Posts by Steven Roper

Re: 'Barter'

These days it would be your taxi driver friend that would be charged for perving or sexual harassment or something if a girl did this. I guess he's lucky he got out of the game before the SJWs took over the government.

Re: I have an idea

Done and done.

Re: Bob Iger, Chairman and CEO, The Walt Disney Company

Yep. So much for getting rid of political correctness, which Disney is an absolute exemplar of.

Re: To understand what happened...

Never in my 10+ years as a member of this community have I been so sorely tempted to register a thousand sockpuppet accounts just so I could give someone a thousand upvotes. Absolutely spot on.

I've long said that I supported Trump myself, not because I thought he'd be a good President, but simply because him being elected would show that people no longer buy into the Ministry of Truth leftist propaganda machine the mainstream media has become. When he won the election (on Wednesday afternoon Australia time) I actually cried with joy as I danced around my house with my hands making V-signs in the air, even though America's not my country, because against all hope I knew finally that millions of other people were as sick of the sanctimonious, self-righteous hypocritical spouters of political correctness as I was.

You cannot defeat hate with hate. Railing against "toxic masculinity", "white privilege", branding all men as violent predatory thugs, dogpiling children who dress as Polynesians and American Indians for "cultural appropriation", and passing laws turning ordinary, harmless behaviours into hate crimes isn't going to get people onside, it's going to make then angry and fight back. Worse, by hijacking what should have been a noble ideal and turning it into a tool of totalitarian control has undermined - if not outright destroyed - any chance of real equality being achieved, because "equality" has been perverted to mean "special treatment for women and selected minorities while tearing down those evil white males." This bullshit notion of "privilege" is just duckspeak for justifying discrimination and stereotyping of white males while hypocritically claiming the moral high horse against discrimination and stereotypes.

Now I want to see women be able to better themselves, as much as men. I want to see more women designing bridges, playing football and flying space missions. But for that to happen, why is it necessary to constantly harp on about how pathetic, privileged and perverted men are? So what if a man says something sexually suggestive to a woman? Men are jocularly rude and offensive to each other as well. That's a natural part of masculine culture, and to label it as "bigoted", "misogynistic" and "oppressive" is as evil as labelling feminine culture as "weak", "prissy" and "submissive."

And if you paint someone as a villian and a bastard for long enough, even if they're a saint to start with, eventually they will become a villain and a bastard just to get their money's worth. This is why so many men are abusive towards women today, where in the past they never used to be. They've become that way because society expects them to be that way. So now, acceptance of women in male roles is further off than ever, because the ideal of it has been misused as a weapon of hate against men. And that's the real tragedy in all this.

It is the fact that not only white males themselves, but the women who have seen the men they love demonised and attacked at every turn by these hate-spewing, whining PC crybullies, that got Trump elected.

Sadly, reading those sanctimonious articles in the Guardian (and the MSM in general) shows these crybullies are not learning from their mistake. And the longer they fail to see themselves as the outright bigoted hypocrites they are, this conflict is only going to get worse and worse until it explodes across the West in a burst of uncontrollable violence.

Re: Most of these arrive via the Inbox

Tracing and finding them is only part of the equation. The rest of it is coming up with a suitably deterrent punishment. Like publicly skinning them alive one square centimetre at a time over the course of a week or two.

Re: 'things' that attack hospitals

As somebody else suggested, these maggots do have a use to society; they'd make good organ donors.

Re: What I want to know...

What difference does it make? What if the kid was "full-blooded French" (by which I assume you mean he's a Privileged White Male™) would that change the outcome? The only difference I can see here is that if the kid was Muslim, that would be an excuse for regressive-left virtue-signalling sycophants to play the racism card in his defence - who would say nothing if he turned out to be non-Muslim.

Re: In Other News

"Maybe the word "samsung" means "high quality" in Arabic."

More like "Made of Explodium."

Re: Ban Linux from off the Internet

So what alternative would you suggest? Windows? $DEITY help us.

You ARE aware that the vast majority of machines running the backbone of the internet are running Linux, right? If you ban Linux, you pretty much wipe out the entire internet.

Also, the problem here isn't Linux, it's the shoddy security practices associated with the IoT. If you hard-code username: admin / password: password on a device, then it doesn't matter how watertight or hardened your OS code is, if you've used default login credentials. If you change the username and password (if the device will let you) then its security is as good as any other Linux box.

Re: Internet of Shit

The reason we are up in arms about the IoT is because we've had enough life experience to know that every time something is pushed on the public with the zeal and fervour that the IoT is, two things are true:

1. There's a nefarious purpose behind the apparent usefulness, in the case of IoT the level of surveillance and profileing it will enable; and

2. In order to push the thing on the public, the thing it's replacing will be made obsolete and unavailable in order to deny consumers the choice and force the new thing on everyone. In this case that means that soon, "non-smart" devices will become increasingly difficult, and eventually impossible, to obtain.

It is this lack of choice that will inevitably be imposed on us that we are up in arms about. If we could be sure that manufacturers will indefinitely continue to sell "non-smart" light bulbs, toasters, TVs, fridges and cars, we'd likely still reject the idea but if people wanted to use it that's their lookout. But we all know that won't happen. What will happen is that one day, we'll go to the shop to buy a light bulb and only the "smart" ones will be available - and trying to run it without a connection to the net will simply result in it not working, thus forcing us to adopt the invasive tech, or go back to using candles.

It is this forcing of the technology, the inevitable denial of choice, based on repeated past experience of similar things being foisted on the public, that is why so many people here are so fervently opposed to it.

Re: No.

A subscription model is a cost effective way for me to keep cycling my music as I stop listening to old songs

I don't stop listening to old songs. I have so much music that it would take me months to listen to it all. I tend to have a nostalgia period where I'll listen to 1980s pop music for a week or two, then get bored of it and switch to listing to my old Black Sabbath and Ronnie James Dio stuff; then I'll get into Jean-Michel Jarre, Vangelis and Kitaro; then it's marching bands, then Wagnerian opera.

From this you can deduce I have a very broad taste in music - pretty much everything from Antonio Vivaldi to Paul Oakenfold is on my list, in fact about the only genres I don't like are rap, hip-hop and dubstep.

but just checking that you paid for all of those rather than pirated, because that sounds like a huge investment.

That's a bit of a question. Did I download music from Napster and torrents? Yes - but only music I knew because I'd already had it in some form or another. During my youth, I spent literally thousands on cassettes, LPs and later, CDs because of my passion for music. In addition, my parents, cousins and siblings had their collections too. When MP3s became ubiquitous and I discovered I could set up a playlist in Winamp and leave it going all day rather than having to choose a new CD or tape every half hour or so, I set about ripping many of these old CDs and tapes to MP3.

When Napster came along, I found it was far quicker just to search for the albums I had in my collection and download them; while CDs can be ripped fairly quickly, it takes a lot longer to rip LPs and cassettes and the quality is not always as good. But I tended to download only what I already had somewhere on an LP, tape or CD.

Some would still call that piracy. I don't. I just call it format-shifting. Pay once, play forever, that's what I said.

In some cases I have downloaded torrented music either on someone's recommendation or out of curiosity. But if I like it, I invariably make a point of buying a CD because I want an original in my collection. And if I don't, then it gets deleted. Case in point: Paul Oakenfold. A friend introduced me to his brand of trance/techno by giving me an MP3 of his album Tranceport; I liked it so much that over the next few years I ended up hunting down and buying his entire discography - several hundred dollars worth of sales he (or more accurately his label) wouldn't have made but for the fact I pirated Tranceport in the first place.

Aside from that, my music downloads are either YouTube rips, which I also don't consider to be piracy, since it's available legally for free anyway, or from CC indie artists distributing through MySpace, Free Music Archive and such places.

What boots it that the public won't stand for it when intrusive IoT fridges designed to pack up after 3 years are the only kind you can buy? The free-market argument of capitalism has failed because there is now a cartel of massive suppliers, who collude in establishing control of the marketplace.

So, you need a fridge. And you can choose from Smasung, LG, Hisense, Westinghouse, or Fisher & Paykel. All of who make basically the same fridge with the same limitations and the same IoT spying ability.

What do you do? Your options are to buy one of these smart fridges or give up on refrigerated food - which I can tell you from youthful experience comes down to eating out of cans. You can bitch and moan and say you won't stand for it but you still had to buy one and the company still made their money.

Suppose an upstart startup decides to exploit the market for "non-smart" fridges, assuming there is one: while Reg readers seem to be universally opposed to this whole IoT shit, the great unwashed don't give a fuck. They're already spewing every detail of their lives out on Facebook anyway, so why would they care about IoT privacy? But, suppose this startup decides there is a privacy-conscious market after all and starts making fridges to cater to it. The big manufacturers, as soon as they see their intrusive surveillance-capitalism model threatened, simply contact all the big box stores and tell them that if they stock this startup's non-smart fridges they'll lose their supplier discounts. Bam - said startup now has no way to sell fridges, short of online, which is going to restrict their market since most people still like to browse a big-box store for large whitegoods and major appliances.

So if these bastards want to get into your home, how do you stop them? In an earlier post I mentioned a cottage industry springing up to strip out the smart stuff from these things aftermarket - but I can see that becoming a sketchy underground setup like console modchips, that soon would get shut down by an army of corporate lawyers. When was the last time you saw a modchip provider for the latest consoles? It wouldn't be long before "de-smarting" shops would suffer the same fate.

Re: Just trying to work out

"un-in-a-small-pile-on-an-interesting-plate"

That's a generous assessment, if my experience of such restaurants is anything to go by. I recall the one time I spent $50 at one of these places, and was served 3 evenly-spaced peas, a carefully sculpted quarter of a potato, a teaspoon of spinach and a rump steak that might have been cut from the hindquarters of a fieldmouse, with a perfectly Spirographed drizzle of sauce, precisely centred on a huge, dazzlingly white plate the size of a semitrailer hubcap.

Which necessitated a further $10 trip to the local fish and chippery afterwards for something resembling an actual meal, instead of something you'd expect to see hanging on the wall in an art gallery.

Paysafe cards is one way of doing it

Another laundering technique I've seen used is going to the local casino, buying a stack of ships, having a bit of a tipple on the tables, and then cashing the remaining chips back out and getting a receipt identifying the money as a casino win. You can clean small amounts less than $10k this way.

An even safer method is to bypass the casino and clean it through the poker machines in pubs instead. Nobody looks twice at someone pumping a few grand through the pokies in most pubs around my town.

One guy I knew many years ago ran a pizza shop for several years, and apparently sold a lot more pizzas than were actually going out the door; the majority of his profits were coming from something a little greener than pizzas. He only got caught because an audit showed the number of pizzas sold couldn't be accounted for against the relatively small amounts of ingredients he was buying: I think it worked out something like a tablespoon's worth of dough per 12" pizza!

It was a pity since if you knew the guy well enough, for a small extra fee he was quite happy to add some home-grown ingredients to your pizza that most definitely weren't on the menu, which made his pizzas a lot more enjoyable to eat than your average ones!

"If the cheese hasn't gone green and fury"

But green furry mould-raddled cheese is the tastiest kind. If it's not on the brink of evolving intelligence it's just not worth eating!

Re: Evil Russians doing evil ...

Iceland looks like the best option given the way the world seems to be going,

Re: The applications are infinite!

"E-Ink on my pet's food & water bowls to remind me to refill them!"

Now there's a pointless idea if ever there was one! My two cats already let me know when their food and water bowls need refilling, far more effectively than any app ever could short of equipping mobile phones with protractable claws...

Re: That table actually tells us why Turnbull is right

"Do you think that 2 wind farms that are 100Km apart would switch off within 0.05 of a second of each other because they independently judged the wind speed too strong?"

Your analysis is certainly a possibility.

But there is also this one: I was monitoring the weather on the Himawari-8 satellite feed before the power went down. That storm front was huge: easily two thousand kilometres long, north to south. So it's also feasible that the wind farm shutdowns were directed from a central C&C in advance of the predicted high winds along that entire frontage.

Re: What is 'Smart'?

For me at least "Smart" has become a euphemism for "constantly monitors your behaviour and phones home about it for profiling and monetisation." Perhaps "Connected" or the even more descriptive "Telemetrised" devices might be a more approrpiate term.

Re: Slartibartfast Hovercraft

It does raise the question of how the Star Trek computers were able to figure out when you were talking to them and when you were just talking to other people, since people didn't use the trigger word "Computer!" all the time.

I think the computer needs to be able to use other cues than just a trigger word. One thing that comes to mind is that when most people use their phones, they hold them in front of their chests, below their faces, to see the screen. So the phone's front-facing camera could match the face and eyes of the person to determine that they are looking at the phone, as well as using the phone's positioning sensor to determine that it's being held in a particular position, before responding to whatever the person is saying. These cues could be enough to be a trigger on their own, without the need for a trigger word - in much the same way that when Picard would say, "Tea, Earl Grey, Hot," it was likely the fact that he was standing in front of the replicator facing it, that set it off.

And before Apple or anyone else go trying to patent this technique, I hereby posit this post as proof of prior art.

Re: "If Facebook can control millions of votes [...], is that still democracy?"

"People who get their news through Facebook are less likely to have an interest in politics and are likely to be easily swayed one way or the other."

Says the person who has obviously never used Facebook...!

Once, I used to use it so I could keep in touch with my family, since they all used to use it. The main reason I stopped using it was because of the never-ending stream of political diahorrea everyone kept pouring out on there. I'd a thousand times rather be treated to a constant flow of cats, babies, dinners, and Like-and-OMG spam than the torrent of political garbage, fights and arguments that I got treated to.

My family has always been very loving and close-knit. Facebook was the only thing in existence that raised the possibility of threatening that closeness.

Never. Again.

Re: Civil disobedience?

Civil disobedience? Armed insurrection is starting to look the the best option.

"You're mugging yourself then. ...meritocracy_is_bad_it_leads_to_massive_entrenched_inequality.html"

Ok, let's rock.

If I understand that article correctly, its argument is based on equating establishing equality with the provision of charity. I fail to see how the end result of that is "mugging myself." Not only that, I find this whole premise problematic - to borrow one of your lot's buzzwords - on several fronts.

First of all, equality of opportunity is not equality of outcome. I believe in equality of opportunity; the principle that every one deserves a fair go, and a helping hand on an individual basis if they're struggling, but how they use that to help themselves or not is up to them. On the other hand, equality of outcome is not only unjust in increasing the burden on those who do help themselves, it is patronising and demeaning to the very "minorities" you are claiming to support, because by giving them a "leg up" based on their putative lack of privilege, you are saying they aren't capable of making the grade on their own. It's like setting quotas for women in STEM overriding the required qualifications: doing that is tantamount to stating that women aren't as smart as men, so the entry requirements for them should be lowered so the poor dumb bimboes can get in and make up the numbers. If that in itself isn't sexism and misogyny, what is?

And before you try to call out that last argument as a strawman, consider this: If a specific number of positions have to be set aside in a given field for women and/or blacks, and the entry requirements do remain constant, if the number of female or black applicants is less than the number of places set aside for them, one of three possible things has to happen: 1) those places remain vacant (unlikely because that's a waste of institute resources); 2) those places are filled by whites and/or males (which denies the quota altogether); and 3) women and blacks whose qualifications don't meet the entry requirements are now considered for those places (vis a vis my original argument.)

Second, the article talks about the fact that we help blind people and amputees because they need help, despite their lack of "merit" in seeing or walking. But this is false equivalence. Being blind or crippled is a genuine setback, and organisations exist to provide the assistance these people need to participate in society - organisations I'm more than happy to support, I might add. But being female or black or gay isn't such an impediment; to imply that it is, is to engage in the very sexism and racism you people claim so desperately to want eliminated. If you want people to treat everyone as human beings, you first need to stop telegraphing the arbitrary labels and differences you use to separate everyone into "victim" and "oppressor" groups.

Third, all this PC puff about gender and race privilege and inequality is really a divide-and-conquer distraction implemented by the ruling classes to keep everyone from focusing on the only real cause of privilege: wealth and class. People don't give you favours and preferential treatment because you're white and/or male; they give them to you because you're rich and powerful. A wealthy and powerful black woman like Oprah Winfrey or Whoopi Goldberg packs a damn sight more privilege than the drunken white male derro sitting sacked-out in the gutter. The main reason all this gender/race politics has been accelerated in recent years, probably has much to do with popular uprisings like the Occupy movement coming very close to exposing the massive and ever-increasing wealth gap dividing our society. That's your privilege, right there. Notice how the Occupy movement started out being about the "99% and the 1%", before it became inundated by feminists, gay rights activists, black rights protestors, and the like, which shattered it? Perfect divide and conquer.

So what you people don't realise when you push this gender/race privilege stuff is that you're playing right into the hands of the ruling class, distracting and disunifying the masses from addressing wealth inequality, which affects everyone regardless of gender or race.

Finally, let's get back to why my employing people on merit isn't mugging myself: I'm not running a charity. I support certain charities, yes, but my business isn't one, and as it stands, can't afford to be one. I'm not in the business of virtue-signalling for diversity, I'm in the business of developing web applications, publishing and marketing solutions for small to medium enterprises. Employing Aboriginal genderqueer women with no training or experience doesn't make my business any money; employing human beings, of whatever "kind," capable of maintaining web applications and designing brochures and books does. Then I can use some of that money to help out people who need help.

Mugging myself would be employing a load of deadweight for appearances and quotas over people who can actually do the jobs I need done.

"Year 7? Is that upper-sixth, or some reference to the 'new money' classifications?"

It's been the standard system in Australia since before I was in school back in the 70s, and still is. Here it's R(Reception) and Years 1 - 7 are primary school, 8 - 13 (used to be 12 or "matriculation" in my day) are high school. In my day the primary school years were called "Grades" as in "Grade 1", "Grade 2" etc, whereas high school it was "Year 8" or "1st Year", "Year 9" or "2nd Year", and so on. I think this last distinction has been discontinued these days, however, so it's just "Year X" now.

Larger R-13 schools often subdivide into Junior, Middle and Senior schools, where R-5 is Junior, 6-9 is Middle, and 10-13 is Senior.

Re: Oh Gawd

"El Reg linking to itself 18 years ago. I feel old."

They also keep every comment you ever posted, even rejected ones (although only you and presumably the Reg admins can read those.) It can be quite an eye-opener to click a page near the end of the list and read stuff you posted a decade ago and had long since forgotten. Some of it will bring back fond memories of the good old days.

Just also be prepared that at some point you're going to facepalm and groan, "What the hell was I on when I posted that!?!"

Re: No it isn't

"A man persistently staring in a way that makes a woman (or a man or a child) feel unsafe and targeted"

And how is that decided exactly? What constitutes "persistently staring?" 2 seconds? 5? 10? Looking once? Twice? Ten times? Looking anywhere between chin and feet? Is there a difference between how long, and where, an attractive young guy is allowed to look and a creepy old guy is allowed to look?

When you define crimes based on people's feelings and emotional responses instead of concrete specific acts you create a situation in which anyone could be found to have broken the law simply because someone else didn't like the look of them. That is not, by any stretch, a free society.

Re: Yeah right

we are living longer, healthier lives, in more comfort, than at any time in history.

Yes, we are. But a bitter price was paid for our comfort by our forebears; chronologically before that was this period known as the Industrial Revolution. You might want to look into what life was like for the majority of people, and the few powerful magnates who owned all the factories they were forced to work in, during that time.

Read The People Of The Abyss by Jack London, a non-fictional first-hand account of the horrors endured by the working classes in the Victorian / Edwardian UK, for example. The Iron Heel, also by Jack London, and Hard Times by Charles Dickens, are fictional, but are telling illustrations of the entitled sanctimonious indifference of the ruling elite to the plight of the slaves who made their luxurious lifestyles possible.

The lesson of history here is that world-changing, civilisation-restructuring technologies inevitably end up funnelling absolute power into the hands of those who have gained control of the technology, and humans being what they are, those people invariably use that power to cement their absolute and unyielding control of the lives of everyone else in their servitude. Only wars, rebellions and civil uprisings alter this state of affairs.

Therefore it is certainly possible that a new Golden Age will dawn for humanity. Most likely some time in the next century. In the meantime, the Information Revolution is looking more and more likely to result in the 21st century being to us, what the Industrial Revolution was to the cottage-industry villages and farms of the post-Rennaisance era. For our great-great-grandchildren, maybe life will be wonderful. For us, however, the sun has set and the long night is only just getting started. And our children, and their children, and their children, are likely to live their entire lives in that horror before the new day dawns, if history is any teacher.

So they will drag me into that analogous "factory" in the form of ubiquitous cloud AI, kicking and screaming with my head bashed in. And if that means I get called a Luddite for valuing my freedom and my wish not to be a slave to greedy and manipulative puppetmasters, so be it.