It’s not all roses and rainbows: Thatcher was a chemical engineer, and the only thing she engineered while in power was the downfall of England as a world power.

Hold on, Blindsight has a sequel? This could be fun…

You got downvoted as though you were posting a thatsthejoke.jpg, but I also had never considered that “I got better!” could have layers to it.

For real though, the shortest license is probably the WTFPL:

0. You just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO.

Might’ve used it a couple of times myself.

If the police and/or Crown Prosecution Service claim you’re hiding Material behind a password, you can either hand over the password or get thrown in jail under RIPA §53.

I don’t know what section of the US Code would apply for the same, but a generic “Obstructing Justice” wouldn’t surprise me.

This was on PM earlier, they were interviewing one of the named postmasters: she only found out about this leak when The Mail called for a quote.

As she said herself, there’s accident and there’s incompetence; this leans heavily to the latter.

That’s law in the UK:

Section 49 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 gives the police the power to issue a notice which requires the suspect to disclose their PIN or password if necessary. You are not compelled to provide your password to the police in any instance.

However, section 53 of RIPA makes it a criminal offence not to comply with the terms of a s.49 notice which is punishable by up to two years imprisonment and up to 5 years imprisonment in cases involving national security and child indecency.

“I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” - Albert Einstein.

Snopes says this sentiment was actually expressed by Einstein, though perhaps not in this exact phrasing.

As I understand it, the prophecy is that when the state of Israel is fully unified once more, and the temple of Solomon is rebuilt, Jesus will return and the second battle of Armageddon will commence.

End of the world, rapture of the believers into Heaven, the whole bit.

A tip one contractor passed on to me when caulking: use pieces of toilet paper to smooth it out after applying. You won’t get your fingers gunked up, and toilet paper’s cheap enough that you can use a bit to smooth off a few inches of caulk and throw the paper away.

Think I got through half a roll when sealing up a window frame a couple years back, looks great.

According to the Tolkien Professor (during his YouTube streams on the History of Middle Earth series) there was always the intent to publish the Quenta Silmarillion (the central tale of the Silmarils) as a First-Age story of the Elves, but it kept getting revised and rewritten and never reached a publishable form.

Until Tolkien’s son wanted to complete that piece of the legacy, and found multiple (sometimes contradictory) sets of notes and mostly-finished stories, and Editorial Decisions had to be made.

Essentially. If the end user is being asked to make a financial outlay to get to the same things they did before, it’s unlikely that will go down well.

Excellent. I’m on Stage 4 on the Thursday afternoon: “Brewing Tea Over The Internet”.

Should be fun times, see you there.

I haven’t been exploring in the depths of EFnet in …many years. I’m confined to the programming-related channels I found in the Way Back When, nowadays: at the moment, #c is probably the most active and it’s almost all old-timers.

Did the predilection for tea give me away?

I did go to a conference once where they were handing out laptop stickers, and in the pack was a 418 teapot.

Of course, a week after I stuck that to my machine, it died. Telling the laptop it was a teapot didn’t agree with it, I guess.

For “real” RFCs that aren’t Apr 1st jokes, there’s an independent submissions track for the public to write Internet-Drafts and then submit them into the review process.

With the joke RFCs, they get emailed straight to the editor at least two weeks beforehand. I’m not privy to the selection meeting, but I expect it’s fun.

I never understood the beef people had with that. The Internet is a series of tubes, of various widths and sizes, with inputs at random points in the stream.

Plumbing analogies are apt.

So replicators are kind of a special case: they can make anything already fully prepared, without the need for a brewing command to be sent. It’s possible that by the 24th century, there’s a compatibility layer between Replicator Intermediate Language and HTCPCP, but I’ll leave that to future generations to establish.

Out.

Can’t stand pineapple at the best of times, on pizza is another level of wrong.