- > Then they hand it to you and expect a miracle in 5 mins. Sorry this is the first time I have every seen something like this it may take me a few mins to figure out what is wrong before I can even begin to fix it.
Oh yeah, like when I have to fix the smartphones of people who have been using them for years while I do not own or use a smartphone. I will fix it, but I've got to learn how to launch/exit an application first ;-)
Many people (hi mum!) are surprised that you may take a few minutes to calmly observe, probe, assess, read and think a bit before engaging in the actual fixing. It never occurred to them that one may do something else than clicking, more or less randomly and as fast as possible, when something shows up. And do not worry about your example altering their future behaviour, it will unshakeably go on as it always went :-)
- > Fighting for a foreign nation and/or mercenaries is illegal in itself
Nope. It depends on countries (and mood of the year).
Some countries allow to become mercenaries and forbid voluntary fighting for a foreign nation. Some countries allow to voluntary fight for a foreign nation and forbid to become mercenaries. And so on.
France even has the French Foreign Legion...
- No, the President in France has little power.
1. He can call for new elections of the Assembly (not of the Senate) ;
2. He names the Prime Minister and chooses to accept or not the government the Prime Minister then proposes ;
3. He's got minor powers regarding foreign policy.
And that's it.
Now what goes against the President:
a. Regarding [2.] which may seem a major power: the Prime Minister and his government can be kicked out basically at any moment by a vote of the Assembly. So there is no way the President could pick a Prime Minister and a government that doesn't suit the Assembly. Basically, the Assembly has the last word on it, and keeps this power all along the legislature.
b. The government decides and leads the policy (politics?) of the nation (article 20: «Le Gouvernement détermine et conduit la politique de la nation.»): the President is not supposed to have a say about it.
c. Once the President has named the Prime Minister, he cannot remove him. Nor can he remove any other minister. Only the Assembly can do it.
The problem is not the constitution. The problem is that the constitution hasn't got a sacred role as in the USA, and everyone in the various positions of power wipes his ass with it.
So, all what gradually happened more and more in the last few years, is Members of the Parliament voluntarily de facto abdicating their powers to the Government, and members of the Government voluntarily de facto abdicating their powers to the President. In the end they mostly take orders from above and act and vote as they are told to. Just because they enjoy their seat...
- You always get only a really tiny window of information, selected by your medias, about foreign countries. (It doesn't matter which receiving country you are in, it is a general principle, not just about the USA).
In France, we almost only hear about other countries politics when there is a chance for a far right party to gain something. As far as all other domains are concerned, we may from time to time get a funny/shocking miscellaneous news item, and that's it.
Also, images/stereotypes about a country last a long time, long after they have stopped being true.
Ironically, perhaps the only emitting country that differs a bit is... the USA, for probably most countries over the planet are flooded with information and contemporary culture from the USA.
For example, to get back a bit to the original subject, people may know the American police and justice system better than their own. Like, French people when they are arrested would believe that they have enforceable rights and that rigorous processes are respected. Ah!
Once, in custody, I even had the impudence of requesting a lawyer as I was allowed to. LOL, no way. And it is not simply a problem of a rotten police: the prosecutor, the judges, they are all covering this up, it is the whole police+justice system which 'works' like this.
- > Honestly, I can't believe it that here it is 2023(!!), and there still exist sites that can't figure out reliable cross-browser video playback.
Ah! I was telling myself the same thing last month (how is it possible in 2023 that things which seemed solved _years_ ago, actually still do not work?), when I was trying to watch some recording of a sport event. The site proposed several players (generally 3).
3 different computers (Linux_A, Windows_A, Windows_B).
Linux_A with browser_A: only player_A worked OK.
Windows_A with browser_B: player_A some days worked, some days didn't; player_B and player_C worked OK.
Windows_B with browser_B: player_A gave audio but no video; player_B stuttered; player_C didn't work ==> no success with this OS+browser combination
Windows_B with browser_C: only player_C worked OK;
We can note that among those combinations, we had two systems with the same OS and the same browser, and yet the behaviour was completely different.
> These sites should just give up, provide the URL to the raw video file, and let users play them back in whatever way works for them.
In general, I agree I'd also rather _not_ have web players. However, in the specific case I am talking about, the videos were more or less 6 hours long, so I'd rather not download the whole high resolution stuff (and likely see the process fail), but be able to skip parts and/or watch/download a few parts in lower resolution and other ones in high resolution. - It's funny that this pops up now, as I discovered the existence of the game(s) only 2 weeks ago, and made a rough computer version for myself.
A good site that presents many possible rule variants and their balance: http://aagenielsen.dk/overview.php
- Even back then, I guarantee that small villages like where I grew up didn't have any shop. Some never did, actually. The 'centre village' of the neighbouring municipality valiantly sported: one church, its presbytery, the town hall if we may call so, one house, and that was it. They were coming to school in my village, because we had no shop but we had a 2-room school.
But they closed the school a few years ago, and everyone has to drive to a big burg.
Of course I get what he meant, and everyone has a different definition of 'small' and of 'village'. Personally, I'd says shops start from 'big village' and post-offices from 'small burgs'. But you can have quite many neighbouring country municipalities in a row which do not have any shop.
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Yeah, in the last 30 years, the spread has been terrible, and it is not contained to suburbs of cities and big towns, but it also affects remote areas, around small burgs and even many villages. What we have then is suburbs without the 'urb'; perhaps even more depressing to witness than actual suburbs.
- > Every city, no matter the size, feels alive. People live there. They don’t sleep in one area then go live in another.
Average commute time is the same in France as it is in the USA. (Of course, in both cases, it varies a lot depending on the area.)
I lived a short while in a suburb of Paris; that municipality had 1 bar/café/pub for 50,000 inhabitants...
I worked in a suburb of Toulouse in a public service. I was walking 1/2 or 3/4 of a mile to have lunch in 2 different schools depending on the day, that's about 30-40 minutes there and back; I basically never walked across any fellow pedestrian, even though most of the time I was walking along main streets and crossing part of the 'centre'. The whole place was covered in private housing developments, same as neighbouring suburbs. Everyone drives to the central area or to other suburbs specialized in offices, industries or retail where they have their job.
I worked in another suburb, just next to the border of the city. I was the only one in the whole building (shared by several small companies) who lived in the city, all other people lived in suburbs, often remote ones.
I am now back in the countryside. There are still a few shops where I am, but their disappearance (started looooon ago) hasn't completely stopped. People don't walk or ride to the shop 1/4 mile away from their home, they rather drive 2 times 10 miles to get to large supermarkets. The population slowly changes, many newcomers never walk out of their house, they only drive out of it. Recently a few shops/services have even closed doors in the centre, and reopened out of the village, on the side of the main road, with parking lots. Elders cannot get there by foot easily any more; one of those place even only planned an entrance for cars, not for pedestrians. Despite all the nice discourses, in the 2020s it keeps on evolving as it did in the 1970s.
- > You have been trained to require external validation for your work. Maybe it's a modern thing with upvotes and twitter and likes and whatnot.
And simply the fact that, nowadays, you have access to the production of thousands of other people, with which you can compare yours. And in most cases it will compare unfavourably; to make it worse, almost all those people are unknown to the general public, they are often not even professionals, they are just very ordinary persons with a hobby, and yet you can see in a couple of clicks that they get (much) better results than you do.
On may call this a self-validation based on external elements.
Perhaps, as it devalues your creations in your own eyes, it reinforces the need for external validation.
- > about 2 acres of farmland
That's huge; I haven't seen anything like that, even in the deep country where I grew up, where people (farmers) almost didn't buy anything but grew and processed most of their stuff. Their gardens hardly ever went over a 1/4 of an acre, I'd say, that was already pretty large and provided for filling quite a number of jar of tomatoes and beans and stuff.
Didn't your parents sell anything?
Using 400-500 sq ft, I get enough potatoes for a family of 3. Not that potato is our only staple food, but...
- You don't need a community effort or astonishingly vast land to grow potatoes :-) What I mean by that is that the choice of stuff you grow matters. Lettuce, peppers (and one might add tomatoes) won't feed you much indeed. They are however indeed interesting in small spaces when you don't expect them to feed you but to provide you nice, fresh extras.
I mean, I produce about 800 lbs of vegetables by spending 20 mn a day on it (average on 365 days, which means more at times and nothing at other times). Surely it requires more space that you had. But no motorised tool involved, no fertiliser but a tiny bit of manure (no fancy permaculture tricks either, just traditional beds), no pesticide except in case of emergency like once a year on 10% of the garden, no watering except in case of emergency again, no search of any optimisation (time, space, yield, ...). It isn't a bid deal to get a partial yet significant autonomy; it just gets harder and harder as you want to get close to 100%.
There are stuff you can keep across winter in storage without transformation, like potatoes or cereals (onions, shallot don't do bad either); and stuff that can be kept where they lie, in the ground, like parsnip, sunchoke, and a few other root vegetables; cabbage can stay too, leeks as well. (Of course, it depends on the geographical location.)
Yeah, a base of potatoes + cabbages + onions get you a long way; and they are quite versatile as far as cooking is concerned.
- The European 'we' who like using public transit and bike is unfortunately a small minority.
In France, if you add those two modes, you barely get over 10-12% of the number of moves people make.
The number of cars has again increased by 10% in the last decade. It has doubled since the 80s, when we thought that almost everyone who needed a car had one, and that they were already too many and had bad influence urban planning and many other aspects. The progression seems to never stop.
It's a flood of cars. If I take my municipality, there are more individual cars and vans than people who can drive them. It is not uncommon to see households with 3 or 5 cars. Cars are parked everywhere (rarely on owners' property, though); and that's before city people come over for the week-end or holidays (2/3 of houses are secondary residences)...
Everywhere but in large cities, local elected officials keep on pushing projects of motorways 'for economic development' like it was 1972 (a strategy which hasn't worked in 60 years, but eh...), spending tens and hundreds of millions of €, sometimes in direct competition of an existing or abandoned railroad. A case a few dozen miles away from my place: €200M for a 2 km bypass (no 0 is missing or extra). They have bottomless pockets for roads.
- Religion is the only reason and purpose which motivate their minimal use of technology. There are many different sorts of Amish, each with different rules (in the tradition of protestant sects which split on a regular basis), depending on which amount and type of technology they believe would interfere with their devotion. It is not some sort of hippy community which rejects the excess of modern technology and wraps some spirituality around it. It is the other way round.
- I have always considered it a social network, 'the social network for young programmers' as I called it, which turned free software into social networking (portfolio for first employment(s), etc.), and that's why I always refused to create an account over there as I don't want to push those things even further, and got gradually more appalled as I watched projects following the trend and moving there one after the other, making themselves more and more dependent of the tools conveniently provided by that silo, and cutting other ways to interact with them. Long before Microsoft entered the picture.
- > Don't understand that line - Chickenpox is not vaccinated in the UK
I am always a bit surprised when I read on this site Americans taking offence that some crazy reckless people do not vaccinate their child against this and this. And I am like "Oh? there's a vaccine against that? Over here it is[1] considered normal to catch it because it is considered mild and just watched and cured in the rare serious cases."
> Charles Stross is from the UK so I am quite surprised he doesn't know this
Furthermore, it appears that the vaccine is rather recent, thus it cannot be that "we're generally vaccinated in infancy", let alone that he was. Strange.
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[1] 'is' or 'was', for over here too, in the name of fighting presumed anti-vaxers, more vaccines have been getting mandatory. It's a strange political mechanic to witness, because imposing rather useless vaccines has been a major factor in creating anti-vaxers, which didn't really exist before that.
- Output (text output) isn't bad in C, but indeed input is another story (either lacking like keypresses, or when a convenience like scanf() is provided, it is full of traps for beginners).
Its origin is really showing: UNIXes and their line-oriented terminals. No notion of a screen-oriented console, let alone a graphical one, unlike most BASICs aimed at personal computers.
- > I meant that “abc” + “def” is most likely illegal
That would be adding 2 pointers, and that's indeed illegal.
However, you can subtract them: “abc” - “def” . Now, the result is not a pointer any more, it's a ptrdiff_t (an integer type), so most compilers will warn if you try to assign that to a char *.
- I believe that, whenever possible, tests should be written in a different language that the one used for the code under test (even better, in a dedicated, mostly declarative, testing language).
It avoids replicating the same category of errors in both the test and the code under test, especially when some calculation or some sub-tests generation is made in the test.
Subtle hint: the handful would need to grow a sixth finger :-)
...
Not subtle hint: 'y' is a vowel too.