Posts by imanidiot

Yes. Because banks are closing offices left right and center and there's lots and lots of things that simply cannot be done without using a computer or a smartphone. And many use if also for things like chatting with the grand-kids

Re: Chuddies (sort of)

"The 'underband' is in inches, minus either 4 or 5, depending on manufacturers' whim"

Actually no. Nowadays underbust/band size "should" be the underbust measurement rounded up to the nearest 2 inches (There's only even number band sizes, so a 33 probably doesn't even exist outside some weird brands. You'd need either a 32 or a 34 band size. But where in the range a bra falls when new is questionable. For some a 32 band is still tight on a 32 underbust after loads of washing and maybe moving to the tighter hooks, on other brands a 32 means when brand new it is just about tight enough on a 32 underbust on the tightest hooks and will be way too lose once "worn in". So that doesn't really help.

Cup size is theoretically based on the difference between overbust and underbust measurement (with every 1 inch difference being a cup size, so a 36 underbust, 40 overbust would be a 36D bra) but that ignores natural variations in shape, volume, firmness, etc that make that system of measurement nearly pointless.

The "add 4 inches" is very outdated and stems from the time when bra's would be barely elasticated and you needed extra inches to have room to breathe. That's stopped being applicable somewhere in the 70s, but somehow it keeps getting propagated. In the end it boils down to ladies having to just try stuff out, because basically every single model of bra fits different.

And no, I won't go into why I know all that as a blokey-bloke ;)

Re: A little power

Why do you have your laptop configured to shut down when the lid is closed??? That's the first thing I change back to a sane setting ("do nothing") whenever I get a new laptop or IT thinks they need to mess with my power settings.

Re: Outside the cocked hat

Depends on where you are. In NL magnetic declination is roughly 2 degrees east currently. Not really enough to worry about for short hops, but enough to take into account on longer distances. Head east and it starts rising. It's up to about 5 to 6 degrees by the time you get to Poland.

Re: Play some video games!

From a logistics standpoint, gross identification is basically all you need. If I understand correctly their main concern was being able to quickly grab a container from the transfer craft and move it to it's correct location in the space station. For that, coloured labels work perfectly.

Pro-tip: If you ever have to move, label your moving boxes and furniture with colored tape or labels according to the room they have to go to in the new house and ofcourse mark the rooms accordingly. Unloading will be much much faster, everybody will know where stuff goes without needing a single overloaded coordinator and you'll have your stuff close to where you need it to go. (Bonus points for taping final locations for furniture ahead of time, so you can put it where it needs to go straight away)

Re: We want a hostage - I mean on site support

I've done similar things. 3 times basically. (semiconductor equipment support).

First time I arrived on site and the stuff I was sent in to do because there was no way local team could do it without support had already been completed by local team without my support. Spend nearly 2 weeks mostly as an inbetween and interpreter to work out some work instruction issues and "incompatibilities" between OSHA and EU/Dutch work safety rules. (If anybody can tell me what OSHA rules apply for HV insulation testing (megger test) I'd be much obliged. Still haven't worked that out 8 years later).

Second time around I knew going in I'd mostly be the "be there locally to get shouted at and run interference so the home team can actually focus on getting answers" guy. Worked out that way, but was a very tense series of calls and meetings with the customer while there trying to skirt the borders of ITAR regulations, company "crown jewels" and providing customer with enough information to keep them happy. Never been so mentally exhausted after a 90 minute meeting in my life.

Third time was an: arrive on site, find local team left a set of transport lockings in place we had explicitly asked them to check, remove those, then spend another week mostly waiting around for them to get things up and running.

Re: People get this wrong all the time

Given enough training data, time, fine tuning and optimized circumstances, yes, computer vision works very well. But it's not cheap nor easy to implement. Things have been improving somewhat with the advent of dedicated machine learning systems and the likes, but it's still (most of the time) a finicky process to get working right, and not one you start implementing if 6 to 10 years of hiring low/minimum wage humans works out to be about as expensive.

Computer vision is most definitely NOT a matter of pointing a camera at a conveyor belt, hooking up some robots and pressing a green button. Even the simplest project I've come across required 4 engineers and 6 months to design and implement and another 4 months before it was running smoothly. (And this was for a client that already had good training data as they already had a scanning system that took well lit photographs of their products to use as training and test data).

Re: Standards of measure

Indeed, apparently (according to google) a US quarter dollar coin is 0.955 in, 24.26 mm, 0.1733 linguine in diameter. Which is 4.662 square centimeters. Unfortunately an area of that size doesn't even register (heh) in the smallest of El Regs area units the Nano-Wales. So that's an oversight to begin with.

Goes back to the Unix principle more or less. Do one thing and do it well.

And as said in the article, if it does the job it well enough, leave it alone. Don't fix something until it's broken.

Re: Faulty parents

We already have a truancy/absence rules for the children. In this case I don't think there should be a difference between kids missing school days versus parents missing school days. As for funding, etc, there's already been lots of talk of reducing the amount of working hours from the standard 40 hour weeks anyway so here's a good input for what to do with those hours.

As for cirricula, I don't have a good answer for that, but given the massive amount of "public servants" I see in pretty much every country getting involved in education (whether it needs it or not) I doubt we don't have the manhours to spare for a project like this. We're not talking a full year of 5 days a week full time education. More of a short course on "how not to be a total knobhead to your kids and give them a fighting chance". You could probably fill a day already just with teachers of a school explaining to parents the lesson plan they wrote for that year and what lessons they will expect the kids to learn at what time.

I'm not entirely sure what you're insinuating, and I'm not entirely sure whether it's legal or would land you in rather hot water.

Re: Cable Ties and powertools

Most of the tools lately seem to have been bought directly by LIDL themselves from Chinese manufacturers and the quality has taken a noticeable nose-dive.

Aldi's not much better anymore. A friend recent bought a circular saw there. He now has 3. One of which more or less works (the last one they sent as a replacement), one of which is still a bit wonky but fixed with the application of some mild bodgery and one he managed to make work properly by taking parts from 2 of the broken ones and mashing them together. They didn't even want to take the bad units back for Q&A, he could just keep them and they sent a new unit by mail every time he made a claim.

Re: George Carlin

I'd imagine he'd be able to base an entire show on the premise and go through all of them at least once during the set, instead of having only a single bit about it. I don't even think his seven dirty words bit is his strongest work. Probably his most well known work but he's made such good commentary on stuff that is still highly applicable.

Re: The plural of "bus"

That only works if you use horridly incorrect pronunciation on the Latin parts.

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The one with the rather old yet barely used latin dictionary please.

Following and tracking a person without them noticing or at the very least feeling something is "off" is quite hard and few non-state level bad actors could perform such a thing for any extended amount of time. People are surprisingly unaware of their surroundings most of the time, but show up in their peripherals often enough and they start getting that funny "being watched" feeling. Bluetooth tracking however can be low effort, much easier to do and completely unnoticeable. Even just getting a 'ping' whenever the "target" passes by a certain location can be a big problem for the target.

They DO already ban people from stating OTHER people look like Winnie-the-Pooh though

“Space, is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”

Increasing the size of the satellite with the size of the sail means a very small bit in terms of cross sectional area and drag, but is absolutely negligible when it comes to increasing the chances of it hitting something. The increased risk from the added area of this sail is FAR outweighed by the massive decrease in making sure the satellite spends much less time in orbit.

I get a better shave with an old fashioned safety razor. (IF I wet shave, but I can't usually be arsed and use an electric Philips shaver). Modern razors in my experience are almost universally shit.

Re: Why does Facebook still exist again?

It's not that I don't like people sharing their views, it's that I dislike the way Facebook and others very carefully steer and manipulate their platforms so that hype and half-truths prevail. Their platforms are designed to create and reinforce bubbles and black/white thinking. It's us vs. them all the way (twitter is especially bad for this). There is no moderation, there is no thoughtful discourse. There is no variation possible. It's agree or get mobbed to death. So it's not even really about FB or Twitter censoring speech directly, what they're doing behind the scenes is much more evil and malignant.

And why is the go-to nowadays to call people fascists?? It's a very well defined term with a very specific meaning. being against very large corporations influencing the way large groups of people think and interact with each other isn't fascistic. If anything being against big capitalist corporations exploiting their workers and users would be a moderate left-wing standpoint .

Re: Trust

No, but China is buying more and more influence in it's neighbouring countries and is kinda hard to ignore once they come with "offers"

Re: Good Value

Minor typo there, it's the "Senate Lunch System". All that lobbying is paying for their lunches.

Re: I was working in the lab, late one night ....

have a coworker that had a bit of an incident with an N2 leak. He was even wearing a canary (O2 monitor) and had done some checks. All seemed clear. While checking for loose connections he ducked into the back of a cabinet. And almost immediately blacked out and fell back out where he quickly came around again. Turns out the back of the cabinet was badly ventilated and there was an N2 leak back there. He had inhaled right as he had bent down and stuck his head in. And if you're breathing absolutely pure N2 with NO oxygen there's basically no hypoxia effects apparently. It's just straight to lights out. The O2 monitor clipped to his chest never even went off.

Had a lucky escape that he fell straight back out without injuring himself any further and had coworkers on hand with knowledge of the effects of N2 to catch him and make sure he was alright. Came off as far as anyone can tell no worse for wear.

Unfortunately yes.

Fortunately with the cost of todays basic electronics for running a 3d printer being fairly low (though prone to rise due to fab capacity shortages) the proprietary solutions are very often more expensive and more shit than the free alternatives. There's little my fairly stock Creality Ender 3 couldn't do that a much, much more expensive "closed source" printer does.

Re: Let's just hire every person in Europe to be a bureaucrat

The problem in the US is that you don't have to deal with JUST the regulations of the United States of America federal government but also with the (often conflicting or at least very different) state laws and even local municipal laws. And then there's 20001 different agencies on both federal, state and municipal levels who often have their own interpretation on what the laws should be regardless of what the actual laws read.

Facebook et al. don't care who uses their product as long as it gets them eyes looking at their adverts or data to flog.

Bans like this is really obviously doing the absolute minimum they can get away with doing. Nobody cared before the Taliban took over about their use of Whatsapp or Facebook, it's only when it comes into the general public eye that any steps are taken.

Re: I swear ...

Just leave a 50 quid note under the foot of your computer monitor as a contribution to the BOFH beer fund. He doesn't usually care about the foot-folk unless they cross him.

Re: One time for an audit

Sounds like a sparky that needs a good PAT testing

Re: Ball crud

Oh the fun you could have with those. Just rotate the mouse mat of your unsuspecting coworkers and laugh as their mouse suddenly moves 90 degrees in the wrong direction.