Posts by Voland's right hand

Re: I was not posting it in jest

Somehow I don't think non-UK nationals living here have Kristallnacht,

Want to tell that to the Poles unfortunate to live in Harlow?

Re: Let's see:

- Processor Speeds * # of Cores barely increasing over the last 5 years;

Exactly. If you can upgrade the memory and the disk, you are forced to replace due to battery wear now, not because of performance.

Re: Samdung deserves to pay the fullest amount

Sometimes it's just because the hominem in question isn't WORTH arguing with

Exactly, since when is a Troll (supposedly a silicon life form) species part of the Homo genus? Last time I checked it was not, so using an "ad hominem" falls into the same category as personification of animals. Kind'a cute and Setton-Tompsony if you are describing a loyal and cuddly pet. I do not think it applies to a Troll though.

Re: PDP-11

Yeah, but this is pre-ISO, etc C with half of the includes and most libraries people rely upon today missing. You will have difficulty finding people to work with that.

And there's the problem; profits are taxed. I can take £100 million in the UK, send £99 million to my HQ in another country for licensing, services and anything else I can think of

You - cannot. Me - cannot. Joe on the street cannot. Related parties transaction.

Apple, Google, Facebook - can.

Whichever

You are looking at the typical attitude of the person in his position which sees this as a non-essential, unpleasant and unwanted overhead instead of an essential cost to doing business.

Looks like he has not learned that in his business the uptime and reputation are everything and the costs to protect either are essential costs. Not unwanted additional overheads - they should have been budgeted and paid in _ADVANCE_.

So IMHO there will be more of the same here. It is only a matter of time.

Re: Greedy corporates OR Conspiracy !

Or cluelessness.

I today got the following email from Vodafone: <readacted>name</redacted>, win the new Samsung Galaxy S7 with our Big Prize Grab

While I would love to assign the label "criminal corporate greed" to the Voda marketing cretin who has issued it, "stupidity and cluelessness" are the more likely correct label.

See - we have extra stock of these [ batteries | charge controllers | phones ] - let's shovel them out.

Re: Jamming by definition causes radio noise

Yes and no. In theory, you can hit it.

In practice US anti-radar missiles have the tendency to fail to hit the source if the approach terrain has hills even if they have not lost the GPS track.

Example: https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/apr/30/richardnortontaylor.kateconnolly

This was not "rogue". It was actually fired at the Sofia Airport Gematronic 5GHz met radar (same one as used by quite a few Nato countries). The trigger happy monkey at the controls of the USA Elint aircraft at the time pressed the button immediately after the met radar lit it up as a part of its normal day-to-day operations (they programmed an exclusion zone in the scanning after that until the end of the bombings).

The missile failed to hit a civilian airport in the middle of daily operations only because it was dumb enough to fail to avoid an apartment block on the way. Thanks god for small miracles as the radar is right in the middle of the air ambulance and if memory serves me right, the nearby repair workshops and the crop dusters were also still active at the time (they were relocated ~ 2000-something). It was also thankfully on the other side of the field and unattended (the operators are on the other side of the airfield). Imagine if it hit the terminal...

So as you see, a correctly deployed jammer will probably suffer no consequences while the HARMs are blowing up on the nearby hills.

Re: Different world views

Politely pointing out that deploying poisonous radio-actives in foreign capitals, shooting down passenger jets, annexing foreign countries and attempting to undermine the US election is not nice might get you somewhere in the long term.

Not likely.

Now, not financing a band of "freedom fighters" which take primary schools, theatres and maternity wards full of hostages in the first place would have worked. Not telling them to f*ck off (as C*ntoleeza did) when they politely asked to stop would have worked even better. As we did not do either trying any polite talk at this stage is not likely to provide the results we want as it, quite rightfully, will be considered insincere.

Re: Lots of conjectures

And given how little value Google's home tat adds to a home, I can't see that having a big impact either.

Err... It does not add value for YOU. The customer. It adds significant value to the buyer of the real products which are:

1. Your profile (anyway you like to define that).

2. The APIs to do things to you, your home, etc. Usually leveraging the profile to increase the profile sales.

From that perspective, Google will still break even or be in profit if it _GAVE_ you that tat and paid you to take it as it is a case of "you are not the customer, you are the product".

It also cements its foothold in the home and makes it unassailable by anything short of Eu/FTC "mandatory breakup" level intervention. Same as Android practically concreted its position in search to a level where it cannot be dislodged by anything short of a nuclear bunker buster.

Re: Don't like the check? Don't work for them

Slightly more complicated.

Your plumber, mechanic and gardener do not have one of their customers slapping them with a contract with an "interesting" non-compete clause which is the exact problem in the case of Lyft, Uber and Amazon in USA.

Re: "how we label our food"

That comes across as rather silly.

This is what the statistics say. Silly or not, the numbers are clear.

Pity it will not be these numbers shouldering the burden of the ensuing clusterf*** once all the European doctors on the NHS leave.

Re: It's not a flaw

Hanlon's Razor

Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to simple incompetence.

Re: Replacement batteries

The one place where DRM makes sense and yet they're reticent to use it

It is used in laptop batteries. If the battery id is not recognized it will not charge it.

Re: How many click they voted

Wrong question.

How many click they voted while having faked their age to subscribe to F***book as adults while in reality being underage.

Re: Cirrus

Not enough energy in it. I am going to wait until it becomes a proper Cumulonimbus. Then we can start putting some jobs on the anvil and talking some proper business. One with a spark.

Re: Didn't Homeland do this already?

No need to worry unless you're a politician.

No need to worry unless you are an investigative journalist.

I call bull

I continued reading it until I saw Israel having lower average measurement than most Western European countries.

I have some very serious doubts in the testing methodology which went into that study and the level of cultural or language bias involved.

Re: Apple Vs Samsung

do with how the guy holds it

Not how - where. See report - back pocket. Nuff said.

It is not even an internet enabled fridge

It is a tablet bolted onto a fridge. Real IoT and internet enabled fridge functionality somewhere right around absolute zero.