Re: Pardon me / Pardon you
And El Reg doesn't care about an easy to get Presidential pardon. They are more likely to shoot for the impossible and aim for an Apple pardon.
25247 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010
"they already have the basic shape with their rockets."
FWIW, Blue Origin have them well and truly beaten in the design stakes. Sadly, they can't get it up as high or for as long as SpaceX although both seem to be doing well at going down after going up.
"“New premises are being built all the time,” the minister said. “This means that there will always be a number of premises around Australia that are not yet ‘ready to connect’. ""
Why? Surely whatever their equivalent of Building Regulations are have already been amended such that providing the ductwork for quick connection to the network as part of the finishing out process is in place. No new build should be sold without the infrastructure already in place. After all, connecting new builds ought to be easiest and cheapest since they can do it while the other utilities are going in rather than having to dig roads, paths, gardens etc and reinstating.
"The government’s poor control of Covid-19 has increased the force of the infection and allowed more mutations to happen."
So, how many COVID-19 mutations are there running rampant across the USA where infection rates have never really gone down at all? Looking at their graphs, re-opening the economy in many States far too early caused not just a second wave before most other countries, but now a third wave.
"The whole tier system in the UK and rules is just bewildering."
At the start, I thought the rules were pretty clear. On the whole, the rules now are pretty clear if people bother to notice them. The problem is people choosing to NOT follow the rules for their area. There are two stories on the Beeb news today, party of 60 in Leicester and a party of 200 in Manchester. Probably many more around the country. Huge numbers of people travelling to lower tier areas just for a fucking pint in a pub. 160 find and many more warned in York. One twat drove over 200 miles to go to a pub in Cornwall. Every single one of those people are selfish unthinking bastards in my book, risking catching the damn virus and passing it on to their own families.
Young, fit, healthy people are less likely to get a bad case, but they can. It can still kill them. The odds are better then winning the lottery jackpot, but I bet a lot of those people play the lottery!. They may have underlying conditions they are not aware of. If it doesn't kill them, there's evidence that some people, apparently other fit and healthy, suffering various long term post-COVID symptoms, some quite debilitating.
"No, but you can give your mates millions of pounds to convert a warehouse into a "nightingale hospital" that never gets used."
Yeah, and think of all that house insurance you paid over the years and then never used. It's called contingency planning. Imagine what would have happened if we'd really needed the Nightingale hospitals and the Gov had decided NOT to implement them in advance. Remember, the idea was that they would take all the COVID patients that needed hospitalisation and maybe oxygen feed but NOT patients needing ventilators, freeing up the general wards for "normal" patients, ie keeping COVID out of hospitals as much as possible since they populated by the vulnerable.
"I'd still like to see evidence of this magical NATIONAL 1970s *pandemic* plan where the army, wearing hazmat suits apparently, but not spreading any infection, would feed and test the entire nation for the N months whatever pandemic orgamism would take to clear from the population. I'd imagine in that picture the infected would be left to die (or army style open wards?)."
Not only that, but the army is a bit smaller these days. The army had a strength of about 373,000 in 1970 to 315,000 in 1979 so hard to say what the plan might have been since the army was reducing all through the decade. Currently, the army has 79,620 regulars; 29,980 Army Reserve, less than a 1/3rd the available in the early 1970s, and that's assuming all reservists are called up and all overseas troops are brought home. Any plan from the 70s would need a very significant revamp to be even barely workable 50 years later.
"Where originally the plan was herd immunity. Then that was considered stupid. Now a vaccine to help form herd immunity."
The side effects and potential deaths caused by a vaccine are miniscule compared to the side effects and deaths caused by the virus. Which version of herd immunity are you advocating?
"So I ended up getting my own credit card, buying a few random items and a year later I have "good credit" rating."
Yes, it's weird but true. If you don't use credit, then your credit rating is zilch. They want proof you can pay off debt before they allow you to accrue debt. It's a bit of a catch 22. I've had no debt for over 20 years now so my credit rating, like yours, will be at the bottom of the scale if I ever try to get credit.
On the other hand, utilities are paid in arrears and so they are credit (or debt) and should be easy enough to account for by the credit reference agencies. Gas, electric, water and telecoms/broadband are all essentially the same as paying off a monthly credit card balance.
"perform poorly, never deliver anything promised and fail to make a profit,"
On the other hand, maybe it a surreptitious plan for world peace. After all, one of the states aims to sell the course on to other nations military. If they all become equally incompetent, Cramita get rich and we get world peace. Win Win!! (oe Lose Win, since tr's Crapita getting rich)
"more responsive sites with faster UIs"
The vast majority of sites neither have nor need a "UI", unless you class the page itself as a UI. Most sites don't need JS just to deliver and display the basic data. That's what HTML and CSS is for. I can't think of a single reason why a site should render as a blank page if the user has JS disabled.
"I really can't imagine any scenario where plugging something in the wrong way around won't create merry mayhem with the electrical signals."
USB-C? Or any two pin mains connector. Or any of many others I could think of but will leave as an exercise for the reader.
"The thing was completely smothered in several cm of grey dust which I assumed was years of accumulated fag ash and congealed smoke."
With 30 people in the office, a fair chunk of that dust would be human skin too. The condensed nicotine and tar from the smoke just helps glue it all into place and adds some extra aroma.
Try a paper mill. Apart from the explosion risk, that dust not only gets everywhere, it also completely fills every available enclosed cavity. I once got called out a factory floor wide carriage dot matrix printer. It looked quite unusual in that it seemed to have some sort of polystyrene block inside, cut specifically to allow the printhead to move side to side, even to the extent that it had printhead shaped edges at each side of the head path. But no, it was just an almost solid lump of paper dust filling the entire printer apart from where the moving parts move to and fro.
"You can always tell when there's a bit of warm (or overheating) kit around here, as you'll usually find the cat sitting on it."
The obvious and immediate solution is to make sure there is bigger source of heat, to which any cat will naturally gravitate. Ours will lay down in front of the fire, stretching at least one paw out as close as is bearable. Even to the extant that his tongue is out and he's panting to indicate he's reached the optimum temperature.
In summer, he'll sleep on the sunny patch where the sun shines through the window. He does get quite grumpy that the patch moves with the Sun and tends to blame me for not stopping the rotation of the Earth such that the sunny patch will stay still.
"And the article claims 10% of the entire market is fraudulent."
50% or advertising budget is wasted money, but no one knows which 50%. So, only 10% of it being fraud only accounts for 1/5th of the waste. They still don't know which 40% is the rest of the waste :-)
"Perhaps supermarkets will inflict some terrible adverts for branded products on us so they can put up the price of Store's Own Brand. Judging by a couple of adverts I saw recently, this is already happening.""
That's the entire premise of the Aldi and Lidl TV ads :-)
"This is a problem that could trivially be solved algorithmically "
Could be? It was solved years ago. There are many s/w applications capable of detecting silences in audio, with adjustable levels. The early ones I saw were primarily used for digitising vinyl albums to split the tracks. Newer ones can differentiate between speech and other sounds. One I've used recently is mp3splt which has a 17 year pedigree.
I will add that this is not just a problem with streaming services though. Many cable channels are run on a shoestring budget and are mainly automated. Ads are placed at certain times, irrespective of the content being show at the time. Even CNN do the same. The "ads" come at specific times, not "breaking" the shows, but often flash ads intended for some other region before cutting the intended ones.
"Here Chinese scientists have a big advantage in that a budget and building site for a new project can be determined before many other nations manage to figure out the first part. The years that it took for ITER's building site to be determined was an embarrassment, in my humble opinion."
It certainly helps when you have an authoritarian government that, if on board with the project, can just say "Yes. Build it there. Here's the money" as opposed to many other countries where not only does the location have to be agreed between international partners, but it has to be somewhere which doesn't affect the locals, or the locals need to be properly compensated and given time to move. Then there's the many court cases brought by the various protesters (you can't just shoot them in most countries!) Living in a democracy with restrictions on Government is allowed to do by dictat has its downside too.
PS, I upvoted you for the general thrust of your post, I agree with you :-)
"Despite being shut off from the ISS, they are still designing their space station modules to be compatible with ISS docking."
That might be pragmatism. If there's any future co-operation or even an emergency, there are a number of craft capable of using that docking system from a number of sources. Not to mention that they were probably given the relevant plans, details, methods etc, by NASA because a universal docking system makes way more sense than propriety ones. And it's cheaper and faster then inventing your own.
"c) blame all issues as somehow being inherited from the Trump presidency"
That's a given in politics. All leaders blame everything on their predecessors! Here in the UK, Labour were blaming all their woes on the Tories, right up to the day they left office after being in power for 13 years.