Re: Least favourite job
>implying chavs buy Apple gadgets...
1832 publicly visible posts • joined 10 May 2011
I always put my DOB as 20 July 1969 (the day of the Moon landing). It's only a few years+months after my actual birth date, so it doesn't arouse suspicion with regard to my physical age, and Dad getting me out of bed to watch Armstrong give his famous speech on the telly, is my earliest childhood memory - hence the day I was "born" to my own awareness.
Only my bank and certain government agencies have my real DOB (which given said agencies' propensity for USB sticks, laptops and trains probably means world+dog have it by now anyway!)
Bollocks. Electricity has gone through the roof over here - South Australia now has the most expensive electricity on the PLANET. Not only that, but housing prices have also exploded, to the point where a normal suburban home will set you back around half a million dollars. Rents have increased accordingly. Most working class people are now spending more than the recommended third of their income on housing because of the insane property prices in this country. and these increased costs have had a flow-on effect to everything else.
Basic foodstuffs have remained relatively stable, as have consumer electronics, although how I don't know, considering petrol, energy, housing and everything else have gone nuts over here.
10 years before all men are required to wear one of these, because all men are rapists and sex offenders, right?
Considering the feminist bias of the mods on this forum, I'll be amazed if this gets published. But I'll say it anyway, because the man-haters can't hide the truth forever. Most people know what's going on despite all the efforts at censorship.
I do remember the past as a "happier time", because although the computers have improved far beyond my expectations of those days, people have not. I recall back in those days you could speak your mind without having to worry about "offending" someone, and people were nowhere near as precious as they are now. In an age when political correctness has replaced common sense, and fear for safety has replaced freedom, how can anyone who remembers the 70s and 80s not mourn for what we've lost?
I use and recommend SrsVPS (srsvps.com), they're cheap, reliable and hosted in Romania so it's beyond the reach of the copyright mafia (not so much for piracy, but losing your data a la Megaupload comes to mind.) I've been using them as my personal cloud storage for the last 3 months and haven't had a problem yet.
"skywatcher will survey – and publish – the entire visible sky on a weekly basis"
No it won't. Not unless it can see through thousands of miles of solid and molten rock. As I recall, Chile is in the southern hemisphere, so siting it there means that it won't be taking any pictures of the Ursa Minor / Draco / Ursa Major part of the sky any time soon...
1. Mercenary - Escape From Targ (I spent weeks playing that, wandering around the city looking for keys and unattended vehicles to steal, and it was the first game I ever actually completed without help or walkthroughs)
2. SubLogic Flight Simulator II (After I bought it, I found it was disk-only, so I want straight out and laid-by a 1541 so I could play it. I actually kept a logbook and racked up more than 1000 hours flight time on the thing!)
3. Raid Over Moscow (Along with Beach Head I and II, Bruce Carver's games had just that right level of precision-related frustration to keep me going on them for ages)
4. Bugaboo The Flea (This had that infuriating control system whereby the longer you held the space bar the more power was built up allowing the flea to jump higher and further. It drove me mad trying to line up on the various platforms, but somehow the ambience and atmosphere of the game just caught me)
5. Fight Night. (Unique among fighting games in that you could custom-create your own boxer by setting attack and defence strength to head and body and so on. My brother and I spent weeks experimenting until we created the perfect boxer, who we called "Killer" and defeated every other boxer we put against him - nor could we beat him ourselves!)
since it's outside their jurisdiction.
Case in point: A few years ago the police attended the house of a friend of mine concerning a runaway child, and saw my friend torrenting the latest Simpsons episode. My friend thought he was busted for sure, but the cop actually asked him how to set up bittorrent so he could get the latest show for his kids!
My friend and the cop ended up having a friendly half-hour conversation on how to set up bittorrent and the best sites to go to to download TV shows, music, and other copyrighted content.
So much for copyright law in this country, when even the police aren't bothered about it (the Federal cops, though, are another matter!)
I absolutely hate patent trolls who sit on the sidelines and say nothing until someone successfully markets a product, and then they grab for a piece.
But in this case, since it's Apple he's attacking, I wish him every success and I hope he bites them in the arse for billions. If he were able to bankrupt the bastards that would be joyous, but that's probably hoping for too much.
can FUCK RIGHT OFF out of our two countries. The very things it is complaining about are the few things our governments are actually doing right! Shows just how the "land of the free" is full of it. The whole USA government can take it's corporate dictatorship shite and piss off, thank you very much.
Considering how unjust the laws are these days and how our so-called "democracies" have somehow become corporate dictatorships there's plenty of things to hide that, while now illegal, are still within the realm of basic human rights - which our legislators are increasingly ignoring.
Just because lawmakers have become corporate puppets doesn't mean the public has given up its right of resistance.
I owe you my career. Without your invaluable and incredible contribution to mainstream computing in the form of the C64, I wouldn't have got into computers and wouldn't have the skills I have today, and I'm sure many of us here can say the same. Rest in peace, sir, and may your legacy long endure.
Nice strawman there AC. Bob never said everyone who disagreed with him was a shill. He merely remarked that this and other forums were "infested" by paid shills. Which I don't doubt. El Reg has a big enough readership and a far enough reach to be of interest to the big boys.
And if you think there are no shills on El Reg, you might want to look at this xkcd post and think again. There's a very good reason why companies like Apple and Microsoft would astroturf here.
some people on here are blaming the "conservative" right for this law. I personally would put this one at the feet of the politically-correct "liberal" left, since they're the ones that preach "tolerance" and "acceptance" while being more intolerant and unaccepting of those whose opinions differ from the official PC worldview, than any historical fascists ever were.
Consider how dangerous (even potentially career-destroying) it has become to publicly say anything that is politically incorrect these days. The irony is that while so many people profess to despise political correctness, large numbers of those same people will blow their fuses in fury and demand resignations the moment somebody says something that is actually un-PC.
Not "annoy or offend"? Only PC proponents - and that's the lefties - would demand legislation banning "offending" people.
4chan ran a campaign to replace the "unknown" word in captchas with a well-known anti-African racial slur. As I recall, they pushed it for several months - but I never saw the slur nor any effect from it either in captchas or in Google Books as a result. Even with 4chan pushing it, I consider it highly unlikely that that their numbers made a significant difference against the huge numbers of people who at least attempted to get it right.
And even if there were enough trolls to make a difference, I'm sure the Oompa-loompas would pick up on it sooner or later and simply erase the effect of anyone entering that word - after all, they would already have made sure that racial slurs and other un-PC words wouldn't make it into the captcha system anyway, for fear of lawsuits.
I've seen this before - with Legend of the Seeker. I thought LotS was a brilliant series, with loads of plot twists and a real examination of trust and treachery, but then, come the second season, loads of people started rubbishing it, for no good reason, to the point where it got canned on a cliffhanger.
What I'm seeing in this thread is the start of the same thing again. People whose interpretational abilities probably can't encompass anything beyond Idol and Big Brother start weighing in and rubbishing a brilliant show. So now it'll probably be canned at the end of Season 2, just like LotS was, just because the millions of Idol-watching retards have to open their whining mouths.
Downvote me all you want; I don't care. I love GoT and would love to see it last a few more seasons, but I have a feeling the hordes of armchair critics will put paid to it before it has a chance to go anywhere.
is strip searches of the public anywhere, for any reason. That's the next freedom to be taken away. Oh, and you can bet Australia will follow in quick succession like we do with everything else US.
My money's on 2018 as being the year we finally have no freedoms or rights left at all.
Just to recap what we've lost so far:
Right to be charged before detention: gone
Right to counsel on arrest: gone
Habeus corpus: gone
Right to trial and right of defence: gone
Double jeopardy: gone
Statute of limitations: gone
Freedom of speech: gone
Freedom of assembly: gone
Right of first sale: gone
Right of privacy: gone
Right to own computing device and data: almost gone (once Windows 7 is grandfathered out)
Anyone think of any others?
I also ended up voting for Highlander 2. I was torn between that and Phantom Menace, but then I realised I've actually watched PM more than once, and there were the occasional parts of it I enjoyed, whereas I saw H2 only once and it will never disgrace my eyeballs and ears again.
I realised the main reason I wanted to vote for PM was my anti-feminist ideology lashing out at the misandrist aspect of Anakin not having a father ("who needs mere men when you have midichlorians?") So I put aside my political judgements and decided that H2 was in fact the viler pile of shite.
My reasoning is actually because of one scene on Highlander where Connor asks Ramirez, "How did it happen for God's sake?", to which Ramirez replies, "Why does the sun come up? Or are the stars just holes in the curtain of night? Who knows?" And that sets just the right tone for the mystery behind the immortals' existence, a mystery that does not need further explanation.
Then Highlander 2 tries to get all "realistic" and makes them into aliens from the planet Zeist. Quite beside the dismal name, it completely destroys the mystery that is supposed to be behind the immortals. I detested Indiana Jones 4 for the same reason: you aren't supposed to know what the nature or cause of the power in the Ark of the Covenant, the Sankara Stones, or the Holy Grail is. That's the mystery. So when they "explained" the crystal skulls as belonging to "aliens" it completely ruined the mystique for me.
This is why I voted for Highlander 2 as the worst movie ever. Some things just don't need logical explanations. Or half-arsed attempts at them.
In other news, Cadbury has been forced to ramp up production of its Creme Egg line after a well-known nerd comic strip triggered a worldwide rush on the product. Xkcd.com, a comic strip noted for nerd humour, recently posted a strip describing Cadbury's Creme Eggs as a measure of sugar content in drinks. A Cadbury spokeswoman described the spike in Creme Egg sales as "highly profitable" and thanked xkcd for the free advertising. She said the strip's publication, and its further reproduction in other media, may have resulted in more than $US20 million in Creme Egg sales, and noted that Cadbury shares rose by nearly 3 percent as a result of the increased revenue.
Coming up after the break: Doctors in the UK and USA are reported to be "extremely concerned" after an unexplained dramatic increase in the number of diabetics diagnosed in the last 48 hours. Stay tuned for these important messages...
To me, the two are the same thing in essence. This professor's sanctimonious attitude in wanting to "cure" those who don't drink the Kool-Aid is typical of this mentality: if you don't believe in body thetans - or human-induced climate change - you must be sick and need help.
I personally find that professor's attitude extremely offensive, and it does nothing to sway me towards the ranks of the faithful; in fact, it makes me want to become even more staunch in my viewpoint: Is the climate is changing? Yes, but it's been changing continuously since the Earth was formed 4 1/2 billion years ago. Are humans causing the climate to change? I very much doubt it. The size of us and all our machinery compared to the size of the Earth is so insignificant, one might as well say that a flea can kill an elephant, as to say that we have a measurable effect on an entire planet's climate.
since the highest resolution monitor I've been able to find is 2048 x 1536 and they started at about 5 grand (Australian). Sub-1000 dollars gets you 1920 x 1200 at best, and it's been like that for a while now.
I recently went looking for a monitor to upgrade and what I found was this: the 2048 x 1536 was a 22" LED job and that was the biggest (in fact the only) screen I could find at that resolution. I found loads of monitors up to 24" with 1920 x 1200, but oddly enough the bigger monitors (26" and 28") only sported 1920 x 1080, or 1080p. I could not, after 3 hours of searching, find a monitor bigger than 24" that had any higher resolution than that.
So unless the LCD/LED manufacturers suddenly and dramatically increase the resolution of their screens, having the ability to display 4k x 2k will simply be a waste since nobody will have a monitor (much less a telly) that can support it.
was that the climate change believers would be having apoplexies and screaming about Andrew being a biased denier and so forth. Andrew, you're a brave man.
Getting the popcorn now, ready to watch the faithful start frothing at the mouth and speaking in tongues...
Valid points, Michael, but when I said "hard radiation" it wasn't the UV I was thinking of - it was the gamma that is a result of all thermonuclear reactions. A red dwarf is still, at its heart, a massive thermonuclear reactor, albeit a smaller one, and it still chucks out a sizeable amount of gamma in the process.
Whether that's enough to irradiate a planet beyond the capacity to support life is a function of how much less gamma the star is producing than the Sun versus the increased exposure due to the reduced orbital distance (the inverse square law applying here), and the strength of the planet's magnetic field (if any).
Since to the best of my knowledge planetary magnetic fields are a product of the planet's rotation affecting its roiling interior, I would imagine the vast majority of planets that are tidally locked would, due to the slow rotation, not have much of a magnetic field at all. We have an example in our very own solar system; of the four rocky planets, only Earth has an appreciable magnetic field. And without a magnetic field to deflect and absorb that radiation, there's no way a planet is going to be able to support life.
That said, it would be interesting to see what the result of a planet having a large moon (like Earth) in such a proximal orbit to a red dwarf would be. The moon has a far greater tidal effect on the Earth than the Sun because of its proximity over the mass difference, so would a planet with a large moon orbiting a red dwarf still be tidally locked to the star, or to the moon? Or would the clash of tidal forces result in the planet still having an appreciable rotation?
Since I'm not an astrophysicist, the answer to that is beyond my puny maths, but it would be interesting to hear the take of someone with more knowledge on this, since I haven't heard it mentioned in discussions of planets in close orbits of red dwarfs.
is that, being so small and dim compared to the Sun, the habitable zone is so close to the star that 1) any planets are being bathed in hard radiation and 2) are highly likely to be tidally locked, so one hemisphere is in permanent daylight and the other in permanent night. We already have an example of this in Gliese 581g.
Whether life can evolve or even be sustained under such conditions is a question even our grandchildren may not be able to answer.
Because a site that you've set NoScript to allow might one day be compromised. It has happened before and will again.
Don't get me wrong, I swear by AdBlock and NoScript. But they aren't the be-all-and-end-all of malware protection, they work as an outer pre-emptive blocking layer, while your antivirus/anti-spyware suites are your inner lines of defence for when shit gets past them.
Most definitely it would need tweaking, since a lot of sites these days fetch data from CDNs that aren't part of the primary domain. For example, Youtube won't play videos unless you allow ytimg.com as well as youtube.com.
You and I might not have a problem with this, but from personal experience I know Johnny Sixpack has issues with it. When I installed Firefox with Adblock and NoScript on my parents' machines, I had to help them quite a bit while they were training NoScript to allow the various CDN domains these sites use.
It's U+203D in Unicode... or, more easily, just go to the Interrobang page on Wikipedia and copypaste it from there like I did!
You know what's more ironic? Someone arguing fallaciously from the position that atheism is a belief in the same way that religion is. I've seen around the internet, the truism that "Atheism is a religion in the same sense that 'off' is a TV channel."
Atheism isn't a religion, and it isn't a belief. It's merely the absence of them. It has no rituals, no doctrines, no holy texts, no creed, and no deities. And a worldwide absence of religious belief would be a substantial improvement to all on this benighted planet, yes?