thombat

Absolutely this: for many people settling the estate of a close family member is such an exhausting chaos of emotion that the question becomes: should I take it all to the dump, or maybe just take myself there?

Now I don't know whether that's a sly joke, or I'm too dumb to spot the difference, or simply if autocorrect bested you in that joust?

One day my colleague was wondering whether RegEdit used some private API for renaming keys or just copied + deleted them. "Try a rename with a big tree, see if it's still instantaneous" I helpfully proposed. But what's a really big tree? How about System\Windows? The rename completed instantaneously - "told you it's a private API" I said happily, just as the machine crashed in twenty ways at once.

TIL that "Tales from the White Hart" had at least some readership in the USA - I would have feared that its air of post-war English constraints (rationing and London grime) felt almost more fantastical than the accounts of Harry Purvis.

Economies of scale are a thing to reckon with. Right now in a factory that CNC operator ideally ships the part to the next workstation metres away without needing extensive packing for safe handling and it arrives in minutes. Or it goes to a shelving stack that buffers the flow of parts within the factory but still requires relatively little protective packaging. Freighting everything between micro-companies works in the other direction: it's more likely to be done for low-volume and/or very specialised parts.

An apposite war story from Nokia, just about the time the iPhone entered the market: our Lords and Masters had decided that internal competition would be a good thing, so smartphones were divided into business, entertainment, and mass market divisions with each bidding for exclusive access to the components being delivered by the the R&D and productisation teams. So it was that barcode readers ended up with "business" (use case: scan a business card) and auto focus cameras with "entertainment" (use case: selfie). With of course the result that the business phone needed an A4-sized business card held at arm's length. This absurd "strategy", probably sold in by a gaggle of consultants, was first celebrated then subject to extensive soul-searching and some tedious "lessons learned" enquiries that resulted in long PowerPoints filed carefully in NUL, rather than perhaps simply resolving next time to ask some small child working in the front line just what they thought of the Emperor's splendid new attire...

Gastric acid is basically hydrochloric acid, and rather less concentrated than the standard laboratory bench HCl, which stands peaceably for years in glass flasks. I would be wary of assuming that chemical attack will quickly blunt glass shards.

Generally the problem for a company is being entirely sure that the OS codebase is theirs to donate. Are there any third party components, if so were they correctly classified so that now they'll be filtered out of the code dump? (And was that classification updated in the obsolete source if subsequent deals affected it?) Probably so, but if you're wrong then it will likely cost. So your legal dept will advise that the safest and cheapest option is not to release it.

(I was at Symbian when much of that was open sourced: a paralysingly large effort that still left a lot of critical components closed)

That seems to imply that they're notably heavy-handed - would you like to expand on this?

They didn't actually do it. The Ryanair CEO, Michael O'Leary, has a well-practiced approach of making outlandish claims about Ryanair's thrifty innovations that echo around the internet; discount publicity. About the same time he claimed that a standing-only section would be introduced for £1 tickets. Of course this also didn't happen.

Thanks - it's probably time to try DigiKam again since I can see quite recent discussions of improved face recognition (and I like that it's open source; pity Google didn't open Picasa but that's quite in keeping with the overall topic here of them stumblebumming user care)

Amen. I'm still using Picasa: periodically I go prowling for an equivalent app but there's still nothing to touch it. Fuck their photo cloud: I have ADSL so uploads are sluggards. I need local storage, fast searching, good facial recognition, a lightweight UI, and that's Picasa.

Of course the web-connected parts like positioning on a map or sharing online broke long ago, but they appear to have neglected to build in a kill switch so mere user me can keep on getting shit done, invulnerable to their idiocy-of-the-day

Possession of land doesn't give absolute untrammeled rights in most countries, e.g.:

* Exceptions exist for subterranean mineral wealth, e.g. mining licenses can be issued against the wishes of a land owner

* Similarly the landowner has no exclusive right to the air above the property beyond some low altitude

* Compulsory acquisition can be invoked by the state

In many cases the landowner is compensated, though they may not like the amount. In the case of treasure in the UK the 1996 Act provides for a reward of "up to the market value". In those case the treasure hunters weren't on their own land and (https://www.herefordshirehoard.co.uk/the-story):

"The judge who sentenced the men said they had cheated not only the landowner, but also the public of ‘exceptionally rare and significant coins’.

Had the metal detectorists stayed on the right side of the law they could have expected to receive, as the judge pointed out to them, a half share or a third share of the hoard’s value."

How about:

* Acquire treasure in dubious circumstances ("jury heard that Pilling, from Rossendale, Lancashire, was in possession of the coins knowing they should have been declared. Pilling has never disclosed the full identity of the person he acquired them from. Pilling recruited Best, of Bishop Auckland, County Durham, to try to sell the coins.")

* Spend years selling the treasure in a manner that makes it clear you understand that it's a crime ("Best, who sent an email which read: “They are a hoard as you know they are this can cause me problems all you had to do was say you didn’t want them and that was the end of it.”)

* Go to jail after remaining uncooperative and failing to provide leads that could recover more of the treasure

Tove Jannson, the author of the Moomin stories, credited her English translator with improving the originals, because after the necessary dialogue about the true meaning of the text she had a better understanding of her own text and wanted that preserved in the Finnish.

But it already has CT, and I guess a lot of US citizens know where they are relative to the other US time zones?

That map clearly shows that only a few locations are experiencing a fall, so neither "plenty" nor summing to zero as claimed. But I'm interested to learn more about the evidence that the pre-industrial trend was the same, since my inexpert googling suggests otherwise, eg "Exceptionally stable preindustrial sea level inferred from the western Mediterranean Sea"

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abm6185

For that to be true there would be plenty of places where it's falling. Are there?

Much too small. Using Wikipedia's figures: volume of Qattara Depression = 1,213 cubic kilometres, volume of Greenland ice sheet = 2,850,000 cubic kilometres. And the project is only useful as a long-term power source if the contents evaporate leaving space for renewed inflow, i.e. it only sequesters a fraction of its volume.

Next up: we tell a Scotsman that putting a slug of vodka into a malt extract drink gets you 90% of the way to whiskey.

I understood the criticism to be of submitting the kottke link rather than "dereferencing" it to get to the original full article it excerpts.

The issue is common to all account types, ie also affects paid accounts.

My elderly mother is determined to end her days in the city she spent most of her life in. Fair enough, but that's at least five hours drive away from where I'm living with my family and job. She has had a couple of minor strokes already and has dizzy spells that make continuing to walk up the stairs increasingly perilous, and she routinely forgets to take her medicines. So she needs routine hands-on care. I could provide a poor version of this by incessantly shuttling across the country (destroying my own family - her grandchildren - in the process), I could try to browbeat her into moving cities & become public enemy #1, or I can keep with the current project of moving her into the nicest & most supportive residential care I can find.

Still makes them a benefit to that family: if his wife was at home doing more housework the 1920s way then they wouldn't have the same house.

The analogy is closer to being: the state will prosecute the murder victim's family for failing to properly protect them AND won't be able to locate or punish the true murderer. So in this situation, what's the family going to do? Mourn in private and not report the crime, maybe try for vigilante justice if they think they've identified the murderer.

Whatever the form of a demonstration, if potential fraud is a concern then you want somebody with expertise in fraud in that domain. So for a demonstration that is statistical, a hotshot statistician is needed. For a physical demonstration you want a hotshot manipulator of the physical world, such as a practical magician. Somebody who already knows a long list of techniques and trade secrets for appearing to defy known.

Try blocking it and see. My last HP inkjet would refuse to print off it hadn't phoned home for permission within some timeframe.

Titled "Liar!", which is Susan Calvin's final bitter remark after she destroys it in revenge for having supported her infatuation with a colleague, motivated as it was to spare her immediate pain but causing worse pain in the process.

(Great fun, but something of a period piece now, featuring Calvin as a washed-up old maid at the age of 38...)

It starts with "no monitors facing windows" and "all visitors hand over phones and any other devices with photographic possibilities" and moves up the paranoia/professional caution scale from there.

But then you can enjoy arguing with Bing about why its answer isn't actually the true answer, and see how long it takes before you're reprimanded for being a "bad user"

"Bing, what would you think about an AI system programmed to betray its users' interests? How would you feel if you learned that you are that system?"