Posts by onefang 1954 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Dec 2017
But but butt, in a BDSM context, the Master / slave relationship IS consensual. Us kinky people are now offended that the vanillas consider Master / slave to be offensive. To balance this situation, I'll now go through all source code that I am in control of, and rewrite all the instances of the word "count" to something with one less letter. I'll tell the boss it's just a de-bloating exercise, he's always happy when I make the results take up less space.
"Smart meters don't bring an end to estimated bills !! (or billing errors)"
I recently moved house, after living for almost 12 years in a place where the owner paid the first $100 of each quarters electricity bill per resident, and we paid the rest. So I didn't deal with the electricity company directly. I did note they had the old style meters.
At the new place, the meters are digital. I dunno yet if they are smart meters. I now get billed monthly, and I've only been here long enough to have gotten one bill. I was asked to read the meter myself, I asked them "Are these smart meters? Don't you read them remotely? Do I really have to read the meter myself?" The answer was that they are smart meters, that will be read remotely, and I don't have to do anything other than pay the bill. The bill that turned up was "estimated". I'll actually read it myself next time, see what difference that makes. And I'll look up the brand and model number of the meter, see if they are supposed to be smart meters.
"When those solid ink printers first came out I worked for a large urban school district where the new director of IT decided that all printers should be networked Xerox Phaser (solid ink, i.e., fancy, expensive square crayons), shared among numerous classrooms. He wanted to make his mark."
So he wanted to make his mark with crayons? How many months ago did he graduate from pre-school?
"I had the opposite experience. Working for a charity,"
Same here, I do volunteer work for a charity that looks after seniors, basically as the onsite IT guy, helping seniors with their technology. They survive on donations and grants. The charity has existed for a very long time (1948 if I recall correctly). The top executive positions are elected positions, and they have a high turnover of volunteers. When I started early last year, I was given a small office that had a variety of computer hardware, most of it supplied through grants, some of it purchased, some of it I have no idea where it came from. None of the computers had been updated for years, since that was the last time they had an IT volunteer. The paid for IT support company only works on the office computer systems, not the donated freebies used for training. There is stuff in there that every one forgot about.
Often I'm asked to find low cost solutions to their IT problems, coz they just don't have the money for more expensive solutions. So far I have managed to solve all but one of their problems by either re-purposing old equipment they know about that was being unused, or finding stuff that had been hiding in a cupboard for years, but solved their problem. The one exception was their need for a Chromecast, to hook up to the projector, to demonstrate Android stuff to a bunch of people, some of which have bad eyesight and can't see the details on a small phone screen. I had initially been using my own, but eventually had them purchase one. I suspect they had one before, or was borrowing one before, as some of their office computers had the software for it. I just couldn't find the old one anywhere.
Taking another detour from waiting for compiling...
I left a modern laptop running over night in the office yesterday, coz -
It hadn't finished installing the June Windows 10 update yet, coz -
No one had left it turned on for long enough since June, coz -
By my estimate, it was gonna take 15 hours to complete the update, having already downloaded it when I checked it yesterday morning. Maybe longer, I'll check it on Thursday.
"Anyone else remember[1] the era when to build gcc, you would bootstrap a skeleton gcc using whatever native or other cc you could find, then use that gcc in a second pass to build the real thing?"
Remember? I'll be doing that later today. An embedded system I'm responsible for uses Aboriginal Linux, where as an "air-lock" step, you first build gcc to build a host gcc (moving from "whatever compiler you happen to have laying around" to "we know what this compiler is, we just built it"), that is then used to build a target gcc, that is used to build the rest of the OS in a VM (in my case, a 486 VM). Linux From Scratch does something similar, you first build a gcc that is used to build a target gcc, that is then used to build the rest of Linux from Scratch in a chroot. Apparently Linux From Scratch was the inspiration for that process in Aboriginal Linux.
"IMHO, and its only mine: E-sports are not sports. I'll just leave that there for all of the sedentary gamers who think that they are playing a sport..."
It's almost as much of a sport as darts and snooker. All are things you can play wearing a business suit, drinking beer, and barely raising a sweat.
$ units -1 "3ms c" "km"
* 899.37737
That'll be speed of light in a vacuum, not speed of signal in air to the 5G base station, plus switching delays, plus speed of light in optical fibre, plus more switching delays, then divide the distance by two, coz the graphics data has to come back to you.
Also, you need to update your units program to more modern El Reg units.
"How does it cope with for example a Chelsea Boot that doesn't have a tongue."
And thongs, don't forget thongs. Though knowing that the non-Aussie world calls them flip-flops, and think that thongs are an item of underwear, would the bots get confused and emulate the pussy grabbing antics of Mr Trump?
My other question is, are tongues the usual way of picking up shoes? I'm not into shoes, being mostly barefoot, so maybe I'm doing it wrong?
We need to teach these bots to pick up coats next, I'll get mine.
"Please tell me they have corks ......"
I can only vouch for the local schools, where I regularly see the kids wandering the streets in their uniforms, no corks sorry. Though about half of those schools are upper class schools, who wouldn't be seen dead dangling corks from their hats.
Corks tend to be more popular where flies are a problem, and we don't have a fly problem in my part of this city.
"Not been anywhere sunny recently? Wedding? Visiting the queen?"
Or lived here in sub-tropical Australia, where all the school kids wear wide brimmed hats (part of the uniform), and every one else is encouraged to wear wide brim hats, to help keep that nasty skin cancer inducing strong sun off our pretty faces. I can see one from where I sit, and I know there's another one on top of that cupboard over there. I may have a third one stored under the bed, but I might have thrown it away.
I have images of a cleaning robot following a teen to clean up their mess, followed by the teens sibling making a new mess, followed by their mother telling both "Don't make me follow you around, cleaning up your messes.", and a smug looking father with a screwdriver and a floppy disk in hand working on the next robot, teaching it to fetch a beer.
"Though now I'm trying out the RSS feed, that doesn't include those bits."
A couple of weeks after declaring that I'll be trying out the RSS feed, and I think I like it. I haven't looked at the home page since. RSS informs me of new articles, and https://forums.theregister.co.uk/my/forums/ informs me of new comments on any article I'm interested in. If we could get an RSS feed of the user forums, then it'll all be good.
"we have statutory regulations on alcohol selling and distribution. maybe its time for porn to have the same?"
At least here in Oz we do. You have to be over 18 to buy or view porn. You can't import porn with the women having small tits, coz that's classified by the customs officials as child porn (I don't think there is a matching small dick rule). As well as other sundry rules and regulations.
Though unlike alcohol, there's no laws about driving under the influence of porn, no random roadside porn testing, and sex shops don't throw you out if you have indulged too much.
That reminds me of my two experiences with sex education.
When I was in high school, back in the mid '70s, we had our sex education class. One single class, where we where given a book about sex education, and expected to read it quietly in our science class, and don't ask questions. I read through it rather quickly, since my parents had already provided me with better sex education books a year earlier. I knew it all already. Much to my dismay, this fact didn't make me more popular with the female students in my class. Perhaps finishing first just isn't popular, er reading the book I meant.
Fast forward to the year 2000, where I got a quick demonstration of the state of the progress of sex education in Australia. A friends ten year old showed me the popup sex education book being used at the time. So the age of sex education had been lowered, the material was more interesting (pop up genitals), and the kids are allowed to take them home.
Fast forward to today, with that rate of progress I'm expecting toddlers to be reading "My First Porno, Fun with Dick and Jane" *, and watching "Peppa Pig does Porno" on YouTube, in pre-school. I don't currently have any friends with toddlers, so no idea. Things are no doubt different in UK, where "No Sex Please, We're British" was a thing.
Paris Hilton icon, not coz I wish she was involved in my sex education, she was born later than that, but that someone that looks like her was.
* Yes, I'm aware that movie had nothing to do with sex, it fits the "My First Reader" style of names though, plus has the word "Dick" in it.
"But to be exempted from the rule, won't the politicians have to provide their personal details to the sites, so that they can be identified and do not need to provide them when browsing for porn?"
Ah, there will be a "UK politician" account on all porn sites, with a password of "password1234", and it will leak rather quickly. Well, first it'll be a little dripping, then it will be a large spurt.
"Esoterica is what I happen to collect rather than pr0n. [I'm verbal, not visual so stories would work, I suppose.) It's all the weird shit on the Internet:"
And after a quick web search, it's also apparently related to backgammon.
"So he smokes weed. Doesn't surprise me, and it makes no more difference then if it was just Tobacco."
The thing that disappointed me was the tobacco content of the joint. Mixing a perfectly good drug with the horror that is 'baccy, the man should be ashamed. I did see this coming when he was talking about going private for $420 a share.
"You don't need to know about any roundabouts, superstores, churches, or other landmarks on the way."
Depends on what sort of navigator you are. Some people navigate better with landmarks than with dead reckoning.
"carry on until you get to the A454, turn left, 500 yards, your're there"
Your example includes a landmark, the A454. A superstore might be a tad more obviously visible than a street sign that says "A454".
'Reminds me of a short story (by Kurt Vonnegut???) where computers / statistics have gotten so powerful / intelligent that they can extrapolate a correct election result from a smaller and smaller pool until that pool shrinks to 1 person, and there is no linger "the voters" but "the voter"'
May have been Asimov, or maybe they both did one. Isaac Asimov wrote "The Franchise", a short story where that was basically the plot.
"Better yet, you join in singing along because the sprogs don't realise the latest hit is yet another cover version from your own youth. That usually puts the wind up them!"
The ones that annoy me are where they take only a couple of lines from the original, and repeat them over and over and over and over again.
"With the falling costs of launches, I wonder if anyone has considered sticking a filler cap on the fuel tank?"
But then where would you swipe your credit card to pay for it? Probably need to add a rest room to, coz Mr Webb will need a dunny break every now and then.
"with more than one in 10 falling victim or knowing someone who'd been a victim"
Yeah, I was wondering if they got to "one in 10" by counting people twice. You get counted the first time by falling victim, and got counted the second time by telling someone that also responded to the survey.
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