PhobosAnomaly

I suspect the answer lies in paragraph 4, where I’m making the assumption that the scammers make contact directly with the buyers, and invite a payment to be made to the scammers rather than the brokers.

I suppose in a strictly legal sense, the brokers are off the hook then as they’ve no idea the scammers have asked the buyers to send a payment.

It’s scummy as fuck all round.

Man I miss Eudora back in the day. I used the mail client in SeaMonkey before I just started using my phone to check mail.

The 90s and 2000s were a simpler time.

That’s not the problematic metric though. It’s the 70-80% (link) install base of the Windows OS on desktop computers that Edge is installed with that’s the basis of the anti-competitive allegation.

The fact that it still only takes 5% of the browser usage is more of a happy accident.

This is how you get shot for the silliest of reasons.

Unless it’s the initial outreach team or on-premises staff, sales would be one of the few roles totally suited to remote working.

Some of the more creative or collaborative roles I can see the argument for hybrid working - even if it’s just one day a week or month in the office - but sales, customer service, or first line support seems to be the last area you’d impose a return to work mandate on.

That said, I haven’t got extortionate office rents to justify 😂

Do a credit card next!

Oh I like a pessimistic view - partly because it makes a discussion spicier, but also because it’s important for a user to understand the power that an instance owner wields!

Oh man, this is awesome - it’s wonderful hearing from the practitioners of the art!

I’m just trying to figure out what driver establishing the tipping point for breaking or the ban hammer - is there any empirical data to drive these decisions, or is the fediverse user base small enough that you act on “feel” or “professional instinct”?

Managing emerging technologies fascinates me so any input - including the germs you’ve already volunteered - is very much appreciated 👍

That’s a strong viewpoint and I appreciate where you’re coming from, but how many votedicks does it take to derail a post? I appreciate the fediverse is reasonably small in comparison to othe headline social media sites, but does banning one or two bots or people do enough to save posts from getting bombed?

Thamk you for the insight, instance administrator views are valuable and unique.

At the risk of sounding like I’m presenting a bad faith argument, why ban them? I don’t like the whole “free market” analogy but surely it’s one of the liberating features of federated servers, being able to to largely express your votes or content as you see fit within the legal framework of the host nation. Wouldn’t the odd one or two mass downvoters/upvoters/theyvoters ultimately be a statistical abberation or is the fediverse still small enough for this sort of shit to carry weight?

Open criticism of my view welcome, as always!

Same as the Unihertz Titan. I ran with that for two years and it was decent, if underpowered.

The dream is all but dead for all fourteen and a half of us QWERTY phone enthusiasts I think. A surprising number went to the Samsung Galaxy Flip models, though having used this for two years or so, I wouldn’t recommend it either.

Maybe one day…

I encountered Quishing the other day - the inadvertent scanning of QR codes that take a browser to a malformed URL or site with malware embedded.

Back in my day, it was just called “being a bit dense”, especially as most cameras/QR readers will offer you a prompt to go to a website first.

A shitpost duel awaits.

The winner gets seven statues on all continents, each facing a finely-calibrated direction - the intersection of their gazes meet at a point where the secret to humanity is buried.

The loser gets a year using the upside-downternet, six months on ISDN, or a week on MySpace as the only communication method with the outside world.

Intelligence is domain specific.

I need this on a plaque above my desk phone. It’s perfect.

Canonical’s Snap up your credit cards because they’ve been maxed by very naughty people, yo

Don’t

simple really

Obligatory:

Another story from the workplace probably worthy of a “who, me?” segment on el reg:

An old admin grade at one of my last workplaces was… unique, in her approach to her workload. In the times that we haven’t had an admin assistant in post, the workload gets shared out amongst the team so the job still gets done, but it’s primarily menial and trivial stuff. It’s not difficult, but the way the civil service works, sometimes a ten second job takes ten minutes. It wasn’t that she was particularly awful - just a bit useless and had all the critical thinking skills of a common housebrick. Anything that needed a decision made became someone else’s job.

Someone went in to to see her wanting another AA battery, to replace one in the clock to stop people from losing their minds having done a few hours in the office, but still only seeing half past nine on the clock. There’s none left in the store cupboard, so she logs on to the ordering system, and realises that they come in nondescript “units”, rather than the SKU style setup you see on most retailer sites. So, she goes for 10 - thinking ten packs would be enough for a while.

A week later, a lorry pulls up at the office, with a pallet for delivery. Nobody’s expecting this, and we can’t lift it off the lorry for it being too heavy, and we had to get a neighbouring unit’s forklift driver to pop it off the lorry for us and leave it at our side door, probably for a pack of fags and a coffee. We opens it up, and hurrah, our batteries are here!

All ten thousand of them.

Turns out, a “unit” in this branch of the civil service is “per thousand”, so we literally had nearly a tonne of batteries on a pallet outside. We tried phoning the distribution centre, and they’re clearly not giving a fuck about something as low value as this, and certainly aren’t sending a truck to get them - this was now an “us” problem.

One of the lads pulls out a stick of batteries, goes back into the office, comes back ashen faced…

“Boys, the clock needs AAA batteries”

We had a slowly dwindling mountain of AA batteries for about three months, literally people taking strips of batteries home at Christmas to put in toys, people bringing in old Game Boys or Game Gears just to try them out with a supply of new batteries, and a Sky Digital remote control with a now perpetually infinite lifespan.

God bless the civil service.

Are you not referring to a fixed-term project rather than part-time? I’m making the assumption that the reference to “half-time” is describing a reduced-hours term of appointment, as in working 18, 20, 24hrs, or whatever per week rather than 37 or 40.

That’s certainly fairly common in the UK - especially for those with domestic commitments or for those on double decent incomes.

Yes but how are you going to leave a printf(‘oh noes I fucked up!’) statement in by mistake, for someone to find in production ten years down the line when the planets align and a strange set of circumstances occur?

That’s half the fun :)