* Posts by salman ali

16 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Jul 2007

North American cities go green under LED street lights

salman ali
Thumb Up

re: 4 x $100,000 = $630,000?

They said the LEDs last 10 years instead of 2. Presumably replacing the bulbs twice, with the manpower and replacements and transport involved costs the extra 230,000.

Currency launched to cover the cosmos

salman ali
Dead Vulture

not a joke?

This is serious? I thought it was just a spoof piece >.>

I have no idea what this bleeding dead chicken avatar is supposed to mean btw.

Lawmaker shows nudie pic to high school seniors

salman ali

re:Snicker

As far as I know, snicker is a quite widely used synonym for snigger.

The chocolaty snack is called "Snickers" btw.

FBI redefines length of century

salman ali

re: Can we add 1908+100, kids?

"So basically the century rollover is in '01 because first century was 1-100 instead of 0-99, not because of freaky counting. Oh, and that is because you're counting from the first day of first year, to last day of last year. Move over the "start pointer" one day, and you would get 0-100 or 1-101. ;)"

Arguing about when a century starts is even more arbitrary though, given the number of times the calendar has been reformed in the past two millenia. Whether a year was skipped at the start of the caledar isn't really relevant compared to all the other discontinuities in the recorded timeline that lead to this year being counted as the 2007th.

I wonder if anyone has worked out how many complete solar revolutions the earth has made since whatever day christ died, I've never thought of googling that till now.

Staying connected?

salman ali

Misleading categories

Survey categories are possibly a bit misleading. I'd fall into the "I'm content to only have access while I'm at my desk" category, but that's because I'm at my desk almost all my waking hours. I don't need to carry around a mobile computing device for that reason alone, I'm barely mobile, and most of my geeky friends are the same.

Bell Canada in Sex Pistols billboard ad gaffe

salman ali

re: re: Oversensitivity!

"Do you laugh at the ethnic cleansing going on round the world? Do you revel in torture and death?"

Sometimes >.> Massive exposure to the internet leaves me a firm believer in the view that any joke can be funny, regardless of whether its subject is horrifying or not. As long as I don't think the person making the joke believes in whatever bit of biggotry his current joke features, why wouldn't I appreciate any humour it has?

On topic of the pulled ad, I'm in Canada and caught neither the reference to the Sex Pistols, nor to concentration camps.

Mr and Mrs Renault cannot name daughter Megane

salman ali

pretty obscure article without the comments

Name seemed perfectly normal to me (grew up in south asia, now living in canada).

Even if the name is the name of a car, it hardly sounds comparable to something like "4real". Are Belgian's really that touchy about car names? If my parents were Mr and Mrs Diablo, I certainly wouldn't mind my first name being Lambourghini (no I don't know how to spell that correctly, sorry).

Crypto boffins break car cypher

salman ali

Hollywood has better techniques:

The article covered the Batman/Bourne Conspiracy technique. The "Mission Impossible" technique is much more entertaining and practical:

1. Be a ravishingly attractive super-spy.

2. Seduce car-owner.

3. Rumpy-pump said owner into unconsciousness.

4. Take car keys.

5. Drive off.

'Law and Order' cop accused of child porn possession

salman ali

invasion of privacy or not...

... isn't it still illegal search? How can they base prosecution on evidence gleaned from poking around in stuff they're not supposed to poke around? Even if the techie did just catch on to the porn because of file names turned up during a virus scan (assuming the computer problem justified such a scan, and assuming the tech should be permitted to watch the files names flying by at all), he undoubtedly opened some of the images/videos before calling the cops, and he had no right to do so.

Basically the flavour of all this is, "if you sniff a hint of CP in the air, accuse, and worry about being just later on". By that note, they should investigate the techie too, since he's been tainted by the cloying odour of CP as well, no one cares whether this secondary investigation is justified or not.

Also by the witchhunt rules described above, apparently I and most of my friends should be in jail simply for having visited various futaba clones like 4chan, since regardless of having no interest in CP, we've doubtless accumulated countless borderline images in our caches.

Doctor Who signs up thinking man's crumpet

salman ali

re: Kylie and acting ability

the disparity in reaction probably has something to do with Kylie not having already played a horribly unpleasant character in the series.

Cloak and dagger Chinese firm tells Google to change its name

salman ali

quote the names

I would be nice if you quoted the Chinese names used by the two companies instead of just saying they're similar. I realize that they're available in the linked Danwei article and this is an English publication, but it still seems a pretty important thing to leave out of an article like this.

Google flirts with online OS

salman ali

RE: OS != Filesystem

An OS is software that manages all your computer's resources. In the context of modern consumer PCs, that includes things like scheduling, multithreading, virtual memory, interrupt handling, and providing abstraction layers for all the various hardware systems in a PC.

Regardless of the fact that Unix systems view all device I/O as "files", having an online file system has pretty much nothing to do with being an actual Operating System. While Google could conceivably have some form of online OS (I can't really imagine how that could possibly work, but it is Google, so who knows...), this article doesn't actually say anything in support of this.

Reg hack hypnotised by bouncing boob samba

salman ali

Based off the Fairy Dance page

Looks very derivative of the Fairy Dance page, which did the same thing with an array of slightly varied anime drawings of a very happy fairy bouncing up and down (no nudity). Imho that page was a lot nicer, but sadly it too recently went offline: http://starterupsteve.servepics.com/dance/fairy/index.html

salman ali

Fairy Dance page found!

Found a working link to the fairy dance mentioned above:

http://www.starterupsteve.com/dance/fairy/index.html

There goes my day's productivity...

US court says just viewing child porn is not a crime

salman ali

re: Tech Support Question

Mike: that sounds like the google toolbar's version of Google Suggest. While I don't know of a way to prevent it from suggesting "school girls" when you type "sch" (in fact, I'd be surprised if there was an easy way, since I believe it communicates with google servers in realtime as you type "sch" to get suggestions, at least that's what the google suggest beta did), you can disable the suggestion feature under the options for the google toolbar. It's called "suggest popular searches" under the search bar settings. As long as you leave the other option for suggesting search from your history, it'll still suggest from the list of things you actually typed in.

That being said, I doubt you'd get in trouble with the law over having searched for school girls :) It is, after all, the most popular search on google beginning with the letters "sch" :).

Catherine Tate to accompany Doctor Who

salman ali

who?

Ugh. I'd no idea before who this Catherine Tate person was, but hearing it's that horrible woman from the christmas episode is disheartening. Why would they do that, there are so many better assistants he's passed by.

It's not even just that she's old and unattractive, the assistant from the episode where all the teachers in a high school were alien bats was old too, but she'd still have been a far more engaging assistant than this Tate person :(