Re: Bring back the girls!
What do you suggest? Compulsory membership for girls?
32773 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
The finger pointing issue is a more general problem than utilities provision. I know of 4 instances in recent years of retaining wall failure and these seem to run on for years. One has left a house teetering on the brink of a landslip - and a closed road - for well over a year. In each case it seems to be the local council arguing responsibility with insurers.
We need legislation to ensure that, in the event of stand-offs between service providers (in the widest sense of the term) the individual has the right, after a reasonable lapse of time, to put the parties on, say, a week's notice to finally resolve the issue after which the costs of rectification and any additional costs, loss of service, etc, will be split equally between them. Providing those additional costs are made sufficient (maybe throw in some statutory compensation) to make attempts to game the system too expensive, the parties should have sufficient incentive to resolve things quickly. Perhaps as an additional incentive the extra costs should come out of the management bonuses rather than shareholders' funds.
As to the suddenly dumb "smart" devices - well, if you will buy such things..
If they've been made redundant the present tense doesn't apply: they've left and it wasn't their decision hence going to competitors wasn't their purpose. If the former employer then starts to throw their weight around they're just making a case to be taken to an employment tribunal and subsequently to the cleaners. However I suspect your use of the term "General Counsel" means you're from parts where there might be less protection for the victims.
"many will probably be legally blocked from using a lot of their accumulated knowledge"
Would that really be the case? I'd have thought it would be difficult to argue that the knowledge you've just declared redundant is valuable. At the very least it would be ammunition in an employment tribunal and would likely earn a bigger payout.
"For them to still claim that this is the result of Western aggression makes them either thick or liars."
I think they're looking after their own interests, or think they are. They've flourished while he's in charge and rely on him continuing to be there. They probably expect him to be ousted if the invasion fails and that the price of Western help putting the Russian economy together is going to include their being rooted out.
"applications move to probabilistic computing models, in which processing and decision making is based on inferences drawn from large piles of data"
Back when I was doing these things it never occurred to me to decide where to address an order based on inferences drawn from large piles of data. I took the simple route of dispatching it to the address given with the order. This might be wild supposition on my part but I think that's still how it's done today and that that's how business collects money from customers. That raises the question of what extra value is added to a business by making inference and whether that added value, if it exists, justifies the expense of making the inferences.
"probably lessens the life of the starter, battery, and engine"
SWMBO as an Ignis which has this feature. It's allegedly a hybrid in that it has a small second 12V battery charged by a generator/motor coupled to the engine by a toothed belt similar to a cam belt. It's this that provides the start/stop facility so it doesn't affect the ordinary starter or primary battery.
That ancillary battery doesn't have much capacity. I habitually drive over a hill to get to the next village. If I take the Ignis the battery will be fully discharged by the time I get to the top and fully recharged by the time I get to the bottom.
The stop/start isn't enabled unless there's enough charge in the battery. I'm not sure how it affects the life of the engine, my concern might be the other way round. A few years ago I looked at, but didn't buy,t a car with stop/start but AFAIK just an ordinary battery/starter arrangement. I wondered how well it would work with 100,000 on the clock.
"The general public is now completely conditioned to everything being a subscription or monthly credit payment of some sort."
With rising inflation the public might start looking at expenditure a little more carefully and unnecessary subscriptions are the easiest things to cut out. The subscription model could soon be one whose time has gone.
"It will be difficult for Italy's data security agency to force the company to pay up, but the decision could deter Italian companies from using Clearview's software."
GDPR has options for holding officers of the company responsible. I think an extradition request for the CEO, CFO and directors for non-payment of the fine would produce quick results.
"requires you to be tethered to a remote server that may be at the end of a still slow connection"
Too true. A colleague in our Civic Soc. usually sends our lecture posters as PDFs to somebody's farcebook page. She was recently told to use some web page to convert it to a JPEG. Really? Somebody thinks you need a remote server to convert a PDF page to a JPEG?
Could you clarify why Gates and Bezos are part of NATO, who the others implied by "to" are and how they are also part of NATO. If they were part of the old "industrial-military complex" I'd understand your thinking. However neither Microsoft nor Amazon can be no more thought of as part of that than they are part of any other industrial complex, anywhere on the globe, that uses their ubiquitous products and services.
Like several other people I once developed a code generator for Informix 4GL which would delve into the system catalogs and put together some generic but table-specific code for basic retrieval, update and deletions which could then be augmented with application-specific code. At that time Informix SQL didn't have a scroll cursor so it was largely prompted by the need to provide an emulation of this to enable the user to scroll backwards as well as forwards through the retrieved rows. It had some placeholder prompts in it which would be replaced by something more application-specific when the program was worked up.
I took this with me on several jobs. One which I've mentioned before, in a software house, needed a lot of work to disentangle an application which was one mess of Informix Perform screens into a set of discrete 4GL modules using the core generator to start things off. As I've also mentioned I parachuted myself out of that job leaving some of the modules as work in progress with default prompts in there. Roll forward to early retirement out of that subsequent job and into freelance.
One of the freelance gigs was to oversee UAT for a migration to a new server for an organisation in the field that that system was aimed at although I didn't recognise the application name. This was about 10 or 11 years since I was working in that area. Standing in reception when I first arrived I could see some of the screens in the distance & thought they looked very like how I liked to lay out a 4GL screen. Sure enough, when I got there it was my old application having been through various name changes. The default prompts were still there in the stuff I'd left as WIP and so, I think, was the scroll cursor emulation although the Informix engine had had that for years now. A couple of years later I got called back to repeat the gig for another server upgrade. Still all the old stuff left in.
Then you produce the signature acknowledging that either they accept that this is not the standard product bundle that IT currently have the skill-set to support and that either they arrange their own support or they will, out of their own budget, arrange for sufficient IT staff to go on sufficient training courses to be able to provide support. That would be the memo they were obliged to sign before getting their kit. It's now accompanied by the requisition they need to sign for the aforementioned training courses which will take place in reassuringly expensive locations and to be paid for out of the aforementioned budget.