* Posts by Steven Roper

1832 publicly visible posts • joined 10 May 2011

Samsung will add cross-suits in Oz

Steven Roper
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Come on Samsung!

Everyone in my office is barracking (non-Australians - cheering, rooting) for you! Show those cnuts what massive Asian conglomerates can do to litigious, anti-competitive, anti-consumer, control-freak pissant outfits like Apple, and stomp their fucking faces into the courtroom floor!

Russian rocket flub threatens to empty ISS

Steven Roper
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And the retreat from space continues as civilisation collapses

I could see this coming back when they grounded Concorde several years ago. No more commercial supersonic flight. Then the shuttle was retired. America's space program comes to an end. Now even the Russians, famed for their quality engineering, are struggling to maintain a space presence. Once the last astronauts return from the ISS, that will be it - they will be the last human beings in space.

Just as in the fall of the Roman Empire, greed, decadence, hedonism, and self-righteousness have reached levels under which civilisation cannot endure. As more and more people "look out for number one" the glue of altruism that sustained civilisation in the past will come unstuck, and, assisted by the spread of religion and superstition, we will descend into a new Dark Age. In keeping with the principle that the higher you go, the further you fall, we have a long way to fall this time; so it's entirely possible that recovery could take thousands of years, if indeed it ever happens.

Even if we did recover eventually, in this cycle we have depleted the Earth's resources, so the next Renaissance in 5000 AD or whenever will have nothing left to build on. We had this one shot, and we blew it. Perhaps Nature will decide that intelligence and sentience were evolutionary mistakes, and our distant descendants will consequently be indistinguishable from baboons.

I for one have always looked forward to seeing the end of the world, albeit that I wished such an ending was not in reality slow and messy and may take few generations - nothing like the cataclysmic apocalypses envisioned by the SF set, such as I had hoped to witness. But then, as T.S. Eliot rightly wrote, the world will end not with a bang, but with a whimper.

Silence ≠ 'yes', watchdog tells lustful ad-biz bakers

Steven Roper
Stop

@AC 28th August 21:38

"Which is why they're keen to target the adverts to your interests. Is this evil?"

The advertising industry has a lot to answer for. Now if advertising were merely about letting me know which products exist and where to buy them for how much, I would have no problems whatsoever with this.

But that's not what advertising companies are about. What they are about is psychological manipulation, about using psychology and mental science to bypass your conscious decision-making mechanisms and make you "want" to buy the product. It's about getting inside your head so they can exploit your weaknesses to generate more sales. And if you think you're smarter than these people who spend their lives working out ways of manipulating you, you're deluding yourself. We all like to think we're immune to such manipulation, but I can tell you, from having dealt with such people professionally, that we're not.

This, I have a very big fucking problem with. I do not want some trained psychological manipulators building intimate profiles of my interests, habits and personality traits in order to manipulate me into buying something I might not otherwise normally want to buy. To me, that IS evil. When the advertising industry and the legislators who should be regulating them recognise this and do something about it, I might change my mind about being tracked online. But as long as these bastards are bent on manipulating me - AND attacking me and spitting in my face by trying to bypass my cookie settings with respawning cookies and whatnot - I will fight back with everything I have. And that starts with AdBlock, NoScript and CookieMonster and goes on to include supporting stricter controls and legislation on how they can and cannot use my private information.

CERN: 'Climate models will need to be substantially revised'

Steven Roper

@Anarchic-teapot

It's not about supporting fossil fuel companies, it's about keeping electricity affordable for people besides the wealthy, so that more can partake of the benefits of civilisation. If you climate change believers have your way, the only sources of power will be wind, hydro and solar - which will NOT generate enough power to service anyone other than millionaires. Already in Australia electricity prices have become so prohibitive that there are now around 18,000 households (not people, *households*), that cook on open fires and light their homes with oil lamps and candles because they cannot afford electricity any more. That's the world you AGW faithful are creating.

Add to that the increasing body of evidence that climate change is continuous throughout Earth's history and that our contribution to it is minimal at best, and the claims of the climate change believers begin to wear increasingly thin.

Google+ offers new 'Ignore' feature

Steven Roper

And this is textbook example of why

Google's efforts in social networking fail, time and again. Just as with Wave and Buzz, and now with Plus, they make a huge song and dance about it and then make it invitation only. So when people respond to the hype they are stonewalled by the invitation requirement. Seriously, Google's marketing manager must have the IQ of a fucking dormouse.

If you're still only beta testing, then don't make such a huge hype-up about it. Let word of mouth alone build the beta testing userbase, get your beta testers to sign NDAs and keep it under wraps until you're ready to go live. Then, and *only then*, crank up the hype machine when it's ready, exploit all the rumour and secrecy that's built up around it, and let people join up in their millions. Don't wind everyone up with hype and then drive valuable traffic away with an invite wall, which simply causes people to turn away in disgust and either go back to Facebook or on to the next thing. This is the root of Google's social networking problem.

Google will never beat Facebook if they don't consider this fact. In addition, this is their third failed attempt now. People are going to get sick of signing up to these social services only to find their time wasted as yet another one gets cancelled.

id Software Wolfenstein 3D

Steven Roper

The first 3D game I remember seeing

was Atari Battlezone in 1980. You drove a tank around an outline-vector landscape with cubes, pyramids and enemy tanks littered around the place. Other "3D" games that predated Midi Maze were 3D Pacman, Elite, Mercenary: Escape From Targ, and SubLogic Flight Simulator, all of which were released on the Commodore 64 in or before 1985.

I also remember a Wolfenstein lookalike known as Gloom, released on the Amiga in the early 1990s. My friend and I played it for months on our A1200s, until we had choreographed the exact sequence of moves required to clear every level and complete it without losing a life. It had 21 levels, in 3 areas of 7 levels each known as Spacehulk, Gothic Tomb and Hell, and we could do a full clear (that's killing every mob in the game including trash and bosses, rendering the levels what we called "safe for children"!) inside of an hour. Fun days, indeed!

Seven Dwarfs password gag declared Fringe's best

Steven Roper
Headmaster

Re: Pardon my ignorance

The rule is, I before E except after C or before G. Here's some examples:

I before E: piece, retrieve, belief

except after C: deceive, conceit, receipt

or before G: neighbour, foreign, inveigle

That's the way I was taught by my English teacher (about 35 years ago mind!) and yes, there are exceptions - reins, villein, and so on - but as a rule of thumb I've found it quite effective for remembering the correct spelling of these words.

Steven Roper
Stop

Cancer isn't funny - ever

After watching my grandfather die of prostate cancer which metastasized through his body, I wouldn't wish that death on anyone, no matter how evil or deserving they might be. *Nobody* deserves to die like that, and to find humour in it is ignorantly sadistic at best.

Greyhound spatters Nashville with semen

Steven Roper
WTF?

LN2 can only be transported by road?

Which I assume means it can't be transported by rail or air. But when you consider the relative safety and crash records of air and rail transport compared to road transport, you have to wonder if that's not one of the more idiotic laws on the books.

US judge: Warrant required to access mobile location data

Steven Roper
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This is a great example of why

separation of the judiciary and legislature is a founding pillar of any democratic government system. The government legislates, and then the judiciary tells them whether or not they're full of shit.

Russian Progress space truck crashes in Siberia

Steven Roper
Pint

The way the "In Soviet Russia..." meme works

is that in Soviet Russia, an object you normally do an action to or with, does that action to you instead. For example, "In Soviet Russia, television watches YOU!" - where normally *you* watch television. So a more apropos example for this subject might be something like "In Soviet Russia, the rocket flies into YOU!" - as opposed to you flying in(to?) the rocket. ;)

Amphibious Nazi raccoons menace Sweden

Steven Roper
Stop

No, no, no!

Take it from our bitter experience here in Australia. We grow lots of sugar here. A pest, the cane beetle, was devastating our sugar crops. So we imported cane toads to eat the beetles. The problem is that there's not much that can eat cane toads. Which means that football-sized, deadly poisonous toads are now infesting the northern half of the country in their billions, and are threatening to invade the southern half. You can imagine the effect these fuckers are having on our wildlife, not to mention the hazards of driving down a toad-guts-slicked-up road coated with the stinking mangled innards of millions of the things...

So unless you want to potentially end up with a plague of honey badgers, I would venture that that is a bad idea. Badgers of all species are supposedly quite vicious, I believe? Not the sort of creature you want infesting your barns and pantries like rats. Especially considering you have rabies in that part of the world.

Viral/bacteriological warfare is much more effective and can be more precisely controlled. Here, we've used the artificially engineered rabbit-specific diseases myxomatosis and later calicivirus to effectively control our feral rabbit population. Your R&D organisations would be better off looking at a similar solution rather than trying to import feral predators.

Hey, Music Industry. You're suing the wrong people

Steven Roper
Go

@ Sean Baggley Re: Off switch on entertainment devices?

I'm not aware of the existence of *any* modern entertainment device that has an "off" switch. Standby / Sleep / Hibernate / Shutdown / etc switches, sure, that merely *reduce* the power usage, but a real honest-to-goodness, actually-disconnects-the-power OFF switch on an entertainment device? I Haven't seen one of those in ohhh, 20 years?

Steven Roper

It is volume of sales

In case you hadn't noticed, countries where people earn $2 a week are also countries whose populations are usually on the high side. So where in England or America you might sell 100 CDs at $10 each, in India and China you'd sell 1000 CDs at $1 each and make the same money.

Steven Roper
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That's not Andrew

From the self-righteous tone of that post, more likely it's JimC or Doug Glass. Andrew tends to be a bit subtler (albeit no less emphatic) in his anti-piracy rants.

While we are on the subject of anti-piracy ranters, anyone seen PirateSlayer lately? I miss his particular brand of vitriol...

NASA to work on approved sci-fi books

Steven Roper
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One of my earliest childhood memories

is of Dad getting me out of bed at night to watch to Armstrong and Aldrin make history on TV. I was three at the time, and it influenced my love of all things space ever since. Like you, I am royally pissed that space program has gone backwards ever since. I remember thinking that the space shuttle, when it started, was the beginning of the road to Mars; we'd been to the moon, and Mars was the logical next step, especially in view of the front-page coverage of the Viking landers that were providing spectacular photos of the Martian surface at the time. And then it all just seemed to... fizzle out, and the dream died.

One more thing: If you want to know where the money's really going, I would change just two letters of your last sentence - "It's not like it even costs that much, compared to the fire-hose of cash spent on wARfare."

Marriage makes women get fat, divorce does same to men

Steven Roper

Ok...

Vladimir - From your posts it is clear that you are a male feminist. Your use of the word "misogynist" - a favourite of feminists everywhere - to simply mean anyone who doesn't kowtow to feminists, and accusation of me having a "victim mentality" establishes that right off the bat. Seeking justice and a fair go in the face of lies, propaganda and innuendo is not a "victim mentality", it is a perfectly natural human desire to respected and treated with dignity. As to the systematic demonisation of men at the hands of feminists over the last 30 years being "opinion and conjecture", allow me to point you to some resources:

http://baltonorth.blogspot.com/2010/01/martha-coakley-amirault-case-and.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathanson_and_Young

http://www.singularity2050.com/2010/01/the-misandry-bubble.html

To AC: I agree with you that there are many cases where the accusation of domestic violence is true, and I am also personally familiar with two cases where the man did indeed abuse his wife. The problem is, that the large number of women who lie about domestic violence to bolster their divorce cases, seriously undermines the cases of those women who who are genuinely victims of violence. So addressing the issue of false accusations is as much about helping women who are really victims as it is about men who are falsely accused. You are also right about humans exploiting any opportunity available - we all do it. Which is why I do NOT blame *women*, I blame *feminists*.

Let me explain something here. Feminists have for years tried to equate "feminist" with "female" in the public mind. This I call "the first lie of feminism". Female is a sex, a biological form. Feminism is a socio-political movement. Being opposed to feminism is not "misogynist" as they are so fond of pointing out. Hating women is misogynist, and I most certainly don't hate women. Opposing feminism is simply a political stance. During my various campaigns against the excesses of feminism, I've discovered a startling truth: Some of our most staunch supporters have been women themselves, such as Sue Price, the founder of the MRA in Australia. And some of our most bigoted feminist opponents have been men, such as Vladimir above.

So feminist does not equal female. When one understands this point, it becomes easy to see that those of us who simply want justice and equal treatment at the hands of the law are not "misogynists", do not hate women, but simply fairly ask that we are not punished for some imagined misdeeds of our ancestors and that we are given equal respect by the law.

Steven Roper
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I hear you

With only one exception, every single one of my male friends who got married are now divorced, some of them twice. Because of my way with words, and because I have the ability to spot mistakes and contradictions in large bodies of text, many of my friends asked me to help them with their paperwork in divorce cases, and to sit in court with them.

Consequently, I am *very* familiar with Australian Family Law and Family Court procedures, even though I myself have never been married (and after what I've seen, I never bloody will be!), and in the 9 or so cases I'm personally familiar with, I've observed a number of things of interest:

1) Every divorce I've ever been privy to was initiated by the woman. I know of no case personally where the man divorced his wife. It is also notable that in every divorce I am privy to, the woman waited until there was at least one child before initiating the divorce (since a woman divorcing from a childless marriage has far less to gain from doing so.)

2) The woman, without fail, ALWAYS claimed to be a victim of Domestic Violence, even when it's clearly impossible or so completely out of character for the man as to verge on absurdity. In only one case was the woman so good a liar that even I could not fault her affidavits, even though one of her statements had to be false since the man was with me at the time she claimed the incident occurred. All the other women had small inconsistencies in their affidavits that I was able to spot and point out to the respondent husband.

3) Until 2006, with the passage of the shared-parenting legislation (which I and other supporters of the MRA* had spent several years lobbying for), the Family Court in every case I am familiar with, awarded custody of the child(ren) to the mother by default. The only time I saw a father gain custody was when the mother was hospitalized for psychiatric treatment and alcohol abuse, and even then it took several months before we could get the father custody - and that's several months the child was in the care of a mentally-ill, alcoholic woman. All because she had accused him of domestic violence (which I knew to be false) and the court was reluctant to grant the father custody "just in case."

All this is because of the systematic assault on men conducted by feminists over the last 3 or so decades. All men are rapists, all women are victims, a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle - these are the messages that have been hammered into us through media, feminist propaganda, and so-called "equal opportunity" legislation that assumes men are guilty and women are innocent.

Groups such as the MRA have made considerable headway against this scourge in recent years though, so in Australia at least it's not quite as bad now as it was 10 years ago. At least, unless the woman can now PROVE Domestic Violence, children can now spend 1 week with their mother and 1 week with their father, and nobody pays anybody maintenance - the shared parenting laws we lobbied for. Of course, the feminazis (a surprising number of whom are traitorous "manginas") are fighting tooth and nail to get it repealed. So much still remains to be done, but as long as people like you speak out for your divorced friends, the effort remains worthwhile.

*MRA = Men's Rights Agency, http://www.mensrights.com.au. Founded and helmed by a woman, no less ;)

Facebook revamps privacy settings (again)

Steven Roper

Oh goody

Another privacy settings fiasco in the making. Of course, in the "upgrade" all our current privacy settings will be reset to their default "opt-out", viewable by all mode, so we'll have to keep an eye on FB for the change so we can log in and re-change all our privacy settings back to our preferred levels again.

Also keep in mind that privacy settings merely mean "what you don't want anyone other than Facebook to see", they don't protect you from Facebook itself. So as always, watch what you put on there. A simple rule of thumb is - if you wouldn't declare it in a police station, don't put it on Facebook.

Amateur balloonists hit record 40,575m above East Anglia

Steven Roper
Pint

Exactly

This guys statement that he doesn't drink Foster's is merely pointing out the obvious: *Nobody* in this country drinks that horse piss, not even bogans. I don't even know of a pub in Adelaide where they have it on tap. So don't believe their advertising - Australians don't drink it!

Ridley Scott confirmed for Blade Runner pre/sequel

Steven Roper
Thumb Up

@LaeMing

Right on man. The number of brilliant sci-fi books I've read that would make absolute blockbusters but that Hollywood refuses to touch is staggering. Consider Harry Harrison's "Deathworld" and "To The Stars" trilogies; Julian May's "Galactic Milieu" and "Saga of the Pliocene Exiles" epics; Greg Bear's "Eon", "Eternity", "Forge of God", and "Anvil of Stars"; Vernor Vinge's "Marooned in Realtime"; Brian Aldiss's "Helliconia" trilogy (particularly relevant in this age of environmental awareness and climate change)... .the list is endless, and if handled properly would make the most awesome movies imaginable.

Actually, there's the rub: "if handled properly." Given Hollywood's propensity for butchering books to the point where the only things in common between book and movie are the title and the names of a few characters, perhaps it's better that these books remain only as books. Unless some non-Hollywood filmmaker does it. Australian, Canadian and English filmmakers are all far superior to Hollywood's tripe.

Better ATM skimming through thermal imaging

Steven Roper

The problem with randomising key positions

as some have suggested, is that it fucks up those of us who, like myself, remember our PINs not as a number sequence, but as a pattern on the keyboard. My PIN forms a regular geometric shape when typed, but I can't remember what the number actually is unless I type out that shape.

I also have a few security measures I have when using ATMs. First, I pull hard on any flanges on the machine, and try to pick the keypad off with my fingers. This is to check for "overlays" - a common scam in Australia where the crooks put a fake keypad and ATM cover on the machine which then copies your card, keylogs what you type, or contains a hidden camera to spy on your PIN. I also cover the keypad with my left hand when typing my PIN, covering my right fingers while typing it. Finally, I always wipe the keypad thoroughly with my sleeve when I'm done, to prevent dusting to see which keys I pressed.) I suppose I'll now be adding pressing random keys before wiping to stop this particular attack vector.

Oxford adds woot! to dictionary

Steven Roper
Go

1'm 45 4nd 1 u5e num83r5 1n w0rd5

pr1m4r1ly 4s 4 m34n5 0f 0bfu5c471n9 c0mm0n d1c710n4ry pa55w0rd5... ;)

DARPA shells out $21m for IBM cat brain chip

Steven Roper
Thumb Up

Re: Ummm...

They already know how to program the meat based version. The technique is known as "mass media".

Dob in suspect blingy neighbours on Facebook, say cops

Steven Roper
Thumb Up

And earn double bonus

for reporting a family member!

COMET WILL DEFINITELY NOT HIT EARTH – NASA

Steven Roper

I also remember seeing Halley's comet

And realising there's not a lot left of it after all that ablation by the Sun. Hale-Bopp wasn't that much of a spectacle either - at least from Australia

Two comets that have stood out here were Hyakutake (1996) and McNaught (2006). In fact McNaught was the most spectacular astronomical sight I've ever seen; like the famous Donati's Comet (1858), it had a huge, curved tail that spanned half the sky.

Dog fight game bitten with pro-PETA virus

Steven Roper

@ Chad H.

Agree with you there mate - I've long maintained that PETA should be listed as a terrorist organisation and its members rounded up and arrested. These self-righteous bigots are as bad as any nutjob religion for forcing their way of life on everyone else. One of these days they'll piss off some politician and find themselves on the international terrorist register - at which point I'll throw a street party!

Facebook flashplodder to appeal against 4-yr cooler stint

Steven Roper

You don't have to die

to receive a Darwin Award. These awards are given for *removing yourself from the gene pool*, not necessarily killing yourself. So you can still receive one, for example, if you survive running around with a lit firework in your pocket and blowing your own balls off. As long as you are rendered incapable of reproducing by your stupidity (and haven't yet reproduced), you're eligible.

Wikipedia: It's not for girls

Steven Roper

"isolate ways women and men compose their language"

There is a site that does this:

http://www.hackerfactor.com/GenderGuesser.php

This site takes a block of text and uses statistical analysis to determine the probability of it being written by a male or a female. In my own tests it has proven to be remarkably accurate - on the order of around 85-90%. While this is still a significant margin of error, it is still far more accurate than determining the author by their stated gender identity. Consider that a lot of women would identify as men in order to avoid being hit on or discriminated against, and a significant number of men would identify as women in order to get free gifts and such. I know from running a female character in WoW that people are much more willing to give gold, gear and help to someone they perceive as female than they are to a male!

So the error factor resulting from false gender self-identification would be considerably greater than the 10-15% error exhibited by that analysis site.

If you've got the time, feed some wiki articles into it and let us know what you find.

Steven Roper

I gave up trying

to contribute to Wikipedia years ago. I once spent days on there going through correcting spelling and grammatical errors, not even adding or altering the factual content. Nor did I "correct" American spelling - I was merely correcting genuinely misspelled words and grammatical errors.

After discovering that the vast majority of my edits were being reverted to the erroneous versions by snot-faced little elitist pricks with an editorial superiority complex, I told them to go fuck themselves, got banned for my pains, and haven't been back since.

The only thing I use Wikipedia for now is to get the source websites listed at the ends of the articles for information. I wouldn't take anything from Wikipedia itself as gospel.

Google gets UK OK on privacy in slurping probe

Steven Roper
FAIL

But if you leave your plasma TV on the public footpath

with a sign saying "please take me" and someone walks off with it it's perfectly reasonable for them to do so.

Man reveals secret recipe behind undeletable cookies

Steven Roper
Mushroom

NoScript is coming increasingly under attack

As a long-time user of NoScript, I've seen a disturbingly increasing number of sites recently that, when you visit them, simply display nothing but a "Please enable Javascript to view this site" message - even when the content of the page is merely non-interactive HTML, in which Javascript is completely unnecessary. Such sites are in most cases simply using Javascript's document.write() command to create the markup instead of putting it directly in HTML.

This is obviously an attack on NoScript users to force them to enable Javascript so that the site operators can run more insidious scripts (including possible malware injectors) besides the markup writer.

My usual response has been simply to leave the site, blacklist the domain, fire off an email to the WHOIS admin to the effect that I will not be doing business with them, and try another site; but the number of sites doing this shit is increasing exponentially. Eventually we'll have no choice but to always allow Javascript if we want to use the net at all.

What needs to happen is for NoScript to be able to detect where page markup is being created by document.write (possibly by using regexes to search/replace instances of document.write followed by literal strings and replace them with NULL, or by parsing variables only where used in conjunction with document.write) and converting them back to raw HTML markup without running any other script on the page. Something along the lines of ~= s/document\.write(['|"]//g; perhaps.

A possibly easier solution might be to have an option to only allow execution of document.write and variable assignments but no other Javascript commands. Either way, we need something, and we need it soon, to bypass the efforts of these fucking bastards who use unnecessary Javascript to display plain HTML in their attempts to force people to allow Javascript.

Why has the internet turned into a fucking warzone for the greedy and unscrupulous? Why must we constantly be waging an endless arms race to defend our right not to be tracked, spied on, and exploited?

BBC explains 'All your Twitter pics are belong to us' gaffe

Steven Roper

@Solomon Grundy

"but to expect a a huge payout is silly."

Why is it silly? Is it any sillier than the RIAA demanding thousands of dollars per song copied over a P2P network? If the MAFIAA can charge ridiculous amounts for copyright infringement, why can't the common man?

Also, in Australia at least, the standard penalty for copyright infringement is $50,000 AUD per offence for individuals, and $250,000 AUD per offence for companies. If the ABC (Australia's version of the BBC) were to infringe my photographs or 3D renders I'd not only be suing them for thousands, I'd be asking the court to levy the maximum fine as well.

If I am to be threatened for using bittorrent to download my favourite TV shows then the copyright cartels can bloody well be threatened tit for tat. What this shows is the brazen, in-your-face pissing on the common man - do as we say, not as we do.

Steven Roper

@Oninoshiko

"...you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy..."

Think about that for a second. "Right to sublicense" means in plainspeak, "You give us the right to sell and profit from your work with no further payment to you." This is why I don't use Twitter at all. They could take a photograph of mine and sell it for a million bucks to a newspaper and I wouldn't receive a cent. Furthermore, "...process, adapt, modify..." means they can use your image in advertising or in any derivative work they might come up with, again with no attribution and no payment.

Fuck that for a bloody joke.

AFACT vs iiNet round 3

Steven Roper
Facepalm

This is the last level of appeal

in the Australian legal system. Hopefully, if the High Court judges display the same level of decency and common sense as the other judges in this case have so far, these greedy bastards will be sent packing.

To AFACT and their corporate masters I say: Want a market for your product? 1. Stop using geolocation to prevent people in other countries from viewing content. The internet is GLOBAL. 2. Stop using DRM to try to restrict how and where we listen to or watch media. 3. Set up an all-you-can-eat download site that works as efficiently and as user-friendly as bittorrent does.

Then you'll have your market. But as long as you continue to insist on trying to megalomaniacally micromanage our use of media, we will continue to fight you. And you won't win. Not now. Not in a thousand years.

IBM PC daddy: 'The PC era is over'

Steven Roper
Devil

A tablet from another company

isn't available anymore since megalomaniApple are in the process of suing anyone who makes flat rectangular objects out of business.

Google lands patent for, um, estimating shipment time

Steven Roper
FAIL

That patent won't apply in Australia

since my company's been doing exactly what this patent describes on our own website since 2006, and we have the documentation to prove it. I know, because I wrote much of the code that does it. We have prior art on this one. I'm not surprised though, that with all the patent grubbing going on in the last few years, that someone should sooner or later come up with one that we've already done first.

Apple patent disputes Xoom towards Motorola

Steven Roper
Pint

I'm with you brother

Not only will Apple NEVER see a dollar from me, I won't even allow people to bring their products into my house. I have insisted before - to my visitors' chagrin - that they leave their iPhone in the car if they wish to step over my threshold. I've been so vehement about it that I've actually managed to switch several (now ex-) iFans over to Android phones and tablets.

I spent a lot of my life thinking that Microsoft were evil. But they are a fucking humanist charity compared to Apple. Microsoft might be greedy, monopolistic and litigious, but at least they don't require vetting of all software by them before publication, reserve for themselves the right to tell me what software and data I can and cannot install, or prevent any third-party manufacturers from making hardware for or expanding on their product.

Apple are all that I consider to be truly vile - litigious, monopolistic, innovation-stifling, megalomaniac control freaks who want to micromanage every aspect of the closed, locked-down technology they seek to impose to the exclusion of any competitors. They don't partner with any other company; they exist in their own self-created universe, and seek only to destroy anybody who might impinge upon their absolute control of it.

What I'm hoping for is to see Samsung, Google, Motorola and other technology giants get so sick of this patent-trolling interloper in their midst that they band together, and with their combined legal and financial might, wipe Apple off the map for good. I have promised I will throw a party for my neighbourhood with free beer for all, the day I see Apple file for bankruptcy.

New DVD discs claim 1,000 year life

Steven Roper
Go

Ah, yes, the Paradox of Plastic

"Synthetic fibres and plastics from the hardware store are shot to hell in only a year and a half to three in use."

Yet those same synthetic fibres and plastics will still be clogging up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch 50,000 years from now. Plastic is a weird substance that outlasts plutonium yet somehow becomes useless within the lifespan of an ant.

Steven Roper

In most cases, you won't

The most common kind of book, the pulp paperback, won't last 100 years, let alone 1000. Most book paper contains sulphates which react with moisture in the atmosphere to form sulphuric acid, which breaks down the paper fibres. This is why book paper turns brown over time - the brown is the sulphuric acid impregnating and corroding the paper.

I have several much-loved paperbacks from my childhood; the oldest one, a copy of Enid Blyton's "Five Fall Into Adventure", dates back to 1974. Its pages are quite brown with age and the paper is already starting to crumble in places - and this is a book that is 37 years old. It'll crumble to dust in the next 20-30 years at the very outside, most likely sooner.

So paper isn't the enduring storage medium you might think it is. Parchment or papyrus maybe, but we have yet to invent anything that will outlast the good old carved stone tablet. ;)

Will the looters 'loose' their benefits?

Steven Roper
Facepalm

OK

so we can add Zot to the list of known El Reg RIAA shills, currently consisting of PirateSlayer, JimC, and Doug Glass.

Fake collar bomb victim back in lock down

Steven Roper

While self-defence laws do exist in Australia

if you're acting within the law it's unlikely you'd be defending yourself with a gun. Australia's gun laws require that all firearms not in use must be locked in a safe which is fixed to the building structure, and that ammunition must be kept separately to the firearms. Which means that, if someone breaks into your house, you'd most likely have to get to the safe, open it, take out the gun, go to where the ammunition is kept, take some out, and load the gun. All of which is not easily done when your home is being invaded.

Which is why I have a 3-kilo steel table leg on the floor next to my computer desk. The first person to break into my home while I'm here gets a piece of that upside the head. ;)

Neurogaming set to be launched by Disney

Steven Roper
Thumb Up

Huxley's predictions fulfilled again

with this invention. We already have the crass hedonism, shallow lifestyles, soma, and now the feelie has come to fruition. About all we need now is Bokanovsky's Process and Huxley's vision of the future is complete!

I've also got 50 bucks that says despite Disney developing this thing, it'll be the porn industry that builds the market for it.

Peaches Geldof explains Kubrick's 2001

Steven Roper
Coat

And so we have

a name for El Reg's next space project after LOHAN:

Powered Exospheric Altitude Combined High-Exit Spacecraft...

Apple blocks sale of Samsung's Android fondleslab across EU

Steven Roper

This is why Apple really need to be taken down

They do nothing but use their patent portfolio to stifle innovation and try to create a monopoly on technology that they were NOT the first to develop - tablets and touchscreen interfaces were around long before the iPad, for one example. They are litigious, monopolistic control freaks and those who support them are doing the world of computing a great disservice.

Death haunts government petitions site

Steven Roper
Stop

I've said it before

and I'll say it again:

If the penalty for the crime is death then the criminal will kill to escape.

Those advocating the death penalty only need to look at crime in just one Western country - the good ole US of A - to see that it doesn't work. That hasn't stopped the thousands of murders that happen there every year.

And a large part of the reason the murder rate is relatively high in the US is because many of those murders start out as muggings or rapes and escalate precisely because the mugger/rapist thinks "Well I'm going to die if I get caught so I may as well go the whole hog - dead (wo)men tell no tales, right?"

Do you really want the fucker who abducted your kids to have that incentive to kill them because he knows he's going to swing for the kidnapping anyway, instead of him knowing he won't die and giving police negotiators a chance of talking him into letting them go?

If that's what you Daily-Mail-reading oxygen thieves really want, just keep on advocating the death penalty.

Game graphics could be 100,000 times better

Steven Roper
Go

That could be the key...

That is, if they can convert polygon data to voxellated objects on the fly.

Think about that - if it's doable, then this really would revolutionise game graphics. You'd store a polygon version of a palm tree (which takes very little space), along with a procedural dataset for generating bark and leaf surfaces when you get close enough. Then your converter kicks in and renders out the voxel tree. Then you just do instancing of your stored objects, and either store or procedurally generate a map of where your instanced copies are in the game world. Storage problem solved.

This would also eliminate the previously-mentioned animation, deformation and physics issues as well - you do your deformation and physics on the stored polygon objects, then convert them over to voxel objects on the fly - and off we go!

Just in case this is NOT what Euclidion are doing, if what I've described above hasn't been done yet, I hereby declare this post as prior art in the event of any greedy corporate pigs looking to patent it down the track, and release it into the public domain as an 'open patent' (i.e. you can use it freely but you can't stop anyone else from using it or charge them for doing so.) :-)

Steven Roper
Coat

@ Dibbley

Well, we've had Slashdotted when Slashdot links an unsuspecting site and Googleblatted (before Google sorted that out) when Google linked a site on their search page, hmm, what can we call it when The Register does it?

I know... DeRegistered? DeRegged? Regged?

Ok, that one was bad even for me. I'm going now... >grabs coat and slinks shamefacedly out door<

Reg readers ponder LOHAN's substantial globes

Steven Roper
Stop

As was mentioned in an earlier thread...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendulum_rocket_fallacy

Steven Roper

There's just one small problem...

That wind you speak of that will blow the balloon away will also be knocking the rocket around. There will most likely also be some oscillation of the payload prior to launch, which will persist while the rocket is in freefall. All of this combines to mean that the rocket will be pointing in a pretty random direction when the motor fires. If that direction happens to be the ground, what you have is an incoming ballistic missile, which among other things could see the El Reg crew off for an extended holiday in Cuba. There needs to be some way of making sure the rocket is pointing generally upwards before firing the motor.