thombat

9 ms·

91.
by thombat 3y ago
My abiding fear is that the point where I'm sure I want no more life will arrive at the point where I have gone past the physical or mental ability to put that decision into practice. Like Lot's wife I'll be tempted to pause
92.
by thombat 3y ago
For example, by my forgetting that the "-j" option of "make" had the number of concurrent tasks as an optional parameter, and without that it simply launches every possible compile simultaneously. Paralysis of course: gi
93.
by thombat 3y ago
That's not just a beautiful high-level description, it's even therapeutic: the next time my HDD is thrashing I'll sit patiently and think that the Page King is too busy ruling his kingdom to grant my humble request right now.
94.
by thombat 3y ago
Something that I'm not even asked to read, just shown a link to alongside the link to the privacy policy, doesn't seem like any kind of "agreement" If it's necessary for me to read something as part of an agreement
95.
by thombat 3y ago
Could be you'll need a differently patched up mutant breed for Linux?
96.
by thombat 3y ago
Being the splendidly reactive stuff that it is, molecular oxygen doesn't survive very long in any atmosphere: generally there's always something that needs oxidising. So it's thought to be a good indicator of life, only arisi
97.
by thombat 3y ago
Anything launched is assembled from parts that have been certified as fit for purpose, voluminous paperwork showing the examinations, testing, etc, all to try to minimise the risk of failure. Once it has been in orbit for years or decades,
98.
by thombat 3y ago
Further away than non-space robot workers, and we don't really have those either (at least not in the sense of machines operating autonomously in arbitrarily complex environments such that humans aren't required at all)
99.
by thombat 3y ago
Try imagining being a prisoner in a soviet psychiatric "hospital"...
100.
by thombat 3y ago
Only works if the natural soil is remarkably solid or the traffic negligible. Unpaved roads with more than very modest traffic generally need routine grading (repairing corrugations by scraping it over with a levelling blade) and re-graveli
101.
by thombat 3y ago
Exactly: all the sewage systems I know of process it enough to dump into a sea or river, where even if a downstream town draws drinking water from it the dilution with other water plus additional environmental chemistry reduces the purifica
102.
by thombat 3y ago
I'm curious why this would be worthwhile: since Singapore is an island conventional desalination would seem easier than either coping with the witches' brew of sewage (random amounts of random chemicals) or the expense of plumbing
103.
by thombat 3y ago
Both know where they hid the bodies, but for the designers it's a metaphor for the parts of the language they wish had come out better whereas for the killers it's a source of glee that they outsmarted the police.
104.
by thombat 3y ago
As big as the Cave of Caerbannog?
105.
by thombat 3y ago
It's more about how it does it: injecting executable code directly into the stack so that some other code unwittingly transfers control to it. Stack-smashing is a lot more malware-ISH than a few lines of shell script.
106.
by thombat 3y ago
The word list is 40,000 long, so without plurals probably there aren't enough words that people could spell or even pronounce. A better fix would be making it "what four words" - I wonder if they'd already committed too
107.
by thombat 3y ago
So nothing of immediate or direct use here on earth, just things that may be usable for further off-world construction or (in the case of He-3) might be an energy source someday.
108.
by thombat 3y ago
Those leftovers are water soluble, so either you perform some interesting chemistry to convert them into something more durable or your buildings have to be in arid places (condominium in an old salt mine?)
109.
by thombat 3y ago
A German colleague tells this joke, in his best exaggerated war-movie accent: How many Germans does it take to change a lightbulb? Just one. We Germans are very efficient and have no sense of humour.
110.
by thombat 3y ago
Huzzah for VOS! I've always been a sucker for solar system walks but being able to effortlessly superimpose one on my home is golden.
111.
by thombat 3y ago
Voila! Three connected pools, none of them Olympic or at the top :-)
112.
by thombat 3y ago
Not a useful comparison, since the limitation isn't of the supply of cards overall but of particular cards that (other than the material printed) are identical to the common ones.
113.
by thombat 3y ago
Given the long history of sectarian violence a business may notice but choose not to make a fuss. Especially a Catholic-owned business.
114.
by thombat 3y ago
Absolutely this: for many people settling the estate of a close family member is such an exhausting chaos of emotion that the question becomes: should I take it all to the dump, or maybe just take myself there?
115.
by thombat 3y ago
Now I don't know whether that's a sly joke, or I'm too dumb to spot the difference, or simply if autocorrect bested you in that joust?
116.
by thombat 3y ago
One day my colleague was wondering whether RegEdit used some private API for renaming keys or just copied + deleted them. "Try a rename with a big tree, see if it's still instantaneous" I helpfully proposed. But what's a
117.
by thombat 3y ago
TIL that "Tales from the White Hart" had at least some readership in the USA - I would have feared that its air of post-war English constraints (rationing and London grime) felt almost more fantastical than the accounts of Harry P
118.
by thombat 3y ago
Economies of scale are a thing to reckon with. Right now in a factory that CNC operator ideally ships the part to the next workstation metres away without needing extensive packing for safe handling and it arrives in minutes. Or it goes to
119.
by thombat 3y ago
An apposite war story from Nokia, just about the time the iPhone entered the market: our Lords and Masters had decided that internal competition would be a good thing, so smartphones were divided into business, entertainment, and mass marke
120.
by thombat 3y ago
Gastric acid is basically hydrochloric acid, and rather less concentrated than the standard laboratory bench HCl, which stands peaceably for years in glass flasks. I would be wary of assuming that chemical attack will quickly blunt glass sh

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