[Ed P]

A spooky prediction was made in August 2012. link

It is sometimes hard to sort out pseudoscience from partially developed theories, but intuitively there may be something in Peter Turchin’s work — well, at least as much as the basis for chartists gambling billions on the Stock Market.

Kondratiev Waves are similar examples that purport to underpin humanities irrational actions and predicted an economic crash in 2008! (We are twenty years away from the next one thankfully).

Chaos Theory supports these boom and bust scenarios, but does not really provide any sound predictive element.

[Ed P]

Hacker News opened my eyes to all the free games that are hosted on Github. link

Most of course can be found in typical Linux distros, but one or two such as OpenTomb  do not appear elsewhere. Some, (Arx Fatalis & OpenMW) needs some game data from a commercial install disk, similar to Doom ports or extensions, however they often make substantial improvements to the original. Not the least of which is being able to run on a modern GPU.

Something at least to browse through while locked-up indoors on a freezing cold foggy day.

[Ed P]

“I was just wondering why I don’t need a using for begin() and end() ?”

I’d guess that it is explicitly declared in the ‘iterator’ definition, somewhere in the standard library, along with the definition for ‘string’.

C++ has doubtless moved on a lot since I last dabbled with it, but back in those days C++ was written in C as it was just an extension of C. Nowadays I believe the C++ compiler is somehow recursively written in C++!

[Ed P]

Currently I have an old Wileyfox Swift 2X, which is a tad larger than I would like and only does okayish photos. I jibe from paying the Apple tax especially on a phone hampered by a small battery. (they should of made it a little thicker to accommodate more cells). However, the iPhone 12 mini does have a great camera.

[Ed P]

Ta, but I must be missing something. Amazon’s stock all show up as phablet size~6″? :scratch:

[Ed P]

No further comment required:

“BREAKING: Sriwijaya Air flight SJ182, a Boeing 737, has disappeared from radar after taking off from Jakarta, Indonesia.” Twitter

[Ed P]

Out of evil came good!

Covid caused remission in a Hodgkin Lymphoma cancer case. It isn’t clear from the paper but it looks like it saved his life, or at least gave him more time!

Medical Research link

[Ed P]

At least it is the military in charge of logistics and not a complete a-hole like Dildo Harding.

[Ed P]

My previous comment is expanded in this Bloomberg report that includes a ‘Heat Map’ of jabs/head of population around the world.

[Ed P]

C  lacks the beginning and end functions otherwise it is very similar with pointers instead of iterators. The one huge difference I guess is that you have to be extremely careful with allocating memory and garbage collection in C.

As a rule of thumb, C is very similar to C++ except it lacks all the things that should stop you being stupid (or evil :whistle: ).

[Ed P]

Gutted – Bob has had a rough few years but he has been a lesson to all of us in keeping his own and other’s morale high.

Please ask Bob to pass on the forum address to his g’son, assuming that he does not already have it, as I’m sure he would like to be able read Bob’s reminiscences at some point in time.

Still, all things said and done, it ain’t over till the fat lady sings. Here’s hoping she misses her cue and that Bob has a few years yet! :good:

[Ed P]

Also giving credit where it is due, the US has administered 6.25 million doses which on a percent of population vaccinated is roughly on par with the UK.

[Ed P]

Thanks to the Government’s early purchases of vaccine, and the work by the NHS and Public Health, the UK leads Europe in the numbers already vaccinated. :good:

UK vaccinations 1.3 million

Germany 0.3 million

France <0.01 million

Italy 0.2 million

Netherlands ~nil (they want to use Oxford vaccine, but not yet approved in EU)

[Ed P]

Dave Rice wrote:

Bob has been back on FB for a couple of days posting in his own style

I read that Trump has just been barred from FB. I trust that Bob has been a good boy in his posts! 🙂 😉

Good to hear that he is able to participate in the wider world once more.

[Ed P]

Iterators sound very much like linked lists in C. Is there a special class of iterators that acts like a blockchain (i.e. the iterator is hashed or otherwise encrypted)?

[Ed P]

As you can see in the link, Windows Defender is just as guilty with respect for exes it does not recognise, especially if they have unusual privileges.

link for Defender undelete method

[Ed P]

I agree with Dave. Kaspersky for example can delete exe and other files that it does not recognise.

link

[Ed P]

For now at least, Trump remains in control of the Government reins. Having urged his ‘patriotic’ supporters for days to turn up in Washington on 6 January and then encouraging them to protest the fraudulent election, it was almost certain that he also ordered restraint by the police within the Capitol Building so that they could seize the ‘fraudulent’ ballot papers.(they almost succeeded!)

It is probably now appropriate for The New Yorker to resurrect their 2016 parody:

“Addressing the American people from her office in Buckingham Palace, the Queen said that she was making the offer “in recognition of the desperate situation you now find yourselves in.”

“This two-hundred-and-forty-(four)-year experiment in self-rule began with the best of intentions, but I think we can all agree that it didn’t end well,” she said.” :yahoo:

[Ed P]

Unfortunately what happened yesterday will not be the end of this insurrection. There are too many right-wing wackos who are completely convinced that an elitist world-wide Illuminati-like cadre of billionaires are really in control of the US organs of state and media for their own and China’s benefit.

These wackos are convinced that they need to ‘take-back America’, and save it from the ‘Communist’ clutches of Joe Biden. Most belong to heavily armed southern US neo-fascist groups who are an an unholy mixture of White Suprematist/Survivalist/Religious/ex-Military/Ultra-patriotic people. Emotions are running high, and irrational acts are still very likely to be borne out of the powerless frustration they feel.

I honestly fear that this could split the US apart unless the situation is handled very carefully not just in the immediate aftermath but in the months to come. I just hope that the US does not go seeking an external enemy in order to take media focus off their own internal problems.

On a more positive note, it was good that there were not too many ‘martyrs’ yesterday, and only one ex-military female was killed.

[Ed P]

Wheels-Of-Fire wrote:

Ooh, I have been promoted to Editor status on Stack Overflow.

Please do not join the unfriendly barstewards on Stack Overflow who expect noobs to either know that a question has been asked before or fail to make allowance for the question being badly framed due to the questioner’s knowledge level being insufficient.

I have given up using Stack for Python because the Python purists fail to recognise the (many) shortcomings of the Python syntax. (the biggest for C/C++/Delphi users  being the use of white space separators.)

[Author]

Posts