Posts by jake

You don't need a measuring system to find a center line.

Re: If the lander's rocking...

"There is no dark side of the moon, really. Matter of fact, it's all dark. The only thing that makes it look light is the sun." —Gerry O'Driscoll

Working with fractions is only difficult if you're not used to it. I do both when restoring old cars, bikes, boats and farm equipment, and I've never had any issues. A measuring system's a measuring system.

And that is precisely why you insular Brits are so pathetically condescending when it comes to every other nation and culture on Earth. Your teachers beat it into you as youngsters. And I should know ... I've got me O and A levels to show for it (I saw sense and bailed out of Kings College in favo(u)r of Berkeley after one year ... ).

No, I was talking about NASA's Project Apollo. NASA was run by a guy born in North Carolina, and Apollo was run by a guy born in Missouri. Between them, they ran a team comprised of tens of thousands of people, thousands of whom were engineers.

This being ElReg, one would be remiss in not mentioning Margaret Hamilton, who was Apollo's Director of the Software Engineering Division starting in 1965. Arguably, without her code in all of the onboard flight systems, Apollo would never have gotten off the ground. She was born in Indiana.

"what sort of a backward hick uses Fahrenheit today?"

The only one who has actually put footprints on the Moon.

Re: Define “misinformation” ..

"Define misinformation and just who gets to define misinformation?"

If you really have to ask, it's probably whatever your your shaman du jour says it is.

At least as far as you are concerned, because thinking is hard.

Re: Fairly obvious answer.

No, the FCC does not have such a list; if it did, it would be listed here.

Here is the Public Radio Exchange folks take on the subject.

For the copy/past set, here's that FCC link:

https://help.prx.org/hc/en-us/articles/360044988133-A-guide-to-broadcast-obscenities-and-issuing-content-advisories

And the one for the PRX:

https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/obscene-indecent-and-profane-broadcasts

Re: Fairly obvious answer.

Nice misdirection.

We were talking about when tackiling such misinformation becomes censorship, not the validity or invalidity of the words.

Re: Fairly obvious answer.

"Suppressing information, regardless of truthfulness, is always likely to be a losing game"

Well, yes. The folks complaining about their speech being "censored" in TOA are a good example. At no time whatsoever were their words fully removed from the Internet, and anybody could find out what they had to say on the subject at any time.

In other words, there was no "censorship", despite the bleating of the sheep.

Before anyone says it, I personally would not allow their words on systems under my control. Am I censoring them?

Actually, the yelling of "FIRE" is perfectly legal, even in a crowded theater. What is illegal is the intent.

If the intent is to warn of an actual fire, you might be hailed as a hero. If the intent is to cause a panic, maybe not so much.

Re: This is absurd

"Most of the people posting the shit sadly, actually believe it."

I don't know about most. There are a lot of trolls out there. Even here on ElReg.

Re: No comment required.

"Meta’s Threads is temporarily blocking searches about Covid-19"

Then stop using it. There are many, many more sites which aren't blocking anything at all on the subject.

Besides, how many ElReg commentards would consider MetaFace a decent single-source for information about anything at all? I'm willing to bet that that number is so low as to be lost in statistical error.

Re: Big Tech censorship is real

But you ultimately and easily found what you were looking for.

And you did not get locked up for it. In fact, you can print it out and show it to all your local politicians with complete indemnity.

Clearly the .gov and BigTech have miserably failed in this supposed instance of "censorship".

Or maybe, despite all the paranoid babble about it, there is no actual censorship happening at all.

Re: Fairly obvious answer.

"I remember a comedian making a good living saying the words that were not allowed by the government on TV or radio."

The government did not (and still does not) actually have such a list. The airwaves are largely self-regulating here in the US, mostly due to pressure from advertisers.

"He was funnier than hell, god rest his sole. Oops, just said one."

Yes, he was funnier than hell. I brought home a copy of "Class Clown" in 1972, much to MeDearOldMum's consternation. Dad found both Mom's reaction and the album hysterical.

No, you did not just say one. You're probably thinking of Carlin's "7 dirty words", which were shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits. These words were pseudo-random, chosen more for their cadence in the comedian's bit than because they were the worst of the worst. Carlin was known to change them up for various reasons, to great comedic effect ... and as he put it once at The Greek in Berkeley "I'd be one bored motherfucker if I didn't".

Prior to Carlin, in the mid '60s Lenny Bruce also had such a list, this time 9 words. He claimed to have been arrested for using the words ass, balls, cocksucker, cunt, fuck, motherfucker, piss, shit and tits. To the best of my knowledge there was no proof of the supposed arrest.

Re: I I be a-goin there, I be-n't start from here

"To me, part of the blame lies with the manufacturer of said very expensive kit."

Yes, and no. Remember, thus was the mid- 1980s. The assumption was that only people with clues would have access to such kit. This is the time when many stories of switches set to 120V were wired into 240V mains, with a resulting release of the magic smoke. It's also the era when we started seeing units that would automagically adjust for most household voltages world-wide.

Re: I I be a-goin there, I be-n't start from here

"But also why the hell have the option for double the power"

Never used a bench-top power supply, I take it. Handy bits of kit ... but capable of getting a neophyte into all kinds of trouble.

Re: Nope

That's pronounced "Anti-Defamation League". It's international, not simply American.

Re: So Musk has blood on his hands

As a horse guy, a car guy, and a computer guy, I'll take the horse every time.

The concept of computers, with all their faults, taking control of a mechanical contraption such as a car with all of THAT that can go wrong, and then subjecting the combination to the vagaries of the planet scares the shit out of me. Far, far too many things to go wrong ... and the more safety checks they put in, the more the problems compound.

Now, if the cars were on "computer controlled" roads only, maybe. But I still wouldn't buy one as long as critters and weather might be involved.

How fat?

That would be completely up to the wetware installer, and is outside the scope of TFA's knowledge.

Re: Rabbit nozzles

They dispense water. It's essentially a check valve that replaces a bottle's cap. Functionally, it's a ball held captive in a peened-over tube. Bunny licks the ball, out comes water. Requires little maintenance other than refilling the bottle once or twice per day.

They make a varietal that plugs into your barn's pressure water supply, but I don't like those. Too much to go wrong.

It's no trick, but I have so far managed not to install Chrome at all.

Fuck alphagoo, the horse they rode in on, the saddle they sat on, etc. etc.

Re: Greybeard 2

"Existence tends to beat most of them."

Longevity tends to beat the rest.

Compilers aren't perfect, and never will be ... although see "longevity", above.

Re: Looking forward to that "more in-depth review"!

"I went from OS/2 to Win2k, that being the first version of Windows that was half decent."

Win2K was peak Microsoft. It's all been downhill from there.

Re: Compilers?

I've been using gcc with OS/2 for decades. Works fine.

Note: That's assuming you know something about programming.

For hardware compatibility, try:

https://www.arcanoae.com/wiki/arcaos/technical-specifications/

Their phone support is excellent once you have a copy.

Over the years I've tried to convince them to make it available for free to home users, but it would seem that IBM, in their infinite glory, wants nothing to do with that scene.

Yes, that's 64GB.

Re: Expose

"most editions of the bible aren’t free"

"Most editions" is not equivalent to "most copies". Not by a long shot.

The Gideons supposedly distribute more than two copies per second, all day, every day. (They claim 70 million copies per year).

Re: Expose

The Books of Gideon are so free, sometimes you'll find several copies behind the sofa you're hiding from the Mormons behind.

Re: Expose

Only one M in that, so I gotta ask, what were (or are) "ormons"?

Re: Huh

I suspect it's not so much software as the logic involved in the current flow across a Wheatstone bridge.

Which isn't exactly unknown to most of the commentardariat here, I'd wager ... O-level physics, from what I remember.

Re: Please stop ffs....

Oh, goodie. Another boorish xenophobe. Is it just me, or is ElReg attracting these kiddies all of a sudden?

The plural of boar can indeed be boars, at least according to my big dic. (OED, 2nd dead tree edition.)

As a Yank, I can assure you that nobody uses "aircrafts" or "deers" over here. Perhaps your issue is a trifle more local?

As for your hacking little baby pigs up with knives, WOW! What a man! Not that it has ever happened ... no adult would allow you to do such a thing. The release of stress hormones from the critter would make the meat virtually inedible, which would be both a shame and a waste.

Re: Typo/fact checking

"I think you mean English. Our language, our rules! Merriam-Webster is not an English language dictionary!"

The book I was discussing was both translated and published in The Strand, London, approximately one year before Noah Webster was born, so I rather suspect that the British had more to say about it than any prototype American outlaw lexicographer.

Re: Hold the f'ing panic!

Mis-translation, Shirley.

The boar was clearly taking the laptop, but not necessarily taken to using it.

Re: Typo/fact checking

"so they call it "wolf-ram"."

No, you ignorant sophomoric xenophobe, we do not. It has always been Tungsten on this side of the pond. However, the Brits used Wolfram for a period of time through at least the mid-1700s.

c.f. the 1757 English translation of Henckel’s Pyritologia, "Though this tin ore be not easily separable from wolfram, a kind of mock-tin, or an irony tin mineral." ... Chapter IX, page 132.

Personally, I think it SHOULD be called Wolfram, because that's what the guys who first managed to isolate it called it.