Posts by Colin Sharples

@dervheid

I am not a sceptic tank, thank you very much.

Of course America is an empire, they just don't admit it.

And of course the ACW was a real war. The north just called it ACW to make it look as though it was an internal struggle, but the reality is that the USA invaded and conquered the CSA, which was a separate sovereign nation.

The point is, there are plenty of people in the US who like to make out that the US only ever fights righteous wars of liberation. That just ain't so.

[sits back and waits for the flames...]

Next up from NIPCC

More incontrovertible facts from NIPCC

- smoking extends life expectancy by 30 years

- driving a fast car makes your penis grow longer

- depleted uranium improves crop yields

- burying your head in the sand stops bad things happening to you

Who needs data when you can just make shit up...

@Michael Sheils

And what exactly was your point?

Which online store was "repeatedly" plugged, in your opinion? There was one mention of iTunes, and one mention of MLB.com. Have you discovered some new meaning of the word "repeatedly" which means "exactly once"?

How much did the competitors of whoever-it-was-you-think-AV-was-plugging pay you to write your comment?

And, for the love of all that's holy...

Where! is! the! IT! angle! in! this! story!?!?!

re: Chordic keyboard

Yeah, those things were cool. A friend of mine at York Uni was doing a project with those around 1991. He rigged up a chordic keyboard (don't remember what make) on top of a mouse, so you could do everything with just one hand. It was mainly intended as an accessibility device.

He devised a test which involved having to click on various things interspersed with some text input. The rest of us in the class were roped in to be test subjects. After 20 minutes or so of practice to learn the chording (just numbers), we did the test. I was significantly faster using his device compared to using normal qwerty plus mouse.

Captain Cyborg Test

How about a Captain Cyborg test for the first human to successfully pose as a computer? I nominate amanFromMars :-)

PC alert

Oh great, now the PC brigade will be telling us we can't say "no brainer" anymore, in case we hurt the guy's feelings...

LAX security - yeah, right

Security at LAX is a complete joke. It mainly consists of the security guards shouting at people for no apparent reason. When checking in my luggage, I was told that the bags had to be scanned first, and was shown to the scanner, which was about 10 feet away from the check-in desk. I walked straight over there, and was met by a scowling guard who demanded that I walk 20 yards down to the end of a divider rope, and 20 yards back up the other side, despite the fact that I was the only person in the whole check-in office. How in God's name does that improve security? The X-ray scanners were worse. Several guards just shouting at people - not actually explaining what you need to do, just telling you off for not doing whatever it was they wanted you to do. The whole thing was ripe for a bit of social engineering - just generate a bit more chaos, and you'd be able to slip something nasty past the scanners. And no, that doesn't make me a terrorist just for pointing out how incredibly crap LAX is at security.

Freedom

Don - what a load of shite.

You obviously haven't the faintest idea what GPL is about. There is nothing - absolutely nothing - in any free/open source license that restricts you the way you say.

If I use a GPL library to write an original program that has nothing to do with the library itself, then I can do whatever I want with it, just as you can with the Windows libraries.

If, on the other hand, I write an *extension* to that GPL library, say by providing extra functionality that other users of that library might find useful, then I can STILL do whatever I like with it - sell it, give it away free, print it out and make papier mache puppets, whatever. All I have to do is license my derivative work under the GPL and publish the source code.

Try doing that with a Windows library. Go on, I dare you.

Thank you AdamV

I was going to say the same thing - the C is completely redundant, and appears to be there only to turn it into a TLA, as if we need another one.

Perhaps the dickheads who thought that one up can show us a form of communication that doesn't involve information - then there might be some point in talking about Information AND Communication Technology. Until then IT does just fine.

On the other hand, we could start a new trend for turning all existing two letter acronyms into PTTs (Pointless Tautological TLAs), e.g.

PE -> PPE (Physical and Physiological Education)

RE -> RME (Religious and Mystical Education)

MP -> MPD (Member of Parliament and Dickhead)

etc

Anatidaen is not a word

Family names end in -idae. To refer to a species as a member of a family, you drop the -ae, for example humans belong to the family Hominidae, and so are referred to as hominids. You should have said "plastic anatids", not "plastic anatidaens".

I'll get me coat...

Dinosaurs mating

http://foldoc.org/index.cgi?dinosaurs+mating

Nuff said

Turing test

I'm reminded of Scott Adams' comments on the Turing test - there's no point in coming up with fancy algorithms to get a computer to pass the Turing test: just make it ignore any questions it's asked, and whinge about its job.

Language - especially conversational language - simply doesn't follow rules, regardless of what my Latin teacher always told me...

This! joke's! getting! really! old!

'Nuff! Said!

Breeding like rabbits...

I hate to be pedantic (well, no I don't), but the reproductive capacity of rabbits isn't nearly as impressive as most people think. A female rabbit in good condition can produce a litter of 4-10 kittens every 30 days. In optimal conditions, they can do this for 8-9 months of the year, so potentially one female could produce close to a hundred offspring in one year. Young females can produce their first litter at 4 or 5 months, so it is possible for a female to produce grandchildren in one season.

In practice, the breeding rate is much lower than that (except in certain parts of Australia). The point that most people miss, though, is that 90% or more of rabbit offspring will never see their first birthday, due to predation and disease. The rate of population increase for rabbits is still pretty good for a mammal, but not nearly as explosive as people imagine.

So yes, the 4000 escaped rabbits may well be able to produce, say 10,000 offspring in a few weeks, but most of those will be dead by the end of the year anyway...

Wikipedia wrong? No way...

Wow, those wikifiddlers are really on the ball. The Ms PacMan article has *already* been updated to say 1982.

Nice to know that really important facts like release dates of computer games are being kept up to date - much more important than trivial things like bios being vandalised with defamatory comments, eh?

Out of memory errors

The out of memory errors seem to be caused by a bug in the Sun JDK. Update to the latest rev (update 8) of the JDK (http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp), and you should be okay. There is quite a big discussion about this in the Eclipse bugs system (https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=92250).