It doesn't matter how many times he does it, if he can avoid getting into an "accident" then he should be allowed to do it. Once he gets into an "accident", then that is when laws like Utah's are good. 15 year prison term for causing someone's death is probably not enough. They should have restricted driving privileges after they get out, for at least the next 10 years.
Crap!!!!!!!!!
The offense is doing the action, not getting caught for it. In your terminally fucked up universe you can get away with anything till you are caught. Then totally disproportionate penalties are applied.
Pity punitive "justice" works not at all. Realistically, I agree that there is culpability here. but how does one assess this? Punitive "justice" is not justice. Revenge makes nobody better. Will it deter even one crime?
And if not, what is the point? Does it make some punitive scumbag feel better? And if so, why?
Revenge is not a useful way to determine one's criminal justice system.
I am extremely glad I live on another continent - you are not welcome to mine.
And just how far does your vehicle travel in this time? Remember it takes about 0.3s to react to anything. Can you guarantee that the vehicle in front of you has working brake lights? Mine didn't till today.
Glad I live in a different continent from you. Idiot...
Good news coverage is worth paying for. Unfortunately for Murdoch, with the sole exception of the Wall Street Journal, none of his holdings produce good journalism. Because with the exception of the Journal, everything covered in his TV stations or newspapers I can find in three hundred other locations on the web, in other newspapers, or on other TV stations. Because its all reworked AP stories. Good in-depth journalism died years ago, and now all we get from 99.9999999 percent of US media sources, including Murdoch's, is cookie-cutter stories.
If Murdoch really expects me to pay, then he's going to have to improve journalism at his own holdings and give me original information I can't find anywhere else. When he can do that, I'll pay (as I do for the WSJ now). Until then, not a chance in hell.
In the Eighties (About 84 AFAIR) all the journalists on the Sun went out on strike for 3 months. Nobody noticed as all the news was made up by the sub-editors as per usual. "Quality" journalism indeed!
OK, it was 30 years ago, but I managed to get away with using quite a lot of my uncle's textbooks - he was an undergraduate in 1945 - I used quite a few of his books in 1978-9. Unfortunately, he died in 1978 so i couldn't pick his brains.
I still have some of them and they are still exactly as comprehensible as they were when I graduated. However, I'm not a chemist any more and looking at a first year chemistry paper a few years ago, the only question I could answer was the one that said: Name:
It would appear that the chemistry syllabus locally has changed quite a bit in the last 30 years. The nearly 65 year old textbooks are just as good as they ever were for refreshing my memory though.
Might make it hard to pass exams, however. This may be more due to fashion than anything else. The basics - the first year or so have not really changed since the 1920's.
There was a story going around about a netware system that got walled up behind sheet rock and ran for years and years without anyone being able to even touch the server. I doubt it on a personal level just on power alone (where can you find power that NEVER drops over many years? I'd sure like to know...) I could see that a system wouldn't have a critical hardware failure over 6+ years, I just don't see that same system being able to stay up without power problems.
Clean power?
Where I live (Smallish UK city) I've had a total of 35 minutes of outages, one of 10 mins and one of 25, since January 1990. Both outages were someone's carelessness with a backhoe. More than ten years of power uptime no problem. This is not unusual for most cities here.
AEK II was my favorite keyboard ever; I still have one of these in the closet for old times sake, but of course they never made a USB version. My second favorite is the current generation of wired Mac keyboards -- the thin silver things. Great tactile response but without the overly loud clickage. And no travel at all - those things cause me serious pain
I'm right handed but in the days when I went target shooting I shot left handed as my left eye was a lot better than my right. Shooting right handed I could see either the sights or the target, not both so I learned to shoot (badly) left-handed.
Most southpaws can do most things far better right handed than most right handers can do left handed stuff.
Nearly all southpaws I know have their mice set to right-handed use, I only know one person who has hers set to left-handed. I find it almost unusable.
That depends on what you learned to type on. I learned to type on a sand filled Olivetti manual typewriter (Working in a desert at the time, you got sand with everything) - it took 3 months of practice to strengthen my left little finger enough to type the letter "a". I beat keyboards to death with my fingers. Even Apple Extended II keyboards die by my finger though they live for longer than most.
And I tend to get quite a bit of ash into them as well being a smoker.
The only keyboards that survive me for more than 5 years are Model M's. Apple Extended II's were the only ones that lasted that long - cheap stuff could die in a couple of weeks. The last Extended II I bought cost me about $200 at the then prevailing exchange rate.
Now that I can buy Model M clones with USB interfaces, I have no reason other than weight to use anything else. The keyboard I carry weighs nearly as much as the laptop I attach it to - given the typical price of laptop keyboards and my fingers this makes a strange sort of sense. If weight is an issue, i carry one of the silicone rubber roll-up keyboards and a closed-cell foam pad to put under it as I still type rather too hard for the travel available on those things.
My last laptop had had more spent on keyboards for it than I originally paid for the thing after the 6 years it lived.
I can certainly type louder, if no faster on a buckling spring keyboard than on anything else. But they survive which no others do. They certainly do not slow me down. On any other keyboard I will be lucky to get 70wpm - and routinely get 80wpm on a Model M (according to highly dubious online tests - I doubt I can do a proper 40 wpm which I have a certificate somewhere saying I could do in 1985)
But then my typing style is more violent than most people's.
I have 3 of them on my desk. LCD colour sucks seriously and unless you spend a lot more than I'm prepared to spend on a car you are not going to get colour accuracy. I used to print colour photos for a living so this seriously matters to me. I get the screens from unwise design places for nothing when they ditch them for usually nasty cheap LCDs so I'm not about to run out of them.
Most standard res TV is unwatchable in terms of content, let alone display - I do not own or want a TV set. However, I find standard PAL TV unwatchable on large LCDs as it almost makes my eyes bleed. Nor is my eyesight up to silly resolution LCD screens - I own a 1600x1200 16" screen Sony laptop which i cannot read anything on till I turn the resolution down to something sensible or up the display font size to something silly. Or wear glasses.
Still have a Sony radio that I use every day as i have done since i bought it in 1984 (ICF7600D). Cost more than a large colour TV at the time and has been worth every penny. Now there is nothing made by Sony, other then their Ericsson designed phones, I'd even consider buying - i got given the laptop.
The Trinitron was great - I've never, ever been bothered by the wires. Never seen a Daimondtron I liked though. there are a few in the garage for the day that everything else fails.
RIP Trinitron.
Come to that: RIP Sony, you used to make great stuff.
Stuff that! CFL marketing claims are one thing, light meters are another...
Say 25W and you get closer, but not there. 30W CFLs probably exceed 100W incandescent lightbulbs, lower wattage ones don't. Speaking as the guy who still tries to find 200W incandescent bulbs which used to be easy to find and now aren't findable at all.
In a more than 1,000,000 employee outift (NHS) we are still running NT4. Totally flies on ancient hardware - until this year I was using a P133 - the only reason it got replaced was that the virus scanner needed more RAM than the box had in total. The "new" box was on its fourth, fifth and sixth users (3 of us). Which says a lot about our importance in the scheme of things.
Apparently we are moving to Active Directory from Netware (Which suits the (outsourced) IT dept. right down to the ground but will produce less than zero benefit to the poor sods who actually have to use it.) so will need 2000 - so the antique (p3 of some sort, can't say I care enough to check) will have to support it - after a fashion. It uses IE5 or some similar crap that doesn't actually work on our intranet (smart that!). Windowsupdate is blocked BTW. Opera has its uses. Since the primary use is a box to run Office 97 and receive spam, Windows for Workgroups would do the trixck
XP may just happen in 2010 or thereby when they find some other antique to issue to us. Most of the place has older boxes.
I suspect we aren't the only large outfit that is in a similar position - if most of the computers were thrown in a skip (dumpster for Americans), productivity would dramtaically increase. Vista may, or may not happen by the time I retire and I'm not 50 yet....
Agreed entirely! The noise is a pain but tolerable - when I did CS in the late 70's the noise of a hundred or so teletypes was quite something. Admittedly that wasn't the keyboards but...
I ive alone so the Model M noise doesn't bother me at all, but the most durable keyboard I've ever had (given that I smoke a lot) was an original Apple Extended that lived for about 14 years on a solid diet of ash and whatever else...
I like Model M keyboards a lot, but you still can't beat the Extended II for durability under extremely adverse conditions, i.e., my fingers.
I learned to type many years ago in an African desert on a sand-filled manual typewriter, so I tend to beat keyboards to death with my fingers. Only Model M's and decent Apple keyboards can take the abuse that my fingers dish out. My record for keyboard destruction is under an hour (When I was writng up a PhD) on a real cheapo piece of garbage. Silicone dome keyboards don't live long here.
Thus far, the Apple USB keyboards (of which I own quite a few) just don't have the life of the old Exended II, but I do like them. I only use Model M's for the Linux/Winders boxen around here. Thus far, I've destroyed 2 Compaq (membrane) keyboards for the antiques at work - my "new" box is a P3.
Long live the Model M! And all such older, but really nice keyboardds.
Sheer size. The NHS employs around a million people (882,000 for England alone) and you are talking about the records for nearly 60 million living people (and the digitised records of dead people - some clinical records are required to be kept for 75 years after the death of the patient). The NHS is 58 years old. That's a lot of data. Tax records are far simpler
Number of locations - every GP surgery in the country - even the ones in the islands 10,465 of them in 2004 (figures here) plus all the dentists (5-10,000 practices) opthalmic practitioners (8,000), the 10,000 contracted pharmacies (More figures), and so on.
ALL of these will need to be connected. There probably isn't much like it anywhere on that scale - and expectations of it are wildly unrealistic.
The backbone will be fun to build out to the islands where power is often flaky in winter - and the UK is rather longer than it is wide. I doubt adequate telco infrastructure is in place for quite large parts of the country - think everywhere where you can't get a mobile signal.
In practice for most NHS workers, all this stuff is taking huge amounts of money away from what really matters - care for the patients. The (7 year old) PC eating half my desk is only useful for receiving bureaucratic garbage - anything important gets done on the phone or in the wards. A huge amount of time is wasted, going through all the garbage that gets emailed to all and sundry, some of which actually needs reading but the vast majority doesn't. The problem is figuring out which is which without reading it first. My favourite one was the day that 10,000 people in got the email about the new lines being painted in a rural health centre car park (staff 8) meaning that there would be 2 less parking spaces that day.
Not to mention the fun stuff like wiring up 200 year old hospital buildings, GP practices and the like.
If my experience from twenty years ago is still valid, many Africans, at least in the bit that used to be British ruled, are only literate in English. All teaching in Zambia past about Grade 4 was in English, or to be more accurate, the Zambian dialect of English.
I shared a house with a guy who spoke more than a dozen languages. However, I saw him when his parents wrote to him. His father wrote to him in Tumbuka - he'd write out a translation in English, compose a reply in English, write it out, then translate it into Tumbuka and write that out.
His mother wrote to him in Chichewa and he'd go through the same painful process.
This seemed to be fairly common with the folks I worked with (teachers all in a high school) - but would be hard to check as every single one of them has died of AIDS. If they had had electricity, let alone Internet access, they would mostly have looked in English first anyway.
This may not be rpepresentative of the areas that could use Swahili though.
A rubber hammer - you lack ambition. A 4lb bricklayers hammer works far better. Learned this one 25 years ago when I worked in a camera shop.
Repairs to fiddly bits of cameras are best not attempted while severely hungover - especially the morning after someone has tried to break in through the window in the basement. Anyway customer comes in with jammed camera - this model (Russian Leica 3 clone) easy to fix once the top plate removed so wandered through the back to get small screwdrivers. Meanwhile boss in basement trying to fix broken window and yells up for me to bring down hammer.
Customer sees me emerging from the back of the shop wielding a hammer. His expression truly terrified at the thought of my attempting percussive maintenance to his camera with it. He had not been reassured by the aroma of stale whisky either and I've never seen anyone leave the shop so fast before or since.
Much relief when I wandered down to the basement with the hammer. Ever since then a 4lb hammer has been in the toolkit as the customers tend to shut up and let you get on with it once you have produced that. Only time it ever got used was when trying to make an antique colour laser printer fit in a skip. Now that WAS fun, if a little sad - that beast earned me something like its purchase price over the years when it played up.
It is much easier to make thermite than a shaped charge.
Southern African school. I was head of chemistry. School had a serious attack of bandits - probably SWAPO who hadn't been paid lately.
30 rounds from an AK47 had wrecked the safe door handle - which was quite a bit older than I was. No electricity, no access to explosives that I hadn't made myself - seeing the no power bit do you really want to try to make explosives with no means of cooling the reaction - I didn't. Yes most of the required reactions are endothermic, but do you really want to bet on it?
Rust is not exactly hard to find, even in a desert - it isn't exactly hard to make your own anyway. Aluminium powder isn't that hard to find either if you can find a grinding wheel.
Magnesium ribbon or barium peroxide to set it off with (thermite isn't that easy to light) is perhaps a little bit harder if you aren't a chemistry teacher. I really really wouldn't want to try water to stop the resultant molten mess. Nor is it a good plan to open a safe whose entire contents are made of paper by this method. How do I know this...?
Remember that most hard drive casings contain a lot of zinc if they aren't actually made of zinc - this will vapourise at thermite temperatures. Ask any welder about how bad an idea it is to inhale zinc vapour, it is likely to be lethal so just hope the cops don't get irate about that bit - dead cops do tend to upset the living ones.
Really, really don't try grinding your rust and aluminium together unless you are seriously sure you know what you are doing - you are not going to be able to put the fire out should you manage to light it
It shoud be possible to heat your drives above their Curie point (AFAIR 650 Centigrade) at which point all the data is gone permanently without such drastic measures. The trick is to be able to do so instantaneously, or at least within a second or two. Rigging up a 600 amp welder to an anti-tamper switch ought to do the trick, but see the comment on zinc vapour.
Best bet is not to have anything incriminating in the first place
And even if you don't have a TV, the dreaded TV Licensing people - winner more than once of privacy invasion awards - will still come after you with automated threats spat out roughly annually.
I have even had them phone me to threaten me, a large part of the reason why my phone number is now nowhere to be found. The best response to this is a demand for the call centre worker's name and home address as a summons for defamation is on its way - it is good to ask for the Chief Executive's home address as well for the same purpose.
The TV licensing outfit is NOT a part of the BBC though it likes to pretend it is. From their website on the "About" page. http://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/
"TV Licensing is the trading name used by the BBC's agents who collect the licence fee on behalf of the BBC."
They used to be a part of the Post Office when the phones were as well. I suppose the BBC prefers to keep such activities at arm's length nowadays.
TV Licensing is NOT a government agency though it tries to pretend it is. It was outsourced quite a while ago though it is still keen on egregious privacy invasion.
The upper chamber is in the process of being "reformed" i.e. emasculated so that it can be filled by appointees instead - this is about as democratic as the present system
Slashdot Mirror
Hey shithead!
You only think you can.
Now get the fuck off the roads and leave them to those who are actually capable of paying attention.
Fuckwit!!!!!!!!!!!
Sorry chummy. If you think you ever could do this you were deluding yourself. Just as much a danger to others as anyone else.
Mine doesn't allow me to enter stuff if the vehicle is moving. And this is as it ought to be.
If it does not some dickheaded USians will sue. There is no remedy for stupidity other than that that Darwin offered.
It doesn't matter how many times he does it, if he can avoid getting into an "accident" then he should be allowed to do it. Once he gets into an "accident", then that is when laws like Utah's are good. 15 year prison term for causing someone's death is probably not enough. They should have restricted driving privileges after they get out, for at least the next 10 years.
Crap!!!!!!!!!
The offense is doing the action, not getting caught for it. In your terminally fucked up universe you can get away with anything till you are caught. Then totally disproportionate penalties are applied.
Pity punitive "justice" works not at all. Realistically, I agree that there is culpability here. but how does one assess this? Punitive "justice" is not justice. Revenge makes nobody better. Will it deter even one crime?
And if not, what is the point? Does it make some punitive scumbag feel better? And if so, why?
Revenge is not a useful way to determine one's criminal justice system.
I am extremely glad I live on another continent - you are not welcome to mine.
And just how far does your vehicle travel in this time? Remember it takes about 0.3s to react to anything. Can you guarantee that the vehicle in front of you has working brake lights? Mine didn't till today.
Glad I live in a different continent from you. Idiot...
Good news coverage is worth paying for. Unfortunately for Murdoch, with the sole exception of the Wall Street Journal, none of his holdings produce good journalism. Because with the exception of the Journal, everything covered in his TV stations or newspapers I can find in three hundred other locations on the web, in other newspapers, or on other TV stations. Because its all reworked AP stories. Good in-depth journalism died years ago, and now all we get from 99.9999999 percent of US media sources, including Murdoch's, is cookie-cutter stories.
If Murdoch really expects me to pay, then he's going to have to improve journalism at his own holdings and give me original information I can't find anywhere else. When he can do that, I'll pay (as I do for the WSJ now). Until then, not a chance in hell.
In the Eighties (About 84 AFAIR) all the journalists on the Sun went out on strike for 3 months. Nobody noticed as all the news was made up by the sub-editors as per usual. "Quality" journalism indeed!
OK, it was 30 years ago, but I managed to get away with using quite a lot of my uncle's textbooks - he was an undergraduate in 1945 - I used quite a few of his books in 1978-9. Unfortunately, he died in 1978 so i couldn't pick his brains.
I still have some of them and they are still exactly as comprehensible as they were when I graduated. However, I'm not a chemist any more and looking at a first year chemistry paper a few years ago, the only question I could answer was the one that said: Name:
It would appear that the chemistry syllabus locally has changed quite a bit in the last 30 years. The nearly 65 year old textbooks are just as good as they ever were for refreshing my memory though.
Might make it hard to pass exams, however. This may be more due to fashion than anything else. The basics - the first year or so have not really changed since the 1920's.
Principles rarely change much. Exam questions do...
There was a story going around about a netware system that got walled up behind sheet rock and ran for years and years without anyone being able to even touch the server. I doubt it on a personal level just on power alone (where can you find power that NEVER drops over many years? I'd sure like to know...) I could see that a system wouldn't have a critical hardware failure over 6+ years, I just don't see that same system being able to stay up without power problems.
Clean power?
Where I live (Smallish UK city) I've had a total of 35 minutes of outages, one of 10 mins and one of 25, since January 1990. Both outages were someone's carelessness with a backhoe. More than ten years of power uptime no problem. This is not unusual for most cities here.
I'm right handed but in the days when I went target shooting I shot left handed as my left eye was a lot better than my right. Shooting right handed I could see either the sights or the target, not both so I learned to shoot (badly) left-handed.
Most southpaws can do most things far better right handed than most right handers can do left handed stuff.
Nearly all southpaws I know have their mice set to right-handed use, I only know one person who has hers set to left-handed. I find it almost unusable.
That depends on what you learned to type on. I learned to type on a sand filled Olivetti manual typewriter (Working in a desert at the time, you got sand with everything) - it took 3 months of practice to strengthen my left little finger enough to type the letter "a". I beat keyboards to death with my fingers. Even Apple Extended II keyboards die by my finger though they live for longer than most.
And I tend to get quite a bit of ash into them as well being a smoker.
The only keyboards that survive me for more than 5 years are Model M's. Apple Extended II's were the only ones that lasted that long - cheap stuff could die in a couple of weeks. The last Extended II I bought cost me about $200 at the then prevailing exchange rate.
Now that I can buy Model M clones with USB interfaces, I have no reason other than weight to use anything else. The keyboard I carry weighs nearly as much as the laptop I attach it to - given the typical price of laptop keyboards and my fingers this makes a strange sort of sense. If weight is an issue, i carry one of the silicone rubber roll-up keyboards and a closed-cell foam pad to put under it as I still type rather too hard for the travel available on those things.
My last laptop had had more spent on keyboards for it than I originally paid for the thing after the 6 years it lived.
I can certainly type louder, if no faster on a buckling spring keyboard than on anything else. But they survive which no others do. They certainly do not slow me down. On any other keyboard I will be lucky to get 70wpm - and routinely get 80wpm on a Model M (according to highly dubious online tests - I doubt I can do a proper 40 wpm which I have a certificate somewhere saying I could do in 1985)
But then my typing style is more violent than most people's.
Still do. So what?
I have 3 of them on my desk. LCD colour sucks seriously and unless you spend a lot more than I'm prepared to spend on a car you are not going to get colour accuracy. I used to print colour photos for a living so this seriously matters to me. I get the screens from unwise design places for nothing when they ditch them for usually nasty cheap LCDs so I'm not about to run out of them.
Most standard res TV is unwatchable in terms of content, let alone display - I do not own or want a TV set. However, I find standard PAL TV unwatchable on large LCDs as it almost makes my eyes bleed. Nor is my eyesight up to silly resolution LCD screens - I own a 1600x1200 16" screen Sony laptop which i cannot read anything on till I turn the resolution down to something sensible or up the display font size to something silly. Or wear glasses.
Still have a Sony radio that I use every day as i have done since i bought it in 1984 (ICF7600D). Cost more than a large colour TV at the time and has been worth every penny. Now there is nothing made by Sony, other then their Ericsson designed phones, I'd even consider buying - i got given the laptop.
The Trinitron was great - I've never, ever been bothered by the wires. Never seen a Daimondtron I liked though. there are a few in the garage for the day that everything else fails.
RIP Trinitron.
Come to that: RIP Sony, you used to make great stuff.
Stuff that!
CFL marketing claims are one thing, light meters are another...
Say 25W and you get closer, but not there. 30W CFLs probably exceed 100W incandescent lightbulbs, lower wattage ones don't. Speaking as the guy who still tries to find 200W incandescent bulbs which used to be easy to find and now aren't findable at all.
Win2K!!!
In a more than 1,000,000 employee outift (NHS) we are still running NT4. Totally flies on ancient hardware - until this year I was using a P133 - the only reason it got replaced was that the virus scanner needed more RAM than the box had in total. The "new" box was on its fourth, fifth and sixth users (3 of us). Which says a lot about our importance in the scheme of things.
Apparently we are moving to Active Directory from Netware (Which suits the (outsourced) IT dept. right down to the ground but will produce less than zero benefit to the poor sods who actually have to use it.) so will need 2000 - so the antique (p3 of some sort, can't say I care enough to check) will have to support it - after a fashion. It uses IE5 or some similar crap that doesn't actually work on our intranet (smart that!). Windowsupdate is blocked BTW. Opera has its uses. Since the primary use is a box to run Office 97 and receive spam, Windows for Workgroups would do the trixck
XP may just happen in 2010 or thereby when they find some other antique to issue to us. Most of the place has older boxes.
I suspect we aren't the only large outfit that is in a similar position - if most of the computers were thrown in a skip (dumpster for Americans), productivity would dramtaically increase. Vista may, or may not happen by the time I retire and I'm not 50 yet....
Agreed entirely! The noise is a pain but tolerable - when I did CS in the late 70's the noise of a hundred or so teletypes was quite something. Admittedly that wasn't the keyboards but...
I ive alone so the Model M noise doesn't bother me at all, but the most durable keyboard I've ever had (given that I smoke a lot) was an original Apple Extended that lived for about 14 years on a solid diet of ash and whatever else...
I like Model M keyboards a lot, but you still can't beat the Extended II for durability under extremely adverse conditions, i.e., my fingers.
I learned to type many years ago in an African desert on a sand-filled manual typewriter, so I tend to beat keyboards to death with my fingers. Only Model M's and decent Apple keyboards can take the abuse that my fingers dish out. My record for keyboard destruction is under an hour (When I was writng up a PhD) on a real cheapo piece of garbage. Silicone dome keyboards don't live long here.
Thus far, the Apple USB keyboards (of which I own quite a few) just don't have the life of the old Exended II, but I do like them. I only use Model M's for the Linux/Winders boxen around here. Thus far, I've destroyed 2 Compaq (membrane) keyboards for the antiques at work - my "new" box is a P3.
Long live the Model M! And all such older, but really nice keyboardds.
Sheer size. The NHS employs around a million people (882,000 for England alone) and you are talking about the records for nearly 60 million living people (and the digitised records of dead people - some clinical records are required to be kept for 75 years after the death of the patient). The NHS is 58 years old. That's a lot of data. Tax records are far simpler
Number of locations - every GP surgery in the country - even the ones in the islands 10,465 of them in 2004 (figures here) plus all the dentists (5-10,000 practices) opthalmic practitioners (8,000), the 10,000 contracted pharmacies (More figures), and so on.
ALL of these will need to be connected. There probably isn't much like it anywhere on that scale - and expectations of it are wildly unrealistic.
The backbone will be fun to build out to the islands where power is often flaky in winter - and the UK is rather longer than it is wide. I doubt adequate telco infrastructure is in place for quite large parts of the country - think everywhere where you can't get a mobile signal.
In practice for most NHS workers, all this stuff is taking huge amounts of money away from what really matters - care for the patients. The (7 year old) PC eating half my desk is only useful for receiving bureaucratic garbage - anything important gets done on the phone or in the wards. A huge amount of time is wasted, going through all the garbage that gets emailed to all and sundry, some of which actually needs reading but the vast majority doesn't. The problem is figuring out which is which without reading it first. My favourite one was the day that 10,000 people in got the email about the new lines being painted in a rural health centre car park (staff 8) meaning that there would be 2 less parking spaces that day.
Not to mention the fun stuff like wiring up 200 year old hospital buildings, GP practices and the like.If my experience from twenty years ago is still valid, many Africans, at least in the bit that used to be British ruled, are only literate in English. All teaching in Zambia past about Grade 4 was in English, or to be more accurate, the Zambian dialect of English.
I shared a house with a guy who spoke more than a dozen languages. However, I saw him when his parents wrote to him. His father wrote to him in Tumbuka - he'd write out a translation in English, compose a reply in English, write it out, then translate it into Tumbuka and write that out.
His mother wrote to him in Chichewa and he'd go through the same painful process.
This seemed to be fairly common with the folks I worked with (teachers all in a high school) - but would be hard to check as every single one of them has died of AIDS. If they had had electricity, let alone Internet access, they would mostly have looked in English first anyway.
This may not be rpepresentative of the areas that could use Swahili though.
Not correct.
;-)
Read your usage guides.
Effect and affect are interchangeable in mosdt circumstances when used as a varb. As a noun it is different however...
Personally, I'd use effect too - "affect" to me implies mood.
So there
Nope
The Mac II ran a 68020 when the all in one boxes were using a 68000. It most certainly was a real Mac. It predates the LC by about 5 years.
The LC was hardly the first - the Mac II predates it by quite a way. Still have one somewhere....
Depends...
Here you could buy several new desks for the price of the oak to resurface.
Not to mention my total ineptitude with wood - if you can't use an angle grinder on it I don't want to know.
Well you can do that to wood, but remember to shut all windows and doors first. It is also a good idea to cut wood with an angle grinder outside.
How do I know this?
A rubber hammer - you lack ambition. A 4lb bricklayers hammer works far better. Learned this one 25 years ago when I worked in a camera shop.
Repairs to fiddly bits of cameras are best not attempted while severely hungover - especially the morning after someone has tried to break in through the window in the basement. Anyway customer comes in with jammed camera - this model (Russian Leica 3 clone) easy to fix once the top plate removed so wandered through the back to get small screwdrivers. Meanwhile boss in basement trying to fix broken window and yells up for me to bring down hammer.
Customer sees me emerging from the back of the shop wielding a hammer. His expression truly terrified at the thought of my attempting percussive maintenance to his camera with it. He had not been reassured by the aroma of stale whisky either and I've never seen anyone leave the shop so fast before or since.
Much relief when I wandered down to the basement with the hammer. Ever since then a 4lb hammer has been in the toolkit as the customers tend to shut up and let you get on with it once you have produced that. Only time it ever got used was when trying to make an antique colour laser printer fit in a skip. Now that WAS fun, if a little sad - that beast earned me something like its purchase price over the years when it played up.
It is much easier to make thermite than a shaped charge.
Southern African school. I was head of chemistry. School had a serious attack of bandits - probably SWAPO who hadn't been paid lately.
30 rounds from an AK47 had wrecked the safe door handle - which was quite a bit older than I was. No electricity, no access to explosives that I hadn't made myself - seeing the no power bit do you really want to try to make explosives with no means of cooling the reaction - I didn't. Yes most of the required reactions are endothermic, but do you really want to bet on it?
Rust is not exactly hard to find, even in a desert - it isn't exactly hard to make your own anyway. Aluminium powder isn't that hard to find either if you can find a grinding wheel.
Magnesium ribbon or barium peroxide to set it off with (thermite isn't that easy to light) is perhaps a little bit harder if you aren't a chemistry teacher. I really really wouldn't want to try water to stop the resultant molten mess. Nor is it a good plan to open a safe whose entire contents are made of paper by this method. How do I know this...?
Remember that most hard drive casings contain a lot of zinc if they aren't actually made of zinc - this will vapourise at thermite temperatures. Ask any welder about how bad an idea it is to inhale zinc vapour, it is likely to be lethal so just hope the cops don't get irate about that bit - dead cops do tend to upset the living ones.
Really, really don't try grinding your rust and aluminium together unless you are seriously sure you know what you are doing - you are not going to be able to put the fire out should you manage to light it
It shoud be possible to heat your drives above their Curie point (AFAIR 650 Centigrade) at which point all the data is gone permanently without such drastic measures. The trick is to be able to do so instantaneously, or at least within a second or two. Rigging up a 600 amp welder to an anti-tamper switch ought to do the trick, but see the comment on zinc vapour.
Best bet is not to have anything incriminating in the first place
And even if you don't have a TV, the dreaded TV Licensing people - winner more than once of privacy invasion awards - will still come after you with automated threats spat out roughly annually.
I have even had them phone me to threaten me, a large part of the reason why my phone number is now nowhere to be found. The best response to this is a demand for the call centre worker's name and home address as a summons for defamation is on its way - it is good to ask for the Chief Executive's home address as well for the same purpose.
The TV licensing outfit is NOT a part of the BBC though it likes to pretend it is. From their website on the "About" page. http://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/
"TV Licensing is the trading name used by the BBC's agents who collect the licence fee on behalf of the BBC."
They used to be a part of the Post Office when the phones were as well. I suppose the BBC prefers to keep such activities at arm's length nowadays.
TV Licensing is NOT a government agency though it tries to pretend it is. It was outsourced quite a while ago though it is still keen on egregious privacy invasion.
The upper chamber is in the process of being "reformed" i.e. emasculated so that it can be filled by appointees instead - this is about as democratic as the present system