Posts by Kubla Cant

Re: It's all wrong anyway

I'm sure I read somewhere that the stars only took four days.

Thanks @masonbrown, but both these seem to be US sites, and I'm in the UK (hence the reference to 13A sockets).

Re: Safety??

Automatic lights? Rain sensitive wipers? If you can't tell it's dark or wet you shouldn't be relying on the car to tell you: you should walk.

Automatic timing? If you can't tell when the engine's backfiring, you should walk. Automatic choke? If you can't tell when the engine's cold you should walk. Self-cancelling indicators? If you can't tell when you've turned the corner ....

It's not just cars. The tendency with all machines is to automate functions that start out manual. Personally, I like the automatic lights, though sometimes I disagree with their judgement.

Automatic wipers are actually a safety feature when there's little or no rain falling, but a passing lorry throws up a shower of water and mud and totally obscures the windscreen. They're also a logical development: my first car had single-speed wipers, subsequent cars had two-speed, intermittent with a constant delay, then intermittent with a continuously-variable delay. Taking the meatware component out of the loop makes sense.

Re: "The Machine"

really gets my goat when I hear the voice-over at the end of the trailer saying "Ex Mack in a"

I hope I'm not missing the point of some exquisitely honed irony, but can you let us know how you think ex machina should be pronounced? "Ex Mack in a" may not be International Phonetic Alphabet, but it seems a reasonable approximation, unless you favour Edwardian Latin pronunciation.

Re: I always

Everybody watched Girl on a Motorcycle to see (young) Marianne Faithfull fake an orgasm while riding up the motorway. There must have been something else in it, but that's all I remember.

Re: You can’t just say 'it’s national security – go away',” he said.

Who is this Baroness MILF?

Re: UK Scout Database

"no a happy parent"

Does it mean that you have very little command of the English language?

"no a happy parent" is clearly an echo of "no a happy Scouter" in the original post. You should read the whole thread before replying.

Re: Not too sure

OK, so I decided I'd better look at PowerShell. The introduction I was reading said you could enter ls for a directory listing. I was quite impressed to find that Unix commands are included. So I entered the directory command I use most.

ls -ltr

Get-ChildItem : A parameter cannot be found that matches parameter name 'ltr'.

At line:1 char:4

+ ls -ltr

+ ~~~~

+ CategoryInfo : InvalidArgument: (:) [Get-ChildItem], ParameterBindingException

+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : NamedParameterNotFound,Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.GetChildItemCommand

Re: Voice?

A friend has just acquired a phone with Cortana. It's actually very impressive, but annoyingly it refuses to work without an internet connection. OK on a desktop PC, but a pain in the neck on a phone, tablet or laptop.

Why would a croc leaves two cat carcasses?

I'm not an expert, but I think crocodiles/alligators like their food well-rotted. When they pull animals into the water they stash them in a hole under the bank until they're nice and squishy.

Luxembourg

it must just be that Luxembourg doesn't need to collect many taxes, because their government are just so damned efficient

Amazon may not pay much tax, but with a population of about 500,000 it probably amounts to about €20,000 per Luxembugger. No wonder they were quick to agree.

When there was all the row about Junker, I thought it was just because he was a federalist. But you have to wonder at how much useful experience he got from running a place the size of a smallish city where the main industry is tax dodging.

Re: Lhassi/Lassi

Unfortunately most yoghurts are low-fat. Even if your lassi is made with full-fat yoghurt, it probably won't have much more fat than the equivalent quantity of milk.

Interesting to read about the noxious vapours released when this omelette was cooking. Although I only use fairly mild chillies I've found that even gentle frying causes them to release a vapour that causes discomfort, so I've taken to adding them at the end.

Re: Please write out 100 times.

Yes but it was the first image they could find on Google.

Not least among the horrors of the Reg redesign is the replacement of a small collection of, admittedly rather boring, images with a larger range of bigger, more intrusive, and largely irrelevant ones.

@AC

"You know MySQL is free right?"

If your time has no value.

This is an idiotic statement. I've worked fairly extensively with Oracle and MySQL*. Oracle is certainly the more feature-rich, but for many applications there is little or no time penalty for using MySQL. The advantage may even be the other way, as you don't need the army of DBAs that seem to be part of every Oracle installation.

It appears, however, that this row isn't about Oracle database, but Oracle applications, so MySQL isn't an alternative.

* and Sybase and SQL Server and PostgreSQL (and Rdb, for those who remember it)

Re: odd choices

Without the proper gearbox it's more of a imposter than a sport car.

I drove manual sports cars for years (and one of the best was my Alfa Bertone GTV). But I'm not sure that automatic transmission disqualifies this one.

Once upon a time cars were equipped with a manual advance-retard control. When it became clear that a machine could manage the ignition timing more reliably and safely I don't suppose anybody regretted the change. A modern automatic gearbox can change gear faster than the driver can, and it can manage more gears - does anybody really want to stick-shift through 8 or more ratios?

I don't think it will be long before manual gearshifts are as indicative of performance as fake air vents and external exhaust pipes.

The headline for this item is missing an asterisk in 'a**' of course.

I thought it was about donkeys.

Re: "Sellafield is going to cost way more than the current £70 Billion alloted "

I should think Sellafield is a poor example for the decommissioning cost of generating plants, anyway. It's significantly older than most nuclear power stations, and in its early days it was called Windscale Plutonium Factory (!) before they decided to sanitise the name.

Re: Water on Earth is ELEMENTAL, my dear Watson !

I only looked at the landing page of your site, but it was enough to suggest that you've discovered the HTML equivalent of green ink.

Re: And for an encore

+1 for the joke, but I think historic ink was more likely made from iron and oak galls than squid.

Presumably a +1 channel is cheap, as there's no additional editorial cost. The programs on BBC3 may look like they cost nothing, but it's still the more expensive option.

I don't watch commercial channels much because I find it annoying when programmes are interrupted for ads. I was horrified to discover that BBC3 interrupts films with non-ad breaks in which some witless totty recites "news" about "celebrities". The sooner they close it the better.

Re: One way?

@Gazareth

I have to rise to this because I "studied" at Oxford and live near Cambridge. Both score equal points for their historic centres. Oxford has nice Victorian suburbs that are mostly lacking in Cambridge, but it also has Cowley, Blackbird Leys, etc. The countryside around Cambridge is something of an acquired taste; the Oxfordshire environment is mostly picturesque, but it's a bit Chipping Norton.