This one is a King amongst toasters

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dualit...

You're the second person to make this mistake in the thread.

"Danielle". Not "Daniel."

ie, a woman.

Interesting bias. A professor of engineering has to be a man, right?

And to a system not directly mounted as user accessible files, or they'll encrypt your backups too.

So you want a network storage server specifically configured to only permit create and append, but not delete.

Backup to Dropbox would probably be acceptable.

It keeps the prior versions of files for the last 30 days, and AFAIK the API does not expose the ability to delete them.

Mum's computer (well, aside from running Ubuntu) is set to make a weekly incremental backup to a cloud folder.

The limitations of the technology have historically been terrible.

Ever been to Disney World? They have an arcade building with a bunch of old games and new in there.

One of the rides is an Aladdin Magic Carpet VR ride. Possibly the cause of the most horrible motion sickness of my life.

I'm not prone to motion sickness. I was born in a coastal town. Ships pitching in the ocean are part of my natural environment. I play FPS and sim games without problems. I love most rollercoasters. This thing left me pale and sweating and nauseous.

Oculus made the first big pubic thrust at solving the problems that cause this - latency between the viewpoint input and the display being primary amongst them.

Shaft them with a Rod from God

We used to refer to this phenomenon as "needing a cardboard developer" ; I've both experienced and witnessed it many times.

It's likely to be something which they can read easily, so not OTR.

SIGINT dudes are not just keen on encryption. They are keen on reading communications too. To this end they usually advocate systems with key escrow at the very least, because they want to be able to keep tabs on their agents and analysts.

I saw a brief prepared for the UK National Health Service by GCHQ on data security, it heavily emphasised key escrow, which reveals the bias of the agency that produced it. A crypto brief prepared by doctors would most emphatically not include the capability to forge signatures - no doctor is going to sign up for a system where his word might be brought into doubt.

This.

My mother was employed as a legal secretary most of her life. When they graduated from electronic typewriters to computers, they issued her at some point with the standard squishy membrane keyboard. Her finger joint arthritis flared right up, because the feedback cues she had got used to from a lifetime of typing on proper keyboards had gone.

As her loving son, it was my duty to mail her a Cherry MX keyboard (A G80-3000). Her IT support griped and bitched about having to replace her keyboard, but she told them I was both an IT guy *and* a doctor, which shut them up.

Her finger arthritis was markedly better in a couple of weeks. She took the keyboard home with her when she retired and it's still in use on her workstation at home.

IMHO, giving professional typists a membrane keyboard should be considered a health and safety violation. It staggers me that so-called ergonomic layouts are usually membrane boards.

Yeah, my daughter has an Android tablet that she's TOTALLY thrashed the battery on because she keeps running it to flat ; I've sat there and watched it drop 5% charge in less than a minute. My 2012 Nexus 7 is still going strong, even better now that I've upgraded it to Android 5 and ditched most of the apps with resident processes (for the most part : the official Twitter app, which exceeded my official threshold of "fucking creepy" some time ago).

> Who's going to employ poor people once you destroy the businesses who employ poor people?

These businesses function on razor thin margins, and that's part of the problem. Part of the vast economies of scale that they command is keeping labour costs down.

If they go out of business, the huge volumes they deal in would presumably be missed. Other suppliers would step in to fill the void, only not being so large, not commanding such economy of scale. In short, having to employ more people to get the same amount of stuff done.

> They can achieve that by automation or by paying people what they're worth.

And that's the cornerstone of your argument - that some people are not worth paying enough to survive, in short, that they have so little value that they should die. This must be the case, because their income needs supplementing with government aid. If their labour was actually worth enough to let them live, they wouldn't need that support.

Oh, wait, if they died, they wouldn't be around to be a component of those "very useful services" that Wal-Mart and McDonalds provide.

Looks like the market is failing to me - if their employer didn't pay enough to maintain the fork lifts, or the fry cooker, they'd be unable to do business. But they don't pay enough to maintain the shelf stacker or the burger flipper. They only way they continue to work is because the government steps in. You wouldn't expect the government to step in to fix your milkshake machine, so why should they support your underpaid labour?

Because the governement has a moral obligation to help the needy, the only way around this is to legislate that labour is paid enough for them not to have to.

Should already be a thing.

Productivity has rocketed since the 50s. Doubled since around 1970, which is when wages went flat.

You should be working 20 hour weeks for a decent standard of living.

Instead, you're working 60 hour weeks and getting shafted.

The stupid ones are generally the richest ones.. or at least, home to the richest.

The countries where people have a better standard of living are the ones leveraging their natural resources for the good of their people, rather than just selling them at pennies on the dollar to a few oligarchs.

A low minimum wage means the government is subsidising corporate profits - if the wages are insufficient to live on, those people end up on government benefits of some kind. Their subsistence becomes dependant on our taxes, rather than the ability of the corporation to pay them.

Which is fine by the corporations, because they worked so hard to transfer the burden of taxes away from themselves. Yup, it's really ironic - everyone in America is working for Wal-Mart, they just don't know it.

The vast majority of benefits in the UK are paid to people with jobs. Because their jobs are underpaid. Huge swathes of taxpayers money go into the pockets of landlords and shareholders, in order to keep a roof barely over the heads of those who do all the shit jobs. It's basically slavery.

You're right though. Raising the minimum wage won't help for the exact reason you point out. If you want people to work for you, you should have to be able to attract labour, which means you should be able to offer something better.

At the moment, you just have to be able to offer something better than scraping by in poverty while the government does it's level best to pull the rug out from under you.

Give the people a Universal Basic Income, and you'd have to offer something better than a mere three squares a day and a basic but acceptable accomodation. Then you'd actually see the market come into play - people making a choice about who they work for, and how much.

Right now, they work for less than a wage and a handful of food stamps, because there is literally no choice. No choice - no market.

Your phrasing implies that they would work, if they were actually possible.

That's a bit like saying that Marilyn Monroe would totally be into me, if she wasn't dead.