Posts by Robert Brockway

Re: anti-crime

Some offences have an element of intent, some do not.

There is a defence in common law called "honest mistake of fact" in which a person can be excused from otherwise criminal behaviour by virtue of really believing they were acting lawfully. The example given to me many years ago was of a person driving the wrong car out of a carpark because it looked exactly like their car (to a reasonable first approximation) and their key worked. Back in the old days of physical keys there weren't that many combinations so the chance of a matching key was higher than many might expect. Also, very old keys were known to be good at opening car doors.

Obviously, this defence does not work for all crimes.

Re: I have a code of conduct

Everything in moderation, including moderation -- anonymous.

Re: Not in IT...

"Indeed, you thought you had just reduced a\ wage bill, but you actually threw away valuable capital that you have invested a lot of money in (that knowledge and experience)"

Precisely. The fact that this seems to be common knowledge in IT circles but unknown to management in so many companies is worrying.

Octothorpe

We can distinguish between the name of a symbol (arguably octothorpe) and its pronounciation as 'hash' , 'pound' or 'number sign'. This is analagous to the '&' character which is known as an ambersand but pronounced as 'and'.

Fun fact: ambersand used to be counted as the 27th letter of the English language. We've lost other letters over the centuries too but anyone interested should use their favourite search engine to read the fascinating story of the English Alphabet.

Re: What will happen during a war?

There are a number of problems with MAD. Two that come to mind:

(1) It presumes both belligerents are rational players.

(2) It presumes that both are in command of sufficient accurate information to be able to make an informed decision.

Re: Soldier?

In that case the soviets had portable factories. In the face of a German invasion in WW2 they completely dismantled many factories in European Russia and reassembled them in the Ural Mountains and beyond. I've always been impressed by that.

Railways were apparently the key to moving the factories.

Re: Passed through the BS -> English translator

Ok Wallaby we get it, you don't like Linux :)

Posted on a Debian GNU/Linux 9 box running fvwm2 and Chrome.

Re: Political correctness BS

[In response to a comment that almost everyone is posting anonymously]

Not me. I've been openly speaking out about political correctness gone mad, and related topics, for years. Every time someone stands up it's easier for the next person.

I'm amazed that you've been down-voted so much. A problem in IT going back decades is that most consumer grade systems are sold critically short of ram. The price difference is small but the performance difference is huge. The general public don't realise how serious a problem this is.

My main desktop system at home until recently was maxedout at 32GB ram. It was 6 years old and failing. I replaced it recently with a NUC maxed out at 32GB ram. Next system will probably have more.

Re: Hmmm...

There is precedent here. The kernel still tests for the F00F bug on boot and applies the kernel-level work around only on systems that need it. Thus the slow down is only applied where it is needed. I expect this will happen in this case, although we are talking about a significant architectural change here.

Re: Solution for what?

The entire point of the proposal is to _force_ private interests to invest, recognising that they won't do so voluntarily. The problem is that neither public nor private institutions are prepared to invest in truly long term projects today and he's arguing we need to change the rules so that these investments are viable. One option, for example, would be to require investors to invest $1 in long term projects for every $10 they invest in anything else. Such things are possible through government regulation and proper oversight. Any such effort would have to be international of course.

Many of the economic institutions of today, such as a central bank and income tax, are quite recent inventions. Just because it hasn't happened before doesn't mean we can't do it, and people born in 50 years time may be surprised to discovered it was ever otherwise.

What we would need would be widespread buy-in that it is necessary. That's what we don't yet have. Hence, I presume, why this idea has been publically proposed now.

The master/slave terminology have been dropped from OpenLDAP. Now they are producers and consumers.

Re: Friends take care of friends

These five industrialised nations that (mostly) speak English and have a common cultural origin are conveniently placed around the world allowing them to watch each other's backs very nicely.