
Re: fixing Model M switches
Thank you for taking the time to make this very helpful reply!
652 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Jun 2010
The only yacht I've ever been on was a racing one. Sleeping accommodation was bunks in tiers of three, with no room to swing the proverbial cat anywhere below deck. It was jolly good fun for a weekend, but not what I would call luxurious.
Icon: the nearest thing to nautical, arrr!
From my point of view it's unfortunate because driving trade to China empowers an authoritarian regime with an appalling record on human rights.
China might be a useful counterweight to the USA's current madness, but that doesn't mean that they're suddenly the good guys.
Apparently there was a similar conversation between two branches of my family a couple of generations ago, both of which emigrated from the UK to Canada. The people who had settled in Vancouver were asked to meet the next wave off the boat in Nova Scotia. The reply which came back was along the same lines of "you go to meet them, you're closer!" :-D
Perl source is compiled into an internal structure which is then optimised before being run (see here for more details). This happens every time rather than doing it once to produce a separate executable, which makes it look like an interpreted language. Producing a standalone executable is difficult at least in part because of the presence of the eval
function.
Stop me if I've told this one before ;-)
I was working in a team of Perl developers and was asked to review the first change made by a new contractor. It didn't work. At all. Somehow the guy had managed to write Perl code which not only didn't do the right thing, but didn't even compile! And he confidently submitted it for review without mentioning that he'd had any trouble with it. Two days later he was gone.
Er, no. "Five" is pronounced "fife" and "nine" is "niner", to distinguish between the two and because the English "v" sound is difficult for some non-native speakers. There are a few more (scroll down for numbers), but I don't remember ever hearing native English speakers using "wun" or "tree".
The point is to do their best to highlight what is going on. It may be hopeless, but what's the alternative? Bend the knee and kiss the ring? Anyone in the US who stands up for truth and justice right now deserves more than a little respect.
Who will be the USA's Alexei Navalny?
You'll get lunar gravity at a precise distance from the axis ("at the midpoint of the crew capsule lockers"), but at every other distance it will be either lesser or greater than that. In such a small capsule the difference will be pretty noticeable, and the Coriolis force will probably also be apparent. So I suspect that this is only going to be useful for pretty small experiments.
Still pretty cool though :-)
According to their press release the "obscure name" is Florida Turbine Technologies:
Boom has selected Florida Turbine Technologies, a business unit of Kratos Defense & Security Solutions, Inc., as its engine design team. FTT has leading supersonic engine design expertise, including key engineers among the team responsible for the design of the F-119 and F-135 supersonic engines that power the F-22 and F-35.
Obscure, but maybe not inexperienced.
Which is lazy on "their" part, and an abuse of the postcode system which is designed to facilitate the delivery of post. The last time I wanted to report a pothole it was at a rural road junction not near any property - what's the postcode for that? No postcode, no pothole, no problem, right?!
If they're really interested in finding out where the potholes are, they could make it easier for people with Actual Intelligence to report them, maybe by sticking a pin in a map?
You didn't miss much. A friend of mine has no TV and has been ignoring these for years with no discernible effect.
The first year he was a good little boy and followed the instructions to declare that he didn't need a license.
The second year he sent a slightly snotty letter to say that he didn't have a TV, that he would tell them if he ever got one, and to please leave him alone until then.
Then he got a few escalating in tone from "please pay now" to "you're risking a £1,000 fine" to "we'll be in your area next Tuesday". He still gets one of those every so often, but has never had a knock on the door.
At the risk of feeding the troll....
Are there any ethnic Russians in Poland?
Are there any Nazis in Ukraine? As I recall, Putin's given reason for invading was to get rid of the Nazis there. What are the odds that if he ever succeeds, then as soon as his military has recovered it will turn out that Poland (or wherever) is also being run by Nazis and needs to be "liberated"?
"Don't Feed The Troll" works when the majority of readers can recognise a troll, for example (hopefully!) here. It doesn't work so well when most of the troll's 200+ million followers believe the last soundbite they heard in their favourite echo chamber.
I think that political leaders have to respond to these accusations because their silence is more likely to be taken as an admission of guilt than the contempt which the original statement deserves. Unfortunately the troll's followers are not likely to see or believe the responses, but they should be on record.
I'm not sure if that's the book I read, as I later lent it to someone and haven't got it back >:-( But the story is definitely one for the ages.
It bears repeating:
“For scientific discovery give me Scott; for speed and efficiency of travel give me Amundsen; but when disaster strikes and all hope is gone, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton.”
Something which isn't always mentioned is the support expedition on the Aurora which set up supply dumps on the other side of Antarctica. That ship also became icebound, stranding the shore party which completed its mission and lost three men in the process.
They've dealt with it, in the usual "goodwill" way, meaning not admitting any liability.
It's just another example of shoddy systems. Wasn't there any testing which would have shown the meter readings being overread by a factor of 1,000? No sanity checks on bills suddenly leaping by the same factor? Or are they just hoping that people will pay up without questioning the infullible (sic) computer?
On a related but slightly different note, we've recently had a "smart" meter fitted by Thames Water. As with Lee, the meter appears to be working perfectly. But Thames Water have managed to ignore the decimal point and tried to charge us for cubic metres instead of litres! The bill even had a "real world" translation which helpfully told us we'd been having four showers per hour, 24/7, since the meter was installed X-(
Hmmm. I'm still smarting from the film adaptation of Johnny Mnemonic, so I'm not holding my breath.
While I generally find the two-hour (ish) movie format is too short to do justice to a novel, I'm not sure that Neuromancer has enough material to last for ten hours or so. I suppose they could start with Burning Chrome and carry on with the other books. Maybe that could be interesting :-)
Although the blurb at Apple TV has dampened my enthusiasm again:
The series will follow a damaged, top-rung super-hacker named Case who is thrust into a web of digital espionage and high stakes crime with his partner Molly, a razor-girl assassin with mirrored eyes aiming to pull a heist on a corporate dynasty with untold secrets.
Surely Concorde already solved this problem with the famous "droop snoot". Of course with a nose this long they might have to go one better and have a second hinge in the other direction to prevent the nose from touching the ground. Or multiple hinges so that the nose curls up under the body like a butterfly's proboscis :-D