Posts by Robert Carnegie

Re: Hmmmmm

If landlord says "my electricity" then presumably landlord is the electric account holder, and either taking money for it in rent, or billing for it separately.

Putting "rent includes electricity" into Google (in UK) shows a trend of student accommodation provided like this: possibly a room with shared electricity and gas for the house, also shared kitchen, bathroom? Or is that old fashioned?

It's still possible that a landlord is "over charging" for electricity although it is "included" in the rent, but that's on their conscience. There probably isn't a meter to charge each room individually anyway.

If it's your own knuckle then it's anxiety behaviour. Wikipedia mentions it under "dermatophagia" which still isn't a sex thing.

If someone else's... guess which awful comic song by Tom Lehrer I'm thinking of.

In ROT13 code it's:

"v ubyq lbhe unaq va zvar"

Re: No problem with most of it, but...

Well... I don't use archetype every day. It's three syllables (I think?), some people won't enjoy spelling it, and I have a feeling that it doesn't scale well: to have multiple archetypes, or a series of daily archetypes containing the most current updates, doesn't feel right.

I want to mention the situation where there is a "master" tape backup of data from the server and it is three years old.

They didn't say that it is for personal use only.

My home wordprocessing needs are "hardly at all", but I also see a role for a program configured to do simple things simply and also explain them simply. For personal uses. For simple minded people. Although I don't think that this is that, and even if it is, being libre it can come with the serious stuff in board as well.

Re: Mondrian

I was going to offer squareism but that turns out to be real and different.

Re: At Pen-y-gors, re: they know who you are...

Anyway you won't get far, and not only because the scooters are geo-fenced apparently.

Re: It Could Be Made to Work ???

Ordinary people in the UK can go on using the US or EU GPS for service similar to current. What the UK won't get that way is super accurate positioning and/or military applications. I presume that using these satellites for that will indeed require new fancy equipment at the point of use.

AddressBase

AddressBase Premium is four dimensional. It has records of properties that existed in the past.

I think they get the spatial data from local government databases. So apparently, I think I heard or read in Private Eye or just imagined it, Dominic Cummings' naughty holiday was literally off the grid in a farm cottage that local government wasn't told about. Probably no council tax either, tee hee.

When I looked at AddressBase, a few addresses from Royal Mail were attached to the wrong council property record - usually not too far out, you'd have a row of houses with the numbers off by one. Or a building with two Flat 5 and no Flat 1. It doesn't matter, unless it's yours, then it bloody does. And somebody knocked down number 11 Empirical Crescent and built a smaller modern number 11 and an 11A, but in AB Premium, Royal Mail address number 11 was retained by the original, now non-existent building. I had to write to someone in 2015 to get that fixed. :-)

Re: "cartoons depicting lazy American workers"

Nationality isn't a race in UK law (someone claimed anti English discrimination in Scotland and got hee-haw for it), but "American" isn't really a nationality - it is two point one continents after all.

"Race" isn't really defined except as something to discriminate on, unless you're discriminating on something else.

The theme song to "American Dad" refers to "the American race" as if there is one (and only one that matters), but this isn't a documentary.

A newspaper website gives me permission to read a few articles without paying. Anything I want to look at, as far as I can tell, but rationed. This meant that I saw a "complimentary article" about President Trump that was the opposite of complimentary. My point is they give away everything but they don't let me take everything.

I expect there are ways around the restriction, but I'm not pursuing that. At the moment I'm not subscribing either, I can insult President Trump myself and I frequently do.

Re: Fax will never die!

My doctor started taking repeat prescription requests online a few years ago. Stopped a couple of years later. I'm considering taking my sickness elsewhere.

Re: What used to be a joke has become fact

I keep saying that Donald Trump is not as stupid as he seems, but apparently that is some special kind of secret because no one believes me.

I do say he's not as clever as he thinks.

Re: NHSX devs apparently superior to Google devs

The information about Find My Phone might be unofficial because it covers the scenario of theft and you don't want to help thieves to circumvent it. But it's just as likely to be your briefcase or handbag or coat that is lost or stolen and it may be moving. (Also if you left it in a taxi or something.) Not where you left it.

Then again, wasn't there a house somewhere in the U.S. that for some reason was reported as the location of 50% of all lost cellphones and got extremely frequent visits from police...? Something like that?

Re: india?

That's not what "gardening leave" means! (that, instead of gardening, you leave)

Re: Sentencing

As of a year or three ago, "Woman's Hour" was complaining that more women than men are sent to jail for the same convictions, one logical reason offered being that they can't pay fines so they get jail time instead. Separately, or at the same time, we hear that a prison sentence less than a year (e.g. for not paying a fine) does nothing to prevent re offending, is very expensive for the tax payer, and is less effective than a community penalty. It isn't long enough for a prisoner to connect with education and other services in there, although perhaps it should be. I'm not sure if it's considered that if someone is locked up for a year (or in practice six months maybe) then they're mostly stopped from harming the public during that time and have a reasonable chance to be further penalised if they do harm to other people locked up with them. Nevertheless, unless violence is likely to occur, making people perform a community penalty is more effective than a short sentence.

Robert is still reading...

Animation doesn't have to move. Derek Jarman made a film called "Blue" which visually just has a blue screen for an hour and a half. Familiar to Windows users... It does come on either DVD or CD so not entirely taking the liberty. The CD might come with "No D" glasses to not watch it through?

Re: To be fair...

I think I still get told by Google on my work computer (at home currently) that I would be better off using Chrome, but that is in Internet Explorer so I think even Microsoft is calling that fair.

Re: Testing

Well, you probably can't use the term "non-unionized" either.

Re: Sounds excellent all round

"No keypad" as a feature? Where we're going, we don't... count?

In one or more "Latin" languages, the word for "keyboard" is something like "teclado". If that really sounds like it does in my head (like somebody typing), that has to be something to do with it...??

Re: Now, tell us, Troy

Are you really in "Today's Ten Thousand" people who learn something that we thought "everyone" knew?

https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/327:_Exploits_of_a_Mom

https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1053:_Ten_Thousand

(10000 is estimated from U.S. population and birth rate. In fact we should call it... 10000. Or how could we link to the comic?)

Is any site too small? If only to recruit you into performing the next distributed attack.

Sometime really I should improve my password for this forum. It's left over from much more innocent days.

Re: Can't remember where I saw this...

Internet Speculative Fiction Database usually would know any title, but nothing that sounds right comes up. (Note that 'worlds war' does not elicit "The War of the Worlds".)

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi

Re: That's a cheap-ass looking hat he's hawking.

Well, if there's still a shortage of toilet paper by then...

Re: Is it really the first?

That may or may not be different from an accurate temperature measurement device, you saw it I didn't. And the new product is a "consumer" model. The Caterpillar is a tough, workshop, "handy if you misplaced your hammer" model.