Posts by handleoclast

Re: Inter-departmental communication

@Captain Scarlet

The departments concerned do know that they can communicate with each other. And they attempt to do so.

Unfortunately, company policy mandates that they use Skype for Business to communicate, and that is so crap they just don't bother.

Re: How do they exchange the racing pigeons?

You have correctly identified a significant problem with private pigeon exchange.

This is why work is in progress to develop public pigeon exchange. The major problem to be solved is signing the pigeons: tattoos require the pigeon to be plucked and then time is needed to replace feathers. Obviously, something better is needed.

Once the scheme is perfected, perfect forward privacy will be assured by the use of session pigeons carried by the public pigeons.

Re: I'm sorry I read this now...

I expect downvotes from those who read only the first line or two of a post before voting. And from those who read all the way through to the end. Some of the bits in the middle are OK, though. :)

Football bores me. I'd rather watch 90 minutes of a slow-motion replay of paint drying. So from my personal perspective, the players are all vastly overpaid. Don't get me wrong, I hate all sport and consider football to be more interesting (on a relative scale) than most other sports. On an absolute scale of interesting, though, I'd put it in negative numbers.

That said, we all have different tastes, and there are enough people who like football that players deserve paying some amount of money. So I don't begrudge them a salary.

Once you accept that they deserve payment, you also have to acknowledge that they have a limited career span. Eventually, their body is no longer able to perform at a top level, or they get caught in a "spit roast" scandal, or whatever. And because many of them left school as early as possible in order to go into football, they have no qualifications or experience that would allow them to enter any career more demanding than one where they repeatedly ask "Do you want fries with that?" So they try to earn as much as possible during that limited career span so they can afford to drink themselves to death in their old age.

So the question is, should they be protected from circumstance such that they don't have to work in MuckDonald's or sign on at the Jobcentre++ once their career is over? Most people's jobs don't provide them with that luxury, so if you're an egalitarian you'd answer no, they made their bed and should piss in it. On the other hand, if you're a free-marketer you'd say that people are prepared to pay enough for matches/TV for that to happen, so you'd answer yes.

I don't begrudge them their extra money, even though some of them aren't bright enough to hang on to it for post-career income and instead suck it up their nose. What really annoys me is the celebrity these twats get after their footballing days are over. I really don't care about non-entity Becks and his marriage to non-entity Posh, or the state of Gazza's liver or any of the rest of it. I'd be happy for them to have all that money if they then disappeared into obscurity. Hell, I'd even chip in a few quid of my own if Becks, Posh, Gazza and the like would just fuck off out of the news.

Re: Relevant Thunderf00t videos

@handleoclast

Yeah, bad form to reply to your own posts. But I realized something.

Some of these schemes start out as scams. Maybe most of them. But some of them happen because few people smoke these days. I'm not arguing that nicotine improves intelligence, or anything like that. But the decline in smoking has an indirect effect on these schemes happening.

For example. You're sitting there with a glass of cold beer in your hand. You notice condensation forming on the outside of the glass. That (together with the beer already consumed) gets you thinking. Cold causes water to condense. Peltier-effect cooling devices exist. Peltier-effect devices run on electricity. Solar cells generate electricity. Maybe if you hooked up a Peltier-effect device to a solar cell you could condense water out of the air. Wow! You might be able to make a self-filling water bottle.

At this point, if you smoked, you'd reach for the fags and start jotting figures down on the back of the packet. Shortly after you'd realize that the yield would be so low, even on a bright sunny day with the solar cell angled for optimum power, it would still take weeks to fill a small bottle. So you realize your dream of a self-filling bottle with a flexible solar panel wrapped around it, slung under a bicycle frame between your legs (which shade the solar panels, and the panels weren't angled for maximum power anyway) isn't going to work. The figures on the back of your fag packet prove it won't work, so you abandon the idea. But if you don't smoke you try to get your moronic idea crowdfunded because you had nothing to do calculations on.

BTW, I didn't make that example up. The thought processes I described came from my imagination. The product itself, the bottle slung under the bike frame between your legs, was actually crowdfunded (and debunked by Thunderf00t).

The icon is not me reaching for my coat, it's me realizing I left my fags in my coat pocket.

Re: They now need a name change.

Have a pint on me.

Re: We've been doing this to our pets for close to two decades.

@whoseyourdaddy

You do remember that these are encapsulated in high-grade plastic?

Presumably plastic of a high enough grade not to cause problems in the typical 20-year-lifetime of an indoor cat (indoor dogs and outdoor cats can have shorter lives. Call it 25 years, since some cats manage to live that long.

So, good enough for 80 years in a human? Implant at 20, live until 100. No carcinogens, no toxic breakdown products, no allergic reactions, or anything like that. Right? Because we've proved it's safe in animals that typically live no longer than 20 years. Oh, and we tend not to do detailed autopsies on them to find out if their implant caused their demise.

Safe enough. Right?

Or maybe not. We need some test subjects. You can volunteer. By the time the experiment has concluded in 80 years, I'll be dead. And probably so will you. But your children will know if it was safe or not.

Re: They are not laws

@Destroy All Monsters

They are not laws, they are changes to the constitution, and, being in effect, articles of the Constitution.

They are laws. From Article VI:

This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.

So, yes, amendments are changes to the Constitution and become, effectively, articles of the Constitution. And, being articles of the Constitution, they are the supreme law of the land.

They are laws.

Re: By "Officer of the Deck" do you mean "Officer of the Watch"?

I'm obviously losing the plot here. I thought they were using a fondleslab. Now you're saying they've put it onto a smart watch? Does it need the phone or is it operating independently?

Re: Undersea pyramids?

Yeah, but Bill O'R'lyeh getting fired for sexual harassment is old news, whatever language you say it in.