Damian

Recent Actions

• Commented on Is Microsoft trying to commit suicide?
  It was night, raining, and I mistook a train track for a road lane. I quickly recognized my error, and backed out the same way I entered the train track. While I didn't turn onto the tracks, I did have...
• Commented on Is Microsoft trying to commit suicide?
  Maybe it's a good idea to take kids to phoneless areas so that they develop some disconnected skills while they still can? This also brings us back to those questions: will there be a crash? How big (intensity of population...
• Commented on Is Microsoft trying to commit suicide?
  I like to think that somewhere in Democratic HQ there's some very serioius strategists arguing about just how much of "legitimate government" is left, how much will survive a Trump term, and what they should do in response You'd like...
• Commented on Is Microsoft trying to commit suicide?
  It reads to me like an almost trivial reference to the Roman claim to descent via Aeneas from Troy, which today we think was a real historic place east of the Dardanelles (disclaimer: per physical archaeology, resemblances to the Homeric...
• Commented on Is Microsoft trying to commit suicide?
  Gibbons made it possible for western empires like Britain and the Holy Roman Empire to claim to be the heirs of Rome and the Catholic Church To be fair, the HRE made this claim centuries before Gibbons. But in their...
• Commented on Is Microsoft trying to commit suicide?
  Well the word "from" is a bit troublesome, but the Goths are supposed to have come from (whatever that means) Scandinavia and migrated south and east in the 3rd and 4th centuries. But at the time when they first became...
• Commented on Is Microsoft trying to commit suicide?
  So how about that T20? Afghanistan is really on a roll there, or so I hear....
• Commented on Is Microsoft trying to commit suicide?
  I will usually still happily mow on days up to around 38ºC. You have to make sure to remember to drink enough water. But that's part of living with the climate, and not really anything all that special (we talk...
• Commented on Is Microsoft trying to commit suicide?
  Ranching kangaroos is hard because they're very mobile and they don't understand fences (except in that 'things to pass over' that seagulls also understand fences). I understand that herding them is also difficult. Fences must be 15-foot/5-metre minimum. They don't...
• Commented on Is Microsoft trying to commit suicide?
  Now we have local, server, personal cloud, and company cloud to lose things in. Throw in: DFS and NFS shares, direct-from-PC shares, Novell, Sharepoint, Azure file share, and the need to migrate between any of these (although one hopes mostly...
• Commented on Is Microsoft trying to commit suicide?
  They're not making that mistake again In the event of a try-again becoming possible, I suppose the main hope is that the ignorance and capriciousness previously displayed will continue to thwart friend and foe alike. To be blunt, Trump's on...
• Commented on Is Microsoft trying to commit suicide?
  Would agriculture be as big a focus as it was in Russia? Germany was far closer to what Marx saw as the place Communism would start, being industrialized and capitalist. That's sort of the gist of my thoughts on seeing...
• Commented on Is Microsoft trying to commit suicide?
  The right wing militias are not a centrally coordinated movement, for the most part they are a large mass of individuals troll posting each other on the internet. I think this correctly identifies the limiting factor* at play without spelling...
• Commented on Is Microsoft trying to commit suicide?
  I'll have to try harder next time we make it down there :) Last year we were staying in North Sydney, but all over the place during the days (the only friends we caught up with were at Parramatta and...
• Commented on Is Microsoft trying to commit suicide?
  the Reich breaking apart into a patchwork quilt. It weakens Prussia enormously Given a considerable proportion of the Empire consisted of former HRE-aligned states that were permanently ceded by Austria in the Napoleonic Era and earlier, and that the Habsburg...
• Commented on Is Microsoft trying to commit suicide?
  FWIW I often or even usually skip over most other people's very long posts, but generally will read yours if I can because, going by my experience hanging around here for the last 10-or-so years, I usually learn something worth...
• Commented on Is Microsoft trying to commit suicide?
  I don't know if Makita has inflators. But Makita is in the home "our battery system" will handle all kinds of tools. They do... I see Bunnings sell them "skin only" for A$179. I might have to get one. Even...
• Commented on Is Microsoft trying to commit suicide?
  Especially as some people started bringing their own bells. I never made a phreaking box, but they were definitely a thing....
• Commented on Is Microsoft trying to commit suicide?
  For true British style there'd have to be a naval assault on some small, landlocked country. Using cavalry. I always thought The Mouse That Roared, which was after all a British film, referred vaguely to Liechtenstein. I suppose the UK...
• Commented on Is Microsoft trying to commit suicide?
  It worked quite well. Yes it did! But it was pulse dialling and not tones being emulated. ISTR there was a sequence to initiate a call from certain payphones in the 80s, but from the mid 80s to the early...
• Commented on Is Microsoft trying to commit suicide?
  Hmm, I think I like this outcome! It gets betterer. Denmark recognises the opportunity to defuse its own racist right by transferring its Syrian refugees to permanent settlement programs in the former UK (now Royal Danish Great Britain... having ceded...
• Commented on Is Microsoft trying to commit suicide?
  When I was in high school I learned how to take apart the handheld part of a payphone and short circuit the connection with a coin to get a free call. For at least a period when I was in...
• Commented on Is Microsoft trying to commit suicide?
  Oh, never mind... you're in Sydney. For a moment I'd misremembered and thought you were in Canberra (not that I've lived there either, for roughly 26 years, which is how old my anecdote is)....
• Commented on Is Microsoft trying to commit suicide?
  Do not take overturned vehicle? I used to see that (upside down, or possibly more accurately the right way up) on a car that was often parked near the AD Hope building at ANU....
• Commented on Is Microsoft trying to commit suicide?
  Don't know any clinical stats on this but often this is a condition that is forced on people not something they opt for. Yes, this. Learned helplessness is a term that refers to a specific trauma response. People develop it...
• Commented on Is Microsoft trying to commit suicide?
  That's if there's mention of an OS at all. The POS device can be a single-purpose object that's obviously a computer, but runs in a POS software shell all the time. No user-serviceable code inside, so to speak. Presumably there's...
• Commented on Is Microsoft trying to commit suicide?
  I guess at least biz Windows laptops come with a dinky little shutter for the camera. Of course MS have pushed out "hello" to encourage leaving it open. But the autosave thing is still niggling. I guess Pages is available....
• Commented on Is Microsoft trying to commit suicide?
  The Office autosave thing on its own was pretty damn annoying. Apple has done stuff at least as annoying, but this is different. It sort of means that Windows PCs at home are no good for anything other than games,...
• Commented on Harmless Fun
  I've witnessed a motorcycle kill a ute (aka light pickup) and the rider survived, apparently not even badly hurt. The ute had pulled out of a side street to turn right while screened by a slow-moving car the motorcycle was...
• Commented on Harmless Fun
  I must say I struggle with glyphosate as the causative agent, because why just here and not everywhere? Noting the subsequent discussion after this comment, I still wanted to contribute the following thought. Disease clusters are often mysterious and there...