Posts by Voland's right hand

1. He was not on active duty, he was in training

2. It is a sword which cuts both ways. A lot of shrewd people (not just in the USA) use their army reserve affiliation as an employment protection method. Similar reserve programs exist in nearly every army in the world and the army does not make compromises when protecting them. It is one of the most perfectly legal and legit methods to make yourself redundancy-proof. The downside of this method is that you may end up dealing for 6 months with bearded lunatics in some er... shall we call it DumbF***stan location, but in peacetime it works a treat. The only way for the WiFi alliance to fire him was to fire all 7 of its project managers.

Re: Gig Economy

Uber, Lift, Deliveroo, etc just take it to the ultimate extreme.

On top of everything else this is a clear case of illegal competition via price dumping. A business operating legally and paying the minimum salary cannot compete with someone who is operating illegally and paying half of it.

Re: Aimed right at the heart of america

Putin seems to have the measure of Trump. He knows the guy is an unbearable narcissist (it takes one to know one?) and that he couldn't let a challenge like this go unanswered.

Couple of things. Most of the commentariat has failed to read the official Russian and American strategy in its most recent editions. Russian was published a few years back, American just got published a few weeks ago.

Russian is very Russian. It is Slavic to the bone. The key differentiator between Slavic mentality and Anglo-Saxon one is that Slavic and especially Russian mentality does not know the concept of limited response. The response is "as big as it takes that you never fucking bother us again". It is erroneously labeled in UK and USA recent analysis as "escalate to deescalate". No it is not - it is escalate so there is no f*cking repeat of this. Translated in real terms, this means that Russia has postulated that it will use its FULL military force with no restrictions in a "limited" conflict (just as it did in Ossetia) to make sure nobody gets funky ideas about limited conflicts. The only "rule" is - it will not deploy its nukes first.

The official response by USA in the new Trump policy is the use of tactical nukes including USA if necessary using them first in such scenario to keep the conflict "limited" and deter the Russians from using a sledgehammer to crack nuts. If you just spit your coffee on your keyboard, go and read it. Whoever wrote that in Trump team is on some very weird meds. Meds or no meds, the fact is a fact, they will be actually building the weapons to deliver this idea.

The official Russian response proscribed by their strategy to that is similar - use of weapons of mass destruction against their forces leads to unlimited response on a "this country will not exist to do this stupidity again" basis. This is something they have and they can deploy today. No USA weapon changes this equation.

Now, looking back on the weapons in question. They are actually a deviation from their official strategy (if they exist). They allow them instead of the proscribed complete destruction to chose a target of any value they like and make a BIG show of taking it out. Without it being a guaranteed end of the world. It may still be an end of the world none the less, but you never know.

In any case, the correct response here is to de-escalate and rescind the USA policy back to its Obama and earlier incarnations which was "no nukes first". From there on it would be possible to discuss some disarmament. Unfortunately, this is not likely to happen and it is not Trump who is the culprit - there a plenty of psychotic hawks at all levels in both NATO and USA command too and it is them who are calling the shots, not the politicians - same as during the early years of Reagan/Andropov era.

Does anyone else wonder if there is a background government plotting and ignoring the actual government or at least part of it?

When was the last time you watched "Yes Minister"?

Re: If you say no

The Sony Xperia lower end phones are good enough for most peoples basic use requirements these days

Bingo. They are also significantly sturdier and more reliable than anything else in the same bracket. Based on the experience of running a 100% Xperia fleet for 5 years straight (2 adults, 2 children, 1 OAP), they usually live to the date when you need to upgrade them because the hardware is too old for modern apps, not because the user has destroyed them.

I really do not see a use case for the XZ2. A XA does practically everything you may need from a phone, going beyond that is rather pointless.

Well that's screws Ginni's IBM policy of bringing in cheap Indians

Not in the slightest - IBM has no issues to provide the necessary paperwork. The same is valid for any other company of similar size - they will have no issues with these new requirements.

It screws only smaller companies and agencies. The former are not a big H1B user anyway and as far as the latter is concerned, good bye and good riddance.

Re: the British government does not allow their driving licences to be exchanged for British ones.

the British government does not allow their driving licences to be exchanged for British ones. I did not know this.

It is mostly correct. American license counts as a form of "provisional" license. You do not need adult supervision like with the normal provisional license, but you are allowed to drive with it only for a year. After that you have to sit the test.

There were also some caveats regarding automatic vs manual - I think that the provisional condition is only valid for automatic cars too.

It's been awhile since I've done my driving exam so my memory is a bit fuzzy on this one.

This is in the Register -- why?

I will ask you that question again after you are done chasing an autonegotiation issue between two switches in two racks which cannot be explained by anything short of the intervention of ectoplasma.

The wheels of justice turn slowly. Very slowly...

This was 2007. Technology has moved on.

Re: I wonder how many times that "money saved from EU contributions" will be re-used.

the UK struggles to compete against cheaper low-cost producers from the Southern Hemisphere and South America"

Price is not the problem. UK not slaughtering the animals to the customer requirement IS the problem. UK lamb is stunned, then factory killed instead of it done properly with a knife while alive.

90% of sheep meet consumption is in Muslim countries - predominantly the middle east. If you want to sell there it has to be killed the HALAL way. By a human. With a knife. While conscious.

1. It is a manual process. There are not enough qualified Eastern European immigrants to do that and there will be even less after BrExit.

2. If UK will start slaughtering this amount of lamb to the customer requirements there will be civil war with the animal protesters at each and every slaughterhouse. Considering their numbers and how militant they are in the UK it is just not worth it.

I'm pretty sure for 50,000 pounds a year in damage, it's cheaper to pay off the claims than analyze DNA and store it.

The 50K damage are not the target. The millions (literally) of fines to owners who do not clean up after their mutt are the target here.

It would have been nice if the police was honest for once. They may actually get public support on this one.

Re: Fall in patent quality?

the considerable backlog can be dealt with by replacing all the patent examiners with a monkey with two rubber stamps.

Outsourcing it to USPTO will do the trick. It is pretty much equivalent to that idea.

Re: Ads

click here to make a payment of the hugely crippling sum of 0.231 pence

1. That is per page.

2. Every service which tried to offer this functionality so far has failed. One of the main reasons is that doing this as a service and integrating it into a website is significantly harder than doing ads. Google has made it deceptively easy so micropayments will remain non-starter unless that money flow seizes altogether.

Re: "The main problems..."

Most of them do not.

However the only of PREVENTING them from going to a cloud service is a firewall.

So the first thing you do when it comes from a shop is to see if it can be configured to operate in a firewalled DMZ using motion or similar software

It it cannot - you send it back to where it came from and thank god for the distance selling regulation.

Re: Where Gemini's value really lies

I think I'd need a reasonable linux distro on there, rather than Android, though.

I remember it being marketed as such - you were supposed to have access to the underlying Linux and it was supposed to be nowhere near as crippled like the environment used to run Android.

I believe this is fixable. Recent android kernels have support for lxc so you should be able to spin up a proper distro as a container. This should be goof enough for most stuff.

he has no defined objectives that his performance can be measured against

Even worse - he is a PR professional. So in addition to not having any objectives, he has the professional skills to present his "achievements" in the appropriate rosy colours.

Re: Email address as username

Concur.

Having a username != officially visible email is a mandatory first line of defence.

Re: They'll get away with it...you wouldn't!

They can install what they like, capture they like, apologise and it's all good.

I would not be so sure. Depends who deals with this. If they pissed off a flight sim fan who happens to be a lawyer or work in CPS they may be up to a very unpleasant experience. Unfortunately as with many other things the only exemption to "we, in the UK, have one of the best legal system money can buy" is when you are dealing with members of said system.

Re: Election integrity is easy *if* they're willing.

How are ID checks and thumbprints going to prevent fraud in absentee votes?

The Baltic/Nordic/Eastern European way - the votes are submitted online and a signing certificate used to verify you are who you are. You have the option of the certificate being stored by a third party or being stored on your crypto-token/card or the crypto in the ID itself being used. They have been experimenting with this for a while now. I believe only Baltics went as far as running limited trials for voting though. The rest uses it for other stuff - taxes, banking, signing contracts, etc.

Using it is not as mad as it looks. 95% of adults in UK have access to a card reader. Our banks have made us have one so we can use the Internet banking.

The downside is that you have to trust the election commission to record your vote in the tally, but not record how you voted so you can be identified personally at a later date.

Re: And the proverbial "thinking man"?

Probably wouldn't want either a self driving car or KFC.

I will take a car which is INTEGRATED with the highway and under highway control any day. Something that has proper algorithms which implement the solution to an optimal control problem. Something which is under the central control of the computer responsible for this particular highway stretch not everyone doing their own thing.

Neural network regurgitated belch? Screw that. I have done numerical methods work in my past lives and I know exactly easy it is to clusterf*** the underlying math. No amount of californicating dope can convince me to the opposite.

Re: @ Halcin

No, mostly remainers.

Define remainer. For example, I voted remain in the referendum. Similarly, most of Eastern Europe prior to the referendum supported UK remaining in the Eu.

Now, one year after the BrExit declaration most of Eastern Europe has realized that the harder the BrExit the bigger the financial injection they get. Similarly, those of us who CAN invest there have realized that the harder the BrExit the bigger our ROI.

Nothing personal. Just business.

Re: "...any visible smoke..."

I looked up the pollution standard for heavy diesel vehicles.

That was a UK specific issue. UK was the only country in Europe which disallowed diesel fumigation (*). In the pre-DPF days fumigating a diesel with small injection of LPG at the air intake manifold was the only way to reduce soot by several orders of magnitude. This technique is now out of fashion for automotive - it is replaced by DPF. It will probably not pass today reqs too - it makes the burn much cleaner resulting in significantly higher NO2 emissions. It is still used for motorboats as well as other places where DPF is not suitable.

Unfortunately, in addition to reducing soot, it also increases power output and reduces diesel fuel consumption. As a result it suffered the fate of anything which could endanger the fuel excise revenue. Sleazy Tony Bliar and Gordon Brownpants did not make compromises on anything like that. Anything which would significantly reduce excise revenue was sabotaged by any means possible. So UK pretended it did not exist while most of Eu large city public transport (f.e all of Milan, most German cities, etc) ran fumigated.

This is the root cause of the ridiculous soot standard for city buses, etc ~15-20 years ago. It was there in order to be able to pretend that fumigation is unnecessary.

(*)_{Aka white diesel, disel bianco, etc}