Posts by Stoneshop

All it took was a whiff of moisture for them to start rotting.

That, plus Lucas electrics on British-built Fords ...

No, that's not a jacket, that's the tarp to cover my car.

Re: Should have used the sprinkler

I've referred to such a bodge before: a site run by the Ministry of Agriculture was down half its cooling capacity as it had an apparently unfixable pinhole leak in one of its two circuits, and they had already exhausted their Freon quotum refilling it. This was in a temporary barrack, one storey, low, tarpaper roof, and with even just moderate sunshine temperatures in the offices next to the computer room would already be approaching 30C and the computer room would hit 25C with the one chiller running flat out. So they had a tap installed, with two fairly serious sprinklers underneath the working half of the heat exchanger.

So once the computer room temp would pass 25C, someone would open the tap, which then often had to stay running a fair bit into the evening until the temperature had sufficiently dropped again. "Tap duty overtime" must have been a nice little earner for some, hence the reluctance to fit a valve controlled by a thermostat and/or timer. Dropping a few buckets of white paint, or tacking aluminised bubble foil on that section of the roof was similarly declined.

They also suffered from a well over average number of parts failures,

Probably required a little more effort than described, like the outflow hose ejecting itself in an utterly cartoonesque way from the city drain and spraying the chemically enriched water coming out of the Univac into some particularly sensitive areas of the Mustang.

It would also have to be a rather rundown Mustang already to be declared a total loss after a liquid encounter like this.

Re: Robots and boxes

Get shown captcha -> open in container -> set ublock to temporarily allow google.com -> solve captcha -> slam door on google -> proceed with whatever I need to do on that site.

Re: Oh great!

You happily drive a cat with 60-80 litres of explosive liquid

The cat, on the other hand, would very likely not be very happy about it.

Re: Company compliance officer

Their recruitment ad: "Come, pliant officer".

Which was fulfilled, evidently.

Re: What is an OS for?

"markting has to justify its existence every once in a while"

And limiting themselves to finding out whether people would like to be able to fit fire nasally is not in their genes.

Re: What is an OS for?

along with as many changes as possible to describe standard features as added value features.

You misspelled 'value addled features'.

Re: This is starting to look bad

My only hope is that when the end is really nigh, they point it back home

The words 'can' and 'will' are missing in your sentence. This time it's not the gyros or the orientation controller, but if that one fails, or the receiver goes deaf there won't be much pointing it anywhere any more.

Perhaps we could combine this with the Bezos petition

Pesos for Bezos.

(the one with the dog-eared copy of 'Ignition!')

Re: Assange -vs- Navalny

I know two people who went to high school with Assange, and he was a downright self-centered prick back then already.

Re: Did he really say this?

:s/on/who should be first against/

There, much better.

Re: I'm sorry...

And having images of everyone's favourite Icelandic export

So, hákarl then.

Re: Good

Or his demise.

Just plain dead will do, but the more ignominious the better.

Re: Not holding my breath

First it was a lifetime ban... then they had to rethink it, now it is 2 years,

Two years could well be lifetime for that orange overweight oaf, depending on his consumption of Big Mac and Cokes. Although there'll always be some tame quack who will use every chemical known to man to counter this and extend his existence.

Re: Power buttons

The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive – you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same programme.

Re: You have my sympathies...

Then there is the "Brownian motion" of the remotes

Very few of them can deal with being dunked in a fresh[0] cuppa.

[0] or a stale one, showing that the thermal component of the fluid has very little influence.

Re: After you have found it ...

If you have time for that. Because in eleven cases out of ten the manager ordering you to FIND!!1! THAT!11!! ITEM!11eleven!! needed it half an hour ago of course, and you still have to bring it over, set it up, activate it and guide said mangler through using it as he of bloody course didn't have time to read the manual and that is for those tech peons anyway.

one has to have some sense of proportion, after all.

That would require a piece of fairy cake, to start with.