donnacha
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31 minutes ago, KhaoYai said:I can't speak for Ireland but you're not quite correct about the UK. To the best of my knowledge, the only people to have the second jab early are those that had it before the change to 12 weeks and those who were with some GP's who went against the grain. The appointment for the second dose is booked at the same time as you book the first and is approximately 12 weeks after the first. My first was on 7 March and my second is booked for 25 May.
I'm surprised to hear that, I have a vague recollection of Pfizer being insistent that their vaccine should only be used in same timeframes as it was tested, but thanks for letting me know.
31 minutes ago, KhaoYai said:The remaining age groups - Phase 2 may take a little longer as people come forward for their second dose but the programme is targeted to be complete by 31 July.
That is a monumental achievement on the single most important task so far in this decade for any country. It is not an exaggeration to say that the UK economy's early emergence from lockdown is going to be a game-changer, at a crucial time, in terms of how the world perceives the new UK and the confidence the British people feel about themselves.
31 minutes ago, KhaoYai said:Uptake in England has been very good in all groups over 60 years old but varied by area between 82% and 91%.
Straightforward, sensible people when it really matters, with no leaders stirring up hysteria for geo-political purposes. Impressive. The Irish are much the same but, sadly, we trusted other people to organize the supply.
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3 hours ago, irishman25 said:
As a Irishman the UK is leading the way to quickly control and stop this covid 19 virus. they were right to lengthy the does;s to 9 to 12 weeks more people can get vaccinated and SAVE LIVES other country's should do the same
Ireland and the UK are taking essentially the same approach. Ireland just has far fewer vaccines because, tragically, we were ordered to stop making our own arrangements and cancel the existing contracts we had made.
In both the UK and Ireland, the mRNA vaccines (Pfizer and Moderna) are mostly being allocated to older folks. They receive their second shot about 4 weeks later.
Most younger folks getting early access (frontline workers, care workers etc) are getting AstraZeneca and receiving their second shot 12 weeks later. It is a good strategy but, unfortunately, it does not make up for the ridiculous shortages. Ireland is at almost 11% first shot received, slightly above the EU average of 10%, while over the border in Northern Ireland half the population have received at least their first shot.
To put this into perspective, current projections suggests that any Irish citizen under 50 but not in a special job or health category will receive their first shot in November.
My hope is that the current hysteria on the continent (which, under various guises over the past few months, has essentially always been about Brexit) will result in a million or so extra AZ shots being redirected to Ireland, allowing us to reach general availability by the summer.
The greatest pity is that Europeans will not simply be allowed to buy the shots privately. Some need to travel for family and business reasons. Many members of this forum are currently trapped outside Thailand. The various vaccination passport schemes will emerge over the coming months. Once the most vulnerable have been inoculated, people willing to pay €1000 or whatever to be able to get those shots and that certification, so they can travel without quarantines, testing, and special insurance, should be allowed to do so.
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On 3/11/2021 at 1:02 PM, IslandLover said:
Are you the culprit by any chance? ????
No. If I was, the forum would not be back up now.
It has well over a dozen vulnerabilities. I would consecutively hammer them all, causing at least a couple of weeks of intermittent downtime to ensure that their Google rankings would never recover.
Such an action on my part is, however, unnecessary. They are perfectly capable of destroying this forum on their own.
Their current Cloudflare settings alone are going to decimate their traffic. Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. They really haven't thought this through.
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My guess would be that one individual, annoyed by his treatment, set up monitoring to alert him if a non-Cloudflare IP was ever revealed, even for a minute. He would then have set up his own server to bombard that IP or, more likely, paid a service a few dollars (probably around $50) to do it, most likely using a botnet of hacked servers.
None of this requires skill. Any idiot can find a tutorial on how to do it.
On the other hand, recovering from this sort of attack is relatively easy. You simply flip over to another server, as I described in an earlier post. Some sites even keep a second server running with the latest backup already running and automatically switch to it when their system detects a problem with the first server. The expense is justified because any downtime at all can permanently damage your search engine rankings.
An actual hack is far more damaging but requires far more skill to carry out.
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It is practically impossible to get DDoS'd if you remain hidden behind Cloudflare. The attackers can only bypass Cloudflare if you somehow reveal your server's actual IP address, probably through a DNS configuration error, or running some services directly.
Once they have your server's IP address they can hammer it directly. There is nothing that you or Cloudflare can do about that.
The solution is to immediately fire up another server (with a different IP address), restore the most recent backup of your site to it, and redirect your domain, via Cloudflare, to your new server. As everything is going through Cloudflare, you don't even need to wait for new DNS details to propagate.
That should not take more than 20 minutes, including ordering the new server.
No matter how how catastrophic an attack may seem to be, you are golden as long as you keep regular backups and are ready to spin up a new server whenever the need arises.
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1 minute ago, NanLaew said:You did what now? Watched a crashed website for a day-and-a-half?
Nope, not what I said. When I went to see if the forum was back I simply examined the headers. I work in this field, so, I am naturally curious about the mistakes that lead people to get hacked or DDoS'd, and how they handle the situation.
4 minutes ago, NanLaew said:I went fishing, cooked dinner, did some shopping, fixed up an old water pump and checked out some home improvement stuff for a friend.
I look forward to being retired too someday.
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8 minutes ago, tomazbodner said:How about you take off your pink glasses and glance at these 2 pages to see how accurate your statement is for 2021:
Neither of those links - to the home pages of news sites on the broad subject of hacking - were in any way relevant to this discussion.
Again, no other major Invision forum disappears for 3 days. If you get hacked, you simply restore from your last unhacked backup and are online again before almost anyone notices. No complicated dance moves required.
Thank you for wasting two unrecoverable minutes of my life.
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6 minutes ago, ThailandRyan said:Well then let Sputnik reign down for all of the Russian expats, then the US vaccines for those expats and the same for the EU and UK, in using your view on reducing the overall risk scenario to the Motherland. I think it is more of a "Give our Nationals from China our vaccine:, or we will not supply you with anymore money, nor continue in our support, and will instead just roll on in and take over your country like we are doing for the other Asian nations. But then that is just my view on it.
I suspect their more immediate worry, right now, is that the South East nations so popular with Chinese long-stay tourists have all hidden their actual infection levels from the start and are raging reservoirs for the virus. The last thing China wants to deal with is a continual flow of infected citizens bringing it back home.
Their longer-term plans for regional domination will resume once they have dealt with their current mess.
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It is not unreasonable to expect a major site, minting money through truly absurd levels of advertising, to remain accessible.
I am not impatient. I presumed the site would reappear eventually, but let's not pretend that it is complicated to keep a PHP & MySQL-based forum running. Over the past few years, I cannot think of any other major Invision forum that massacred its own Google rankings by disappearing for three days.
There should be no such thing as an "unexpected" crash - whether website or forum, you automate your backups and, if there is a problem, you simply restore from your last good backup. The whole thing should take no more than five minutes. It doesn't even cost money to set this up properly.
Instead, I watched in real-time as your "technical team" mucked about with Cloudflare settings. I presume this means that you actually got DDoS'd or hacked.
Rather than lambast @Bangkok Barry for daring to bring it up, you should acknowledge that the forum's job of providing a platform for the community was not fulfilled over the past few days. You owe nothing to any of us but, at the same time, the profitability of your platform depends on keeping your users engaged.
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33 minutes ago, Eric Loh said:
It is more than printing money that is the driver for dollar weakness.
Sure but, from my perspective, as someone with a vested interest in the collapse of the dollar, the money printing is a really useful culmination of all the other factors. This is beyond politics. What we are seeing in so many areas - for example, online commerce, working from home, the use of video conferencing instead of air travel - is a massive acceleration of beneficial trends that were already happening.
When all is said and done, despite the hundreds of trillions of dollars of damage to the world economy, we will have leap-frogged ahead by a decade in areas of key importance. One of those will be the widening of the selection of major currencies, with the reliance on a single currency (the US dollar) relegated to the past. Ultimately, that is even healthy for the US economy, because it will no longer be able to export inflation, and that will force future governments - both Democrat and Republican - to become far leaner.
It is also ideal timing for Bitcoin because, after a decade of existence, it was not entirely clear, despite the ingenious design, what Bitcoin was for. Now, both corporations and regular Americans will be able to use it to insulate their savings during a period of turbulent inflation. That will educate and prepare public opinion to insist that the next version of the dollar is designed to be more solid, robust, and limited in supply.
The next few years will be rough but, medium to long-term, I am optimistic. I believe the US has an excellent chance of remaining relevant throughout the coming century.
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3 minutes ago, scorecard said:Not really the point in regard to yingluck, she and her gang of thieves got removed because they where so corrupt. Quick example her trade minister and his deputy both got jail for several decades for their fake international rice sales scams.
They got removed in a coup. Thai soldiers used guns, paid for by the Thai people, to remove a government against the overwhelming wishes of the Thai people.
Whatever the faults of Yingluck's cabinet, they were amateurs compared to the current mafia. Thailand would be in a far better place today if the will of the people had been respected.
QuoteDemocracy is the worst form of Government except for all those others - Winston Churchill
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41 minutes ago, webfact said:
If the vaccine is given, it may state the condition to take care of the Chinese nationals in Thailand.
This is smart. Chinese nationals in Thailand are massively more likely (than random Thai citizens) to visit China in the coming years. Gifting vaccines to nearby countries is always about reducing the overall risk to the motherland.
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Even composing
About foul Chiang Mai air
Virtue signal Trump?- 1
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I can speak for everyone heavily invested in Bitcoin when I say that Biden is doing a terrific job and I pray that he will not hesitate to print trillions more dollars throughout the rest of his administration.
The alarm today among businesses and corporations holding dollars was the boost Bitcoin needed to bring it back up to the levels of the all-time highs it hit around the end of last month. This consolidates Bitcoin's credibility and makes the corporations and funds who shifted into Bitcoin last month, as a hedge against dollar debasement, look like geniuses. That will be a tipping point for many more to convert a portion of their dollar holdings into Bitcoin. I hold tightly to my prediction that Bitcoin will hit 200k before the end of this unique year.
From a human perspective, what America is doing is also good for, and generous to, the world. By cashing in the credibility of the dollar for temporary political gain, it gives other major currencies the chance to become the default currency. We needed competition in this area but no one dared hope that the US would step aside like this.
It also takes a lot of pressure off the EU who had seriously messed up their vaccination programme by telling individual countries to not make their own orders and, then, failing to make any orders of their own for three months. The economic carnage of this unprecedented bureaucratic FUBAR was threatening to bring down the European Central Bank, but now the Euro suddenly looks like a viable replacement for the dollar as world currency.
Of course, it does mean tough times ahead for any retirees in Thailand on fixed incomes denominated in dollars. Again, though, this is a generous act on the part of the American government that will allow expats in Thailand from other countries to snap up bargains as a certain portion of American retirees are forced to sell up and leave.
Overall, the end result is mostly positive, and I am more impressed with Biden (or whoever is actually making the decisions) than I thought I would be. As long as he is willing to keep debasing the dollar, he will have our fervent support.
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2 hours ago, onebir said:At least his hands are clean
Apart from using the guns paid for by the Thai people to steal the entire country from the Thai people, yes.- 8
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The pollution might be affecting this forum.
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I visit Lamphun sometimes because my partner is from there. I have often thought that Lamphun town (as opposed to the province) would a great spot for anyone on a tight budget who just wants a relaxed life. Foreigners are still somewhat exotic there, the pubs are fun because you have young factory workers from all over Thailand, and you can easily find very cheap accommodation, around 3k per month + electricity. There are a couple of big, modern shopping malls, lots of coffee shops etc. The Thai restaurants and food markets are significantly cheaper than anywhere in Chiang Mai. You've still got the same fibre Internet connections as Chiang Mai.
I'm not sure why anyone would consider it difficult in terms of transport. It takes 28 minutes to drive to Chiang Mai airport, there are always plenty of Grab and other taxis. It is, effectively, a suburb of Chiang Mai.
I reckon that relatively new expats get too tied up with the idea that they need to live on Nimmanhaemin or some other central spot, but the overall experience is often more interesting and more fun in areas less saturated with Westerners. Your chances of stumbling upon a real relationship are certainly higher.
My hunch is that Lamphun might become a lot more popular with American expats on fixed incomes if the current stimulus devalues the dollar relative to the Baht and, equally, for Europeans if the ECB collapses this year.
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17 minutes ago, LosLobo said:Punters who bought Ethereum two weeks ago would not agree with your advice. Current prices would indicate a 20% loss. Maybe not good advice for Aussies on the pension.
This is a tough to explain to people but, if your investment period is two weeks, you need to stay the Hell away from crypto.
When we say that an asset is highly-volatile, it means that there are massive swings every week, even when things are going well. The reason why we stick with such assets is because the general trend, over the courses of months and years, is impressively profitable.
If you bought Ethereum 3 months ago you are currently up 300%.
If you bought 6 months ago you are currently up 500%.
If you bought one year ago you are currently up 1000%.
Again, my recommendation is not Ethereum but Bitcoin, I am confident it will see major gains before the end of this year, and I am extremely happy with its long-term performance so far, I have made tens of millions from it.
No one should invest money in anything if they can only afford to leave it in for two weeks. Is this an Australian thing?
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1 minute ago, stevenl said:
It is a few idiots only.
You would have to be an idiot to accept the imposition of a night-time curfew on the grounds that there was a virus going around.
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Chiang Mai is lovely, but you are insane if you spend time there during the first half of the year. The data is clear, the health consequences are now well understood, anyone who thinks they are saving money by ignoring this is in for a big surprise when they discover how expensive medical care for terminal conditions can be.
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23 minutes ago, foreverlomsak said:
and not forgetting that double doses are required, and we may even need periodic boosters.
My guess is that, once vaccination of the general population pushes infection levels back below 0.1% again, the annual covid jab will simply be given to the same segment of the population who get flu vaccines every year, and probably at the same time.
There has never been any logical reason to lock down the entire population rather than re-focus the limited resources on shielding the individuals who were actually vulnerable. The human race, through a mixture of modern media hysteria, social media panic, and weak politicians, has been corralled into a stunning overreaction that will be marveled over for centuries to come.
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2 minutes ago, jack71 said:I would not get out of bed for 4% a yr. Is this a joke?
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I keep hearing about these exotic coins offering high rates of interest.
I am not interested because they do not make any sense to me.
Right now, in March 2021, there is one clear dynamic. As money printing goes into high gear, the world will be awash with money and, as has been clearly demonstrated since 2001, when that happens a lot of the money rushes into assets. Due to the unique, once-in-a-century situation, over the next two years all assets will rise far faster than usual. Bitcoin will rise the most.
Perhaps I could make more money by artfully day-trading but I have neither the time nor interest. I put my money in Bitcoin, I pay no attention to the daily volatility, and at the end of the year I get a nice surprise.
These are not normal times, the usual rules no longer apply.
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It is just another asset. You report as part of your regular tax return when you transfer your profits back to your Australian bank account. Nothing complicated about it.
It is not really an investment, more of a hedge against the likely debasement of regular currencies over the next few years. My advice is to take only a small portion of your net worth, maybe 10%, and stick it into Bitcoin or, maybe, Ethereum. Ignore all the other coins unless you know what you are doing.
If there is rapid devaluation of the regular currencies Bitcoin is likely to go up quite a bit. Your profits there will balance out the loses you make on any cash your are holding. Worth noting that currency devaluation is also likely to increase the value of any property or other assets you own. In my opinion, Bitcoin will continue outpacing gold, silver, and all other asset classes but, again, don't put all your eggs in one basket.
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Dutch inventor of the cassette tape dies aged 94
in Entertainment
Posted
Famously, until his final years, he would fly into a blind fury when anyone mentioned the word "iPod".