Posts by TeeCee 9436 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Oct 2007
"“It is doubtless that such a technological terror in the hands of so primitive a world would be used to upset the peace and sanctity of the citizens of the Galactic Empire."
Response without a Death Star:
Grovel, grovel, grovel, apologise, etc.
Response with a Death Star:
"Like we give a shit what you think, we've got a Death Star."
until 1995, rugby union banned players for being paid to play league.
They should have stuck with that. There's too much of that "run straight into the opposition" shit in Union these days. It was mind-numbingly tedious to watch in League and it hasn't got any more interesting in changing codes.
I wouldn't mind so much, but in Union they get to do it more than 5 bloody times without giving the ball away!
You are over 100 years late with that idea.
Back when you could actually patent a perpetual motion machine as a power source it would have gone down a storm.
Hint: The energy required to get the bag back up is exactly the same amount as it gave you on the way down, assuming a system with no losses (tough shit there too). Thus there's nothing left to run the light......
I just hoick the contents of my Inbox into a folder named YY-MM as the month rolls over. These are all held under a single local folder unimaginatively titled "Read" and as Outlook 2k3's advanced search option recurses (you didn't know this?), the whole shebang's searchable as one.
5 gigs of it takes all of 40 seconds to search.......and this 'ere work laptop is a sclerotic POS.
Once in blue moon I take a look at it, decide that n years is too much and nuke a year or two.
Actually I think that the perceived problem is the exact opposite.
It's precisely because the UN and its committees are tedious talking shops, where the world and his dog get a veto, that makes them eminently unfit to run anything of any importance.
Try getting, say, the IPv6 standard approved by a bunch who can argue the toss for a week over whether a footnote should be a footnote or a text inclusion. A load of 'em studying the text for evidence of western imperialism, another load studying it for evidence of godless communism and another load studying it to work out whether it's possible to insult ${deity} in a hexadecimal address that long so it should be banned as a product of infidels. Meanwhile, the actual technical content goes on the "Who gives a toss?" pile.
Screw that for a game of soldiers......
"The entrepreneur, who made his money from internet web firm Mail.ru and investing in Twitter, Spotify and Facebook..."
Should surely read:
"The entrepreneur, who made his money from internet web firm Mail.ru and investing in Twitter, Spotify and then lost a shitload of it investing in Facebook...."
Terry Pratchett likened it to firing a gun at the ground and riding the recoil into space.
Obigatory XKCD "What if?" link.
Er, that's the world's supply of illegal heroin is safe.
Most of the legit, medical stuff comes from plants grown in Tasmania IIRC.
One of the more noticable by-products of the yank escapades in Afghanistan is that you now see copious supplies of Pomegranate juice in supermarkets. That'll be because Pomegranates are the only other high-value crop that can be grown in Afghanistan and they're being subsidised to drive up demand and convince Afghan farmers that ripping out poppies and planting Pomegranates is a good idea.
As I've become rather partial to the stuff, I'm right behind this plan.
I have already outlined above one of the main issues with these systems from a vehicle development perspective.
The flip side of that is that the systems are nigh-on bulletproof, often providing two decades or more service with no maintenance at all. The bearings on the suspension arms ususally give up before anything else and the units are good for at least two bearing sets, which last about 15 years...
The only vulnerability is the interlinking pipes beneath the car. Corrosion here will cause the system to lose fluid and the suspension to drop. An obvious improvement, but one never made, would be to use stainless steel pipes.
In my opinion, the earlier Hydralastic system was better than Hydragas. The "float and sit" ride produced by the former is unequalled in mass production vehicles and offers Rolls-Royce ride quality coupled with zero body roll on cornering[1]. Hydragas does have the advantage that it removes the choppyness encountered if Hydralastic is used on smaller, lighter cars.
The achilles' heel of both systems is dive on braking and squat on acceleration, which is a product of the interlinking front / rear. It's something you get used to and nowhere near as puke-inducing as Citroen's Hydropneumatic system though.....
[1] Suspension is almost always a compromise. Softer suspension improves ride, but at the expense of roll and poorer handling. Moulton's systems provide the ride quality without the handling compromises.
Unfortunately the MGF, which did use Hydragas, compromised by having the units isolated and adding conventional dampers.
One of the big problems with both Hydralastic and Hydragas systems is development time. Altering the spring, rebound and damp rates requires depressurisation, the changing of the valves and then repressurisation. Tuning conventional suspension involves swapping parts that can be changed in moments.
The Metro also used isolated units, but without additional dampers. Moulton had a Metro he'd reworked to reinstate the fore / after interlinking that the system was designed for and then tuned the setup himself. Everyone who tried it said that it was far better than the vanilla product.
Soon to be seen on general release in a Poundland DVD bin near you.
Then again, people watched the Zuckerbitch movie and that didn't have murder, dead dogs, itinerant dolphin salesmen or Bath Bomb Bum Banditry in it.......
Ah! Another one.
It's perfectly possible to get commercial satnav units which will route trucks appropriately given their size / weight / etc and which provided mapping regular updates to accommodate diversions due to roadworks etc.
For some reason HGV drivers seem to think that entrusting their 120,000 quid tractor unit, trailer and load to an off-the-shelf TomTom unit from Halfords is not a false economy.
Well, if you have your device configured to fire the action associated with a QR code immediately, rather then presenting you with what it's about to do or where it's about to go and asking for your confirmation, congratulations! You are low-hanging fruit.
The only surprise here is that its taken the scrotes this long to spot the obvious boot-filling opportunity for presenting obfuscated URLs to mugs.
I'm still waiting for the howls of anguish when some mob compromises one of the URL-shortening services though......
That wasn't actually the fault of the lads on the ground, one of my ex-colleagues was there.
Conscript army and the standard issue firearm was the Uzi. After the umpty-somethingth grunt had shot himself / shot friend / shot innocent bystander by dropping the thing on the floor[1], their superiors came up with the novel solution of taking away all the ammo and locking it up securely.
When the Serbs turned up, they were all effectively unarmed and the senior officer with the keys to the ammo store was away. Once they ran out of options in bullshitting, the only option left was to leave.
I can't vouch for the accuracy of that, but as I got it firsthand and we hadn't really got stuck into the evening's drinking at the time, I suspect it to be true.
[1] Possibly the Uzi's only fault. Hair trigger and a safety catch that's not entirely reliable.
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