* Posts by Mike VandeVelde

355 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Mar 2007

Page:

Iran bans Tehran invasion first-person shooter

Mike VandeVelde
Big Brother

this one?

http://www.underash.net/en_download.htm

Not banned, as far as I know.

A list is here, if anyone knows any that are missing then go ahead and add them:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banned_video_games

Boffins reckon Mars quite blustery actually

Mike VandeVelde
Alert

Wormsign!

PETA riled by Mario's raccoon skin suit

Mike VandeVelde
Unhappy

laugh it up sickos, real hilarious

www.google.ca/search?q=dog+skinned+alive&safe=off&tbm=vid

Anonymous runs amock in Israel, Finland, Portugal

Mike VandeVelde
WTF?

"The group temporarily published..."

"temporarily published" - wtf is that?

"Senior figures in the hacktivist collective..." - senior as in members follow their orders?

:P

Smart meters: Nothing can possibly go wrong, says gov

Mike VandeVelde
Meh

"£12bn plan to roll out smart energy meters in the UK by 2019"

2019??? Got mine installed a few weeks ago, they'll all be done (BC Canada) by the end of next year:

http://www.bchydro.com/energy_in_bc/projects/smart_metering_infrastructure_program.html

We'll let you know how it goes...

The Register Guide on how to stay anonymous (part 1)

Mike VandeVelde
FAIL

"better targeted ads"

You can't get any better at targetting ads at me than just doing it randomly. Seriously. Do not want. Have never ever bought something because I saw it in an ad. The ad could be for a brand new life extending pill that also make you handsomer and that's just gone on sale for 95% off, and I would pass right by it or get up to use the bathroom while it played. I don't want to know about any "product" unless I am out looking for it, just make it convenient for me to find the information WHEN I WANT IT and that's the best you can do. If you try to cram information down my throat just because you think I might be interested you are pissing in the wind at best, more likely planting the seed of annoyance with your "brand" in my head.

"All this free technology" - so everything isn't hugely more expensive because of all the utterly ridiculously pointlessly retarded amount of resources that go into marketing in all its parasitic forms? The unholy triumvirate of financial and legal and promotional, doing their best to make capitalism into way more of an unworkable joke collapsing under its own weight than communism ever was.

Father of Lisp and AI John McCarthy has died

Mike VandeVelde
Pint

AI

We're no closer to AI than when he first invented the term, only able to make that much more detailed simulations thanks to moore's law marching on. Could have made a computer to win every possible chess match in the 70s if there were terabytes of memory and petabytes of storage and gigahertz of processing power available. Could make an expert system truly expert if you jam in enough rules and have enough processing power to trawl through them all. But that's not how intelligence works. Or maybe it is, who can say, we still have barely the faintest clue.

When the internet gains (gained?) consciousness, the trick will be (is?) to even recognize it as such. If it influences the world, say by creating online personalities, or altering communications between actual personalities online, who could guess what the goal might be? How long do you suppose it could (will?) go on without breaking through the surface of human awareness? When Gaia reaches this level in planetary evolution, who or what out there might take notice? At some point maybe the need for us fungal microbes that made it all possible might fade away, maybe there will be some kind of a molting?

I took the artificial intelligence option at school because it sounded interesting, and it was, but fat lot of good it did me :( Lisp and Prolog, like LSD and DMT, give your brain a good stretching, that can be healthy in some way I suppose, but not much more point to it than that.

Cheers to the man for doing his bit to keep novelty progressing.

Euro beaks mull copyright of software features

Mike VandeVelde
Facepalm

By your own admission your "right" to profit is worth more than people's lives. If something saves lives, then getting that something cheaper could save more lives, who are you to tell people they deserve to die because otherwise you would be !cheated!, dying people just line up and you will save them as fast as you can and thank goodness you can set your lawyers on anyone who tries to help or else then what kind of world would we live in. Try a different analogy please.

EU recording copyright extension 'will cost €1bn'

Mike VandeVelde

"income gap at the end of their life times"

Yes, if they had a big hit when they were 10 years old (the vast majority of us won't live past 80), and then never worked another day in their lives. Sorry, I don't have any tears for someone like that.

Not, if they had hits early in their careers and then <gasp>kept working at it</gasp> and created more good music later in their lives. You know, like all the rest of us plebes.

Between copyright/patents and sex/drugs prohibition, no wonder there is so little respect for the law, and the fence post politicians who write the laws, and the scavenger lawyers who argue the laws, with law enforcement personnel stuck trying to maintain some semblance of order under it all.

'Leaked' FBI Anonymous/LulzSec psych profile is bogus

Mike VandeVelde
Meh

"an elaborate joke"

Not really very elaborate, considering.

Feds probe eBay over Craigslist plunder allegations

Mike VandeVelde
Childcatcher

kijiji.ca is still alive and thriving, this is the first I've heard it had anything to do with ebay. No mention on the about page:

http://kijijiblog.ca/about-us/

Now that I look through the other countries (never even occured to me before), I see kijiji still used in a lot of countries, a bunch of countries are gumtree (mostly European), another bunch are slando (mostly Eastern European), and another bunch are ebay related, with a few other random collections of letters as well. What a mess!

Police kill mobile phone service to squelch protest

Mike VandeVelde
Megaphone

"current social networks are highly centralized"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_%28software%29

Lightning strikes cloud: Amazon, MS downed

Mike VandeVelde
Mushroom

clouds & social media

"using social media where its own service has failed"

But what if Twitter was down at the same time? I guess then you could say it would truly be time to panic? Because as long as you can tweet to your customers "we are aware that your service is currently unavailable" then you can say you've done everything you possibly could have with a straight face.

End user productivity: is technology a help or a hindrance?

Mike VandeVelde
Facepalm

productivity

When the paperwork that used to take too much time is automated, then do you end up with more time to do real work? No, because now you can do much more paperwork. When the manager who used to get a report on last week next week now gets a report on yesterday last night, they can dream up 10 times as many reports to be required, and have more meetings to discuss it all. Corporate used to get quarterly reports by division now has day by day results available and wants to drill down to individuals (but not be overloaded!). Where someone used to send out a few memos a day, then dozens of faxes a day, they can now email hundreds of people a day (or "tweet" to thousands). We're all doing more, but are we being more productive? I don't think standard of living is improving anymore anyway, relation? Dragging society down with busy work, because we can?

Good news: A meltdown would kill fewer than we thought

Mike VandeVelde
Facepalm

I sit corrected, thank you

"you should get your facts straight...."

Which was kind of the point of my posting!!

Shoulda woulda coulda fired a quick question at The Google before posting about my vague recollection of NASA history, but the steam pressure between my ears was red lining!

Revising safety margins in light of new information is all well and good, and in this case safe is actually even safer than we thought, but we are talking about highly radioactive substances that will melt your face of if you look at them funny, when we are assured that it is absolutely safe then it's very uncomfortable to find out that there was actually something left to learn about it, even if in this case the missing information was in our favour.

*8-)

Mike VandeVelde
WTF?

re: Chemistry

Sounds very convincing, is that based on some wondrous new discoveries in chemistry I haven't heard of? They didn't know this before?? Did not take water into account??? Is this supposed to be more or less comforting than when they mixed metric and imperial and a space shuttle blew up???? Lessons learned, now it's actually really safe for real this time, honest!!

So what are the "unkown unknowns" now?????

News leech loses appeal on High Court copyright case

Mike VandeVelde
Pirate

headlines?

How about book titles? If I put together a list of <someobscurecategory> books, and put it up on my website *with ads!1!!* for fans of <someobscurecategory>, when the publishing houses notice they can say "hey look someone has come up with an inovative new way to make money, let's milk them to death with court cases and outrageous demands for fees". Book titles are hard to come up with, and if someone comes up with a way to make money from them, then that should be turned into less money so that some corporations can get their rightful cut, and then even less money as some oversized fee collecting bureaurocracy is set up and populated with useless hangers on.

When the whole point of headlines / book titles / sound recordings / video recordings in the first place was to entice people into lining up for the full experience, and they still perform that function nicely, but once the smell of money gets in the water the lawyers get into a frenzy and people start getting weird ideas that where headlines were once written for hire and then given away to anyone who would take one now they are some kind of works of art that nobody should be able to experience without paying a fee to a huge parade of middlemen.

The ridiculousness rolls on. Small wonder so many people tune out?

Gamer claims complete console collection

Mike VandeVelde
FAIL

coleco tabletops?

I didn't see any of these:

http://www.handheldmuseum.com/Coleco/PacMan.htm

Aussie carbon tax in actually-makes-sense shocker

Mike VandeVelde
Megaphone

Tim Worstall

Do you think the carbon tax we have here in British Columbia is different in some substantial way? Or did you just not know about it?

http://www.livesmartbc.ca/government/carbon_tax.html

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/blogs/canada-politics/b-c-carbon-tax-successful-other-provinces-worry-195524669.html

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/bc-finds-success-with-controversial-carbon-tax/article2084989/

http://www.metronews.ca/halifax/life/article/905211--b-c-carbon-tax-reaches-3rd-anniversary--page0

Parmo v poutine: The ultimate post-pub nosh deathmatch

Mike VandeVelde
Angel

"poutinerie" ftw

look at the menus for inspiration:

http://www.mybigcheese.com/

http://smokespoutinerie.com/

end of discussion.

(+1 for donairs, for a little variety now and then)

(deep fried pork cutlets compare how exactly???)

New Yorkers battle giant blindness-causing plants

Mike VandeVelde
Alien

"Attack of the Giant Hogweed"

Love the organ intro:

http://www2.worksafebc.com/Publications/Multimedia/Videos.asp?ReportID=34980

(warning: contains burn examples)

Italian and Swiss cops cuff 15 Anonymous suspects

Mike VandeVelde
Facepalm

re: Clare

"I program Microsoft FrontPage 2002. I have never seen the problems you mention, maybe this is more secure than what you use for your web sites?"

LOL, ROFL, hehehe, hahaha, harharhar!!1!

"web specialist"

That's awesome.

Thanks for the chuckles.

IDC warns resellers of ticking cloud time bomb

Mike VandeVelde
Go

analyst predictions

We sold our first one today, which means we sold none yesterday, so if we follow this daily infinity percent increase trend out to 2015, ZOMFG $73 TRILLION MARKET HOP ON WHILE THE HOPPING IS GOOD!!!1!!eleventy1!!!

Refusal to unveil scuppers French refusal-to-unveil trial

Mike VandeVelde
Unhappy

castrate??

I understood it to be more like circumcision. In order to technically be castration, wouldn't it need to involve the ovaries? I don't think they cut that deep?

So ban it all then, including peircings and tatoos and branding.

But seriously, nobody should be allowed to do that shit to children, male or female.

Vomiting icon please.

Stand by for more big, windfarm-driven 'leccy price rises

Mike VandeVelde
Coffee/keyboard

re: Matt Bryant

There's an open market for energy???

Conventional coal stations are competing entirely on their own two feet??

Everything boils down to cost, so that if something doesn't generate acceptable income then there is no possible other reason for that something to exist?

Mike VandeVelde
Megaphone

So what you're saying is...

The main problem is that these power plants are in private hands?

In order to satisfy the profit motives of corporations little people are getting shafted? <sarcasm>Shocking, isn't it.</sarcasm>

Wind turbines are not the magic bullet, but they do help to generate needed electricity, but in order to prop up the corporations who build them they are crippled with extortionate fees to *guarantee* a return on investment for the "risk" that investors are taking.

So nationalize them. Problem solved. You're welcome.

Verity Stob and the super subjunction

Mike VandeVelde
Thumb Up

commas and periods only

anything else and, well, youre just being frilly.

What is UltraViolet™ and why should you care?

Mike VandeVelde
Go

+1

"I will pay a reasonable price for content, provided it's DRM free and there is open source software to play and convert it into other formats."

This is the only possible way it can end, only question is how long.

Hackers pwn PBS in revenge for WikiLeaks doco

Mike VandeVelde
WTF?

watch it here:

http://video.pbs.org/video/1946795242

Also see the "Chat with the Reporters & Brian Manning" transcript, with Julian Assange and David House calling in:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/wikileaks/live-chat-reporters-brian-manning/

Why would PBS be high on anyone's target list? Not a flattering story sure, but wow man.

http://www.pbs.org/about/corporate-information/

Total Recall rehash – exit Martians, enter Jessica Biel

Mike VandeVelde
Unhappy

could they make it any cheesier than the original?

all signs point to yes

Drink 8 bottles of wine, you'll be unharmed if hit by Mike Tyson

Mike VandeVelde
Alert

while weed is actually the better medecine

http://norml.org/index.cfm?Group_ID=6812#Neuroprotection

MongoDB daddy: My baby beats Google BigTable

Mike VandeVelde
Megaphone

My thoughts exactly. "CouchDB is the other obvious example"...

...which was written by a Lotus Notes guy, and borrows a lot from the .nsf data store - probably the main non-relational database in the world, for the past couple of decades. Would that have been so hard?

Freedom from the restrictions of relational databases is a major attraction of Lotus Notes (or a major pitfall if you don't figure out what you are doing).

Netflix overtakes Bittorrent as traffic champ

Mike VandeVelde
Happy

non copyright infringing is at the bottom of the feature list

I have Netflix here in Canada. The selection almost approaches passable, but it will only grow. Nice to have it on the Wii as well. You probably won't find what you're looking for, but you can find something watchable. Lots of classics. Giving up on basic cable, Netflix helps tip the scales a little.

I also have an Emusic account. Similar boat, but I find the selection is fantastic (as long as you're not into top 40, further bonus). The historical lack of drm is a key factor for Emusic, I would abandon Netflix in the blink of an eye for a similar competitor with drm free downloads, I would even pay more or if it were possible suffer a less complete library.

The thing is, if there were a pirate version that was more all around convenient, I would drop them. I use these legal options because of the work they put into their libraries. If I do a search, I know all the results will be what they say on the tin, and of standardized decent quality, and that there are people whose job is to organize things to help me discover what I like. That's worth something to me, so I pay for it. The fact that they won't be simply turned off some day by some globo corp lawyers, and that they won't be throttled by my friendly neighbourhood ISP, and that some thug bondsman won't be sniffing my underwear and sending me extortionate nastygrams, well those are bonuses too, but I would suffer possible annoyances for a good experience. The fact that a few pennies out of what I'm paying might make it back to the artists, well that's nice and all but really not much different than those round up your purchase price for charity deals they have going on in some places - practically inconsequential to me. Sure I'll pay - especially when part of a useful service. To be a part of the stories we tell each other and the songs we sing to each other and the things we talk about together. This stuff exists, Napster opened people's eyes, no matter how much wack a mole they play it will keep emerging, if they were smart they would have jumped on board as soon as it all got rolling instead of trying so hard to hold it all back etc.

What is this "added to my queue" of which you southern Netflixors speak? Here in Canada we have full access to the (ahem) full catalog at any time!

BOFH: Attack of the Global Corporate Overlords

Mike VandeVelde
Go

Lotus Notes

Hehe dirty blond with a full 5 o'clock shadow here (5 o'clock Tuesday, last month). Been loving Lotus Notes for 12+ years. Knocks the pants off Outlook/Exchange/whatever else MS needs included ever since they first started trying to compete, don't even mention PainPoint hahaha, just too bad so many people can't see past MS marketing. I have years of mail available, instantly full text searchable, been through so many client / server upgrades with no problems. But who cares about mail, it's the apps, full local replicas available for working offline, such great built in security you hardly have to think about it, runs on almost any OS. Swap out SBS for Foundations and live happily ever after. Sametime vs whatever they eventually turn Skype into. Stop hating haters and take a closer look!!

Sad to see Simon take a cheap shot, but great episode anyway :-)

Linux kernel runs inside web browser

Mike VandeVelde
Pint

for he's a jolly good fellow!

cheers! :-)

Digital Music: a collective failure of imagination

Mike VandeVelde
Pirate

there's the rub

Kind of like how the illuminator's guild has remained so powerful all these centuries - since nobody in their right mind could bring themselves to steal, *STEAL* from them by stooping to Piracy with those artist crushing printing press contraptions.

There are a lot of musicians out there who are focusing on being musical, and not stressing out about having tyrannical control over the pale imitation of the real thing you get with any kind of recording. Those glory days of hot and cold running hookers for the pop music fabrication of the day are ending, no tears over here.

I like collecting CDs too, but it's become a bit like collecting stamps now hasn't it?

Would putting all the climate scientists in a room solve global warming...

Mike VandeVelde
Alert

wasted capital and resources

You can find *much* bigger piles of wasted capital and resources in many other areas besides our half hearted attempts at climate change mitigation. I wish the one-world-order-tyrants-are-taking-milk-straight-from-my-babies-mouth types would get a little perspective.

IPCC report: Renewables can never meet energy demand

Mike VandeVelde
Alert

fixit_f

You don't encourage smaller families by simply making life worse for larger families. All of your solutions simply punish the children who have no choice in the matter, who will grow up to violently overthrow your perfected society.

People should replace themselves, carry on their gene line, and leave it at that. Some people will be infertile, some people won't make to child bearing age for various reasons. If people only replace themselves, then the population will slowly start falling. Genetic diversity is a good thing, it's not selfish. If all the people who are smart/educated enough to realize population decline is a good thing just completely stop having children, I think the result for humanity is obvious.

User data stolen in Sony PlayStation Network hack attack

Mike VandeVelde
Gates Horns

+1...

...right up until that last paragraph there ;-)

Note to Mozilla: We don't get the Firefox billboards

Mike VandeVelde
WTF?

business model?

Various organizations offer web browsing software, none of them cost any money. Where does business model come into the decision which one to use? Once you get past features, your choices are corporations A through X, and then Mozilla the non-profit foundation. The mission of Mozilla has nothing to do with business models, or even profit for that matter.

"The claim that it also "does good" is irrelevant"

Maybe to you. To me this makes the decision to use Firefox (w/ Firebug) & Thunderbird even more attractive. More people should be aware of this kind of stuff:

http://www.mozilla.org/about/manifesto.en.html

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/technologies.html

https://mozillalabs.com/projects/

I don't know why you couldn't convince your customer to spend more money on your support services, but what does that have to do with the price of tea in China? Does Mozilla even offer support services, let alone have a profit motive? Your little anecdote seems to hang waaay off the side of your strange problem with Mozilla's recent advertising.

Amazon to lend Kindle books at 11,000 US libraries

Mike VandeVelde
WTF?

HarperCollins

Does this have anything to do with HarperCollins saying libraries have to purchase a new digital copy every time they lend the old one out 26 times? Introducing an artificial "tattering" to prop up their business model? What does this cost the libraries?

http://www.reghardware.com/2011/03/02/library_e_books_get_time_limit/

So, what's the best sci-fi film never made?

Mike VandeVelde
Go

+1 moorcock

just to hear that organ where the keys are hooked up to torture people who scream different notes gotta get me one of those ;-)

Embrace chaos, beat pirates... buy my book, says Mason

Mike VandeVelde
Go

keep your CDs

I don't steal CDs. I can understand how if everyone stole CDs then pretty soon there would be no CDs to steal anymore.

We're talking about music. No matter what you do, there will always be music. You could actually punish people for making music, and there would still be music.

No tears for the buggy whip industry here, sorry.

Mike VandeVelde
Flame

shoulders of giants and all

If you were born locked in a room and had no human interaction and came up with something new and useful, then that would be worth something. Otherwise I want what's owed to my ancestor's estate for the use of the fire she invented that made it all possible!!

Swedish newlyweds enjoy lively honeymoon

Mike VandeVelde
Alert

no kidding

"Swedish newlyweds... departed their native land on 6 December, with their baby daughter in tow... returned to Stockholm on 29 March"

4 month honeymoon? I know you get a lot of holidays over there, but is that anything like normal??

Fukushima's toxic legacy: Ignorance and fear

Mike VandeVelde
WTF?

low personal risk

Yes their is low personal risk. And yes attributing the root cause of a particular incedence of cancer directly to exposure from any particular event is not realistic. But even just a 1% rise in cancer rates when spread among several hundred workers basically means that several additional deaths can be expected. Does entering that kind of lottery give anyone even a little more respect for the danger these people are facing?

Fukushima: Situation improving all the time

Mike VandeVelde
FAIL

context

The radiation exposure limit for workers was raised from 100 milliSieverts to 250 milliSieverts, which is only done in cases of danger to human life, and was probably not done just to keep that 1 worker you mention on the job.

250 milliSieverts is equal to about 50 chest xrays.

An average person receives about 2.4 milliSieverts in a whole year from normal background radiation.

You get around 0.01 milliSieverts per hour flying in a jet plane.

I understand that there have not been any Nazis opening the ark of the covenant face melting episodes. But even if you believe that we already have access to the entire story, I still say it is callous to minimize the danger the workers are facing, regardless of if you can teach about it in a classroom.

Mike VandeVelde
Flame

Mr Page is Fukushima'd

The abridged version of this lunacy is almost funny. The events you've been slowly admitting are happening seem horrifying enough to me. I guess you're a harder kind of man, if it's no big deal to you unless thousands of people are dying. Those workers at that plant arent following any sort of "nuclear safety" manual that sets out this situation and all the steps they are to be taking. They have been exposed to dangerous levels of radiation. "Cancer is a normal way to die", holy shit man.

I kept coming back here only to lighten up from reality a little and get a picture of the rosiest potential outcome still humanly possible. But the community of commenters that sprung up got interesting as well. So I guess I'm happy you did what you did there. You had facts in there with your happy twists, and anything you forgot to cherry pick would usually come up in the comments. There was the insulting tone, but fuck this is the internet. Great troll, but you really wouldn't get my vote for any kind of journalism award though.

You were, unreasonably optomistic shall we say, several times with your predictions. You were callous to the dangers the workers have faced and are facing. The underlying story of ingenuity and heroics is fascinating, and you demand that it receive less attention. Reactor buildings explode and containment breaches emit radiation and spent fuel burns, and you think people who are worried are ignorant?

Can you admit at least that we should be taking a harder look at facilities that require active cooling? Is this the only 40 year old reactor out there? Are there any more with the same design flaw on the way? Should any existing reactors be re evaluated for tsunami risk? Nope none of that is worth discussing because nuclear is safe and all reasonable contingencies have been accounted for. Except this one. And that other one, and those other few. Hey let's build hundreds more of them, and maintain their consequences for thousands of years, because our bad luck must have run out already by now!!!

EA dubs Nintendo Wii a 'legacy platform'

Mike VandeVelde
Go

boom blox

ftw

Fukushima situation as of Wednesday

Mike VandeVelde
Megaphone

a leg to stand on

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKhEw7nD9C4

CONTAINMENT CAN NOT BE BREACHED! NUCLEAR IS PERFECTLY SAFE! YOUD KNOW IT IF YOU WERENT THICK! IT'S JUST A MINOR PROBLEM! ERRR, A SERIES OF MINOR PROBLEMS! NO DANGER OF RADIATION! ERRR, RADIATION IS HARDLY HARMFUL ANYWAY! YOU WOULD UNDERSTAND IF YOU WERE CAPABLE! CHERNOBYL NEVER HURT NOBODY! NUCLEAR IS PERFECTLY SAFE!

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