Posts by Doctor Syntax

A desk tidy for several different sizes of Post-It notes. There are no known sizes of Post-It notes that fit it.

OTOH, this being on the early days of mobiles, I was in an office with a shop on the ground floor. The carrier bags were considered wonderfully cool for the kids to take their stuff to school in.

Re: AHH the good old USB

A requirement of mine is that the stick be easily removable from the key-ring when required. One reason being that having the weight of a big bunch of keys is not good for the connectors. Another might be that the bunch of keys makes it too conspicuous.

A further requirement is that when not in use the connector should be protected from pocket lint.

Probably. But possibly a BOT that's discovered a gap in its training data.

DDG also has it at the top hit. I'm not sure where any of the rest might lead.

And irrespective of the county, I'd have thought sunlight would have been the least of problems on a building site.

the big 3 will have to agree to it, and they will.

Isn't "When you have them by the balls their hearts and minds will follow" an old American saying?

Re: Delusional Description: GDPR Is Still A Joke....

Correct up to a point but the real shortcoming of GDPR in both the EU and UK is that all it does is enable someone to make a complaint. There's nothing about pro-active enforcement in any jurisdiction, at least as regards individual give-aways. That's why we rely on Max Schrems.

Ageed. The suit needs to be against who you gave the data to in the first place and in the jurisdiction where the initial transaction took place. If the costs of that are sufficient deterrent then the data should never get within reach of the US, not even via the CLOUD Act.

I still think a lot of small claims would be the best way to discourage them. Death by a thousand cuts. A small claims route means that even if they send a heavy weight lawyer to contest it they can't get their costs back if they win, they wouldn't be able to set a precedent so they'd have to defend them all or concede and if the sort of numbers which would interest a class action lawyer were to do that every year they couldn't really afford to throw money away if they were going to lose regularly.

"WTF is a half bath?"

What you get when someone with an angle grinder tries to fit a bath into a shower cubicle.

Re: "hanging processes"

"And let's not forget that those first early humans were undoubtedly dark skinned."

As late as the Mesolithic in N Europe, I think. In evolutionary terms that's quite recent. Light skin is only an adaptation to lack of sunlight & consequent reduced vitamin D production.

Re: Blind spot

"Octopus eyes are weird."

Convergent evolution in action.

Re: Boycott The Language Marxists-Nazis

Not the old British Library Reading Room in the BM? That's the one that normally gets the credit.

Re: "English has more words than any other language, , by a factor of two or three"

Also should one take into account the multiple meanings of some words sequences of letters?

Re: "hanging processes"

And don't forget black vs red as indicating credit vs debit (and, oddly, a positive vs negative balance). And although red might be derogatory there a red-letter day is something special.

Re: Boycott The Language Marxists-Nazis

I think you're confusing Marx and Engels. Engels certainly had Mancunian connections.

Re: Get a life, hand-wringers & namby-pambys.

I suppose it would depend on the area concerned but such bans could be considered demeaning to the local culture where such usages are traditional.

Re: Scones

"the Scone of Stone"

That's what comes of letting them dry out. You should leave no scone unturnedeaten.

Re: Scones

Surely they don't want to trigger all those arguments about how it's pronounced. It should, of course, be pronounced with a short O.

Re: sequels, prequels, and "reimaginings"

"Others come up with something I find interesting and occasionally make it past series 2 without being cancelled."

Maybe interesting material runs its course fairly quickly while the turd mines are limitless.