After the point UK law diverged from EU law, EU regulations became UK law that could be modified. So now, if I’m talking about Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (aka “the GDPR”) I need to clarify that I’m talking about the UK’s fork of the codebase. Can I find a standard way of doing this? Can I bobbins. If legislation was in git I’d just cite the commit ID and annoy everyone.
that is extraordinary. Whatever the lowest possible rung of amateur half-arsed coder is, I am he. Yet I have implemented the one line solution without even having to Google it.
Er, what? How can anyone get a job as a programmer if they understand so little? How do they retain their job when any of their colleagues sees such obviously absurd code as this?
@hembrow It reminds me of a channel where people come for help with Lua scripting in a video game. Some visitors don’t have the slightest clue about anything. Elaborate negation is literally what shows up sometimes. At least *they* aren’t paid for that.
@hembrow @maas I'm normally not a fan of book burning but in this case I might make an exception. I think I'd prefer stickers with better code replacing the bad code. A bit like covering a racist sticker with a pride sticker at the local bus shelter.
Yes, Fujitsu must shoulder some blame for the faulty technology, and possibly more for being in denial. But Fujitsu did not choose to pursue the users for the "missing" money and prosecute them. There is a considerable human side to this story. We must not let the Post Office offload all the financial responsibility onto Fujitsu.
"We only acted like complete bastards because their software fucked up." won't cut it.
@Dave Mc Dunno about reporting, but the technical issues and bugs are covered in the technical appendices to the High Court judgment. bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/QB/20…
Fujitsu knowingly delivered faulty software, and lied about it working. The money we paid them should be returned, and all their current contracts be cancelled, with money back from those too.
Why, yes, I do know someone who knows what Fujitsu are like...
@agvbergin @ajlanes @ldodds ok, that's pretty awful. A good chunk of those failure modes should have been obvious and could have been avoided if common and well known design patterns were used.
@guigsy @ajlanes To go back to OP's original point, the point is that the subpostmasters found the bugs bc of their professional practical expertise. PO should have listened to them, not gaslit and prosectured them.
@agvbergin @guigsy @ajlanes Amazing chutzpah to describe something from 2008-2011 as being a "historic document", like it was written by Pepys or something.
A map of showing the path of a 1764 eclipse across Europe, printed in two passes, with the map in sepia and the shadow line in black.
A great acquisition in and of itself, but what's really special is that the map was designed by a woman, engraved by a woman, and printed by a woman. And not two weeks ago we were brainstorming ideas for a future exhibition on women in science, so it couldn't be more perfect.
Fallopian fact: although medical illustrations often depict the ovarian tubes as attached to the ovaries, they're not. And if you only have one tube, it can pick up eggs from either ovary, a bit like (but not at all like) one of those grabby claw games.
Some of you wanted to know a bit more about how ovarian tubes can pick up eggs from either ovary, so we're *delighted* to tell you more about this, because yes, it's real, the tubes can move around in there!
Here's a diagram of the ovary (labelled O) and tube from a 19th century medical textbook. This image depicts the usual relationship between a tube and ovary: as you can see, they're not attached to each other. One end of the tube comes out of the top of the uterus, it then curves over the ovary and its other end floats nearby.
Here is a video of human ovulation caught on camera. You can see the fimbriae waggling around near the ovary, then, as the egg is released they grab it. youtube.com/watch?v=2-VKgdhfNp…
Belgian researchers have captured ovulation on film for the first time. Read more about how they observed the process at: https://www.newscientist.com/articl...
The job of the fimbriae is to catch the egg and bring it into the tube. The fimbriae are very good at their job. When an egg is about to be released, they will draw closer to the ovary, and make that catch. They sweep the surface of the ovary with fine hairs and pick up the egg.
Science has known that the tubes move around inside the body for a long time. Here's a 1924 video of a rabbit's tubes in motion (please note, this video contains footage of an animal's internal organs) wellcomecollection.org/works/f…
As well as having the ability to move around inside the abdominal cavity, the tubes are very good at getting things moving inside them. Once an egg is picked up, it doesn't just slide down the tube like a helter skelter (sorry if that was a delightful mental image you've always held).
The tubes are lined by little hair-like cells called cilia which waft the egg down to the uterus. The muscle of the tubes also squeeze the egg down in a movement called peristalsis.
The fimbriae are responsive to sex hormones released around ovulation. This is what tells them to come and catch an egg. Once they get the signal, they head over to catch that egg.
The tubes themselves move with the movement of the fimbriae, because the fimbriae are part of the tube. When there isn't an egg to pick up, sometimes the tubes will stick around in the position you usually see them in diagrams, sometimes they might be hanging around near the other ovary, and sometimes they might just have a little lie down on top of the uterus.
Finally got around to looking at #PEH578L's petrol gauge. Multimeter showed that the fault was at the sender, which is a simple float on an arm operating a variable resistor.
Opened it up and was slightly surprised to discover a wire-wound rheostat. Also that three of the turns are broken which would explain why it doesn't work. So unless I feel like re-winding it, I probably need a new one.
@ajlanes The tank is basically a cuboid, so I don't think that's what it's for.
It might be compensating for the fact that the float is on a pivoting arm, so the rate of rotation changes with depth.
But now that I look at it, I think the variance may be the wrong way around for that, so maybe it's compensating for non-linearity in the dashboard gauge instead.
@ajlanes If I was designing this, I'd fill it up by 10%'s and draw a graph and not worry about which part was causing it! 😄 That doesn't stop someone downstream being interested in its origin, of course!
An "open firmware" project, where people produce and share FOSS firmware for common household devices, replacing the manufacturer's firmware with a decrapified version.
A smart TV? Reflash it with FOSS firmware, which removes tracking, calls to the manufacturer's servers, and any Internet-connected services that you don't want?
A printer? It's now yours. No ink subscription, or need for an app to print remotely.
I worked at a Famous DVR Company for a decade. CE software is hard, like maybe NP Complete hard on Friday afternoon when you just want to push the damn build to beta and go home.
"OpenWRT, but for TV's" would be the elevator pitch. OpenWRT was already mentioned in the comments but it's still a good example of how mediocre vendor firmware got replaced. And in looking into firmware on other wireless routers I now see they start with an OpenWRT image and go from there, making it full circle.
this would be great indeed. Maybe it could work in some future if adhering to standars and openness would thus become more of a competitive advantage for manufacturers.
Probably the closest we have to this are a handful or open router projects and some of the 3rd party Android and Linux phone Distros targeting common smartphone models. Love to see this for televisions, especially as so many of them are no shipping incredibly user hostile features like voice recording, viewing habit profiling. Televisions have in effect become just another bug, watching you watch it.
It's hard to shake the gravity of a place that featured in a third of my life, which is also currently the majority of my adult life. I have a certain COVID-like time dilation effect where I think "Oh that was just a few years ago" and suddenly remember that 2004 was a lot longer ago than that!
@cstross @FredKiesche I originally read it as "Tempest Procrastinator", and I wonder if Pratchett might have coined such a device to allow wizards to put off storms they didn't want to deal with right now...
@edchivers @FredKiesche I'm just now visualizing the self-propelled version installed in the rectum of a hippopotamus, using mating Placobdelloides jaegerskioeldi. (If there's a storm coming the hippo gets angry, points into the direction the storm is coming from, and spins its tail as it projectile-shits.)
Well, I know that as a cis guy I probably don't really get a vote here - but as we both know how much it will wind up the soi-disant Stoic Defenders of Something-Or-Other, I say: go for it.
So you're out #sailing in a new area and your electrics fail. No bother, just go back to using a paper chart for navigation (if you ever stopped: I didn't).
The only problem is that the United Kingdom Hydrographic Office is withdrawing its portfolio of Admiralty Standard Nautical Charts and Thematic Charts.
Thank Bob we still have Imray ... for now.
I'm also wondering what small or traditional boat sailors without electronics are meant to do.
That's interesting: it makes sense, I have hardly ever seen a paper chart in use.
That said, when I went deep sea fishing, they had all the paper charts they would ever need (this was NZ) as a backup. It feels... a bit presumptous to believe that e navigation will totally replace paper charts.
@goatsarah @ajlanes @squishymage42 I think for me part of the reason I still value paper charts (other than then not needing electrons) that I sail on other people's boats and I can *always* navigate using charts whereas every chart plotter seems to have a different UI.
@dan_turner ... and a spare of glasses if you need those. I read of a solo sailor who had to be piloted in by the RNLI after losing his specs and not being able to navigate.
A discussion about how they make software and what this means by Jonathan Blow, Thekla, Inc.DevGAMM is the biggest game developers conference in Eastern Euro...
Oh! One factor is that all mobile comms will go Satellite in the next 5 years. But it's not here yet and even then one's device could easily fail (and I'd bet it would be the software that failed first).
I don't understand. The work of updating the charts remains necessary and relevant, so they'll still have to keep the actual data up to date. Doing as Ordnance Survey have done and providing a print-on-demand service for paper charts is surely much easier and more profitable than the work required to safely move everyone to digital-only?
The US is well along the same path, and the answer for us is "online viewer for the chart database can generate custom PDFs for printing, and here's a world-wide vendors certified to print bigger (A2-equivalent) ones for you that meet carry requirements." Including Stanfords in the UK so I'd imagine a similar partnership would be easy to reach.
Credit: Andrew S. Merdith et al, "Extending full-plate tectonic models into deep time: Linking the Neoproterozoic and the Phanerozoic" via u/Useless_or_inept on reddit
LGBT conversion therapy (yes, including trans people) is now illegal in Portugal.
Penalties of people found guilty of trying to change sexual orientation or gender identity: up to 3 years in prison and, if the victim was a minor, a ban on working with minors for between 2 and 20 years.
Fellow trans women site owners: that HOA guy with the blocklist that blocks Nazis and trans women, but mostly trans women, is back on another instance. Just got the shock of my life when he showed up in my feed. It appears that his new personal instance is h-i.social.
You may wish to preemptively defederate for your own protection.
I understand that for the blocking trans women, but it seems odd that someone with that mindset is blocking Nazis. You would expect them to be pretty right wing themselves
ah, so am I so I should have picked that up. It's an odd mindset to want to deny to others rights your community has had to fight hard to achieve. But then I'm a middle-aged cishet white neuro(fairly)typical male
@KeithC It's the British establishment "admit only the right kind of people and close ranks" thing. There were a few journalists who were transphobic, and it became a kind of loyalty test in order to be in the "in group" for them.
We focus when we think of the solstice on the length of the day, but I wonder how much that’s it and how much it’s the quality of the light, the angle of the sun, that makes this time of year miserable. Today it looks like the sun will not get more than 15° above the horizon
Hypothetically if the sun reached the heights it does in Summer during the 7h42 of daylight we get today, would it be more pleasant? (Assume for the purposes of this exercise that I’ve arranged the physics to work to permit this somehow. Either the sun operates like a lightbulb or speeds up or something.)
@goatsarah I completely understand ... I wouldn't expect any trans people to put themselves in that situation without knowing what might happen ... Hugz
I am unsure how abandoning the narrative to the transphobes works out. Perhaps granting exclusives to the Guardian will make up some some of the slack.
Dear #lazyweb I'm looking for a very particular product from like 10 years ago (or it's modern equivalent).
It was a linksys usb/ethernet dongle. Tiny, like a tube of lipstick, with 2 wifi interfaces built in, and a microcontroller web server/router. You'd connect it to USB, login to the web server via wifi (if you'd set it up already) or usb/ethernet if not. Then configure one wifi interface to connect to upstream wifi, and other wifi could act as a personal hotspot.
I know I could build this with a pi zero w and a second wifi dongle, but it'd be bully and honestly less reliable. That little linksys guy just WORKED. It had one job, and it did it.
@wez @jordan Yeah, this is looking like my best bet. Nothing near so tiny as the Asus (Josh found the product I was thinking of), but it's not so much the size the matters, as what you can do with it.
Puli (GL-XE300) looks like the one for my purposes. I don't *need* the cellular connectivity, but it can't hurt...
Thank you, lazyweb. I ended up getting the GLiNet XE-300 "Puli". The cellular support stops at 4G, but that's not a feature I'm looking to use anyway, I have phone tethering for that. The rest of the feature set is bangin'.
There’s always so much to do at this time of year - but what can really help is to write a well-defined To Do List of what you might realistically achieve in your day.
I've got one more piece to finish (a horn that needs sewing up) and then it will be time for the goat-ening. Be prepared for many pictures of a crochet goat.
(In case you're not aware, I'm making one of these youtube.com/watch?v=CC_NDwdzww… but in crochet form. I'm not intended for it to be burned, or destroyed by jackdaws, as seems to be the case for this year's model.)
This is the live feed of the Gävle Goat located in Gävle, Sweden. The Gävle Goat live stream will be active until New Years' unless, of course, the straw goa...
Of course, me being me, I didn't check every piece before I started sewing, so I only realised that I'd used the head for the tail after I'd undone several rounds and attached it firmly to the body. I'm now making a new head.
The goat now has a head, neck, tail and four legs all in the right places. I need to figure out how to fix the horns on so they don't flop all over the place.
If you're book shopping for the festive season, one of the best things I read this year was The Red Scholar’s Wake by Aliette de Bodard. The space pirate love story you didn't know you needed.
As I am in the Caribbean, I have discovered that there is quite a difference in what things cost. Take apple pies, for example: in Antigua an apple pie costs 9 eastern Caribbean dollars. In St Lucia, it’s 12. In Grenada, 10.
The Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill has been published with much fanfare, following the conclusion a treaty between the UK and Rwanda that provides for some asylum-seekers to be remo…
Martin Campbell
in reply to Alexandra Lanes • • •EUR-Lex - 02016R0679-20160504 - EN - EUR-Lex
eur-lex.europa.euAlexandra Lanes likes this.
Alexandra Lanes
in reply to Martin Campbell • •@Martin Campbell The version on legislation.gov.uk similarly: legislation.gov.uk/eur/2016/67…
…but how one is supposed to write that in the OU’s preferred citation style for legal authorities, I do not know.
Martin Campbell
in reply to Alexandra Lanes • • •Legislation.gov.uk
www.legislation.gov.ukAlexandra Lanes likes this.