Hope they were insured!
Posts by LaeMing
2410 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Dec 2009
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Russia: SEXY LIZARDS which landed FROM SPACE are all DEAD
Australia deflates Valve with Steam sueball
Well, for broken or otherwise 'unfit' goods, one presumes the game would have to be provably sufficiently unplayable or varient to advertised expectations to pass the definition (which numerous games have proved to be over the decades).
For un-wanted items, if the packaging (DRM) is unopened (never-activated) that should be fair evidence of not having played it.
I don't think Valve (or any other software supplier) is being asked anything unreasonable here.
Mozilla's 'Tiles' ads debut in new Firefox nightlies
Boffins attempt to prove the universe is just a hologram
Government report: average Oz user will want 15 Mbps by 2023
China hopes home-grown OS will oust Microsoft
Fast And Furious 6 cammer thrown in slammer for nearly three years
NBN Co claims 96 mbps download speeds for FTTN trial
Aussie telcos to sell user location data to marketers
Intel's Raspberry Pi rival Galileo can now run Windows
This'll end well: US govt says car-to-car jibber-jabber will SAVE lives
Google's so smart it's discovered SHARKS HAVE TEETH
Five Totally Believable Things Car Makers Must Do To Thwart Hackers
AMD's first 64-bit ARM cores star in ... Heatless in Seattle*
HUMAN RACE PERIL: Not nukes, it'll be AI that kills us off, warns Musk
Turnbull to Big Content: Let your movies RUN FREE ... for a fair price
Re: Some thoughts...
The DVD rental store still pays a per-hire fee to the rights holder, so, yes, the rights-holder still has a loss. A very small one, but still a loss.
As I have said before. What I want is to be able to purchase - for a reasonable price - a business-card-sized* plastic chit which licences me to hold the content in any form I wish. I get the media in the format that suits my playback equipment (a Linux box at present, but may change ongoing) and the rights-holder gets paid (which, if the media is worth me having, I would like to pay /reasonable/ fee for if only to encourage more media of that type to be made!).
*Business-card-sized means conveniently-small but not misplacably-small and also wallets/boxes for storage are readily available.
Yes, Australia's government SHOULD store comms metadata
AMD dangles 64-bit ARM code developer kit over, well ... developers
NBN Co adds apartments to FTTP rollout
Lower prices are BAD FOR CONSUMERS, says Turnbull
Writing about an Australian Snowden would land Vulture South in the clink
Spinning SPACE DUCK is comet-chasing Rosetta probe's PREY
Interview: Michael Cordover, voteware freedom-of-information crusader
NBN Co execs: No FTTN product until 2015
I got mail!
Hmmm. I recieved a leaflet in my letter box yesterday explaining that in the next few months they would be digging up our area to install node boxes (and assuring us they would put the pavement, grass, trees, etc. back afterwards).
Not /REAL/ NBN, but better than nothing, I guess!
My mum, in a large regional centre down the coast, is still waiting to see if any-kind-of-wired-networking or death-by-old-age reaches her first.
Microsoft's anti-bug breakthrough: Wire devs to BRAIN SCANNERS
Data retention saves Australia from TERROR says Labor MP
Watch: DARPA shows off first successful test of STEERABLE bullet
I've got 99 problems, but a Facebook boycott ain't one
F1? No, it's Formula E as electric racing cars hit the track
iPhone user shamegasm: 'I beg of you', delete sex app from my purchase list
Oh SNAP! Old-school '80s Unix hack to smack OSX, iOS, Red Hat?
Re: Confused heyrick... Ho humm this old saw again.
"I said many years ago, in response to "Linux is completely secure!" type statements, that Linux was secure THEN because it was not important enough to be an attack vector. With Windows 8 not flying out the door and many many mobile phones running a variant; it has now matured into something worth attacking"
Of course back many years ago, Windows was only a majority player on the Desktop, while the vast bulk of externally-connected servers (the ones serious hackers want to attack) were *NIX. These days, I believe, the spread between *NIX and Windows on the server is closer to 50:50, so by your argument attacks on *NIX systems should be going DOWN!
Remember the turbo button on PCs? New AWS instance has one for CPU burst
For those damned yoof amongst us:
The 'turbo' button on PCs of old was a button that, when activated, had the PC run at its full rated speed (generally 12 or 16 - or 20 if you were posh - MHz). When de-activated it would slow the PC down, preferably to 8MHz (though it often just halved the clock frequency).
Why would anyone want to slow down their PC? Well, some games back then, instead of using the PCs clock to pace themselves, relied on the processor speed for timing, so if you tried to play your game with the Turbo button on, it would run rather faster than you might find playable!
Why 'Turbo' on by default and not 'Slow' off by default? Marketing, of course.
NBN Co reveals THOUSAND-node FTTN trial built by Telstra
Supermodel Lily Cole: 'I got a little bit upset by that Register article'
Australia.gov.au Alpha design revealed to grateful nation
600 school sysadmins sacked in New South Wales
Tech talk bloke compares girlfriend to irritating Java tool – did he deserve flames?
Verizon threatens Netflix in video lag blame game
Londoners urged to cut landlines and take up wireless broadband
Re: Bonkers.
Technically, 4G IS broadband: it is using a (relatively) broad section of the available bandwidth for its signal. But people have been trained to associate the word 'broadband' with speed because on an unshared copper wire the speed is, of course, very high. But it is the exclusiveness of the wire that makes it fast, not the 'broadband'. If we had to share that wire with everyone and their aunt, party-line-style, the 'broadband' wouldn't help us much there either.
Problem is that most customers for these kinds of services don't (want to be bothered to) understand what they are buying into. Sucks to be them, I guess!
(Except you then get people - like my mum - who knows full well what the score is, but can't do anything about it because the idiots in the government also believe wireless 'broadband' is magically not limited by the laws of physics - laws which aren't subject to corporate buy-out. It really really does suck to be caught unwillingly in that trap through no fault of one's own!)
Australia's first public swatting victim a nice bloke
'Fan docks' are about to become a thing
"For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive - you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same programme."
- Douglas Adams "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy", Ch12.
Please be seated at your FOUR-LEGGED PC
I have actually been keeping an eye out for an antique-looking (though obviously not monetarily or historically valuable) writing desk to make into an integrated computer + TV desk for my mum.
Collecting lots of old valves (to bore out and LED-light) and some nice 'olde' meters, switches, dials and stuff too.
Samsung, Chipzilla in 4K monitor price cut pact
In the end,
it doesn't matter if Samsung's competitors also do well out of the deal. All that matters is if Samsung and Intel do better out of having the deal than from not having the deal. Business is about making money, not hamstringing oneself so spite the 'competition'. Samsung probably knows this.