* Posts by I ain't Spartacus

10123 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jun 2009

OnePlus 8T: Solid performance and a great screen make this 5G sub-flagship a delight

I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

Re: non premium

That's more than I paid for a new iPad Air at Christmas. Which is last year's iPad Pro with an updated processor.

I ain't Spartacus Gold badge
Thumb Up

Re: Questions...

Dave 126,

I'd not seen the XKCD Phone IV before, so thank you.

Personally I will find the Gregorian / Julian calendar switch particularly useful.

However the best feature is clearly the SpaceX Impact Protection: When dropped, phone lands on barge.

The SpaceX system carefully guides falling phones down to the surface, a process which the phones increasingly often survive without exploding.

ISS air leakage fixed in time for crew handover, thanks to floating teabag

I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

But you can't get a proper cuppa with Lipton's yellow label.

Admittedly Johnny foreigner sometimes issues you with a mug of below boiling hot water and a teabag to dunk in it, thus meaning you need to wait five minutes to get the thing to even vaguely resemble a liquid that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.

I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

Re: A Nimrod Variation

On operation Black Buck - the first successful attempt to bomb the Falkland Islands runway was nearly aborted because the backup aircraft had a refuelling problem. Earlier, the strike aircraft had been unable to pressurise the cockpit after take-off, because they couldn't close one of the windows.

However, they were determined to make it. So they unwrapped one of the pilot's sandwiches, and blocked the gap with the wrapping. Not sure if it was clingfilm, brown paper bag or tinfoil though. Neither does history record what the sandwich filling was. However I'm pretty certain that there would have been plenty of flasks of tea on board - especially as the cabin heater on a Vulcan apparently took half an hour to get up to temperature - so you were pretty chilly for the first bit of any Vulcan flight. Especially with the windows open.

I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

Re: Earl grey or english breakfast?

I was disappointed by that headline. I read it and thought, well if you leave a teabag in a cup for too long, it does tend to stick to the sides and be hard to remove. Not to mention that time someone put one in the dishwasher at work, and it got stuck in the plastic rotating water jet thingymagig. That took a lot of work to get clear - so I can attest that dried teabags can be pretty strong. But I'm not sure I'd trust my life support to one.

For a repair I'd stake my life on I'd use either dried porridge or gaffer tape...

Congrats, Meg Whitman, another multi-billion-dollar write-off for the CV: Her web vid upstart Quibi implodes

I ain't Spartacus Gold badge
Paris Hilton

Re: Perfect... just Perfect

Excuse me? Are you suggesting that Donald Trump is blond?

How much is he paying you to say that?

Blond and orange are not the same colour you know...

It's supposed to be orange skin, blond hair and glowingly white teeth. Just ask Paris.

I ain't Spartacus Gold badge
Flame

Re: Lost in Translaton

Don't forget that there was still space on their cash runway...

Now there's a phrase that ought to put terror into the hearts of VC funders. I suppose it's at least better than companies like Uber or WeWork who probably have a cash woodpile, ready to put it into their cash furnaces where they burn cash until the invisible unicorns come to make their business models actually vaible.

Then again, if you need some money to burn, there's always Softbank...

Notpetya, Olympics hacking, Novichok probe meddling... America throws the book at six alleged Kremlin hackers

I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

Re: Hmmmm.

Can that be argued? I've not seen anyone argue it seriously and I'm not sure I'd believe them if they did.

It's not as if computer intrusion is anything new, or as if states haven't been doing it - probably since there were computers.

But as I said, show me evidence of GCHQ, the NSA or Mossad trying to fix some skiing - and I'll admit you have a point. Otherwise it's just pointless whatabouttery.

I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

Re: I don't get this

Stop. Now you're just taking the piste!

I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

Re: Hmmmm.

Isn't the guy making an actual serious point here. Israel and the US cooperated on Stuxnet for a serious and reasonably proportionate purpose of stopping the Iranian nuclear program. Or at least delayng it long enough to try and negotiate it away. The alternative option being allowing a nuclear Iran or bombing their nuclear program - neither of which are exactly peachy.

You might say this is wrong / illegal / stupid / whatever. But it's neither disproportionate nor trivial.

Here the allegation is that the Russian government, sulking after getting caught cheating massively at international sport, tried to sabotage the Olympics for no other purpose than childish spite.

GRU hackers were in fact caught by Dutch police war-driving outside the OPCW headquarters - trying to hack into the networks of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Despite the fact that Russia is a member of that organisation - and therefore gets the full reports and data that they publish. Which, while bad, is at least the sort of thing you expect to use spies for.

But that same team had also got info on their laptops that they'd got from war-driving outside a lab used by the World Anti-Doping Agency - so as well as the serious work of trying to cover up a Russian government use of chemical weapons - the same guys were also involved in trying to cover up that cheating at the Olympics. Which is trivial. In fact, downright fucking pathetic. So I don't think it's an unreasonable accusation.

When the NSA are caught trying to fix the Olympic basketball, you'll have a point.

I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

Re: The poor GRU

The problem with chemical weapons is that they're often deadly but hard to distribute. Plus, if they're being hand delivered, it's kind of obvious if there's the corpse of the guy who painted it on your door handle lying right there. Plus hard to recruit agents for your next assassination.

Equally you can't be wearing a full NBC suit in order to deliver it covertly, as that's the kind of thing people might notice...

So you either have to use it in low doses, or in such a way that it's slow-acting. Hence there's time for treatment with atropine.

Notice that all the people who've been infected have been on life support for the next few weeks, other than the one that died. Plus they'll probably all have ongoing side-effects and I'd imagine shortened lives. The Russian guy who wrote a book back in the 90s about the Soviet Novichok program talked about one scientist who got unlucky. And said that he nearly died but never fully recovered and had nasty side effects for the rest of his life, which was only about 5 years.

A lot of nerve agents work on suppressing cholinesterase - which is what the body uses to shut down nerves once they've fired. So untreated they kill you by causing increasing levels of muscle spasms as nerves keep on randomly firing and your nervous system breaks down and stops your heart and/or breathing.

The life support is required because it takes the body time to flush the stuff out of its system, and it's not able to create more cholinesterase until that's happened, at which point it can regain control of the nervous system.

I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

The poor GRU

The poor GRU must be awfully busy. When the Dutch police caught those 3 guys war-driving outside the OPCW HQ in the Hague they had a look on their computers and found that they'd also been in Geneva trying to hack into a Swiss WADA lab as well.

Which seems a bit odd really. I mean, I can well understand deploying your nation's intelligence services when you've just fucked up murdering an ex-spy with massively illegal chemical weapons on foreign soil. While it doesn't exactly speak well of your morals, it shows a perfectly reasonable sense of proportion. But when you're also using the same team (always at high risk of exposure abroad) to try to hack into the World Anti-Doping Authority to try and cover-up your Olympic level cheating - that rather seems like a massive over-reaction. Particularly as covering it up at this point was pretty much impossible. You might be able to cast doubt on some of the tests being done at that lab, or even just get some embarrassing emails to leak and try to look a bit more like the victim of a nasty conspiracy. But by that point the cheating was just too well-documented to cover up.

What I think the Russian government need is a nice cup of tea and sit down, with someone sympathetic to offer them a few biccies and tell them to calm the fuck down. Their problem seems to be that they want to be perceived as badass supervillains, at the same time they want to be liked and respected.

I ain't Spartacus Gold badge
Happy

Re: I don't get this

That yoghurt was Russo-phobic I tell you!

When you tell Chrome to wipe private data about you, it spares two websites from the purge: Google.com, YouTube

I ain't Spartacus Gold badge
Happy

Re: Flash

deadlockvictim,

It is cheesy. But in a good way. I wouldn't say that the special effects haven't aged well, but only because they weren't all that good in the first place... But the soundtrack is great, I particularly love the bit when the Wedding March starts up, and it's full-on Queen guitars-a-go-go.

It's good, leave-your-brain-at-the-door fun. And no worse for it. Even when future Blue Peter presenter Peter Duncan is failing to act and saying, "spare me the madness" before being killed off by future James Bond Timothy Dalton.

If I wasn't at work I'd crank up the speakers right now and chuck a bit of Queen on.

I ain't Spartacus Gold badge
Happy

Re: What's "site data"?

Flash still exists?

Don't you mean, "Gordon's Alive?!?!"

Dum! Dum! Dum! Dum! Dum!

"Deespatch Var Rocket Ajax to breeng back his body!"

I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

Re: "We asked Google for an explanation."

Nope. Good guess though. After all, it's worked before. But the article has now been updated to say "it's a bug that will be corrected". Which is another favourite.

There's a story, I don't know if it's actually true mind, about Macy's department store in the 1920s. If a customer cut up really rough, and was a really entitled arse abot their complaint then the manager could summon a particular guy. Don't know what his day job was, but his side role was to be sacked. So said manager would listen to the complaint and then tell the customer that they'd deal with the person responsible. This guy would then be summoned, dressed-down in front of the customer and told that they were dismissed. Then it was back to wherever they came from an on with whatever they were doing. Unless Macy's had so may annoying customers that the guy was getting "sacked" every half hour...

Anyway I feel that it's time Google got themselves a nice sacrificial engineer - perhaps with a particularly fetching hat - that they can publicly wheel out and sack whenever they want to use this excuse. It can be the same one every time, its not like they don't know that we know that they're lying through their teeth. But at least it makes the pretence more interesting. Perhaps a trained actor, who can cry on cue and give us a better show...

If you're feeling down, know that we've just buried a heat sensor in an alien planet. If NASA can get through Mars soil, we can get through 2020

I ain't Spartacus Gold badge
Devil

A quick tap on the bottom from a shovel should sort you out nicely sir.

The vid-confs drinking game: Down a shot of brandy every time someone titters 'Sorry, I was on mute'

I ain't Spartacus Gold badge
Coat

Oh! Oh! I know these!

I’ve prepared since childhood for this one...

Q. What time is it, when an elephant sits on your fence?

A. Time to get a new one.

or

Q. What did Tarzan say when he saw the elephants coming into the kitchen?

A. Swim for it!

I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

Re: Alternate reality

Shadow Systems,

How's your poetry? I warn you that your chosen route off-world holds certain dangers. You may be better off hitching a lift with a teaser. On t'other hand, not being able to see the Vogons is a distinct advantage...

When my brother was looking for a pub to run - something similar had happened to one of his candidates. The place was at least 150 years old, but had just lost access to its own garden! Local residents had comoplained to the council that they could here people in the pub garden of a Saturday night having fun, laughing and *gasp!* swearing! For shame!

So the licensing conditions had been changed, and they can no longer open up the garden, which meant he couldn't have tables out there to make enough money from food in the Summer - when you can fill a small pub wth diners twice over. So he took another, more rural, pub with a garden instead.

You can bet those same wankers willl be whining on about how annoying it is that their local pub has closed and how it's definitely all down to the evil breweries taking all the profits.

I ain't Spartacus Gold badge
Pint

Re: Me and the wife have a problem....

How can having too much booze on hand constitute a problem?

But even if it is, I would like to quote you the usual bollocks from lifestyle coaches, management consultants and their ilk. Which fits rather well in this case.

"There's no such thing as problems, only opportunities."

...glug...

I ain't Spartacus Gold badge
Happy

Re: Sequencing universes

“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarrely inexplicable.

There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”

I ain't Spartacus Gold badge
Happy

Re: Alternate reality

I stayed with my Aunt and Uncle a few years ago - in the more rural "posh" bits of Essex, where it gets dangerously close to Suffolk.

So its hot, its August, I'm sleeping with the windows open. I get woken from my drunken slumber by the local cockerels announcing that this is the countryside dammit! Why aren't you up you lazy townie bastard! Fair enough, I knew the risk when I left the window open, this is a noise I can safely ignore and roll over and go back to sleep.

Half an hour later, the local peacocks go off! Which is a pleasant but unearthly noise when you hear distant ones while visiting a National Trust garden or something. But when the damned thing has decided to perch on the roof, right under your window and screamed at the top of its lungs as if a small alien child is being murdered... That's the kind of sound that might make you distrust the country, and assume all the farmers are up early murdering people of a Sunday morning...

We bought a knockoff Lego launchpad kit from China for our Saturn V rocket so you don't have to

I ain't Spartacus Gold badge
Coat

Although Werner von Braun did create an awful lot of work for plasterers (and various other members of the building trade) in his earlier career...

Elizabeth Holmes' plan to avoid her Theranos fraud trial worked out about as well as her useless blood-testing machines

I ain't Spartacus Gold badge
Devil

But, injecting disinfectant will get rid of Covid-19. If you say dilute the blood with 10% disinfectant I'm sure that this will kill all the cells and viruses in your bloodstream quite effectively...

It'll end all your other problems as well, and guarantee you a long future of peace and quiet.

Mark Zuckerberg, 36, decides that having people on his website deny the deaths of six million Jews is a bad thing

I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

Re: Censorship vs Regulation

That's a fair enough argument. Zuckerberg is not responsible for what anyone posts on Facebook. If it's highly offensive or illegal, then it's perfectly fine to wait until someone sees it and reports it, then remove it. I'm fine with that.

However, once Facebook take something that one of their users post and turn it into content that Facebook choose to share - once they post it to the feeds of other users - then Facebook have published that post. And Facebook are then jointly responsible with the person that wrote it. They currently have an exemption from that law (the so-called Safe Harbour), which I don't think is either politically tenable nor morally justifiable. Once FB have the same legal liabilities as El Reg, for doing the same thing, then I'm happy.

But Zuckerberg likes his free user-generate content. And doesn't want to be responsible for what he publishes. Or to have to pay to generate usuable content to sell adverts alongside. So his easy answer is to ban that stuff from FB. Which is fine too, it's a private company, and a private network - and so if he doesn't like it he has the right not to carry it.

I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

Re: I met one the other day

Eclectic Man,

What do you mean "morphed into"? Communism has always been a totalitarian regime

I'd agree, but the Chinese Communist Party were communist for a long time. Having started to liberalise the economy since the 80s to some extent they were undergoing a period of change. With a system in place of regular leadership changes, so they were some kind of oligarchy, rather than a dictatorship. Admittedly this wasn't really to protect the people, but to stop some single person taking charge and starting up all the purges of other Party leaders again, that Mao used to enjoy indulging in so much. However now they've let Xi Xinping take over as something close to leader for life, they've got the hyper-nationalism and corporatism and believe that everybody/everything should be subservient to the needs of the state. So I'd say they now meet the definition, in a way they didn't say 10-15 years ago.

I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

Re: Ever increasing totals

More jews were killed by firing squad or in gas lorries in Russia than at Auschwitz-Birkenau. That was what the SS Einsatzgruppen were doing before the death camps were built. The Wanasee Conference (on "the Final Solution to the Jewish Problem in Europe") was called partly to find a more efficient way of murdering all the people they wanted to - because it's logistically hard to kill people in that way and also it's hard to find troops who can keep murdering people without morale collapsing.

But as well as the death camps, we also have the concentration camps. The two are not quite the same. The SS had their own entire separate war economy, producing their own weapons and uniforms. Much of it done by slave labour in the camps. The prisoners were mostly deliberately fed fewer calories than they burned doing the work demanded of them. This was I believe actually worked out too, not just chance and wartime shortages. So I guess they were also death camps really, but they didn't have the gas chambers and crematoria - but that's what camps like Belsen and Ravensbruck were.

Plus the Nazis had a whole department of slave labour, the Organisation Todt. So lots of people like Russian prisoners of war were fed into that, and worked to death, building roads, bunkers, invasion defences.

There's also all the special factories for Hitler's favourite weapons, that were often buried in mountains. And were horrifically expensive in lives of slave labour. I believe the SS killed more workers building V2 rockets (and their factories) than they killed people using the damned things.

I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

Re: I met one the other day

Your post prompted me to look it up, as my memory was that the total figure was something like 12 million - but that's many years ago and history changes a lot as new facts are discovered. Or old ones revised.

Looks like one total is about 17.3m. Although that makes me wonder if modern definitions are getting a bit loose. As it includes 5.7m Soviet civilians - which is an awful lot and I suspect that's including deaths by hunger in the areas around the fighting? Although admittedly quite a lot of that was deliberate. It's way more than the Todt organisation used in slave labour - and many of those were Soviet prisoners of war - of which 3m were also killed.

I knew about the Jehova's Witnesses, German opposition, people with disabilities and the Roma - something above half a million of whom were killed.

I'd known the occupation of Yugoslavia was particularly brutal, but hadn't realised the sheer numbers of Serb civilians murdered is over 300,000.

But even if you don't count Russian and Polish civilians not killed in camps - many of whose deaths were in massacres and many others by deliberate starvation, you're still left with 6m Jews, at least 200,000 Poles, 3m Russian prisoners of war, 500,000 Roma and disabled, plus others.

My source: link

I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

Re: I met one the other day

It's one of the great things about being a conspiracy nut. You never have to be wrong, because even good evidence of statistics or testimonies and photographs can simply be dismissed as fakes created by the conspiracy. So you need never lose an argument - you just bring up the next level of the conspiracy.

It wouldn't surprise me if the stuff about swimming pools and "friendly sports competition between jews and SS guards" was originally created by the Nazis at the time. I seem to remember they promoted Theresienstadt as something like a model community - rather than what it actually was, which was a place to hold people until they could be sent off to the death camps.

Nowadays the Chinese government talks about it's "career training" camps in Xinjiang. Quite why Uyghur people can't do these lessons at home, rather than behind barbed wire, isn't made clear... Presumably nobody's supposed to actually believe this shit, it's just enough of an excuse for offficials to not have to admit that they're representatives of a basically fascist government (which doesn't seem to be an unfair description of what the Chinese Communist Party has morphed into).

I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

Dave-numbers,

Facebook haven't ever chosen to treat content equally. They have a set of algorithms that generate all their users' news feeds. Said algorithms aim to push targetted adverts for profit, as well as a mix of posts from family, friends and whatever Facebook groups they've joined, as well as news, politics, cat videos, random stuff from the internet and weird quizzes designed to gain personal data or get people to sign themselves or friends up to marketing mailing lists.

Facebook actively choose everything that goes into those news feeds. Obviously they don't have a bloke sitting at a desk deciding what will go into each person's feed today - and users' have some power over what they see by actively clicking on posts to say they don't want to see more of that type of stuff. As well as FB following people's preferences - so they'll get more of what they've previously clicked on. After all, the aim is to gain more ad sales by keeping people using Facebook as their main portal to the rest of the internet.

But algorithmically-generated or not, Facebook are responsible for those choices that they are making. After all, they designed those algorithms.

One of the traits of Facebook has been that because all they care about is user engagement, they've tended to push users' into echo-chambers. Showing them only stuff they like and spend time looking at. So if you're my Mum, you're interested in family stuff and all those weird quizzes. But not interested in clicking on the politics or cat videos. So her feed, that I've seen while fixing her computer, is full of family posts and shitty quizzes.

Similarly my mate, on the soft left of the Labour Party, gets almost all political stories. And of course it's all from the new lefty media (places like Sqwawkbox, the Canary) as well as the more traditional Guardian. But it seems to be that the more you stoke up the outrage, the more clicks you get and the more Facebook therefore push your posts. Which is one of the forces increasing polarisation in politics, in my opinion.

If Facebook lose their protection from the responsibilities that other publishers face, then they'll have to account for the stuff that they push into their users' news feeds. As they should be, given that they're the ones doing it. That would destroy their business model, because they don't have the resources, competence or intention to do that checking. So banning the things that most annoy the politicians who might regulate them appears to be their current tactic. Much cheaper than actually taking their responsibility as a news publisher seriously and doing a proper job. The next alternative is to get out of news publishing, and just to show family pictures and adverts - but that risks them making less money.

I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

JDX,

I agree with you that censorship isn't the greatest idea. And nobody should be comfortable with giving the power of deciding to people like Zuckerberg's Facebook - and Google and Twitter are little better.

On the other hand though, Facebook is a private platform and therefore has the right to allow or ban stuff on it - without that being censorship. As does El Reg on its forums. Or say Disney, who have supposedly child-safe forums - which is something they can only achieve by paying serious numbers of people to moderate said forums and keep the teenagers from pretending to be 6 so they can swear at or troll young children.

Personally I think the main problem isn't Facebook banning stuff or not - it's Facebook promoting stuff. Their whole money-making scheme is predicated on two things. Keeping people engaged and spending time on the site, and selling them adverts. The way they've chosen to do that is via the "news" stream. So the idea is that you see a steady bunch of posts from all your "friends" intermingled with adverts and whatever content from randoms that FB's algorithms choose to promote at you. Often targetted (if political) to agree with your prejudices/beliefs in order to keep you all happy and give you the warm and fuzzy feeling of being safe in the club. The whole point of this all is to give the adverts (and for some weird reason promoted content) the warm and fuzzy glow of approval that it's come from your friends and so if more trustworthy than if Facebook were just spewing a series of adverts at you all day. Which is of course exactly what they're doing.

Clearly they've in the past decided that spewing a stream of horrible views at some users is worth it, because it might re-inforce their own horrible views and therefore keep them online and consuming adverts.

Rather than face up to the implications of this, I guess it's easier for Zuckerberg to pontificate about free speech and consider banning "unacceptable" speech. Because the alternative is to admit that he's promoted hate speech in order to make a little extra profit - and is only really looking at stopping now that there's a serious risk of losing even more profit through possible government regulation.

I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

I met one the other day

Met a chap I'd not seen in decades. And to be honest barely remembered. Life had clearly not been kind to him over that time - and I don't know if that's why he'd retreated into conspiracy nutjobbery. Or if maybe the conspiracy theories were a symptom of other problems that were part of the reason his life hadn't gone so well. It wasn't a comfortable conversation anyway. And he had a whole list of people whose fault everything was - but then maybe that's a more comfortable place to view the world from - if things haven't gone well for you?

Anyway I met a version of holocaust denial I'd not come across before. Presumably because even some conspiracy nuts have "standards", and denying one of the worst crimes in history does tend to make you look bad. So it turns out there is a massive conspiracy, either by or in favour of the Jews, to big up the holocaust. To give them special victim status of something. Yes there were death camps, and yes the Nazis did kill some Jews. But the numbers have been inflated, "and it was only a couple of million". So apparently that's fine...

I guess here, everone's a winner? Because normal people can perhaps still be satisified that you aren't a complete heartless idiot. But you are still able to feel that you're one of the cognoscenti - knowing the deeper truths that mere sheeple are too blinded by our global overlords to discover. Personally I'm struggling with the use of the words "only" and "couple" when talking about millions. But then as Stalin supposedly said, "one death is a tragedy but a million is merely a statistic." And I guess if you think the jews* are part of the global conspiracy then maybe "only" a couple of million of them dying isn't all that bad?

It's an outlook I struggle to comprehend.

* Should "The Jews" be captitalised/italicised, and possibly in bold here and maybe followed by [TM]? Scare quotes a further option...

Contract to run .eu domain-name registry is up for grabs as Brussels tries to avoid a .co-style debacle

I ain't Spartacus Gold badge
Happy

Re: Reg, you mentioned the UK....

I think you'll find Nominet are very definitely a non-profit organisation.

Admittedly it's not for lack of trying...

I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

Have you not noticed that The Register publish an anti-Nominet article about twice a month? Or more, if there's occasion to. Which given the pisspoor state of Nominet's board is often the case. They even take a dig at Nominet in the bloody article.

So why the whiny defence of the admittedly less poor EU processes? There article is fully self-aware - the Register are simply doing their job of reporting poor practise where they find it. In this case the Commission's various bizarre gyrations on Brexit policy - when they could have just left things well alone and watied until it all blew over then if they really felt it was important start a policy of no longer registering domains from the UK sometime next year.

Which is still pretty silly, in my opinion, but it's perfectly reasonable to insist on .eu being an EU-only registry. Although deliberately limiting the number of domains that people can buy for a domain that's already not very popular, is hardly likely to attract many bidders.

My only slight complaint about the article is I'd be interested to know why the Commission have seemingly fallen out of love with EURid? But then I'm sure El Reg would have told us if they knew.

Google won’t let Australia have shiny new toys unless it picks apart pay-for-news plan

I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

And nothing of value was lost...

Come on guys. It's a new Google product. It'll be end-of-lifed by sometime in early 2022 anyway - having never got out of beta - and Google having already launched at least 2 slightly different but similar services in 2021...

As China trials its Digital Yuan with a giveaway, seven big central banks outline response

I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

Global domination?

I don't see why so many mentions in the article about Chinese global cryptocoin domination. They don't even allow the Yuan to be freely traded globally, it's pretty unlikely that it's going to be much use to anyone outside China, unless they want to use it in China. At which point if you're using your money in China you'll have to use what the Chinese tell you to anyway.

One of the reasons that so much capital has fled China in the last 10-20 years is that Chinese people don't trust the Chinese government - and Chinese exchange controls have entirely failed to stop that so far - with Chinese companies buying foreign assets to retain profits outside China or doing various invoicing tricks to book smaller profits on their export transactions - and then leave that cash in foreign accounts no longer traceable to the Chinese government.

Obviously the government would like to stop this. But of course the big problem with Xi Xinping's anti-corruption policies is that they're not really about corruption. They're about purging the people from the Party leadership that he doesn't like, or don't support him. But not about stopping corruption. So loopholes will have to be left for those whose support he needs, and those loopholes will always be usable by anyone else.

A 73bn-kg, skyscraper-size chocolate creme egg spinning fast enough to eventually explode – it's asteroid Bennu

I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

Re: Interesting thought

Isn’t the Oort Cloud a bit far from the Sun for major YORP effects? Whereas Bennu is much closer in.

UK privacy watchdog wraps up probe into Cambridge Analytica and... it was all a little bit overblown, no?

I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

Re: Big data

In many cases, big data seems to be just bollocks...

It really is your last chance to see anything at Cineworld for quite some time, and this big-screen bork speaks volumes

I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

Re: Cineworld

There's not much else that purpose-built cinemas can be used for. So somebody is going to come along and re-use those assets when this is all over, assuming people can be tempted back to watch on the big screen. And I think they can. Because that's one thing that "young people"* haven't abandoned, unlike old skool telly and newspapers.

* With their long hair and their loud music, you can't even understand the words, and their weird clothes - not like in my day. Hanging's too good for 'em - they should all do a few years in the army, make men of them... Don't know they're born... In my day... ... ...Proper puddings with custard... ...mumble mumble mumble...

I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

My local Cineworld were doing that. Even more surprising, when I watched Empire Strikes Back there were no adverts or trailers. Was a disappointment to turn up for Tenet and get the full "experience" of ten minutes of crap adverts followed by trailers (which I don't mind) and then a couple more crap adverts.

At least in the old days some of the advertisers made an effort to make their ads actually funny - so it was less annoying having to sit through them.

I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

Re: Cinemas in their current form are an artefact of the limited availability of reels of film

It is very weird that Cineworld haven't made more of an effort to get films in. My local one has gone to the back catalogue to show all the Rocky films, Empire Strikes Back and the 3 Back to the Futures. I've been looking every week to see what's on, as if we don't go out, then a whole bunch of places are going to go bust. So I did my bit by seeing Tenet twice, with dinner beforehand. And I went to see Empire in July - but there are so many old films they could have shown. They've now got digital projection and a network to download films to the cinema's servers - so I don't see why they haven't made a bit more effort. I'd love to see 2001 on a proper big screen, or Jaws maybe. All sorts of films from the 60s and 70s that I'm too young to have seen first time round.

I suppose I did miss out on the opportunity to see Flash Gordon projected on a massive screen, I've just remembered they showed that on one day in July.

Obviously it's the studios fault too. Tenet had taken $250m globally, as of 2 weeks ago - which is less than I'm sure they were hoping, but still pretty reasonable. And it's still running - obviously you can't pack the cinemas out in the first weekend to get the stupid numbers - but I'd imagine they were expecting $500m up by the time it closes. So it's at least in the right area.

And if studios are worried that they'll make less by just selling to streaming services, that's what they'll be left with anyway - if they bankrupt the cinemas by not releasing stuff for them to show.

New Workspace for your WFH office? Nah, it's just Google shooting G Suite with the rebrandogun

I ain't Spartacus Gold badge
Coat

Not unless you get pleasure from inflicting needless pain on other people!

Are you a dominotrix?

[gets coat]

I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

And joss sticks. Don't forget those...

I ain't Spartacus Gold badge
Happy

Also, when are we going to change the save icon? Currently being represented by a floppy disk picture - which means buggery-all to da kidz. Come to think of it, the telephone icon on many bits of software is the handset from an old skool home phone - the type with rotary dial and affixed to the wall by the front door. Often in "ivory white" plastic. Or orange. Fisher Price brought back their pull-along rotary dial phone a few years ago, to the bemusement of many small children who had no idea what it was supposed to represent. To them a phone is a flat rectangle whose front is entirely made of glass.

Also, who uses magnifying glasses to find things? I have a brass one on my monitor stand in the office - but then I have very poor eyesight so own 6 or 7 magnifiers, of various types.

The oddest one of all is the filter icon. I guess it's supposed to be a funnel - but is often rendered more to look like a pair of underpants. "You want to filter that column in Excel? Press the Y-fronts button on the top right of your screen then."

I ain't Spartacus Gold badge
Happy

Re: Completely (deliberately) missing the point...

Still better than the Lotus Smartsuite nightclub we used to go to though...

I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

Re: Serious question - usability?

I'd not thought of the nested email handling before. But Gmail must be a nightmare for a work client. I've recently been sending a bunch of emails back and forth to my brother - normally Gmail is just my repository for spam - and so it's the first time I'd noticed that answering his points from the last email in the sequence was impossible iwthout having to scroll up 5 pages and then back down again. Is this because Google's UI designers all use Macs and so don't use their own stuff for work? Or are they just rubbish?

Also those prices! They're more expensive than the online-only version of Office365. And the premium version isn't much less than the cost of full-offline Office with 5 copies to download. Which is what I use for work. And given that Google's does less, I'm surprised by that. Although I guess there's heavy discounting for large users.

The thing I liked was the ability to have a Google spreadsheet open with several people in it simultaneously - so you could be talking and modifying the sheet together, or simply working on different bits - in a way that Excel still doesn't allow.

Hasta la vista, Ola: TfL bans ridesharing startup, claiming unlicensed drivers picked up passengers

I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

Re: Uber Employees

Plus a bunch of developers. And all the people involved in their self-crashingdriving car program. The one they put out on the road for testing with no emergency braking system. Not that it mattered, the software was so shit that it didn't stop for stuff it couldn't identify - so it ploughed straight into that cyclist without even triggering the alarm buzzer that they'd replaced the computer's control of the brakes with.

Revenues from in-app purchases swelled 32% to almost $30bn for Q3 2020 – and Apple snaffled most of it

I ain't Spartacus Gold badge
Happy

Re: 10%

I would not get out of bed to have a shit for only 10% profit.

idiottaxpayerhere,

I'm intrigued. What is your shit made of? Obviously if you're pooing diamonds then the pain is going to be quite high, and you would clearly deserve very high profit margins. But if your poo is only made of Nutella - then I feel that 10% profit is more than you deserve. I'm presuming that's how they make Nutella? Feed hazlenuts to people and harvest their poo?

Although I feel you should reconsider your financial decisions. Cleaning materials are expensive - so not leaving the bed in order to shit has costs. And 10% profit is not to be sneezed at. Especially while passing sharp objects like diamonds...

ISS? More like HISS, am I right? Space station air leakage narrowed down to Russia's Zvezda module

I ain't Spartacus Gold badge
Happy

Re: Air Sucking Space Leeches!

Doctor Who - State of Decay. A Tom Baker episode I never saw, but for some reason had the audiobook on tape as a kid. The Doctor realises that the vampire's castle is in fact a spaceship - hence the pointy tower - and launches it so that it will come back and pierce the giant vampire creature's heart. He basically turns it into a Space Stake.

Although surely that shouldn't work, as it's not made of wood? But I guess if you start looking for plot holes, you'll never finish.

We need a happy descent into nostalgia icon. Or just an old git one...

I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

Re: SBD - Silent But [Not Yet] Deadly

Can I just point out that the one who smelt it, dealt it.