Posts by Steven Roper

Cost of living increase benign?

Bollocks. Electricity has gone through the roof over here - South Australia now has the most expensive electricity on the PLANET. Not only that, but housing prices have also exploded, to the point where a normal suburban home will set you back around half a million dollars. Rents have increased accordingly. Most working class people are now spending more than the recommended third of their income on housing because of the insane property prices in this country. and these increased costs have had a flow-on effect to everything else.

Basic foodstuffs have remained relatively stable, as have consumer electronics, although how I don't know, considering petrol, energy, housing and everything else have gone nuts over here.

For me, the past WAS a happier time

I do remember the past as a "happier time", because although the computers have improved far beyond my expectations of those days, people have not. I recall back in those days you could speak your mind without having to worry about "offending" someone, and people were nowhere near as precious as they are now. In an age when political correctness has replaced common sense, and fear for safety has replaced freedom, how can anyone who remembers the 70s and 80s not mourn for what we've lost?

Judging by the downvote distribution...

it sure is fanboi in here...

Erm..

"skywatcher will survey – and publish – the entire visible sky on a weekly basis"

No it won't. Not unless it can see through thousands of miles of solid and molten rock. As I recall, Chile is in the southern hemisphere, so siting it there means that it won't be taking any pictures of the Ursa Minor / Draco / Ursa Major part of the sky any time soon...

And my top 5 old faves (C64) were

1. Mercenary - Escape From Targ (I spent weeks playing that, wandering around the city looking for keys and unattended vehicles to steal, and it was the first game I ever actually completed without help or walkthroughs)

2. SubLogic Flight Simulator II (After I bought it, I found it was disk-only, so I want straight out and laid-by a 1541 so I could play it. I actually kept a logbook and racked up more than 1000 hours flight time on the thing!)

3. Raid Over Moscow (Along with Beach Head I and II, Bruce Carver's games had just that right level of precision-related frustration to keep me going on them for ages)

4. Bugaboo The Flea (This had that infuriating control system whereby the longer you held the space bar the more power was built up allowing the flea to jump higher and further. It drove me mad trying to line up on the various platforms, but somehow the ambience and atmosphere of the game just caught me)

5. Fight Night. (Unique among fighting games in that you could custom-create your own boxer by setting attack and defence strength to head and body and so on. My brother and I spent weeks experimenting until we created the perfect boxer, who we called "Killer" and defeated every other boxer we put against him - nor could we beat him ourselves!)

State police aren't interested in copyright

since it's outside their jurisdiction.

Case in point: A few years ago the police attended the house of a friend of mine concerning a runaway child, and saw my friend torrenting the latest Simpsons episode. My friend thought he was busted for sure, but the cop actually asked him how to set up bittorrent so he could get the latest show for his kids!

My friend and the cop ended up having a friendly half-hour conversation on how to set up bittorrent and the best sites to go to to download TV shows, music, and other copyrighted content.

So much for copyright law in this country, when even the police aren't bothered about it (the Federal cops, though, are another matter!)

Normally

I absolutely hate patent trolls who sit on the sidelines and say nothing until someone successfully markets a product, and then they grab for a piece.

But in this case, since it's Apple he's attacking, I wish him every success and I hope he bites them in the arse for billions. If he were able to bankrupt the bastards that would be joyous, but that's probably hoping for too much.

So...

given all the hoo-ha recently about supposedly FTL neutrinos and the LHC not being FTL after all, and now this, possibly indicating that information can possibly be transmitted FTL anyway - was Einstein right or not? Make up your bloody minds, people!

And the USTR

can FUCK RIGHT OFF out of our two countries. The very things it is complaining about are the few things our governments are actually doing right! Shows just how the "land of the free" is full of it. The whole USA government can take it's corporate dictatorship shite and piss off, thank you very much.

$34m to build a robot

capable of all that, with today's tech? You might get a dishwashing routine added to your RealDoll for that price!

Add another zero to that figure and we'll talk.

I have a saying that is most apropos here, Wozniak

"The vilest evil is that which is convinced of its own virtue."

All this reminds me of something...

Bo Xilai now unperson all refs doubleplusungood correct immediately upsub antefiling.

I notice

some people on here are blaming the "conservative" right for this law. I personally would put this one at the feet of the politically-correct "liberal" left, since they're the ones that preach "tolerance" and "acceptance" while being more intolerant and unaccepting of those whose opinions differ from the official PC worldview, than any historical fascists ever were.

Consider how dangerous (even potentially career-destroying) it has become to publicly say anything that is politically incorrect these days. The irony is that while so many people profess to despise political correctness, large numbers of those same people will blow their fuses in fury and demand resignations the moment somebody says something that is actually un-PC.

Not "annoy or offend"? Only PC proponents - and that's the lefties - would demand legislation banning "offending" people.

Oh no...

I've seen this before - with Legend of the Seeker. I thought LotS was a brilliant series, with loads of plot twists and a real examination of trust and treachery, but then, come the second season, loads of people started rubbishing it, for no good reason, to the point where it got canned on a cliffhanger.

What I'm seeing in this thread is the start of the same thing again. People whose interpretational abilities probably can't encompass anything beyond Idol and Big Brother start weighing in and rubbishing a brilliant show. So now it'll probably be canned at the end of Season 2, just like LotS was, just because the millions of Idol-watching retards have to open their whining mouths.

Downvote me all you want; I don't care. I love GoT and would love to see it last a few more seasons, but I have a feeling the hordes of armchair critics will put paid to it before it has a chance to go anywhere.

"Patently Apple"

There's an entire fucking magazine devoted to Apple's patent portfolio?

I had harboured some hope of humanity, but this tears it. I'm off to tell the lizard overlords that this planet needs to be destroyed. Now. For the good of the Universe.

My first thought on reading that article

was that the climate change believers would be having apoplexies and screaming about Andrew being a biased denier and so forth. Andrew, you're a brave man.

Getting the popcorn now, ready to watch the faithful start frothing at the mouth and speaking in tongues...