Posts by Vincent Ballard 506 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Aug 2008
I don't think that's quite right, because the patient won't necessarily know what side effects the real stuff has (and anyway, side effects vary from person to person). But I am reminded of something I read decades ago about making placebos taste really unpleasant because the patient will think that something that nasty must be effective.
Some quick Googling brings up pages which suggest that ginger hair has the lowest density of strands per unit area and that darker hair has thicker strands, so ginger beards probably weigh less than other colours after correction for beard length.
In-bus displays seem to be particularly prone to problems. My latest photo in this collection is a blue screen of "your computer needs recovery" from Schippol taken 10 days ago, although since it was taken with the camera of a cheap phone it's not worth sending in.
Sometimes I have to ask a non-technical client to run a debug command on the command line and redirect the output to a file. I fully understand that they might not grok that greater-than output.log writes to output.log. I was, however, surprised yesterday when I had to explain this to our first-line support guy.
They're afraid that if they delay more than 24 hours, the browsers will implement official policy and remove their root certificates from the browsers' trusted list, causing all of their certificates (and not merely the 0.4% at issue) to become worthless for interactions involving anything other than wget/curl/equivalent.
My bank has an automated system to use it for authentication when you phone them, before they connect you to an operator. The bank also switched from numeric-only passwords to alphanumeric ones. But, and it's a big one, although you can enter numbers by dialling, for letters you have to use voice recognition, and the voice recognition fails spectacularly for me. The last time I tried it I made six attempts on the phone and then gave up and went across town to visit "my" branch.
Even more fun in bilingual regions / countries. Google Maps seems to select the language to show at random independently for each section of the same road.
In Spain a moderate number of roads are named after the dates of significant events. Or, at least, events which the councillors at the time deemed significant. I have no idea which of the many events of Spanish history which occurred on the 2nd of April is behind the naming of the street C/ 2 de abril in my city.
The best mistaken city story I've heard, which may be apocryphal but I hope that it's true, involved the delivery of a large dragon prop/costume for a performance of Wagner's Ring cycle in his home town of Bayreuth. My source for the story didn't explicitly mention telephones, but the address must have been dictated rather than provided in writing, because the merchandise was sent instead to Beirut.
Before reading your post I had been thinking that I recall various professors emeriti floating around, still enjoying themselves and probably making useful contributions, so I was unsure that retirement from official administrative responsibilities would have much effect, but the issue you raise about grants more than clarifies that uncertainly. Thank you.
The warmth? I accidentally filled my parents' bathroom with ladybirds a couple of years ago when visiting them at Christmas. I opened the window slightly before showering, to avoid steaming the room up, unaware that there were dozens of ladybirds enjoying the warmth and possibly humidity escaping through the cracks in the frame.
The CAB have pretty much killed off certificates with multi-year validity, but since getting bitten by a certificate expiry I have a weekly task which sends me a report of certificates that are expiring in the next few weeks. Now the only way that certificates cause me support headaches are the users in third world countries who use 10-year-old Android phones whose root certificate lists need updating, and we only get one or two of those a year.
I'm not sure that it's really necessary for every MP to read every word of every bill. Surely part of the point of having parties is that that kind of detail work can be centralised? But certainly each party should have a team of lawyers and subject matter experts, whether MPs or not, read each bill carefully and create an internal report.
No, this wasn't a Jew talking to other Jews in Israel. The quote's from 1 Timothy: it's a Greek-speaking Jew writing to a Greek-speaking Jew in Greek.
Note that that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be interpreted as "all kinds of evil" (where in colloquial English "all kinds" doesn't mean every kind). My post was complementing AC's in that regard, not contradicting it: if I'd spelt it out in detail the error in AC's post is putting the definite article before "root".
Back in the day only regular travellers had noticed the rear stairs. I would drink a coffee in a bar with a view to the gate, and when the queue for passport control was almost empty I'd join, walk past the long queue for the front stairs to the non-queue for the rear stairs, and be seated within a minute of passport control. I think Ryanair brought back assigned seating because it makes it easier to split people 50/50 between the two sets of stairs.
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