jthompson

Some stats on the radio this morning indicated that the Australian policy of requiring players to get vaccinated appears to have worked pretty well, Djokovic aside. The vaccination rates of the top 100 players have jumped up to pretty high levels in the lead-up to the tournament.

I wonder how long before they can just deep fake Sean Connery back into the role.

I wonder if you could bodge it be renaming the accounts prior to deleting them, such that they'll no longer match your new accounts?

You may need to wait a certain number of days after deleting the old account before it's fully purged. Google allows you to recover recently deleted accounts, which is what it sounds like could be happening in your case. You could maybe test that if you can remember the account name of an account you deleted last year or something. This article says that accounts are recoverable for up to 20 days after being deleted. https://apps.google.com/supportwidget/articlehome?article_url=https%3A%2F%2Fsupport.google.com%2Fa%2Fanswer%2F1397578&assistant_event=welcome&assistant_id=!yo1I78BBbClCZXju_7O8gw%3D%3D&product_context=1397578&product_name=UnuFlow&trigger_context=a

I do despise that term 'live with covid'. What does it mean? I suspect those who use it mean "abandon masks, testing, self isolation and social distancing as fast as possible", but it could also be interpreted to mean "live with masks, testing, self isolation and social distancing".

I think what PCR brings to the table really is just its huge sensitivity. A sub-optimal swab for a PCR may be far less likely to produce a false negative compared to a similarly sub-optimal swab for an LFT. The fact that it can detect a months old infection, or whatever, is probably just coincidental rather than a useful feature as such. The thing about everybody doing routine LFTs twice a week even when they have no symptoms is to detect asymptomatic cases (or at least a usefully significant proportion of them) in the 3-4 days after infection. That may still just be detecting cases at their viral peak, though. But yeah, I dunno, all quite confusing.

I think 55% is going to be the false negative rate, 99% the false positive rate. That's why someone with symptoms needed to get a PCR even if their LFT was negative, since there was a roughly 50% chance that that LFT result was wrong. Or something. Another thing with LFT vs PCR is that LFT is useful only within a period of a few days following infection, whereas PCR will be sensitive for quite a while afterwards. I don't know if that's what's behind the 55% false negative rate or whatever (i.e. tests being taken too early or too late following infection).

Are you thinking that it might just have been a couple of Fox's?

I guess there's a world of difference between "don't need to confirm a positive LFT with PCR" and "don't need to do a PCR if you do an LFT", which may get lost in translation quite easily.

You won't need money when you're a HERO!

Even if you were to delete that person's mailbox for them, it does nothing to remove recipients' copies of their messages.

What you need to do is put them all into the bin and then pour your heart into producing the most blood-boilingly passive agressive note possible to leave in place. Back on topic, I was going to ask whether others had seen the Christmas Lectures this year? All about viruses and the pandemic, hosted by JVT (we like JVT in our household). Some pretty cool demonstrations, with my particular favourite being the WiFi thing showing how things propogate according to different spatial distributions of R. I haven't seen the 3rd lecture yet. They'll be on iPlayer.

Haven't painted much in recent months, but I do have a lot of new models that need assembling. I'm hoping to get busy on them soon and get the builds done in time to catch the 2 or 3 days in the year that have the Goldilocks weather conditions for spray-painting (no breeze, no rain, not hot, not cold, not a work day, not a day taken up with domestic chores).

If allowing removable media as read-only, you'd definitely want to have AppLocker or equivalent application allowlisting in place, to prevent users from running portable apps or malware. In fact, you want application allowlisting in place regardless. That's a whole other topic, though. I don't think you'd want your readable/writeable workaround to be in the power of the users, so keeping it within the realm of sysadmins' tools is probably best.

We allow reading from USB, so job candidates, etc. bringing in a presentation on a USB can still just use them. I'm not sure that there's too much of an issue associated with people bringing in resources from USB, particularly if you're at the point where it's largely dropped out of use amongst your users. We do this using GPO. For a quick workaround on specific machines, we'd just move the machine to a nested OU and apply a policy which specificially allows writing to non-encrypted removable media (i.e. overrides the general policy that sets them as read-only). iPads, cameras, SD cards, etc. should all be fine as read-only.

I sometimes wish I'd kept all of the broken, snapped, failed USB sticks that have landed on my desk over the years, and created some sort of wall art out of them all. It'd look crap, but might have helped bring about the end of the USB era quite a bit sooner.

I tend to avoid the scaring method: it's likely to make less confident users feel even less confident. More "this is how things will work from now on" than "you're doing it wrong".

Having OneDrive desktop sync set up means that you're in a good position to be able to proceed with phasing out USB drives, since that ought to address the vast majority of complaints that you might get. Use Group Policy to set removable media to read-only on your domain computers, rather than outright disabling them. IMHO you don't need to disable outright*, and it's far less jarring for staff who have stuff on USB currently. That allows staff who do have things on USB to still be able to access them to transfer that data into your domain, or for new staff to be able to bring resources in when they join the organisation. I'd also recommend having a policy set up that you can apply to specific machines that will override that and allow write access to non-BitLocker-protected volumes, so as to quickly allow for any unforeseen circumstances where an existing workflow gets broken. For example, Languages staff working with dictaphone recordings. You can then work out longer term solutions for those workflows without having to allow writeable USB more generally for everyone else. *Slightly different but related issue, you should also be preventing any execution from removable drives, if not already. The read-only aspect covers the data protection side of things, whilst the blocking of execution covers the security side of things.

Best to have a different vaccine for you booster than you had for initial jabs, it seems. I don't know if in the UK that is factored into what the booking system offers people online. My booster was at a walk-in that only offered Pfizer (I had AZ previously). I'm guessing they wouldn't turn anyone away from being boostered with the same vaccine that they've already had.

Happy new year everyone. Time to apply the latest patch to your 2020s! I can't find the release notes though, so can only hope that there are some cool new features and plenty of big fixes for us.

I suspect it's something conflating with the whole 'freeman of the land' psuedolaw garbage that people pick up when "doing their own research" (i.e. tumbling down a Facebook rabbit hole).

Milton Keynes Theatre has always put on a really good panto, but this one seemed a little... avant-garde for my tastes. Very disappointed. I didn't get most of the jokes, there were very few songs, and hardly any knee slaps. I give it 1 out of 5.

Started reading the Culture series.

I'd have thought they'd be obliged to mask out any parts of the frame covering neighbouring properties if covering them is unavoidable. That's what we've done in the past.

He bravely ran away. Brave brave Sir Lewis "I didn't!" Bravely ran away away. Oh brave Sir Lewis. "I never!!" [just kidding. Have huge respect for him]