pml540114

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• Commented on The Ferguson Question
  According to wikipedia on the Battle of Mons:- So heavy was the British rifle fire throughout the battle that some Germans thought they were facing batteries of machine-guns....
• Commented on The Ferguson Question
  Er, no. Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler were all in various security services and used their positions to get started. Stalin was a double agent in Czarist pay, Mussolini worked for French intelligence, and Hitler worked for German Army intelligence infiltrating...
• Commented on The Ferguson Question
  And don't forget the point Joe Orton made in Loot: you don't need a warrant if you're from the water board....
• Commented on The Ferguson Question
  The principle behind not arming British police with firearms isn't a civil liberty one to do with making them less dangerous to those they encounter, in its origins it's a constitutional issue so that there isn't an armed force that...
• Commented on The Ferguson Question
  Funnily enough, that same problem came up here in Australia when Ned Kelly fronted up in his home made armour - but the troopers caught on, and started shooting at his legs until he went down....
• Commented on The Ferguson Question
  I have fired both a long bow and a cross bow. No, you haven't. Nobody ever has. They aren't firearms. I'm sorry if that appears pedantic, but this is actually one of those technicalities that can really matter, if...
• Commented on Holding pattern
  What's on the "back", so to speak and as it were, of that Josephine XV one?...
• Commented on Some rambling thoughts on region restrictions
  Checks have no implicit security to speak of, and are held together entirely by anti-fraud legislation. It may have changed since I knew it, but France backed cheques more strongly. Cheques were legal tender, i.e. refusing to accept one...
• Commented on Competition Redux!
  I think my mistake was not realising it was supposed to be fiction....
• Commented on Some rambling thoughts on region restrictions
  Right now, we in the developed world are having a lot of pain -- falling living standards, rising kleptocratic oligarchs, etc. But the world overall is seeing massive gains in the standard of living, falling Gini coefficient, and so...
• Commented on The Rhesus Chart: Chapter One
  (Note: this chapter was manually converted from the final manuscript. It may contain minor typos and other errata that differ from [those in] the published book.) Well, if you really wanted any, I only spotted one genuine possible: "On...
• Commented on YAPC::NA 2014 keynote: Programming Perl in 2034
  Even worse: the cognitive workload of programming requires that the programmer, in order to be anything other than a cut-and-paste monkey with a text editor, has to understand at the least a handful of key abstractions: variables, looping, and...
• Commented on YAPC::NA 2014 keynote: Programming Perl in 2034
  Three-valued logic has some nice enough properties, computationally speaking that people have been trying to implement this one for a long time. I say try, because no one has been able to do trinary despite being very clever, very...
• Commented on Competition Time!
  General advisory: do not disregard any sense of impending doom. It may be yours. Palindrome a even not, backwards anything read never and. Safetied (unbroken, single sentence limited redaction long form) specific advisory: in view of the semiotic implications of...
• Commented on Competition Time!
  On June 19, 2014 16:02 DudleySmith wrote:- Unauthorized use of Raimi-King circuit to reanimate daughter's deceased hamster. Used unsanctioned compulsion geas to stop kindergarten teacher calling police. Subsequently summoned OCCULUS team to stop fast thinker possessed rodent, which had chewed...
• Commented on A message from our sponsors
  Why is that so ridiculous? After all, the north eastern bit of North America is a practically untapped market. You'd be hard pressed to find any competition at all in Baffin Island....
• Commented on We need a pony. And the moon on a stick. By next Thursday.
  Right now, just off the top of my head, I can think of two promising approaches to this problem:- Don't try to identify the sarcasm as such. Use the negative approach for identifying weeds, i.e. a weed is anything you...
• Commented on Amazon: malignant monopoly, or just plain evil?
  Sorry for the delay replying, El - and for replying here rather than contacting you separately, but I don't see how to reach you (if you want to reach me, you can get an email address for me from that...
• Commented on Amazon: malignant monopoly, or just plain evil?
  ... self-publishing ... [is] expensive in startup costs (think in terms of paying editors to work by the hour) and will require a lot of work ... Cue an issue I've been having. Hoping nobody objects, I'll throw it...
• Commented on Amazon: malignant monopoly, or just plain evil?
  None of us can proofread our own work. Our brains know what they put on that page. If the eyes report otherwise, they are obviously mistaken. That's not quite true, though the exception I know is often impractical (see...
• Commented on The myth of heroism
  Two things stood out for me: firstly that Mossadeq had tried to negotiate a settlement with the Brit oil companies that would have involved some degree of compensation, and secondly that his government was the object of deliberate attempts...
• Commented on The myth of heroism
  I think you're about a quarter of a century ahead of the change, for Scotland. Remember that Thomas Aikenhead was hanged for blasphemy as late as 1697, near Edinburgh. We may take it that he represented an early stirring of...
• Commented on The myth of heroism
  Shahs, not Czars. General Lionel Dunsterville, the "Stalky" of Kipling's Stalky & Co., took a flying column ("Dunsterforce") up through Persia as far as Baku in the wake of the October Revolution (remember the Twenty-six Commissars of Baku!), so see...
• Commented on The myth of heroism
  If you've grown up in a post-1953 Iran the UK and US are rather likely to seem evil. Because, you know, they overthrew a democratically-elected social-democratic regime and installed a bloody-handed dictator who tortured and executed his enemies? (And...
• Commented on The myth of heroism
  For certain values of "straightforward", which doesn't mean easy, the most straightforward biological way to wipe out mosquitoes (or humanity) is with a "meiotic driving gene", e.g. for mammals like us all you would need to do is genetically manipulate...
• Commented on The myth of heroism
  The older was the son of minor nobility in the extreme provinces, who rose to military power & then turned into the usual mass-murdering dictator. { Though at Estercon last year or '12, he was referred to as a...
• Commented on The myth of heroism
  After all, we are all the heroes of our internal narrative (even those of us who others see as villains: nobody wakes up in the morning, twirls their moustache, and thinks, how can I most effectively act to further...
• Commented on The Snowden leaks; a meta-narrative
  I don't think that's quite true, about "the US constitution predates things like national-level armies". Although they didn't use the Age of Revolutions, Nation in Arms, mass conscription model, the northern powers - Denmark, Sweden, and (in response to those)...
• Commented on The Snowden leaks; a meta-narrative
  Oops - "aren't", not "are"....
• Commented on The Snowden leaks; a meta-narrative
  Water flowing past in a river does not ameliorate a desert, except through human intervention, soes it? Actually, no, any more than the wild life that flourished in the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates needed human intervention. But, people being...