* Posts by LaeMing

2410 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Dec 2009

Boobquake fails to destroy planet

LaeMing
Happy

Bit like the myth that...

a man's size doesn't matter, eh: ;-P

Ridley Scott talks up 'nasty' Alien prequel

LaeMing
Badgers

twenty feet high... sounds familiar

alistair millington: "The thing in the chair with it's chest blown open was alien as it was about twenty feet tall so where do humans fit in exactly?"

It was a native of Pandora. The Na'vi were once a great space-faring race, until they encountered the Alien species. By the time Avatar was set, they had reverted to a more 'natural' civilisation. But at least the Alien infestation had weeded all the Greedy Corporation (tm) out of their gene pool before it was finally dealt with.

Sorry for the spoiler.

School secretly snapped 1000s of students at home

LaeMing
Black Helicopters

Several months back...

...my university IT department switched our standard office monitor to one with an inbuilt webcam. Mainly because of the new videoconferencing kit we just installed. But a lot of postgrads were getting paranoid about being spied on.

Not sure why anyone would actually want to watch postgrads sitting in their grotty food-packet-filled offices, but I am sure this incident will result in the first aid cabinets needing another top-up of bandaids (used to cover the webcam lenses).

I was lucky enough to get a new monitor before the webcam ones. I prefer a seperate webcam. I can turn it upside down for internal video calls. And it is easier to move to where I can use my hand, made up with whiteboard marker lips and eyes, as my puppet (my motto is currently "talk to the hand"). I am planning to get hold of a fake eyeball from the science centre gift shop some time and do Vindaoonian impersonations too. Luckily my boss has a good sense of humour. :-D

Apple backs down from Pulitzer putsch

LaeMing
Flame

It's about time Apple started having to apply

It's about time Apple started having to apply for the privilege of hosting high-profile content of this type. Let /them/ come begging -- multiple times after arbitrary and for-dubious-reasons rejection. Would teach them some much-needed humility.

He gave me the hairless eyeball

LaeMing
Welcome

I for one welcome...

...the iEye.

Internet abuzz with BitTorrent bypass code

LaeMing
Boffin

GNUNET?

http://gnunet.org/

Fear 2012? Bunker hustler has you covered

LaeMing
Heart

Excellent Point

Be proactive about the food supply. I love it!

LaeMing
Badgers

Nice little money spinner, I'm sure.

However most 'disasters' that are over in less than a year are surface-survivable anyway (at least if you are a reasonable distance from ground-zero). The big ones will require you to stay holed up for far longer than that! Even if you ate all the other residents after the food ran out, you wouldn't make it.

I'll take my chances sitting around with the zombies trading complaints about the poor quality of human brains these days.

LaeMing
Happy

2012 and the Mayans

Little known fact*:

The whole 'world ends when the Mayan Calendar ends' thing is all a linguistic mis-understanding. What the Mayans actually prophesied was:

"In the days following the end of the current calendar,

all our systems will crash

because some dimwit only used a four-byte year field.

(Long-count overflow error #30)"

*It's on the Internet (now) so it must be true!!!

Bloke threatens BT with giant plywood cheque

LaeMing
Happy

Cash not accepted

My mum does not have a CC or a cheque book and refuses to pay the exorbitant fees for a bank cheque or money order, which made paying for her TAFE (trade college) course difficult. Until I advised her to point out that the "Cash not accepted" sign at the counter was in violation of the Australian Federal Treasures Act. They accepted her cash payment, and I noticed a few weeks later the "Cash not accepted" sign was also suddenly absent from the counter window at my own TAFE college.

BOFH: The PFY Chronicles Part The Third

LaeMing

Even if you did all that...

...you would likely just find yourself in the dock for murdering the BOHF's beancounter twin brother while the BOFH finds himself the sole beneficiary of the inheritance.

Bush-authored warrantless wiretapping suffers abrupt defeat

LaeMing

Nah

They would just find a way to grab the land out of a Native American reserve.

Irish civil rights group takes aim at iPad launch

LaeMing
Thumb Up

And so it begins

alas.

Bank security guru: Sue your bank for refund

LaeMing
Flame

Or as we say here in Aust.

"Which bank? Every bloody bank!"

(In reference to the old "Which Bank? The Commonwealth Bank" ad campeign of decades yore.)

MSI tells 97,000 customers to 'Read The F***ing Manual'

LaeMing
Happy

Well...

...I don't celebrate X-mass day at all (being neither a Christian or a mindless-consumer-drone). But I get your point ;-)

However, a whole day of it gets rather tedious anyway.

LaeMing

Where I am...

...April Fools is also limited to the AM timeslot of April 1st. Anyone pranking in the PM slot is themselves an April Fool.

I'm sure there is a manual for popular cultural celebrations out there. MSI probably should read it.

Kit attacks Microsoft keyboards (and a whole lot more)

LaeMing

I'm old skool. I likes the copper!

I really miss keyboard curly-cables. (I assume USB signals don't like the loops so much).

'Switch to Century Gothic to save the planet'

LaeMing
Joke

Morse

One of the Morse Code fonts even better!

The Pirate Party is the shape of things to come

LaeMing
Thumb Down

Or maybe this Noddy chap...

...could release some new content that people want to pay for.

I'm not able to keep living off the proceeds of last year's computer deployments. I have to go out and deploy more if I want to keep getting paid.

Big Phone to US: 'Give us spectrum. Then shut up'

LaeMing
Flame

"greatest hope for global leadership"

Oh, come on! The US is still squabbling internally about whether it should provide all its own people with basic health care of third-world standards. Then again, Aust. Govts (all of them) have been drooling over the hope of getting a more US-like system so they could gouge the saved healthcare money into their own slush finds for decades, so I guess that does represent US leadership in a way.

Back on topic: "Regulation might scare away investors". Where as non-regulation will swallow up their money like it did in the banking sector. That was a real great experience for everyone. Yeah.

Teen's mobe loaded with X-rated smut

LaeMing
Thumb Up

FANTASTIC

This is your mum's world - we just live in it.

Council deforests beauty spot to combat dogging

LaeMing
Big Brother

Perverts!

Surely the ones going so far out of their way to get offended by the forestorial goings on are the perverts. It is like drilling a hole in the fence around the nudist colony and then complaining about what you see through it.

Pirate Party UK launches manifesto

LaeMing
Thumb Up

Well it is more traditional

15 years is at least prety close to the 14 years that Copyright was origionally set at (actually 7 years with another 7 by applcation, IIRC).

Telegraph trips over the Large Hardon Collider

LaeMing
Coat

Goodness Gracious!

Great balls of fire!!

Dell bars Win 7 refunds from Linux lovers

LaeMing

Business customers only

My workplace gets them no-OS too as we have a site licence for MS stuff. Trying to get this as a normal consumer is not possible AFAIK.

LaeMing

I considered a Dell for my mum

Why? 1) because where I work uses a lot of Dells and I get a discount, 2) They were the only all-in-one unit I could find that didn't have a gimmicky touch screen.

My mum just wanted a word processing station to replace her dead MacSE. She doesn't need all the tedious mucking about with software keys and anti-virus.

I called Dell, asked if I could buy the desired unit without Windows as Kubuntu was more suited to the intended user. They said "no." I said "Thank you for your time." They said "Are you still interested in purchasing." I said "Sorry, not if I have to pay for an OS I won't be using."

Then I went and built mum a beige-box atom+ion micro-system.

Mum is happy. My brother is scared of the thing. My 8- and 11yo nieces, who had never seen a KDE desktop or OpenOffice before, took 15 minutes to get up to speed enough to help mum with her text formatting.

Muso turfed off train for 'suspicious' set list

LaeMing
Happy

Sounds Horrid over there!

As a regular train user in Australia, I have had much better experiences with our lot:

On the way home from a job refreshing a bunch of PCs in a school lab (why do people think schools appreciate having half-broken 6yo kit 'donated' to them?) and was quietly dis-assembling some old ball-mice and a few other bits for waste-separation+recycling purposes (and the purpose of killing time on a 1-hour train trip). Suddenly this tosser in a cheap suit gets up from his seat, swaggers over to me and suggests "Why can't you read a book or listen to an iPod like a normal person." Naturally I told him to sod off (I think the words I used were "Go away little man.") So he goes away, and shortly returns with a rail official, who looks at what I am doing, then sits down with the tosser and gives him a ten-minute lecture on not harassing other passengers.

On his way off, the official apologised to me. I already had a response prepared, and made sure all the nearby passengers could enjoy it - and the tosser not: "I'm a primary teacher, putting up with petty bullies running to authority figures when their victims don't cooperate is part of the job." The rail guy couldn't laugh, but he looked like he wanted to.

Jobcentre ejects Jedi Knight

LaeMing

Um...

"don't make everyone else bend to accept them as well"

Isn't that a major point of most religions?

'The LHC will implode the Moon or PUT OUT THE SUN'

LaeMing
Grenade

Refund

I'm sure if the LHC destroys us all, we will be able to collect a full refund on the costs.

Seriously, we'd all be dead quicker than we could become aware of our impending demise, and the other 99.99999999999999999999% of the universe would carry on without even noticing our abscence.

Twitter seeks to embed self in everything

LaeMing
Stop

Hello! I'm on the internet.

"Hello! I'm on so-so's web site.... Nah, it's rubbish."

Lib Dem candidate admits to unnatural vice

LaeMing
Megaphone

Shock!

People change their views over significant amounts of time! Who would have guessed!

Of course the parties and their affiliates in the press prefer the 'traditional' voter who votes for them because that is how his dad and granddad voted and the fact that the major parties now stand for almost the exact opposite of what they did 50 years ago is irrelevant.

'Twitter gives voice to the voiceless' - eg the US President

LaeMing
Badgers

I'm eating Honey Oat Flakes for breakfast

Just thought you would all like to know that.

Sony serves up Mothers' Day e-book reader deal

LaeMing
Thumb Down

My mum would strangle me

My mum would strangle me if I gave her that list of supermarket-shelf mind-rot.

And I'd help her!

Photographers rue Mandy's copyright landgrab

LaeMing
Stop

Stop talking about the "The Government"

The correct term is "The Government and their Corporate Sponsors".

Sexy is as sexy does: UK.gov struggles with sexualisation

LaeMing

Couldn't agree more.

THIS is the stuff that should be sold in brown paper bags from shops fronting back alleys requiring ID to get in. Not on every supermarket checkout. For the reasons stated by the OP.

Web2.0rhea means ‘higher insurance premiums’

LaeMing

Probably meant...

...the thief would track down the employee's home address and burgle that.

Wouldn't work so well on people like me who prefer to take holidays at home (often with a welding-stick in hand).

LaeMing

Butch R Mann

Like in the Chopping Block webcomic where our favorite serial killer leaves expensive home entertainment system boxes in front of his home and waits...

BOFH: The PFY Chronicles

LaeMing

Slim pickings

To spend the afterlife wandering PHB- and user-lands hungry for brains. That WOULD be hell.

Aussie net censorship turning Chinese

LaeMing

Reverse-end censorship

We need as many internet servers as possible refusing requests from Australian Government IP ranges. They want a half-functional internet, it is our duty to give it to them.

LaeMing
Thumb Down

Contagious

Australian politics has for decades followed the US with a 5-10-year lag.

Computer Engineer Barbie coming soon to a toy store near you

LaeMing
Boffin

Or an "Officer"

Apparently I joined the armed forces without knowing it! I still insist on calling myself a "field technician". I'm good enough at my job I don't need a fancy-sounding-but-meaningless title!

Men at Work swiped Down Under riff

LaeMing

Rollback!

IIRC, copyright was originally for 7 years with an option to (for a fee) extend for a further 7 years; for a maximum of 14 years. Sounds reasonable to me.

Aussie censor balks at bijou boobs

LaeMing
Joke

Oh, and another thing...

Next time I am between work contracts I will be requesting a breast enlargement operation to be funded by the Dole office to increase my eligibility for work!

No intention of going through wit the opp of course - I have no desire to have myself butchered just to satisfy the sexual lusts of some wrinkly old misogynistic has-been politician.

We need a bill to ban men with small wrinkly willies from public office.

LaeMing
Thumb Down

Well, there goes another career option for me!

The politicians over here are a decrepit self-serving joke and have been for decades. But people keep voting them in, so I guess we get what the majority deserves.

Google graduates social stalking tool

LaeMing
Black Helicopters

It's a wonderful time...

...to be an antisocial outcast.

Obama to scrap Moon, Mars expeditions - report

LaeMing
Thumb Down

Ho hum.

Plenty of innovative countries in the former developing world gearing up to do what the West has lost the will to. The rewards are undefinable looking forward but I wish them every success in reaping them and hope they will send us in the West some by-then-needed aid (and associated cultural colonialism) since we will need them both by then to drag us into the mid 21st century.

Posting from Australia - once known for being the world leader in space launch services, now best known for bad-mannered ex-pats and attempts to criminalise possession of small boobs.

Spanish town to reward good drivers

LaeMing

What about non-drivers?

What about those of us who have taken some trouble to organise our lives to not need voluntary self-impoverishment (AKA: a car)? We still have to deal with the idiots who think footpaths are parking lots and pedestrian crossings are race-track finish lines.

California school pulls 'oral sex' dictionary

LaeMing
Joke

Tattletale

A FAR more reliable source of correct information about sex is schoolyard tattletale. Who needs dictionaries? Let them learn by ill-informed experimentation, I say!

Apple and Microsoft plot iPhone Google slap

LaeMing
FAIL

Since when?!

Since when were MS and Apple mortal enemies? Market competitors, yes, but MS has too many fingers in the Apple pie for anything beyond PR-based animosity from either side. Keep it real people!

Chinese stamp on Avatar

LaeMing

It already is out on DVD in China.

And with Asian new year coming up, the police will sweep the illegal DVD markets in a few weeks and confiscate them all, after which street markets will pop up for the week when the indoor markets close for the holiday and the DVDs will be available even cheaper from stall operators, many of whom didn't even bother to leave their police jackets at home.

Can't speak for Beijing or Shanghai (showcase cities) but in regional cities, that is my experience.