Posts by handleoclast

The church is upset...

...that other people want to make money out of the crucifiction (spelling is deliberate - it was a fiction). Even worse, they want to make money out of it to give to the poor and needy.

Let's be clear here. The church is selling afterlife insurance. And it gives a money-back guarantee. If you die and there's no afterlife then all you have to do is ask for your money back and they'll return it.

Incidentally, for those who want to make Sunday special: stone your priest to death. He gets paid to deliver those church services, so he's working on a Sunday. You know it makes sense.

Obviously trying the Saunders gambit

You know the one. It goes "I'm totally doolally with no hope of a cure. Please let me out of prison so I can die of insanity some place a little more pleasant." To be followed, if it succeeds, by a miraculous recovery.

I wonder if the system will be stupid enough to be fooled again.

So why isn't Amber Rudd demanding a ban on cars?

She's only banning encrypted cars.

Your mileage may vary.

Internet of shit?

Surely it only qualifies for "internet of shit" if it is used anally.

Ransomware

Ads in fucking file fucking explorer?!?!?!?!

I get ads in android apps from the play store. A lot of the better apps that have ads also have a "pro" version or a "donate" option to get rid of the ads. This is intuitive, ethical, and sane. Free software may have annoying ads, pay for the software and you get rid of the annoying ads. My choice to uninstall, tolerate the ads, or pay some money. But file explorer isn't really optional, it's a necessary component of the OS (however infrequently you use it).

So Microsoft make you pay for their (mostly shitty) software and then fling ads at you? Unless you pay extra? Let's call it what it is. It's fucking RANSOMWARE. The usability of your computer is compromised unless you fork over dosh.

Thank fuck I don't have to use this shiteware.

A mix of pork and beef tallow

This is a combination with proven efficacy, dating back to 1856. It was used to grease the Minié balls fired by the then new Enfield P-53 rifles and worked perfectly with absolutely no drawbacks.

Well, it had one tiny drawback. It provoked the Sepoy Mutiny, eventually leading to Indian independence, but that was not considered a drawback in India, only in Britain.

Just think. India might still be an imperial possession of only we'd greased the bullets with palm oil. Or 5-pound notes.

Unfographic

I don't know if it was a typo (the "u" and "i" keys are adjacent) or a deliberate neologism, but I think "unfographic" is a brilliant description of shitty infographics that actually tell you fuck all.

A new one for the lexicon.

It's not a bug, it's a feature

This legislation, if passed, will drastically reduce the availability of internet access in Alabama. And that's a feature, not a bug.

Internet access means that your average undereducated Alabaman may stumble across websites causing him/her to question many things: Are Republican politicians corrupt, greedy bastards who steal from the poor to give to the rich? Is Donald Trump sane? Was it a good idea to marry my sister? Are black people really inferior? Is there really a God?

Jack Williams' career, and the careers of many politicians and Talibangelicals, depends upon people NOT questioning those things. So he wants to put Alabamans in a bubble and justifies it by saying he's protecting them.

“Inbreeding leads to harmful mutations” is a lay understanding of genetics.

Nope. That is wrong. It's a lay MISunderstanding of genetics.

Smoking can lead to harmful mutations. Radioactivity can lead to harmful mutations. Some chemicals can lead to harmful mutations. Inbreeding CANNOT lead to harmful mutations because inbreeding CANNOT cause harmful mutations to arise, it can only cause them to be expressed.

Inbreeding increases the likelihood of recessive mutations in an individual's grandparent becoming homozygotic in the individual. Those mutations may be harmless (or even beneficial) when heterozygotic but harmful when homozygotic.

OTOH, those mutations may be beneficial, in which case inbreeding can be good. Which is why breeders use it when trying to develop or fix new traits. You may have to cull the vast majority of the offspring, but it can be worth it.. Whether or not inbreeding is used depends upon the goal: producing more individuals for immediate use or creating new varieties.

FTFY.

Coupland seems to have perfected the art of minimal work. I made the mistake of buying one of his books (it was second-hand, so not a big loss). A not very plausible plot with not very plausible characters padded out with crap like several pages of pi and similar dumps of stuff to skip over. Those could have been cut down by, for example, replacing several pages of pi with "Fred Boring printed out several pages of pi and gave it to Jane Tokenwoman to read" rather than inflicting it on us. But hey, it means he can "write" a book with half the actual work.

If he gets any further up his own arsehole he could end up being nominated for a Booker.

And the other annoyances...

Modern web pages on mobiles with delayed/JIT loading. Such as on esquire.com. You're scrolling through the text when suddenly it jumps to make way for an advert that's just started loading. So you have to scroll back to where you were, and because the advert is now off-screen it collapses, causing another text jump. Grrrrrrr.

What I find more annoying is Windows dialogue boxes that insist on monotasking. You've navigated through a load of configuration menus/submenus/subsubsubsubsubsubsubmenus to get to the one you want. Only to find you need some more information from somewhere else in order to figure out which option to select. On any sane operating system this dialogue box multitasks, not only with other applications but with the application it is a dialogue box of. So on any sane OS you can look through other aspect of the app, or use google, to find out what you need to know and continue configuring. On Windows you have to abandon all progress (by repeatedly cancelling your way up the menu tree) until you can dig out the info you needed, write it down (no point jotting it in Notepad because you won't be able to get at Notepad when you need it), painfully go back through all those dialogue menus, and do what you need to do.

What the fuck could be more stupid than that? Oh yeah, in order to stop your computer running, click on the START menu.

It was often said of ATLAS (Abbreviated Test Language for All Systems, a US military invention for testing avionic systems) that its most useful command is "LEAVE ATLAS" to permit a jump to something written in a more usable and useful language.

I expect the most longed-for command on Bixby will be "Bixby, FUCK OFF FOREVER!" Sadly, I doubt it will be implemented. So you'll have to go through many fiddly, non-obvious menus to get rid of it most of the time, although it will insist on sneaking back in some circumstances (if the google voice thingy on my android phone is anything to go by).

Like a chainsaw, the Internet is not a toy for unsupervised use by children.

I do not want my ability to see LEGAL material curtailed in order to make life easier for inadequate parents who want to be able to plonk their children in front of a computer as an alternative to plonking them in front of a TV.

What colour is Uranus?

The same colour as Mars.

I have no idea what made me think of that. Apart from the fact that those pics remind me of the appearance of the toilet the morning after a vindaloo when I do a really runny shit.

Somebody EVER thought Zuck was a genius?

This article stands with others along the lines of "Does gravity make you fall?" "Is water wet?" and "Is Trump insane?"

Farcebook is a pile of poo. The UI sucks big time. Want to read the most recent comments on a post when there are a lot of comments? Chronological order seems like a good way, until you realize it puts the newest posts at the bottom, not the top where you want them.

It's a pile of shit catering to narcissists. It took off because some people are so self-obsessed they'll put up with a really shitty interface as long as they can post their banal, trite, masturbatory crapfest.

Zuck isn't a genius, he was just lucky that the pile of shitty garbage he put together was slightly more popular than similar piles of shitty garbage that were around at the time and that positive feedback kicked in. Without Zuck we might have had something a lot better.

Betcha the religious fundies eat unhealthy foods

Praise the Lard!

Truecrypt is a threat

The problem with truecrypt is, and has been for at least 6 years (when I first took a look at it) that it supports hidden volumes. Sounds wonderful. If you're doing something very bad, you use a hidden volume. With just the ordinary pw you see the ordinary volume. Use a second pw and you see the hidden volume (if there is one). Wonderful! Except...

As the documentation says, your adversary cannot prove that you're using a hidden volume, even if you are. What the documentation doesn't say is that you cannot prove that you're not using a hidden volume even if you're not. Throw in the law regarding handing over the encryption keys and you can go to prison for life.

The police can require you to hand over your encryption keys. Fair enough, you give them the key to the ordinary volume. Then they ask for the key to the hidden volume. Which you don't have because you're not a bad guy so you're not using one. But the bad guys say that too, so the police insist. You repeat that you're not using one so you can't hand over the key. Six months (or 3 months, or whatever) in prison. Upon release they ask you for the key to the hidden volume. You repeat that you weren't using one. Back to prison you go, with no way of breaking out of the loop.

All that was bad enough, but at least you could cover yourself by using a hidden volume even if you weren't doing anything dodgy enough to need one. The docs did NOT warn you to do that, no did occasional appeals by various people in the forums to document it achieve anything. A couple of years ago I checked again - still no warning that you MUST use a hidden volume to be safe. Plus now there's a patch, not supported by the developers but advertised on the site to have hidden volumes inside hidden volumes to any arbitrary depth. At that point no sane person would ever use truecrypt because plod will insist you have the patched version on a thumb drive and however many depths of key you give them they will insist there is one more.

I repeat, for the hard-of-thinking, use truecrypt and you are at risk of spending a lifetime in prison.

Asterisk sucks

Unlike others, I'm not going to offer an opinion on the merit of the idea itself. I've been wrong enough times in the past (twitter? srsly?) that my opinion about the merits of the idea is probably wrong. Well, it would probably be wrong if I thought about the idea long enough to form an opinion in the first place.

What I will say is that asterisk is Krap with a special K. Yeah, it works most of the time but the innards are a horrible mess meaning that every so often it has an epileptic fit. Asterisk WILL lose calls. Try freeswitch instead. Don't bother trying to run either of them in a VM no matter what the docs (and testimonials) say - you'll get stuttering even when the host machine is at minimal load.

Other than that, go for it. Maybe you'll make a lot of money, maybe you'll lose a lot of money. But asterisk guarantees you'll have problems, so don't do that.

It's war

The guy is a twat.

One primary aspect of warfare is that it causes damage. If played according to the rules then that damage affects only the military of the other side. If played not according to the rules (as happened in every war that has ever occurred) then it affects civilians too.

It's warfare. Doesn't matter whether it fucks up the SCADA of electricity generators or fucks up bank accounts, it's warfare. Here's a big fucking clue: whether you demolish essential infrastructure with a cruise missile or a virus, the effects are the same.

Cold blooded?

"They may have been cold-blooded"?

More likely not.

The sole surviving branch of the dinosaurs (birds) is warm-blooded.

One of the three types of scales on birds' legs can be induced (by chemical treatment of the embryo) to turn into feathers (down feathers, not flight feathers).

Fossils of several dinosaur species have been found to have feathers (flight feathers in archaeopterix, down feathers in others).

Down feathers provide insulation. Important in WARM-blooded animals.

So probably warm-blooded.

Of course, you did say "may," but in context that reads as "Despite being cold-blooded..."

Now I shall go outside to watch the dinosaurs.

Let your satnav do the walking...

The most likely explanation for vehicles ending up on undriveable paths and having to be airlifted out of there by helicopter is not mapping errors but due to the nut behind the wheel.

Most satnavs offer a choice of fastest route, shortest route and WALKING route. Guess which choice results in vehicles trapped on goat tracks...