Posts by DropBear

Re: Hmm.

That's only true for the 1.0 version. Mark II will include patented lightsaber technology, and the photons will stop propagating past half a meter or so from the screen...

Re: He obviously read my comment on the previous article

A mod of this needs to go on Kickstarter, stat. It should read "USB inverter with 220V output! Plug in your power brick and power your laptop from its own USB port for free indefinitely!" If things go the usual way, the campaign would be at least halfway through before anything happens...

Re: hang on...

So tell me - does she seem to be unaware of the "camera" in the video...? No...? Quite the opposite? Well then...

Re: FCC regulating unlicensed bands

"You OBVIOUSLY do not understand the problem!"

Well it's a good thing then we have someone like you who does. Except of course that what they are actually trying to protect is that portion of the 5Ghz band (if your router only does 2.4GHz stuff, the FCC's new stuff doesn't even care about you) that some... ugh... bright spark both left open for unlicensed use and also employed as a weather radar band. Routers using that band are supposed to continuously listen for radar chirps and if they receive any they must back off and stay the fuck off that channel; existing routers in that band already contain code that takes care of this. Apparently, some alternative stuff makes it possible to hose that functionality and apparently some clueless people managed to turn it off resulting in nicely "shadowed-in" sectors like this - that's what they're so pissed about.

Re: They still don't get it.

"clarity was urgently needed"

Nono, those "medium-sized companies" know full well there's a snowflake's chance in hell they'll suddenly stop sending data overseas; the clarity sought is regarding what new piece of legal excuse can they use to justify going on as usual...

Maybe they calculated how many people can you feed for how many days with all the Ramen you can buy for that and went from there...

Re: I say we take him at face value...

Well of course we did have impeccable versioning but you see m'lud the leopard kicked over the filing cabinet with all the whirring things inside and cor blimey, everything got a bit jumbled up so we can't really tell who dunnit no more, honest, guv!

Re: Their (lack of) privacy stance will strangle this in the crib.

" I genuinely wish somebody would step up and give Apple a push as their software has been getting sloppy, but it doesn't seem to be happening."

Hey, if you have the VC cash mountain required to start up the real-world Sandbenders, I'm game...

Re: re. battery life

Re: battery belt (I propose we do it properly and make it a bandolier) - I do believe it would grant the wearer absolutely awesome battery life superpowers, but for the love of $DEITY don't EVER try to enter an airport or a bank wearing one (and absolutely, positively NEVER EVER try to wear it at school)...

Re: So what will you do about it?

If you can do work you actually enjoy then you are vastly more fortunate than most and if you can afford to treat 0s in your income so chivalrously then you clearly aren't affected by the more gruesome ways money makes the world go round for people who can barely afford to pay for their continued existence even when they do still have a job. And no, you don't have to go to Asia or Africa to find armies of them. One could argue you seem to be ill-equipped to try solving their financial problems I'd say...

Re: only one suitable comment

This is NOT like giving a child a knife only to find he cut himself with it - this is like giving an ADULT a knife only to find him/her complaining loudly "OH GAWD, THIS CUTS?!?" F**king retard...

Re: Honesty?

Seriously?!? Anyone who seriously thinks that a rocket sent to the moon cannot possibly fail in any imaginable way needs to take his medication, stat...

Re: Once I was a computer geek...

"Trying to do DTP with a word processor is like trying to nail jelly to a tree"

On one hand, you're quite right. On the other hand, do please tell me who ever set out to "nail jelly to a tree" instead of wanting to stick an image somewhere and have it STICK THERE. Why do these pieces of shit called "word processors" exist at all?!? Halfway between "text-with-rigid-layout" and "bucket'o'ASCII with (some form of) linefeed", they make exactly as much sense as being "half alive"...

Re: Plausible

"It really is quite plausible"

No. It really, really isn't.

Re: That was rather predictable

"I mean seriously, the people working at that company think..."

Amen to that! Seriously, "script kiddie" is an academic title compared to the level of crass amateurism going on on that site. I have to reload the front page about three times on average just to have it finally load at all. You get completely different front page for the exact same URL coming from outside or from within the site. You can search directly for a creator's name (featured prominently IF you find the guy by other means) and get zero results just because it's not their page's "official title" (so you better know that one or have a direct link...). There is absolutely no way to prod them to re-try charging your card for pending pledges if you ever hit a snag - you just try to muck with your payment details randomly hoping they'll retry when you hit "update" on the exact same card; sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. You can write them with explicit complaints and they'll thank you, admit you're right and promise to do something about it ASAP then of course nothing ever happens. It's just... ridiculously bad.

"It is only if enough people [...] the stupid law will be repealed"

Awesome! When can we expect copyright getting scrapped then? Next Tuesday sounds fine...

Re: Ogres

Ok, but which one is Churyumov and which one is Gerasimenko...?!?

Re: he was unaware of the "defeat device"

Bollocks. This is not "every aspect". This is THE ONE SINGLE aspect of how their engineering is done that management needs (and absofuckinglutely would) know about - exactly for the reasons depicted currently.

Re: In the UK

"Is this a good time or a bad time"

I'd say that depends a lot on the specific secondness of the hand in question - for instance, my double-decade old VW diesel never purported to be anything other than Euro 2 and I don't think it will suddenly develop any difficulty in sticking to that, so its price should not be impacted at all - whatever you'd consider its residual value to be. I can tell you it still runs great though, so I'm not sellin'...

Re: BBC programme

"So why is it vital to keep Bletchley secret from the Germans in 1979?"

To play the devil's advocate here - it's choice 4, plus the fact that "knowledge is power", exclusive knowledge exponentially so; therefore even if it wouldn't actually matter a miserable iota whether anyone else knew or not, them *not* knowing is demonstrably, quantitatively *moaaaar power* than letting them know - so obviously we don't, even if we have no other justification whatsoever to keep it secret. Which is not even the actual case - you listed a few reasons yourself...

Re: They've found 'MARVIN THE MARTIAN'

Naaah, they found that HP printer....

Re: Machine that DID go Ping

Could have been worse. Much worse. Like a bottle of tequila on the "delete" key...

Re: @Pete H

"it is highly likely that they will want to help you sort it out"

That's irrelevant. They won't have the authorisation to do so. First off, they'll be mighty annoyed that you are holding up the already endless queue with your unsolvable data mismatch. Second even if by some miracle they still find it in themselves to actually sympathize with you past that, they'll just patiently explain to you (several times while your tone goes up) that there's absolutely nothing they can do with your data screwed up like that - even if anyone can see what's wrong and what the right data is - because there's no way in hell they're allowed to override the existing data no matter how obviously wrong.

For that, you first have to go to the High Authority who has such powers, but do keep in mind they're only open during the lunch break (while they're out getting lunch, much like Major Major Major Major) and they also take about a month to look up some sort of proof to your claim even if it's neatly sorted in some cabinet in a room right behind the office you're standing in (SELECT DISTINCTROW is, like, haaaaaard in the real world, maaaaan....). That is, of course, assuming that (at least some branch of) said High Authority does actually reside in your own city - all bets are off if it doesn't. And you better be hoping said error is not something propagating through multiple documents, because if it is not even an elf's life span will suffice to get through the bureaucracy involved in fixing them all...