Posts by Tom Melly
65 posts • joined Friday 27th April 2007 09:30 GMT
Re: Stupid question
In fairness, placebos are very effective for pretty much everyone. Bizarrely, it doesn't even matter much if you're told that you're taking a placebo. Oh, and it helps if you're charged a lot of money. Seriously.
Anecdotally, I was given homoeopathic medicine when I was covered in very virulent mosquito bites. It worked brilliantly within minutes, and I know that stuff is a load of bollocks.
Re: DRM cant work
Netflix IMHO have got it right. I don't bother trying to circumnavigate the DRM because I don't need to. The monthly price is low and I can watch on pretty much any device in the home. I don't feel I'm 'buying' content, so don't feel aggrieved that it's DRM-enabled.
Posted in Evernote joins the notably hackable club
Re: Salts - one or many?
So common passwords (e.g. 'password') would look the same encrypted?
Could they have also get hold of the salt? If so, this would presumably allow them to encrypt various common passwords and then see which accounts had a match?
Posted in Evernote joins the notably hackable club
Salts - one or many?
Can someone tell me - does each password get its own salt or is there a global salt that's used?
Re: Tricky one
Hmm... I seem to remember a story called, iirc, "Welcome to the Goldfish Bowl". There was a huge time-viewer that allowed you to see the past housed in a massive building, and it could only look back if the event was over 500 years ago or something.
Then someone worked out a) how to make it small and cheap and b) how to get around the 500 year thing (possibly realising it was an artificial restriction). They released the machine to the public, and a very angry man from the government turned up with the simple question "how long ago is the past?" and then left, muttering the story's title. (or something).
The trouble FB faces is that it doesn't really allow any development as a communications medium. No discussion threads, everything dropping out of site after a few hours - it doesn't really support anything more complex than gossip, kittens and promotional pages. Everyone's trapped in an endless loop.
Observing my children and their friends, calls are ridiculously short. They seem to treat speaking as an extension of texting, and employ the same brevity. It can be quite shocking for us old 'uns, as it often (from our perspective) comes across as incredibly rude - e.g.
Daughter: Do you want to come round?
Friend: No (end of call).
1 min later
Mother of friend: I'm sorry - X was so rude. She can't come round as we're just off to see her gran.
Cue agreement from me and the wife, head-scratching from daughter...
Re: Out of that entire article
I didn't know that - and nor does Wikipedia amusingly...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Melly#References
check out number 7... it's a link to an el reg article about, mostly, wikipedia...
Re: a waste of NASAs time
I suspect NASA know that there are a hard-core who will never be convinced even if you rubbed their faces in Martian dust whilst giving them a spacesuit wedgie.
The point is that potential converts (who might otherwise be convinced by a 'no way this could have been taken on Mars' argument) have an alternative - and correct - explanation.
I guess they've learned from all the nonsense that sprung up around the moon landings with regard to shadows and fluttering flags, and so on.*
* what I love about conspiracy theories is how they require the conspirators to be both superhuman geniuses and complete cretins - they build a convincing moon set, but then decide that a gentle breeze and some extra lighting would improve the ambience?
Lots of ommissions
A pair of houses in Greyswood St, SW16 were bombed and rebuilt, but no sign of that either (we used to live opposite, and I was puzzled for some time by the discontinuity in the architecture and design).
Do they give any rough idea of what % of bombs are recorded?
One of the problems with wikipedia - and relevant to this issue - is that the inaccuracy is now verifiable - the article can cite the levenson report (citation is more important than truth).
It's a constant problem with wikipedia - an incorrect or unverified fact is lifted from wikipedia by a lazy journo, and the journo's article then becomes the verification.
See http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/15/tom_melly_wikipedia_comment/ for an example (and for added irony, note that the reg article has become one of the citations).
What worries me is that they seem to be heading towards a "if enough people complain" standard. Mob justice and faux outrage as law... great.
Personally, I'd be happier if they picked the cases they're going to prosecute out of a hat.
But what about the Beano, Dandy, etc.
Some interesting stuff in the comments (I really must give 2000AD another go - several years since I even looked at a copy), but no one is really addressing the issue of what went wrong for the old-style UK kids comics.
Take the Beano - it was fairly clear picking up an issue even 10 years ago that this wasn't really a comic - more of a magazine with a few strips. Why did that change? Once would assume that it was economic necessity, but I'm not sure where the necessity came from. Both my kids will happily read old Beano annuals, so why did kids stop buying kids' comics?
Re: What? No 'Mission of Gravity' reference?
'Mesklin' was mentioned by another poster...
Mostly correct, but I don't know where you get the 'years younger' bit. At 1G, it will take you about 12 years (ship time), and you will therefore be 12 years older...
Re: Optional
Ah, I was wondering who would make the Mission of Gravity connection...
Re: whats the point
AFAICT if you accelerate/decelerate at 1G the whole way, then you can make it in around 12 years (ship time).
Sorry about this...
Bono and the boys decide to retire and move to Australia to take up surfing. Anyway, a reporter goes to interview them in their new beach pad. Unfortunately, on the day of the interview, the entire band is drowned in a freak accident, and on arrival, the reporter is greeted by a tearful manservant. The reporter asks if the band is ready to be interviewed, to which the manservant replies, "No, Mister - Bondi-expats U2 die."
Posted in Is lightspeed really a limit?
Re: Am I On Youtube?
... and apparently they're spending their life talking (and thinking) bollox.
... and that's ignoring the fact that 'boring' in this case is referring to experimental evidence that time and space change their relative dimensions in order to maintain a constant value for c.
Posted in Is lightspeed really a limit?
Am I On Youtube?
For a tech-site, I'm amazed at the fundamental ignorance shown by many posters of the basics of relativity.
How can people spend what appears to be quite a lot of time dreaming up nonsense when a little reading would at least give a basic understanding of the principles (which have been proved time and time again in the lab)?
Posted in Is lightspeed really a limit?
but c is not the speed of light - it is the speed that any particle with zero rest-mass MUST travel at. Actually, and iirc, it is more complicated than that. In a sense, everything travels at speed c all the time - it's just that massless particles travel at c in 3d space as well as 4d space-time.
In other words, to travel faster than c requires you to behave differently from every other particle in the universe.
Posted in Is lightspeed really a limit?
Re: FTL - easy-peasy...
I don't think it quite works like that (but I could be wrong). Apart from anything else, remember that your propulsion mass is increasing too...
Thought experiment - can the people on the ship measure that they have more mass? If not, how would they explain the sudden need for shed-loads of energy?
Posted in Is lightspeed really a limit?
Re: there is already something faster than light
I down-voted you and el reg said it was sorry I didn't like your post. This is not true. I loved your post. Still chuckling...
Posted in Is lightspeed really a limit?
FTL - easy-peasy...
Travelling faster than c (as in "reaching a star x light years away in less than x years") is perfectly possible - it's getting back in time for tea that's the problem...
Posted in Is lightspeed really a limit?
Point of order (hopefully an interesting one). C is not the speed of light - it is the speed that anything with zero rest-mass will travel at - i.e. light is one of the class of things that travel at C.
Re: IE deliberate bug
Actually, almost all browsers screw up in some way or another when it comes to 'split', and IE only screws up when the delimiter is a regex rather than a string. Not defending IE - I only use it for one must-use-IE application - but cross-browser JS implementation issues are not going to go away any time soon, irrespective of which browser you use.
Favourite MR James lines?
Mine (from Casting the Runes):
There was more unpleasantness, however. Either an economical suburban company had decided that their light would not be required in the small hours, and had stopped working, or else something was wrong with the meter; the effect was in any case that the electric light was off. The obvious course was to find a match, and also to consult his watch: he might as well know how many hours of discomfort awaited him. So he put his hand into the well-known nook under the pillow: only, it did not get so far.
What he touched was, according to his account, a mouth, with teeth, and with hair about it, and, he declares, not the mouth of a human being. I do not think it is any use to guess what he said or did; but he was in a spare room with the door locked and his ear to it before he was clearly conscious again. And there he spent the rest of a most miserable night, looking every moment for some fumbling at the door: but nothing came.
Re: Sir
Which would be fine if they hadn't made it clear that it was to 'protect' their catering staff rather than the pupils. Since she wasn't actually photographing anything but her plate of food, they basically made themselves look like twats.
Anyway, whatever, thanks to the council, she's raised nearly £100,000
Posted in XP - Latest KB updates
XP - Latest KB updates
Anyone else having problems with today's (?) security updates? KB 2518864, 2572073 and 2633880.
Keeps prompting, installing, prompting again, installing again, and so on...
I don't appear to be alone (http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_xp-windows_update/windows-update-keep-installing/03b79e2b-da93-4e63-99b5-f933e3841036)
Posted in PlayStation Suite SDK beta opens today
Re: what devices are supported?
where does it say that it's only for mobile devices?
Posted in Aliens Blu-ray disc set
Hmm... apart from the sound (and I'm partially deaf) I can't think of any particular reason to buy this.
So... moving on, is it just me or does the special edition suck? (as in "adds nothing, takes away a lot")
The main crimes:
1. The scenes with the colonists
2. Boring shooting gallery scene with the automatic guns in the corridor
More useful info from XKCD
Nice, but, if you're going to start referencing XKCD, can we have something more useful?
http://xkcd.com/936/
Just pretend it's foreign aid...
... because otherwise it makes no sense at all.
You could pay twice as much to have it developed in the UK and it would still make sense not to off-shore. Not only is this tax revenue leaving the country rather than being spent back into the economy, but you've also just increased the unemployment figures...
This is like using your petrol to fuel someone else's car on the basis that they get better MPG than you... (I admit that this fails to include the possibility that we might get some decent software at the end of it, but then how likely is that?)
Posted in Lego space shuttle hits 114,000ft
I don't want to complain, but...
... would it have killed them to wait for a nicer day?
Posted in Netflix vs Lovefilm
Netflix - two probems
At the price, the lack of recent releases doesn't bother me so much, and seems pretty much inevitable, and I assume that their catalogue is going to expand.
My two gripes so far are occasional problems with the sound/picture being slightly out of sync and the fact that you can't browse the entire catalogue. The syncing thing seems to sometimes go away if you stop and restart the film, but I don't even understand how modern hardware and codecs even allow that to happen...
I would add some of the categories it offers me to the complaint, but they're more just bizarre rather than a problem ("Dark thrillers with a strong female lead", or something like that - that's a thing?).
Price-wise, netflix seems to be a clear winner - either that or I misunderstood what lovefilm was offering.
Anyway, lovefilm's not an option. We have a good dvd deal with them which their desperate to make us switch from. Every new service they offer requires us to switch away from it. TBH I haven't even used the deal we have (pay-per-disc rather than monthly), but I don't want to cancel it, I want to pass it on to my children when I die....
Indeed. I presume BT pay their PR people and don't just crowd-source them or something. How do large companies keep making the fundamental mistake of thinking no one will find out?
More than one occasion?!?
"That computer has legitimately saved my life on more than one occasion."
This is the bit that scares me... I'm tempted to forgive it as hyperbole, but imagine the same statement about, say, smoke detectors saving one person's life on more than one occasion. I'd humbly suggest that they might be doing something wrong...
No surprise
My job involves a lot of work with the NHS. For all their ICO bollox, they rarely train or provide any encryption software.
We've largely given up the battle of trying to persuade some of our clients to stop sending us unencrypted patient data via email...
Posted in Webcam sextortion perve gets 6 years
Shocking of course, but...
... someone managed to trick users into taking the pc into the shower with them by generating a fake error message?
I have to admit that I'm sort of vaguely impressed - although whether by the stupidity of the users or the recognition of that stupidity by the culprit, I'm not sure...
Oh, and it was on a Mac ;)
I'd rather they had a better process for handling username disputes
Any shite-stirring bugger can report you to sony and get you barred, and getting stuff back that you actually paid for is a nightmare.
And what exactly is wrong with P3n1sVanLesb1an anyway?
Right but wrong
It's worded very confusingly...
I think it means:
before 10% legit email, 90% spam - eg. 10/90
now 25% legit email, 75% spam - eg. 10/30 (since the amount of legit is unchanged)
or not... no, you're right. It still doesn't make much sense...
Because...
... if you're in government, the answer to every problem is always more complexity.
I think they did it on purpose
I think they deliberately went very generic - they wanted something that they could sell everywhere and would offend nobody.
Simple lesson to learn
I have no real comment to make on the seriousness or otherwise of what happened, but it seems there's a fairly simple lesson - make sure that you factor in not having mains power for several days.
Jesus - don't these people read Jurassic Park or anything?
Posted in Reactions to iiNet's copyright win
address the growing demand for studio content to be delivered in a timely and cost-effective manner
The above quote from the article is the point IMHO.
I looked into using iTunes to watch films with the family. Could I burn them to dvd? No. Torrent it is then...
Stupid Sony
The really dumb thing was offering it in the first place without a clear strategy to cope with the PR fallout when they (inevitably) had to remove the feature.
They should have never offered it, and, if for some reason they felt they had to offer it, they should have shouted from the rooftops what was going to happen when it got hacked...
no problem?
If you bothered to read his blog post, you'd see that he does have a backup of the originals - however, all the metadata is now gone, all the links to his photos on flickr are broken, and he has to upload the whole lot again.
In what way does a paid service screwing up like this without any way of fixing the issue represent 'no problem'?
And BTW, can everyone who is ever tempted to post some smug and inane remark about backups every time they read about someone losing data, count to 10 and then go and do something more productive.
Backup Fail
I have copies of my photos on my local HD as well as on flickr, and if my HD fails, then I can just download them all from flickr to copy to my new HD... oh, hang on...
Err, flickr, if you're not going to back up our photos, at least give us some way to do so...
Posted in Top Ten Arcade Classics
Too short
Only 10? And no Strider or R-Type?
Tcchh - I'm not coming to your video arcade. Hardly worth getting my change from the grumpy git in the glass box for...
