Posts by lglethal

Re: Autistic People too

I dont think it's just autistic people that struggle with these types of adverts. Pretty much anyone low on confidence or whose relatively fresh on to the market looks at those types of adverts and thinks either I couldnt do that, or I havent got a chance. It's such a wasteful and lazy way to search for people.

Having knowledge of a particular program/skill might be important for the job, but whether you've used it for 3 months, 12 months or 20 years, it's unlikely to have too much of an effect if the person is good and able/willing to learn.

I'm sure we all know people who have used Word for 20 years, who still havent got a clue about hotkeys or shortcuts, which is a good counter argument that having 20 years experience in something doesnt necessarily make you good at it..

Ever take out a bank loan?

Yep, 3 in fact. And never once had to pay something up front to get the loan. I've also always gone to the premise of either the Bank or the Financial advisor who was organising the loan before signing anything.

Perhaps the one thing you're talking about is paying the deposit on our house, which had to come from our money, rather than the banks, but even then, that transaction took place whilst sitting in the solicitor's office opposite the couple we were buying the house from.

So like I said, maybe it's done differently in other nations, but at least where I am, things happen in person, or in professional environments. Which makes the thought of doing such large scale transactions in the ether to be almost unbelievable...

Re: "life expectancy in [the USA]"

That's a strangely specific thing to be afraid of. I can only imagine you have family who have suffered through it, and fear hereditary effects.

But you should then probably be aware that Alzheimer's doesnt hit in a day. It's a pretty steady downward spiral, which takes a good year or two for you to actually notice and get perhaps an initial diagnosis. As such, you really dont have a good reason to own a gun right now. By all means, if you the worst happens and you get diagnosed with Alzheimer's and you still feel that way, then you can still buy a gun and make use of it. But there is really no reason to have a gun whilst your healthy. You're far more likely to have an accident with it and hurt yourselfv (or god forbid someone else) then to ever need to make use of it for Alzheimer's.

Re: So, good or bad

I'm guessing at this point it's a "We dont know!".

First you have to spot that there is a difference, then work out where the difference is occuring, and by how much the difference is. THEN, you can start working out if that's good or bad.

I'd take the Yeast and test if it can still make beer. If not, then clearly it's a bad thing. Because in the future we are definitely going to need beer in space!

Just out of curiosity, have you tried contacting the organisations (at least the legitimate ones) over a public channel, so something like Twitter (although I'm loathe to actually suggest using Twitter). When you publically shame firms, they tend to actually react. If you contact only by email, they can ignore it, pretend they never saw the email, etc.

Maybe someone needs to create a site, where people with their own servers can post info about from which infrastructure attacks are coming from, collate the Info, identify a worst offenders list, and get some media coverage about it. El Reg would probably help out there. You'd be surprised how quickly media pressure can focus minds in business...

Re: Wouldn't it be easier

Obviously I have no idea what the smugglers that don't get caught do.

Sure you dont Katrinab, sure you dont. *wink wink nudge nudge*

The loss of $250 million in bail money, and a likely trip before the Beak to face charges of helping someone break their bail conditions.

Then again, I can imagine a few parents who would be less than understanding if the kids wanted to move back in, so maybe that would be an easy way to get the house back to themselves...

That's why we have Ornithopters watching out, ready to lift the Harvester from the surface before the Worms attack.

Havent you watched that documentary, what was it called again, Dune?

It's fairly common in Asia to name the "new" Tech hubs, Cyber something or other. I worked for a while in Cyberjaya, Malaysia. It's a suburb of Putrajaya (and about an hour by train from Kuala Lumpur).

Funnily enough I also worked for a few months in Cyberabad, but no one called it that when I was there (except for the politicians of course).

Havent you been to Pizza Hut???

Re: Discriminatory?

More that facial recognition is bad at doing non-white people. And struggles more with women than men. So black women have a massively reduced chance of having their documentation checked correctly by facial recognition, and hence would have their authentification rejected. That would then be massively discriminatory. If it was equally bad at everyone, that would be better than being good with some and crap at others.

Still them continuing to claim that they met the standard when they deliberately werent using the standard is utterly stupid.

What the Poli's do on their personal phones (or more likely what their social media lackeys do on their personal phones) is completely up to them.

But I can never understand why people would want any social media programs on a work phone! Work and private life are separate things for f%&ks sake!

At work, I'm currently unable to use a specific program, because the only way to use it is to link it to a mobile phone for 2FA. I do not have a company phone, and so I refuse to link it to my personal phone. IT's response was to tell me to get a company phone. My managers response to that was that I can get a company phone when it comes out of IT's budget. To be clear, I dont want a company phone, and find it ridiculous that my firm would want people doing anything related to work on a personal device. It's almost certain that my personal phone is not as well protected as a company phone (since I can download any app I want, or open any site I want), so it's just opening up an attack vector against the firm. And I dont want anything from my firm on my personal phone, since that paints a big Target sign on my back for anyone focusing on my firm. Even more annoying since there's a big focus on cyber security at my firm at the moment (due to a supplier being hit by ransomware a couple of months back), and yet bring up a topic like this and you get blank stares...

Oh well, all the top brass have company phone, so naturally they cant see the problems at all...

Re: Aaaaargh!

Are you implying that tying people's salary to a specific performance metric, might see people focusing on that metric rather than the actual Job at hand? Surely not!?! Who would do such a thing?

*cough*Everyone!*cough*

Re: Video Upload Interface on (Crypto) ATMs

Let me guess the movie title:

"How to spot a sucker?"

Re: Sputnik-like CubeSat?

lol I was wondering if someone would pick up on my paraphrasing Red Dwarf. Good Work Dizzy! :P

Was thinking the exact same thing! ;)

Never lock yourself into a single vendor in such a way, it will never work well, since they know they can screw you and keep on screwing you and you cant escape without screwing yourself further...

Re: Printing

How else would the NSA get to see what you were printing?

Re: NASA Marketing -- who knew?

I'd agree with you on the fact that NASA needs to market everything to make sure the idiots in Congress keep funding it properly. NASA's budget is a drop in the ocean compared to things like military spending.

However, trying to put blame on the student loan repayment scheme is beyond stupid. The two have nothing to do with each other. And the vast majority of students do not spend their time doing worthless degrees, you might not like people studying things other than STEM, but people complete degrees in order to try to get ahead with their lives. That the US can even think of charging $100k for a ANY degree is ridiculous.

I come from a land which is marginally saner on degree prices, but I still walked out of my Engineering degree with $32k in debt, which took me almost 20 years to pay off in full (I was only paying the minimum, because at least we get below inflation interest rates on our loans, but even so). Is that right that you should load up fresh graduates with a life time of debt? Especially when every single one of those politicians got their degrees for free?

Your comment implies that you come from that era of free or heavily subsidised tertiary education. Since no one who has had to start their working life massively in debt would begrudge others getting some relief from that...

Re: RIP LockBit

Yep 3000 variants of different flanges and brackets. Woohoo! That's my evening sorted...

Re: Company Culture of Suppressing Bad News

I believe that falls under the purview of the old saying "Damned if you do, damned if you dont."

But at least if you Do speak out, you can hold your head up as being someone with a modicium of integrity...

Re: Snake Oil Salesman who forgot to move on...

It glides as softly as a cloud...

Re: ICE

These are one use nodes (and robot). So long as the nodes have the same life as the robot then your fine.

If you really wanted to, you could even make the first nodes with bigger batteries than the later nodes, because naturally they'll be in work longer. Although the cost of making the nodes to a non-standard design might end up being more expensive than acknowledging that your later nodes will be carrying much more power than they need. Standardisation can be such a god send on weight and cost, even if it's not always the optimal use of resources...

Re: Funding

No not really. An IPO sells shares in a company to investors. Those investors are now owners of the firm. If the firm makes money, share price goes up, and they make money, in addition they might get a share of the profits in the form of a dividend, however, if the firm loses money, the share price goes down and if they sell they lose money. It's standard stock trading.

In a leveraged buyout, the "investors" buy the firm, become its owners, but are not responsible for any of the debt they've organised in order to buy the firm. So the new owners have just borrowed a ton of cash, but they dont have to actually pay back that cash, the company has to pay for it. But the "investors" remain the boss of the firm, even though it's the firm itself paying off it's own debt.

Compare that to if you buy a house. You organise a loan from a bank, so YOU are responsible for the debt on the house. And as you pay it off, the House becomes yours. However, if you fail to pay for it, the bank might take possession of the house, sell it off to pay off your debt, and if that doesnt cover the full loan, then the bank will also chase you to pay off the debt.

But imagine, if you could buy your house with a leveraged buyout. You would own the house, but the house would be expected to pay the debts (I guess your renting the house out for that to work :P), if the House doesnt pay off its loans, then sure the bank can take possession of the house, and sell it off, but if that doesnt cover the debts. Well too bad for the bank, your home scot free. And you probably still "own" the land, so can tear down the house and build something on the rubble. All up it's pretty much cost you nothing, as the bank held all the debt, but you got to be the "owner".

I'll never understand why any bank would get involved in such a purchase, they pretty much only ever stand to lose or at best break even...