Re: British Nanny State
@PapaD I suspect that whooshing sound is probably a Nanny flying past by her umbrella. Either that or Paul 195's point
Posts by 's water music
1529 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Jan 2013
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Amazon, eBay and pals agree to Europe's other GDPR: Generally Dangerous Products Removed from websites
Tuesday 26th June 2018 07:55 GMT
Anonymous Coward
"reporting products they feel are unsafe"
"they feel"
[...] SJWs flagging stuff as dangerous because they find it "offensive" by some deranged "logic"
Careful that a stalk from your straw-man doesn't poke you in the eye. I may have to report it for your own protection. :-)
Also beware of RSI from overuse of "scare" quotes
looks like PPE ---->
UK taxman has amassed voice profiles of 5.1 million taxpayers
Monday 25th June 2018 13:04 GMT
Re: opt-out
I can't remember if it was my bank or HMRC, but I was so offended by the lack of an option for an opt-out, I just tried to break the damn thing. It was fun responding:
I applaud your anarchic approach but be careful what you wish for
GDPR forgive us, it's been one month since you were enforced…
Monday 25th June 2018 09:01 GMT
disappointed...
...that most of those organisations* who fill up my spam folder on a daily basis and 'threatened' that they wouldn't be able to send me 'valued' communications any more if I didn't opt-in seem to have found a way to keep on doing it. A bit like one of those millionaires who threatens to emigrate if someone they don't like wins an election and inevitably doesn't
*I'm talking about orgs that I have actually had some relationship with at some point, not pure spammers
Cops: Autonomous Uber driver may have been streaming The Voice before death crash
Dawn of The Planet of the Phablets in 2019 will see off smartphones
Thursday 21st June 2018 14:43 GMT
Re: Health Risk?
Am I the only person who buys shirts with pockets? I simply can't imagine carrying my phone where it's difficult to get at when I'm sitting on the bus/at the office/relaxing at home.
Since phablets appeal strongly to myopic older men I always assumed that people carried them in their cargo shorts pocket like I do
Dixons Carphone profits drop 24% amid hack 'n' high street struggles
MSDN unleashes a fresh round of unintentional innuendo bingo
Thursday 21st June 2018 10:20 GMT
Re: Back to School
At the risk of sounding pious, I stopped sniggering at this kind of thing at some point during my time at primary school.
Life comes at you fast doesn't it? Of course formal education crushes a lot of the joy out of many of us but also affords a glimpse of untold intellectual riches. One hopes that it will leave you with some of the former and inspire you to pursue the latter but sadly it can easily work out like Larkin's mum and dad.
I am absolutely sincere in my wish that you will someday rediscover the joy of a good knob gag alongside your loftier pursuits.
National ID cards might not mean much when up against incompetence of the UK Home Office
Tuesday 19th June 2018 10:31 GMT
In my case, they kept my passport for seven months for a single visa application
I thought you were complaining about how long it took, not boasting about how quickly you got it fast-tracked. Although I have used the icon to indicate irony, I'm not really joking.
In the interests of balance I can confirm from, personal experience, that the home office have been fucking over people's lives in the arena of immigration and asylum since well before the coalition government. Perhaps May's genius was to take the famously 'not fit for purpose' department and redefine its incompetence as a performance target.
Developer’s code worked, but not in the right century
Monday 18th June 2018 14:19 GMT
>> "...and it still occasionally gets presented with new user variants that need extra coding - or a human doing the interpretation."
You mean like 02/03/18, 2nd March or 3rd Feb? Almost impossible to identify with certainty, even if you do know the nationality of the user. Sanity checking ism't likely to much help except in specific circumstances.
Au contraire, sanity checking reveals that any sane person would mean 18th March 2002, although they would have written it as 2002/03/18 so maybe it is still ambiguous. One from @VinceH perhaps?
Audi chief exec arrested over Dieselgate car emissions scandal
PETA calls for fish friendly Swedish street signage
Keep your hands on the f*cking wheel! New Tesla update like being taught to drive by your dad
Friday 15th June 2018 13:40 GMT
Re: The Merc solution
Not sure whether it actually pulls over or just stops you in your current lane (no doubt the fast one). The latter would then become exciting very quickly...
I dunno, how long is going to be before a Tesla comes along and barrels into the back of your Merc? You don't see that many of them on the road yet.
Friday 15th June 2018 10:03 GMT
Re: Auto-crash-pilot
You would be able to keep a safe braking distance from the car in front to start with, at which point the auto-pilot's reaction (full on braking the instant it sees the stationary car) would prevent the collision.
I thought the issue was that, in common with similar systems, the Tesla cruise control ignores stationary objects that it detects once the vehicle is doing a certain speed to avoid the risk of emergency braking on high speed roads which is, perhaps, counter-intuitive to many people who have seen what the cruise control is capable of handling. I presume that the baking after hitting the inflatable car was either as a result of the Tesla detecting the impact or was done by the driver having made his point and knowing that there was another real vehicle in front of the inflatable one, or both.
Creepy software knows what you are about to do... to that poor salad
Men are officially the worst… top-level domain
So net neutrality has officially expired. Now what do we do?
IBM to GTS: We want you to 'rotate' clients every two years
Hmmm, we can already seize your stuff, so why can't we shoot down your drone, officials mull
Schadenfreude for UK mobile networks over the tumult at Carphone
Tuesday 5th June 2018 11:59 GMT
Re: Internets for the win!
>>[replacement for Moto G4: Nokia 7+?]
I was looking at the Huey Honour 10 it's a lot of phone for the money.
It's still a lot of money for the phone even if spectacularly greater value than current flagships (I mean the GBP400 rather than the Honor 10 specifically).
I've been thinking about both of those for a similar upgrade scenario, then I look at the Moto G6 and wonder what I am really getting for the extra GBBP100-170. Then I reflect that my 40-month-old phone still works well enough despite the cracks at the top of the screen which will probably kill it eventually.
Of course my opinions are driven by my own bias, prejudice and use-cases
Tuesday 5th June 2018 11:47 GMT
Re: Internets for the win!
For example, the 64gb iPhone 8 with 8gb data on Voda is £79 + (24 * £57) = £1447
or handset direct from Apple and equivalent contract from smarty is £799 + (24 * £15) = £1159
Giving a difference of £288 for the loan.
A shade under 18% APR I think so not ridiculous for unsecured consumer credit. It depends on whether you have the capital, what else you would be doing with it instead and the utility of the handset to you. Whether it is worthy of debate depends on whether the sum are material to you or not
MH370 search ends – probably – without finding missing 777
BOFH: Their bright orange plumage warns other species, 'Back off! I'm dangerous!'
America's comms watchdog takes on the internet era's real criminals: Pirate pastors
Tuesday 29th May 2018 10:51 GMT
Re: italics and/or bold (and sometimes strike) for emphasis work better in this forum
Well, my local county council are fuckwits so about 10 years ago they advised students and unemployed people on their training schemes that CVs should be in Comic Sans
I wonder if it was some sort of overspill from education policies? In the days when fonts cost actual money and DTP (of a sort) was becoming available in education, Comic Sans was one of the the few widely available, free fonts whose glyph for lower case 'a' was the more hand-writing like style. Its use became wide-spread in primary education and may have bled through from LEAs to LAs.
These days, of course, its primary use is to smoke out typography bores :-) although your example might have just been a Tory Councillor have a joke by fucking with the local unemployables
Uber robo-ride's deadly crash: Self-driving car had emergency braking switched off by design
Hitler 'is dead' declares French prof who gazed at dictator's nashers
Want to know what an organisation is really like? Visit the restroom
Monday 21st May 2018 15:35 GMT
Re: We need some ...
Then there was the time some druggie decided to cut themselves pretty good or so something, because there was enough blood on the (thankfully, tile) floor that I dumped the industrial 'destroys ALL LIFEFORMS' grade cleaner straight out of the jug on the floor and let it sit for a couple minutes before mopping that disaster up.
DNAHIKT you shouldn't underestimate how much blood can be habitually released by chronic Nobbies. No excuse for not cleaning up after yourself though.
Most people I ever worked with in offices gave a passable impression of adult humanity. Teh Toiletz tell another story, sadly.
Sysadmin hailed as hero for deleting data from the wrong disk drive
Monday 21st May 2018 14:45 GMT
Re: Personal Tragedy
If you're using a proper camera with removable card storage, there is a simple way to do photo backups. When the card gets full, stick a new one in and put the old one somewhere safe. SD cards are cheap enough nowadays to consider them as write-once media and they certainly don't take up much space!
SD cards are also fragile enough that you should not rely on them as ever-read-from-again media
Facebook Android app caught seeking 'superuser' clearance
We've found it! A cloud-and-AI angle on the royal wedding
Tuesday 15th May 2018 11:00 GMT
Re: Now that
Absolutely fed up to the back teeth with this shit.
An antiquated, archaic system that should be disbanded.
Hang on. I based much of my IT career on antiquated, archaic system[s] that should be disbanded. Although, to be fair, some days I am also Absolutely fed up to the back teeth with this [that] shit
Hacking train Wi-Fi may expose passenger data and control systems
Friday 11th May 2018 14:52 GMT
Re: Security researcher clickbait
Just another variation on the theme of "I hacked a plane by plugging into the infotainment but have no evidence to back my technically impossible assertion but please give me lots of coverage"
Yeah sure but can you be certain that would not be possible to bridge from the train ethernet to the nuclear launch codes? Ok he may not be able to but CAN WE AFFORD TO RISK IT? Also what if the researcher had been a PAEDO?
I've started already-->
Scrap London cops' 'racially biased' gang database – campaigners
Thursday 10th May 2018 11:22 GMT
Re: Sadly
>>" I'd you were 5'11" would you be happy to be stopped and searched every couple of weeks?"
If it made sense to target gangs and / or gun and knife crime then yes, absolutely.
I would be as well because
1 I have nothing to hide and hence nothing to fear
2 The police have an excellent record in not fitting people up when they lack evidence but know they are guilty
The whole point with institutional racism/structural inequality is that individual participants on the power side of the equation can often have good intentions but the harm is still real even if the correlation being used is quite strong
Trademark dispute by Dr Dre against Dr Drai the gynaecologist dismissed
Size does matter, chaps: Oversized todgers an evolutionary handicap
Great Western Railway warns of great Western password reuse: Brits told to reset logins
Wednesday 11th April 2018 12:24 GMT
Re: No email here
I just went on to reset my password only to find that the existing (browser remembered) password didn;t work. I hadn't reached the point in the article that mentioned the general reset nor seen the email from GWR that only arrived five minutes ago. Normal password reset process worked ok though.
Email said my account was not breached but they had forced a password reset anyway
German sauna drags punters to court over naked truth
VMs: Imperfect answers to imperfect problems, but they're all we have
Tuesday 10th April 2018 13:53 GMT
culture wars... ...in a good way
I think that the article (and most of the comments) could be summed up in the old direction advice: "the best way to get to over there is not to start from over here" yet here we are, and as well as getting to there we have to balance competing (and contradictory) goals, resource constraints, legacy investments and organisational politics. Take three axes of success and you can pick (at most) two of them. Achieving at least one is a better-than-average day in my book. We need both the single track, mission-poster nutters as well as the pragmatists to move forward in balance as there is not right answer and no point pretending that there is.
This sort of diverse, opinionated, unpredictable, irreverent but mostly constructive and respectful discussion is what I have always liked about el reg
Birds can feel Earth's magnetic fields? Yeah, that might fly. Bioboffins find vital sense proteins
Monday 9th April 2018 09:44 GMT
Re: How would it feel?
You know how you can make a magnet by pointing a length of metal, eg a screwdriver in line with the earths magnetic field and striking it? That was a hell of a "strike" 65 million years ago when birds were still dinosaurs.
So you are saying that this is some sort of racial memory of being successed by a meteor when dinosaurs roamed the earth? I would say that sounds legit except surely the dinos/birds would have had to be dynamised by extreme dilution. And Requel welch would be able to sense magnets too. How does that fucking work? :-)
My Tibetan digital detox lasted one morning, how about yours?
Sunday 8th April 2018 11:16 GMT
Other Spas are available
"Women prefer their best friends to their husband, study finds"
https://www.indy100.com/article/married-women-prefer-best-friends-husbands-study-research-champneys-health-spa-relationships-8293491
Luxury vendor commissions survey which discovers that people prefer consuming their product to alternative activities. It must have been a relief to marketing when the result went the way they were hoping
I say, I say, I say: What's the difference between a king penguin and liquid?
Elon Musk's mighty erection fires sperm at orbiting space station
Tuesday 3rd April 2018 16:42 GMT
Re: confirmation classes
This is NASA. They wouldn't use dirty sheets. They'd spend oodles of money on astro-wanking-socks.
True that. Still, with the increase in home working these days they should be better placed to defray their costs in a larger market.
Tuesday 3rd April 2018 09:27 GMT
confirmation classes
From the article:
> but there have been no confirmed cases low-Earth ejaculation so far.
Now, I am not a doctor or a professional in any other biological science, however, my understanding from vaguely remembered biology classes... [a need to drain reservoirs]
Emphasis added to confirmed. It just means that they bundle up the dirty sheets and stuff them into old supply capsules without thinking too much about how starchy they are
2001: A Space Odyssey has haunted pop culture with anxiety about rogue AIs for half a century
Tuesday 3rd April 2018 10:21 GMT
Re: "the monolith is a representation of a wideframe cinema screen rotated 90°."
Nope, sorry. The dimensions of the Monolith are explicitly given as being in the ratio 1:4:9 - the first three square numbers. The ratio of a cinema screen is 2.35:1, not the necessary 2.25:1.
I applaud your pedantry (obvs) but must also point out that 6*9<>42
Tech’s big lie: Relations between capital and labor don't matter
Tuesday 3rd April 2018 10:03 GMT
Re: Where did it go wrong?
Today, thins have evolved. Commodity hardware has become cheap as chips - you buy but a pi zero (faster than the Vax I worked on ~27 years ago) for the cost of a round in London pub.
I call bullshit until you can name a London pub where you can get a round for GBP15 or less
10Mbps for world+dog, hoots UK.gov, and here is how we're doing it
Take the dashboard too literally and your brains might end up all over it
Slap visibility beacons on bikes so they can chat to auto autos, says trade body
Tuesday 27th March 2018 11:04 GMT
Re: Education
I always thought that lighting was supposed to show a STEADY or STATIC white lamp at the front of a bike or vehicle and equally the same (in red, of course) for the rear, so doesn't that make the flashers (if you pardon the expression) technically illegal?
You were correct until over a decade ago*. Here is some education. You're welcome.
*there are an awful lot of UK non-compliant bicycle lights on the market and in use
Biting the hand that feeds IT
