Posts by Loyal Commenter

Re: And matter is just +ve -ve and electric force

My BSometer started going of VERY quickly, with the talk of the Universe having a resonant centre

Quite.

The universe has no centre, just like there is no concept of the surface of a bubble having a centre, or a circle having a 'start'. If you start talking about brane theory, then there may be a higher-dimensional 'centre' of our universe, in the same way that a bubble has a centre, or a circle has a focus. However, it's still up for debate whether the curvature of our space-time is open (like a hyperbola, which doesn't have a cental focus), closed (like a n-dimensional sphere), flat, or some combination of open/closed in diffent dimensions (e.g. toroidal, tubular, etc.). Not to mention the debate about how many dimesions there really are. Is it 3, 4, 11, 23, etc? - Let alone whether 'our' universe is just one 'brane' of many in a higher-dimensional space.

Brane theory (like string theory) is, of course, not even a proper theory, as it hasn't yet made any observable predictions (i.e. have anything you can measure and attribute to it). In other words, just like the surface of a bubble, the fact that the bubble itself has a centre has no effect in making any point on the surface any different from any other.

Re: "In short, it's a bad deal for everyone"

The EU has never been properly audited

Simply not true. https://fullfact.org/europe/did-auditors-sign-eu-budget/

0/10 - must try harder, see me after class.

What are you going to try to pretend is true next? Bendy bananas are illegal? The enitre population of Turkey is moving here? Jean-Claude Juncker is going to conscript you into an EU army and invade Kent? Tsk.

Re: 'Something big'

if an FRB lasts 3ms then whatever made it is no larger than 1,000km across

I'm curious about how you've arrived at this figure. My understanding is that the mechanism behind FRBs is unknown, nad there are several postulated explanations. Is this making an assumption that they are caused by one of these postulated mechanisms, in which case, which one, and can you give more details?

Re: Wrong letter?

Presumably, that would make it "Brogrammed Software", as in software programmed by some insufferably smug hipster?

Re: Ancient but not unchanged

Large inner solar-system objects ike Earth have a lot of things going on that Kuiper-belt objects do not. Apart from the amount of energy being pumped out from the sun, which tends to un-freeze a lot of stuff that would otherwise be frozen in the outer solar-system, the Earth is large enough to have things like plate tectonics going on, not to mention that pesky life thing. The inner solar system is also orders of magnitude busier than the Kuiper Belt, so collisions are much much more common, especially ones involving planetary-sized bodies. We can gain some information from things that hit the Earth (such as chondritic meteorites), but only after they have been cooked by aero-braking, and then battered by litho-braking. That tends to alter the chemical and physical properties quite substantially.

The amount of 'weathering' outer solar-system objects will have receved will be largely limited to the effects of solar wind particles, and the further you get from the Sun, the less those effects will be.

Re: Cancer rate would rise by 50%

So if you have a 2% chance of dying from cancer it would rise to a whopping 3%? On no!

That's 50% increase for something the size of a human. Since you only need to get cancer in one cell, and it then spreads, if something is irradiating you, the larger cross-section you have, the higher the chance of one cell getting hit. Megaladons were quite large (60 feet, 130 linguine, or 2 double-decker buses) so would have been affected much much more than a human. Larger animals also tend to breed slower than smaller ones. There would have been a cut-off point in size, where that 2% would become high enough to kill things off faster than they breed, which would cause extinction.

Re: Bah!

Offence can never be caused; it's a choice the offended person always makes to be offended.

Whilst this is undoubtedly true in some cases, I wonder whether you would agree that, for instance, daubing racist graffiti on someone's door, in human excrement, would be deliberately causing offence, or whther the victims are just being "snowflakes", because you'd have a hard time defending that position in front of a magistrate.

Re: Why use a revision control system?

Your tapes shatter on spin up?

You're holding them wrong.

Maybe not shatter, but tape can demagnetise or otherwise degrade over time. Plastic becomes brittle and perishes with age. Do you know what state the tape from a 1990s backup is in right now without trying to restore from it?

This was my thought too. The US has a not-great record, but the failings of the US govt. shouldn't preclude others who happen to hail from that country from criticising others. Even if it is a case of the pot calling the kettle black, that doesn't affect the blackness, or otherwise, of the kettle. In reality, nobody is squeaky-clean, but that shouldn't preclude us from getting the Brasso out to brighten things up a bit, and stretch this analogy to death.

You may jest, but it is a bit of a bold statement. The Moon*, for instance, is generally not thought to contain an iron core, due to the mechanism of its formation. UNless you define a "rocky planet" as havingthat structure, you can't really claim that it applies to *all* rocky planets, everywhere.

*Yes I know the Moon isnt' technically a planet, but if it was in its own orbit aroud the Sun, it would be considered to be one. It's not a lot smaller than Mercury.

Re: History lesson

A super-rich, arrogant little twonk sets himself up against the government that invented modern democracy several hundreds of years ago and has been dealing with run by super-rich, arrogant little twonks ever since.

FTFY

Re: What a waste of time

Oh, that was a bit knee-jerk.

I suggest you allow a little leeway for other opinions.

The OP was being a little selective with the truth, picking one instance of where the police let the community down badly (and I won't argue that they didn't), and drawing a biased conclusion about the ethnicity of those involved, largely because although this sort of crime does, very sadly, happen too often, it makes more headlines when those involved happen to be of Asian ethnic origin.

This is exactly what the convicted football hooligan "Tommy Robinson" (an alias he uses to hide his identity) was doing - "reporting" only on crimes committed by non-whites, and doing so in such a way as to prejudice (and therefore jeopardise) ongoing trials. He was convicted of contempt of court, because if he'd kept up his "free speech", sooner or later one of those trials would have collapsed as a result.

As for what the police were doing "instead". I suggest you look at some crime statistics. A big old portion of police time is spent dealing with domestic violence, which, given that most of the population of this country is white, consists largely of white-skinned scumbags beating up their partners. Sadly, this is so common, and goes on so much, that it never gets reported in the media because it's non-news.

It's not a case of "allowing leeway for other opinions", its a case of calling out bullshit.

Re: Starship

@ WonkoTheSane - beat me to it!

I'd suggest "Proft Margin", "Screw Loose", "Funny, it Worked Last Time...", or possibly "Revisionist"

I carry my lathe and mill in and leave them in the kitchen every night, it's true.

I certainly wouldn't keep either of those in a shed in a field. I'm thinking more like a properly secure warm, dry workshop attached to your house, and if it is anything other than a tatty old foot-operated pole lathe, a decent alarm system too.

Re: Dead birds?

Simple solution for those who get mysterious ailments 'caused by' mobile masts / wi-fi / bad energy, etc.:

1) Put up a great big dummy mast somewhere obvious.

2) Wait for all the loonies to be attracted to it

3) Meanwhile install the real masts in peace and quiet.

4) Publicly announce that the mast that all the loonies have been protesting about and camping outside is in fact a dummy mast and that their illnesses are all psychogenic.

Re: One argument in YAML's favour: a good DIFF

In JSON, whitespace is irrelevant, so you could put the comma on the same line as your new item. Not that I'd recommend doing it, but it would be valid JSON.

On balance, whether it shows as one line or two in a diff isn't the highest thing on most programmers' agendas.

Re: What about Windows 10 that Office is sitting on?

It's 4% of turnover... still a not small amount.

Technically, it's either 2% or 4% (depending on teh type of infraction) of global turnover. One wonders how easy it would be to actually calculate MS's global turnover, and also where the limit is on determining what applies (i.e. parent and related companies). I expect MS's corporate structure is less complex than some (for instance, a different legal entity in each jurisidiction it operates in, rather than the labyrinthine structures employed by some multinationals to avoid tax), but if they do get fined, this could be an interesting test case.

Re: Security overdone

People may not be aware that in general, embedded chips are *dumb*.

In general, these things work by picking up a small amount of induced current via their aerial (the coily bit round the outside), doing something with that in the chip in the middle, and re-emiitting the result. They are only limited by the computational limits of what can be achieved with the power induced from the supplied pulse. This certainly doesn't limit them to responding with a fixed response. If they did, your RFID bank card would be trivial to clone.

Re: Age discrimination?

My thoughts exactly.

Let me tell you about latex...

Technically, latex is a sol (solid marticles in a liquid medium), whereas cream cheese is an emulsion (liquid-in-liquid). Both are colloids, but then again, so is smoke.

Latex can cross-link to become rubbery, in which case it forms a gel (liquid in solid). If your cream cheese does this, I'd suggest it's time to throw it out. Although technically soft and medium-hard cheeses are probably gels as well to some degree or another.

Re: "And I also have a bridge to sell you..."

Anyone who thinks letting the EU have a say in how the internet is controlled is a good idea, especially within a few days of the same person suggesting the creation of a Central European Army controlled by Brussels

Do you have a citation for Macron suggeting this? I'm not being funny about it, but this doesn't ring true. Not least because any such motion would require unanimous assent from all 28* member nations, and any national leader proposing it is likley to find themselves in prompt receipt of 27 vetoes.

See history for the trouble they had getting approval for the Maastricht treaty, which, for all the bickering was not much more than a broad agreement that everyone should agree. Whenever anyone brings up an 'EU army', it usually has a very strong smell about it.

*28 for now at least.

Re: Did you accept the USB?

But of course (b) requires that you know how to reformat it and that you are running an OS that gives you the option of reformatting a USB device before its filing system is accessed.

That's little use if it presents itself to the USB bus as something other than a file system, for example as an input device.

Not familiar with that particular engine but one possibility is that it contains the log of current transactions, i.e. WORK that's STARTed but not yet COMMITted or ROLLed BACK.

Pretty much spot on. Depending on your database recovery model, it either contains the data for uncommitted transactions, or a log of everything that has been done in the database since the last full backup (enabling a restore to any point in time since then, and fancy things like database mirroring / log shipping).

The former should mean small(ish) log files, which usually contain a fair amount of empty space, corresponding to the largest transaction in the file's history. That space can be freed up by using the database commands to shrink the file.

The latter means big log files, especially if you're not regularly backing up the database.

On a modern file system, the log file will be locked while the database is online, safe from errant presses of the Delete key in file explorer. I'm guessing that on Win2000, not so much...