Posts by John Brown (no body)

Re: Jumping the gun a bit, aren't they ?

But considering it's been all over the news for weeks now, including details of how than manual contact tracing works and that the app is still not ready/being tested on the Isle of Wight, I'm gobsmacked at the numbers posting here who clearly have no clue and are ill informed. Have we been invaded by Sun readers?

"The whole thing is a fucking farce."

It may well be, but clearly you have no idea what a "contact" is or you'd not have mentioned the 90 people you passed in the street and *may* have been within 2m of you for a second or two. After 2 months of being told constantly what a "significant contact" is, you still haven't got yet.

Re: not all speech is protected

Actually, he doesn't. If you listen carefully or read the transcripts, he says things that any reasonable person would infer as to mean what you say above but always, always is said in way that leaves him an "out". Her is NEVER explicit in those sorts of claims. It only sounds like he is rambling on like a buffoon because that's what he wants you to think.

Re: I get that the cameras may not have picked out the truck...

"just have the car shout at the driver."

Maybe the car should be playing a constant tone where the frequency varies by numbers of decisions made and the assess accuracy of the decisions based on the earlier and later observations of the system and/or other detections constantly happening. This would train the "driver" to realise what is happening and learn when and how often things are going wrong. Many people, even non-techies, could tell when the dial-up modem was going to connect or fail to connect or even when it connected at a low speed and to manually hang up and try again, just from the noises it made. It will even have the knock on effect of keeping the driver more attentive.

Re: FUCKED

Oz? Or maybe NZ? It's fact mate!

Re: The video doesn't show the full story...

"it appears the igntion point of the explosion is external to SN4:"

Lesson learned: Memo to all ground crew. No more sneaking around the back of the shed for a crafty fag during testing.

Re: Pretty little dot..

If they'd launched on Weds, I was hoping to see that too. But after a beautiful sunny day, it clouded over just enough that the moon was the only visible object in the sky. Today, I was able to watch the launch live but by the time there was a likelihood of the ISS and or the Dragon being overhead, the sun was still shining in another beautiful clear sky.

There does seem to be some sort of higher power conspiring to hide anything interesting happening above our heads. Meteor shower? Cloudy. Eclipse? Cloudy. ISS? Cloudy. Our Great Lizard Overlords doing a flypast? Cloudy.

Re: Wow. What a whiny ass little b**ch.

Trump is actually a lot smaller than he appears on TV. A merkin is what he wears on his head.

Re: Trumpetsters Trumpet Drumpfs Lumps

I thought it was a line from Nellie The Elephant...

Re: @IGotOut Simple Response.

"Many will read the headline now, go yee-haw and never notice that in law it never existed"

Like his vote winning promise to re-open the coal mines. Since he became President, US coal usage has dropped by over 15%. I suspect that none of the mine re-openings or saving/increasing miners jobs has actually happened. I wonder how many of those miners will vote again for him? Or might they notice the lack of new mines and jobs?

I've often wondered why someone felt the need to invent the term "podcast"

Re: "Easy to enforce in C [using fwrite()] but quite difficult in Pascal."

Don't forget, what people now call a "feature phone" is what many called a smartphone before what we now call smartphones arrived.

Re: To my shame ..

Don't confuse the job title "Manager" with people who actually manage people and/or aspects of the business and have the authority to do so. These days, for example, bank mangers are little more than office supervisors and have almost no ability or authority to deal with your account issues. Likewise, most of the 20-somethings who seem to "manage" retail shops. And there's the "building manager" in many places who is basically a handyman/woman/person or caretaker. In IT you'll often get job titles which include "manager" and they are nothing of the sort in the traditional sense. Systems Manager, Server Manager, Apps Manager, Network Manager; all in the same team with no one directly below them or answering to them, but they do actually "manage" some hardware or software.

Re: "the concept of saving face"

It's long, long time since any politician or civil servant has "fallen on the sword". Just calling out the current lot is a bit short sighted. eg WMDs

Re: Ah, customers.

"If the standard is strict enough that you'd lose certification on just accepting bad data instead of sendingit, that standard is crap."

Systems accepting and processing malformed data is the bread and butter for hackers.

Re: average office

That sounds reasonable. If you'd gone with the density of an average Trump supporter however, that would have just ended up with ridiculously outrageous numbers.

Additionally, that publicly available searchable information is all over the place. I'd like to see them do a facial recognition search without taking a copy of and storing all those images, ie "making a copy" for commercial usage as opposed to going off to "look at" each image on it's host server at the time of the search. IIRC, Google got stung a while ago with this sort of data scrape and store and so now only keep a small, relatively poor quality thumbnail and then link to the original if the user wants the larger image, most often to the page and not just the image itself.

Re: Good and bad

"Great. So I can get anyone I don't like locked up for two weeks simply by giving their name. That could be fun."

You know they don't contact you to trace possible infections until after your test comes back positive, don't you? I would also expect the contact tracer to ask the infected person where they met their suspected infectees. If I get a call from a contact tracer I'll be asking them where and when I supposedly met this person so I could confirm the accuracy or otherwise of the claim. No need to know who it is or pass on any personal data. I very much doubt the contact tracers will simply bas asking for names and addresses because that's not enough information. They need to know the risk level too, ie were you close to the person for a significant length of time.

Re: Good and bad

"being in quarantine is bad enough, being entirely unavailable means that other arrangements would be required, at additional cost and difficulty."

Not a problem. You can safely and legally drive at least 260 miles to take your dependants somewhere safe, even while infected and showing symptoms. This matter is now closed.

I have some backups of historical research too. It's a full 20 volume set of 1930's encyclopaedias!

And not forgetting that the Laws of Australia trump the laws of mathematics when it comes to decryption.

Re: the 5G Bioshield is nothing more than a £5 USB key

"I'm sure would argue it weakens the immune system too"

Correct 5G weakens the immune system. What you need is to counteract it with 5D because that increases your vitamin D levels.

Re: What 5G ?

My wife and I were in the general area last year on holiday and spent a day in Glastonbury. It's a nice place in general but yes, it's got a LOT more than it's fair share of weirdos. I suspect quite a few villages are missing their idiots.

You should never pooh pooh a pooh pooh