Re: Can I opt out of Fucking Teams Transcripts??
Remember, folks: it's somebody else's computer and you don't control it.
33002 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
It gets a bit harder when you're working with historical material and you mostly day, month, year but the occasional "14th century". ISO is probably best if you allow truncation so the 14th century can simply be "13". (This is only one of the many problems with historical dates - Julian/Gregorian, dating by reference to saints' days and regnal years are others. It pays to give close attention to otherpeople's transalation of Regnal years - off-by-one is a hazard.)
Only time I was at CDG was a flight from a working trip to Naples (equally grotty if you spend all your time in a big factory) and the flight was grounded due to storms over the UK airport. Eventually diverted to Heathrow, car parked at Gatwick (or maybe t'other way about but client who'd booked flight was in Crawley). Come to think of it, the outbound flight was delayed because of a leaking fuel filler cap. Air travel!!!
"All servers shall have only one keyboard layout and it shall be US International"
Is this the physical keyboard or the keyboard layout setting? The real pain comes with an bootable USB drive when they differ, especially when the WiFi passphrase contains at least one of those characters that gets relocated.
"it looks very clean and remains quite intuitive"
It looks ugly. Black icons following the trend of looking as if a cuneiform writer has attempted hieroglyphics on dark grey is not a good look.
If you were using it exclusively you'd at least get to know the icon set. The trouble is that when something built on this framework, say pdf-arranger*, is installed in another environment it can't respond to whatever icon theme (nor colour theme) is in use and the responses of the system menu button are idiosyncratic. Consequently it's not really intuitive at all.
* The only one so far I haven't been able to avoid.
"Initial criticisms centered on the administration's decision not to shoot the balloon down while it was over land for fear of the harm it could cause"
Perhaps it would be a good idea to take whatever of the gondola that survived the shooting down a few thousand feet above some suitable idiot's house and release it. It might help them get the message.
"As for 'having a backdoor' in strong encryption ... will someone send these idiots on a basic university mathematics course"
No. Just ask them to commission a proof of concept. It would, of course, have to pass scrutiny by independent experts to verify that the monitoring facility couldn't possibly provide any form of point of weakness.
Oddly enough they do tend to use the services they're attacking. They maybe don't realise they are encrypted because it's apt to leak out anyway - they leak it themselves whenever it becomes worth it to do so. E.g. handing it all over to a journalist to help them write their account of dealing with Covid.
The (partial) solution: use peer-to-peer messaging where the ONLY messaging software is resident on user end-points.....and the encryption protocols exist ONLY on the end-points. (So no dependencies on any third-party "service".)
1. Protocols are fine but you need software to implement them. I suppose this was what you meant to say.
2. How do you get that S/W onto the endpoints?
3. How do the peers get in touch with each other?
4. Have you actually looked at Signal?
Boris would and will say anything that he thinks will further his own interests with whoever he's talking to. H may well believe it until he has to say the opposite to someone else in a hours - or minutes time and will be entirely unaware of having contradicted himself. One of the things which slipped out when some of his staff started describing their time working for him was that they kept trying to stop him talking to anyone, at least when they weren't there.
"For example, at the time of Brexit, the claim that any problems created due to the border issue in Northern Ireland could be quickly and easily fixed by the application of modern technology."
Anyone with any intelligence would have realised that three mutually incompatible requirements created a problem beyond fixing other than by entirely removing one of them which was a political impossibility given that the third requirement was the one HMG had introduced.
"and rumour has it Microsoft was actively involved in the Cloud Act (although I have as yet not seen any evidence of that"
You must have missed the reporting at the time it was passed. Microsoft pushed them into it by insisting on warrant in a case where the data* was held in an Irish data centre. Logic would suggest that it would have made an even deeper cleft stick for them as it would still mean ignoring the need for an Irish warrant. Did they protest about that? No, they welcomed it.
* Existing international agreements would have enabled this if the USian PTB had been prepared to seek one in ireland.
It's the unrented, unoccupied ones that are the problem.
I have some personal interest in this in that I have a pension fund which includes a commercial property element. That certainly doesn't stop me believing that the established state of affairs - big cities, long commutes - is unsustainable in the long run, needs to be rethought and rebalanced, and the quicker the better.
The target as I see it should be a mixture of:
- less urban office space
- more urban residential space for those whose lifestyle it would suit
- more working at home (I distinguish that from working from home. There are many jobs, field engineer, for example, where at least some of the work is performed in locations which is neither home nor the employers' premises but this is less likely to be affected in any rebalancing.)
- more suburban offices so work in the office does not need long commutes for cases where W@H does not fit
- more use of serviced offices for those who do not have suitable working space at home
There's an urgent need for governments to catch on and change the planning rules PDQ. For instance use of "brown-field" sites is encouraged for residential use but those sites, at least those in my area, are old mill buildings which would provide for the last two of my points and there are very few of them left.
One instance given was that supposed efficiencies were due to the fact that the WFH employees were working longer to get the work done. The true comparison should have been between the WFH extended hours vs the total employee WFO time of office hours plus commuting time.
One thing that gets conveniently overlooked in these discussions is the time that commuters are donating to employers without charge. My worst case used to be at best an hour & a half each way, door to door, High Wycombe to central London. 15 hours a week, equivalent to about 2 full days per week of my time life unpaid for several years.
Having spent time working without commuting staff now perceive that the cost of it, not just in fares but in time, has fallen on them but benefited their employers and that it really wasn't needed.
If, in fact, employers were to pay commuting staff for the time spent commuting then efficiency of working in the office would be seen to be much lower. The challenge for employers now is to work out how to achieve whatever benefits they see to working under one roof without excessive commuting; perhaps dispersing offices to suburban hubs.
House name carved in stone 6" high letters next to the road and drivers still used to have problems. Fair enough if they're coming down the road because it's not so easily visible then - but we've had at least one delivery to a neighbour from whose gate our house name is perfectly visible.
And the there's the TLA delivery company which give its drivers GPS coordinates but refuses to give them the correct ones even after emailing them the Google StreetView link clearly showing that stone and from which they can take the real coordinates. As far as I can make out the drivers aren't even allowed to stop the van other than the TLA's location so the those who know the house have to part there and walk up the road.
"Down hill: turn left at the T junction, past a field on the left, first house round the corner; Up hill: second house on the right past the farm" would be far better.