Posts by Crumble 12 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Sep 2014
Careful, you're only one step away from "I don't need to test it, I coded it correctly"!
To put it another way, yes you do need to re-test it every single time. If you constructed the test right the first time, it's trivial to prove it again. Then you can spend the rest of the afternoon working out why it didn't pass this time even though you DIDN'T CHANGE THAT BIT.
In my days as a consultant, I was regularly warned about giving advice without a contract in place. I was told that if any advice was to be acted on and went sour, there was no limited liability. Even though I've never seen this happen I was always very careful after that.
In James's place I might have been in touch offering to come and spend a few hours handover of work in progress subject to a suitable (large) fee. No obligation though. And management should already have been aware of the forward schedule for any significant actions required, so I'd expect them to refuse my offer anyway.
Mr Moffat already has far too many ideas and insists on including all of them in whichever episode he is working on at the time. Result? Plot holes, continuity gaps, unexplained non-sequiturs that seem to be thrown in just for the fun of it. He needs a script editor with discipline.
"And the philosophy of Marxism, that drives the left, is almost utterly irrelevant in a world in which there are no human workers, only machines."
Ever since I was a boy reading science fiction, I have struggled to see how such a world could work. How do you get the output of the machines to the people?
The best I can come up with is, take all the money, give it to the people, they use it to buy the output of the machines. Then you have to take all the money off the owner of the machines and give it back to the people to keep the cycle going. I don't think you can dispense with money and give the goods directly to the people, how do you know which people need stuff? At least money allows the people to choose which goods to obtain.
If we could only work out where we're headed, the path ahead would be a lot clearer!
In Kurt Vonnegut Jr's debut novel "Player Piano", central planning allocates goods to people, who mostly work in either the army or the "reconstruction and reclamation corps". It turns out not to be a great solution (although it's an excellent novel).
Meanwhile the Star Trek universe survives fine without money, although sadly Mr Roddenberry didn't go into sufficient detail as to how this works.
"On a general point the entire plumbing industry seems dedicated to producing large numbers of parts none of which are what you need, probably don't fit together and when they do they leak"
QFT!
"What's a toa?" I'm not an expert, but I know a bit about word processing. "toa" is short for "to spend a".
I don't buy it.
The snag with using government bond yields as a proxy for average rate of return is that yields have been badly distorted by Quantitative Easing programmes. The flood of money coming in has pushed up demand and pushed down yields. Ten year gilts are about 2% and no likelihood of returning to the old "normal" any time soon. What happens if the UK ends up like Switzerland with ten year bonds yielding less than zero percent?
If you want to do this complicated scheme (who am I to argue with a Nobel), find another proxy.
Squeezer has it. Scientific testing in the world of high-end hifi is virtually non-existent. There's no point asking the opinion of an audiophile who swears he can hear the difference if his speaker cables are connected back to front (with the lettering on the cable running from speaker to amp).
Nigel11 is right that your best chance of hearing a difference is on very simple music where any "unmusical" digital artefacts will add a perceived harshness to the sound. But I try hard not to listen to the sound and just enjoy the music. I suggest you do the same. It's bound to be coming through better than it did on pirate radio in the 1960's and that was hugely enjoyable regardless!
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