Posts by DropBear

Re: Just one thing left to make it good

"Yes, I could remember that. But why should I have to when there's no need?"

Funnily enough that exact reason is why I have zero use for "searching" for programs. I simply have no idea what they're called - what was that again, "fruityfoglia"...? Ah, no, "Piriform defraggler" - and I would have found it even in my sleep right in the "System Tools" start menu folder where I keep such things. Yes, I can remember "Visual Studio", but I can't remember the names of 90% of the tools I use - I just know to hit up everything I find under "Recovery Tools" whenever something gets deleted that should not have been. Same for various media conversion tools. Or audio editors. Or esoteric CAD format viewers. Or hex viewers. Or CPU fan speed / temperature testers. Or whatever else. I have no idea what any of those are called, so I CAN'T search for them. But I sure CAN browse, and let me assure you, my first-level start menu is a single column wide. I can reach anything I have within 2-3 levels, tops. But search is NOT discoverable - and Windows is welcome to shove it where the sun don't shine just as much as Ubuntu is, as far as I'm concerned.

Did they start 27000 years ago?!? That's one heck of a "long game" indeed...

Same there

...except you can't, see, they're "all gone". So you buy one from someone who already has one and is willing to sell / lease, for the mentioned $1M. Neat, innit?

Re: Haha, they'll be taken down even faster. They're making the...

They're making the Enigma mistake.

You mean they'll encode an input character to any other character except the original one...? I'm a bit confused here...

Re: The definition of insanity ...

The quoted definition is a horribly poor one anyway - it only applies if everything concerned is deterministically influenced solely by the user input and nothing else; if any uncontrolled variables are present (yeah, welcome to the Real World) the definition of insanity would be rather to expect the same thing to happen every time...

Re: So what this is

My only problem with this is that one needs to use something the size of the Arecibo radio telescope dish to make RFID work farther than 40.000 mm away. Granted, RFID also uses that energy to run the chip itself which I gather is not the case here. On the other hand, RFID usually has a half-decent sized loop - again, not the case here. *Yoda voice* ...curious piece of tech this is...

Re: WTF!!!

"operating" here was meant to mean "charge it up, turn it on and put it in your pocket".

Re: Falcon XX

"the "slightly used rocket" has a proven track-record of making a successful flight, which includes stresses and regimes that you just can't test for. "

I'm not quite sure where to factor into that possible metal fatigue / starting hairline cracks / wire harnesses on the verge of getting interrupted / shorted / abraded / melted in hard-to-reach places etc. It clearly wouldn't be practical to unbolt every single nut after every single launch, although I'm sure that's exactly what they'll do for the first time...

Re: Mere mortals, they are not.

I'd prefer to see some "Dark-Matter/Dark-Energy-in-a-vial" produced by boffins first before I'm convinced it is something that actually exists... Hmmm, perhaps we could try to produce some using appropriately sized Dark Suckers...?

Well...

"Personally, I usually quite like superhero movies, for the simple reason that they are mindless escapism, much like James Bond for example. If I want to be challenged intellectually I'll read a book."

To each his own I guess, but I have to say superhero movies don't work for me at all - the glossy, sleek CGI feels like a cheap veneer of plastic to me and everybody being over-the-top strong/resilient/etc. makes it much harder for me to care for any of them than for Lt. Bullit for instance. There is really nothing at stake, we all know it all too well. As for intellectuality, Hopscotch or Charade (heck, even Love and Bullets) are hardly Eisenstein-level heavy duty stuff either, but I enjoy them even today incomparably more than the 101th incarnation of "bad guy shows up, kicks the hell out of good guys, good guys regroup, barely manage to defeat bad guy, THE END". I think I can handle a bit more challenge than that...

Re: Oatmeal?

That's okay, I have no idea what either is...

Re: Its either free speech or its not

Indeed. I strongly suspect that anyone attempting to exclusively cultivate "wonderful, creative, funny, smart, and silly communities" only will find it harder than creating a magnetic monopole. There's that pesky thing about no matter how small groups of people you study you grind up magnets, they keep developing opposing poles...

Yeah wouldn't it be nice. Except even though I have Flash set to "Ask to activate" I have to activate it literally dozens of times every day, to access content or services I'm absolutely NOT willing forego. Security is always secondary to actual functionality, and while I would certainly prefer to be less vulnerable, uninstalling flash will not happen a long as I'm forced to use it or accept being locked out.

I suppose it's the age old "just because I have no use whatsoever for this property of mine doesn't mean you're allowed to use it instead, even if that would mean zero inconvenience for me" argument - one of the classic cases where what's legal and what's moral are at polar opposites. I wonder when, if ever, will people finally realise that "lawful" implies no correlation whatsoever with "reasonable", "moral", "the right thing to do", "decent", "sane" etc.

Re: A Certain Age

In other news, arbitrary definition of "planet" is arbitrary. I prefer to define "planet" as "orbiting the sun but not as a moon of another planet" and "round" (reserving the right to exclude accidentally spherically shaped pebbles). I promise not to be bothered by whatever definition the boffins choose to agree upon as long as they leave me alone to use mine and that's that.

Re: If my phone can become a PC...

Valid point, but in different circumstances where standardized "monitor+keyboard+mouse" shells were practically ubiquitous, the idea of only having to carry your phone around to always have access to your own laptop-like computer does have merit (even if only between home and office - I know which I'd prefer to carry, a laptop or a phone...). And that doesn't even start addressing more far-fetched use cases where projected keyboards and tightly-rollable / foldable / projected screens might give you the same thing completely integrated in a roughly phone-sized package. To be honest, the logical conclusion of "personal computing" started by the PC _is_ the piece of hardware you already carry everywhere - your phone. The rest is details...

Not all versions of Firefox can play HTML, and not everyone is free to upgrade to the latest FF on the latest OS (please don't mention Palemoon - same issue applies except this time you won't even get to install it).