Re: Does that mean there's will be a version with proper accent entry?
Holding down a letter to get an accents pop-up? Are you saying Macs don't have auto-repeat on key-press?
25255 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010
"The cost of the medallions was pretty substantial, but market forces set the price."
That's actually a major part of the problem IMHO. Why should "market forces" determine the price? It's effectively a social service provided and managed by the city, hopefully to an optimum level. Surely it would be better to sell the medallions to applicants at a reasonable rate based on fitness for the job, aptitude and whatever other relevant qualifications are deemed necessary. Not the people with the deepest pockets. If the medallions weren't sold at extortionate rates, maybe the drivers could make a living while charging lower rates to passengers and truly be independents.
I do like your more correct description of a "disrupter" though. :-)
Uber are incredibly lucky it wasn't someone with more evil intent. By the sounds of it, they could have pretty much wiped out Uber if they had cared enough to do so. A $$multi-billion business, everything online, cloudy stuff they can't properly protect. I wonder if they could have recovered from someone wiping all those systems where access was gained? Is *everything* backed up? Offline backups? Tested offline backups?
Our company does a "disaster recovery" exercise every year. The official start of the process is someone quite senior pulling the breaker switch on a Friday evening. The guys have until 8am Monday to be 100% back up and running on the original kit. It normally takes about 12 hours to recover fully while everything ticks over on the backup systems so hopefully no actual downtime.
"If the policy says "don't share your password" it shouldn't make any difference who asks for it - you just don't share it."
We get "pen tested" every now and then by an outside company. It's usually, from a users point view, some "important" email with a link to follow where we need to log in. The link is long that's nigh on impossible to check where it's really going from the browser address bar. It's looks very much like the common sort of stupidly long links our system use. I usually follow the link, find a realistic looking login page, enter my username (my publically available email address", then enter "password" for the password. A page open telling me all about what just happened, why I shouldn't follow "unknown" links and auto-subscribes me to a 10 minute security "training" course, which I complete. After the 3rd or 4th occasion, I get a phone call from my manager, sounding a bit upset. So I tell him I was testing out the quality of the phishing attempt because it was abnormally good but wasn;t stupid enough to use my real password and if the pen testers were doing their job properly instead of using automated scripts, they'd have know that I'd not fallen for it.
He asked me not to do it again as it was raising red flags but copied me in on the email back to "security" explaining how poor the pen testing was and was it really worth the money :-)
According to Wikipedia
The world's first commercial floating offshore windfarm, Hywind Scotland, was commissioned in 2017.[40] It uses 5 Siemens turbines of 6 MW each, has a capacity of 30 MW and is sited 18 miles (29 km) off Peterhead. The project also incorporates a 1 MWh lithium-ion battery system (called Batwind).[6]
WindFloat Atlantic, sited 20 km off the coast of Viana do Castelo, Portugal, has a capacity of 25 MW and has operated since July 2020.[56]
The 48 MW Kincardine Offshore Wind Farm is the UK's second commercial floating offshore windfarm, and completed construction in August 2021.[42][57] "
All of the first 20 or so results from Google, searching on "the first floating wind farm in the world" (without the quotes), say Wikipedia is correct. There were a couple of single test installations earlier, one off the coast of the Netherlands and one off the coast of Norway (Also called Hywind) off the coast of Norway and lead directly the Scottish Hywind farm.
"The North Sea is very shallow"
Mostly, which has been a bit of a boon for offshore wind, but not only is it not all shallow, there are other seas and coasts around the UK, some of which are busy shipping lanes and fishing grounds. The UK has floating wind turbines out there now.
So, R&D started some time ago and 5 years experience of running the system. More research, if shared, is always welcome though.
"Probably a floating wind turbine requires better anchoring than a floating oil rig."
It does. Just look at the existing floating offshore wind turbines.
That prize money and the way it's being put over, it almost feels as though the US has come up with a new idea and suddenly wants to develop it and become a world leader.
Maybe it's just the articles author and the way he wrote it, but it doesn't even offer a nod to the existing technology.
It's the new official El Reg House Style. North American.
Some PHB at El Reg has decided that having authors from different parts of the world writing in their own local version of English is confusing for their poor dumb readers and have chosen to do everything in American English instead of English. Maybe most of their writers are from the USA these days. Or maybe their "analytics" show most of their readers are in the USA. Or maybe USA readers are less likely than others to have script blockers blocking the "analytics" and so skewing the results towards the USA.
But I agree, of so many "Americanisms", eyeglasses feels more jarring to this Brit than most others. Worse even than necktie :-)
"One of the largest US cities, currently de-populating claims it doesn't have the support services or infrastructure to host a few hundred migrants, but a suburb apparently can."
Everywhere has plenty of space for tax payers. Welfare recipients, not so much.
"“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore."
""Love thy neighbour" is seemingly hate speech in some devoutly Christian circles.
They probably have it confused with "Do not covet thy neighbours[1] wife" and think it means no more swingers parties.
[1} Note: UK spelling. Jesus is far more likely to be British[2} than a Texan :-)
[2] Clearly not as there was no place named Britain 2000-odd years ago just as there was no such place name as Texas. But he may have made a whistle stop tour of the Green and Pleasant land though certainly not the Lone Star State[3].
[3] Yes, I'm trolling Texas Reps :-)
If that quote is accurate, I'm not surprised they wanted it gone as quickly as possible. A better analogy might have been thought of if the person writing it had stopped to think for a few seconds, but it sounds like a thoughtless "shoot from the hip" comment directly comparing asylum seekers with "trash". Not a good look.
"laptops...faster clocked CPUs...that fit the existing CPU socket"
Not something I see very often on the many business grade laptops I see everyday. In many cases, the base RAM is onboard too with a single SODIMM socket for expansion. Consumer grade often won't even have any socketed RAM, never mind a socketed CPU. At best, it'll be a socketed NVMe SSD, about the only upgradeable item in the system nowadays. Making things slimmer and lighter (and cheaper to make) has driven this. Leading to many more models on offer at many price points because you can no longe buy a cheap model and later upgrade it. So yet more landfill.
They might be better off reducing the range of products. Most of of them are not especially special, just a little different. Maybe follow the fast food industry and have three CPUs, Medium (or Regular), Large and Extra Large. No Small, that won't sell according to Marketing). And when the cooling system fails, you can have fries with it too.
You can't trademark a common word. You CAN trademark a common word in specific style/colour/logo design though. On the other hand, successful trademarks can become diluted in common usage, eg Sellotape, Biro, Hoover, Sharpie etc such that they become almost useless in marketing. Intel may have just come up with the shortest ever useful life of a marketing name-brand.
"The box was standing on what was obviously a new carpet, of a matching colour."
As a field engineer, I came across that same problem at many customer sites. They were told it would be fixed but future call-outs would likely be chargeable as "user induced damage" if they didn't lift the PCs off the floor by at least 6"/15cm. Most of the dust is disturbed by peoples feet moving under the desk, but not by much. 6" seemed to be enough to more or less eliminate the problem.
"I could likely get to the destination as or more quickly if I just hop in the car and go if it's only a couple of hundred miles."
Yes, for many people, short haul flights are often more of a status or habit thing. If you don't live near the departure airport and need to be somewhere well away from the destination airport, the extra travel at each end plus the security theatre at the airports can easily make it quicker to travel by car, train or coach/bus for many.
It would need a significant optimisation to increase the carrying capacity and range to make it useful. On the other hand, the early[*] EV cars had a range of barely 40 miles, not a great deal further than this flying bike. On the other hand, what needs optimising is power generation/storage and electric motor efficiency and this bike is already using the very latest improvements that now give EV cars a 200+ mile range. No regenerative braking or other optimisation suitable for road vehicles.
There's probably a learning curve. You don't let some over-excited motoring journalist loose on your brand new flying prototype. It's not in his/her skill-set :-)
Having said that, it is just a prototype and doesn't seem to have anything new or innovative in it.
"Proclaiming your science-derived guesses as absolute, indisputable fact that may not be challenged changes it from science to religion."
Luckily, most science isn't like that and the published papers can be read, showing that. How the press spin the stories, or worse, how the PR from the company or Government sponsoring it might spin it is what leads to the "absolutist science" we keep seeing in the media.
It's his job. As with science, nothing is impossible, so he has to talk up the possible attack vectors so that he can show he looked at them, tried to get funding to protect against them and set plans in place for if or when that funding materialises.
Looking at it from the other side of the coin, maybe the Chinese are experimenting with ways to clean up orbital space junk. Somewhere in the middle, China has military leaders in the same position. They see the US satellite as a threat and must, as part of their jobs, identify and attempt to get funding to combat that threat if necessary. Space junk clean-up methods are also ideal for disabling "enemy" satellites. It's all very sad, but it's the way of the world.
Possibly. It's been rumbling on for years though, so maybe a small share will be doled out if the UK had some involvement in the gathering of useful evidence while sill in the EU. At best, it might be a tiny reduction in the ongoing monies still being paid to the EU for various schemes we were involved in, especially the pensions.
Interesting story in the press recently. It should be of interest no matter where on the spectrum of the diversity debate one stands.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-62826983
Now, there is probably more to that story than this one report shows. But it looks, from that report, that the primary arguments against this person being given the job is entirely because he's a man. There doesn't seem to be anyone questioning the line up of candidates or their qualifications. It'll be an interesting one to follow as local councils are usually sticklers for following all the rules in this sort of matter and in particular like to be shown as being fair and diverse.
Well, all these $BigCorp have to put their huge profits somewhere. It earns nothing sitting in a bank, might even depreciate, while the bank makes profits lending it out. Can't give it away as bonuses or dividends, that attracts taxes. So why not just become their own bank instead? Win Win for $BigCorp. And they are all run by bean counters anyway. They always need more beans to count.
"the simplicity and reliability of the Volkswagen Beetle."
Have you seen the current incarnation of the VW Beetle? Few people buy cheap, basic, easily maintainable cars these days. They are more likely to lease something flashy. Cars as a Service has already arrived.
"It's worked for fertilizer producers, seed vendors, grain intermediaries, shipping companies. And it looks like it's going to work for John Deere."
And not forgetting biotech with their GM crops that either don't reproduce or are licenced in a way that you MUST buy seed from them, no holding back some the crop for next years planting. And the sue balls fired at adjoining farmers because their crops now contain some identifiable propriety GM seed from wind-blow.