Posts by Robert Carnegie

Re: Aaaaargh!

Burglars may be speeding. Usually in the police car chases on TV, the people being chased have done something naughty first.

Re: Kaspersky's People Problem

Western Digital will do that in hardware if you don't have a backup, and if you do have a backup, then you'll be OK.

Re: what a twat

I'm not sure how far I should take this, but an anagram of his name is Noel Skum.

But it's not fair to make a joke of someone's name - it can even be racial abuse.

But in this case, it's hard to resist.

Re: How much RAM?

Maybe this time it's under that pop-up keyboard?

Re: Doesn't make sense ...

Possibly Pinduoduo did create the malware versions (government spying versions?) seen elsewhere and also tried to submit a malware version into Google Play. Let's suppose that Google blocked that - however, it would be reasonable to expect Pinduoduo to try again and again to release another malware version into Google Play, and they could eventually succeed. So instead, uninvite them, first. This is only my speculative hypothesis, and not knowledge.

Re: Accidental save?

It is likely - but check. As I read it, the not-deleted data is not a valid part of the PNG file format. It is like this:

Here is an example of a longer sentence.

Here is a shorter sentence.ger sentence.

When you open a PNG file normally, it reads data until the full stop i.e. "Here is a shorter sentence." (This is a metaphor, and also I don't know for sure.) But the other data is still in the file, and it's technically possible to decode it. However, a normal PNG file viewer will ignore the extra data. I think. And if you save, or compress the file, not on Android 10 and 11, then the new saved file will end at the first full stop.

Re: Deemed employees

"New Labour" isn't interested in unions. I'd sort of like them to change the party name. Probably to "Lawyers for" something. "Lawyers for Legitimate Interests", whatever those are. All I know is that web sites have them, and if they have more than three of them then I turn them all off as they're obviously joking.

Re: Don't get me started...

I looked this up once. What I found is that "burglar" is a very old word, but at one time, I think close to the end of the 19th century, the U.K. started saying "burgle" and the U.S. said "burglarize" for what a burglar does. Before that, I suppose it was just called stealing.

Re: Sometimes people being stingy with the cash works in your favour

Did you softly and suddenly vanish away, and never be met with again? :-)

(Go ask Alice...)

Re: Fluorescence

Don't worry, the UV-C radiation is deadly anyway. But you go blind first. (I think the device is meant to operate when no one is in the car.)

UV also doesn't pass through glass, I think.

Re: Good!

The first problem with your idea is that murdering copyright owners becomes a good business plan for would-be competitors. If they get caught... for that matter, if copyright holder A dies in suspicious circumstances, you would blame their main competitor, B, but it could be actuallly that C did it just to get B into trouble. I won't go on to other flaws...

Also, as a graphic novel, it is usual in that creative business for someone to write a script, or a plot, in words, which then an artist interprets in graphic form. The script can look like a film script. A plot is less detailed and the artist has more scope for free interpretation. Artists are not necessarily good writers, and vice versa. And they say that a picture is worth a thousand words... so, if the thousand words are there, then isn't the picture composed from those words, a derivative work, so that if there is copyright in the words, there also is copyright in the picture?

I'm not a biologist, but I think there was some reporting that the omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 had "learned" to infect the upper respiratory tract, or something like that. I'm not swearing to this. This meant that less of critical physical damage was done in the lungs - I suppose that your immune system would be fighting the virus before it entered the lungs, whereas a big part of the harm done is your immune system fighting a war against the virus when it is entrenched, so to speak, in the lungs. Your body is the battlefield, and it gets hurt. There also was an idea that the infection being in the upper respiratory tract means that more of the virus particles get blown out on your breath.

A virus doesn't care if you live or die, it just "wants" to reproduce. Being too deadly isn't good for that: as infected people die, the virus dies. So there's a trend for a virus to kill fewer and fewer of its victims. But in the case of omicron, although it does continue to kill people, I think we were "lucky" that it accidentally chose to infect us in a different way - if any of what I've said is what actually happened.

It's fascism, son. Why do people like it? Because the Leader is For You and is Against Those Not Like You. So don't worry! The Leader is For You! ...as long as You are for The Leader, of course.

See also "religion".

Re: Whose account?

"the platform used to send an email to 50 percent of the world's email addresses"

I wouldn't boast about that. It sounds like a Major Incident.

Re: Cube

I think you're describing some kind of "really" soundproofed "pod". "The Cube", as far as I can tell, is just cubicles again, and they don't come with a roof although there are Dilbert cartoons about roof & cubicle - roofing with walls from other cubicles - in 1993 and again in 1998.

I liked the sound of an office pod where you could go and just hide. Maybe there was more to the concept than I understood.

As for curves, the "womb" metaphor was also used in Dilbert in 1998. A womb with(out) a view...

Re: Does Elon live off whisky cocktails and cheese?

In space, no one can smell your socks.

Re: The beatings will continue...

I'm not a lawyer, but I think legally you're not "redundant" if the employer wants to keep you working there or to replace you with someone else to do the work.

Or maybe now you are... there was that thing where P & O ships fired everybody then offered them less pay to keep working, and the UK government said "how dreadful, what a pity, and what a good idea" and I gathered somewhere that they would or they have made it legal. "Taking back control", I suppose. P & O were able to do it because the company is based in Atlantis, outside any territorial waters.

In settings such as "The Invaders", those people probably are aliens themselves. A lot of us are, you know... v'ir fnvq gbb zhpu. :-)

Re: Hard of understanding... $250 Wireless headphones

I think we are to understand that putting a display screen on your ear is a lot of what makes it "worst product".

Re: fratzonic chambered exhaust

Call me ableist but I am not convinced that accommodating the blind road user minority first is the right choice.

I see it as a scheme of carbon-burning vehicles against the electric ones, much like previous or possible current laws in the U.S. that required margarine to be as unpleasant as could be enforced vs. butter. This seems needless as you would suppose that real margarine is sufficiently unpleasant anyway.

Instead, a car should toot the horn if a human or a car looks like crossing into the path of travel. If it does not toot, then it probably is out to get you, and in that case probably it will get you, regardless.

Also there are bicycles that are just as capable of maiming or killing a pedestrian, even not on purpose. The difference is that bicycles should dingaling instead of tooting. I myself am a dingaling cyclist.

Re: Your probem is not my emergency

Do you blame an employee for something they didn't do?

Specifically, they didn't put a new backup tape in on Friday afternoon!

;-)

Re: If you have one, you have none

I just read an article about companies planning to run small pilotless cargo aeroplanes - but they're not allowed to yet.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-63595481

Drones may be allowed on set routes, such as in this case to (or from?) the Isle of Wight, just offshore from England.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hampshire-58672437

Re: Sensible

As far as I know, Apple doesn't publish an end of support date for iThings, so your old iPad may get a security update for the next discovered flaw that affects old and new devices, or it may not. I would like to know. But they don't say.

Here is an article...

https://nerdschalk.com/iphone-7-support-end-date/

...that admits to being "just educated guesses".

Reading between the lines myself, the prudent thing to do is to upgrade when your device won't run the latest iOS, or to use the device very, very carefully. That may mean upgrading your main device anyway, and keeping the old one as a spare. Or, looking for a trade-in offer, but it may be too late for that.

Conceivably, the extension of support depends on whether some large customers of Apple are willing to pay for that, as well as whether Apple is willing to provide it.

I suppose too that advertising the date of end of support may embolden hackers to devise their bugs and save them up until the point in time when bugs aren't going to be fixed on older devices.

In the opposite direction of policy, don't Chromebooks have a built-in end of life date, regardless of whether the hardware is working or isn't?

Re: Worst code I ever saw...

It's likely that the other guy's code is in a rocket that did the big firework thing, so no evidence :-)

Examples that we do seem to know about, probably all of us, include "wrong arithmetic sign, tried to fly down instead of up" and "failed to convert metric and imperial measurements".