Re: Threepwood!
The prophecy has come true!
2678 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Mar 2007
Thing is, Lars, she calls herself a socialist - though in practice she's much more of the social democrat that is the norm in Sweden. In fact she out-capitalists me sometimes... :D
But she calls herself a socialist and she knows all the talking points. I'm not going to argue with her about that, not unless I want to have my half of the bed redistributed between the cats.
No, he's pretty much right. Marxism is a pile of sophomoric rubbish thought up by a man who sponged off his rich parents and only got jobs to show "solidarity" with the working classes. Marx, the affecter of poverty who spent most of his working life as a piss-poor "journalist", would fit right in at the Guardian. He's even got the racism disguised as paternalistic "concern" for the poor oppressed foreign sorts down pat.
Socialism is a different matter, though as a righty I'm reflexively against the idea anyway (which leads to lots of interesting debate with the swedish socialist I find myself married to). And before you argue that socialism and marxism are the same: They aren't.
Compose + e + ' produces é, compose + e + ` produces è. Simple. I don't think I've encountered a keyboard yet that doesn't have the ` key on it somewhere.
You can also, if you're wondering, get a ´ by typing compose + ' + ' which is... well it's `interesting´ I suppose.
At least that's how it is on debian. I'm going to assume it's the same on OSX.
Everyone always seems to forget that Schrödinger's Cat was a thought experiment he devised to demonstrate what he believed to be the absurdity of the conscious observer effect, which holds that a particle is in a superposition of states until "observed" by some mysterious "observer", which has led to the silly idea that the universe doesn't exist until someone looks at it.
By and large, the hereditaries werent' all that wealthy - yes, I know, they often had a lot of land, but they didn't have much income from it. They also didn't receive a wage for attending parliament. Most of them had jobs of some sort, and a fair number even worked in industries relevant to the legislation they were scrutinising, or were hobbyists or passionately involved in some other way.
It wasn't perfect of course - you had your usual collection of imbeciles and wastrels that you'd expect in any hereditary system, but for the most part they only attended for as long as it took to get to the various bars and private dining rooms in Westminster Palace.
The end result was that the Lords tended to act as a brake on the profligate excesses of the executive and forced Parliament to pay attention to the detail of proposals before sending them for scrutiny, even after attempts to stuff it with appointed life peers. Naturally it had to go.
Nobody can legitimately argue that what we have now is in any way better than what we had before. I'd even go as far as to argue that very few alternatives would be better given they all rely on political patronage of some sort. An elected upper house, which has been proposed a few times, would probably be the worst solution of all. The only real alternative is to take the original principle of the Lords, which was essentially a sort of severely restricted jury service based on property and title, and generalise it to to the entire population. Appoint members to the Upper House by lot, have them attend for a fix period with suitable compensation. That way you can avoid the problem of appointed patsies, perpetual election campaigners and party-political ideologues (though you do potentially risk replacing it with a different set of ideologues) and instead you get a relatively reasonable cross-section of the population, with a higher chance that someone proposing or scrutinising legislation has some idea of what they're talking about.
Blue and Red, Green and Purple.
The difference between HS2 and the california thing is that HS2 has an extra political dimension to it. Viewed purely in terms of Great Britain it's entirely pointless, replicating lines that already exist and that travel at almost the same speed, but it was never meant to be merely a line between London and Edinburgh. It's part of the European high-speed rail network. Viewed from that perspective it makes sense - at least politically, if not economically.
The benefit is in allowing reliable refurbishing of the engines at low cost instead of hoping that the engines survive immersion in sea water, which in turns cuts the cost of launches, as the engines can be re-used reliably instead of having to be built fresh for each launch.
On the capsule side, having it land at a designated landing site instead of splashing down would slash the recovery costs to a fraction of their current level. Instead of having to keep a bunch of ships and aircraft on standby to find the capsule, you can just walk up to it and open the door. And you can refurb and re-use it without much effort too.
How about having it very clearly explained that being a temp doesn't excuse you from taking part and then being let go right before Christmas - and right before the gifts are handed out.
If I knew then what I know now, that place would have stunk for weeks afterwards.
No, scrap metal is metal going for scrap. It can be perfectly useable but no longer useful - like the old cast iron radiators we used to scrap all the time when I was a builder. They worked. They didn't work well, so they were scrapped. That made them scrap metal, even though they were fully functional.
Perhaps they engineered it. Oh wait that was a noun that became a verb (before being a verb that became a noun), I guess we can't use that. Did they oversee the build? Oh wait that's a verb that became a noun too! Why it's almost like language changes over time!
Object if you like (lord knows I do) but don't act like it's some new thing. It's how language came to even exist.
What gets me - having just had a quick drive into town - is this idea that the reversing-around-a-corner manoeuvre is somehow useless as well. have any of these people ever tried pulling a car out of a parking spot? Or reversing into one for that matter. Reversing out of a driveway?
I get the feeling whatever committee thought up this pile of rubbish consists of lazy sods who get driven everywhere and probably haven't been behind the wheel for years.
When it comes to design, there is nothing truly original, which is why it's so easy to classify architectural and design periods through history - because they tend to trend. Say "Georgian" to someone in the UK and they'll immediately think of tall, elegant frontages, palisters, porticos, delicate sash windows with a dozen or so little panes and panelled doors. Say Victorian and they'll think stovepipe hats, dowdy black dresses, iron frameworks and lots of tall collars.
Design trends.
Ive thinks he led one. He just happened to be prominent and bring together several elements of something that was already occurring, as can be seen by other similar design ideas that accompanied or even preceded his work in various fields.
You could say the same about people who insist on making tea in a strainer rather than just using a bag. Some people insist that the old way is obviously superior and take great pleasure in the ritual of making their drink. Whether such things are pantomime or comfortable, pleasurable experience is entirely in the eye of the beholder.
That's pretty much what spectrum means these days, in contexts outside the measurement of light. One of its definitions is "a range; a continuous, infinite, one-dimensional set, possibly bounded by extremes." presumably taken from the near-infinite gradation of the electromagnetic spectrum. Words tend to get used for similar but distinct ideas and over time, and in differing contexts, change meaning in quite fundamental ways.
Since we're getting picky about words, however, I must stress that it's not Aspergers/autism. Aspergers is one expression of the condition and is more properly labelled as higher-functioning autism to distinguish it from more severe expressions of the condition. It's also not a disease.
Oh don't get me started on the video "tutorials" for every damn thing. They're worming into some pretty technical areas that are far better served by a page or two of text. Video and images as accompanying illustrations to highlight particular elements of the process are fine, but if you only provide a video it's not going to be much use to a lot of people. A piece of text I can skim back and forth to see and understand the processes involved. A video? Follow it by rote. Can't search it if something doesn't quite go right and I need to double-check. Can't skip ahead to the part I need without faffing around dragging the time bar thing back and forth until I get it just so. Can't skip my attention between the information and the project. Can't move at my pace, have to wait for the video to get to the point... the list goes on and on and on.
Blithering idiot. We had a well-organised, well-funded terrorist organisation just a hop across the Irish Sea from us for most of the latter half of the 20th century but they were mostly kept at bay without all of these powers the police and "security" services are demanding now. The ones that got through were almost entirely because reports of potential activity were ignored by the same kind of people now demanding all these extra powers.
Laboratory conditions strike again!
The problem with this test is that it doesn't appear to replicate the real-world conditions involved. The "bendgate" video showed uneven pressure being applied across a corner, which - unintentionally, I'm sure - is a more realistic representation of what would happen. A phone jammed in a front pocket, as reported at the start of the controversy, would be subjected to unequal pressure on one corner as its owner bent their leg to sit down and stand, or walk around. The problem is magnified if that corner is also the one with the controls, which present a significant weak spot.
The full cross-section of the phone is a great deal stronger than a partial section across the corner. Testing the full cross-section doesn't address the demonstrated failure.
The smaller phone is more robust due to the relative strength of the case material in cross-section. The larger phone is weaker. It's rare, but this bending issue obviously does happen, and it's a case of Apple apparently not realising that scaling the phone up without accounting for the square/cube law is asking for trouble.