Posts by sisk

Fast food firm fields Sith sandwich

I've said it before, I'll say it again: the best burgers come off of grills in backyards. Some are better than others, but most are FAR better than any burger that comes in a bag. The best ones, in my opinion, come off of charcoal powered grills.

Official: File-sharing is a religion... in Sweden

@Asgard

"I refer you to the Asgard in the Stargate series who fought against and stopped all false gods "

You forget that they were, themselves, false gods. Granted they took up that mantle to protect civilizations that they felt weren't able to handle the truth, but they were still false gods. Actually that also brings up another point: they were condescending bastards. Benevolent condescending bastards, but condescending bastards all the same.

Completely unrelated to the issue at hand (but related to something you said), condoms do very little to prevent HIV infections. The more people who know that the better. If you doubt it, just ask your doctor if a condom gives you enough protection to have sex with someone you know to be infected. The virus is smaller than the space between the silicon molocules, so trying to stop it with a silicone condom is rather like trying to keep water out of a submarine with a mesh screen. The only effective measure against HIV we currently have is responsible behaviour. That means getting tested regularly and keeping your sex life tied up in your long term, monogamous relationships. I'm not saying wait till you're married or anything (because we all know how well THAT message goes over, and, given that my eldest child is older than my marriage, trying to deliver it would make me a hypocrit anyway), but one night stands and the like are just a way of asking for trouble.

I think the comparison is that they are not so much actual religions as fronts for another purpose. Scientology began as a money making scheme for its founder (and presumedly remains one, though I couldn't begin to guess who's getting the money now) and this is nothing more than an excuse for copyright infringement.

iPad typos are Apple's fault, not yours - new claim

Sigh

It's so tempting to rag on Apple, but the thing seems to be doing what it was designed to do. This guy just can't seem to pick up his fingers while he's typing, hence the errors. So the fault lies with the typist trying to use a touchpad the same way he would use a real keyboard. That's never going to work no matter how well the thing's designed.

Now autocorrect, that's a fail. I don't expect something like that to be perfect but Apples version of autocorrect seems to be worse than just having the misspelled words in your message.

KIBOSH 'non lethal' sticky-bomb hits a car, fills it with gas

Less lethal

Given that most less lethal weapons have very few (and in a couple cases no) documented fatalities, I'd say the term is applicable. It's a hell of a lot more accurate than the 'non-lethal' term they used to use.

Put another way, which are you less likely to die from: a taser or a bullet? A fragmentation grenade or a flash bang? A sticky bomb spaying sleep gas into your car or a 40mm grenade landing in your lap?

Apple to conquer connected TVs? Steady on, lad

A dozen ugly boxes? Try one, and it's usually not ugly. Any reasonably decent BluRay player will do it all and most are asthetically well designed. Failing a decent BluRay player, you can add a wireless Roku that's just as tiny as an Apple TV.

As for BluRay needing to die, I don't know what BluRay player you're using, but I have no such trouble watching BluRays on my PS3.

LOHAN fires up sizzling thruster

Copperheads?

It's been quite a while since I've flown model rockets, but it used to be a weekly event. Back in those days of yore when I had time to do things like spend whole days building model rockets and chasing them down I found copperheads to be the bane of my hobby. Sadly they were all I could get around here. As if the failure rate wasn't bad enough, safety pactices (at the time enforced by elders carrying titles like 'Dad') demanded that we take a ten minute break from launching just in case the motor decided to spontaniously ignite. To be fair it did happen on occasion.

Met to push rape warnings over Wi-Fi to Xmas partygoers

WTF?

"If...their judgement is impaired by alcohol they are legally unable to consent"

Not that I condone taking advantage of drunks, but surely there's a difference between falling victim to a set of beer goggles and being assaulted. Does the law over on the island across the pond really treat them the same?

US spy drone hijacked with GPS spoof hack, report says

Must we turn everything into an opportunity to take a dig at the Bible? Seriously, the authenticity (or lack thereof, as you see it) of the Bible has nothing at all to do with the situation. AC's point was that the average Tea Partier believes that by starting wars in the Middle East brings them closer to the second coming of Christ, but that if they actually bothered to read it they would see that it says quite the opposite. Basically (s)he's highlighting the stupidity of the people gunning for permanent war by showing how they don't even know their own religion.

I'm not sure I agree with the assessment of the Tea Party. True most of them need to sit down and actually read the book they're so hot on, but I'm not convinced that very many of them actually believe that starting wars in the Middle East can hasten the end of time.

@Imsimil Berati-Lahn

Over a captured spy drone? I very much doubt it. The American public is so sick of being at war at this point that starting another one would be tantamount to political suicide for any American politician. With a Presidential election coming up and the current President looking like the underdog already no one in DC is going to make that mistake.

P2P veterans sue the Cloud ... for copying their stuff

Re: Why not?

Unless dragging this through the courts for the next decade until Bermeister and Weiss run out of money costs more than just paying the royalties they've got no chance. Sadly the American civil court system more often than not comes down to who has the most money that they're willing to throw at lawyers, and Google and Amazon have quite a lot of money to throw. VM Ware has a lot also, though not quite as much. I have no idea where Dropbox is sitting, but they can hide behind Google and Amazon on this one. The big boys won't want a precedent set against them just because Dropbox is smaller than they are.

Sony off the hook for killing Linux on PS3

You're mistaken. It wasn't Linux that allowed PS2s to run pirated games. It was the fact that the console was cracked to be able to run unsigned code. The way the OtherOS was implemented was the only thing that prevented piracy on the PS3 for so long. Remember it's always been the Linux geeks who crack open consoles for unsigned code first and pirates come in behind them. If you let the Linux geeks do what they want without having to crack the system the pirates are pretty impotent. The PS3 is a perfect case in point. For years it was considered unhackable, but they pulled OtherOS and we had proof of concept code within 6 months, Linux within 8, and pirated games within a year.

"Was obvious this was going to fail."

No. Legally it shouldn't have failed. Sony effectively lied to their customers to sell a product and they obviously now own another judge.

"However the reality is, most of them weren't really games I guess, but gamer stooges dressed up by Microsoft to fuel the Sony internet hate machine."

No. The reality is that most of them were Linux geeks, about the last people in the world who would allow themselves to be dressed up by Microsoft for any purpose. When it came out the PS3 was one of the best machines on the market. I can tell you for certain that the OtherOS feature was a major factor in my decision to get PS3 rather than put the money towards upgrading my gaming PC.

"The harsh reality is, the ONLY reason Sony removed OtherOS, what because GeoHot was bragging online about how he was using it to try and get access to the hypervisor."

Irrelevant. That doesn't change the fact that they removed a feature people had paid for. GenHot's hack didn't pose any risk to Sony's bottom line. That was just their excuse.

"The other harsh reality is, nobody cared about OtherOS before this, it was an unloved and unused add-on. It's only when gamers were tricked into thinking they were losing something that might one day open the system up to pirated games, did they start caring."

Complete BS. If that were true why is it that as soon as OtherOS vanished we saw the regular progression of hacks, starting with getting Linux on the machine, that eventually led to pirated games on the formerly 'unhackable' PS3 when for years before that no one had even gotten so much as proof of concept code to run on the thing? There's a whole community of people who cared about OtherOS, and I'm one or them.

2011's Best... Smartphones

Asthetics...

are all opinion based. Personally I find the iOS to be the most fugly thing in the mobile market, with the phones it runs on being not far behind, but I can guarantee you that a whole lot of people will disagree with me.

As for the RAZR, I wouldn't call it elegant by any stretch, but neither was the original RAZR (I had one for a couple years and it was just plain uncomfortable in my hand). I also wouldn't call it fugly. A little odd with that hump for the camera, sure, but fugly? Nah.

Mythbusters cannonball ‘myth-fires’

@Zippy

True, they are still subject to civil liabilities, but they're already taking care of those without so much as an angry word being cast in their direction, let alone having to be dragged kicking and screaming through the courts. All in all I think they're handling their civil responsibilties in this instance far better than the police would have.

Given that they had filled out all the necessary paperwork to use a police bomb range and there were officers on hand to supervise the test, I would have to say that the likelihood of any laws being broken approaches zero rapidly.

You're all too critical

What it sounds like to me, taking the sheriff's official statement into consideration, is that the cannonball bounced in an unpredictable way instead of burying itself in the backstop the way everyone expected it to. Likely it was pointed in a direction that was uninhabited until the bounce. The Mythbusters do take safety very seriously, despite their propensity towards high explosives, after all, plus there were cops on hand to make sure they took all the proper precautions.

Really other that the fact that they were working with a very dangerous weapon for entertainment it doesn't sound like they did anything wrong.

Plywood's cheap and plentiful. Brick is expensive and difficult to get in a lot of parts of the US. Also, in California plywood homes tend to outlast brick ones. I think it has to do with flexing instead of breaking in earthquakes.

Alec Baldwin kicked off plane for playing with his phone

So many words...

And me with too much decency to use them in public. Seriously, though, would someone take some of these idiotic celebs aside and explain to them, with a clue-by-four if need be, that the rules apply to them just like they do to anyone else? It's like they think being famous somehow makes them better than the rest of us.

And as if that weren't bad enough, the whining and the horrendous grammer is enough to make me contemplate violence. Maybe I'm just a bit more irritable than normal today, but that's just unacceptable from an adult. It's barely tolerable when it comes from teens who are young enough not to know better.

Swiss insist file-sharers don't hurt copyright holders

"I do not know what you do but I sincerely hope it does not end up online one day and becomes a downloadable commodity because if it does, your fecked, your boss is fecked and so are all his suppliers as long a people have the same mind set as your good self. It is theft and it always affects someone."

That comment is ironic in the extreme given that I'm a web developer.

But I digress. Had you bothered to read my post in it's entirety you would have noticed two things:

1) Copyright infringement is, in my opinion, an immoral activity. I do not condone it, I mearly don't like seeing it called something it isn't. Calling file sharing theft is like calling a severe but non-sexual beating a rape. It is sensational and dishonest, but the beating was still wrong.

2) When a file is downloaded the owner can still sell that file to legitimate customers, which is why it is not theft. In order for theft to occur, someone must loose something. You would have noticed this had you even bothered to read the part of my post you quoted.

Now to your points:

When you steal a car, the owner of that car looses something (the car). Therefore theft has occured. Now if you were able to somehow produce an exact copy of that car out of thin air and drive off with it, then the owner of the car would still have the original and would not have lost anything. That is infringement.

The equating of P2P with rioting is hyperbole at best and stupidity at worst. As I have pointed out and logically proven, infringement is a different beast than theft, and last time I checked file sharing has never resulted in bodily injuries.

And as I said, I'm a web developer. If my stuff isn't downloadable there's something terribly wrong.

There's a difference

When you steal food, someone looses something. After you steal the food the store can not then sell it to someone else and has therefore lost a sale. That's not the case at all with filesharing.

When you download a song, there is nothing to prevent the producer from selling the same song to someone else. As study after study after study has show, the vast majority of file sharers would not (and truely, in most cases, could not) pay for the content that they download. So the sell to the pirate would never have happened anyway (and therefore is not lost) and the sell to a paying customer is not prevented (and therefore is not lost). Therefore, nothing is lost and the content owner is in no way harmed. The same holds true with pretty much every other form of frequently downloaded media. That's why filesharing is not theft. Which is not to say that it's not immoral - that's a seperate discussion (and one I suspect you and I would agree upon judging from your comment here). However laws should not be based upon morality. Morality is too subjective to make a foundation for law, unless you like the idea of laws preventing the sale of liquor on Sundays or bans on gay marriage (both the products of morality based law). Harm, however, is much more testable and verifiable and makes a much more firm basis for law.

Japan, Russia in plan for elephant to birth CLONE MAMMOTH

Health problems?

Don't clones typically exhibit a myriad of health problems and die relatively young? I know that Dolly died about the same time as her much older mother/donor/whatever the appropriate term is. Have they ever worked out that problem with cloning or do they still tend towards those kinds of problems? If they haven't gotten that worked out then there's really not much point in bringing back an extinct species like this.

Potential ALIEN LIFE habitats FOUND ON MOONS

I think the key phrase in the article is "along Earthly lines".

Let's face it, if you start considering not-Earthling-like life then we have to take a good long look at every single exoplanet, not to mention searching stars for potential hydrogen based life. It's just easier to narrow the parameters down to looking for other carbon based life that breaths oxygen.

Anonymous launches OpRobinHood against banks

FAIL!

I agree with the sentiment, but this course of action crosses the line from distasteful to flat out wrong. I just lost some respect for Anonymous.

Lovefilm dumps Flash, BLINDS Linux fans with Silverlight

"Blame Flash/Adobe"

No, their only problem is that there's no DRM built into Flash. That's a Good Thing, really, and one of the reasons that Flash is better for consumers than Silverlight.

"Blame the Movie studios pressuring them."

Yes, absolutely. The moronic movie studios are so concerned about piracy that they're stupidly chasing away legitimate customers to prevent it. This move will result in an increase in piracy, as the first AC has already pointed out.

"Blame Netflix."

You do realize that Netflix was forced to make this same move several years ago, right? You can't watch Netflix on Linux or antique PPC based Macs either, and an Android it only works because there's an app for it.

That hasn't happened to Netflix yet, at least not to my knowledge, and they use Silverlight also.

Iran bans Tehran invasion first-person shooter

Let's hope not. Some of us Americans are damn sick and tired of constantly being at war with some random nation on the other side of the globe.

Failure of logic

"In that Battlefield 3 is not available for purchase in Iran, we can only hope the ban will help prevent pirated copies reaching consumers there,"

So zero sales is a good thing because it also means zero piracy? That just proves to me that certain corporate entities have completely lost thier minds when it comes to piracy. I'm not saying piracy is good, but surely having some income and a lot of piracy is better than no income and no piracy.

Despite Android lead, iOS devs slurp scads more mazuma

In that case you're pretty much wrong. I know which Android phones are offered for free by the carriers around here and you very rarely see them. Maybe one in ten of the Androids I see is one of the 'free with contract' models. In fact a lot of the Android phones I see actually cost more than iPhones.

Actually no I'm not. If I find something useful I'm quite happy to pay for it. I just don't happen to find having my pocket picked for 30% useful (and make no mistake, I'd HAVE to charge for any app I put in the iStore just because of how expensive it is to get them in there in the first place). Nor do I find paying an insane yearly fee for the dubious privilege of allowing a multi-billion dollar to make a few bucks off my work while contributing to their abusive business model useful.

Scuze you

Why would I pirate anything on Android when there's already a free app out there for nearly anything I could want?

Besides I'd rather give my apps away free on Android (which I do) than deal with Apple's BS. Granted I don't make my living off my apps, but still Google's a hell of a lot friendlier to us than Apple is.

"Android users are by and large of the free app (and free phone!) variety, cheap on the .99 and free with the semi-literate 1 star reviews."

I was with you right up till you started slamming free apps. There are some very good free apps avaialable for both iOS and Android. Angry Birds (yes, I know there's a paid version, but honestly what percentage of the AB install base does that represent? 10%, 20% at the most?), Dropbox, Quickdocs (again, yes there's a paid version, but how many use it?), and K9, just to name a few.

I guess my experience with iOS is prettly limited, so maybe the free apps over there are crap, and I will admit there's no shortage of crap in the Android market, but there are also some real gems.

Dragonriders of Pern author Anne McCaffrey dies

RIP Anne McCaffrey

It's been a while since I've picked up a Pern book (and I never could get into any of her other series), but I remember getting so involved reading Moreta that I started to panic when I sneezed while reading it. Then, of course, my brain kicked in and I remembered the plague was only happening in the book. The really funny thing is that I watched my room mate do the exact same thing two weeks later.

Few books can draw me in that way. I consider it the mark of greatness when it happens.

Got a few minutes to help LOHAN suck?

Low Orbit Vacuum Experimental Lab And Cooling Environment

Better waterproof the camera if you take that approach. It'll be sitting in a puddle, or possibly even a block of ice (depending on a number of unknown variables) in the bottom of the chamber by the time the vaccum is formed.

Man sues boss for 'condemning him to eternal damnation'

Ridiculous....

both the termination of the employee over this and the reaction of a whole shedload of commentards. Just because you all think his beliefs are nuts he's not entitled to the same kind of respect for those beliefs that you'd all give someone who shares your own? Get a collective life.

The boss here was CLEARLY in the legal wrong, to say nothing of it just being an a-hole move in the first place. Even in a 'right-to-work' state like Georgia you cannot be legally terminated for acting in accordance to your religious beliefs unless those beliefs cause a significant disruption to your ability to do your job, and even then it's iffy in a lot of states. That's right up there with firing someone for being gay on the list of civil rights. Not wearing a sticker that says you were accident free for 666 days? No affect on his job.

LHC results may solve riddle of how universe can exist

*BOOOOM*

Dangit....forgot my reinforced hat. I knew I shouldn't have clicked that link.

IKEA cuts ribbon on 'I've Got A Screw Loose Street'

Nah. You've just got a screw loose.

Voyager 2 finally agrees to a long hard thrust

"Both Voyagers 1 and 2 are currently at the outer limits of our solar system, in the region of space known as the heliosheath, the outer shell of the bubble of charged particles around our Sun. They will soon reach interstellar space, the space between the stars."

I can't recall...are the Voyager craft capable of transmitting pictures back to us still? I'd love to see the view of our little corner of the galaxy from interstellar space in something other than an artists' rendition.

PETA riled by Mario's raccoon skin suit

The people eating tasty animals have really lost their minds this time.

Really? A video game is cruel to animals because the main character wears a fur? Kids are going to start thinking that if they skin a raccoon they can fly and turn into a statue? Give me a break.

Mines the one with the smartphone running a NES emulator with SMB3 in the pocket.

Fusion boffins crack shreddy eddy plasma puzzle

I'll believe it when I see it.

The claims are how fusion SHOULD in THEORY work. In reality some rich bastard is going to get massively richer when the coal fired plant gets replaced with a fusion plant and the electricity bill doesn't change, or possibly even goes up to cover the cost of building the plant.

Oh, and there's no such thing as an almost infinate supply of fuel here on Earth. That's what they said about oil a hundred years ago and look at where we are now.

Apple's iPad not so shiny once you get it home

Flipped around those numbers don't look any better. At the pricetag of an iPad if 86% of the people bought it themselves then at least 86% should find it useful. Instead, only 73% do. And if only 54% of the people who bought any other product found it to be a good value then you'd see it vanishing from the market within a year or two. Realistically a successful product should have somewhere in the neighborhood of 80% at least who think it was worth their money.

I will say, however, that I don't really consider this study to be very trustworthy. Consider the source: this isn't exactly a trusted consumer reporting publication we're talking about here. Much as I'd like to take the numbers and run with them I sincerly doubt their accuracy.

Mars, Moon, solar system could be littered with alien artifacts

Even if what we can see of the universe were all that there was of it I've always felt that chances are there are aliens out there somewhere. Even if our solar system is an oddity and only half the stars we can see have any planets at all and most of those only have one (both of which I think are unlikely scenarios) that's still an awful lot of planets. For this to be the only planet out of a zillion or so to have intelligent life seems extremely unlikely to me.

As humans we have this drive to see what's just past the edge of our vision or around the next turn. It assumes this same trait in all intelligent life. Perhaps there are civilizations out there thousand of years more advanced than us who, lacking said drive, have yet to even send a manned craft into orbit around their own planet.

Kansas IT boss found faking CV resigns

Bah, Brownback...

Living in Kansas means having to deal with Brownback's bull right now. Whether education was a factor or not in his hiring the fact remains that the man LIED ON HIS RESUME. At least he had the decency to resign, even if Brownback didn't have the sense to fire him.

Counting down till we get to elect a new governor....

Is Apple nobbling iPhones to avoid more patent misery?

Well well

Aren't all the fruity fanbois always screaming that Android copied Apple?

New pics of giant black sphere hurtling toward Earth

Merchandising Merchandising Merchandising

It's where all money made by the movie comes from. Anyone got a Yogurt doll?

Apple expels serial hacker for publishing iPhone exploit

Normally I feel that Apple's in the wrong when they do these sorts of things, but not this time. I'd have dumped him out of the program to. Regardless of whether he informed Apple of the flaw beforehand or not that was a dick move on his part.

Comp-sci boffin aims to REPROGRAM LIFE ITSELF

Makes sense

After all, what is DNA but a base-4 equivalent to binary that runs on organic machines, and what in RNA but an organic processor?

And yes, I'm quite aware that is an massive oversimplification.

US.gov: We aren't hiding any space aliens

Waste of time

Surely they realize that the tin hat brigade is going to write this off as another is a long string of denials of the truth. I mean it's not like they don't all already know that Barack Obama was born on Alpha Centauri to lizardman parents.