| December... |
[12 Dec 2008|07:07pm] |
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Nice time to get your credit-card compromised.
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| Human rights 'apply to UK troops' |
[11 Apr 2008|06:01pm] |
From the BBC:
Human rights laws can be applied to British troops on active service, a High Court judge has ruled.
Ministers are appealing against the ruling.
Nice way to support the troops, don't you think?
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| Prozac and other SSRIs; or, oh, for fuck's sake. |
[26 Feb 2008|03:14pm] |
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/feb/26/mentalhealth.medicalresearch
So, Prozac in the usual light doses it's prescribed in is indistinguishable from a placebo. But that's not what this is about. What this is about is the following gem:
[[[
The only exception is in the most severely depressed patients, according to the authors - Prof Irving Kirsch from the department of psychology at Hull University and colleagues in the US and Canada. But that is probably because the placebo stopped working so well, they say, rather than the drugs having worked better.
]]]
Let's have that once again.
But that is probably because the placebo stopped working so well, they say, rather than the drugs having worked better.
This kind of crap is enough to put one in a mood that is as likely to be affected by placebos as SSRIs :-/
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| Asymmetry: D isn't M any more, but it certainly is A. |
[22 Jan 2008|10:33pm] |
| [ |
mood |
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drowning in irony |
] |
From the Guardian (and elsewhere), a position paper on NATO. What an excellent quote:
"The first use of nuclear weapons must remain in the quiver of escalation as the ultimate instrument to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction."
Let's have that once again.
"The first use of nuclear weapons must remain in the quiver of escalation as the ultimate instrument to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction."
If you're reading this from a NATO member state then you're more likely to die in a road accident than in a terrorist attack. But let's just be clear on that:
"The first use of nuclear weapons must remain in the quiver of escalation as the ultimate instrument to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction."
For fuck's sake.
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| Tomb Raider Anniversary |
[01 Aug 2007|09:41am] |
| [ |
mood |
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less frustrated. |
] |
Turns out that the two centaur bad guys are easy to kill, once you understand how to reliably perform the adrenaline dodge.
The secret is not to treat it like a twitch game but to be running in plenty of time as the horse charges you. Then when time slows, you just tap the dodge button. I was doing the move/dodge combination in under half a second which isn't enough for Lara to actually be moving fast enough to roll out of the way.
The other thing which might help is to spot which of the centaurs is going to charge you: when an enemy rages, there's a small orange flash around their head. You can lock on (with L2) at that point to the one who is going to charge, which helps with camera angles etc. I have no idea if the lock is necessary to perform the head-shot, but having done this right the first time I tried it (thanks to Ruth for actually trawling through a million internet posts saying, "I cannot perform the adrenaline dodge!" until she found one with a useful description) I wasn't about to blow it on trying again.
Still can't use the move against the smaller raging monsters, but typically the shotgun to knock them down followed by the desert eagles to finish them off does the trick.
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| Next Big Brother.... |
[08 Jun 2007|10:54am] |
... so here's the idea. Take a dozen or so of the usual misfits, chuck them in a house for 10 weeks or whatever it is. Usual production team making up pointless and barbaric rules as they go along.
And don't screen any of it.
When the housemates nominate evictees, the one chucked out is selected by the toss of a coin. They go outside to find a waiting taxi. When they get in you might film five minutes of their expression as you tell them that they haven't been on TV for the last how long. You whisk them home and don't broadcast the resulting 30 minutes of total footage for at least two years.
For added bonuses the capricious producers can repeatedly lower the prize money (because it's clearly not about the prize money anyway, that wouldn't be Keeping It Real, would it?) until the value of "winning"* is 15 bob.
Now, I'd pay to not see _that_.
* The only way to win is not to play the game.
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| Quick trip to London |
[23 Oct 2006|11:05am] |
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then back from Paddington. Bloke sitting opposite me was in a wheelchair, bald with a scar over one eye. As we passed through Reading station, he looks up and says, "curses! I was meant to go to Brighton!" "Don't worry, Blofeld," says I, and pull the emergency cord. "Your train of error stops here."
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| semiotic pudding |
[31 Jul 2006|11:03am] |
These unmarried lesbians lost their bid to get their marriage legally recognised in the UK. The government's defence was that, since the rights due to a married couple are identical to those of a civil partnership (which, note, Ruth and I cannot enter into - unless, possibly, we both claim to be gay) there can be no discrimination. Why, then, prevent them applying the label of marriage to their union?
Summary: I disagree with the decision. Having said that, if a bunch of greengrocer's went to court to get their misuse of an apostrophe legally recognised, I'd be one of the morally outraged crowd who couldn't see past the syntactical issue. Conclusion: I am a hypocrite. (But God intended that an apostrophe be used to indicate possession or an elision of letters, not a plural form, dammit.)
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| Someone doesn't get it: object orientation. |
[27 Jul 2006|03:31pm] |
The register is a rag, let's face it. Here's an example: Code inheritance and reuse: a delicate balancing act. Read down the first page.
[[[
Changes to the external protocol
When a subclass adds new methods that are available outside the class, it changes the external protocol of the superclass. This happens in a number of different situations:
...
* The subclass restricts methods provided by the superclass. This may include removing methods, or changing method parameters to types that are more restrictive. Currently, there is no way in Java to restrict the methods inherited from a class.
]]]
Nor will there ever be. How very 90s: the author doesn't understand what "is-a" means. Clueless feckwit.
Note, it's perfectly OK for a subclass to provide a method that accepts broader types as parameters, or whose return type specification is a subtype of the parent method's. (Although the JVM has a little trouble with this due to the way it locates methods; you have to fake this, but that's an implementatino detail.)
One might find it surprising that the author doesn't mention contracts in his discussion of componentisation. On the other hand, the error here wouldn't be made by someone who understood them.
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| I cannot trype tdoay. |
[06 Sep 2004|03:39pm] |
Or spell either. Something's wrong.
For what it's worth, I don't think I had any hallucinations last night after all, so maybe Sudaca food wasn't responsible for my previous trippy night.
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| ticks are arthropods, not insects |
[10 Jun 2004|10:17pm] |
| [ |
mood |
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why, oh why, oh why |
] |
BBC "news": Greatest maths problem 'solved' on dBdB's latest crack at the problem scores twice as highly on the "BBC news is shit"ometer than usual.
First:
[[
The hypothesis concerns prime numbers and has stumped the world's mathematicians for more than 150 years.
]]
[[
It has defeated mathematicians since 1859 when Bernhard Riemann published a conjecture about how prime numbers were distributed amongst other numbers.
]]
Doesn't take a mathematician to work that one out. Then there's the "related story" link in the sidebar with the short title, "Largest Prime Number Discovered".
They really are very, very poor.
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| manly bruising |
[27 Aug 2003|11:19am] |
Well, as stag events go this one was remarkably free from cocks. People took their hits, tempers didn't fray, and we had a whale of a time. Most people even managed to get their head around the "surrender" rule (you demand a surrender rather than shooting someone at point-blank range, Simon).
Spike made "man of the match" through good sniping, wiping out four opposing players when he was the last left on his team, and the "capture the flag" saunter which the refs interpreted as absolute cool rather than "must... put... one... leg in front... of... the other...".
Oh, and I couldn't bring myself to shoot the Stag in the back (although the opportunity presented itself).
Best bruise of the event (post a photo, Ben!) goes to the MBA starting a new job on Monday who has a purple-and-yellow concentric ring formation an inch across in the middle of his forehead.
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[04 Aug 2003|03:12pm] |
zen in a nutshell
there is no reality
the world is just NUL
header incoming
like a needle pulling thread
we do it just SOH
confuscious enscribed
at the start of all his works
a neat "STX"
and when he had done
his brightest students would close
with an "ETX"
the end of all things
universal EOT
there will be no more
understanding sought:
wouldn't you like to know, eh?
make your ENQuiry
ACK: a straight answer
the dog has buddha nature
like you always thought
the monks come to prayer
ascend the holy mountain
to the chime of BEL
political talk?
what is said can be unsaid
with good old BS
moving right along
a handy delimiter
Horizontal Tab
the queue is for bread
many hungry mouths are there
this calls for Line Feed
turn ninety degrees
(that's pi-by-two radians)
Tab Vertically
when all's said and done
we turn over a new leaf
emit a Form Feed
riding in grand style
Sun Tzu leads his army home
the Carriage Returns
(this one's seldom used)
"Shift Out" calls the overseer
the workers go home
a new lot arrive
to begin their daily toil
the cry is "Shift In"
Data Link Escape:
fly from Tibet to safety
DLE lama
undam the river
waters cannot be held back:
there must be XON
Device Control 2
we bend nature to our will
with this character
and turn back the tide
the ocean will not honour
our XOFF request
Device Control 4
haven't I heard this before?
ascii control freaks!
a shake of the head
I do not concur with you
NAK, I say!
the two act as one
the lovers move together
but is it a SYN?
the scribe takes a rest
and eases his aching wrist:
End of this Text Block
order rescinded
CANcel your actions at once
return to your post
the seer breathes his last
no more entrails shall he read
End of Medium
call for a new seer!
they send out at once for a
SUBstitute wise man
eat of the lotus
shake off these eartly shackles
ESCape the mundane
File Separator
the red cord stretched between the poles
keeps the queue in check
loyalists stand here,
revolutionaries there:
Group Separator
bing is not elvis
analogy escapes me:
Record Separator
one here and one there-
a Unit Separator
the joke's getting tired
stare into blank SPace
you've done too much opium
wisdom has left you
unweaving the threads
a life's works are all undone
naught left but to DEL
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| Dell |
[07 Jul 2003|10:15am] |
Well, as you may know, it's rare for me to be so angry that I physically shake. I hate feeling like this.
Dell really fucking suck.
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| Dell computers... my glee was apparently premature |
[06 Jul 2003|01:42pm] |
... since I'd assumed that I wouldnt be actually lied to by their customer care department.
Oh well, I am still the proud possessor of a boxed Dell, waiting for collection - but bugger only knows when.
Nice machines, a shame about the after-sales service. Unless you take "service" to mean "fucking".
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