Viewing profile — eponeponepon

Are you in the UK and within some short distance of civilisation? If so, you very likely have a newsagent near by you and there's a surprisingly good chance they still do a paper d…

It's fine, it's worked for millennia - you simply gather your many belligerent sons, hand them large clubs and send them to batter the power company's director till he gives in.

On a long enough timescale, all of these things are dust, though. ...basically, label your axes.

The key to building an idea is inducing blind faith in others . ...imho. Edit to expound: if you have blind faith in your idea, then when it is about to fail, you will go down with…

I'm not disagreeing :-)

The Orwell comparisons may seem trite to you, but the fact is that if there's no available word for a thing, it becomes difficult for people at large to discuss it. Some organisati…

My word, but this would break _so much_. I would like to think that I've managed to keep my wits about me enough over the years that I haven't got any code needing to find both 'A.…

Email has been slowly balkanising itself for years now. By way of example, I know personally several people who run mail relays and not only refuse to relay messages from and to Go…

I think this is the story you were after: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-42951788 (apologies if that's one of the BBC's randomly unavailable-outside-the-UK pages...)

It's not just Western society, it's humans in general. The rest of the world might not get so wound up about narcotics as the West does, but there are plenty of other things that t…

There is never anything wrong with writing "n/a" in any kind of form. There was a long overlap during which any form that took contact details already had fields for email address …

Unsettling is exactly the word. https://stackroboflow.com/#!/question/16662 leaves me trying to work out what on earth the poster's really trying to do - even though I know full we…

On the other hand, cherrypicked excerpts can be terrifyingly convincing: "What is the best way to login to my Ruby application in a browser via Perl?" We've all been asked a questi…

Neat. I could definitely use this for some home infrastructure I'm playing around with at the moment - will definitely give it a shot!

I don't really get the way terminal usage gets framed as outdated, or GUIs as unnecessary depending on one's preference. They're each for very separate use cases - tasks that are e…

E2E doesn't actually matter that much in the end; it's far more interesting to advertisers (and therefore valuable to Facebook) to know who you're talking to than to know what you …

I think the exact changes that he (or his agents) made are kind of immaterial - ultimately, it seems, he tried to implement too large a change too suddenly, and it failed. There's …

The Amarna period is endlessly fascinating to me - it seems such a clear example of how little has changed in the way politics and society interact for thousands of years.

In theory, the same way as a policeman - assessing the situation and the context, and then making a decision not to issue the fine. But in practice, I don't think it can, without h…

This cuts both ways, of course - in some ways, I think we want automated systems to be able to discriminate. A good example is speed cameras - in days past, a man speeding to get h…

There's a world of difference between "this person has a track record of not paying their bills, so exercise caution before lending" and "this person was observed reading subversiv…

Some matter is conscious. My fingernail is not, but it's a subset of the matter that equals me, and I am conscious (you'll just have to take my word); I am a subset of the matter t…

It's a throwback to our feral ancestry. I'd contend that the urge to overcome our animal nature is the bedrock of what makes us human.

> In a way, that's part > of its appeal. You're not wrong - and this is no small part of why it's a tough problem. But I think those three are a bit of a "pick any two" situation.

> sad kids LARPing as Nazis. Spot on. A description I am undoubtedly going to steal when the opportunity arises, so thanks! :)