Posts by John PM Chappell 194 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Mar 2007
Completely agree, I was alive for it too, though a little young to actually drive them, on the whole. My parents did have an Allegro and I recall a Metro briefly. They were both crap. Dad ended up with a Ford Sierra that lasted forever. They died because the cars they designed were crap, they built them crappily, and they ran their business and plants crappily.
To be fair, heard both glottal stop (what you're referring to) and "in t' ", speaking as someone with Yorkshire family, and a father who considers himself a "dyed in the woll Yorkshireman" (but amusingly, has no real Yorkshire accent anymore, because he left years ago to join the RAF and then went into the Defence industry and spent most of his working life abroad or anywhere else in the UK).
I've had that experience with a touch of the other comment below, too.
Looking at some old code in a project, I came across something that worked, but could use a touch of modernization, which I began. In the course of doing that I came to a part that was pretty arcane and found myself muttering things like "Who the hell wrote this, anyway?" and "This guy knew his stuff, but his comments are awful".
Needless to say, at some point I came across a copyright block identifying my younger self as the author. I apparently knew things back then which would probably fox me today, and I was also much worse at writing code. :P
So ... Paxton's acquittal was an embarassment, even to many Republican politicians here, who were disgusted with the outcome. At least he was actually facing impeachment, though. Progress?
Sadly, Texas has a long history (it's not alone in this regard, but it is very notable) of serious political corruption, including with law enforcement (Sheriffs running their county as personal fiefs, running liquor and drugs, etc), to the point that there have been many Federal interventions. It is worth noting that Texas is a *big* state, which makes a lot of this easier in some regards, and that it's by no means typical of the average Texan, but ... still, it is and has been 'a thing' for basically the entire history of the state, alas.
The abortion position has basically no real support on the ground - there are many, though not a majority, who support restricting abortion in some way, even prohibiting it at a state level outside some very narrow exceptions, but basically nobody supports hunting women down and prosecuting them for even trying to get an abortion - and many 'moderate' voters have been pushed into seeking to oppose those politicians who did back this. As 'jake' has noted above, only time will tell if they actually vote their professed positions, but Texas has never been a true 'Republican Heartland' the way many fondly imagine. The cities have always been largely Democrat voters, and the rural areas are mixed but shifted heavily to the Republicans in the 1990s with the whole courting of Evangelical Christians by the GOP. As of today, that is increasingly not holding, in no small part thanks to the previous resident of the White House.
It varies by state whether openly carrying would be legal or not, but that is indeed the distinction. A concealed firearm, or indeed any concealed weapon, is one "not in plain view, and readily accessible by the possessor"; this means that having it in a container which you can immediately reach, rather than strictly on your person, is also concealment. Many states have a specific authorization for firearms in vehicles (where they are usually in the 'glove box' or 'centre console') for this reason.
Jake's mostly covered it, but just to say that '95 definitely didn't have TCP/IP built in until later, and early NT didn't have it, and for a long time what it did have was notoriously bad. I think NT 4 late SPs fixed that.
It almost certainly was Windows 95, given the time he identified and the mention of '486 based PCs.
Actually it was always possible to login to your Amazon account and deregister devices. It *might* have not been granular, a long long time ago, meaning you'd need to deregister all devices, but it never required physical access. Failing that call CS.
It's always been possible, precisely because they can be lost / stolen.
Let's tackle "why?" first. Even in the UK owning a shotgun is hardly unusual, though it's nowhere near the level of ownership in the USA (more on which later).
Shotguns are useful for vermin control, sport shooting, some hunting, and 'home defence'. Rifles are primarily useful for sport shooting and hunting. Handguns are useful for some hunting, target shooting, and as a side-arm ("To fight your way to where your rifle is").
There is a saying here: "When seconds count, the police are just minutes away." Bottom line, the USA is not the UK. It's much larger, and though its population is about six times larger too, even in the cities population density is lower than the UK. In rural areas, even ignoring Alaska, it's very low. Self-defence is not all about "shooting the bad man", there remains dangerous wildlife close enough to settlements to be a regular, sometimes weekly for some people, nuisance. Go off the beaten track a little, or live on a ranch or similar situation and it's arguably negligent *not* to have fast access to a firearm for defence from dangerous animals, in many places.
Now the cultural stuff - It's enshrined law from a principle it inherited from the UK, specifically English law. It's actually the UK which has shifted hard in the other direction, not the USA that has suddenly gone "gun mad", though there was always more of a "gun culture" here, given the historical realities. That law is an amendment precisely because the original 'framers' of the constitution felt it was so blindingly obvious a right it did not need to be spelt out, but some states attempted to restrict access and ownership, resulting in the second amendment. A similar story exists with regard to the first.
In Houston, you could buy a shotgun or handgun, after being checked by the FBI against their database (the 'background check' you hear about a lot) to confirm that you are not prohibited from possessing or purchasing a firearm at that time. There are many ways to be so prohibited, from the essentially permanent prohibition for violent felons, to temporary ones for people facing certain criminal charges, etc. No "pass" from the FBI, no sale (and likely a visit to your home address from said FBI).
No private citizen can own an M16 - that is a military designation for a weapon based on the Armalite AR-15 rifle. It's also not an "assault rifle" (it's debatable if that term even has meaning), it is a ''battle rifle".
A nuclear weapon would be excluded by various laws, including the prohibition on owning "destructive devices". Basically, it is not considered a personal weapon, the law in question is about ownership and possession of personal weapons - "arms".
No, it doesn't. Ohm's law states that current between two points is proportional to the potential difference between them. (V = IR).
What you're talking about is the power equation, where the terms are voltage, current and power (not 'volts' 'amps' & 'watts', which are units for measuring those); P (sometimes W) = IV.
On a thin conductor, your concern is heat from resistance to the current, since it will reach a higher temperature from the same amount of energy; it will melt sooner than a thicker conductor carrying the same current. 240 Watts is not inconsiderable, and it is impressive to me, also, that USB-C will support it.
To directly address your assertion, for a given voltage, you can only control the current by controlling the resistance: if you increase the voltage, you need a higher resistance for the same current, and the higher resistance means more heat. You cannot really change the resistance of a conductor, you can change input voltage, and that will proportinally affect current (I.E. Higher voltage gives higher current). In short, No.
"*Zulu time defines the baseline as the time “Zulu” was shown on BBC1 on Christmas Day 1980, that being stated as 00:00:00 Zulu time."
I realize (hope?) you were probably joking, but just for clarity of readers who might not know better, this is not the case. It is most likely based on Sandford Fleming's system, but in any case came from making official already existing usage in the armed forced of NATO, specifically the two most important (in practice) the UK and the USA.
Z (Zulu, from the NATO phonetic alphabet) is UTC (Historically, UT1/GMT), A through M (J - Juliet is skipped) are positive offsets (UTC+1, ... UTC+12), N through Y are negative offsets starting with UTC-1. Twenty-five letters used, one for each offset, and one for UTC itself.
Aviation exclusively uses it (UTC) in communication, to ensure nobody is confused about timing.
Also in Texas here. People in the UK have no clue about the climate here. I know. I'm originally from Scotland.
Getting off the plane, when I first came to Texas, the heat hit me like a wave, I stripped down to my tee shirt and asked my then fiancée if it was far to the car. It was nighttime, in November. The temperature was mid-seventies.
After about a month, I had acclimated, for the most part, to the point where locals putting on coats because it was sixty-something did not seem ridiculous to me anymore. The humidity is what make it unpleasant, for the most part - I'd spent time in Arizona years before and very much enjoyed the climate. I was there in summer, with daytime temperatures regularly approaching 110 degrees Fahrenheit.
There is not 'altitude' without a gorund reference. Altitude is a flight thing, this is a spacecraft. Attitude is what matters - I.E. Where is it pointing? This is also a thing planes worry about and have controls for. You may be confused because attitude, to a large degree, is how you change altitude, but the control surfaces actually change attitude. (V'Ger uses thrusters, because - space).
Scrivener is good, and it does more than novels. It is, however, essentially focussed on creative writing and related media (screen writing, for example), rather than being a simple text editor with outlining.
It would cover, I think, what you want, but there is a lot of other stuff you absolutely don't need. It covers that because, as for you, a novelist / screenwriter / etc is not concerned with details of font and format per se, but with proper outline. The text is then submitted to a publisher, usually, who will handle those details, typically in several different versions (large text edition, paperback, etc).
"Presumably your electric kettle has to run off a different circuit to your other appliances though, and does not run on 110V?"
No, regular outlet. They cannot make them as powerful as a British (or most other places) one (potentially could be), though, because as we surely all know W=IV, and they're starting with V less than half the value of the UK mains.
In practice, US home wiring is up to the job of running home appliances (well, they'll work, at any rate ... I have my own opinions on the quality of the parts used and relative sanity of the whole setup).
Likewise, though I did not personally witness it, was just made aware after the fact and got the details from those who were actually on site.
Legally speaking, it falls under "knowingly" which tends to get a much more severe response from a court than "recklessly", since you clearly knew you should not have done it.
Came here to say exactly that. I agree with the sentiment of those horrified by the implications, but the ruling was questionable when it was made, and it's been a *long* time since it was made, during which time successive Democrat administrations (the party most likely to put through legislation making it a legal right) have absolutely nothing to cement that decision.
This situation was not only inevitable, it was actually long overdue and the 'strict' interpretation doctrine has implications for far more than this particular situation. I happen to agree that they should indeed be making narrow interpretations of the text and ruling accordingly, even though I also agree it is no business of the state's who has an abortion (in general).
Doing anything unauthorized on a TS system is likely to result in, at minimum, reduction in rank, and very easily can result in doing hard time for the duration, possibly followed by more time once kicked to civvy street. If you're not aware of this, fair enough, but in that case avoid commenting on things you're ignorant of.
Completely agree. I compile with all warnings on and "treat warnings as errors"; those warnings almost always do warrant some attention, either in improved, or more explicit code and the truly harmless ones, where you really do mean what was coded (and no, it is not a problem) can be dealt with on a case by case basis, with a #pragma or similar.
@Loyal Commenter - totally agree with your sentiment, too.
No, it doesn't care because that's not "the internet", that's just your local device and network access method, your local network (even if that is actually an ISP you connect to, in whatever way) then connects to "the internet" (backbone network) and from that you can access anything else that is publicly accesible from "the internet".
To put it another way; there is only one way to "access the internet" and that is to implement a TCP/IP stack on a device that can communicate with "the internet". All those "access methods" you're talking about are ways for your end devices to connect to other devices that, can themselves ultimately connect to the backbone devices. They don't connect you to "the internet" per se, they connect to another device, which may or may not be networked itself, and so on, and so on. "The internet" was not designed as some monolith that you connected to in a certain was, indeed as 'jake' has implied several times, it's debatable it was really designed, so much as thrown together and played with, then left standing to play with some more. It's fundamentally a collection networks, with their own topologies, devices, standards and so on, that also connect to other networks - which they do with TCP/IP.
This used to be much more visible when local networking used protocols that were not TCP/IP and only used TCP/IP to reach "the internet". Those days are not all that far away for PC users, where IPX/SPX, for example, was quite common.
Firemen use water or something more appropriate in their judgement (based on what may be present) on vehicle fires because it is a *vehicle*, I.E. Not wired up to mains electrical supply. They would not thank anyone for a real risk of electrocution that comes from inappropriately using water on electrical equipment wired to a mains supply.
Exact same thing, even down to the A road going dual-single-dual, on a warm day, in a Skoda.
I was young at the time (hence a Skoda - was a gift from my parents who figured that if I were going to crash something, it may as well be something cheap) so no direct experience, but luckily I did (and do) understand some basic physical realities, and I had the "brainwave" of doing exactly what you did.
Passenger and I were not exactly thrilled with hot air being blasted at our faces, on a hot day, but it beat breaking downing in nose-to-tail traffic and a few hours later we arrived at our destination, a little sweatier than we'd have liked but with a working vehicle. :)
I see those who've never worked a day in their lives as a contractor are as clueless and irrationally envious as ever.
This case is a mess, and not a typical example. It went the distance because it does seem like the guy was, to all intents and purposes, functionally an employee and not a freelance contractor.
If he and his legal advice feel they still have a case for disagreeing (legally provable case, not just disagreeing with the result), no doubt it will be pursued.
For those of you who have never contracted, please educate yourself a little - contractors are responsible for all their own costs and benefits, the rate of pay demanded reflects that along with compensating for the insecurity of the position, and base value of the services offered.
If you really think it's easy and a tax dodge, quit your job, set up a "fake" Ltd, employ yourself, your wife and your dog, and go make the millions you think are on offer and that you're worth. Otherwise, do shut up about how unfair it is people with a different contract to you are paid differently.
Actual etymology completely contradicts you. The word (phrase, really) doesn't appear until the early 20th C, in print, but there are attestations that it was in common use, especially with Jazz musicians, at least a decade, probably a couple, before then.
Its roots are in no way related to slavery or racism, and the laughable attempts to link it to them show the difference between actual research, based on data and knowledge of language, and people who think that if a word sounds similar, it is the same thing.
I am calling B.S. on your police story, too. Police officers would only be disciplined if being intentionally offensive, and even there, we all know very well it has to be both a big deal, and public enough that they are forced to act. Police do a rough job, and frequently do use rough language, for which they face no repercussions (nor should they, typically). Nitty-gritty is not even remotely in the ballpark for that.
'The militia' not 'militias' (a modern term, which pluralizes an already plural term) - the militia is composed of all able-bodied men. At that the time, that essentially meant literally males, though the term men has wider meaning and did so then, also (and practically speaking many of those women were perfectly capable and willing to take up arms too).
The revisionism is in trying to claim this was some sort of "state militia", which is never mentioned and which did not exist at the time of the amendment. It's also worth remembering that the main objection to the amendment was that it was unnecessary, as lawmakers of the time thought it was a foregone conclusion that a free people would obviously be free to bear arms. Funny how that looks in hindsight.
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