Posts by Stevie 7284 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2008
Or, you know, just turn them off.
They have an off-switch, and just about everyone but my mum has voice mail so no urgent missive will be lost.
And no office college could complain about having their phone non-destructively turned off under circumstances of such boorishness. Neither could a colleague.
If the atmosphere inside is to American standards is does. About 5psi if I remember correctly. Makes the engineering of the seals and hull easier.
If they go with the Russian model you are right.
I'm wondering what the place will smell like after a couple of shifts of bonking plutocrats have been cycled through it, and whether this will be seen as a plus or a minus to the whole experience.
The Americans used to make their astronauts sit in a rubber dinghy while a helicopter churned up a nice, deodorizing salt spray around them. The Russians were careful to bring their cosmonauts down in rural areas where no-one else would catch a whiff of them until they had a chance for the desert breeze to work its magic.
There's a reason why the shuttle used to sit for half an hour before anyone went near it, and anyone who thinks it has to do with hydrazine more than an opportunity to crack the hatches and air the place out before any of the press got near is fooling themselves.
I commute using the trains of the Long Island Rail Road, and the chemical toilets in them are unbearable after only eight hours. Imagine what it will be like in a place where the air cannot be changed, ever.
And I wouldn't want to be the poor sod changing the air filters in the PODs.
Wouldn't a better measure of privacy-smarts be to see who doesn't put stuff up on the internet to start with?
"Privacy controls". What a joke. Especially given the epic levels of vengeance women can reach for, dwarfing those from any man I know. A falling out, a cut-and-paste and there goes your privacy.
Notwithstanding that the "private" stuff is sitting in several places the "owner" doesn't know about - the cloud has to touch down somewhere and then there's all those backups and redundancy measures.
Perhaps all that is required is to have a bit of empathy.
Don't jab your elbows into the other guy because it isn't polite.
Don't be rude to the other person on the grounds they don't fit a seat size they had no hand in designing.
Don't recline your seat before takeoff - that rule isn't for your safety, it is for that of the person behind you.
Don't behave as if the entire flight is designed as an imposition on you personally.
Do understand that on an aeroplane, even if when you look around you *can* see the a-hole, it still could be you. Planes usually have more than one riding in them.
Do accede to the requests of the cabin staff with good grace, even if one of them is the a-hole. You can complain much more effectively after the flight.
Ryanair? Aren't they the ones that wanted to get rid of toilets and make everyone fly standing up? Oh yeah, by all means patronize that bunch of twonks. They have your passenger needs front and center. What goes out the window after the bogs and the seats? Unnecessary control surfaces? An engine or two? Maybe an aircrew person - "do more with less" is the current battle cry of the accountant-heavy business after all. An expensively outfitted aircraft might fall out of the sky and kill everyone, but a cheap and cheerful shaved to the bone one is a smoking hole in the ground waiting to happen.
Maybe not blu-tak but we've been using foam-based coatings to protect space-stuff from high-speed micrometeorite impacts for decades so why not have a satellite with a large umbrella coated with the same stuff just fly in circles until it has swept out a clean area? Bigger stuff can be dealt with using different techniques.
Stupid Question, but: Do you actually have any teen-aged kids of your own?
'Cos if not, your opinions are all theory with no experimental data to back them up.
I'm upvoting all ammo and calibre related thumbs ups because I have a kid. She's an angel, but her friends contain quite a few examples of Snottius Princessus Whinifferia, none of whom have any reason to complain about life.
An excellent and practical suggestion sir, with just two minor problems:
First, it doesn't get that cold in Winter, to judge by the pictures. My first hint was the shirtsleeve motif of the video.
Second He probably hasn't got any thermite to hand, but demonstrably does have a .45 automatic.
Why not use a hammer?
a) Because it would take forever. The gun causes the real damage where it's wanted - inside - instantly.
2) Because it is less effort. My shoulder would be raging at me for days after I hammered a laptop to bits.
%) Because it is more fun and more satisfying, plus, you can put the thing back in the bedroom for the little shit to find without having to go down on hands and knees with a baggie for the bits.
No, he has a 15 year old and knows he'll won't have her respect for a good few years yet. It's not about respect, at least, not yet it isn't. It's a learning experience, and a valuable one.
What he wants is for her to understand that actions have consequences, even on the "consequence free" internet (where people can and do say anything they feel so much as a momentary impulse to share) and that the consequence of bad-mouthing her parents in a public forum can be quite bad for someone who is living on charity.
I doubt he expects this to stop her internet usage - after all most libraries have internet connected terminals these days - but it has put a serious crimp in her style in front of her friends.
Most of the crybaby posters here clearly have never actually raised a mardy-arsed teen and think they are just "small adults".
And as for the deadly weapon usage, note how far back from anywhere this took place. Note that the laptop was positioned so the possibility of live ordinance going on to damage something else in the neighbourhood were so minimal as to be negligible (hollow point rounds would be fragments by the time they got through shredding the chassis - those tiny holes aren't what is killing this machine - and any that made it out the other side would simply end up in the soil).
Lastly, kids understand force when they don't understand the ethics of reasonable behaviour. No-one has been physically harmed here.
I still use a Kodak point and shoot digital camera. It has an optical viewfinder that works better than a screen in bright sunlight, and came with twice the internal memory of the competing brands' offerings in the same price range. Tough too. The only way I know they can be killed is by running them over with a car.
Kodak pioneered color photography, and invented a dye-based grainless slide film that made images that can be enlarged up to the limits of the enlarger without noticeable loss of resolution possible.
The end of an era indeed.
Are there any videos of these miserable freeloaders brushing up against the catenary?
I suggest swinging axes and hammers, along with improbably large munitions periodically fired down the length of the train to dislodge ticket dodgers on the unelectrified sections.
With a bit of forethought this could be merchandised into the next X-Box game.
A pardon is not a declaration of innocence, it is a forgiving of the crime regardless. If there is no crime, there cannot be a pardon for it. Pardons are sometimes issued in the case of wrongful convictions, but these are a usually legal face-saving maneuver designed to forestall future "second thoughts on the matter", and more to the point are a pardon for the crime that the person was convicted of (possibly wrongfully).
If you don't like the terms, don't use the product.
Of course, terms subject to change without notice and all that.
And there are plenty of less expensive alternatives to writing (and distributing) your work, but they don't come to you just because you switch your computer on.
On the writing front I'd like to put in a plug for Scrivener, a nice little number that works fine on my Windows 7 laptop and cost the pocket-ripping amount of $40. You may need a word processor to leverage this baby for your purpose, and sadly it doesn't speak native OpenOffice but the good news is that OpenOffice can write Office 97 files and Scrivener understands *them*. If you are a budding screenwriter or stage author, it has a number of in-built extras to make your life particularly easy. You can try Scrivener yourself for free of course.
Not affiliated or in any way compensated for that plug, just impressed with the thing.
Everyone here *does* understand that NASA doesn't make the stuff it uses, but bids it out to...private industry, don't they?
Yes, the Apollo 1 Command Module, the SRBs and the ceramic tiles and glue used to hold 'em on were all manufactured by private companies.
Private companies funded by taxpayer dollars, available in unbelievable amounts.
Which I see people here calling to be given to SPACE X.
If SPACE X needs cash, let 'em raise it the private industry way - by getting private investors to pony up.
The problem with NASA isn't that it is a government agency, it is that it doesn't have the freedom to pay top dollar to the people it wants to. You get what you pay for. In the case of the space shuttle, pork-barrel projects that prioritize jobs in states rather than adhering to the design goals.
Anyway, talk of landings on other worlds is pointless. The only use the public can be made to see for space is to park stuff that makes the internet, GPS and TV work.
"Irony"?
It would be irony if Professor Lewis had reversed his position on one of the two matters.
The word you are looking for is "consistent".
Though personally, I've seen the Athabasca Glacier and I don't need convincing the place is getting warmer, or - to judge by all the soot on it - that there's a component to that that is entirely due to the burning of fossil fuels. I also seem to recollect that the US army has plans - perhaps as yet speculative - on how to deal with the fact that the domestic wheat belts are walking North and will eventually be in Canada.
I don't care. I'll be long dead before Da Yoofs start fighting over edibles and water. Serves 'em right. You get the climate you live in. Falling standards, wouldn't happen in my day, etc etc etc.
So encrypt your gmail. Let them scrape the bugger and get gibberish.
This whole "personalization" thing is a big Orwellian to my mind. Driven by retail marketing in the first instance it insidiously ensures that people never move outside their comfort zone by never seeing anything new.
Imagine what will happen when electioneering goes interwebby big time.
Security by obscurity may not be foolproof, but it's hard to break through a veil of secrecy you don't even know is there.
Even worse is the idea being promoted by Google honchos that what they have is "information" about people. What they actually have is data (pluralize that to your taste). The two are not equivalent, as a quick rummage through your My Amazon recommendations should prove.
Wouldn't it be funny if the country were brought to its knees not by economics or invasion but by incompetent data scraping and attempts to invest that with meaning?
Two Chavs shown the door by bored DHS personnel out for a bit of fun.
No real story here.
Funny thing: I have a friend who some years ago was questioned for hours because he was talking into a portable recorder hidden in his inside jacket pocket in front of machine-gun armed police - at Heathrow Airport.
He had much the same reaction as some of the commentards here, but I told him he was a tw*t for behaving stupidly and to suck it up.
Don't taunt DHS. They have no sense of humour and just like the officers of Traffic Division the real answer to "Don't you have better things to do with your time?" is "No, now shut up and bend over".
Except the press, from several weeks before the US release up to and including this article, have been calling the device in so many words a competitor to the iPad and it isn't.
Even a non-savvy buyer can see the obvious difference in size and knows enough to ask "can it do what an iPad can do?" to which the commission-conscious salesdrone will say "No", this time at least with the comfort of telling the exact and whole truth.
Smaller, no camera, no microphone, and those are just the things I can list without switching on another braincell.
Informed customers might think to ask if it is running full-blown android and will then learn that it isn't exactly a replacement for a tablet either, at least, not unless you go in and stamp all over Kindle's OS with your size 12s. Many of the Android apps for sale on Amazon won't run properly or at all on the Fire's OS.
I seriously doubt from conversations I've had with dozens of iPad owners - not all of them IT savvy - that any of them would have given a second thought to buying a Fire instead of their iPad, even those who use it only for the things you've listed. The Fire isn't an iPad, you see.
More telling: were this article to be about the Nook we wouldn't be having this discussion because the Nook was never trumpeted in the press as an iPad killer even though to all intents and purposes it is the same animal as the Kindle Fire.
Tellingest: Amazon have never made this overblown claim themselves. If there were any substance to the claim, don't you think the worlds fastest-growing license to print money would have somehow worked in a way of saying so on their Kindle page?
I say all this from the viewpoint of someone who owns and uses a Kindle Fire and has never used or owned an iPad. The Fire is a bookreader that can do other things when pressed. The iPad is, well, I'm not sure to be honest and those who own them don't have a consensus on the subject, but it allows you to read books as one of the nifty things it does, not as the primary design concept.
The lesson here is "don't turn someone else's property into a theatrical set" and nothing more, really.
It is very sad for the misguided twit who thought he had permanent squatting rights, but that's about it.
Also, it might be better to plan this sort of thing to be in a shed or garage, like model railway builders often do. You can always move the shed to a new location if it comes to it.
The strictures about previous convictions are based on the - possibly naive - premiss that if you've done the time you've paid for the crime. To do otherwise is to make every crime a life sentence.
It's not about getting the judicial system you deserve, it's about getting the one you say you want with the goals you claim to be the whole point of the affair.
If the idea is just to punish then we can go back to amputations, the lash and transportation to places that render the guilty incommunicado (whether the indigenous peoples of those places agree or not) and stop pretending to be enlightened.
Or we could harvest their organs like that place our politicians and business owners admire so much does.
We just have to stop pretending to be re-educating the prison population is all. Admit you just want revenge and we can all get back to watching Top Gear under the watchful eye of the benevolent "safety cameras".
I've run their Internet Suite for years. Yes it slows stuff down, but I've not been virused and I was protected from the nitwit infections of family members who didn't get why they should clean up their machines and who e-mailed me e-syphilis over and over again as a result.
But.
They are gone as of this year. I have always found their policy of auto-renewing against my credit card a month and more before the due date annoying, but yesterday windows told me that Symantec "couldn't be sure my AV was up to date".
See, I changed my credit card and the auto-renew fell over, cuing umpteen begging letters.
But surely an AV subscription is either up to date or out of date? There is no third state here, and the NIS control applet was proudly displaying "23 days left" in the subscription alert so that binary status was indeed known to NIS. So where was the uncertainty?
I'm switching to windows firewall and Malwarebytes on that machine. It no longer has to defend me against my kid's and my wife's daft downloading.
I want to see what happens when the sub goes out. Does the software refuse to start?
And on top of that I was totally unimpressed by Norton Ghost, which set up unwanted scheduling, nagware and I dunno what else, failed to properly recreate the system disc after a crash (the sole reason it was deployed in the first place) and wouldn't work at all until all the Norton stuff had been deleted and re-installed in a given order.
Then there was the tech (yes, I found out how to talk to a Norton tech, but it turns out it isn't worth the hours it takes) who tried to fix it by remote desktop, and proved to my complete satisfaction that Symantec techs are no better at that than I am, and obliged me to change all my passwords afterwards - who the hell knows who these guys are anyway?
No, they've worn out their welcome and this news story only makes me more determined to be done with them.
Fools!
Has no-one but me read "The Colour Out Of Space?"
If the rich back catalogue of 50's SF on both the large and small screens has told us anything, it is that nothing good comes from a meteorite.
When will people learn? When these so-called "scientists" stagger out of the badlands looking like rotting cacti or gorillas wearing diving helmets?
While the indexing and search is absent from the native PDF reader and there are other things that could be better tuned to the form-factor of the device, I use Kindle PDF extensively and much prefer it in certain uses to Mobi.
For reading long tracts you are right that Mobi has the edge, but it is really an issue of the screen size rather than the PDF format/engine itself. Mobi presents the information in Kindle screen-sized pages. Images are not clever in my experience with Mobi. If they are small they cannot be zoomed (at least the ones I've come across can't). PDF's work with the screen pinch gesture.
I liked the way the author of this piece filled out the space where the working temperature of the substrate was supposed to go with a side-discussion of freezing water and the startling introduction to the hitherto-unknown "Kelvin" scale.
I recall a similar ploy used by me on my mock O-Level English exam which involved a book I hadn't read enough of.
This excellent tactic was entirely successful in filling up the disturbing amount of white paper in the answer booklet.
Not saying that improving GPS/SatNav tech is a bad idea, but I note that the instant update turnaround time for a printed map was on the order of months or years which would lead one to the conclusion this problem must have been huge before GPS/SatNav.
Except it wasn't, really.
DDS (Daft Driving Syndrome) seems to be a product of the technology, not the phenomena of the maps not being accurate. Perhaps the GPS/SatNav devices need to say "watch the road, process what you're seeing, remember I'm just a jukebox" every five minutes or so to remind people that they still need to drive with their brains switched ON.
My GPS device wants to route me through Manhattan every time I drive off Long Island. Do I follow the increasingly hysterical demands from "Susan" for me to do that? Not on a bet. Not for a million dollars. Not for all the tea in China.
Of course, this sort of nonsense just proves two things: a) that the time is long-overdue for taking humans out of the business of driving cars in public and 2) the technology to *take* humans out of the business of driving in public is laughably far off in the future. Still.
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