Posts by Cpt Blue Bear 485 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Aug 2010
Pedantically speaking you are correct but out in The Real World(tm)* you'll find "countersunk" used for any recess at the top of a fastener hole. Most of them are neither "sunk" nor "bored" but cast, moulded or, in the case of almost all I produce, 3D printed. :-)
* A scary place. I recommend avoiding it as much as possible.
"You don't even need that much torque. A couple passes with a needle file and they usually back right out like a normal screw."
Not if they are used correctly and If you managed it like that than they definitely weren't.
They should be countersunk to stop tampering with the head. They should also be torqued past the plastic deformation point so any serious force applied snaps the head off. For bonus points, make them harder than the case metal so a hand drill tends to skate sideways and break the bit.
Like all security measures, it comes down to how serious an attacker you need to keep out.
"From now on, my SOP when dealing with voice-activated answering systems is going to be "I want to close my account, please." That'll get me a human to speak to like a shot."
This sort of thing is exactly what I find so profoundly depressing about the world just now. Find someone who grew up in the Soviet Union or one of its satellites. They will have numerous stories to parallel this of ways people actually got things done in spite of the system.
On the upside, the "Saves Dept" inmates will get their service stats up and probably get a bonus.
Franz Kafka didn't know the half of it.
"I got a desperate call from a blind friend who uses screen reading software to use his PC"
I got a similar call after the big update last year. Fucking thing reset accessibility settings. Fortunately I could talk his daughter through re-enabling them.
"...ordinary just a Realtek HD ..."
A while back I came across a string of cases where Windows 10 was automagically installing the wrong driver for one of the Realteck sound chipsets. A client had a bunch of Asus (I think) laptops that suffered from it and I also saw it on some deaktops. From memory it required manually removing the incorrect driver and manually installing the right one. It sounds like the Windows driver library is still borked.
None of which helps you if don't have access to the PC but.
"Surely you jest about the stability of windows? Experience tend to point in the direction of instability especially with the latest offering."
Your experience must be limited to old and crappy hardware then 'cause stability hasn't been a serious issue for any OS in the last 10 years. Kids today don't know what instability is...
Mate, those have always been the rules. Well, for values of always of about 20 years. Whether they have been correctly applied is another question (to which the answer is a very definite no). My guess is you fell foul of some kind of lack-of-activity purge system. Nothing to do with GST other than BAS returns are are used (incorrectly) as a flag of activity.
But none of this has anything do with Mrs Diogenes who is still not liable to account for GST but is now having to pay it on purchases at the border.
I suspect there is more that story than you are telling because as that stands it simply isn't true.
You have to submit the BAS paperwork if you are registered for GST not just because you have an ABN. You have to register if your turnover is more than $75,000 excluding GST. If you don't turn over that amount, then you don't have to account for GST.
"I recommend us Aussies who used to do yearly road pilgrimages to QLD, instead go on a nice OS shopping trip. Maybe this would get reversed pretty quickly..."
It won't because its purpose is to stop Jerry Harvey pissing in the PM's ear about how unfair it all is to multimillionaires and give Scott "Happy Clapper" Morrison a way to claim he's being hard on multinational tax avoidance.
What I haven't seen any sign of is the massive increase in Customs personel and infrastructure necessary to actually enforce this...
"@ Diogenes - in your example, she should pay no GST (or get it reimbursed) on the purchase because she is on-selling. As the final-stage seller, she collects the GST."
That's not how it works.
Everyone who sells anything or supplies a service to anyone and is registered for GST collects it. I then get to deduct any GST I have paid and remit the difference. There is no such thing as a final stage seller, everyone in the supply chain is collecting GST. This is what makes it an administrative nightmare.
In this case it probably moot because I doubt Mrs Diogenes turns over more than $75,000 (excluding GST for some reason) so she should not be registered for GST, submitting a Business Activity Statement or remitting any money. She is also unable to claim any GST paid.
"The problem is a lot of people are addicted to cheap- screw social responsibility, ethical trading, food miles etc. As far as they are concerned, cheap isn't cheap enough."
Bullshit.
The problem is we have a tax system that is based on a last century model of commerce. Its underlying assumption is that there is no retail trade between tax jurisdictions. It is simply no longer fit for purpose.
"The government collects from her first. Unless Ali & wish start charging GST & do the remitting , she will receive a card in the mail (instead of her package) , she then has to go to the post office to pay the GST, at which point the parcel will be released."
I pay it by credit card on the customs (or whatever they are called this week) website. It usually adds about two weeks to shipping time.
"This will cost many times the 50c in GST she will have to pay for her average parcel value, and the nett revenue will be negative."
This.
This seems to be the fundamental misunderstanding of all the Level Playing Field (tm) posters. They don't seem to realise that it costs to collect. They seem to think GST is collected by the Magic Fairies and left under the pillow of the Treasurer if he's been good.
Can you tell I'm sick of pointing this out recently [/SARCASM]
"Shades of idiot Keating deciding to tax the ARES expecting to raise 10 million in tax"
Sadly, he was followed by a much bigger idiot in Howard who added a high school level economic ideology. Consumption taxes are a wonderful idea in theory. Sadly, in practice they are a nightmare to administer. You can tell the people who have never had to actually do it, they are ones replying that its simple.
We used to have a pragmatic solution: just don't try to collect where the cost of collection is more than the sum collected. A reasonable solution in an unwieldy regulatory regime. We now have a bunch of muppets imposing an even more massive, costly and unwieldy system in order to compensate for the inequalities of their original scheme. I can only regard it as a form of madness.
The ATO never wanted the GST because it is highly inefficient from a collection point of view. They have to process a vast amount of paper work in order to collect a huge number of small amounts. In reality, the cost of collection doesn't vary much whether you collect 10c or $10,000 Its far more efficient to extract large amounts from a few choke points and they know it. As does everyone except a few economic idealogues.
At the time it struck me as exactly the sort of thing Randy would do. He wanted to watch the circus while while he attempted to tamper with evidence. He could hardly have seen all the shenanigans if he'd been hiding in the back of the car, and by extension it couldn't be conveyed to the reader in nearly so entertaining a manner as this sequence is written from Randy's point of view.
"... having a daydream about a modified Econoline rolling up to the Dark Tower Facebook HQ, industrious dwarves (for it is they) leaping out and briskly mounting a piece of exotic-looking plumbing athwart the van's roof, and then unleashing a thunderbolt of awesome and richly deserved EMP into the place."
If I recall correctly, that was not a constructive move and scuppered Randy's attempt at more um, subtle action.
An upvote for the Cryptonomicon reference anyway.
"Some Australian elections use a method that can be done by hand and allows for preference voting."
By some I presume you mean all except for local government. Voting is also compulsory and we generally get the result before bed time the night of the election.
Yeah, we get all this done in one day but people still say compulsory voting is impossible and proportional representation is too hard.
My Grandad loved to tell the story about the sanitary orderly of some WWII era camp in the middle of nowhere running out of whatever it was he poured into the long drops to keep the flies down. He has a bright idea: petrol. Enter an unsuspecting victim in search of relief. He lights a cigarette while thus occupied and drops the match into the pit. The result: second degree burns to the bum.
"Not having signed into my Yahoo account in some months I thought on seeing the comments here I'd better go have a look. All the ad stuff was off by default with both per site opt-in toggles and global opt-in toggle.
I wonder why I'm seeing something different to you?"
Call me cynical but maybe management backtracked on the threat to close accounts when they saw how many hadn't responded at all.
The success of services like this are judged by the number of accounts (as a proxy for the number of users). Would you want to be the Yahoo exec responsible for tanking what remains of the share price by owning up that half your "users" aren't really? Its (probably) just as easy to bulk reset privacy options as to batch delete accounts...
"every IT project needs is a bunch of fucking halfwits with less than no idea telling you how to do something"
Its worse than that. He made it quite clear that they provide no real input and accept no responsibility for the outcome. It seems the DTA's job description is "turns up now again for a cup of tea and a biscuit".
"the PM's interest"
That PM would be the same bloke who gave some Russian fella he sat next to a paid dinner $10,000,000 of public money for, just wait you'll love this, electrostatic rainmaking experiments.
"1925 / 1930 / 1937 - Burton / Harris / Hopkins. Not huge gap..."
You are quite right. I guess I think of Hopkins as younger because his career got a second wind in the late '80s by which time Burton was dead.
Reading the Juggernaut plot summary rings bells for me. The cast is impressive including Bilbo Baggins and Roj Blake.
"Modelling themselves on Richard Burton, Richard Harris and Anthony Hopkins reborn..."
I think you might be confusing Anthony Hopkins with Richard Harris. The former would surely have been to young for the main cast of Flight of the Wild Geese in 1978. From memory he is also still alive. IMDB makes no mention of it but does say that around the same time Hopkins played Yitzhak Rabin in something called Victory at Entebbe, along with a cast that could have been the headliners in The Wild Geese.
It also says he was in A Bridge Too Far, but then looking down the cast list it seems every actor currently over 55 was too.
Its also ironic given that the core of the Wild Geese story of a of an aging soldier of fortune trying to assuage the guilt of his past with one last operation and how it is all undone by his even more mercenary (pardon the pun) paymasters.
"The Sherrifs offices that originally published this data charged what to take it down?"
Certainly not! The Sheriff's Office charging to remove data would be both an abuse of process and possibly perverting the course of justice.
What individual Sheriff OfficeRs might charge is another matter all together.
I have a mate who is a fire inspector and tells the wonderful story of the a building fire caused by such a toaster. Morning crew are well settled into their 12 hour shift and have reached the tea / coffee and toast stage when their alarm goes off. They all leap up, grab their gear and race off leaving one of those old fashioned hinged sided toasters with two pieces of bread on. Cue fire that guts their rec room and causes serious structural damage to the building.
The punch line: they were a fire crew and they burnt down their band new fire station. Oh how we laughed.
"Are you, or have you ever been, a customer of Telstra, or are you just spouting off the common, but generally unjustified, bile that seems to be fashionable?"
I'll play. I have been a Telstra customer and we have a large number of clients who are. I reckon we see a Telstra related problem about once a week.
The latest one was 45 minutes on the phone plus a four hour wait in order to reset an email password for a service that is scarily archaic but only six months old.
Most of the customer service problems stem from Telstra being so Balkanised. There seem to be hundreds of tiny departments responsible for hundreds of unconnected services. No one talks to anyone else until forced to when have to go through the same tortuous phone system as outside callers. And woe unto thee who has to contact the Digital Business unit - they simply don't answer the phone even to internal calls.
Wait until your business has been without phones for a week because the service visit was cancelled by another department (WTF?), then see if you think the bile is merely fashionable rather than totally justified.
Indeed. The quicklime is to prevent decomposition and scavenging animals.
I hear the best thing to do is feed them to pigs [sucks teeth theatrically]...
I also hear that the "lifespan" of a body in the desert is about 72 hours. It seems that things that live in deserts don't let protein or water go to waste...
Neither do undersea scavengers like lobsters, crabs and crayfish. Bear that in mind next time you sit down to a seafood dinner.
Strangely enough I was reading the Bones Don't Lie blog on an unrelated topic yesterday. Totally unrelated, honest Officer.
"But the common experience is that if you fight hard enough the companies remove your symptom, but leave the disease intact."
That's because these operations run despite their systems not because of them. In the background there always people who actually get things done. The challenge is to find them and get a direct number or email.
I once started a job as 2IC of IT at a medium sized company which had just driven into the comms equivalent of a peat bog while following Cisco's product roadmap. My first project was "get those fuckers out of the company".
Thus, I oversaw replacing all the Cisco kit with HP kit...
The CIO thought that went so well that next he wanted me to get rid of Oracle. I took another job rather than deal with that can of worms.
That was as high up the greasy corporate pole as I reached and I have no desire to return to those heights.
"Brings back memories of making lots of nitrogen tri-iodide in high school and spreading it on floors to see the beetles blow themselves up. The explosion makes a nice purple cloud."
The same Chem teacher who gave the advice about home made nitroglycerine taught us to make touch powder (as it was known then). Great fun spread on the window sills in summer to catch out unsuspecting blow flies. Bzzzzz, CRACK, snigger.
Also fun to spread on pathways which lead to the hilarious sight of a friend demonstrating her dance class piece accompanied by a series of bangs and pops. Hilarious as performance art goes. I wish I had a video of it but not of the bollocking we got shortly after.
"It's probably a good thing then that the instructor didn't try nitrating glycerin then. We had one go wrong at the high school I went to. The teacher lost several fingers and everyone's ears rang for several days."
My chemistry teacher gave us the sage advice not to make more than a teaspoon of nitroglycerin at a time. That way when it exploded we'd still have the fingers on the other hand to dial the ambulance.
"DT hires lawyers and then some senior exec decides to use them."
No, I doubt any company executive was involved.
The way these thing work is the company hires a local lawyer to "defend their interests". Said local lawyer soon discovers the retainer doesn't cover the repayments on a Mercedes and that he actually has to run up some billable hours before he can, well, bill for them. Thus he jumps on things like this. It doesn't matter if its sensible or if he can win, all that matters is he has some hours to bill the client.
As evidence in this case I cite the generic IP related press release. If anyone at head office had any idea what this was about it would reference specifics.
The real problem is that companies pay these bills without questioning the value of the work done.
"I reach into my pocket for change, lucky I am still old school and carry some real cash."
At times like that I think of the story I heard about Joseph Stalin:
Uncle Joe only carried pocket change. Whenever he wanted something it was given to him by a grateful public. Except when he took his nieces for a walk around Gorki Park and bought drinks at the vending machine. Vending machines aren't afraid of being sent to the gulags, you see.
"This is required in New York by code. At least one socket must be controlled by a switch in each room because there is no requirement that the room be fitted with light fixtures."
Aha!
Thank you for solving a mystery that has been with me for 20 years. Coming from Oz, where every mains socket has to have its own switch, I had assumed it was a cheapskate measure to save a few bucks on switches. If it had been in a private home rather than a hotel I would have assumed it was the work of an amateur electrician (my Grandad was one and not one light switch in his house worked as expected).
"Give some thought as to who actually pays corporation tax, and tax on corporations in general."
I can make the same argument: the only way I can pay income tax is by working for money. My employee pays me by charging their customers (clue: that's you). So by making me pay income tax you actually make yourself poorer!
I think I first spotted the flaw in this moronic argument when I was about 11. If a not particularly bright preteen can see it why do we keep hearing this nonsense?
Back in the real world, which do you think is easier to do: levy a tax at a single point or millions? Answers on a postcard to the ATO (or IR, IRS or whoever).
Before you start applying, its not JD you'll get but Bundaberg rum. Its easy to tell the difference: Jack Daniels leaves you wondering where the whiskey promised on the label is while Bundy (as its affectionately known) will make you want to punch the bastard responsible for ruining it.
I disagree.
The first series of Brexit played like great satire. The season closing NI border crisis thing was like Armando Iannucci at his best.
The second season started well by winding up the David Davis and 40 Impact Statements story arc. They do seem to be currently rehashing plot lines from the first season but I suspect these are the bridging and setup episodes. Soon we get into the meat of the story of trying to square two mutually exclusive objectives by keeping everyone believing they are getting what they want. Like all good farce the audience can see the inevitable disaster looming but the characters seem oblivious.
The President Trump Show on the other hand is getting seriously off the rails.
Like a lot of US shows, it suffers from writers who get green-lighted based a good premise and a few great plot ideas but ultimately haven't a plan for where its going. I expect it to run down to an ignominious end that leaves its remaining fans wondering WTF was that about.
If you want zombies, well there is Steve Bannon who certainly looks like The Walking Dead, but that story seems to have petered out right now. I presume they mean to bring it back later.
But its main problem is all the major characters are two dimensional caricatures or cliches straight out of central casting. There have been some terrific supporting performances - Sarah Huckabee Sanders' deadpan is comic genius - but in general its over played stock characters.
From out here in Oz, I have to say that Brexit definitely has it over The President Trump Show for sheer laughs.
If you like these shows, you should also check out our own long running local political comedy: Paradise Lost. The current story of a rural MP who rises by luck to become Deputy PM only to be brought down by his inability to keep it in his pants is funny as hell and a lot more nuanced than you might expect. It does help if you've been watching from the start or you may not get some of the gags.
[Presses Submit and removes tongue from cheek]
"Would you even listen to, let alone be influenced by, a cold call from and automatic spieling machine?"
That's not what they do, as Mr Nix is basically quoted as saying. What they claim to be able to do is insert advertising that is indistinguishable from actual news into the news feeds (whatever they are) of tightly targeted punters. These messages are carefully crafted to play on the fears and preconceptions of said punters. They are effectively invisible to others, who presumably get their own fears and preconceptions reinforced. This certainly reinforces my preconceptions about Facebook.
Here in Oz during our Great Gay Marriage Personality Contest and Definitely Not A Plebiscite there actually was a dodgy robocall campaign disguised as a phone poll...
Now that I've cleared that up for you, I'll be happy to help you liberate your fortune from Nigeria. Just send me 10% to cover costs and I'll get right on it...
I just had a look at my local area and noticed two things:
1. I can find the entrance and exits to the track so I know where the owners live.
2. Either they generate a lot of spurious location data or some smart arse has strapped one to his cat - I see a track that runs across the roof of two houses, through the gardens of another three to the reserve bordering the main road...
A month old post but it made me smile remembering a couple of incidents:
Back with I was a junior site service monkey I had Mac user (graphic / layout artist so can be excused for not knowing any better) with a dead mouse. No Apple mouse to hand, but I tried a generic USB PC mouse and it worked perfectly including the right button and scroll wheel. He was so impressed with it that he spent the next several months telling everyone how amazing the special mouse I had given him was seemingly oblivious to the fact that every non-Mac user in the building already had one...
A mate spent his honours or PhD (can't remember which) working on a Sun pizza box thing with this bizarro "3D" mouse. It looked like plastic mushroom: you could slide it 'round the desk but you could also rock it front to back and left to right. It had (from memory) five buttons*. At his first job he was given a shiny new Powermac with one mouse button...
* In all seriousness: has anyone else seen one of these things? I have yet to meet anyone outside of the guys who were in that lab and one bloke who worked at Sun that has any clue what I am talking about.
Maybe they are waiting to pounce, but its an effect rather than a cause - pure opportunism.
What you are seeing is the effect of the same forces that got you Brexit manifest in a different way. There is no longer enough slack in the system to allow it to run properly. Its usually the product of management with an "efficiency" fixation pushing to do more with less until you pass some inflection point where it breaks down.
My former boss likened it to a worn bicycle chain: you keep adjusting it until its overtight and fails catastrophically. He was a great source of colourful metaphors...
"Countries like Vietnam and Nigeria are rolling out faster mobile networks than the UK because we love to talk and argue so much about this nonsense."
No.
Countries like Vietnam and Nigeria are rolling out faster networks because they don't already have incumbents with massive investments in existing infrastructure.
"Could update 'things' in shops too, "Mr Smith will arrive in 5min, he'll need some help to pack his prescription", "here is Mr Smith food order."
...thus eliminating all the tedious chatting, relaxing and making friends that people were previously forced to do while waiting for elevators
I have been told by C-level executives at three different companies that backups no longer matter because its all "in the cloud" and if anything goes wrong we can take them court. Not with a straight face but that smug look of an idiot who thinks he's being really clever.
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