denton-scratch

8 ms·

31.
by denton-scratch 2y ago
Acidity causes things to taste sour, not bitter. Bitterness is associated with alkaloids (many alkaloids are poisonous, so the fact we have taste-buds for bitterness is an advantage). I experience lemons as both sweet and sour, but certainl
32.
by denton-scratch 2y ago
Yeah, I wasn't "swapping" PSU cables; the cable was part of the PSU. I replaced a Dell PSU with a standard one, and <smoke!> No more motherboard. Manufacturers who pull this type of incompatibility shit risk their reput
33.
by denton-scratch 2y ago
Depends where you are. US law doesn't apply everywhere. Also, I'd guess that even in the USA, evidence produced by a burglar can be challenged on the grounds that it isn't what it purports to be. I suspect that US chain-of-cu
34.
by denton-scratch 2y ago
> get a Dell PC, ones I've read online that were serviceable When I "repaired" a Dell PC, I destroyed the machine. Dell power-supplies looked like standard PC power supplies; they connected to the motherboard using the sam
35.
by denton-scratch 2y ago
> not been gathered in line with due process Well, that looks about right to me. I don't see how you can mount a valid prosecution based on evidence derived from a giant hack.
36.
by denton-scratch 2y ago
You missed the point: what Suleyman was saying is that content is freeware, provided the publisher doesn't have a well-staffed legal department. Microsoft does have that, so what they publish isn't freeware. This is an attitude th
37.
by denton-scratch 2y ago
It's cynical and wrong. What he (seems to be) saying is that it's fine to violate the legal rights of other people if they don't have a large legal department, and you do. It's blindingly obvious that's wrong. &qu
38.
by denton-scratch 2y ago
The jiu-jitsu of older people (not really counting 50s) is simply that they know what they can and can't achieve, because they've mostly done whatever they're going to do. Sure, some over-60s have great things before them; bu
39.
by denton-scratch 2y ago
> Is there a name for this type of fallacy It's a type of non-sequitur, i.e. a formal fallacy. General conclusions can't be drawn from a single datapoint.
40.
by denton-scratch 2y ago
> They were an essential defence mechanism, as they allowed the castle to be organized when facing an ambush. How do you "ambush" a castle? Perhaps TFA meant "siege"?
41.
by denton-scratch 2y ago
Thanks - "ntp has been replaced ntpsec", but it's not the default. My mistake - my systems are systemd-free. On my initial encounter with ntpsec, I found ntpsec running, but ntp was also installed. That's an interesting
42.
by denton-scratch 2y ago
I hadn't heard of NTS until a Debian upgrade quietly installed ntpsec. It seems to now be the Debian default.
43.
by denton-scratch 2y ago
> At least the current Labour leader strikes me as a decent man with some actual principles and backbone You are speaking of the "human rights lawyer" who at best acquiesced in Starmer being locked up in Belmarsh. You are speak
44.
by denton-scratch 2y ago
Thank you! I was wondering how they managed to wedge an AI model into a RasPi. And I couldn't figure out what the AI was needed for.
45.
by denton-scratch 2y ago
Yup. I stopped reading when I got to the bit where they explained that the "secret city" was the City of London. That's tabloid crap.
46.
by denton-scratch 2y ago
There seems to be a category of "archaeologist" that likes to explain artifacts they don't understand as being ceremonial or religious, because they can't think of any other explanation, and without having any informatio
47.
by denton-scratch 2y ago
I'm suspicious that perhaps silver nanowires might be a health risk? I believe finely-divided silver can be toxic, at least in some circumstances. Also, it's a composite with a plastic material, and would probably resist all attem
48.
by denton-scratch 2y ago
That blade cuts both ways; the electron beam in a CRT travels through a vacuum, there's nothing to "rush in". A hole beam would have to travel through a medium with no free electrons.
49.
by denton-scratch 2y ago
Your hole-gun idea left me scratching my head. An electron gun produces a beam that contains only electrons; there is no conductor, and I think holes can exist only in the presence of a conductor. So you can't shoot a beam of holes thr
50.
by denton-scratch 2y ago
> but it turns out they were going the other way Nobody seems to have mentioned Holes. Holes are positive charge-carriers. Yeah - they're virtual, they're not like positrons or protons. But they behave just like electrons going
51.
by denton-scratch 2y ago
> NTS has a custom open source license with extremely strange clauses around modification. My word, that is indeed an odd licence! Those "strange clauses" make up most of the body of the licence. I've never read a licence
52.
by denton-scratch 2y ago
Sure. This was the early eighties; we didn't really have "libraries", and even if we had, there was no way to plug them into this proprietary development system. > library like mpfr suited for financial applications, a fix
53.
by denton-scratch 2y ago
> efficient ways to represent numbers of arbitrary precision I used to write COBOL for Burroughs machines, which had hardware BCD arithmetic. It wasn't "arbitrary precision" in the sense that you could input an arbitrary n
54.
by denton-scratch 2y ago
I once wrote some accounting software for a tiny team in an investment bank. The bosses decided that we should use our brand-new platform, which was cheap to develop for, because most (normal) things could be done without code. All went wel
55.
by denton-scratch 2y ago
> Two decades ago you could set up a simple site that needed no attention for twenty years. ...but as of yesterday, you can't?
56.
by denton-scratch 2y ago
Isn't the Second Law basically statistical? And wasn't it spelled out before anybody mentioned "spacetime"? There's this line about all the water molecules in a glass "randomly" jumping upward at the same
57.
by denton-scratch 2y ago
> that close to a black hole How close to a black hole? This isn't a common-or-garden black hole, it's supermassive. If it's (300M years ago) suddenly started producing intense radiation that we can measure here, then I
58.
by denton-scratch 2y ago
> 1. You can only go forward in time to varying degrees, never back. That's what we seem to observe; but I'm not aware of any reason why that should be so a priori, and I don't know what kind of evidence would be conclusiv
59.
by denton-scratch 2y ago
Hey, vote me down to oblivion if you want; I don't care. But I think it's nice to say why. What have I misunderstood? Is this a 4D space in a 5D spacetime? Is "block spacetime" discredited? I thought the parent comment s
60.
by denton-scratch 2y ago
> are traveling through a 4D space Huh? My standard interpretation of "4D" in this kind of context is spacetime. But one doesn't "travel" through spacetime; one's entire journey "just is". https:&

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