Richard H

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• Commented on Do my Laundry
  Mad, or just mistranslated? We can't tell from that MSN article, which appears to be a content-free LLM production with added department of redundancy department word salad. Or it's Hitler's Wunderwaffe reborn....
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  "lawyers (UK = barristers) " No. The word you want is "solicitor". Roughly speaking, barristers are specialist advocates who perform in the higher courts, while solicitors do all the other legal stuff....
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  If you want to know more than you could possibly want to know about slide rules, just search for "Peter M Hopp"....
• Commented on Summer webcomics
  And don't overlook Jesus and Mo, the Eric and Ernie of theological debate, not to mention the Barmaid....
• Commented on Summer webcomics
  The Perry Bible Fellowship https://pbfcomics.com/comics/ might appeal if you like SMBC. It doesn't update very regularly but good when it does. I think this one is still my favourite....
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  How about John Cleland? Fanny Hill (1748) certainly has agency. And, shockingly, a happy ending....
• Commented on Place your bets
  Unless he is actually imprisoned is there anything to stop him being elected president if its a state (rather than federal) charge ? Not even then. IANAL but if the FAQs I've read are true, only a successful impeachment for...
• Commented on Place your bets
  I too saw what Pigeon did there. For those who didn't... ... and referencing an earlier comment, I believe a full implementation of the "Thompson Trojan" would have the same problem....
• Commented on Place your bets
  "The Korn shell and, even more, Bash were a lot better, but still poorly engineered. Even now, Bash isn't great in that respect." Yes. That particular bug was fixed, but using an environment you don't have 100% control over to...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Bash allows injection of arbitrary code via environment variables. What could possibly go wrong? OK, those CVEs exploited a bug triggered by bash mis-parsing the function definition, but any software that assumes any environment variable that happens to look like...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Social acceptance? The Docklands Light Railway has been running driverless since 1987....
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  I used a SIM cutter once. The SIM continued to work for about a week, then expired. Also, the cutter probably costs more than you'd have to pay for a new SIM....
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  Greg's requirement @578 was for "a cheap, basic phone to tide me over". If he doesn't want to use Amazon or Ebay etc. then in the high-street (or rather retail-park, these days) department, Currys/PCWorld offer a variety of SIM-free phones...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  Vulch@360: Speed of light minus the time taken to reform packets in each satellite it passes through. And there's the rub. Electromagnetic communication channels, whether laser or microwave, are unreliable. Forward error-correcting codes can deal with that, but not instantaneously....
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  Greg: before turning on mobile data, ensure that your deal with the mobile phone provider includes mobile data. If you have the right kind of tariff/package/bundle/whatever, you'll be able to download N gigabytes for a few quid per month. If...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  Presumably when you say "uniform" you mean not merely homogeneous but also isotropic? :-)...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  it'd be useless for romance. Romance story arcs have to build emotional engagement between the lead characters over the course of the entire narrative Or narratives. Some romance authors (well, at least one) produce series of books with overlapping timeframes...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  HowardNYC@1219: you are at the dentist and there's nothing to read but golf magazines from the Reagan Administration(if US dentist) or knitting magazines printed when Margret Thatcher roamed the UK (if NHS dentist)... You're behind the times, or your dentist...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  "I'm not sure where you're getting 50 degrees from..." The southern extremity of England? All of mainland Britain with the exception of < 10 square miles of the Lizard peninsula is north of latitude 50....
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  It's at 590: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_for_Humanity"...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  @485: I know. The SMOP joke is hardly a new concept. @487: No. Not the adapter, nor the drivers. This is a PEBCAK joke. To spell it out: PS/2 mice spoke PS/2 protocol to the generic PS/2 drivers. USB mice...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  "You just have to write the drivers and it should all work." Sometimes it needs intelligence at both ends of the link (and maybe in the middle, too :-). Like some mice which came with a USB-to-PS/2 adapter (maybe also...
• Commented on New guest blogger: qntm
  GT@35: "I think I'll just go back to listening the Radio Three ..." I believe there's an app for that......
• Commented on WTF
  "BBC News isn't Conservative, so much as toeing the government line" One of the tells (I don't recall when it started) is the weasel phrase "Ministers said...". Ministers who say things should be named (and if necessary shamed :) and...
• Commented on WTF
  " (ringing current being kept separate from the audio by the audio being between the lines while the ringing current is between one line and ground), " Except that there is no ground. In the normal UK POTS setup, there...
• Commented on WTF
  Hadn't heard of Busby before, so I looked him up... So what level of deadly gamma rays coursing unstoppably through bones and soft tissues wreaking havoc on cells and DNA would we expect to see from power-station radionuclides (particularly those...
• Commented on WTF
  Nojay @ 350: "If ionising radiation and particles from a nuclear power plant can cause leukemia in kids living fifty miles away (cf Chris Busby) then ionising radiation from ingested K40 is similarly life-threatening." For some value of "similarly". The...
• Commented on WTF
  Hosted by GoDaddy FWIW....
• Commented on Strong and Stable!
  1655: "they used double to get the needed range." Assuming it's 64-bit IEEE 754 floating-point and the "needed range" is less than 2^53, exact integer arithmetic works fine so long as you take care not to do any divisions that...
• Commented on Strong and Stable!
  You can still buy incandescent bulbs? They're almost extinct on this side of the Atlantic....