Posts by onefang 1956 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Dec 2017
"It only costs a few quid a year to own your own domain"
You can get freebies to, from places like freedns.afraid.org.
As for your own mail server, if you have a typical Linux or BSD installed, chances are you already have a local only email server. If you have a static IP, open it up to the world, done. Oh, and turn off relaying, or find yourself on spam blacklists fairly quickly.
"Minor problem is that I do not have a webcam."
I don't either, and if I did, all it would see if trying to record from it while I was surfing porn sites is me searching for more porn to download. I never watch it direct from the site. I'd likely even have all my clothes on, and not touching him who rules with his little head from downstairs.
"It's a shame a lot of regular sites view any email address containing the '+' as invalid."
I've recently tried to get Tinder to send a verification email, so it will notify my via email when things happen, instead of failing to notify me on my phone. It entirely failed to even attempt to send any emails to my own email server, which are not on any spam blacklist that I check regularly. Everyone else can send to that server fine. I tend to use individual addresses for individual sites / services, so this was to tinder@... They didn't say why it failed, just that it did. No attempts spotted in my logs. Perhaps I'll try this + trick, see what happens. Or create yet another throw away gmail account.
Most of the article was about the legal to and fro. Not enough info about the actual case. Is this person a minor or a grown man? Was this minor / man the driver? Why is the contents of the phone needed, what relevance does it have to the car crash? What relevance does a pending iOS update have to the need for the passcode/words?
"I quite like The Donald"
I have no idea of the accuracy of that example. I don't know enough about all the other USA presidents. On the other hand, it says "PRESIDENT", and though it mentions "AMERICAN HISTORY", it's not specific that it means "USA PRESIDENT". There are likely much worse and much more hated presidents of other countries, even of some other American countries.
"Likewise, we only have to look at ANY aspect of US politics (and most countries) to know that lobbying is a legalised form of bribery."
Certainly applies to my country of Australia. So yeah, lots of truth in that one.
"The US can't beat Australia when it comes to deadly spiders,"
There is two, maybe three, Aussie spiders you want to avoid. Red back and funnel web can actually be fatal. White tails may or may not eat your flesh with their venom, the jury is still out.
"I've seen a farm field of miles plagued by Wolf spiders (migration or some displacement was assumed). Walking from one end to the other would mean certain death."
Wolf spiders isn't one of them. Itchy, mild pain, some swelling, but you get that from most insect bites.
Aussie snakes is where we are world beaters. Last I checked we have seven of the top twenty most dangerous snakes.
"The secure ones the government hands out probably have a special baseband that's had all the "bugs" the NSA get Qualcomm & Intel to insert in theirs removed."
You think the NSA isn't bugging Trump? They unofficially bug everyone else, so why not?
"he's also re-built LCD screens entirely, although that's a very tricky thing"
This particular LCD monitor was sealed, so I had to crack it open before repairing it. Now I keep it closed with a couple of wing nuts and bolts through two holes carefully drilled through the case. I call it my Frankenstein monitor.
"OR put enough explosives on the car that it instantly evaporates and everyone is safe..."
Except the driver and the passengers. Though instantly vaporising something that big tends to damage things around it a lot. That's the "nuke it from inside, the only way to be sure" option.
"However if there is no traffic now and I can get across the street now, I will do that, rather than press the button and then have to wait wait for the lights to change."
I have a habit of pressing the button and waiting anyway. Lifetime habit of an asthmatic, it's good to just stop every now and then to catch my breath.
"The time slowing down in an accident situation is very real, I have experienced it more than once in cars and on motorcycles."
Hmm, last time I came off my bike I remember thinking "You take a long time to slide to a stop when you come off at 110 km/h". It might have been time slowing, or it might just be that you take a long time to slide to a stop when you come off at 110 km/h.
Actually, it was likely more than 110 km/h, I was doing the speed limit, the guy behind me wasn't, I may have been sped up before actually hitting the road.
"Last few derailments and accidents i have seen in the news have been due to drivers going to fast or general failings of meat bags."
The last two I saw where driverless trains derailing. Though you can always blame "general failings of meat bags", meat bags programmed the things.
"what to hit is instinctual"
I was going to point that out to. The results from this sort of experiment are likely to be entirely different to what happens out in the real world when you are driving and about to hit something. In particular I really doubt the "hit the fattie, not the fittie" result. I have noticed that when I was a lot fatter, walking around with my large backpack on, drivers of small cars tended to give way to me. Their thinking was likely "If I hit that guy, it's gonna do lots of damage to my car.". Hit a skinny person, meh you'll break them in two, and they'll bounce down the road, barely scratching my duco.
All the recent Google ads I have seen recently have been in Russian, a language I can't read. Google seems to have misplaced me. So I have no idea if they where advertising new ways to get sexually molested by their execs. I'd pass them through Google Translate, but I have no idea what new unreadable language I'll get when I ask for English.
Every five years the government asks me to give them shit, er I mean sends me a bowel cancer screening kit. Anybody that has been paying attention to my commentarding knows that I do that all the time here, no need to ask. So now in future Telstra will be asking me to give them shit. I could easily do that here to.
"Holy Computer! We can only assume the inventors not only put their AI through not just rigorous Turing and IQ tests and university exams, but also ascertained that its soul was in a state of grace and if it could *accurately* communicate with the Lord of Hosts through prayer."
Wait, does this mean it's now a sin to just throw the old computers on the scrap heap, coz now they have souls? We need to have old computers homes, where they can be abused for profit instead. Can I now be arrested for carrying a concealed USB stick with Darik's Boot and Nuke on it, except in states where concealed carry is legal? "It's properly licensed Officer, I've published the source code on my web site."
"Someone would still insist on getting their dates by extrapolating from the passages on 'who begat who'."
From my vague recollections from the one and only time I tried to read the bible, in the bit where they are claiming ridiculously long life times for some people, I think if you substituted "months old" for "years old", they would come down to more likely ages.
I gave up on the old testament when things got horridly violent, and picked things up again at the beginning of the new testament. Apparently I missed the fun and games in Solomon.
"Can it re-phrase this into a form that doesn't cause schoolboys to fall asleep?"
Balshazar rammed the two spotted camels and the four buttered goats into Rashomon's house with a tent peg, slewing them into little bits. Yeah, then they smoked pot while watching Kim Kardashian's gash for three hours. Here endeth the lesson.
"Is Windows 10 better or worse than Vista? ME?"
VIsta* and ME suck less coz most of the people still using them actually like it, or they would have moved on. 10 is the most suckage, coz people are stuck with it, being the last Windows version ever.
* Sure in the office I work in there is still a Vista, that no one uses, and every one hates, but someone else was gonna replace it with 7, he just hasn't gotten around to it yet.
"over 50 per cent of commercial devices were now on Windows 10."
Not sure exactly what they mean by "commercial devices". The photocopier? The coffee machine in the office kitchen? 50 per cent of the staplers? Are computers that dual boot Linux / Windows 10 counted as 50 per cent on Windows 10, or only if booted into Windows 50 per cent of the time? Perhaps 50 per cent of computers in the office that sneakily upgraded themselves to Windows 10 before we could stop them all?
"If the ISPs put in FTTP then a change in technology would probably just mean swapping the devices at each end of the fibre."
If only the Oz government had stuck with FTTP for nbn, then we wouldn't be the last people getting this new Oz technology.
Ah, that's the other half of Augustus De Morgan's poem "Siphonaptera" that no one ever quotes. The entire thing is -
Big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so, ad infinitum.
And the great fleas, themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on;
While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on.
Have a beer, likely there's no fleas in it.
