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Jose posted:a possible joke that they were playing ABBA and a neighbour asked them to stop out of respect for captain top being in hospital with covid Asking a question in the last hour of the month like a coward. Anyway, depends - if you want just cheap and cheerful, given the mobile phone shops aren't open, your local big supermarket will have half a dozen sub-£100 handsets. For mid-level stuff Amazon, for high-end straight from the manufacturer because anyone doing latest-model iPhones or whatever cheaper than the manufacturer is probably a con of some kind.
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Feb 1, 2021 01:56
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Jose posted:first hand. probably pixel 4a Direct from Google or one of the approved resellers on the site then, you won't get the full warranty through a non-approved reseller.
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Feb 1, 2021 01:57
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Barry Foster posted:Speaking as someone who also has asthma and is under 60 - you aren't going to have to worry about getting your vaccination until autumn at the very earliest anyway, which is plenty of time to ensure you are properly registered If they keep up the current pace* (or rather half it to allow for second jabs) then the entire over-16 population should be done by the middle of Autumn **. Realistically I'd be very surprised if it were impossible for someone in a non-vulnerable group to get one by late Summer, and I'm quietly optimistic we'll hit the 60% magic number***** by Autumn. * This is unlikely for a lot of reasons I've gone into but it's not impossible, and I think it's a useful enough rough number **current rate is 2.5m a week, half that is 1.25m a week, 54m over-16s, that's 43 weeks so mid-October*** - the target is 4m jabs, or 2m completed vaccinations, a week**** so that would be July *** I've played very fast and loose with the numbers here because I can't be bothered properly accounting for the first jabs already given and am just assuming we started at this rate on 1st Jan, but gently caress it it's still more rigorous than any number that comes out from behind a plinth at 5 o'clock **** If they actually achieve this for just one week, let alone sustaining it for a couple of months, I will have to put my hands up and say that that's genuinely impressive. Like I said before though, once you get outside of the vulnerable groups takeup is likely to slow right down regardless of actual capacity **** (Should have numbered these footnotes really) This is assuming that the 90% efficacy isn't too badly hurt by this bullshit 12-week delay between jabs; if it turns out we actually need 70% or higher uptake to get to herd immunity then we might start running into serious problems next winter.
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Feb 1, 2021 16:03
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peanut- posted:Why would it slow? Once you're outside of the vulnerable groups you're into all the people who have far fewer issues with getting to vaccinations centres etc, I'd have thought that at least to begin with take-up will improve if anything. A couple of reasons. By that point the lockdown will have been eased, we'll be into spring/summer, and the general tone will be "well it's all over now". Also vulnerable groups at the moment are being told when and where to turn up, rather than having to make a positive step to take to actually book a jab. Loads of people will say "Oh yeah, I'll get round to that next week", and once the worried well get done I suspect a big chunk of the population just won't bother.
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Feb 1, 2021 16:41
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peanut- posted:I am sceptical of that. Once it's open access (if that's how it will be worked), you could open vaccination centres 24/7 and have them full every minute of the day for a good while before you get through all of the people who are desperate for this imo Like I say, we're into summer by then. Deaths will be back down to the dozens, the government and their stenographers will be telling us that we've beaten it, and people will just forget the last year. Look at how many people *right now*, with >1000 deaths/day, are actively resisting or just not bothering with the most passive prevention. You think the people who can't even be arsed putting a mask on are going to go and get a needle stuck in them? Twice?
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Feb 1, 2021 17:26
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Guavanaut posted:Like Roald Dahl, author of beloved children's books such as James and the Giant Jewish Plot to Overcharge for Basic Goods. The Top Flight Time Machine deep-dive into The Twits was loving amazing. Also in the middle of it the Dahl family put out an apology for him being a big old racist and the timing confused me as the fucker's been dead for years and I thought that maybe TFTM's mockery had provoked them, then two weeks later a new version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (naturally a dark and gritty prequel) was about to start filming.
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Feb 1, 2021 21:38
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stev posted:Not finishing a loaf the day you get it always feels like a waste of freshness. If someone didn't already come up with some sort of daily bread delivery subscription during lockdown they should. During the war bakers were forbidden from selling fresh bread and had to keep it locked up for a day for exactly this reason.
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Feb 2, 2021 16:57
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https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1356689724660981767 Holy poo poo they might just gave fallen arse-backwards into success here.
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Feb 2, 2021 21:28
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gently caress me that's worse than the Dr. Doom crying at the World Trade Centre one.
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Feb 2, 2021 21:35
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namesake posted:Christ well it's reassuring to know it won't be a deadly farce but lol loving hell. Yeah, that's an odd one. I wonder if it is a behavioural thing, people thinking that because they got it on the approved schedule they were safer? Also one factor I've no idea how they could account for is people getting infected after the first jab and it effectively being a booster if timed right? Anyway as I believe they were going to use the AZ vaccine for the vast majority of jabs anyway (after all it's the cheapest and only needs to be stored at fridge temperatures) this is presumably going to set up another big standoff with the EU over production of the vaccine which will chuck another 5 points on the Tory vote.
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Feb 2, 2021 21:40
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Guavanaut posted:Found what goddamnedtwisto has been up to instead of huge posts about post offices. Actually my current squeeze is Dyson Sphere Project but I hit "Buy" on that so quickly I think my finger actually broke the speed of sound. Did I ever promise a post office post? TBH I'm fairly sure I've long since exhausted the subject with the only two interesting facts about it - that the GPO building was once famous enough that the CLR station outside St. Pauls was actually called "Post Office" when it opened (and of course Jago Hazzard has done a video about it) and the existence of Mail Rail (and the possibility it was to be used to evacuate the royals and upper government in the event of nuclear war).
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Feb 2, 2021 23:05
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Guavanaut posted:I'm sure that you mentioned a big post of some sort between unusual train propulsion and the walking tour of London project, but I can't recall the topic exactly. I've got three drafts sitting unfinished at the minute, with reasons they're unfinished: - Secret tunnels (bit hard to get pictures of, also went down a rabbit hole (heh) researching them without really finishing) - Spy buildings (got good pictures, just kept changing my mind about how I wanted to lay it out - it was this one that actually got the walking blog idea in my head and so I never went back to it) - Non-council mass house building (mostly just a rant about how much I hated bay windows, started boring even myself with it) I've also now got three walking blogs in draft: - Mile End Road (finished and recorded but not edited (and really needing rerecording because my mic is utter poo poo, was hoping for Amazon vouchers for Christmas to get one but I suppose I'll have to pay for it myself) - Brick Lane and Commercial Street (written but not recorded) - Battle of Cable Street (outlined, but I need to do a bit more research) and plans for 4 more (London Docks/Wapping, around the City walls, and a two-parter down the river from the Tower to Parliament) and a vague idea of doing at least some of the spy buildings and secret tunnels in a walk around Westminster but that needs a lot more work. I've put all these on the back burner over Christmas because obviously I had other stuff on and frankly I *hate* the sound of my own voice so editing was just a chore. I've got a vague plan to start releasing them in the spring when people are more likely to want to walk and also I've got a better idea of exactly *how* I'm going to release them (really should chat to the podcast peeps about that). Oh and also I'll need to kill Jago Hazard before I dare release them, obviously. Anyway this is just nudging me to get some of them done, but some utter bastard just alerted me to the existence of a game that lets me put public transport where it's *supposed* to be in London so there's no loving chance they'll see the light of day before autumn.
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Feb 3, 2021 01:11
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Guavanaut posted:If their internet capacity has progressed at the same rate as the rest of the world and they're up to IRC and phpBB forums now then that sounds better than social media videoconferencing world. Fairly sure it's still over shortwave - too high a latitude for satellite, line-of-sight microwave is out for obvious reasons, and I seriously doubt anyone's arsed to lie an undersea fibre to them (and even if they did it still only ends up in Patagonia, not known for being a hotbed of connectivity). I'd be astonished if they have more than a megabit to play with and obviously that's shared between dozens of people and actual science works probably takes a chunk of that anyway. e: Huh, turns out they do have intermittent sat comms to McMurdo at least - they don't mention the pole but I'm fairly certain it's out of reach, not impossible they could actually have microwave from McMurdo to the pole though. goddamnedtwisto fucked around with this message at 03:03 on Feb 3, 2021 |
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Feb 3, 2021 02:59
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Guavanaut posted:He's not found out what his authentically held values are yet. Surely the luxury yacht wankers just give £ridiculous/month to Inmarsat for something that Just Works over the vast majority of the ocean rather than potentially missing an important trade/merger/Bulgarian sex-slave auction because the ionosphere isn't playing ball?
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Feb 3, 2021 10:21
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https://twitter.com/Tayloredword/status/1356892182582591488 Oh no the brainworms have mutated.
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Feb 3, 2021 11:08
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OwlFancier posted:How in the gently caress did this not get posted at war christmas? Sorry but that's objectively awesome and I would buy enough poppies to be allowed to canvass for Labour if I were to see him.
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Feb 3, 2021 14:23
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:ok so Typhoid Mum did go to my sister's. Didn't stay in the garden which she said she was going to. Sis slapped a mask on as soon as she heard her coming up the stairs. There comes a point where you just have to hide their car keys/bus pass.
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Feb 3, 2021 14:28
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:A couple of my US-based real-life friends (age about 70) who have now had the second jab have had quite bad reaction to the second one that they didn't have to the first. Not sure if that might be enough to finish off anyone with other complicating factors. Prooooooooooooobably not - the reactions are mostly self-limiting because it's your immune system going into overdrive when it sees the second jab, which is how it's supposed to work, but it's also self-limiting in that people with weaker immune systems won't give as vigorous a response. However the reaction does include fever, swelling and raised blood pressure and heart rate which is going to very slightly increase your chances of a heart attack, stroke, aneurysm, or other serious medical problem so even if it's only like a 0.001% chance, when you're dealing with an entire population that's going to be thousands of deaths - but compared to the ~2% death rate in those older age groups when they are infected with covid it's a total non-brainer.
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Feb 3, 2021 14:39
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https://twitter.com/evolvepolitics/status/1356952637162332160
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Feb 3, 2021 14:47
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Failed Imagineer posted:Thread, I need virtual pub quiz round ideas. We've been doing this over Zoom for nearly a year now and I'm out of juice. We've done endless movie trivia, Guess the Next Line, mashups, name the flag, general knowledge, identify the city from the aerial view, name this weird fruit, name this spaceship, name these songs from this Weird Al polka medley, name these Scooby Doo celebrity guest stars, and a million other rounds... Help I've just done one called "Stuff you're supposed to know" - rounds with questions taken from the driving theory test, Life In The UK exam, 11+, and basic first-aid, and simple DIY FAQs.
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Feb 3, 2021 14:50
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Failed Imagineer posted:E: ^^^^^°° also very good , cheers. I knew crowd sourcing this was the right move I did a really long Simpsons one that was basically "Hit random on Frinkiac, come up with a question based on what comes up" that ran to like 70 questions because there's just so much material there but alas Kahoot quarantined it, presumably for copyright reasons, otherwise I'd share it
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Feb 3, 2021 14:56
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:Yeah I had to google - that was the only context I'd heard EMA in previously. It's still written in giant letters on the building they used to rent in Canary Wharf. TBH I was always *deeply* suspicious about that because that's some hellaciously expensive office space and miles away from the medical establishment, but was right in the middle of all the banks and consultancy firms (the building itself is owned by Ernst and Young), which makes you wonder exactly who they were meant to be serving.
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Feb 3, 2021 21:17
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:Or it might just be having a break and a cuppa before doing the next bit. Nah, chalk cliffs are very safe just after they've collapsed - the sea erodes the bottom away until the unsupported weight shears off, once that's done they're about as safe as they get because the break always happens immediately and catastrophically, taking all of the unsupported area with it. That's how they stay so vertical - other rocks gradually slump as they weather (e.g. the clay and sandstone either side of the Kentish chalk), the chalk constantly sharpens itself.
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Feb 3, 2021 21:59
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https://www.gumtree.com/p/property-...65cK8sJYV2Oge94 TBH this isn't the most ridiculous London property I've ever seen (although the lack of reference to a bathroom makes me suspicious) but even so, £370 a week for a "flat" too small even for a traditional Murphy bed, instead relying on the bed moving down on what looks like a garage door track and then being supported by the sofa and "kitchen table" is certainly an example of the free market innovation we all know and love.
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Feb 4, 2021 10:09
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peanut- posted:Genuinely why are we opening a coal mine. Is it profitable? It's for coking coal, which is even more intriguing because that's about the lowest profit margin on coal you can get (you need a shitload of energy, plus expensive scrubbers, to turn coal into coke and it leaves a shitload of extravagantly toxic residue and there's just not that big a market for coke in western Europe any more). I'm deeply suspicious that this is the beginning of a process of "removing red tape" so we can become the China of Europe by just not giving a poo poo about pollution.
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Feb 4, 2021 10:17
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a pipe smoking dog posted:has anyone had any luck buying glasses online? My frames are hosed and in an attempt at fixing them I manage to gently caress them even more by getting superglue on the lenses. I've got my prescription but it doesn't have my "pupillary distance" (how close together/far apart my eyes are) and I don't want to go into an opticians if they're even open because the idea of having someone get that close to my face is loving terrifying. You can measure that yourself pretty much the same way they do at an opticians - stand about 5 feet from a mirror wearing your old glasses, look yourself in the eyes (this might be the trickiest part for some) and use a dry-wipe marker to mark the centre of your vision in each eye, then measure the distance between the dots The tricky part (and the bit where having a helper do it for you really helps) is keeping your attention on the distant you rather than on the approaching pen (bring the pen up at an angle rather than going straight in), and even if you get the distance perfect the glasses will still be a little imperfect because the new frames will sit slightly differently on your nose and most faces are asymmetric, but in an emergency it'll have to do.
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Feb 4, 2021 11:09
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peanut- posted:Is it a strategic asset thing? Like I could have some sympathy for the argument that we should maintain the institutional knowledge and minimum amount of infrastructure required for an end-to-end steel making process entirely within the UK. Maybe, but there's dozens, if not hundreds, of other things we'd have to protect or re-learn for that. I think the simplest explanation is just that this is marginal farmland that just happens to be on top of a particularly good deposit and the landowner wants to extract more rent from it, mixed with Owning The Libs and Bold International Britain.
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Feb 4, 2021 11:17
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MikeCrotch posted:This would make more sense if the Tories hadn't let the UK steel industry go to the wall We still have a steel industry, it just consists of hacking bits off the Imperial German fleet at Scapa Flow. (I joke but we do actually have a small steel industry, mostly high-quality specialist alloys - but these don't use much, if any, coke because they start with recycled steel and iron and use arc furnaces and graphite to much more precisely control the process. It sounds ridiculous but it's taken the Chinese almost 3 decades of research to crack the steelmaking process required to make ballpoint pen nibs, and there are hundreds of these weird little specialist processes and companies that specialise in them)
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Feb 4, 2021 11:22
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Skarsnik posted:I feel like the tricky part would be reaching the mirror You mark it on the glasses, should have made that clear.
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Feb 4, 2021 11:43
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Mano posted:In general there's only one way to safely delete data from a harddisk /ssd when giving it away: you physically destroy it. If you're not dealing with a state actor, format and overwrite is more than enough. There's no perverts/identity thieves out there buying up hard drives off ebay and chucking them under an electron microscope.
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Feb 4, 2021 17:48
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So what I'm hearing is it's an excellent time to mortgage my house and hide the cash under my mattress?
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Feb 4, 2021 17:51
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Bobby Deluxe posted:I love the idea that he lives somewhere like Knightsbridge or South Kensington, and then in the middle of these gorgeous neighbourhoods there's this towering brutalist monolith and a man sat outside at a table with a sign saying 'my house is the best, change my mind.' You know I was worried that over the years I've *definitely* given enough info in my posts to find my house with absolutely minimum effort, but the fact you think I live in West London is both reassuring and massively, massively offensive.
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Feb 4, 2021 18:35
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Doctor_Fruitbat posted:I was meaning to ask about that, because it seemed counterintuitive that you could recover data once it had been overwritten, let alone needing to do it hundreds of times. The basic principle is that a zero and a one are slightly different physical sizes on a hard drive, so it's possible to tell the difference between a bit that was once a one and was now a zero, and vice versa, so a single overwrite with zeroes (or even zeroes then ones with a sensitive enough process) would still leave enough of a ghost of what was once there to be detected.
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Feb 4, 2021 18:56
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endlessmonotony posted:Theoretically you can toss the hard drive in a shredder, then toss the shredder and the hard drive into a volcano, then drop the mother of all bombs on it and still recover the data. Degaussing and pulverisation to micron dust - something you can can hire a lorry to come around and do for you* - would require several world-changing (and possibly universe-changing depending on how much you think nanotechnology can bend the laws of physics) advances in technology to be recoverable, and is the way actual state-level actors, who presumably know exactly where the cutting edge is and go way, way past it, say you should destroy hard drives that contain stuff they don't want to risk other state-level actors getting their hands on. Realistically, for the ultra, ultra paranoid, heating it past the Curie temperature for the magnetic medium of the platters then smacking it with a big old hammer would also do the trick - completely melting it would also work, of course, but that's not something you could do in your back garden with a disposable barbecue and a leaf blower. * Well they leave the kit there and let you get on with it for obvious security reasons, but what you *should* do is build the degausser and disintegrator yourself to ensure David Copperfield doesn't get involved and do a switcheroo on you.
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Feb 4, 2021 20:48
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endlessmonotony posted:You can do all of that at the same time and the data is still recoverable. Okay, go ahead and explain the mechanism by which you recover the contents of a hard drive that has been taken past its Curie point and shocked several times, just to take the least secure option of the one I mentioned. And I'm not sure why you think that nanotechnology thing is somehow *helping* your case here, because like I say you would need something not just far beyond the current state of the art in nanotechnology to reassemble a hard drive platter from micron dust - and to do it after a proper degaussing takes it into the realm of Maxwell's Demon. goddamnedtwisto fucked around with this message at 22:21 on Feb 4, 2021 |
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Feb 4, 2021 22:19
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Communist Thoughts posted:I have an inkling that the reason BAME people have worse outcomes on Racism Island isn't because of their genetics While obviously there are a lot of social and economic reasons why BAME people have worse health outcomes in general, covid is hitting people from these communities far worse than e.g. flu, and a couple of genetic factors have already been identified that seem to change your risk of severe disease once infected. The two that come to mind are that people with type O blood have a far greater chance of mild or no symptoms than people with type AB, and people with a generic predisposition to apple-shape obesity seem to be hit far harder by covid *even if they are not obese*. These factors are both more common in BAME communities and crucially the difference in outcomes is consistent across ethnic groups, so BAME people would be being hit hardest by this even in a perfectly equal society.
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Feb 5, 2021 13:26
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Miftan posted:Extremely inefficient supply lines from the mainland there. Must be all that red tape! I always thought that was meant to be a joke about the Germans going round in circles or something but no, that's actually the route the Nazis took during the Battle of France - that big detour is Army Group B, who mounted a fake attack on the Low Countries while Army Group A pushed through the Ardennes. After Dunkirk, B moved south to mop up the rest of the French forces, then after France surrendered they wandered over to Normandy to seize the rest of the Channel ports. Ironically, that pissed-up arrow is the main reason why the Allies were defeated so easily. Allied planning had always been for the Germans to invade from the north through Holland and Belgium because the Maginot Line - the French fortifications along the German border - was considered impregnable, so all of their forces were concentrated in Belgium. When the Nazis did indeed invade the Netherlands, everyone patted themselves on the back and said it would all be over by Christmas, and when the French airforce noticed 10,000 tanks queuing up to go into the Ardennes, everyone ignored it because it would be *silly* to try and invade through such heavy forests... (Obviously the lines aren't close to accurate geographically, the Germans invaded across a much narrower front, but conceptually it's one of the more accurate bits about that show)
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Feb 5, 2021 16:50
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Red Oktober posted:And Diva has gone full circle - it used to (like Prima Donna) refer to a revered opera singer, then went to mean 'demanding opera singer', and now it's gone back. Isn't primadonna one of those terms that started out purely descriptive then got turned into a pejorative? Like it was literally just the word for the lead female singer in an opera company, but then they kept making outrageous requests like "can I actually get paid please?"
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Feb 5, 2021 18:34
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Miftan posted:That's super interesting, thanks. I was taught in high school that the reason the German invasion of France went so well is that they built the Maginot line, patted themselves on the back, and then were completely blindsided when the Germans just ignored it and invaded through the Netherlands/Belgium. I haven't had any reason to ever apply even the smallest amount of critical thinking to the subject so it's just something that has sat in the back of my brain for over a decade for absolutely no reason, despite it being really really loving stupid. Obviously the French would notice if the Germans invaded Belgium/the Netherlands, and people in the 30s weren't much dumber than they are today, they definitely would have prepared for that. The Belgians had their own defensive fortifications, not quite as good as the Maginot Line, but still something that would have stopped most armies in their tracks. Unfortunately someone went and invented the shaped charge and they were taken out in one night by a handful of paratroopers. It was this that panicked the Allies into really throwing everything they had in the way of the diversionary attack, because nobody had expected the Germans to get into Belgium quite so easily, it had been assumed they'd have a week or two of taking potshots at them from the fortress before they'd actually have to fight. It's a pretty classic example of trying to fight the last war, despite the Germans clearly telegraphing in Spain and in Poland that they weren't playing that game any more - the Allies assumed that they were still fighting an army that moved at walking pace. I've always thought the popular perception of the Battle of France was arse-covering by the British - it's easier to just call the French a bunch of cheese-eating surrender monkeys than face up to the woeful leadership and complete collapse of the BEF - but at the same time the French leadership really didn't help with that perception. As it became clear the Germans had completely wrong-footed them they sacked the general in charge of the defence and replaced him with Weygand, who cancelled the plan for a counterattack that would have probably smashed the Germans who were badly stretched by the rush to Calais, then spent three days in Paris visiting various dignitaries to be congratulated on his promotion, then decided to try a counter-attack against the German line that had had almost a week to reinforce itself. When this failed, there were basically only two divisions between the Germans and Paris, and the French basically had no choice but to surrender. Two things I will grudgingly concede - the southern French armies fought like bastards in that counterattack, and almost certainly gained enough time for Dunkirk to be evacuated, and the French weren't uniquely blindsided by the Ardennes because the Americans made the *exact same mistake* just 4 years later, completely ignoring the Ardennes and allowing a massive German counteroffensive (which, notably, was eventually turned back using an almost identical counterattack to the one Weyand had cancelled before going off to Paris to swan about a bit).
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Feb 5, 2021 19:15
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Miftan posted:Wouldn't surprise me. The UK probably had a few of those as well, not to mention the 'Actually the nazis are pretty great' crowd, so roughly the same as today as well. The Daily Mail does indeed still exist.
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Feb 5, 2021 19:15
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