Posts by sisk

Vatican mulls God particle, calls for appointment of antichrist

Actually that my be why the devil recruits so heavily: he's not bringing souls in fast enough to prevent the freezing over of Hell, and we all know how much he hates snow.

Actually the Antichrist is more heavily discussed in Daniel than in Revelation. Not by that name, granted, but every Bible scholar I've seen equates Daniel's little horn with the Antichrist of Revelation. In fact any serious study of Biblical prophecy concerning the end times will spend just as much, if not more, time in Daniel as in Revelation.

And no, I'm not a fundie. In my opinion you can't think your yourself (which I do, much to the annoyance of several pastors over the years) and still be a fundie.

Alien city lights could be detected across interstellar space

Lots of problems

1) It's possible that inventing artificial light is a rare phenominon. After all the natural human sleep cycle would have us going to bed at dusk and getting up at dawn, leaving little or no need for widespread artificial lighting.

2) Who says aliens can't be nocturnal, therefore having no need for artificial lighting.

3) There are plenty of critters here on Earth, even discounting the nocturnal ones, that see perfectly fine in the dark, such as housecats.

4) Perhaps they don't 'see' as we think of it. I can think of lots of sensory devices that could replace sight. Echolocation is just the start. Magnetic fields, other forms of radiation, heck, even a gravity sense (yeah, yeah, very science fictiony, but then we are talking about aliens here). Or maybe they're even blind, relying on olfactory, tactical, and auditory senses. And that doesn't even count things that they could sense that would be beyond my imagination (of which I'm sure there are plenty).

5) If you start with the assumption that an alien civilization developed as we did, you stand a very good chance of being wrong. For instance, our own path would have been far different had the oxygen crisis never happened.

Alien civilizations may not have a Nikolai Tesla to promote AC before a DC based infrastructure could be build. Once the DC infrastructure is in place it would be highly unlikely that they would switch to an AC based one. Kinda like how one of the biggest obstacles in moving past gasoline powered cars is the lack of high speed charging/hydrogen/natural gas/whatever-else-you-want-to-burn stations to replace our gasoline stations, only on a much more costly scale.

The Great Smartphone OS Shoot-out

My comparison

Android is like the slightly nerdy kid who can't get a date to the prom but shows up to the 10 year reunion with a supermodel wife who gushes about what a great husband he is. iOS is more like the slightly retarded but widely loved jock who really can only do one thing well, but it's the one thing everyone cares about. WinPho is the kid whose older siblings were all troublemakers and who hasn't yet had a chance, which we all hope he will take, to distiguish himself from them. Blackberry is the class president of the class that graduated two years ago but still hangs around the high school.

Yes, but where would an interested party go to buy a phone running Symbian these days? I haven't seen one in quite some time.

It's not JUST an HTC thing. Every custom ROM I've tried has it. I can't say for stock ROMs though.

Nude lady recreates Star Wars tauntaun scene in dead horse

if(nakedLady + deadHorse == art || nakedLady + deadHorse == goodIdea){

getHelp('psychological');

}

China, Russia called out as cyberspy hotbeds

Ok...

Let's see the hands of anyone who didn't already know that a massive number of cyberespionage attacks are coming out of Russia and China these days. *cricket cricket*

File this one under 'the obvious makes a headline'

Apple was OK to fire man for private Facebook comments

Bah.

If you don't want your boss/spouse/grandmother/kids/pet weasel seeing it, don't post it online. Anywhere. Simple as that.

Hands on with the Motorola Xoom 2 10.1in Android tablet

Or those who believe that the appearance of a piece of personal electronics kit has nothing to do with how well it functions. That'd be me, by the way. I'll take an ugly but useful and reliable piece of kit over a shiny turd any day (and there are plenty of shiny turds in the consumer electronics market to choose from.)

I have no plans to pick one up, in case you're wondering. Maybe a used Xoom if I can get one for a song, but really any tablet would end up being just an expensive toy to me. I have more important things to do with my money, like buying expensive toys my kids. Given that they've managed to destroy a 'laptop' made for little kids by LeapFrog I don't want to see what they'd do to a tablet.

Robot cop tackles mystery tinfoil poo-bomb bandit

Enlightenment

Possible scenario:

Drunk #1 "*Hiccup* I'm too homefaced to get shit and I gotta drunk."

Drunk #2 "Yeah, yeah, me to. Hey look, there's some foil over there."

Later...

Drunk #1 "Whadda we do wif these?"

Drunk #2 "Let's hide them under that car."

Apple assails mobile porn purveyor's URLs

Hmm...

I only see three of the seven that anyone would be in danger of mistaking for anything but a porn site. Surely URL infringement requires more than simply having the name of a product in the URL. Am I wrong? I'm not too familiar with the WIPO rules.

Crime-fighting Seattle superhero unmasked, fired

One of the Rain City Defenders, or whatever they're calling themselves, had to get charged with assault sooner or later, but is being misguided enough to think the comic book approach to fighting crime is a good idea really a good reason to fire a man who works with autistic children? That's a job you have to care about and people who care are in short supply.

Ah well. Here's hoping that the rest of the costumed 'super heros' running around Seattle take this as a reality check and find a better way to improve the world before one of them pokes their nose into something more serious than a bar fight and gets killed. I have my doubts, but it could happen.

Americans' right to hang fake balls on trucks left dangling

No more offensive than a zoo

Seriously, if you're going to call these offensive you need to put pants on the zoo animals. Besides, these folks have a right to their bad taste. Personally I don't get the point behind the things (or any of the other various crap people put on their cars for that matter) but they certainly shouldn't be illegal.

Steve Jobs named most influential game guy – ever

You have GOT to be kidding me. The games on iOS are pretty much the same sorts of games that have been on NewGrounds for 10 years now, only with a touchscreen instead of a mouse. What fantasy world are these people living in?

iPad 3 to debut Q3 2012 as iPad 4

Cult of Jobs?

Surely it's now the Cult of Cook...or maybe the Cult of Fruit...or Fruitcakes.

Yeah, I know. I'm going.

Nintendo pwns notion Wii was only for casual gaming

Eh?? O_o

They marketted the thing from the get go as a casual platform, they licensed mostly casual titles (with the notable exceptions of their own lines like Zelda and Metroid), they specced far below what most non-Nintendo hardcore games require... and now they say they weren't targetting casual gamers? Who do they think they're fooling?

Steve Jobs' last words: 'OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.'

That's so direspectful to him. Of course it had to be iBudda. Let's respect the man's iFaith if we're going to make iJokes.

"Not any kind of visions of the afterlife or ghosts or any of that mythical nonsense."

People seeing visions as they near death is pretty well documented and can't realistically be called nonsense. If you want to call them hallucinations I'll go with that, but to say people don't see things that look like God or angels or (more likely in Jobs' case) Nirvana is to ignore tons of documented research on the subject.

Official: Kindles get heavier as you add e-books

"Stand back, I've got a Kindle"

"Am I supposed to be scZZZPPHHHHTTT"

Google Maps API now costs $4 per 1,000 requests

Meh

25.000 page loads a day? That's more than we get on our entire site, let alone the two pages that have maps on them. No worries for us then. If you were getting that many you probably should have been paying their commercial usage fee anyway.

"Google just copied iOS"

BS. Android was in development long before the iPhone was released.

"they are now trying to copy Apple's business model too"

No, Apple's business model is to make sure you can't go anywhere but Apple for all your needs. Google is merely starting to charge for a service that costs them a fortune to run. Which, by the way, is NOT a feeble argument. I've been in the boat of having to start charging for something I had been giving away myself.

"any company with common sense would basically copy Apple"

And no company with a shred of business ethics would ever copy Apple's exploitive business model. Ever.

But hey, have your little fantasy world where it's perfectly ok to take 30% out of the pockets of developers after telling them what language they have to use and what kinds of apps they're allowed to write. Along with it, keep your phone with it's one-size-fits-all-because-Apple-says-so interface and the inability to access a huge chunk of the web. You're welcome to it and that's your choice. It's the only one you get with them.

I'll keep mine, with the interface that I, not Apple, choose to use and the apps that I, not some micromanaging entity, choose from whatever source I, not some company 2000 miles away, choose to trust, including the ones I wrote and put on my own phone without having to fork over $90 to the company that made my phone for a developer's license.

BioWare Baldur's Gate

Boo is a miniature giant space hamster. Don't forget that. Minsc gets agitated when people treat Boo like a normal hamster.

BG is antique code?

Geez, now I feel old.

Great game though. Playing a character from BG all the way through both games and their expansions was a good way to spend a few months worth of free time. I went to fire it up again a few months ago, but alas, the original 4 disc + Sword Coast version doesn't run on modern systems apparently. I'll have to go dig up a copy of the 3 disc version eventually.

German boffins BREAK LAWS OF THERMODYNAMICS!

Breaking of laws??

I see no break in the laws of thermodynamics here. Converting heat to electricity is neat, but hardly a break in thermodynamics. Unless, of course, the conversion is done with perfect efficiency, which doesn't sound like the case here.

Anonymous threatens Mexican drug cartel

Something else to keep in mind: guns are legal in the US because our founding fathers felt that an armed populace was vital for a just society. Basically the idea is that if we need to we can overthrow our own government by force. In practice any such attempt would get smacked down, hard, but that's why guns are legal here. To paraphrase one of the founding fathers, the second amendment will be completely useless until they try to take it away.

"Guns are legal in the US of A, yes? Enjoying the murder rate, are you?"

Depending on the studies you look at the legality of guns may not have any impact on the murder rate (yes, I know that's a big MAY). At any rate our murder rate isn't as high as a lot of the rest of the world seems to think. Here, for instance, there have been a grand total of two murders in the last five years, and that's if you count the guy who shot a burgler in self defense (which, by the way, is the only killing in this area since I've been old enough to care about the news that actually involved a gun. The rest have all been stabbings or blunt insturments).

Two iPads put a hole through man's wallet stomach

Meh, it's been done

Years ago, using cheap digicams.I first saw this sort of thing back in 2005. Granted, it required the ability to take apart a digital camera without destroying it, but it only cost about $100 and didn't need wifi.

Open-sourcers suggest Linux secure boot block workarounds

Absolute neccessity

I'd go so far as to say that this is neccessary if you want UEFI to serve it's intended purpose. If Linux geeks have to break UEFI to install Linux then they will. If that happens then malware writers will come along behind them, pick up thier work, and use it to install malware.

What you've got here is the same situation that game consoles face: the crackers may not have the skill to break it, but the Linux hackers do. Let the Linux guys do what they want and they'll never make the tools for crackers to use down the line. Case in point: the PS3, thought to be unhackable until the people who wanted to run Linux on it had to hack it to do so.

Stallman: Did I say Jobs was evil? I meant really evil

"They are facts. The question is whether they are important?"

Yes. Absolutely. They are and always will be.

". The majority of users now are consumers of web content. To them the important thing is does it work reliably? Can I access the content I want? Is it easy to use?"

That may be what the average consumer cares about, but it doesn't change the fact that being able to use their device as they choose is important. Just because the majority wants something shiny and isn't ever going to tinker with it doesn't mean that the ability to tinker is unimportant.

Let's look at some other things that are true by your argument. Most people wouldn't be affected if the use of a five button mouse were suddenly removed from Windows, so that woludn't be important. Most people wouldn't be affected if Windows were the only OS available, so let's just do away with all the others. Most people wouldn't be affected if international calls were suddenly impossible, so lets do away with that capability (maybe to help curb terrorism). Most people don't have any secrets that would be harmful to them if the government knew about them, so we don't really need laws restricting the government's ability to listen in on our phone calls.

See where that kind of thinking leads?

"Only the true pistonheads think so."

So very, very wrong. No one who knows me would EVER classify me as a piston head. A couple of them actually cringe when they see me in an auto parts store by myself. Even so I sorely resent being forced to pay a mechanic to fix a problem that I should be able to fix by myself just because some idiot decided that my car needs to be computer controlled. Very few people I know would disagree with that sentiment.

The computer in cars added little of value. They just make for more complexity and more things that can go wrong. It's the same thing with the lockdown on mobile devices: little or no real added value for the consumer, but lots of things are taken out of the user's hands for no good reason.

Apple gets patent for ‘unlock gesture’

"Why should it not be patentable? It fulfils the non-obvious part of the patent requirement that most of the patents out there currently for trolling seem to lack."

No, it's pretty freaking obvious. The only reason it wasn't widespread before the iPhone (and I'm certain it was around earlier than that) is because there weren't many touchscreen-only devices around that fit in your pocket before then. USPTO is just being stupid in granting this patent, but then that's par for the course.

Tweens would miss web and mobes more than TV

Me to

TV? Meh. I only use it as something to hook my consoles up to.

Internet? Don't you dare lay a finger on my $80/month pipe.

Moble? Before I had an Android I'd have said to take it, please. Now you're liable to loose a finger trying to take it away from me.

Father of Lisp and AI John McCarthy has died

RIP McCarthy. We built a chunk of an industry on your back, so I'd say you earned the rest.

They say things happen in threes. If you count Jobs (I wouldn't, but the case could be made) that makes three men who helped build the pillars of the modern IT world to leave us in the last month. Can we stop now? My toasts are going to start getting repetitious if too many more of these oldschool geniuses die.

McKinnon's mum up for human rights gong

"Gaddafi offered to set up a peaceful transfer of power and the NTC refused."

Really? When did this happen? Not saying it didn't, but I was following the situation and never saw that. That and if he'd really wanted a peaceful resolution all he had to do is leave the country never to return. Banishment would have been better than anything he could have realistically expected from the NTC (starting with imprisonment, of course).

"When they caught him, he was executed without trial."

You forgot that they beat him to a bloody pulp while parading him around while he begged for mercy before they executed him. Yeah, they dang sure shouldn't be in line for any human rights awards. Hopefully that's the last of that kind of behavior we'll see from them, but I'm not optimistic. How a group treats a defeated enemy is usually a good indicator of how they'll treat their subjects.

Anonymous shuts down hidden child abuse hub

I've always had a certain amount of respect for Anonymous, but it's always been tempered by distaste for their methods. So as you can imagine, this will be the first time I've ever said this:

Well done Anonymous. Well done indeed. The quicker that kind of filth vanishes from the net the better.

Android grabs quarter of tablet market

Glad I'm not the only one having trouble finding a real use for the things. Sure it's good for web browsing, but so is the much more convienent phone that fits in my pocket. Ditto ebook reading.

Jobs: 'I'll spend my dying breath destroying Android'

"they did totally rip-off the iPhone with Android"

Only in the sense that Apple ripped off all the existing MP3 players when they came out with the iPod.

Crap alchemist jailed for poo-into-gold experiment

But the Mythbusters did it...

War boffin: Killer cyber attacks won't happen

In a simulated attack (run by the US government), hackers were able to shut down the entire US power grid and huge chunk of the rest of the utilities in three days. Doubtless in that situation some people will die. And it would be even easier to induce a panic which leads to rioting and mob violence. I agree it's unlikely that it will ever actually happen, but it very well could.

Ballmer disses Android as cheap and complex

News flash!

Balmer slams a product that competes with a Microsoft product in the consumer market.

In other news, water is wet.

iPad baby baffled by paper magazine

Babies are cute

I doubt the kid thinks the magazine is a broken iPad, but it's still a cute video. Then again I find all babies cute.

Back to the Future DeLorean to go under the hammer

Lend me some cash?

I'll need about a million or so in cash. Lend it to me and I'll immediately pull up next to myself in a DeLorean, hand you back the money, and then hop into the DeLorean with myself and speed off leaving only a pair of firey tire tracks as evidence that I was ever there.

BOFH: Where's my free fondleslab?

Meh

I got the jokes, but it wasn't funny. It was actually painful to watch Simon and the PFY (off topic: surely that acne's cleared up by now?) sell out like that. Even if it was just for satirical purposes.

Pay Jobs due respect - by crushing the empire he created

@ian 22

Wait, are you actually saying the iPad is perfect? You can't be that deluded, could you? There's no product in any sector of the IT market (or, really, any other market for that matter) that can realistically be called perfect.

A better wheel? That's been done several times over the centuries. The most recent improvement involved inflatable vulcanized rubber. I'm sure that someone will eventually improve upon that.

Here, hold this anchor. It'll keep you in the real world.

Hard-up OpenOffice whips out begging-cap website

@Goat Jam

Yeah, that's why waiting as long as they did was a fail.

"Nice fail from Oracle (again)"

I disagree. The only fail I see here on Oracle's part is waiting as long as they did to let go of OpenOffice. Hold those downvotes a minute and hear me out.

Oracle deals in enterprise level databases and other such beasts rarely seen outside of a server room. Their customers are either part of or make decisions for corporate IT departments. They have a history of being somewhat hostile towards FOSS.

OpenOffice, on the other hand, is an office suite. It's target audience are mostly non-technical minded users (yes geeks use it, but geeks are the minority of users with any office suite). And it is FOSS.

In short, OpenOffice and Oracle were never a good match. I honestly expected Oracle to lock it up and try to charge for it or dump it into the community's hands within a couple months of their aquisition of Sun.

Sony network ransacked in huge brute-force attack

It's not really their fault this time

It was a brute force attack. All brute force attackers need to overcome any single factor security (such as username and password) is time. There's really no way to defend against brute force except by adding biometrics or something to your signon.

Stallman: Jobs exerted 'malign influence' on computing

He always kind of reminded me more of Moses or John the Baptist than FP, what with his oft-unkept beard and his persistant zealotry.

For all that, though, I like the man. I don't agree with a lot of his ideas but at least he's trying to help people in what he believes is the best way he can.