Posts by Doctor Syntax 42407 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
Sometimes it's not the user/customer who's wrong.
Phone and internet became intermittent one afternoon. During an interval when the phone was working ask BT helldesk is there's work going on in the area.
There isn't. We can send out an engineer, £80 charge if it's not our fault.
Offer declined, walk down to the village where the footway cabinet is located to find:
2 x OpenReach vans
2 x manholes opened
2 x OpenReach bods occupying manholes, redoing everyone's connections.
When it comes to desktop environments pedestrian and conservative are good. Their purpose is - or should be - to unobtrusively enable the user to run applications and open files. What the user doesn't need is a new, exciting and unfamiliar way of doing or failing to do this that then has to be fathomed out. A DE that makes for an impressive demo runs the risk of being the exact opposite of what the user needs.
But all these new DEs offer "discoverability" don't they? I don't want to spend today discovering how to do what I knew how to do yesterday.
Pre-1945 steel was used as shielding in low-level radiation counting set-ups. The Belfast carbon dating lab was lucky having a ship-yard just down the road to source second-hand steel plates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel
I don't think the judgement actually comments on this (at least it didn't before my eyes glazed over) but the implication seems to be that they knew, or at least assumed, some dollar subs were already coming from the EU and the subsequent half dozen UK or EU subs might only be a subset of those.
I'm not sure why you got the downvotes as it is actually a good question.
AFAICS that wasn't a situation the court was asked to decide on so it didn't decide on it. The choice of currency was taken as an indication of trading in the EU (including the UK at the time). Presumably this was what the complainant argued. If they only accepted dollars there may have been other indications for the complainant to argue and the court to accept or reject as it considered appropriate.
If they only accepted USD and specifically said "Not available in the EU" or maybe USD and other non-EU currencies the situation might have been different but you'd need to see how a court ruled in those circumstances to be sure.
Case law grows by interpreting the legislation in relation to specific sets of circumstances.
"Bungler-In-Chief also messed up with the 'there won't be a border in the Irish sea' palaver, hoping to force the Republic out of the EU single market and back into the UK orbit. Yet, that's not happened."
I doubt such long term "planning" was involved. It was just a thing he needed to say at the time to those he was addressing. All his utterances are the same.
The Good Friday agreement was predicated on NI and the EU being in the single market, hence removing the need for a hard border. That's why NI has to remain in the single market for it to function. If NI is in the single market and the UK isn't then there has to be some form of customs border in the Irish Sea. No amount of flannelling can dispose of that set of consequences.
To be fair a different measurement technology can reduce the needed sample size. For instance back in the late '60s we were doing carbon dating by radiometry. We needed samples of several grammes. Subsequently mass-spec came along to enable a direct measurement of isotope ratios. Presented with the smallest sample we could work with they'd have to sub-sample it as it would have been too big to work with in its entirety.
In forensic science glass comparison depended on being able to measure the RI microscopic chips to precession orders of magnitude better than the manufacturers' QC labs were measuring bulk samples. By using various attachments we were able to get IR spectra from about 2mm of individual synthetic textile fibres whilst manufacturers' QA was using films about the thickness of photographic films. In that case our spectra were indeed of poorer quality (ye canna defy the laws of physics) and we couldn't see the halogenated monomers that were added as tracers - but when I left my colleagues were proposing to use SEM/XRF to see if they could pick them up another way.
The point is, of course, that for each analysis that sort of transformation requires a lot of development work. There isn't going to be a magic bullet that hits all the anions, cations, simple organic compounds and enzymes that blood analysis involves. Given the number of specialist companies working in this field and the hundreds of existing man-years of experience at all levels is shouldn't have been credible than someone with no background could come along and do what they couldn't. It simply takes disrupter theory too far.
"There was after all : a company, a working lab, a research and a product development division, and a product - albeit that it never worked."
I'm suddenly reminded of Feynman's words explaining cargo cults.
"I honestly believe that she set out to try to achieve what she wanted to achieve"
You also have to ask yourself, as she should have asked herself, whether she had the requisite background to achieve that.
In order to successfully direct the development effort to produce that sort of machine would need decades of experience in the field. In fact, that experience would be needed to decide whether it was even feasible. She didn't have that. So what was her role? I think the jury's answered that question.
"Juries are not that stupid and operate under strict instructions."
Juries are given a summing up by the judge and advice as to what the law is. When they get into the jury room their response to that is entirely their own.
1. changing the type from the equivalent of "int32_t" to "uint32_t" would solve the problem for several thousand years.
But they'd have lost the ability to handle BC dates.
2. Does everyone understand that by reserving four digits for an update counter *within a day*, Microsoft effectively said "our software is sooooo bad, we might actually have to post a thousand or more updates *in a single day*"?
It's the sort of conservative approach they should have taken in handling the date in the scanner.
