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dghf

May I ask why? If one can suffer, one by definition can have subjective experience. And I understand that for you, that is not sufficient for consciousness, which is fine: one of the biggest problems of the whole consciousness debate is what is actually meant by the word. But it does indicate that there is something going on inside rabbits that isn’t going on inside rocks (assuming that rabbits can indeed suffer and rocks cannot).
Can a rabbit suffer? I don't think a rock can. I doubt slime moulds can either (though I admit I don't know a huge amount about how their internal makeup). But I suspect rabbits can.
Re:That's a Lot of YAML on Monday August 31, 2026 @06:39AM (#49508081)
> snarky comments

How was my comment snarky? The YAML maintainers may have intended YAML to be a superset of JSON, but failed by not incorporating some obscure feature of it that bore on whether it was streamable or not.

Re:That's a Lot of YAML on Friday August 28, 2026 @05:44AM (#49476430)
YAML is (or at least, is declared by its maintainers to be) a superset of JSON, making any JSON document also a valid YAML document.

So surely if YAML is streamable, JSON must be too?

Or are the YAML maintainers incorrect?

Re:A joke domain purchase turned in geopolitical warfare on Thursday August 20, 2026 @04:26AM (#49371897)
The right to a trial by jury in civil suits where the sum in dispute is greater than US$20 is a universal natural right?
Point of pedantry: federation usually implies a federal government, and the UK is a unitary state.
1) Most Commonwealth countries are republics, not monarchies.

2) The monarchies in the Commonwealth countries are ruled by different crowns; but, for historical reasons, most of those crowns are worn by the same physical head. (But not all of them. The King of Malaysia is a different natural person from the King of the UK, for example.)

The Scottish NHS has always been a separate organisation, even before devolution, created under a separate Act of Parliament. It's just that it used to be answerable to the UK government (specifically to the Secretary of State for Scotland, rather than the Secretary of State for Health), and now it's answerable to the Scottish government.

Why it was done like that, I'm not sure, but I suspect it was a combination of Scotland having its own legal system and laws (guaranteed by the Acts of Union of 1707) and existing ministerial division of responsibility (where public health in Scotland fell within the purview of the Scottish Secretary, along with Scottish education and a bunch of other areas that had their own distinct Cabinet ministers for England and Wales).

And while the Welsh NHS was originally part of the same NHS as operated in England, control over the NHS in Wales passed from the Health Secretary to the Welsh Secretary with the creation of the Welsh Office in 1969, and then to the devolved Welsh government in 1999.

Northern Ireland already had devolution (or to be precise, home rule) when the NHS was created in 1948, and the Northern Irish equivalent -- the Health and Social Care service -- is a direct creation of the Parliament of Northern Ireland rather than of the UK Parliament.

Re:This blog is written in en-GB on Thursday July 02, 2026 @10:44AM (#48762425)
No, that's en-GB-Yamyam.
Re:Dostoyevsky Isn't Difficult on Thursday June 25, 2026 @11:25AM (#48674822)
According to Wikipedia:

- Jehan (Old French form of "John") -> Jan

- Jan -> Jankin (diminutive)

- Jankin -> Jackin

- Jackin -> Jack

Re:Dostoyevsky Isn't Difficult on Thursday June 25, 2026 @11:22AM (#48674784)
Traditionally, yes; these days, perhaps not so much.

The author Jack London was originally John London. John F. Kennedy was familiarly known as Jack ("Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy"). The British racing driver John Stewart is far more commonly known as Jackie Stewart. In Patrick O'Brian's naval fiction, Captain John Aubrey is almost always referred to as Jack.

Re:"They're made out of weights" on Saturday June 06, 2026 @11:38AM (#48426051)
Apologies, didn't notice when I got the link from YT's "Share" button. Won't make that mistake again.

Comment is now to old to edit: for convenience, here's the link without the parameter -- https://youtu.be/LRq_SAuQDec

Re:"They're made out of weights" on Thursday June 04, 2026 @04:39AM (#48395889)
> a compelling story about a sentient toaster

"Howdy-doodly-doo! Anybody like any toast?"

https://youtu.be/LRq_SAuQDec?si=YbQfnZbrCe01Bicy

I keep on meaning to try these out: https://www.schaffter.ca/mom/
Re:The Spread of Christianity Animated on Friday May 22, 2026 @12:33PM (#48238186)
Yes, it seems to be promoting the idea, popular in New Age writings, that Celtic Christianity was a separate denomination (or what Rome would have considered a heresy); and that just doesn’t seem to have been the case.
Re:The Spread of Christianity Animated on Friday May 22, 2026 @12:21PM (#48238010)
But was it doctrinally different from Chalcedonian Christianity to justify its own colour on the map. Wikipedia suggests no, which chimes with my understanding: some local minor differences in practice, but nothing like the Christological disputes that caused the rift with the Church of the East, nor like the row over papal supremacy etc. that led to the Great Schism between Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.
Re:The Spread of Christianity Animated on Friday May 22, 2026 @12:16PM (#48237952)
But the graphic suggests that Celtic Christianity was in some sense theologically distinct from Chalcedonian Christianity, and that doesn't seem to have been the case. The main ways that the Christians of Ireland and Britain differed from those of continental western Europe seem to have been in the shape of the monastic tonsure and the calculation of the date of Easter; and in the latter, at least, British and Irish Christians were in conformity with Rome by the end of the eighth century. (There was also an emphasis on penance and absolution as a private rather than public rite, but this was ultimately adopted by the wider church.)

There doesn't seem to have been any doctrinal disputes, nor any suggestion that British and Irish Christianity was in any way separate from the Church of Rome.

Re:The Spread of Christianity Animated on Friday May 22, 2026 @11:33AM (#48237315)
What is going on with Celtic Christianity? Was it really as distinct from Roman Catholicism (and for as long) as the graphic suggests?

Also, why no Cathars/Albigensians in the south of France during the 12th & 13th centuries?

Re:Michael Keating has died on Thursday May 21, 2026 @12:26PM (#48225351)
One of the only episodes of Blake's 7 I really remember is "Orbit", in which Avon and Vila play a game of cat-and-mouse aboard a shuttle that's been stripped back to the wiring but is still doomed to crash into the planet it's trying to launch from unless another 70 kg can be ejected: as Orac helpfully points out to Avon, this is more or less exactly Vila's body mass. The respective faces pulled by Avon and Vila as Orac announces this tell you everything you need to know about their characters.
The manuscript is ~1200 years old, but the poem was composed earlier. The Venerable Bede, who died in 735, includes it and the story of its composition in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People: according to that story, it was composed while Saint Hilda was abbess of Whitby, c.660-680.
I was under the impression that the "machine elves" were very different from the tiny people described in this article.
The Wannadies had to go with "You & Me Song" https://youtu.be/t_e_45Szprk?si=4JVZHZzguqm3SFHN
Re:The road signs that teach travellers about France on Monday March 30, 2026 @05:55AM (#47572375)
The ones in the UK are much more minimalist: logos and symbols rather than detailed drawings.
Re:Apple Just Lost Me on Wednesday March 25, 2026 @12:32PM (#47519638)
That mentions app stores, but I can't see anything about device-level age-verification there.

Also, does Ofcom have the power under the Online Safety Act to mandate app-store verification (or device-level verification, for that matter)? Or would it require secondary, or even primary, legislation?

Re:Apple Just Lost Me on Wednesday March 25, 2026 @11:08AM (#47518376)
> it is fundamentally the UK’s fault by requiring such draconian measures

It would appear the UK doesn't:

> Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator, praised Apple for the decision, especially since it’s not required to implement age verification for the iOS or its App Store under the region’s Online Safety Act.

-- https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/apple-introduces-age-verif...

Re:Apple Just Lost Me on Wednesday March 25, 2026 @11:07AM (#47518353)
To counter your downvoters:

> Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator, praised Apple for the decision, especially since it’s not required to implement age verification for the iOS or its App Store under the region’s Online Safety Act.

-- https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/apple-introduces-age-verif...

Re:Apple Just Lost Me on Wednesday March 25, 2026 @11:05AM (#47518325)
> Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator, praised Apple for the decision, especially since it’s not required to implement age verification for the iOS or its App Store under the region’s Online Safety Act.

https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/apple-introduces-age-verif...

Re:Is it a pint? on Tuesday March 24, 2026 @03:31AM (#47499556)
Apologies, I was specifically replying to your last sentence, "Every other drink has to use in metric."
Re:Is it a pint? on Monday March 23, 2026 @04:12PM (#47494473)
Many Americans do claim to use imperial units. They’re wrong, but they do claim it.
Re:Is it a pint? on Monday March 23, 2026 @04:09PM (#47494456)
But that just means the quantity has to be expressed in metric units, possibly in addition to imperial, correct? E.g. I currently have a carton of milk in my fridge that’s labelled “2272ml 4 pints”.

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