Posts by david 12 2373 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jul 2009
The system works by extorting guilty pleas, by threatening insane judgements, from legislation enacted to please the proportion of the population who went to the colosseum to see christians and other criminals tortured, and flocked to public hangings in London.
Joshua Schulte didn't plead out, so he got the vengeful entertainment sentence.
It would be interesting to code a VBA version and do the comparison -- I'm not certain it would come out ahead. Excel has a highly optimized cell-calculation engine. There's also the HPC extensions for Excel -- I can't help but wonder what the HPC-Excel extensions version with the (High Performance Computing) server would look like. Speaking of which, is there a performance difference in "Microsoft 365??
The other people in northern Europe, or at least the UK,
Heat pumps probably make sense in England, where pumping heat from the "cold to the hot" is possible, but not in central Canada and northern USA, where pumping heat from the "very-cold to the hot" requires double-pump technology or new refrigerants. There is ongoing research, and funding from the DOE. The same is true in parts of Northern Europe.
Self healing power grids sound like fantasy. You'd need multiple redundant routes and spare capacity.
Yes, that's how existing macro-grids work. The are called "grids" because of the multiple redundant routes. When the source talks about "within 5 years" and "software upgrade", they are talking about existing grids.
It's not an idea for upgrading grid inter-connects: it's an idea for upgrading grids. Grid inter-connects get a lot more discussion, because they are significant and unusual, but grid connections are ubiquitous and critical.
And those grids each have a history of falling over, each like a row of dominoes. But they haven't been broken up, because each of those grids creates resilience: the grid is tougher than it's constituent parts. There is an obvious and real contradiction in aims: each domino in the grid is supported by the other dominoes, but each domino has the potential to take out all the others.
So here's a suggestion to break up the mega-grids into micro-grids, and here's a discussion at The Register, where the idea of making the mega-grid more stable has been derailed by a discussion of generating capacity.
The state and federal governments are also "non-profit". They don't run at a profit either. Of course, the argument that St Anthony's is "non-profit" is a little shaky, given than that it's in a notoriously corrupt city: they've been named for corrupt contracts, and the head of HR was fired after protesting about the CEO handing out jobs to relatives of a corrupt city official and allocating contracts in return for funding. But what if it is "non-profit"? The CEO is on around 1 million a year ($670,418 + $414,316), as you would expect for an organization with 1000 staff and a turnover of 150m.
I'm not in favour of crime or extortion: I'm just unimpressed with cheap journalism that uses "non-profit" as an excuse.
In the USA, FCC rules cover receivers as well as transmitters and emitters. 10 years ago, GLONASS and Galileo were not authorized for use in the USA, and the commissioning manifest on your device typically disabled GLONASS and Galileo when you were located in the USA, in the same way that you weren't able to transmit / connect / emit on un-authorized frequency bands. Flying out of Europe, Galileo would be visible: landing in the USA Galileo would not be visible.
What's the situation now? Did GLONASS AND Galileo eventually get waivers or approval?
The AT28C245 is not 'flash', and can't be flashed. It's pretty unusual though: coming from a flash-memory company, it's probably got flash memory inside, and from the outside it's got a pseudo-flash mode: there's a unique set of data values you can load to a unique set of address location, which commands the chip to do a chip-erase.
"Flash" memory was an evolution of Read-Only-Memory (ROM) design. First there was mask-programmable ROM, then Programable ROM, then Erasable PROM, then Electrically EPROM. EEPROM didn't have an "erase" method as such: you could just overwrite each byte with FF, one at a time, which was slow and error-prone. Hence parts like the AT28C245, which could be erased using the same method, on the same hardware, but faster and more reliably.
Then came 'flash' ROM, which added a flash-erase command to the Read and Write commands -- and which then circled back by adding things like an i2c interface.
"Not quite an operating system" is just trolling, but WFW 3.11 really didn't have deterministic response times. There was a single thread, with co-operative multi-tasking. WinNT 3.x was a significant improvement, offering 2 digit instead of 3 digit typical response times. Unix derivatives might have been usable on better hardware, but on 16 bit commodity microprocessors it was DOS or bare-metal.
but rather mDNS,
Initially, mDNS was broken by use of .local for internal DNS. It's still incompatible. By design. The allocation of .local to mDNS was done by people who thought that all domains should be global, and that people who disagreed with them shouldn't be allowed to use the internet. FWIW, these are the same people who told us that NAT was immoral, and who gave us globally addressable IPv6 as the alternative.
The problem ICANN is addressing is that the "globally accessible servers" people haven't entirely won: there are still .local domains, and people who want to use mDNS still want local domains
FWIW:
The very first thing you want to do is pre-warm the pot. So you want to fill your pot or your mug up with hot water while you bring your water to a boil in a kettle.
Use loose leaf tea in a big tea infuser [that has enough room for the tea to expand]. I have this very prosaic basket that’s roughly the size of the mug. Agitate the tea leaves, stir them with a spoon.
And American tea?
“You get some awful cups of tea in the US. People here often use lukewarm water straight from a tap. It’s horrific,”
The impact of having a clearly inferior product probably had something to do with it too.
I've still got Firefox installed, along with Edge and Chrome. FF is set as my default browser, so my saved URLs come up in FF. Which serves to remind me why I don't use FF for web browsing.
who are supposedly trained to deal with tricky situations,
I'm old enough to remember the introduction of guns for my local (vic.au) police.
First they shot windows, clock towers, and each other, because they had no gun training or experience.
Then they were trained on an American model, stopped killing each other, and started killing criminals, until the criminals started shooting back ("I'll take some of you with me")
Then they were trained on an English model, and police officer shooting deaths went down again. (most police officer deaths on duty are caused by stupidity in traffic stops ("I can't get run over, I'm in uniform" and those deaths are unrelated to firearms).
Since then the training has changed again, and for a while they were shooting psychotic schizophrenics. I don't know what the training is now, but the point is that the effect of "trained to deal with tricky situations" depends on police unions and senior management: there is a choice of training and outcomes available.
And, according to theory, you can get better results on eye-witness testimony by excluding cases by use of AI -- because AI generally uses different recognition algorithms, it hallucinates orthogonally to human perception.
Of course, neither human nor AI is immune to the problem of "use of old photograph", as is alleged in this case. The odd thing in this case is that the victim was out of custody in a couple of hours -- arrest procedures can take all day, and nobody would have been even considering his alibi in the first couple of hours. In the case of my pasty-pink relative, it took them that long just to decide that he wasn't black.
Humboldt was a celebrity scientist -- there are towns named after him, statues in parks, universities. He's still known for the Humboldt Current in the Pacific Ocean, the Humboldt Mountains in Antartica, his Geographic studies and publications in South America, and the Humboldt Penguin. A particularly felicitous name for a cable connecting South America to Antarctica
"potential" link to NZ, and then "potential" link from Mangawhai to Invercargill, then "potential" link from Invercargill to Antarctica, none of which have been funded.
The Americans are looking for funding for a cable to McMurdo -- they also like the idea that they could lay scientific instruments as part of the cable to their scientific research station. Maybe the Humboldt people are hoping that if the NSA gets funding for a cable to McMurdo, the Americans will want a cable from the Mid-Pacific to NZ. Or maybe it's just PR to get more press coverage.
A cut down beginners version of ForTran.
BASIC had string objects, and exception handling, which did not exist in FORTRAN and were not implemented in c or Pascal until those languages got object-oriented versions.
It's also fair to point out that the "interpreted" nature of BASIC was an innovative design feature that enabled Edit-And-Continue , something FORTRAN, c and Pascal also didn't get until decades later.
Technically, the first version of BASIC was JIT line-compiled rather than interpreted, but either way implies the existence of a meta-process -- and it was the meta-process that handled object lifetimes and exceptions. It also turned out that interpretation / JIT compilation supported dynamic (object-oriented and functional) programming patterns, which, although they weren't part of the original use-case for BASIC, were widely used in application-programming.
Exceptions, Functional and object-oriented programming patterns weren't obvious choices for "a language for putting unix on new processors", but in those aspects as in many others, BASIC was a precursor to C++ and Python, not an inferior version of FORTRAN Pascal or c.
However I suspect in the case bricks and mortar the police wouldn't give you much sympathy
I suspect that in the case of bricks and mortar, the rule is "present without lawful excuse". If, as in this case, you were engaged in legitimate inspection of your employer's property, and while going through doors and down corridors found yourself in someone else's warehouse, then you've got a "lawful excuse" and no offense has been committed.
Well, obviously, the existing tradition of main-frame text games and text graphics, which in turn were inspired by both sci-fi stories and by the early use of computers for targeting and for linear programming -- the activity that gave us the word "programming". Pretend and Make-believe have always been at the heart of "games" and "play". When "real" computers were used for simulating economies and for wargaming, "simulating economies and wargaming" were what grown-up kids wanted too.
The new generation did the same thing much better and at much lower cost, introducing the ideas to a new audience.
it is a replicated, distributed, application and database system that can work in a single office or scale and work at a global level.
I guess for a lot of sites, that's just feature bloat.
My wife's employer transitioned from Exchange to Notes -- and that went so well that they transitioned back to Exchange again. They moved to Google 18 months later, which wasn't as good as Exchange, but with the extra 2.5 years had improved enough to be competitive (was fairly new at the time).
MS is providing a large chunk of funding to a fusion R&D company -- an application that demands large amounts of AI training. I've wondered how much of the funding is being provided in cash, and how much is in-kind provision of AI compute. I've never seen any details reported --- it is at least possible that MS GPU is fully utilized, and that it is not appearing as profit on the reports.
When I was at school in Aus, s and z were dictionary spellings for 'ize' words, with 'ize' the preferred spelling, because we used Oxford dictionaries. But when the Australian Macquarie Dictionary was released, it simplified spelling choice to "ise" only, and in the on-line newsgroups in the 90's, anyone using the "ize" spelling in an AUS newsgroup was called out for for using "American" spelling. (Haters got to hate).
You could even play music with command line players, even watch videos without a GUI.
I can do that with Windows, and could with DOS, back when I was still failing to get graphics drivers to work in red hat.
I've been balls deep since about 1999
At the risk of being obvious, this is why you are only at "user" level on Windows systems.
So they couldn't slow charge them at low cost while they wait to be cleaned and checked?
Most rental outlets (car and truck) don't have vast lots for holding vehicles. They are tiny lots for interchange, in high traffic areas or on high-rent airport real-estate, and they depend on most of their vehicles being out on rent. If everything comes in at once, they're parked in the street all around.
faulty-door-dooms-plane
FWIW, that was a failure of the internal floor of the DC10. The internal floor is not, and was not, designed to be a pressure vessel, so when the cargo hatch came off and the cargo hold depressurised, (without catastrophic failure of the pressure vessel), the floor failed. The floor failure took out the control systems, and the plane crashed. That was a control system catastrophe, not "if the pressure vessel fails in a scenario like this, it would fail catastrophically"
The Wright brothers were the first to achieve controlled powered flight.
They took off, flew, and didn't crash. The "not crashing" part was important. Lots of earlier flight experimental series had ended with the death of the invertor.
The Wright brothers originated and patented the idea of using linked left-and-right side controls, (which controlled both Roll and Yaw), and which made it possible for a learner pilot to control the airplane without dying.
Modern aircraft don't have linked Roll and Yaw control -- modern aircraft are stable enough that an experienced pilot can control roll and yaw independently -- but modern aircraft do have linked left-side and right-side control. Even modern pilots in modern aircraft don't fly by individually setting the right-side and left-side "articulated control surfaces"
Curtis added some new ideas -- the later patent pool included both the Wright and the Curtis patents. "Controlled flight without crashing" was the critical contribution made by the Wright brothers, and their patent claim explicitly included any other mechanism that used linked control surfaces for system control.
Can't see any meat in the story.
Lentils and nuts.
It's fairly easy to get a complete protein complement is you pay any attention -- certainly when I was young most of Asia and South America lived on almost meat-free diets.
In another 20 years, his protein-utilization efficiency will be dropping, and he may need to increase the protein % in his diet.
looks like the uniqueness of fingerprints for forensics remains valid for the time being.
It is well known that fingerprints are not unique. Like DNA, the only guarantee is that fingerprint characteristics are unusual -- there aren't many people out there who will be identified as having the same DNA signature or fingerprint signature. The fingerprint signature depends on having a complete or nearly complete set: since individual fingerprints are far from unique, you need a set of 10 to make a reliable fingerprint signature. Of course hash conflicts do happen -- their have been a few people out there who are unfortunate enough to have fingerprint signatures matching that of wanted criminals.
Given that "It is well known that fingerprints are not unique.", it is rather unfortunate that this Register article manages to attribute the exact opposite statement to some unknown journal rejection.
FWIW, the new information is about the similarity of different fingers on one person. It (sort of, in an unreliable way) manages to help build up a complete set of fingerprints from individual fingers of that set. Having a set enables you to build the set signature that enables you to do fingerprint identification.
"Get it straight from some of the people involved in making the decisions"
There's a couple of pretty good Register articles about it:
https://www.theregister.com/2012/11/27/the_os_wars_os2_25years_old/
https://www.theregister.com/2012/11/23/why_os2_failed_part_one/
Oh, I'm sure it certainly helped Microsoft.
By enabling them (and sometimes other large development companies with pre-release agreements) to bring out applications based on pre-release versions of Windows.
As a result of anti-monopoly litigation, they were later forced to reveal the "private" API used by MS applications, and they are still doing so: if you want to look at the private API used by Word, or Excel, or any of scores of more recent applications, you can just download it: you don't have to register or anything.
Which enables you to see that there really is nothing to see: the private API just contains a pre-release variation of the published API, not containing any particular value.
(and later FoxPro, which would become 'Access')
"Access" was the end point of a very long-running series of projects in Microsoft, long predating their acquisition of FoxPro.
Access Version 3 benefited from the inclusion of query-optimisation algorithms adopted from FoxPro.
Besides, is Microsoft wrong to assume that “26 drive letters ought to be enough for anybody”?
It's not MS that's making that assumption. If you want to mount all your partitions under root, that's been possible since the days of MSDOS.
Windows uses device names (you may be familiar with shares like c$ and IPC$ and devices like PRN and COM1). Windows has a default of assigning device names like "c:" to partitions, but even with DOS that was not enough for everybody and everything - that's just for people who don't care, never had to mount a tape drive, pipe, mailslot, stream or file folder, or whose in-depth knowledge of other systems is complemented by the shallowness of their knowledge of Windows.
Different viruses mutate in different ways and at different rate
5 years ago, coronavirus were known/thought to have very low mutation rates: the crowns were known/thought to be very stable and strongly conserved, and there was an expectation/hope that a coronavirus vaccine might also be very long-lasting.
I don't know if the thinking about coronaviruses has changed, or if it is just that COVID-19 presently has such a vast reservoir of infected hosts in which mutation and exchange is occurring.
COVID is a common cold. It's common, and it's a COronaVIrus Disease. There are other common kinds of common cold: as well as coronaviruses there are common rhinoviruses, adenoviruses and enteroviruses. And actually, there are Influenza colds as well: the common diagnostic for flu was "serious illness", so if you didn't get "serious illness", it wasn't diagnosed as Influenza. But actually, like Coronavirus diseases, Influenza "colds" are common in the community. And infulenza often appears as an intestinal infection: since Influenza intestinal infection doesn't lead to death by subsequent bacterial pneumonia (the most common fatal outcome of influenza infection), it's very little studied and very rarely reported.
The natural progression of infectious diseases is to become more pathogenetic and less virulent. SARS-CoV-2 is demonstrating the expected progression. It is well on the way to being endemic in childhood, like other common colds, and like other common colds will continue to cause Non-specific Multisystem Post-Viral Symptoms, including Chronic Fatigue, as well as specific system post-viral conditions like Arthralgia and Post-viral Cerebellar Ataxia.
Simply send all female crews?
"Studies performed on Earth in which rodents were exposed to experimentally generated HZE particles have demonstrated a high sensitivity of ovarian follicles"
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41574-019-0267-6
"it is well known from patients undergoing cancer treatment (radiotherapy), that oocytes are very sensitive to radiation"
https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMra1614676
Any compliant c compiler will emit crap arithmetic code because the standard demands it: 32 bit arithmetic emits a 32 bit number. If you don't see the problem with that, it's not your area.
And modern c compilers are almost all pretty crap with 8 bit processors: everything gets promoted to 16 bits. That's not a problem an optimising compiler can fix.
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