Posts by Kiwi 4368 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Sep 2011
€30 (which according go Google is NZ$ 45.30) gets me:
A "skite of the month" award? :)
Don't suppose you'd be up for a life-swap to NZ for a while? (not long, only the lesser of 1) till NZ gets decent mobile data rates or 2) the end of my natural life)
Even on prepay €20 will give you more data than most people could use if you pick the right networks.
All I can say to that is shutupyabastard!
ATM here in NZ one of our BigBoxChains is doing 1G for $4, up to 4G in any 31day period. But with most providers you're looking at $20 for a whopping 500Mb of mobile data, though with some you can get a whole Gb! (unless prices have improved since I last checked). When your home is mobile-data only, it doesn't go far!
Thankfully I have a very large pir er, private music collection built over some years.
By using a digital codec, you can potentially offer 20Hz to 20kHz audio - if you use the right one, and have the broadcast bandwidth to carry it.
That's kinda like what they said about digital TV. We all know how crappily that worked out...
Do everything over IP, including streaming audio.
And when you get earthaquake/blizzard/electrical storm/flood/bad accident etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc where a significant portion of the phone network is down and what survives is quickly inundated with emergency calls or people making calls to check on family or friends, what then for your IP radio? It's gonna be as dead as the poor people who rely on it for urgent information.
Whereas AM and FM will just keep plodding on. Where the frequencies 3g and 4g operate at fail to get around obstacles needing many more transmitters per mile, AM/FM will happily go on. Where all sorts of special circuitry is needed to make digital receivers, I could use a lighter, some wire and a few bits from a smashed stereo to make an AM receiver, and though I can't recall the specifics IIRC I've built a crystal set that handled FM as well (it was some 30 years ago so it could've been AM but I am sure that station was FM only).
DAB may give more stations, but it won't improve the quality of what is available, and when you're relying on up to date information during an emergency, well, you might just find yourself hoping that those who made such things happen are among the perished, while hoping like hell your loved ones can get the information they need to survive.
No it's more a case of DAB+ is demonstrably better than FM in every way and that's where the UK should be going.
Oh? Is the quality of the content going to somehow be magically better? No? Is it going to have better coverage? No? Is it going to have better quality in fringe reception areas? No? Is it somehow going to magically reduce the road and other noise in your car while you drive? No? What about the acoustics of you house? Still no? Will it magically improve the rest of your audio kit? Another no?
Then what is it going to do better than FM? I'm in a really fringe area, yet get great FM reception. I'm a little under 100m from the nearest digital TV transmitter, but I can't get any detectable signal from it even on a very high gain antenna. I can tell you that this house was able to receive the old analogue signals from the same mast back when we had them.
Digital seems to often reduce costs (equipment including receivers need replacing) while reducing overall quality. As others have mentioned, digital tv tends to be quite crap. I've seen enough "HD" to see it often suffers from colour banding and lots of blocky artefacts, and that's on decent kit in good reception areas. Lets not have another idiotic digital failure.
Every country should start dumping FM and free the space for DAB+ with a plan to sunset DAB a few years on from that.
Cool. Er, what's the range of a DAB+ transmitter compared to normal FM? How well does the signal cope with hills etc? How well would it's infrastructure cope in something like a natural disaster? Say one where large areas lose power for hours at a time (like can happen in earthquakes) and you have another event to alert people to, like a tsunami warning?
A couple of months ago, a few hours after some quakes big enough to be reported here on El Reg, I was woken by civil defence sirens. If we'd had DAB radio, not FM or AM, neither I nor many other people would've been able to get vital information. New receivers cost money, and a hell of a lot of people around the world simply cannot afford to replace their electronics just because some idiot thinks it would be a good idea.
I've not looked at DAB at all, but suspect it might suffer from the same thing with mobile going to 2g then 3g then 4g.. The more "digital" it gets the more towers are needed, with each tower covering less and less area. The more towers, the more reliable power needed in an emergency to keep them running, only in an emergency you don't have reliable electricity. Me and 20,000 of my closest neighbours can tell you all about that.
As to TV, I've been watching stuff in so-called "high definition" for a long time and seldom bother with broadcast TV. I felt it was a massive waste of resources to digitise NZ tv, and mourned the loss of a couple of smaller private transmitters nearby who offered a really crappy signal and low production values, but content that more than made up for it and was way above the hollywood shitefest we normally have to suffer. (Actually, there is something far far worse than what comes out of hollywood, and that's what comes out of TV NZ - including their main news which I think would make Faux and all the worst tabloids look like decent intelligent balanced reporting!)
"We need a better approach which treats the root cause of this and fixes them before they fuck up someones life, not after."only a 'feel' solution is likely to come out of this line of thinking, which means more gummint, stupidER laws, and a whole lot of emotion and getting NOTHING accomplished. no thanks.
Yes, because the current system works so well. The one that takes a teen with a few issues and turns them into criminals, denies them chances to get help and so on. I've worked with troubled teens. I've seen a high success rate. Kids who would've been dead or in prison in their late teens instead are hard working members of society with a good family of their own by their mid 20s.
But hey, lets just act like a bunch of retards and keep chucking people in prison and coming up with idiotic laws to further restrict freedoms and create even more criminals. You do know a common definition of insanity is "doing the same thing expecting different results", right? Doesn't that make society somewhat insane if we use the same idiotic methods in hopes of somehow improving this world?
Punishment instead of rehabilitation is and always will be a failure, and the worst criminals of the lot are the scum who willingly promote such things (I don't mean housewives who read Daily Mail etc who haven't given this sort of thing any thought, but people who claim intelligence who promote this stuff - if anyone should have a life sentence without parole it is them)
I'm not after whatever a "feel" solution is. I'm after an effective solution. It takes hard work, but the results are worth it, and in the long term cost society far less than what you promote.
How about this: you punish criminals as HARD as you can, keep them out of peaceful society for as LONG as you can ?
Tell me, with all the stuff your president elect appears to have done/promoted/has been accused of, what should be done with him? How long do you think should he be inside for?
As to supporting the death penalty, well.. Only the most hate-filled people can promote or support such things.
How can what you promote ever be part of "peaceful society"? Revenge breeds revenge, peace breeds peace, hate breeds hate, love breeds love. Revenge and hate are quick, easy, and feel good at the time, but the overall results are more revenge, hate, and pain. Peace and love however, while they take work to achieve and maintain, have better results long-term, and the overall quality of life for everyone is improved.
There is actual _EVIL_ in the world.
Yes, that's obvious just from your post.
There are people who will go out of their way to do criminal act to get money or pleasure [or whatever], even if their skills and intelligence could otherwise get them employed,
Not everyone who commits a crime is like that. Some don't know better, and have a chance to be educated. But the stupid idea of locking up people for longer only promotes crime, and more violent crime at that. If stealing a loaf of bread gets you 20 years, you might as well kill any witnesses as well.
The vast majority of people who commit crimes would rather not. They'd rather be educated and have good jobs. They'd rather be straight than on drugs or booze (try getting them away from peers who lead them that way and put them with peers who promote getting out and having a good time through sports/other social activities where you don't substances to give you a "high", the changes and rapidity of those changes will astound you!)
I've known a couple of these *kinds* of people: an uncle, and a friend's brother. Both are dead, and you COULD say their own evil/selfish lifestyle contributed to a short lifespan, as well as outright victimizing others (or society in general) from time to time.
Everything you do leads to the moment of your death. Many good people die young (eg a teenager who dies trying to save someone else from drowning vs many nasty people die old and rich (how many mob leaders, empires built on the back of drug victims and other victims of violent crimes, die old and filthy rich?).
I've also known a number of "these kinds" of people (whatever that is supposed to mean). I know from past volunteer work, and the friends I've had in more recent times who've made some significant mistakes, what it takes to cause someone to take a different track in life. A bad track is usually from an aberration that can be dealt with given appropriate "treatment" and resources. A change to a good track is the rewarding result of taking the time to find out what they need, then meeting that need.
It's not society's fault, their parents' fault, or anybody ELSE's fault but their own.
You don't see the hypocrisy in what you're saying here? You want to deprive people of their freedoms for as long as possible due to the mistakes they make, and you somehow think you are better than them? How messed up is your thinking?
Everyone who has input into your life has a hand in how you turn out. Not all have a totally causative effect, but there are a lot of factors. Most criminals for example come from poorer backgrounds and broken homes - lots of childhood stress which can have a significant detrimental impact on young brains and minds. Yet there are many children from extreme poverty who do well. It doesn't mean the parents of those who commit crimes are directly at fault, but there may be some fault in that they didn't find a way to reach the person who broke the law. Of course, those who bring their kids up around crime or drug/alcohol abuse are pretty directly responsible.
Changing the mindset, while they're still young, changes the outcome. But you have to have the resources and willingness to reach them, and you have to have them willing to come to you without fear of further problems. IOW, seeking help needs to lead to a life of freedom and health, not prison and pain. If people are afraid to get help for a problem before they commit a crime, then they'll not seek help.
There are several areas where society has a say in the outcome of a person's life. Example, I grew up gay, even though in NZ it became legal in my teens. In other parts of the world I believe it is (or at least was back then) a capital crime. Yes, people like you would be baying for my execution. There are those, even reading this now, who would want my death and eternity in hell for being gay. I was driven to suicide (one thing I proudly say I was a failure at!) by the efforts of some who thought they were decent people; vile trash who rated themselves so high and moral, yet they nearly succeeded in destroying the life of several teens. Some did. I was lucky, I managed to find a way out through my faith and into a better life. I still made mistakes, but I built a life I can be proud of. Not everyone I knew was so lucky, and some made choices that got them imprisoned, and a few took their lives over how society treated them. Can you imagine what it is like for a parent who loses a kid to suicide? How about a parent whose child is the most gentle loving soul you can imagine, but who has something they feel is so wrong they cannot live, be it homosexuality in decades past or other sexual fantasies or unusual thinking today? Can you imagine what that does to their siblings and friends? But that is, ultimately, what you promote. A life without hope of change, only to be punished by society.
I was headed towards some very violent crime. I hated everyone, and I wanted to punish everyone for the pain inflicted on me. The right person took a chance, and my life was turned around, and here I am. I can be proud of my life and achievements.
How society views certain things can make them worse for the person who experiences them. Since we're on a topic relating to sexual abuse.. If we were to lighten up on the views on such things to some degree, in regard to how we treat victims of such abuse, we would see a lowering of crime from them. Society does a lot to make the victims of abuse feel bad about themselves, and even worse than that we strongly and openly promote the views that they're more likely to become abusers or to commit other serious crimes. We heap so much bad upon their shoulders, over and above what they experienced, that we basically program them to become criminals.
Proverbs says "As a man thinks in his heart, so he is", and that is what we do to people. Over and over, constantly building and reinforcing this teaching that "because X happened you, you'll likely do Y and Z, and probably some V as well". The ones who don't fail are the ones who manage to change their thinking - but that can take a lot of work.
Neuroscience also agrees with this, and shows that if you continue to reinforce a habit/pattern, then it becomes more and more ingrained. If, however, you can break that pattern, then thinking and therefore actions can be changed. I've seen it happen with and without Christ, and although I obviously prefer "with Christ" I'll take anything that changes a person's life and stops them being a criminal. Anything intelligent and effective that is.
Fixing the root cause of THAT can only be done by eliminating the aberrations (criminally-minded people) from the bell curve of human nature.
If the death penalty works to prevent crimes, then why is the murder rate in the US so high? If incarceration works, why is the US (almost?) the country with the greatest number (%) of people in prison in the western world, yet also the country with the highest crime rate. If what you propose works so well, the US should be a country with very low crime.
It isn't. Clearly such practices are a complete failure and need to be abandoned.
(Post edited for El Reg 10kchar limit - and what's with the captcha?)
That particular judge is unlikely to ever be released.
I don't know how I feel about that. On one hand he put innocent people inside, I guess a number of them, and needs to repay that debt - and it's pretty damned impossible. On the other, people can change, and they can change significantly and quickly even if the catalyst is selfish motives (in this case "I miss my authority" and or "I miss my money" and or "I miss my expensive toys" with a distant maybe "I miss my family"). I'd love to see a system where if you could convince enough people of decent change, you can get out very early whereas if you can only show that you've not changed, you stay. Of course that would need our prisons to move from punishment to rehab, and would also mean the victims can only be a part of decision (lets face it, victims especially of nastier crimes can hold a massive grudge, and a really harmful crime can come from one stupid decision where the outcome is completely unexpected - eg who ever thinks that one extra drink will impair them enough that it causes them to crash and kill someome? (no I don't excuse drunk driving and think that by the time of a 3rd offense lifetime driving bans should be a real possibility! (yes I know that sounds hypocritical)
Corruption in the USA is at least as bad as any west african country, just slightly less blatent in most cases.
There are many forms of corruption. NZ often gets voted quite highly if not at the top of the "least corrupt", yet our cops can be among the worst when it comes to things like evidence tampering, witness tampering and various other things. And a big part of that, AIUI, is that they're given significant bonuses for convictions. When you can get a (I believe but could be wrong and don't have a source handy) $20K bonus for a murder conviction, that's quite an inducement to maybe ignore some of the evidence that can show someone is guilty, and perhaps get that one tiny partial print promoted to the jury as if it's a full set of finger/palm/foot prints as well as signed confession, and a full DNA lot as well. DNA doesn't match? Well, we'll just say that no DNA tests were performed, then the defence doesn't have to know about that.
NZ cops take bribes from crims/gangs etc? Almost never, maybe not even 1 in a thousand. Tamper with evidence to help get their conviction? That may be a different story..
I would like to play with shaped charge explosives though as a way of cutting metal in the workshop... the hacksaw makes my arm tired.
I too would love to play with some HE.. Just for fun and research purposes mind.. Like how much of a bang causes an involuntary download of brownware in passers by... :)
While explosively cutting stuff can be much more fun than labouriously cutting away with a hacksaw, you could perhaps make a cheap version of a device I only knew of as a "powersaw" (and not the circular type chippies use either). You could probably use repurposed bits for it easily enough, as the one I saw was effectively a larger version of a hacksaw blade.
So, make a carrier for a hacksaw blade (even if it's just a normal hacksaw itself, whatever you can make work). At one end it has to take a drive system and at the other a weight. You'll need something to give it a back'n'forth motion for the cutting action - perhaps the mechanics from a car's screen wipers will do for this for small applications, see parts from an old washing machine for larger applications. A feed of lubricating fluid would also be helpful, to keep the blade and the metal being cut cool and to keep the blade moving. A car's screen washer bottle with pump and the tubing going to just above and to either side of the blade would work well here, you can then have it drain (through some sort of filter - a wire mesh or various types of cloth could work well here) back into the bottle directly. Would have to be a light oil as the pump will probably not handle heavier stuff much. Oh, the blade has to be hinged so you can lift the end opposite the drive and drop it on the work easily. Then you just need a table and clamp for the work - and just resting the work on your normal bench and using a G clamp will do that well enough.
Set the work in the machine, start the machine, bugger off for a few minutes. The machine might take a while to cut but you can do other stuff. We used to use one to cut very large bar stock that would not fit in other machines and take a while to cut with a cutting blade on a grinder (not to mention the waste of metal that would cause), and would kill several hacksaw blades (not to mention arms) trying to cut it manually. The machine would take maybe 20 minutes but would do it itself. IIRC the stroke would be about 2", and the cycle would be about a second (so it would go forward and back in 1 second, and a line marked on the blade would travel about 2 inches). IIRC we would've had about a pound or less in weight keeping the blade on the work (or rather, stroke would be about 50mm/5cm, and around 500gms of weight on the end of the blade - but you guys work in that weird imperial system so I'm roughly converting :) )
DisclaimersThis probably is covered by a few patents so be careful if you try to sell this to anyone. The home brew version of this design I only thought of today in response to the message I am replying to, I have not built such a device myself and there could be flaws in my design I haven't yet conceived of - use at own risk. If you do find a commercial application and wish to thank me for savings/profits, then consider giving money to charities which help elderly or poor people, or cats. CATS ARE NICE.
And damn it, I like things that go Bang!
Easy. One weekend, spill your beer into the oversized 3-phase motor you chose to power the above..
And the politicians will, likely as not, support them too, because the majority of our 'representatives' are not only in favour of over-zealous displays of 'law and order' but actively work to increase the powers of the agencies and law enforcement while simultaneously reducing any restrictions or oversight and removing what few public protections are left.
We saw that over here with the Dotcom (or is it Dotkom? can never remember) affair. "Mr (former PM) Key, what those agents did in this case was highly illegal, they need to be arrested, charged, tried, and sent away for a very long time"
"Nope, wasn't illegal. We, the "National" party, will (under urgency no less!) change the law retrospectively so what they did is no longer a crime and they cannot be charged."
(They were good at that, passing a hell of a lot of stuff under urgency (even stuff that wasn't urgent and stuff that really needed a lot more work), making sure their people who committed crimes were clear, making sure their rich friends could get richer, while making it harder for people to get work, and making a few things that weren't illegal criminal offences with prison time available, and also retrospective IIRC)
Few days back I was talking about how US courts should not award stupid amounts of money in some claims.
However, I think that for the people behind this sort of thing, there should be an example made such that those who have profitted from innocent people going to prison will truly and for the rest of their lives know what poverty is (preferably by collectively spending the same amount of time inside as their victims, so if 1,000 victims spent 3 days each inside then there's 3,000 days worth of jail time to be used equally by the highest and lowest people who knew this was going on and didn't speak out publicly or at least in court against it - so if there's 10 of them they have to do 300 days each).
If your actions put an innocent person in prison/jail through known faulty systems (different matter if say they were found holding the weapon at a murder scene) then you should a) do the same time as them, b) have to cover ALL of the costs incurred by them/their loved ones including travelling to court/to visit them inside, any medical or funeral costs (more than one person has had a fatal heart attack or stroke as a result of news of a loved one's arrest, especially on serious charges) and a whopping wrongful death case in case of such, and also pay for a lot of full-page newspaper ads, at least 3x the coverage on TV saying the person is absolutely innocent, and a massive online campaign to remove any mention of their guilt and clearly show their innocence. If you're bankrupted through this, good. Don't put innocent people in jail and if there's a risk something is producing even 0.1% false positives then stop using it.
</rant>
As noted, just check how OTHER anklet systems work. They've already been through the tamper-resistant, basement-capable wringer.
At best standard cellphone networks, so notoriously unreliable that the GPS ones can have people hundreds of metres from where they're said to be, and the home devices (for those on curfew or house arrest) so often don't give a reliable signal that the cops can take hours to respond even when those monitoring these people tell the cops to urgently go to the house and check the person is there, at least as per NZ media reports. As to tamper-resistant, well, I won't go much into that but we did have someone show, on live TV, just how quickly and easily they could be defeated. Wet paper would last longer than those things against household scissors (TV3's current-affairs type program named "Story", some time during 2016 IIRC, probably locatable via a quick search on Google or TV3.co.nz)
But if it phones home, the police will get wind of this pretty quickly, much like how you usually can't remove or otherwise disable other kinds of "prison" anklets without them noticing.
Yup, and 3 or 4 days later, when the cops can be arsed actually looking at it, his feet will be well dry and he'll innocently say "Oh that was probably when I was in the bath"...
Besides.. All they'd have to do is sit at a table with the right type of metallic top, or a sheet of tinfoil under the top.. The separation between ankle and device would let the WiFi get through while letting the ankle bracelet still talk to base.
(Ok, good in theory, no idea how it'd work in practice...)
Option 3: consult a spellchecker or online dictionary. (Whether you will is an entirely different question.)
Fail 1 : Haku was quoting the original spelling verbatim, so in that sense spelt it correctly.
Fail2 : My spell checker says that "spellchecker" is wrong.
"With USB devices, if you plug it straight into the computer you can bypass passwords and get right on the system," RAF Wing Commander Peter D'Ardenne told Reuters."Yes, there are valid reasons for stopping people bringing USB devices into particular environments but using an iPod to bypass passwords isn't top of the list of reasons to ban the use of USB devices.
Erm, Stuxnet? Wasn't that spread by dropping infected USB devices outside the target? And Brontic(IIRC, could be a different nasty), and lots of other bits of malware. Put them into a windows machine, malware loaded before AV even gets a chance to do something about it. Doesn't matter if autorun is on or off. (MS may've fixed this but I doubt it!)
IIRC there is something like a driver part of some USB sticks which could be infected, again bypassing any security and loading your nasty to a nice low level. ICBW, been a while since I had to deal with that. But yes, USB devices have been used to infect machines without user interaction.
You weren't supposed to answer. I was trying to bait some of the less intelligent/more feisty commentards! :)
[If you buy that rather than I had a coffee-lack/wrong website reading induced brainfart, I have a large English bridge to sell you, or some special patch cables that improve the streaming of your MP3's, only $8,500 saving you $1,500!]
The problem is that the catch words are built-in to conserve precious battery life.
Thing is.. A 3 syllable word or phrase takes just as much to process as any other 3 syllable word/phrase when you have to process everything even remotely close to tell if that's the target word/phrase. It has to process every thing it hears that could be close enough - and that's assuming there's some level of pre-processing to avoid it trying to process "you're stupid".
However, if I record a phrase in my voice, then it only has to respond to my voice. I can make it what I want (so doesn't have to be a name), and it only has to check what it hears against what it has in memory - reasonable match = listen, otherwise ignore. My much-mentioned T209 was given a 3 or 4 word wake-up phrase that would never come up in ordinary conversation, and that only one other person managed to get past no matter how well he mimicked my voice. And this was mid 90's tech.
Given that the device is going to be sending stuff off over a wireless or other link, processing/sending off audio data and so on, it's rather ingenious to claim "battery life" for such things. Takes more battery life to send audio over WiFi than it takes to compare with a block of internal ram. My T209 had something over 24hours talk time, and enough standby time that it could last a couple of weeks between charges if I didn't talk on it often. So all this waffle about "saving battery life" really is just shite. Especially in an age where most of the western world are used to their phabs needing to be charged every half hour.
Don't forget, the context of this conversation is the wake-up word and letting people change it. Especially away from a fairly common first name, which was a ridiculously stupid idea to use and suggests that Amazon intended such incidents.
But, assuming (no idea) live human voices actually carry recognizable higher harmonics, could devices not use special microphones that recognize their absence and therefore infer that it's listening to a recording or broadcast?
I have a vague memory of hearing of something like that being worked on. Whether it was somewhere like TV/Movie, SciFi book, or something non-fiction I'm afraid I couldn't say, but the idea was that certain frequencies weren't reproduced by electronic systems so if they weren't detected.
That said, I am sure that a sound source generating 1khz will produce harmonics and sub-harmonics the same whether human voicebox or speaker (no idea what freqs human voice ops at)
As an added bonus, folks with Monster cables or the $30K stereos could still get dinged!
Not necessarily true.. The speaker and the amp make the system, the cable is just, well, nothing but wire. I have friends who believe my speakers are fed by some expensive cabling throughout the house, just because it sounds right to their trained ears. Truth is.. I had a spare roll of mains cable... Oxygen-free copper with gold plating isn't going to carry electrons any differently, not over these distances (and aside from perhaps lowering the resistance of the cable, I doubt it would matter over any distance (potential interference aside), electrons is electrons)
But this a nice idea, and I cannot think of a more deserving bunch for some pranks based on "faithful reproduction" of certain sounds..
So what happens when intrinsically insecure options are ALL YOU HAVE? And you're still expected to present a solution or you don't get paid and they also threaten to get you blacklisted so you won't get hired anywhere else?
And aside from one or two negative poster's dreamworlds, where would that happen?
Process the return (Additional Labour cost), refund the sale cost, write of the inital delivery, packaging & labour costs (Along with any transaction fees for their payment provider) then they are left with an item that they probably cant resell as new...
EVERY online shopping thing I've seen1 has charged packaging and shipping separate to the item cost, and also made return shipping the responsibility of the receiver. And "I don't want it" may not be enough to get a refund in many jurisdictions, because you did enable the system that is now well known to order whatever follows "Alexa" in it's2 hearing. Not Amazon's fault if you didn't fix the settings on their system now that it has made international headlines more than once. Been in all the major news media, not their fault you didn't change it.
Then of course you have the fact that the customers that you have pissed off may not order from you again.
I will never shop from Amazon aga OHLOOKNEWCHEAPSHINY! MUSTHAVENOW!
People will go where the cheap is, not where their morales/integrity/past vows say they should. Otherwise Amazon wouldn't exist and small local retailers (who give a hell of a lot better overall service for a tiny amount more price, and often a cheaper price for a better product with real product knowledge) would be booming.
In short, I seriously doubt that anyone would be stupid enough to try this as a sales tactic (at least not in a country with half decent consumer laws)
If TPPA was to get in, there would be no consumer laws. Well, none that are friendly to the consumer anyway.
1I'm one of those weird freaks who generally prefers to see an item first-hand before deciding to buy, so I haven't seen a lot of such things. But I have seen things like a certain big box chain in NZ where you can order items to be picked up in store, and you get charged freight even if the item is part of their normal stock.
2Yes, the apostrophe probably should be there, shows ownership in the same way as eg "in Paul's hearing".
"Does nobody just stick insulating tape over their laptop camera these days?"I think most cameras are textured on the outside or otherwise have anti-adhesive features around the lens such that tape tends to fall off quickly. And I wouldn't try to disable the camera in hardware, as it may cause the laptop to brick.
Easy fix. Superglue is more adhesive, even if you just want to smooth the surface. Or stick it to the lens along with whatever blocking substance you wish. Sandpaper works as well. And a lot of (older) cases can be opened just enough to drop the lens of the camera down enough that it can't see.
And no hope on the mic since it can still pick up while completely enclosed by feeling the vibrations of the case.
Wirecutters and an appropriate ohmage resistor should you be worried about the actual mic being tested. Or fit a socket and proper mic if you wish to use it sometimes. And if it has a normal socket (not a lenovo must-use-expensive-proprietary-mic one) then just plug in a plug that has no leads coming off it.
All this stuff you chuck up is trivially defeated, usually in a matter of 1/2 a seconds thought and a few seconds work.
Was it ever explicitly stated that Avon and Callie were involved together?
I don't recall such.
It would be well worth your time to watch it again I beleive. Some of the SFX are, well, low-budget 1980's BBC, but the plotlines and some of the other SFX are fairly decent.
IIRC the BBC did release it on DVD, which promptly made its way to various online sources..
I'm continually amazed that while MS could apparently get it right on a sclerotic ARM core with sod-all memory, the likes of Amazon, Google (and MS - hah!) still can't while using powerful servers to do the job.
I see things the same. I've seen all sorts of small devices with reasonable Voice Reg over the years, and apple marketed "a computer that understands you" back in the 90's. But the more powerful systems get, the less usable VR seems to get. They also seem to get more stupid in many cases.
Avon: Because you're the only one of us stupid enough to sound like they need tech support. Get dialling !
I think the movie "Starship: Rising" was at least set in the Blake universe, though much later than B7. IIRC it had a number of planet and other names similar to B7, though no overt references.
IIRC it also appeared to be a pilot, or attempt at one..
Villa wasn't anywhere near as stupid as he looked/acted. I recall one episode in S4 where he pretended to be drunk to get out of some messy job Avon and Tarrant(?) wanted to send him on
BTW.. The S1 episode "Duel" and one episode soon after appear to use a smartphone, even simillar form factor. You see the device later next to the transporter controls, complete with what looks like a homescreen grid of icons on screen... Must take another watch of it...
The first thing they should do is ask you to give them a new name that can't be their actual name.
My ancient Sony Ericson T209(?) effectively had that. You recorded a word for it to listen for (eg name) and after that it tried to listen for further commands. It didn't come with a pre-set name, you had to put it in yourself.
Voice is a stupid idea.
Not all of us are able-bodied. While I agree that most people don't need voice, for those with missing/disabled limbs this sort of thing can be quite helpful.
Of course, they've probably had some decent voice-operation software on their computer for a long time.
Agree with the rest though.
Now, who do I know, and dislike, who has one of these and an old-school answerphone.. Just need to phone when they're out..
"Alexa, order me some vibrators, extra large..."Alexa, large shipment of adult diapers" "Alexa, a dozen blow-up dolls please, male" (or female if the hated one is female, black for racists, you get the idea..)
Or more fun/sinister... "Alexa, order me a length of rubber hose." "Alexa, order me a ski mask." "Alexa, order me a bear trap" (oblig XKCD https://xkcd.com/576/ )
The Android fix mentioned here, was only during a certain boot phase, and not really an issue unless you rebooted the phone whilst connected to a malicious charger.
Not really a rare occurrence. Given the pitiful battery life of smartphones, odds are quite good that your phone will die while you're out needing a charge. And many people cannot bear to be aware from it for very long so they will turn it on seconds after connecting it to the charger.
Most chargers aren't just a collection of resistors, capacitors and transformers anymore. They need some "intelligence" at least to negotiate how much power to transfer, as most devices can take a higher current than the 500mA sent by default over USB. Some may also use this intelligence to monitor how the phone battery is charging, and adjust their current accordingly (say reducing the current when the phone is nearly charged).
I have 2 car/bike battery chargers. One can deliver up to 5 amps, the other I think up to 20A. The 20A one delivers what the battery needs at the time. If it's a completely flat battery this thing delivers pulses at the higher rate until the voltage in the battery starts to rise, then as the battery gets closer to full charge the current supplied by the charger is reduced.
The charger consists of 1) a mains transformer, 2) a rectifier, 3) a current display (simple gauge) to show what the battery is drawing and 4) a cut-out that as it heats up (from over current draw) it cuts out till it cools down, hence limiting the output current to 20A. It's also quite old, early 80's or late 70's
While I've not opened the much more modern 5A charger, it's probably much the same except it's also a "maintenance charger" in that it's designed for vehicles/batteries that are not being used (eg motorbikes parked up over winter), in that when the battery reaches full charge it completely cuts off the power and only drops a little bit in every now and then to keep the power up rather than a constant draw.
This stuff is basic electronics and doesn't need anything fancy to do it.
Dell laptop chargers have a bit of extra circuits in them to tell the laptop what wattage the charger is, to protect Dell machines from you not spending enough $ on them/to protect Dell from you buying a perfectly OK charger that someone else sells. But even this does not need anything special that could be compromised. Is simple to make both ends protected, on the laptop don't let the circuitry that talks to the charger do any more than pass a "yes charger is OK" or "no charger from 3rd party EVIL EVIL EVIL" (or "charger wrong wattage") to the laptop - you could do it with 2 bits, a few more if you want it to specify it's wattage. It takes nothing more than that.
So basic I can't believe the stupid involved in this!
malicious power chargers
No! NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO!
There are all sorts of reliable, proven, and simple ways for chargers to deliver more power when needed and reduce the power later.
Hell, car battery chargers and the like have been doing it for what, 50 years? 80? Technology so old and stable we use it in our daily lives and never give it another thought.
No need for anything in the charger that can allow it to be infected.
This is just stupid on so many levels. Beyond stupid. Who the hell thinks "Oh hey, let's take basic electronics that don't need to be fancy and turn them into something complex that can carry malware"?
Wat WASN'T her fault was that the coffee was served BLISTERINGLY hot
Which anyone who isn't severely mentally handicapped would know from the very first time they tried to make coffee.
Turn jug on. Prepare other ingredients to desire. When jug boils, pour boiling contents into cup.
Coffeemakers also boil their water.
McD's should've appealed. She and the judge&jury who awarded her should've been sold into slavery to repay the costs involved for McD's.
Actually that could help improve the jury system, where a lot of people base their decisions not on the evidence but "he looks like a criminal" (and after being stuck in prison for a couple of years awaiting trial...) - if you fuck up on jury service and send an innocent person to jail, you're sold into slavery to repay your debt to them (or made their personal slave to do with as they wish - all 12 of you!)
In that regard, what you are describing is a prior vetting of any complaint so that a judge would have to be involved in every filing before the prospective defendant was even issued with the claim.
There's another way it can work. Had the judge told that woman "You should know that if you spill hot coffee on yourself you'll get burnt you stupid bitch!" , or at the very least "Well, you had hospital treatment costing $10,000 so I'm awarding you $10,000 and not one cent more", and such for many other cases, then you wouldn't have crap like this going on. Under the "law of Moses" as some call it (OT Biblical stuff), if you were responsible for someone being injured you were responsible for their medical costs until they were well, nothing more nothing less.
The rest of the world has people trying to sue other people/companies every day. We don't have people expecting to get stupidly rich from it. Nor do we have people who commit crimes expecting to be able to sue victims of the crime, even if the victims negligently left a knife under their skylight or used the wrong sort of glass so poor little criminal cut himself when trying to break into someone's home1. Change the expectations of the payouts to more reasonable levels, you'll change the problem overnight. Stop letting people sue others for their own mistakes.
1 I don't know how much of this stuff is true, but I'm quite certain some stupid cases like this have been brought, and won, with silly payouts given.
(run by Tucows).
Wow, they're still going? I'd forgotten about them since my Windows days. IIRC they used to.. er.. Too far back but I think they used to have some good tools or other downloads or something? Must pay them a visit for old times sake..
(Hopefully they're not another malware-ridden download.com clone these days...)
[edit couple of mins later..] Ok, their software (especially the Linux stuff) needs some serious updates. 2002 versions of software? (eg Bluefish 0.11 vs Aptitude's version 2.2.7-2! ]
Nope. When you transfer to another registrar you pay the fee (which is similar to a yearly renewal fee, often a bit cheaper because bait) and you get a year added on until the domain expires.
Not with the group I normally use (1stdomains.co.nz), at least not when I last transferred someone to them, which was a year or so back. You only pay when you register or renew, and if you transfer an existing domain to them you don't have to pay until renewal (or if you want to use some of their other services). Of course, they could've changed that since then, and of course this may be fairly unique to them.
FWIW I'm using UK2 for my domains lately.
I've had to fire off a missive to abuse@uk2group.com due to a hell of a lot of naughty traffic coming from one of their IP's today. Attacked started about midnight NZ time and stopped about 5am.
That said, probably more noticeable because I'd turned denyhosts off briefly and forgotten to turn it on. Denyhosts would've kicked the bugger permanently after a few failed attempts.. Has been some 6 hours since I sent the email (with log entries) and no response thus far, not even an acknowledgement.
(Is this the "UK2" you refer to? AKA "Midphase"?)
Another told her - with a straight face - that you knew if a skeleton was male or female because there was one less rib. Only in Bible school, darling.
Nope, not even there. There's nothing in the Bible to say that, never was. These people should get to know their Bible a bit more if they believe such nonsense!
If you really want, the mass can be made up of Ni Cad battery cells.
A good idea. Get a couple of hours life out of your iPhab/Phabdroid (or one 10 minute call), gain strength and lose weight all at the one time :)
IIRC there was once a wrist band you could buy that was largely lead weights in a nice soft fabric, but NiCad's would work just as well :)
with gnome 2, then Mate, I can put 22 launch icons, plus the menu, system monitor, and the clock stuff into the top panel, and STILL have room for white space between groups of things. I can't even do HALF of that with Gnome 3 and they only let you group left, center, right. I want MULTIPLE groups, and positioned manually, MY way, not THEIR way.
And here you have why I also use Mate and not Gnome! Way back when I first tried out Linux seriously as a desktop this was one of the things that sold me. Windows had its rather limited single taskbar, Gnome had that plus I could add more, and put on launch icons, menus, monitors, and if I really began to run out of room I could add more. I could also have separate ones for my second screen.
I'd played with a few things and ran KDE and whatever came on the Knoppix disks, but Gnome2 was a big part of me becoming someone who used Linux on the desktop most of the time.
Every time I've used G3 I've stopped as quickly as possible, and only from a live image. Did intend to install it once but thankfully hit the "try" instead of "install" buttons, survived a few minutes trying to get it into a usable state. Hopefully they've improved?
Glad to see there is a Mate version for Fedora, downloading now and will give it a spin soon. Will try Gnome3 again but I think
Why not ask the power company to come out and fix it properly???
If I am remembering correctly, it would be linked to the bureaucracy in that particular part of the world. Same reason his entire supply is almost 10% more than my jug uses (I could not have my jug and my PC turned on at the same time there!)
Actually from the US, and the situation varies as to where you are. Everywhere that I've lived, power has been supplied by a local utility, usually a private company (here it is a co-op) serving a limited area. Age also plays a factor: in the neighborhood I was describing houses still had a lot of "knob and tube" wiring, and the power infrastructure was from about the same date.
In NZ we used to have lots of small suppliers, often at a district level. Did mean no competition, but they were co-ops also owned largely by the town with profits going back into the town. Not sure exactly when that ended but in the mid 90's some utter complete [multiple expletives deleted]wonderful person in government had a complete [more expletives]brain fartbrilliant idea and brought in a whole change to the power industry that pushed prices way up making it hard for many poor people esp pensioners to afford hot meals and home heating in wintersignificantly reduced costs for everyone exactly as promised. Now we have several billing companies, the lines network owned by separate company/ies (all government owned I believe), several generation companies (all completely independently government owned, at least up till National sold off the national assets), so your power can be generated by one lot, transmitted by lines owned by another lot, and billed to you by another group who only manage the billing even though the account is officially with them. It's uncertain who has "ownership" of the meters as they should belogn to the billing company but maybe a 4th or 5th company handles that. I do know that in the meter box outside all the meters are different, no two flats have the same model. This is probably a large part of why we have the ability for the billing companies to remotely cut off your power.
Also, every house I've owned, including brand new, has the meter on the outside.
The home I grew up in had the meter just inside the front door. Every other house I've been in had the meters outside, some with the fuse/breaker box also outside (most have a bank of breakers inside though). Last house I was in was a double unit and had whole lot in the neighbours back yard, meaning if you didn't get on with the neighbour you might have trouble changing a fuse!
What might also be different: Line of demarcation is generally power company from the meter out, home owner from the meter in - although what is inside generally has to pass an inspection.
I believe that's the same here, only.. See above..
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