* Posts by The Indomitable Gall

1657 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

Life on Mars means subsisting on grim diet of turd-garden spinach

The Indomitable Gall

As stated elsewhere: the bacteria in shit is the bacteria in the human that produced it. Excrement is a vector for spreading a disease that's already present in the population. Sending people with cholera or dysentery into space would be a bad idea. But screening and quarantining will result in a safe population....

The Indomitable Gall

Re: 12 Years - a lot can happen...

"The thing is psychological profiles are a summation of expected and socially acceptable reactions based on previous experiences observed in others. There are no profiles for what to expect when a group who has been exposed to modern civilization is suddenly cut off from that civilization."

There have been a few people who've tried it, though, marooning themselves on desert islands with nothing but a camcorder for company. However, most of the time, they restrict themselves to a year. There was an experiment that was stuck a bunch of folk in a mock-up space capsule for a few years to simulate Mars-length cabin fever. I can't remember how long for or whether they've finished yet....

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Wow...

Human excrement is also of rather low value as a fertiliser due to the way humans have evolved to eat cooked food, thereby stripping most of the nutritional value out of anything passing through the gut. On a space ship, you might get a more productive fertiliser from the skin cells caught by the air filters....

First, the bad news: EA bags Star Wars games rights

The Indomitable Gall

Re: "true believer"

Because "true believer" is a term that Stan Lee dreamed up to refer to the readers of his comics during his time as editor-in-chief at Marvel. So as a "true believer", he's just making do with whatever crap he can get his hands on until such time as he manages to nab the Spiderman license.

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The Indomitable Gall

Re: Just airbagged?

The Spanish article refers to "him" frequently, says "trasvesti" (not a false friends) and "dressed as a woman, with breasts (he was operated on). So it would appear that yes, he was "just airbagged" and yes, it is still acceptable to refer to him as him. (Although there is no mention of whether or not he wants to become a she in the long term.)

Oz chap blows his own Google Glass

The Indomitable Gall

Re: But...

Well, he didsay that he would say "Open Facebook". And he's there.

The UK's copyright landgrab: The FAQ

The Indomitable Gall

Re: hmm so...

"should copies of films start turning up online without credits.. etc.. then would they then be deemed legal copies?"

No, and this leads to a point that Andrew maybe doesn't push as much as he could.

Orphan work legislation will very rarely have any effect on works owned by the "big guys" as anything with any major success is likely to be easily researched, so is still well protected.

It's us "little guys" with our videos that aren't notable enough for an IMDB entry or a Wikipedia page that produce stuff that can't be traced.

The big guys would have blocked the legislation if it reduced their protection rather than ours.

So long, Hotmail: Remaining users migrated to Outlook.com

The Indomitable Gall
FAIL

Re: Has It been a year already?

Well I personally didn't have a problem with sending emails. I did find the new print procedure interesting though. Rather than a clickable "print" option, you have to click on "forward" then enter the address of another account you have access to....

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Impressive

@Roland6

"If memory serves me correctly, HOTmail..."

Clearly your memory doesn't serve you correctly. The site was called HoTMaiL.....

ANCIENT CURSED RING known to TOLKIEN goes on display

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Valkyries

Nope, that's a well-established myth. JRR Tolkien was a complete world folklore geek and was aware of more ring stories than Steven Seagal has made crappy straight-to-video action flicks.

Hard luck lads, todger size DOES matter: Official

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Well in the classical world...

There's another theory that says classical statues are modestly endowed because of the self-consciousness of the patron. Do you want a statue in your home that has a bigger one than you? There have been documented cases of sculptures in the classical style being "reduced" for this very reason.

(Of course, this goes hand in hand with the observation that most men of average size believe they are smaller than average because foreshortening makes your own penis look short when you look down at it, compared to seeing another man's when he's naked and standing a modest distance away from you.)

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Really?

More to the point, it's a survey. Ask a conscious question, get a conscious answer. People will always rank on the variables when they're consciously ranking. Gaze analysis, skin galvanisation (for arousal) etc are much more objective ratings.

The problem is that woman aren't turned on by grey polygonads, so there is no objective measure to be made here.

Mali to give away .ML domains for free

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Allegedly?

Unfortunately, head office is the CIA, who in a particularly "Our Man in Havana"/"Tailor of Panama" move got some overpriced and underinformed informant to invent the name for them. Allegedly.

Maggie Thatcher: The Iron Lady who saved us from drab Post Office mobes

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Thank the stars she privatised BT...

Yeah, Thatcher's "liberalisation" of the markets has left the majority of the country still connected to a single operator that is still considered monopolistic to the point that it has to be forced by law to charge MORE than its competitors in order not to be seen to be unfairly leveraging its monopoly.

Think about that. Next year is the china anniversary of BT Plc, and after two decades in a "competitive market" it will still constitute a monopoly. The absolute success of privatisation.

Vietnamese high school kids can pass Google interview

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Nature/nurture: fight!

"The world needs ditch-diggers too - far more than those constrained to the role by their intellectual ability."

Google "conservation tourism" -- intellectual people often pay to go away and dig ditches for a couple of weeks.

One of the core ideas of early (ie. pre-Soviet) communism was that people would be happier with a bit of variety in their lives than becoming increasingly efficient at a single specific task.

So most of the time, the local doc's in his surgery, but come harvest time, he's out there bailing hay like the best of them. Just like in a traditional community. Hence "communism".

Drunk driving: No more dangerous than talking on handsfree mobe

The Indomitable Gall

Re: The difference between mobile use and drinking and simulators and reality

The other thing is that once you start drink, the impaired judgement not only has a direct effect on your ability to drive, it has the indirect effect of making it easier to say "another wee half won't kill anyone."

Famous last words.

New nuke could POWER WORLD UNTIL 2083

The Indomitable Gall
Coat

Potential energy

"The reactors only use about 3 per cent of the potential energy stored in the uranium pellets that power them,"

Easy solution: just let them fall further!

Ten serious sci-fi films for the sentient fan

The Indomitable Gall

Sunshine...?

Sunshine was an excellent spectacle, and a great attempt to revive the "endeavour sci-fi" genre, but two problems:

A) it was fairly light on the "human nature" side of things -- the baddie in Sunshine wasn't much of a clear analogy of anything. To be fair, a lot of endeavour sci-fi is lacking in this respect, and often they do descended into chase movies in a metal box.

B) the only reason we left the cinema impressed with it was the sheer scale and spectacle of it. I loved it. I said to a friend how much I loved it. He criticised the ending. I realised he was right. The film was really well crafted, and it perfectly generated willful suspension of disbelief, which excuses a really nonsensical ending only as far as "good entertainment", but not to the point where it can be considered "excellent sci-fi"....

Infinite loop: the Sinclair ZX Microdrive story

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Hip?

Don't you remember the big walker robots in StarFox? They had hips....

Heavily armed dolphins on rampage in Black Sea

The Indomitable Gall
Stop

EXCLUSIVE!!!

Sun Exclusive! Soldiers go off base on quest for booze and sex!

Chaos Theory causes password entry pandemonium

The Indomitable Gall

Overcoming muscle memory

The problem with muscle memory is it makes dictionary attacks possible.

Simple solution: learn to program in an obscure, outdated programming language. New muscle memory, but unlikely to be in the attackers' dictionary lists.

Z80 assembler anyone? A mathematical expression in FORTH?

Multimillionaire Brit games dev wants your cash for Shroud of the Avatar

The Indomitable Gall

Re: multimillionaire seeks funding?

@JDK

""The rest of the successful business world" rely on attracting investors and partners precisely so they are operating at lower risk."

Yes, but investors and partners share the risk and also the reward. Any discount in the Kickstarter price over retail really doesn't account for the high risk of nothing ever appearing.

Tito's Mars mission to use HUMAN WASTE as radiation shield

The Indomitable Gall

Nice font...

Just noticed the font on the spaceship mockup. How original!

The Indomitable Gall

Yes but...

The aerogel would be in addition to all the original mass for the food. The goal of storing cr@p is to refill the gaps left by taking the food out.

On a side point, can anyone explain to me how aerogels manage to work as radiation shielding? I just can't get my head round how an ultra-low density solid could possibly stop anything.... But then again, I'm just a Computer Science grad....

Strategic SIEGE ROBOTS defeated by 'heavily intoxicated' man, 62

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Vandalising government property?

Quite. If I was drunk and some crazy mechanised contraption battered down my door, sure as hell* I'd want to beat it to scrap with whatever I had to hand....

* (well, surer than hell -- I am agnostic, after all...)

Four firms pitch hi-def DRM for Flash cards

The Indomitable Gall

Re: When will the studios realise...

@The BigYin

"If you don't like the price the market sets, you do not have the right to interfere in said market and create artificial barriers (e.g. region locks) to try and get the price you want (which is what the RIAA, BPI et al try and do)."

Region locks and regional licensing aren't there to stop me and you getting stuff at the "price the market sets", because the price we pay correlates very closely with the cost of production. Region locks allow the producers to make extra money by selling in regions where the price we pay wouldn't be viable.

Because "the market" is very different for people on a nice 20k+ a year wage and the poor sods who make our trainers for £1 a day.

Please please please don't believe that the price they pay for Spiderman Umpteen is the true value of Spiderman Umpteen. Maybe it's crap overhyped blockbuster sh!te, but it's still an expensive production. If there was no region locking and no ability to block parallel import of IP works, it wouldn't mean a reduction in film prices, it would mean an increase, because American film studios would not be able to afford to sell at the street price for Ougadougou the world over, so they'd be restricting their market to North America and Europe, and they'd have to make all their profits here.

(Of course, loosing out on Spiderman Umpteen might be good for developing countries as they could instead build their own film industries and stop exporting their cash to rich US conglomerates, but that's a different issue.)

And going back to "market forces", if you're not willing to pay, you're not forced into buying. That's the consumer's prerogative. The producer offers, the consumer accepts or rejects. Part of what they offer is the DRM, region locking etc, and that is the producer's prerogative.

But nobody seriously describes IP infringement as a legitimate "market force".

Elon Musk: 'Fudged' NYT article cost Tesla $100m

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Who cares?

@Snake

"The facts are that this is pure driver error. The driver failed to provide enough 'fuel' (power charge) to go the distance necessary.

Period. The driver ran out of gas.

Yet somehow this is the fault of an inanimate object. Somehow this is the fault of an electric car, not to go further than the charge level versus distance provided to it.

The quite indisputable fact is that Broder failed to charge the car fully at the Newark, DE Supercharger station. Broder stopped the charge at 72%. His excuse is 'it said I had enough charge'. But that's the car's fault."

Yes it's the car's fault. Do you want your reviewers to execute everything flawlessly... or realistically?

Put it this way: when a car fails its Euro NCAP crash test, do you complain that driving into a brick wall is "driver error" and therefore the obliteration of the crash-test dummy is not "the car's fault"...?

Google reveals Glass details in patent application

The Indomitable Gall

What exactly are they patenting?

Projection of laser on the retina has been a research goal for ages -- the idea is nothing new. Having a wearable device on your head is not a new idea either. What's innovative in this particular theoretical patent???

Ad-titan Google blocks Adblock Plus in Android security tweak

The Indomitable Gall

To be fair...

To be fair, while I admit that Google have more than a passing interest in ensuring people don't use Adblock, as a security move, they've got a point.

To me, the fact that users can install a proxy server locally without their knowledge sounds like an attack vector begging for an exploit.

If I install "Vegetable Ninja" and later find that my Hotmail account is being piped through a black-hat proxy that's adding a couple of spam messages for every mail I send, I won't be happy.

Nature pulls ‘North Korean radioactivity’ story

The Indomitable Gall

"Kaboom"....?

"I believe that the correct term for the effect of a nuclear warhead is; "KABOOM!!"."

No, it's K. By the time the A starts, your eardrums have been vaporised. By the B, your genes have been torn apart to the point where even Findus wouldn't be able to tell the difference between you and horsemeat.

The Indomitable Gall

Re: "Koreans are like that"

There are some very major differences between North and South Korea -- to compare the two is just like dismissing the differences between West Germany (vorsprung durch technik) and East Germany (vault-spring durch espionage) in the 1980s.

iPad? Pah. Behold the EYEPAD, patented by Sony for the 'PS4'

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Well

The pad is really not that generic. If you look closely, you'll see that it's not even a rectangle.

As Sony is a very rich company, I'm assuming their designers understand something called "perspective", therefore taking their drawing as Gospel, it must be a non-orthogonal pad, which is something entirely new....

Pope resigns months after launching social networking effort

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Thank God!

Yes, but more than that, I am now completely sure that I can never be anything other than completely unsure as to the nature of life, the universe and everything? (I'm also completely sure that I don't use the "Oxford comma" -- I'm not from Oxford!)

I was mostly agnostic when I was Catholic, because I accepted on a fundamental level that even the most unshakeable faith is not "certainty", merely "faith".

The Indomitable Gall

Re: As a Hitler Youth volunteer...

Right, let's put this to rest once and for all most Germans of his age were in the Hitler youth. You can't hold him responsible for that.

But most Germans of his age haven't knowingly aided and abetted paedophiles in their evasion of justice. You can hold him responsible for that.

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Maybe he read Richard Dawkin's "The God Delusion"

"It's possible for a man to be arrogant and correct."

However, it is usually impossible for an arrogant man to convince anyone else that he is correct. Dawkins is an expert at preaching to the choir such that the choir think he's actually said something meaningful, but his entire writing style is antagonistic, and no debate that starts with one party calling the other stupid ever bore fruit....

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Thank God!

If he'd at least had the guts to say it was because of the cover-ups, he might have got some respect, but he's repeatedly refused to accept any real culpability.

"If not, he will be sent down and, upon his death, may he burn in hell."

Actually, is there not something in the Bible about those who are punished on Earth being let off the hook in the afterlife, and those who escape punishment on Earth being damned to eternal torment? Perhaps someone ought to remind him that the longer he denies any wrong-doing, the less time he's got to receive Earthly just before departing this mortal coil....

(These revelations were the straw that broke the back of my dwindling faith. Now totally definitely agnostic.)

NASA deep space probe sends back video of 'Comet of the Century'

The Indomitable Gall

Re: poor FX

Ah, you got us. We actually just used an outtake from George Méliès's Journey to the Moon and we hoped no-one would notice.

Our sincerest apologies,

NASA.

Netbooks were a GOOD thing and we threw them under a bus

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Eee PC?

Also mosquito for "your blood smells nice."

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Netbooks not attractive for regular users

Get yourself to a university. Stick your head in a few lecture theatres. Netbooks have a reasonable chunk of the student market. Small and light enough to take to class, cheap enough to afford. I did once write to the Open University complaining about their mandating of .DOC files and suggesting that telling everyone to install the *totally free* OpenOffice.org wouldn't be onerous. They replied saying they had chosen MS Office because most people already had it and they didn't want to force people to install new software. (!!) I also suggested to them that IT support would be much easier if they offered a standard OU netbook offering a completely uniform operating environment, while also opening up an alternative revenue stream. They didn't go for that either.

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Throw it under a bus? Great idea.

Windows version, then? Here's a nickel, kid, go and buy yourself a real operating system.

Me, I used to fire up my Linux eee pc at the same time as my Windows PC and use it to check my email while I was waiting for the other PC to boot up.

I also found it a handy video phone as Skype on my 3-or-4-times-as-powerful machine kept stalling due to something or other running in the background.

The Indomitable Gall

Saturation

@Mark .

"But no, what happened is the market reached saturation - everyone who wanted one, had one, and there was no draw to convince additional people to buy them."

I'm not convinced this is strictly true, I just think the current market for the netbook is a bit "niche", because I'm teaching in a university, and there's three types of devices on my student's desks: tablets, Macbooks and netbooks.

The student market is somewhat niche, but it's nothing to be sniffed at. I'm surprised it's not enough to keep two or three models in production, because I figure a lot of students might opt for the tablet this year but decide they need a proper keyboard next year....

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Come back Netbook

I actually suspect that tablets could provide a genuine second wind for the netbook. If you Google "android mini laptop" you'll see that there's a white-label device or two out there using cheap tablet parts to built up 7" smaller-than-eee netbooks. Cutting the touchscreen makes it cheaper than a tablet, apparently. If tablet users do start using keyboards and mice to use their tablets for something more, we might start seeing better pseudo-desktop support in Android. If the manufacturers can build a range of netbooks and tablets off the same production line will minimal retooling, then the netbook might make its comeback in the form of Android.

If this comes it will start in the Far East, as the no-names have nothing to lose by challenging Wintel dominance, and everything to gain.

And finally... why do I think this is realistic?

Even Microsoft is trying to merge the mobile and desktop experience. If the public is given the choice between the Android mobile experience or Windows Phone, which would they chose? ...what has the reaction to W8 been like so far...?

The Indomitable Gall

eee 4G

I've just ordered a new charger for my 4 gig stock 1st gen EEE. I suspect I might find I need a new battery shortly, but I'm sick of classes being held up because my vastly-more-powerful 2012 laptop doesn't want to display the video I'm trying to show my students. It's small, light, with good codec support and an SVGA port. Job's a good un.

Tech firms face massive tax bill if Dutch vote to end loopholes

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Who pays the tax?

Uh-huh.

Now, if Starbucks isn't paying tax, and Mrs Robinson's Tea Shoppe next door is (because it's UK based), is that in the public's interest? And is the lower cost at Starbucks passed on to the customer...?

The Indomitable Gall

@Obviously!

"This whole Jesus/religious story you are preaching is fiction! Let’s stick to the facts and not waffle on about wastage or how tax is spent in ways you do not approve of."

Go on then, prove it! The "render unto Caesar" stuff and the "turn the other cheek/go the extra mile" stuff are very likely the teachings of a genuine radical in Judea during the Roman occupation. It's all about passive resistance.

Now imagine two thousand years from now, the dominant religion is Gandhiism, which worships Mahatma, the son of Brahma, born of a virgin in India. Three world leaders came to pay tribute after his birth was foretold on Twitter, and they went to Queen Victoria to ask where the new King of the Indians was, which led her to massacre all the children in Amritsar.

Would that change the fact that the teachings of Mohandas K Gandhi were and are teachings of peace, of love, and of general moral good?

So why do you dismiss the good teachings of religion along with their bad parts? Throwing the bathwater out with the baby Jesus, so to speak....

Another new asteroid-mining firm: 'First commercial space fleet'

The Indomitable Gall

@LarsG

It doesn't take a crook like Bernie Madoff to discredit this sort of thing.

London City Airport only became profitable when it folded, loosing the original investors a lot of cash. Another group picked it up cheap and the turnaround was pretty much inevitable because they didn't start with a crippling debt.

The original channel tunnel company went bust, leaving another group to pick it up cheap, and again, it was because the original debt burden was lost that the thing went profitable.

The same thing happens on smaller projects if they're still ambitious, such as the Edinburgh International Climbing Arena, that the council picked up cheap after the guys that built it went bust (the original construction cost was too high to ever make a profit).

For anything really big, you need someone else to make the loss first so that you can make the profit in the aftermath.

(And of course this is the point of patents: to afford some protection to the trailblazing losers so that they remain competitive against the guys without the debt burden from the R&D. Space patents will most likely deal with the specifics rather than the core problems of space mining, particularly given most of the big problems have already undergone a lot of public debate, so there'll be a fair bit of wiggle room to work around them....)

Asteroid-mining 'FireFlys' will be ready for action by 2015, vows space firm

The Indomitable Gall

Re: They have arrived!

Are you sure that's not tinfoil, and not a sintered metal powder brain/computer interface....?

Microsoft to end Windows 8 discounts on January 31

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Shooting themselves in the foot?

Well, I can see from the internet that the US doesn't seem to care about eternal discounts ("must end soon" being a permanent fixture on many smaller websites), but in many countries it's fraud to claim a discounted price when there's never a "full" price to discount it against -- the UK is one of these.

So what choice did they have? If they'd raised the price only in countries where they were legally obliged to do so, there would have been a backlash against "rip-off" foreign prices etc.

If they want to drop the price, they'll have to wait a while -- 3 months, IIRC in the UK, and it's unlikely to be much longer elsewhere.

NRA: Video games kill people, not guns. And here's our video game

The Indomitable Gall

"I'm pretty certain no-one in the NRA really believes games cause violence,"

@Matt Bryant,

"I'm pretty certain no-one in the NRA really believes games cause violence,"

Why so sure? You're forgetting the basics of being "invested" in an idea.

The gun owner says "I am a good person -- I don't kill people". He then conflates his self-identity as a "good person" with his group identity as a member of the firearms community. This group identity is tied to the physical items we call guns. Therefore the firearms enthusiast has to believe that a gun is a good thing, as it is part of his "good person" identity.

The evidence that he is presented with overwhelmingly indicates that guns are Very Bad Things indeed, and that now threatens his own self-image, as he actually considers the gun a part of his person. Therefore he must convince himself 100% that the problem is elsewhere.

That's the psychology behind it, and that's what we've got to fight against.