Posts by John Brown (no body) 25355 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010
"But, having said all that, I don't know anyone who doesn't carry another telephone with them, just for such an emergency. And NO, if a thief steals your phone, they are not going to hang around and search you just on the off chance that you may have another one with you."
Did you just contradict yourself? Everyone you know has two phones. No thief knows that everyone has two phones.
Having said that, most crims use more than one phone. They (or Hollywood) likes to use the term "burner phone"
"How many iPhone thieves know someone who knows how to crack phones?"
Very few, obviously. But then, how many car thieves knew someone who could build a remote replay attack device. But they did know someone who could sell them one and show them how to use it.
Once a vuln is found and somone make s a device to make use of it, you can be sure someone will be building and selling the devices. That can be very lucrative and relatively safe. Just building and selling the devices might even be legal in some circumstances.
That statement doesn't appear to define how the patron might be a danger to themselves or others. Someone served four or five whiskies and than walking home isn't likely to be danger to themselves or others and isn't breaking any laws, whereas someone drinking the same and then driving home not only likely is a danger to themselves and others but is also over the drink/drive limit. Two very different circumstances and any prosecution would have to show that the person serving the drinks knew the patron was going to be driving or saw them heading to a car and didn't try to stop them.
If that law actually states that *anyone* served alcohol who then goes on to commit a crime of some sort, including drink driving, as a result of drinking said alcohol is a very unbalanced and unfair law and puts a huge onus on all establishments serving alcohol. I don't see how a bar tender or their employer can be held responsible for a drunk driver if they had know inkling that the patron had parked around the corner and walked in, had a few drinks and walked out.
Of course, all that may be moot in this case, since it might be the case they knew he was driving. The point is, a prosecutor has to prove that knowledge was evident at the time.
Yes, and the estimation of how drunk someone is before you are supposed to stop serving them is well over the drink/drive limit. You'd still have to prove the person serving the drinks *knew* the customer was planning on driving or had observed them leaving and heading to the drivers side of the car.
Are Tesla actually advertising "full self driving"? I thoiught that was still a "coming Real Soon Now" paid for upgrade, which at least one poster above has indicated may be in beta testing with some drivers. I'm only aware of their "Autopilot" system, which is very definitely NOT Full Self Driving, nor advertised as such (although hinted at in the headline advertising and is what the cops are suing over in the first place)
I'm not so sure that is always the case in the UK either. I've not read to entire fine print, but I'd bet there's a clause somewhere along the lines of "knowingly driving while impaired" or something to that effect. But I suspect the "3rd party" bit will still be in force, ie they'll payout for injury or damage you cause, just not for your own car.
True,, but I think it may be a high burden of proof to claim the restaurant employees are to blame. First they have to prove they knew they guy came by car. He might have walked, or been with others and there was a "designated driver" staying sober. I think the prosecution will have to clearly demonstrate that the staff serving the drinks saw him drive in alone and there was no chance that anyone other than he was planning on being the driver on leaving.
"Yes, the driver here was seriously drunk - drunk enough to not react as his car was heading straight into the back of a pair of police cruisers parked on flashing blue lights... that takes a lot of obliviousness."
Not paying attention, certainly, but do we know he was "seriously drunk"? In other instance of Tesla crashes, the drivers were simply not aware of their surroundings while definitely not being drunk or drugged. On the other hand, either this guy didn't care about being a drunk driver or was in the mistaken belief that if he was too drunk to drive, his "autopilot" Tesla would take him home like a taxi.
"Also, this isn't the first high-profile case of Teslas completely failing to identify emergency vehicles on the roadside, so it DOES seem like there is a systemic failure on their part."
While I agree with you on the whole, I'd be wary of calling it a systemic failure without seeing evidence which may show that in many, most, or even the vast majority of cases that the Tesla cars do see and avoid emergency vehicles with their lights on. After all, "Tesla autopilot avoids emergency vehicle" isn't exactly headline news.
"Autopilot is a term to describe pilot aids in aircraft, which maintain constant speed, altitude and bearing and not systems which will avoid hitting objects in their path."
They can also be engaged for take off and landing too. Technically, they may be different systems, but there's no technical reason why it can't be all one single "auto-pilot" that can theoretically handle the entire flight.
From what I've seen in most UK motorway services, the urinals are 100% water free. I'm not sure how often they get "treated" or how long the treatment lasts, but the cleaners just wipe them down and spray them with some chemical. If the little sprinkler/water dispenser things are still there, they are covered or blanked off, they aren't special "high tech" advert displays.
And anyway, here in the UK, there's plenty of money, seemingly, for putting in flashy new tech stuff, but never any money to repair or maintain them. Few services still have touchless water taps at the washing facilities any more. The expensive sensor operated taps, when they break, get replaced with old style push to operate taps.
"For portraits? The electronic kind never took off, people simply aren't going to replace their printed family pics on their walls by multiple expensive devices that require power."
I wonder if the black/white rotating balls thing of e-ink could be repurposed in some way to use adjustable microlenses for "pixels" to give a sort of static 3D image display?
"But even just stating facts leads to trouble. Saying "5 BP garages had their fuel deliveries cancelled due to lack of HGV drivers" leads to idiots panic buying and causing fuel shortages."
Yeah, but when the above was a true fact and most of the media was reporting that fact, the Daily Mail was printing the headline "Britain Running on Empty". THAT was the sort of thing that caused the panic buying,
"I can't count the number of times drivers (in particular large trucks) got themselves stuck because they followed the satnav instructions;"
To be fair, that's often because the truck driver or haulage company cheaped out and bought consumer SatNavs instead paying for the ones that include narrow lane and height restriction warnings.
"A simple GPS signal can be used to determine each locations actual time - no needless clumping involved."
So, from London, you tell your mate in Bristol you'll phone at 12 noon tomorrow. He gets a bit pissed off when you phone 10 minutes early while he's still in a meeting. That's why "railway time" was invented :-)
(If you're running a flash app on a kiosk, it's doesn't need OS support, so long as it's not connected to the wider internet. They might have hardware issues in the future though, either failing kit or inability to get suitable kit to run it on or external devices supported by WinXP drivers.
Taped to the screen yes. Keyboard disconnected, no. Although that does depend on how long ago it was and what is meant to happen after a power failure. XT and AT keyboards, you could generally get away with hot plugging them. PS/2 keyboards had a habit of not being recognised if plugged into a running system. Either of those XT/AT or PS/2 types could blow the keyboard fuse or, if not fitted, kill a motherboard. Likewise, again depending on how long ago and the BIOS in use, it may or may not have an option to ignore the missing keyboard error on boot, even if it did have an option to power back in after a power outage. (Prehistoric PCs didn't have "soft" power at all. The power switch was directly wired to the mains, and were very likely to report "Keyboard Error - Press F1 to continue" with no BIOS override option to be set in advance)
"I do not think the deal with MWZ was mainly aimed to release the 2 Canadians rather than showing ( once again, as if we needed it) that the lefties (or commies, if there is a difference for you) are liars."
Why would the US care about a couple of foreigners? Why have the US not presented enough suitable evidence to Canada to allow the extradition to the US to occur? While defending China in any way, how is what the US did not lying? They claimed to have evidence but seem not to actually have any.
"I certainly hope that someday Xi Jinping will stand trial in the Dominion of Hong Kong, a self-governing Dominion in the British Commonwealth of Nations"
Unless you are predicting that the UK is going to take back Hong Kong some time in the future, I think you need to look at the international headlines from back in 1999.
Likewise, it's a huge climb-down for the US. After 3 years of trying, they've not managed to convince Canada of the evidence to justify deporting her to the USA. And now, instead of presenting the relevant evidence to one of their closets allies, they've basically said to her, "look, if you pretend you did it, we'll drop the extradition, you can go home and we'll no longer pursue the charges."
No matter how they try to present it, this is hugely embarrassing for the US.
Had a customer who was complaining their HP LJ8000 was broken. Every now and then it would just stop with an undetermined error. It'd happened 4 times in the last 5 days. I visited a couple of times, and couldn't find any issues. I asked if they could leave it stopped next time and I'd get there as quickly as possible to have a look. They were unsure as it was the primary office printer and couldn't afford the down time. A week later, after 4 more stoppages, they agreed. Got there, and sure enough, it was stopped. It didn't help me. No reported error. It just stopped. Lots of tests, lots of diags. Phoned HP who were stumped. I eventually elicited from them that it was always the same document being printed when it stopped. Forehead slapping moment. Why had no one mentioned this sooner? The long and the short of it was that HP were aware of an issue printing certain PDF documents created on a certain package that sent some code that the HP PDF interpreter choked on. Opening the file in a different PDF creator and saving it again "fixed" the issue, reported this back to HP and their comment? Oh, yeah, we know about that. It's a "will not fix" issue, those printers are nearly EOL now.
Last year, we did an online refresher course on lifting objects and using steps/step ladders. In the example video of lifting a heavy object requiring two people, it was an HP LasterJet, ie the original one :-)
(Not that we would be doing much object lifting or using of steps in the middle of lockdown 1.0 and working from home!)
"New and remanufactured toner cartridges for these are likely still available at every office supply place in the world, and usually cheaper than the ones for most modern lasers."
The patents on the cartridges have expired so anyone can make new ones as opposed to re-filling/re-engineering original ones :-)
"designed for purpose, not to look like something out of a SF movie."
Because they are one-off concept designs or very low run prototypes. If they ever get into mass production, you can guarantee the bean counters will rip out all that expensively shaped moulding and replace it with a box on wheels. You only have to compare new electric vehicles with the original concept designs first touted to see that in action. Also, production vehicle design is still very conservative, no matter what the coloured pencil department might produce on paper. Cars still look like cars. Look at Tesla. Started from scratch with none of the baggage from decades of tradition, and their cars look just like every other car on the roads. (much of it streamlining, of course, but for short range town cars, that doesn't matter much, but it's still there)
"I had decent Hertz status basically locked in due to some horrific customer service experiences and it being given as an apology so got some nice upgrades without any points changing hands."
I had similar with a local franchise of one of the big multi-national car hire companies. Due to an incident with a camera I'd forgotten and left in the hire car, there were issue after I collected it the next day than had the film developed. After the complaint, my wife got an unexpected and quite expensive bunch of flowers delivered later that same day and every hire car my company paid for was upgraded for free to whatever they currently had in as "best".
One company I worked at provided company cars based on actual need, not (self-)impo[r]tance. Managers who mostly didn't really need a company car got either mid-range Escort sized cars or use of a pool car. Field engineers got something a lot better since they were generally doing many 1000's of miles per year. 300 per day wasn't unusual. Managers and directors rarely did long trips and would usually go by train anyway.
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