* Posts by Loyal Commenter

5761 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jul 2010

Solving a big, yellow IT problem: If it's not wearing hi-vis, I don't trust it

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Re: Big motors

What the hell were they turning on that? Whole trees?

Wondering what to do over the holiday season? How about aiming a laser at commercial aircraft and then spending years of your life in prison?

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Their other favoured tactic is to pick a spot where the speed limit signs are obscured and nab everyone who comes through at the prior limit.

I think they'd get a bit of a telling-off if they did that, due to the number of successful appeals in court, and the amount of their time taken up by having to appear to give evidence.

IANAL, but I'm pretty sure that there have been plenty of cases where people have had speeding fines annulled because the speed limit signs had trees / hedges etc obscuring them, or the signs were missing. It's basically one of the very few excuses you stand a chance of getting away with.

Obviously this won't help if you're caught exceeding the limit before the "missing" sign (e.g. doing 50 where it goes form a 40 limit down to a 30).

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1MW (as opposed to 1mW) wouldn't just need a chunky battery. Even if that's pulse output fed by a bank of supercapacitors, it would need a generator the size of a truck (plus the second truck for the caps).

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Re: small minds, easily amused

I'd posit that if it is bright enough to illuminate a cockpit, it is bright enough to blind, or at least permanently damage vision. Coherent light is notably more dangerous to vision than spread-spectrum light, because physics (I can't be bothered to go and look up the long technical reasons, but it has to do with the fact that the energy of all the photons is the same so damages things it hits more than white light). Maybe it should be tested in court?

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Re: Polarizing filter

I'll just add that the idea with the cameras and windowless cockpit has the obvious disadvantage of not being able to "fail-safe". In other words, if it breaks, you're flying blind (well, on instruments, anyway). I believe it's a fundamental principle in aviation that things should fail-safe if at all possible, which is why you have lots of instruments in the cockpit to give multiple different bits of information to a pilot. Very few aircraft are flown on sight alone; even gliders have cockpit instruments. No-one in their right mind would fly blind out of choice.

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Re: Polarizing filter

I think maybe the military solution would be an air-to-ground missile. Ironically, probably laser guided. Nice of the target to point itself, eh?

I think there's a probably a Darwin Award waiting for the first person to try lasing a military aircraft.

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Yes, there are reasons, reasons that also involve the word "guided" and are of a military persuasion.

For several reasons (such as not being seen, and avoiding violations of the Geneva Convention rules on dazzling weapons), such lasers are, AFAIK, not visible ones, but are presumably infrared, or longer wavelength

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Re: small minds, easily amused

Lead lined, and steel-plate coated. With spikes.

On a serious note, shouldn't using these things outside be regulated in the same way as discharging a firearm?

Worth noting here that their use as a dazzling weapon is actually banned under the Geneva Convention. I'm all for prosecuting their use to dazzle people as a war crime. If any military used them for this, there would be serious repercussions, doubly so if used on civilian non-combatants.

BOFH: You might want to sit down for this. Oh, right, you can't. Listen carefully: THIS IS NOT AN IT PROBLEM!

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Re: yet another

Just googled that hammer. That's some nice hammer porn right there.

My go-to desk hammer is a Globemaster 5310. For less delicate jobs, there's the 4 lb lump hammer in the allotment shed.

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The half that's broken.

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Re: Older gear is always an option

How far back from your monitor do you need to sit to take a 43" screen in? Are you using a 5m long HDMI cable for that?

YMMV, but I've found a pair of 24" QHD monitors to be both cheaper than a single 4K one, and more practical because it's easier to have two screens with two different things on them than arranging things on a single monitor. Smaller 4K monitors seem to be coming down in price now (my two monitors were around £200 each when bought), so at some point I might upgrade to two 24" 4k monitors but it'll probably only be when one or both of them dies. I don't expect this to be for 5 or 6 years.

[Checks meeting agenda...] Where does it say 'Talk cr*p and waste everyone's time'?

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I splashed out and bought a wireless gaming headset (non-bluetooth), because (A) I wanted something more comfortable than the budget call-centre plastic tat one-ear wired headset supplied by my work, and (B) although you might not notice it in a call, BT has a noticeable delay which can be several hundred milliseconds. Enough to really screw with your head if you actually using it for gaming.

It uses some proprietary wireless dongle which does require plugging into a spare USB socket, which given the preponderance of things to plug into USB these days (mouse, keyboard, phone charger, etc. etc.) may exhaust the measly number of sockets on some laptops. However, with the amount of time everyone seems to be spending in skype/teams/zoom/whatever "meetings" it's a godsend to have something that doesn't make your ears sore and has decent sound quality.

It plays nicely with Teams as well, and apparently works under Linux.

As with such things, it wasn't cheap, and some might balk at spending £100 on a headset. You could probably claim the tax back on one if you could claim it was for work though...

edit - it comes with a 1.5m charging cable (micor-USB) as well so you can plug it in to charge and still move around for those really long meetings.

UK tax dept's IT savings created 'significant risk', technical debt as it faces difficult conversation with Chancellor

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Facepalm

Re: @Howard Sway

If you consider trolling a dyslexic by being a grammar nazi you must have a pretty boring life.

For the long term observation of your posts over several years, I can see no evidence of dyslexia. Not knowing the difference between "its" and "it's", between "their", "there" and "they're", or in this case, between "who's" and "whose", on its own, with no other indications of dyslexia isn't dyslexia, it's a lack of understanding of the rules of grammar. If you were dyslexic, there would be other instances of you mis-spelling or confusing words. So I'm calling bullshit on that one.

You replied to one of my comments and quoted a completely different one! Muppet

You do know the same universe continues to exist in the space between two separate comments on an internet message board, don't you? In colloquial terms, such a logical construct is known as a callback, and is often used in comedy. I'm sure it has in fact been used on the Muppet Show. In this instance, it is used to illustrate the inherent contradiction between your two posts, by employing your own words against you for comedic effect. Glad you laughed.

But then I'm probably too much of a muppet, right?

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Re: @Howard Sway

"How do you come to believe they think that?"

edit - and it's whose as in "belonging to whom", not who's as in "who is". Normally I wouldn't be a Grammar Nazi, but some people just deserve to be trolled.

H2? Oh! New water-splitting technique pushes progress of green hydrogen

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It's not that it "seeps" through tiny holes, hydrogen has a non-zero rate of quantum tunnelling, so it can (very very slowly) seep through where there aren't any holes.

Did I or did I not ask you to double-check that the socket was on? Now I've driven 15 miles, what have we found?

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it's not that the photons are faster, but there are more of them... or something.

The best analogy would be not "faster" but "bigger", as in each photon has more energy packed into it. It actually has a higher frequency, but since you're talking about photons as particles, that inevitably leads to having to answer questions about how a particle has a frequency, which leads down the rabbit hole of EM radiation actually being neither particles or waves in the classical sense, and whoops you just said radiation and now your patient is back to being scared of the radiotherapy...

If you're trying to explain how radiotherapy is different to an x-ray, how would you go about explaining it to the layperson? Technically, the photons used are more energetic, and are more tightly focussed than an X-ray but to Joe Public you might as well be talking Chinese.

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We had the Vermin media TV box die (with an impressive pop) due to a nearby lightning strike last year. I'm assuming the lightning induced a current in the coaxial cable supplying it. Curiously, both the TV box and router are connected to the same cable (via a splitter which I'm assuming is just a HF filter of some sort). The router didn't even reset, but the TV box was well and truly cooked; I'm assuming it was an electrolytic cap exploding that destroyed it, it did rattle quite nicely afterwards when shaken!

We never worked out what the lightning actually hit, but it was very close because the flash and (very loud) bang were simultaneous.

The call to the inevitably offshored call centre operative involved explaining that, no, there weren't any lights on it, and no, there wasn't an error code on my TV, because, as I repeatedly explained, it had been STRUCK BY LIGHTNING.

This all happened the day before we were going away for a few weeks, and to be fair to VM, the replacement box did get delivered successfully to a neighbour well before we got back.

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Re: Why are sockets switched?

I was always told it's because 240V will kill you easier than 120V.

I am also reminded of a certain American inventor* electrocuting an elephant with AC to "prove" it was more dangerous than DC.

*I use the word "inventor" advisedly here, as the individual in question appears to have made most of his money by patenting other people's inventions.

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Re: Why are sockets switched?

Indeed, the lower US voltage is not only more dangerous because of the higher current, which means more heating in conductors, so they need to be accordingly heftier to avoid failure, but also means transmission losses are greater. There's a reason that overhead power cables are high voltage AC, because the transmission losses are proportional to the current, and thus inversely proportional to the voltage.

You only live twice: Once to start the installation, and the other time to finish it off

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Re: Sadly, no international jet-settng for me

I have found that, once you have added on the hidden extras (like paying for your hand luggage), that the "not-as-expensive-as-you-might-assume" Irish carrier is not actually much more expensive than the "not-so-cheap-as-they-would-imply" Irish carrier, when flying to Ireland at any rate. Plus you get an in-flight meal, and no rigmarole of "squash your hand-luggage into this tiny cage or pay €50". I should expect that similar considerations apply when flying to most countries they cover, plus you get to fly from the same terminal as all the grown-ups, not from the shed in a field round the back of the airport that is also shared by the "curiously-orange-but-not-quite-as-unpleasant" carrier.

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Re: Fairly Frequent Flier

She really should have taken the batteries out...

Devs strung up about .NET 5.0 string changes that may break working code are told: It's not a bug, it's a feature

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Re: Internationalization was always a huge PITA

Is that English (Traditional) or English (Simplified)?

(if your spelling of internationalisation didn't give it away already)

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Re: An API should NEVER change its behavior

Indeed. If you're writing code, and need to do a string operation, do you want to have to go and look up which version of the built-in function you should be using?

It's a bit naughty of MS to change the behaviour of an existing function, yes, but languages evolve, and with C#, changes aren't made on a whim, but usually as a result of feedback from the community and a fair amount of debate.

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Re: To be fair to Microsoft

Agreed. It is a proper ball-ache to not default to something invariant across cultures. Like a byte-by-byte comparison. Let's not get into big-endian vs little-endian architectures, and pretend that problem doesn't exist too.

It probably says something about where the original language designers at Microsoft were coming from. I should think the expectation was that string searching would be used more often for processing chunks of actual language, rather than being interested in exact string equality. I'm with you on this not necessarily being the best default.

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Re: They are doing different things though.

I'm not disagreeing with you; they probably should both use the same comparison culture by default. But they don't, and the language specification says so.

To be a purist, there is actually no need for the language to provide both a Contains and an IndexOf function, as one can be implemented as a function of the other. The moment you start providing functions that can be implemented using other functions, you run into the issue that the behaviour may diverge. It's a balancing act between providing easy to use functionality, and making the language a memory test where you have to remember that to check if a string contains another string you have to check to see if the index of that second string in the first one is greater than zero.

I'd be interested to see what bytecode the two different approaches would produce; Contains() vs IndexOf() > -1. I wouldn't be surprised if the only difference is the comparison culture that gets recorded.

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Re: there's no indication that they had calls to contains followed by similar calls to indexOf

It seems folks are tripping up on the fancy-pants aspects of the system culture supported by indexOf, since contains is, by some argument, broken, or at least feature poor.

The problem here isn't that IndexOf supports cultures, and Contains doesn't, but that they default to subtly different cultures if you don't specify one, and rely on the default. Which is why the IDE warns you when you do that, because usually you should specify a culture, even if it is Ordinal or InvariantCulture. If you're actually interested in treating strings as byte arrays and searching for a series of specific bytes, then cast it to a byte array and do that instead, without worrying about all the messiness of Unicode with its multi-byte character encodings.

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Re: "... that doesn't create new productivity improvements for our users"

It's probably, in this case, down to whether your default comparison culture considers CR + LF to be indivisible. It's not an unreasonable thing to be defined as such, to be fair. Line endings in text files are notoriously variable. Some systems use CR + LF, some use just CR, others use just LF, some even use LF + CR. To treat the "newline" as indivisible (e.g. CRLF not CR + LF) would imply that, for instance, checking for the existence for "{LF}Bob" in the string "Alice{CRLF}and{CRLF}Bob" would not match, whilst "{CRLF}Bob" would, unless you specify the comparison culture where the searched string is essentially "Alice{CR}{LF}and{CR}{LF}Bob". The same rules about divisibility probably apply to things like diacritics (you woulnd't search for the acute accent on its own and expect to find a match in a string containing "é" for example).

The specification for string.Contains, where a comparison culture is not specified, says:

This method performs an ordinal (case-sensitive and culture-insensitive) comparison.

whereas, the documentation for string.IndexOf says:

This method performs a word (case-sensitive and culture-sensitive) search using the current culture. (my emphasis).

Whether it is right or not for it to be specified this way is another question, but you can't argue it isn't behaving according to spec!

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Re: To be fair to everyone else

They are doing different things though.

I'm not making a judgement on whether what MS have done here is right or wrong, but if IndexOf() is supposed to ignore culture specific continuation characters (such as soft hyphens for instance, so that the position of "Alice" in the two strings "Alice sees Bob" and "Al-ice sees Bob", is reported as the same) and Contains is not then the behaviour is arguably correct. It depends on how the correct behaviour is specified. And I'll bet you it is. Ask Jon Skeet...

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Except the people using EBCDIC.

And those who were also using EBCDIC but it wasn't the same EBCDIC.

And the other four people using the other four versions of EBCDIC...

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Re: "... that doesn't create new productivity improvements for our users"

If str is null?

In the latest language specifications for C#, it will be (by default) a compile error for either failing to check for whether a nullable is null, or failing to declare that it isn't nullable. If you declare it as not nullable and try to assign a value to it that can be null? Guess what? A compile error (unless you explicitly allow it).

If you declare str as nullable and don't assign to it, that line of code won't compile.

If you declare it as non-nullable and don't assign to it, it will default to having string.Empty as its value so won't be null.

If you declare it as non-nullable and try to assign something to it, that won't compile unless you null-check it (e.g. using the null-coalescing operator, ?? to assign a non-null value), or explicitly allow that value to be assigned without null checking it (using the null forgiving operator, postfix !). If you use the null forgiving operator, you are explicitly stating that you know it may be null, and are effectively making a promise to not do anything with that variable that might go bang. If you then do use it where you can't have a null, you will get a Null Reference Exception. Which you deserve. Because you lied to the compiler.

So, the short answer is, if str is null, your code won't compile. If you jump through hoops to make it compile, then you'll get an exception. Which is reasonable behaviour

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To be fair to Microsoft

Whilst making breaking changes is never a good thing, it's not like Visual Studio doesn't tell you to specify a culture, and the documentation does tell you that it defaults to StringComparison.CurrentCulture. If you're not controlling the comparison culture, on your own head be it.

Trump's official campaign website vandalized by hackers who 'had enough of the President's fake news'

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Re: ... another 4 or 8 or ... 12 years

Let's not forget how he claimed that a dementia test was an IQ test and it proved he was smart.

A test that is not usually used to determine whether someone has dementia, but the scope and extent of their dementia.

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Re: A sign of the times

Looking at a particularly overblown novel as the future pattern of .us

It's worth noting that all the things that happen in that "overblown novel" were, at the time it was written, which was now some decades ago, based on things that had actually happened somewhere in the world. It's essentially a transposition of the Iranian revolution onto modern American Christian fundamentalism. The thing about fundamentalism, of course, being that the more fundamentalist people get, the less you can actually tell the religions apart, especially when the ones you're looking at are both Abrahamic.

People identifying as "religious" may well be down, but where it counts (such as in the SCOTUS) they are way overrepresented. Their new supreme court judge, for example, is a member of an extreme religious right-wing group that believes all women are subordinate to men. Throughout history, countries have been led by people whose religious views very likely to not match those of the general population. Hence why Europe through its history (and I'm including the UK here) has had various waves of persecutions of Catholics, Protestants, Jews, atheists et al.

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Re: A sign of the times

Between "a unhinged narcissist and a senile kiddie fondler" and whom?

What, you mean that wasn't just the description of the current sitting tenant?

I think that before we go off accusing anyone of being a "kiddie fondler" we should probably check to make sure we have some evidence to back that claim too. So perhaps we should replace that phrase with "serial adulterer, misogynist and accused rapist" to fit with known facts?

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Re: I approve of anything which stops George Bush having four more years.

A treatment for what? Not having skin cancer and/or cataracts?

I think pretty much everyone has, by now, seen or heard the original claims made by The Orange One in that press conference. We can all see what he said, and we can all fact-check those words to see that he was not making verifiable scientific claims...

Did Arthur C. Clarke call it right? Water spotted in Moon's sunlit Clavius crater by NASA telescope

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Re: A question for an industrial chemist

The moon is made from the same stuff the rest of the planets are made of.

Wrong.

Simply put, all bodies in the solar system were formed from the same accretion disk (with the possible exception of a few extrasolar rocks like Oumuamua). It goes without saying that the middle of this disk, would be hotter due the source of heat - even before the Sun reached the critical ignition temperature, the middle would have been hotter due to gravity. That means that the things condensing and accreting near the middle would be different to those further away, so you get rocky bodies near the Sun and gas giants further away. Most of the water ends up in the outer solar system, hence the preponderance of icy bodies forming the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and no ice moons in the inner solar system. The Earth is thought of as a watery body, but itself only consists of 0.02% water, which is thought to have arrived in large part in asteroids from the outer solar system.

It is demonstrably true that the rocky inner bodies are different in nature to the gaseous outer ones. By your logic, the Earth is made of the same stuff as Jupiter. Reductio ad absurbum.

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Re: Drill baby drill

The accepted mechanism for the formation of the moon is from a collision between the Earth and another body in its early history, leading to a large amount of molten magma being thrown into space and coalescing into the Moon as we know it. The temperatures involved (hundreds to thousands of degrees) don't leave much room for liquid water to be involved (plus most of the Earth's water was thought to have arrived later during the Late Heavy Bombardment). The Moon is thus largely made from the same stuff as the Earth's mantle. It used to be thought that the Moon had no core, but current thinking is that it may have a small metallic core similar to the Earth's, but much smaller in scale, and certainly not large enough to generate a magnetic field.

The magnetic field bit is also important, because having one of these helps prevent a body's atmosphere being eroded by the solar wind.

You talk about water in the atmospheres of the gas giants. Without going into too much detail about stellar evolution and accretion discs and all that sort of thing, the rule of thumb is that when bodies are forming in a solar system, the stuff with the highest melting point accretes where it is hottest, and the lowest where it is coldest. This means rocky planets in the inner solar system, and gaseous ones in the outer solar system. Short chain hydrocarbons (methane, ethane, propane, butane etc.) have boiling points below room temperature, so can only condense where it is colder. Note that this is room temperature at Earth's atmospheric pressure. The pressure in an accretion disk is close to a vacuum so the temperatures where these things can accrete is much lower.

As I mentioned above, most of the Earth's water is thought to have arrived from the outer solar system in asteroids during a period known as "The Late Heavy Bombardment". Evidence for exactly what caused this is scant, because it is thought to have happened around 4 billion years ago. Any water arriving on the Moon would be on or close to the surface, and would be hot on arrival due to the impact. The lack of a sufficient gravitational field, protective magnetic field, or existing atmosphere would mean rapid loss to space (and potentially capture by Earth's gravity well).

It's worth adding at this point, that there are also other sources for water on Earth, for example the reactions of minerals in the mantle and crust, driven by plate tectonics. It goes without saying that the existence of tectonic plates is another distinguishing feature between the Earth and the Moon. Mars is also thought to have had tectonic activity in the past, but which has now stopped; this is a contributing factor for why Mars is now essentially dry, with the exception of its polar ice caps (which IIRC are largely CO2 in any case).

Of course, there are many competing theories about exactly how the Moon formed, and how Earth got its water. I think the general consensus though, is that, on the whole the Earth is wet and has an atmosphere, and the Moon is dry and does not.

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Re: Nuclear waste dump.

The problem with those, is that people building fast reactors tend to like building fast breeder reactors, and that whole breeder bit can be a bit of an issue, unless you like your climate to be at a couple of million degrees. The right sort of fast reactor is the sort that is burning all of the actinides, including the ones with a mass of 239...

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Re: Drill baby drill

Titan is massive enough (1.82 Moons), and far enough from the sun (9.5 AU) to retain an atmosphere. If you moved it to the Earth's orbit at 1 AU, it would be appreciably warmer, which would almost certainly result in its atmosphere being stripped, with the possible exception of the heavier hydrocarbons. Anything that exists as a liquid counts as atmosphere for this purpose, due to vapour pressure.

So basically, if Titan was where the Moon is, it would be a tarry lump with no methane.

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Re: Drill baby drill

You need to read up on:

1) Vapour pressure

2) Lunar escape velocity

3) Molecular velocity distribution (which is a function of molecular mass and temperature)

If a material is a liquid, it has a non-zero vapour pressure, which means that some of it will evaporate and form a gas phase. If any of the molecules in that gas can reach a velocity above the escape velocity of the body it sits on, it will be lost to space. This will decrease the vapour pressure, leading to further evaporation.

This is the reason that Earth loses helium to space. The molecular mass, of 4, leads to a high mean velocity, which has an appreciable distribution above the Earth's escape velocity, and it is lost to space. If free hydrogen had an appreciable lifetime in the atmosphere, we'd be losing that as well. As it turns out, hydrogen is a bit reactive so doesn't tend to exist as H2 in our atmosphere or reach the top of the atmosphere in order to escape to space.

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Re: A question for an industrial chemist

There is probably brine a few hundred meters down where it is warmer

That sort of claim requires some sort of evidence. As far as I am aware, the Moon is a "cold" body - it has no metallic core, certainly not a molten one, so no radioactive metals to provide an internal heat source like the Earth. AFAIK, there's no evidence that there was ever an appreciable amount of water on the Moon, which is what you would need for it to form aquifers. It also bears mentioning that if water ever existed in its liquid form, the combination of a lack of atmosphere, low gravitational escape velocity and solar wind would pretty much guarantee its loss into space in a relatively short period of time. Which is why the important part of this article is how the water is trapped in tiny glass beads.

A cautionary tale of virtual floppies and all too real credentials

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Re: I've mentioned it before...

It's just a shame that MS-SQL's interpretation of SQL transactions is so broken.

Broken in what way? It certainly doesn't break ACID.

Nested transactions can be a bit of an oddity (only the outer transaction ever gets committed, which is arguably correct), but if you are using those... why?

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Re: I've mentioned it before...

If I tried that at my old job, before I was halfway through making the backup, users would be on the line demanding to know why the system wasn't responding. (Because the table was locked by my transaction.)

You forgot the (NOLOCK) clause; a little dangerous in itself, as this may include records from an uncommitted transaction another user has open (i.e. so called "ghost records"), but you are making a backup for the sake of safety, so including those records isn't the biggest issue if you need to access that backup to unfuck the data because you didn't follow the other steps properly.

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Re: FTP config files...

FTP as root? *shudder*

FTP. *shudder*. Let's start with the lack of encryption there shall we?

Those were more innocent days, where nobody considered the possibility of connection eavesdropping and MitM attacks.

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Thanks @Jake.

It was actually a gentle reminder that not everyone uses dir to list the contents of a folder / directory / inode / whatever terminology you favour*.

My life in IT doesn't personally date back that far, but I believe the use of ls predates dir by some decades, originating in Multics (the predecessor to Unix and all modern *nixes). dir I believe originates in CP/M, and became widely used with the advent of MSDOS. Wikipedia assures me that Muiltics predates CP/M by a decade or so, and MSDOS by almost two. The history of such things is a bit more twisty-turny than this, but that is it in a nutshell.

The vast majority of command-line jockies certainly used to be using *nix type systems in preference to DOS-type ones (I don't believe CP/M ever really got to being a well adopted OS), so really what I was insinuating is that for those who think that those file-containing structures should be called directories because that's how the DIR command is named should perhaps broaden their horizons a little.

FWIW, the first OS I grew up with used CAT as its command, to CATalogue the contents of a file system. On a C90 cassette.

*My opinion here is that in computer science, the terminology is secondary to the actual concept. As long as others can understand what you are talking about, it doesn't matter. See also the pointless column / field debate in database nomenclature.

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Re: I've mentioned it before...

I know of more than one person here who has run a SQL DELETE command and forgotten to add the WHERE clause. With client data.

This is why, when working with anything remotely like a live database, the series of steps goes something like this:

1) BEGIN TRANSACTION

2) SELECT * INTO Affected_table_backup_{today's date} FROM Affected_table (probably best to have backed the database up first too if possible)

3) SELECT * FROM Affected_table WHERE {delete criteria} (to make sure you are getting the right records)

4) DELETE FROM Affected_table WHERE {delete criteria} (by amending the SELECT statement to make sure the WHERE clause doesn't get lost)

5) COMMIT TRANSACTION

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Proven by the fact that to list the contents of one you type "dir", not "fol"

ls

FYI: NASA appears to have scooped dirt from an asteroid 200 million miles away and plans to bring it back home

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Joke

Let's all hope it not a Bendy Boris Bus, or it'll get stuck on a roundabout somewhere on the outskirts of the asteroid belt.

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Re: "While you were out..."

Hermes recently "delivered" a package to my wife, which they claimed was in "an outhouse". The GPS tracking they provided showed it in the middle of a nearby road. We live in a flat in the middle of a city; outhouses there ain't. We never worked out where they "delivered" it to, but they refused to acknowledge that we hadn't got it!

DPD, on the other hand, always go to the same incorrect nearby address, despite anything they deliver being correctly addressed, as do most Deliveroo riders, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose...

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Alien

We're all doomed I tell ya!

Didn't anyone at NASA ever see the Andromeda Strain?