palordrolap

How about, I don’t know, not yanking the cord (or setting things up so the cord is yanked automatically) and pursuing the payment later?

But then that could mean that someone might - even temporarily - get something for nothing, and they can’t be seen to promote anything even remotely similar to that.

Perhaps this tiny company are so close to the knife edge that they can’t afford to allow it to happen. Must have constant revenue stream or else close up sho… wait, Micro-who?

I just imagined a horrible alternative universe where it’s illegal for brand names to become corrupted regardless of whatever else happens to data. Eventually humanity would start communicating only in brand names to ensure messages get through. *shudder*

Why do you think you wanted to run ELIZA on a Timex/Sinclair 2068?

I about gave myself an aneurysm deliberately and pedantically (and dare I say, facetiously) trying to parse this as written (lack of punctuation) rather than as intended.

Any such pain is well deserved, of course, but still.

Best guess, something owns or has some oversight of an entire group of human (or at least sentient) control tests (or control testers) that are identified by the letter ‘a’.

There is no conclusive evidence that its b control test people are better than its a control test people.

That’ll be a problem for that one system that’s at right angles to the plane of the galaxy, but I suppose it could work otherwise.

I can also envisage situations where systems that are close to being at right angles to the galactic plane have the different star-planet lines cross the galactic polar line at opposite sides of the star due to slight variances in relative orbital plane. None of our planets are exactly aligned that way, for example.

Perhaps that’s not a concern though.

Not all planets pass directly between their star and the centre of the galaxy. The plane of our own solar system isn’t lined up with the plane of the galaxy, for example. If the Sun were attached to Sagittarius A* by a thin cotton thread, I’m pretty sure none of the planets would hit it.

We’d perhaps have to define it as the centre of the planet crossing the unique plane that both passes through the star and the centre of the galaxy and is perpendicular to the planet’s orbit relative to the star. And for some planets in some systems that would still be hard to calculate on account of an extremely oblique crossing angle.

And even then there might be severe problems with that for systems closer to the galactic core that are stable, but otherwise weirdly affected by nearby gravitational effects.

Also, what about planets that are far enough out to orbit two stars? Do we switch to barycentres and which do we use?

And what about moon dwellers or binary planetary systems? Pluto and Charon orbit a point that is outside both. There are further complications there.

If there was ever a time to replace this Drake format with the Geordi LaForge alternative, this was it.

That’s a thorny question: Do comments need to be in the base standard, or can that be offloaded to those building on it? It doesn’t look like it would be hard to have (comment "foo bar baz") in an expression and have a re-parser throw that out.

Is the complaint that no two groups of people will use the same comment standard if left to their own devices? It’s not like the other data from different sources will always match up. What’s one extra, and fairly easy to handle SNAFU?

That said, yes, I think I’d be more comfortable knowing there was an accepted comment format. The aesthetic seems to be Lisp-like, and I notice that the Lisp comment marker, the semicolon, is currently a reserved character, that is, it’s illegal to use it unquoted. Maybe they’re thinking of adding that at some point.

The video’s suggestion of /dev/null makes that super easy.

My money’s on Microsoft Frontpage