Posts by John H Woods 3577 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Nov 2007
"... historical, political and societal points ... closed and mysterious ... between barbarism and civilisation ... between nomadism and pastoralism ... capitalism and progress – the list goes on."
It does rather, and with every item you reinforce my point that the use of the adjective means more than "Great Big" especially as the one item obviously missing from that list is its sheer size :-D
Hmm, and you know what's much older than even that? Great big fortified walls that English speakers already knew about: built hundreds of years before even the oldest parts of the GWoC and known about for at least a thousand.
So I suspect "Chinese" has got to mean something additional to "Great Big" in this context. I'm not sure the GWoC impinged much on Anglophone consciousness before the 1980s, so I'd be interested to know if you can dig out an earlier metaphorical usage.
Is this related to the (what, 2 decades old?) analogy by Prof John Searle about the Chinese Room? He was talking about AI but I can sort of see an analogy to an process / department that does stuff without full knowledge of the relevance of their actions outside the room. Like homomorphic encryption ...?
"although that might change if the punishments were extreme enough"
The evidence, both historical and current, is that it doesn't. People were still stealing when the penalty was death or transportation and a quick look around the world shows that the countries with the harshest justice systems don't have the least crime - if anything, rather the opposite.
"Schools have been doing a terrible job of teaching critical thinking for generations."
In the UK at least, state (i.e. normal) schools teach a curriculum set by politicians. A moment's critical thinking will tell you that such a curriculum is unlikely to cover critical thinking.
NB: I know they're trying to target the people who use "Rover123" and obviously 3 random words are vastly preferable to that --- but I think the approach misses the required entropy of a moderately secure password by a factor of at least a million (probably a billion with more common words).
I'm suspect What 3 Words works on a vocabulary of about 40k words, which probably matches an English speaker's passive vocabulary. (The earth has an area of about 5.1e14 square metres; 4e4^3 is 6.4e13, meaning that a W3W square is just under 8 square metres, which seems about right.)
Let's be really generous and assume someone asked to come up with three random words is able to pick each word from a 50k word vocabulary (I suspect, in practice, an awful lot of people would be picking, from an immediately accessible vocabulary of 5k words or less). So, like W3W, you now have 6.4e13 combinations.
On my keyboard I can comfortably type 88 different symbols (26 letters + 10 shift-digit symbols + 8 punctuation = 44, all of which can be shifted to give another 44).
Now my maths might be wrong (l seem to have some kind of long Covid neurological issue going on, so please be gentle!) but as 88^7 = 4.1e13 and 88^8 = 3.6e15 that means even a good three word passphrase would have about 50% more entropy than a 7 character password whilst an 8 character password would have 50x more entropy.
Sony phones usually have an Android close to stock ... and, in my judgement, pretty decent cameras. I've had SONY phones for years since the first waterproof Xperia, love them. If you time the purchase right, you can usually got some good freebies - I got PS3, PS4 and some *really* good N/C headphones this way.
... are no such thing, they are just indicators of disagreement. You find them inexplicable because you find even the fact of people holding a differing view to be inexplicable, which may explain why some of those downvoters have decided not to bother attempting to advance a counterargument. HTH.
I had actual diagnosed carpal tunnel syndrome. I switched to Dvorak and that seemed to help. Maybe just because it slowed me down a lot. Although I eventually became reasonablyi fast, now at 80+ wpm when I never got beyond 60 as a Qwertist.
But the absolute best thing about Dvorak is when some berk tries to use your keyboard without your permission ...
I dunno what they mean by ”35 tons" of pressure but your calculations yield a paltry 5 atmosphere pressure ... It just doesn't sound strong enough to me.
The R16 data in your link specifies the hydraulic system operating pressure as 200Kgf/cm² ... Near enough 20MPa. Why so much pressure to generate 0.5MPa?
"I used to listen and watch BBC to get an alternate take on US activities"
But, not being here, you seem to have missed the fact that most brits get their news from other sources, quite often a variety of them.
The BBC is not 'state controlled' although it has been reluctant to criticise various governments, of both sides. So you can watch BBC all you like but you do not know "what is going on here"
Quite apart from that it is absolutely risible to suggest that people should only form opinions about the country they live in. People of all countries in the world are, at the very least, going to have a strong interest about the world's most powerful countries: what happens in the USA can affect us all.
@Waldo - I actually agree with that. I don't think lawmakers should be directly engaging with the public on twitter any more than, say, a senior judge or police commander should be directly engaging with the public. The people who make the laws need to be as diligent as the people who execute them: maintaining the distance required to perform public service duties properly.
W@ldo, we've all read Animal Farm and 1984. You recommending them to us is like hearing self-confessed Black-ops aficionados exclaim, incredulously, "Reznov's not real?". It just makes us wonder how you can have missed the point by such a wide margin.
See also one of the idiotic 'Pillage People' from the recent half-arsed attempted coup, with the The Outsiders Mark tattooed on his hand --- someone who clearly hasn't realised that Dishonoured isn't exactly a game with a conservative message!
"Is it wrong to be more sexually attracted to your own daughter than your wife?"
Probably couldn't be wronger. Oh, wait, let's just check what age Ivanka was when he was alleged to have said this ... ah, yes - 13. So yes, it is even more wrong than it looks at first glance.
I was slightly confused that energy density per volume would be in Norris per Wales and therefore pressure but have now realised that this kind of makes physical sense - you can store energy in a fixed volume by filling it with pressurized gas: my back of fagpacket gives 100 atmostpheres to be about `36MJ i.e 10kWh per cubic metre (which is about 0.1% of the energy density of diesel, I think, whilst Li-Ion is what, about 200kWh per cubic metre, or around 2% of diesel).
Watt = Joule / sec
so 1 Wh = 3600J
Joule = Newton Metre
1N = 0.01 Norris
1m = 7.1429 Linguine
So 1 Joule = 0.071429 NorrisLinguine
So 1Wh = 257.14 NorrisLinguine.
AMIRITE?
So energy density per mass is NorrisLinguine/Jub; whereas energy density per volume is NorrisLinguine/Grapefruit. However, Linguine/Grapefruit can also be expressed in 1/Wales, so Norris per Wales would also be cromulent.
If you hate "rejecting history and culture" then stop doing it ... it's you guys who have such a hang-up about the documented historic sins of slavery, Nazism, expansionism, colonialism, exploitation, genocide and so on - Christ, you're calling them "alleged" without even realising how mad that sounds.
Either ignore history and concentrate on the present, or accept *all* of it. You don't have to feel bad that "we" were prime movers in the transatlantic slave trade, because you weren't there. Same reason you shouldn't have to feel proud about the Industrial Revolution: none of it was down to you.
But thinking that knowing the truth about your country's past is being taught to hate it ... I'm speechless to be honest.
... I think this is possibly making a bad situation worse.
I actually had a friend complain he couldn't fit his formula in the character limit of an individual cell. Maybe, like the Internet, Excel has become too easy to (ab)use. And powerpoint actually started that way. Meanwhile, 30 years on the amount of work you have to do to get a professional looking document out of MS Word continues to amaze me.
I don't know what you mean by "regression testing is not done in code"
A lot of pipelines have automatic regression testing, performed by scripts. Are we talking across purposes?
Nevertheless, testing the whole application from top to bottom (and, ideally, non-functionally as well as functionally) to ensure you haven't broken something is the very definition of regression testing.
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