Posts by DropBear 4735 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2013
"The exact point of gravitational balance between the Earth and the Moon" is not very useful actually, depending on how you define "gravitational balance". The spot where the Earth and the Moon pull on you equally in opposite directions is nowhere near stable actually - the spot where the difference between those two exactly balances out the effects of your orbital speed around Earth is the one you're looking for (and known as "L1", with others all the way to "L5" )
"I don't believe that a driver who drives fast with a goal in mind will jeopardize the attainment of his/her goal by getting into an accident."
Utter bullshit. They have exactly three things in mind, and nothing else:
- It is my prerogative to drive as fast as I want and I do enjoy doing it so I damn right will, whenever I feel like it, which is always
- I am an excellent driver and accidents are what happens to other people - I can avoid one under any conditions because I have absolute perception and I am always perfectly in control
- I have none of my precious time to waste on those other losers who can't afford fast cars like mine - fuck them!
"In the post Tokyo/San Francisco earthquake world of the early 21st century, Colin Laney is referred to agents of mega-rock star Rez of the musical group Lo/Rez for a job using his peculiar talent of sifting through vast amounts of mundane data to find "nodal points" of particular relevance" - about William Gibson, Idoru
Maybe there will be, one day...
Actually, I find that the first ten pages invariably turn out to be either from Pinterest (which I'd prefer banned from my results in perpetuity considering a) it's always utterly irrelevant b) wants me to register even to give me the time of the day), Alibaba (for which I, not being an en-gros merchant with Eastern proclivities have precisely zero use, ever) or some site aggregating "best deals" from half of the retailers on the internet (bonus: if, accidentally, it advertises exactly the item I'm looking for, it turns out the affiliate link is expired or the item is no longer sold by the actual retailer who pretends to have never even heard of it).
Oh, and the best part? As far as I know, there is no such thing as "operator" or "boolean", at least not on Google. The only thing they let you do is put your terms in quotes to (hopefully) search for exact expression. "Plus" means nothing. "AND" means nothing (guess what, "OR" works - because it doesn't impede Googles ability to shove MORE unrelated garbage down your throat - but it's useless, because it's on by default either way). You wanted BOTH your search terms mandatory? Tough luck, sunshine, we don't have the technology for that. Not any more...
"It also means that if you have to replace a computer your email client is up to date almost instantly"
Why would you need IMAP for that? My mail is only archived on Gmail once I POP it, not deleted. I have a full copy. They have a full copy. And there's a Gmail setting called "Enable POP for all mail (even mail that's already been downloaded)" - any new device could slurp down everything to a fresh local POP store and keep going. Also, my mobe can see and search all of it all the time through its Gmail app.
I know IMAP _can_ mirror things locally - but as far as I know that's not really how you're _supposed_ to be using it; I just can't shake the feeling it's more of a local cache than a proper mailbox, and it might decide to "sync" to an empty folder wiping all my local mail any time something doesn't quite work out. I could be wrong - but I definitely don't enjoy performing edge-of-the-seat pucker-factor-eleven acrobatics just so I can keep doing exactly what I used to do, only imperceptibly differently and with one more sword hanging precariously above my head.
"People are also eminently capable of failing to notice a toddler, or as they are also known, mobile tripping hazards."
Living things tend to be exceedingly good at diverting/cushioning the blow in the last milliseconds preceding an impact they failed to avoid whenever there is something around they might want to protect; they can also be warned to exercise heightened caution wherever said mobile tripping hazards may dwell. Neither of those things is really feasible with a four-disk Flying Buzzsaw of Dismemberment. And no, you really don't want to get in contact even with a four-inch featherweight toy.
Say what...? As recounted, that would have been a non-event - assuming one of the sides is floating, you can't measure anything at all between two sides of a transformer, or indeed produce any kind of current flow, let alone an eventful one. At the very least, a voltmeter capable of measuring mains on the primary side should have had zero problems measuring across the sides of any transformer, regardless of what it was referenced to. I'm sure you did blow up something, but the details seem somewhat misremembered/understood...
...except the extension connector on the back of the Spectrum was gold-plated PCB traces ("fingers") of the CPU's bus, as-is, and building something that would properly galvanically isolate it while still doing bidirectional I/O at 3.5MHz, while not impossible, was at the time not a practical option for 99.999999% of its owners. Anything less would only have been buffering, hopefully protecting against back-driving the bus but not against any "funny" voltages. So what you actually did instead was design stuff carefully and properly the first time*!
* let's not get into risk multipliers caused by the appropriate PCB-edge connector being unavailable and fabricating your own from two other pieces of PCB comb-slit into flexible-ish individual contacts for each finger, with a bit of wire soldered onto for better-than-PCB-on-PCB contact. Yes, I did get a Kempston joystick interface out of it and yes, I was definitely wearing my brown pants when I first powered the thing up...
There's a clip on YouTube somewhere with a car stopping at a traffic light - then two youngsters rapidly drag a moped in front of it, get on it, back it forcefully into the car's bonnet with the "passenger" slamming himself onto it as well. On the other hand the clip is on YouTube - so the young Thespians noticed the dash cam and scuppered away in a real hurry right after that...
I'm in the process of assembling the most excellently tasteful auto-colour-changing-LED-powered "pot plant" desk tchotchke / night-light-wannabe with the sole and explicit raison d'etre of incorporating a merciless boost converter and one holder for every conceivably type of battery I tend to use in order to wring the remaining half of power out of them once their original gadget rejects them as empty. Just so I can ultimately throw them out in good conscience as completely empty indeed. You may now commence laughing at your earliest convenience...
"Well not sure about complete aircraft, but cockpits plus a bit..."
Considering how incredibly precarious the positions of dedicated Flight Sim control gear makers seem to be these days (and there are likely many times more people with cash and room for a HOTAS than a full cockpit) I wouldn't rush into mass production on that idea alone...
Dropbox folder completely encrypted through EncFS. Gets around both this specific problem and snooping by the cloud host. Much less practical if you need to share any of those docs, but between different devices of mine it works fine. The original issue of being MitM-ed at all remains of course...
"If a site owner shows a popup or Ts&Cs stating that XYZ is happening on their site for purposes A, B and C and the visitor agrees to that"
There is no "if". The visitor shall agree by virtue of needing to use the site, as evidenced by showing up and trying to use it in the first place. There is nothing "optional" involved in it anywhere. The number of activities you have the luxury to perform on any number of alternate sites if you have a problem with the original one's T&C is exceedingly small.
A few weeks back I learned about an awful lot of sites that they were Cloudflare-powered by virtue of all of them falling off the web, with some sort of SSL error - Cloudflare was throwing their hands up going "you can reach us, we can't reach this guy" but in the end, half the internet went missing for most of the holidays...
I have a very different experience with Palemoon - apparently related to the presence of "Goana" in some of the relevant strings, quite a number of sites treat it like a mobile browser, without any option to override that; and more often than not, the result is utterly broken even as a mobile web page. Also apparently, a simple user agent changer doesn't fix this. That is not to say Palemoon isn't quite useful most of the time, but site incompatibility due to this or other causes is not an occasional but a permanent annoyance for me...
" it's parsed the question correctly"
Absolutely not. It merely noted that "country" tends to be statistically closely associated with "state", and in the wikipedia article that most people statistically tend to click on in the search results there is a sub-heading containing both "border" and "states" and it quoted the first paragraph from that. "Parsed"...? It parsed precisely nothing.
"Given that email is so important, why are there so few email clients around? And why do people insist on using Outlook, when Thunderbird is so much more reliable (at least with IMAP)?"
Because casual users don't use anything that isn't a browser any more, and non-casual (enterprise) users have grown accustomed to the integrated facilities of Outlook, as you point out, for which still no acceptable substitute whatsoever seems to exist.
In my opinion, a proper integrated Carddav / Caldav (kinda exists in Lightning) support would be much more useful that any UI "redesign"; I stayed with Classic Theme Restorer ever since Firefox went mad and I refuse to upgrade to latest version that doesn't support it ever since Firefox went mad again. The instant Thunderbird does the same, I refuse to update that too. The loonies can have their Metro / Australis / Material design / "flat" / Gnome3 revolution all they want, I won't be following.
Ehhh, remodeling these days seems to be considered hardly a bigger deal than reshuffling furniture repeatedly until you like it, only you're reshuffling non-load-bearing walls instead (granted, hella unpleasant if you live next door). On the other hand I have doubts that construction of a new house would commence without an existing complete set of plans (such as they are), or that the architect would be willing to change anything past that point without discussing supplementary compensation up front...
I suspect this is supposed to be meant for those with "cold war" level neighbours who land their drone in a conveniently covert spot to monitor you continuously (a drone in flight wouldn't last long enough for much any meaningful "surveillance", and the inherent constant motion in its picture would defeat this "attack" anyway). Which means the classic adage applies: you're either a military site if you worry about this sort of thing, or else you really, really, REALLY worry about the wrong issue because you have an incomparably larger one.
@ThatOne that's ok, I'm suspecting a confusion is to blame - I'm well aware that the instrument the article talks about doesn't need to be aimed and works based on timings; I was reacting to the original post that alleged simply looking optically at stars could do the same which sounds seriously implausible in the absence of the relevant pulse timing shifts: "That said in space with a big enough star catalog [...] visible stars should be able to do the same."
Unfortunately for you, that was long after you passed away on a winter night in a damp cardboard box.
This will need to become far, far worse before it has any hope of getting any better, because as long as enough people aren't literally starving yet, people will inevitably prefer to try holding on to the last vestiges of whatever they have left rather then go out to get effortlessly pulverized by whatever military force will be commanded out to "restore order", justifying indefinite martial law in the process.
And without this sort of "encouragement" those that would be in a position to actually make a more acceptable wealth distribution happen will never feel inclined to do so on their own, regardless of how much ink gets wasted on the matter.
I don't think the ease of access to the required extra knowledge is the relevant issue, but rather the typical required level of effort - It doesn't matter if circumventing your lock would only require "level 11" effort instead of "level 10", if most locks can be bypassed at 10; most crooks just won't bother making the extra effort if 10 gets them where they want to go most of the time. Not that I think this offers much serious protection; but I don't think it's flat-out useless either as long as it's not the single thing you rely on for protection and as long as the average level of malware doesn't include randomization of traffic as standard feature (it might already for all I know). Rather like obscurity - it's piss-poor security by itself, but that doesn't mean it isn't useful all else being equal.
Unfortunately, it looks mostly like just "shut up" time - I've been looking at that number each and every day, and while it's steadily climbing it does so at a pace more glacial than an elderly snail. That it asks for an ongoing commitment probably doesn't help, although I can completely understand why it is necessary and ultimately it might not make that much of a difference. The slight problem of getting privacy-conscious folks to advertise the project on social media does remain though - if they're anything like me, they might have no way whatsoever to do that even if they wanted to...
PS - just noticed they removed the "mini noyb (250K) / full noyb (500K)" target - now it's just "250k or bust", exactly what I meant...
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