Posts by CrazyOldCatMan 6355 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Oct 2015
it can be a very tedious process
Especially as a lot of it will be testing for obscure edge cases that people unused to safety-critical systems just won't be used to thinking about.
"Oh - we didn't think about that" is not a good thing to hear from a designer of safety-critical systems.
(to wife): Yes dear, the decorating will done by Christmas
(Wife to me): "In which case, I'd better get on with it because I don't trust you with a paint brush.."
(I do stuff that goes "beep"[1]. She does the rest).
[1] Also stuff that goes "meow" or "woof"[2]. And stuff that's fried or wok'ed or not standard British cuisine.
[2] Unless it involves getting up at unsociable hours of the morning (like 6:30am) in which case we (sort of) share the duty. One day YoungestDog *will* learn how to use the cat door so that he can go out to releive his bladder in the garden..
"luxury waterfront living"? UK ports? You used these in the same sentence?
In some places - yes. Two examples - the Bristol Harbourside developments and various ex-working ports in London with lots of swanky new highrise developments.
I very much doubt wether that applies to anywhere north of Birmingham or west of Bristol though.
Plus the UK's lack of space
Depends where you go - the SE of England is pretty crowded but go north a few hundred miles and the population density drops right off. Go even further north into Scotland and there is plenty of space once you get past the Dun Edin/Glasachu axis.
Of course, a lot of the land is in private hands but palms can always be greased. And (post Brixit) Scotland may well end up independent so you are back into the realm of border tariffs..
Budweiser has been a Belgian company
ITYM "rabidly monopolistic US company" - after all, they are the ones who tried to sue the *original* Budweiser (Budweiser Budvar - the Czech company who have been around longer than the US company that brews Budweiser) in order to stop them using the name Budweiser for their beer - despite the fact that Budvar had been using it a lot longer.
I will admit that I sometimes do have a US-recipe Budweiser - it seems that it's association with real beer is sufficiently tenuous that it doesn't have the same effect as most barley-based beers (possibly because they only use barley malt with the rest of the yeast feedstock being rice).
I think you must be having my allocation since I rarely drink beer (gives me bad headaches after only a pint or two). The exception being Weiss Bier - being more wheat-based it doesn't seem to have the same effect.
Bizarrely, whisky doesn't have the same effect even though it's barley-based too.
Ever wondered why "socialism" always ends up as an ogliarchy
Same reason as capitalism usually ends up as an oligarchy - human nature. No matter what the window dressing, people are people. And amoral and unethical people will end up at the top of any political system and profit from the misfortunes of others.
When you are at the bottom of the heap, the words that the top tier use to oppress don't matter much and the boot on your neck has the same sole regardless of whether it has a hammer and sickle or a bald eagle stamped on it.
Get a ndfeb magnet and hit it with a grinder
When I was an active motorbike rider, there was a fashion amongst the kneedown sect to wear knee sliders with magnesium/titanium studs in them. Apparently, the sparks that came out when they slid across the tarmac was something to behold.
I was never in the kneedown community - I mostly concentrated on going round the corner as fast as possible and (most of the time) getting your knee down wasn't the quickest. I was in the KSB[1] community though..
[1] This only works with normally-aspirated engines. You get up to a nice high speed and then (staying in gear) flick the engine kill-switch to kill the ignition. The bike carries on moving (but slowing down) and the engine keeps being turned by gearbox - thus sucking in unburnt fuel and then (since the ignition isn't on) pushing it out of the exhaust. After a second or so, you flick the kill-switch back off to re-enable the ignition. The engine bump-starts and then all that nice unburnt fuel in the exhaust and exhaust manifold gets ignited by the very hot gasses coming out of the cylinder. The unburnt fuel in the exhaust pipe makes a very nice loud bang.. Best done in tunnels or enclosed roads. Doing it may invalidate any warranty on your engine or exhaust pipe (exhaust pipes really are not designed to contain exploding fuel and more than one set of exhaust baffles have been destroyed using this method.) It also can scare the crap out of a car driver if you are alongside them when you restart the engine..
A built in Cloud Recovery is nonsense
Why? MacOS has had it for quite a while and it's pretty useful if your Mac is trashed and you don't have the install media to hand..
(Mind you - Apple don't have to check for licensing since any Apple-branded Mac hardware has the right to run MacOS. There also can be a problem with some types of proxies but, in general, it works pretty well - especially when combined with iCloud backups).
The amount she paid in had nothing to do with it
Wrong - even under the old (ie Classic) government pension, you could make extra contributions to top up the end pension sum. Under the current (Nuvos or Alpha) pensions (neither of which are final salary - they are sort-of career average with every year of service adding to the percentage of your career-average salary that you get as a percentage) you can buy extra years of pension elegibility, pay to bring forward your pensionable age or pay extra contributions to top up the pension.
Many years ago (as a callow youth) I spent a while playing Call of Cthulu. Now, I'm generally a fan of tabletop RPGs (I've played many different systems - currently playing Pathfinder). I eventually gave up - my preferred character type is magic-using and doing so in CoC hastens the retiremment of your character due to SAN loss.
In fact, no matter what character type, you were pretty much guarenteed that your character would eventually have to be retired, simply due to game mechanics. Not by favourite game system..
Paranoia OTOH can be fun, especially when accompanied by alcohol.
'crawling under desks'
In my distant, dark days of being desktop support I very quickly got into the habit of warning people when I was about to crawl under their bank of desks - largely to give any ladies (especially those with short skirts) the opportunity to preserve their modesty..
It's a whole other world under the desks - especially if they have been in the same place for a long time.
Mr Fox. This correspondent has used myriad repellents to keep the vermin out of my carefully tended green space
At least two of our cats (senior female and junior female) have form for chasing foxes out of our garden - despite neither being anywhere near the size of a fox (SF is about 6.5kg, JF is about 3.5kg).
The two male cats don't care and just watch them strolling by.
Actually never saw LoTR in a movie theatre
We saw all of them - all on the last showing of the day so as to avoid having croth-fruit present (makes for a less-interrupted viewing).
And then we bought the directors cut of each of them to watch at home (for a number of years we watched them all back to back over the Christmas holidays).
I'd love for them to do some of The Silmarillion but I suspect that it's too broad a scope for them to touch.
Not that I'm a LOTR geek at all.. (but it was probably the first fantasy book[1] I read - by the age of 11 I'd read them all multiple times (including Silmarillion). However, I didn't read The Hobbit until doing my English O level.
[1] Of very, very many - I'm averaging one book/day at the moment.
or a walking stick
For attending non-seated gigs[1] I have a seat-stick - the top has a pivoting small seat that, in the upright position becomes the handle for the stick and, in the down position, becomes a small and fairly uncomfortable seat.
In the upright position it would make a fairly good weapon - especially if someone glued a sharp edge on.
When has it ever looked like there was going to be a Communist revolt in Britain?
In the 1920's.. the then politicians were petrified that the events in Russia would be replicated in the UK. There was a huge amount of labour unrest (a lot of it for very good reasons) and a lot of the young male population had military experience of one sort or another.
t's the common man they're afraid of. In both Britain and the United States modern gun control schemes showed up not when lawmakers saw large amounts of violent crime
Au contraire - the big jump in anti-gun laws in the UK came about after the Hungerford massacre (17 people died including the shooter). In the wake of which, the Firearms (amended) Act 1988 was passed that made it illegal to own semi-automatic weapons and restricted heavily the use of pump-action shotguns.
Things were further tightened up after the Dunblane school massacre.
Criminals will always be able to get guns (which is why the police have firearms squads) but at least our laws make it harder for them to be obtained (especially automatic and semi-automatic weapons) and a lot of the gang weapons recovered tend to be older weapons put back into commission (usually pretty crudely).
The answer is yes - but to do so it would need changes that would make it have to be completely re-certified as it would no longer be a linear descendent of the previous 737 model.
Of course, it could be argued that it already wasn't and should have been fully re-certified anyway - something that Boeing wanted to avoid because of the expense..
Since the certification process would have cost less money than they are currently losing I'll bet that they are starting to regret their penny-pinching.
puss filled sores
Amusing misspelling - especially as cats (being primary carnivores) won't touch carrion or anything rotting unless they are really, really hungry..
(A good methos of testing whether that cooked meat that's been in the fridge for a week is safe to eat is to offer it to a well-fed cat (their sense of smell isn't a good as a dogs but it's a magnitude better than ours). If the cat won't touch it then it's probably not safe.. Don't try this technique with a dog..)
At the point your speech turns to violence
.. or you actively are trying to get other people to commit violence. You see, in the real world, words have consequences - either in a direct form ("you have to kill him because he's an xxxx") or indirectly by spreading the message of hate and division.
The attitude that says "I can say whatever I want to and demand that there be no consequences" is childish and immature. Adults realise that the real world isn't just a black and white set of decisions.
Hence three is a fundamental number, the Trinity etc.
So it's a number invented by the Catholic Church some time in the 3rd century CE?
(It's what they call an 'Inferred[1] Doctrine' - one for which there is no direct evidence but is created to try to explain some parts of the text. Except it kinda destroys a whole bunch of others..)
Hebrew Yod is a dot
Err.. no. It's more akin to an apostrophe (but bigger). You do (in Modern Hebrew) get vowel points which are dots (which can be above or below the letters that they affect) but they didn't exist in Biblical Hebrew (which didn't have vowels at all - which leads to amusement when evangelicals insist on saying 'Jehovah'[2] or 'Yahweh' for YHWH since we can't be sure about how the tetragammnaton was acually pronounced - especially as the ancient Hebrews used 'adonai' instead so as to avoid blashphemy..).
[1] Nothing to do with cats.
[2] BiblicalHebrew didn't have the 'J' sound. Strictly speaking, 'Jesus' would have been 'Yeshua'..
I worked with those once, way back at the beginning of my career
When Nearest and Dearest was young (a little while ago), her first job was in an accounting team of a double-glazing company. Because she Knew About Computers (she'd done a NCSA Computers course after leaving school) she got to be the operator of the mini-computer that they used to do their accounts. Jobs included running the daily backups and changing the 10MB removable platters that their data was backed up to.
Now she's not the biggest person in the world (5 foot 2, and at that point, less than 8 stone) so it was somewhat of a struggle sometimes because those removable disk platters were not light and the 'computer room' (AKA - a small closet that was chosen because it had a window that could be opened for ventilation and cooling) was only just about big enough for the minicomputer, the cupboard for the removable platters and a person and the platter enclosure was somewhat sturdy.
Southern Europe arson is a big business
It is here too - especially in the conservation business with unscrupulous people buying crumbling listed buildings that then have mysterious fires when listed building consent is denied for whatever mad scheme they have..
It's remarkable how flammable some old stone-built listed buildings can suddenly become.
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