of all but the skips full of scrap metal and the whole site had CCTV, IR alarms and a dog patrol.
Well, on a legal point, you'd have to consult the adjudication surrounding Tetris. There is a legal maxim that you cannot copyright the mechanism of a game, only things like graphics, music etc. but it was found that a Tetris clone, minimax or something like that, was so similar to the original in look, feel, operation and concept that it did in fact impinge on copyright. I picked Arkanoid as an example of a similar game that was produced by a rival company and asked the question "At that time, did Atari seek remedy over the similarity of that game to Breakout?" If they did NOT, and failed to do so with many of the other clone games then the US court system would deem it to be an undefended intellectual property, and simply throw the case out of court. I suspect that Arkanoid was not licensed and if the copyright was challenged, then I suspect Atari lost the case on the grounds you mentioned. In any event it puts Atari on a very shaky footing.
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