Posts by Steven Roper 1832 publicly visible posts • joined 10 May 2011
the scientists, both those who support AGW and those who don't, are actually making some effort to discover the facts and provide proof for their assertions. You, on the other hand, simply threw in the towel and gave up trying to understand how the world works the day you started explaining things as "works of God".
they call this "voluntary" filtering. Voluntary for the ISP that is. NOT voluntary for the customer if the ISP goes ahead with it. So this is the backdoor method by which they impose Conjob's filter on everyone. It's purely voluntary - if you don't like it, you can go to another ISP.
Now watch what happens to ISPs who refuse to implement this "voluntary" filter. Such as Internode - my own ISP - who have stated that they will not be filtering their customers' internet. But for how long? How long before government officials and the do-gooder nannies start saying things like "Internode - the child pornographer's ISP of choice" and "What's the matter Internode? Are you guys really willing to let your customer access that filth?" and so on until they cave in from all the bad publicity.
"Voluntary" my fucking arse.
It contains zero fat (the meat is all muscle with no white stuff in it), is tender when fried or grilled, and has a rich, savoury taste to it that beats beef hands down. The main problem with it is that, having zero fat, it can dry out very quickly in cooking, so you either need to stew it or add oil when cooking it.
Here in Australia it's also the cheapest meat, on account of the limited number of people prepared to eat it (despite popular perception, most Australians are just as squeamish about eating meat other than chicken/turkey/mutton/beef/pork/fish as any Western country!). If you can get it, try it.
is a really bad idea. Most ISPs have their customers on dynamic IPs that can change every hour or so. Added to that, a lot of people come through anonymising proxies or VPNs (especially in this day and age of web blocking and censorship) which can be completely misleading as to their location and identity.
I myself use a lesser-known but blisteringly fast VPN service with tunnels to several countries to get around things like Hulu and BBC geolocation, or to confuse location-tracking websites when I don't want them to know where I'm from. I know several people who now subscribe to VPNs in the face of the Telstra/Optus voluntary censorship coming up in Australia. This market is only going to grow in future, and it means for web developers that IP addresses are no more an effective means of tracking state than the user-agent string.
Ultimately there are two ways of keeping state around a website: cookies and session-ids. Cookies have the disadvantage of being easily blocked by the visitor (and of now being covered by this law), but they also have the advantages that they automatically maintain state once set without any further action needed from the web designer, and that they maintain state when the visitor leaves the site.
Session-ids OTOH are embedded in the url (or postdata for form submissions) and have the advantage of not being easily blocked by the user or being covered by laws, but have the disadvantages of losing state if the visitor leaves the site, and that every intra-site link on every page must carry the session-id.
Either way is a much better way of maintaining state than an IP address.
is that Amazon can reach into it and delete content you've paid for without your knowledge or consent. Which to my way of thinking is theft, but nothing was ever really done about it. Remember the 1984 fiasco a few years ago? I haven't forgotten, and I will still never buy a Kindle because of it.
Ugh. I would not plug any item I found in a car park into my computer any more than I would eat a stepped-on pie or sandwich I saw lying on the pavement. Yuck!
Unsolicited gifts are also a point of suspicion, and have been to me since the 70s. Despite there being laws against it, I occasionally got "gifts" sent in that were subsequently invoiced for, or was supposed to retain only if I took out a subscription or something. While the law technically allowed me to keep whatever was sent, the trouble the senders usually caused over it made it not worth keeping. So from that, I have a healthy skepticism concerning unsolicited deliveries. Seems like there's another reason to keep that going now.
for illegally looking up a *celebrity's* record, you can just imagine what the (non-)consequences would be for cops looking up yours or mine.
This is where the Big Brother state really comes into its own. If the Party enforcers decide they don't like you, they can ruin your life and there's sod-all you can do about it. The problem is that the sort of people who join the police are the same people who get drunk on power over others. Shit floats and all that.
If you enjoy the Glenfiddich may I recommend you try the Ardbeg, Talisker and Caol Ila? They're all huge single malts with a real peaty kick to them. My usual favourite is the Caol Ila for the punch it packs, but if I'm in the mood for a smoother ride I go for the Talisker.
is that Apple only distributes iTunes music in their proprietary .aac format which, while not necessarily DRM-locked as you say, can only be played on Apple devices unless you can find a converter program to convert them to mp3s. So no, technically it's not DRM by the strictest definition of the term, but it may as well be.
Just a heads up in case you aren't aware of this kind of Apple double-talk.
with Windows Phone 7 and Windows 8, bringing them into line with Amazon, Google, Apple and every other fucking OS/device manufacturer out there who think they've now got the right to reach into my devices and mess with my apps and data.
TBH I'm in two minds about this one. While I applaud the FBI's efforts to take down a botnet and I agree that such measures are necessary to combat the scourge or computer crime, I have to ask at the same time - who says what's malware?
Consider this: Granted they currently have to ask permission, but for how long once the door is open? The FBI removing a virus from my machine is one thing. The FBI removing my torrent clients, DRM-removal software or No-CD cracks, just because the music/movie/games industries don't like them is something else. And while that might not have happened yet, opening the legal door to allowing the FBI or other organisations remote access to people's computers to remove malware means it's only a matter of time.
Google will soon delete this application from the Market, as well as retroactively removing it from the phones of everyone who installed it. Which is why I don't like this trend towards remote deletion and interference these companies have accorded themselves on just about every new OS.
Do I get a refund if Google delete from my phone an app that I paid for? I bet I don't. Which is theft as far as I'm concerned.
the salaries for these high-ranking jobs slashed to about that of a toilet cleaner. That way, the only people who will go for the job are those who seriously want to make a difference and actually do the job, instead of just those who are solely motivated by money. If you pay peanuts you may get monkeys, but if you pay gold you get fat greedy pigs.
If you want to get the fat shits out of government, pay them a maximum of 25,000 quid a year. Then we'd see some real change in how the country is run.
cloud storage will only ever be secondary. No sane person will entrust their data to a system where some cloud company has control over your access to it - not to mention what they could do to it without your knowledge. Any business or person who uses only cloud storage rather than their own private storage is simply asking for it.
While cloud storage has its uses, it clearly has its pitfalls as well. Any sensible company will use it primarily as a means of giving their mobile staff and contractors access to what they need, and private cloud users may store *copies* of their media files there, but if they have any brains at all, they'll keep their own copies at home.
So Hauger's point about "all computing infrastructure moving to the cloud" is pure bollocks, about as likely to happen as everyone leaving their car keys in their car doors for easier access.
"Google stresses that there are no guarantees that DOM Snitch will work flawlessly for all web applications."
So if this application falsely flags a company's sites as insecure when they aren't (as verified by their own penetration testers) and thus wrongfully gives visitors a bad impression, Google may be sued for libel? I'll be interested to see how long this lasts.
I'm sure I could be forgiven for thinking you're a tax office shill or working for MasterCard or PayPal or something. What's your interest in all this? Why are you so opposed to people having a means to trade that can't be tracked? Why is it so important to you that only methods of transactions that can be monitored should be allowed to exist? Surely it can't just be that you have nothing to hide so you have nothing to fear? Because if you do, then may I point you in the direction of the Daily Mail forums, because your moronic comments are neither needed, welcome, or even effective here.
that I now assume any site whose domain name ends in "z" where it would normally be a plural "s" is a scam or a malware bomber - warez, beenz, lockerz, starz... the list goes on. It's a simple rule of thumb that's stood me in good stead so far - if the domain name ends in a plural z, it's a ripoff or malware.
(inb4 any Douglas Adams sector coordinate references :))
"She... worked on the proletarian novel-writing machines... the big kaleidoscopes on which the plots of novels were 'roughed in'."
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell described trashy, pornographic tat novels written by machines he called "kaleidoscopes" (computers not really being widely-known at the time of writing). Here we see it again coming to fruition - machine-generated trashy "books", assembled from bits and pieces of writing in the manner of - a kaleidoscope. Albeit that the motive is different - in Orweel's book it was to entertain and distract the proles, whereas here it's an attempt to defraud people for money. I don't know which one is worse.
Is there any part of this seminal book that *hasn't* happened yet? Two-way telescreens in our homes I suppose - but I'd wager that's coming, and most likely will be here within the next 5-10 years...
taking pictures in crowded places? Where I live, you do that only at your extreme peril. Because if you're male and caught taking pictures in crowds, you're either a terrorist or a paedophile.
Nice idea though, just a shame that our freedoms have already been destroyed to the point that you can't implement it without considerable risk. Or get a woman to do the photographing. Nobody thinks women are terrorists or paedophiles.
>"People... go to where the infrastructure already exists... otherwise why did you build it in the first place?"
Google "new empty cities in China" sometime. In short, the Chinese government has been building entire cities and suburbs, with all their infrastructure, that nobody lives in - simply to provide jobs and growth. Some of the pictures of these empty cities are quite creepy - it looks like something from Aftermath: Population Zero. It is the end result of what an unsustainable growth model can lead to.
The Unconventional Economist has some interesting info on this matter:
http://www.unconventionaleconomist.com/2010/12/chinas-empty-cities.html
I sincerely hope, next time you need other human beings to help you or your loved ones, that they leave you all to die and rot in the gutter where you belong, after all why should they pay to help mean-spirited shits like you? You selfish bastards. People like you are why this world is a steaming pile of shit. Look up the words "generosity", "altruism" and "humanity" sometime. They all represent something you deserve nothing of.
I have this delightful image in my head of someone like Tegne or ant 2 collapsing on a busy street with a heart attack while dozens of people stand around watching, mobile phones held high. Karma's a bitch, arsewipes.
>"I don't care if it's in the dictionary..."
By that statement you completely invalidate your entire argument. What you're saying amounts to "English is what I say it is and nobody can gainsay me, not even the OED". Well, this may come as a small surprise to you mate, but the vast majority of English speakers on this planet will tend go by what the OED (or Marriam-Webster for 'merkins) says rather than Richard 120.
I suggest you return to your dictionary and look up the word "portmanteau". Then have a think about where a substantial number of the words in the English language come from. Consider what Shakespeare might have made of words like "computer", "internet", "email" and "telephone". If you study the history of any language that is not a conlang, you'll see that it is continuously evolving as cultures, technologies and social mores change. English perhaps more so than most, on account of its being spoken by the widest variety of countries and cultures. Words like "chillax" and "guesstimate" that seem so ridiculous to you now will, to people years hence, be as much part of the language as words like "computer" and "internet" are to us.
doesn't work. It only hurts the ratepayers because the council will just factor the fine into its budget and raise rates accordingly. What needs to happen is that the oiks responsible for sending the emails should be PERSONALLY fined. Then it doesn't affect the ratepayers, and the idiots responsible get an expensive lesson on why to treat other people's information with respect.
Whether there is DRM on this music library is irrelevant, because it's not needed. The music isn't stored on your devices under your control, it's stored in Apple's cloud under THEIR control. That's how they can limit your usage to 10 devices without any DRM - because you no longer have a copy of the music under your control. You merely stream it from Apple's cloud, which detects which device is connected and refuses the connection if you have more than 10 registered to your cloud account.
This is the REAL danger of the so-called "cloud". It's about transferring storage and control of your files from you to some 3rd party provider, who could theoretically lock, edit or delete them leaving you with no evidence they ever existed in the form you provided them. Or make them available to those who have enough money/power to convince the cloud provider to let them in. After all, money talks and bullshit walks.
I can see its usefulness - having your files accessible anywhere there is an Internet connection speaks for itself - but don't ever let it become a replacement for private storage. Otherwise the information revolution is well and truly lost, because the kind of manipulation of history envisaged by Orwell becomes trivial for the ruling bodies once everything is in "the cloud".
since it's obvious that a sufficiently bright visible light source can kill as well. I'm talking about the frequency, which is directly related to the energy, of any radiative source. Microwave radiation is of a lower frequency to that of visible light, therefore has less energy per photon. So a light source of one watt has more energy per photon than a microwave source of one watt (so would emit less photons per watt of course). Mobile phones are a few watts typically, so they give off the equivalent of a fairly decent torch. Holding a Maglite next to your head isn't likely to cause cancer. So neither is a mobile phone.
As to resonance, that also can affect you regardless of frequency. For example, a strobe flashing at around 9 Hz will make most people feel uncomfortable and disoriented after a few seconds, and is the frequency most likely to trigger seizures in photic-sensitive epileptics. So electromagnetics resonance probably can kill, yes. But that too is not what I'm talking about.
What I mean is that one photon of gamma radiation is much more likely to do damage than one photon of visible light. It has much more energy because of its higher frequency. Similarly, one photon of microwave has less energy (and ionising power) than a visible photon. The diminished energy translates directly to a reduction of chance to cause damage. That is not factually incorrect, it's simple logic.
Ok, mobile phone fearmongers, Physics 101, once more from the top:
There's this form of energy known as the electromagnetic spectrum. It includes all forms of radiating energy. From lowest frequency to highest, those forms of energy are known as radio, microwave, infra-red, visible light, ultraviolet, X-rays, gamma rays, and cosmic rays.
Now the higher the frequency, the greater the energy. The greater the energy, the greater the chance it's going to give you cancer and/or otherwise muck up your cellular structure. Pretty much anything of higher frequency than visible light is going to increase cancer risk. Ultraviolet has a fair chance of giving you cancer, X-rays have a good chance of giving you cancer, and gamma rays will almost certainly cause cancer. Visible light has next to no chance of giving you cancer, and frequencies lower than visible light have no chance of giving you cancer.
Mobile phones operate on microwave frequencies. These frequencies are less than infra-red and much less than visible light. People exposed to visible light alone do not have any higher incidence of cancer than those who might live their lives in darkness. Sunlight can cause cancer, but that's because it contains ultraviolet light in its spectrum. Exposure to ordinary light bulbs and LEDs does not cause cancer.
So, if exposure to a light bulb or LED, which emits higher frequency and higher energy radiation than a mobile phone, does not cause cancer, then you can safely say that exposure to a mobile phone, being lower frequency and lower energy than visible light, does not cause cancer. QED.
So please, scaremongers, if you're going to moan about phones causing cancer, then you'd better get started on the more dangerous visible light from the LEDs on our appliances, because that is more likely to cause cancer than mobile phone microwaves are. Otherwise, stop with the mobile phones and go back to moaning about tanning beds, which really do increase the cancer risk, because they do emit ultraviolet.
that means between five and 17 data centres depending on load and load balancing requirements. They probably only run five during times of low traffic, but when things peak they bring more data centres online from a pool of 17 total. It would be a poor service provider who was running their equipment on the redline all the time; you should have backup resources for those unexpected surges and spikes in traffic. Just as it would make sense to power down unused data centres (or at least run them in standby) to save energy costs when traffic is thin.
Ok, last AC: I'm not sure what you mean by "merely using the work imposes a moral obligation" so I'll clarify my standpoint. Consider an open source project, such as Celestia, which I've downloaded and use a lot. Doing so places no moral obligation on me or anyone else to contribute to the project, or pay anything for doing so. Although - in resonse to another poster who accuses me of double standards - I HAVE contributed to Celestia and a couple of other projects that caught my interest. So don't tell me that I don't when you have no idea what I do.
Now suppose someone were to take the code for Celestia and turn it into a closed-source space game for which they charge say $60 and a $20 a month subscription, without releasing the source. Not only is that a violation of the GPL, it's morally execrable. It is THIS that I was having a go at, and I stand by what I said. If I contribute source to a project, and some company steals that source and uses it in a closed-source product, that is what I meant they can damn well pay me for. Not merely downloading and using the program, but reusing open source code in their own closed source projects.
Sorry if I caused any misunderstanding of my view there, I hope this clarifies things. If you still disagree with me on my stance, however, then I am opposed to your way of thinking.
There is a moral obligation attached to using open source, and it's exactly the same obligation requiring us to pay for the work of artists and programmers that we commonly know as copyright law. For open source, it's called copyleft - the idea that if you can use the work I contribute for free, then the work you contribute must be free as well.
My reasoning here is this: If I spend days working on a code module for an OSS project, and I get no renumeration for doing so - I do because I enjoy the work, not to make money - then why should you be able to take my work and profit from it without giving your work back? I contributed. If you use my work in your own, so should you. Otherwise you can damn well pay me for it.
since they now have no space program. As the Roman Empire, the Mongol Empire, and the Spanish Empire before us, so now does the West finally go gently into that good night.
It's all up to China and India to carry the flag now. They are the future; we are the dead.
I also refuse to buy Apple products. In fact I have a rule that they are not to even come into my house. A few friends had iPhones and weren't happy about leaving them in the car, but my house - my rules. After explaining a few things to them about Apple and its wannabe tyranny, I've successfully weaned four people off of Apple products and moved them onto other brands instead. I'm currently working on a fifth, and I will keep going after that.
Just because millions of fanbois keep on buying their products does not invalidate the actions of those of us who disagree with Apple's business models and general screw-everyone attitude. Each person I wean off of Apple is one less customer to buy their next iGadget. And I'm not alone, as evidenced by some of the comments here.
Remember the old Chinese philosophy of Sil Lum Tao - the great mountain made of many small pebbles. If enough people take a few pebbles each, eventually there is no mountain left.
"Wilful blindess" is an interesting doctrine, because what that amounts to is making pursuit of plausible deniability illegal. I wonder if that tentacle of the law extends to intelligence agencies and corporate executives, or if it's just yet another law that only applies to "us" and not to "them".
To get from Monaco to Australia? They're doing it wrong. The old SAILING ships of 100+ years ago did that trip in a couple of months. Obviously the wind power we'd been using for hundred of years is somewhat superior to solar, not to mention a damn sight cheaper. Newer is not always better!
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