John Hughes

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• Commented on Place your bets
  Of course the UK is a signatory to the ICC, so the UK could have been charged for its war crimes, and the ICC opened investigations into whether UK citizens should be charged. But this was very early in the...
• Commented on Place your bets
  I am literally screaming about this. Russia doesn't recognize the ICC. No. But Ukraine does. I am trying to decide if it will affect my ability to sell fiction if I write a letter to the NYT, the WaPo, and...
• Commented on WTF
  Along with refinements over the next century this reduced the cost of printing by around 3 orders of magnitude over the Chinese system. That made it feasible for Joe Tradesman to buy a textbook to learn how to do something,...
• Commented on WTF
  Massive spoiler for directive 51 and its sequels: It seems to be about a insane ecological cult trying to destroy civilisation using improbable nanotechnology (that trashes electrical engines) and biotechnology (that eats nitrates and rubber) and has access to non...
• Commented on WTF
  Because most all rounds are fired from light machineguns not rifles. "The rifleman's job is to carry ammo for the LMG. The LMG gunners job is to prevent the enemy advancing towards the artillery. The artillerymen's job is to kill...
• Commented on Books I will not write: BIGGLES!!
  So long as there's not a reservoir in some animal species for it to reinfect from, that will be that. I've read that COVID-19 is endemic in American deer populations....
• Commented on Books I will not write: BIGGLES!!
  The discussion about merits of different computer/programming languages ... if programming is about logic, why so many different programming languages*? Yeah, I get that in math you can solve many problems using different approaches, but if you're striving for efficiency...
• Commented on Books I will not write: BIGGLES!!
  Para 4 - Which site? I'm absolutely certain it was not Ardeer (Stevenston), and pretty sure it was not any of the Dumfries or Girvan sites. My grandfather told me the same story, he was probably working at Dalbeattie at...
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  IKEA is a BV. Closest translation into American is LLC. I.E. IKEA is incorporated. Nothing unusual about being a privately owned corporation....
• Commented on Holding pattern 2022 ...
  Hum. ICT COBOL had PERFORM in 1966 (maybe earlier, that's the oldest version of the manual I can find). https://icl1900.co.uk/techpub/tl1588.djvu...
• Commented on Holding pattern 2022 ...
  The only time I ever used a GOTO in COBBLE was to force it into letting me have subroutines. Why not use PERFORM? PERFORM paragraph1 THRU paragraph22. A thing of beauty....
• Commented on Roe v Wade v Sanity
  YELLOW CARD: On this blog it is known as The slaveowners' treasonous rebellion. And that's official. The slaveowners' [ second ] treasonous rebellion, surely?...
• Commented on Holding pattern 2022 ...
  The alternative to paging wasn't not paging. The alternative to paging was doing it by hand. Or just not running the program....
• Commented on Holding pattern 2022 ...
  One reason would be hardware, or the lack of it. Mainframes of that period simply didn't have enough physical memory for it to be worth using dynamic allocation. What "period" are you talking about? Lisp had been using garbage collected...
• Commented on Holding pattern 2022 ...
  The language definition might be printed in 1977. But it could take a while for the first compilers to come out. For example, ALGOL 68: a draft report was published in February 1968, the official Report was published in January...
• Commented on Roe v Wade v Sanity
  Not quite. There are multiple rulings over the years where SCOTUS has said, there's no right to this in the document but you can write a law. You appear to be assuming good faith....
• Commented on Roe v Wade v Sanity
  suddenly the legislative gridlock evaporates and they pass a Federal law explicitly enumerating rights to this stuff.And the "supreme" court strikes down that law as unconstitutional....
• Commented on Holding pattern 2022 ...
  Is the term "vril" too contaminated by far-right fruitloopery for use in fiction? What, you think leftists prefer marmite?...
• Commented on Holding pattern 2022 ...
  Seagull is a smarter Qanon....
• Commented on Holding pattern 2022 ...
  Well, I guess I was drunk when I posted that because it didn't come out anything like how I meant it. What I was trying to say was more like: I can't imagine how anyone could describe Macron as a...
• Commented on Holding pattern 2022 ...
  Charlie apparently tweeted: Macron is a horrible, bad, no-good President Really? Care to justify?...
• Commented on Oh, 2022!
  But, when HDD makers were pushing the boundaries, the first 10,000 RPM drives were 2.5"; it took close to a decade for geninue 3.5" 10K RPM drives to come out. I've been using 15K RPM 3.5" HD's since around 2005....
• Commented on Oh, 2022!
  There's also the flip side assumption to watch for: if it doesn't work for me, it's not worth doing at all. True, though I'm not seeing it on this site.Bwahahahaahha!...
• Commented on Oh, 2022!
  How low can you go? Your claim was that with temperatures of "high/lows (in Celsius) for the next 5 days - -5/-10, -8/-20, -6/-10, -7-25, -13/-21" the result would be: Now in theory in the day the sunlight will thaw...
• Commented on Oh, 2022!
  Except these are the forecast high/lows (in Celsius) for the next 5 days - -5/-10, -8/-20, -6/-10, -7-25, -13/-21 Antifreeze?...
• Commented on Oh, 2022!
  Well this is unexpected (not): Shell’s Massive Carbon Capture Plant Is Emitting More Than It’s Capturing....
• Commented on Oh, 2022!
  Parallel Systems Autonomous Pod Train is an Obvious Grift...
• Commented on Oh, 2022!
  That was the major impetus for them to start building a large fleet of identical three-loop M910 nuclear power plants in a hurry, using the knowledge gained from their nuclear weapons development program. Arguably the main "knowledge gained from...
• Commented on Oh, 2022!
  As it happens we are going to have to rip out 80% of the UK's central heating infrastructure over the next couple of decades -- it burns natural gas -- and either replace it with hydrogen burners If you can...
• Commented on Oh, 2022!
  ...and both were driven by heavy-duty political power from clandestine nuclear weapons ambitions. Please explain why France would have built a fleet of PWRs, useless for generating plutonium, for "clandestine nuclear weapons ambitions" when it already had the bomb....