* Posts by Teiwaz

4133 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Oct 2011

The internet is going to hell and its creators want your help fixing it

Teiwaz

Re: The US, Europe and China.

Ah those pesky europeans, making us adhere to a convention on human rights that WE wrote.

Seems to happen a lot.

There's been a significant amount of indignant huffing over the Galileo restrictions 'WE' insisted on before 'WE' decided to leave.

We know it's not so much a u-turn or a reversal of policy, but instead an undeserved sense of exceptionism on behalf of our deluded political servants.

Teiwaz

Re: The US, Europe and China.

I start thinking that this is the plan all along.

It seemed fairly clear that the ECHR was the target all along, at least by some individuals or group with an agenda within government.

May herself observed while on the remain campaign trail she'd prefer to stay in the EU, but leave the EHCR - I remember at the time how swept on by it was, news reported it, but didn't dwell on it.

However, I think we can be fairly certain May herself was not one of the conspirators, she was in the remain camp as career-wise that was safe. It wasn't until after the referendum was in and the shit hit the fan that she saw the door open, the room empty, the steps up to the big chair clear and the crown sitting unattended.

Teiwaz

Re: The US, Europe and China.

psssst. the UK is still part of the EU, and will always be in Europe

pssssst? You'd need to be if you think it ends there, remain, renegotiation, re-ferendum or re-election.

Leave EU suddenly got expanded to leave ECHR also after all....and certain factions won't be content with EEA should that end up being a compromise.

Teiwaz

The US, Europe and China.

What?

The UK wasn't one?

Not a world leader after all, or merely content to follow (China)?

In 2018, Facebook is the villain and Microsoft the shining light, according to techies

Teiwaz

Who were the other panelists?

I mean, if you are going to ask an attorney which corporate giant is acting more for societies benefit rather than the norm for a corporate giant which is often more similar to a swarm of locusts or those insects that capture other insects and lay their eggs in them so their young devour their way out when hatched.

Ms may seem to be more benign and less destructive lately, but all the giving they've been doing lately is aimed at their own interest. They're 'casting their bread upon the waters', because the ducks threw win 8 back at them and ignored the winphones cast before them.

Official: Voyager 2 is now an interstellar spacecraft

Teiwaz

Re: I was around 50 years ago, just barely

Yup, it's been 50 years since we sent our interplanetary^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hstellar neighbours a mix track, some nudes and directions to our house.

Put it like that, it sounds like a teenagers clumsy dating strategy.

Couple of thousand years, could be an interstellar cop car round to caution the human race for being too young to be distributing nudes of themselves. Worst case, we could find ourselves on a Galactic Register.

Dine crime: Chippy sells deep fried Xmas dinner

Teiwaz

I no longer live in the area but their battered mince pies make leaving the area the best idea I ever had.

Just not eating them is always an option at a pinch.

Teiwaz

Re: Xmas dinner?

Gravy yes, but not horseradish.

As longs as it's not that convenience 'beef' based bisto.....yeurgghhh! it's like coffee and marmite on your spuds.

Teiwaz

Re: Xmas dinner?

roasties???

Me old mums used to give me headache as a kid - I preferred croquettes.

Teiwaz

Re: battered?

First take some bacon lardons and cook them over a moderate heat in a sauté pan until you have rendered most of the fat off them. Put the lardons to one side and stir-fry the sprouts in the bacon fat for 5 minutes or so.

My advice is much that, except with less detail and timings,

parboil the sprouts then halve and fry with chopped bacon and chopped onion and mushroom, bit od a stir fry style side dish. Also works with cabbage.

Teiwaz

Reply Icon

Obligatory video from Bottom. Though you really need to watch the Christmas episode to know where they come from.

That said, I thought the biggest problem with sprouts was a general tendency to brassica intolerance compounded by the infrequency: some people only eat them over Christmas. Don't know what they're missing!

Don't have the sprouts!

For fax sake: NHS to be banned from buying archaic copy-flingers

Teiwaz

Re: Sweapstake

** For inbredistanis and non UK residents - Luton is the UK version of Tatooine.. "If there's a bright centre to the universe - you're in the shithole that's furthest from...". Even Daleks & Cybermen leave it well alone - on the basis that:

@Jemma: Never been to 'Derry then??? it's like Luton with worse rail connections.

Teiwaz

Typical half-assed Gov thinking

Problem:

For lack of a more up to date working communication system for authorized orders, the (outdated) Fax is used to carry signatured orders.

Gov. Solution:

Ban the Fax machine from being a solution going forward, someone will sort out an alternative and the Health Minister can pat himself on the back, problem solved.

Have a gander at this: Amazon agrees not to act as Silicon Valley's foie gras dealer

Teiwaz

Like abusive porn and some drugs, why aren't they raiding homes to looking for the banned item in peoples pantries (stop giggling, that's pantries)???

Privacy, security fears about ID cards? UK.gov's digital bod has one simple solution: 'Get over it'

Teiwaz

People were also perfectly happy to vote for Adolf Hitler, watch the Black & White Minstrels Show and let their kids hang around with Jimmy Saville.

Perhaps, but Adolf was invited by the Weimar President to take up the role of Chancellor, I don't believe he even held a seat in the Reichstag, although the Nazi party had a large number of seats.

As for the latter two, there were no known issues with either at the time, but I blame the BBC who have a tendancy to overuse popular TV hosts, so much so that even the most unassuming and humble eventually either collapse into illness, mental health of drug problems or develop huge awkward to work with egos.

Teiwaz

Re: There is no advantage in universal ID

"There are plenty of "database nations" out there where every single bit the government has on you (even your parking tickets) is organized in a central database and neatly indexed by your national ID. A lot of them are actually at least as free as UK

Might that not be the crux of the reservations the public has?

Not that they are against ID cards, but that they don't much care for the kind of society the current British Political Parties would create in future years with the an all-encompassing ID card system (and techies know the ID card system will be woefully broken and like it even less).

Whatchu got for us this week, Microsoft? Skype, Powerpoint tweaks and – oh – another foldable

Teiwaz

This is how bad the development cycle has become for Skype

Seemingly, it and all MS products.

They seem to be going for a regular state of well below sub-par, that way they have to put less effort into being barely competent.

Brit bomb hoax teen who fantasised about being a notorious hacker cops 3 years in jail

Teiwaz

Re: Batman

He'd make a fairly interesting Batman villian.

A tad too realistic a villian for Batman, to be fair (and I'm a fan) all of the Batman villians are the product of a deranged imagination, very weird as Batman himself is one of the most down to earth and realistic of heros.

Teiwaz

something from a Monty Python sketch...

it was...well, close enough

"strangling animals, golf and masterbating" - Hobbies of a Contestant on the Seaside Summarised Proust Competition

Teiwaz

"His computers and devices were ordered to be destroyed"

When did courts start euthanising electronics?

They've been doing the same to cars for ages, even ones that are road-worthy.

Not really environmentally friendly or pro recycling.

Teiwaz

Re: Don't mess

Or T'Pau.

The 80's singer with big hair? (not a very helpful descriptor)

Amazon robot fingered for bear spray leak that hospitalised 24 staffers

Teiwaz

Re: The machines were just trying to share!

None of the residents report either explosive decompression or the proverbial ring of fire.

Pity, you might make a good rocket launch centre otherwise.

Why millions of Brits' mobile phones were knackered on Thursday: An expired Ericsson software certificate

Teiwaz

Re: Don't feel so bad Ericsson, you probably did us all a favour!

or worse actually talk to other passengers!

Talk about expecting miracles.

I remember using public transport more often than I do now, back before mobile phones or even smart phones.

I don't recall random passengers striking up conversations with others on public transport then either*.

But perhaps the technique of sitting frozen frigid in embarrassed silence and trying not to make eye contact with anyone is a lost skill now.

* Well, maybe once, and I'm fairly sure she was a visitor from another dimension.

FCC slammed for 'arbitrary and reckless' plan to change how text messages are regulated

Teiwaz

Re: Universal Service Fund

Like so many OTHER liberal "rob Peter to pay Paul" giveaway programs, _I_ will _NEVER_ see _ANY_ of that.

Bob, do you carve a notch into your forearm with your penknife for every downvote or only for the occasional upvote?

Teiwaz

Re: comforting innit.

@Fatman <i?Trickle down, MY ASS!!!</i>

Did your sarcasm alarm fail to go off reading that post?

OP Might have well have suggested executives offspring get state funded champagne instead of breaktime milk (not that many get even that these days, and if it were available there'd be a allergy crisis alert etc. just in case someone got given the wrong carton).

Tumblr resorts to AI in attempt to scrub itself clean from filth

Teiwaz
Joke

Re: Differentiating nipples

@cutterman

I expect you have a collection in a sack in the basement, or a small room with white plasterboard shelves otherwise wallpapered in newspaper cuttings and your trophies laid out neatly labelled on the little shelves.

Teiwaz

Re: Even the supposedly "Progressive" corporations are a bunch of Puritans in the USA

Maybe you're thinking of the first European settlers in what's now the US, but the Vikings weren't noted for their sexual repression. Nor were the Spanish, particularly..............................

...................................In other words, complex problems are complex.

I still think my observation, while maybe less accurate, is pithier.

And I am sorry, I am not qualified to award you your degree for that thesis.

Teiwaz

Re: Even the supposedly "Progressive" corporations are a bunch of Puritans in the USA

I'm not sure how Corporate America became the enforcement arm of the Puritanical Religious Zealots, while claiming to be "progressive",

I think that one can be easily traced back to the first settlers to America and the generally overarching mainstream puritan mindset that still exists, despite the occasional vibrant subculture movements in the opposite direction.

We've been going in this direction since the eighties, every decade it gets worse. Inclusive and tolerant only if the group can be packaged for a good personal interest story - the kind of thing that passes for news these days.

Teiwaz

Re: "All of these images are both porn (at least to me)"

The very word derives from the Greek for a prostitute (he pornaia).

Very good, but the general public don't care what the root of a word was or what it used to mean, they'll take your dictionary and beat you over the head with it.

nude = porn

in most of the publics mind, because a lot of trouble has been gone to by some vested interests (or just really lazy sloppy journalists mirroring the most common moron mindset - hey who says the internet is the first to hothouse reflect informed opinion back as fact) to purposefully muddle the two.

You almost might as well try to correct the cracker/hacker mislabel.

Teiwaz

Re: Human moderators are thick too

Who said he was a human?

Pratchett noted in Men at Arms that people aren't naturally paid up members of humanity, merely because they were born human.

Just about everything humans do will offend some who don't spend much time around others and think their own experience or understanding of life is the be all end all.

Teiwaz
Coat

Re: Blanket Ban on Searches

Judging by my testing of this last night, Tumblr simply picked up dozens of words which relate to sex or sexual content and just blocked all searches on them.

Bad luck for those looking for content on cocktail recipes featuring salt on the edge of the glass then. Too easily confused by the other sort of 'how to rim'

Teiwaz

Re: Child porn

Yes if the problem is child porn then ban child porn. However easier just to ban photos of children since a paedo enjoys all pictures of children.

So do many who would certainly be outraged by being though of in the same way. Women who coo over baby pictures, especially those awful pastel attempts featuring infants dressed up as flowers, and lonely old people who enjoy church pantomimes featuring children not related to them.

Teiwaz
Coat

Re: Obscenity is subjective

Quite right

What about the gun porn with bikini clad ladies or even beardy blokes in leather jackets or trucker caps and dirty t-shirts cradling huge weaponery

also unix porn (fun in the 2000s but a little tired now), animal porn (way too much kitty pics is excessive), weird fetishes that don't involve nipples like latex, gimps and strange 'are you my mummy' gas mask things in off putting colours (and smells no doubt were you to encounter such a pervert in person if you find excessive talcum powder off putting).

this message brought to you by someone who can't 'identify as' anything as there doesn't appear to be a name, label or category for it.

The British Home Office was warned about its crappy data management – then Windrush happened

Teiwaz

Re: In occasions like this...

it's hard to tell whether it's a case of absolute evil or one of absolute incompetence.

Really doesn't agree with the opinion of Lord Vetinari that evil people have better organisational skills.

Maybe we'd all be better off having the country run by means of the heroic cycle - allow some despot in to get things running nicely then aim a hero at him or her and then the population can rejoice in a cathartic moment of the fall of a tyrant (plus the occasional* messy overlord execution) be a great national unifier and morale booster every eight to ten years.

* has to be ocassional, if there's not the chance they might be able to escape and live a life in luxury and tax exile we'd not have any recruits for despot.

Awkward... Revealed Facebook emails show plans for data slurping, selling access to addicts' info, crafty PR spinning

Teiwaz

FB on my Android devices?

Zuck on man... I have no FB crap on any of my Droids, and prefer to keep them Zuckerborg-free, kthanxbai.

I can one-up that, I'm Android free as well.

Even less slurp - It's bad enough on the (I was going to write regular desktop internet access, but it's probably less so these days) without letting it follow you as you carry it around in your pocket tracking you.

Teiwaz

Re: Riddle me this?

In my experience, they seem to fall into one of two camps; "people who bought this, bought that", and those bloody things that haunt you after a purchase based on the principle that since you bought a tap washer yesterday you'll be in the buying zone for more for the next two weeks.

Yes, and because of this I've decided the real suckers in this is the companies convinced that it's effective (or at least more effective than traditional advertising strategies) and forking out money to Facebook for little return value.

I'm probably deluding myself, but it does make me feel better and less of a chump (not that I ever use Facebook).

Teiwaz

Re: Alternative business model please

Reminds me the thinking is that porn was behind the growth of VHS.

Any advance on ads, porn ..... ?

If you were 11-15 and male during the rise of the video cassette recorder, the main reason to hassle parents to invest in the new tech was more likely to be the fake underground Horror flicks.

Which had the almost wholesome benefit of being actually far tamer than young imaginations perceived they might be.

Teiwaz

Re: Users should pay to use Facebook

I take this to mean they could probably run the business without all the unpleasantness of ads and slurping and stalking if they just charged a price low enough that it wouldn't significantly impact the users, but if they did that then they wouldn't make anything like as much money.

Maybe I'm a hair more pessimistic than you, but I took it too mean charge users as well as sell them and everyone they know to all insundry.

Teiwaz

Re: Popcorn anyone?

I'm sure I will still be monetized long after I am dead. At least I hope I will be, to cost advertisers more money.

Just think, maybe some Facebook will have collected enough information about you to render a ghost personality* that is almost but not quite unlike you in order to prop up some shit new service and convince advertisers they have more users than they actually do once the young have left and the orginal tide of users from around 2011 have passed on.

* Think Caprica only not at all accurate personalities that just drivel on the topics you optimistically hit 'Like' on five minutes after you originally signed up for facebook plus some regurgitated facts from your timeline.

Teiwaz

Re: Popcorn anyone?

Trade you beer for popcorn. This is going to be good.

And like any drama, once the final curtain on this current presentation falls, life will resume, and Facebook will no doubt get a chance to do a matinee the next time they put a foot or dozen wrong, because we can threaten to break ties with the EU over the folklore of no say and the myth of taking back control but corporations get to continue running roughshod over us and the gormless population hands them the keys every day with every idiot post about their mindless trivia and not just every couple of years to idiot politicians.

Waymo's revolutionary driverless robo-taxi service launches in America... with drivers

Teiwaz

Message from Orions Arm.

Time to chase the entire population of the planet Earth back into the oceans for another couple of million years (trees no longer an option, as the monkeys appear to have cut them all down in order to wipe their bottoms with them), it's well passed obvious that any intelligence perceived earlier among the monkey people was mere fluke and a lot of them gathered round the same typewriter.

Adobe Flash zero-day exploit... leveraging ActiveX… embedded in Office Doc... BINGO!

Teiwaz

Re: Flash, ActiveX, Office doc embedding/scripting - should already be DISABLED

The problem is, some VP really needs that email from "Doctor@hospital.com" with a document titled "IMPOTENT:

A shame, and end to his bloodline maybe, but not the end of the world - some of us don't get the opportunity to have offspring in the first place.

Former headteacher fined £700 after dumping old pupil data on server at new school

Teiwaz

It begs the question "why?"

Why would a headmaster - or any teacher - want pupil data from a previous school in his new position

I can't think it'd be possible or even wise to headhunt well performing pupils from previous schools for a new post at a struggling one institution.

But such we have come to with the League Table nonsense.

Estonian ex-foreign sec urges governments: Get cosy with the private sector on cybersecurity

Teiwaz

Re: POlitician praising the private sector?

Something I've seen time and time again is politicians being utter incompetents at solving a problem or just tend to ignore a little issue that can be easily solved until it becomes some massive problem that is nearly impossible to fix.

I've no idea about her specifically, but isn't Estonia that Baltic country* that sort of did that e-gov thing quite well, unlike the series of long drawn out car crash events that is the UK (plus a few train wrecks for good measure).

Oz opposition folds, agrees to give Australians coal in their stockings this Christmas

Teiwaz

Politicians and Sympathy???

claiming their loved one would have been alive but for the politician's decision to stop law enforcement snooping.

Perhaps, but it a lot of recent terror cases, it's usually quickly revealed that the guilty party was already known to the system (through snooping or merely sticking up like a sore thumb) but no action was taken.

OR

Person was able to do it anyway because lone nuts often don't need to communicated with anyone else in order to go nuts (I presume all the voices or at least negative dialogue goes in (for now at least) the privacy of their own heads).

Apple co-founder and former CEO has the most expensive John Hancock on the planet

Teiwaz
Coat

Job lot

If this was the goal, they should have had him vacuum dessicated* (can we do that?) and sold like the ferengi funeral practice as featured in Ds9.

If not, there's always plastinated, sliced and packaged.

Icon : Using it a lot recently, potentially unpopular / poor taste warning.

As sales slide, virtual reality fans look to a bright, untethered future

Teiwaz
Coat

I'm still waiting for all that cyber sex I was promised 25 years ago.

I'm still waiting on all the sex I was promised for buying Linx deoderant.....

Microsoft polishes up Chromium as EdgeHTML peers into the abyss

Teiwaz

Re: Embrace, Extend and Extinguish?

Windows 10 was insistent Edge was faster. I'm confused?!?! I

Just a product of an unbridled and undeserved corporate optimism.

Like a restaurant selling half-raw pork as delicious juicy well-cooked roast chicken.

Teiwaz

Re: Use Firefox

Or Chrome, if somehow you think Google data slurping is morally superior to MS data slurping.

Considering you are 'paying' Google for use of everything it provides by your usage, while Windows also theoretically* can still come with a pricetag, so you are paying MS twice.

I'd say, potentially, yes, Google slurp is morally superior (not that that is saying much).

* I say theoretically, as most people get it with a computer and regard it as free. As I go out of my way to avoid any bundling options with my computer purchases, if I wanted to use Windows I'd have to buy it.

Teiwaz

Re: Open Source

So it isn't enough that Microsoft eff up their own shit. Now they want to eff up someone ( everyone ) else's stuff too?

When you're in your own home, you can leave the bathroom and kitchen in a shit state every morning and worry about it later.

When Sharing is a different matter. Other people will be able to see how badly you clean up after yourself and will rightly complain.