Posts by Archibear

Reg man 0: Japanese electronic toilet 1

The best alternative...

... is clearly the neck of a swan.

Sex app Tinder in public meltdown – because a journo dared suggest it was, well, a sex app

Re: Even bad publicity

Pretty much...

The men are all on Growlr and Scruff ;)

Wham, bam... premium rate scam: Grindr users hit with fun-killing charges

Re: Are we talking about a parallel universe I'd like to live in?

Yes, but not everyone who uses these apps can be open and up-front about their sexuality. There is still a lot of truth in the old, old joke:

Q. What do you call a man who's up before the magistrate on cottaging charges?

A. Married with two children.

Drag queens: Oh, don't be so bitchy, Facebook! Let us use our stage names

Yay, the Sisters!

Sister Roma is a very well known member of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (who, by the way, have been doing good things [by spoiling it for everybody else] amongst the LGBT and wider communities since 1979).

Basically, everybody knows her as Sister Roma ... pretty much nobody recognizes her non-sister name. She's been Sister Roma for longer than Facebook has existed. Hell, for probably longer than Mark Zuckerberg has existed.

The fact that she doesn't have a bit of paper with that as her name on it, is really not the point - what FB are doing is saying "you know that name everybody knows you by? You can't use it. Well, you can use it but it's just some subordinated thing, it's not your *real* identity". Or, "OK, you can use it but then you've got to be a 'brand' or a 'corporate entity'".. or some such equally fake strategy boutique style nonsense.

That's really one of the most offensive things you could do to a person .. and I'm not surprised she and the others are pissed.

Alienware says it WILL ship a Steam Machine in 2014 – running Windows

Dell/Alienware have preinstalled Steam as an option on their Alienware kit for ages - don't see how this is much more that a bit of skinning over the vanilla client plus a bundled controller really.

The weird and wonderful mind of H.R Giger is no more

Also need to mention the great scriptwriting on Alien - I love the way that it essentially reworks Dark Star but done for horror rather than for laughs.

If you're going to remake a movie *that's* how you do it.

Zuckerberg, Musk and Fake Steve Jobs invest in secretive AI firm

"Bathed in his currents of liquid helium, self-contained, immobile, vastly well informed by every mechanical sense: Shalmaneser. Every now and again there passes through his circuits a pulse which carries the cybernetic equivalent of the phrase, 'Christ, what an imagination I’ve got.'"

Analogue TV snuffs it tonight on UK mainland

"The sky above the port ...

... was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

Neal Stephenson on swordplay, space and depressing SF

Re: Age?

If you want parts of Neuromancer that don't make sense any more, just consider the (classic) first line.

'iTunes in the Cloud' has arrived in iTunes 10.5 update

"For a year it has kept telling me that there is an update available, only to download all 666.66Mb of it and crash at the end, which then begins the download again."

Yeah - I had that - didn't happen when I temporarily turned Kaspersky off....

I've also recently done a metal up rebuild of that maching and that seems to have solved the problem as well

Gravity wave detector gets more sensitive

"Could you give examples of these 'uncertainty' pairs"

All observables have associated special operators. In some cases, if you apply two operators one after the other, it doesn't matter what order you do it. In some cases, it does - you get different things. [like multiplying matrices together if that's any help]

Any pair of observables where the operators don't commute will have an uncertainty relationship between them.

So quantum mechanics would be a lot simpler if all the observables worked from home.