* Posts by Steven Roper

1832 publicly visible posts • joined 10 May 2011

So, what IS the worst film ever made?

Steven Roper
Thumb Up

Seconded on "Knowing"

I cite that film as the archetypal example of "Seen the trailer? You've now seen all the good bits so don't bother with the rest."

The trailer touts it as an end-of-the world thriller, but in reality it's an hour and a half of Cage and his son puzzling over some numbers on a piece of paper, followed by 3, count them, 3 minutes of actual world-busting special effects, and then - that fucking ending with them dancing off on that paradise planet? Oh please.

At least that other better-films-in-my-toilet-bowl stinker 2012 had enough sequences of cities falling to bits and tsunamis flooding over mountains, to gratify my innate desire to see the world destroyed, throughout the movie instead of the first/last five minutes as is usual with disaster movies.

Steven Roper

Re: My top 3

I beg to differ on Sucker Punch - I thought it was quite impressive, given it's a sexploitation movie. I especially liked the plot twist at the end where (trying to avoid spoilers here) the heroine is not the girl you think. The cinematography wasn't bad either; a bit film noir for my taste but appropriate for the movie's setting and context.

Battlefield Earth I fully agree with you on, that's two hours of my life I'll never get back; in fact it was so bad I won't even watch any movie with John Travolta in it any more.

Never saw The Avengers so can't comment on that one.

But my vote for worst movie ever is Hawk The Slayer, a vomitously cheesy C-grade swords-and-sorcery fantasy flick from the early 80s that looks like it was made by a bunch of schoolkids. Everything about it was a paragon of how not to make a movie: hammy bad acting (it had Jack Palance in it so you can imagine what the acting was like), a plot so contrived it made George Bush look guileless, backyard-grade special effects, creatures that made Kermit the Frog look lifelike, and wildly inappropriate disco music in a swords and sorcery setting. What I can't believe is that my brother and I actually watched it about 20 or so times when we were kids!

Future car tech

Steven Roper
Stop

And exactly why

are you leaving a 2-year-old unsupervised in a parked car? Where I live (Adelaide, Australia), doing that generally results in Family and Youth Services removing your kids from your custody and charging you with neglect.

Given, part of the problem in Adelaide is that on our hotter days the inside of a car can top 65 Celsius which can (and has) kill(ed) a kid left inside within minutes, which is why we specifically have that law against leaving kids in cars; but one would imagine common sense would tell anyone to take their kids with them when they leave the car for any length of time.

Lawyers of Mordor retreat from The Hobbit

Steven Roper

"Copyright on his works expired in 2010"

For now. Until Disney get copyright terms extended again to protect the Rat, then Sir Arthur's work goes right back into copyright for the next 500 years.

Sex-starved fruit flies hit the sauce

Steven Roper
Facepalm

And human nature being what it is

the first thing I thought of was how this could be abused.

"by activating its production, they were able to make the rejected flies act satisfied and curtail their drinking; and by suppressing it, sexually satisfied flies would behave as if they were deprived and drink more."

So all we have to do to make the slaves happy and contented even though their deprived lives are utter shit, is to pump them full of this neuropeptide and BAM - instant happiness! And the anti-drinking, anti-drug, anti-fun Daily Mail crowd will love it: an instant cure for anything "addictive" like alcohol, tobacco, dope and and other drugs, and a way to make everyone instantly receptive to their PC worldview.

Happiness is mandatory, citizen.

PhD pimp's mobe lock screen outwits Feds - Google told to help

Steven Roper
WTF?

@ Hud Dunlap

"My problem is why someone involved in human trafficking is getting such light sentences?"

That had me stunned too. This guy was charged with kidnapping and underage sex slavery and he only got four years? I'd wager that anybody who actually paid for sex with one of his underage sex slaves would be doing 15-20 and life on the SOR, yet this guy abducts and enslaves multiple kids for that purpose and only does four?

It raises the question: Who the fuck was he paying off?

Tech titans say sayonara to Japan in quake wake

Steven Roper

Well, this is what we get

for building our major manufacturing centres on the Pacific Ring of Fire. Concentrating all our civilisation's most essential technology fabrication plants in the planet's most geologically unstable region was bound to have consequences sooner or later.

Australia and Russia both have much more suitable areas for this. Both the Pilbara and Mongolian Siberia, repsectively, are geologically stable locations with no volcanoes and only rarely minor earth tremors, an almost complete absence of rain (so no flooding), distant from oceanic shorelines (so no tsunamis or hurricanes), free of vegetation (so no fires) and level ground for easy construction and transportation. In addition, these areas are useless for cultivation and so utilising them does not subtract from available food producing land. Finally, both areas, being devoid of rain and cloud, would make perfect sites for massive solar power stations to drive the fabrication plants and the necessary air-conditioning for the area's workers.

So relocating our tech-fab facilities to either location would do much to remove the disaster-induced issues we face today.

Web trawlers may have to pay to slurp up German newspaper snippets

Steven Roper
Mushroom

Let me get this straight

If I am to understand what the news services want from the news aggregators' and Google's perspective:

1. I link to your site.

2. You want me to pay to link to your site.

3. I remove my link to your site because I don't want to pay to advertise your site.

4. You bitch at me because I removed my link to your site.

5.In other words, you want to force me to link to your site AND pay for it?

...

FUCK. YOU.

Tim Cook's post-PC iPad domination dream crushed by reality

Steven Roper

PCs aren't going anywhere

any more than cars are.

Cars have been around for the thick end of a century, and aside from changes in appearance and engine efficiency, are pretty much the same sort of thing now as they were back then. The first cars were "horseless carriages" that looked like boxes on wheels, compared to the streamlined vehicles of today. But cars still have 4 wheels, an internal combustion engine, a steering wheel, accelerator and brake pedals, and a windscreen, the function of which haven't changed for a century.

The WIMP (windows icons mouse pointer) interface is as much the standard for driving a computer as the steering wheel and brake + accelerator pedals are for driving a car. Despite the advent of touchscreens, many processes are still better performed with a keyboard and mouse. Anyone who has tried typing an article or constructing a 3D model on a fondleslab will understand this.

Fondleslabs will end up becoming an adjunct to PCs, but won't be replacing them any time soon, if ever.

Katie Price's teasing 'strapline reveal' avoids bust

Steven Roper
Joke

Not quite

Your Give-A-Monkeys-o-meter obviously deflected enough to make you want to post a comment about it!

EFF accuses Warner of spamming DMCA takedown notices

Steven Roper
Trollface

@AC 01:49

In case you didn't know, Turtle is El Reg's resident serial downvote collector, who I think is trying to set some kind of record. Just give him his downvote and move on and he'll be happy.

For my part, I say Turtle is actually Gene Simmons and I claim my 5 quid!

Workers can't escape Windows 8 Metro - Microsoft COO

Steven Roper

@dogged

They are.

Lego space shuttle hits 114,000ft

Steven Roper

I was going to say

What's with the happy clappy music? It sounded like the sort of thing people would sit around holding hands and singing during Scientology love-ins or something!

AOL pulls the plug on Brizzly

Steven Roper

So

what happens in the future, when everyone's been using cloud storage for years and privately owned hard drives are just a fading memory, and one of these cloud companies decides to shut down in this manner?

All your data gets lost because you've nowhere to put it?

What this illustrates is just one of the perils of relying on cloud storage with no onsite backup.

Hobbit movie locations using 6km of data cabling

Steven Roper
Joke

Re: How much bandwidth on a Palantiri network?

Loads - more even than fibre, in fact - but unfortunately all the Palantiri connections seem to have been routed solely to the cloud server in Mordor. Attempts to retrieve data stored on this cloud seem to result only in a video of a giant flaming eye and a cryptic "I see you" message.

So as a means of communicating data directly between other Palantir locations the cat5 is actually an interim solution until the IT bods over there can get the Palantiri reconnected correctly.

Apple claims its 'innovation' creates 514,000 US jobs

Steven Roper
Mushroom

One question, AC

Why do you assume everyone who hates Apple, loves Google?

I personally hate both. Yes, I hate Apple more than Google, but only in the sense that Mt Everest is higher than K2. I'm personally working towards getting completely out of the IT industry because I'm sick of what these two corporations have done to it. Clouds, walled gardens, software installations restricted to app stores, closed silos, insidious privacy invasion, remote control of our devices, endless patent wars - they've turned what was once an engaging and stimulating field into a mountain-sized steaming pile of shit.

Anonymous web weapon backfires with hidden banking Trojan

Steven Roper
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I hope they will

Maybe Anonymous will succeed where the police forces of a dozen nations have failed. I hope Anon will dox these malware-pushing bastards and then proceed to make their lives, and hopefully those of their families as well, such an utter living hell that they'll wish the police had got to them instead.

Hadron-colliding, volcano-tracking boffins pocket cloud freebie

Steven Roper
Big Brother

Re: BEING OF SIMPLE MIND

It will change our lives for the worse, by pushing more "cloud" mentality (aka the "WE control and can delete and modify your data as we see fit, and/or bill you every time you access your own files" mentality) rather than proper onsite data storage solutions. See, this "donation" gets well publicised and allows the cloud-pushing companies behind it to say "See, cloud storage really works, these scientists are making good use of it, etc, etc".

But once everything is in the "cloud", Orwell's slogan, "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past" will become fully realisable by those whose interest it is to do so.

Linode hackers escape with $70K in daring bitcoin heist

Steven Roper
Thumb Down

@Captian Save-a-ho

Visa and Mastercard are "publicly held" corporations? Oh, yeah right, they're publicly accountable - to those wealthy enough to own enough shares in them to influence board decisions. Is that your idea of democracy? Having to own huge amounts of shares in order to have a say in anything that affects your livelihood and freedom?

Spare me your "democracy", Captain, it looks a whole lot like a plutocratic dictatorship from here.

Steven Roper
Stop

Re: If it Ain't Broke....

I can see a hint of the old "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" in there, Bob.

Bitcoin is needed because right now unaccountable corporations Mastercard and Visa control who is able to trade. You may recall the recent fracas with Wikileaks and how MC and Visa refused to process payments for them.

This is wrong on every level possible. Why the hell do these unelected and unaccountable corporations have the right to decide which free organisations can exist or not?

Also, both Mastercard and Visa have lately been making noises about selling your transaction history to third-party advertisers. You better hope you haven't used your credit card on any sketchy porn sites recently, because your purchase history is about to become effectively public knowledge.

So Bitcoin has a VERY valid place and purpose. It allows organistions like Wikileaks to exist despite the evil machinations of MC and Visa, it provides a confidentiality blanket for purchases we'd rather weren't general knowledge, and ensures freedom of trade between human beings.

Male dinosaurs failing on social privacy

Steven Roper
Big Brother

@Asgard

"I would like to see how many don't sign up to sites like Facebook because of the privacy issues."

Unfortunately the article points out a dismal statistic:

From the article: "From the 2,277 people sampled, 93 per cent had a Facebook account"

So it looks like 93% of the population (of the US at least) is using Facebook. Seems like not too many worried about their privacy there. No wonder government agencies are beginning to make public services require it. No wonder courts are starting to make rulings about it. And nothing in the world of IT scares me more. Except perhaps Apple, but that's a whole different story...

Galaxy is teeming with homeless planets

Steven Roper
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I'm not surprised

In star formation, supergiant stars like Rigel and Deneb are rare but massive, then as you go down the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram (W to O to B to A to F to G to K to M) the star types become more common as mass/size/brightness decreases. Blue B-type stars like Rigel are less common than G-stars like the Sun; stars like the Sun are less common than M-type red dwarfs like Wolf 359 or Proxima Centauri.

The numbers increase exponentially, too: for every Rigel there's a thousand Suns, but a million Proxima Centauris.

So it follows that if smaller = a LOT more common, then it's logical that free-formed planet-sized bodies should outnumber stars, even red dwarfs, by thousands to one.

By this hypothesis, many, if not most of these planets are quite likely to have formed independently of any star system, rather than having been expelled from one in the early stages of it's formation. This is borne out by the sheer number of them alluded to in the article; if they all came from star systems, there would be thousands of planets per star, which is not feasible.

Without nearby stars to blow off their atmospheres with stellar wind during their formation, these planets are also likely to have immense, nebulous atmospheres tens or even hundreds of thousands of kilometres deep, such that their outer surfaces may be far less distinguishable than even Jupiter or Saturn's. A photo of such a world would be an intriguing sight indeed.

Chinese cops bust culinary Apple trademark thieves

Steven Roper

I was going to say...

.here I was hoping China would turn out to be the last best hope of freedom from the tyranny of intellectual property rapidly descending about this benighted planet, even to the point of my being prepared to sacrifice freedom of speech in exchange for freedom from patents, but no, they seem to be falling into the same IP trap as the west. What a shame.

Google Goggle glasses ARE WATCHING YOU

Steven Roper
Stop

@ David W.

"Where do people get this stuff, anyway? Is the urge to be outraged so strong that the smallest shreds of common sense are puffed away in the breeze?"

I can't speak for others, but I personally hold that the purpose of patents has become corrupted, that now they are being registered purely defensively for the express purpose of suing anybody who happens to invent something later that uses it. Patents are now stifling innovation and crushing out the small inventor. I myself have come up with a number of ideas for products which I can't make because some fucking greedy megacorp somewhere has a patent on the shape of a spring or something.

So I oppose the whole patent stupidity with a vengeance. What started out as a means to protect the little guy from exploitation has been turned about to suppress creativity and innovation in the name of greed. So any straw at which I can clutch, including nebulous claims of "prior art" must be brought to bear if we are ever to have a hope of defeating this madness.

Spitzer spots first solid buckyballs in stellar disc

Steven Roper
Thumb Up

I remember when fullerenes were discovered

back in the 80s, and the word "fullerene" quickly came into general use then, in all the papers of the time. But somewhere in the late 90s the full name, buckminsterfullerene, came back. I'd assumed there had probably been some kind of intellectual property lawsuit from Buckminster Fuller's estate or something over the use of the word "fullerene" , since I can't think of anything else that would push people from using a shorter term to a longer polysyllabic one.

Steven Roper
Headmaster

Your artist should be spoken to

Since the star in that picture is a very Sun-like G-class yellow, and a B-class star as referred to in the article is actually supposed to be blue. Remember your high-school astronomy - Wow! Oh Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me Right Now Sweetie!

MP allegedly cuffed after scrap in Commons bar

Steven Roper

Posting in an epic thread

since Andrew has actually enabled comments in an article using the word "freetard"...well done sir!

It's actually good to see an MP that actually understands the stupidity of today's copyright laws. Downloading is not theft, it's copyright violation, and saying so does not make anyone a "freetard", Andrew, which is mere ad-hominem name-calling and does nothing to validate your point of view.

Innovation aborted in South Australia

Steven Roper
Thumb Up

I believe the correct cry is

BULLSHIT!

Pirate Bay AND its users violate labels' copyright - judge

Steven Roper

"Whatever the record companies are currently doing is legal"

Only because the fuckers bought and paid for the laws that make it so. That doesn't make what they do right. I could theoretically get away with murdering babies with pickaxes if I had enough money to pay off enough politicians to pass a law making it legal to murder babies with pickaxes. Doesn't make it a good thing to do though!

Proview wins new Chinese IPAD ruling as Apple threatens to sue

Steven Roper
Facepalm

Only 2 billion?

Proview should shoot the wad and demand 2 HUNDRED billion, and do the world the favour of bankrupting the fruity bastards!

Microsoft explains bland new Windows logo

Steven Roper
Thumb Up

Re: Speaking as a graphic designer with 30+ years' experience...

Hey, don't knock the ol' teal and purple! That horrendous colour scheme is what got my company a major contract with our state government!

Steven Roper
Facepalm

@ theodore

Actually, I care, and I'm sure quite a few other people do also, who'd rather not have to hold in our vomit while forced to look at some hideously deformed collagen and botox monstrosity with miniskirted tree-trunk legs and varicose veins like the Amazon river system trying desperately to recapture its youth, down at the local shopping mall!

Tiny transistor stays where it's put

Steven Roper
Coat

@Graham Wilson

Maybe they've managed to build the much-anticipated Heisenberg Compensator?

Man surfs slopes at night in LED suit

Steven Roper
Thumb Up

This looks shopped

I can tell from the pixels and from seeing quite a few shops in my time.

Google swings new mobile unlock patent punch at Apple

Steven Roper

Microsoft

may be saints for now but they'll be shedding their halos to join the evil Apple empire with the release of Windows 8 - which has all the invasive remote control and walled garden of iOS. In the coming years, if you want your computer to actually be yours, and not subject to remote control by megalomaniac corporations, your only choice will be Linux - if there's anything left of it after Microsoft black-ban any motherboard manufacturer that puts unlockable UEFI on their boards.

The future of IT looks very bleak, and it all started with Apple and that fucking megalomaniac despot Jobs, may his soul rot in hell for all eternity.

European Parliament prez slams ACTA 'in current form'

Steven Roper

Which is exactly

why he doesn't turn on comments for IP related articles. Andrew has a very pro-IP viewpoint and he is well aware that the majority of the readership doesn't share his opinion. He calls everyone who doesn't adore the principles of DRM and consumption control "freetards" but lacks the courage to allow any public debate of his statements.

Likewise, some of the mod team here also seem to be fairly protective of Andrew, since about half my posts that are critical of him don't get published. I give this post a 50/50 chance of making it past the mods, depending on which one approves/disapproves it...

US Navy preps railgun for tests

Steven Roper
Thumb Up

@ Mikel

Interesting post. However, a couple of things I should point out:

1) Alpha Centauri is due south, not north. It's one of the pointers to the Southern Cross, and as such it's within 30 degrees of the south celestial pole. (It's circumpolar from where I live in Adelaide, Australia)

2) Mounting a bloody great fuck-off railgun launcher through the guts of Ceres and launching multi-hundred-ton spacecraft from it at multiples of earth gravities will, by virtue of Newton's 3rd Law, undoubtedly do wonderful and interesting things to the orbit of said asteroid. If you orient the launch vectors appropriately, you could even start it on a collision course with Earth, which, considering Ceres is comparable in size to Texas, would go a long way towards doing the Universe the favour of removing the human race from it! ;)

Coming to a continent near you: America

Steven Roper

It's been known for years

albeit without the specifics listed in the article, that the continents would one day merge into what the scientists have long been calling "Pangaea Ultima".

http://www.scotese.com/earth.htm, look at the links for Future World, Future +100, and Future +250 - this site places Pangaea Ultima at around 250m.y. from now.

Google will swap you a box of crisps for your web privacy

Steven Roper

@ JDX

Please post here your:

Full and real name

Address of residence

Home telephone number

Email address

Date of birth

Company name and address of your primary employer

Your credit card numbers, CVCs, expiry dates and cardholder names

Thank you.

Oh, I'm sorry, what? That information's private? But you gave the impression that privacy doesn't matter, when you call us privacy zealots frothing at the mouth. Looks like you might be doing a little frothing yourself once somebody gets hold of the above information and ruins your life with it...

Move over cybercrims, DDoS now protesters' weapon of choice

Steven Roper

The right of free speech

does not, by definition, include the right to advocate the destruction of freedom of speech.

Parliament ponders £400,000 iPads-for-MPs plan

Steven Roper
Devil

Given Apple's control freakery

Do all those MP's really want to store sensitive government info on a device which Apple can easily remotely reach into and delete or alter files at their whim? These MPs really need to take a good hard look at the intrusive, megalomaniac nature of the corporation they're dealing with before buying into the Apple hype.

Laser boffins blast bits onto hard drive at 200Gb/sec

Steven Roper
Meh

Yeah, yeah

yet another pie-in-the-sky 1000-times-more-this-n-that storage solution that will never materialise, while we're STILL stuck using the same old magnetic-spinny-disk tech we were using 25 years ago. The only alternative now is SSDs, which may be heaps faster but die after 6 months of use.

This? I'll believe it when I see it at my local IT store, like all^H^H^Hnone of the other oh-so-amazing storage inventions that never made it there.

Google goggles with Terminator HUD 'coming soon'

Steven Roper
Thumb Up

Knowing that what you say won't happen

and knowing that the future is a horror because this sort of thing is exactly how human greed will cause all such technology to be abused, is the primary reason why I've refused to have children.

Drink diet pop all the time? Look forward to VASCULAR DEATH

Steven Roper
Thumb Up

@PaulW

"that means theres at least 1 of them running around"

Maybe it's a kind of magic, but as we all know, there can be only one.

Google dings missive to lawmakers: 'We're misunderstood'

Steven Roper
Coat

@Rob 5

Here's a simple 3-step guide to maximising privacy when using Google products:

1. Don't use Google products.

2. ???

3. PROFIT!!!

Millions face Megaupload data deletion by Thursday

Steven Roper
Thumb Up

In on sense

I'm actually pleased about this fracas with Megaupload. It gave me a lot of very good ammo to convince the board of my company that moving our data storage to the cloud is a Really Bad Idea™. It let me paint a doomsday scenario that cleanly convinced the majority of the board that my precious servers here should stay. Thanks to this, my job is now secured against any cloud-pushing droid that oozes through our front door.

If you're in IT, and you value your job, you also should be working overtime to convince your superiors that moving to the "cloud" is a disaster waiting to happen. The bottom line to use is:

"Why the hell should we give control of our data to someone else who can lose it or tamper with it at any time, like the Megaupload case? If someone else uses the same cloud to infringe copyright or commit other crimes, we're screwed!"

Twitter cosies up to governments with country-level filters

Steven Roper

@Mectron

Yes, but has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?

Apple's Dutch Galaxy Tab ban shot down by The Hague

Steven Roper
Thumb Up

The real root of the problem

is the fanbois (and grrls) that buy Apple's products. Drop your nukes on them, and you kill two birds with one stone: you eliminate Apple's market, and you reduce the global population problem to sustainable levels AND increase the average intelligence by removing the shallow end of the gene pool.

Facebook, MySpace, Twitter expose Google's 'evil'

Steven Roper
FAIL

For once

(I don't believe I'm about to say this, but) Eric Schmidt is right about one thing.

If I deliberately block Google from spidering my website, I have no grounds for complaint when my site doesn't show up in Google's search results. This is self-evident; if I want my site to appear on Google, I have to let the Googlebot spider my site.

Facebook and Twitter both actively prevent Google from spidering their pages. So they have no grounds to complain when Google's search results don't display them. They have only themselves to blame if their sites aren't showing up.

Man vanquishes robot cop in hand-to-hand combat

Steven Roper
Stop

Doesn't matter, at least where I live

Dogs in the canine unit of the South Australian police force are given police officer rank and accorded the rights and responsibilities associated with it. If you attack a police dog in the course of its duty in SA, you do indeed go down for assaulting a police officer - in fact, if you *kill* the dog, you go away for the first-degree murder of a police officer. There are people here doing long stretches in Yatala (an Adelaide prison) because they found out the hard way that police dogs are regarded in law the same as police humans.

I would probably imagine it would be similar for most Western police forces' canine units.