Posts by Steven Roper 1832 publicly visible posts • joined 10 May 2011
( Tried to reply directly to your comment but for some reason got a "Gone" http error when I tried)
Absolutely agree with you about these devices pandering to Apple. It's for that reson, as I read the reviews, that I decided the only unit I'd be interested in out of the lot of them would be the Logitech - simply because it did NOT have an Apple suck-up dock.
Just as I refuse to allow Apple products in my house, I similarly refuse to allow products that accommodate them.
I recall reading his book "Islands in the sky", in which a boy wins an all-expenses paid trip the "Inner Station" - an equivalent of the ISS - and during his stay, meets a film crew involved in making the first movie shot in space. So for the third time in my life I live to see something mentioned in a ACC sci-fi novel! (the first two being the years 2001 and 2010.)
But my preferred method would be to publicly hang them *and* their immediate families, if it can be shown that the family members were aware of the scam and were benefiting from it. When these scamming scum realise that it's not only themselves but their loved ones as well that will swing from the gibbet for their crimes, they'll have a strong enough disincentive not to do it!
Ch-Click...HOCK! HOOOOORRRRAAAAAAYYYYY!!!
and they'll hang themselves.
The more Apple do this, the more they'll damage their image and drive people away from their products. I've noticed lately that a lot of fanbois are going quiet because owning Apple products is rapidly becoming a synonym for uncool. More and more people are waking up to the fact that Apple are fucking scumbags and so are those who support them.
Samsung and the others most likely aren't wasting money on suing Apple because the Cupertino Cockheads are digging their own grave for free.
worship and adulate "intellectual property" so much, I expect you to, for the next 120 years:
1. Pay the plumber who installed your toilet every time you use it;
2. Pay the electrician who installed the light switches in you home every time you turn them on;
3. Pay the manufacturer of your car every time you drive it;
4. Pay the architect of your house every time you cross the front door.
I could go on, but I think your 2-cell brain should get the picture. FOADIAF.
Boasting about how secure an OS is, is really baiting the bull. I can see every hacker, cracker and two-bit script kiddie doing their utmost to compromise this "hardened" Android simply for the challenge of putting one up the NSA. And since what man can make, man can break, I give it a matter of weeks before someone demonstrates an exploit that blows it wide open!
The time under discussion here is UTC (or GMT) rather than local time. Considering that where I live (Australia), the sun generally rises somewhere between 7:30 PM and 9:00 PM UTC, for the majority of the planet UTC doesn't correspond to sunrise/sunset anyway.
So having UTC refer to a fixed number of seconds rather than the wobbly rock we're sitting on does make sense. Although calculating local time might become a bit more fiddly than just adding or subtracting X hours from UTC, the difference would be small enough for the next few thousand years that for most practical purposes it would be insignificant.
On Wednesday, my 3 personal sites will also be displaying only an anti-SOPA message. I've also convinced my company management to turn our main website black and place an anti-SOPA banner across the top of the page for 24 hours (the CEO wouldn't allow us to disable the site completely, but this at least is the next best thing!)
in which direction? Velocity is a vector quantity consisting of speed and direction. So, did the craft speed up by 12mph (delta-v of 12 mph at 0, 0 degrees [relative to the initial direction of travel and the plane of the ecliptic]), slow down by 12 mph (delta-v of 12 mph at 180, 0 degrees), or actually change course (delta-v of 12 mph at e.g. 90, 0 degrees)?
Or did the craft merely change *speed* by 12 mph?
not because of any concern over privacy issues, but simply because Google have a a shitty track record of starting these things and then shutting them down a year or so later. Like Wave, Buzz and a raft of other "services", Google?+ will end up in the bin sooner or later. So why should I go to all the hassle of setting up all my info on Google+ only to lose it all again by this time next year? No thanks.
May I suggest, if you're going to boycott a company, to do it properly. Like you, I also have a never-buy-Sony policy. But mine isn't subject to compromise - I don't care if Sony invent an immortality machine or start giving away free Ferraris with every purchase - I will not buy their products, period.
I believe Sony (like Apple, but that's a discussion for another time) to be an unconscionable company whose greed, lust for control, and unethical behaviour has set a number of dangerous precedents against basic civil liberties and human rights, and I feel that strongly enough to uphold my personal boycott against them, no matter how "good" their products might be, now or in the future.
then let me point you to Auran's excellent Trainz Railroad Simulator, which not only provides realistic train simulation but lets you design your own layouts, locomotives and rolling stock, as well as putting together your own trains. I've been using it for years, and it's without doubt the best train sim I've ever had, a lot better than Microsoft's offering IMO.
http://www.auran.com
was initially proposed by one Trofim Lysenko during the reign of Stalin, if I remember my Soviet history correctly. His work was largely discredited by Western biologists, although anybody who dared to question Lysenko's ideas in the USSR generally earned themselves a one-way ticket to the gulag.
Are we to believe this charlatan was actually right after all?
"I have had digital property stolen... I felt the impact financially."
No you didn't. That's absolute bullshit. Because anyone who copied your shit wouldn't have paid for it anyway, so you didn't lose any sales worth mentioning. You've bought into the old fallacy of one download being equivalent to one lost sale, which has been shown time and again to be clearly false.
Because if it was true, the record companies in the last five years would have made many times over the total amount of money that actually exists on the planet, by their own admission. That fact alone should clarify the extent to which this kind of thinking is fallacious.
You had me agreeing with you, right up until you used the word "racist." That word has been so overused by the PC lobby to squelch any and all cultural debate and enforcing their worldview that, like "think of the children" and "protect against terrorists", it has become a mockery of its original meaning, a symbol of oppression and reduction of freedom.
The moment you labelled LarsG a racist, you invalidated your argument because I'd wager big money that race was the last thing on his mind when he came up with his solution. Granted, it's a bit extreme, but then he's probably concerned about a potentially hostile and oppressive communist nation having the power to destroy our livelihoods. The fact that a large proportion of China's residents also have slanted eyes and yellow skin most likely never even entered LarsG's thoughts, nor does it have any relevance to the threat China represents.
I'd hazard a guess that's why you currently have 4 downvotes for an otherwise sensible post.
iiNet buying out Internode is bad enough. But the mere possibility of TGP buying iiNet thereafter is a horror! If TGP end up owning Internode I might even have to consider >retch< BigPond, because there's no way I'm ever becoming a customer of those rip-off sharks! >:(
TGP is to the Internet what Vodafone is to phone comms in this country.
Having been with Internode since 2003 they've been flawless. I sincerely hope this doesn't mark the end of the top service, reliability and line speed I've become used to. Oh well, all good things must come to an end, I guess.
You've got that the wrong way round mate. It's goats that rip the grass out by the roots, whereas sheep only crop the grass. I know because every couple of years or so we go out feral goat shooting up at my mate's farm because the bastards destroy the sheep paddocks, and it sure as hell ain't the sheep that do the damage. In fact even the roos do more damage than the sheep!
At the Gorge Wildlife Park near Adelaide, there's an even more vivid example: a series of small paddocks or large enclosures, each containing a few specimens of one type of animal. The one with the goats has been eroded down to more than a foot below ground level across *every square inch* of the enclosure. No other animal does this so destructively.
If "unplugging that geezers car so it ain't charged up in the morning" becomes a local sport then you might want to introduce the players thereof to the equally entertaining sport known as, "electrocuting the chavvy little bastards who mess with your e-car's power connector." I'm sure 80 amps of 3-phase will give them a very good workout besides charging your car! ;)
Think outside the box, man.
There are a number of ways you can implement overhead catenary on main roads for cars. Remember that since s/he mentioned that cars would still have a battery, the car wouldn't have to have its pantograph in contact with the catenary all the time. It wouldn't be too much to develop a system that automatically lowers and raises the pantograph when you change lanes or overtake, for instance.
I like the idea, it fits with my own vision of having induction coils built into all major freeways, to charge electric cars as they drive over them. It's exactly this kind of out-of-the-box thinking that has created most of the inventions we take for granted today.
Went to that site myself, and it listed my IP address, called me a pirate - and then presented me with a list of movies and ebooks I'd never even heard of, let alone downloaded. It didn't get even ONE thing right (that is, it didn't name one thing I *had* actually downloaded.) Not only that, but it got my physical location wrong on the order of about a thousand kilometres, and in a different state.
So I'd question the veracity of their statements about the RIAA and Universal et al downloading stuff illegally, too.
Nowhere does it say "death threats". It says he "predicted her violent death" - which any psychic could do if a client pissed them off. If I say "next year you will die in a car crash", it's a horrible thing to say to but DOES NOT constitute a death threat. A death threat would be "I'm going to ram my car into you and kill you," which would - and should - be actionable.
And fortunately, this sensible judge clearly understands the difference.
about adverts here in Oz is the way the stations disperse them through the show.
When a show starts, you usually get the first 15-20 minutes with no ads. That's just to rope you in and get you hooked watching the show. Then they start bombing you with ads - after the first ad break, you get maybe 7-8 minutes of show, then another 5 minutes of ads. The ads get more and more frequent towards the end - 5 minutes of show, 5 minutes of ads, 2 minutes of show, 5 minutes of ads - until at the very end, the fuckers cut the last 30 seconds of the show to hit you with one last bout of ads, then finally let you see that last 30 seconds and the end credits. That's right, 5 MINUTES of ads before the last THIRTY FUCKING SECONDS of the show!
Note that Australia many years ago "deregulated" TV advertising, that's why you get pretty much 20 minutes of ads per hour.
Add to that the fact that Australia has a TV censorship regime that would make China's most conservative hardliners look like porn industry freedom fighters compared, not to mention that our TV stations usually run 2 seasons behind the rest of the world, and one can see why I (and a lot of other Aussies!) watch all my shows on the Bittorrent channel!
That's because you and everyone else are such unique, precious snowflakes, right? I'm 45 and I use the word "sheeple" regularly - even in reference to myself and my friends when the occasion warrants it - because it is a very apt portmanteau when dealing with the vast majority of the human race. We do indeed behave like sheep more often than not!
in the Climate Change Religion or you will be arrested and burned at the stake for heresy.
For me, this means that climate change has ceased to be science and is now nothing more than a religious/political agenda and those who support it are no better than the Spanish Inquisition. Way to win support for the cause, idiots. I might have have entertained the possibility of anthropogenic climate change before, but this simply makes me oppose it now for no other reason than it's being forced on us.
ANTHROPOGENIC CLIMATE CHANGE IS A LIE.
This is the real problem, not the interface. I too used to be a fairly prolific contributor to Wikipedia, although my contributions consisted primarily of correcting spelling and grammatical errors. I'm not talking about "correcting" American spelling, either; if an article was written with American spelling then I actually followed that convention throughout that article, to ensure consistency.
However, the wiki seems full of stuck-up little 15-year-old dipshits who go around reverting people's contributions for the hell of it. One correction I made - where "atmosphere" was spelled "atmoshpere" in the article, was reverted within 30 seconds of me correcting it, and when I corrected it again and discussed it on the talk page, I copped a torrent of abuse of being a grammar nazi.
So I gave up bothering. Wikipedia need to evict these pathetic, arrogant little shits if they want to retain serious and capable editors.
or drilled it out or something similar, right?
Here in Australia at least (and probably in the UK if it hasn't already) the banks and credit card companies have already gotten wise to this move.
My card has one of those damnable NFC chips on it, because I don't have the choice - it's either that or cash, which, thanks to deregulation, the banks now charge everyone $2 every time we use an ATM, specifically to discourage people from withdrawing cash. So you can either fork out $2 every time you visit a hole in the wall, which very quickly adds up if you're only pulling out a small amount each time, or you can withdraw a huge amount of cash to save repeated $2 fees, and risk being robbed. The system really is geared to push you to use your card all the time.
So I tried wrecking the chip on my card, but then I found that if the store you're buying from has NFC ability on their EFTPOS machines, THE FUCKING THINGS WON'T ACCEPT THE CARD FROM A MAGNETIC SWIPE.
That's right, if your card is "flagged" as an NFC capable card, the machine tells you to use the NFC device instead of swiping the magnetic strip and *refuses the transaction* otherwise. Only if the store doesn't have an NFC reader will it accept the magnetic strip swipe. And those stores are getting to be few and far between, as local businesses "upgrade" their systems.
Which means that destroying the NFC chip now renders your card unusable in a majority of locations.
It's just one more example of how our corporate overlords FORCE the uptake of these new technologies, by simply removing any other choice from the system. Who needs guns to people's heads when you can simply lock them out in the cold if they refuse to comply?
I had to wait two weeks while I waited for the new card I requested from my bank to arrive, to replace the one I 'accidentally' damaged the chip on.
The next item I purchased was a lead-lined wallet.
"Free" as in "you don't have to pay any money but we get to eavesdrop on all your phone calls, monitor your browsing history, record your music and video preferences, copy down all your keystrokes and generally have complete control over the device you're using, including the ability to delete and modify files on it and secretly install whatever apps we feel like sticking on there."
No thanks. I've had the 21st century's definition of "free" up to my fucking eyeballs. If it's at all possible in this invasive new world any more, I'd still rather pay money and know that my device is MINE, thank you very much.
or at least within 200 km of Adelaide, as there was a fucking huge belt of cloud covering the entire state for the duration of the eclipse. No rain, just a sheet of stratus heavy enough to block the moon out. My friend and I drove all over the Adelaide Hills and Murray Basin with nary a glimpse of the moon to be had.
But the next day was clear and cloudless - how's that for weather pissing in your face?
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