Posts by The Indomitable Gall

By that reasoning...

".uk covers Wales. Why does it need it's own?"

Well, .eu covers the UK too. As do the non-geographic names.

And consider all the registrations in Companies House that include some geographical descriptor. Location is part of brand. And some franchises only operate in certain areas (Hertz Wales is distinct from Hertz UK, for example, or it was last time I tried to return a car across the border).

The TLD can and should be used as part of the brand or it is wasted space, and that means allowing subdivisions of this manner.

And in case you didn't notice, TFA does in fact mention ".london" as a possibility.

I always wondered...

I always wondered why there's no such category as "European American"....

Not a brick.

A brick surely would have been falling much faster and the touchdown would have been messy.

If there was no "glide" involved, it would have come down hard on the nose or tail, and I imagine there would be visible damage to them.

Or to put it another way: imagine a brick falling from space and hitting your head. Now imagine Vulture 1 falling from space and hitting your head. Now imagine a small object with the density of brick but the mass of Vulture 1 falling from space and hitting your head. The only survivable one is Vulture 1....

Re: Murder

"You condemn Israel for protecting itself. Maybe it makes you feel morally superior."

No, we condemn Israel for conducting illegal acts. Even if Mabhuh had been a baby-eating demon from the nether regions of hell's sub-basement level, Israel lost the moral high-ground when they nicked other people's passports.

Er....

Wouldn't you prefer a 0.568 litre...?

Read what I wrote.

article: "as if the Gaels aren't getting enough of subsidy"

me: "they aren't" = they aren't getting enough.

Yes they get a subsidy, no they don't get enough.

Urdu, Hindi, Hebrew, French, German, Spanish, Polish... whatever language you care to mention, there are channels available on satellite, cable and the internet. The Urdu community don't need a BBC Urdu channel, because they've already got stuff to watch.

There's practically no Gaelic outside of Scotland, so Scotland is the only country producing Gaelic TV.

As for the "bagpipes and shortbread" comment... you clearly haven't watched the channel much. It is not an extended White Heather Club, it is a TV channel for a general audience. Yes, there's a lot of music output, but that's because music TV is relatively cheap. Yes, most of that's Scottish music, but then Scottish music is cheaper than pop particularly when they piggyback onto existing festivals and awards, as BBC Alba currently do. (And Scottish music is also much more likely to be available in Gaelic!)

The BBC's English channels have some great output -- particularly BBC3's Mongrels -- but much of their stuff would be successful commercially (eg Strictly Come Dancing) and isn't really fulfilling a "public service" role.

I love the BBC and have no problem with paying a license fee to maintain it, but if it wasn't for legislation and public money, nobody would be making Gaelic programming. Public service should be about making programmes no-one else would make, and Gaelic programming falls squarely into this category.

You're the odd one out then.

Notice that the *top 10* ebooks are outselling physical books.

It's the inverse-long-tail effect all over again. They said mp3 downloads would widen our musical tastes, and that music would have a longer "shelf-life", but in the end, we found that more people were just buying the latest big thing.

Same here with books -- everyone's buying the latest and greatest, and the out-of-print buyers are a minority.

Is it simply that the internet isn't good for (oh irony!) browsing books or is it that the infinite supply means you never pick up an alternative when the item you were looking for isn't in stock?

Either way, freedom seems to mean discovering less.

No, it doesn't mention that.

It doesn't mention that because it is not a legal argument. I do not have an automatic right to publish unsolicited adverts for anyone.

It's a moral argument, and incidental to the legal one.

Yeah, check it, blud.

Yo man, dis ICBM I has got is da bomb. Check it, it's well blingin -- it like solid gold man. See dat America? She is gonna be like soooooooooo jealous when she sees ma ICBM. She gonna be like "wow, man, you is like cool man".

According to the internet...

According to the internet, the Americans think this is an "Arabian proverb". Personally I think they fell for it, hook line and sinker.

As a Scot...

As a Scot, I can sympathise. We have our own parliament with its own budget that keeps getting the rug pulled out from under it by another bigger parliament that changes its budget all the time.

Re: Sigh - let the flaming begin

I'm going to try to avoid this being a flame, and try to stay rational.

The internet has in the last 10 years turned from something cool to part of the fabric of consumer and business life.

The internet was supposed to free us rural folk from the need to all migrate to cities when we grew up. I grew up, I migrated to a city. I would love to go back home, but the infrastructure just ain't there.

Leaving rural areas on dial-up is like giving them cycle paths instead of roads and saying the cost of their choice to live in the countryside is that they can't get access to fast transport. It's the country dwellers who need cars most, and it's the country dwellers, without access to the bright lights of the west-end party scene and close access to offices etc that need the internet.

The Western Isles were so badly served by BT that they had to develop their own too-clever-by-half wireless system that 8 years in is badly outdated, underspecced and riddled with faults. And not yet finished.

BT are a business, but they are also a monopoly, particularly in the sort of places we're talking about now. Capitalism abhors commercial monopoly. Socialism abhors commercial monopoly. It's time to nationalise the internet.

True, but...

...there wouldn't have been an "other side" if the Falange hadn't outsted the democratically elected government, in order to defend "traditional Spanish values" from the Spanish people, who didn't actually hold them to start off with.

If it wasn't for the war, the craziest nutters in some of the fringe anarchist groups would never have gained prominence, but when it comes to shooting you neighbours, being an amoral self-serving b*st*rd is a useful qualification.

Meanwhile, in the Truro WeightWatchers committee room...

"They don't like human flesh as we are not fatty enough"

Hey guys, I think I've got our next poster campaign -- "shed that sharkbait".

Reason? Reason?!?

There is nothing unreasonable about ill-informed internet ranting -- it is our human right to make broad sweeping judgements without full knowledge of the facts.

We thank the great demigod Berners-Lee for allowing our opinionated pub politics to be spread with the whole wide world. I will now sacrifice a mouse in his honour.

(Oh wait, someone's already nicked my mouse and reception have no spares...)

Would that be...?

Would that perchance be a "veil of tiers" then?

Language change.

This is a demonstration of linguistic evolution in action.

Remember that what you call correct, the generation before would call an error.

Wouldst thou prefer that nothing change?

Agreed^2

Quite right. Suing the public purse is pointless -- prosecute, or at the very least sack and ban from ever working with children again.

Absolute opposite of OO....

The point of OO is that the operations are intrinsically linked to the objects operated upon and the results of the operation. Lovelace was pretty much declarative, borderlining on functional, in her approach to programming.

Out of where...?

Given the record of public figures, I have to ask who put them there, and whether they were paid for this service or not....