" Pam Ayres. As she'd have written now: .net one, purl one."
Surely that should be: .net one; perl one?
PS Sorry for calling you Shirley!
162 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Aug 2012
"The reason for that is that credit card fields have EXACTLY 16 spaces in them.
...
Sometimes, you just can't fix stupid."
<pedant>
Nor, apparently, can you fix ignorance.
American Express card numbers have 15 digits (4 + 6 + 5), and --- several years after they introduced the 3-digit security CSC (like all the other credit/debit cards) --- I can't find a single payment service (Sage, Worldpay, any of the banks) that will allow you to specify it (the 3-digit CSC) rather than the 4-digit number that is printed on the face of the Amex Card.
Sigh!
</pedant>
In 1986 I wrote a credit card acceptance function for MUD II that stripped out the spaces and --- in every card acceptance page I have authored since then --- that continues to be the case; it seems I'm in a minority of one.
"When your No 7 to East Acton comes along, there will be three more right behind it all empty. such is the nature of London Busses."
<pedant>
Strictly speaking it's more to do with the nature of London traffic than the bus itself.
It's always a problem in cities and towns; buses would be so much more consistent with the published timetable if it weren't for other road users and --- more importantly --- passengers!
</pedant>
"Found the exact battery part from China (40% of apple cost) ..."
Have one of these (it is Friday after all) --->
Though you do need to take care with some of the replacement parts (even the branded Apple parts are probably from China, so it's not the nationality) as they may be poorer quality - possibly more prone to catch fire, or lesser capacity.
There is a difference between noname and branded replacements: I've repaired my wife's phone's screen with both types and the Nokia branded part doesn't cause the phone to freeze and require a reboot and didn't cost all that much more than the noname brand.
"Of course, a big concern for ATMs is balancing convenience and security," said Jose Diaz, director of payment strategy at Thales e-Security. "The use of mobile devices and biometrics at cash point will not only provide a more convenient method of taking out money but it will also help counter incidents of identity theft and card skimming, providing better and stronger authentication."
<rant>
Can we have a loud of chorus of: "Biometrics are usernames not passwords!"
</rant>
"He received a fixed penalty notice in the post and was horrified that he didn't get a copy of the photo."
It used to be asking for the evidence (after a suitable delay) was a good way to get the charge dismissed as the police were apt to dispose of the photographs before the 6 weeks had elapsed.
(Though now I think more critically about this, it's probably an urban legend. Sigh!)
"No decision has been taken as to whether HMS Prince of Wales will be equipped with the Joint Precision Landing and Approach System (JPALS)"
Shouldn't that be either "JPLAS" or Joint Precision Approach and Landing System?
Maybe that's the been the trouble with the F35 all along, they're doing the landings before they do the approach - but then that's the US for you: always putting the cart before the horse--
Mine's the one with the funny straps at the end of the sleeves
"I dont know how much the propellant for a gun like this is but I'd bet its a shit load cheaper than rocket fuel ..."
If one used a railgun then one isn't dealing with a propellant at all, just a source of electricity.
Another advantage is the lack of noise from the explosive combustion of the said propellant, leaving only the sonic boom, so watch out for a sudden brown-out followed by a loud bang (and the sound of breaking glass)!
"I thought 83 feet seemed an odd value to settle on, until it dawned on me that it's the same as 25.2984 metres."
I think it was rounded up from 82' 6" and we are looking at a height of 5 rods (poles or perches)*
(*I have waited 50 years to use "rod, pole or perch" in a sentence)
Edit: Dammit! @JohnBrown got in before me!
"The whole concept is broken at so many levels. It's really just about the ability to shed load."
They're being quite open about it too.
Their current slogan is "Getting Gaz and Leccy under control", the kicker is that it is their control and not your control!
"Automatics because hard to drink coffee, eat donut, steer AND change gear"
Don't forget answering the 'phone and texting!
That said I've never seen the point of doing more work than necessary and my VW DSG can change gear in milliseconds, so why should I muck about being all macho and insisting on a manual? (OK in this case it's pretty much just a manual with an automatic clutch (or two), but my previous cars have all been traditional automatics and there was nothing more satisfying than leaving a manual driving adversary-- sorry fellow driver in the next lane, in the dust at traffic lights - I defy your average driver of a manual car to outperform pretty much any automatic gearbox equipped car driven in "kickdown"!).
Meanwhile was there an earthquake on the night in question?
BTW I am a Brit. and I don't bother with the handbrake either, when the car is in "Park" and the ground is flat.
"Maser: “microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation”. A device that emits microwave radiation in a very precise manner, similar to how a laser emits light."
<pedant>
Call me uber-picky, but the MASER came first by around 7 years, so LASERs need to be described in terms of MASERs.
</pedant>
While we're on the subject of population inversions, am I the only one to notice that the M40 on a Friday evening shows a classic inversion where the two inner lanes are almost empty and the rightmost lane is nose-to-tail traffic (albeit generally quite fast-moving), does anyone have any idea what it would take to turn the motorway into a CASER (Car Ammplification ...)?
Where's my coat?
Edit: The perils of posting without reading all the previous comments. Sorry @Jan 0.
"And then they "break open the paper rolls of the coins". That would be the rolls they come in from the bank."
I've just read his website and it seems he delivered 5whbs of "UNROLLED" coins, so the "Shear bloody mindedness mascerading as Incompetance.(several sics)" would appear to be on the part of the protagonist (well, the bloody-mindedness part anyway).
"The 'back of an envelope' calculation is always a good place to start."
To paraphrase Randall Munroe "any number you can write down basically rounds to zero" so pretty much all your calculations will end up that way!
"Shoot the artists, give everyone else a nice warm cup of tea and a bit of fairy cake and they'll have the job done in half an hour."
Now is that the cup of tea that was used to create the "infinite improbability drive"?
Or perhaps the fairy cake was used by Trin Tragula in his "total perspective vortex"?
Sigh! Douglas Adams, gone far too early!
Have a pint (and an upvote)!
" I will transition to rocket powered paper weights as soon as they become available and fervently support research into ion drive paper weights"
<pedant>
The rocket-powered paperweight is only good for short-term usage, so as long as you only require your papers to be held down for a few minutes at a time then you're OK; the ion-drive paperweight is a long-term solution for those that require their papers to be weighted for months (possibly years) at a time. They address two different sets of requirements, so you don't need to replace your rocket-powered paperweights with ion-drive paperweights.
</pedant>
"The real question is: what qubit coherence duration is required to solve the problem? As I understand it, at the moment the coherence duration is of the order of milliseconds. What was assumed by the people offering their opinion in this article? If the coherence duration was increased to 1 second, would that do it? 10 seconds?""
And almost immediately we have this news:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/10/18/researchers_increase_qubit_stability_tenfold_by_dressing_them_with_em_field/
Well done "that man".
"My Audi is now more than five years old, and it has a driving assistance system which the manufacturer does not market as an "Autopilot", rather they call it Adaptive Cruise Control."
The VW/Audi/etc. system doesn't do autosteer AFAICS.
Since you are still steering the car you are less likely to be disengaged from the road conditions in which you are driving. (Though I find myself entering a "fugue state" on older Motorways if I am not careful.)
If I recall correctly Mercedes and BMW have "lane keeping" assistance features, so they will have some form of autosteer, does anyone know what the accident statistics for these cars are like?
Possibly the main difference between all the cars with this kind of self-drive ability is the fact that the Musk is so high profile and keeps talking about it?
"right, lithium being the second most chemically reactive substance in the known universe, and the most reactive of all of the metals."
Err. No. Lithium is the least reactive of the Alkali metals (Group II); in this case reactivity increases as you go down the group. So Caesium would be the most reactive of these metals.
There is an entertaining film I remember from my school days where each metal in turn is reacted with water, which demonstrates this point quite explosively
Here's a YouTube video that contains some of the scenes from that film: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvVUtpdK7xw)
"If it does things automagically, that makes it an active system in my book. Just sayin'"
I think the clue is in the following: "The IDA is studded with sensors that feed data to approaching spacecraft so that they can dock automatically without requiring help from inside the habitat."
Personally, I'd rather not have unexpected visitors just dropping in without me present if I was umpteen thousand miles up with nowhere to go if they're less than friendly.
"It is also important to understand the fear that cops feel everyday on road checkpoints where anybody could fire at him asking papers."
At this point one wonders why take the risk of pulling someone over for what seems like (to my UK ears at least) an extremely trivial matter.
The NRA apparently wants to increase gun ownership, which will lead inevitably to more situations where people (the police included) will be in fear of their lives and will shoot at the slightest hint of increased danger. To quote an article from Cracked (http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-7-stupidest-arguments-against-gun-control/) "... this is a supersaturated solution of bullets crystallizing out into gravestones."
"That's because at that time the 'Amalgated Union of Professional Thinkers'* strongly opposed the idea of their work being done by machines eventually."
So was there a sudden increase in wandering academic pundits at about this time?
Was the mechanism designed to find the answer* or the question**?
(Oh all right *42, **"What do you get if you multiply six by nine?")
"Unfortunately, also John Maynard Keynes and the Fired Mars Bar."
Oy! Without "Keynes" there would be only be three North Towers at Essex University, and where would we be then? On second thoughts I'd have had not so far to walk to get to William Morris... (any chance of discrediting R. H. Tawney? :) )
Meanwhile I'm not sure about "Fired Mars Bar", is this referring to the possible creation of a confectionery shooting device (a whole new meaning to fast food), or perhaps some kind of ceramic coating...
"It's not about assumptions, it's about theories. And it's always time to re-evaluate theories in the light of new information; we call this process "science"."
Strictly speaking it's about hypotheses, not theories; and just because new information may cause us to expand an existing theory it doesn't stop us continuing to use the old theory as long as its predictions are still useful.
Einstein's General Relativity may have superseded Newton, but Newton's theories are still good enough for NASA successfully to compute the orbits for the Voyager missions for example, and when something replaces General Relativty, our GPS systems will continue to work in spite of that.