Bah!
Typical! The police arrive with a pair of fire trucks in tow if I burn so much as a handful of leaves but these buggers set light to seven tons of assorted non-recyclables and get a standing ovation.
7282 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2008
I think they should generate a unique browser name each session and send that to the bloody stats gathering crap (the major reason I can't load bloody websites on my commute as I pass from one WiFi hotspot to the next before Google.nothingtodowiththethingIwant finishes dawdling and lets me see the content.
For all the badness, it's worth remembering that the Browser Wars resulted in - free browsers. Netscape originally sold Navigator for Fifty dollars. That's fifty nineteen ninety five dollars too. that's like, I dunno, three grand in today's money. Or something.
Incoming clue missile: It's about not putting public focus on someone for the benefit of those too ... let's say "busy" ... to do that work, and to not do so to someone who is entirely unconnected to the affair.
And by Jove lets hope that whoever is named in this jolly little demonstration of the rule of the mob in action is actually the one to blame.
Though "anonymous" will be safe in any event because, well, no-one is threatening to name any of them.
No e-book is worth $9.99.
Not many e-books are worth half that. $5 is the level at which I begin to baulk, looking instead for the remaindered hardback, originally priced around $25 now going for $10 or even less.
I wonder what the authors make of that calculus.
I also wonder at an industry that pushes e-books optically scanned - and therefore error-laden - from originals published in the 1950s and 1960s, written by authors dead two decades and more and prices them at around $12-$15, and wonder what the living authors think of that. Who would buy such a thing?
And I can't tell you the smell that comes to mind when an e-book costs $12 while the hardback is in print, but can be had for less than half that when the paperback is published with no changes to the e-content. Not so much as a change of typeface. Yes, George, I'm talking about your books. And no George, I didn't buy it until the price dropped to $3. I believe that's your nose lying at your feet.
Perhaps it's time to remember that making a living by writing books is a very recent phenomenon, and that the window for that being possible may be closing owing to too many fat bastards grabbing all the pie.
I'll remind you of the memo of 8th Aug inst. Re: defamatory language in usage by embassy staff to whit: The practice of referring to the members of the Groaci diplomatic mission as "sticky-fingered five-eyes" will cease forthwith under penalty of extra duty in voucher reconciliation and expense report filing.
Two phishing attempts in two weeks to my normally phish-free email, one "from" Bank America, the other Paypal (apparently I must follow the link to unlock my account, which has been frozen due to unlawful activity!)
Crap.
I hope this originates from some stupid StackOverflow account and not anything I care about.
Yesyesyes. Every 12 year old has done that math (or I would hope they had).
But this thing doesn't put out 1G. This motor would not pass muster in any sort of planetside test by the Galactic Patrol as it cannot make way in even an asteroidal gravity well.
Consider: To make the microwaves and steer them about you need lots of metal. To actually get any useful thrust from this motor it would need to be made entirely out of soap film.
You can't reach luminal velocity. The implications of the various bits of Relativity Theory in play mean that as you get faster the spacecraft gets more massive requiring more and more oomph just to maintain the same acceleration. The change isn't linear either. Near the speed of light the energy required to nudge the craft up to the line (photonic speed-wise) goes asymptotic. At least, it did some thirty odd years ago when I last did the maths involved to see what was what using equations I found in Einstein's own book "Relativity" (very readable, worth a look).
We don't need to do the experiment you describe to confirm the mass-gain at fractional lightspeed velocities. We use the effect all the time in supercolliders.
""Test results indicate that the RF resonant cavity thruster design, which is unique as an electric propulsion device, is producing a force that is not attributable to any classical electromagnetic phenomenon and therefore is potentially demonstrating an interaction with the quantum vacuum virtual plasma," "
Prediction: No, it isn't.
skelband, may I recommend you seriously consider purchasing a large (7500 KW peak load or better) "worksite" generator and mount it in the flatbed of your King Cab pickup truck (having family in Alberta I know that all Real Canadians have a King Cab truck)?
That way if you need to use a namby-pamby electric tool you can fire up the earsplitting generator and experience the thrill of go-anywhere electricity AND the proper amount of decibels for the job at hand.
My generator sounds like a badly maintained ice-cream truck has parked in my garden, and during the aftermath of hurricanes and other weather annoyances gives me the double joy of internet and lights AND neighbor annoyance in one earsplitting package.
The 10 mm one is still jammed on an inlet manifold bolt of his car. The 12 mm one is dangling from one of the battery terminals where it will eventually cause a short and arc-weld itself across the terminals. It will then be interesting to see whether the battery electrolyte will boil away *before* the battery explodes violently or whether the heat of this process sets the various plastic parts and rubber hoses on fire.
The rest of the "complete set" are scattered over the roadways of your home town as they were inadvertently left on various cross members and handy ledges in the engine compartment after the last job.
Kids. Love them, feed them, educate them, but never ever ever lend them your tools.
No, Joe Public likes them because they are self-piloting and self-recessing when used for their intended purpose: hanging drywall aka sheetrock or, in the case of the galvanized or resin coated version, building a deck or fixing a fence. The thin shank is designed for displacing the minimum of the material being fastened in place so you *don't* need to drill a pilot hole.
Before you wade in, you are exchanging words with someone who drove about two hundred of the resin-coated type last Saturday in a marathon fence-repairing the likes of which hasn't been seen since the last marathon fence repairing at Chateau Stevie (gale force winds, carpenter ants - who against all reason are actually not real carpenters at all but bloody vandals that gnaw holes in wood instead of getting a proper house - termites and rot. I have some of each in The Fence of Go Away Neighbours).
Ordinary woodscrews, which absolutely require a pilot hole to sink, will shear as you drive them under these conditions, especially is using an electric drill-driver.
Oh, there are a lot more confusing differences waiting in the spanner drawer of the toolbox for the unwary ex-pat doing the in-driveway-engineering thing than that obvious and well-known one.
Upside: awesome tools that often would be banned in the EU, like gasoline-powered chainsaws mounted on 10-foot poles and portable hydraulic pincers only the fire brigade is allowed to have elsewhere.
Land of the Red Man. Land of the Free. Land of Husqvarna and Tecumseh. Praise the lord and pass the two-stroke oil.
Riddled with inaccuracies, as usual for The Register.
A "Brummie Screwdriver" is NOT a common-or-garden clawhammer, but rather the old-fashioned cast-iron Stillson's-type plumber's monkey-wrench, 15-18 inches long, traditionally painted red on the handle.
The hammering face is usually the back of the monkey-screw housing.
Also, picture number 2 *is* a screw, specifically a "Machine Screw".
The bolt, which the author seems to have confused this with, is easily distinguished by a smooth, threadless section near the head. You can *use* a machine screw as a bolt, but there are penalties for doing so without using a bushing as any proper engineer would know.
*I* miss VB4 and the "can do" attitude that surrounded it. You could buy the full product for less than the down payment on a new car too. Ditto LogicWorks ERWin. Ditto Visual C. Now it's all about knobbled "free" versions and multi-kilobuck licenses.
You can get ERWin for free *if* you keep revalidating it every month. This info good as of last summer when I got tired of it all and switched to a nastier but free DB design tool on account of CA always seeming to decide revalidation was required while I was trying to work on a train with a non-persistent and slow as frozen treacle internet connection.
8op 8ob 8op
Thrrp.
So, if I understand the ramifications of recent legal precedent and the current idiocy:
ICANN does not own the property it sells. Furthermore, ICANN claims the property does not in fact exist (otherwise, how could it be that *no-one* can own it?). Add to that the fact that ICANN is, under US law, a person in certain important legal respects.
By gad, what we have here is a penniless scam artist who is surely only minutes away from demanding public assistance.
With clear evidence of recidivism (this is not the first time ICANN has sold a non-existent piece of property I'm told), why isn't ICANN (in the form of its board of directors) in jail for fraud and being a threat to the (re)public good?
Or there's "Bring the Jubilee"* by Ward Moore, in which time travelers ... nope, you'll have to read it yourself.
* the name of the song known by many as "Marching through Georgia", used as an anthem by CSA citizens (and, with alternate lyrics, by Manchester United fans).
"You could even go back as far as 1943 with the Ferdinand Elefant tank destroyer that had a hybrid electric drive."
You'd be mad if you did, though, since the drive was a miserable failure in the competitive tests vs MAN* when bidding for the intended use (the Panzer VI aka Tiger) and when the chassis was repurposed as the Ferdinand aka Elefant it was a death trap on tracks due to other ridiculously obvious design issues (the most prominent being no self-defense machine gun; there are credible reports of commanders opening the gun breach and firing pistols down the barrel in an attempt to stop an onrush of infantry bent on close-quarter tank vandalization and the ever-popular dropping-of-grenades-down-hatches).
Most Ferdinand/Elefant AFVs were abandoned by crews once they ran out of ammo. I never saw a picture of one repurposed for "the other side" (usually the Russians, who had a few panzers of various marks wearing the red star by the end of WWII) which speaks volumes for the market for them. Or, the lack of willingness of people to photograph them. Or both.
* So was the MAN chassis. It broke down several times during the trial. But Team MAN were better at explaining why than Team Porsche were.
You will note that there is a big bux vendor involved, and that that vendor used to make expensive aeroplanes for the government, but now doesn't so much. Keep that in mind for a bit.
I work at the sharp end of Govt IT these days and I can state unequivocally that were the taxpayer to shut up demanding that we bid out every bloody project to grubbing low-bid vendors they might actually get value for money instead of the atrocious waste they actually fund. Government is a not-for-profit organization when working properly. No private vendor is, especially a former aerospace giant. You do the math.
One vendor I had the misfortune to be interacting with bills by the page of documentation. That's how they word their contracts - documentation is proof of work done. Their project documents are a thing to fear, and by some accounts are responsible for much of the deforestation of Latin America. I never knew IT involved so many adjectives and adverbs.
And you never get one vendor rep, they only come in three- and six- packs, depending on who else will be at the meetings. Of course, there is *always* one that must attend by phone too.
Makes me pine for the old days, in the manufacturing industry in the UK. Actually, I only remember cost overruns and abandoned projects as the norm then too, and I only worked in the private sector.
However the reality is that they show you a box to choose the options, the text they place next to ODF is along the lines of "if you use this then you will be missing out on a ton of features that you paid money for are you really really sure you want to spoil your experience and waste your money...
And you will lose functionality. The last one that caught me was a document that I wanted to be in three columns per page *except* page one which needed to be in two columns. MSWord: Easy. OOWriter: Not possible.
You might not care about that loss of functionality of course, but it is real, just as real as the cross version problems OO warns about under certain circumstances when you use heavy-on-the-functions OOCalc.
Not warning about this sort of stuff would be the Evil Thing To Do (in my opinion, as an educated user of the advanced functions of both OO and MSO).
Bravo HM Govt. for making the jump. Shame the argument they use is bankrupt (if you want the message to get out you use HTML or PDF because they are universally portable - or damn near so). Let's hope this is more than just the opening move in a license negotiation.
You do know there's a switch to turn off all the inline styles, right?
And that they are there because of an insane requirement that not only should the generated HTML "look like" the original document, but that any HTML made from a word document by default be able to be reconverted back into a word document with minimal loss of styling from the original Word document?
It's right there in the help, or was last time I looked (MSO 2003). Turn off the switch and you'll get about what you'd expect plus a couple of meta tags.