* Posts by Stevie

7282 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2008

US military's latest toy set: Record-breaking laser death star, er, truck

Stevie

Bah!

The trucks themselves must present a sizable heat signature after firing, I'd think.

As for keeping the beam on the target, that works against you all the way because in order for the turret motors to keep pace with the angular change in target position, you have to be far enough away to make the rate of change relatively slow, meaning you need a more powerful laser.

What happens if you paint your missiles with the paint used for lining roads? Or cover it with cat's eye reflectors?

User jams up PC. Literally. No, we don't know which flavour

Stevie

Re: Jammed...

Which reminds me of the aging co-worker who would bang on about his Californian dietary oddness and his gun collection when he was a consultant during the early dotcom boom, when he was a member of the Veal, Snapper and Hunters Lo-Cal Club.

Do the numbers, Einstein: AI is more than maths as some know it

Stevie

Maths isn't about equations you can't understand

I wish you'd told this to my 6th form calculus teacher at St John Backsides Comprehensive years ago. Could've saved everyone a lot of tedious shouting and threatening and carrying on like a lunatic.

Dungeons & Dragons finally going digital

Stevie

Re: Bah!

Notwithstanding the fact that the 100 bux Ogre is not the same game at all as the old ex-metagame version, and the fact that a better-made version of that pocket version was sold last year, I think GURPS died mostly because the RPG market is different to the one we had in the 1980s.

I play and run a variety of games these days, but my unexpectedly hands-down favourite is the Savage Worlds based Deadlands:Reloaded.

As a 30 something I'd have lapped up GURPS' complexity. 30 years later I want an easier learning curve.

Stevie

Bah!

Wizards of the coast just don't get how massively useful pdf versions of game materials are, nor how pricing them properly can avoid rampant piracy and boost sales of hard copy products.

See Paizo's Pathfinder or PEG's Savage Worlds lines for the way to get it right. Core pdfs cost between 9 to 19 dollars, and everything you can get in print is available as a watermarked pdf. Most people I know want both. My latest purchass have reluctantly eshewed the hard copies because of shelf space limitations Chez Stevie.

See Steve Jackson's GURPS for how to get it wrong. Every book costs upwards of 25 bux and there isn't a full range available. Result: Pie Rats.

See Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu for how to get it desperately wrong. Overpriced unindexed pdfs, even on brand new products. Result: people staying away in droves.

Judge issues search warrant for anyone who Googled a victim's name

Stevie

Bah!

Wait, what?

Didn't Gary Larson draw the surrealist satirical cartoon The Far Side?

I think I see what's going on here.

IBM could have made almost all the voluntary redundancies it needed

Stevie
Trollface

Re: 5k in bonuses

Nice to know that your loyalty can be bought, and the ballpark figure it takes.

8o)

Scott McNealy: Your data is safer with marketers than governments

Stevie

Bah!

Your data would be safer printed out, rolled up and stuffed into your neighbour's privet hedge than in the hands of either the government or marketers.

And only an American could come up with the line "you can't change countries".

Although that could be true in England soon, I guess.

Oracle gives FCC a great big sloppy kiss: You're doing a great job axing net neutrality, privacy

Stevie

Bah!

When asked about the letter's contents, Oracle spokesman Mr U. Heap said "We're so humble. Humble, humble, humble."

To Hull with the crap town naysayers: UK Culture City's got some amazing... telecoms

Stevie

Bah!

How can Hull win "Crappiest UK Town" when Harlow New Town still blights the map? This was the first place I ever saw yoofs huffing glue - at five o' clock at night.

That's right, the town was so huffing naff the kids would rather breath glue fumes from a brown paper bag than look at it.

NSA hacking chief's mission impossible: Advising White House on cybersecurity

Stevie

Bah!

Rudy 9-11 didn't last long, did he?

Must've been caught using myspace.

Zombie webcams? Pah! It's the really BIG 'Things' that scare me

Stevie

Bah!

How about the impact of someone turning your central heating on full blast and your fridge-freezer off the day you set out for a two week cruise?

Or maybe turning on all the burners on your stove (just because they can)? Or unlocking the front door? Or starting your car?

All because you felt the need for mood lighting on the cheap and fell in love with the ease of the Internet of Tat.

All this idiot stuff needed to be thought out better years ago.

Time crystals really do exist, say physicists*

Stevie

Bah!

Still don't know what this "time crystal" is. Article should be used for a wikipedia page.

Repentant priest from Cuntis sorry he dressed as Hugh Hefner

Stevie

Bah!

To paraphrase Commissioner Gordon (when confronted with the Joker's "electric gambling torture truck"):

"A crossdresser simulation of gay sex with a disguised priest carnival float? The mere possession of such a vehicle breaks 27 state laws."

Force employees to take DNA tests for bosses? We've got a new law to make that happen, beam House Republicans

Stevie

Re: Missing the point 4 matt bryant

Well, if we are going to lecture about missing the point, none of the countries that deliver better health care for less money than we do in the USA requires genetic data to get there.

Just not treating the wants of the insurance industry above the needs of the people seems to work well.

But if you are bound and determined to have as many middle men between the patient and doctor as possible, I suppose this plan makes sense.

Oh wait ... no it doesn't. It would appear to be a massive breach of the unreasonable search and seizure statutes that go all the way back to the Constitution.

User lubed PC with butter, because pressing a button didn't work

Stevie

Bah!

I might have been tempted to replace the drive but send the original machine back with a small piece of meat dropped into the casing.

Stevie

Re: Living hell 4 m0rt

Don't use MS office products unless forced to, only OpenOffice on the Stevielaptop, but that bit of political autocorrection notwithstanding, if you can't make phone numbers appear as phone numbers in any spreadsheet program with consumate ease you should just give it up.

Seriously.

Get a grip.

Stevie

Re: Living hell

Only if you don't know how spreadsheets actually work, and know the difference between what's stored and what's displayed.

Living hell. For god's sake get a grip old boy, there are Americans watching.

Lawyer defending arson suspect flees court with pants on fire

Stevie

Bah!

He had a pocketful of Lion batteries?

Once again, Lawyer==Dumb as dirt.

Apple empties gas can, strikes match, burns bridge to hot-patch apps

Stevie

Re: barriers

Wouldn't static linking be one such barrier?

FBI boss: 'Memories are not absolutely private in America'

Stevie

Bah!

The irony of talking about needing to provide backdoor keys to aid in matters of state security after a megadump of documents from inside a state security agency is to rich for me.

Stevie

Re: What Olly North Said

Well actually there were two hearings, both televised.

Hearing one, a sweating North said he could not speak in public about his part in things.

Hearing two, a spiffily dressed Col. North in his dress uniform (all he was missing was a bull terrier on a leash sitting by his feet) proudly announced that he would only speak in front of the American public.

I know because I was very sick at the time and only had a TV with rabbit ears.

Stevie

Re: I don't recall

Worked for Reagan during the Iran Contra hearings.

Tesla 'API crashes' after update, angry rich bods complain

Stevie

Bah!

He followed advice to reboot the driver console but that only deleted the speedo and the pedal cluster.

Two further reboots resulted in the loss of the MP3 player but the gain of no less than four battery condition meters, all showing different (and incorrect) levels of remaining charge.

A fourth reboot resulted in the doors locking permanently while a seemingly endless series of seating configurations were installed one after another. After three hours the body shell suddenly became that of a Volkswagen Beetle and all four wheels were deleted.

The owner professed himself "disappointed" by the situation, but said Tesla were shipping a bootable USB Stick to address the problem.

"Only thing is, there isn't anywhere to insert the stick" he said. "I lost the USB port about the time the unwanted nodding dog was installed on the rear parcel shelf. I must've missed one of the umpteen 'recommended partner product' checkboxes littering the confirmation page when I tapped 'OK' I guess".

Judge orders FBI to reveal whether White House launched 'Tor pedo' torpedo exploits

Stevie

Bah!

See, if *I* was establishing, say, a network for those who appreciate models wearing shiny man-made textile clothing, and were that sort of thing illegal, I would call it something like TaxCodesOfVenezuala or TensileBoltProperties, not Shinymaids on account of the giveaway factor when emails get grepped by The Nice Men In The Bunker.

Fraud detection system with 93% failure rate gets IT companies sued

Stevie

Bah!

MiDAS "regularly and as a matter of practice determined that eligible beneficiaries committed unemployment fraud without any factual basis,"

Replace "MiDAS" with "Republican politicians" and you have the story behind massive spending on biometirc fingerprinting measures to combat the same thing in the Tristate Area (NY, NJ, Ct pols claimed people were "walking across state lines" to claim duplicate benefits in the mid 90s - cf Voter Fraud claims of recent years).

There certainly was fraud at high levels going on, but it was being done by the vendors of services. Make you cry to know what school supplies were being charged out at if you saw the figures. But those were small businessmen and so were untouchable.

So blame was laid on a few homeless who apparently had bionic legs and could sprint between three states every week.

Donald Trump didn't originate the art of making bullshit statements to the public with a straight face, he just elevated it to a science.

RadioShack bankruptcy savior to file for, you guessed it, bankruptcy

Stevie

Bah!

The advantage of a brick-and-mortar store is that while you are shopping for what you want you are getting ideas for what yopu can do with what you see, not always what the inventor thinks you should be doing with it either.

I turned some plumbing supplies and some case-modder lights into a really nice steampunk raygun, for example.

(And yes I get clods who upon seeing the awesome say "That's just some plumbing stuff fastened together", but I just smile because the next question is always "How did you make the lighting effect?" To which I say "That's the clever part" and walk off).

Stevie

Re: They were okay, but not great

Man, I miss the Barton Bros. place tucked round the back of Smithford Way in Coventry. You had to know what you wanted but if they didn't have it it was because no-one was mining the raw materials any more. My dad kept an old 405 line Echo brand TV going for years thanks to their stock of valves. Even fixed one of the first automotive alternators fitted as standard wiith rectifiers bought there (you could do that then because the rectifier pack was removable and could be opened with a bit of effort). Thirty quid repair plus labour saved by addition of two bob's worth of bits and some serious glue (probably banned in Nanny-State Britain these days on account of if you drink it in direct contraventiopn of the warnings on tgeh can, you die).

Stevie

Re: ☹️

No, you can trust the original poster. Not only did the Coventry Tandy (in Corporation St if I remember right) sell Dragon computers, the staff would tell you how to mod the TRS joysticks so they'd work properly in a Dragon controller port.

If the original poster lived on Gospel Oak Road at one time, I'd like to speak with him again.

Watt the f... Dim smart meters caught simply making up readings

Stevie

Re: Errrmmm....

You didn't correct for RMS.

US Marines seek a few supposedly good men ... who leaked naked pics of a few good women

Stevie

Re: Different hats

Heads still roundish all round though, yes?

Stevie

Bah!

All you apologists put there; it shouldn't need an official rule in the code of conduct to prevent this idiocy. What does it say about the judgement of those that did it?

And notwithstanding the differing mores in the military, Arsebook is a civilian platform.

The intrnet is reminding me of those tooth-achingly bad SF stories popular in the late 60s in which a few humans bury a technology (or aliens forbid it) on the grounds that "humanity isn't ready for this yet".

Azathoth's Nebular Knob, the collapse of the electricity grid is looking like something to look forward to right now.

Shopping for PCs? Ding, dong, the Dock is dead in 2017's new models

Stevie

Bah!

Still pushing the mindless drive to thinness over function in the portable market, though.

That big scary 1.4bn leak was 100s of millions of email, postal addresses

Stevie

Bah!

And double bah!

Has your spouse stayed on after Mobile World Congress? This sex doll brothel might be why

Stevie

Bah!

Dr Kathleen Richardson is wrong.

Robot Totty should not only be legal, it should - more importantly - be a real thing by now.

Stupid laggardly robotics "experts".

Cybersecurity rules toughened up for NY financial firms

Stevie

Bah!

Not to panic. Team Trump's TsyberTsar Rudi Nine-eleven will rush in to decry, denounce and other stuff beginning with "d", and make this jumped-up Fake Governor back off and cool it with the industry-crushing regulation already.

US military drone goes AWOL, ends up crashing into tree 623 miles away

Stevie

Bah!

How is dropping mortars by drone a good idea? The enemy will simply dodge them and then pick them up and use them to shoot back.

What they need to do is drop some sort of explosive munition. I expect better use of resources from the USMC.

Nintendo Switch orders delayed: Dun dun dun... dundundun dundundun dadada!

Stevie

Bah!

Fragile lot, gamers, eh?

Google's troll-destroying AI can't cope with typos

Stevie

Bah!

So El Reg's articles about Yahoo should still get indexed by headline in the Google search results then.

Online shops plundered by bank card-stealing malware after bungling backend Aptos hacked

Stevie

Re: So what has the FBI cyber unit discovered in 2 months about the crim?

No, Aptos spokesdrones are saying the FBI is to blame for tardy warnings. Not the same thing.

Congratulations IBM for 'inventing' out-of-office email. You win Stupid Patent of the Month

Stevie

Bah!

Well at least this patent application was probably accompanied by a working model.

Net neutrality? Bye bye, says American Pai

Stevie

Re: You had a whole bunch of coal industry workers put out by some of Obama's regs and

*shrugs* I sympathize with the workers' position, not so much that of the people they work for.

Coal is a filthy way of making electricity, no matter what you do to make the actual burning less impactful at the smokestack. The companies that comprise the coal industry have a terrible record of voluntary action of any kind that does not focus on making money for the directors.

Health and safety of the miners. Environmental impact on the land itself. Mitigating the eyesore factor. Common sense precautions to prevent fallout from becoming lethal. None of these has been at all an initiative undertaken by any coal mining operation in the US.

We've seen underground fires that have burned for over forty years and resulted in millions of dollars worth of losses. The health of former miners is a byword for neglect and corporate prevarication (takes a lawyer to move most diseases into the public mind but everyone and his dog knows about Black Lung). Tailing piles have collapsed into rivers, toxic pools have ruptured and polluted rivers and lakes. The list goes on for as long as you care to look.

Saying coal is a clean industry is an evasion at best and a lie at worst. Claims by the current administration that legal requirements are not needed to enforce sensible, safe practices are risible.

Right now I'm most concerned about the hints of a relaxation of controls on Big Pharma. Another Thalidomide disaster we don't need, but start taking a lump hammer to the goveners and that's what we'll end up seeing. If the review were sane and restrained it could be beneficial, but I've seen this before and what we have is a doctrinal zeal at work (some of it in direct opposition to experiential proof that said doctrine is - in certain special cases - blither).

The problem is that politicians are reactionary rather than proactionary (I'm not sure that is a word) and favor doing nothing at all until the wheels have come off on both axles. That's how they stay in office.

Stevie

Re: "What idiots made this happen?"

My esteemed AC makes a valid point.

No, not anything he wrote, but the fact that he could write all that and not achieve enlightenment.

It is convenient to believe the Bill Maher reasons for Trump Voting, and to be sure there are always a few idiots willing to demonstrate for a gleeful press that they do indeed exist (just as there were really people who slept the entire night shift at British Leyland in the late 70s/early 80s, people who got a disproportionate coverage in the papers and TV news distorting the extent of the "idle git" problem and provoking tarring with a very wide brush).

The concerns of Trump voters cover a wide spectrum of issues, largely rooted in an erosion of their standard of living, often a drastic one when we consider a company town with no company any more. And remember, the IT jobs the Clinton government were dangling as a way out of penury were being shipped abroad as he spoke. This is an electorate ripe for rage voting, irrespective of racist overtones that may be but often aren't part of the calculus.

The inability to empathize with the very real concerns of those who brought Trump to the white house will guarantee him a second term. This goes for the would-be voter just as much as for the would-be candidate.

FYI: Jack Daniels and a bunch of other stuff is made in Tennessee

The "P" in your PBJ? Probably came from the same place the most famous horse race in the US is held, as did your post-it notes

Apart from the obvious Orange Juice industry, and the huge numbers of foreign tourists visiting for their own spendy reasons, there's quite a few things made in Florida that Americans like to buy.

And those are all before we start looking at the mineral resources. Tennessee, for example, probably provided at least some of the coal used so you could make your ranty post and I could make this snarky reply to it.

But I'm sure there are quite a few racist idiots who see Trump as permission to wind back the clock. We had a bunch of anti-Semitic crap go down in NY just recently (we export bank collapses and stock market crashes; you're welcome).

Idiots are idiots, and need little excuse to start behaving as such (as the rifle-toting twats who showed up to candidate Obama's speeches proved, and as the endless witless Arsebooking about "coming to get our guns" showed throughout his presidency). Then there was/is the Do Nothing Congress and the Do Nothing Senate, the twin national disgraces.

But when a country's electorate speak so clearly (and notwithstanding the popular vote bum steer, no-one thought that Trump's demagoguery would draw *ANY* number of votes at first - he was a joke candidate like that fool who believes the Pyramids are grain silos) it behooves everyone who voted differently to listen and attempt understanding beyond a smart-ass one-liner on a late night comedy show, so they can demand a better candidate of their own next time.

Let's be brutally frank: What lost the elections this time was as much the DNC's dynastic view of their world in spite of a clear groundswell indicating there were serious problems with the heir apparent in the public's eye as the charismatic draw of OPOTUS. Huge numbers of people were so enthused by their choices that they just stayed home on polling day.

Prisoners' 'innovative' anti-IMSI catcher defence was ... er, tinfoil

Stevie

Bah!

So to recap:

invisible stalker installation - f*cked up.

email redaction - f*cked up.

Would it be jejune on the strength of this nought-for-two performance to call for a head count to confirm that there are actually any prisoners inside this gaol?

Fireball in Tasmania: Possible CubeSat re-entry sparks alien panic

Stevie

Bah!

I'd just like to say "G'Day" to our new alien overlords, mate.

IBM UK: Oh, remote workers. We want to be colocated with you again

Stevie

Bah!

"Tosca Colangeli, IBM’s UK veep of Systems and Technology Group, warned employees in a recording, seen by The Register, that a “big feature” of 2017 is a “desire to be colocated together in a central location again”."

Interestingly, you can remove the word " colocated" from that statement without damaging the meaning.

US Air Force terminates Predator drones. Now you will fear the Reaper

Stevie

Re: living on the Left Coast

Alanis Morissette says SNL is written in and broadcast from the Left Coast's biggest city ...

Stevie

Re: How Cute

Turns out the public information slogan "Don't Fear The Reaper" was already in wide use by domestic undesirables.

There was no other recourse if unacceptable levels of association with longhairs and other pinkoes was to be avoided.

Also, Air Force brass were tired of shakedown trial assessment summaries reading "needs more cowbell".

San Francisco uni IT bods to protest Tuesday over cuts, outsourcing

Stevie

Bah!

Call OPOTUS. The Jobinator.