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Muzer

 Discussion on answer by TimR: Does "I…

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Muzer
Nov 21, 2023 21:15
I will also say than in British English you can "have a lie-in" which is unambiguously intentional (it's often got the connotation of lying in bed relaxing without necessarily being asleep though).
Muzer
Nov 21, 2023 21:15
@StuartF As a Brit I would more likely use "oversleep" for accidental. Maybe this is an Americanism that has crept into my vocabulary but I don't think any Brit would find it unusual. As for the opposite, I'm thinking of that famous scene from the first Home Alone film where the (American) parents shout "WE SLEPT IN!". So while there might be more of a tendancy towards one or the other among Brits and Americans I don't think this is universal. However I will say I agree with the broad strokes that to me by default "slept in" means intentionally and "overslept" is always unintentional.
 

 Discussion on answer by amon: GDPR & …

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Muzer
Jul 18, 2022 17:28
@Charles enough websites are basically mandatory to use in the modern world that no, this wouldn't work. GDPR is a necessary thing to provide a simple baseline of expectations for privacy and data security. If they're too onerous for you to comply with, consider that you are very much a part of the problem that GDPR is trying to fix.
 

 Discussion on answer by neph: Is it i…

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Muzer
Sep 9, 2021 07:36
I did read it. I object to it being described as "incorrect" rather than just "considered informal" or similar.
Muzer
Sep 9, 2021 07:36
@neph then why classify another thing as "the most correct" when both are correct?
Muzer
Sep 9, 2021 07:36
Downvoting for prescriptivist nonsense. It's absolutely fine to say "I'm 20 next month".
 

 Discussion on answer by Fattie: Have …

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Muzer
Feb 11, 2020 11:12
@Acccumulation they are unrelated. "Leave" as in exit comes ultimately from a word meaning "stay" - the word originally referred to leaving a belonging behind (ie the belonging is the thing staying), and the meaning of course shifted over time. "Leave" as in permission comes from a word meaning "to love" which morphed into a meaning of favour or worth, and from there into privilege or permission. The two words are completely unrelated. Their spellings and pronunciations just happen to have evolved closer together over time until in modern English they are identical.
 

 Discussion on answer by Avery: Did El…

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Muzer
Jan 16, 2020 14:19
Err, recipes as in the facts of how to cook that particular meal can't be copyrighted, but recipes as in the wording used to describe how to cook it ARE, at least if they're anything more creative than just the bare facts.
 

 Discussion on question by Acroneos: V…

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Muzer
Dec 20, 2019 17:29
@Fattie your post to me clearly implied that everyone sees trains as transport and nothing more whereas they see driving as an end in its own right. It leaves no room for other views. My point was just that some other people (me included) see it precisely the opposite way round. Also, "whatever you do, don't take a train or indeed any public transport" is ridiculous advice for going to London - driving around central London is so much more painful than using public transport. Nobody's going to enjoy London if you insist on driving within it - perhaps that's why you hate it so much?
Muzer
Dec 20, 2019 17:29
@Fattie completely disagree - driving for me is a chore but trains are a joy and an end in their own right. There's nothing quite like relaxing with a drink in a seat on a sunny day watching the scenery go past at 125mph. But different people have different views and it's best not to try to assume everyone thinks like you ;)
 

 Discussion on answer by Muzer: Vistin…

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Muzer
Dec 20, 2019 11:16
@Traveller I think you've just misinterpreted what he meant - I took it to mean "you indicate in the direction you intend to exit the roundabout from where you started" which is broadly correct (though I've obviously clarified it in the paragraph I wrote).
Muzer
Dec 20, 2019 11:16
@TomRevell it's not specifically legally prohibited, but in general if they want to make an example out of people police will generally charge you under a generic driving law (eg "driving without due care and attention") if you are not driving in accordance with the Highway Code. Hence I said "not allowed by the Highway Code" rather than "illegal" which is what "MUST NOT" means.
Muzer
Dec 20, 2019 11:16
@MarkJohnson and it still is commonplace, but it's technically not allowed as I said :)
Muzer
Dec 20, 2019 11:16
@DiegoSánchez cheers, didn't know the roundabout indicator rules were different in mainland Europe!
Muzer
Dec 20, 2019 11:16
@MarkJohnson technically not allowed (highway code 239) but never enforced in the UK.
Muzer
Dec 20, 2019 11:16
@DiegoSánchez added a note about that :)
Muzer
Dec 20, 2019 11:16
Thanks both, I've implemented both of your suggestions in my answer :)
 

 Discussion on answer by Richard Says …

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Muzer
Dec 4, 2019 08:40
"Imagine, if you can, the color orange being painful, and every time you saw it, it felt like someone kicked you. Even when you know you're going to see it, you still feel the kick. Then, people around you are wondering why you are making such a big deal about the color orange. You, of course, not knowing that other people don't feel pain when they see orange, are going to wonder why you are so weak because they don't react to the pain they must be feeling, while telling you to stop making such a big deal of it." Bright orange used to make my teeth stand on edge when I was little...
 

 Discussion on answer by Dan: Speaking…

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Muzer
Nov 7, 2019 12:12
@fNek turns out I got it right by accident then - my German isn't very good at all!
Muzer
Nov 7, 2019 12:12
I had a great one on an OEBB train at the buffet car. Me: "Zwei Colas und ein Mineralwasser, bitte". Him: "Still or sparkling?". I did get a chance to use my rudimentary German later on in the trip though, as I had to get a taxi from a very small town and the person on the phone knew only a little English, and the taxi driver knew none at all!
 

 Discussion on question by GridAlien: …

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Muzer
Sep 13, 2019 00:59
Why the hell are they housing university students in places with curfews for guests, as if they're kids or something?
 

 Discussion on answer by o.m.: Are the…

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Muzer
Aug 14, 2019 16:56
@Pakk from what I've read it does seem to be the BBC who chose not to show it.
 

 Discussion on answer by Harper: What …

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Muzer
Jan 16, 2019 19:45
@Alexander These things often have very dodgy contacts. I don't recall the exact video but I remember one being found in the wild with a disconnected earth pin (which you wouldn't notice until you need it for safety...). But the poor contacts are likely to cause heating with normal use (which if the plastic isn't up to spec either, could definitely cause a fire), and they could bend sockets out of shape meaning poor contact even with normal plugs used afterwards is more likely. Anecdotally, I've seen someone blow up a power socket (with sparks and scorch marks) by using one of these normally.
Muzer
Jan 16, 2019 19:45
@WilliamMariager I don't know about you but I'd rather bend the rules of Stackexchange to make this more visible and perhaps save a few hotels from being burnt down...
 

 Discussion on answer by Thorsten S.: …

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Muzer
Jul 2, 2018 17:40
Fair enough, I apologise for that accusation! I think thinking in terms of locomotives is still flawed, though. I mean, you yourselves have the ICE trains, which from the ICE 3 onwards are undeniably multiple units rather than locomotive-hauled trains.
Muzer
Jul 2, 2018 17:40
This sounds like a somewhat US-centric answer, since trains aren't that big in much of Europe, and many of them don't have locomotives anyway.
 

 Discussion on answer by Raffzahn: The…

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Muzer
Feb 8, 2018 09:49
@Raffzahn K&R first edition: "C guarantees that no pointer that validly points at data will contain zero" - which is exactly what I've been saying this whole time.
Muzer
Feb 7, 2018 12:21
@Raffzahn I never said anything about checks. The thing the standard guarantees is that no valid pointer will compare true to a NULL pointer. Whether this is explicitly mentioned in K&R or not I'm not sure, but K&R isn't a standard, it's a manual.
Muzer
Feb 7, 2018 12:21
"C also doesn't treat NULL different from any other pointer." I disagree with this. The C standard states that NULL will never be a valid pointer, which is an indication that it is treated differently to other pointers.
 

 Discussion on answer by tchrist: What…

Imported from a comment discussion on english.stackexchange.co...
Muzer
Jan 2, 2018 18:36
@M.I.Wright As far as I know there's no satisfactory explanation for the origin of "akimbo". OED: "Deriv. unknown. Prof. Skeat (Append.) gives a suggestion of Magnussen, comparing the earliest known forms with Icel. keng-boginn, -it, ’crooked’ (Vigfusson), lit. ’bent staple-wise, or in a horse-shoe curve’; other suggestions are a cambok in the manner of a crooked stick (ME. cambok, med.L. cambuca, see cammock); a cam bow in a crooked bow. None of these satisfies all conditions."
 

 Discussion on question by Eric M. Sch…

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Muzer
Dec 19, 2017 20:02
If each block is distinct of course it could be 2*19! but since that wasn't given as a possible answer I guess we can discount it ;)
Muzer
Dec 19, 2017 20:02
@Pakk I can't for the life of me figure out what they're asking in 4 either.
 

 Discussion on answer by Digital Fire:…

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Muzer
Oct 30, 2017 21:16
This is so demonstrably wrong it's ridiculous. This is terrible advice.
 

 Discussion on answer by Neil_UK: Why …

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Muzer
Oct 25, 2017 08:55
A lot of the discussion has been very US-centric. It's worth noting that similar things apply to other countries. For example, we have both commercial and public service radio stations on both AM and FM (and, of course, DAB). I don't think it's true that AM-quality audio == advertisers won't touch it, at least in every country.
 

 Discussion on question by user75918: …

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Muzer
Aug 24, 2017 14:58
@HopefullyHelpful you can when you find a buffer overflow/remote arbitrary code execution vulnerability in the game ;)
Muzer
Aug 23, 2017 23:35
I know someone who (a long time ago) wrote a cheat bot for a popular online game. Of course he wrote it for his personal amusement and gave it to a couple of friends under strict instructions to keep it to themselves. And of course it leaked onto the internet. What did he do? He didn't strut around being proud of completely breaking online play of a great game. Instead he wrote a counter cheat program that detected and remotely disabled his first cheat program. Not only that, it also made the game work on the latest versions of Windows. THAT is what got him acclaim and recognition.
 

 Discussion on answer by Mike Ounswort…

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Muzer
Aug 15, 2017 18:31
@deviantfan I can think of some possible architectures involving secure keystrokes. Whether they'd be feasible to implement after all these years of legacy is another question.
 

 Discussion on answer by Aurora0001: W…

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Muzer
Jul 11, 2017 14:44
@Jeutnarg Git hosting sites often give free private repositories to students.
 

 The Classroom

General discussion for cseducators.stackexchange.com.
Muzer
Jul 7, 2017 10:44
But it also kind of makes sense for the C++ world, because if you're not thinking about performance it's very easy to write really inefficient code, which will then lead to general performance degradation across the software that is hard to fix without changing a lot of things. For example, how easy it is to produce copies of a complex object instead of referencing or moving it. This is more of a problem in C++ because of its use of stack allocation by default.
Muzer
Jul 7, 2017 10:42
This is very far from the attitude that most programmers have! And while it has its merits, it does sometimes end up leading to far too many micro-optimisations and so forth.
Muzer
Jul 7, 2017 10:41
Haha! It really depends what sort of world you're in. I'm a C++ programmer, and very much the attitude from a lot of people is that you should always be thinking about performance, and as long as it doesn't add huge maintenance burdens/etc., you should always be careful not to do things that are less efficient for no reason.
Muzer
Jul 7, 2017 10:37
So I guess you wouldn't have a cache miss if the pointer list and the things that are pointed to are both on the stack.
Muzer
Jul 7, 2017 10:37
And yeah, I'm not sure if it's the pointer dereference being expensive or the fact that you'd need more memory (to store all the pointers somewhere) that led to C multidimensional arrays being implemented as they are. Probably a bit of both. The latter possibility only occurred to me when I was halfway through typing my comment. But yeah, nowadays, pointer dereferences are more often seen as expensive because of the cache misses that usually come along with them rather than being inherently bad.
Muzer
Jul 7, 2017 10:34
:D absolutely! Of course, C++ is different and has "new" and "delete" as language features, because of the extra complexity required to construct objects.
Muzer
Jul 7, 2017 10:29
Hi Ben I. Dunno if you've already had this answered, but in the C language, no language operation will cause a heap allocation. If you want a heap allocation, you need to call out to the standard library (eg malloc). I understand that this is intentional to allow a minimal stack-only subset of C to be implemented eg on embedded systems (where you know the whole address layout and so can manage your own memory), with only changes to the standard library and not to the language itself.
 

 Discussion on answer by Oli: Hurry! U…

Imported from a comment discussion on askubuntu.com/questions/...
Muzer
Jul 5, 2017 17:23
@A.D. if you're literally seconds from your system becoming completely unusable, using -9 could make all the difference. And on a modern system with something like a web browser, you're unlikely to run into issues.
 

 Discussion on question by Fattie: Did…

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Muzer
Jul 3, 2017 14:03
@gerrit Food served in first class on weekdays on British trains can be very good. Probably the best is the Pullman Dining services that are run by Great Western Railway. And that IS opinion-based ;)
Muzer
Jul 3, 2017 14:03
I don't think this is opinion based. There's a clear difference between cold, snacky food like sandwiches and a freshly-cooked hot meal.
 

 Discussion on answer by Jessica B: Sh…

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Muzer
Jul 2, 2017 15:20
Indeed, many group projects I've been involved with when I was at uni allow each individual to specify (often in private, which I prefer) a contribution percentage for each other individual, with reasoning to back this up and a general list of what each person did. This is then taken into account by the grader to weight the final grade everyone gets.
 

 Discussion on question by wizzwizz4: …

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Muzer
Jun 27, 2017 20:31
@tofro I've seen many keyboards (I'm in the UK), mostly PC ones from the late 90s and early 2000s, with the issue. I remember specifically being confused about why I couldn't type a pipe symbol as a child when I first tried to start programming. Search for old UK PC keyboard on Google Images, you'll find things such as preater.com/modelm/images/model-m-front-large1.jpg and fentek-ind.com/kbukusbb.jpg . If you buy one today it will very likely have the correct symbol, hence why you couldn't find it.