Posts by Steve Brooks

bloody daylight savings, its all wank!

Isn't it about time we stopped all tihs pansy arsed pissing around with time zones and daylight savings wank. If you want to get up an hour earlier get up a frigging hour early. Put all computers on 24 hour time using one central time standard, if software wants local time, the user can type in the current time and the software can adjust itself, but the ocmputer and all appointment and time sensitive programs should run on 24 hour central time, and I don't care what central, Greenwich, paris, even bloody Timbuctoo, but the sooner we stop changing the master time on our computers every time the bloody sun starts shining thee happier I'll be!

TOS needs taming.

"just their own terms of service" And the terms of service for the iphone state that they can kill your app for...well....any reason they care to. In fact they state they don't have to have a reason to kill you, but just cause they want to. TOS need to be made to comply at least marginally with reasonable rules of business, in other words they shouldn't be allowed to use TOS that give them total control over your lifes work, I think this was amply demonstrated with the big uprising over google's ( and others) TOS that simply stated (paraphrased for simplcity) "we owns all your stuff!"

make mine an ipad with extra kosher please

"Many countries don't check equipment carried by individual travellers but the Israelis may have taken the view that as they are new and sought after......" Or alternatively since they are new and sought after the Israeli security guards have decided it would look nice sitting on their coffee tables and so decided to actually enforce a rule that they normally ignore.

DAB DEAD

As usual with technology it will develop in the direction that people want to go. Time and again governments have tried pushing develpopment, only to find it spear off into a completely unexpected direction, the more money they throw at trying to guide technology, the more money they end up throwing away. Its likely that by the time DAB has exanded to provide coverage to 94% of the population streaming radio from the internet will be encroaching on that traditional market and DAB will fail before it even starts. best let the market, led by the people, decide what they want. I mean even where the big corporations try to force people to follow thier rules they are just ignored (RIAA et al and file sharing) what makes the governments of any country think they will fare any better.

turfed

So he had a choice, he could leave the train politely, or object and be "physically" turfed off, probably very painfully and with some damage from sliding along the platform after being physically turfed. Could you aks the spokesman where, in the definition of turfed, does it mention that it requries physical force, turfed is merely the act of removal against ones will, the methods of that turfing are immaterial. He's an idiot, and there's no doubt on the defintiion of that one I might add!

censorship...blah!

Of course I simply don't understand why its necessary to filter it out In countries such as those. Surely everybody is so religiously inclined they simply wouldn't type in those words anyway, so the only people they are protecting are actually visitors who aren't sexually repressed freaks in the first place. Censorship is all rather strange, all you are doing is protecting people who don't need protecting, and those who do need to be stopped, the crims, paedophiles, drug dealers etc, just use technology to go around the fitlers.

Like a One Man Band, only worse!

"Single Chip Cloud" isn't that like a "one man band?" Plays lots of instruments, none of them for very long, none of them particularly well, and people rarely go for second hearing.

Sort of pointless really.

Free Internet doesn't just mean free news

"As long as Australians are free to read articles such as this criticizing the law, I don't see any threat to Australian democracy." Fortunately there are many Australians that disagree with you on this Mr Conroy under a false name, don't presume to speak for others on this regard, certainly if you are happy to be censored I will be happy to come around and install family friendly filter on your PC, but why should I be censored to the level of a child without a choice.

Its not about not being able to read news, its about not being able to access adult suitable material such as, ooh, abortion information, euthenasia discussions, spraypainting movies etc. The porn is just a a bonus ;-)

soon get rid of them

Easy one for the terrorists to fix for us, all they need to do is invent a trigger that goes off when they are scanned. How many security guards are going to stand beside the scanner then? Better yet, what will the rest of the passenger do when they see the security guards direct some poor victim through the scanner, then leg it behind the nearest blast wall! Oh fun times.

Shemale?

"and she thinks female orgasms are 'abhorrent'?"

I'll think you'll find that Senator Joyce Barnaby is actually a man. Well at least he/she dresses like a man, looks like a man and walks like a man, what's actually in his britches, or not as the case may be, is, thankfully, fully censored!

http://www.barnabyjoyce.com.au/

nonsense science!

"is said to release the “free energy” latent in the space all around us."

Well yes, plenty indeed, vacuum energy, however its calculated that to release vacuum energy in any usable quantity it will require the sum total of energy in the universe. The N-Machine may simply be harnessing the power of the earth rotation to create energy, which will of course slow that rotation, making the days longer, causing run away climate change and super-cyclonic storms due to the heat differential between the light and dark side of the earth, and eventually cause the moon to crash into the earth due to tidal forces. Hmm, its amazing what you can pick up from Stargate innit!

secrets, lol

"If it's shared, how can it be a secret?" Maybe it becomes nearly a secret, like being nearly pregnant, or nearly dead. Strangely enough my bank just dropped the "secret question" verification routine as being to insecure to rely on for identification for major finacial transactions, so who designed these systems?

DRM

So the only real aff4ect of DRM is to stop people who paid for it from actually seeing it, I am sure the pirates already have it cracked and uploaded to P2P.

"In other words, the technology would have worked better, if they'd used it less." One interpretation, the other is, the technology is fine and worked exactly as it was inteneded, people without valid decryption keys can't watch or play it, we just get less revenue as a result. But hang on, isn't DRM supposed to stop piracy and increase revenue?

Kid safe world You bet!

"But we must ensure that the virtual world is as safe for them as this one"

Oh dear, oh deary deary me. Whatever will they think of next, make it as safe as the real world, because in the real world you certainly let your 6 year old go down the palyground by him/herself, and just drop them off at the pool and ask a passing stranger to walk them in or send them toddling off across the motorway to buy you pack of fags down the local supermarket. NO IDIOTS!! Kids are safe in the real world because their effing parents don't let them walk around alone, the don't let them cross the road alone, or wander off with strangers! The real worl IS NOT KIDDY SAFE! I wonder if they heard that? Probably not, political selective hearing I guess.

VOMIT!

I once had the misfortune to go to dinner in Australia one day to a well know steak house that served, well....steak! It was all Amercanised right down to the staff uniform, cowboy hats, cowboy boots and cowboy shirts. And amazingly enough, right in the middle of serving, they all lined up in the middle of the floor and did a line dance, all smiling and happy and spontaneous. And I am sure, before starting work that night, the manager had given them a pep talk something along the lines of...."YOU WILL F&^%$#ING DANCE TONIGHT, AND YOU WILL LOOK F&^%$#ING HAPPY DOING IT, AND IF YOU DON'T LOOK F*&^%$#ING HAPPY DOING IT I AM GOING TO FIRE YOUR WORTHLESS F(*&^%ING A(*&^%$S INTO NEXT F&^%$#IING WEEK, F*&^%$ING GOT THAT?"

learn how to think people!

" At the moment, the 2-qubit processor is only 79 per cent accurate."

Q: What is 2 + 2 ?

A: 4.

Q: What is 2 + 2 ?

A: 4.

Q: What is 2 + 2 ?

A: 3.

Q: What is 2 + 2 ?

A: Twelfty?

Sounds great.

Oh dear, miss the point and the boat. it doesn't matter what the factor of acuracy is as long as it is greater than 50%. It's a quantum computer, calculate 2+2 50 trillion times and use the answer that comes up most often, it will be 100% correct every time :-) As the preceding admittedly few calcualtion demonstrate clearly, the correct answer is 4.

insecure

"So a hacked system is insecure --- what a surprise"

Well actually no, any system that has a "default" password that isn't prompted to be changed automatically on first use is insecure. On first turning on an iphone the correct procedure should be to prompt people to enter their own passowrd and thus replace the default password. The insecurity is built into the system, much like windows, surprise!

paragraphs! They're for normal people.

You can always tell who the nuts are, paragraphs people, paragraphs. Has anybody else ever noticed how people with nutty idea also think paragraphs are for "other" people?

See that gap Wolf207, that's paragraph space, once you master that simple concept people will read a lot more of what you write, I only went back to read it because of the other comments, I originally dismissed it as nuts. Well....I was correct, true, but at least I would have made the effort to read it sooner.

Precendent? Use the one Apple set for em!

Living in Oz I have actually seen the woolies apple shaped logo in action, it is 100% linked to fresh food, the jingle for woolies in Oz is "Woolies, the fresh food people." Now Apple got around the Beatles trademark problem by simply pointing out that the Beatles sold Music and Apple sold computers (ignoring for now iTunes and the Apple Music Shop). To argue against Woolies using thier logo to sell fresh food would be to argue against their own argument that let them use the apple in their trademark.

Now to iTunes and et al. When apple started selling music (despite having promised never to do so, the Beatles didn't want two Apple logos in the music industry) there was a big court case, surely we all remember that? In fact the Beatles lost that case, the summary was thus;

"But Mr Justice Anthony Mann ruled that the computer company used the Apple logo in association with its store, not the music, and so was not in breach."

So Woolworth simply needs to dredge up the details of this case and argue that their green curly Apple logo is used in association with their store, and not any computer hardware it may sell, using Apples own court case as precedent. I can't imagine Woolies lawyers are idiots and since Apple themselves have already set the precedent I smell a big fail coming Apples way!

Autorun? Autofail!

"Well wtf is everyone doing plugging-in or inserting 'unknown' content into their USB/CD/DVD drives?"

Its not just about sticking unknown content into your USB drive. I often have to stick my SB memory stick into someone elses computer to use cleanup tools. Just a few times I have had the spyware/malware that I was trying to clean out silently install software onto the USB stick. Then the USB stick, once inserted into another computer, autoruns and infects it with spyware/malware. The infection uses the autorun feature to help spread, therefore the autorun feature is just another infection vector.

Of course having said that I have had people call me up to complain that thier CD drive isn't working and when I get there I find it is working perfectly. When I ask them why they think it isn't working they shove a disk in and wait and then say, "see, nothing happens!" So no autorun or autoplay pops up and they think its broken! Oh dear. I can see it now, dozens of complaints that their disks aren't working because they don't know how to select the CD/DVD drive and click "setup". That's what you get from raising a generation of people on windows!

20 years for MA15+ video clip!

Oh thats nothing, try this on for size.

"Queensland Police want to send a father of four to jail for up to 20 years on child-abuse charges over a video the Federal Government's own censors have classified as MA15+."

http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/over-the-top-childabuse-video-rated-ma15-20090903-f95t.html

confronting? Bollocks, this is confronting.......F^%$ O*&^

Now that you have all finished barbacueing the poor lady for her use of ALL CAPS, why don't you actually have a look at the email itself, yes....I know, actually look at the evidence first, novel idea aye? Just to help, here is a link to an article with a reproduction of the email in question.

First thing we notice, it isn't actually ALL in CAPS, just the last sentence, ibviously to make it stand out more, quite likely she has had people ignore her previous emails, or when she askes them why they didn't do as she asked probakly mumbled soemthing like "oh I didn't see it hidden down there at the bottom."

The other thing we notice is that the only bit of colour used is in the date and time, obviously an inportant deadline if its in red, should make people notice this time aye? Well they did notice it, enough to get her sacked!

All in all as a confronting email it fails on several points, for a start it contains the word PLEASE (yes in caps I must admit) and any email that contains the word please is not very confronting at all, and there are NO SWEAR WORDS (either in caps or as far as I can tell in the small writing). As an excuse for sacking someone it seems to me to be just that, an excuse.

Bing (Crosby) maps FAIL!

"This is Nessie: http://www.bing.com/maps/default.aspx?v=2&FORM=LMLTCC&cp=57.378094~-4.343183&style=a&lvl=19&tilt=-90&dir=0&alt=-1000&phx=0&phy=0&phscl=1&encType=1"

Ok so just for the heck of it I checked it out, Bing Maps, hah. I think its called Bing maps because the (low resolution) maps were relevant when Bing Crosby was a big star, now they just show old roads that either no longer exist or have been replaced by 6 lane highways, so its hardly going to be a useful tool to spot anything that happened in, say, the last 30 years!

BG 1980

Oh dear, flying motorcycles, Battlestar Galactica 1980 all over again, it was a bad idea then, what has changed in the meantime that makes it any better?

trials? Who needs em when you can set the goal posts yourself!

Interesting you should ask. Some ISP's have finished the trials, one said that there was no slow down experienced by the opt-in testers at all. When further queried about the number of participants they said that 15 of their custmer base had opted in. And yes youdid read that right 15, not 1500, or even 150, but 15! The government is happy with the trial and the said they will write the report, yes them, NOT an independent testing lab called Ennex who did the actual testing. Most respected Ausrtalian scholars and statisticians have said that the results from such small samples are meaningless.

Oh yes, the government has also said that once they have written the report they will set the success criteria and declare the trial a complete success, mind you it was said a bit more diplomatically than that, but that's what it amounts to.

Find that hard to believe?

http://www.arnnet.com.au/article/312845/statistics_experts_label_isp_filtering_trials_unscientific?fp=16&fpid=1

idiots the lot of you.

1) The guy had a lghter in his hand and was running at the police with a full container of petrol and threatening to burn them alive, forgive me for thinking that this was a life threatening situation. The story is if they hadn't had the taser they would have had to use their handguns. of course they COULD have just ran away and not bothered trying to arrest him, which sends a good message tot he aboriginal youth, just threaten to burn them and they will let you alone no matter what you do!

2) The police had gone to the house to arrest him, he wasn't NOT going to get arrested, even if he HADN'T run at police. And yes it is illegal to posess petrol for the purposes of sniffing, just as its illegal to possess paint spray cans for the purposes of performing acts of vandalism (well art in some sub-cultures), and no its not illegal to possess petrol for the purposes of pouring into the petrol tank of your car.

There are legal and illegal uses for all kinds of devices and substances

Fake, oh yes, file sharing forever!

"Doesn't anyone else think it's more than odd that NASA erased the original hi-resolution moon landing tapes?" Actually no, this is the reason why file sharing is essential to our society, because the idiots in charge don't have the sense to keep their data safe. If file sharing existed back then there would be milions of hi-def copies all over the world, so it's our duty to posterity to keep as many terrabytes of shared files on our hard drives as possible! And yes they are fake, they're wooden mockup NASA put there to convince anyone taking pictures that we actually went to the moon.....wait, um, well it sounded sensible when that conspiracy nut told me all about it!

Stopping, use the sir brakes sir! Oops no air! Who designed this crate!

"It's all very well accelerating at ridiculous speeds to get to Mars in just over one month instead of a year. But I hope the brakes are good because you might want to stop when you get there!!" Umm the usual method for a continuous thrust propulsion device is that you accelerate for half the journey then turn the whole shebang around and decelerate for the other half. Theoretically, if you weren't worried about stopping, you could get there in much less than one month.

sounds familiar

"Green Dam's developers disabled Cybersitter's porn blacklist. "Their own blacklist has only about 6,000 sites on it and many don't exist any more," Milburn tells us. "You can surf all day for porn and you won't be blocked."

Ah, just like the Australian "we must protect the children" filter then. Almost no sites listed compared the actual number out there, most of the sites are already closed and gone, and rather than protect the children the main aim seems to be to disrupt normal internet use.

I wonder who's learning from who here!

idiots!

"As for consensus, surely 20,000 individuals sending a unified message in less than 24 hours is something at least worth your consideration."

Idiots....That's 20,000 individuals WHO STILL USE OUTLOOK no matter how bad it is. It just sends the message to MS that no matter how bad it is people will still use, so why bother wasting money to fix it! Maybe if you got those 20,000 people to uninstall Outlook, package the disk and licence up and send it to MS with a note telling em that they will never touch Outlook again until it is fixed they might get a reaction. Bottom line is, as long as people keep using it MS coudn't care less how bad it is.

Krudd and Conjob FTW

"Spotty little fucks like this need to keep their noses out of things like the internet," unfortunately us in the good ol US....oops sorry, Australia, it gets hard to tell the differemce sometimes, actually voted a spotty little fuck just like him into supreme power and now he's keen to censor us all whether we like it or not, so just learn from our plight, blighties, get rid of him by any means necessary as the saying goes!

Steve from AU

passwords? Who needs em!

"If you have to surrender your keys, but not a safe combination, then if the password is in his memory, he shouldn't have to surrender it"

The best option is to NOT have the password in your mind, then you can't be compelled to surrender it. For instance, I can't imagine it would take much effort to create an encryption system that encrypted the data using a completely random password if the computer wasn't shut down properly (ie: using the original password). So border guard spies some, erm, interesting stuff, immediately confiscates laptop and hard powers down, next time it starts up it randomly generates a password and encryptes the file system, and you can argue its just a standard security feature to prevent IP theft etc in case someone steals the laptop.

demand register?

"Our local phone company wasn't in a big hurry to roll DSL out either, siting that there was no demand; They had a "list" that you could "sign up for" that no one ever saw."

Ah yes for the local demand register for the broadband on a web page that takes 10 minutes to load for dial-up and that people without internet can't even access - so no response to a register that you can't actually get to = no demand.

time travel really possible then?

"it is likely to find evidence that NCSoft willfully and deliberately infringed on its patent. ®"

Now here's an interesting one, how can you willfully and deliberately infringe on a patent that doesn't exist? Are they claiming that NCsoft used a time machine to travel forward in time, saw that there was such a patent issued, then travelled back in time to create an infringing game?

Or alternatively that NCsoft saw the patent released, then travelled back in time ot create previously non-existing prior art to claim expemption? If they did they have changed the future, apparantly succesfully despite all previous evidence that such a thing is impossible, changing the past always creates a calamity in the future when the traveler returns. Or is that actually how the war on terror started? In that case couldn't we take NCsoft to court for creating the terrorism threat, the Iraq war and anything else nasty that's happened in the last few years?

Nutjobs? They're all nutjobs!

As for "First past the post at least keeps the fringe elements (aka nutjobs) out of office", what utter bollocks. Anne Widdicombe springs to mind (unfortunately).

As does Conroy, Rudd etc, just because you are a member of a major party doesn't make you immune from being a nutjob. The problem is we know that the fringe elements are nutjobs simply because of the name of their party, its the nutjobs you elect that are hard to spot that are the problem.

suspects as criminals!

"you can't cry about a law being unfair when you're wantonly breaking the law in the first place"

The entire problem is here;

"The content industry has lobbied to force internet service providers (ISPs) to disconnect users they SUSPECT of engaging in copyright-infringing file-sharing after two warnings."

Not know, not have proof, but SUSPECT.

So that's anybody. This law is not designed to stop pirates accessing the internet, its to stop SUSPECTS accessing the internet. Maybe they should apply the same theory to speeding and take your licence away if they suspect you have been speeding, how does that sound? Or how about suspected armed robbers, you're carrying a knife, therefore you are a supected armed robber and subject to a curfew, we'll ignore the fact that you are wearing oevralls and are in the process of removing paint from a window, you're still a suspect.

Hey this is getting really useful, so not that we now apply penalties to SUSPECTS in some areas, maybe it will be useful for the police. The police have a list of suspects for a crime, lets not bother trying to find out who actually did it, just bang the lot up, the guilty ones bound to be ammong them, so job done! 100% solving of all crimes.

even if it was free, it wouldn't be popular!

"If ISP level content filters were popular ... "

The Australian Government tried giving away FREE filtering software, unfiortunately the 2% uptake of the free software didn't meet the governments expectations.

http://www.netalert.gov.au/filters.html

So they decided to shaft us all, bastards!

Nice outlines!

@dudeskinn "look on the net before you make absurd comments. It is just an outline"

Ooh like this you mean?

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/10/16/2392829.htm

Nice "outlines" indeed

Or this comment from one of the deploying bodies.

"It will show the private parts of people, but what we've decided is that we're not going to blur those out, because it severely limits the detection capabilities. It is possible to see genitals and breasts while they're going through the machine, though."

Another piccy here;

http://www.news.com.au/travel/story/0,26058,24440099-5014090,00.html

And a better example, see the point (sorry couldnt resist that one lol)

ebay of course

"Surely she missed a trick by not selling it on eBay?"

No she didn't miss that trick!

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,24366956-2,00.html

Depends

"I have to admit that I see the USAF's point here. Given that an enlisted man wrote software for use specifically by the USAF,"

I think whether or not he owes the code the government due to his employment depends very much on what he was employed to do, if he was employed to write code to do this sort of thing then yes they would have an expectation, if he was employed to shoot people and wrote the code as a hobby that's different. To claim that he owed the Air Force the code would be the same as claiming that if an enlisted man painted masterpieces in his spare time they were also government property. They wouldn't be, even if he hung them in the canteen to brighten the place up because he thought it was dull and mind numbing.

Just because other members of the forces found his code useful doesn't meant they automatically owned it, just as they wouldn't own the painting if they liked them.

security?

"And how do they verify users who call tech support (which redirects to a call centre in India)? By asking for username and login password over the plain phone line, of course."

Lucky you don't live in AU, The countries largest ISP (or their claimed representative) will call you on YOUR phone with what they caim is an important message, then ask for proof of who you are, date of birth, un/pw, full name, address, maiden name etc. But ask them to prove who THEY are and they respond by replying that they can't do that until they know who YOU are and refuse to provide further details.

Brian-wave?

"rather than the more usual politician-with-a-brian-wave"

Ok so the only thing that stood out for me in the entire collection of user comments was this one, I just can help wondering what a brian-wave would look like? I'm from Australia so that probably explains it though!

Steve

to be or not to be: religion

"Certainly the idea that a government tells you whether ones beliefs constitute a religion or not is abhorrent."

Well the main problem here is that being a religion has certain benefits not available to ordinary organisations. Why in this case coouldn't anyone make up thier own religion and then claim a tax free status based on that. Or do we have a panel of "other" religions deciding which belief system can be classed as religion, I am sure that would go down well!

There has to be a definition or list of acceptible religion for governments to operate with, either that or remove all the benefits of being a religion and make them just an ordinary organisation subject to ordinary taxes and rules.

lots to hit

"Any way what is there to hit any where near Alice?"

Again somebody whose obviously never been to Alice Springs, it's usually the drivers mother laying in the middle of the road after an all day bender on the local cask red.

perGb usage charges

Good idea, then you can all join the poor fools in AU who still use Bigpond as their provider, 20Mb download speed, 200Mb usage allowance, $150.00Gb excess usage charges, $15,000 monthly internet bill!

And no, I'm not joking, these plans are still being sold to grannies and OAP's

one jub or two?

"The standard unit of weight shall be the Jub (Jb), representing the weight required to crush an Australian beer can at sea level,"

What? Just how thick are you lot? I know for a fact it takes two jubs to crush a beer can, I was there!

Steve, Perth WA