palordrolap

Yes. It is theoretically possible for a dictator to rule with the actual best interests of the people in mind, rather than a misguided belief about what those are, or else a complete lack of concern for anyone but themselves.

Since political beliefs tend to align along party lines, the party of such a dictator does matter somewhat, however little that might be.

Unfortunately, any benevolent dictatorship would be at constant risk of turning, and almost certainly be doomed to turn, into one of the other two options.

Even less fortunately, most dictatorships skip the benevolent step entirely.

Whoa. Haven’t seen this guy in a while.

Given the engineer’s amendment to “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” is usually “If it ain’t broke, it doesn’t have enough features yet.”, I can only surmise that COBOL must be one of those languages that are so terrible that they deter their programmers from wanting to do that.

I’m not sure Douglas Adams could have written that today. Most of the people who would have been digital watch people are generally more obsessed with their personal portable computing and communication devices instead. And I like to think that’s what he would have called them, repeatedly and often in a handful of paragraphs dedicated to them for no other reason than how well “personal portable computing and communication device” rolls off the tongue.

The sort of phrase that Ford would use when talking to Arthur who would instead be expecting “mobile phone” at most. And then there’d be a little pointless argument about how “mobile phone” wasn’t anywhere near descriptive enough.

“What? You mean like ‘Mostly harmless’?” asked Arthur pointedly.

“Exactly!” said Ford, cheerily. “Now you’re getting it!”

Arthur wasn’t getting it. In fact he wasn’t sure if that if he had it that he wouldn’t want to get rid of it as soon as possible.

There is literally a game about this. Except it’s not about that at all. Or is it? But that’s kind of a spoiler. Or is it?

Watch funny Australian man play it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAqwbhoAp7Q

Then you notice how far apart their eyes are or there’s a zit there or they’ve a faint monobrow and you wonder if they’ve ever considered shaving it and you just missed most of the last five things they said.

So there’s this commonly stated thing about ageing which is that we perceive each day of our lives not as a day, but as being the size of the fraction of our lives a day represents. Or more simply, a day is as long for a 5-year-old as two days are for a 10-year-old and so on.

With that in mind, and knowledge of a little mathematics, our lives viewed this way aren’t linear, but logarithmic, and it means that we reach middle age not at 40-something but at something on the order of the square root of our life expectancy.

Looked at this way, we’ve lived far more than half our lives by the time we’re ten, even if we expect to live to be a hundred.

No wonder so many of us feel like children. Or act like them.

Urge to analyse… rising…

My first guess would be to take out that semicolon on line 264. JavaScript will often happily take a new line as end of statement if it makes sense to do that, so in theory, that semicolon is not needed. And it might be a Greek question mark your prankster colleague put in your code when you weren’t looking.

And then I’d be tracing parentheses, curlies, quotes and so on, because that error could be the point the parser gave up trying to make sense of the code rather than where the error actually is.

And if that didn’t find it, I’d put in a deliberate error at an earlier, known line to see where the parser thinks that error is. If it’s offset by 20 lines, then I know the original error is probably offset by a similar amount.

This isn’t strictly true. Most houses built between WWII and the '90s were built with sockets that didn’t have switches on them. It was only later safety regulations / suggestions that made the switches preferable.

Where I live was built in the late '80s right before switched sockets became more common. All the original sockets have no switch. Some in the kitchen have switches, but it’s clear these were added at a later date.

I’m not sure of the exact rulings and where and when a socket must have a switch, but you can still find switchless sockets for sale at the sorts of retailers who sell those sorts of things, so there are definitely places where those sockets are still allowed.

Ah, misleading use of terminology that indicates one thing, but will win in court even if it actually means, or can later be said to mean, another.

I hope those involved in helping companies win these lawsuits choke on bones from food sold as boneless. Because that won a court case after “boneless” was redefined as a cooking method.

I don’t want them to choke to death. Just a little lesson, you know?

drive to Canada and hope they let me in

The Canadian folks are slightly more likely to let you pass than their counterparts on the other side, but unfortunately it’s not the Canadians you’ll reach first.

My guess is that they could do that, but eventually doing so would be called out as pointless time wasting and be disallowed.

I can see a directive going out that any participants are to be barred from participating in anything at all. Even if there’s some legislative rule that says they can’t be, because we all know how the new administration feels about old legislation. And then actual, literal guards will be brought in to keep those people out.

And maybe all others in the same political party “just in case they decide to try the same thing”.

TBH, the Trumpists are probably looking for any excuse to do just that.

If you’re killing the cow in the same way the people in those videos kill cats, then it doesn’t hit much different at all.

There’s definitely a line here, but I suspect that we disagree on where that line is.

I’m British and I tried to plug something into it.

Your comment reads like you’re a chastised misogynist, angry that some misandrist is getting away with an equivalent transgression against men and that you think they should be chastised like you were.

You might not be a misogynist, it’s just how it reads to me.

Misogyny is bad. Misandry is also bad. They’re not opposites. Too many edge cases.

But, yeah, the comic is a bit reductive.

I think they meant “joke®” as shorthand for “joke or joker”. Not sure how they got code quotes into there though.

For French bread, life is pain.

The show has an orchestral edit: instrumental end-of-episode theme that was written for the opening titles. Proof: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hsn2xVmVuGE

Make it quick, Smokey. My teddy bear and his friends are upstairs. Please give them a good home.

Ah that horse, always… if only there was a phrase for this. Equining about, maybe.