Posts by Rich 11

Re: Awesome!

It's the unpublishable ones I'd really like to see.

Re: Not a lot has changed

It also bears a passing resemblance to the evening classes I took in 1981 (though implementation of software taking regard of date and pointer types was somewhat limited on a ZX-80).

Re: Interesting

"Alexa, tell Cortana to tell Alexa to fuck off."

Heh. I've just tried it. Alexa responds, "I'd rather not answer that."

She sounded a bit miffed.

Equality

Google$, Fa$cebook, Twi$tter... Happy now?

Re: IEC

It's why the US refuses to adopt many standards and uses "American customary units".

American Customary Units include such delights as US gallons, ungrounded electrical plugs and gerrymandered electoral districts.

Re: Incomprehensible

Can you imagine it, a bridge gets built, but then needs to be closed 18 thousand times for patches

Most bridges are designed to be single-function, mostly solid, mostly immovable objects, though, and meant to last for centuries; you can't say the same for any general-purpose OS. Bridges do receive regular maintenance to keep them fit for purpose (well, maybe not in Genoa), and are occasionally closed for things like widening, repairing the roadbed or even adding suicide nets, not to mention for carrying out repairs for damage caused by storms, floods and/or earthquakes.

That said, patching Windows does occasionally feel like painting the Forth Road Bridge. And they don't even have to repaint that every year now.

Anyone know how to block the production of ethanol dehydrogenase? I'd like that option when I'm on my deathbed. It sounds like more fun than slowly building up a tolerance to synthetic opioids.

Trust Us (c)

You can see why they dropped their 'Don't be evil' slogan, but what they conveniently forgot to do was replace it with 'Lie like a motherfucker'.

Re: Land of the Incarcerated

Hey, slave labour ain't free, you know!

https://www.cio.com/article/2417888/outsourcing/prison-labor--outsourcing-s--best-kept-secret-.html

Re: Americans need to alter the criteria for being allowed to be president.

He was even a really successful President

He was particularly successful at not being able to recall anything on the witness stand.

Re: Huh?

Moral: test the WHOLE system, not just your part.

Well, obviously. But how often do you get approval from manglement to risk the system going down by running those tests? If you're really, really lucky the entire team ends up working on the morning of Christmas day.

Re: Thanks, Labour

I don't think you can blame the council for the quality of the letter, though you can certainly blame them for the piss-poor excuse. If you look closely you'll see the contact is 'within Babcock LDP', a firm of educational consultants.

On second thoughts, you can blame the council: they outsourced the enforcement of their statutory obligations to a private company who employed someone unable to use a spell checker and took a slice of taxpayers' money as private profit. It also seems to be a private company which is owned by a chain of other Babcock limited liability partnerships, possibly culminating (the chain is too tangled for me) in a Babcock Corporate Secretaries Limited which holds interests in over 200 companies in the services, aircraft and arms sectors. Sounds like a nice little earner.

Smell my cheese!

Re: Shame

Freedom? I can see why that would upset some people but usually the ones who want control.

I have no problem with the personal liberty aspect. It's the deregulation and small government drive that goes with it. Look at the US and the ongoing removal of environmental preservation laws, the industrial fouling of rivers, strip mining and clear felling. It's all done to maximise profit now and pays no mind to the future. If you live downstream of a mining operation and the leachate gets into your water table, there's currently little recourse and Koch and his ilk are aiming for no recourse. Want low taxes? Of course you do. Then say goodbye to any form of social safety net and fuck the sick, the elderly and the poor. Doesn't matter because it's their fault for being poor because they didn't work hard enough, right? Or never managed to save any money because two minimum-wage jobs barely provides enough to pay the rent. Nothing to do with decades of schools being run down in areas of low property value, and definitely nothing to do with race because the US is a post-racial society now, right? Just put them all to work in prisons, where they'll be paid a dollar an hour and undercut local businesses (yes, prisons no longer make licence plates and mail bags; they run call centres and win ditch-clearing contracts). I once met an idiot who thought police and fire services should only be available to those paying for a contract with a given SLA; I soon found out he wasn't the only one.

Don't get even me started on healthcare, or the acceptance of quackery or the belief that desperate ill people have the right to be ripped off and die an early death, all in the name of freedom. Your piss-poor argument that exploitation via libertarianism doesn't matter because authoritarians do it too is hardly a clarion call for acceptance, is it?

Re: Curiously American

A right that is deserved, not earned. Extra annual days are earned, through long service, usually, but everyone deserves the opportunity to get away from work for a while and relax or just do life stuff.

Re: @1 hr A Non e-mouse

Whoosh!

Go and wibble elsewhere, sad little wibbler.

Re: Last time I checked Spain was in Europe...

It's that ugly 'one drop' attitude. If you look like you might have even the lightest of brown skin tones they leap (unconsciously or otherwise) to the conclusion that your great-great-great-great-great-grandmother must have been a depraved and immoral miscegenator.

Re: It was aliens wot did it

Many of us have known about this since at least 1973. Some of us were brought up on the late Lyall Watson's seminal Supernature, which included a chapter on how to keep a razor blade sharp by storing it overnight in a cardboard replica of the Great Pyramid.

That's the one! I picked up a secondhand copy when I was 12. I built a little cardboard pyramid and borrowed a used razor blade from my dad. I left it there for several weeks, testing the edge every day on another sheet of cardboard, and of course noticed that it just got blunter and blunter. At about the same time Uri Geller was in the news and on Blue Peter bending spoons, and I think he was the one who mentioned pyramids keeping bacon fresh. That didn't work either.

I've always been grateful to Lyall Watson for contributing to the development of my sceptical mindset (fair play, he did write well too). I refuse to thank Uri Geller for anything, though, the fucking fraudulent grifter.

Re: FFS - NO

There is no point to them.

Of course there's a point to them. They remind foreigners that they're not trusted, and they remind the rest of us that -- depending upon your political viewpoint -- either a) successive governments are happy to spend lots of money on a pointless exercise, or b) that it's only right to have a crackdown on those goddamn bogus asylum seekers who are really economic migrants and over here taking our jobs and our women.