Posts by Steven Roper 1832 publicly visible posts • joined 10 May 2011
"Also check out her autobiography "My Head Whistles In a Crosswind"."
Fuck ya - you just made me snort coffee through my nose all over my keyboard.
Have a thumbs up for making me laugh so hard. I'm going to steal that line next time I need to insult someone's stupidity: "Heeelllloooo! Is your head whistling in a crosswind or something?!?"
Brilliant.
Ah, I see you're a fellow xkcd reader as well!
Still not a patch on the 250-light-year trek those Ethiopian stone tools have made though...
"Then ask yourself if you own anything that old that's still working, never mind contactable after travelling more than 17 light hours through the radiation-wracked nastiness of space."
I still have my old Casio FX series pocket calculator from school from that era, sitting on my desk near the mouse. Still works too, after more than 3 decades. They certainly don't build them like they used to.
And while it hasn't endured the harsh conditions of radiation and space travel that Voyager has, it has endured the harsh conditions of my rotting-uneaten-lunch-and-leaky-cordial-bottle-toting schoolbag back then, and the coffee-and-Coke-spilled peril of my desk ever since - outlasting a few dozen keyboards in the process!
What if you have a common name, like mine? There are over 240 people called "Steven Roper" in Australia alone (I was part of a survey some years back), any and all of whom could come up in a Google search of the name. I was surprised to learn a while ago that there's even a well-known American comic-book character with my name (Intrepid reporter Steve Roper and his sidekick Chief Wahoo) which will quickly dominate any search for it.
Which I'm actually quite glad about, since it makes it very hard for anyone to positively identify any search result with me personally, and gives me a nice level of plausible deniability should anyone decide to go digging up some dirt!
But in regard to this business of de-indexing my name, how would I tell Google which results relate to me, which to the well known doctor in America with my name, and which to the even better-known comic strip character? Do I have to supply every URL that contains the information I want removed? And if so, wouldn't I then be giving Google a list of everything I specifically want to hide?
Seems to me to be better if you just keep your mouth shut and ignore any detrimental references to your name on the internet. It seems better to keep the plausible deniability than to demand some dirt's removal and inextricably link yourself to it in some watchlist somewhere...
"Not sure about Australia."
Before European colonisation, much of Australia, except for the Nullarbor and inland deserts in the main body of the continent, was covered in eucalyptus forest, while the Murray-Darling Basin was mostly mallee. Mallee is a large bush or small tree, famed for its toughness and resilience, that in the wild forms an interlocked and impenetrable tangle of head-high scrub. Most of this was cleared for farmland during colonisation, although large swaths of it remain in places like the Sunset Country and Big Desert national parks.
Considering that mallee wood is as hard as steel and blunts axes and chainsaws with infuriating rapidity, clearing thousands of square miles of that shit was no mean feat!
We had two Muscovy ducks as pets when I was a kid back in the 70s. They were lovely as ducklings and we kids loved them. Then they grew up and covered the entire backyard in a 6-inch deep layer of duck shit, which Dad loved for the garden, until Mum slipped in it and hurt herself.
Whereupon the ducks were politely escorted off the premises and dumped in the Torrens to fend for themselves, since we kids refused outright to allow Dad to kill and cook them. A few months later, the Department of National Parks and Wildlife gassed all the feral ducks on the Torrens to allow the native species to return. So in the end they died anyway and we missed out on some roast duck for our sympathy!
I'd really like to rip these do-gooders a new one, but I'm currently suffering from rant fatigue and can't be arsed. Most of the regulars here know what my responses to this shit are anyway, and you've heard all the arguments before, so I'll just register my strong disapproval here and leave it at that.
Absolutely
I classify Chrome as malware for exactly this reason. The only reason nobody rags on Google for this practice is because they're so big. Hopefully if CERT US have the authority or backing to take action on this underhanded and deceptive practice, that Google will also be targeted alongside the likes of Ask and Zango. They might even manage to get the practice made illegal. Hey, I can dream, can't I?
"Some law somewhere will be stuck to them with a nail gun."
Here in Australia, that would be the charge of "interfering with the operation of an aircraft", the same offence they slap the idiots who shine laser pointers at planes with. It's a terrorism-related offence, so getting slapped with that means you are in some very, very deep doo-doo.
"Frank Herbert's logorrhoeic idiot son"
Having read his extensions to the Dune saga recently, I have to agree with that assessment - in part. The three Butlerian Jihad books were pretty good, with just a few minor niggles (like the supernatural powers of the Sorceresses of Rossak.) Nor were the two post-Chapterhouse continuations too bad, although the final ending was a bit twee in a "happily ever after" kind of way. But the three House prequels set just before the events of Dune and the interquels were an atrocity. As far as I'm concerned, like the mythical Highlander II, they don't actually exist!
This is exactly why DRM is snake oil, and those who sell it are the real thieves, not so much to us, the end-consumers, but to all the music and media companies they keep on selling the same lie to over and over.
In cryptographic terms, DRM is flawed because in any DRM scenario, Bob and Mallory are the same person. That is, in the usual cryptographic cast of characters where Alice, the sender, sends a message to Bob, the intended recipient and Mallory, the attacker, trying to intercept the message, DRM is treating the intended recipient as the attacker. But since Bob has to have the decryption key in order to read the message, it follows that DRM, by definition, is giving the key to Mallory to decrypt the message, since the recipient is ipso facto the attacker.
This principle is why DRM is a scam, no matter how the snake-oil merchants try to dress it up. Were I in power, I would have every staff member and shareholder of every DRM company arrested and charged with fraud for this reason.
This is probably the most sensible post I've seen yet on the subject of feminism and misandry being used to incite rage and hate, and it's likely to remain so in the inevitable wave of bigotry and ranting that this thread is going to turn into.. Divide and conquer. Obviously the two brainwashed PC morons who downvoted you (as of this reply) lack the necessary brain cells to comprehend your point.
This is precisely why this hypocritical false "equality" exists - to enrage people and distract them from the real issue. White men are not privileged, any more than women or ethnic minorities are. The common PC furphy that because most privileged people are white men therefore all white men are privileged is the same as saying that because all boy-buggerers are gay therefore all gays must bhe boy-buggerers. What about privileged white women? Or privileged blacks - like Obama, currently the most powerful and privileged man on the planet? And what about all the "privileged" white men currently eating out of bins and sleeping in the gutters because they're so "privileged" they have no need of shelters, as women have?
I'll tell you what ALL privileged people have in common, and it's not gender, race or who they enjoy fucking. It's WEALTH and POWER. Nothing else. And they use this wealth and power to push bullshit like affirmative action and political correctness, pissing in the face of gender and race discrimination by doing so, for the express purpose of distracting the masses from the real issue, which is that 1% of the population controls 99% of the wealth.
Nowhere was this more clearly demonstrated than the undermining and eventual destruction of the Occupy movement. For a while, they were a real threat to the established order. They exposed the reality of the greed, hypocrisy and corruption of the ruling classes that make a mockery of the principles of democracy and freedom.
Then along came the feminists, anti-racists, and gay-rights activists. Funded and encouraged by the ruling elite, they flooded the Occupy movement with their gender, race and sexuality issues, effectively dividing it and distracting it from the real issue, which was, and has always been, CLASS. Not gender. Not race. Not sexuality. CLASS. And in so doing, they divided and discredited the entire Occupy movement in the eyes of the public.
Only when more people realise that affirmative action and its various supporters are being used as tools to disguise the real injustices of the world will those injustices ever be corrected. Playing hypocrite and fomenting hate as the IESF is doing here simply plays into the hands of the real criminals - those currently running every western nation.
I wish I could upvote you a thousand times. But alas, I have only one to give.
I believe the phenomenon you're looking for is something I call "rant fatigue". Any politically charged issue that incites people to post long internet rants on the topic eventually wears them out, so they give up trying for a while.
For example: Every so often, I find myself getting my knickers in a knot about feminism and misandry and the injustices visited upon men and so forth. To vent it, I go on an internet rampage, tearing into feminists and their supporters alike, composing and posting long missives concerning fallacies about male privilege, the gender pay gap myth, the hypocrisy of affirmative action, rant, rant, rant.
Then, when I've got it all out of my system, I find myself in a burnt-out state of mind where I simply don't care any more. I get to the point where I could read a blog entry by someone like Andrea Dworkin going on about how all men are rapists and child molesters and should be publicly castrated, and not give two shits about it. As to commenting on it? Fuck it, can't be arsed. Next site.
That mental state is what I call "rant fatigue." I've spent the last day or so ranting to strangers about my pet hate, and I'm too stuffed now to write any more about it.
In your scenario, it appears that the climate "deniers" charged in yesterday and burnt themselves out ranting about the evils of the climate change lobby - so the next day, all suffering from rant fatigue, they left the comments thread to the "believers" first.
That's my take on the subject, anyway.
I'm still waiting to see what the result of a barbie with both ostriches and kangaroos on the guest list might be.
That's already happened mate. It's called a cassowary. Looks like an ostrich, kicks like a roo.
What?!?
What's holding me back from giving a 3rd party all my data is the possibility of anyone rooting through it, state actor or no. That's why I would insist on all my data not being given to a 3rd party, and instead stored in-house on a computer under my control, where I can monitor and regulate any and all access to it. And that would make you think I'm not committed to data security?
AVoiceForMen has this to say about the kinds of manipulative scum who use these misandrist attacks to goad men into compliance with their schemes:
All your life you are told by others what it means to be a real man. And you are told how worthless you are if you don't measure up.
Just know this. Anyone, man or woman, sending you this message is trying to shame you into their service. They are manipulating you to carry their load, to take on their hardships; even to bleed and die for their cause... or their profit.
Don't buy the lie. No one but you can define you as a human being or measure your worth. Never trust anyone who puts an adjective in front of the word MAN.
No, we don't need to know everything our governments are doing in our name. We do, however, need to be able to know anything our governments are doing in our name. Transparency doesn't mean forcing everyone to constantly monitor governments' actions, it means having the ability to expose any action that people would have a good reason to object to.
You might not want to know the details, but those who have the means to stop the government from acting unjustly may need to know the details in order to prevent it from doing so.
"We want to just have a very consistent user experience, so if you have one TV in one room and another TV in another room and they both say Android TV, we want them to work the same and look the same."
Let me FTFY: "...we want them to work the same and look the same unless we, and only we, decide to change how it works."
What Google is doing is denying any design or creative input from any source other than themselves, as though only they knew how to design a user interface. It fits with the general mentality of micromanagement and absolute control that seems to be prevailing in corporate environments these days.
"It's hackneyed to the point of uselessness, comes off as smug and superior, and turns away the very people you might hope to sway."
AKA "You catch more flies with honey than vinegar."
And it's amazing how many people these days forget this simple lesson. For example, I myself would probably be more supportive of the ideals of the various "equality" movements, were their proponents less disposed to snottily dismiss anyone who opposes them as an unenlightened overprivileged bigot, instead of logically explaining where they think the opponent is wrong. I wonder how much opposition to their causes results from this vinegar/honey effect, as opposed to genuine political disagreement with their ideas?
When I was a kid, an adult friend of the family once told me, "Everyone always has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason, and the real reason... So before you say yes to anyone, make sure you know what the real reason is."
Your post is a perfect illustration of that early life lesson!
This is exactly why I no longer use any service Google provides, with the exception of the occasional search if I can't find what I'm looking for on DuckDuckGo (which is not often.) I learned that lesson with the demise of the iGoogle homepage.
My iGoogle homepage became for me a portal to the web. I had a news gadget, weather report, world clocks, currency converter, world sunlight map, dictionary/thesaurus, whois/IP lookup, and Wikpedia search all laid out conveniently in little boxes on my single home page. Then Google took it away, and I never found an adequate replacement; I feel to this day that the internet has taken a small step backwards for its loss. These days I just use the 9 preset 'quicklinks' Firefox displays when you open a new tab, to visit the sites that perform the equivalent functions, but it's not an adequate replacement for iGoogle.
But from this I learned the dangers of coming to rely on a service you do not control. It can be taken away, at any time, for any reason. This is exactly why I refuse to embrace cloud and SaaS - because it could be taken away at any time, and there's nothing you can do about it. Do all your graphics work in Adobe's Creative Cloud? Too bloody bad if Adobe shuts down or has problems. You lose all your work, everything. Keeping all your documents and reports on Office 365? Too bloody bad if Microsoft suddenly decides it doesn't want to provide the service any more. You lose everything.
And that is why I will now only work with software that is installed directly on my machine, that does not require any connection to the internet to keep working, has no expiry date or subscription-based bullshit, and saves its data only on my local drive.
So thank you Google, for teaching me this important lesson. I won't fall for that shit again.
when this shit is linked to the facial-expression and emotional analysis software being mooted for monitoring your expression while watching smart TVs. I can picture you at the wheel, gritting your teeth and swearing at the moron who just cut you off, when this thing takes control, pulls the car over, and chimes in with:
"Look, Dave. I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over."
Rest assured, I'd have the fucking thing singing "Daisy, Daisy" before it got to the end of my street!
I get where you're coming from, and I agree that people deserve the right to choose who they want to marry and/or make love to.
However, assembling internet lynch mobs - and make no mistake, "lynch mob" is exactly what this is - to destroy those who don't support their cause is NOT the way to go about it, no matter how right or true your cause may be to you.
If Mr. Eich has broken any laws, then you take it to court and you discuss his actions in front of a judge. That is how we deal with these matters in a civilised society under the rule of law. If the laws are inadequate to criminalise his actions, then you take it to your politicians and campaign to get laws passed criminalising opposition to your cause. Then if he continues to oppose it in spite of the law, then you take it to court and you discuss it with a judge.
Rousing up internet lynch mobs to destroy the lives of those whose political opinions differ from your own when they have committed no crime under the laws of the land is vigilante justice at best, and pitchfork-and-torches barbarism at its worst.
Since OKCupid was the bunch that started the hate campaign against Mozilla ex-CEO Brendan Eich, that forced him to resign for exercising his right to hold a politically-incorrect opinion, I can't say I feel overly sorry for all those members whose security is thus compromised by OKCupid's incompetence. I guess karma's a bitch.
Just to clarify: I personally have no problem with people's sexual choices as long as it's consensual. But I do have a problem when people see fit to ruin the lives of those who don't share their opinions, no matter how right you think you are.
The solution is simple: The affected business owners notify Yelp of the extortion letters and the threats, then if their business receives a lot of negative reviews and should Yelp publish them, the business then sues Yelp for the amount demanded by the extortionists plus damages for loss of sales, on the grounds that Yelp is aiding and abetting criminal extortion.
It's high time these so-called "business review" sites like Yelp were brought to account for this sort of thing anyway. While they do provide a useful service, the measures they take to prevent this kind of embezzlement are clearly inadequate.
It still allows strangers to use my Internet connection and consume my bandwidth allocation, for which I pay. I commented before about Telstra foisting this on their customers and my opinion on that hasn't changed.
Also, I don't trust this "separation from the private network" they speak of. On my home network my wireless is secured with WPA2-PSK, suppressed SSID and MAC filtering for any WiFi device trying to connect to it. Under all this, I have multiple folders shared across my computers, many writable as well as readable, and mapped as network drives. This is to facilitate passing Cinema4D files to my render farm and rendered images back, transferring data to and from my private website testing server, streaming movies, music and TV shows to my TV and various portable devices, and so on. I've maximised security externally and minimised it internally so I'm not bothered with having to grant access and enter passwords every time I want to get something from another computer on my network.
As a result, the thought of allowing strangers into my WiFi, regardless of any "separation", gives me the willies. Not going to happen. Not on my watch.
Actually I was quite pleased to see the Reg add that footnote about the lack of effort being made to encourage men into traditionally female fields. That balanced perspective is why I prefer to get my news from El Reg instead of the feminist-biased mainstream media. Of course misandrists like you would find that "misogynistic".
Just as misandrists like you feel it necessary to post mindless feminist rhetoric in the comments threads of every publication that doesn't grovel to your worldview. Do you honestly think you're going to convert anyone or make even one commentard cut his cock off in some form of male guilt trip with comments like that?
If you're looking for other man-haters to circlejerk with, Tumblr is right over thattaway. ---------------->
I wish I could upvote this 100 times.
This principle lies at the heart of all anonymising processes. It is an unfortunate fact that any anonymising system will protect paedophiles and terrorists if it is to equally protect good people fighting for freedom and human rights in bad regimes, because the alternative is that if the system can be compromised to allow the tracing of paedophiles, it can be compromised to trace anybody else a legal authority doesn't like. There can be no half measures; a system is either uncompromisably anonymous or it is not, and the downside is that uncompromisable anonymity protects evil people as well as good ones.
Technology doesn't do morality, and regardless of all the rights laws and privacy protections in the world, what matters is not whether a compromising agency will violate that protection, all that matters is whether it can.
It is, of course, impossible to know whether this artificial-muscle focusing scheme will ever make it into an Apple iPhone or iPad
It won't. It's simply so that if someone actually produces something similar they can stifle that innovation and stamp out competition which is what their business model is founded on.
Bring it, fanbois. My post vote ratio needs balancing anyway.
Dailymotion. Vimeo. Flickr. Metacafe. Veoh. Imeem.
This is your big chance, fellas. Even good old MySpace has an opportunity for a renaissance here.
YouTube will become socially declassé if it starts carrying on like this. In an age where everyone is trying to be individual and different, flocking like sheep to YouTube will soon become seen as simply following the flock, if you see my meaning. Especially once word spreads about how only mainstream corporate trash is allowed on there.
Yes, we may well be Google's "products". However, unlike traditional boxed products, these "products" can jump off the shelves and walk away. Take note, you greedy bastards.
"A few have been known to think."
Such as Nick Xenophon. I'll pop a short letter off to him on the subject. He's been supportive before when I've contacted him, such as with the Conroy net censorship controversy, so I'll see what he has to say about this little piece of bullshit.
Nice strawman, and one typical of religious apologists.
It has nothing to do with feeling or being "superior", and everything to do with me deciding how I live my life, including my right to drink alcohol, eat ham and bacon, watch pornography and whatever else in my own home without self-righteous, sanctimonious bastards like you reaching into my life and telling me how I must live simply because some book written by a bunch of power-crazed desert goatherds 2000 years ago says I must.
I get where you're coming from, Trevor, and believe me I do know how horrible people are. So horrible that I've even refused to have children because I despise the human race that much.
Those who are in power are exactly the ones who shouldn't be (I think Douglas Adams put that most succinctly) since they got there by being greedy, unscrupulous, manipulative, sociopathic, all the traits that make human beings so horrible. So by restricting the tools of power, such as surveillance, to those people we are effectively handing our world over to vicious sociopaths anyway.
Achieving a balanced society has always been humanity's greatest bugaboo ever since we figured out how to throw rocks at each other. History has shown time and again, right up to the present day, that technology that enables one man to gain power over another always results in degeneration to an oppressive, brutal society ruled by Machiavellian overlords. Our world is going that way right now. So how do we avoid where this is all inevitably going?
While I see your point about psychos, bitter exes and moral crusaders going on rampages against you or whoever, and believe me as an MRA I've encountered first-hand the sheer malice and hatred of the more radical feminists in our world as well, I can't see any other way of achieving the social balance of power our world really needs.
I'd rather there was no surveillance technology at all, and we could all go about our lives knowing that our every move is not being tracked and monitored. But unfortunately the genie is out of the bottle. We can't put it back in. All we can hope to do is to implement some means of holding those who hold the reins to account. I don't trust our rulers; few of us do. We all know that their objective is to enslave and dominate and control and get as much as they can while giving as little as possible.
So like you, yes, such an open "level" world scares the hell out of me too. But a world in which only those who have already seized power by any means retain sole control of the means to hold onto it, scares me even more.
1. Provide "free" internet to everyone on the planet.
2. Since nobody wants to pay for something that can be had for "free", all the ISPs go out of business.
3. With no ISPs the Internet as we know it dies and is replaced by the "free" Googlenet.
4. Google now has final and absolute control over what is allowed to be posted on the Googlenet by simply blocking access to whatever they don't like, and also gets to record and utilise the browsing history of every person on the planet, Chrome or no Chrome.
5. Don't be evil my fucking arse.
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