Posts by Stevie
1593 posts • joined Thursday 12th June 2008 16:24 GMT
Page:
Bah!
I remember Tom Jones, but if you want to make a pun based on his songs you should at least take the elementary step of making your version scan to the meter of the tune if you want the reader to have any chance of appreciating how clever you've been.
Or not, as in this case. My entire post is, of course, a parody of the hit "Two Tribes" by Frankie Goes To Hollywood" which you spotted unless you actually expected the rhythm and subject matter of it to match that of the song, in which case you are SOL.
Re: The title is too long
I don't suppose it was to stop the hacker getting shivved by rather more physical members of the population, perhaps holding views of the alleged offense against the interests of National Security and being inclined to do more than post to El Reg in response?
Re: @SuccessCase (was: "The point is it has now been shown these things ::are useless::")
I can buy a real gun for less than the cost of a RepRap. It will fire thousands of shots and never explode in my hand.
In point of fact, having tried to source a RepRap recently I can also state that I can get the real gun at a fraction of the time and effort it will take me to get the RepRap too, and I live in a state with rather heavy gun control laws.
The printagun is stupid again.
Re: A different concern?
Or maybe pay one of the less-than minimum wage cleaning staff (who have all been so thoroughly vetted - riiiiiight) to stash a real gun somewhere you can get to it once you've passed through the security station.
Re: If I was making a police video for this
You *do* know that for home printing there is a grand total of two types of plastic that can be piped through a printers print head, don't you? You don't have infinite choice of what your weedwhacker wire is made from, you must choose from the two (PLA and ABS if I remember correctly and you must use a different print head for each type).
Neither of these is ideal for anything that will undergo sudden excursions of pressure and temperature in a small printed space.
Indeed, neither is particularly suitable for anything arduous, which is why people in industry (where they have a much wider range of printing materials) refer to the field of 3d printing as a rapid prototyping technology, good for making models for people to look at and fondle, good for making patterns for other processes, but not typically useful for production items (unless you are making little plastic robots and even then Injection Moulding is faster, cheaper, better).
This particular gun was *supposed* to work when printed from one of those two materials. It doesn't, as anyone with half a brain could have predicted, and is probably the slowest, most expensive way of improvising a dangerous-to-the-user weapon ever invented. One might use the phrase "F*cktard Design" if one hadn't already done so days before.
Bah!
So once again we focus on this stupidly idiotic zip gun (as in: making a zip gun out of black pipe the traditional way is faster and results in a sturdier yet no-less useless weapon) instead of the real threat looming on the horizon: The GPS guided, googletech cruise missile self-steering car.
My god what a blindsiding bum steer this f*cking 3d printagun issue is becoming.
If any indicator as to the absolute uselessness of the so-called weapon and the emasculated nature of the so-called threat it poses were to be taken as definitive, the fact that the politicians are all over the issue should sound earsplitting bullshit sirens loud and clear in everyone's ears.
Bah!
Oh look, a new breed of hacker is born.
White hat.
Black Hat.
Asshat.
Hang on
Why aren't the same penalties waved in front of a certain now deceased MIT hacker being threatened?
Re: Wow-2
"Let me state, just to salvage some small modicum of dignity, that what you Brits may not know..."
Yar, some of we Brits be tax-paying Americans, and yer dignity be already a-languishin' in Davey Jones's locker matey on account of ye be talkin' more like a tw*t than a pirate, so ye be.
Yar!
If ye be truly worried about yer dubloons bein' poured into a bottomless hole, ye need look no further than the tradition oil companies who be a-makin' record profits but still be demandin' enough public subsidy booty to split the bilges of a Spanish treasure galleon. Why, 'tis an open scandal what they be a-perpetratin' on the public purse.
I remain, sir, yer obedient servant so I do,
Twelve Fathom Stevie, scourge o' the Long Island Sound.
Re: Note that difference *loan* (with interest) versus old car maker (2nd or 3rd) bailout.
"This is not the same as funding development for mainframe computers or putting a man on the moon or even developing new ways to turn corn or algae into ethanol. This is entirely and totally a toy."
Because the moon landing wasn't just a political stunt, the effort abandoned just as soon as practicable after those gosh-darn rooskies had been put in their place, and ethanol has been such a contention-free addition to the energy diet of the nation and not at all a way for farmers to suck on the public teat while at the same time not be able to accurately state how expensive their crops are to produce so the sums can be done?
Time was a digital watch was a toy for the rich.
Re: It was always 'jif'
If it annoys Ben Norris, I'm for it. Gif gifgifgifgfifgifgifgifgifgfifgifgifgifgifgfifgifgifgifgifgfifgifgifgifgifgfifgifgifgifgifgfifgif
Re: As a former CompuServe employee...
Compuserve? Didn't that have valves in it when it was relevant?
But all these people saying that "Jif" means we have to say "Jraphics" are lunatics.
Says the commentator with a serial number for a name. Wubble, sir (or madam), wubble!
SATA is still, definitely, "Sarter" (not "Satter").
Round here it is pronounced "SAY ta". Rules of English. First vowel says its name. (Mrs Shuttleworth, Parkgate Infants Indoctrination Centre and Internment Facility).
Are we supposed to call JPEGs Gay-Pejs now as well?
It is my understanding that you can't ask and they aren't obliged to answer if you do.
Re: Apologies to Izzard
Alnwick. Leicester. Bicester.
Having read the road signs I couldn't resist. 8oP
Bah!
Apparently he invented the Jraphic Interchange Format then. I don't suppose he mentioned that he lifted the encoding algorithm from Unisys without asking? Thought not.
Daft twat.
Posted in IBM gives a cloudy outlook for COBOL
Re: COBOL ain't going nowhere soon.
Does the job it was designed to do in spades.
Sensible, consistent punctuation rules that are easy to teach and use, so no missing or extra semicolons to f*ck up your week (goes double if you insist on using vi on a console to edit), inbuilt currency compatible data type so no having to watch over the shoulder of the new hire or the systems programmer slumming it in applications to guard against floating point use in the general ledger, and inbuilt intuitive support for overlaid structures.
No fuss, no muss. Write your OS-level stuff in C++, keep your finances straight with Cobol, and do whatever you want with Java but not near me. For everything in between, perl size fits all.
Re: Solution???
Cane Toad? *Cane* Toad? Pah! Luxury! I got m' Clever Person Certificate from UEA and the place were overrun wi' Coypus brought in by Victorians frum South America t' manage banks o' Norfolk Broads.
Bloody things were size o' beavers an' med noise like human baby cryin'.
Cane Toad. Pfft! You soft southern hemisphere jessies.
Re: Bah!
""Spoofing" that pheromone would mean synthesizing it."
Yeeeees....your point is?
Bah!
Okay, here's an El Reg style answer to the problem: Why not spoof this "signal" the ants send out when taking killer-volts up the mandibles?
Re: * Set-up
Is "beltup" a word?
Good Grief!
Do people still do the Eurovision Song Contest thing? Why? Even in my day it was simply a way to get an otherwise established act to sing the worst song ever recorded in <insert language>, then line 'em up so we could all have a good laugh.
Power to all my friends, to the music that never ends! (No matter how much you beg).
Bah!
"Second" new Coke moment? Aren't we forgetting Windows Millennium Edition?
Re: Wait, hasn't anyone told him this:
Sorry, Tom, but many Computer Assisted Annoyance Machines are now rigged to spot an immediate "0" as an "unrecognized response" here in New York.
I believe National Grid's voicebot was the first I encountered to be so hardened against the customer experience, proving that British firms still have what it takes to lead the way. (NG moves gas in my neck o' the woods).
No doubt coming to a voice navigated menubot near you soon.
Egad!
Give that man an OBE at once!
Um...
I wonder how long it will take for anyone important to figure out that if printable guns are a problem waiting to happen, a very well-camouflaged cruise missile tootling towards its target at 30 mph looking for all the world like a GPS-guided Fiat 500 (or whatever the then-popular fadmobile will look like) is a much more useful terrorist tool?
I'll bet there's an election in that for someone.
Re: Bah!...errr
"To accuse me of not believing that there might be benefits when I'm explaining the system by which we try to decide whether there are benefits is a bit much really...."
Or an indication of how opaque you made the point of your anti-train diatribe. All I brought back from it was "trains bad, internet good".
Perhaps I was misled by your insightful "You know, this lovely train set that the politicians want to plonk down in the middle of England. I've never quite been sure why it is that politicians love such train sets: most of us get over this around the age of 14 when we discover girls."
Or perhaps I failed to find the "but the benefits don't seem to be enough to cover the costs of the project" argument convincing without any sort of quantitative supporting statements.
I apparently did not read closely enough.
Doesn't matter to me anyway. I don't live there any more.
Egad!
This is right out of one of those John Brunner Consumer Reports from the 1960s.
He has dibs on the term "perfumolator", and I think Harry Harrison has the prior art on "Smellovision".
Bah!
Wow. Clearly the author does not believe that there might be tangible benefits to be had from a system of moving people from the non-capital area into said area in doublequick time above and beyond those of the weekday business world. I wonder what the London restaurant, theatre, museum and art gallery owners think about that?
For a good example of what happens when you run only a bottom-line evaluation on your infrastructure investment, look no further than New York as typified by the late 80s/early 90s, when bridges used every day for upstate suburb to NYC commuter traffic started falling into the Hudson, cars'n'all. The bridge toll monies were being used "to better effect" instead of paying painters and inspectors, as originally intended.
That was about the time BR got privatized and so many trains went for a high-speed walk in the fields on account of no-one was fixing or upgrading anything because it was too expensive. I saw that on TV.
For a nation of people that spends so much time berating the American Way of Life, you seem to want to stampede into it at every opportunity.
Bah!
So what is needed is a bunch of those kiddy trains that go round in circles at about 4 mph, fitted with a secure public WiFi node?
Bah! And Double Bah!
Here we go again.
"People use Android in spite of the end user experience, not because of it. "
Here I see the comment of someone filtering real-world sales figures past his own wolrdview and issuing a bewildered conclusion that has never been fact-checked against the sample he is "analyzing" so deftly.
Why do I say that? I don't own an android device (Well, a Kindle but everyone knows that doesn't count). Because if you swap the word "Android" with "Windows" you have the rallying cry of the Linux community trying to explain why ten years in their predictions of a massive inroad into the Microsoft desktop market were still not coming true.
I don't really care about this, but it seems to me that the intelligent way to start trying to overhaul Andriod would be to find out the *real* reasons (plural) why people want to use it now rather than trying to clone the Apple experience so many are walking away from by choice.
Good word that, choice. Having more than one app to do something isn't bad per se, it's having multiple apps that are crap. This is what Nintendo understood to have killed the console game market for Atari - the flood of crap software - and why they defended their brand so viciously in the first days of the NES. This approach coupled with aggressive marketing and vision for what the product should be and what it should provide re-launched the console game market, certainly in America, where it had been dead for over a decade.
Which is the long way of saying that before anyone puts fingers to keyboard they should find out what people would like from their Android devices that they don't get now and form a coherent plan for delivering those things without getting so in love with the cleverness the job balloons outside of the plan boundaries. Put out something that looks like what people want and what you said you were going to do about it. Afterwards, plan to add in the cleverness but only if people want it.
Never happen.
Posted in Amazon launches own currency
Re: Who owes the company store how much?
"does this not mean that non US customers are in effect subsidising those purchases?"
Probably, but since the costs are spread globally your share would probably be insignificant.
Also, you have to buy stuff before this "subsidy" takes effect and I get the impression that the UK is a hard sell for Amazon, at least, to those would-be UK customers who post in these pages.
Nah!
The BIG question is how far you can stress the plastic substrate before the image-making gubbins breaks.
Are we ever going to have a reader that can, for example, be rolled into a case the size of a fat Sharpie pen like a small window blind so it can be carried in a smaller form factor than is best for viewing (this being the conundrum: smaller is better for carrying around but absolute pants for being a useful media consumption terminal)?
Will it be rigid enough to be useful when unrolled (a droopy surface will be useless for real use as modern day newspapers prove every time someone shakes one in your face to stiffen up the page he/she is reading on your commute)?
Will this technology ever be deployed in a manner that takes into account what people need from a portable reading technology, or will it be business as usual in digital tat land?
I say chaps...
Isn't what Google is doing the functional equivalent of gathering one's browsing history and keeping it so they can, for example, "enrich the user experience"?
After all, if authors should be glad their works have been copied without permission, shouldn't we *all* be glad our browsing histories are being stored by the same benevolent, well-meaning organization?
"Accept 3rd Party Cookies" on, lads!
Or are we all feeling a tad two-faced today?
Re: As a publisher, Eric Flint has already addressed this issue...
And yet when REM tried an experiment in voluntary pricing they got well and truly reamed - by their fans yet.
Perhaps the issue you are alluding to (the Baen Free Library effect) is not applicable as widely as you (and the Baen stable of authors) would like? (Disclosure: I am a fan of many of those authors and have purchased many of their works, often in hardcover at premium prices partly as a gesture of support).
In any event, the significant point is that the BFL is an OPT-IN affair, and the Project Googlescrape is a "Let's not tell anyone and see how much we can get away with before we are caught" one.
The Fair Use arguments are likely to be lively, since Google isn't using the excerpts themselves (to present an argument or as part of a critical review) but passing them on to others and I'm pretty sure that's a no-no, covered in black letter law. The original Fair Use statutes said I could video a movie but only so I could watch it myself. I couldn't gift it on, as that would be distributing someone else's work.
I wonder how they will filter this for the UK market (where I understand there are no fair use laws and the Googlescrape is absolutely naughty)?
Re: S/B class action, but authors should lose
I read your post three times but couldn't get any sense out of it other than free (at other people's expense)=good.
Because you seem to have trouble grasping the point: These authors are probably quite cognizant of how to market their works - since said works are already in libraries we can assume a certain level of expertise in the publishing world - and I'm almost certain they have a very good idea of how much good will accrue from this Googlescrape.
I imagine most of these works are the kind of reference where if one grabs a Google precis of, say, a famous quote, summary of a philosophy or fact of the physical universe, one won't need to buy the book it was scraped from.
This isn't hard to intuit from the subtext of the article. Why is it that supposedly clever people of IT have such a problem working outside their own limited set of interests? Maybe I'll Google the answer from someone's textbook on psychology and save myself the cost of the book.
You should know that "cyberspace" is now considered a clabby term to be avoided at all costs by the clixby set. Coincidentally, it's a term invented by an author who probably has a lot to say on the subject of Googlescraping.
And where on Earth did you get the ridiculous idea that roads, bridges, power grids etc materialized for free so everyone could use them? Do you not understand the concept of taxation?
Nah...
I've seen two waves of these buggers already. Loud yes, motorbike loud, no.
They actually sound like a lawn sprinkler system, admittedly a big lawn sprinkler system, and that's when they all get going together.
They look more like cockroaches than grasshoppers, mostly black and about the size of a man's thumb, with iridescent wings.
The worst part is in early September when their corpses litter the sidewalks and fall from the trees. Disgusting.
Nature. Ban this filth.
8oo
</GOBSMACKED MODE=SPEECHLESS WITH ADMIRATION>
Bah!
So, only works where there's a web connection then?
If anyone DOES come up with an alternative suite, please make it independent of always-on interwebs. That way we can do stuff in a power cut (Long Island occasionally resembles a third world country now; what with hurricanes and super storms and blizzards and people stupidly running their A/C in summer, LIPA can't keep the juice on reliably 365x24x7. I have my own genny for such occasions but it won't make teh webs work when Cablevision, Verizon et al are dark too).
Posted in Flat mobe battery? Just light a fire
Bah!
I was thinking "why not just use the space that thing would take up to carry spare charged batteries?" when I took another look at the pic and realized the problem with that: iPhone.
Bah!
Instead of this faffing about after some stupid long-life lager, how about a project to bring back Davenport's Top Brew Deluxe?
Bah!
The best thing about beards is other people's reactions when you change them up a bit.
I've worn a beard since I could grow one, typically trimmed back to a number two comb length on a Wahl trimmer, but for a steampunk costume party a couple of years ago I grew the length out for a month and then carved out the chin so I could go all Nigel Green/Colour Sergeant Bourne. A red jacket and a pith helmet and I was done.
The way the younger attendees who knew me freaked out you'd have thought I'd cut off an arm or gouged out an eye.
I won the Best Costume contest, and the wife (a firm beard-lover) thought I should keep it that way "for a bit".
So I did. The shaving is a pain, as my beard hair grows to the right, requiring a sideways sweep of the razor if I need to get a really close shave.
On the downside it had been several years since I last cut off the beard. In the interrim Gillette stopped making the continuous band razor that had been such a joy to use, and for some reason the shaving world has decided if one blade is good, twenty seven are better. It took me quite a while to find a multi-blade razor that worked without carving up my face.
Re: David, you missed the point
" and in the case of cavities, you're probably looking at a two parts that are then glued together."
No, you are looking at something that is rigid under the heat load of the printing but that can be removed later by, say, chemical action. Sugar sand mixed with small amounts of chinaclay with a smidgeon of moisture would be my first choice to experiment with, because it could be dislodged using water.
We've been doing this sort of thing since the early days of sandcasting and jewelry-making. No new concepts to come up with. How do you think they make oilways and the water jacket in an engine block?
Posted in Movie review: Star Trek Into Darkness
Bah!
"largely unsuccessful - but rather crap - Star Trek: The Motion Picture."
There, fixed it for you.
Bah!
Oh good, margarine beer.
What's a BSOD?
Seriously, I haven't seen one in several years. Win XP on an old Compaq since 2001 and Win 7 (64 bit) on a Dell Inspiron 1545 since 2009.
Of course, I haven't got this "agent" on any of those machines...
@Graham Marsden Re: @LinkOfHyrule - Seriously? People think this is all going to be OK?
I fear you are unclear on the concept. No-one is campaigning to prevent you using your Googletat in your own home.
It's what you do when you come outside and join the rest of the world that people are worried about. If you put your doings on Facebook you only have yourself to blame. If someone else puts them up, that is an entirely different matter.
And there should be specific and harsh criminal penalties for using this idiot technology while driving, akin to the drink driving statutes. I was almost killed yesterday crossing a carpark when a woman in an SUV first pulled across my path to park in a firefighter access zone, barely missing me and blocking me from the sidewalk I had been aiming for, then, when I walked around her vehicle she abruptly reversed it for no apparent reason, hitting me. All she had working against her was the iPhone she was holding while driving and a black glass rear windshield. Add Googletat to this scenario and it gets super-dangerous for everyone not in the car.
There's no self-governor on stupid.
