Posts by John Brown (no body)

Re: chewed wires

So, as soon as you pulled the old cable and put fresh "food" in its place, he was back like a rat up a drainpipe?

Re: Strange

"As for the Post Office ex CEO (what about previous CEOs ?) she says (in essence) we relied on what we were told and it wasn't really our role to oversee this stuff anyway."

Clearly one or more people further down the food chain were "shielding" the board from the bad news and thus were criminally negligent. Someone, somewhere was hiding the bad news and lying by omission at the very least. Or the board DID know but made sure they were only ever told orally, so no paper trail.

"It should be a required test for legislators proposing this sort of legislation to publish this up-front."

Did the current President ever disclose his accounts?

Re: So once the Government gets its way....

"The College works on a strange and convoluted system and in the 2016 Election Hilary Clinton actually got more of the popular vote than Trump and still lost."

That can happen in the UK too. Not sure if it's ever happened, but "first past the post" means you won more seats, not necessaries more votes. Enough "just good enough" results wins the race even if you lose massively in all the other seats. This can also lead to a majority government with as little as 25% of the vote.

Re: stupidity out of ignorance or avarice

I wonder how much "black budget" the TLAs have available for lobbying?

Re: Hmm

"a contractual impossibility under our registry agreement."

Unless that contract contains the phrase "in perpetuity", I doubt that very much.

I wonder if Ethos Capital and the string of shell/holding companies still exist and what their current capitalisation is? It seems fairly obvious to most that Ethos was set up specifically for this purchase to hide the real buyer from the limelight. But since I don't have an MBA, hey what would my opinion be worth anyway? Probably about as much as Ethos Capital.

Re: An end to police racial bias?

From what I read on the Beeb, it was rejected for publication and the university has distanced itself from it.

Re: this is not bias

"at the scale included in the article the image of Obama and not Obama are very comparable indeed."

If you squint and blur your vision, the general shape is very good. But the skin tones are significantly lighter in the generated image. That's the bias showing. Generally, when upscaling or zooming a poor image to enhance it, you want to create new pixels between the larger pixels which are averages of the general area of the image. How you can interpolate lighter pixels between darker areas such that the average across the whole area becomes lighter is beyond me.

It'd be interesting to see what it does to a pixelated image of Trump after he's just come off the sunbed and is at is most "orange panda-like" best. It'd probably put glasses on him :-)

Re: In the UK

blares "look at me, I'm a tosser" repeatedly at decent volume

That mean they would still be banned in York then :-)

Re: Face Masks

Likewise, farting loudly to mask the sound of a cough.

Re: What do you think it is about

"Try explaining to people that commercial television is NOT about showing entertainment, but that their main goal is to show commercials."

It's not quite that black and white. They have to show enough "good" entertainment to attract enough eyeballs that they can sell the adverts. Having said that, there is clearly a subset of humanity who are happy sit and watch adverts all day, hence the various shopping channels.

Ah, but can the Coloured Pencil Clan play their Flash-based creations on it?

Non-moving, non-interactive, non-multimedia adverts are just sooooo prehistoric!!

Re: Sledgehammer, meet nut.

"That said, it's really trivial to pause Windows updates indefinitely. If no-one on your staff can figure that out, maybe even the above is too much to ask."

These are the people who use crayons and coloured pencils. They may well have highly advanced technological tools, but they may not have any "mechanics" on staff. They just "drive" the tools, have learned some of the right buttons to press and if anything "breaks", the just take it "to the garage".

Re: But...

"At last, someone points out the "obvious" flaw in current A.I!"

Agreed, but I would point out that it's not the first time these flaws in so-called Artificial Intelligence or Machine learning have been referred to on these hallowed pages. I think pretty much all readers here would agree there is no such thing as "artificial intelligence" (apart from that poster who claims he i9nvnted it, of course!)

Re: Oh, good. Another case of having an agency (NYPD) police its own actions.

If they'd had any sense, they#d have taken advantage of the free jolly, taken you at your word, flew back and then almost certainly been sent back on another free jolly to confirm certain details that they "forgot" to clarify the first time around. I'm sure they could have turned it into "no case to answer" eventually anyway.

"If there wasn't looting where did all the video footage of people running out of broken windows carrying expensive goods come from?"

I blame Hollywood. US kids are brought up on a diet of TV and movies showing them how to behave if or when a protest turns nasty. The only thing missing was a zombie attack.

Re: Liar, she hit a traffic light

"CCTV-on-pole, has one draw-back,"

...it's impossible to quickly turn and focus based on sounds like a human being on a horse can. CCTV is great for the incident commander to get an overview and maybe evidential purposes, but you can't beat people on the ground for seeing and dealing with the detail and maybe escalating the situation.

Having said that, I also remember the miners strikes and what went on during that time.

Re: Liar, she hit a traffic light

Maybe you are too young to remember the days of the "firms" travelling to football matches specifically to fight the other "firms". It was a weekly occurrence all around the UK and lead to massive police presence at matches, away and home fans being strictly segregated, away fans being escorted in "parades", flanked by 100's of officers and horses from the bus/train stations to and from the ground, and an entire generation of young kids not being taken to matches, and the threats and fines from UEFA and FIFA against British clubs because of the violent fans.

Of course, the UK wasn't alone in this and some countries are still being sanctioned because of their fans behaviour to the extent that some internationals have been held behind closed doors cutting off that income stream.

Re: Protests

"under Brack Husains Admin."

I would have downvoted you anyway, but that childish phrase garners an automatic downvote every time. Shame you didn't start your post with that so I could have saved the time it took to read the rest of it.

Re: Crikey!

Probably a legal term/definition for use on a charge sheet.

Re: Fax will never die!

"my GP refuses to hook up to whatever modern-ish system exists for referrals and they hadn't sent the correct fax over, or some such nonsense"

One of the silver linings of the CV19 cloud. GPs and pharmacies have been dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century! Just a few short months ago, it was quicker to call in to the GP surgery and request a prescription renewal than to have to keep re-dialling the single phone line hoping to get anything other than an engaged tone. (They did already have an online offering, but my wife can't register for that because she doesn't have enough of the right kinds of ID to prove she's the same person that's been going to that GP surgery for the last 20 years.) They have a nice simple system now. A separate prescription renewal number you call, giving name, address DoB and prescription and it gets delivered a day or so later. Simple, works and minimum technology.