Posts by Robert Carnegie

Re: Light Sensors

Have you seen the video to Fat Boy Slim ft. Bootsy Collins, "Weapon of Choice"?

Christopher Walken. Dancin. And more, watch to the end!

Re: Excuses, excuses

You might keep your supply tucked behind a particular ceiling tile, so if the cameras are only observing the above false ceiling space then there's some argument for it. I think the principle of having to be told that you're being watched still applies, though. But... you could be told that, perhaps without being told where all the cameras are.

Re: Remote finger

"A Dark Traveling" specifically has an electric security golem on loan from another universe (read the book) who is passed off by the child characters as not speaking English. Which is true.

"Futurama" has Bender, an evil robot built to bend things, whose closet space is explored in "I, Roommate".

Re: Don't mention the...

I'm not clear on how this works in general, but BBC World Service radio (Europe anyway) broadcasts in English and in Greenwich Mean Time twelve months of the year. I suppose if you're halfway round the globe then converting that to your local time needs knowing how far away Greenwich is and whether you have local daylight saving, which you probably know, but it excuses you knowing whether it's daylight saving in Greenwich, because how would you.

So in this sense at least, Greenwich Mean Time exists while London (except the BBC) is not using GMT.

Re: £ vs #

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_sign#History

(sic)

"It is believed" that "lb" weight was written with a cross stroke, then with two cross strokes in a loop, then just as # .

"Why" probably is to make it distinct from numerals, either Roman or a variety of versions of Arabic numeral i.e. 1, 2, 3, etc., some of which have had very different shapes over time and with development of different types of pen.

Specifically distinguishing "lb" from an extra 1 is mentioned.

Re: Apple screws the pre-iOD 13 customers

Ah, not this time: behold iOS 12.5.5. Took a few days though.

https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/24/apple_zero_day/

...fixes another nasty thing too.

But allegedly not some others which are also in iOS 15.0. So... next week?

Re: Fuck it. I'm buying a peddle car.

How about a memorial Sinclair C5?

Re: Again with the "remote"

It says I can (theoretically) send you an e-mail with this in it. If you click on the e-mail, and why would you not, then (theoretically) I pwned you. Remote compromise.

This is different, of course, from you creating the compromise file on your own desktop and running it manually. For one thing, if you built the file yourself then you probably gave it permission to run. The bug is that it can run even without that permission.

Re: My Cynical Mind...

Thank god for that, but you left out chopped into little pieces or was that Samsung...

Re: At least two ways of dealing with problems

Similarly: https://notalwaysright.com/this-lesson-really-stings-part-3/233328/

...third adventure of a story protagonist with a title that really refers to episode one. So, confusing.

Nothing says "this is bollocks" like an office e-mail reminding you that you haven't submitted your anonymous employee satisfaction survey form yet.

Re: Blame the lowest-paid guy in the room

"And why has some fool left this plastic cover over it?" Rip cover off, throw into trash.

Re: For Whenever Taking a Walk on the WWWild Side of Life .......

"amanfromMars" always writes nearly meaningful gibberish. With this he steals processing time from your irreplaceable life, as you foolishly try to find sense in his output.

I suspect that some of the other people I meet in chat contexts had a similar motive, and died some time ago leaving their respective automatic provocation programs running.

Well, if there wasn't a TUPE rule, then they'd just fire everybody who wasn't specifically needed in this situation.

Another approach would be to make it illegal for this work to be outsourced at all, so that the workers would be council employees and that's that. TUPE is a compromise between "fire everybody" and "a job for life for everybody". Or until the national government reorganises local councils, this council ceases to exist, and everyone id fired anyway... but you do still get TUPE with the next generation of local government.

Don't forget about Windows 95/98/ME. That platform didn't have user security - but it did have the software that users wanted on a personal machine. And that software wouldn't install on Windows XP except for the Administrator, so the user had to be the Administrator.

Re: Shame to feckbook!

Someone was on radio the other day talking about online trolls who told her she is an animal. Since the trolls didn't mean it in the "technically, correct" sense, I do recognise it as a problem.

Re: "System App" bollocks

OK, I did a bit of checking, there's this from July: https://www.laptopmag.com/uk/news/windows-11-install-requires-a-microsoft-account-heres-how-to-avoid-it

Despite what the URL says, the actual article quotes from "a source close to the company" that you CAN install Windows 11 Pro creating a "local" account.

Other Windows 11 versions - no.

And it says with Windows 11 Home "You will be able to move to a local account after you have completed installation", but since I got the firm impression that if you install Windows 10 with a Microsoft account then after that you can only use Microsoft accounts, I'm sceptical that that would be different for Windows 11.

Go on...

I for one will be happy to hear another story? ;-)

I think the risk there is less "government which can afford to install a billion CCTV cameras and face recognition that even works" and more "kidnapper or mugger".

I won't describe how you might track someone going home with an expensive looking phone if you aren't the government and also you don't want to spend your whole day following them, but knowing their route and choosing a good place for an uninterrupted robbery is one purpose of the exercise.

Re: Alternatively...

You have to grow the vegetables anyway and then feed them to the meat animal. And there's the question of methane - which BBC World Service Radio covered at length this week. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3ct1hsw

(One of the contributors is a big producer of methane, which a. is worse than CO2 and b. turns into CO2 anyway.

So the one thing worse than burning methane, is not burning methane.)

Re: implementing Surf control was fun

I don't really want to invest time thinking of something witty to say about "insider dealing", but it could apply.

Re: Not my kind of humor, but

Well, they're putting that in cars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECall also U.S., Russia, etc.

I think there's also phone apps so that if the phone is moving at car speed then abruptly stops, then it reports an accident.

Re: GDPR

You realise that that means we know which sex web sites you use.

News, propaganda, and deliberate misinformation are basically the same stuff. I'd argue that regulation would need to cover all of these. You also might have to forbid the government from lying. That could be tricky. The estimable CJ Cregg was shown lying to the press as a part of her job. If you can't trust her, who can you?

BBC radio recently reported on an extraordinary... thing in how people think about their money. I am afraid to name it.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3ct1xzv

The BBC may have made this up. But if there really is a community of people believing in that, religiously as it seems... my impulse is to give up.

Re: You’ve possibly made a mistake....

Jumping on: the project was late, it didn't need to match a standardisation which didn't apply, but it did need to work, which the existing project code didn't and couldn't do. Job done, move on.

"Die Another Day"

Or was that the name of Halle Berry's character - Diane Otherday.

I'm slightly remembering and swiping from something like a BBC radio "write your own James Bond plot" spot in which Tamara Neverdies showed up too.

"The Man with the Golden Gun" film has something similar, but I think it's the type of arrangement where a lot of sunlight is reflected onto a small, expensive electricity generating solar cell. But the power station also has its own solar ray gun... somehow.

Let me guess - a nice photograph of tennis player Anna Kournikova.