Posts by disgruntled yank 2040 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
Somebody or other had a Strava map showing very neatly the location of a base in Afghanistan. It was amusing, but I can hardly imagine that anyone in the province, whether friendly or hostile, or simply concerned not to get blown up by land mines or sentries, didn't already know this.
Perhaps Twitter will add a geolocation feature, and shock all the tourists who didn't know where the White House is.
Given that Wikileaks splashed a lot of Clinton's emails, the POTUS probably thinks that Wikileaks is a grand operation. Now, his ability to think the same thought for any length of time is limited, and the fellows in the three-letter agencies probably don't care for Assange, so I don't entirely blame Assange for being jumpy about this.
"Many suspected racism on Donald's part: although a US territory, Puerto Rico is predominantly Spanish speaking, with fewer than 20 per cent of residents speaking English."
Even if El Reg gets its information about Spanish-speakers from reruns of Fawlty Towers, surely somebody here has noticed that there are quite a few persons in all hemispheres with Spanish as a mother tongue and Spanish surnames who are as pale if not as orange as the president of the US. As it happens, the residents of Puerto Rico are largely of African descent.
"Scandal hit in 1972 when “Big Mac,” the Grand Champion steer, was ruled ineligible. It had been previously entered at the American Royal Show in Kansas City as a white steer, but had been dyed black for the National Western Stock Show!"
(https://www.azcentral.com/story/entertainment/events/2016/01/21/national-western-stock-show-through-years-history-colorado/79141426/)
What this does not tell you is that the judges at the National Western Stock Show did not go purely by color of coat in taking Big Mac for a Black Angus, but also inspected membranes fore and aft: the kid who passed off the Hereford (I think) had gone to considerable lengths.
Well, three can play at that game. I think that a German cruiser cut the cable to Australia in 1914, and I know that the US cut the (Spanish) cable at Manila in 1898. And the US and perhaps the UK did a lot of tapping of Soviet cables during the later days of the Cold War.
As you've surely guessed, is the Bayou Tapestry. Not as old, mind you, but the food and music are much better. And maybe the weather, depending on your tolerance for heat and humidity.
Seriously, I have heard a local pronounce "Bayeux" as "bayou". I hope that he didn't cause any fainting spells in Normandy.
Well, the jurist Learned Hand did say that in his worst nightmares he was the defendant in a trial by jury. Having said that, the jury you end up with might depend on what your attorney can use in the way of peremptory challenges; the one jury I was on that sat until a verdict was OK. And de Tocqueville in some of his notes on the American legal system remarked that judges often end up by thinking that everyone is guilty.
I have heard plenty of these, but don't recall them being much used.
For connoisseurs of this sort of thing, you might see what you can find of the defunct journal Maledicta. I never saw the journal itself, but the Atlantic once carried an excerpt from an article on the medical profession's terms for patients.
The use of marijuana is now legal in the District of Columbia. At a paraphernalia store on Columbia Road NW, the electronic sign says says "NO FREE GRASS", followed by "PLEASE DON'T ASK". But ask any politician outside the Atlantic drainage, and some within it: people in the heartland are the salt of the earth, those along the east coast are soulless parasites.
The article that the story thoughtfully links to includes the sentence
"Consequently, we have reached a state of affairs where the public think that the QUEEN ELIZABETH is a late, leaking and broken white elephant without any planes."
Does The Register have any idea how the public got that idea?
Bob, it appears that California is heading for a shortage of capital letters and exclamation points. Should I email Governor Brown?
Remind me how failure to water lawns induces wildfires. Would hairy-chested libertarian Californians be heading out to water the scrub and grasslands but for socialist oppression?
(And I am very disappointed that you didn't reach for Mike Royko's old "Governor Moonbeam" moniker for Jerry Brown. Kids today...)
Try searching as "Jason Rammed". (No, I've never met anyone with the surname "Rammed".) A whole lot of Jasons posted
"Before leaving office, the Obama Administration rammed through a massive scheme that gave the federal government broad regulatory control over the internet. That misguided policy decision is threatening innovation and hurting broadband investment in one of the largest and most important sectors of the U.S. economy. I support the Federal Communications Commission’s decision to roll back Title II and allow for free market principles to guide our digital economy."
Don't know about septic tank cleaners, but there has been litigation about access to construction work, mining, and a number of other tough jobs in the US. These jobs are not well paid compared to law or much of IT, but as blue collar jobs go they pay well, and some women want them. Some women who have wanted them in the past have had to go to court to get hired, and often enough put up with a bad time at the work site.
Having said that, I don't know the hand-wringing over IT is particularly worth it.
But "Sacred Cow of Diversity" would be fine name for a band.
" Campbell commented: "It's rare in computer forensics for criminal cases, whatever the alleged crime and if the user is male, not to find traces of porn viewing, especially in late-night sessions. The evidence in my experiences is that that is a norm for most British blokes, even those whose religion might forbid it. If he was working late, it's to be expected."'
Most British blokes, or most British blokes who come to the attention of the law?
Long ago, I applied for a Denver taxi job. I assume that had I taken the job, the company would have checked my license information with the state motor vehicle department, but it didn't sound as if this would have happened quickly: data processing then was not what it is now. The main requirement that I remember was that I provide the company with a doctor's statement that I did not suffer from hemorrhoids. As it happens, a better job offer came along, and the family doctor was spared the trouble.
First, what is "lefty leaning", as you describe Mr. O'Brien? Somebody not ideologically committed to be left-leaning, yet with a soft spot in his heart for tunes such The Red Flag and the Internationale?
Second, you describe Georgia as rejecting help with its voting systems as "a power grab from the centre". By "centre" do you mean the federal government? It is never so called in the US, and for that matter only real-estate developers ever spell the word "centre".
Finally, faith in democracy is my experience pretty rare. At any given time, a large chunk of the US would like to disfranchise another large chunk of the US, mostly on grounds that come down to "not voting my way". The jurist Learned Hand once said that in his worst nightmares he was the defendant in a trial by jury; what he thought of being governed by system that requires not unanimity nor even a majority, I haven't read.
My point, evidently as clear as somebody else's code, is that one need not fight one's way through regexes--as on the snippet of the main article, that there are sane and sound ways of using Perl to do this, e.g. somebody else's tested, documented library.
The point I was too hurried to make is that CPAN is a huge reason to use Perl.
Some years ago, it seemed good to write a script to transfer a bunch of posts from one server to another. In an uncharacteristic moment of common sense, I decided not to use regexps, and instead used HTML::TreeBuilder. That saved a great deal of trouble and time--my own, and that of the people who would have had to do copy and paste and discover on their own that, No, the new system does not support the blink tag.
Could I have done this in Python, rather than Perl? Yes, I suppose. But it worked.
" I am sorry that so many women feel wronged by me". The beginning of the second sentence, and it gets better from there.
"This advice from attorneys is one reason why as a community we can’t properly discuss the issues hitting our industry." No, the advice from attorneys that prevents discussions is "Settle, and get a non-disclosure agreement."
Hah! A friend of my wife's, a woman then about 50, applied for a job with an electronic publisher. The latter asked her what her SAT scores were. (Note to those from outside the US: this has nothing to do with P/NP. The SATs are the Scholastic Aptitude Tests that American teens take when applying to college.)
Thank goodness you aren't one of the sheeple.
Ah, yes, jury nullification. A splendid notion in theory, in practice the reason that for example the non-white population of much of the US lived outside the protection of the law for so long.
But I do see what you mean about social media. If there were a way for a voir dire to determine whether the potential juror wore out the caps lock key, it might well be a good thing.
I think that it is Bagehot who quotes someone as saying the cure for admiring the House of Lords is to go and look at it.
"I deduce from this that something cannot be right."
That is not a deduction. It is an inference, and might charitably be called induction. (Perhaps we should introduce a method of logic suitable to legislatures: the sillygism.)
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