Posts by Eponymous Cowherd 1596 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Nov 2007
Everyone I spoke to was of the mind "bring it on" just get the trains running, anything else is giving the terrorists what they want.
Yes, this!
All of the current risk-adverse cowering and fearfulness is just telling the Daesh scum that what they are doing is working.
That was in the bad old days when it would regularly pancake you into a platform.
These days its pretty faultless unless you are stupid enough to come in from the back end of an Orbis station and expect it to guide you through the hab ring spokes.
Personally I use it only for the final landing. Usually blast through the mail slot at full speed to avoid scans, then decelerate to a stop to kick in the DC for the final landing. Nailing the mailslot at 300m/s in a Clipper loaded with naughty stuff is invigorating.
TOR functionality is already built into Gargoyle, which runs on most TP-Link routers. I imagine it won't be long before off-the-shelf devices with similar functionality start appearing.
I can imagine anyone who attempted to bring such a thing to market "Doing a Kelly", but that would just be me being paranoid.
Or would it?
Hardly an unbiased survey. This site is (largely) frequented by people who know and understand technology, and appreciate tech that does exactly what its supposed to.
Hardly fertile ground to find lovers lovers of Apple's non-waterproof, less-than-a-day battery life, blank-display, techno-bling.
How about the Government spends money on things that save most lives.
Some 160,000 die of cancer each year in the UK.
Around 1700 people are killed in road traffic accidents each year.
Some 500+ are murdered each year.
Some 250+ die in fires each year.
0.4 people die in terrorist attacks per year (2 since 2010)
Because that is all encryption is, maths. Banning encryption isn't like banning guns, where most people don't have the ability or resources to make one and requires physical transport to redistribute.
An encryption algorithm is just maths. Any maths undergraduate is quite capable of rolling their own and making it available to anyone who needs it.
Is soon as I hear those words I do one of two things/
If I'm busy, I just say "Fuck off" and hang up.
If I'm not busy, and fancy a bit of entertainment, I string the bastard along for as long as I can manage (40 minutes, or so) then, finally tell him that I'm not interested and was just doing just that (winding him up ). That usually elicits some choice language, to which I reply "Fuck off" and hang up.
Yeah, Kias aren't the budget brand they once were. Kind of a shame really, as my 2010 Cee'd Eco SW is a fantastic car for the money. Nice to drive and really does do 60+ mpg.
I actually really like the look of the current Cee'd, but they are not longer a "reasonably priced car"
The same thing has happened to the other budget marques like Skoda, much more main-stream these days.
The real budget buy in Europe at the moment is Dacia. Just Mrs Cowherd just bought a Sandero as a run-around to replace the pile of shite Chevrolet (which expired at 5 years old and 29K miles). For £9.5K you get a car only a little smaller than a Golf, powered by Renault's grunty little TCE-90 engine. Sat-nav / media centre, air-con, cruise control, etc.
On the down-side, you can see where they have cut costs, hard plastic interior trim, cheap rocker switches, etc, and the design is a little dated looking. It is, however, very pleasant to drive and it is one hell of a lot of car for under £10K
I have a Pebble Steel (original, not Time) and, for me, it ticks all of the boxes.
First of all, I actually like the "Industrial" look of it. It doesn't look like girly bling, like a certain other smartwarches.
played around with a variety of apps and functions on it, but the feature that it is most useful for is notifications. A quick glance at my wrist and I can see if its something I need to deal with. It does this as well as any other smartwatch, but without their inherent downsides of poor battery life and normally off display.
The always on display is clear and means it doesn't really look like a smartwatch. The battery really does last 7 days and it really is waterproof. This, pretty much, means I can treat it like a "real" watch in the way I wear and use it.
I like the wide range of 3rd party watch faces that are freely available. Currently sporting a LCARS style face. Nerdy but actually looks rather nice.
The "Cloud Pebble" development environment is rather neat. It works well, is well documented and means I can knock up apps and faces wherever I have access to a web browser.
Essentially it is a watch that is "smart", rather than the micro-fondleslab on your wrist that the more "upmarket" smartwatches try to be.
This gives a great insight into the mindset of those who desire wholesale surveillance of the entire population's Internet activity.
We (IT pros) all know that the whole "snoopers' charter" thing is a huge expensive white elephant that just, plain, will not do anything to "protect" us from the terrorists. Irrespective of any civil liberties and/or human rights issues, it is a pointless waste of money.
But the spooks and their Civil Servant bosses are so used to being able to snoop on who they like, when they like, with no Judicial oversight, that they cannot bear to lose that power. The trouble is that freely available strong encryption seriously puts a spanner in their works., and the great unwashed are now more aware than ever about the way Governments spy on them and how encryption can protect them from this. Hence Cameron's latest turd-spurt regarding getting it banned / regulated ( despite that being akin to trying to ban farting in public ).
The article also makes it precisely clear who are the bosses and who are the minions and neatly explains why successive governments and home secretaries all go down the illiberal Big Brother route as soon as they get into power. They are merely doing what they are told do to like good little boys and girls.
"But don't those yellow zig-zags mean "SUV Parking Only"?"
A Police officer friend of mine once old me how they received a number of complaints from the local MumsNet chapter (yummy mummy division) about people parking inconsiderately outside a local school.
They duly dispatched a couple of plods who slapped tickets on a swathe of vehicles parked on the yellow zig-zags (which, apparently, earns you points as well as a fine).
Next day, another load of complaints from the same people (who had originally complained), who had all been ticketed. Apparently they "had" to park on the zig-zags because all of the legal parking spaces were taken.
They expected Plod to move on people who were parked legally, so they could park, and were incensed that they were ticketed as they made the complaint in the first place.
I don't know if they were driving SUVs, but, in my mind's eye they were. The sense of righteous entitlement to the entire road kind of fits.
Until Big Media decided to make an issue over this, there was clear blue water between the practice of buying a CD and ripping it for my own use, and grabbing it from a torrent.
One was legal, the other wasn't.
Now, if you rip your bought-and-paid-for CD, you are crook. If you grab a torrent, you are a crook.
So you may as well grab the torrent and save yourself some money as you are a crook whatever you do.
"Confusing name, underpowered, inept user interface and a shortage of games – these were the names of the four horses of the Wii U's apocalypse."
The original Wii had a confusing name and was underpowered and had fewer games than its rivals.
Yet is was a huge success. There were a number of reasons for this. The first was innovation. The Wii controllers were truly revolutionary. Second was price. The Wii, on release was (IIRC) £170, far cheaper than its rivals. Third was that it appealed to a different demographic to its rivals. It was a family/party console.
The Wii-U was too expensive, on release it was £300 (for the 32GB version), and its killer feature (the Wii-pad, thingy) was a solution looking for a problem. For most people who owned a Wii (myself included), there was little point in upgrading.
Eventually I bought an XBox One, but still wheel out the Wii for party games. Wii Sports Resort still knocks the spots off the, frankly lamentable, Kinect Sports.
" On the other hand, it hardly needed a huge long discussion to determine that The Big Bang Theory is unfunny moronic shit that grossly misrepresents every aspect of the subject and people it depicts. For that it gets the nuclear blast icon, from which it shall not receive even the dubious protection of Dr Jones' refrigerator."
Errrm, please suggest a comedy that doesn't "grossly misrepresent" its subjects.
Oh, you want a "comedy" that accurately portrays the lives of physicists, IT techs (IT Crowd), hotel managers (Fawlty Towers), market traders (Only fools), A bunch of people in a pub (Friends, Coupling, etc), the Home Guard (Dad's Army), Irish matriarchs (Mrs Brown's boys), Space accident survivors (Red Dwarf), etc, etc, etc?
Wow. what a barrel of laughs those would be.
There were a number of reasons why 999 was chosen:
Having three identical digits made it simple to create "emergency only" dials/phones.
So which digit to choose? Dial phones use loop-disconnect dialling at 10 pulses per second (pps). If a low number was chosen (particularly 1) it would have been possible to accidentally "dial" by jiggling the switchhooks. The ideal number would have been 0, but that is the STD prefix, so 9 was ne next best option.
Incidentally, in most old Strowger systems, you only had to dial "99" to get to the emergency operator.That was why the operator was often on the line as soon as you dialled the last 9 (of 3).
The "smoke filled room" thing came afterwards (after all, finding 1 or 0 on a rotary dial is easier).
"This isn't about Amazon giving you a refund for your unused pizza, this is about Amazon keeping your money but then docking the kitchen staff's pay because they don't think that the pizza was good enough for you to eat it all at once."
No, this is more like Dominoes docking kitchen staff pay because the customer didn't eat all of their pizza, despite charging that customer for the whole pizza.
It doesn't matter why the customer didn't eat their pizza (maybe they just weren't as hungry as they thought) the staff still get their pay docked and the company still trouser the difference.
What utter tosh.
I have a Pebble Steel and wouldn't swap it for either an Apple Watch or an Android Wear jobbie. It has an always on display (just like a watch), it is waterproof to 5atm, has a solid steel case and lasts 7 days on one charge.
It will also work with Android or iPhone and has a free and open API and a cloud based IDE for developing apps and faces.
Compare that to the Apple watch Sport which costs twice the price of the Pebble Steel. Non persistent display, Not waterproof, aluminium case, battery lasts less than a day. You can't write or obtain 3rd party faces and can only develop apps for it if you pay Apple for the privilege and own a Mac.
Not sure if you are just trolling or are such an ardent fanboi that you cannot comprehend that a competing product can be better than Apple's finest but, when it comes to the features that make a watch (smart or otherwise) usable and practical, the Pebble Steel wipes the floor with the Apple Watch, and for half the price of the cheapo "sport" model.
So you are happy being uncomfortable on a flight because, for you, that is the status quo?
Personally I'm 6'5" and 221lb and dislike economy air travel due to the lack of leg room. I also dislike economy rail and bus travel for exactly the same reason. The difference is I am usually only on a bus for 30 mins or so, or a train for a couple of hours max. 10 hours on a long-haul in an economy bucket is detestable.
"In a letter submitted to the court earlier this week, Ulbricht said he realized he had "ruined my life and destroyed my future" ... "Even now I understand what a terrible mistake I made," Ulbricht wrote in his letter."Do we have a different definition of remorse and responsibility?
To me that reads like he is sorry he got caught and is sorry that his life has been destroyed. It shows little sign of remorse for his victims.
Here's a question to pose to Ms May should any of you be (un)lucky enough to meet her.
"Give me one, just one, scenario where the proposed measures could prevent a terrorist atrocity"?
As hard as I try, I cannot think of a single one. I can imagine how they might be used to bring accomplices to justice after an attack, but not to actually "keep us safe".
Add to that the fact that in every recent atrocity, the perpetrators were known to the authorities but couldn't be adequately monitored, despite being known risks, because of the lack of resources.
How they hell do they intend to "keeps us safe" from an unknown threat embedded in a humongous database of snoop data when they cant even protect us from the nutters they know about? Would it not be better to spend the money intended for this white elephant on some real human resources?
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