This gem from the ABC news coverage has my mind 100% boggled:
"711 has been affected by the outage … went in to buy a sandwich and a coffee and they couldn’t even open the till. People who had filled up their cars were getting stuck in the shop because they couldn’t pay."
Can't even take CASH payment without the computer, what a world!
Technically a payment terminal can go into island mode and take offline credit card transactions and post them later. PIN can be verified against the card.
Depends if the retailer wants to take the chance of all that.
Having worked with some of these retail systems, yes, it depends on how they are configured.
There are stores in many places in the country with sporadic internet or where outages are not uncommon, and where you would want to configure the terminals to still work while offline. In these cases, the payment terminals can be configured to take offline transactions, and they are stored locally on the lane or a server located in the store until a connection to the internet is re-established.
At where though? The example given was in 711 which is a nationwide chain a bit like a Tesco Express or Sainsbury's Local, both of which still accept cash nationwide in the UK too.
But sometimes not fast enough. IIRC, you can wait for a HPROCESS in Win32 with the WaitForSingleObject call but that is signaled when the application code finishes _not_ when the OS has finished it's clean up. So if the process you were waiting on was an application that would write, say, "a.txt" and you wanted to wait until that process was done so that you can read "a.txt", it is possible that you fail to open that file because the OS had not released the file resource.
Of course, I wouldn't put that clean up in an atexit.
Pre 9/11 I used to routinely fly a commercial route with no security screening process. There was once even an attempted hijacking and the (lack of) procedures remained. The grandparent is correct, everyone went insane after 9/11. And this wasn't even in the same hemisphere as the USA.
The rest of the world is entitled to opinions about what the ADF is being used for.
If you think this is the point of the military then we just have two very different opinions about what it says about a governments ability to manage the mess they made themselves.
The use of coercion is a sign you've failed regardless of the outcome.
>If you think this is the point of the military then we just have two very different opinions about what it says about a governments ability to manage the mess they made themselves.
The ADF's stated mission is "to defend Australia and its national interests in order to advance Australia's security and prosperity.", and further goes on to state one of it's purposes is to "defend Australia and its national interests through the conduct of operations and provision of support for the Australian community and civilian authorities in accordance with Government direction."
Supporting state government and local police during a time of declared emergency is clearly within that scope.
Further, the ADF personnel deployed to assist with the lockdown will not be armed and will not have law enforcement powers - each ADF member will be paired with a regular police officer, and the police will be performing checks as they have for the last however many months [2]. This is simply to alleviate staffing and logistical issues, and is entirely ordinary. No one's getting a rifle squad kicking down their door because they didn't wear a mask.
>The use of coercion is a sign you've failed regardless of the outcome.
There is no coercion, and the whole point of the lockdowns are to prevent failure (that is, uncontrolled community transmission of COVID).
If you are so successful why did you have to use military to coerce people into doing it? That's not success thats failure. If we can't agree on that I guess we just have to agree to disagree.
The failure belongs to the selfish individuals who are ignoring the lockdown because it offends their personal convenience. If everyone did the right thing by isolating, engaging with contact tracing and getting tested for possible exposures, etc. voluntarily then there would be no need for enforcement.
Given that we know people are ignoring lockdown, it would be a failing of the government NOT to do something about it given the grave consequences to both individuals and the security of the nation as a whole.
>why did you have to use military to coerce people
The ADF are not there in a military capacity. They are assisting regular law enforcement with a labor shortage due to the scale of the outbreak.
And again, it is not coercive for police officers to enforce the law, including public health directives. Unless you consider all law enforcement to be coercive, in which case I no longer have any time for your opinions and would encourage you to expatriate yourself to a country with a more "relaxed" legal system as soon as you can. I hear Mogadishu is nice this time of year.
You are assuming that you are on the right side of this.
If you can't at least understand why people are opposed to the lockdown of course you think "boots on the neck" is a justified response.
Most people luckily do know the nuances and do understand the consequences of lockdown taken to the extreme of what we see in Australia.
That's why as I said we should probably just agree to disagree, I am not convinced about your justification for coercion no matter what semantic and rhetorical games you throw at it.
I couldn't give up induction now and I have used gas plenty. FWIW, my induction handles 4-11" and I had no pans that were not induction-compatible, but that might depend on where you live I guess.
> Nothing beats gas for output
Yeah, maybe if you have a huge wok burner? my induction boils water substantially quicker than any gas stove I have used.
Yeah, that statement was confusing I guess. Same as you, my induction hob boils water in a suitable pot faster than my largest gas hob.
The largest gas hob I've ever used is 20,000 BTU/hr. It will heat up a saucier faster and more evenly than any electric or induction hob could hope to, but that's partly due to the pan's narrow base, and to the way I use it. It doesn't often sit on a hob for very long.
"711 has been affected by the outage … went in to buy a sandwich and a coffee and they couldn’t even open the till. People who had filled up their cars were getting stuck in the shop because they couldn’t pay."
Can't even take CASH payment without the computer, what a world!