* Posts by Loyal Commenter

5761 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jul 2010

NOBODY PRINT! Selfless hero saves typing pool from carbon catastrophe

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Coat

Was the other one "helicopter"?

If I'd been able to get my hands on the local Dymo label printer, it would have been...

Everyone back to the office! Why? Because the decision has been made

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Re: Deliver us from office keyboards

When working from home, I also invested in a proper clicky keyboard. I used it for about an hour before my wife (who is working in the same room) threatened to insert it into a normally exit-only orifice.

I then invested in a keyboard with cherry red MX keys, not cherry blue ones. However, I use that for my personal PC, and not my work laptop, which is fine to use with the old cheapo (but still mechanical) i-rocks K10 with knock-off switches.

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Re: Scheme

...the "back to the office" brigade seem to be labouring under the false memory of lockdowns as well. There were relatively few times, and relatively short periods, early on in the pandemic, when people were instructed to actually not work from offices. For a lot of the time over the last two years, the "official" advice has been "work from home if you can". At all other times, those who could not work effectively from home, or who find it easier to work from an office environment have been able to do so, provided there is an office environment open for them to work from.

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Re: Scheme

If they are jobs that need to be done from the office, or which are vastly easier to do from an office environment, then the impetus to do them from the office will be from the people doing them. No need from a top-down edict.

Such edicts only indicate that there is no need for office presence, otherwise they wouldn't need to be making them...

Similarly, if there are jobs that can only be done from an office, and which are vital for the functioning of the organisation, then that would have been an exception during lockdown, and would have been happening, and still will be. For instance, an ambulance driver can't work from home, and never did, so the "some jobs have to be done from the office" argument is a bit hollow. What is particularly disingenuous is where you see this argument used as a justification for getting everyone back into office buildings, often at a hit to actual productivity.

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Re: Scheme

I think maybe some of the readers here don't understand irony.

Show me anyone who is really keen to get workers back to the office, and I'll show you a commercial landlord, or someone whose budget depends on buildings and maintenance.

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Now all the HTML is leaking out of his top...

UK govt promises to sink billions into electronic health records for England

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Re: Our data, not theirs to sell

I resent that comment, the Beano has a lot to teach us about how to make a cow pie.

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Re: NHS Arithmetic

*Citation required*

I'm not going to claim that there aren't dodgy politicians in every political party. However, the Venn diagram of dodgy politicians and Labour and the Tories would be a circle to represent the dodgy ones, a circle slightly overlapping this to represent the Labour party, and a circle contained within the first representing the current lot of Tories. The even-slightly-reputable ones (and I hesitate to refer to the likes of Ken Clarke as reputable) were pushed out at the last election.

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Re: Priorities

Normally, I'd refer to the adage, "never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence." However, with this lot, I'd give malice and incompetence equal footing.

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Spyware

There's a reason I didn't put the government COVID app on my phone, not least of which is that several early versions of it were rejected by the platform's app store over privacy concerns. I got around the need to use this to scan barcodes everywhere by making the sensible decision not to go into crowded public places during a pandemic unless I really had to.

I'm told the NHS "official" app is better than the government's one, but how long before this is replaced by something "NHS" branded but wholly owned and operated by private interests (with lots of suspicious links to the Tory Party?), and with no link to, or oversight from, the NHS at all. You know, just like "NHS Track and Trace".

With the current government's fetish for derogating human rights, and willingness to weaken data protection laws, I have absolutely zero confidence that this won't be used to gather private and personal data and sell it to the highest bidder. Given their track record, this is essentially a foregone conclusion.

On the flip side, I can see the benefits of a unified electronic medical record. However, the subject MUST have complete control over how this is gathered, where it is stored, and what it is used for. There must be proper, legally enforceable oversight, and any transfers to organisations outside of the UK must be an opt-in process, with a basis in necessity. I can't actually think of any necessary cases where my medical data needs to leave the UK, except possibly for emergency treatment when overseas.

There may need to be exceptions to consent, for example in emergencies when the subject can't consent, but in these cases, there needs to be proper data governance, with the principles of limitation (only the data that is needed for the purpose), auditing (a log being kept of who, what, and when, stored with the main record), and assurance of destruction when no longer required (e.g. when discharged from that overseas hospital). There must be absolutely no scope for data collection, storage, and sale of this data.

I have no confidence in the current government to ensure any of these things. In fact, I can envision them licking their chops hungrily at the thought of just how they will spend the cash they get from selling us out.

The Raspberry Pi Pico goes wireless with the $6 W

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Re: I/O

Such things as I2C serial-to-parallel buses exist. Okay, so you're going to be reducing the throughput by serialising it, so that 100 KHz bus is going to manage a 32-bit parallel bus at around 3 KHz. If you need something faster, I'd suggest that this is not the hardware you're looking for.

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Re: I/O

Oh, and I forgot the most important one of all - the onboard LED on GP25 (may be a different pin number on the wireless one)

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Re: I/O

...some of us will even be working on stuff where it'd be considered rather over-provisioned in the IO department

I'm willing to bet that MOST uses won't need anything like the various I/O it supports.

From memory, that's two I2C channels, two SPI channels, two independent state machines with programmable clock, up to the processor clock speed (125MHz by default, but can run faster), 3 D/A converters (16 bit IIRC), plus a fourth one hooked up to an onboard temperature sensor, and a whole a bunch of bare pins for binary bit-fiddling if you need them. I reckon most people will find themselves hooking it up to one or two I2C/SPI sensors, and maybe an LED or two, and using it to monitor stuff, do some basic analysis, and connecting to whatever is listening for the results of what is being monitored either via the onboard USB or the wireless. Bear in mind that these things are probably cheaper than the sensors you'd be connecting them to, so the attitude in most use cases should be: if you need to do more stuff, use more devices.

If you are after more parallel pins, then why not just use an I2C or SPI device that provides them?

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Debug pins

I had to look up the datasheet to work out where the debug pins have gone; for some reason they've moved them from the end of the board to the middle. Perhaps running the lines under/next to the wireless chip causes too much RF interference?

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Re: I/O

SPI and I2C don't need a lot of pins, and support a lot of devices in parallel (as long as they have different IDs)

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Re: I/O

It's pretty cool, once you get your head around the state machine programming. It just sits there to one side managing your I/O without eating your processor cycles.

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Re: Pounds?

Indeed, and in the US, it would be $6 + sales tax

Soviet-era tech could change the geothermal industry

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Re: A Different Tack

Sure, sounds like science fiction, but in Verne's and Wells' time, so did space travel.

Space travel, as describe by Jules Verne very much still is science fiction. Unless you fancy being fired out of a gun at high G. Let me know when you've found of way of not being turned into jam by that.

As for HG Wells, I'm pretty sure that if there is any life on Mars, it's microbial and isn't coming here in cylinders with tripods with heat-rays. Still sci-fi there, buddy.

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Re: A Different Tack

The problem with your argument is that:

1) Taking energy from the waves doesn't remove it from the closed system, ultimately, that energy would either be lost to space via heat from friction, or heat from being used.

2) Same argument for heat from the Earth's depths. It would ultimately be lost to space via infrared radiation. The only effect from speeding this up slightly might be an incredibly marginal reduction in the amount of heat available for volcanism. I would not class this as a negative (or even measurable) effect. You'd have to extract an AWFUL lot of heat to cause any noticeable cooling.

3) Wind power and wave power have the same argument - this energy is otherwise wasted into space ultimately from heating effects from friction / turbulence. The net effect of taking some of it and using it for useful work is zero on the system as a whole. You'd have to fill the skies with pretty much edge-to-edge windmills to have a noticeable effect on the amount of wind, so your argument makes about as much sense as the people who complain that wind turbines are making it windier because they're big fans (allegedly). Next up: birds aren't real, etc.

4) If you're referring to burning fuels with your allusion to "sapping all plant life", well then, yes, that's the point of renewable energy, so you don't have to do that.

5) Technically solar power is using energy that would otherwise be largely reflected back into space (unless you're putting your solar panels in front of something with a lower albedo). On a large scale, this technically would lead to warming (although I doubt it would be noticeable). The problems are really that it prevents that land being used for other things (like growing crops, forestation, grazing, etc.), and that solar power is subject to weather, seasons, and the diurnal cycle, and doesn't produce that much energy for the amount of surface area used (although efficiencies are improving). By all means, stick panels on roofs, and so on, but you have to be mindful of edging out other uses for the land they are on.

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Re: Blowback

There's probably a few factors that will limit the "lifetime" of that hole for practical uses, without having to re-bore it or bore a new one from time to time.

The ones I can think of are:

Mineralisation - hot water under pressure tends to dissolve things. Hot water under pressure with dissolved things tends to precipitate them again when the heat and / or pressure is reduced. This is likely to mean mineral transfer from the bottom of the hole to the top over time, causing it to "fur up", because there will be a temperature gradient, even if slight.

Heat transfer - I'm not sure how well hot rocks under pressure conduct heat, but if you're extracting that heat, over time, there will be less of it. Again, I don't know how quickly this will happen, and how quickly heat from surrounding rocks will be conducted in, but in theory, eventually, the temperature at the bottom of the hole would fall, reducing the thermodynamic efficiency of the power plant on top.

"Fracking" - injection of cold water into hot rocks will crack them, causing fissures over time, and the slow break-up of the rock at the bottom of the hole. Presumably, this is going to result in a "chamber" at the bottom of the hole, which might not be a big problem, but eventually, due to the elastic compressibility of hot fluids, you could get some problems with pressure building up in waves, as with a geyser, which probably would cause problems up-top.

Integrity of the borehole - cracking of the rocks further up from the bottom of the hole, due to similar effects, could also cause problems, potentially blocking the borehole, or causing the injected water to leak into surrounding rocks at a lesser depth. Steam produced at the bottom of the borehole could also end up leaking into surrounding rocks on the way back up.

In terms of injecting water into hot rocks at depth, and retrieving it as steam, presumably you want some sort of loop with two boreholes, rather than one, with water being injected into one borehole, and the steam being retrieved from the other. I'm not sure how you'd go about connecting the two boreholes at depth, whilst preventing them from "short-circuiting" at a shallower depth. Presumably, they will need to be some way apart, and have no geological faults anywhere between them.

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Actually nobody will accept geothermal energy, of course not the oil/gas/nuclear lobby, but even most "green" politicians will be against it, because it isn't their own pet solution and it doesn't profit to the people who pay them.

Meanwhile, in Iceland...

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Re: Blowback

Ok so that *might* answer the "how deep" question, but not the "how long" one. (fnarr, fnarr)

He also doesn't mention energy requirements (I doubt vapourising rock is cheap in terms of energy usage, you're talking 1000°C or so just to melt it, depending on the type of rock). If it takes the output of a power station to drill a borehole, and takes months to do so, are the costs ever going to add up?

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Re: what if ...

They'll probably stick with experiments with chemical lasers for now. Who's for a tanker full of extremely hazardous fluorine compounds as a by-product?

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Re: what if ...

For a 60 tonne tank, a little over 1 million moles of iron, with the specific heat capacity of iron at 25 J/mol, and perfect absorption, you're talking 25 MJ to raise the temperature by one degree. To do that in one second, takes 25 MW. Iron is, of course, reflective to microwaves, so even if it absorbs a frankly unrealistic 1% of that radiation (it will be much less), you're talking 2.5 GW to raise it by one degree per second. You'll want to do it quickly, as well, because the rate of heat loss to the environment is proportional to the heat difference (the 4th law of thermodynamics, since you were asking). Oh, and one of the things tanks are not known for is remaining stationary.

To put that in perspective, since we're talking science fiction here, you can operate a flux capacitor at 2.1 GW. Have you got your Mr Fusion handy?

This approach is actually far, far worse than trying to make a hole in the tank.

Once again, it's worth pointing out that if you want to stop a tank, you'd be far better off using an anti-tank weapon.

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Re: what if ...

*I did of course, mean "being largely composed of water, and conducting electricity with high resistance"

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Re: what if ...

However, "at this kind of power" is the output of a power station. Also, as noted by others here, the microwave reflectivity of metal conductors is pretty close to perfect, whilst the microwave absorption of humans is pretty much perfect as well, being largely composed of water, and conducting electricity with high conductivity.

Such a weapon would scatter microwaves all around the place, setting fire to everything, and doing the tank's job for it.

In other words, you'd need a lot of energy focused very well to melt through metal, and the side-effect would be orders of magnitude more energy being sprayed about the place and hitting things much more susceptible to being damaged by it, including yourself. It would be about as sensible as trying to hammer in a nail by firing a gun at it. You're much more likely to hurt yourself than be successful in your endeavour.

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Re: Could this be the energy source that 'solves' energy for humanity??

One place I stayed in Reykjavík, on the Laugarnes peninsular, the hot water supply was directly from the spring, rather than through a secondary heating system. It took a couple of days to get used to the eggy smell in the shower.

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Re: Blowback

Also, not mentioned in the article is both how deep Quase's hole is (fnarr) and how long it took to melt it.

1 cm per day isn't going to cut it (pun absolutely intended).

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Re: what if ...

how fast can it drill through 30cm of steel?

See my calculations above for an idea, this depends wholly on the power supply

and how small can the device get?

It's not a question of how small can the device be, it's more a question of how big does the power supply need to be? This ties in with your first question.

how far from the object being drilled into can the beam emitter stay?

If it's a focused beam, then attenuation is going to be linear (i.e. by a fixed % per unit distance through air), otherwise the reverse square law applies.

can it be used from.. let's say, 100 meters away?

Depends on how big your power station is, and how much of its output you're swallowing up (a typical power station output is several GW). In order to be effective, you'd probably be using up most of that, because of the combination of beam attenuation, reflection, and a moving target. You'd better have a fire crew standing by for dealing with misses as well, because things like trees, plants, and houses are much better absorbers of microwaves than metals.

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Re: what if ...

...and with even 0.1% reflected back would vapourise you quicker.

For example, let's work out the amount of energy required to heat and melt lets say a 10x10cm hole in 1 mm thickness of tungsten, that's 10 cm3, which is 192.8g, working out to 1.048 moles. The heat capacity of tungsten is 24.8 J/mole and its melting point is 3,422°C, so let's assume you're starting on a warmish day, and you only have to raise the temperature by 3,400°C, the amount of energy required to heat it to melting point is 88.43 KJ. You'll then need to actually melt it. The heat of fusion of tungsten is 35.4KJ/mole, so you'll need a further 37.1 KJ to melt it making around 125.5 KJ in total.

We'll assume that the surface here is not 99.9% reflective, and be generous and say 50% (that tank is very dirty) to make it easier to absorb, so you'll only need around 250 KJ to melt that hole, rather than 125 MJ.

Because metals conduct heat well, you'll be wanting to do this quickly, before it dissipates, so you'll be wanting a power supply that can deliver that in less than a second. Let's be generous and say you want to do it in 1s, and this means you'll need a 250kW continuous power supply to take out a millimetre's thickness of tungsten on the surface of that tank under ideal conditions, assuming no attenuation and only 50% reflection, oh and the tank being stationary. You might conceivably fit that into a truck, but that's not going to last long on a battlefield.

Now, we've got through the reflective armour, you only have to get through the rest of the tank, which is what? Several inches thick, and moving, and heavily armed.

To be practical, and using your figure of 99.9% reflectivity, you'd need a moderate sized power station to power that weapon. For every joule of heat you deliver to that tank, you're delivering 1kJ back at you. Let's assume that's scattered and you only get 0.1% of that hitting you; unless you've got better armour than that tank, you're doing as much damage to yourself (and everything around you). Your power station is now on fire and being attacked by an angry tank.

Meanwhile, one anti-tank missile presumably costs less than a power station, and some very good sunglasses.

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Re: How deep?

If I remember my geology correctly, the rocks that produce the oil and gas are sedimentary, but the ones that trap it in place tend to be impermeable igneous ones, which will be the ones you have to drill through to get to the gas/oil pocket, and igneous rocks (granite and basalt) tend to be anything other than soft.

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Re: Could this be the energy source that 'solves' energy for humanity??

If we're talking about repurposing existing turbines in coal plants, there's unlikely to be much of a district to heat (for some reason people don't want to live near them, whodathunkit?)

New plants, on the other hand; well I can't think of any reason they couldn't be put onto any old industrial estate.

As it happens, the geothermal plants in Iceland have many kilometres of lagged pipes going out from them for exactly this purpose, because the plants are where the heat is, not where the people are. The roads in Reykjavík don't freeze in winter because of the grid of pipes under the surface.

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Re: what if ...

As is putting anything reflective on the outside of those tanks, which is hat their owners are likely to do as soon as they realise what you are up to. Microwaves might be quite good at cutting through metal, but direct them at *shiny* metal with a high melting point, such as polished tungsten, and you might find that they are even better at cutting through you.

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Re: Could this be the energy source that 'solves' energy for humanity??

Or, if you have the cash handy, visit Iceland and do the same, at the likes of The Blue Lagoon which is actually the outflow from a geothermal plant, after they have extracted the useful heat from it. Oddly, they don't mention that in the brochure, as "bathe in the power station outflow" sounds a bit too Scarfolk.

More than $100m in cryptocurrency stolen from blockchain biz

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Re: Isn't it funny...

Yup, crypto-bros will still be crypto-bros...

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Re: What I find odd

Well, yes and no. If you "valued" it at $100M using the Ether price six months ago, you'd definitely be looking at much less (somewhere in the region of $30M at today's price). If you made that "valuation" a week ago, you'd currently be looking at around $115M, because the "value" has rebounded a bit.

The sheer nature of that amount of volatility means that it deeply unsuitable as any sort of serious investment vehicle. Of course, if you were to "buy the dip" right now, you could be looking at 10x your investment in two years time, or, just as likely, 10% of it. It's probably fairly unlikely to fall to zero, but you have the additional problem that, if you have a reasonably large investment in to, and want to get out, fast, when the "market" falls, then you'll be hard-pressed to find a buyer for the whole amount, and you'll probably contribute to pushing the price down even further.

Then again, there are "serious" stocks and shares that exactly the same considerations apply to. Part of the problem with "markets" is that the value of a thing gets decoupled from its nature, and people are only trading on the numbers, without caring about what they are buying or selling (there is a possibly apocryphal story somewhere of someone trading in fossil fuels finding themselves taking delivery of a large number of barges of coal to the London Docklands because they forgot to tick the box saying they didn't actually want physical delivery of the "asset" they had bought, but had been unable to find a buyer for, to turn a profit).

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Re: Isn't it funny...

To be fair, nobody sensible is claiming that. Cryptocurrencies are really quite badly named, in that the only time they are really used as a currency, it's more like a barter system (a bit like "buying" something with bearer bonds) and there is someone at the other end who is either going to exchange them for actual currency (e.g. by "trading" them on an exchange) or who is going to pass them on to another in another "purchase".

There are real obstacles to using them like real currency, the most obvious one with Bitcoin, beyond the elephant in the room of price instablity, is the need for transactions to have a certain number of confirmations in the blockchain to be treated as completed. The Bitcoin blockchain, by design, has an average block time of ten minutes, and six confirmations are normally the level at which a transaction is considered to be "confirmed", so in order to use them like you'd use currency, you'd have to be sitting around for an hour to make sure the "money" has gone through before handing over the goods.

What most cryptocurrencies are more akin to, is a very volatile kind of investment, although it has to be said, that even after the most recent "crash", if you'd bought some Bitcoin at the most recent high, it'd still be performing better than those Deliveroo shares I foolishly bought.

The strengths of "crypto" if they can be said to have any, are "non-fungibility", which roughly translates as "can't be forged", a decentralised ledger (so you can't "cook the books") and anonymity. The first of these is pretty moot, if they can be stolen, in this case, the weakness being a vulnerability in the "in-transit" part, a bit like nicking the gold in The Italian Job. Also, the second of these can actually defat the third, in that forensic analysis of the blockchain ledger, there for all to see, allows pretty comprehensive de-anonymisation of wallet ownership, useful to law enforcement, but not so much to those concerned with privacy. The problem being, of course, that the criminal element are attracted to its use exactly for this purpose. Ironically, they'd be better dealing off in USD, in non-sequential unmarked used mid-denomination notes, which is why that is still the preferred currency of crims...

Returning to the Moon on the European Service Module

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Re: Where have El Reg's usual units of measurement gone?

To be fair, if you're going after them for that, you should be properly pedantic and point out they spelt "pressurised" "wrong" as well.

I think maybe the author is left-pondian where they speak English (Simplified) and not English (Traditional).

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Re: Sometime very soon, only USA will be non-metric. …

Their local press release conversions are to US customary units rather than to Imperial units; we’ve never used Imperial units here.

Yet, perversely, I've often heard "US customary units" referred to as "British units" despite the fact that many of them differ from British Imperial units, for instance a "pint" being 473ml there, and 568ml here.

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no more 454ml of milk etc.

And it's a testament to how far we have moved, that nobody has yet pointed out that a pint is 568ml, and a pound is 454g.

You need to RTFM, but feel free to use your brain too

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To be fair, those keys are next to each other in both the commonly used keyboard layouts for the Roman alphabet (QWERTY and AZERTY), on which the OP was likely to be typing. If they're using some sort of IME on a non-Roman keyboard (e.g. a Japanese, Russian, Greek, Korean, Simplified Chinese etc. layout) then it's more likely it was deliberate and not a typo (or the work of the evil autocorrect). Somehow I doubt that this was the case though.

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How do you know which way up they were holding their keyboard?

(phew, think I got away with that...)

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I have no need to do so, because (a) you appear to have missed the very obvious joke as it flew over your head, and (b), I have been using a QWERTY-layout keyboard, on a daily basis, for well over a quarter of a century, and could confirm that without examining the order of the keys.

Anyway, apart from everything Freud said being essentially bollocks, who's to say it's not the OP's subconscious causing his finger to momentarily shift to the left just to prank them?

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Freudian typo?

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Re: Decent instructions...

...and to clarify, the reason for that "read these in full" instruction is because you can't control the actions of others in the future when they come along and butcher your document. At least, by requiring the reader to read to the end, you're giving them the chance to see and read out-of-order instructions that others might cause, before they work through the instructions and miss out such steps.

Documentation is rarely set in stone, so you should treat anything you produce as transient.

Misguided call for a 7-Zip boycott brings attention to FOSS archiving tools

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Re: I like 7Zip.

...and giving some credence to Putin's claims that the West is evil and is victimising Russia (even though neither is true)...

I think we have to be honest here, and acknowledge that the West can be a bit evil at times, but that we're talking about an awful lot of people, who are not one homogeneous mass. For example, the current goings-on in the US Supreme Court are abhorrent, but that doesn't mean for one second that everyone west of the Urals is a far-right bible-eating gun-toting nutjob.

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Re: I like 7Zip.

Where were you at the time? I'm willing to bet a large amount of cash that you weren't in Iraq defending Saddam Hussein.

Or maybe you were? Are you that Iraqi spokesman who, in the early days of the invasion, kept going on Iraqi TV and saying the equivalent of "there is no invasion, the Americans are losing, there are no tanks driving into Baghdad"?

No, on reflection, it's probably more likely you were getting ready to start your GCSEs, amirite?

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Re: I like 7Zip.

Guess what? Plenty of people here were against that war as well. I seem to recall a million people marching on parliament (the only time it has been surpassed was when people marched on for what was, I think, the fifth or sixth time, to protest against brexit, but for some reason, that wasn't widely reported).

To reiterate my other post here; you don't hold the people responsible for the actions of their leaders. I'll add to that the tired cliché, "two wrongs don't make a right", and the more current equivalent, "fuck off with your whataboutery".

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Re: I like 7Zip.

The behaviour of the Russian* government/military may be despicable but it should not justify xenophobia (or worse) against individuals who happen to by born of that country.

Absolutely correct. I'd be horrified if someone tried to blame me for the behaviour of my country's leaders, and I'm pretty sure there are plenty of left-pondian readers here who feel the same about theirs (and the SCOTUS).

We should always be careful to separate the actions of a country's leaders from the desires of its people. No doubt Putin has managed to whip up at least a portion of his subjects* into a frenzy through the use of captive media, such that a lot of them may even believe that the invasion of Ukraine is justified. At the end of the day, though, it's not those people's fault that they were lied to. Exactly the same argument goes for other abominations elsewhere, such as brexit, US gun laws, and so on (and before anyone supporting those things jumps on and tries to start a "discussion" on them, you know who you are, and I've no interest in re-hashing the same bullshit again today).

*an elected dictatorship has subjects, not citizens.

The perfect crime – undone by the perfect email backups

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Re: Manager and Cashier

Let's assume that you get that (frankly unrealistic) 3.5%, your $71K (around £50k) isn't going to be going up with inflation. With inflation at about 10% at the moment, the value of that £50k is going to decrease pretty rapidly, to the extent that in a decade or so, it's probably not even going to pay your rent (you didn't use that $2M to buy property, so you're on-the-run and renting).

For example, even at 5% inflation, the real value of that £50K p/a is going to be a little under £30k after ten years. If you assume inflation goes down by 1% each year (currently at 10%, next year 9% and so on), which is an optimistic assumption, it's just over £28k in ten years time.

Also, good luck finding a high-interest bearing account into which you can put $2M, no questions asked, and from which you can withdraw the interest with nobody tracking you down and freezing your assets.