thisrod

26 ms·

211.
by thisrod 9y ago
So why is this a surprise? The experiments on identical and fraternal twins were done decades ago, and there just isn't any doubt that genes influence sexual orientation. Nor is there any possibility that they determine it: many gay
212.
by thisrod 9y ago
Do you know what's happened to China's sex ratio since it became possible to selectively abort female foetuses? If some hormone were found to be associated with men becoming same-sex attracted, the commies would probably put it i
213.
by thisrod 9y ago
Those are the requirements to enter the lottery.
214.
by thisrod 9y ago
I worry that this is path dependent. Recently, I went to a talk by a guy from New Zealand with an expensively manageable disability. I asked him what it would take to get the NZ accident compensation scheme to happen in Australia. The an
215.
by thisrod 9y ago
Good point. Multics was used just as much, or little, as Plan 9 was. We might wish our predecessors had made the jump to distributed, securable operating systems, but there was never a time at which it made sense to do so.
216.
by thisrod 9y ago
Scientists have always made a principle of not believing each other. The motto of the Royal Society is usually translated as "Take no one's word for it."
217.
by thisrod 9y ago
It's hard to find good dairy products in a country whose population mostly can't tolerate lactose? Who would have guessed that.
218.
by thisrod 9y ago
Wet kitchens are a very sensible idea, for the kind of cooking that is done in them. Just hang around a hawker stir fry cart, and imagine 20 years of that smoke and oil mist raining down in your living room.
219.
by thisrod 9y ago
The way I see that history, Multics was the second system that never shipped, and Plan 9 was the fourth system that belatedly did ship Multics.
220.
by thisrod 9y ago
It's worth pointing out that this battery only solved a second order problem: what to do when one thing unexpectedly breaks. The big technical problem in Australia is what to do when the weather forecast says that a whole lot of things
221.
by thisrod 9y ago
> we aren't building coal or nuclear because there are outrageous political risks This is a one sided way of putting it. The people who build coal plants in Australia say that they've stopped doing it because of climate change
222.
by thisrod 9y ago
Not much. Without the battery, everything would have happened as expected; with the battery, it happened a few seconds faster than expected.
223.
by thisrod 9y ago
Errson?
224.
by thisrod 9y ago
Which Australian right wing government are you referring to? Australian telecoms ran off the rails in the late 90s, the moment that the Howard government privatised the state-run phone network. They either stuffed it up (thinking charitab
225.
by thisrod 9y ago
Thanks for that reminder. I've been using Acme for years, but I never figured out SREs.
226.
by thisrod 9y ago
https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html
227.
by thisrod 9y ago
> Make Technology Relatable and Accessible I've considered drawing up a directed acyclic graph of fault propagation in Linux. E.g., an incorrect WPA key causes WiFi to be misconfigured causes the physical network layer to be unavai
228.
Scatter plots of Australian SSM votes vs. electorate demography(pollbludger.net)
1 points by thisrod 9y ago|0 comments
229.
by thisrod 9y ago
I seem to be cursed with the ability to crash any language interpreter I play with. My favorite so far was when I tried Smalltalk, mixed up / and //, and asked for a window that was 3/2 pixels wide (maybe not 3/2,
230.
by thisrod 9y ago
Australia taxes shareholders instead of companies. Companies pay tax on paper, but it gets refunded to their shareholders when they pay dividends, and those dividends are taxed like any other income. If other developed countries did the sa
231.
by thisrod 9y ago
Maybe, once FUSE came along, 9pfuse made more sense than putting 9p in the kernel? https://9fans.github.io/plan9port/man/man4/9pfuse.html
232.
by thisrod 9y ago
I remember a quote from some Unix book around 1990: "IRC is a simple tool that allows two users to type ASCII messages to each other's terminals. Oh, did we mention that it's more addictive than crack cocaine?"
233.
by thisrod 9y ago
PDEs are hard to solve numerically, because you usually need to evaluate the derivatives. The errors are not smooth functions of the coordinates, so their derivatives tend to swamp the derivative of the solution. By contrast, ODE solving
234.
by thisrod 9y ago
It's worth knowing the context to this. The author was invited to present a prize in memory of Mark Colvin, but the Colvin family took offence to the arrogantly foolish things he has said about the greenhouse effect. There's an
235.
by thisrod 9y ago
I was expecting to read about some brilliant new way to solve all of the normalisation problems with Unicode, and make plain text safe again. What a let down!
236.
by thisrod 9y ago
I agree. How is this different from all the other failures caused by false assumptions about map datums? (And why aren't those just another case of bad metadata, comparable to character encoding issues?) Edit, read the rest of the ar
237.
by thisrod 9y ago
After being forced to use PHP, I've come to respect it a lot more than when I'd only looked at it. There is nothing ground breaking in bog-standard imperative control flow, a default data structure of association lists whose keys
238.
by thisrod 9y ago
I'm amazed by the range of completion rates in that first scatter plot. Here are the Australian figures, for contrast. Note that living in the NT is strongly correlated with being Indigenous. (Indigenous Australians are the people f
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Australians, please enrol to vote for same sex marriage(aec.gov.au)
2 points by thisrod 9y ago|4 comments
240.
by thisrod 9y ago
That's true. But this isn't about Google releasing a whole class of information by policy. It's about them responding, or not, to a specific question of the form, "We run a legitimate website on the topic that the Amer

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