JdeBP

51 ms·

841.
by JdeBP 3y ago
Yes, Post Office Ltd is a private company. It was privatized at the turn of the 21st century, and there are odd holdovers from the four centuries of it being a royal monopoly with sweeping powers, more on which at https://news.y
842.
by JdeBP 3y ago
Which continues the theme, really. That the British public is not motivated by a BBC Panorama documentary in 2015 or by ten years of Private Eye coverage or by 15 years of Computer World coverage, but only finally by a dramatization b
843.
by JdeBP 3y ago
The simile is more colourful (and simplistic) than the reality. The poverty levels are extreme in some parts of the U.K. that are far away from London and the high population density belt that goes through Birmingham to Manchester, lower th
844.
by JdeBP 3y ago
It's not just that. "of" and "the" are often omitted from initialisms, possibly as a lingering effect of, and false transferral of the conventions from, Latin where "of" is just the genitive case and &quo
845.
by JdeBP 3y ago
There has already been a public inquiry, note. It started in 2020. It was set up by Boris Johnson. Yes, I know.
846.
by JdeBP 3y ago
ITVX is, purportedly, though. I have some relatives who tried out ITVX for the first time especially to watch the drama, which they didn't catch as it was broadcast. They reported that ITVX was almost unusable, and also that the app c
847.
by JdeBP 3y ago
There are legal arguments recounted in modern law textbooks that the whole idea of private prosecutions in England and Wales is a hold-over nowadays. The argument goes that since CPS decisions are subject to judicial review, the raison d
848.
by JdeBP 3y ago
Lots of people have told you that anyone can bring a private prosecution. But they aren't telling the whole story. Post Office Ltd, by being a successor to the government monopoly of four centuries, is in a rather strange legal posit
849.
by JdeBP 3y ago
It's not quite regular. Normally, the (purported) victim and the prosecutor are not the same person. That's another thing that has been highlighted by this case: the fact that Post Office Ltd has inherited the ability to prosecu
850.
by JdeBP 3y ago
That seems to be one of the points that the BBC article is making, too. Panorama , one of the BBC's highest profile current affairs shows, points this out in 2015, and nothing happens. Post Office Ltd even pats itself on the back th
851.
by JdeBP 3y ago
I think that it's a bit of a reach there to blame 3rd century Latin for why computer/telegraphy people 16/17 centuries later decided to not retain the idea of lower case, when by that point it had been around in writing since
852.
by JdeBP 3y ago
One of the books was an entire annotated disassembly of the BASIC interpreter, if memory serves. I vaguely remember there being some sort of kerfuffle about that. Another thing that one got: a printed circuit diagram of the machine. As for
853.
by JdeBP 3y ago
Looking at the difference page, it's not BBC BASIC as one might remember it. But that's not possible outwith actual BBC Micro hardware, complete with Kenneth Kendall's voice in ROM. And I suspect that Kenneth Kendall cannot
854.
by JdeBP 3y ago
I am certain that M. Siebenmann has known about file descriptions for decades. The problem with a "here is what Linux does" response is that it actually bespeaks of the respondent not knowing enough. Linux isn't even relev
855.
by JdeBP 3y ago
The problem is Wikipedia being misleading again. They each support a proc filesystem. There is no single the proc filesystem that they support. A case in point: FreeBSD's /proc is very different to Linux's /proc, a
856.
by JdeBP 3y ago
You are conflating and confusing several different things, including what operating systems even had a terminal paradigm. Windows NT started out with a "console" paradigm, like OS/2 before it, not a "terminal" one.
857.
by JdeBP 3y ago
Which is why a 2003 paper being "the first write-up I can find of the potential issues with terminal security" doesn't sit well. Quite a lot of this stuff was written up decades ago. Just on Usenet and BBSes and documents t
858.
by JdeBP 3y ago
That was invented in 1986. It was called the VIO subsystem of OS/2, and was followed by the console paradigm of Windows NT.
859.
by JdeBP 3y ago
No it isn't. The problem is using regular expressions as the tool for doing it. By feeding the character stream through a proper DEC VT state machine, it's actually fairly trivial. After all, terminal emulators do exactly this.
860.
by JdeBP 3y ago
> Every time my terminal blows up because I wrote some binary data and I have to run `reset` or `stty sane` I'm amazed that we let things get to this point. Every time that your terminal emulator does this in response to binary data
861.
by JdeBP 3y ago
Well, yes and no. ECMA-48 is an established standard, and dates from 1976. The standards in use today have been around that long, long enough even that terminals that aren't ECMA-48 compatible are exceedingly rare nowadays. So it
862.
by JdeBP 3y ago
Amusingly, FF is almost never the control character for clearing the screen. The idea that it is, is widespread, and attributable to some home computers of the 1980s. But it was never the case for DEC VTs. It's equivalent to VT.
863.
by JdeBP 3y ago
Whilst it is true that ECMA-48 terminals are overwhelmingly the norm nowadays, that is not a counterpoint to "If you use colours, please consider making them optional".
864.
by JdeBP 3y ago
Actually, it's that question that is the straw man. jstanley's point is that to the reader "posted last week" could mean almost no time at all ago. It's not about the display library choosing to label recent thi
865.
by JdeBP 3y ago
Or even https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/windows-itpro-docs/commit/2...
866.
by JdeBP 3y ago
Welcome to The Register , the on-line newspaper that has been calling people who write Wikipedia "wiki-wankers" and "wiki-fiddlers" since 2004, and named Kevin Warwick "Captain Cyborg". There is a reason that
867.
by JdeBP 3y ago
The gravity of Terra is exactly enough to cause the curved orbit. You are just missing how shallowly curved it really is, by squashing out the time part of spacetime. In 4 dimensional spacetime, the circle is (to simplify a little) really
868.
by JdeBP 3y ago
That's because the writer of the article at hand is poor. For a better exposition of the argument, have James Wright, archaeologist. https://triskeleheritage.triskelepublishing.com/mediaeval-my... To paraphrase: We kn
869.
by JdeBP 3y ago
All of those confusing streets in Bedworth? They aren't streets. They are blocks of flats or small terraces all around the Bedworth Water Tower. Here is Lye Corner with Emes Walk in the background: https://gnb-user-uploads.s
870.
by JdeBP 3y ago
You have the burden of proof the wrong way around. The earliest occurrence of this hypothesis was propounded by Theodore Andrea Cook in 1903. That was not the Victorian Era, but was later . Cook was not a historian, but a sports writer a

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