Posts by electricmonk

Re: This is why I prefer unrestricted offline-capabilities

>> "they are just glorified zip files with a specific structure allowing me to correct typos easily."

I just love the idea that you buy ebooks then correct the typos in them as you read them. I hope you send an updated copy back when you've finished.

"Dear Mr. Joyce,

Although I greatly enjoyed reading your novel 'Finnegan's Wake' I feel I must point out that it contains a large number of mis-spellings, non-existent words and egregious grammatical errors. I enclose a corrected copy for your education. Yours, etc."

Re: SI police strikes again

Small back gardens.

HTH

Re: Voyager 1 & 2

"No location pings"?? Are you sure about that? Seems to me that sending location data is a vital part of its mission. "Yeah, we've got all this data but we don't know where the craft was when it collected it, because Data Protection."

Re: Are you ok?

https://www.theregister.com/2002/01/11/is_your_son_a_computer/

It's humour from more than twenty years ago, and it wasn't very funny then either.

Re: While many know Kyocera for its ruggedized smartphones

You're witnessing another step in the gradual Americanisation of El Reg. Kyocera's ruggedised phones are well-known in Japan and the US; elsewhere, they're unavailable and pretty much unknown. You'd think the writer would know that.

Re: Some sales pitch!

That's not the Ratner effect. The Ratner effect is "This new one's crap too. But we know you'll buy it anyway because it's shiny, it has a SALE sticker on it, and you're suckers."

Re: It appears we are just behind Australia

Exactly. The laws about not passing on card fees were never really about consumer protection, they were the result of heavy lobbying and devious PR by the card industry and exist solely to protect the card industry's revenues. They know that if people were charged more for paying by card, some of them would choose to pay another way and card payment revenues would go down. The net result is that any customer who pays by other means is subsidising the customer who pays by card.

Many of my customers are happy to pay by bank transfer, which costs me nothing in transaction fees - and in these days of online and mobile banking it's very easy for them to do so. If they pay by card I have to hand over a percentage to the card industry. I'd love to give the bank-transfer customers a small discount as they've saved me money, but it's illegal for me to do that. Instead the fees become part of my overheads and my prices have to go up a little - for everyone, regardless of how they pay.

Re: How many reactor's have been fully decommissioned?

Upvote for the bucket of reality thrown over the flights of fantasy and wishful thinking in here.

Downvote for the apostrophes.

Re: Neighbor WiFi

Said neighbours might reasonably respond that they never asked you to flood their house with your WiFi radiation. As you have no legal reason to extend your WiFi coverage into their household, you are effectively littering their property with your discarded energy. If you don't want them to make use of it, you should take steps to restrict your unlicensed signal transmissions to within your own property boundary. What they are doing costs you nothing - it won't increase the power consumption of your router.

This is, of course, different from them piggybacking into your WiFi service to use your Internet connection without your permission - they would be in trouble then, but not because of the energy used.

So about those meeting rules...

Well, no. Firstly you're looking at an out of date version of the Articles. They were amended at the September 2020 AGM. The current Articles are here:

https://www.nominet.uk/corporate-governance/memorandum-and-articles/

The only bye-laws required are the ones for the election of non-exec directors, and they're here:

https://www.nominet.uk/corporate-governance/agm/

But here's where it gets interesting. One of the new clauses in the amended Articles is this one:

5.3 If it appears to the chair of the general meeting that the electronic platform, facilities or security at the electronic general meeting have become inadequate then the chair may, without the consent of the meeting, interrupt or adjourn the general meeting. All business conducted at the general meeting up to the time of that adjournment shall be valid.

In other words, if the online conferencing service goes on the blink, the chair can unilaterally decide to postpone the meeting. That might sound innocuous, but consider this:

This is the only case in the Articles where the chair can postpone a general meeting without the consent of the members present. (Even if there are still enough members physically present in the room to make up a quorum, the chair can still postpone without a vote.) There is no stated limit in the Articles on how long the chair can postpone the meeting for.

This clause was obviously added in a hurry, as it doesn't fit well with the rest of the Articles, so you have to ask who added it, and why?

What money on a sudden and totally unexpected failure of the online conferencing tech at a critical point during the EGM? It wouldn't block the campaigners completely but it would complicate the process and buy the board some more time. Maybe they are that desperate.

Re: It's Quantum innit

Yes.

Or no.

Re: TANSTAAFL

"Although we expect to become Licensing Act 2003 compliant in 2019, our practices with respect to this type of refreshment are evolving and do not yet fully comply with that industry standard and other applicable guidelines. Cheers."

"natural signal blockers"

Or as we call it, "scenery".

"I honestly judge our banking supplier (Barclays) SO harshly because their online smartcard-based super-duper sign-in to authorise payments for a multi-million-pound business has a minimum spec of "IE 10, or Firefox ESR"... and it literally doesn't work on Chrome at all."

Funny - it works fine for me, using Chrome on Windows 10. Maybe you're holding it wrong?

Actually the sign-in is the only good thing about my Barclays business account - features like tabbing between form fields working properly, the fact that the time-limited single-use passcode is not hidden as you type it in, and (shock horror) a single sign-in that gives me access both to the business account and to the personal account of a relative for whom I hold LPA, all indicate that somebody actually thought about usability for once. Shame the rest of their service is so dire.

Shouldn't that be ytrewq-face?

Re: Get patching. ®

On affected sites the conyouse script appears on the wp-login.php and wp-admin pages and on login forms inserted into other pages. So I'm guessing the dodgy code is more likely to be found in the login functions in general-template.php.

(I see Richard Chirgwin thinks Blissfields Festival is a "small community group". Try to keep up with the kids, Richard... :-) )

Re: Hey Satya, free tip..

>>> they had "hotmail" as a strong brand

Yeah, as in "I wasn't sure if it was genuine, but then I saw it was from a Hotmail address so I deleted it."

Re: why is it okay to be running a 12 year old OS?

Meanwhile in Redmond:

"Hey, this Pascal guy is right! Our customers won't replace something that works fine. What we should do is, we should screw up XP so it doesn't work any more! Get me the dev team, I feel an urgent "security patch" coming on..."

Re: @AC and @Mr C Hill

"Unfortunately, Sugar also kept the cost of the CPC-464 system down by having it manufactured in the Far East instead of the UK where many computers were made until the mid-80s. He also later transferred Spectrum manufacturing to Taiwan (IIRC) and then China. To be fair, other UK and US manufacturers also started doing this in the mid-80s as well."

To be fair, Sinclair had already shifted most ZX Spectrum production from the UK to Portugal a year earlier. (Strange to tell now, but in those days many southern European countries had cheap enough wage levels that they were considered a viable alternative to far-east manufacturing - which was how Spain ended up with a huge car industry.)

The answer is nuclear power. What was the question again?

Actually, what the government did was funnel a *relatively* modest amount of money into green energy then conveniently fail to challenge those who chose to undermine it with ludicrous exaggerations and outright lies. (Wind farms are killing all our birds!! One wind farm won't power the whole of Birmingham so we shouldn't build any at all!!!)

At which point, surprise surprise, it turns out there's only one alternative - the insanity of more nuclear fission plants. A way of throwing billions of pounds at huge corporations who will over-charge and under-deliver, after which the public sector will have to pay the cost of cleaning up the waste. Again. As a nation we haven't even finished paying for the first wave of nuclear power yet.

Of course the government could put lots more investment into energy efficiency so we don't need so much of it in the first place. That would make both environmental and economic sense, which is why the government is raising the levies on power companies to... oh, wait. Hang on a minute.

Re: coffee straw???

Check out the "Learn More" pages - apparently it was invented for Parkinson's sufferers to use. Also (judging from the testimonials) it's popular with people recovering from facial operations and the like. A bit specialist maybe, but not needless.

Re: Caching will only get you so far

Just slightly undermined your own argument there. Anyone who's driven through the Welsh valleys will know that all the FM radio stations also disappear with monotonous regularity. .

Re: Marks & Spencer take cards now?!??!

It was nothing to do with luddism - they thought the card acquirers were demanding an extortionate cut of the takings, so they were holding out for a better deal.

Re: Gov't tests

Let me tell you about my mother -

Re: Here's what I want to see

I have only one thing to say to you:

BBC4.

They're probably working on the Tomorrow's World Restrospective even now, just as soon as they've finished preparing the next batch of 1970s TOTP episodes. (It takes ages to edit out every shot of The DJ Whose Name Must Not Be Mentioned.)

Anyway, Crystal Maze was Channel 4.