Posts by unimaginative 359 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Sep 2009
"And the carefully worded claims that smart meters will 'help you save energy' with the caveat way down the page that all it does it let you see your power consumption and it is up to you to actually take action."
That is not entirely true. They allow you to adjust your consumption to dynamic surge/discount pricing periods. Not something I am keen on coping with, but its coming.
I assume it is the Reg sense of humour.
They are not very keen on Bibles there. Not as bad as their neighbours: they even allowed a church to be built, although strictly for the use of foreigners and anyone even trying to covert Muslims gets five years in the nick.
They are even treating women a bit better now. Not equal or anything, but a bit less oppression.
Not anywhere near going a bit easier on gays though, or treating imported cheap labour decently.
They would probably not like the icon. -------->
Or even the work icon, or ikon.
I think you are out of date. Since no fault divorce was introduced in 2022 it is very simple. I filed for divorce under the new procedure as soon as it was introduced in April 2022.
1. apple online
2. have spouse acknowledge receipt of email, otherwise arrange to have papers to be served
3. Wait a few months (there is colling off period)
4. get notified you have conditional order (what used to be called the decreee nisi)
5. Wait a few more weeks
6. Apply for the decree absolute.You get it the same day.
There can be a lot of paperwork with the financial and child arrangements cases, but these are separate and do not have to happen (my ex and I just handled things with informal arrangements).
You are probably right that the applicant was delaying applying for the final order as some sort of outmaneuver, but after three months the other spouse can apply for the final order so it cannot be held up for long which limits its value as a threat. If you want all the details of the process they are here: https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/family/how-to-separate1/getting-a-divorce-or-dissolution/
"On the other hand, if there was no financial judgement made before the divorce was finalized, the gent is free and clear of any alimony or loss of any finances to the missus. So silver lining perhaps?"
Not how it works. The financial arrangements (and child arrangements if they have any) are separate cases from ending the marriage. While it is usual to proceed with them in parallel so they are done by the tine the final order is issued, you do not have to.
That is not true, because they would not have anything like as much taxable Irish profit without the tax breaks. The Irish people gain because their government has higher tax revenues..
The losers are the tax payers in the countries where the profits would be taxed if the dodge was not allowed.
Except that it is not people turning up to vote by pretending to be someone else that is the problem in the UK.
The main problem is fraudulent, coerced or bribed postal votes, which requiring ID for voting in person does nothing about.
The people who chose to solve the non-problem but ignore the actual problem must be presumed to benefit from it.
Woke means:
Policing people's language (and their by discriminating against people from the wrong backgrounds, especially non-native English speakers and immigrants), banning books because you do not like the ideas in them, hounding people of of their jobs because they disagree with you, imposing American cultural norms on the rest of the world (words like "master" in version control, or "blacklist" are banned in international projects and companies purely because of their role in American history and culture).
Essentially work is an oppressive and cultural imperialist movement.
"The discussion is worth a read, and reinforces our impression that many of the Linux projects seeking to avoid systemd do so by retaining simpler, 20th-century style init systems, often driven by lots of interlinked shell scripts."
I do not get that from the discussion. The comparison is with OpenRC, which is dependency based, and very much 21st century (first release in 2007).
Her major gripe with OpenRC seems to be lack of systemd compatibility "the polyfills for various systemd apis to work on openrc do not actually work correctly in many cases, leading to unnecessary bugs on the desktop" and lack of features and active development.
That is lightweight these days!
I have ended up using KDE on a low end tablet (because I have not been able to get anything lighter to work correctly with the touchscreen so far) and it is usable, albeit sometimes laggy.
I do quite like XFCE though. It is pretty light and very mature and is the other DE I have used in recent years.
Actually, some layers of management are good candidates for replacement by LLMs. I suspect others already have been replaced by software: e.g. I know software decides routes in logistics, that must have been at least partly a junior to mid management decision before that.
There have been computers doing financial trading for a while too.
"The EU wants more regulation, the UK less, what is wrong with that and that is the point of brexit."
Part true. Not necessarily more or less. Just different.
The problem with stuff like this that is supplied globally is that it has to comply everywhere you do business (or maybe even just let people look at your content) - the EU, US, China....
There are already American websites that block people in the EU or the UK. I think this is where things will go - different products in different markets.
SMEs, as defined these days, are not tiny businesses. IN the UK it is less than 250 employees, in the US it is a lot more.
So you are getting something that might well run all your server needs for very possibly less than $1,000 per employee. Assume it lasts five years that works out at less than $20 per employee per month.
Birmingham is incapable of delegating, so it's the largest administrative nightmare.
Not entirely fair. The size of local authorities is decided at a national level.
Funny how, even after Brexit, things in the UK have to be compared to Europe.
What has Brexit got to do with it? Where else do you compare with to make the point it is bigger than anything else at a higher level than national? If you find something is the biggest in the UK would your next natural step be to check whether there is a bigger one in South America? I quite often hear that something is the biggest/most whatever in Asia or Africa or the Americas.
It's the old "Fog over the Channel, the continent is isolated".
AFAIK that headline is an urban myth, BUT this is the opposite. It is looking at things in a European context which is very relevant to the UK. We are still in Europe and the countries most similar to the UK are European. They are not the only comparator that is relevant, but still an important one.
There's something seriously wrong in UK Government circles.
Addiction to big projects. The bigger a project the more complex it is, and therefore more likely to go wrong. Nassim Nicholas Taleb gave a lecture (about one of his books, so probably drawn from it) using UK data to argue that bigger projects are far more likely to fail in general, but he claims it is a general law, rather than a UK problem.
Test, people. Test. And get your bloody specifications right. If you don't know how to do that, hire an expensive consultant to tell you that you're idiots and listen to him.
They very often do, but the expensive consultants are often not good and even if they are its not easy. Ever done that job? I did for a short while as a full time job, and often as part of what I do now, and it is hard to get specs right because it means everyone knowing what they are doing and giving the consultant the right information, including people (most people) who have no idea what you need.. That is dealing with relatively simple (to spec, not necessarily to implement) systems.
I prefer press a key and start typing.
I do this on KDE - a key assigned to start krunner and then type the first two or three letters of the application name. It means an extra keypress or two, but it also means all applications can be started from there and you do not have to remember key combinations). It has other advantages (it also shows matching already open windows so you can switch to them instead, you can type in amounts to do calculations or currency conversions etc.).
KDE is far from lightweight, but there are stand alone equivalents which are quite light.
I do use KDE pin to task manager on my tablet.
India is very different from China. Much as I dislike the current Indian government, it is still a democracy, and has free press and meaningful opposition.
its interests may not be aligned with the West's, but not all Western countries interests are aligned either. Do the US and Germany have the same difference priorities? Not since China became a bigger threat than Russia to the US. Do the UK and the US have the same economic interests? Sometimes.
Yes, but it needs huge (expensive) improvements in public transport. A car is essential for me now, but it was not when I lived in cities with good public transport and did not have kids. I never even owned a car back then. I did rent a few times for trips.
I think another thing that would help a lot is encouraging the use of smaller cars. A smaller car is less polluting (to make as well as run) damages the roads less, causes less injury in an accident, and generally makes cities better than a similar larger one (i.e. ICE vs ICE, EVE vs EV, etc.).
THis could be encouraged by taxing cars be weight and size, and by reserving parking spaces for small cars.
> The problem with experiments relating to religion is they often violate CIOMS guidelines for ethical research on human subjects.
There is a deeper problem.
What are the null and alternative hypotheses?
One experiment that has been done is testing whether prayers work by asking people to pray for randomly selected sick people and see whether they recover better than a control group. This specifically tests for the existence of a God who is willing and able to answer prayers for the sick, but does not take any account of motives and is willing to provide this experiment.
> the indigenous people of the Amazon tested Christianity by crucifying missionaries
Really? Sounds like a distorted version of an SF story I read.
That said, it is another bad experiment. Do Christians believe that anyone who is crucified comes back from the dead? Obviously not, so the null hypothesis is not a test of Christianity.
That is true, so is that problem that the people running the study do not know what the clergy do?
In that case, I would also question whether they know what the other jobs really involve. If you look at paper describing the methodology it involves assigning scores to the importance of 52 abilities to each job. Did they do a study of each job to measure that? I doubt it. They almost certainly assigned weights based on what the researchers thought. Lots of method, but based on poor data so the whole report is a waste of time and this is just an example of why.
Because they want to use an exact font. It might be the designer, or marketing people who want to use the same font for the brand that they use in printed materials and images. Add to that tight budgets or timelines, or a lazy front end designer, and the fast/easy way to do it is to copy and past a line from Google Fonts.
The Register decided long ago that some American culture wars clickbait comments were good so why expect any better of its readership. It has a lot of stories on controversial topics that have nothing to do with tech and both articles and comments will bring up anything that will get people emotional from abortion to Brexit on the flimiest pretext..
It is an idiotic comment on many levels: ANE mythology was not made up for children, only (American style) evangelicals think such stories are literally true, and the commentard cannot spell "tales" but it fulfils it purpose of letting someone the commentors tribal side with regard to anything to do with religion. The commentard is just as stupid as the biblical literalists they claim to despise, but that is irrelevant - its all about being on the right side.
No tech IPO this size has ever happened in London. Tech IPOs have always favoured the NASDAQ.
ARM was UK listed because it was much smaller at time it listed. It is less British AND a lot bigger than it was back then.
Even smaller tech businesses favour NASDAQ. I used to work for an Asian company that aimed at a NASDAQ listing one day. I asked one of the management why they did not consider London, and the answer was "why should we?" - because tech always goes for NASDAQ. Ironically, said company is now owned by the London Stock Exchange.
You are right about too much choice. Well proven.
I do not understand why you think this or any other fork is incomparible witn end user applications. What applications do you have in mind?
Forks do have a pupose though. Antix, for example, makes old hardware usable. Saves money and the planet.
There are a few select distros for the average Joe user with reasonably new hardware, and a few more to revive old hardware. The rest either lack a userbase, or are server distros, or specialist tool.
You do have to take action to prevent a trademark from becoming a generic term: i has happened to lots of former trademarks like "escalator"
This is not going to happen if someone uses your trademark to talk about your products. It will happen if someo
Arm are hoping that people who do not understand this will be fooled by this statement and not think they are being idiotic.
is it misinformation? It seems to be at least part true:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-and-twitter-censorship-alex-berenson-covid-vaccines-white-house-social-media-11660335186
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/08/alex-berenson-twitter-ban-lawsuit-covid-misinformation/671219/
Incidentally, I have no idea who the guy is, but right wing nutjob or not, he has a right to free speech. If he is spreading misinformation, you have a right to free speech so you can rebut it.
Will they though? Will the experts be allowed to give opinions other than what the politicians want them to say? If you look at the EU's other legislation (banning end to end encryption, defining rule engines as AI, the impact on FOSS of the Cyber Resilience Act) they seem to be in a competition with other western governments to see who can be the worst.
The restrictions on advertising targetting are a good thing in this law are a good thing. However when governments start setting policies about content I cannot see that as a good thing. People usually defend social media content moderation because they are private platforms and have the right to do what they fit, but when we now have a government telling them what to do, there are real concerns about free speech.
If they had these powers during covid, would they have used it to prevent people discussing the lab leak hypothesis (which was labelled misinformation at the time)? I think they would have. More than that, even bad people have a right to express their views that quote misattributed to Voltaire about defending people right to say things you agree with applies.
It made me think of OVH too.
What that was a good drmonstration of was how many people do not know what they are buying. A lot of people assume cloud means everything is taken care off: redundacy, backups, updates......
The EU's proposal seems to be worse, and their politicians seem to have even less of understanding of technology. The EU commissioner in charge is claiming you can scan encrypted communications without unencrypting them
That sounds lovely in theory, and I never owned a car when I lived in London, not in Manchester until i had kids. Now the kids are older I still would not have a car if I lived in a city.
However, in practice, if you reduce car use without improving public transport, the end result is that the 15 minute city becomes a limitation rather than a utopia. Do it, but do it right - which means spending lots of money.
The problem happens when one company owns the copyrights - typically this means they do all the develoment, or almost all, and outside contributors must sign contrubutions overto them, or use a license that allows closing adding restrictions.
I think the question to ask when a business says its software is open source, is whether they have a bsiness modelthat works with ooen source.
I have had several interactions with the police in the UK, and while there are two refusals to investigate (non-violent domestic abuse, and yobs throwing things at people that did not hit them) and maybe one other minor incident I am not happy about, the others (traffic, racist vandalism, domestic violence allegations) have been dealt with pretty professionally and about as well as I can expect.
This over a period of time from the late 70s, about half of which I have lived in the UK. The most recent four interactions have been in the last five years.
The police are definitely not always good, but a blanket statement that they cannot be trusted are ridiculous.
Most people in the West are clueless about what is happening in Asia.
They think the West still dominates the world economically and militarily. There is definitely some racism in this - notice how the rivals they fear are the (white) Russians rather than the far more economically and militarily capable (and more ambitious in terms of empire building) Chinese.
The EU still talks about a multi-polar world with itself as one of the superpowers - while its economy is in the slowest growing region of the world and shrinking part of the world economy. Absolutely delusional. In the meantime they are cracking down on immigration which would give them the population they need to keep up. TO be fair the US and Canada are growing through immigration, much of it highly skilled, so that part of the West has a better outlook.
To say nothing of the Cabinet using Zoom during the lockdown - by the nature of Cabinet meetings they discuss highly classified information.
Staff devices should be locked down and they should not be allowed to install software. Browsers should be locked down too to prevent uploads.
I do some work with medical images. That is outside the NHS systems. I am currently looking at implementing some stuff with NHS APIs and there are mechanisms (hopefully secure) for transferring patient data (at least in NHS England - not sure what they have in Scotland).
I use KDE withatiling extension, and yes, it is alot more than tiling or a two window split, even quarters.my favourites are three columns (1to 3 windows per column) and spiral. You can see everything i a project on one virtuak desktop.
That plus multiple desktops and knowing the keyboard shortcuts makes managing complex workflows a lot easier.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
