'(I'll still be working until I'm dead, and then contract out as a ghost, during my "retirement")'
Ah, so you'll be a bombastic ghost writer, and we can look forward to bombastic bill.
1954 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Dec 2017
"you can find yourself caught with your pants down plunged into almost complete blackness."
I have that problem with this new place I have moved into. The downstairs dunny has a timed light, with the switch on the outside. You have three minutes to get your business done, or you bring a torch.
'a troublesome lavatory cistern whose owner explained to her theatrical paying guest, "You have to surprise it, Mr. ____" - which I suppose means a sudden sharp pull.'
Is that whacking off rather quickly, or a very quick jerk off, that you mean by "sudden sharp pull"? Sounds painful.
"They've evolved to the point where they can recognise a tech' who actually knows what they are doing, so behave properly in fear of being molested."
Known in the industry as a "faulty technician sensor". I never did find out if it was the technician or the sensor that is considered faulty. I believe other industries have similar terms. Or perhaps that's "Fawlty technician sensor". I have seen it in action many times, recalcitrant computer gear that suddenly starts to work if even the threat of having me poke at it is mentioned within earshot of the device.
"Living in a small village near Stockholm was a good place to learn Swedish - which I did mostly by reading Asterix the Gaul. That gave me a fairly good grasp of everyday usage - but did little for my pronunciation."
I have Esperanto translations of Asterix (er Asteriks I mean) books for that same reason. Though apparently my pronunciation is perfect. That's why they moved me to the advanced Esperanto class, so they could all listen to my pronunciation in awe, despite the fact I had no idea what it was I was saying. Which is why I left those classes, it wasn't teaching me anything. I later found out I pronounce Esperanto with the same thick Aussie accent I pronounce English with, just all the other Aussie Esperanto students and teachers didn't notice.
"Croc clips are just like alligator clips, only not as tasty."
I tried eating croc once, it tasted just like chicken, very overpriced chicken. Not very surprising, that's what they feed them. So now I cut out the middle man, er middle croc, and just eat pure chicken.
"As for color, who gives a fuck? They are machines. You can paint 'em any color you like."
I'm surprised that more robots are not painted green. Green is the new black. Though personally I'd want purple robots. Sexy, female, purple robots, with long green hair. That otherwise look like Paris.
"we all know about recursive file deletion when in the wrong directory"
I did that last weekend. I had created a temporary directory in my home directory on my server, filled it with files, then SCPed the lot to my home computer. Since it was only temporary, I then deleted it. Only some network glitch, or perhaps a keyboard bounce, or just plain fat fingers meant I was doing it in the home directory instead, one level up from where I thought I was. Though I noticed a couple of seconds later, and desperately tried to abort the delete, it was too late, everything in my home directory was gone. I still had mc open on that directory in another tmux session, which confirm my suspicion that there was nothing important there anyway. Important stuff on that server actually gets backed up in several places.
"Alcohol is a natural by-product of the digestion process."
Ah, that explains something my doctor once wrote that I have been scratching my head about ever since. In a general report about my health he noted that I don't drink alcohol (which is true), but right next to that said that I should try to drink less alcohol. I've been wondering ever since how to produce alcohol from my body to reach this "less alcohol" goal. Now I know. I guess some carefully timed throwing up is in order.
"The sort of thing we do all the time without thinking."
We are thinking about these things though, just at a lower level. A robot has to think hard about walking on two legs, something that a human seems to do "without thinking". Take away the humans brain and they'll suddenly forget how to walk. And how to breath, ...
"Maybe it will be like razors and we'll see phones with three, four, five and more cameras someday"
Some of the phones in the article have three cameras on the back and one on the front. So that's four. Though you might be able to count the fingerprint sensor as a "camera", so that'll be five cameras. My Moto Z has three light / presence sensors as well, and a bunch of microphones. On the other hand, I've never owned a razor.
"So Mr Nand Flash from India has a pet Egyptain snake that will slowly climb down a tree in the second half of this year."
Ah, that explains my babel fish dieing of fright, the snake scared her. All a bit of a QoQ-up really, I should have gotten a more robust fish.
Though wouldn't a 10% QoQ drop mean that Mr Nand Flash's voice is now a bit deeper?
'You can head to the "My Forums" tab of your "Edit my details" (account) page, and you can toggle the "Switch off automatic post fading" on if you'd like.'
I like, and I turned off, er on that option. No more "More", er I mean no more "Expand comment" for me. Thanks.
And now I've re-enabled the cookie to keep seeing the new stuff. Doing a bit of A/B testing.
"You don't need back doors. Just Australian Law. As Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnball said, Australian Law trumps the laws of mathematics governing encryption."
Any day now I expect our Aussie governbent to redefine π to be 10, coz we is a metric country and it's just easier all 'round. Or maybe 1, that's even easier.
"Actually I wrote a short story along these lines a few dacades back, but you're right in a way - it wasn't exactly a blockbuster."
I'm sure Asimov and / or someone wrote such a story. From a very vague memory, planet wide hive mind that included microbes. May have been called Nemesis, and I may be entirely wrong. I'm too busy these days to go and reread it.
Though I think they didn't use stasis.