Posts by Pen-y-gors

WTF?

In what strange alternate universe would anyone think that connecting the car radio to the brakes was a good idea?

Totally wrong!

A Smidgin is several kg - more or less depending on breakfast time.

(I suppose I should explain that Smidgin is the name of one of my sweet little pussycats - who is rather under-sized following a difficult birth - I'd upload a piccie but ElReg doesn't do piccies)

I actually have a theory that the word is actually "Smidgín" and is derived from the Gaelic -een endings for a small thing. Probably totally wrong....

Invisible updates?

I could probably live with this, PROVIDED that the update process is changed so that it happens invisibly in the background and doesn't lock my pc for 30 mins with a 'windows is updating, 10% complete, installing update 3 of 29" message just when I try and reboot to give a presentation to a customer! Is that so difficult?

So....

all we need is for Elon Musk to invent a warp drive and away we all go. Or perhaps we should send the B Ark first.

Grimbledon Down?

Nu-Food?

I think not...

Spring cleaning time

Although my Win7 laptop is way over the minimum specs, I'll be buying a new one (probably early next year, once all the Win 10 bugs are ironed out) Excellent chance to remove all the crap, upgrade software etc. And drivers...I had an old Shuttle box that worked fine with Ubuntu (several releases ago), tried updating Ubuntu and the embedded video would no longer work. One dead Shuttle, and I can't be bothered to try and install another distro.

Experts?

"Experts predict problems of this type will become more commonplace as cars rely more and more heavily on digital technology"

You really don't need to be an 'expert' to predict that!

Prison?

Surely there is some way for these evil scum to end up in prison? They must have broken some laws somewhere - ten years in a Colombian jail is too good for them!

Embedded names?

I think they're on dodgy ground once they start saying that the domain includes the name of the complainant - Oxford University will shortly lose its domains to the Ford motor company...

Possibly not so bad?

"obtains actual knowledge of any terrorist activity . . . shall provide"

So if they don't monitor and read everything, then they won't know anyway, so no need to report.

And as it refers to 'actual knowledge' then if there is a terrorist incident (bomb in Kabul?) and anyone mentions it in a tweet or post then they MUST report each and every post. That should slow up the NSA

Politicians should not be allowed to draft or amend the wording of legislation - they always get it wrong.

Wonderful!

Many of their citizens don't have clean drinking water, sanitation or adequate housing, but they've all got a Gigabyte of cloud storage. Job done. Treble lassis all round.

Easy PhD

"I have made some wonderful discoveries about infosec vulnerabilities, but if I pout them in my thesis and tell you about them the CIA will have to kill you. Please send diploma to my usual address...

Food processors...

"food processors that also do the cooking for you"

Isn't that called Dominos?

Operations?

I'm not sure that the Falklands was the only time the Vulcans flew in anger - we were out in Aden in the early/mid sixties and I have vague memories of Vulcans being used around then to drop small loads of conventional weaponry on recalcitrant tribal villages up in the hills of Yemen (plus ca change...)

Very sad to see her grounded. Lived at Scampton and Waddington for 5 years in my teens, and the house shook as they took off and the engines pointed straight at us. Even had a holiday job for two summers at Scampton scrubbing them - there's a lot of wing to clean when you only have a small brush!

Could we have a Kickstarter whip-round to raise the dosh to bribe someone to keep issueing air-worthiness certificates?

Bear of little brain is confused...

I am of limited intellectual powers. Could someone please explain how this can work?

1) I am in the contact book for some one who uses Win 10, using my regular e-mail address of balls-of-steel@narcissist.com

2) my laptop comes in range of my poor deluded Win10 user

3) What on earth is there that connects my laptop (called numerouno) with a user account of eljefe to the e-mail address in the contacts list on the Win10 box?

Let's hope they switch it off by default before release date. And then kill it entirely

Circlehealth

"10-year deal with CircleHealth which operates a network of NHS and private hospitals"

Help, Nurse, my pacemaker isn't working properly.

Have you tried switching it off and on again?

Without supporting Sky in any way...

('cos Murdoch is 100 times more of a shit than BT)...

Openreach do need a kick up the arse.

We were originally due to get FTTC last December. Then they moved it to March. Then to June. Then in early June they moved it to September. (Although the boss told the local AM that it would be Xmas - left hand/right hand?) At this point correspondence revealed that there was a problem in installing new cabinets, allegedly a question over whether they could install them on a trunk road(WTF?) How could they get to three weeks from live date and suddenly discover they hadn't actually installed the cabinets? We've had Openreach engineers digging up roads for months! Where on earth do Openreach get their 'project managers'?

Silly people

If they tried to use the calendar in a logical, natural way, and referred to dates as DDMM e.g. 11/9 or 11th September then they wouldn't have a problem. Don't get me started on the lunacy of displaying dates as mm/dd/yyyy. And how about using 999 as an emergency number?

Let's be realistic

The 'brain' behind any car-control software MUST reside on the vehicle, preferably in triplicate, with fail-safe options by default. Same thing for aircraft or any fast-moving, life-threating objects. Connection to a datacentre is fine for the occasional software or map data update, but that's it. We won't see 5G outside London, Brum and the Northern Powerhouse until at least 2086 anyway.

Free keyboard?

Does it come with a free keyboard and mouse that will attach to a phone?

Not specifically a criticism of M$, personally I find that phones are really, really rubbish for any sort of serious data entry or manipulation, even with 6-7 inch screens (or bigger) - those on-screen keyboards really suck. Okayish for typing a text or an e-mail, but a report in Word/Docs/OpenOffice? No thanks

Pockets?

Does the bikini come with a waterproof pocket for the smartphone that receives the messages?

Yeah, but...

"Modern communications networks can be used by the unscrupulous for purposes ranging from cyber-attack, terrorism and espionage to fraud, kidnap and child sexual exploitation."

And so can the 'royal' mail - are they planning to open every letter?

And so can cars and bicycles - are they planning to track every vehicle and put CCTV inside?

And so can old-style dead-letter drops - are they planning to have a plod watching every tree and litter-bin in every park in the country?

Terrorists and kiddie-fiddlers have to eat - are they planning to track every purchase of food?

No? Then why is modern communications technology any different?

Rock-boffin?

Now that's a pretty cool job title!

Typical short-sighted approach

Power source will run out in 2025, after less than 50 years operation! If they'd thought ahead and bunged in an extra ounce or two of plutonium it could have gone on to the end of the century. Pah! Penny-pinchers!

I'm confused

by all this talk of 'apps' - I run Windows 7 on one machine and Win 8.1 on another. Both run programs, not apps. (win 8.1 boots to desktop and has a start menu installed, so it looks very similar to win 7). I have no idea what to do with those silly coloured squares that sometimes appear under Win 8.1 - they don't seem to serve any useful purpose.

My phone and tablets use android - they run apps.

How would I run a check Windows 10 app on a windows 7 machine, which only runs programs?

I'm looking forward to getting a new laptop in a year vor so, with Win 10 installed from scratch, and hopefully without any of these silly 'apps', or Office 365.

</grumpy old sod mode>

Indeed, where are the police?

Sounds as if it was okay to ride naked through Canterbury on Sunday. What would happen if I do the same today, or tomorrow? Would the Peelers pull me over? And if this is okay, then why do the police keep arresting that poor bloke who is trying to walk around naked, but is spending most of his life in jail? Where's the consistency? Is it legal to be naked in public or not?

I love loopholes

Who will be the first citizen with nothing to hide terrorist to register as pastor of the North East Westphalian Independent Jedi Free Church?

Tankards, meh!

Proper beer is drunk from a straight glass - could we have a Lohan branded one please? And of course no need to worry about sinistrals and dextrals.

InSight?

How did they get Insight as an Acronym of Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport - I reckon it's IEUSIGAHT

Not good...

It was bad enough having muggers chop off your fingers so they could use fingerprint recognition systems, now they'll need to gouge out your eyes as well! This is getting pretty mediaeval

Protecting wildlife is very important.

and usually trumps all other considerations - economic benefit etc. Can't they take out an injunction against the volcano?

Chanting

Presumably the "sound of Emirates chanting" is the muezzin at the top of his minaret in Abu Dhabi

Astronomy

I remember going for an interview at UCL (back in the seventies) which was held at their observatory out at Mill Hill - originally Will Hays place. Impressive selection of equipment (well, I thought so at the time - Hubble it wasn't). It must have been wonderful when it was built, out there in the countryside north of London. By the seventies it had a dual carriageway right on the doorstep, laden with massive lorries rumbling by and shaking everything up, and the sodium streetlights everywhere were a bit of a problem too. At optical wavelengths the site was pretty well useless. Pity.

Encouragement?

Given that the Merkins are still happy to say that it's okay to spy on non-merkins, could we encourage them to mend their ways, at least in Europe, with some legislation that explicitly states that privacy rights etc do not apply to US citizens? So it would be perfectly legal to use a long lense to stream video from the US ambassador's bedroom, to bug the phones and hack the voicemail of visiting US actors and military etc.

What's sauce for the goose...

It's wonderful, but...

Why on earth are they grounding it? I appreciate that relying on elderly technicians isn't an option, but have they never heard of 'apprentices'? Perhaps get the elderly experts to train their successors? If they can keep the Lanc, Hurricane and Spitfire flying, which ar a lot older, why not train new technicians to keep the Vulcan flying?

The Vulcan is one of the most impressive aircraft ever built, in Britain or anywhere. Is it really 'The Spirit of Britain' to ground it without trying to train a new generation of people to maintain it?

(Actually, I rather fear that it IS the 'Spririt of Modern Britain' Pooh!)

Strange

Seems a bit odd to arrest someone for doing the impossible (or at least according to the manufacturers and airlines)

What next? Nicked for using a perpetual motion machine in a public place?

Obviously religious

Clearly a place of worship erected by the Clangers (who have taken Philae down into their underground caverns where it is now used to store the soup)

Silly

It does nobody any good collecting hefty fines from public bodies. There needs to be a system where the people responsible (i.e. the bosses) are personally fined, albeit smaller amounts. That might encourage them to get their house in order.