Posts by the spectacularly refined chap

Re: "a persistent stare capability"

No, the men stare at goats, not the other way around.

Re: Sales

Quite possibly. I never saw this instance but the biggest sets they installed were the size of 40ft shipping containers - if you needed bigger than that you would chain multiple sets together since obviously road transport is the usual requirement. I wouldn't imagine we would've talking anywhere near that big but even "small" sets could be perhaps 5x5x20ft. I know my local hospital has several such sets dotted around the site (from the same company), presumably they are distributed to avoid the JCB through an on site power line thing.

Re: the parent has been unwilling or unable to provide appropriate alternative evidence

OK, so a 13 year old has a kid... Four or five years years later that kid needs to go to primary school. Mum herself is still in education and thus not paying taxes.

Congratulations. Your pig-headedness has deprived that kid of an education. Be sure to pat yourself on the back in twenty years every time she collects her welfare payment as she is now unemployable.

It doesn't even have to be so extreme, with the state of house prices children are staying with their parents later than ever. The grandparents may pay their property taxes but that doesn't cover the grandchild. Tough, you don't care.

Your taxes pay for a public service - liability for that tax is a political consideration generally based on the individual circumstances. Entitlement to public services is based on an entirely separate set of considerations.

Re: Pascal nil pointer

No one is suggesting you can get rid of null/nil pointers and leave everything unchanged: the language needs further changes to plug the gap.

Since you refer to lists the conventional view in functional programming is that they are either empty or can be decomposed into a head and a tail, i.e. the first item from the list and the rest of the list. You can't even attempt to take a value from an empty list, there are not the language constructs to go that. You can attempt to decompose it which will cause a error but an empty list has a distinct value of its own.

Coupled with pattern matching, again popular with the functional languages, you can test each possibility (not just two, and over multiple variables) in a very uniform way that makes it easy to identify if there are any corner cases left uncovered, indeed the compiler will frequently issue a warning in the case of a non-exhaustive pattern match.

Probably not. This is simply screaming "I've never had a girlfriend ever".

He may as well wear a shirt sponsored by Richard Branson.

Re: 250 years only ? Maybe add a couple of 0s.

I didn't realise America even had any history until I saw a few Jago Cooper documentaries. Far more interesting than the cartoonish stuff you get from US media outlets.

It's like saying that they should be prosecuted for their little peccadilloes

Little peckers, surely? One of the most prominent is famous for his tiny hands.

Re: Parents

You would hope most parents would. However there is only a window of two months to make secondary applications and four and a half for primaries. Those periods are spelled out in law and we can't change them. In year applications such as when moving into the area work differently since clearly they can happen at any point.

In practice you'll have three basic categories of parent - perhaps a quarter will be eager and looking into this as soon as they are out of the maternity ward, half will need a reminder that it is time to put an application in and the remaining quarter need prodding and poking all the way. As a county we still have hundreds of children not in school and even prosecution doesn't always help.

The primary motivation for lower voltage was cooling rather than signal effects. The original Pentium-60 and -66 at 5V were well known for running particularly hot. The Pentium-90 was the first at 3.3V and was a lot cooler. ISTR many (if not all) DX4-100 and (AMD) DX4-120s were 3.3V for the same reason.

Re: ransom fees and copper cables

why can't I keep using my modern one, that works absolutely fine

You can, and probably will, carry on doing so. The media have done a good job of getting this back to front - the copper is staying for now and it'll probably be many decades before everything is fibre. What is changing is the equipment on either end, the same copper line will now carry a digital signal rather than an analogue POTS one.

They'll replace the copper at some point in the future as part of a local refresh but the equipment in the exchange is being updated over a much shorter timescale. Putting everyone on digital simplifies the equipment there and potentially allows greater speed over those same lines in the medium term, as backwards compatibility with POTS equipment and signalling does not need to be considered.

Re: A reminder

You can have as many username/credential pairs aliased to UID 0 as you like.

Re: De-intellectualisation?

No, not craters.

Just a gas leak that caused an estimated 16,000 deaths. Yes, Union Carbide is part of Dow now.

Fortunately they were Indian and thus apparently don't matter.

Sounds like the lyrics to a Weird Al song.

Yes, that's AL, not AI.

Re: The only banking app that didn't accept payments

Payments out? Still website only.

It's 2026 ffs.

That sounds ideal to me. I hate those words "you can use our app for this..."

Particularly when it is functionality that works fine on the desktop website but is mysteriously not possible on the mobile site. Yes I may be using a phone instead of a desktop today but that isn't an excuse: if you demand I install an app I am forced to conclude it is for nefarious purposes that my web browser would block for security reasons.

It's 2026? Yes, that's exactly why I maintain the above.

It's a well known saying...

Those that can, do.

Those that can't, teach.

Those that can't teach, teach teachers

Re: an ‘entity’ that probably has something like emotions

It's a glorified pattern matcher. It can't be insulted.

Then why do my computers start behaving when I threaten them?

Yes those seem to be caught up too. If everyone was rational and shill bidding was taken seriously it wouldn't make any difference. However neither of those is true. People do get carried away and bid more than they originally intended and blatant shills and bid retractions do not get actioned even when reported.

Another use is for bid groups - I want an X, here's eight current listings - bid up to £a on that one, £b on that, £c on that one until you win one for me. Incredibly useful and avoids you getting carried away on individual auctions when there are plenty of options available.

Re: It's a good thing that in New Outlook, save to OneDrive is the only option then

Time to quote Michael Elkins on Mutt...

"All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less."

Re: 10 years after

Whoopie doo!

"My stuff is easy to migrate on account of it being simple and boring. Sod anyone else."

I love this feature. It is the fastest way to copy paste with mouse selection.

Of course it is, because it pastes the text al opposed to the text+formatting which when taken from another source will almost certainly not match the document you are writing.

Presumably whoever decided that would be the default will end up in the same part of hell as the chap proposing this new misfeature.

Re: I used to like

It would also frequently blow on onboard fuse if you did attempt to hot plug it, generally meaning a new mobo.

Re: There would be plenty of budget available for NASA ...

They favor military spending because our constitution allows them to do that. Feeding, clothing or educating aren't really things that our constitution intended for them to do.

The US Founding Fathers were against the establishment of a standing army, indeed they observed that most coups against established civil power either originated in or are contingent on the military. This is why there is a constitutional bar on defence appropriations for more than two years at a time, but not for any other form of spending - the government can raise an army as needed, but it wasn't intended to be on an ongoing basis.

It is also where those second amendment rights to arms come from. In a country without a regular army the ability to raise a militia for the protection of the state becomes a sensible safeguard. It was not as frequently portrayed for protection from the state, which is the goal of all the other clauses in the constitution.

Re: Calculators

If you want a nice HP calculator go to Swissmicros. The "real" HP calcs are distinctly average algebraic types these days.

Re: Have We Reached "Do No Good" Yet?

What? No "Beware of the leopard" sign?

Arguably the split went ahead At the beginning of the 90s IBM were a one stop shop - You could have an IBM base unit coupled to an IBM monitor and IBM printer. Inside the base unit was an IBM processor and an IBM hard drive, and it was running an IBM OS. They don't do any of that now, bits have been split off as new entities (Lexmark) or sold off as unprofitable (HGST, Lenovo). IBM is now a services company with a sideline in big iron, they are a shadow of what they were.

Don't they have GPS as a backup, then direct the ntp daemons to use that, configured as stratum 2 just in case, until the primary reference is up again?

Be careful, it's turtles all the way down.

Where do you think the GPS clocks are synced to?

I thought of that too, and also it's amazing you can design something to make the BMW C1 look stylish.

Re: Nice try.

It has to be linked...

Re: Pulling out the old foot-gun?

That is merely channelling George W. His great priority was The War Against Tourism, when he wasn't busy being proud of being a merkin.

Re: More cloudybollocks

That only really works for the joyriders.

A professional thief won't give a Ferrari, Bentley or whatever a second glance, they are far too niche and attract far too much attention.

Much better to grab something mass market and anonymous, much easier to pass off under a cloned identity, or break up and shift as parts.

Re: A few things will always be missing

Please, please, go away and read up about what you wish to pontificate about.

The Tivoization controversy has absolutely nothing to do with aggregation as even 30 seconds of research would have shown you. Rather it was about digital signing. An executable image for the device needs to be signed with a secret key. Without the key you can't correctly sign the image and the hardware will refuse to run it.

Thus, no you can't create your own valid executable and yes, GPL2 does nothing to prohibit that.