Posts by Vincent Ballard 487 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Aug 2008
The other problem is that the support for validating your data stream before deserialising is negligible to non-existent. A nice compromise between writing a custom file format and using insecure serialisation would be to allow deserialisation with a custom "context" object which allows you to filter the classes which may be deserialised. If I can permit deserialising anything whose package begins com.mycompany. and reject anything else then I'm safe from whatever weirdness org.apache might have in its many libraries.
It does seem to be quite difficult, yes. Where I live the stops have displays to tell you how long until the next one, and they fairly frequently tell me that the next bus is 10 minutes away when I can see it at the end of the road, or that it's at the end of the road and then I have to wait 10 minutes.
There are two easy rebuttals to the idea that you can just look at family histories: recessive genes, and new mutations. I suspect that most people don't realise how common the latter are. E.g. according to the U.S. National Institute of Health,
At least 25 percent of Marfan syndrome cases result from a new mutation in the FBN1 gene. These cases occur in people with no history of the disorder in their family.
The name CAMBRIDGE is registered as a UK trademark in different categories by a variety of companies. In addition to the university, there's a food company, a water board, Yamaha, a stationery company, a towel company, a furniture company, and an air conditioning company. Of those, the university would be the one with the best claim to the domain: it has the trademark for Cambridge in the contexts of "electronic publications, downloadable" and "publication of directories". But, of course, the .com domain isn't subservient to UK trademarks.
The subhead ("Should have been pulped. Weren't") suggests that the items for recycling were licence certificates with the keys printed on them. Although that raises the question of how they can have infringed copyright: breach of contract, yes, but if they were merely reselling physical items then no copying was performed.
It's not essentially unbounded either. It's 20-bit. Nor is UTF-8 unbounded: in principle it can encode 36-bit values (although it's never been specified for more than 31-bit), but beyond that you need to make major design changes. UTF-16 is a good way for encoding certain strings, in particular ones which mainly use characters from the top half of the BMP (e.g. a lot of the supported Asian languages).
Jamón serrano is cured, yes. Although crispy bacon would be worth trying as a substitute.
Health-and-safety-conscious people might want to sear the inside of the steak before assembling: typically the idea with rare steak is to cook it just enough to kill the bacteria on the cut surface.
Websites can be edited for not much more than it would have cost to do the thing properly in the first place. Restaurants can be renamed, albeit it costs more because you have to replace the signage, menus, and any other customised decor. If you want something really expensive to fix, how about a TV programme?
A BBC series called Episodes had a gravestone which said in English that the departed would be dearly missed, and in Hebrew that he would be pickled at great expense.
In order to register someone as dead a form detailing the cause of mortality needs to be filled out by a doctor within 24 hours of that person's final breath.This definitely isn't true in the UK - it can take much longer than that to get an autopsy - but it's not clear from context whether it's talking about Australia or the US.
in California you need an arts degree.Please tell me this is a joke. Why shouldn't someone with a degree in, say, biochemistry be considered capable of handling a body?
Speaking as someone who regularly has to ask for clarification from the people who set the questions at my pub quiz, I think that it's very sensible to specify that the answer which is considered correct is the one which fits a specific, easily identified, version. Otherwise you'll get people claiming that their (officially wrong) answer is the correct one in the Penguin version, or in the original Danish version, or somesuch.
Or Nominet, who back in May sent an e-mail to everyone with a domain under the .uk CCTLD (including those with .co.uk etc. domains) saying
"You now have access to an online account with Nominet that you can use to manage some other services associated with your .uk domain names (for example to transfer your domain name or check your registration details).
"Please follow the link below to access your online account and confirm that your contact details are correct"
According to their customer support this was a genuine e-mail rather than a phish, but it fails every sniff test.
Drivers for esoteric hardware? That's the classic reason for science labs to keep antique kit running.
Or maybe they value stability over all else and don't want to risk a migration. That's the reason that a lot of hospitals still use WinXP. I was seeing IE6 in my logs for a clinical trial progress tracking website last year.
Incidentally, I spotted the Sun Microsystems badge in one of those photos before I got to the line about kit from companies which don't exist any more. Been a while since I saw that logo.
The application form is at http://www.oxfordcollegeirl.com/?id=11 . "Registration Fees 20000 Sterling Plus Donations", which is a somewhat interesting interpretation of "donation". I decided my previous post was long enough without mentioning that. But looking at the list of honour, lists of graduates, and photos apparently of graduation ceremonies, I suspect that they're mainly aiming to defraud people from the Middle East rather than British or Irish.
I'm not sure what the best part of that site is. Whether it's the pictures of Wills and Kate in the "List of honor" (sic), even though they're not named in the list. Or the fact that one of the people in their slider is apparently a hand-drawn circuit diagram. Or that they claim to be "bringing the attention to an important kind of medical research known as clinical research". Or that they claim to offer a graphic design course that includes "Introduction to using windows XP". Perhaps the winner is the claim under "Research Topics > Astrophysics" that Mars is inhabited by primates and clay fertility goddesses, whereas Saturn is inhabited by owls and grey aliens. It's comedy gold wherever you look.
Advanced knowledge is understanding that they actually go well with avocado, mango, melon, pineapple, raspberries, strawberries, honey, citrus, cream, yoghurt, almonds, and hazelnuts. (Source: The Flavor Bible). Pick a suitable subset and you can make a nice fruit salad with tomato.
I've had a series of rabies shots. They weren't fun, but they weren't nearly as bad as the tetanus shot which left me unable to walk without pain for days and gave me a needle phobia for years. And they're certainly not as bad as actually getting rabies.
Spain hasn't given up claiming Gibraltar, even though it's now been British for about 100 years longer than it was Spanish. But at a grassroots level (as a resident of Spain), rather than complaints about non-fulfilment of the Treaty of Utrecht what I hear are complaints about cigarette smuggling.
Since it says that traditionally you use left-over rice from yesterday, the answer must be "Yes". (And I personally would not do anything with left-over rice from yesterday other than chuck it in the bin: with its massive surface area, left-over rice is once of the main sources of food poisoning).
I have to wonder whether it's coincidence that this recipe should appear on El Reg in the same week that a menu offering Nazi Goring appeared on a major linguistics blog.
Interesting stuff.
There's one statistic which you didn't mention, and which is important context for the reasoning you present. A priori, improved healthcare could mean that the number of births per woman drop but the number of surviving children per woman rise. The dataset you link also includes infant mortality rates, and e.g. for India they show the number of children per woman who survive 5 years fell from ~4.5 to ~2.4.
It's not an either/or between seseo and ceceo. Roughly speaking, Spanish has names for every "non-standard" variant, but not for the "standard". The "standard" is to pronounce z and (c before i or e) as "th", and s as "s". Seseo is to pronounce z and (c before i or e) as "s"; it is common in the south of Spain (including the Canaries) and the whole of Spanish-speaking America. Ceceo is to pronounce s as "th"; it is found in parts of the south of Spain, and scarcely anywhere else.
Something like 80% of Spaniards use the "standard" pronunciation of these particular letters, in contrast to the widespread "non-standard" yeísmo (pronouncing ll as "y").
Being able to vote against a particular candidate may be nice, but the real downside of closed party lists is that it makes the candidates much more worried about pleasing the party hierarchy than the electorate. If each of the main parties can pretty much guarantee 3 seats out of the 10 going in a region, you want to suck up to the person who decides which names go in the first 3 slots. Open lists all the way.
I'm not sure that xkcd 1312 actually contradicts the statement that Haskell is "one of the most popular functional languages". In fact, there's a good case to be made that it picks on Haskell because more readers will at least have heard of it than Ocaml, and more will have tried it out than F#.
Actually, abogado.es just redirects to abogacia.es, the site of the Consejo General de la Abogacía Española, which is a body established by statute to represent and coordinate the various regional lawyers' guilds.
There is a sense in which the case for protecting es.abogado is stronger than for protecting abogado.es, although it's not a valid concern in the current context of protecting national brands. "Es abogado" means "Is a lawyer", so the use of fulano.es.abogado if Fulano is not a lawyer would be rather dodgy.
It's not quite true that all block cipher methods were vulnerable to BEAST. All block ciphers in CBC mode were, but people who were relatively up to date and had GCM available (and preferred in the negotiation) were ok. The problem there is that both the client and the server have to be up to date.
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