Posts by Loyal Commenter

Re: 6 years (and counting) for a fridge

£300 for a re-gas. Fucking hell what sort of freon are they using? Unobtainium?

It's that typical thing of sending thick people to very expensive schools. It doesn't produce geniuses, it just produces very confident idiots.

It's interesting you should say this. I was 'fortunate' enough to be schooled at a reasonably expensive school (not a very expensive one, mind), largely for the better quality of teaching. Having previously experienced the teaching quality at the local comprehensive, I can confirm that this was undoubtedly of better quality.

However, there was an atmosphere even here whereby achievement was measured not by academic success, but by who you were, and how well you did on the sports field. For instance, the head boy in my year just happened (purely by chance I'm sure) to be the son of the school's bursar (which is a posh word for accountant). Even in a relatively unknown private school, there was a culture of preference towards 'breeding' - in other words the posh boys got away with whatever they liked and were handed privilege on a plate.

At the time, I thought I was lucky to get a better quality of education than the masses, but in hindsight, the whole experience really just illustrates how private schooling feeds social division. The money pumped into such schools would instead be much better spent on giving the same level of education to all, so that those with the greatest ability get the support they need to achieve to their potential, instead of, as stated above, ending up with more very confident idiots.

Re: The name 'Tesla' has been hijacked

When you ask someone what a Tesla is unless they are an old skool Electrical Engineer they might say 'oh, that's a funny car that runs on batteries'.

I'd go with something you shouldn't go near with your keys in your pocket, unless you want to be stuck to whatever is causing it.

As a unit of measurement, the scale is a bit off of most practical uses.

Re: Escalation

Or Station's most bodacious creation, the good robot us-es?

When I was a student, I remember seeing a number of 2 pence coins placed edge to edge suspended in mid-air following the field lines of an NMR spectrometer. It gives you an appreciation of the field strengths involved, especially considering that 2p coins are not ferromagnetic..

Powering down (and restarting) the magnets on those things is not a trivial task, especially when you consider that (at the time at least), they were cooled with liquid helium (at -269°C), which itself was surrounded with liquid nitrogen (at -196°C). Getting those things up to room temperature so that foreign objects can be accessed and removed, and then cooling them back down again is a serious undertaking.

Admittedly, it is the best part of two decades since I've used an NMR machine. IIRC, ¹³C spectra are weak (due to low isotope abundance) and messy (due to lots of coupling in anything but the simpelst compounds), so require much higher fields to get a clean spectrum. At the time, the cutting-edge machines ran at about 400MHz (with field strengths of around 10T), and the one in use at my Uni was 100Mhz. I suspect the frequencies (and corresponding field strengths) have gone up since then towards the 1GHz range.

You're absolutely right about the ²D spectra - I'd totally forgotten that deuterium isn't spin-neutral! If my memory serves me correctly, the peak from trace amounts of un-deuterated solvent at the machine's native frequency was used as the reference point, as the solvents were usually 99+% deuterated, not 100%.

Re: using beams of light to manipulate atoms.

But ( and I know I'm wrong about this, but that doesn't mean I understand ), if they're massless then the force they exert is their speed multiplied by zero?

Newtonian mechanics (F=mv) applies pretty well at non-relativistic speeds (i.e. anything travelling at under an appreciable fraction of the speed of light). Photons travel at the speed of light (in a vacuum, anyway), so Einstein's pesky general realtivity comes into effect, and those equations get a whole load more terms in them.

Re: "Keep calm and carry on"

The UK has given notice, and the EU has set a deadline.

Not strictly true; The Prime Minister gave A50 notice to the EU parliament, and herself set a pretty arbitrary deadline. There are pretty good indications that the other EU nations would have little trouble agreeing to an extention of this limit, or indeed a withdrawal of the A50 notice entirely. The only reason May won't do this is the impression she has given herself that she is in control and competent, and won't have to backpedal when she can't get a deal involving magical unicorns for all - in other words she doesn't want to lose credibility, not realising that she doesn't have any left anyway.

Re: Actually ...

... here in the US, we still spell them correctly. You lot bastardized them.

Whilst this may be historically accurate, in that the US retained one variant spelling, whilst the UK retained the other, back at a time when either was probably considered to be perfectly acceptable, would you care to explain, on behalf of your fellow Left-Pondians, why you decided to start arbitrarily dropping letters from words like colour, labour, etc.?

I have heard (and I'm not sure how much truth there is to this, or whether it is apocryphal), that this was done to save money on newspaper adverts, when they were paid for by the letter, and free newspapers being one of the few printed things that many Americans were able to get hold of at the time, these spellings became common usage as a result.

Re: I really hope he gets the boot

He's a human being after all. Would any human being "want" to get arrested by a TLA notorious for prisoners going poof?

Those two women he allegedly raped in Sweden are human beings as well. It's worth remembering that he was in Sweden for some time after the leaks he is allegedly worried about, without any apparent concern about rendition to the US. He only seems to have become worried about this after he ran away from Sweden to the UK after these allegations came to light, and he only 'sought asylum' in the Ecuadorian embassy after being picked up by the UK police so that the Swedish prosecutors could catch up with him, and bailed - which he promptly skipped out on. it's also worth remembering that the UK has a far less stringent extradition treaty with the US than Sweden does, so if he was, as he claims, seeking to avoid extradition there from Sweden, the UK is about the last place he would have wanted to come.

Occam's Razor would suggest that, rather than a vast conspiracy against him by US TLAs, the Swedish Government, the British Government, and the Ecuadorian Government, to lock him up (and lets not forget that the person who actually leaked those documents has already been freed), it seems much more likely that here is a guy with an inflated sense of self-importance running from justice from a country where the idea of sexual consent is a bit more rigorous than his home nation.

Re: Weren't there protest in Dublin about hosuing costs recently?

Apple have their EU headquarters in Cork. For those that know anything about Irish geography, Cork is a good few hours drive South-West of Dublin, and Apple being based there is unlikely to be that cause of elevated housing prices in Dublin.

Now, if you were to talk about the other tech companies in Dublin, which bring people into the city, and the previous collapse in the housing market about ten years back, when loads of newly built houses in "ghost estates" had to be demolished, making developers understandably reluctant to build new housing, then you might be getting closer to the root causes of those housing protests.

Re: I still get wound up...

Because of course there are places in the world where trespassers do have permission... *AAARRRGGGHHH!*

In the UK, they're called public rights of way (usually footpaths or bridleways), and may cross private land, much to the annoyance of some in the farming community.

Also, as noted by the poster above, trespass isn't a crime in the UK. If you leave your front door open, and someone comes into your house, they're not committing a crime unless they cause damage, steal something, or become aggressive. I'm not sure you could even have them arrested if they refused to leave.

Re: Sage 50!

If it's using the windows beep, is it not possible to change the sound associated with that beep to silent?

Failing that, find the .wav file it's playing, rename it and replace it with a zero-byte file with the same name?

At the moment, Android phones are cheaper because Google don't charge for all the other bits that they bundle with their money-makers (Search and Chrome). A phone with FF and DDG instead would be more expensive because Google would be charging a licence fee for the other apps, and most importantly, the Play Store. Of course, you could have a phone without those and side-load all your apps. Most users aren't going to want something that doesn't just "work out of the box" though, or which uses a third-party app store that has nothing in it but tumbleweed.

So, by your reasoning, if I'm ever on the run from the law, I can come and sleep on your sofa, eat from your fridge, and if you ask me to clean the toilet after myself, I'm being imprisoned, despite the fact that I can leave at any time and am living rent free in your house, and you're not handing me over to the cops?

You, sir, are a total bell-end.

Re: And all we can do...

Worth noting that for the last march for a people's vote a few months ago, Bristol for Europe, my local campaign group, filled two coaches of people. There were around 150,000 people on that march (and a few hundred gammons / kippers on the counter-march). As of last week, BfE had sold out tickets for eight coaches for the coming march. If we use that as an indicator of how many people are likely to turn up this weekend, if the weather is nice, that will be somewhere north of 1M people trying to get into Parliament Square.

For a general rule-of-thumb, for each person who turns up to a demonstration, there are twenty others who also have the same strongly-felt political opinion (and politicians generally use this rule-of thumb when gauging public opinion), so lets call that 20M+ people. That is already several million more people than the 17.4M who voted to leave the EU in 2016. Of course, everyone on that march will be a Russian Troll™ trying to interfere with the democratic rights of those freedom loving quitters.

Such demonstrations are important (and an important part of democracy) because they are one of the best ways of making governments sit up and take notice of what the people are saying.

It's looking less and less likely that May will get a deal that will satisfy Parliament (and looking more likely that she will get no deal at all), it is up to us to make it known that it is time for her to stop playing the "will of the people" game and become a proper grown-up states-person who is able to put the interests of the country ahead of the interests of her own career, or her party's. And lets face it, the Tory Party isn't exactly going to come out the far end of this smelling of roses in any eventuality.

Re: And all we can do...

Going in to the Referendum it was made very, VERY clear that it was a one-time vote with a binding result.

I'm sorry, but that is total tosh. When parliament voted on the enabling bill for the referendum, the preamble for the bill, which is available on Hansard, so you can check it for yourself, explicitly stated several things:

- The bill was advisory

- The bill was non-binding

- For the bill to be made non-advisory and binding would require it to be re-written to require a super-majority and to include all UK citizens of voting age (which it did not, UK nationals living abroad for more than 10 years were excluded, skewing the results quite a bit)

Just because David Cameron then stated that the result of the referendum would be acted on doesn't bind parliament in any way. The Prime Minister may be the leader of the house, but they are not the ruler of the house, and the other 650 odd MPs are elected to represent their constituencies, not their party, and certainly not the leader of the party with the most votes.

The only reason the likes of May and Corbyn insist that the results of the referendum "must be respected" is that they know that for them to say otherwise would invite a political backlash against themselves. They have only their own interests at heart, not those of the country, which should be abundantly clear to anyone who has taken even a cursory glance at any politicians ever*.

*Hyperbole aside, some politicians are worse than others, an my local MP is actually not too bad. Those that rise to the top, however, do so not because they represent the people the best, but because they are the best at rising to the top of politics, which requires an entirely different skill-set.

Re: Casino Royale

There's only only one decent Bond Film called "Casino Royale" and it certainly doesn't feature Daniel Craig in it...

Re: Silly first name.

...

Gráinne not Gronnyer

Cliona not Cleaner

...

Aren't Gaelic names fun?