Posts by fajensen 1362 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jun 2008
I always liked English Village Naming Standards, like: Ham Spray (Marlborough SN8 3QY) and of course Brown Willy, Soggy Bottom as well as; Ascott-under-Wychwood and Pudlicote (there is something devious about Pudlicote).
The more local attempts, like, "Porrarp" (PornHamlet) in Sweden doesn't have the same ring to it.
I doubt the Swedish strategy would have worked in the UK.
Oh, it's working the same way in Sweden, being a materially similar 'heard-immunity'-strategy (also known as Eugenics), the difference is that it is more coherently branded in Sweden.
In fact Sweden is a bit ahead of the UK with a faster growth rate:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-deaths-days-since-per-million?country=DNK+NOR+GBR+SWE
BOFH needs to sleep and recuperate sometime.
With the kill-bot activated and roaming Floor Level 2, maybe with some thermal security cameras feeding it targeting information .... or maybe someone with the BOFH coding skills could re-skin 'The Works' as a pretty and addictive online game, like Pacman, where teenagers navigates the kill-bot around a maze, with a layout just like an open-plan office, eating fat security guards and middle-managers to protect the food supplies?
Nah. For Donald Trump, only Donald Trump matters and everyone else just don’t. Being racist requires some level of interest in other people that I think Donald Trump does not have.
But he does know what his supporters want to hear and since he doesn’t give a shit about anyone he will just give it to them (deliberately in such a way that courts will later block it and he then can claim to be “sabotaged by libruls”, which keeps his fans angry and “business” happy).
Yes it does. No matter what 'the science' says about it, it's a pretty hard sell that everyone, except for tourists just plodding off a plane from Italy, should self-isolate and be diligent.
You *have to* treat your own people better than your customers otherwise it causes resentment, and then staff discipline together with service quality will go to hell!
The very job of the politicians is to make reasonable decisions without having reliable data!
'Data' will pull us down: While waiting for 'reliable data', the number of confirmed cases in the UK doubles every four days. Next doubling is from 6600 cases to 12000 on Friday. Out of those 'confirmed, aka as people feeling shit enough to seek medical attention' 1 in 5 cases ends up in hospital. Next Friday, the NHS has to make room for 2400 new cases. Monday another 5000 will arrive. Friday after that 10000 .... Monday 20000 ...
The 'wait for data' people must be writing their school papers from "Assume Infinite Health Care Resources and frictionless supply lines ..."
You never know: People can do a lot of supposedly very hard things if the motivation is there.
My young teenage son and his slacker friends had a period where they were busy building levels for CounterStrike, managing to use the swine of a compiler which came as part of the development kit (which ONLY a developer would love). None of that lot had any ideas of computer programming or SDK's but they could do program and compile levels because they wanted to game hard enough.
And God - or rather political donations working smaller miracles - Forbid that all those fine, upstanding, folks who are paying those "unwanted" illegal immigrants cash-in-hand to "come here" were ever to be taken to court over any of it!
Better to kick the immigrants down, it's much safer.
Uhhuh - The Fed and the ECB can print multiples of 100's of billions and buy all of those treasuries in one mornings trading session, China dumping Everything wouldn't even cause a blip on the exchange.
No, The whole thing is about Donald Trump draining the swamp only to be refilling it with raw sewage. Then letting new-and-improved swamp-creatures made from pure garbage, like Pompeo, run around and stink up the world at large!
Listen to the guy: "To preserve it's sovereignty Britain had better do Exactly what the Fuck I say!
Not only that, the military usually require a lifecycle of 25 years, sometimes longer. The military also requires that the whole production facility is qualified to MIL-HDBK-520 or similar. ISO-9001 will NOT cut it. The military tends to buy all of their needed product ONCE. Then services and upgrades comes in drips and drabs. Maybe.
Basically, the supplier has to price their offers for 2 Golden Years followed by 10 years of Drought - and keeping the documentation, the tooling and those MIL-HDBK-520 certifications 'alive' for the 25 years contractual lifecycle. THAT costs Money!
That's cool and all, however, Government (yours and mine too), Businesses, Intelligence Services ('ours' and 'theirs'), Business People (The Russian Kind, The Murdoch Kind) ... I.O.W.:
All manner of people with actual power (kinetic and political) and influence on the political and kinetic people at their disposal will *continue* to use FaceBook to 'sound out what The People wants' and of course to 'influence what The People will want next'.
We are not safe from FaceBook until it is dead, dismantled, burnt to the ground, its ashes scattered to the winds, the hounds released on its staff and ZuckBerg himself dropped out of a helicopter over the Indian Ocean!
And? Being Chinese, and therefore obviously incapable of thinking, and they can't just buy one like us sophisticated folks do?
Give AMSL (https://www.asml.com/en) some money and they can do you up with a nice container-sized facility, that does 7 nm in volume and pisses off the Yanks, which is not exactly a losing policy any longer! TSMC are in Taiwan, basically China, whether they like it or not!!
They did buy a couple of Swedish micro-mechanical manufacturers and moved the whole assembly and team to China before the Swedes caught up with the idea that *maybe* it is not a good approach to flog off their best assets to the competition (However, Sweden is neo-liberal lala-land, so, Because Markets! they will stay with the idea and do no action).
The Donald just blew up a NATO conference https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/08/world/europe/carla-sands-trump-nato.html
The conference wasn't immediately cancelled, it became cancelled when several of the VIP's were "regrettably unable to attend because of sudden commitments". Now Carla Sands will find that her no doubt busy schedule with the top-tier businesses and organisations drying out, being repacked by 3'rd rate triers and wannabes.
The US ambassador is no longer a brand that 'the old money' desires to be associated too much with.
I dropped it when I got spooked by Avast secretly inserting a proxy-SSL service in front of my 'NNTP' client, then finding out that it pretty much did that for everything SSL. Only NNTP was rarely used so little tested and this threw some exceptions.
First thought was: "Why the f*ck would they do that!?" to scan for viruses obviously, but, what else could they do with that proxy?
Then I figured that Avast was perhaps much *too* nice, polished and even well-maintained for a free piece of proprietary software. 'Someone' was maybe paying big money for the capability of building hashes of all the files on all computers on the planet and, for example, monitoring which hashes moves over SSL to where and likely having access to getting copies of the traffic going over SSL.
'Someone' rolling in that kind of unquestioned, permanent, funding would be someone with interest in the communication gathering. Like the NSA or just maybe the CIA.
The housebuilders of the future will stop faffing about chasing cables for switches everywhere and just power the rings and put individually-controllable relays on each outlet.
You can buy that Right Now with KNX (https://www.knx.org/knx-en/for-professionals/index.php) and you will get nice products, that will not torch your home, from people who knows what they are doing, like ABB, Schnieder, Siemens and so on and so forth.
No 'cloud' needed, but, it will cost money to have installed.
In current management parlance:
A 'stakeholder' is 'person designated to be ending up holding up a long greased pole with their rectum'.
This can be reversible or irreversible, someone having the option of getting off the pole for a fee, is a 'client' or 'customer', someone renting a wobbly chair to postpone the grisly end is a 'subscriber', the irreversible insertions are found amongst 'employee', 'taxpayer' and 'investor' categories.
The banks and creditcard providers must be bearing a fair whack of the cost of this where they're the ones required by law to reimburse consumers.
Nope. Not how credit cards are wired, it goes like this: Credit card providers do not pay out any money they don't have and even then only after 3-4 months after the transactions were made.
A fraudulent transaction is therefore 'just' cancelled, sticking the merchant, who accepted the transaction with the losses - on top of the 3% service charge. Debit cards, OTOH, transfer the money directly so only Swedish* and straight-up idiots use debit cards on the Internet or while travelling!
The credit card provider simply runs a ledger recording the credit card transactions, at this stage presumably all authorised by the cardholder.
At the end of 'month 01', the credit card provider presents the ledger from 'month-00' to the cardholder.
Cardholder approves the ledger by paying it in part or full OR cardholder rejects transactions that cardholder claims are fraudulent. Cardholder has almost one month to pay the credit card provider.
The credit card provider now goes to the merchant accounts from where the fraudulent transactions were created and requests that the merchant proves that those transactions were correctly authorised by the actual cardholder. If the merchant cannot convince the credit card provider that the transactions are genuine and made by the cardholder, the credit card provider will remove that entry from the ledger and bump a 'fraud-metrics' against the merchant. If that metric goes high enough the merchant will lose access to credit card transaction clearing - for almost ALL cards, globally, because there exists a global credit card issuer cartel against scam-prone merchants.
Now, at 'month-03', the credit card provider has got the money for 'month-01' from the cardholder and at the end of 'month-03', they run down the ledger now containing only valid transactions and transfer the funds to the merchants.
I.O.W: Amazon will be stuck with the fraudulent charges. Too many of those and/or too much lip about not eating their losses willingly and they can lose their credit card facilities, temporarily or permanently.
*)
The Swedish banks for some obscure reason only offers 'Debit Cards linked to an account with an overdraft facility' marketed as 'Credit Cards' to the unsuspecting upcoming victims of credit card fraud. This of course causing an unpleasant discussion between the bank where the overdrawn account resides and cardholder on who gets to eat the loss.
'They' said one couldn't replace the battery on my 'TomTom GO 50' which, as it happens, was sold to me with 'unlimited updates'. Well, indeed it could be done. Opening the 'snap-together' case was the trixy part. Now I can leech more updates!
Anyone trying this at home should use a 'Japanese spatula', the small square of spring steel kind, not the Onomiyaki kind. There is also a special repair kit available on the net with a suitable spatula in it.
Why are they not apprehended more quickly ?
Global War On Terrorism (and Everything Else) needs a steady supply of terrorists!
The incentives for GWOT are no different than when some idiot dolt politicians decides to pay dollars for rat tails, hoping to let The Market get rid of more rats. Then Free Enterprise will kick in and lead to the breeding of more rats since now rats have a financial value (Grandad was smarter though, as a kid he would get paid for bundles of Beetroot 'tails', since exactly nobody does close inspection of bundles of bloody rat parts, kinda like 'we' do when droning a wedding).
It's not 200 million actual terrorists, it's 200 million potential terrorists.
We know from pre-IPO Uber, and all those other money-burning Unicorns, that Potentials will kick the butt of Actuals, Always and Forever.So, 200 million potentials is Growth - visible all the way to Alpha Centauri!
We are still here, aren't we?
Maybe not really. Maybe we are in that astronomically extremely unlikely wheeler-multiverse corner where humanity didn't nuke itself? That would explain why everything is getting weirder and weirder - every time humanity nukes itself everything become a lot more unlikely!
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