Posts by Weylin

Computer scientists at University of Edinburgh contemplate courses without 'Alice' and 'Bob'

Singlular "they" has been good grammar for over 6 centuries. Americans however are more averse to notional agreement than Brits.

NB Spanish has the neutral pronoun "lo" to refer to an indefinite person.

Using "they" as a singular pronoun has a long history of usage in English going back to the late 1300s.

It was prescriptivist grammarians who advised against it.

"but it is not every body who will bestow praise where they may. You do not often overpower me with it." Jane Austen, Emma.

Europe completes first phase of silicon independence project

Re: Is this an EU or Europe thing ?

You've confused governance of the project with technical decisions. Your assumption that individual countries will propose their own instructions is unfounded.

Russia spoofed AIS data to fake British warship's course days before Crimea guns showdown

Re: Diplomacy

"The people there choose to speak Russian". Russians only became a majority in Crimea as a direct result of the mass deportation and murder of the native Tartars.

UK science suffers as lawmakers continue to dither over Brexit negotiations

Re: British institutions are left high and dry

The "correct paperwork" includes evidence of geolocation for vessels under 12m, whereas such evidence is not provided for in the trade and cooperation agreement.

Facebook posts job ad for 10,000 'high-skilled' roles to 'build the metaverse' – and they'll all be based in the EU

But not world beating. ;)

Happy birthday, Linux: From a bedroom project to billions of devices in 30 years

Re: I've got a suggestion...

It's nothing to do with Oxford commas. It's the difference between a defining clause and a non-defining clause.

Apple sued in nightmare case involving teen wrongly accused of shoplifting, driver's permit used by impostor, and unreliable facial-rec tech

The stolen temporary permit did not contain a photo. It's quite reasonable that a document without a photo isn't a valid ID. They deleted the video footage of the thefts. What would normally be considered vital evidence. They did claim that he was the person in the video. They claimed this multiple times.

UK's National Cyber Security Centre recommends password generation idea suggested by El Reg commenter

Use words from more than one language.

Feature bloat: Psychology boffins find people tend to add elements to solve a problem rather than take things away

"All the participants were told they could alter the structure however they wanted to"

IBM creates a COBOL compiler – for Linux on x86

Re: COBOL

The BBC B Micro did binary coded decimal in hardware.

GitLab latest to ditch 'master' as default initial branch name: It's now simply called 'main'

It's even more fun for a few nouns such as crêpe and voile which are both masculine and feminine, but with different meanings.

We didn't collude with Twitter to throw Parler off our servers, says AWS in court filing

Re: Small difference

These publicly traded companies are privately owned. They are not owned by the government. Perhaps a point that might help your argument is to mention that they enjoy monopoly positions.

Loser Trump is no longer useful to Twitter, entire account deleted over fears he'll whip up more mayhem

Re: An elephant in the room

Richard Sharp, the BBC's new governor is a former advisor of Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson.

America says banks can now transact using so-called stable crypto-coins. What does that actually mean?

Many transfer services will split your transfer into smaller amounts i.e. £25,000 to avoid charges.

Study: While text-generating AI can write like humans, it lacks common sense

"but they don't have common sense"

So how are they different from humans?

UK's 'minimum viable product' for Brexit transit software will not be ready until December, leaving no time for testing

Re: Wow

Those are only the direct costs

Now that's a Finnish-ing move: Finland offers free 90-day tryout of Helsinki tech scene with childcare thrown in

Re: Second thoughts

Finland was part of the Russian Empire, not part of Russia.

Finland was not an ally of Germany prior to the invasion by the USSR. The USSR had a pact with Germany at the time it invaded Finland.

The USSR invaded Finland two years before the siege of Leningrad.

With less than two months left, let's check in on Brexit: All IT systems are up and running and ready to go, says no one

Re: re: anyone who leaves their club has to be punished.

We want complete access to the single market while not following the rules of the single market. The EU27 aren't prepared to wreck to make Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson happy.

Vodafone bets big on OpenRAN as it replaces its Huawei estate in rural Wales and South West England

Re: Free market failure

You're confusing the provision of equipment with the provision of a network service. He's talking about market failure in the provision of equipment not in the provision of a network. A limited number of vendors is a sign of market failure in what ought to be a free market. Networks on the other hand are natural monopolies so we don't expect to see many.

Furthermore, these are examples not definitions and they are examples of capitalism but not of free markets.

Brexit travel permits designed to avoid 7,000-lorry jams come January depend on software that won't be finished till April

Re: Dont worry, the pain

The Swiss have large customs facilities with huge lorry parks and working IT systems.

How do you solve 'disruption' at the UK border after Brexit? Let's call Peter Thiel! AI biz Palantir – you're hired

Re: Hmm

To send British border patrol boats into French territorial waters and "arrest" French law enforcement officers is not very clever.

Dido 'Queen of Carnage' Harding to lead UK's Institute for Health Protection because Test and Trace went so well

Re: "Are you suggesting the Tories gambled with our lives for ideological reasons "

That is quite simply untrue.

BAE Systems tosses its contractors a blanket... ban on off-payroll working under upcoming IR35 tax reforms

Re: *HIS* point

Singular "they" has been in use for over 5 centuries.