[Ed P]

I’d guess that the person concerned just pulled out the plug at one stage and did a crash shutdown. If the HDD is ‘write-behind’ that is a sure-fire way of borking the registry and drivers.

However, I bet that you never get an admission of guilt. I don’t know what it is about computers, but most people will lie through their teeth rather than admit that they may have caused a problem.

[Ed P]

If anyone is interested the following is the redacted version of the EU/OxfordAstrazeneca contract:

Note the term ‘best reasonable efforts’ is littered throughout and the only reference to including UK manufacture is in clause 5.4 which is a clause that allows Astrazeneca to use UK manufacturing for the EU, but clause 5.1 by implication (the initial doses) does not include the UK.  I’m not a lawyer, but I think the EU are on shaky ground to insist that UK manufacture is used for their initial doses.

All that said, IMO if we see that we will have some spare doses in the near term we should offer them to the EU.

[Ed P]

Sorry – I did smile at the frogs legs bit, but I just happened to remember the Swiss work.

Incidentally both Russia and the US have been working on BCI controls for fighter jets. I think the US are using it for their capable F16 buddy planes that escort their F35 Flying Turkeys, while I read somewhere that the Russians were using it in their ‘Look and Shoot’ systems.

I looked for links to the Russian work but cannot find them.

This hints at the US military strategy. link

[Ed P]

I agree it is probably the HID driver that has been borked.

FYI you should be able to use a PS2/USB adapter  in order to try your usb mouse. The USB spec is just a fancy serial interface at heart and common to the PS/2 interface..

[Ed P]

I just had the Pfizer vaccination, and I asked the $64000 question, ‘What happens if the EU stop vaccine exports in 12 weeks time?’. The answer was that they had not been told if an adequate level of protection could be obtained by substituting the Oxford vaccine, or even if it would be sanctioned.

Could be interesting times if we get into a vaccine war with the EU.

[Ed P]

Funny you should say that — not the French, but close. The Swiss have done it. Iirc the Poles took this a couple of stages further.

[Ed P]

New battery in the mouse?

[Ed P]

Wheels-Of-Fire wrote:

The methods that read brain activity are still only remote controls at best, they can only sense if there IS activity in areas of the brain, not WHAT it is.

I do not disagree with the thrust of what you said, however if you get feedback on something then it becomes possible to control it. This holds promise for controlling the otherwise autonomic activities of your body. For example, heart rate, blood pressure and even blood sugar levels. It also offers a bypass if some of your own neural pathways have been damaged e.g. a way of offsetting a Parkinson tremor.

I agree that what I linked is a one way system, but I’m not sure that I want an interface that could directly affect the way I think or see. That sounds pretty dangerous to me.

The Musk version has its possible values but sounds too intrusive to me.

[Ed P]

Back on the philosopher physicist track, many comment that life is an aberration and for a time disobeys the law of entropy which says that things tend to become more disordered over time. For a short period we grow from a couple of cells, that become ever more ordered, and turn energy into order and growth. At some time this becomes sufficiently ordered to do as Les says, and is able to form experiences into memory, extrapolate and postulate this into additional thoughts, memories and stories apparently breaking the laws of entropy all the time .

Unfortunately entropy always wins in the end and life eventually  just fragments and dissipates.

Another way of looking at it is that we were all born of star dust, and that is what we go back to in the end.

[Ed P]

I’m not into having a chip stuck in my head, but a couple of years ago I did play with a so-called brain interface. That one worked by sensing the small electrical signals produced by things like jaw muscles, frowning etc. It only worked after a fashion for me as I produced too much electronic static. I believe that such interfaces have moved on a lot since then and work rather like an EEG sensing all the different wave signals produced by your brain. Unfortunately that sophistication comes at a price Emotiv site link, though if I was ever unfortunate to suffer a disabling stroke it would be something that I would rapidly investigate and sod the price.

[Ed P]

What colour is being displayed on your hub?

If it is an orange light the hub is ok but in all probability BT have applied an update to your hub that has failed. If it is green the hub is ok but quite possibly the same update has screwed up the wifi. The cure for both cases is the same. Pull out the mains plug, wait 30 seconds (important) then switch on again.  It will then take a couple of minutes to handshake with your gear and restart the wifi. With luck it will then work until the next carp BT update!

If the colour is red, you are correct . The hub is fecked, and you have to wait for your new one. If you look at the BT shop you will see that for HH2 they have the ‘huge’ stock of all of six to cover the UK. Your wait could be quite a while!

[Ed P]

Bob Williams wrote:

Bearing in mind my Humanism and atheism, I still have the question: what happens to Mind?

Physicists are often philosophers, especially those who play in the make-believe worlds of Astrophysics as they have a fixation about ‘The Beginning’.  Although time is an arrow and only seems to go one way, many Physicists dodge the bullet of God and all that by postulating that time is circular and we live in a multi-dimensional Universe where time branches based on individual decisions for each entity. All this noise of individual actions results in the general trend being the same until enough changes are accumulated, but individual entities could finish up with a very different path through life.

I don’t think this is too different from Buddhist beliefs.

I don’t know if it gives you comfort that you might have to endure the bitch Fräulein all over again, but on the other hand maybe something will make you jerk your hand and spill a stein of beer all over her! Or maybe you would just like to go through it all again with just minor improvements. Maybe it will be your choice . . .

[Ed P]

Glad you have a date. Now that they have given us at least another 6 weeks of lock-down, you will be nearly half-way through to the second jab and probably 60% protected by the time you get out.

Hopefully the bunch of *ankers we have in Government will look very hard at doing something more for the self-employed. Driving people out of business is not cost effective for the national economy, and more than offsets the costs of a few people scamming the system.

With apologies to Steve, I have worked for/with companies run by auditors. In general they make terrible business managers, and unfortunately we seem to have a Treasury run by auditors.

[Ed P]

Saddened to hear your news Bob. Over the years I have enjoyed your many reminiscences, and the insights they have given me into your world and that of your family.  Please do not forget to pass on the address of this forum to your g’son, I know that he will get a little comfort from the obvious love you have for him, and will also gain a little understanding of a very different generation.

Although we must all physically die, it was once said that no-one is really dead if someone remembers you, or reads about you and just wonders …

You will be with us for a long time!

[Ed P]

Interesting that it only barfed for a different server connection. As you say it must have something to do with the authentication method. They obviously fear something that the students will/could do from within the firewall. :wacko:

[Ed P]

I could see HOW to block (look at your Outlook message headers versus that of Postbox). I cannot think WHY they would do it unless you have a SysAdmin who has a particular hatred of things Apple.

Message headers normally contain details of the sender. As the headers seem to follow a standard format it would be a five minute coding job to block Outlook on Apple senders. That does however leave the question of why anyone would do so. :wacko:

On Linux mail headers this is shown as details of the User Agent. Mine says  Mozilla, gives the Linux and Gecko releases and ends with TBird and its version number. I’ve never looked at headers within Outlook but I guess it still uses the User Agent data, for a Mac sender which details the web service, OSX version, Apple Webkit and Safari version numbers.

The following is sheer guesswork on my part.

I suspect that there may be something in your setup that worries your system security. Buy the SysAdmin a beer and ask him/her nicely wtf is happening. Maybe you have a fairly secure system that looks for authorised connections from authorised hardware and throws out anyone else.

Failing all else, and Dave not chipping in, it may have something to do with the Mac OS’s use of bigendian format byte data versus nearly every other OSs use of little endian. If you are sending data maybe something innocent is being flagged as malicious. As you can tell, I really do not know! :unsure:

[Ed P]

Make sure you give sufficient time and attention to your spouse. She is going to hate the time you are buried away in your own little world oblivious to all around. :scratch:

[Ed P]

Dave, I suspect that if you want to drive everyone to suicidal despair then you should concentrate on the death rate and the plateauing of Covid cases despite the lock down.

I honestly think we are at a stage where it is correct to emphasise the positives for the National Good.

Actual infection rates do appear to be slowly moving down despite a more infectious disease. We also have one of the best vaccination/head rates in the world,

However, I would not give our Scientific Civil Servants a free ride, and neither would I do for our too slow to react Government. There are many lessons to learn and we should be starting now.

RANT follows:

This country has one of the worst Covid track records in the world (5th in deaths/head of population). We would have had far fewer cases and deaths had we just adopted the precautionary principle . In other words how have others been more successful and is there any slight scientific rationale for their actions – if so, copy and improve.

If it might help do it, do not just fanny around and study it!

We still do not enforce the compulsory wearing of face masks in all public locations. We do not advise people to sanitise anything coming through the door. We do not (England) close Garden Centres that are more like Departmental Stores. We do not enforce self isolation using phone calls at random times and geolocating the recipient.(Singapore etc.). We do not give sufficient financial support to those who self isolate.We do not spray hotspot urban areas with detergent sprays as was done in China. (Belgium are doing this too).

We are also failing in the post-Covid environment. We seem to have no real plans for job creation, instead the Government are again going to waste money by paying bloated US companies to find make-weight so-called self-employed jobs for people. We should be paying people to take up training in trades, and paying employers to take on apprenticeships. We should be using this time to address our massive skills shortages.

[Ed P]

The wife and I have had our call to get a jab (Pfizer probably as it is at a centre equipped with the correct refrigeration).

My wife sees it as a ticket to freedom, but I’m not counting chickens as no Government can relax restrictions on individuals without causing mayhem. I just look at the somewhat disingenuous PHE message about not knowing if the jab cuts transmission (typical Blairing of the truth in that it is true that 5-25%  of people could still catch Covid and pass it on.) From this Blairing it is obvious that the Government have a difficult problem to manage expectations.

I suspect with the latest ONS news that the lockdown has only paused the infection rate the Government are still a month or two away from any restriction relaxation, and then any relaxation will be for all in major geographic zones not a lucky few.

[Ed P]

I assume you Googled on the subject of using US phones in the UK.

The links I read about adding bands all looked horrendous and started with rooting the phone. They were however pretty old links. Hopefully things have moved on thanks to our being in the EU, as that stopped a lot of the ISP’s restrictive practices which seemed to be the cause of certain bands being unavailable..

Good luck with your efforts.

[Author]

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