paulific

8 ms·

1.
by paulific 6y ago
Interesting. I didn't know they moved the Siegessäule. Reminds me of what I read about the approach to the Vatican and the way Mussolini obliterated bits of (messy) historic city to achieve a suitably scenic and impressive vista.
2.
by paulific 6y ago
Microbrewery? ;-)
3.
by paulific 7y ago
The blind leading the blind and both shall walk into a transparent wall.
4.
by paulific 7y ago
The Monty Python custard pie lecture is also hilarious.
5.
by paulific 7y ago
For a look at just how hands on early motoring was, check out this article about Kipling and cars (he was an enthusiastic "early adopter"): http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/rg_steamtactics_kipearly.htm Reading thi
6.
by paulific 7y ago
Part of the politics is that the Republic of China still officially claims to be the legitimate government of the whole of China. So it really is recognize one or the other. Politics within Taiwan have so far prevented declaration of Taiwan
7.
by paulific 7y ago
I guess this is why I have free to play games sitting on my phone but never play them. They take me through a tutorial full of tasks and menus and resources and I subconsciously feel intimated by all the work.
8.
by paulific 7y ago
Yup. By no means a developer, but I Python was the first programming language I learned and I always felt it was my native language. I was happy to stick around with 2.7 for as long as it was there, but I guess this is the motivation I need
9.
by paulific 7y ago
I learned that from Tony Robinson's "Worst Jobs in History" http://www.unofficialtonyrobinsonwebsite.co.uk/pages/worst_j...
10.
by paulific 7y ago
The quotes in the Wired article are all kind of the opposite though. For example: "Today, 99.9 percent of humanity cannot beat the best commercial software at blitz chess. Within the decade, it's likely the machine on your desk wi
11.
by paulific 7y ago
Yes, I remember my local supermarket had 'recommended' products that were marked like they were specials, but were not actually discounted at all. I appreciated the business logic, but basically stopped shopping there.
12.
by paulific 7y ago
Yup, almost everything in I have ever worked with in Japanese to English translation has been shackled by the need to produce English translations optimized for English speaking Japanese readers.
13.
by paulific 7y ago
I think I'm going to go back and finish Paolo Bacigalupi's The Water Knife. It feels less like dystopian science fiction and more like realistic observation than ever at this point.
14.
by paulific 7y ago
Well, Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy had both. The premise of William Gibson's The Peripheral also seems to be that the development of futuristic technology is not going to stop, it's just going to exacerbate the unequal
15.
by paulific 7y ago
From the article: "From left to right, these rosettes show the surprisingly beautiful paths of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus as seen from Earth. " https://earthsky.org/space/what-is-retrog
16.
by paulific 7y ago
One of the university labs I had to use did not allow access to Netscape for whatever reason, so I actually used Lynx a lot. For reading text on webpages it actually did a quite sturdy job.
17.
by paulific 7y ago
You can pass N2 in one year of full time study (if you apply yourself). The multiple years tend to be when people are trying to pass it doing part time study.
18.
by paulific 7y ago
Oh, I thought it was the Cumaean Sybil. But I guess that is where Trelawney's name comes from.
19.
by paulific 7y ago
If you only hear it spoken, or you don't understand the naming convention and start making guesses about what you think is going on. People in countries where middle names are normal also tend to make the assume that one of the syllabl
20.
by paulific 7y ago
I deal with the reverse of this problem all the time. Living in Japan, my bank cards (and other ID) all have my name in the Japanese order, with my surname first followed by my first name and my middle name last. Without fail, the staff at
21.
by paulific 7y ago
Notably there have only been two reigning empresses since the 8th Century and none at all in the modern era. The current Imperial Household Law only allows males to ascend the throne, so they were in real trouble 10 or 15 years back before
22.
by paulific 7y ago
That was more or less the point of Tolkien's Lecture "The Monster and the Critics". He compared it to building a tower out rocks that came from a historical ruin. Everybody was interested in taking it apart to see where the r
23.
by paulific 7y ago
I think the original comment only really mentioned taxes in passing and then the discussion went off down a rabbit hole; but a wonderful rabbit hole in which each subsequent comment added more interesting and relevant information.
24.
by paulific 7y ago
That is the point. The Japanese approach to creating legal documents is to make them as ambiguous as possible so that they can be interpreted any way the creator likes. This is somewhat true of overbroad legislation in other jurisdictions a
25.
by paulific 8y ago
US jurisprudence may be different from the Australian law I studied, but as I understand it the "more likely than not" applies to the facts in a civil case not to the legal issue of what constitutes an act of war. That is a questi
26.
by paulific 8y ago
Well if you believe Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_N... the tallest NY building voluntarily demolished to date was the Singer Building at 185m. My guess is that there is a point
27.
by paulific 8y ago
Are people worried that they're trying to eradicate free software at the source?
28.
by paulific 8y ago
I don't know how much good advice I have, but I've been in a similar situation, so I can at least offer sympathy. I spent three years building up my translation work to get "self sponsorship" and then got dumped by the a
29.
by paulific 8y ago
That happens to me too, and I find it equally annoying, but I think it is a deliberate design choice. As I understand it they are trying to make it hard to accidentally turn off the alarm and go back to sleep, which would be a critical fail
30.
by paulific 8y ago
The variety in transit cards is mostly due to the variety of operators who use different systems. Japan Rail has Suica, Tokyo Subway lines use Passmo. Some regional operators have their own ones. As you say you can mostly use them interch

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