Posts by Rich 11 4578 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Jul 2009
The only way they will likely have seen assembler is if they were paying close attention to the GCHQ screens in the Channel 4 drama 'The Undeclared War' last June/July. Every other hacker-style film or series just scrolls JavaScript up and down the screen at a ridiculous rate of knots.
I would actually expect that most unemployed 50+ ex-IT workers are happily retired, having (a) had enough of this s**t
Count me in that category. When blithering idiots thinking that 'move fast and break things' is an acceptable replacement for solid analysis, planning and testing took over, I fucked off. I've not for one moment regretted it, and no amount of money or promises from Chancellor *unt could get me back.
the first day after the winter solstice when an unaided person can detect that the days are starting to get longer
Really? Here at 51N there's only a six or seven second difference per day in day length at that time of year, which I'd be very surprised to see someone identify without a timepiece in the context of an eight-hour day. It doesn't help that sunrise remains stuck at almost the same time for a full fortnight.
Now then. Yeah, it's patchy as well. I had a mate who grew up about eighty miles from where I did but he understood most of my dialect words and I understood most of his, while the people who grew up in the town we both lived in until recently (more than a hundred miles from either of our birthplaces) barely recognised any. He said that back when he started secondary school he'd only had to travel eight miles from his village to the edge of the nearest city, and he found even there that people drew a blank on words he'd commonly use or used them to mean something else.
(the few who do are all in the U.S. and it's not the normal term there either)
The sales of MAGA hats must have been miscounted.
Several patriotic songs from the 19th century must clearly be outdated and need fixing; perhaps their other claims should be amended too.
Thankfully, no politician ever finishes a rousing address with 'God save America!' That would be so wrong.
Yeah, that's Harvest Festival. It was the only service I enjoyed when I was a kid at Sunday School, because I could see all the contributed tins and baskets of food up on the altar, which would be distributed to the needy after the service. Easter and Xmas seemed much less concrete or worthwhile in comparison.
No, Xmas is a slight against Christ, no other way to interpret it.
That's what my old headmaster said to the school in assembly, all the way back in December 1977, when someone climbed up on the roof opposite his office and wrote 'Merry Xmas, Phil' in six foot high letters in the snow. His snappy lecture wasn't very well-received, even by my mates in the Christian Union.
He was wrong then and you're wrong now. The X isn't a placeholder for anything; your Xkah and Xdan comparisons are just silly. MJB7 provided the explanation.
Methane is broken down by sunlight into carbon dioxide and water, but that of course takes time. It is a closed loop, but one which traps infrared as well as chemical bond energy in our environment over the best part of a century.
It's taken me the last three years to completely remove beef from my diet (I'm focusing on beef because it's the greatest pollutant producer per calorie re. human consumption) and replace it with meat-like non-meat alternatives in such a way that I'll never go back to my old diet. If I'd started that and stuck with it thirty years ago (and I did try in 1989, but the meat-like alternatives available to me at the time were pretty vile, at least to my taste) then only by now would 60% of the global warming consequences of the chain of production leading to that last beefburger or Sunday roast have left the atmosphere (60% because of the way the half-lives of methane and carbon dioxide work).
Bloody hell, it took me less time to give up smoking (also from 1989) and at least my lungs had fully cleared within ten years of that.
Greater numbers of digits are always scarier, in my experience. I recall two models of generator in use at different times on a site, in the same safety compound, both clearly labelled with danger signs. The first genny was additionally labelled '1000kVA', the second '1MW'. Once the second replaced the first it became a popular choice as a bicycle park, because clearly all those safety bars and hurricane fencing are intended for use with bike locks -- especially the door, because there's already an example of how to use a padlock there.
Alexa, can the cast of Coronation Street finish reading me The Complete works of the Marquis de Sade?
I now can't help but hear in my head the dulcet tones of a digitally-resurrected Violet Carson reciting the tales of Madame Desgranges. You bastard.
Lots of things were tried at the beginning of the pandemic, when knowledge of Covid-19 was minimal. In fact, in the US, I think remdesivir was one of those which Trump had approved for compassionate use in critical cases when there was nothing better that doctors could do.
Perhaps you haven't read the recent studies regarding the overall effectiveness of remdesivir. It saved some people from having to be ventilated.
the right bang on about cancel culture (to pick one example) as an attack on the left when there is just as much evidence or counterclaim of such a charge against themselves.
This behaviour, especially amongst Trump and the GOP, has given rise to the phrase 'every accusation is a confession'. Every crackpot or illegal thing they declare that someone else is doing comes directly from their own playbook, because they can't imagine that someone else wouldn't do what they would do if they were in that position. Trafficking children? Hello, Matt Gaetz and Ron DeSantis. Murder by medical misinformation? Hi there, Marjorie Taylor Greene. Ubermenschen eugenics? Steve Bannon, so good to see you on a literal platform in front of a crowd of fucking thousands.
My to-do app created a reminder task for it, although I'm not sure what present I should buy a dead parent.
Depends on how much money you have to spare. I'd suggest the following, in order of rising cost:
i) Daily monastical prayers for the soul in Purgatory.
ii) A funeral games in the Colosseum.
iii) Twenty extra minutes worth of electricity to keep the head safe in cryonic storage.
I couldn't believe the last two were serious considerations. Even the one before that was a bit suspect: no previous ministerial experience and, most tellingly, the first Prime Minister in my lifetime to be younger than me! Unsurprisingly he didn't turn out too well.
Anyway, my opinion on the subject, now or at a general election, doesn't really matter: I have one vote, Rupert Murdoch has several billion.
I've twice had to investigate suspected use of work computers for, er, personal satisfaction during office hours. This was decades ago, when almost no-one knew there was such a thing as a browser cache, so it was always easy to figure out whether or not there was a case to answer. The first time I was able to categorise the type of material quite unmistakeably and warned my boss that I could tell him but that he didn't want to know. He said he did want to know. I told him he really didn't. He said he really did. I told him. He said he really didn't want to know.
The second case was much more serious than just a misuse of resources report to HR. After that I told my boss there wasn't going to be a third time; my job description didn't cover risk of psychological trauma.
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