Posts by John Brown (no body) 25401 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010
"maintaining social distancing"
Unless the medical advice has changed, assuming the people you are near are nor coughing or sneezing, you need to be in close contact for significant time to get infected. IIRC, last time I heard, it was 15 minutes. You should be ok passing someone in a corridor, just try to keep it to a minimum.
Thanks for that link. What ir most obviously demonstrates is that trying to get phonetic spelling adopted will always case a backlash because most people speak with local accents different to the proposer and the phonetics simply don't work. Unless the plan is to do away with local or regional accents. To see how that turns out, just ask people who lived through the banning of Welsh in Welsh schools. (yes, I know that's a language, not an accent, but it's the same point)
And likewise, this appears to have been multiple iterations of work done, sent to 3rd party for SDK work, returned for testing and next iteration. Would that really be a new dev with no idea of the device or s/w? The manager was a grade 1 plonker, and may have put a virgin dev onto the device,but is that likely?
Same here, but considering that CSV means Comma Separated Values, the default behavior should be to assume that there is a comma separating the values. sep= should only be required if a non-comma separator is used.
I understand that that can be an issue in the parts of the world that use a comma as a decimal separator, but that means those parts of the world should have been using SSV files, ie Semi-colon Separated Value files back when life was more simple. Nowadays, of course, there are so many more use cases, the sep= option does makes sense as long as other programmes use the same options to import CSV files. I certainly remember creating filters to get exported data from one programme to another because neither could operate with a common file format.
"It turned out she didn't know how to save files and had never asked anyone."
Didn't know how to or didn't know it was possible so didn't know she had a question to ask?
I've met people in that situation where the "training" was so basic, the users didn't know what questions to ask.
But will all that freshly printed money have any value? It seems most developed countries are doing the same thing. I wonder if China, with it's vast reserves, purchased foreign government bonds and positive trade balance will end up with the only hard currency backed by actual assets.
Yeah, we called it the FuckNoSecond too. We were never able to define the duration accurately although the duration seemed to be inversely proportional to the severity of the result while having a gut chill factor of about 11 so the subjective duration was about 11 times longer than the objective duration.
"He could have just tethered his wrists to his belt with pieces of string short enough to keep his hands from his chin."
He's clearly not up there with Dr Sheldon Cooper. He'd have remembered when he was younger and his mother strung his mittens through his coat so as not to lose them. A simple and minor change to this method would worked perfectly.
"a simple inversion of equality in his code would have fixed it, if it was all descrete electronics a transistor or not gate would have done the trick too."
I'm not sure about this particular astroboffin, but I have come across many very, very clever people who see a problem then come up with a massively overly complex "solution" from their own field of expertise and completely overlook the often simple everyday solutions. It's probably akin to the man with a hammer seeing every problem as a nail.
That last point is where once this pandemic is over might be the biggest change. Suddenly a LOT of people are trying out working from home. More might find it works better for them and the employers, assuming they find they can keep productivity, will find they need much less office space and finally realise they really don't need to actually have meetings in person.
Lots of those first time WFH people are working from laptops. If the employers realise this could be a thing, home based workers might get better kit to use at home and just stay there with a dock added to the laptop and descent sized screen.
What might come back and bite some of them is possible business rates on a portion of your home.
No. I did it about mid-morning of the Sunday because despite reminding myself the previouds evening, for the first time in about 40 years, I forgot. Luckily, most things in the house auto-update nowadays. Just my alarm clock, living room clock and central heating. The car still needs to be done.
"Google location services can be turned off, as well as location usage in search results."
Doesn't matter, at least not yet. It looks like they are looking for movements of people in general, not tracking individuals. The majority won't turn off location data, some won't even know how to, so the majority will still be seen as they move around.
"which absolutely ANYONE in power would have mentioned to try and avoid panic"
Most world leaders are NOT sugar coating things and are NOT spouting off about outside chances as beacons of hope to "avoid panic". Not surprisingly, in those countries, other than some initial panic buying in the shops, there has been a dearth of reports of panic in the streets. Maybe those in charge in the US actually think this is going to lead to riots and looting? I suppose with so many armed citizens and a constant diet of zombie apocalypse TV and Movies, the odds may be a bit higher there.
"However Presidents over-promising is also pretty bad news."
The difference between Trumps announcements to his people and other world leaders announcements to their people is generally quite stark. Most world leaders seem to be being fairly frank about what is happening and what is likely to happen. Trump still seems to be in denial, or at least spinning the small amounts of good and simply not talking about the bad. Putin seems to be doing the same.
I'm starting to get worried that my Brexit hoard of yeast might run out before the shops start stocking it again. I have enough cocoa that I can make chocolate cakes instead of lemon cakes. And anyway, if you really get desperate for a lemon cake, you should just open your stash of lemon scented napkins.
The thing is, what he said was almost true. The drugs are approved, are available on prescription. Just not for this particular disease. I'm never sure if he's clever enough to make these sort of statements with embedded plausible deniability or if that's just a "happy circumstance" (from his point of view). And as others have said, he can always back track and scream "Fake News" or call the questioner a "cutie pie" while deflecting the question.
"I'd like to know what percentage of Italian patients require ICU versus how many make it with standard hospital support. And how many in ICU require a ventilator versus making it with supplemental oxygen."
And even that doesn't really inform us on survival or death rates. No one has a clue as to how many are infected and never get ill enough to go to hospital, let alone those who get infected and don't even realise they got it. I suspect we won't get any statistical data that is even close to reality for at least another year, probably longer. Death rates in the media of 1-4% are based on deaths as a function of diagnosed, known case and estimates. Maybe if the Chinese start giving out some real numbers, the rest of the world can get some better estimates.
But having said that, whatever the guidance says, when it comes to enforcement by the Police, the legislation and the law is what matters. I'm not sure you could be fined for going out for a morning and evening run every day even if the guidance says you should only go out once and the Police will be trying to enforce the guidance with the law.
"A reasonable request would have been sufficient. Instead, some jobsworth decided to lecture me and put me in my place."
I would suggest then that you write back informing them of their faux pas and making your feelings clear on the matter. Send copies to whoever think need it.
"Does nobody check out the permissions and at least have a quick look at the privacy terms before downloading and using?"
What;s the point? Even the paid for ones pretty much cover all the bases in the T&Cs. "We *may* slurp all your data and do what the fuck we like with it". Good luck finding anything that doesn't have something like that in the EULA. And of course your privacy is important to them. The last thing they want is the competition getting your private data as well, at least not without paying for it.
Surely the box controlling that display should be locked down with at least a BIOS access password so even with a keyboard plugged the used would get a password prompt on pressing F1/Del/Whatever. Even if this is a remote access (not sure if the local screen would display during this process, I've not personally done it), then the remote admin bod should have been in and out of that screen pretty quickly. Few systems can or should boot into the BIOS config screen, especially a plain vanilla BIOS like that. Some of the more "clever" Asus and similar aimed at home users might do so if there's a failed boot or corrupt/mis-configured overclocking settings.
The general in the interview over his left breast has a tag stating AIR FORCE but it looks like Air is scribbled out leaving just the "R" and "FORCE". Why is he in camo fatigues anyway? He's a general in an office. Don't they ever wear smart dress(ish) uniforms any more? Better yet, why not use uniforms which actually demonstrate which service they are in so they don't need to actually have AIR FORCE or ARMY or whatever labels to let you know. Or do they sometimes forget who they are and need reminding which service they are in?
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