Posts by Pascal Monett 19424 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
In this here brown envelope, I have a full report on the nefarious effects of not third-, not even fourth-, but seventh-, yes I said seventh-hand smoke.
The results are positively frightening and dangerous enough to guarantee that the US is going to invade Chili forthwith to put a stop to this intolerable and insidious campaign against the health of its citizens.
Mark my words : seventh-hand smoke will doom us all.
I've never had any capacitor issue on my motherboards, ASUS or otherwise. And I've bought plenty of motherboards in the past 15 years. 17, to be precise, and at least 5 were ASUS. Yeah, I was on the upgrade treadmill.
Most of my hardware problems were essentially due to bad power units - until I learned my lesson and started buying proper power units, quality and over -dimensioned for my needs. And a UPS to control the quality of the electrical current.
Since that time, about six years ago, I have never had any hardware problem of any kind.
When our Sun is in its Red Giant phase, it will actually cool down because the energy will be emitted across a much larger cross-section (or something like that).
I'm not sure where that will put the Goldilocks zone, but I'm fairly sure that the outer planets and their moons will not get much more energy than they are getting now.
Don't you people have Visa or Master Card ?
You can pay plenty of things with one of those, and it works like a charm.
I once did get a second charge of €400 from a shady dealer, but I pointed it out to the bank and they refunded the money immediately without trouble.
Of course, my Visa is on a proper bank account, from a real bank where I can walk into an agency and yell my head off at some poor teller if there is a real problem.
I don't, never have and never will use PayPal, because I learned early on that PayPal is not a bank and certainly not a pal.
A real bank has the obligation to follow your instructions concerning your money (ie give you your money when you ask for it). A real bank cannot lock you away from your own account without an order from a judge, given during a proper legal procedure.
PayPal takes your money and then does as it pleases with your account. In my book, that is fraud and extortion, and PayPal should be dragged to the nearest wall and shot multiple times for having managed to implement their shoddy practices on a world-wide level.
Another one bites the dust, as it were, and another judge proves that he actually has a brain and can use it for Justice, which is what he is actually paid to do.
And I just love the phrase "iiNet customers were also accused of creating physical DVD copies of Hollywood films - but the court found that the only people who definitely did this were AFCT investigators".
Priceless.
From what I read here, the 3D effect really stands out in rather close-up shots. Anything with a wide angle or with great depth-of-field appears to be too much to make a difference.
So, translated to the famous notion of "content", it would mean that Desperate Housewives, with all the close-in action, would gain immensely from this technology, whereas Lord of the Rings would falter in the wide-area scenes, which are the most beautiful.
Although I'd be as happy as any other bloke to witness fine Bulgarian Airbags (tm) in full 3D, it would be a somewhat small subset of all the stuff I watch on TV. Still, it remains as good a proof as any that the only thing 3D is really going to be good for is porn.
Which probably explains why Nvidia is pushing 3D-enabled video cards with all its might. It knows that, if it is to stay relevant in the PC world, it has to master this emerging technology as best it can.
Well, since Microsoft so famously declared the Internet "irrelevant", back when Gates was still considered as a visionary, its no surprise that Google, which is responsible in part for the way things are on the Internet today, would take advantage of its position and create its own environment.
The Internet is the one realm where Microsoft consistently fails. None of its many attempts to gain supremacy have managed to thoroughly extinguish its rivals. Now Google is coming along with its own tools. Combined with its reputation and market share, Google is certainly capable of making Microsoft quake in its boots.
And quake Microsoft will, because the Internet is a domain where the usual scare tactics don't work. Microsoft can pressure OEMs, distributors and whatever else, but ISPs are immune to its shenanigans. All that exists on the Internet are the users and Microsoft, unlike the RIAA and MPAA, is not dumb enough to try and scare the people who pay it.
Why should we have to have those things implemented under our skin ? Couldn't they work just as well in, say, pads between our feet and our shoes ? Seems to me there's enough squeezing there to do some good in leccy generation.
Add pads in pant seats and you'll have all the beancounters running their computers without need of a plug. And they'll be exercising as well ! Medical and economical issues gone in one stroke of genius !
Send my check to my lawyer.
and I see no problem in waiting a few more.
Actually, what with embedded DRM now apparently a permanant part of the Windows OS landscape, I see no reason to continue purchasing Windows at all.
As long as my games work on my hardware, I'll use XP. It's plenty good for what I do.
The day XP can no longer cope with the hardware, well I'll take a look at the landscape at that point.
After all, I don't change my car every three years either. And yes, my previous car lasted 12 years in case you're wondering.
On the boat (before getting out of range, or when coming back in range) someone should have called the cops and had them waiting at the pier.
It would be a lot less deniable if the cops had arrested everyone, found banned substances and a group of skimpily-clad nubile women.
But they didn't, and they probably didn't take any pics either, so Microsoft will have an easy job of pretending that it is above such practices.
We all know that the Internet belongs to no one. Most of us also know that creating a service like GoogleAds is an expensive and time-consuming endevour.
GoogleAds exists, and more than 6 advertisers out of 10 choose it in preference to other providers.
In that sense, Google has created a well-trodden path of least resistance, and it does indeed own it.
So, in fact, from the advertiser's point of view, there is precious little choice to be had. Either you accept Google's Ts & Cs, or you miss out on 60% of your potential audience.
That does not sound good to me, and I find normal that somebody steps up to the plate to say something about it.
Then again, it does make me think that perhaps Bing is not too late to the market after all. Or even that, maybe, Ballmer is the one stirring up the pot and playing it from the shadows for once.
I mean, I don't even know any other service apart from GoogleAds that does that job. There must be some, of course, but they are not well-known to the general public.
So Bing is probably poised to gain traction in the ad market by simple virtue of being known to the public as the Google competitor.
Egads ! Could Ballmer have actually had an insight ? My worldview has just taken an asteroid to the chin.
I am quite reassured that the majority of comments here follow the same thoughts I have on the subject, namely :
- that 3D will be a mess of standards
- that we are still in Blu-Ray adoption (or avoidance) phase, so starting over again now is ridiculous
- that wearing those stupid glasses at home is out of the question
So now I will just sit back and watch the speed at which this whole mess will implode.
"Avenir de la langue française", eh ? They'd be better off looking at how our teenagers are "writing" (I use the term in the purely technical sense) these days.
Methinks that, in the next twenty years, Avenir de la langue française will be populated by the kids that grew up writing CMMNT CA VA ? instead of Comment ça va ? and, at that point, it will be a damn good thing that English is the international language of choice, because French is drowning in its own ignorance.
And there is no Mitterand that is going to change that.
The merry-go-round continues.
We've gone from local databases to networked databases, to remotely-hosted databases, to databases hosted on the Internet, and now somebody wants to find a way to locally store the remotely-hosted Internet databases. And update them.
I'm sure there's a way to find all this funny, only I can't see it.
For Pete's sake, the reboot has taken the franchise into brand-new territory.
I accept Spock coming back because it holds together in the current story. Fine. But there is no possibility for anyone else to come back. None. Nil. And please don't try to find one for the sake of pleasing Shatner. That's not an excuse.
If this new series starts down that path, it is doomed. Period.
I say the second film should see the death of Old Spock, and get rid of all ties with the previous timeline.
Let's boldly go where Star Trek hasn't been in quite a while : to brand-new, unexplored scripts that are actually coherent and thought through !
Let me see how this works :
1) create (or steal the code to) a website that allows people to share their personal life
2) make it really popular by recruiting coders to enhance its appeal (add apps) for free
3) weed out the independent thinkers by imposing arbitrary and annoying restrictions
4) make sure that most of the users that stay are sheeple that accept everything you do
5) conclude that, since your own users bend over for you on your command, the entire world will do so as well
That, obviously, is where MZ is going to fall on his teeth. When 90% of your users accept what you do it just means that you have managed to recruit people who submit to your will. Congrats on that point, obviously, but I'd rather be hanged than participate willingly in a so-called "social website".
So you won't have MY details to sell, bitch !
This would be a must-have gadget for scouts. Crawl to the top of the hill, whip out the electronoculars and do a slow left-right. Anything moving in the distance gets tagged on the internal screen. One press of a button and the "enocs" zoom in to allow for maximum ident ability. Press button again and normal scanning resumes. Once the sweep is finished, scout crawls back down, and signals that nothing is moving in the next sector.
The squad resumes silent progression through the undergrowth . . .
Such an equipment will obviously require optics that are beyond current abilities. And high-def CCDs coupled to movement-detecting software, along with the requisite 5 pound battery. But hey, I'd really like a working version myself !
It is only the government using the attack as fodder to increase surveillance that makes it a success. It is only the media's morbid interest in anything remotely scary that can be printed or broadcast that makes it important.
Which clearly means that our governments are the true terrorists. Bin Laden & Co are giggling with glee in their Hilton suite - uh, cave. They spend, oh, $2000 telling fibs to an idiot and let him fool around with moderately dangerous, inexpensive components, and our enlightened leaders budget $20,000,000 to "improve" our security.
The true terrorism is economic, and we're doing the job on ourselves.
Winston Churchill would round up the lot of them and have them shot in the backyard for treason, no trial required.
Yeah, we know how THAT is calculated :
- accuse thousands of filesharing
- do not check that IP address and physical location concorde
- accuse said victims of activity far in excess of what actual bandwidth allows
- tag an exorbitantly enormous price to each alledged infrigement, effectively creating an accusation for which the penalty is more severe than for murder
- serve up collated cases as cold, hard cash lost, not mentioning that nothing has actually been won in court yet
Really, I'm terrified. A bunch of scientists implemented the necessary infrastructure to harness the calculating power of hundreds of CPUs, probably via a readily-available communication medium, and tailored that effort to break the 768-bit level of RSA encryption.
As opposed to the russian mafia, who might have those scientists, and might even be able to implement the project, but who would probably be more likely to just send Ivan over to punch you into giving them the password. With a knife on the throat of your firstborn child if necessary.
And if its the NSA or some other spooky governmental agency, well if they're looking at you that intently they already have your password.
Are there really all that many industrial espionage cases based on cracking encryption ? What is encryption really for after all ? Maintaining an acceptable level of privacy. The basic thug cannot crack any RSA key. An international crime outfit doesn't care about personal emails unless you're already on their target list. And the government has hundreds of other ways to get that information if they really want it.
If it takes 1500 years for someone to be able to read the cookie recipie that I sent my brother-in-law last week, well I think that's good enough. Call me when it's down to six months.
3D is a fad that was old twenty years ago. Worse, it is a technology that implies that the film be made around it, instead of serving the idea of the filmmaker.
We are far from holodecks, we don't even have holographic television available. It has been years since this film-with-blue-and-red-glasses technology came out, and the idea has not progressed beyond that in any way.
On top of that, I am simply not interested by 3D, and certainly not enough to change my perfectly good TV against one that will require me to wear those stupid colored glasses.
This will never take off, period.
Wonderful, just what we needed. Millions of angry Germans trashing their cards and going back to paper money.
This problem is a lot more serious than you might think. Most Germans do not trust electronic cards at all. I know, I live next to the border and I can promise you that once you've driven 30 kilometers into that country you can forget about using credit cards - nobody takes them. It's paper money all the way.
There is a little supermarket not 5 kms from where I live that only started accepting credit cards last year.
Now this.
I wonder how much longer it will take to be able to use my Visa in Freiburg for something else than getting money from an ATM.
The first time I heard about using a nuke to deflect an asteroid in space I found the idea ridiculous - and I still do.
Nukes on Earth have a devastating effect because of the air - it is the tremendous force of the explosion acting against the atmosphere that creates the shockwave which blows everything away that has not been incinerated by the initial radiation.
But in space, there is no atmosphere. So there can be no shockwave, and that removes 100% of the mechanical effects of a nuke.
The only thing I can imagine that remains is the radiation. Now I understand the concept of solar wind, and I can comprehend that a nuke may shine a boatload of radiation on the side of an asteroid, but frankly I fail to see how that could change the asteroid's course in a meaningful way.
It would more likely take a dozen nukes, at specific points of the orbit, to induce any serious change of orbit. Especially since a nuke explosion goes in all directions, so even in the very best of cases, 50% of the energy still radiates away from the asteroid, and the further away the nuke is, the less energy the asteroid will get.
To me, it feels a bit like trying to move a car by blowing on it. I just can't imagine it'll work.
White paint on one side seems a lot better. Let the Sun do the work whenever that side is showing.
I second that. My personal ideal model is of the Laetita Casta kind.
Walking coat hangers are not pleasant to look at, and if you ever touch one, all you feel is the bone. The only reason the fashionistas prefer them is because it takes less material to dress them up.
In other words, the whole fashion world is living in fantasy la-la land and has no actual interest in dressing women.
Which seems quite normal given the number of homosexuals that are rumored to be in that industry.
Could we please reserve the term "Earth-like" to exoplanets that actually resemble Earth ?
A planet that is over 6 times Earth's mass, that circles its sun every day and half and has a surface temp of over 200°C is NOT Earth-like.
Being Earth-like should not be due to the simple virtue of being round and smaller than Jupiter.
I want the term Earth-like to designate planets that actually resemble Earth : something that is Earth-sized to within 25% of Earth's mass, that has an orbit of somewhere around 350 days and a surface temperature average of anywhere from 12°C to 20°C. That is Earth-like.
