Posts by Vincent Ballard 487 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Aug 2008
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.
Similarly, someone with a massive gash in their femoral artery won't be seriously and irreparably injured by a failure to perform emergency surgery, because it's already the way things are.
I'm sure there are aspects to the case which make it not black and white, but that argument from Apple strikes me as obviously ridiculous. The reason for the lawsuit is that Epic argues that "the way things are" is harming them.
Citation: Consolidated text: Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Directive 95/46/EC (General Data Protection Regulation). https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A02016R0679-20160504&qid=1689352839415
Note in particular Article 6: processing is lawful only if one of the enumerated conditions applies. Suppose I post my e-mail and home address on a public forum so that e.g. my friends can send me birthday wishes and you wish to scrape that for training your LLM. That doesn't meet the requirements for consent unless I explicitly authorise that purpose; it's not necessary for any contract between us; it's not something that you're being forced to do by a legal obligation; it's not protecting anyone's vital interests; it's not being carried out in the public interest or as an exercise of official authority; and it's not necessary for any legitimate purpose you have because an LLM can perfectly well be trained without it.
> Food prices have gone up because of increased energy costs, worse exchange rates, higher transport/import duties as well as Brexit. These factors are largely a result of government policy failures too.
From the general tone of your post I think it's unintentional, but this seems to imply that the first three factors are independent of Brexit. Brexit was a major factor in the value of the pound dropping, and is surely relevant to the duties as well.
In the original Spanish version of Los Misterios de Laura (I haven't seen the Hollywood version and I don't know whether it kept the plots) there's a murder performed by arranging a heavy object to be supported by ice on a shelf above the landline telephone and then phoning the victim when the murderer calculates that the ice will have melted enough and the object is going to be about to fall and keeping them talking for long enough.
I'm not sure about your point (b). I distinctly remember from the book Bravo Two Zero that they placed a claymore anti-personnel mine as part of their defences at one point (possibly while they slept) and dug it back up and disarmed it when they moved on. The person who placed it was responsible for digging it up because they knew exactly how they'd placed it.
I had a trip to Brussels a few years ago and the day after the trip was a public holiday back home. My boss was agreeable to booking a later return flight, so I managed to actually see some of the sights, in particular the Atomium. If only it didn't require such a coincidence for business travel to be pleasant.
It's interesting to note that they're doing this now. When I tried to make the same library upgrade on some tooling I'd made, I had to largely abandon it because the changes made to the auth mechanism were so severe that I couldn't figure out whether it was even possible to use the new API. I ended up replacing a fully automated system with a half-manual one. I wonder whether this means that it's now time to try to persuade my boss to allocate some time to revisit the issue and myself that my sanity could survive the attempt.
If it can find anything at all in code then it's an improvement from the last time I tried to use code search in Github, a few weeks ago. I could literally copy the name of a type from a source file, paste it into the search box, search for it "in this repository", and it would tell me that there were zero instances of that string.
For completeness, there's the subtlety about Russia being the successor state of the USSR for the purposes of the NPT. The other ex-Soviet states with nuclear warheads (Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus) gave then up in exchange for security guarantees from the permanent members of the Security Council (see: Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances).
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