Posts by Francis Boyle

Re: Scary

The one in four thousand figure applies solely to the present case. Extrapolating to the general case is in no way meaningful. Satellite end-of-life management is a mature art even if things still occasionally go wrong (because space is hard)..

Try

21" Trinitrons. Beautiful displays but moving one was some sort of labour of Hercules.

“talking bollocks”

If that's the British equivalent of Harry Frankfurt's bullshit, I concur. We truly live in the age of enbullshitification.

Compete amateur. Everyone know that you're supposed to replace blown fuses with live rounds. The way he's going the only person he'll kill is himself and what's a Darwin Award worth these days?

Re: Its "just" documentation

Or you could just clone Alan Turing. Seriously, given how successful the Bletchley Park people were in recovering information that was deliberately meant not to be recovered, I wouldn't be so pessimistic about the case were the problem is mere carelessness.

Re: Reminds me of the time ...

I'm pretty sure a genuine cunning linguist should be entirely capable of doing it upside down and back to front.

Nah

This is Hyperloop territory (I.e. makes sense in a science fiction setting – makes absolutely no economic sense in the world we live in.)

A certain Mr Schwarzenegger

might be able to be persuaded.

Wouldn't

the Haynes manual have been cheaper?

Yes, I use a Google account

on my phone. I also refuse to use my phone for anything remotely sensitive. I accepted long ago that my phone is effective a public space. My computer on the other hand – my entire life is there.

I'd call myself

a " free speech absolutist". I don't have a problem with people calling for other people to be killed*. What I do have a problem with is them doing that where there is a practical possibility of that someone will be influenced to do what they are suggesting**.

*Just to be clear, I mean I don't think the utterance itself should be illegal.

**Merely suggesting something, even in a "nudge, nudge, wink, wink" kind of way counts as incitement in my book.

Actually,

they prefer to be called the Knight's Tippler.

I was thinking

about just such a thing while reading the article. Yes have a ultra minimalist distro. That the easy part. The possibly difficult part would be a mechanism to reliably reinstall all the user software (complete with history) after an upgrade.

So it's actually AE

Artificial Eccles.

I've been watching old episodes of Mythbusters

and can confirm that exploding as expected can be very satisfying.

Ah, the play store

Having the search field at the top where people expect it but putting the search button at the bottom was a genius move.

Because I'm simply not masochistic enough to submit myself to the Gimp

Until Linux gets a genuinely powerful and usable photo editor I'm stuck in an abusive relationship with MS.

Daleks

are more you're demolition workers.

In other news

Nasa announces Europa to be renamed "America-a".

Re: Solipsism 101

I'm also here all the time but know you mention it I do feel a bit flickery.

"Type LA supernova"

are more typically fuelled by cocaine.

Easy

you just need to be a stable genius.

Re: That's the fault of car companies

Probably a good thing, then, that the only time you'll find yourself driving up or downhill in the Netherlands is when a cow has dropped an unusually large turd on the motorway.

I'm not sure

objecting to an order of magnitude error counts as pedantry.

Nah

Paul had already done that several centuries before. Constantine just made the Pauline doctrines official.

Trouble is

"actual harm" is too low a bar. Musk thinks it's "evil" to harm him by not buying his cars and by urging others to follow suit. Most sane people would think that's batshit crazy but he is indeed being harmed not just offended. In a robust democracy we actually have to tolerate actions that harm others. Otherwise no change could ever be possible.

Well

I am not a lawyer but they were probably worried about being sued.

At the risk

of pushing the analogy too far it's more like you broke into my house, stole my gold bars, and then your gold-selling business went kaput because you were caught selling gold-painted bricks. No liability there because my duty of care is unlikely to extend to your business interests.

Bags of garbage mostly.

Re: "Do no harm"...

FTFY: All humans are confidently wrong sometimes. Its part and parcel of being human. See also Dunning Kruger.

Nice oone

but I seriously doubt that 'data' (in the modern sense) counts as medieval English.

Except that, yes, most of these components have been carefully designed by experts in the relevant fields to solve specific identified problems. The fact that there is no overall plan and that the components themselves are frequently hamstrung by political compromise is an entirely different matter. I suspect the failure to understand that distinction is why so many people just cannot see why there is a problem with Trump.