Posts by Arthur the cat 3382 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Aug 2009
It's honestly bewildering how this can have occurred, as larger companies like Boeing are under much deeper scrutiny with the regulators practically living in there.
Hasn't the FAA switched to self-certification for the big manufacturers because of budget cutbacks and subsequent lack of staff?
I am told that more than one senior royal declines to wear hats in food factories etc to stop anyone getting a hair sample off them.
Just WTF do they think is going to be done with the sample? Clones to secretly replace them? Or is it more wanting to avoid paternity suits? For some royals the latter seems very likely.
Soon the Dutch will pay for their overthrow of James 2nd
Considering a third of the Netherlands is below mean sea level and another third is below mean high tide level, I think they've already thwarted your plans.
Fun fact: Schiphol airport is the only international airport that's located at the same place as a major naval battle.
3. Charge spots, there's just 4 in my 60,000 pop size town about 10 miles outside London!
Just like the future, charging spots are here, they're just not evenly distributed.
In my neighbourhood alone, a mostly late Victorian/Edwardian housing estate of ~500 houses, we've got 7 on street chargers, each capable of charging two cars. The city council has installed/is installing 70 charging points in its car parks and there are ~100 public charging points in total. This is for a city with a population of ~120,000 where 26% of journeys is by bicycle.
If you still have AM broadcasts you can still build a crystal set. [Snip] A few years later I remember you could buy a small toy crystal set pretty much as above but with a germanium(?) signal diode
It's worth remembering that cat's whisker detectors were primitive Schottky diodes, so if you want to play about with a crystal radio but don't want the faff of getting the crystal to detect, just grab a 1N5817.
Where does this myth come from that Microsoft never breaks apps? That happens with every major Windows release, which is why so many people try to avoid upgrading.
I think the MS approach is to never intentionally break apps. They just accidentally break apps and/or change the interface so drastically that they're as good as broken.
Years ago I took a tour of a wastewater treatment facility. Had a nice drink from the water fountain at the end, which was fed by the plant output. It was purer than tap water - no chlorine or other disinfectants in the final product.
Here in the UK our current regulations prevent such clean water being introduced to the water supply directly. Instead it has to be put into the nearest river, which is contaminated with all sorts of crap (literally), and then the river water is cleaned up at great expense to be pumped into out houses. Horrible inefficiency and a waste of money, all because some people are squeamish.
I want the proponents of these ideas to answer two questions:
1. Where's your peer-reviewed proof of concept that shows it can be done effectively and safely?
We are the government, we know this is what is needed and will work. We do not need experts.
2. Can you produce a convincing argument that this is consistent with the presumption of innocence, a legal principle that has kept us safe for centuries?
We are the government, we would never do anything to harm our legal principles.
Also: We are the government, we decide which answers are satisfactory, not you oiks and troublemakers.
Read Dogs of War and Bear Head by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
As a reading recommendation that's great, but in real life we're probably further from uplifted animals than we are from one way trips to Mars.
And for the latter, read A City on Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith. (TL,DR: not a good idea with our current knowledge, only an idiot would be into.)
At one place I worked there was a tricky bit of geometry code that was originally written in Fortran IV by someone with a grasp of mathematics but little programming style which would PAUSE 666 if it hit a case it couldn't handle. Some years later it got translated into C by someone who didn't understand the maths, and the PAUSE 666 statements got translated into an error message that was potentially user visible, although the guy doing the translation believed it would never actually occur. However, the code was being pushed a little more than it had been before, so not long after the C version of the software was released we got a complaint from a customer saying what does "one of Klas' hairy cases" mean?
Missing it once in a lifetime is unfortunate, missing it twice would be careless - though being dead sounds like a reasonable excuse
The latter will probably be relevant for me. There are no centenarians in my family, nobody's got past 80 which would leave me nearly 30 years short.
Since when was a corporation covered by the first amendment?
Since they became incorporated in the US. Incorporation makes them "a legal person"(*).
Corporations can’t talk!
Speech isn't just talking. Burning a flag has been ruled an act of speech, for example.
(*) IANAL and all that, but that's what incorporation is all about – making the company a "person" that can be sued rather than having to sue the partners/owners.
The cleaner will just unplug it from the UPS for their vacuum cleaner.
There's a lot to be said for using a fused spur if you can, but it's a bugger finding low voltage power supplies that aren't meant to plug into a standard mains socket. (If you know of any that can be wired into a mains spur, please let me know in a reply.)
The big problem was finding an Algol-68 complier to run on your hardware and OS.
Algol 68R was my first programming language(*) and later I ported Algol 68C to Pr1mes. It was just a matter of being in the right place at the right time.
(*) I worked at RRE where it was written and learnt it by being given an existing program that modelled the electronic structure of semiconductors and told to add spin-orbit coupling into the modelling.
Because you can't write a Javascript of Python interpreter in those languages (not without going turtles all the way down)
It's not that you can't, it just that nobody has yet. IIRC Squeak and Pharos (Smalltalk derived systems) are written in themselves, as are several Lisps. Turtles all the way down can be a very elegant solution, once you apply the fixed point combinator.
The largest, up front problem with C++, is that the language is so large that I doubt anyone, including the gray bearded language lawyers, knows all its nooks and crannies.
Fun little test(*): So you think you know C?.
(*) For C not C++. Since C++ templates are Turing Complete I hate to think what an equivalent test for C++ would be like.
Why create a safe Systems Programming Language when we should be creating a safe Application Programming Language.
Because systems software underlies everything we do with computers so if it's borked everything is borked, and application languages often eschew the low level features necessary to do things like bringing up memory management and initialising I/O on a freshly booted machine.
You're forgetting that no new stuff can ever be any good in the field of IT. If it hadn't at least been considered by 1973 then it's no use.
Although I will happily admit that many things in software are getting better, there was work done before 1973 that was very good but got lost because it was "too expensive" and has ended up being painfully reinvented since. Multics, Burroughs memory safe stack machine architecture and RISC load/store architecture are the ones that come to mind immediately. Reading Dijkstra's notes will bring up other lost ideas. And there's whole new steaming piles of nonsense being created in software today as well as the good stuff. Software obeys Sturgeon's Law and it takes time for the filters to refine it down to the good 10%.
workers united will never be defeated
Given my innate cynicism and too many decades of watching industrial relations in this country including nasty union on union turf wars(*), I'd correct that to: workers united would be a fucking miracle.
(*) As opposed to TERF wars, which are a whole new pile of shit I don't want to go anywhere near.
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