Helyar.net

In a US election, most states are pretty much guaranteed to vote a certain way. Amazingly, these political parties are actually distinguishable from one another (this is not the case in my country, in which all politicians are equally corrupt, greedy liars that may as well be in a single political party). These parties have been arguing over the same points for decades.

The solution is obvious. Split the republican states and the democrat states into two separate countries. Swing states can either pick and choose, redefine their borders or emigrate. A couple of suggestions for the name of the resulting republican country are Acirema and ‘merica.

This way, the democratic country can have free healthcare, while the republican country can have all the guns they want and so on.

P.S. This post is tongue in cheek. Don’t take it too seriously (unless you’re a US president and think it’s a good idea!)

OK so this is probably going to demonstrate how bad I am at physics, and I will probably be flamed for being an idiot, but here are some of my thoughts on the faster than light neutrinos.

1. Time slows down as you approach the speed of light. Velocity is a derivation of time (speed = distance / time). This can make it difficult to measure, and the time dilation needs to be accounted for.
2. When measuring things close to the speed of light, the equipment itself has the same limitations. It takes time for a signal to get from one part of the equipment to another.
3. The Earth itself is moving in the solar system, the solar system is moving in the galaxy, and the galaxy is moving in the universe. The speed of light is an absolute limit, but the measurement of something moving between two points on Earth is a relative measurement. If something was fixed in an absolute position, it would be moving very quickly relative to the Earth.
4. The speed of light limitation applies to objects with mass. The mass of neutrinos is believed to be non-zero, but is not yet completely known, and objects with energy essentially have more mass, so the mass of it changes as it accelerates. It’s hard to do maths when you don’t have all of the starting variables.

I’m calling it now. First Windows ME, then Vista, next 8. All failures, or soon to be.

There’s nothing new in Windows 8 that warrants replacing Windows 7 so soon but there’s enough changed on the surface to piss people off. People don’t like having changes forced upon them (see also: Facebook). The only people that will be getting Windows 8 will be people who got it pre-installed and had no choice, and I don’t see any businesses upgrading to Windows 8 whatsoever.

It’s too difficult to set the default command prompt directory on Windows. I found several methods, none of which worked correctly.

In particular, it is common for people to set a “cd /d path” in their AutoRun key in the registry but this breaks the power toy and Windows 7′s built in hold shift and right click on a directory to open a command prompt there. This can be worked around by adding a /d to the shell extension in the registry.

What doesn’t seem to be mentioned anywhere though is that this AutoRun key also gets run when you double click on a batch file. That means a batch file which assumes its own current directory (a reasonable assumption – more reasonable than using absolute paths) may not be able to find files in the same directory as it.

What I really wanted to do was move my home directory to my D: drive but the command prompt was still opening on the C:

Most people also seem to only change the default directory of their command prompt to match a non-default home directory.

The first mistake I made was to type “cmd” into the start menu and right click on it to pin it there. This calls it “Windows Command Processor” and starts in C:\Windows\System32 (because that’s where cmd.exe lives). Instead, go through the start menu programs list and find “Command Prompt” under “Accessories” and pin that. It will correctly default to your home directory, because the “start in” is set to %HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%. Note that you could just change this shortcut’s arguments (cmd /k cd “PATH”) or start in but it will only change it for that one shortcut.

Anyway, once you are using “Command Prompt”, set your home directory. I’m using Windows 7 Pro, so I can go to Computer Management and just set the directory for my user in the GUI under “Users and Groups”. This is no longer available in home versions of Windows (they shouldn’t have removed it) but you may still be able to set your home directory by using the command

net user USERNAME /homedir:PATH

where “USERNAME” is your user name and “PATH” is the directory you want to set. You can check this with the command net user.

When I type “cmd” into the run dialogue, it still opens on C: but at least batch files work now. Further suggestions are welcome.

Can someone explain the point in “pingbacks” to me, because to me it seems like someone just ripping off my posts and pretending they are their own, with no reference to the original post and only using pingbacks to spam the URL of the duplicate article.

(serac.universal.edu.au/blog)

WordPress’ description of pingbacks suggests that they are just remote comments, but as the other site just copied the content verbatim with no additional comments, and even copied site-wide preferences such as the “tagline”, this doesn’t seem right.