Posts by Flocke Kroes 4552 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Oct 2007
I don't care one way or the other. I have some faint hope that someone with enough brains to raid a cookie jar first makes sure there is a possibility that someone else has put cookies in the jar. The alternative is that incompetence causes sugar, flour and eggs to be blocked at the border then some profiteer can hoard up the local supply to sell at black market prices.
For years it has been clear that politicians have no skill at government but I used to think they had a clue about politics - until May called for a general election mid term without a few months of bread and circuses for preparation. Now I do not expect them to know anything at all. It has got so bad that I would vote for one who demonstrated the competence to file a fraudulent expenses claim rather than the twits we have now.
You can always claim that what you said before is fake news created by deep state as a false flag operation. Likewise anything you did not actually say is something you said before but was censored by the biased left wing media. If you can routinely spout nonsense like that you can be president.
Is that any way to refer to "your plastic pal who is fun to be with?" The latest versions with "genuine people personalities" would certainly be distressed. I can just imagine what will happen when you go to the post office and find the place staffed by a robot: "Here I am brain the size of a planet and what to they ask me to do?... Pick up a piece of paper."
This has always had me a bit confused.
Joseph and Mary travel because of the census of Quirinius then Herod the Great allegedly orders mass infanticide in an effort to kill Jesus. Herod the Great died in 4BCE. Judea was then divided into four parts each with a different king. Herod Archelaus gets banished in 6AD and power in his quarter is given to Quirinius - the legate of Syria - to include that province in a census.
Was Jesus born 9 years before the census or did Herod the Great order mass infanticide nine years after his own death?
Because if they installed fibre they would not get a massive government hand-out every year to replace copper with fibre.
Just checked conductivity, density and price: Aluminium is nearly 7x cheaper than copper and Iron is over 11 times cheaper for the same resistance.
My first "Desktop" CPU did not have an FPU or any cache at all. Whether these are required to call something a core is a matter of opinion. Back in the day reviews were clear about the FPUs being shared between two "cores". Anyone who made a trivial effort to find out would have known. There were plenty of benchmarks graphs around showing Bulldozer's limitations with multithreaded FPU tasks.
The most unbelievable part of this case is that there are still people around who think anyone but lawyers benefits from a class action lawsuit.
Apparently it is legal if you send the first $5 of each contribution to the named campaign. If that will cause you too much projectile vomiting you can always sell MAGA baseball caps or just ask people to send you money.
Politicians do talk about getting jobs for their constituents. They will often exchange tax cuts for the promise of local jobs. (The promise is promptly forgotten, but not the tax cuts.)
The other non-optional consequence: Cheap labour overseas make goods sufficiently cheaper that people buy them and try not to listen about how that cheap labour is treated.
If you want manufacturing jobs you can start by lobbying for: no minimum wage, no limit on hours, no requirement to pay for overtime, no paid sick leave, no paid holiday, pay can be in company script that can only be spent in the company shop, no minimum age, working children do not have to attend school and all qualifications depend on satisfactory work experience. In fact, all of these can be yours as soon as you emigrate to the wrong country.
The Osborne story is not that simple. Adam did show a prototype Osborne Executive to journalists on condition that they not print anything until the release date. The journalists did not print anything until after the specified date but the distributors found out early and cancelled orders. Then Kaypro released a machine with a bigger screen for $400 less. The final killer was cash flow. There was $150,000 worth of Osborne 1 motherboards lying around. Someone decided to complete them. That required replacing the worn out tooling for the box and ordering long lead time items like CRTs and disk drives. This tied up the company's capital for months at a time when "more Osborne 1's we cannot sell will be ready in three months" was not a good thing to say to anyone who might have lent them some cash.
For a really spectacular and deliberate shotgun blast to the foot you should be looking at Stephen Elop's "Burning Platform" memo and subsequent catastrophes (not selling a product with excellent reviews and switching to an OS that required a CPU they could not build into products in their own factories).
The -9 is a synonym for KILL. It means the kernel will stop the target process(es) so they never get any more CPU time then deallocate all the process's resources like memory and file descriptors. The meaning of -1 depends on who is asking. If root gives this command it means "all processes except for some special system processes". Anything that is not a "special system process" does not get to put its open files into a consistent state. Expect trouble from any database at the least and probably a bunch of other things too.
If that is not terrifying enough, you then have to guess how special a process has to be so survive. How about the processes that maintain journaled file systems, caches, network and disk access?
Around here if a shop gets robbed every month they either go bankrupt or increase security until some other shop is an easier target. If I am generous I will assume you are exaggerating (or the shop manager it committing insurance fraud). Almost everyone else will assume you are lying. 4 videos of robberies in the same shop with dates within 7 days or it does not happen every day.
If NHK's lawyers did they job right then the fine is small compared to the extra profits. Their competitors will get fines that really hurt. NHK should be able to bid the same prices as competitors but get bigger margins because of those fines. This is how component supply works.
Google have been on the receiving end of anti-trust investigations since Microsoft's lawyers had to justify their continued existence after their spectacular win against Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson. Microsoft provided free legal advice to anyone suing Google - no matter how silly the complaint. Over the years all involved have learned from the experience. The complaints are better quality as is Google defence. Perhaps it will achieve something one day - eg Google will have to buy a president in 2032.
Facebook got a chunky fine for privacy violations but not enough to stop further violations - presumably the data is too valuable to government. AT&T got a thorough beating decades ago. I am sure they deserve another along with Verizon and Comcast.
The DOJ takes at least a decade to reach a verdict and another few years to pass sentence. The rest of the world will have moved on long before. The obvious guess for this time is that the telecom companies will not be such a problem in the telecoms industry because of Starlink. They will be a pest in some other market instead.
"Any meaasure that involves shooting or trapping urban foxes is both illegal and despicably cruel."
ThadiasVonBasterd posted a handy link to the UK government's advice on dealing with foxes. Read it. If 10 pages is a bit of a challenge for, try starting with the bit that says: "You can use cage traps and snares to catch foxes." There are rules, including a prohibition on snares in urban areas but non-spring traps are an option - if you follow the other instructions.
"How do you propose to ensure that the hardworking men and women of law enforcement sworn to protect you and your families maintain lawful access to the information they need to do their jobs?"
I propose firing the next computer illiterate who insists I am not allowed securely encrypt business transactions to prevent others from spending my money.
Stop thinking about it as government money. It is tax payers' money.
If Barr wants warrant breakable encryption he can hire people to code it with his own money. I will even let him accept (taxable) donations for his cause. He can then demonstrate its security by using it for all his bank accounts and business transactions. He can make the entire security community eat crow by demonstrating secure warrant breakable encryption is possible.
If you buy your SD cards from the local market then power cuts will not corrupt the data - they got corrupted when you first put some data on the card. My first two Pi's were ordered in 2012. One died from a poor quality power supply. The other is still going with its original SD card and no UPS. Years ago I had problems with defective flash. Sort out a competent supplier and the problem goes away.
Very close to my question: What is the license for the training data?
The SCO Group spent millions of investor's dollars suing world+penguin for using code that they did not own (and wasn't in the Linux kernel anyway) and infringing patents that did not exist. Some counties have a fair use concept that might allow ripping off a small percentage of someone else's source code but that would be a fragile fig leaf to hide behind even without the certainty that something like SCO version 2 would appear.
If I put a link on my website to Someone Else's it provides some value to Google/Bing/DuckDuckGo/... because they can use it to provide better search results. It also benefits their customers because they get better search results. Mr Else benefits from more Ad revenue / sales of products available from his web site. I also benefit: by choosing links useful to my readers I make my website more useful and increase the chance others will link to it so I get a better search ranking, more visitors and the opportunity to hawk my wares to a larger audience.
The idea presented in paragraph 3 that Google is nicking my link creating labour without returning any value just made me suspicious that someone wanted to cash in on mindless anti-Google sentiment. By all means be anti-Google for a reason, but please make it a good reason.
Just because a candidate swears an oath on the bible every day for a month does not mean he has any ability or intention to implement a campaign promise/threat. You have to look at what they have actually done in the past and base your decision whether more of the same is likely or even a remotely sane idea.
About $500M of aerogel insulation was sold in 2013.
'Our lifetime': 0 to 80 years is a safe guess. 80 years of advances in medical technology may push that up to 300 years for the young and rich.
I think humans on Mars by 2030 is not impossible, by 2040 is an interesting bet and by 2050 would a safe bet for someone young enough to collect.
Everybody has ideas for changes (and occasionally improvements) to the user interfaces they use / put up with. Many contradict someone else's proposals and implementing a significant proportion of them would take ages.
If there is some user interface change that really matters to you, code it, set the default behaviour to the old style and add an on switch for your idea in settings. Test the new idea and test that the old behaviour is correctly restored by pressing clicking the appropriate off button in settings. Publish your patch along with documentation for what it does, how to stop it and why you think it is the best idea since disabling javascript.
If you are right, people will start using your patch and ask why it is not included as standard. If you are wrong, take a hint from the silence (or flames). If you cannot be bothered to code it yourself (even if that includes learning how to program) then you have no right to complain when other people do not bother to do your work for you for free.
"Your user name does not begin with a space."
"Use 'Ctrl' to exit the screen saver, not space."
Now for the really difficult one: a user who needs to look at the mouse to decide which is the left or right button, and then while not looking at the screen moves the mouse before clicking the wrong button.
SLS is doing its job fine. Its purpose is to move federal tax revenues to the preferred contractors in the right states. It will continue to drag on in its current form until it is required to fund different states. At that point it will get a new name, a different goal that requires a complete redesign and a bigger budget. Spacex and Blue Origin will have manned bases on Mars and the Moon before SLS can be cancelled.
There is a whole religion worshipping the invisible pink unicorn. The fun comes when Christians try to convince me she does not exist.
And here you see why major design flaws common throughout the car industry lead to their lack of Apple sized profit margins. I can access the engine compartment of my car by pulling one lever inside the car, another outside and lifting the hood. No specials tools required at all. Changing that battery requires only a screw driver. It is not even glued down. It is a reasonably standard part and I can get a replacement from a different manufacturer. Sometimes even that is not necessary and topping up with distilled water will do the trick. Topping up oil, cooling water and windscreen wash can all be done without manufacturer supplied tooling. It is even possible to put air in the tyres without visiting a Genius Garage. Changing a tyre does require tools many people do not have lying around at home - but they were supplied with the vehicle. At the very least these should be sold separately along with the fuel pump adaptor.
Clearly the automotive industry has a great deal of work to do. They are not going to get anywhere until customers expect that a manufacturing defect means the car has to be thrown away and replaced with a new one from the same manufacturer.
My summer holiday job involved feeding a machine that turned rough planks into smooth planks and a barn full of saw dust. Inside there were lots of sharp things spinning very fast and occasionally a plank would get stuck part way through. The fix (as demonstrated by the machine's owner) was to shot-put the next plank in as hard as possible. Normally your left hand remains on the front end of the plank up to the last possible moment to accurately guide it to the input slot. Near the end of a long day I got a little careless and did not get my left hand out the way quick enough.
By the time I got home my blackened finger tips were so painful I applied the obvious remedy: straighten a paper clip, hold it with pliers, heat it on the cooker til it glows orange and burn a hole through each black finger nail to relieve the pressure. The smell was rather bad but the pain did reduce until the nails dropped off a few days later.
Joining OIN looked like some genuine change I should adapt to. Microsoft continues to patent troll Linux, so no real change. Perhaps Linux diehards have a good reason not to adapt yet. I will believe in unicorns when young girls ride them to school.
A) Kiddy has a cell phone glued to his head transmitting on minimum power because the mast is in the playground.
B) Kiddy has a cell phone glued to his head transmitting on maximum power because twits won't allow masts within a mile of any school.
C) Kiddy has a megaphone to shout at her cell phone which has another megaphone attached to shout back.
Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984 / Disposal of Dead Bodies:
It shall be the duty of a local authority to cause to be buried or cremated the body of any person who has died or been found dead in their area, in any case where it appears to the authority that no suitable arrangements for the disposal of the body have been or are being made otherwise than by the authority.
Presumably they did not like the prices at the local undertakers.
The plan is to deploy resources at locations away from the border. Witch smellers will roam the country, decide who is guilty and torture them until they admit their guilt and pay a fine. Clearly you are not considering the options available to the UK government once they are beyond they reach of ECHR.
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