Posts by Phil O'Sophical 6304 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Oct 2011
Does this mean that Scottish and Irish Gaelic are just dialects of Gaelic?
As I understand it, it's a bigger difference than a simple dialect now, even in Ireland there are three recognised dialects. Irish & Scottish gaelic started out as the same language but diverged over centuries, 'helped' by some spelling reform of Irish 80-odd ago.
I think it is someone asking a local the name of a river, they say river.
And why the Russian for railway station is "вокзал" (Vauxhall). Supposedly when standing outside Vauxhall station in London in the mid-19C and asking "what is that" (expecting "the station"), a visitor was told "that's Vauxhall".
you don't see Trekkies demand that Klingon also be added
I remember some Force(?) 68K VME boards that had over-sensitive RTS/CTS lines. If you left them connected to the modem cable at the card end, but unconnected at the terminal, the voltage generated from cross-talk on long data lines could cause all sorts of weird effects. Terminals would seem to work fine until some pattern of data on Rx/Tx would cause a modem line to drift just far enough to act as an XOFF and everything would seize up. Took a while to figure that one out.
how awful must Mrs Clinton be to lose?
Several things come to mind, in no particular order:
- If she hadn't been married to President Bill, would anyone have ever heard of her? She seems to have been a competent local senator, not much more.
- There was some concern that this was just a way to get BillC back into the White House by the back door. Personally I'm not convinced that was a valid concern, but some voters were.
- She's a woman, and there's still a part of the US voting population that finds the idea of a female president even less acceptable than a black one.
Biden at least scores better on the second two points.
I hope Biden will be different.
Not much sign of it so far, his platform seems to be essentially "Vote for me, I'm not Trump".
Last time round the Democrats should have won easily, with Trump as their opponent, but they still managed to pull a losing candidate out of their hat. It would be nice to think they could do better this time round, but Trump does have the usual advantage of being the incumbent: "better the devil you know". Biden needs to be much more than just "not Trump" to have a decent chance.
Used to be a problem when repairing VCRs (remember them?) as well. The tape beginning/end sensors were triggered by some clear leader tape at each end of the magnetic stuff. I've heard of bench technicians opening up a unit to repair a minor fault, and having it stubbornly refuse to operate at all, eventually traced to sunlight on a bright corner of the bench falling on the tape sensor once the cover was off.
So what does happen in Spain if not a second wave?
Same as in the UK, it's still the first wave that was paused due to the extreme lockdown, and is now picking up again with the easing of lockdown. To truly be a second wave would mean that it had dropped to undetectable levels, life had gone back to normal, and then it had come back.
What we need to do is to contain the spread until it either does die out (through immunity or otherwise, as previous SARS outbreaks have), or we have a vaccine. In the meantime we can at least use the treatments that we now have to reduce the severity of the symptoms so that people recover, and try not to destroy the economy any further.
It is far safer to have the false positives.
That depends entirely non how many real positives there are.
Assume that you have a test with a 1% false positive rate (which is extremely good, 2-3% is more likely).
Test 1m people, of whom 200K actually have it. 1% of the 800K who don't will show up as (false) positives, that's 8K. Not so bad compared to 200K, perhaps.
Now consider the end of the epidemic, when only 1000 people still have the virus. 1% false positive rate of the 999,000 uninfected people is 9990, that's 10x the actual infection rate and makes the test largely worthless.
It won points for the use of a socketed (and thus, upgradeable) CPU
So the CPU is upgradeable (which almost nobody does) and the storage and RAM is not upgradeable (which almost everybody wants to do at some time). It really makes you wonder if anyone in Apple cares about user-oriented design beyond getting the right curve on the corners.
Perhaps a simply star marking would help
I was at a water park/pool party thing a few days ago
Why?
it reminds you how easily Coronavirus rips through groups like that
Not sufficiently, it would seem.
Epidemiogists would rather over-estimate by a factor of 100 than under-estimate by a factor of 10 (or 5). There are some good reasons for this,
It's the "Michael Fish" effect, people remember poor predictions about disasters that then do happen for much longer than they remember the "sky is falling" ones that don't.
All those years of compliance (with a quite sensible and powerful-to-the-consumer law) will be wasted because of our "independence". They'll just cut the red tape so that their own projects (like the track and trace, etc.) don't fall foul of it either.
I can understand reasonable arguments pro/anti Brexit, but why do remainers keep spouting this ludicrous nonsense? Is it just a desperate attempt at propaganda, or blind refusal to understand the arguments of people you disagree with, in case they might be right?
We need to respect international rules to continue international trade (with the EU and elsewhere). British consumer and data protection law has consistently been tougher than EU minima, and tougher than those implemented by other EU countries (pre-GDPR the UK maximum fines were higher than those permitted in Germany, for example). Part of the parliamentary work before Brexit was specifically to enshrine GDPR in UK law, so that it would not just vanish afterwards. There is no credible reason to believe that reducing UK data protection to levels below GDPR is planned, useful or desirable.
They don't have the slightest clue as to what social responsibility is or what it means.
But that cuts both ways. Apple only exists because people buy Apple gear, so is it Apple that doesn't care about social responsibility, or Apple's customers? If enough of the people who claim to want social responsibility stopped buying Apple, would it make a difference? If not, that would suggest that it isn't really important.
And manufacturers are still flogging laptops without 8hrs battery life. No thanks.
I'd rather have a swappable option, like my current Lenovo. Lightweight battery with 3hrs life for general portable use, with a bigger battery that I can swap in when I'm in an all-day meeting or long journey and where the extra weight isn't an issue.
VAXen have a block-move assembler instruction MOVC3, which works much like the C function memcpy(). I remember trying to debug a program that would fall over occasionally, and when it did the resulting memory image made no sense. I eventually found that I had the arguments to the MOVC wrong, and when executed it shifted my entire executable program address space by 8 bytes. After that none of the symbols matched, and the debugger had no idea what was where.
At least that would only have affected my local program memory space, VAX/VMS having good memory protection. Way back in Uni we used ICL systems with a home-grown OS. It had an 'ALTER' command that worked much like a POKE in BASIC, and would allow you to read/change locations in your local address space, you could pause a running program & poke around in it. There was also an assembler instruction which would allow you to send a command to the OS from within a program, a la "system()" in modern C. Both useful, but no-one had tried combining them until one of my fellow students did. Turned out that the system() function was treated as I/O, and handled asynchronously, the command was queued and the program paused until it was executed, then resumed with the result of the command. Of course, on a busy system a paused program could be swapped out and another scheduled until the async operation completed. If you passed an ALTER command like that, since the system didn't have virtual memory, when the ALTER command was run there was no guarantee that the address it was changing belonged to the calling program any more...
My fellow student ran his program, and shortly afterwards every terminal in the room hung. Odd, he thought, but crashes weren't uncommon. We went for coffee, and when we returned the system was back, so he tried again. Same result... At that point he had the wit to call the computer centre and say "umm, I think that might have been me", so the end result was a thank-you from the sysadmin and credit for finding a bug, and not any punishment for crashing the main undergrad system twice in an hour.
After their android version started sending me political messages about not voting for TRUMP.......
That's more likely to be a MITM hack from your phone provider. Are you using a privately-purchased phone with a SIM-only deal, or did you get the phone from a network provider with their software pre-installed?
the fact that London has ceased to be the financial capital of Europe.
As of March 2020 London is rated #2 in world financial centres (behind New York). The closest European one is Geneva at #9, and the closest EU one is Frankfurt at #13.
what benefit -- in pounds and pence -- is Britain gaining from having left?
Little yet, of course. Brexit isn't a magic bullet, it's an escape from the constraints that are dragging the EU down to a stagnant, mediocre, economic polity. UK growth has always been better than the Eurozone, and will continue to do better, but it will take years, of course, for the benefits of Brexit to really take hold. That's always the case when a country gains independence from a controlling bloc.
Brexiteers claim that Britain will not be subject to foreign courts, but just a lie: if we want to trade, foreign courts will be part and parcel of any deal,
You misunderstand (or misrepresent) the situation. The issue is one of jurisdiction. Of course EU courts have jurisdiction over EU issues, and of course British trade with the EU will come at least partly under that jurisdiction and those courts. That should be obvious, no-one has ever claimed otherwise.
The difference now is that EU courts will not be able to overrule British courts on purely British issues.
Also EHCR
Both the European Convention on Human Rights and the European Court of Human Rights derive from the Council of Europe, not from the EU.The UK was a founding member, and is still a member, of the Council of Europe (which is much larger than the EU).
ITLOS
Not even a European body, it's the International Tribunal for the Law Of the Sea, and irrelevant in the context of Brexit.
Lastly, the claim that "we're never going back" is suspect and inherently naive: Northern Ireland is the closest to "going back", but the Channel Islands and Scotland both recognize a different balance of probabilities...
Since the Channel Islands were never in the EU in the first place, the question of going back doesn't arise. If Scotland were so foolish as to leave the UK and (re)join the EU I don't envy them the problems of policing the border. With NI there is an incentive for the UK to find a suitable accommodation with the RoI to keep an open border, but no such incentive would exist for England with respect to Scotland. They could just throw up a fence & leave the Scots to sort it out.
streamline many things common to the bloc
Ah yes, only one way to do it and everyone must do it that way. Whether it actually fits their needs or not. Not a recipe for success.
the ability to take part in trade negotiations representing an area of approx 460 million people meaning you generally get your own way and get to set standards,
Hmm, like the way they won that court case over Apple last week? Or the UPC that's the subject of this article, or...?
What the members actually get is the ability to do things the way a bunch of politicians think it should be done.
laws to protect everyone from discrimination in the workplace which went back to 1957
Are you sure? The EU directive against racial discrimination in the workplace dates from 2000, that for male/female discrimination from 2004. The equivalent UK laws long predate those, as do most UK consumer and employee protection laws. UK employees have a 28 day minimum holiday allowance. the EU minimum is 20 days. Sure, we opted out of the working time agreement because it was too restrictive. I work in an EU country today and the only way I can get my work done in an international environment is to ignore the rules. It's my choice, why should I be prevented from working the hours I want to, in order to be successful?
The fact that you only barely managed to go on holiday to the EU doesn't mean that other people don't think the EU was useful.
Aaaaand there it is, the snide remainer ad-hominem attack when you run out of arguments. Some of us Brexit supporters have lived and worked in other EU countries for decades, we at least have seen and understand both sides of the discussion and can make our choices based on the facts.
there has to be Brexit and, if that's not good enough, Brexit without a trade deal, too. It's friggin national suicide cult.
That's the same crap that was produced before the withdrawal agreement was signed, and it wasn't true then either. The only people who don't want one are the remainers, so that they can have something else to complain about. There will be a trade deal, no-one wants otherwise, UK or EU.
"Not one non-hole driller has been able to explain what tangible benefit they think they have by not drilling a hole in the bottom of this boat".
That's possibly because we would know that there's more to a boat than the bottom, and by looking around intelligently we can find other places to drill holes that could be very useful.
Got any more silly analogies?
FM is realtime; DAB is not.
In both cases a 1 hour program(me) takes 1 hour to listen to, so both are realtime.
In both cases any observed point in the program(me) is delayed by a period from the moment when it was transmitted, either by processing delays or speed-of-light delays, but those processing delays are bounded and the speed-of-light delay is defined by the distance. FM radio is exactly as "real time" as the signals from this 100million-light-year distant black hole.
As for British Airways' other long-haul, four-engined aircraft, the Airbus A380, hope remains that flights might resume for the double-decked monster.
Why? The BA ones have the most uncomfortable cattle-class seats I've suffered on any modern BA aircraft, worse even than those on the 747 which were old but at least had more than a few mm of padding over a rigid plastic base. Feeling my arse beginning to go numb as we crossed Ireland on the way to SFO did not give me hope for a good flight, no matter how smooth and quiet the aircraft itself was.
I'd have more hope that the demise of hub & spoke travel, with it's double dose of security theatre and connections that are always too tight or too long, would kill off the need for all those monsters. A point-to-point A350 or 787 is a more comfortable way to fly. Air France had already started to retire their A380s even before the COVID-19 drop in traffic.
shrugged off with some spurious and disingenious arguments such as, "Ah well, they brought it on themselves!" and "It's a Black-on-Black thing!"
You're the only one doing the whataboutery and disingenious arguments. No-one has suggested that this is a "Black-on-Black thing", they have only related the facts that the slave traders (note the word, trader, one who buys and sells) bought slaves from Africans, shipped them across the world, and sold them. Look up the "Triangular Trade", or perhaps pay a visit to the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool. People of all races and nationalities profited from slavery.
It would appear that people are already forgetting the past story of this, which is all the more reason to reject these cosmetic language changes designed to make people forget about the history.
I just can't understand why anyone would be opposed to it.
Because it's like wallpapering over subsistence cracks in your house. It does nothing to fix the problem, and just hides the real issue while allowing people to say "Look, I did something, aren't I good".
in which case you're probably 68% likely to be white European, which means your ancestors most likely benefitted from colonialism & slave trading.
The slaves that were taken to America from Africa weren't created by white traders. Those traders bought the slaves from (black) Africans, they were often prisoners taken during tribal conflicts. It wasn't just the white traders that benefitted from the trade, it was all those involved, all along the line. Painting this purely as white colonial abuse is itself a racial slur.
Why is your instinctive reaction to efforts like this to want to shut them down, to belittle them, dismiss them as either pointless virtue signalling or an attack on western democracies?
Because it prevents people from discussing and solving the real underlying problem. You don't fix history by rewriting it to hide the abuses of the past, that just hides it so it can happen again.
Are you really opposed to this for the reasons that your kneejerk reaction says you are
Yes
or would you rather not have to think too deeply about it because it's not your problem?
The historical issue isn't my problem, because it happened generations before I was born. My problem will be preventing it from happening again, which I do by helping to educate the next generation about why it's a problem. Hiding the words used to describe it does not help with that.
There is at least one - Chi Onwurah for Labour.
There are over 100 MPs with STEM backgrounds: 57 Tory, 36 Labour, and a smattering of others: https://www.sciencecampaign.org.uk/engaging-with-policy/science-in-westminster/mps-to-watch.html
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