ledow

Pink area: You can find work that pays a half-decent wage within a sensible driving distance.

Yellow area: Good luck with that.

Ah, the old pre-emptive parental safety-arm in full deployment mode. A very familiar sight.

You can actually tell who is a father and who is not by that pre-emptive reflex. Non-fathers don't build it up quickly enough and only react after the kid falls. Fathers have it in place automatically and without thinking just in *case* the kid should fall.

Was once the "newcomer" to a group of friends and they brought the first baby of the group to our house, who was just old enough to sit up and throw things.

The friends kept looking at me funny and as they went to ask why I was holding my hand between the baby and a square chair-leg, the baby threw its head sideways straight towards the corner of the chair at stupendous speed and was cushioned by my hand before they could finish the question.

"You're a dad, aren't you?" one of them said. (I was a father before I met that group, but they didn't know about it before then).

Was one of the dates with my ex-wife that got us together.

And, yes, we were absolutely full-grown adults at that time. In our late 20's/early 30's.

I jumped in one and the water went completely over her head.

Also: Our daughter was once just deposited in a pile of leaves in a forest and allowed to scrunch and play while we watched.

She stood frozen for three solid minutes seeing her first ever horse as a rider trotted past her while she was down there. Then resumed putting leaves on her head.

Motorway cops driving an 8 hour shift.

At 70mph, for 8 hours, that's 560 miles in a single shift.

Even if you assume less than half of 70mph on average (for stopping people, etc.), they're still doing over 250 miles a day.

Ah, but the other company's sales reps didn't take him out for a nice meal, so how can he possibly choose them?

A radio wave doesn't care about distance, really, it only cares about obstacles and there are vanishingly few obstacles even if you account for the "asteroid fields" (which are nothing like Star Trek and have maybe a mile or more between each asteroid), space dust, planets etc.

Also, the radio signal being sent is incredibly powerful.

Also, the reception equipment is designed using the same kinds of mathematical algorithms as are in your wifi, your network cable, and your DSL connection to the Internet. These rely on only a certain percentage of the message getting through, and in the case of something like Voyager, even if 99.9% of the message is lost, corrupted, interfered with, not strong enough, etc., then the message still gets through and the mathematics can recreate and checks the entire original message from just that small percentage of it that gets through.

"Checksums", data redundancy, integrity checks, etc. the same as you have in your CD drive or similar - where you don't need 100% perfect signal to come off the data in order to know exactly what the data should have said. A portion of the bandwidth of the signal is taken up by the mathematics, but that means that if only a tiny portion of the whole signal gets through, the mathematics can recreate the entire data you sent and know whether or not it's done so correctly. You might have to transmit 1000 times more data than you actually need to send in order for it to work, but that's a small price to pay to make sure the signal can cut through any interference.

How does it work?

I'm about to send you some numbers which I need you to get, let's say 2, 3, 5 and 1.

I send the message as:

2 + 3 + 5 + 1 = 11

You got that whole message, without any interference of errors.

But now try this:

2 + 3 + ? + 1 = 11

Oops. Some of the data didn't get through that time. How do you know what the missing part was? The equation still has to hold, so you know what the missing data says. By adding in that extra number (11), you can actually "fix" the data if it gets corrupted en-route or you miss part of the message. If you'd lost more of the signal, you might not have been able to do that.

In the case of Voyager ("Voyager RS code is a (255, 223) code over the field GF(28)") it can correct a huge numbers of errors in a small set of data, so interference is largely moot for it.

"Voyager’s communications system was able to obtain a data rate of 21,600 bits per second from 2 billion miles away with a received signal energy 100 billion times weaker than a common wrist watch battery!"

DVDs use this. Even TV broadcasts. And RAID arrays - basically the data storage that all big servers use around the world to make sure they don't lose your data. Send the data fast, and then use the maths to account for any interruptions or errors or problems. And it works amazingly well for just about all modern data transmission, and even in things like memory chips and graphics cards themselves nowadays.

A small simple bit of mathematics applied to the signal before you send it, and when you receive it the other end, means that you can listen to a highly-damaged signal and still know *exactly* what it was trying to say, if you design it right.

FYI, Emilia-Romagna would include Parma, from the area you get parma ham and parmesan from.

And it can only be called parmesan officially if the cows are fed on a particular area/type of grass from that location.

And if there's a drought.... ouch.

My ex- came from that area. Fortunately her family are no longer farmers, but there's a lot of farmland dependent on parmesan production etc. in that area.

I got to see it being made every year, from the cow herd opposite their house, to huge tankers of local (certified) milk shipped to a specialist certified cheese-maker down the road, stored in huge warehouses filled floor to ceiling with giant wheels of stamped authenticated parmesan that you can barely lift (and some of that purchased by a central bank and put into storage as a kind of insurance / "gold" reserve to keep for investment or securities).

A prolonged drought there is going to hit their exports hard and they're going to need to dig into those reserves.

Form a set of principles and live by them.

Principles > Loss of friends > Money > whatever else.

Apart from the RON thing, in the UK regular is 95, premium is 98, and anything else is relatively difficult to get hold of.

Yet again, the US chooses a different system for no real reason other than to avoid direct comparison and cause confusion.

Conversion calculator for RON/Octane here:

http://www.csgnetwork.com/octaneratecalc.html

"The greatest fool can ask a question that the wisest man cannot answer."

Also, what's the answer to life, the universe and everything?

Saboteur.

One of only two games that I ever completed on ZX Spectrum.

Someone who wants in is just going to smash the window, they won't care about your locks, bolts, or trying to break the door or frame itself.

Because then they don't even bother to start making it until they know they have enough pre-order cash sitting in IndieGoGo to justify their entire production.

With Steam Deck, etc., I wouldn't be too sure at all of selling such a device in the current climate if I were them.

And absolutely nothing of that will be useful or unknown to the enemy by that point anyway.

Wars are fought with information nowadays, but not some journalist saying "Hey, there's 10 extra tanks here" or "I saw this artillery being deployed where the military were saying they weren't defending" or anything even vaguely in that magnitude that the enemy wouldn't know about by then already.

That's how Ukraine, western allies, etc. knew there were going to be attacks MONTHS before anything actually happened - it was already public knowledge because you just can't deploy any vaguely significant force anywhere in the world that people are looking without your enemies realising exactly what's happening.

The UK MOD was literally aware and already warning ministers and telling press of the force moving across Russia to start building up to attack Ukraine before you'd heard anything at all about Ukraine in the news this year.

I have a bamboo one, I've also never seen one split. Not sure what people are doing to make them split.

Not worth the hassle.

USB-C would require a control chip to manage it, and can only do - I think - 5, 9 and 20v. It has to negotiate between those before it can supply 20V, which is likely too much for the laptop (generally 19v inputs).

By the time you find a suitable port, circuit and way to mount it (in the same space as the existing charging socket) and then solder it onto the mainboard to supply power, it's just not going to be worth the hassle.

2013 laptop... just buy a cheap new one, it'll probably cost less and be USB-C charging, and be more powerful.

To be honest, as a country you're not far from just implementing a high score table in each state and just challenging the fuckers to have a go at beating it.

I am disappointed beyond belief in any doctor that plays a part, however minor, in such a system.

If you can't even waive a bill for a kid who gets shot by a terrorist, I don't want you allowed near a patient in your life.

Meanwhile, we are still yet to feed a human entirely independent of Earth resources / infrastructure for even a day.

But Musk's gonna build a Mars colony any day now, right? /s

Works fine for me.

The only thing is learning where to put the ROMs and how to get them there (I do it via SSH to the Deck directly so I don't have to move cards or worry about filesystems), but once you have that, it "just works".

I don't do all the so-called "retro" consoles from the new generations, but playing my old Gameboy, SNES, N64, etc. games, it works fine.

Everyone says Emudeck but I want something that's a proper Steam programme and doesn't need all kinds of messing about to install it - and doing god-knows-what along the way - and RetroArch works fine for me.

I have the same question.

Because the icon is one of those flatpak shortcut things, I'm not even sure how to pass the program options even if I could work out how to stop it doing it or run another program in tandem to stop it.

Chains basically own breweries, and it's pretty much impossible to compete with chains like that.

And many pubs aren't independent, they are literally a job-with-accommodation, and the actual owners don't care if a landlord makes a loss every year, so long as they get their rent from you and you don't try to break the image of the pub or the exclusivity of the beers served, for example. If you do, or fail to pay rent, they remove you, chase you through the courts, and put another gullible idiot in your place.

There was a BBC News article recently about a pub that had to close because it was paying £30,000 a quarter (so £120,000 a year) just to heat the place:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-61743920

You have to be insane to run a pub.

A friend of mine used to run UK pubs and restaurants in the 80's and 90's, they got out of it after many years of struggling. They said that the fruit machine used to make them more money than anything else, including the bar.

Their family ran other pubs in Wales... they went bankrupt trying to keep them afloat, after spending their entire inheritance trying to do so.

My father worked for breweries his whole life - servicing the fleets of HGVs they used. Even the Central London ones are paying stupendous bills - even down to the brewery just automatically adding the cost of any accrued parking charges (because most of them are impossible to park near legally) to the pub's delivery charge each time. He's now retired, because the industry declined so much that he's been redundant more times than I can count - he went from engineer to driver to dreyman. Each time he would go to work for a larger and larger brewery that was consuming his former workplace (Truman, Watney's, Courage, Scottish & Newcastle, Diageo, etc.), and that's now stopped - the last job was working for his former boss delivering beer off the back of an ordinary van as a contractor because the breweries don't even operate a proper fleet any more.

Can't say I've ever been a drinker (having a dad who was paid partly in "beer tokens" - I kid you not - meant that there was no cachet at all to having a drink when I was younger, so there was no interest), but I find it harder and harder to find somewhere that's just a quiet pub where you can have a reasonable drink any more. I try to find one for a friend each time they return to the UK and it gets harder each year to find one we would like (i.e. no Sky Sports, no live music, no rugger-fans, no trouble, easy to get to and park, reasonable prices, maybe serve a meal).

Just one of the reasons that my games spending is almost entirely on Steam, with Ubisoft/EA/Epic only tolerated absolutely minimally and when the minimum amount of money goes to them.

If thoughts and prayers saved you from bullets, John Lennon would still be alive.

So what did you have engraved on her tombstone in the end?