denton-scratch

I see, so thus guy was probably licensed to carry passengers. Thanks.

The seating arrangement was pilot in the front, passenger behind. When my son (about 8) get off his ride and was asked if he enjoyed it, he said "I prefer planes with doors".

> One massive restriction on ultralight airplanes is that you can't carry passengers. Again, on paper, because of risk, but it ends up having some controversial effects. If you want to occasionally carry passengers, as many pilots do, you can't fly a cheap, simple, light, and slow ultralight aircraft.

Ineresting. I get a ride as a passenger in an ultralight two-seater. The pilot was a Vietnam vet. It was in Virginia, and we overflew part of the Great Dismal Swamp, which has alligators.

"Voter literacy" is obviously a good thing; but blockchain and encryption are not part of that. Very few software developers, for example, are qualified to evaluate a crypto scheme.

> But it is possible that every extended family will have at least one member who can run a server

That's as may be; but many, many people have no access to an "extended family". And extended families are not necessarily warm, safe spaces where everyone trusts everyone else; extended families are more likely to be "broken" than nuclear families.

> How costly can it be to test the file fully in a CI job?

It didn't need a CI job. It just needed one person to actually boot and run a Windows instance with the Crowdstrike software installed: a smoke test.

TFA is mostly an irrelevent discourse on the product architecture, stuffed with proprietary Crowdstrike jargon, with about a couple of paragraphs dedicated to the actual problem; and they don't mention the non-existence of a smoke test.

To me, TFA is not a signal that Crowdstrike has a plan to remediate the problem, yet.

> or there is no internal testing

Thing is, as far as I can see, deploying this database update to a Windows machine will result promptly and unconditionally in a BSOD. That implies that this update was tried on exactly zero machines before it was shipped.

The bug can't have "slipped through internal testing"; it would have failed immediately on any machine it was loaded on.

> Respect and endorsement are not the same thing.

This is true, but has no bearing on posters that command neither my endorsement not my respect.

You get my endorsement if I agree with you. You get my respect even if I don't agree with you, provided you don't post lies and nonsense, AND are amenable to rational argument.

But isn't that a fairly tiny risk, compared with letting a third party meddle with your kernel modules without asking nicely? I've never been hit by a zero-day (unless Drupageddon counts).

UK courts can also order a newspaper to publish a retraction or an apology, and can specify the prominence that should be given to it.

> (or in some cases that you have been abducted by aliens)

Really? There are therapists who will try to convince you that you were abducted by aliens?

Back in the 80s, we used to draw network diagrams on the whiteboard; those parts of the network that belonged neither to us nor to our users was represented by an outline of a cloud. This cloud didn't provide storage or (useable) computing resource. If you pushed stuff in here, it came out there.

I think it was a reasonable analogy. You can't see inside it; you don't know how it works, and you don't need to. Note that at this time, 'the internet' wasn't the only way of joining heterogenous networks; there was also the OSI stack.

So I was annoyed when some bunch of kids who had never seen such whiteboard diagrams decided to re-purpose the term to refer to whatever piece of the internet they had decided to appropriate, fence-in and then rent out.

That sounds a bit like the patch cards for the EMS VCS3; you puhed pins into the square patchboard to connect-up the modules. If you mounted a piece of card over the patchboard and pushed the pins through that, the card became a record of your patch.

Of course, you couldn't "read" the card and guess what it souned like; the patchcard didn't record the settings of the knobs either.

Didn't Stockhausen create a notation for electronic music? I was surprised TFA didn't mention it.

That ball of ionized air is opaque to radar, making the rocket hard to detect. Or, so I read somewhere.

I don't know at what speed a rocket has to be going, before the kinetic impact of 200Kg of solid metal exceeds the energy of 200Kg of explosives.

Thd only time I've ever heard a sonic boom was as a kid, on holiday in the south of France. They would regularly fly Mirage jets over the beach resorts. I suspect these flights were for when Gen. de Gaulle was in residence at the Chateau d'If.

I used eXceed. Actually my boss wrote it; I worked for Hummingbird for a while.

But they train their models on everything, regardless of the licence. It follows that the resulting derivative work likely mixes stuff that is under incompatible licences, with the result that it can't be distributed at all.

"God" has some unique properties. One of those might be that God neither exists nor doesn't exist. If God has this property of 'neitherism', then the value of n is undefined. Neitherism has been attributed to many religious entities.

To answer a question, you first have to be able to parse the question.

The question is malformed because it contains a term that cannot be evaluated.

> Let n equal 3 if God exists, or 5 if God does not exist. Is n prime?

[Not yet finished the article]

Author says the answer is True. I say the question is malformed, and cannot be answered.

What's with Lifestyle Domain Holdings? Did they fold, or something?

I don't assume that; I simply observe that a toaster doesn't need software, that simple machines are more likely to be reliable than complex machines, and that the ability to run software makes a machine inherently more complex than (say) a clockwork timer.

I have no opinion on how much is too much software. But perhaps if we are employing people to write software for toasters, then we have too many programmers.

> everything including your toaster is running software

Doesn't that just support the author's claim that there's too much software?

FTR, my Dualit toaster doesn't run software.

> generate a pretty good poem about my cat

I do not consider a text generator to be the pinnacle of "great software", regardless of how well the code was written. I don't think "meh" is the wrong word.

> (not just engineers but designer and UX researchers as well as all the other support roles like project managers etc)

Oh! I thought you were going to say "testing teams, design reviewers, trainers".

I'm not on-board with this "10-50x" claim for the amount of effort. I'd say maybe 3x the effort, given the developers have been well-trained, the methodology is sound, and the managers' focus is exclusively quality. That last item is one I've never experienced; the closest I came was on a banking project where the entire development team was subordinated to the Head of Testing.

> Religious or spiritual texts too have this problem.

That's not simply a function of translation between languages; some of the ideas in religious texts resist even translation into language. In the Buddhist tradition I used to be involved with, I was told that only texts with a continuous practice lineage reaching back to the author can be relied on, and even then, only if you have a teacher who has practiced in that lineage.

Accordingly, none of the sutras were considered reliable. Interesting, engaging, even beautiful, sure; but if the lineage is lost, then nobody can be sure what they mean. Texts by more recent authors, from whom there is still a living practice lineage, were preferred.

For many years I've wanted to build a digital clock out of fluid gates. The medium would be clear water; the 7-segment display would consist of transparent tubes, into which stained oil is pushed to activate a segment. I think a gate would probably be some kind of vortex. I've never tried to build it, because

- I don't know anything about fluid mechanics

- The 'exhaust' is water, so I could only really operate this thing in the bath

> You want a President to be able to carry out the roles of the office without concern that his or her political opponents will use the courts to try to punish those actions.

Why?

In the UK we of course have no president; all government actions can be subjected to judicial review, whichever minister was in charge. Judicial review is a civil procedure, not a criminal one. All the court can do is order the government to reverse the unlawful decision, and make good its consequences.

> like, those assume the court will find anything to be an official act, which is nonsensical.

But the Supremes haven't said what they think an official act is; that's a matter for the court of first instance, according to the Supremes.

To me, in the UK, it looks like vandalism. There's no clear law on what constitutes an official presidential act, and until there is, the Pres is beyond the reach of the law.

I don't think these very senior lawyers are fools, I don't think they made a mistake. They've deliberately fucked-up the US legal system (even more than it's already a mess).

I don't drink a lot of the stuff, but I haven't quit.

I used to drink about a litre of brewed coffee a day, starting at 7AM and going on until 5PM. Eventually that fell away, without any decision on my part, and I now drink one mug a day (1/2 imperial pint), after getting up.

It doesn't seem to power me up or make me more alert; I think it actually makes me dozy, 2-3 hours after my morning joe. That is, I think I only notice the crash.