Posts by TDog

Re: Lessons ?

I was once in court over a poll tax bill and challenged the veracity of the statements produced by Birmingham City Council's computer system. An affadavit was produced by their chief IT honcho to the effect that "the system was working in the normal manner...". I challenged that, pointing out that wording merely meant that the system was working as usual, not accurately. The basic response from the lay magistrate was something along the lines of "Oh dear" and the court paused whilst the professional lawyer who advised the court (clerk of the court) informed the magistrate of the consequences of acting on that information - that literally thousands of bills and fines might have to be repayed.

Eventually I sugested that I could help resolve the issue by agreeing to pay the £21,37 without prejudice and justice continued in its sureal manner. Best half day I ever took off from work - the entertainment value was superb. When I got to the court there were literally over 1000 cases to be heard and only 1 defendant attending. Me. I had anticipated waiting for ever whilst all of the cases for defendants whose names staarted with A-->M were tried but instead the clerk of the court simply said "is anyone here defending a case" and I stood alone. All the others were dealt with as a single entity in abstentia and as having pleaded guilty.

Ah, the theatre of Justice being seen to be done.

My main issue with smart meters is they can be remotely controlled. Too much sparky stuff being used in my county, London isn't getting enough for their high speed trading systems, quickly, reduce the number of users of sparky stuff. "No problemo, I have a little switch..."

It may well be 60K drone hours - running a flotilla of drones simultaneously.

Trouble is it leaves you a complete hostage to others. Imagine, you have just finished 5 years of seminal work on spermiferous tubules. It is your lifetime achievement and your doctoral thesis. You submit it for publication and... The publication notices that your uni's subscription to Word is 6 days out of date - the work is withdrawn and your doctorate viva canceled. All for want of a horseshoe.

Re: Computer wiped every month ?

Aye, and since Ogham has no notation for numbers you won't ever be sure of exactly what you are getting.

Re: Erm

I'm sorry to but into what is almost a private fightclub but might I point out that the value of EC co-operation on medicines was such that they, under the aegis of Ursula Van Lieden, attempted to hijack vaccines that had been developed in Cambridge and produced in Belgium for their own citizens (mertitocrats and beurocrats first?) against their own rules and only backed down under extreme pressure. The NHS is not perfect or good at many things including treating me, but at least I don't have to worry about them stealing (sorry, misappropriating) my medicines for their political convenience.

Re: 70 meters tall?

Shirley the question should be "how many metres are 70 Giraffes, and where are the feet placed on the Giraffe immediately underfoot. The image of Giraffes teetering on each others heads (facing backwards and forwards to avoid toppling) is strangely compelling.

I's seriously worse than that. Their previous settlement was a pay cut that left them earning less than barristers. So this doesn't really do anything other than partially reinstate the saus quo ante.

Re: "cost and lack of charging infrastructure"

i thought the green sticker referred to "little green men", universally known to be caused by nuclear power and or anal probing aliens

Re: Obsoleted?

Torpedo, spotting and Reconnaissance Mk 2; better known as the Swordfish. Simply the ultimate naval strike aircraft of WW2, in terms of kills per airframe.

Re: Does it work the other way round?

Or even worse (or better perhaps) A+B+C, and D+D. D+D is acceptable to the software in a civil partnership, or should be as there is no reason why Peter Jones should not get hooked up with Peter Jones.

Re: "this largely undocumented hellhole of keys and strings and dwords."

That's where I got my Turner - in a box of unsorted prints priced at about £5.00 each. Browsed through them and with trembling hands bought that one. And cringed as the shop assistent tried to fold it to fit into a large envelope. Fortunately I sort of said, "don't worry" and put it in my carrier bag.

Re: Ok adding my not so consipracy take...

Well Martin,

if you are a girl, of suitable age and temperament you may screw me. It's a kind offer but on reflection my wife would probably not allow it. But thank you for the thought. I'm sure, in time, if you persist enough you will find someone of a suitable gender for your personal preferences who will live a happy and fullfilling life with you. But whilst you are searching, ixnay on the exitbray. It;s a very polarising issue. Good luck.

Re: A successful pathogen

An optimaxed pathogen would

* be mild and not affect the host greatly

* be integrated into the host in every place

* make the host totally dependent on it

* give evolutionary advantages that outweigh the disadvantages to the host

* be easily spread and reproducible

* NOT BE YELLOW (shout out to explosions and ire)

(Ignoring the yellow bit, sort of looks like mitochondria and possibly may other inclusion organelles). Or even more interestingly cowpox, which supplanted smallpox cos it found an evolutionary niche that precluded smallpox from entering the host.

Another optimaxed pathogen that was hostile to the host would

* not kill the host untill the R factor was significantly greater than 2

-+

Re: Our data keeps going missing - we want a hostage

Done that for 30 years +, along with, and this is particularly useful.

NEVER SCRIPT EDITS IN SQL SERVER

Instead script creates and make edits in them. If you hit the run button by mistake the create will fail whinging about object already exists, and once you are ready simply change the create to an edit. Saved my ass often enough to be worth the small amount of extra effort, particularly if some bugger interupts you in mid flow.

And speaking of mid flow, never stand next to a co-worker in the urinals. That way neither of you will be disappointed.

Re: Not difficult

Or a different boiler.

Re: Excelent design - aliens must be proud

Well as all the prior literature tends to sugest "Anal Probing", for probes, (or maybe that is just too much of sexstories.com) could I please request that we melt the gold disc showing them where to find us. And if we can't do that, could we please melt the bit that shows the invitingly present USB(456231 C (Version 278/56/021), insertion point.

Re: I worry the "clean" nature may be being overstated here

Just to add a little more information. And this came as part of my OU degree in STEM. The electricity which is used in heat pumps costs about 4* the price of the gas that it replaces in a gas boiler. Thus even with an annual efficiency of 3 (a good value) this indicates that the user will pay about 4/3 the price that would have been paid had gas been used. The green advantage is often touted but as electricity production --> green then there is little to no net green effect. Of course, were the system to be running on dirty electricity the green effect would exist.

Been there, seen that. Mates die. Shit happens.

Re: That cat again...

I always had a problem with that. Why not place the cat in a humane evironment (if you must) or just ensure that life support is available for a week. Run the test with your 50% chance with your radioactive source of choice. Wait a week. open the box; if it is smelly and horrible then the cat died without the event being observed (unless microbes, viruses and whatever count as observers). If there is a strong smell of cat shit and pee, and the cat tries to claw your eyes out then the cat is still alive.

This in itself is not a proof nor a valid test. But the cat has a 50% chance of dying. Should either event occur then repeat the same until you get six sigma results; this is the gold test.

OR

you could simply note the amount of decay in dead cats. If it were bugger all then they have obviously only just died supporting the basic hypothesis of observer effect. And if they smelt like buggery then they died a week ago - so stuff anthropic principles (unless cat's are observers, so repeat the same test with bacteria and penicillin cultures doing the turtles all the way down thing) or accept actually it is a non proven load of bollocks. And then wait for the theoretical physicists to produce several hundreds of papers criticising the methodology, the ethics of the methodoloy, the new string theories that explain this, cosmic (insert your own word here), But the true winners will be the experimental physicist who will explain that you didn't specify the colour, spin and charm of the cat.

Loutus' internal reference for it was "fluffy bunny". And you are right, it was miraculous, and originaly released for the NEXT computer. Ah yes, I remember it well...

Re: Thermodynamics

Worked in an office in the early 90's in mid winter. CFO was an idiot who wanted to save money by cutting heating bills. I didn't, but some one genius wrote a script that ran infinite calculations on the PC's. As the CFO was not replacing staff whilst retaining the workload we were not his friends. So all the spare PC's were running at 100% cpu. It was between 1KW and 1/2 KW per PC. Not fan heaters deliberately but they all had "cooling" (heat redistribution fans). It was quite cosy. Still left.

Re: Betteridge's Law of Headlines

"because it's adding carbon into the cycle that wasn't there before"

Well it may not have been there recently but the last time I looked at fossil fuel creation it was from sequestered atmospheric carbon in a atmosphere generally similar to ours, albeit richer in carbon.

Re: Accuracy v. going rate?

Well, if you are trying to undo your flies time elapsed approaches infinity.

MagThor

Well one of the reasons you won't find many of the systems in museums is that the missile bodies were made of Magthor (A generic name for magnesium thorium alloys). This had the minor issue that thorium is radioactive - not such a worry when built but unacceptable now. The general idea was to lob low yield (about Hiroshima effect sized) warheads into approaching packs of Soviet bombers. These would in general have been subsonic, Tu-4 Bulls (B29 copy), jet powered Badgers and Bears. At maximum speeds none of these would excede about 650mph and were definitely subsonic. It was a lot better than nothing and preferably used during a time of offshore winds...

Nikes were intended as inaccurate weapons and would not affect hypersonic missiles, particularly as the missile wouldn't be ready to launch untill well after the hypersonic chappie was well past it.

Re: Stories from Grandad

Ah, but each one of the women is a singleton, hence the classification as 'odd'

Re: Even if its not a superconductor

"hang them as wires", How do lightning strikes work on superconductors? Is there any heat without resistance and do we get a wave propagating through the whole of the superconducting network, rebounding at inappropriately terminated end points and causing fantastic EMR effects. This could make EMP weapons childs play. I ask purely as a Gedankenexperiment,

But what if that was a target. Maybe this was a green promotion mod that went wrong. So considering the Trolly Problem, if the switch gave you a choice between hitting a tree and coming to rest safely in a field (addmittedly whilst running over some none considerred targets) this would be fine. Perhaps someone introduced an inadverdant ! (not) into the final decision tree. Trivial to fix and the sort of mistake that any progammer (well not me) could make whilst recovering from a hangover.

We've known about neutrinos since !930

Well Pauli first postulated them then. We still don't have a consistent capacity to describe them. (see Sabine Hossenfelder (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p118YbxFtGg)). When you find things that are seriously interesting but don't seem to want to know the rest of the universe, me, I personally think of Terry Pratchets (https://discworld.fandom.com/wiki/History_Monks#The_role_of_The_Order). The real and obvious question (carrying on with the neutrinos) is we are pretty terrible at watching them; how good are they at watching us?

So, if we are being honest, hoping to find out life changing models of things that we can observe because they happened about 3 bn years ago (or is this " dating back to ten billion years" meant to mean 10 billion years ago) when we can't even explain what is happening in our own neck of the woods seems a bit like building on the sand on a sandbank in the Goodwin Sands (running out of sands there) and expecting it to survive because we built it on a set of sands (got another one in) and that will be a sandtastic discovery. (not going to ack the last one, it was terrible. If (and I hope some of you can) you can post better please do).

We all should know that the Standard model of particle physics has some pretty big problems, even ignoring the neutrino (alleged) problem. It doesnt fit with gravity nor, the standard model of astrophysics. Maybe it's just me, but we seem to be searching for more and more defects that are a long way away whilst ignoring the mote in the models eye.

Re: seeing the way they have punished the UK for wanting to leave

I'n not quite sure what you are stating.

Once we had left the EU the lack of borders between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK was an internal issue for the UK, The concerns over the "soft border" with Eire and by extension with the EU could have been met by the UK simply stating that as far as the UK was concerned the border between Eire and the UK would be considered as open. It already was for citizens of Eire who have the rights to live in the UK and vote in the UK since the 1920's. This may have caused issues for the protectivist policies of the EU but that was not an issue for the UK. It would have met it's obligations under the Easter / Good Friday agreements.

Should Eire and by implication, the EU have chosen not to honor their agreement that would have been a peculiarly EU issue, not the UK's.

Re: Scientists

Well according to Harry Harisson it was cheese, (Star Snashers of the Galactic Rangers) but I'm not going to argue over minor details

Re: Unique keys

My sons first names excede 30 chars in length. I filled out his passport application and entered them all, there being suffificient squares of the form. I then got a phone call asking me what to do as there was insufficient space in the DB. I asked who was calling me and it was the passport agency. I advised him to as his boss as it was his problem; he said the boss had asked him to ask me! I muttered a comment that sounded like anchor and to my surprise he said, "yes, a total one". We agreed to ignore the last name.

Re: May??

Microgravitation related illness.

Ah, unless you are talking about in transit (and we have had folks in microgravitation for quite long time periods) then the last time I looked mars had a perfectly reasonable gravitation field.