Bit like the myth that...
a man's size doesn't matter, eh: ;-P
2410 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Dec 2009
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.
...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
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.
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!!!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.