Posts by My Alter Ego 416 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Sep 2009
While I agree with you about the standard of education being lower than it should be (I did some A-Level maths papers for a laugh, and was shocked), I would never write a problem like you have done. I suppose I've always found it safer to use parentheses so as to remove every possible ambiguity.
Of course, if you had given the question *after* explaining "Order of Operations", then you've every right to be appalled.
It tends to be short for a while, and then I forget to go the barbers. End result, I look something like Jack Nicholson after a day of sailing/hiking. I go for the eccentric fluffy look.
@Naughtyhorse: Too bloody right. When I was 18 my mum tried getting me to use rogaine. She was told in no uncertain terms that it'd be a waste of money as I refused to use anything like that.
We had a 2nd ADSL line using Tiscali business. We got shot of them in April 2010 and they continued to bill us. They then threatened to cut us off after we cancelled our direct debit. Only in February did we finally get a letter saying they'd return our money.
At this stage we'd completed our complaint to Otelo, and they've said that Talk Talk have 8 weeks to give our money back plus a good will gesture. I'm going to frame that letter, and also use it as an example why nobody should use the bastards.
It was hilarious listening to the Otelo guy trying to be diplomatic about how shit Talk Talk are.
One word of advice, always CC complaints to the company secretary, they're apparently *supposed* to mention any correspondence in meetings. Even if it isn't, they will be required to reply to it.
Not everyone is using their mobile to play FarmVille on their mobile. Everyone in our office actively trades with people on the road who rely on their mobiles to earn their (often self employed) living. While it hasn't affected us directly, it's been bloody annoying not being able to get hold of many of our contacts.
It's guaranteed to have cost a good few people money. Sure, they're only paying Vodafone £1 per day, but it's more than a little embarrassing for Vodafone to demonstrate how bad their disaster recover is.
As somebody else has commented, you have to make cutbacks to generate £11.5 billion profits. Obviously security was one of those areas.
Seeing as you asked, it's (somewhat) accepted that the protests traversing North Aftica & the Middle East have been incited* by those in Tunisia.
The Tunisian protests kicked off because of unemployment, corruption, etc. However details from the Wikileaks cables detailing the first lady (possibly) making large profits *may* have helped stir things.
Oh yes, in several of the countries, social networking has been cut off in an attempt to stop the protesters from communicating.
And that's today's tenuous link.
* Yes, I know incited isn't the right word, but my mind is drawing a blank at the moment.
I remember being told by a maintenance engineer with BA that while running diagnostics on an aircraft someone for some reason cycled the gear, resulting in a rather sick looking aircraft. In general, safeties can be by-passed.
Another one was somebody working in the bypass section of a turbofan engine, the reverse thrust louvres should have been deactivated but weren't, again somebody for some reason moved the throttle levers. The end result not being very pleasant.
I think Paul Ehrlich is wrong, to really foul things up you need a human, not a computer.
They've an area the size of France & Germany* under water.
They've been told what they are and aren't allowed to see on the internet.
They've lost the Ashes, losing 3 tests by an innings
Now they're going to have bloated "innovative, engaging and truly fabulous creative" content from advertisers foisted upon them
I for one will be adopting an Ozzie today.
* Source BBC
Beer, this one's me.
The resounding reply was, surprise surprise, it won't work.
People seem to forget that for most websites that do tracking, we're not the customer, we're the product. The customers are the advertisers, and websites are selling us to them.
But then, that's a difficult as expecting football fans to understand that it's not a sport to the clubs, but business*, and that they don't care about fans hating the new American owners of the day.
* Had to get the jab in there following this morning's papers being full of transfer "news"
Huh? I had to go back and search the article for "Apple" and "Android", and found no matches. Flash has it places, but not for simple menu systems & searches, for that all you need is the hover class & a html form.
I for one think this is a story, as anything that tells people to stop making bloated flashy websites with fuck all content is good.
"Flash is needed for a full internet experience at this moment in time.", not for me, I use the flashblock* extension in Firefox, that way I get no flashing adverts annoying the hell out of me. Very few websites actually require flash for a "full experience", those that do tend to get neither my attention nor custom.
* I don't use addblock because I don't hate adds, just flashing punch the monkey ones.
Note: As an Android user & developer, you're as rabid a fanboy as the Apple fanboys you take issue with.
It's not like it's an original Australian artifact.
I did however take my Dad to the Ashmolean in Oxford when he was over, I introduced it to him as the "Museum of Plunder".
Similarly, the mirror from the Leviathan of Parsonstown (Birr in the Rep of Ireland) currently resides in the Science Museum after the telescope was dismantled. I heard (an unsubstantiated) rumour that the Science Museum wouldn't give it back when the telescope was being restored.
I for one agree with the OP, I also haven't taken the death of friends and family close to me particularly well in the past. I don't think he's saying he'd shrug his wife's death off, more that while it's distressing there's no point in being squeamish about it. You are after all highly likely to die at some stage in the future.*
The whole using euphemisms for death around children is daft. What child will want to go to bed after being told that Granny or their bunny has gone to sleep and they'll never be seen again.
I also had a enjoyable chat with some bible bashers on my door step once. I told them that I'll die, be put in a box in the ground (or an oven) and that's that. It doesn't mean I won't shit myself if I ever find myself spiralling to my death in an aeroplane.
* I say highly likely as there are about 6,895,600,000 people in the world, and estimates of the number of people to have lived is 100-115 billion, therefore you have a 6.0-6.9% chance of dying.**
** Can you say for absolute certainty that the secret to eternal life will not be found before you die of natural causes.***
*** Thought not.
I've got a base password for all websites (excluding banking), which is random, 8 characters, alphanumeric and mixed case. It doesn't take long to remember this, though for a while I could only remember the casing using muscle memory. Bit of a pain for smartphones.
You then create a simple reproducible method of adding characters to the beginning and end of it, eg. Prepend the first two vowels and append the last two consonants:
For example:
Base password: bCX6ckKy
Domain: theregister.co.uk
Password: eebCX6ckKytr
Of course you can monkey around with the case, and various other things, but as long as it follows set rules it's a decent method of having the same password for multiple sites, and not obvious to anyone looking at a *single* instance of your password.
Of course, this doesn't work if you decide to use a base password of *MyPassword*.
What made me laugh in Casino Royale was that to make it different from a 747, they put 2 engines per pylon (like the B52), with the outboard pylons having fuel tanks. I can't imagine any modern aircraft passing certification in that configuration.
Luckily, I tend to keep opinions like that to myself, and unlike a previous house mate of mine, I don't let it spoil the whole film.
I wiped XP after a particularly annoying trojan (infection vector was Java), and install Ubuntu Netbook Edition and have to say I love unity. Works perfectly on my 13" Toshiba Satellite Pro. Though seeing as I administer a FreeBSD server in work I'm a CLI person, so tweaking things isn't an issue for me. It's such a relief having curl, dig, tar, grep, etc in the OS, rather than having to install Win32 versions.
Wine appears to run the few remaining Win32 apps (the word isn't reserved for mobile applications) pretty well too (MemoryMap is one).
Have to admit, before this I had my fair share of Linux failures, and probably will again when I get a newer laptop.
Vive la différence
Depends on how you deal with your account. I've only added people I really know, and want to keep track of: anyone who I can't be bothered with I accept as a friend and then after a couple of months I remove them.
My account is locked down as tight as possible (excluding bugs of course), so much so, that somebody I sail with said they weren't allowed to add me as a friend even knowing when my email address (could have been a bug)
I have an account because it allows me:
To see what members of my family in Ireland are up to (namely niece & nephew)
To see what friends in Germany are up to.
An easy way to see photos from friends without clogging my Inbox.
What I don't do:
Bad mouth my boss (he's a mate of mine anyway so he knows when I'm pissed off)
Add photos of me pissed, etc.
All it takes is using a bit of common sense, unfortunately that appears to be lacking in today's society. At least you see almost daily reports of somebody seeing the consequences of being an idiot, so maybe things are improving.
This is the same stupid bint that decided it was ok to announce the postal ballot count before the election had even started. Apparently it was ok as she only got a caution:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/10/26/mp_police_caution/
What is surprising is the police coming out and saying that it's a stupid idea, that RAF Puma buzzing our office seems to have a pig flying in close formation.
I'm going to put my pedant hat on an say that 2.3 is Gingerbread, while 3.0 Honeycomb will [apparently] be for entirely for tablets.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPUGNCIozp0
As and Android user, and occasional developer, I actually have to ask why. I couldn't cope with a phone which only has one button (excluding volume, mute & power). Other than that minor shortsight, I have to say I do quite like the hardware.
How the hell do developers forget this. Any online shop I've worked on I compare the receipt to the one the bank have posted back, and only if it matches completely is the download allowed.
As an aside, I was very disappointed to see that Aer Lingus had fixed their CC validation. I used to tell them my card was a Visa Electron to avoid paying the 10GBP booking fee, but use my Visa Debit card. I didn't feel too bad about this as I can't believe Aer Lingus is being charged 10% for a CC transaction, let alone debit card transaction.
It's blatantly a case of fraud, but it's still hard to feel sorry for people who haven't bothered following the guidelines and have case security to the wind.
Got done for whiplash when I went into the back of a Discovery in my Westfield at very low speed. Absolutely no damage to the Disco, and all I needed was a nose cone and radiator.
Weight of Disco + 4 occupants = 2100kg
Weight of Westy + Me = 500kg
Engergy absorbed in impact by Westy = 80%
Completely my fault, but the driver of the disco drove on for about 50yds before she realised I hit her, and yet she and her sons got whiplash. I really should have made regular visits to the football club to see if they were still playing whilst "suffering" from whiplash.
That's apparently what happens when you have an accident with somebody who lives in house called Dun Roamin.
At least I hope so.
I've written a couple of Android Apps, mainly as what I wanted wasn't available, so I gave it a go. My first was a METAR/TAF (Aviation weather reports & forecasts), and I put it on the marketplace for a larf. It's a fairly niche market, and there are plenty of competitors, but I've made about £200 out of it so far.
Not enough to quit my day job, but it'll pay for a nice lunch in the Le Manoir Aux Quat'Saisons. There are companies out there making a lot of money from selling Android apps.
My flight was cancelled.
What I'd like to see is two sets of numbers:
How much money BAA has lost?
How much money the plant equipment required to keep things going would cost.
Finally, what kind of company refuses free help? Extra help, more flights, less cancellations = more income.
Airlines are just as blinkered. I called up Aer Lingus and asked them if they'd give me a full refund if I cancelled my flight so I wouldn't have to trek down to Heathrow (it was the last flight, so labelled as scheduled), and then drive back when it finally gets cancelled. My reasoning was that I'll probably get a refund anyway, and if the flight goes ahead then there'll be a standby seat available for somebody who really wants it (and is willing to pay through the nose, so extra profit). Response? "that's not how it works" & "I don't make the rules". As it was I found it was cancelled before I got to park, but after I left.
That's a good thing isn't? Who needs a law stating that you can't drive while watching porn and pulling one of at the same time. Surely it comes under driving without due care and attention.
I'd be happy living in a place that uses some common sense: where there isn't a new law de jour.
Reading the letter, it sounds like he's got a lot of correspondence to back this up. He's acting exactly as a scientist should, with disgust when it comes to stifling of debate. As somebody else mentioned, I wouldn't be surprised if he accepted AGW once incontrovertible* evidence is found. That however may take some time seeing as his confidence in some of the leading institutions appears to be fairly shaken.
Even as a lay person I know that incontrovertible isn't a word one uses lightly in science. If I were to say that I have incontrovertible evidence that the force between two bodies can be calculated EXACTLY as F = G * m1 * m2 / d^2, I should rightly be asked to prove it. Just because it's accepted as being true at the moment, it doesn't mean that it will not be tweaked in the future to fit future measurements.
Fermatt's last theorem has now been proved to be incontrovertible. It's pretty damn difficult to say the same of anything in natural science.
Obligatory XKCD: http://xkcd.com/435/
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