Notices by Ed Davies (edavies@functional.cafe)

@goatsarah Like 32 m/s?

@goatsarah @christineburns And all to save a few-days-long differences course to add a new rating on pilot's licences. Read some notes, take a multiple choice online test. Maybe an exercise or two in the sim. Perhaps repeated at every third or fourth sim check. Would have cost the airlines a tiny fraction of their training budgets.

Pure marketing.

@argonaut @lesley @gvwilson Especially not text.

Character set. Encoding. Line endings. Tabs vs spaces. Wrapping. …

When somebody says something is “plain” they mean it meets their rather narrow expectations.

@goatsarah Have I missed you sailing down to Portugal or is MarineTraffic right and you're still in Quiberon?

@cyberspice

@rysiek Something I've not seen mentioned explicitly in this case but maybe you, having taken more interest, might know: did the original contract the train operating company signed for these trains specify any obligation to get the maintenance work done by Newag?

I assume not as it should have been mentioned but most of what I've read has been anti-Newag so I'm not sure.

@goatsarah Should've duct taped your round jar on to a square base.

#Apollo13

@goatsarah @thelocalecho @zoe Wow, that is flat for the 5 or 6 knots you've been making. Looks a lovely day. Must be a lot of current. Well done on the timing.

@goatsarah @thelocalecho @zoe RAAAAH! Looks like you've got yourselves a convoy.

I'd forgotten to look for a day or two then clicked on the bookmark and saw you're at the exciting bit and making good progress. Good luck with the rest of the trip.

@project1enigma

Exactly, they're not suggesting that the general public would use this. In fact, the point is that the general public wouldn't use this.

And not “a few geeks” specifically, either, but rather those who these laws are ostensibly targetting - those exchanging CSAM or organizing terrorist operations or whatever who may or may not be geeks as a whole but probably have at least enough geeks available to help them set this up.

For many purposes they wouldn't even need any sort of public-key encryption; simple password-protected zip files with the password sent in a separate message, or perhaps by a separate channel, would be sufficient to bypass this scanning.

Likely, actually just putting the password in the message would be safe enough (I've done that in the past to get round enterprise email scanners disallowing .exe files).

@david_chisnall @signalapp @Mer__edith

@goatsarah @simontatham I was going to say that "pointer" is probably more general and older than the Amiga. It's what the 'P' in WIMP stands for, after all.

which was a bit of a surprise to me.

@goatsarah Yeah, there's a lot to be said for the lack of bureaucracy in the UK but the lack of common ID cards is questionable. They'd sure be convenient but, OTOH, the whole “papers please” attitude is not one we'd like many, including this, government to take too far.

Meanwhile, in the US you get a “secret” password assigned at birth which you can't change [¹] and which you have to use with lots of different enterprises. And, somehow, people there don't think that's bonkers.

[¹] Except under limited circumstances.

@aral OTOH, SLS is the fault of a bunch of transphobic fascist multi-millionaire douchebag congress critters playing silly buggers with other people's money so it's not entirely a win.

@cstross

@goatsarah Reminds me of somebody I knew in the 1980s with a 2CV being tailgated by a BMW. He went over a speed bump at the full speed limit which the 2CV didn't notice, of course, but the BMW did. No actual damage as far we know (unfortunately) but he did see the BMW driver holding his head.

@earthshine And YYYY-DD-MM, as I saw on here recently, is truly an abomination.

@mynameistillian

@aral Nice. Reminds me of a colleague who, whenever there was an unnecessary software frustration, would shake his head and mutter “what a senseless waste of life”.

@goatsarah Very hypothetically if you're the Royal Navy.

@goatsarah 99% agree with you - hydrogen for any consumer application is stupid - electricity (via batteries were required) will always make more efficient use assuming the bulk of our energy is coming from renewable electricity in some form or other.

No opinion one way or the other on hydrogen in aviation. Maybe alcohol or ammonia? Dunno.

Hydrogen for grid-scale semi-interseasonal energy storage does seem to make some sense to me, though. L²/L³ is on your side if you're storing enough of the stuff. OK, the round-trip efficiency isn't great but I don't really see any other way of storing multiple TWh over weeks or months.

The Dutch government seems to have big plans in that direction. They must make at least a bit of sense, even if they're over-affected by the proximity of Shell or whoever.

A reminder for me to re-read Chris Goodall's The Switch, I think.

@GraniteGeek 59 years next Thursday since a major government acknowledged that rising CO₂ levels affecting climate was one of the ecological problems humans faced. LBJ in a speech to Congress, 8th of February 1965.

These things take 60 years, right?

That's from @steve 's book Computing The Climate.

@clacke Conversely: why didn't I see the start of this thread by somebody I'm following. Oh, I'm not following them, must've just been boosts and hash tags I've been seeing for a while.

@clacke Native speaker (from NE London).

recreation -> rek-reation. I.e., the 'c' has drifted into the first syllable over the millennia. Perhaps quite recently as maybe this is a US/UK thing???

re-creation -> ree-creation.