Posts by Bucky 2

We're raising generations of MUTANT KIDS, says Icelandic study

Getting YOUNGER

The only data I have on "normal" social behavior is what I see on TV. I figure TV's as scientific as it gets.

In 1936, the ages of the stars of "Romeo and Juliet"--that is, society's view of what the ages of star-crossed "young" lovers would be--were 34 and 43.

In 1996, this was reduced to 17 and 22.

Now, granted, Shakespeare's idea was that they were about 14 or so. But that's ANTIQUITY. I have hard proof--HARD PROOF--that "young" couples are obviously younger today than they were in the 1st half of the 20th century.

HARD proof, I say.

Doctor Who to unwrap new sidekick in Christmas TV special

Tom Baker?

Worst. Dr. Who. Ever.

Troll, troll, troll your boat / gently down the stream...

Meet the company that wants to destroy Twitter. It's Twitter

"whether Twitter itself has even an inkling of why it's popular"

Aw, give 'em a break.

I don't have an inkling why it's popular, either.

Using Facebook causes less eco damage than farting, figures show

But I thought...

I thought that using Facebook was something that CATALIZED farting, not INHIBITED farting.

Amount of CO2 being sucked away by Earth 'has doubled in 50 years'

Doesn't really matter

It doesn't really matter what the processes are, or what the data show.

As long as we admit to being TERRIFIED, it's all okay.

Apple iPad fondlers are about to enter a THIRD DIMENSION

Re: Fantastic!

"The patent is a 35 page/15,000 Word document"

Doesn't this subsume the patent under Microsoft's paradigm and make it a Microsoft patent?

Olympic athletes compete in RAYGUN SHOOTING for the first time

Re: Outraged!

Ooh! Ooh! And driving! You've got to add drunk driving, too!

We'll get Oksana Baiul back into the Olympics yet!

Ever considered putting a rocket up someone's backside?

Keep coolie cool, boy

Am I the only showtune queen to think of "Cool" from West Side Story?

I live in the desert; I'll get my shoes.

Boffins: VAMPIRE stars are PREYING on their companions

Maybe not "Vampire," but "It"

It sounds a little like "It" from A Wrinkle in Time which FREAKED ME THE HELL OUT when I was 8 years old.

Big biz 'struggling' to dump Windows XP

At least SOME of the problem

...isn't JUST the cost of upgrading n copies of Windows XP (which, as has been noted, can be very significant).

It's the problem that there are sometimes n licenses of Windows XP, but m installations, where m > n (sometimes m >> n). Windows XP let you do this fairly easily. It was much more difficult to do starting with Vista.

And maybe there really ARE m licenses, but the same activation key was used every time for "simplicity."

So on top of the upgrade cost, there's the cost of becoming compliant.

Sounds like a good job for "next month."

McDonalds staff 'rough up' prof with home-made techno-spectacles

Re: Unionised Macdonalds members?

I'm betting it was all a horrible misunderstanding.

From his picture, I'm presuming he was trying to eat in the restaurant shirtless.

Coupled with the "wearable computing" nonsense, it's reasonable to assume he isn't really well-connected to social norms.

Finally, being from Toronto, he probably didn't understand much real French (tee hee), so as the employee tried to more and more physically pantomime why there was a problem, the employee accidentally knocked the preposterous contraption off his face.

E-Cat pitching cold fusion to Australians

Segue

Oh, you nasty skeptics, you.

It wasn't so long ago that we were all pooh-poohing the Segway.

But look at us now--in our re-thought cities--zooming around in our two-wheeled wonder-crafts, with our legs de-evolving beneath us before our very eyes.

Native Americans arrived to find natives already there, fossil poo shows

@naked as a JaylikeBird

The problem here is that if the current Native Americans actually conquered and displaced ANOTHER people who were in the Americas before THEM, then any moral superiority in the face of Europeans who did the same thing kind of evaporates.

Global warming: It's GOOD for the environment

Re: "Uranus Probing Project"

I know. I thought they closed that place down.

'Biologically accurate' robot legs walk like an Egyptian

"biologically accurate (if somewhat jerky)"

I've dated guys who were biologically accurate. If somewhat jerky.

Just saying.

'That new Google button was our idea', claims lawsuit

I had an idea, too

I thought it would be cool if there was some kind of device (like a back scratcher) where I could apply suntan lotion to my own back.

I asked at my local Walgreens about such a thing.

The saleswoman at the drug store thought the whole concept was preposterous.

Eventually I did find the thing at Bed, Bath, and Beyond, months later.

I suppose I COULD sue, since I had the idea before the product was available. It DOES look a lot like a back scratcher, just as I described.

But what kind of self-absorbed megalomaniac would I have to be to believe that this idea was so unique nobody else could have come up with it independently?

Firefox 'new tab' feature exposes users' secured info: Fix promised

Not me

All I get is a bunch of thumbnails warning me that I need to be 18 to proceed.

'People should be free from Peeping Toms' snapping pics of them!

Peeping tommery

Lois: He's the one who owesmean apology. He was watching me go to the bathroom!

Peter: Well, clearly he thinks you're attractive, Lois. It's a positive thing.

Thank you, Glenn, for complimenting our family.

Are you a hot BABE in heels and a short skirt? SCIENCE is for YOU

What's "tat," and how do I exchange it for the other thing?

There aren't enough people going into science, male OR female, so I want to see the beefcake edition of this commercial.

I'm thinking shirtless musclemen, a football, and a bunsen burner.

EU boffins ponder robot copters that carry people but no pilots

Inventions are cool

I like reading about interesting inventions that hope to take a step toward solving difficult problems.

I had always thought that consumer flying machines would need to be light and be able to glide if they completely lost power, so that there would be some reasonable hope of walking away from engine trouble (even those troubles brought on by consumer laziness, like trying to fly farther than available fuel allows). I'm not sure the helicopter approach applies.

There's also the hippie BS about lighter vehicles needing less fuel, but at this stage in development, I think we can reasonably set that aside until we have a working safety model.

Fatties are 'destroying the world'

Well, that's fabulous

I know pounds, and I know kilograms.

I'm assuming a "stone" is the average weight of Patsy Stone (who I know hasn't eaten since 1973)?

Mozilla plans multi-engine search results, native iOS browser

What's hard, here?

I don't know if the answer is so hard. Maybe implementing the obvious answers are difficult.

Like the fact that nested <optgroups> should be cascading menus rather than that stupid-ass thing with the emboldened items in a simple drop-down. The old, abandoned IE/Macintosh used to do it this way. But that was it. What am I missing, here?

Like actually /implementing/ HTML5, rather than giving it lip-service and implementing only the <video> tag.

Perhaps I'm just an old man. I don't want to use a web browser for email, or chatting ("Presence?" WTF?). I want to use individual programs written specifically for those purposes--which can be nimbler when markets/usage changes.

'Kindness of America' snapper shot himself in 'act of self-promotion'

HPD

Well, depending on how the Sandusky case goes, maybe he can just claim "Histrionic Personality Disorder," and sell ANOTHER book--meanwhile absolving himself completely from any harm he might have caused other people. Like getting a completely innocent man imprisoned falsely.

CAPTCHA-busting villains branch out from spam into ID theft

FINALLY

I'm glad these monstrosities are finally on the way out.

My objection to CAPTCHAs is completely aesthetic.

I find nothing cute about creating an acronym which looks the way an illiterate with a speech impediment might spell "capture."

America's X-37B top-secret spaceplane returns to Earth

Obviously a tool to retrieve ET Tech

It has to be remote-controlled because the ETs can't stand the Terran radiation that pours from our Terran bodies (perhaps vice-versa, but I'm betting on us being the bad asses, since the ETs haven't taken us over yet).

W3C: 'Do not track' by default? A thousand times: NO!

Fail Safe?

The issue here is really the failure condition.

People SHOULD set their tracking preferences according to their--well--tracking preferences. As in, they should make a conscious yes/no decision about tracking.

But what should the FAILURE condition be? The W3C says that the failure condition should be allowing tracking.

This is not a fail-safe condition.

The fail-safe condition (from the standpoint of the end user) is to DISallow tracking. Companies serving the user (and I choke a bit as I say this), like Microsoft, should properly set the failure condition to disallowing tracking.

If one downloaded a web browser from an advertising company (like, well, Google), one would expect that the advertising company's priorities would probably be in effect--like not even HAVING an opt-out option.

Oracle staffer accused of sex-for-favours in Singapore

Morally Questionable

Isn't doing business with China already in the realm of morally questionable?

But if they were both consenting, I'm not sure there's a moral issue there.

Of course, I'll grant you that sexual contact between people of different genders has a huge ick factor. A man...and a woman???? Ewwwww!

Two new Jovian moons confirmed

Re: I'm confused

It matches the Roman mythology, where the twin goddesses, S/2010 J 1 and S/2010 J 2, burst full-grown from Jupiter's nose hairs.

Dinosaurs on a diet shed tonnes

Re: Yes, but...

Isn't a 30mm Bushmaster some kind of adult product?

Firefox 13 now available for download

Re: Question for Firefox users

This is actually very good information.

Most people are just going to Google for "Firefox Download" and get here:

http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/fx/

There don't seem to be any links from this page to the ESR download page.

Even if a casual user did stumble upon it, the ESR pages warn in big letters: "Firefox ESR is intended for groups who deploy and maintain the desktop environment in large organizations," which clearly rule out a single user.

I'd argue that the frequent updates aren't a problem for their frequency per se, but because the last several updates have been BFD affairs as far as the end user is concerned, reinforcing a "why even bother" attitude.

What's copying your music really worth to you?

Simple fix

I'd be happy to agree that composers and performers are entitled to royalties from copies of recordings made. The amount of money per recording that a copier should be expected to pay should be identical to the amount of money the recording industry pays to the same composers and performers for republishing works under one format or another.

Per copy made of course--not per copy sold, since that wouldn't be the same thing.

That's fair.

Of couse, the bitch is enforcement.

Microsoft to devs: Don't ruin Win 8 launch with crap code

Oooh! Oooh! I have an idea!

How about document the entire API, so it wouldn't actually be POSSIBLE to use "undocumented" API calls?

Yaaaaaayyy!

Adobe sucks on Oracle brain drain for HTML5 game gain

Out of the frying pan

I'm not sure a move from Oracle to Adobe is much of a step up. Dig Adobe's recent thing where they weren't going to apply any security updates to Photoshop CS5. It looks like there's plenty of corporate assholery in both camps.

So, I think we've got several ways to look at this:

(1) the ex-Oraclers are getting a good bump in salary,

(2) the API lawsuit indicates a corporate lack of faith in the thrust of innovation behind java itself, and this disgusted the ex-Oraclers, or

(3) the ex-Oraclers really don't have much in the way of critical thought

Megacorps accuse Chinese fab workers of pilfering designs

Re: ...and just imagine how these cultural issues are impacting your customers...

I have occasionally sent a question by email, and been presented with a response to check out the FAQ or call a phone number.

Translation: "Find out for yourself, and if you can't do that, here's a quarter--call someone who cares."

I couldn't say if the problem is a cultural phenomenon or a corporate one. Though I find it hard to imagine that this outrageous response would be appropriate in any language, in any country.

Bank dumps customers in 'irrigation ditch'

Did I misunderstand?

In the days before cell phones, you used to have to have land lines all over the place.

If you worked in agriculture, I wouldn't find it all that weird to have a phone way the hell out in the fields. Perhaps near an irrigation ditch. It probably wouldn't be a PRIMARY phone number, and I admit such phones are probably more or less obsolete now.

But if you needed a tag for a location of such a phone, what else would you use?

Google's latest webspam crusade 'breaks' search results

Totally OT

I'm sure there are lovers and haters of every change they make. I'm in favor of thwarting the SEO schmucks. But not every change has been in favor of searchers.

For example, you used to be able to do a search like:

+"Worker MPM" +MySQL

...and get pages that MUST include "Worker MPM" and "MySQL." Now the plus sign is interpreted as part of the word. If you exclude the plus signs, you get a crap load of "worker MPM" pages that don't mention MySQL at all, and I DON'T want the phrase "Worker MPM MySQL," either.

Uh, what was the question?

'Geek' image scares women away from tech industry

The analysis itself is somewhat sexist.

The stereotypical "geek" image isn't any more attractive to boys than it is to girls. It's sexist to assume that girls are more sensitive to external judgment than boys are. I'm willing to be educated, here, but being a high school geek, and a boy, did not get me any "cool" points. Quite the contrary.

What I'm hearing is that girls will go ahead and change their very identity, and mortgage their future because high school sucks, and will do so in a way that boys won't.

Sexist crap.

I'll buy the statement that high school career counselors are useless, because I found mine useless. If they're more useless to their girl charges than their boy charges, then we're stepping beyond the realm of negligence and incompetence and entering into the dark woods of criminal activity.

If they've found evidence of criminal activity, then let them start pressing charges and put a stop to it. Otherwise, it sounds like they're starting with a premise that girls are just, oh, so much more SENSITIVE than boys, and then proving it to themselves.

Thank you, Saint Thomas Aquinas, but I don't buy your proofs. Now take this away and bring me the toasted cheese sandwiches I ordered earlier.

Here's a novel idea. Ask girls what they want to do when they grow up, and then help them do it.

Indiana cops arrest violent 6-year-old

Well, obviously something's wrong with the kid, one way or another.

It's premature--with only this article as information--to make a diagnosis about what the kid's problem is, nor how best to resolve it.

My IMPRESSION from reading the article that the principal had some experience with children who were prone to violence. My IMPRESSION is that calling the cops was not the principal's first choice of resolutions.

Since the next step is likely to be expulsion, I find the parent's response--NOT thanking the principal for NOT expelling the child--to be a bit puzzling.

Google Drive stalls on LAUNCH DAY

Re: What's the rush?

You wouldn't put PERSONAL data online.

You'd put data there that you want world+dog to see, like scenic visas of the last time you visited Joshua Tree.

Your dick pics with the scenic vistas of Joshua Tree in the background stay on your own computer, for the FBI to look through, where they belong.

Megaupload case near collapse: report

Re: Future Business Model

Yikes.

I'm in with the emotion of your sentient. But for me, the math just doesn't work out.

Here's the divide-by-zero error, as I see it. It's a kind of an "I'm better than my neighbors" sentiment--that they need to be controlled, but not by me since it's kind of beneath me, and I've got other things to do.

So, wait--I have an idea. I'll charge my government with keeping my idiot neighbors under control. But somehow (surprise!) I'm being lumped together with my inferiors who I think need to be controlled.

Then (a) I don't have any HIV medication, because no-one can make a living off R&D, (b) I can't defend myself from my own government when it becomes fascist, (c) I can't tell anybody about the better mousetrap I just built, and (d) I can't defend myself from my idiot neighbors when they insist that my mousetrap is evidence of witchcraft, and that I should be burned at the stake for it.

Life sucks. It's true. But it could suck worse.

Beefy Fedora could use a dash of miracle whip

Re: btrfs

The reason this is so heartbreaking is that a default btrfs install was mentioned as one of the features of F17 when F16 came out.

I'm reminded somewhat of the "Samba 4 is coming real soon" previews of the past--oh--150 years or so.

Techie stages 'strip down' protest at TSA 'harassment'

Komonews.com HAS the pics, with the naughy bits blocked out. Lets just say he's not a poster boy and leave it at that.

Unemployed offered money to watch grass grow

Re: An automatic lawnmower...

If you put lipstick on that sheep, then you've got to pay the sheep, too, so it's probably a break-even proposition.

Euro climate probe Envisat silenced, boffins baffled

Sentinal 1

Ah, that one takes me back.

"Sentinal One" was the hologram boss of "The Young Sentinals," rebranded "The Space Sentinals" at some point. Great cartoon.

So, what IS the worst film ever made?

Starcrash

This is a best/worst thing.

Oz anti-gang law hits email, maybe torrents too

Spam?

So, if some spammer sends an email to a gang member, it sounds like he can be prosecuted for "consorting" with the gang.

Delicious!

Hello? You'll never guess where I am ... I'm under a ferry

Hey, any day I find myself under a fairy is a good day.

Online advertising isn't creepy enough

Re: That's not strictly true.

Oh, AC, going naked is ALWAYS an excellent choice.

Facebook blamed for getting Thai teens up the duff

Uh, isn't this the same country which has been known world-wide for generations for its prostitution--especially underage prostitution?

DAMN that Facebook!

Alibaba! and! friends! offer! to! swallow! Yahoo! whole!

What I know about Chinese hosts

If the deal goes through, Yahoo will be full of poorly-spelled malware.