Posts by GrapeBunch 825 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Apr 2015
Neverov could also be a Russian name. Ting! If my Russian isn't too rusty, it means "Unbeliever". I'm not saying anyting about the story, but sometimes fiction writers can't resist a little play on words. Sometimes also, people get attracted to activities that reflect on their surnames, like they were born to do it.
"Canadian telecoms are way worse - we actually envy the Americans."
Candy mint, breath mint. Stop, you're both wrong.
We don't really know how bad it is in the USA. We project our best wishes on our southern cousins. Yes, it's bad here in Canada. But my main complaint with Shaw is that it is expensive. In the vast spectrum of things that can go wrong, paying 50% too much isn't that bad a fate.
Historically in Canada, operating a cable TV company--which has morphed through ISP-dom into full-blown telecom--was described as "a license to print money". That virtual license translated into inflated valuations. They're all trying to make returns (profits) that justify the valuations (stock prices). I'm persuaded that those efforts represent the lion's share of our collective telecom SNAFU.
It's easy to change the size of the Command Prompt screen. Go into Properties and change the font (size).
I also use TCC/LE. In part, I like it for the pdir command:
pdir g:\2017 /s /(dy-m-d zm fpn) >> j:\2017.txt
that sort of thing, in batch files, to have up-to-date listings, in a format of my choice, of offline files.
At best, they're making one thing better, while making a whole bunch of other things slightly worse. Typical. For example, I like the colour bright yellow. An earlier poster liked it against blue, I like it against deep red / maroon. That's what I use when editing text files with ConTEXT 0.98.3 (the later version would occasionally lose its mind, for me). In the article, the line with bright yellow against all backgrounds looks washed out in comparison to the Old Way.
With old monochrome monitors, I think the determinative factor in usability may have been the quality of the equipment rather than the chosen colour. I had a Televideo green monitor, rock-solid, never suffered eyestrain. Made me feel like a real programmer (psssst, don't look at the CODE!). Amber screens (whether black text on amber or amber text on black) tended to give the impression of fleetingness, like an inaudible buzz. Yet you could use the same colours now on an LED without that impression. Even worse were the "paper white" screens I encountered. To get the paper white colour required more complex technology, but that didn't remove the pressure of meeting a price point, so they tended to use a cheaper version of that technology. Today, we're all accustomed to paper white, few complain about it except in darkened rooms. It was the application of technology that stank, not the concept.
"IIRC there was an Inspector Morse plot that revolved round the deliberate? misuse of "s" or "z" in some words in a written note."
Translating that into Laevopudlianese: There was a Perry Mason plot that hinged upon the ignorant misuse of "mimento" for "memento" in a typed letter. The perp immediately confessed to the murder. Today 60 years on, it would be " ... mento? So what? Get your own candy."
"Anyone can pick wholes in any country because none of us are perfect."
I don't have the heart to Grammar-Nazi this, even though it's usually worth a bunch of upvotes.
Fully Completely is the title of a song and album by The Tragically Hip from 1992.
We all know about Assange and Snowden and Manning. But it *is* possible that the next whistle-blower will seek to contact an "untouchable" foreign hero to get the precious info out of the country. Or is that just in Hollywood movies?
I upvoted you, but I'm not sure. "clueless" ... "stupid" ... it could just be a nefarious way to get something they really want. And if the dates are right, they knew they wanted it before the Las Vegas convention, but after Marcus became an accidental hero. They'll certainly be looking for other things in any electronic equipment he might have been carrying (didn't we all agree last month not to carry equipment to USA?), or if there's no data, they could add it. His safest option was to have not been carrying any equipment.
So, are there any safe countries in which to reside--and be a hacker not employed by a government? Perhaps Russia, but maybe not, if you are the wrong flavour.
Or, in the case of chess engine competitions, AI is what worked. Deep Blue, which was a culmination of decades of programmers standing upon each others' shoulders, was as AI as was appropriate for the age. Kasparov's likening of it to an alarm clock is quotable, but disingenuous.
With the score tied in the second match, in the final game, Kasparov made a psychological error, allowing the computer a known strong sacrificial attack in the belief that it would either not be able to handle the attack or would not play it. The computer played the sacrifice, and crushed Kasparov in that game. Did I do that? he might have asked, but rather than needing to count empty bottles, perhaps his downfall was numbered in interviews. Deep Blue was not available for comment.
"Vivaldi"
Yes, me too. Also based on the Chromium engine is Opera, which I also use every day. Also Sleipnir, which admittedly I haven't given much of a workout. Why would one use Chrome when the chromavixxen are so much better? Because it's there?, like using IE?
The third browser I have open at all times (on the laptop that can take the activity) is Firefox (54). I remember a few years ago that the author of the best-working extensions I had ever encountered, got into an argument with Firefox about their requirements for keeping the extension up to date with new FF versions. I don't understand or know the details of the argument, but the author just up and left, pulling the plug on his extensions, so it must have been an important dispute. That put the kibosh on any thoughts I may have harboured of using Firefox exclusively.
I don't think that Chess or Go players, when they are playing Chess or Go, are dumb enough to fall for that. But when a Chess player is playing poker, bets are off! I remember a pretty good chess player who was pretty good at poker and won money locally, but after he came back from Vegas, he admitted that he realized only too late that many if not all of the other elements at the poker table were there to fleece his local winnings. It's even worse online as everything is hidden from view and executed in nanoseconds rather than the "blink of an eye". The ease of using a chess engine to assist one's play is one reason that real money chess tournaments still take place largely in the real world.
I didn't know if you were joking. But whether the patent is real or not, yours was a good comment, so I upvoted it. Imagine, google, debaser of intellectual property, patenting the obvious. Even if it's just as a placemaker so that some even worse miscreant doesn't patent it first, there's always the possibility they could sell it to a patent troll, or it could eventually be picked up by a patent troll from google's floating carcass. Here's hoping that patent trolling gets maced before google expires.
[...] "A human player, thus, would be well advised to plan moves ahead of time. The DeepMind agent, because it's capable of such planning too, is also well suited for this game, the researchers suggest."
That applies to Chess, or Go too. No creativity or AI needed.
Both "creativity" and "AI" are buzzwords. Marcel Duchamp, who must be considered one of the most creative of artists (otherwise what would his fame rest upon, technique?), gave up Art for over a decade and devoted himself to Chess, where he became good enough to represent France at the Chess Olympics, but never quite good enough to break into the world top-50. Duchamp wrote that chess players were the greater artists because they relied on the ultimate truth of their creation, whereas Artists, to be successful, had to curry favour among potential sponsors, sometimes devoting more ~creative~ juices to PR than to their Art.
Back in the days when computers were slow, Artificial Intelligence, which in those days was mainly trying to mimic the ways a human brain works, was thought by many (who I guess thereby became "AI exponents") to be the most productive way forward. Instead it was faster processors, multiple processors and eventually parallel processing, combined with extensive databases of both openings and endgames ("tablebases"), and even more with computer-friendly techniques for pruning the result trees, that made computers the strongest practical (under tournament conditions, where a game takes 5 hours or less to complete) players. So with the strongest players all computers, aspiring chess players in 2017 study the games played between them, right? No, they still study the games between the top human players, all of whom use computers for their preparation, but not during the game (that would be Cheating). Commentators frequently insert a computer-generated variation (often as in "you won't believe what the computer suggested ..."), but elucidation of a computer versus computer game is still exceeding rare. Why? Perhaps human games are more understandable. Perhaps they are more ~creative~.
Creativity, in the sense of "imagining and making real what is not", unfortunately is not always that different from plain old lying, nor from fraught new lying.
I took it that the innovation was to look ahead in the training period. It's a bit like, were you training Tic-Tac-Toe, telling you student that after >Centre, your move should be >Corner, rather than let it lose a million virtual times exploring >Side. If in a complex game they came up with the exact same or even better result (result=game-playing engine) through that cycle-saving, that is a non-trivial result (result=evaluation of training technique). To me, anyway.
Americans think it is normal for Americans to carry firearms on board airplanes. Yes, they understand that it makes other people nervous. They in turn are nervous about armed non-Americans. But they view the disapproval of loaded weapon carrying Americans (did I say that right?) as a kind of technical foul. Yes, it's wrong, but only a little bit. Don't do that again, sir.
Canada had bomb-checking of laptops decades ago, long before the Americans. They would swab the keyboard and other areas for traces of explosives. But AFAIR they stopped doing it quite some time ago. A sensible reason would be if they never after years found anybody carrying a laptop bomb. But in this wild world, it could just as easily be a nonsensical reason.
I think we need to speak with the Water Bears' representatives about the fate of life on earth. I was not able to speak to any Waterbury's, but did achieve the next best thing. Jane Sea-Bear-y says I'd probably be famous if I wasn't such a good Waitress. Just about sums it up, eh?
The new you won't have any memory of the old you. Perhaps that's how life got to Earth in the first place. And of course you don't blast them into space naked, you put then into icy or rocky bodies that might become gravitationally attracted to a planet-sized body, out there. Search term: "Hoyle–Wickramasinghe model of panspermia"
For the here and now, the more profitable tack may be to offer, for a price, to attach somebody else's DNA to the junk DNA of a tardigrade.... and either to put it back in the ocean or send it to Mars. Offer not valid where prohibited by law.
1. They lie. We know this.
2. Based on that statement, they don't even need to lie. Will not search for data held only on remote servers? As we know, they copy Internet transmissions without limit. They have the data already, albeit in difficult-to-decrypt format. They can safely say whatever they want about data held only in the Cloud, because ¬∃ , within reasonable statistical approximation.
I'm wondering if anybody goes to the USA without phone or laptop, and upon being queried, tells the nice agent that the purpose of the visit is to buy a phone and a laptop. The agent might like that. Or Not.
"No one would get that impassioned about an amateur game... You don't hear the Hockey fans belittle Polo much...."
Field Hockey is just an inferior form of Hockey played without ice and only one arm.
Polo is just an inferior form of Field Hockey played by arses riding large donkeys.
FTFY. Didn't want to, but you asked for it.
Mine's the one with the tuque hidden in the sleeve.
The Not So Jolly Roger, set on a pirate radio station, was perhaps my favourite episode of Danger Man. Apologies for the weak audio and video, but it was the (ironically pirate) version found. And an episode summary. The plot was corny, but the location fabulous, and so was Suzie, in all her glory, played by Patsy Ann Noble. Maybe the network economized with a 2-for-1 by getting her to be the actor and also getting to play her song, He Who Rides A Tiger. Ironic dialogue between the two, as Suzie, in what sounds to me like a BBC accent, asks John if he worked in Australia, whereas in real life she was from Australia.
Or perhaps my favourite Danger Man was the one where he pretended to be an effete culture-buff to win the confidence of a spy. With all the homo-erotic overtones they dared put in a 1960s broadcast, but thankfully not more than that. That was a nuanced performance by good old Patrick McGoohan.
Sounds a bit like Percival Lowell spotting "canals" on Mars, this not being found by subsequent telescopic observers, and yet there are canal-like natural features on Mars. Perhaps he saw them under particularly auspicious angles of sunlight. If the current observations don't match the canal maps he made, then he was talking Baltimores. But if they do, he was (observationally) effing brilliant. I wonder if an observer of Earth, when the sun was shining bright on Sydney, could see the shadow of the Andes as a kind of canal.
Another one is Immanuel Velikovsky's prediction that Venus would be found to rotate in a retrograde manner. Again, that turned out to be true, and surprising. Doesn't mean we have to accept Velikovsky's far out theory as to how that came about. But hey, maybe a tiny quantum of sci street cred.
I'm posting this because I'm not convinced that the downvote mechanism is working properly at El Reg. Discovery awaits.
As to the red spot itself, both images we've seen look stonily like Artist Concepts. If "I could have done that", then some artist probably has, retrospectively saving NASA many meeellion$. <joke icon/> In the second image, I get the feeling that the top of the red is lower in the Jovian atmosphere than the top of the surrounding white clouds. That should be testable, by more than one means but certainly by bouncing signals and seeing how long they take to come back. In which case an alternative explanation could be "red spots, meh, they aren't unusual; what is unique is that the cloud cover above it has dispersed".
See how thoroughly I want to test downvoteology? You know you want it.
This very morning, 2017 Jul 12, pop-over notices, for example:
"Dear readers in Canada, today we ask you to help Wikipedia. To protect our independence, we'll never run ads. We're sustained by donations averaging about $15. Only a tiny portion of our readers give. If everyone reading this right now gave $3, we could keep Wikipedia thriving for years to come. That's right, the price of a cup of coffee is all we need. If Wikipedia is useful to you, please take one minute to keep it online and growing. Thank you."
Sooner than later, they're going to start talking about a back-door that civil authorities will be able to use to control / ground / destroy / disable drones, preferably only those that fly off own-airspace. Another idea is that if the owner has a low or no level of licensing, and if the signal of the owner's controller is weak (for example, not within easy eyesight), somebody else can control and pwn the drone. Higher level of licensing, fewer instances of control by non-owner built in to the controller chip. Implies standardization and socketing of the controller chip, so I'm obviously talking bollocks.
Another thought is to change the normal laws of property. When the drone is flying in my airspace, it belongs to the original owner as a liability, and to me as an asset, and then in both senses once I take control of it. Yup, "legalized theft".
It's not even "illegal copying" or "illegal sharing" until proven. It may be "unauthorized copying" or "unauthorized sharing", a bit like ^s or copying some text rather than the link in an email. And if I couldn't ^s a web page, I simply would omit to copy it, rather than buy an offprint or whatever.
IANALBIPAPOTI.
The piracy misnomer has given the words Pirate and Piracy a surprising cachet. The pirate party had the opportunity to collaborate in Government in Iceland recently, but they decided that the working would be too fraught. A cloak of caution that would not look bad on a copyright zealot. Let's not forget that piracy, real piracy, was OK for a victor government and it usually got a cut (of the profits, not of a rapier) as part of its licensing terms. Such a pirate was called a "privateer". "Do as I ... sauce for the gander" said no government ever.
Hear, hear, Mikel. I think that Sir Tim should consider holding out for a little more. Internet History is littered with examples of copy protection that turns out to be unbreakable even for the playing client. From telephone numbers that you phone to obtain a key--until the company decides to discontinue the number--to servers that just go offline or companies that go bust.
Copyright and copyright protection is a social contract. Big publishers, together with their syruped allies in government, have been trying to dictate the terms of that contract in recent decades. Perhaps it's time to take back something for the little guy or gal.
Here is my idea. Yes, W3C agrees to DRM, on this basis: the stream or transmission includes a Basic version of the video, in a resolution that may be the same as terrestrial OTA TV reception from 1967. This version is freely copyable and recordable. The DRM resides in the paid portion of the transmission, which provides higher resolution / higher bitrate audio. Yes, I'm proposing Communism of a low-res version of every program. A bit similar to the way you can see many TV programs in a partial screen and with distorted audio on Youtube. It's already there. Former users of dial-up internet will remember when still images could be imperfectly rendered in a second or two, and then would sharpen with time. It even happens sometimes today on broadband. I don't know if this same concept is implemented in video streaming, but with multiple cores it should be no harder than stills were in 1989. I could make the argument that it's good (marketing) for publishers to give away a low-res version of everything, but instead I will say that it's a reasonable balance for the inventors of the Internet to seek, in favour of humanity. And if the damn verification server disappears, the purchaser will at least have something, even though he knows he paid for it and others did not.
Yes, the publishers can ignore it. Hell, they could have ignored the Internet from the beginning, and I would not complain.
If you have read this far, thank you very much. A lot of BS on the Internet surrounds the partial circumvention of copyright. I'd like to clear away the BS. Readers may note that in Canada, Bachelor of Science is BSc; I'm not talking about that.
I was hoping that by using Skype in retro installations, I would be able to spend the last few Skype dollars in the account and then happily move on. First up, Windows XP. Yes, I know the First Rule of running an out-of-date version of Windows: shut down every possible MS feature and software. Please note that the version of Skype on this XP machine was pre-MS. Result: "Skype can not connect". Second, an iPod 2g. Result: hangs on next step, "Signing in ..." OK, that wasn't a fair test. After I turned Airplane Mode off, it got to the next stage: "Can't connect to Skype".
So, not surprisingly, MS has changed things so that the old software does not work. I was mercilessly downvoted earlier when I wrote that they do that, but oh well. They downvote because they care.
So, is there a way to get a refund check from MS for $7.67 ? Given bank charges and whatever I might not even cash it, but hold on to it as emblematic of a tie, a draw, a Mexican standoff, a stalemate--in an ocean of corporate victories.
Let's face it, "mine is bigger than yours" is a hollow victory when the Himalayas and Andes are not heard from. Here in British Columbia, we have Waddington as our most dire mountain, though in global comparison its 4,019 m (13,186 ft) is wimpy. But it does make up for its short stature in other ways. I doubt that, on this date in 2117, anybody will be writing about a funicular, whether real or planned, on this monster. More flavour here. Thanks to EL REG for allowing us to enjoy technologies recreationally.
I guess they're assuming that nothing is living inside the Asteroid. Just in case we haven't had enough Science Fiction today, or any day.
When I read the article, I thought that they would land their equipment (softly) on the larger of the pair and then use that as the base to launch the fridge at the smaller. Thus the momentum of the pair would be maintained. That's not what the video showed. And depending on how the larger is rotating, it could introduce uncertainty into the question of whether they'll hit the smaller at all. English probably needs a new expression for poor aim, because: "What's a barn, Daddy?"
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