Posts by Grunchy 923 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Mar 2015
Eh? What, did they disappear or something?
It says back in 2003 they developed a clock with accuracy 10^-15 which is superior to their 2001 model which only had accuracy 10^-14.
BUT AT WHAT COST, seems its a bit more finicky as a consequence. After which point the whole group was disbanded in disgrace, wot?
Even better, lease a shop, pick up some ovens from the auction, and develop your own recipe.
Be a entrepreneur & hire the help. Guess what language your web dev will use to set up your online pizza ordering app?
The answer is, it doesn't make any difference as long as it works. Fire the ones that don't succeed.
It's funny to hear web devs argue about nonsense while you're counting stacks of pizza loot :)
Hah, that's nothing. If the UAE police catch you driving about with someone "of the opposite sex" in the same car with you, they can rightfully pull you over and demand to see your marriage license.
Whaaaa????? Yes you are going to the jailhouse now.
(This is an example where homosexuals get away scot free, except if they catch you being homosexual, and then I don't know what they do to you but I imagine it could be worse)
Hey.......
I've been watching James May programmes off youtube here in Canada, including that one episode when he put a toy train back together for entertainment.
Am I supposed to be paying youse guys?
You're not gonna send me a big bill to pay or something are ya. Dang it.
I have a Nokia N810 which is pretty good. I haven't used it in so long, I should check if the battery still works.
What I'd really want is a modernized REX - a credit card sized PDA with touchscreen. Something properly tiny yet mega capable. I never got one when they were current, but I never forgot how much I wanted one.
I'd probably use the iphone anyway, it seems to work great for everything, pretty much. Too bad the OS is so locked down. I should upgrade to an Android phone. Oh well, what the hey, it's free (work phone).
I have ipod nano 6gen, mounted on a wristwatch strap. It's blah.. the only good thing about it is the FM radio.
BTW, what's the rush?
I imagine timing has to include solar activity, because couldn't you get sizzled if you're up in space - away from the protection of the atmosphere?
I dunno, I guess that's great. Yay for space! It's the most hostile environment I can think of, why would anybody want to go there.
I never liked Sony equipment because they put TOO MANY BUTTONS all over the hell of it. Then again, I pretty much only have Sony equipment.
Playstation was good, In fact, that's pretty much all of what Sony is today. I have PSP, PS Vita, PS2, PS3, PS4, and I use none of it ha ha :)
I clicked on this article because I wanted to hear that they are releasing AIBO again and this time, for a reasonable price. Alas & alack, they are not. PITY.
(pain in the you-know-what).
I will tell you what about those headphones: if you leave those in your ear canal, the bacteria goes Insane in there. They headphones have to come out from time to time.
My favorite Walkman: NWZ-W263, and they come out of my ear canal from time to time. I wish they had Bluetooth, I wish they had FM radio, they have neither, and this product is dead as doornail. THANK YOU VERY MUTS Sony, you should have taken this one just a wee bit further.
Talking about 3d, Cracked just put out a youtube video explaining that nobody talks about one #1 movie anymore (Avatar) because the only thing it innovated was 3d, which is pretty much defunct now.
You know what I find hilarious is the fact that, according to this story, Rift was pulled from BestBuy. I've been there a few times around Christmastime and they never had any VR systems to try out. For example: they want $700 Canadian for Sony PSVR, but no trial hardware to try out. Who's going to pay that? Especially when the reason they don't have trial hardware (hygiene) is the reason they're gonna give you static if you buy & don't like it because it makes you sick.
I love to hate Facebook, I'd like to see Zuck fired over this one :)
I remember a time when I had Canon AE-1 which featured the technological innovation known as "lens cap", which was opaque.
My old Sony "Bloggie" has a swiveling lens that actually swivels right into itself, accomplishing the same thing.
Its like an eyeball. Sure, you could do something as easy as draw shut an eye lid; but wouldn't it be better to prise it from its socket & sever its optic nerve?
I used to run a BBS back in the 1980s and it devolved into pettiness, plus had hyper-limited market so I got out of it. A lot of effort with zero potential for monetary gain and nothing but grief. I guess the internet has changed a couple parts of that, but you'd have to be pretty slimy to make a BBS into a business.
Whatevs.
Hey! I have a good idea for safety. We had a home invasion here in Canada where the family was kidnapped and later tortured and executed, then burned up as cremation. Terrible, horrible story. Anyway it occurred to me, yeah it'd be great if you had a house alarm, like the school has a fire alarm. Like you could punch your NEST thermostat in the nose and it'd start squawking and calling 911 for you. Anyway, that doesn't exist yet I do believe, but I guess I could keep my car alarm button near to bed. So that way if somebody breaks in I could press that car alarm button, which might scare away the intruder. As an "intruder alert" as like Berzerk.
Oh no, did I just zuckerberg? whups.
Obviously you could go without access for a couple days, it wouldn't kill you.
I cancelled home phone & signed up with a free VOIP provider. I used the savings to buy a newspaper subscription, yes I did!
What's your phone bill? Oh- mine? Oh yes, mine's free now, thanks.
Then I cancelled digital TV and built an antenna with wire coat hangers and 2x4 board and cardboard covered with aluminum foil, now I've got digital broadcast TV - free. I used the savings to buy 2 year access to Motor Trend On Demand, superior to Netflix IMO. To each of us our own.
For internet (because you need that for VOIP and MTOD to work) I bought an old cable modem and hired 3rd party ISP for less than 1/2 price.
Sorted!
He leaned against the fender of his 1946 GMC half-ton, the fading daylight casting long shadows across the wheatfields, the sunset shining brilliantly behind some clouds low on the horizon.
He took a draw - held it, swallowed, and slowly exhaled, smoothly, his eyes crinkled towards some birds amongst the bushes at the edge of the field. A sound of flapping wings, and train wheels on the tracks from a couple miles to the North. His jeans were careworn, the cowboy boots dusty & creased with years of duty. The smoke formed a cloud above his head and caught the fading light as the sky turned a deep purplish blue.
"Kid - nicotine is a bitch of a drug to kick, and is on par with heroin for addiction," he intoned, staring towards the big dipper, effervescing out of the South East. He stubbed out the smoke and flicked it expertly into the dirt at the side of the road.
"Just don't ever do it in any form." His lean frame settled, thumbs hooked into belt loops, elbows on fender, left heel on a wheel nut. Night was falling.
"Yep. Just don't even start."
95% safer than smoking???
I'm all over that. My dad had a lung operation from lung cancer (smoker risk group), my little brother died from lung cancer (smoker risk group), and my mom is in the smoker risk group.
I'll tell her to use iQOS today! Is it available today?
Nobody else smokes. I wonder who vapes...
One point I heard is that the only time an American party won 3 consecutive terms (modern era) was the Republicans: Ronald Reagan (2 terms, 1981-1989) followed by George Bush Sr (1989-1993).
So for Hillary to win a 3rd Democratic term would be practically unprecedented.
The two main parties are desperately out of touch, pretty much none of the candidates had any popular appeal. That's why crackpots like me advocate for implementation of "negative voting". If you don't like any candidates and couldn't support any of them, why not be permitted to cast a negative vote against one?
In my view, and I admit there's just about nobody else in the world who agrees with this: neither candidate deserved to be elected. I'm pretty sure that if people were allowed to cast negative votes, both candidates would have gotten a net score of below zero, meaning they would have both been declared unelectable.
The electorate are already being controlled by media who loudly trumpets that any third option vote is a wasted vote, or a vote for Trump.
Not so fast!
With two exquisitely unappealing candidates for President you would think people would be clamouring for a third option, and yet they are not. That's the influence of the media for you, and that's the work of decades and decades of programming, to convince people to not ever vote alternative / independent.
My challenge for Democracy:
allow the NEGATIVE vote. Yes you can vote for candidate 1 or for candidate 2, or even (if you're communist or queer or criminal or deranged) for candidate 3. But what if I hate all of them?
What if what I really want is to vote AGAINST CANDIDATE 1!!!!! I demand to cast a negative vote.
The reason I say this is the challenge for Democracy is because: if we the people are allowed to cast negative votes, there is an excellent chance that nobody gets elected.
Think of this: then all of those reject candidates are eliminated and a new election called.
That's my version of election reform!
Ultimately, web surfing is simply using one computer to download data files from a second computer. The first computer then renders that information onto a screen. Part of that information is unwanted by the user of the first computer.
So the way your browser can work is, it renders the information into two places: the filtered copy minus unwanted content is displayed on the screen, the unfiltered copy is rendered onto a virtual screen. Then when the ad malware checks to see if it has remained unfiltered, you direct that query to the data rendered on the virtual, unseen screen.
There is no possible way this can be detected by the second, remote computer, and they have no justification to filter your computer out as a viewer agent.
Foolproof!
It's dangerous to believe that ads don't work on you because you choose to ignore them.
They work by being on your peripheral where they have direct access to your subconscious.
Why, just this year I found myself shopping for Bose Wave on eBay. Took delivery of one, too.
Ads are very, very pernicious. Tread carefully, friends.
The new hardware isn't really all that much better than the old hardware IMO.
For instance I got a dual, quad-core Xeon Lenovo workstation cast-off from the Planetarium for $200, and it's terrific performance! Well good enough anyway.
Maybe AMD Zen will push Intel toward incrementally better performance, because nothing else seems to.
I'll keep my $2,999 thanks. I can buy a USB-C adapter for way less - if I ever wanted to!
sudo killall -9 Autopilot
"Autonomous driving doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be as good or better than the humans."
Oh - you think so?
You think WRONG.
Letting loose robots into the world to kill somewhat less people than already happens accidentally today - NFG. Whoever dares to try this, Elon Musk, you're gonna pay dearly.
Hey what about perfecting something a little less problematic such as self-driving trains first?
The track seems to be a relatively simple, fixed environment.
We already have self-driving mining trucks, self-driving harvesters and combines. Soon we'll have self-driving freighter vessels, etc. Rockets are already self-driving, mostly.
Hey you know what I want, I want a self-driving airliner. No more Andreas Lubitz!
My vacuum cleaner is basically self-driving. My dog, if he gets loose, he's more-or-less self-driving.
Etc!
My Dodge has one backup camera, but it's dirty and doesn't give a good view these days.
One day I need to find the windex and give it a wipe.
Imagine having 8 cameras to keep clean. Also, presumably you wouldn't be allowed to look through the 8 cameras and determine to your own satisfaction if they're clean or not.
Also, let's say you're out self-driving somewhere, and somehow the car splashes itself in the mud and dirties one or more of its cameras. Would you know? Would it recognize the issue? Would it pull over & ask you to give it a wipe?
Would you have the windex on hand to deal with it?
I retired my WRT54GL router a few years ago.
My ISP provides one, that's good enough.
I changed the admin name from "admin" and gave it a good password and disabled remote administration. What else can you do?
I suppose some guy could come "sniff" my Wi-Fi activity and deduce my login credentials. Sigh.
Except - jeesh, I never log into the thing. I just set it up one time and left it at that, "sorted". Am I wrong?
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
