Posts by John Brown (no body) 25340 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010
Does that exclude "design" patents? It seems like an awful lot new and innovative "inventions" for a single year. Maybe a lot of them are minor, inconsequential and possibly even invalid since these are, I assume, patents registered with the underfunded USPTO who don't seem to actually check patent applications any more.
And yet so few of the offenders are caught, even with the carrot of a $10,000 reward and the stick of up to 5 years in prison. It's the reason so much low level crime goes on. The risk reward ratio is in favour of not getting caught in the "noise" of all the other low level crime. The solution is really to try and create a better society where fewer people feel the need to commit crime. (Since you ask, the sky is green with violet highlights on my planet, it's quite nice :-))
"Sadly they are, however, the only indicators that matter to political donors."
As demonstrated by the US Presidents tweet when the vaccine was announced.
"STOCK MARKET UP BIG, VACCINE COMING SOON. REPORT 90% EFFECTIVE. SUCH GREAT NEWS!
Yeah, it's great news, but how he leads the sentence is telling.
...I can tell you that there has been no increase in "normal" call outs because people are working at home home instead of the office. There has, however, been an increase in out-of-warrenty calls for liquid incursions, broken screens and broken PSU/USB ports, ie user damage.
"such a situation would be proof positive that there is no effective alliance of/for equals and it's a dog eats dog world environment with everyone into best servering themselves secret goodies and to hell with everyone and everything else."
I doubt any alliance in history has included sharing all defensive and/or offensive technology. More sharing might happen in an actual shooting war, but even then I doubt it's all shared. Todays ally might be tomorrows enemy. We Brits were shipping millions of tons of supplies and munition to the USSR in the 1940's, including 1000's of tanks. A few short years later, our frenemy was our enemy.
Yes, thanks, that was it.
IIRC, it was in a magazine in the late 70s or early 80s called Speed and Power. Primarily about cars, planes etc related to the title, but ran other historical (and often weird) transport stuff and short SF stories too. It introduced me to Clark and Asimov amongst others.
I seem to vaguely remember reading about a train that used air pressure difference in a tunnel, similar to Hyperloop but at much lower speeds back in Victorian times. IIRC it sucked air at one end to draw the carriage along, which had big rubber seals that moved along the tunnel walls. I've no idea if that was just a concept or if any form of test line was ever built though. It may be that it was an earl;y idea that that never got built but led to the atmospheric railway.
Actually, the quote could quite reasonably say: "Public statements from Foreign Office or GCHQ officials should mostly be taken with a pinch of salt; they often accuse others of doing what they themselves are guilty of."
And we've had almost 4 years of Trump giving a masterclass in the subject. The problem is in the pass rate of the students.
"Sleepy joe, can’t wait to see you roll back the trade war with China and start paying full price for everything"
That's probably better than the current situation of paying full price plus whatever the current additional import tarifs are. Or did you think the Chinese dropped their prices so US consumers would still be paying the same?
I heard a major Trump supporter (Senator? Congressman? Governor? Something elected anyway) is offering Trump $500,000 towards his legal fighting fund. From his is own campaign funds. Is that legal? People game money in good faith for this guys campaign now he's giving it away to trumps lawyers. Surely even the USA has laws on how voluntary donations to political campaign funds can be spent.
"There is no Daily Telegraph or BBC."
Probably because any balanced and independent news outlet would be universally reviled by left, right and everything in between. The BBC is regularly accused of being left wing by the right and right wing by the left. That just tells me they are probably, at least in the main, getting it about right.
"Pour Donald, he may have to cope with his 'popularity' on Twitter dropping somewhat."
When he's a private citizen, he will no longer of the special dispensation afforded world leaders or other people of importance. The ban hammer might fall if he assumes he can get away with the blatant lies and rabble rousing he currently only gets warnings for now.
"Oh to be able to embed the X-Files theme.."
Like that? (ok, not autoplay embedded as such, but the best we can do here)
Rudi seems to be the Kool Aid King. Considering the respect etc he garnered over 9/11, he seems to have lost it now. Watching his press conference outside Four Seasons (the gardening company, not the hotel, my how times have quickly changed!), he seemed to be rocking from attempts at comedy acting to frothing at the mouth.
"Perhaps for next time America needs to sort out a single, clearly defined, set of national voting rules so there's no running to the courts endlessly all over the place (which further delays counting)."
Why would they? Whoever the incumbents are, they know they may need that confusion and legal dispute for themselves next time around. Most politicians seem to be lawyers. The previous two statements may well be linked in some way.
"And then try to prevent the frauds we've seen with postal voting here in the UK."
Election fraud is hard to do and rarely happens in anything other than very minor instances.
https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/sites/default/files/pdf_file/Fraud-allegations-data-report-2017.pdf
"As shown in chart A2 the most frequently reported types of voting case related to the offence of personation (voting as someone else) either at a polling station (28 cases), using a postal vote (22 cases) or using a proxy vote (13 cases). A further 14 cases related to the offence of undue influence. The remaining voting cases related to attempts to tamper with ballot papers (three cases), breaches of secrecy requirements (eight cases), alleged bribery (eight cases) and treating – providing food or drink to influence a voter to vote in a particular way (eight cases). "
"But I also think there have been some real issues wrt allegations of ballot stuffing, absentee ballots etc."
Whilst I agree there was most certainly some irregularities, that's pretty much unavoidable in an election on such a scale, I sincerely doubt there was any organisation behind them and likewise that there could be enough, ie in at least the thousands per voting state/region/area/whatever, to actually swing it. Most notably, there doesn't seem to be any accusations of ballot rigging in places where Republicans won. It seems ballot rigging only ever happens in places where an incumbent loses, more so if those areas they lose in are "vital" to not losing overall.
Well, he's "Irish"[1] and against Brexit, so might not be so good for the UK, although probably a better option than Trump and his "great deal, the best deals"
[1] His ancestors left Ireland 170 years ago. I'm not sure just how "Irish" he is, but he's proud of his roots. (He doesn't mention the French bit though)
That has struck in my mind since I first read it many, many years ago. As a young teen at the time I'd probably say that was and is the core basis of my entire critical thinking process whenever I hear statements or announcements like this, especially if a politician is doing it :-)
"if you're losing billions purely because you're the cheapest, when you're no longer the cheapest who's going to give you money?"
They're also in competition with Deliveroo and others, so it's always going to be a race to the bottom. Also, if they try to increase their cut from the food providers, the food providers will likely just go back to their original model of doing their own deliveries anyway.
My local pizza shop uses Just Eat. But since it's only a 3 minute drive there, I go, they get the full cost of my order and I get a bit of social chat with they guys behind the counter while I wait, they know me, they know I'm a regular, I often get free extras, or samples of new stuff they are trying out. Their own delivery staff do both their own and the Just Eat orders. They could drop Just Eat in a heartbeat if the economics changed.
"Uber offered a separation package, 5 months salary plus tickets back home[4],"
Compared with the legal minimum redundancy packages, that's a pretty good deal actually, despite them being pressured to take it. It's probably a vastly superior deal top anything their US staff will get. Uber hasn't been around for 12 years, so none of the staff could have accumulated enough employment longevity to get the maximum 12 weeks/3 months salary redundancy package. I'm not trying to defend Uber in any way, b ut clearly they are prepared to spend real money to legally "by-pass" the redundancy process.
Also, 5 months pay while you go looking for another job. Using the proper redundancy path, it might be a month or two negotiations followed by the legal minimum notice period and the legal minimum redundancy pay, which for some people might be as little of 1 or 2 weeks notice plus 1 or 2 weeks pay.
PS, I upvoted you because I agree with you. I'm just looking at it from the employees point of view (not that I am one!!)
Is it? Working in a decently lighted area is far better for your eyes than working in the dark with the backlighted keyboard. Are there really so many late night workers who have no other option than to work in the dark because their spouse/partner/housemate/whatever is sleeping and there's no other separate room they could work in?
Other then that, this sounds like a decently good add-on for those who can't afford to throw away one device to buy something more suitable, even if they do end up spending as much as if they'd bought the better option in the first place.
"On one "lucky" occasion three months after my email address had changed it actually put me in a queue at position 99 to chat to real human being. Over an hour later I'd got to position 12 in the queue, then got a message saying "reconnecting" and I was dropped from the queue."
Have you considered that there was never a human involved at all and you only got to position 12 because the people in front also got dropped from the queue? They just build the delay in to make it seem like there's some sort of real process happening.
LOL. With that many, it's not very likely. However, if there IS a market at that time, she may well have one or two that may be especially rare at that point. The oddest things can end up having collector resale value.
eg whiskey and certain plastic toys, "The best piece was the vinyl cape Jawa, the guys from the desert in the original Star Wars film," he said. That item alone fetched £22,000.
Now, in real life, a decent whiskey is relatively likely to have some future value, but guessing which cheap bit of plastic tat might have future value is probably harder than a Vulture Capitalist picking a winning start-up.
I wonder how many people have rooms full of unopened crap that they are hoping will be their retirement fund? They could be lucky and one or two items might well turn out to be collectable and have a future value, but I suspect it' will be the least likely items. The ones people think will have future value are the same things everyone else is collecting with the same hopes which will depress the value until at least after the collectors lifetime when much of the tat will be binned by their children and the few remaining ones might have some real value for the grandchildren who hung on.
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