* Posts by Benegesserict Cumbersomberbatch

794 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Mar 2022

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Lockheed Martin demos 50kW anti-aircraft frickin' laser beam

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Re: Power or energy?

Plug them into one of those Small Modular Nuclear Reactors, and just keep shooting.

What could possibly go wrong?

British monarchy goes after Twitter, alleges rent not paid for UK base

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Re: Not quite.

Father-in-law of dragons?

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Re: Not quite.

No, his title is: Charles III, King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

In the United Kingdom, his title is Charles III, King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

In Canada, he is King of Canada.

In Australia, he is King of Australia.

In New Zealand, he is King of New Zealand.

In Tuvalu, he is King of Tuvalu.

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Re: If you owe the bank...

Only Kingsman.

Windows 10 paid downloads end but buyers need not fear ISO-lation

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Re: Show us the stats

Windows + Mac = 90.00%

Is that coincidence or rubbery figures?

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Re: Show us the stats

Как пропатчить KDE2 под FreeBSD?

It's been 230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system

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Re: Hooray for Avoirdupois and pounds, shillings and pence

He was prosecuted for using uncalibrated scales, i.e. short measure.

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Re: Hooray for Avoirdupois and pounds, shillings and pence

I always mentally translate avoirdupois as "to have some peas" whenever I see it, which makes me laugh at least as much as the system it describes.

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Re: Hooray for Avoirdupois and pounds, shillings and pence

What's your point? If I ask you to calculate the volume of a cube 39 11/32 inches, it will be a damn sight easier for me to tell you it's one cubic metre because I've chosen the value in my unit of preference.

Converting across measurements becomes inherently easier when units are directly correlated. Tell me how wide and deep an Olympic swimming pool is and I'll tell you how much water you need to fill it in about five seconds. Try doing that in mediaeval units.

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Re: Hooray for Avoirdupois and pounds, shillings and pence

"One cubic centimetre cures ten gloomy sentiments," if I remember rightly.

Dear Stupid, I write with news I did not check the content of the [Name] field before sending this letter

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Re: These guys' newsletter?

Work continues across the country on lowering the wires to half-mast.

Corporations start testing Windows 11 in bigger numbers. Good luck

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Re: L'Oreal, huh?

They had to make up a reason to change.

Tesla driver blames full-self-driving software for eight-car Thanksgiving Day pile up

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Re: Happens all the time on CA freeways

Sure, they'll let you back into the cult, just long enough for the brand new model you've just bought to drive you headlong into a brick wall.

I remember how Nineteen Eighty-Four ended.

Google datacenters use 'a quarter of all water' in one US city

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Mushroom

Re: potable water

But is the fluoride there to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids?

(Dr Strangelove icon)

Square Kilometre Array Observatory construction commences

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Re: Indigenous land

It took more than two hundred years for Australia's highest court to remind us officially that there's more than one sovereignty in this land. Think about that for a minute. That's a fact that some people have yet to assimilate, and looks like taking a long time yet to reconcile. Education is hard work.

Unstolen native title endures (Mabo). Temporary alienation of native title is reversible (Wik). That's the law of the land.

It's easy to be dismissive or in denial, but it's real, and it matters.

Cheers from Yawuru country!

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Cue The Church

Wish I knew what you were looking for

Might have known what you would find

And it's something quite peculiar

Something that's shimmering and white

It leads you here despite your destination

Under the Milky Way tonight

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Re: Proud West Aussie here

Suns, maybe?

Longstanding bug in Linux kernel floppy handling fixed

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Re: 1.9MB floppies

All but the boot disk were the 1.68MB XDF format which took more than twice as long to read each track, something to do with having interleaved sectors.

You could reformat them, if you were lucky.

End of an era as the last 747 rolls off the production line

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QF32 minus Richard Champion de Crespigny and his team was gone for all money.

(Planes without pilots tend to crash, but YKWIM)

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Re: "New and/or improved Air Force One(s)"

The task of FAA certification wasn't delegated to a Boeing engineer to sign off, and not be notified of fundamental changes to its function for management reasons until after the fact?

They must want the passengers to survive.

Facebook approved 75% of ads threatening US election workers

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Balanced because every minute spent giving out lies is followed by another one saying how wrong someone claiming the truth is.

US Air Force reveals B-21 Raider stealth bomber that'll fly the unfriendly skies

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Re: Eye-watering

Jim Hacker had that one covered (excuse cut-and-paste):

> Hacker: ...the Americans will always protect us from the Russians, won't they?

> Sir Humphrey: Russians? Who's talking about the Russians?

> Hacker: Well, the independent deterrent.

> Sir Humphrey: It's to protect us against the French!

> Hacker: The French?! But that's astounding!

> Sir Humphrey: Why?

> Hacker: Well they're our allies, our partners.

> Sir Humphrey: Well, they are now, but they've been our enemies for the most of the past 900 years. If they've got the bomb, we must have the bomb!

> Hacker: If it's for the French, of course, that's different. Makes a lot of sense.

> Sir Humphrey: Yes. Can't trust the Frogs.

> Hacker: You can say that again!

Two signs in the comms cabinet said 'Do not unplug'. Guess what happened

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Re: "can't quite believe they turned off a network to charge a device"

First thing you do going into an operating theatre to drive an anaesthetic machine is unplug every connection one at a time, to make sure the alarm activates, then manually silence the alarm after plugging it back in, and making sure it stays silenced.

An anaesthetic machine's POST takes about 5 minutes, with all sorts of interesting noises, leaking hissy sounds and alarms as it artificially generates all of the situations that would be bad if they happened manually.

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Re: You're worried about turning off the server...

Ventilators I've used have had power redundancy and an "are you sure" stupidity filter built in some somewhere. This includes one with an ingenious emergency power generator operated by the pressure gradient from the oxygen supply - not even batteries required!

Pushing the power button generally only activates an appropriately annoying alarm, and unless you put it into the intermediate stage of standby between keeping someone alive and powering off, they keep trying to keep someone alive. They get cunning at working out if a tube gets unplugged somewhere, too.

And if the ventilator doesn't alarm as it dies, the pulse oximeter or capnograph will, before the patient does.

Knowing how to turn it off is mandatory if you're about to withdraw active treatment. Embarrassing for someone's final moments to be accompanied by annoying electronic bleeping...

Sounds like the bed-bound assassin was observant enough to watch how the nurse / doctor did it.

How not to test a new system: push a button and wait to see what happens

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Re: never turn anything off if you don't know how to turn it back on.

Log to stderr

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Re: Alternative Lesson: "Never turn anything off if..."

Pain in the arse is an interesting way to refer to an existential threat to civil society.

New SI prefixes clear the way for quettabytes of storage

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Re: 10 to the power 24 (which would be a yottabyte).

Is a robibyte something you get from Margot if you provoke her?

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Re: Yottabyte?

And Quokkabyte would be good for one on Rottnest Island.

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Re: This is getting silly now

Oh, I misheard you. I thought you said Jraphic format.

CT scanning tech could put an end to 100ml liquid limit on flights by 2024

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Re: FWIW

The unexpected fogging of photographic film was how X-Rays were discovered in the first place, by a bloke named Wilhelm Röntgen.

Time Lords decree an end to leap seconds before risky attempt to reverse time

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Re: Let it slide

Careful, Chris Hemsworth will be out to get you.

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Re: TAI = UTC + 37 seconds, am I missing something?

Trees need both. They take in water and CO2 to make oxygen and glucose which becomes cellulose. But they use oxygen and glucose to drive cellular metabolism, just like us.

They are net consumers of CO2 and net producers of O2, they just make more O2 than they use.

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Re: Cop Out

Didn't I read somewhere SECAM = System Even Crazier than the American Method?

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Re: Didn't someone previously propose

It's always now everywhere.

For is it not written, "I was not born yesterday"?

FTX disarray declared 'unprecedented' by exec who cleaned up after Enron

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The headlines write themselves

Bank Man Brain Fried By Bankman-Fried Brain Freeze.

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FYI Chypre is how you spell Cyprus in French.

It's just unfamiliarity with English.

Hands Up if you're a monoglot Anglophone.

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New name for them

"...control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals..."

So that would be... Bitcoin investors?

Windows 10 – a 7-year-old OS – is still having problems with the desktop and taskbar

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Headmaster

Momentarily disappear

Glad there exists at least one Seppo who knows what momentarily really means.

I imagine thousands of people reading the advisory with bated breath, expecting their taskbar to disappear. Any moment now... Any second...

Bastards! You said it would be happening momentarily! I'm still waiting!

Elon Musk issues ultimatum to Twitter staff: Go hardcore or go home

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Re: Easy choice Elon

Musk bought Twitter.

Musk fired half of Twitter's employees.

Musk delivered an ultimatum to the remaining half to sign up to indefinite servitude, quit if you don't like it.

Attrition from exhaustion / disgust / insanity digests Musk's version from the inside.

Fired employees start their own Twitter-equivalent, taking on those who reject the Musk-flavoured alternate reality.

This is Theseus' Ship, isn't it?

Twitter engineer calls out Elon Musk for technical BS in unusual career move

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Re: Not engineering but...

GOMER hearks back to Samuel Shem's The House of God, essential reading for anyone embarking on a career in hospital medicine.

Last thing we did the night they closed our old Emergency Department before they demolished it was to write the 10 Commandments on the wall...

My personal favourite is 6. THERE IS NO BODY CAVITY THAT CANNOT BE REACHED WITH A 14G NEEDLE AND A GOOD STRONG ARM.

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Re: Not engineering but...

There's NFC (normal for Colac[1]) and NBFC (not bad for Colac).

One GP I know walks around town in Colac with a t-shirt printed with a stamp "Colaci typicalis sum".

[1] Colac (n.): Town of about 12000 inhabitants in South West Victoria.

KFC bot urges Germans to mark Kristallnacht with cheesy chicken

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Re: A double insult

The (rumoured) secret recipe calls for the uncooked chicken to be marinated in buttermilk. So everything chicken-based on sale at Kid Fattening Centre is inherently non-kosher.

Intel's top-spec Raptor Canyon NUC can double as a 700+W space heater

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Re: Email at he cost of running a blower dryer for 12 hours

Plans revealed to rename Trump Tower to the Messiah Complex.

Unlucky for some: Meta chops 13% of global workforce

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Yes, but only to simulate.

Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected.

"Not only has online commerce returned to prior trends, but the macroeconomic downturn, increased competition, and ads signal loss have caused our revenue to be much lower than I'd expected. I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that."

Taking responsibility would be keeping employees on payroll and funding their salaries out of his personal fortune.

Rule one: never lose money

Rule two: see rule one

Run a demo on live data? Sure! What could possibly go wrong? Hang on. Are you sure that's not working?

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That document is very, very, very Swiss. Up to and including the Helvetica.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin: If Musk's Twitter flops, it's not such a bad thing

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I think it means, statistically, he's close to random.

There's a joke in there about standard deviations somewhere. Any takers?

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Re: Fine them

Nazi: If you're not Aryan, I don't care if you live or die. If you get in my way, I'll kill you.

Climate change denier: I don't care if you live or die. If you stop me and my mates getting richer, I'll take away your means of survival. Either I'll buy it so I can survive, or help entropy destroy it.

Worse?

Version 252 of systemd, as expected, locks down the Linux boot process

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Re: For a second....

What, just the females?

9front releases new version of Plan 9 OS fork: The Golden Age of Ballooning

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Re: The Front Fell Off

Gone, but not forgotten. He was a true master of deadpan comedy. Reading of the trials and tribulations of the Australian Farnarkeling team on its world tour even now brings a tear to the eye.

Other interviews worth seeking out are PM Bob Hawke concerning his prostate operation and Education Minister John Dawkins on the best way to buy chalk.

Google settles with Uncle Sam over data that vanished during cryptocurrency biz probe

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Re: "That data was lost before the case could be settled."

The warrant was a court order to submit the data in question to the court, so that the court can decide for itself what laws, if any, apply to its status as evidence and its content.

Google's response to the warrant is "The dog ate my homework."

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