paulajohnson

10 ms·

61.
by paulajohnson 10y ago
I have a complaint letter written by my father-in-law back in the 50s about his car, which had seized up three times. The manufacturer wrote back to say it was his fault for driving at the same speed all the time, and he should vary his spe
62.
by paulajohnson 10y ago
I think thats got a lot to do with it. Google "prison lobby" for a range of articles on the problem. The same companies also pay for public campaigns that talk up the danger from crime, as that makes people vote for punitive restr
63.
by paulajohnson 10y ago
Its curious that the GCHQ statement doesn't actually contradict Trump. Trump claims he was wiretapped before the election, but GCHQ have denied spying on him when he was president-elect, i.e. after the election.
64.
by paulajohnson 10y ago
If you are flying in controlled airspace then you fly where ATC tell you, not where you happen to think would be a good idea. If you want to change course for any reason you ask ATC. The only exception would be to avoid an imminent collisio
65.
by paulajohnson 10y ago
I grew up in the UK. I have never "encountered" a gun outside the USA.
66.
by paulajohnson 10y ago
I've often wondered how "the right to keep and bear arms" can be abridged for, e.g. a shoulder-launched surface-air missile, but not for a hand gun or rifle. Surely both are "arms" within the meaning understood at t
67.
by paulajohnson 10y ago
I can't help thinking that the anti-gun group could exploit this by specifically running content that attacks NRA advertising tropes, thereby turning the NRA ads into an exercise in deconstructing NRA propaganda.
68.
by paulajohnson 10y ago
The problem with Delphi and its relatives is that they are walled gardens. As long as you are working on the kind of application envisaged by the designers (roughly, CRUD with a SQL backend) everything is easy. As soon as you step outside t
69.
by paulajohnson 10y ago
Thats the second time you've posted this. How about pointing at some evidence?
70.
by paulajohnson 10y ago
The lowest level of the US court system tries hard to stick to what law and precedent say, and to avoid engaging with constitutional issues. If you want to drive change you have to appeal it up a level or two, where the senior judges consid
71.
by paulajohnson 10y ago
It is. The idea was floated by the US founding fathers as a form of compensation for having all the land parceled up and owned. Further back you have the Levelers who were essentially proto-communists.
72.
by paulajohnson 10y ago
"Regardless who was an expert in automation in the 60s, I'm pretty sure they weren't being asked". Very much so. In those days if you wanted to know about the future of telecoms you asked telephone engineers. Those guys
73.
by paulajohnson 10y ago
AIUI is just that DOS was complying with the standard, while Unix had decided to break it. The standard was designed for physical teletypes and has a bunch of issues (like, what do you do with LF-CR?) but its not unreasonable of DOS to have
74.
by paulajohnson 10y ago
Its the program itself that is the proof, not the computer running the program. In a sufficiently powerful type system you can express any proposition as a function type. A proof of that proposition is also a program. The proof checker is a
75.
by paulajohnson 10y ago
At a guess, the server probably provides a unified front-end to services written in multiple languages.
76.
by paulajohnson 10y ago
Actually there have been a lot of arrests, but so far they have been of the doctors and staff prescribing the pills, rather than the Mr Bigs. Google "pill mill arrests" for examples.
77.
by paulajohnson 10y ago
The way it generally seems to play out in the USA, especially for white collar defendents who can afford plenty of lawyers, is something like this. They are charged with crimes that carry a decade or two in prison, but are then offered a pl
78.
by paulajohnson 10y ago
"In this country we find it pays to hang an admiral from time to time, to encourage the others".
79.
by paulajohnson 10y ago
It will be interesting to see how the plea bargains come out. There won't be a trial of course.
80.
by paulajohnson 10y ago
The wrong billionaire won the election.
81.
by paulajohnson 10y ago
The problem is that time_t (seconds since 1970) implicitly assumes 86400 seconds per day. You would have to redefine time_t and rewrite every piece of code that uses it.
82.
by paulajohnson 10y ago
That is a historical artifact. The original Unix developers decided to treat time as seconds since the start of 1970, implicitly assuming that every day has 86400 seconds. Back then UTC was in its infancy, most programmers had not even hear
83.
by paulajohnson 10y ago
I disagree. The point of NTP, and of time services in general, is that everyone agrees about the time. If an organisation wants to use non-standard time it can, but public-facing NTP servers should all agree and all provide the standard tim
84.
by paulajohnson 10y ago
This illustrates how slippery the distinction between communications data and metadata really is. The examples in the first paragraph would all just record that you had been to www.reddit.com.
85.
by paulajohnson 10y ago
This doesn't "predict criminals", it predicts those who will be convicted of a crime, which is not the same thing. Suppose that people have an unconscious prejudice against those with eyes set close together. They will be dis
86.
by paulajohnson 10y ago
Why would liberals be less "willing" to link to fake news? Nobody forwarding a link to one of these stories knows its fake (except the small minority being paid).
87.
by paulajohnson 10y ago
I notice that his attempts to seed fake news on the liberal side always got promptly debunked. I think this election is going to be the high water mark for fake news, its just that liberals are ahead of the curve in being skeptical about in
88.
by paulajohnson 10y ago
In the writer's view (AIUI), the "consent of the governed" is not a constitutional property arising from the existence of universal suffrage, it is a dynamic property that rises and falls over time in response to political an
89.
by paulajohnson 10y ago
So, like anything, the available libraries vary, but the important ones score pretty highly. Haddock documentation (like Doxygen) is considered a basic part of the job. "cabal test" will run embedded test harnesses. Stackage conta
90.
by paulajohnson 10y ago
I'm trying to imagine what "rigorous in practice but not theory" might look like. It seems to me that rigor derives from theory and can then be applied in practice. Haskell is rigorous in both.

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