class goat - ... (I read it to find out.) Anti-vehicle land mines are permitted to have anti-tampering fuses, which is to say they're permitted to go off if a person on foot approaches them.

class goat, quoting what he read - "Anti-handling device" means a device intended to protect a mine and which is part of, linked to, attached to or placed under the mine and which activates when an attempt is made to tamper with or otherwise... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by russm at 11:28 PM on May 29, 2008

well yes it could be claimed that way, just like I could claim I mugged that guy because he didn't pay me the money he owed me... doesn't mean I'm going to get away with it, or that the laws against mugging are worthless other than as a salve to people's consciences...

(and if you asked anyone I know in the real world if I'm a pacifist or idealist, I suspect they'd laugh at the notion)
posted to MetaFilter by russm at 12:11 AM on May 30, 2008

I only give my meatwater to my closest friends. - Meatbomb

but your meat shrapnel, you're happy to spread it around?
posted to MetaFilter by russm at 4:08 PM on May 8, 2008

Mikey-San: so, nature over nurture eh? either way, though...
posted to MetaFilter by russm at 11:34 PM on May 3, 2008

jedicus - I've always thought of RPL less as a variant of lisp than as the bastard child of lisp and forth...
posted to MetaFilter by russm at 12:41 AM on April 26, 2008

Maybe some day adobe will come out with its design suite for Linux, and I can say goodbye to BOTH ms and apple.

because MS and Apple are evil soulless corporate behemoths, but Adobe - man, they're made of sunshine, lollipops and kittens...
posted to MetaFilter by russm at 6:17 AM on April 19, 2008

this comment intentionally left content-free
posted to MetaFilter by russm at 2:37 AM on April 1, 2008

Chunder - thinking about it, I don't reckon you could make something like that... when making one of these, the outside hardens & shrinks, forcing some of the material from the inside out (presumably into the tail), then as the reduced amount of interior material hardens it finds itself under tension and pulls in at the now hardened exterior, leaving it in compression... in a perfectly uniform sphere, as the outer shell hardens and contracts, the interior material has nowhere to go and is... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by russm at 3:38 AM on February 18, 2008

give it time, sien... give it time...
posted to MetaFilter by russm at 1:54 AM on February 4, 2008

do I have to imagine kissing all the boys, or can I just assume that they've previously all been kissed by at least one of the girls?
posted to MetaFilter by russm at 8:08 PM on February 2, 2008

I hadn't even moused over the links to see it was about that Hot Chocolate, and I was picturing Kenny Everett licking Errol Brown's head coming out of a large steaming mug... ah, memories...
posted to MetaFilter by russm at 5:39 PM on February 2, 2008

Mr. President - as I understand US law, failure to hand over keys to encrypted subpoenaed documents will get you jailed for contempt of court. assuming my understanding is correct, that certainly looks to me like a criminalisation of a failure to incriminate oneself.
posted to MetaFilter by russm at 1:34 AM on February 2, 2008

Bulgaroktonos - do you have a reference to that Vermont decision? if "properly requested evidence" includes the contents of your brain, how does it not include "were you at the kwik-e-mart on wednesday night?" or the responses to similar questions? it's a tangent, I know, but an obvious follow-on to Dr. Steve's comment about the all-powerfulness of the 5th amendment...
posted to MetaFilter by russm at 7:54 AM on February 2, 2008

The difference is that the keys don't constitute testimony against oneself.
vs.
The short answer is that "properly requested evidence" will never include the contents of the defendant's brain.

This is my point, and my question, and the reason I'm interested to see a reference to the case Bulgaroktonos spoke of (assuming that the passphrase that decrypts something exists nowhere other than in my brain)... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by russm at 3:24 PM on February 2, 2008

'Space Platforms'? Are they the crazy future shoes?

only if they've got those jetsons-style rings around the ankles...
posted to MetaFilter by russm at 5:44 PM on January 31, 2008

my time is valuable

just out of curiosity, last time you "mount[ed] a full-court civil and criminal press", how much time did you spend doing that and how much money did you recover (above the value of the overcharge, that is)?
posted to MetaFilter by russm at 3:00 PM on January 15, 2008

unixrat - because you're telling people how they should spend their money. objectively, you might be right, you might be wrong, but people don't like being told they're idiots for spending their money how they want to spend it. that's why it's controversial.
posted to MetaFilter by russm at 10:24 PM on January 15, 2008

Next they'll try a US version of QI

I almost want to see that done, just as a yardstick for how far it's physically possible to fuck up a TV show...

They have warnings on British shows too. Like Brainiac.

the difference being that Brainiac is shite...
posted to MetaFilter by russm at 2:25 PM on January 15, 2008

are you agreeing with McCullough's view of the game, or putting this out here for us to laugh at?
posted to MetaFilter by russm at 1:40 PM on January 15, 2008

Astro Zombie - are you right handed, or left handed?
posted to MetaFilter by russm at 6:27 PM on January 11, 2008

delmoi: Or is it possible he served 30 years in jail, then got released? Seeing as 30 years > 414 months?

ummm... 414 / 12 = 34.5 years...
posted to MetaFilter by russm at 6:29 PM on January 9, 2008

grumblebee: I read someone's opinion a while ago (talking about Ruby) that people's "I can't tell you what it is but I know it when I see it" distinction between "real language" and "scripting tool" often coincides with whether the language's runtime is hardcoded in the interpreter/VM (like Ruby) vs. just being another library written in the language in question (like Java)...

and since nobody else has, I'll mention the Dis (also) virtual... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by russm at 10:57 PM on December 4, 2007

Any ephemeris will indicate that the sun is in this position (15.7° and due west) in Sheboygan only twice during the year, at 4:52 pm on May 5 and on August 10.

just out of curiosity, does anyone know the error here? that ascension can't be accurate to more than a degree or so, and the bearing even less so. what does this do to the range of possible dates? the sun traverses 23.4° in 183 days, so by my back of the envelope there's gotta be ~1week of... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by russm at 1:24 AM on November 21, 2007

sfenders - in my experience, it leads to a small room, a *very* thorough search of the bag, your other bags, and your person, and a stern warning to Not Do That Again...

of course, this did happen to be the time I was carrying a pack full of of little summer dresses and similar chick clothes for the friend I was meeting overseas at the time... "seriously, that's not my dress... I *told* you I didn't pack this bag myself"...
posted to MetaFilter by russm at 5:49 PM on November 18, 2007

tom: Bored now. Can we vote yet?

I believe early voting opened 2 weeks before election day - though it would take effort to get the AEC to send you the paperwork...
posted to MetaFilter by russm at 2:42 AM on November 12, 2007

unfortunately it sucks on the available copies of the metcalfe ethernet diagram. I keep meaning to find the time to get that in decent enough shape to print on a tshirt.
posted to MetaFilter by russm at 5:55 AM on October 29, 2007

crabby - how exactly is it like that?
posted to MetaFilter by russm at 7:07 PM on July 20, 2007

aha, so I'm just dogmatic and intellectually dishonest... gotcha... no worries...

I'm curious though... what purpose do the brains of non-sentient creatures serve?
posted to MetaFilter by russm at 10:51 PM on July 20, 2007

Crabby - point taken, particularly in regard to (metaphorical) cooling of the blood...

My point, if I'd bothered to make it instead of just sniping, was that I don't see how this offers any evidence either way as to the brain being the seat of consciousness or just a conduit to the soul. I'm assuming we are agreed that either way the brain is intimately connected to consciousness. And also, that whatever it's doing, it's a prety complicated thing.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by russm at 7:57 PM on July 21, 2007

crabby - I would actually love to continue this (with less of a time lag) but unfortunately external time constraints are restricting me... this thread is the only thing I've been popping back in for over the last couple of days...

to be clear about where I'm coming from... I only intend to argue that this particular case (or type of case) is no more evidence in favour of your argument than it is for mine - I don't think we're going to solve the particular issue of the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by russm at 10:55 PM on July 22, 2007

UbuRovias - that would work better as a tagline for NTK
posted to MetaFilter by russm at 4:53 AM on July 19, 2007

gah... UbuRoviasUbuRoivas
posted to MetaFilter by russm at 4:54 AM on July 19, 2007

"Grown men should not be having sex with prostitutes unless they are married to them."

the image that springs to mind here is a grown man having sex with his prostitute wife, but all her clients are teenagers (not "grown men") so everything is fine... or is that not how he meant it?
posted to MetaFilter by russm at 11:36 PM on May 15, 2007

if you're at all hairy, how could these even pretend to look even slightly real?

DU - so you reckon someone is more of a knob for doing something they want to (that you think is dumb) than for wanting to look like they did something (that you think is dumb) but having to fake it because they can't/won't go through with it?
posted to MetaFilter by russm at 7:25 AM on April 18, 2007

hey, cool... the "tribal" ones also have kanji on 'em... schweet...
posted to MetaFilter by russm at 7:30 AM on April 18, 2007

arcticwoman - I have no tatts, but none of the piercings I have hurt any more than getting a shot, and I've never had trouble with healing either... but it's nice to know I'm a wuss for only going half-way...
posted to MetaFilter by russm at 3:46 AM on April 19, 2007

MouseJiggler? back when I were a student, on the Sun boxes with old-school optical mice (that required an aluminium mousepad with scored vertical and horizontal lines), I used to do that with my watch... you'd get logged out if the workstation was idle for 10 minutes or whatever, but if you left the mouse sitting on your (analogue) watch you'd get 1 pixel movement per minute as the second hand swept past the optical sensor... only ever did it if there was someone I trusted at the next space over... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by russm at 4:10 AM on April 16, 2007

youthenrage - cool, so let's preemptively chuck *everybody* in prison and there'll be no more rape or murder...
posted to MetaFilter by russm at 6:15 AM on March 20, 2007

just as the term Web 2.0 is beginning to get on everyone's nerves

just beginning? jeez, get with the times... it was doing that 6 months ago...
posted to MetaFilter by russm at 12:02 AM on March 13, 2007

"The fact that he hasn't yet gotten his times down far enough to achieve that qualification is a good indication that he doesn't have an advantage."

no, it just means that the combination of him + his sprinting legs isn't putting in fast enough times... perhaps he'd be running a 12.5 100m if he'd been born with fibulas... if we chopped Asaffa Powell's legs off and gave him these would he be doing 9.5 seconds over 100m? who knows...... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by russm at 10:39 PM on March 4, 2007

In unrelated news, Switzerland's strategic reserve of false teeth is running dangerously low...
posted to MetaFilter by russm at 12:51 AM on March 3, 2007

cosmicbandito - yeah, but they're nowhere near as cheap... google or google
posted to MetaFilter by russm at 10:29 PM on February 7, 2007

re: profitability to the banks of in-credit accounts... I was always under the impression that the profit the bank makes from having me as a personal banking customer was meant to be in the interest the are able to make on lending my money to their credit clients... while I can understand them charging me for things I ask them to do (depositing a cheque or whatever) that's not where they should be looking for profitability... if they want more profit from re-lending my money they should be... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by russm at 11:54 PM on January 26, 2007

surely the easier justification isn't "the constitution doesn't explicitly grant habeas corpus to anyone" but rather "the constitution doesn't say who has the right of habeas corpus"... that way you can say you're not actually suspending it at all, you're just being selective about who has the protection in the first place...
posted to MetaFilter by russm at 8:54 PM on January 24, 2007

a mate of mine who worked on A380 was present at their failed wing ultimate load test a year ago - souveniring of wing fragments was apparently rife. "I have a piece of wing that will be retrospectively defined to be strong enough"...

eriko: At the middle marker, you were 1.8 nm from the threshold of the runway

I originally parsed that as nanometers, and assumed it was hyperbole... that's what I get for dropping out of Aero Eng back in the day...
posted to MetaFilter by russm at 2:39 AM on January 23, 2007

jimbob - wow, I really wasn't expecting to get preached at by an AJAX demo...
posted to MetaFilter by russm at 5:24 AM on June 24, 2006

Farengast: speed has nothing to do with it - he could be traveling at the speed of sound there and still not be in ground effect unless his nose was a foot off the snow.
posted to MetaFilter by russm at 9:06 PM on June 10, 2006

frogan - the sign doesn't say anything about "bombs", it says "Making any jokes or statements ...". Now we all know what they're talking about, but you've got to admit the message itself is ridiculous.
posted to MetaFilter by russm at 11:53 PM on April 24, 2006

cillit bang - and according to RFC 2119 (as referenced in section 1.2 of RFC 2616 "Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1")
4. SHOULD NOT This phrase, or the phrase "NOT RECOMMENDED" mean that there may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances when the particular behavior is acceptable or even useful, but the full implications should be understood and the case carefully weighed before implementing any behavior described with this label.
plus... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by russm at 3:40 AM on March 29, 2006

Secondly, SHOULD NOTs are only allowed to be broken when the implementor can live with the problems doing so might cause.

well it sounds like they've learnt to live with it in this particular case...
posted to MetaFilter by russm at 6:31 AM on March 29, 2006