Posts by Solo Owl

Re: air CON

They should update to Universal Cereal Bus (type C, of course).

Re: Trouble ahead

Quaoar *is* a creation god, q.v. Wikipedia.

Re: More Context

i am using U-Block Origin. It does not block advertisements — excuse me — "announcements" posted by the website itself.

Re: Funny placenames

Geographic pedantry:

Foggy Bottom is not a suburb, it's just a 15-minute walk to the White House. It is the neighborhood where the State Department, the World Bank and IMF, and a university are located. It is on the Potomac River, not the Delaware River or Delaware Bay. (There are no suburbs of Washington on the Delaware River, as that is ~100 miles away. You may be thinking of Philadelphia.)

In the southern states, "bottom" is a common word for low-lying land, often a flood plain. In many towns it's the poor people and minorities who live in the bottoms.

Re: It's alien

Monoliths naturally occur in national capital cities. (Many are sculpted into the shape of a pomposity, often on horseback.)

Re: Data Entry

Back in the day, I was connected to 360s, 370s, and DEC20s at 300 baud. I could get half a line ahead of the letters echoing on the screen, and I had to pause.

Re: Vladivostok

"on a corvette named Amerika"

Well, at that time the easternmost outpost of the Russian Empire was indeed in America, in what is now called Bodaga Bay, California, a few miles north of what is now San Francisco; it was a few miles from Mexico's northernmost settlements.

Re: Hawaiian shirts

Or a kilt?

Re: Award-winning research right here.

But it is so obviously written with an Ignobel in mind, it should be ejected.

Re: I knew that

The reason is in the history. 200+ years ago there were no canals in the US and the roads were crap. So when Congress decided we needed a Military Academy to train officers, they also required the cadets to learn civil engineering. There are other things for cadets to major in now, but the Corps of Engineers is still a big powerful institution doing all sorts of things that have little to do with national defense. (They still build canals and dams, control where you can put bulkheads and seawalls in harbors, and provide the raw material (Potomac water) to the DC Water supply, and I don't know what else.)

Re: Spooning toner into the copier

Reminds of the fellow working a help desk telephonically. He told the caller to get a clean floppy. There was a long pause. Finally she came back and said, "OK, I washed the floppy."

Re: C

Also in Oregon it is illegal to fuel your own car, last time I was there. In my experience the trigger lock is universal in the US and Canada. They want you to wander into the C-store and buy something more profitable than gasoline.

Re: Help learning Linux..

You can't replace the hard drive?

Re: Again,

My main computer at home is set to turn itself on a few minutes before my phone is programmed to make a very loud noise that is intended to activate me. By the time I fininsh ablutions and find breakfast, the computer is ready and anxious to read mail and the papers. Even with the slowest boot time.

I calculated Amazon's profit at 1.75% of sales. This is not such a bad return on gross sales revenue. Most supermarkets struggle to make 2% on sales.

If I were an investor, I would want to know (among many other things) what is the net profit after taxes as a percentage of the money oroginally invested; and as a percentage of the money that could be raised by selling all of the companies assets. It is not the same thing as a percentage of sales revenue.

(Disclosure: I'm lazy. I invest in mutual funds and index funds.)

Re: "Why the massive emergency services response?"

You forgot to credit Arlo Guthrie....

"And Uncle Sam can get away with it because foreign visitors have no lobby in the US. But if it gets votes, well, hey, I guess that "works" too."

Actually, foreign visitors have a lobby — it's called the tourist industry.

Re: Oh, come on

Why do you need to buy a second license for a machine that already has one?

You cannot re-activate Windows Vista or older; Windows 7 is dicey. In these cases, you must buy a Windows 10 license.

Re: alan.green@balfourbeatty.com

But you can see them. Or at least you can see where they are. All the dust and stars that are circling the a black hole, getting closer and closer until too late, emit very high frequency high-energy electromagnetic radiation, which can be "seen" and measured with gamma-ray detectors and radio telescopes and such.

Re: Luxembourg Ministry

Someone at El Reg is drinking more than their quota. A Luxembourg goverment ministry is located in Latvia? Leads me to discount the entire story.

Re: KB2952664 - "Is it because Windows is a curate's egg?"

Actually, a bad egg is bad through and through. It cannot have any good parts. The Curate was trying to be polite and subservient to his boss. Which was the point of the original 1895 cartoon. [Wikipedia]

Nowadays, the curate would just say, "This egg is fucking bad. Get me another, will ya?"

Re: Hacked machines?

Paper ballots can be hacked. For example: Crooked politicians counting ballots with bits of pencil lead hidden under their fingernails can cause a ballot to have votes for two candidates for the same office, so the ballot will be invalid.