Posts by Noons 58 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Feb 2010
A bug was found in the app that caused it to overestimate the pecker-to-foot ratio. The bug has now been circumcised (auch!) and the app given a new name, to indicate the more reliable prediction: it is now called the "Earnest Evans" app.
P.S.: app developer's comment: "Let me show you my Python..."
Those practicing Reverse Psychology or Reverse Engineering, have got it backwards...
Re-verse Poetry isn't so hard,
You just say it one more time.
The one big advantage
Is that it always does rhyme.
Re-verse Poetry isn't so hard,
You just say it one more time.
The one big advantage
Is that it always does rhyme.
But it tends to be quite boring...
I tend to agree with the ninnies who point out that days have 24 hours, weeks have 7 days and years 365 or even 366 as irrefutable evidence that SI is unnatural. Of course it is unnatural, but so is clean water, or steel, or anything else that we modify from a natural state into one that's evidently more useful to us.
Having said that, I'm ready to lose the argument, if the natural units folk agree to replace the notoriously metrical decade and century with generation and lifetime. I hereby propose that a generation be defined as being equal to the voting age (18 years) or the age of consent (16 years), or the average of both (17 years). A lifetime would of course be the life expectancy, somewhere around 78 years, I think, making a lifetime equal to about 4.588 generations.
These units of time are so useful that they are already widely used, even if lacking a more precise definition. To make them even more natural and friendlier for general use, their definition should adapt to local custom, law and statistics, and subjected to review every so often, say every generation (which would itself be newly defined, thus making history a much more joyful enterprise).
If this proposal is met with success, I shall put forward an even more ambitious new unit of length: the ghoti, sometimes also spelled fish. As any angler knows, this is the ultimate unit for its flexibility. It allows pretty much any length to be described as "as big as a ghoti I once caught", making everything 1 ghoti long. As for square or cubic ghoti, not sure how that would work. My mate Picasso is working on it, and he's looking at it from all sides.
...OK, it's Friday, I obviously need a beer...
P.S.: And the IT angle? Obviously, ghoti and chips... to go with the beer!
I thought I'd bring out how pointless your comment sounds by rephrasing it using a Samsung product even less related to LED light bulbs than print drivers. I tried hard, and failed. Well done, sir! You're so far out already, that it's actually bloody hard to be even more pointless...
Beer, because I think you might be needing one.
... a giant leap for mankind?
Granted, the savings on a single, or half a dozen bulbs may not be great, but if you're responsible for lighting in a building with a few thousand light bulbs, it may sound more interesting. Think about the whole country, and then the benefits of a small saving become more apparent. Besides, progress usually happens in a sequence of small steps, which are no less important than the big, rare jumps that impress smaller minds.
IANAL but in the US corporations are people too, so FB's TS may well be illegal because of insisting that businesses have "pages" instead of "profiles". I have none, so I'm a non-person, wether corporated or incorporated.
To be honest, this is all pointless, which is what makes it fun to watch. A bit like football... I particularly enjoy the detail that Ranting Raj is drawing attention to the fact that he is going against the TS **after** finding a solution to this problem... Somebody please stick a "kick me!" note to his back, I'll go get some popcorn...
And how do you suggest that we recognise it when we get to the point that we "know what we're doing"? I'm sorry, science doesn't work that way, you don't suddenly get to a point when you can say " aha!, NOW I know how it works". Knowledge, unlike dogma, is gained gradually. And while a high level of confidence is possible, certainty isn't. We always work on a best guess footing.
Actually, that's not only science, that's life for you! Try suggesting nobody should have kids until they "know what they're doing"... Good luck with that.
You're right, I should have been more explicit in what I meant with the word accident. Since I'd just been looking it up the day before, it was clear to me than when I mentioned core damage frequency, I was talking about serious shit, not just a light bulb failing. So here's what my calculation is about:
"Core damage frequency (CDF) is a term used in probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) that indicates the likelihood of an accident that would cause damage to a nuclear reactor core. Core damage accidents are considered serious because damage to the core may prevent control of the nuclear reaction, which can lead to a nuclear meltdown."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_damage_frequency)
And no, core damage accidents are not "just like airplane accidents". In an airplane crash, there's no fallout: the passengers are affected, and maybe a few more people on the ground. It has a comparatively restricted extent. Some fuel may leak onto to the ground near the crash. A core damage can affect hugely larger numbers of people over a much, much larger area than an airplane crash would. It takes many years rather than a few weeks for effects to subside.
I'll state it clearly: I'm not part of the NIMBY brigade. In fact, I wouldn't oppose a nuclear power plant being built in my backyard out of fear it'll explode. I'd probably be ok living next to one - not planning to move there any time soon, though. It's the accumulated worldwide risk in the foreseeable future that I find unacceptable. In Japan, the prevailing winds westerly winds blow fallout towards the Pacific, and sun-worshipers in California probably won't notice any increase in radiation levels. But a core damage with fall out in, say, India - that is the stuff of nightmares...
Ok, here's some numbers: nuclear power plant core damage frequency is usually estimated at around 5x10^-5 /year, on one accident every 20,000 years. Some estimates from manufacturers for newer designs are much better than that, getting as low as 3x10^-8 /year. Doesn't sound bad, does it? These are risks, I believe, calculated for equipment failure, not human error.
Declaration of bias: I'll henceforth use the number given by regulators, rather than that given by manufacturers. I'm not presenting an exact calculation, just a rough estimate based on publicly available numbers.
So, one accident every 20,000 years. Per plant. There are now worldwide 440 commercial power plants. That's one accident every 40 years. If you include research reactors and nuclear ships and submarines, that roughly doubles the numbers. There's an additional 60 nuclear power plants under construction, 150 planned and 320 under proposal. So in the foreseeable future, we can expect somewhere in the region of 1500 nuclear reactors. One accident every 14 years or so.
Conclusion: nuclear power plants, individually, are safe. The one in your neighbourhood will typically have an accident every 20,000 years, nothing to worry about unless you have a tendency to be paranoid. Worldwide, you can expect a future with a nuclear accident or two per generation. Acceptable risk? Not for me, thanks.
I first did this calculation yesterday. Up to then, I was inclined to think of nuclear power as a minor risk, and of the anti-nuclear crowd has mostly people afraid of something they don't understand, and reacting out of that fear. Now, I'm firmly on the anti-nuclear side.
(Risk is calculated as follows: for a risk of p per plant and n plants, combined risk is not n*p, but rather p*sum(1-p)^i, from i=0..n-1; the calculation is left as an exercise for the reader. The difference is small for n<<1/p, as in this case)
One thing is knowing that many politicians are dodgy, quite another is accepting them to be openly so. I mean, would you really take your children to the nearest catholic priest and say "alright, alright, just fuck them, I guess that's life..."? I don't think you would, and you also shouldn't just accept politicians to be shameless liars and cheaters.
On the other hand, this guy obviously isn't all that good as a politician either. If he really had those "necessary" qualities, nobody would have ever heard of his cheating. That we all have, only shows he doesn't really know how to play the game*. Good riddance!
* unlike say, Kohl, who made all copies of his own PhD thesis disappear, or Stalin, who perfected the art of wiping out documentary evidence of disgraced former allies.
Before becoming defence minister, Guttenberg had served as an MP since 2002. Before that he managed his family's investments, maybe studied law at university and did his compulsory military service, becoming an email sergeant in an alpine unit. One of his moves as minister was to abolish such conscription, moving the German services' Department of Email toward becoming an all-volunteer open source force.
Baron zu Guttenberg had previously said that he copied chunks of his thesis due to the pressure of other commitments he had at the time, including being an MP, raising his children alongside his wife, TV presenter Countess Stephanie von Bismarck, and going for a drink with his friends at the weekend.
The offending doctorate was granted in 2007 for absence of studies of constitutional law in the USA and EU. Guttenberg is still recovering from the shock of finding out that the subordinates he'd pressured into writing his thesis for him had actually stitched him by producing such a rubbish cut and paste job. They, in stark contrast, are now laughing their heads off at him and the committee that approved the thesis with best grade "suma cum laude". LOL!
I'm not sure what you're on about... Do you really find LibreOffice such a difficult name to pronounce or spell? Agreed, it's not particularly catchy... May I be the first to suggest the name DocType? Particularly if it gets any good at "extracting discs full of teenage poetry from dead word processors".
After looking around some for other options, I've been happily using http://duckduckgo.com/ as default search engine (on Firefox, as it happens) for several months now. Works as well if not better than its more famous relatives, and, importantly, keeps no search history or leak search keywords.
No money in it for Mozilla, though...
... he gets one big chunk of cheese, and you get four big chunks of cheese, courtesy of the white mice. Unfortunately for both of you, the five remaining million-dollar prizes are NOT for the ultimate answer, so there's an infinite improbability that either of you will cash one of them... Good try, though... I'll go and carve some fjords now...
I also found it took 20 times longer to do anything with it, instead of traditional menus.
But really, what you're saying is it takes time to get used to changes. Well done, Sherlock!
There's nothing inherently slower in Linux, YOU are slower. It gets better with practice. TTFN.
That's why I so enjoy reading about the latest news on killing IT over breakfast. Pity there's no photos of maimed bodies. Maybe you could give it a thought next time, Mr. Page? I'll go and play with my tin soldiers now.
What's that red spot on my shir......
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