Posts by Marshalltown

Attachment limits

The sole reason I ever acquired a gmail address was as a means around send and receive attachment size limits on my "real" email account.

Re: actively trying to invalidate applications by searching for prior art.

The true problem with "prior art" is that it often is not patented. All too often the "inventor" is a mediocrity who has *had an idea* and the experience is so overwhelming, he or she patents the idea simply because they have discovered their own personal brilliance. Corporations treated as people are even worse since their "creativity" is entirely parasitic - yeah maybe they did pay some shmuck to write a program or "design" a prism with rounded corners, but the "corporation," per se, never produced or invented anything.

Re: Haven't you seen Fringe ?

That, my lad, was a shaped charge, which was designed to direct the explosive energy at a specific target. A USB stick is a different form factor, and unless the "stick" was specially engineered, would pretty much result in an explosion into the compartment rather than directed into the bulk head.

Re: Mixology

You must realize that putting vodka in a mixed drink and calling it a "MartinI" is something invented by a Phillistine to begin with. It is as nonsensical as making a "vodka and tonic."

Re: @Christian Berger

You really need to consider your semantics. "Security" and "privacy" simultaneously? Seriously? The entire debacle is due to a quest for "security." Privacy of individuals is simply the first casualty of that quest. There are others:

https://www.gov.uk/find-out-if-i-can-buy-or-carry-a-knife

for instance.

Re: Who appointed America as the world's policeman, judge and jury?

There are a couple very different ways of addressing this. The simplest is that at the time, the vast majority of wealth being created was in the US. Europe was a close second. So, quite simply, the largest number of crime victims an targets was in the US and Europe. In that sense, it has nothing to do with being appointed "the world's policeman..." and everything to do with protecting US citizens. Since Vega was targeting European as well as North American interests, there was some very enthusiastic international cooperation to collect the guy, possibly not excluding elements in Russian and Ukraine, where the help may well have been from his competitors. While US prisons can't compete on the nasty scale with Russia and Ukrainian models, they are apparently fairly dismal compared to British pens.

What part?

The part about whose computer he ran the model on, and who paid for the computer time.

Re: "nothing illegal to be wearing Google Glass"... yet.

Four-ways work atleast. Mini-roundabouts are accident generators. There's nothing like coming into one when the yahoo coming in the opposite direction decides to make a left the wrong way 'round - in the US going clockwise around the circle instead of counter-clockwise. Little aware that they are the cause, they scream about right of way, despite traveling the wrong way in the lane.

My own favorite traffic "calming" measure is the widened divider at a non-stop intersection, which causes traffic to swerve toward the Class II bicycle lane. I call these setups "bicyclist elimination zones." It offends every traffic engineer I've tried it on too!

Re: BS

Plainly you must be in administration, either that or a heavy smoker with no sense of smell.

Pertwee defintely

Always my favorite. Tom Baker was also excellent, but not to my mind as good as Pertwee, who had a sense of style that I liked. None of the Doctors were ever bad per se though, so its down to personal preferences.

Inherently _safer_

Open source is not inherently safe, just safer. For instance, no matter how clean the code is, a back door could be inserted into the compiled executable through the compiler or assembler, if they were compromised before being compiled. It could even be lurking in the code in the hardware on the compiling system.

Re: Cool..but also oddly disturbing

We toss ours over the fence into the county forensic science center's lot.

Re: In Idaho...

In Idaho, three quarters of the population are still puzzled by the absence of a dial on their cell phone.

Word perfect

WP's file format was at least easy to clean up. Word in comparison was and is a nightmare when it breaks. The thing I didn't like about WP was that it would accumulate orphaned formatting codes. By default deleting text didn't delete the formatting. A document could grow astonishingly. I had an employer who asked me to look at his document because although it was only 4 pages long, it was terribly slow to print. I opened view codes or whatever it used to be called and discovered that 90% of his doc was orphaned codes. I deleted them and things worked fine. He almost fainted though when he saw the size of the new document. Thought I had deleted most of his work.

Re: Slightly fruity comparison

You obviously either didn't look at that chart link or you didn't understand. Two Fukushima workers experienced potentially hazardous dose according to the chart (http://xkcd.com/radiation/) and that chart actually takes a darker view of the situation than other sources do. None of the surrounding population was. If you have had one or more sunburns during your life, you are as threatened as they are respecting cancer incidence. As regards bananas instead of thinking about the "world" eating bananas, considered walking by that bright yellow pile in the produce section. A shipload of the fruit can set off radiation detectors.

You can buy into the "be afraid" meme, but that won't protect you from radiation. You need to avoid bananas, long distance jet travel, ski vacations, brick, granite, medical scans, live at the lowest elevation above sea level you can, and absolutely avoid tans and sunburn. That of course leads to an entire raft of other health issues, since you need to be exposed to some ionizing radiation for your system to produce vitamin D. Happy paranoia.

Re: Truth or consequences

Going medieval on a bully can be an extraordinarily satisfactory experience, even you get suspended. One good out come is that word goes round not pester you 'cause you're one crazy offspring of biologically incompatible species.

Re: more info please

So, the crater is somewhere between 443 million and 12,900 years old. That is one heck of an error margin.

Have you ever ...

... wondered why the SPCA really exists? Birds, especially ones that travel long ranges in particular would be easy to ban during a bird flu scare. The chicken population in China still hasn't recovered and they barely fly.

Re: The US Gov Bureaucrats have chosen their course

In fact, and I say this in great embarrassment, being an American, the US in general tends to lag behind but slavishly follow British trends. The result is that our anti-gun laws lag Britain's by about 50 years are catching up rapidly. We came up with the NSA after seeing how cool GCHQ worked. Cameras monitoring public areas are increasing in numbers but are still far, far behind the completeness of coverage in Britain. Random police checks are bolder now, again following Britain's lead. Indeed in Texas they have apparently taken to roadside body cavity searches in some counties, which may an innovation even by Britain's standards. I have a friend who wanted to spend time in the British Museum - having acquired a Classics degree - in the lat '90s. He was held and questioned at Heathrow for several hours - apparently because they suspected his red hair might indicate an Irish-based anti-British sympathy, which he indeed had developed by the time they let him go. In the US there is a growing movement to target people with turbans, though the majority of these are Sihks and despise Muslims. So, we may catch up yet.