The Date Is Going Well
palordrolap @ palordrolap @kbin.social Posts 0Comments 434Joined 2 yr. ago
palordrolap @ palordrolap @kbin.social
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At least they haven't removed the web address.
Depends on how you define "scripting language".
Older techs remember when it was only browser-based and they thought of, and perhaps still think of, "scripting languages" as something that would run from some command-line or another. Starting a GUI browser to run a mere script was a ridiculous concept. (There was also that JavaScript had no filesystem access. At least initially. And then it became a gaping security hole, but I digress.)
Today, there exist command-line accessible versions of JavaScript but even there (I figure) most people wince and choose anything else instead. Maybe even Perl.
But another definition of "scripting language" is "(any) interpreted programming language" and where it runs is unimportant.
From that perspective, sure, JavaScript qualifies. And so does QBASIC.
Unfortunately I don't remember his name. And looking into it again, it seems like the NHS have decided that they don't want to do those operations at all now, so maybe I was right the first time. That is, the deliberate inflexibility was a stall until they could make "No" an official policy.
Seems like every person in this situation - and there's a decent number of them - loses all the weight under medical advice but the NHS won't go that extra step at the end, making the patients wonder if the whole thing was worth it.
Most of those that make it to the press are crowdfunding and/or end up going abroad where the price of the operation is cheaper.
Can't really blame the NHS either. They're chronically underfunded and there's an obligation not to show it.
Whenever this comes up I think of that one guy who was told to lose more weight in order to qualify for the operation to have the excess skin removed. Except he had already reached the ideal weight underneath all of that excess.
Unfortunately, he could not make the hospital understand that if he lost that amount of extra weight, he would actually be severely underweight to the point of being in danger of his life.
Something they would apparently only be able to comprehend once he'd lost the dangerous amount of weight and had the surgery.
He couldn't even sue for malpractice because they hadn't actually done anything.
Caveat: This was in the UK, and he wanted the operation on the NHS which would have been cost free. It's possible the hospital were being incompetent on purpose because they didn't want to do the operation and were hoping he'd go private - read "give money" - either there or elsewhere.
But it's more likely that the incompetence stemmed from inflexible (mis)application of guidelines about patients' weight before operations.
No numbers in the article, so I'm going to assume that a modern smartphone would chew through several hundred of these per day and an EV would need a battery the size of a house.
Meat and crumpet? Haven't we learned not to use these terms for each other? "Desirable partners" is the preferred termino...
whisper whisper whisper
I am told that I have misunderstood the headline. Please carry on about your business.
English is an open-source project with no overarching plan and several major variants that has had literally millions of contributors over thousands of release cycles per branch. There's bound to be some cruft in the code.
Anyone who suggests reform is enacting that one xkcd about standards. And no-one will use their variant except for a few enthusiasts who think it's the best thing since sliced silicon.
It's not about whether other people are willing to accept it. It's about whether I'm willing to generate it. This is the other half of the principle.
Irony: The pictured computer is not a 1980s, 1MHz Commodore 64 but instead a 2010s, 2GHz C64x PC, a keyboard-housed x86 system that looks like a breadbin C64.
Maybe I want to say it without saying it. There's no rule against doing that, but people somehow think there is - or that there ought to be.
Most of the time I don't swear, so it makes me uncomfortable to use the word. There have been and undoubtedly will be exceptions. When the mood takes me. When the word, unfettered, feels right. Today was not that day.
Funny how the partial omission offends some people more than the original word does. Adapt your parsers.
The Robustness Principle may seem like little more than a suggestion, but it is the foundation on which many successful things are based.
To boil it down to meme-level old-school Torvaldsry: Assume everyone else is a f--king idiot who can barely do what they're supposed to and expect to parse their files / behaviour / trash accordingly.
If you do not do this, you are, without doubt, one of those f--king idiots everyone else is having to deal with. If you do do this, it does not guarantee that you are not a f--king idiot. Awareness is key.
Examples where this works: Web browser quirks mode; Driving a car; Measure twice, cut once. This latter one is special because it reveals that often, the f--king idiot you're trying to deal with is yourself.
Assume everyone else is worse.
Fun corollary: In altering his behaviour towards f--king idiots people who should know better, Linus has learned to apply the robustness principle to interpersonal communication.
Oh. That sounds like fun. Going round collapsing all the unoccupied chairs, that is.
Prediction: Royal Mint will cease to exist within the decade. King William coinage will be minted in the European Union.
Yeah, that looks like what Google Translate gave me. The old horse-bell yam.
Because people would lose attention if they tried to use a phrase longer than "China", and most people on this side of the world wouldn't know or retain a specific placename in China unless they had specific interest in the country.
The news could throw something like "Malingshu province" and most people wouldn't bat an eye.
... despite the fact that that province name is fake and is in fact a mangled transliteration of one of the Mandarin words for "potato".
One might exist already: lzlib.
I admit I haven't done a great deal of research, so maybe there are problems, but I've found that lzip tends to do better at compression than xz/lzma and, to paraphrase its manual, it's designed to be a drop-in replacement for gzip and bzip2. It's been around since at least 2009 according to the copyright messages.
That said, xz is going to receive a lot of scrutiny from now on, so maybe it doesn't need replacing. Likewise, anything else that allows random binary blobs into the source repository is going to have the same sort of scrutiny. Is that data really random? Can it be generated by non-obfuscated plain text source code instead? etc. etc.
You want to win me over? For starters, provide a layer that supports all hooks and features in xdotool and wmctrl. As I understand it, that's nowhere near present, and maybe even deliberately impossible "for security reasons".
I know about ydotool and dotool. They're something but definitely not drop-in replacements.
Unfortunately, I suspect I'll end up being forced onto Wayland at some point because the easy-use distros will switch to it, and I'll just have to get used to moving and resizing my windows manually with the mouse. Over and over. Because that's secure.
Technically, it's inherited from older, non-x86 systems that had a dedicated 'Compose' key on the keyboard. Here's a picture of a Sun Microsystems UK-layout keyboard; take a look at the bottom right of the main section: Link to a wiki hosting the image
(These keyboards also had the Sun (looks like a diamond) key well before Microsoft decided they'd like a Windows key on every keyboard. But then lots of other non-Microsoft computers did that. Apples, Commodores, etc.)
Note that the tiny circle on the key is a light which comes on when the key is engaged and goes off when the composition is complete. The Caps-, Num- and Scroll Lock keys also have built-in lights. For that reason, some people will use Scroll Lock on PC keyboards, especially if the Compose-emulation is able to toggle the Scroll Lock light in the same way.
(Even though I used similar keyboards many, many years ago, I'm not actually sure if the key has the light in it or whether the light is under the key and the circle is merely a window, but that's not really important right now.)
If I remember correctly, clicking distro links on Distrowatch causes Distrowatch to increase its ranking of that distro, so it's theoretically possible that MX Linux is only at the top because people who don't use it and haven't heard of it think "wtf is MX Linux?", click the link and push its rank ever higher.
Urban Dictionary (not Linux related nor particularly SFW, but bear with me) had a similar problem with their table of "popular definitions" links. (They eventually took them off the site.)
If memory serves (for a second time), some of the links went to non-existent definitions, but those links looked like the only way to reach those definitions, so people clicked them, increasing their popularity and keeping them in the list. Along comes another visitor, "oh what's this", repeat ad nauseam.
Lack of body hair implies youth, often to a disturbing degree.
Why youth? Well we could look at the human as an animal and, like animals conclude that a younger co-parent implies they're healthy, less likely to die any time soon and will create, and be able to help raise, strong offspring.
And then there's the fact that, in our species at least, fertility starts just before hair starts appearing.
This is one of those self-perpetuating evolved responses which extends way back into pre-history. Nature doesn't give a damn whether someone's brain is ready for sex or children; their body is.
And it's happened enough times that the desire is still in the gene pool.
Please note that I do not advocate for having sex with children. Only why making the body of a person over the age of consent look like the body of a person under that age might be a turn-on for some people. It's hard-wired.
They might not even know that's why they like it.
I mean, there might be other reasons too, foot fetishes can't easily be explained this way, for example, so there might be equally weird alternative reasons for liking hairlessness, but the "youth" angle is a safe, yet deeply troubling bet.