Posts by Steven Roper

Re: Any rope is the problem

Well, the next step up from that is what Star Trek euphemistically referred to as "turbolifts".

Once you replace the old Otis rope-and-counterweight system with a rail-based one (even if it's only a rack-and-pinion type rail drive rather than a maglev) it becomes possible to construct points and sidings by which lifts can be shunted and routed around each other. This would save on shaft space by allowing multiple lifts to occupy the same track while still having the possibility of passing each other by swapping rails at the points as needed.

Of course the downside of any rail-driven lift system is power consumption, because you now have to have an engine on the lift car itself driving the car against gravity. This is why the rope-and-counterweight system was invented in the first place - the counterweight means that the only force that has to be overcome is the inertia of the lift car, counterweight and rope - only the difference between the car and counterweight has to be hauled against gravity. (Note that Earth's gravity counts for quite a lot of power; it's the equivalent of going from 0 - 100 km/h in 2.8 seconds, continuously.)

With modern technology, however, the power consumption increase inherent in using a rack-and-pinion driven lift could be offset by using the same regenerative braking system used in electric cars. A lift could generate energy on the way down, by using its gravitational downward motion to charge a battery via its motor-generators. This energy can then be re-used for the upward trip; the entropic loss can easily be made up via a live rail and hot shoe system delivering extra power to the lift. I'd be interested to see what the difference in power use for such a system would be compared to the traditional rope-and-counterweight system. Any engineers care to comment?

With a system like this, there'd be no theoretical limit to the height of the shaft either, other than whatever structural compression limits might obtain on the materials used to construct the shaft and the building itself.

Re: Ya think?

How about 20 years for sanctimonious Dudley Do-rights who sit on their moral high horses pronouncing judgements from on high against anyone who dares to engage in independent thought, or express any kind of dissent against the established order?

Re: Techies

Funny you mention that about the electricians and cablers and so forth.

Last time I went to the cinema, as we were walking from the car park to the cinema, I suddenly noticed that the huge building it was housed in was built out of bricks. Not pre-stressed rendered concrete slabs or sheets of galvabond that many large buildings are constructed of these days, but actual bricks. Hundreds of thousands of them.

And I thought, some brickie had to lay all those. Each brick was individually placed and the mortar trowelled over it ready for the next one. I found myself wondering about the men who had put that wall together, how long it must have taken them, and the sense of achievement they must have felt when it was finally completed and they all stood back and looked it over and said, "bloody good job of work, that!" And I wondered how many of the thousands of people who daily walked past that massive edifice of human endeavour had given it a moment's thought.

So here's a beer for all the tradies and techies who do the grunt-work of making civilisation happen all around us, and who we never notice. Bloody good job of work lads!

Re: How to end up on a watch list:

Haha, I salt my websites and emails with a similar list, except that my personal list of spook-catching keywords currently consists of:

"ANFO, avoid detection, blast, bomb, brisance, contact cell, destroy, Detcord, detonation velocity, diesel, disaster, explode, FBI, Federal Reserve Bank, fertilizer, fuel, hexamine, infiltrate, Interpol, kill, Nitropril, Obama, police, RDX, truck, unmarked, Wall Street, White House"

I do change some of the words from time to time, just to keep the spook-bots hopping. Chucking in a few explosive brand names like "Nitropril" and "Detcord" seems to elicit more interest than simply having loaded keywords like "bomb" and "explode", judging by the rate at which various crawlers return to my sites as I update the keyword lists.

I'm still waiting for my 5 AM door-kicking, however!

Re: As I was saying

My thoughts exactly.

Luckily I've managed to keep my company completely out of the cloud for now and the foreseeable future, for exactly this kind of reason. I'm hoping this debacle will seriously damage cloud adoption amongst other SMEs as well, because we all need to vote with our feet on all this bullshit taking control of our software and data away from us.

@ The_Regulator

Mass-media-brainwashed fuckwits like you are why we have no freedoms left.

It would be poetic justice to see you falsely accused of paedophilia yourself sometime soon, because bastards like you more than anyone else deserve to take your own medicine.

Re: Welp

Those old 8-bit games are a fuck sight more fun to play than the 3D eye-candy shite that passes for video games these days anyway!

Case in point: I was playing Bubble Bobble on an Amiga emulator with my mate a few weeks ago, and I'd forgotten how much fun it was. There's something "delicious" about all those 16-colour cartoon candies that modern realistic games can't match. The gameplay is focused on fun rather than immersion, and I didn't realise how much I'd missed that kind of gameplay until we sat down and whiled away a few evenings with it!

Re: Not very clever

Or in other words, China's government has yet to learn what is meant by the term "Streisand Effect"!

Re: Like - what is it with the Aussey market?

No we don't, because Apple have sued all the other choices off the shelves.

Re: There is potentially a difference.

"cos sooner or later someone will pick up a stone and off we all go again."

And as soon as someone so much as picks up a stone on a field of conflict you charge them with war crimes. Simples!

So by that argument, if I don't want to steer my car via a sidewise slider or reach down the back of the driver's seat to change gear, I'm a luddite? I have some news for you sunshine... Newer is not always Better.

Re: nothing like old fashioned racism

I downvoted you because of your cry of racism - a cry used all too often to silence debate on what has become a serious issue.

First off, you should know that while Australia is big, it's also inhospitable. That vast tract of land you see spanning half the southern hemisphere is fucking desert. We might be the size of the continental US, but we have only a tenth of the fresh water, so we can support only a tenth of the population. Consequently, our government has a responsibility to ensure that population growth doesn't get out of hand. And our current growth is being maintained by immigration as it is.

The problem with "boat people" is that they arrive here with no credentials, no passports or any means of identification. They are not vaccinated, and may be carrying a host of diseases which we are very lucky not to have in Australia. We have no malaria, no rabies, no polio, no yellow fever, all of which these illegal arrivals have been found carrying. We also have a vast and diverse range of unique animal and plant species, found nowhere else in the world, which are extremely vulnerable to imported diseases and invasive species that are carried in on the boats. Our strict quarantine and vaccination laws are in place for a very good reason.

Without identification, how do we know they aren't criminals or terrorists fleeing justice, or Islamist nutjobs like the bastards that murder people in broad daylight on your city streets? We need to be able to check their backgrounds, establish identity, and prevent such violent thugs from entering our country and ruining the very way of life that everyone wants to come here for. Of course not all boat people are terrorists or disease carriers, but we need to be able to confirm this for each one. Once we can confirm it, we let them in, no problem.

It takes time, effort and money to complete background checks on these refugees, to make sure that they can support themselves in Australia, and to make sure they are vaccinated and not carrying any disease. But they're flooding in faster than we can complete these processes, so what are we to supposed to do? Just let them all in willy-nilly and hope the bad ones don't start murdering people in the streets and infecting our kids with malaria and polio? The only thing we can do is keep them somewhere while we sort them out and get them through as best we can.

I'm sorry if these facts offend your delicate liberal sensitivities, but we have a fucking right to protect ourselves, our kids, our wildlife and our way of life from murdering fanatical thugs, deadly tropical diseases and invasive feral species.

Re: Anonymous vs Human Search Engine

...FINISH HIM!

Re: Marketing

Actually the name 'Better Place' suggested to me something like those dollar-dazzler, spend-a-penny $1 shitshops punting cheap-crap Chinese plastic household gewgaws and shonky tools that fall apart the moment you take them out of the packaging. One only ever buys this junk from these places once and swears never again. Which is not an image that would have encouraged me to buy a car from them!

Re: peeves

"5) a pretty woman who regularly shows up to the door and requests IT equipment (mice, keyboards, etc) and who knows that she can get away with it"

That's actually my number one peeve. So I operate on the principle that, since merely looking at a woman the wrong way constitutes "sexual harassment", then so does attempting to use femininity to elicit special favours.

As a result, a "pretty woman" (i.e. flirty manner, provocatively dressed etc) is less likely to get anything out of me than one who presents and conducts herself in a professional manner.

And bite the pillow

'cause I'm goin' in dry!

Re: Booze!

This reminded me of my favourite Churchill quote, attributed to him in a conversation with Lady Astor, who had accused him of being drunk:

"Madam, I am indeed drunk. And you are ugly. But in the morning, I will be sober."

Re: "Tipsters exposed after South Africa's national police force hacked"

Agreed 100%.

As far as I'm concerned, if any of the people named in these files comes to any harm, the script kiddies (I refuse to grace these fuckwits with the term "hacker") responsible should be charged as accessories after the fact. So if any of the named people are killed, then these little bastards should go down as accessories to murder, in addition to any penalties imposed for computer misuse.

Re: Wait, something's missing here...

Eadon isn't here precisely because this topic is about Windows 8. He has nothing to gain by posting here, because his modus operandi as a troll isn't to rant about Windows 8, it's to derail forum threads that have nothing to do with Windows 8 with utterly irrelevant rants about Windows 8.

His objective is to get everyone posting about what a wanker he is and how sick they are of his irrelevant posts and thus obliterate the topic of discussion with anti-Eadon flaming. That's what trolling is all about, and that's exactly what he is. If he posted here, his posts would simply be lost in the general anti-Windows 8 noise, so his trolling here would be a waste of time.

Re: the rustling of small leaves.

If you people are going to honour Eadon with a Reg unit, may I suggest using the Eadon as a measure of irrelevancy rather than sound volume. After all, his posts are a lot more infamous for being irrelevant to the thread than being actually noisy...!

Re: Is May 21st the new April 1st?

"Twisted viral marketing" is probably the right one here.

Kudos to you for putting the concept so simply BTW; it beats my effort to explain the principle via references to Jungian perversion and enantiodromia in my post higher up this forum!

Re: Maybe

"It will allow you to stream high quality, original Hollywood movies, for a reasonable price, available anywhere in the world at the same time."

No, it will come with a Sirius Cybernetics Corporation GPP that will explain, in appropriately dulcet tones, that while it would normally be delighted to provide such a service for you, it regretfully advises that copyright law prevents it from providing said service in your country, apologises for the inconvenience, and provides you with a substitute that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike the Hollywood movie you were looking for.

Re: The Rouge Republic of California

"Some days I have to wonder who is more repressed: the Taliban or Americans."

Oh, that's easy. Americans of course.

Under Americans, both women and men are repressed: women by the patriarchy, men by feminism.

Under the Taliban, only women are repressed.