Posts by Ken Hagan

Re: rock

You say that, but a perfectly plausible explanation of the OPERA result might be based on the realisation that they *do* worry about rock. Which means that geologists can use this method to X-ray the Earth, tomography style.

@Nigel

There's some, but since your pupil size will be determined by the overall level of illumination, there will be far less non-green than the designers of the pattern intended. That means the patterns will be very low in colour contrast and you'll need much better colour vision to get any of the patterns that don't involve green. Colour vision tests under anything less than proper "broadband" daylight are just silly.

I've had these tests before and I'm not perfect but I imagine the test is designed so that very few people are. That day I got almost nothing past the first page. I've never scored anywhere near that badly before and I can't say I've noticed any trouble outside the rather dark and monochrome surroundings of the eye clinic.

Ah, sweet irony

Ah, but Lord Google teaches us that just because you believe in something doesn't make it true.

http://www.allaboutworldview.org/is-hell-mentioned-in-the-bible-faq.htm

Re: pick your own AC

Fair point, but given the choice between "massive company is deliberately losing money" and "massive company screws good deals out of suppliers", I'll go for the former.

Re: How is that fair?

It is fair precisely because, given the exact scenario you have advanced, there obviously *is* some difference between the original version and the remix that the law can't see.

One flopped. The other was wildly successful. The law considers them the same.

Most people would reckon that *demonstrates* a problem in the relevant law.

Re: available on the public internet

You mean, like an *interactive* version of Big Brother?

Sounds fun, but I think Endemol might want royalties.

@kain preacher

This might constitute a third side to the argument, but...

Lockerbie: That trial was a farce. The guilty party was the man at the top who gave the orders. The man in the dock was a bloke doing his job. You *could* reasonably try him the way we tried low-ranking Nazis, rejecting the "only following orders" defence, but when we did that it was after we'd nailed the top brass. Justice is not served if you let the little people carry the can.

You didn't mention it, but that Polonium poisoner probably falls into the same category. People do some pretty despicable things when they are working for seret intelligence agencies, but your beef ought to be with those giving the orders, and if you haven't got the balls to go after *them* then you should shut up and leave everyone else alone.

419 scammers: I hadn't heard that, but it sounds a lot like trying to extend your jurisdiction over some foreign country. Presumably the scammers didn't commit any offence in Nigeria. If you have a problem with that, take it up with Nigeria, rather than looking around for someone little to squash merely to soothe your ruffled ego.

And so to Gary: In *this* case, the host country *is* actually willing and able to prosecute him, and happens to be a close ally, so why are you planting your boots on our soil and pissing us off.

Sounds like it. Presumably these people have never even heard of Scunthorpe.

"They" are the bottlers. The committee considered their "therapeutic" claims and found them wanting.

"If you could be any animal, what animal would you be?"

Human. Do you really have to ask?

Look around. Every other animal's habitat is getting totally screwed to make way for humans. Every habitat we've ever moved into, we've driven the top predators to extinction. The majority of macroscopic animals on the planet exist only because we farm them.

Obviously you wouldn't want to be a *poor* human, but that wasn't the question.

The spare, for when "a" is unavailable?

Re: djbdns maintenance restarted

Debian has a fork (dbndbs) that supports IPv6. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dbndns)

8 tons of documents

Probably just one day's output from their legal department.

Er, maybe it's too heavy to put in an aircraft.

Besides which, if the intended target is enemy air power then *they've* done the job of bringing themselves into LOS.

Re: Morons

Almost right. With Flash you could get a plug-in to turn it *on* if you *did* want to see it.

But that's really beside the point. HTML5 will not make it any harder *at all* to control annoying ads. Every browser lets you switch audio and video content on or off on a site-by-site basis, just as you can for Flash or Java. On the other hand, every defunct plug-in is one less place to hide security bugs and privacy breaches.

Re: new super-weapon

Yes, indeedy. Start building one of those and I'd have thought that every other space-faring nation would regard it as their DUTY (not just their right, although presumably references would be made to UN charter articles and treaties on space weaponry) to blast it to pieces before it could beam down anything more powerful than a GPS signal.

This idea is a non-starter.

Re: Of course, that is not correct.

Specifically, the application of logic in discussing traditional units of measure is not correct.

Every grown man winces...

Nah. This one just thinks "One slip of the grinder and we could have a Darwin contender.".

Btw, apropos of another post, "slip hazard" is probably one reason *not* to use lots of lube.

@Killraven

Nitpick: The library of Alexandria was torched by some bloke called Omar who (apocryphally) said that either its contents parroted the Koran and were therefore superfluous or they deviated from it and were therefore heretical.

The story is almost certainly false, but the destruction was real.

@SuperTim

"This guy, while having some good points, misses the fact that Word is the de facto standard word processor in business and that you CAN TURN OFF SPELL CHECKING on your CV"

That's not how I read it. I read it as "You may have turned off spell-checking, but I haven't and therefore when I read your CV, it flags up all the speling misstakes you made.".

Re: why you should never listen

Let's see. The users complained. You ignored them. After a couple of weeks, they (being intelligent) realised that you weren't going to even listen, let alone change your mind. You (being less intelligent) decided that this proves they were wrong in the first place.

Do you work for Microsoft's user experience division?

"skills that are out-of-date"

I'm not sure I'd call this a "skill".

It's something you can invest time and effort into learning, but all such things have a shelf-life that you should think about before you invest. Kids in colleges should be looking for a mixture of lifetimes -- something to get them their first job, and other things to get them a *few* more after that, and perhaps a handful of things that will last a lifetime (but there are precious few of those to choose from).

Yep, nope.

Uploaded to the store in September. Disclosed in November. What was he waiting for? Was it just that nobody downloaded it in October and so he didn't have the clinching proof of concept?

Re: Adobe failed to deliver

"I don't know if this was lack of investment, incompetence, or because it plain couldn't be made to work."

I don't know either, and outside of a very small number of Adobe employees, I don't suppose anyone ever will. But Adobe *did* deliver for ten versions. Very few pieces of software do that well.

When Flash was born, it was probably portable, but for the first umpty years and ten versions of its life, there was only one platform of commercial significance, so what's a manager to do? By the time ports were actually in demand, even ports to 32-bit Linux or 64-bit Windows proved almost impossible. (They exist, but they aren't as reliable as 32-bit Windows and now probably never will be.) Ports to resource-constrained devices were never going to fly.

Any piece of software that is successful enough to go through ten major versions (and Firefox's recent history doesn't count, btw) without losing backwards compatibility is going to end its life as a tired and bug-ugly pile of hacks. Sometimes it is just time to push the original design into the sidings and start again.

Re: black on a black background

Can't you just select it with the mouse and one of the blacks gets inverted to white? Or am I thinking of government-grade document redaction?

"I don't think iPlayer or iTunes are hard core geek things."

You may be surprised. I expect that most people still watch telly on a telly. On demand, certainly, but using that nice PVR they've bought. And as for videos, I I doubt that more than a tiny fraction of the population buy an average of 14 hours of new movies each month. That's 8-10 DVDs worth, and I suspect that "DVD" is the correct unit here as well, since downloading a movie from iTunes sounds a bit geeky for the grey-haired set.

You sound young and/or unmarried. That's fine, but lots of people aren't, and won't *ever* come close to 17GB in a single month, let alone as an average.

Re: normal joe

Thanks! That's the sort of numbers I needed to see.