bloak

64 ms·

811.
by bloak 6y ago
People who can't cope with leap seconds should stop pestering the people who define UTC and just switch to TAI. They can do that now. No one is stopping them. Leap seconds are a pain and I myself would happily choose TAI over UTC for t
812.
by bloak 6y ago
See this rather nice map: https://jakubmarian.com/map-of-quotation-marks-in-european-l... I like to call «this» the Swiss system, because in Switzerland they use it for four different official languages.
813.
by bloak 6y ago
Thanks for submitting that. I find this kind of list quite useful. I think I've read about a quarter of them.
814.
by bloak 6y ago
I've mentioned this before, but I'll mention it again, because it's a classic example of a crap user interface: my microwave had buttons to add ten seconds or a minute or ten minutes to the time, and when you pressed them it
815.
by bloak 6y ago
There were already some positive preliminary results from the five vaccines being tested in Brazil, so "don't work at all" was already ruled out, I think. Obviously the press release from Pfizer isn't going to mention th
816.
by bloak 6y ago
According to Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_vaccine#Clinical_tria... ) there are 8 COVID-19 vaccines in phase 3 trials. A week or so ago I read about an experiment in Brazil that compared 5 of them. S
817.
by bloak 6y ago
I don't believe that in most sane juridictions a court would keep a suspect in prison indefinitely when the suspect claims to have forgotten the passphrase for a bitcoin wallet. I think the court would have to find the suspect guilty a
818.
by bloak 6y ago
I've read that France will not extradite a French citizen. So that's one other place to hide, if you're a French citizen. You won't escape justice that way, I think - if necessary they'll try you in France for a mur
819.
by bloak 6y ago
I think the term "conspiracy theory" is perhaps unhelpful, and it also seems that people are lumping together phenomena that aren't necessarily all that closely related. If there's a group of people with some strongly he
820.
by bloak 6y ago
Technically it's not "friction" because "friction" has to be between two solids. But arguably that's just being pedantic. The air gets in the way of the object moving through it and slows it down, but energy is
821.
by bloak 6y ago
I'm no expert, but I've read a bit about Vespula vulgaris (the most common sort of wasp in the UK) and tackled a few nests in the past. My impression is that if you put a vacuum cleaner next to the entrance you may, if you're
822.
by bloak 6y ago
"Natural-sounding" is much easier to achieve than "correct".
823.
by bloak 6y ago
I mostly agree. In many, perhaps most cases I'd rather not specify that the input to a function is UTF-8; I'd prefer to say it's an array of bytes that will usually be valid UTF-8. Even valid UTF-8 can turn out to be fa
824.
by bloak 6y ago
Can anyone explain the alleged legal basis of this ( https://www.raspberrypi.org/trademark-rules/ )? "You may not: ... use the Raspberry Pi Word Mark as part of the domain name for your website" I thought it us
825.
by bloak 6y ago
Google Translate does 108!
826.
by bloak 6y ago
There's a better explanation here, though I still don't understand "34-bit unsigned second counter right shifted two bits" and "(((2^34-1) + (2^31-1)) & ~3)": https://lwn.net/Articles/8
827.
by bloak 6y ago
The modernisation of the Soviet Union under Stalin was also very impressive. They went from a feudal society with serfs, like Europe in the Middle Ages, to the first man in space rather quickly. Of course, in both cases, China and the Sovie
828.
by bloak 6y ago
Unfortunately, I don't think generating a load of anti-Chinese sentiment in Europe and North America is going to make the Chinese feel less threatened by the Uyghurs. Rather the reverse, I expect. So I'd recommend people express t
829.
by bloak 6y ago
I've not used any of these services but I'd be interested to know what the portable identifiers look like. Can anyone explain?
830.
by bloak 6y ago
For bash it claims: "Debian : dont know: fails to build from source" Information from Debian itself: https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=bash&suite=si... https://tests.reproducible-b
831.
by bloak 6y ago
Copyright durations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright... George Orwell died in 1950, so it looks as though that book is already out of copyright in Australia and Canada, for example, but wil
832.
by bloak 6y ago
I don't really understand the point you're making, but the Identical Ancestors Point isn't a fixed point in history; it keeps moving forwards. So it is different now from what it was when the book of Genesis was written.
833.
by bloak 6y ago
Restricted subsets of a language are a useful concept, for some purposes, but Basic English itself is not a very good example. For example, if I remember correctly, Basic English doesn't allow the word "tolerate" but does all
834.
by bloak 6y ago
But what species are you talking about? The article is about Corvus corone, I think, found in Europe and Asia. Americans and Australians use the word "crow" to refer to something else, I think.
835.
by bloak 6y ago
> it's a murder of crows if most people agree that it's a murder of crows No, that's not how it works. Each person and each group is their own authority (at least potentially, if they want to be). You're right that th
836.
by bloak 6y ago
If you see what looks like a flock of crows, then probably they're rooks. Crows are usually solitary.
837.
by bloak 6y ago
You point newcomers at the list archive (mailman or whatever)?
838.
by bloak 6y ago
The article compares XML with JSON and YAML. That makes sense for some applications, but for other applications, like a structured text, I'd compare it with Markdown. I'm not happy with XML or Markdown for my source, where "s
839.
by bloak 6y ago
It worked for me just now, with Chrome. If you're on Linux, have you tried `mkdir /tmp/t234 && HOME=/tmp/t234 firefox` or creating a new local user and logging on as that user? It would be interesting to kno
840.
by bloak 6y ago
Elephants could easily be aware of their own mortality. They are social, long-lived, and have been filmed interacting in an interesting way with elephant bones. There was a nice article on elephants posted here: https://news.ycom

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