Posts by Steven Roper
1012 posts • joined Tuesday 10th May 2011 15:00 GMT
Posted in Samsung fights back downunder
Something stinks here
Apple claim Samsung violated their patents AND get the Galaxy yanked from the market while the case is still *sub judice*, but when Apple is accused of violating Samsung's patents why isn't the iPad/iPhone yanked off the market in the same way, for the same reason? Somebody high up in government is an Apple fan maybe?
I think
one of the reasons a male-dominated board of directors might not want women in positions of power is precisely because so many women, like this one, will play the gender-discrimination card the moment they don't get their way. Was she passed over because she was female or because the new male incumbent had more experience, or was it because the board knew she would claim discrimination if she was passed over? What else would she claim discrimination about once she was promoted?
As long as women use political correctness to rise through the ranks, they'll always face that wall of opposition. I look at it from the perspective of, if a woman is willing to play the gender card to gain promotion, will she use the the same trick (or claims of sexual harassment or whatever) to get her own way once she is on the board? I wouldn't want to take a chance promoting anyone with that mentality, woman or man.
The corporate overlords
won't bother with this guy until/unless he starts to make serious money with it. Then they'll decide whether or not he's the kind of material they want in their echelon of power, and if not then they'll sue him into bankruptcy; if he is then they'll see to it that he becomes a multibillionaire like themselves.
This is unenforceable in Australia
since IIRC we have a constitutional clause here that prohibits us from signing away certain inalienable rights - including the right to legal redress in the event of another's negligence.
"A poem or a great movie is worth more than flushing a toilet"
Is it really? So if no plumbers made or repaired toilets so you would be living in your own shit and piss, most likely dying of disease, you wouldn't really be in any position to write your poems or great movies now, would you? Without trade services like plumbers and electricians, civilisation could not exist and your "artistic creativity" wouldn't be worth shit. Get some fucking perspective, idiot.
"Fair reward for creativity"
Yes, of course. As a professional web developer I want my fair reward too, so every time someone visits a site I design for you I should be paid for the same work, over and over again. And my heirs, and their kids, and their kids' kids too - why should they have to do any work at all since their great-grandfather designed some websites a century ago?
What about electricians? Shouldn't they be rewarded for their creativity by making you pay every time you turn on a light? And how about the plumbers? They should be paid every time you flush the toilet - that's only fair reward, right? Don't forget their kids for the next 3 generations too - they've earned the right to be paid again and again for their ancestors' hard work.
Copyright law is a scam, plain and simple. There's no other logical way to look at it. If you spend a week writing and recording a song, you should get paid for a week's worth of work, and no more. Same as everyone else who does honest work for a living. And as long as these thieves and fraudsters have our governments in their pockets, justice remains impossible.
I would a thousand times rather
live in a society of not-quite-right-in-the-head "scumbags" like Victor Ford, than live in constant peril of my life sharing a society with self-righteous bigots who think anyone whose sense of humour or outlook on life differs too much from their own should be hanged.
The problem is
what I've come to call the "Tug-o-war Effect." What I've observed is that usually, people generally do consider the pros and cons of something, because they have to in order to form an opinion on it - until that something turns into a fight.
The moment somebody cries "Oh noes! Ban it!", that something then devolves into a ban/don't ban argument, and in order to make their point, each side must extol, with all their might, the evils or benefits of said something.
Thus, like a Tug-o-war, in which both sides must pull back with all their might in order to have a chance of winning, the arguments become more and more polarised over time as each side tries to gain traction. Eventually there can be no middle ground, because what matters is no longer the central something the fight started over; instead, winning or losing becomes the only purpose of the fight.
I've observed this effect not only with nuclear energy, but also with climate change, left-right politics, religion and atheism, freedom and safety. As soon as there's a fight over it, the name-calling and hate-slinging begins; the polarisation of the arguments to support either side gets under way, and the first casualty of the war is the middle ground - usually the truth of the matter.
I know, because I'm often guilty of it myself. It seems to be a basic principle of human nature.
About Seagate drives being crap
I agree with you - every single one I ever bought went bad within 6 months. I personally swear by WD drives, since I've yet to have one fail on me.
You know what's really interesting? A good friend of mine swears by Seagate drives. When he buys them, they last for donkey's years. Likewise, he detests WD because every time he's bought a WD drive, it's gone bad on him within 6 months.
Explain that anomaly!
This is happening so often
that El Reg should really set up a new article category like RoTM and BOFH specifically dealing with cases of inept government droids losing confidential data.
Posted in StreetView gets the willies in Victoria
Well, there's nothing remotely resembling a dick that I can see
Perhaps Google have fixed it now that you've published it. Maybe you should have posted a screenshot instead of the Flash map where Google can change things.
Awesome
Now we get to see some of the biggest and most powerful corps on the planet banding together to flatten this pathetic, litigious parasite of a company into the dirt where they belong. More popcorn please!
Posted in Early Earth’s ‘golden shower’
A.C. Clarke beat you to it
In 3001, he describes how people have been engaged in a search for the fabled "golden asteroid", which had become an urban legend of the day.
Well, it seems the brainwashing is working then
Baaaa. Baa-Baa. Baaaaaaa. Baa. Baaaaaa. Baaa-Baaa.
How DARE you...
...put legends like Ozzy Osbourne, Black Sabbath and Marilyn Manson in with that pissant little manufactured boy-band twerp! Now go and wash your mouth out with soap! No, make that caustic soda! Bad Marketing Hack! Bad!
Posted in DNS hijack hits The Register: All well
One thing I've noticed
is that as of this morning Australian time, and still as of this post, theregister.co.uk now gives me a DNS error. Interestingly, if I connect to the VPN service I subscribe to (VyprVPN), I can reach the site (which is why your logs for this post would show me as coming from Amsterdam instead of Australia.) Most likely my ISP has cached the error and hasn't caught up yet. So it's also a good test of the censorship-bypassing abilities of the VPN, since a DNS failure at the local level is similar to the effect that the Great Aussie Firewall would have if it were in place, which is the reason I subscribed to the VPN service in the first place.
Good, fast, cheap
Pick any two.
My guess is they'll go for fast and cheap...
They'll have to fight McDonalds for the privilege
Back in the early 80s I remember a story doing the rounds (it later proved to be an urban myth) that McDonalds had bought the rights to be the first fast-food franchise to open on the moon from NASA or some such. So the thought occurred to me that had that been true, Domino's would have been receiving a call from McD's lawyers in response...
Posted in Sea eagles menace Scottish children
@sonicmonkey
Looking at the votes I'd say most beg to differ. You see, unlike Daily-Mail-reading do-gooders such as yourself, most Scots (that I've encountered) have this ability called a "sense of humour", which enables them to laugh off disparaging jokes and even come back with a few of their own. Unfortunately the proliferation of PC hand-wringers in recent years means that this wonderful ability is sadly becoming increasingly rare.
I just don't understand
why people have a problem with Windows 7 on tablets. I've had a Hanvon TouchPad with Windows 7 for over a year now and I've never had a problem using it. The onscreen keyboard is quick and responsive, and I make no more typos on it than on a normal keyboard. The menu interface also works without a hitch - I've never experienced the "you need to be pixel-precise" issue people keep chuntering on about. And the beauty of it is I can install the XAMPP webserver stack on it for demoing websites to clients, Photoshop and Cinema4D for design work, OpenOffice for docs and spreadsheets, and Eclipse for coding. I can use all my favourite programs on the tablet, which you can't do with Android or iOS, and I have no problems using any of them.
The only downside is the battery life - 3-4 hours under normal use. The thing does run an Intel Celeron Mobile so I can understand that its power consumption is fairly greedy. I solved this problem by buying a car cigarette lighter adapter for it, so when I take it with me on the road I just run it off the car's power, and in day-to-day use if I'm out of the office I'm rarely away from the car for more than a couple of hours anyway. Nevertheless, I'd like to see an improvement in this area - a 6-8 hour battery run would be perfect.
Nope
It most definitely was an adjective. Think about it - WTF is a "hoopy" as an object? The word was describing a situation, meaning excellent, cool, awesome or a plethora of other superlatives. Frood is the noun (as in "Ford Prefect is a hoopy frood"), although it did have an adjectival form, froody, as in the line from the books, "That would not be cool and froody."
I haven't seen this feature yet
but I hope they roll it out in Australia soon, because I've wanted the ability to block sites from appearing in my search results for years. For exactly the same reason as you - that fucking site e-e (I refuse to name them fully because it drives up their rankings)
Posted in Biofuel boffins pimp panda poo
The problem is
that PETA, WWF and other animal-rights activists would all start jumping up and down when some biofuel-corp starts farming battery-cage pandas in huge factories, feeding off of conveyor belts and shitting through tubes shoved up their arses to streamline the production process - so maybe using pandas as a fuel source isn't so "green" after all...
@Ken Hagan
"...your decision whether you buy remotely controllable devices..."
The problem with that is, once the new infrastructure is in place, we will start to see more and more "remote-control-compatible" (RCC) devices in the stores, which will edge out and ultimately replace the old ones. A good example is CRT monitors - you try and buy one now. They're only available in specialist shops and they now cost an arm and a leg. Eventually you won't be able to buy them at all. Things like freezers and washing machines will go the same way - all new available models will come with RCC built in.
It doesn't even have to be legislated: the common interests of the corporations and governments in micromanaging our private lives will simply see the RCC devices replace non-RCC ones on the shop shelves until you have no choice left once your old one fails.
Exactly
Few things piss me off more than clicking on a promising-looking result only to find another fucking search engine pushing results that are nothing to do with what I clicked on. See, these spamming fuckers show one thing to Google, and another to us. So say, for example, I'm searching for "javascript DOM methods" and I click a result that appears to show a list of DOM methods, but when I click it all I see is a page full of "results" that are merely ads for javascript design services who have paid the spammer to push their results up. That's because the spam search engine has shown the Googlebot a page that matches the search terms, but what they serve up to me is a page of paid adverts. As far as I'm concerned, that's bait-and-switch tactics, and those that do it are as bad as the penis-pill pushers and deserve the same treatment.
So while I generally don't think much of Google in some areas, they've done the right thing here, pushing these spamming fucks to the bottom.
Then fix it, dear Henry, dear Henry...
Thumbs up because I haven't heard that song in decades, and since I'm currently engaged in tracking down all the songs I can remember from my childhood, you just reminded me that I'd forgotten that one, and several others associated with it in my memory, like "Manah-manah" and "You are my sunshine". Thanks for the memory jog! ;)
And
Giveafuck Bay has been dredged completely clear of Care.
For those
who are concerned about people's obsession with celeb goss and trivia marginalising important issues, I direct you to the following interesting comic strip:
http://www.egodialogues.com/words-language/huxley-orwell.php
TL;DR Compares Huxley and Orwell and finds Huxley was more spot on with his predictions...
Posted in Samsung will add cross-suits in Oz
Come on Samsung!
Everyone in my office is barracking (non-Australians - cheering, rooting) for you! Show those cnuts what massive Asian conglomerates can do to litigious, anti-competitive, anti-consumer, control-freak pissant outfits like Apple, and stomp their fucking faces into the courtroom floor!
And the retreat from space continues as civilisation collapses
I could see this coming back when they grounded Concorde several years ago. No more commercial supersonic flight. Then the shuttle was retired. America's space program comes to an end. Now even the Russians, famed for their quality engineering, are struggling to maintain a space presence. Once the last astronauts return from the ISS, that will be it - they will be the last human beings in space.
Just as in the fall of the Roman Empire, greed, decadence, hedonism, and self-righteousness have reached levels under which civilisation cannot endure. As more and more people "look out for number one" the glue of altruism that sustained civilisation in the past will come unstuck, and, assisted by the spread of religion and superstition, we will descend into a new Dark Age. In keeping with the principle that the higher you go, the further you fall, we have a long way to fall this time; so it's entirely possible that recovery could take thousands of years, if indeed it ever happens.
Even if we did recover eventually, in this cycle we have depleted the Earth's resources, so the next Renaissance in 5000 AD or whenever will have nothing left to build on. We had this one shot, and we blew it. Perhaps Nature will decide that intelligence and sentience were evolutionary mistakes, and our distant descendants will consequently be indistinguishable from baboons.
I for one have always looked forward to seeing the end of the world, albeit that I wished such an ending was not in reality slow and messy and may take few generations - nothing like the cataclysmic apocalypses envisioned by the SF set, such as I had hoped to witness. But then, as T.S. Eliot rightly wrote, the world will end not with a bang, but with a whimper.
@AC 28th August 21:38
"Which is why they're keen to target the adverts to your interests. Is this evil?"
The advertising industry has a lot to answer for. Now if advertising were merely about letting me know which products exist and where to buy them for how much, I would have no problems whatsoever with this.
But that's not what advertising companies are about. What they are about is psychological manipulation, about using psychology and mental science to bypass your conscious decision-making mechanisms and make you "want" to buy the product. It's about getting inside your head so they can exploit your weaknesses to generate more sales. And if you think you're smarter than these people who spend their lives working out ways of manipulating you, you're deluding yourself. We all like to think we're immune to such manipulation, but I can tell you, from having dealt with such people professionally, that we're not.
This, I have a very big fucking problem with. I do not want some trained psychological manipulators building intimate profiles of my interests, habits and personality traits in order to manipulate me into buying something I might not otherwise normally want to buy. To me, that IS evil. When the advertising industry and the legislators who should be regulating them recognise this and do something about it, I might change my mind about being tracked online. But as long as these bastards are bent on manipulating me - AND attacking me and spitting in my face by trying to bypass my cookie settings with respawning cookies and whatnot - I will fight back with everything I have. And that starts with AdBlock, NoScript and CookieMonster and goes on to include supporting stricter controls and legislation on how they can and cannot use my private information.
@Anarchic-teapot
It's not about supporting fossil fuel companies, it's about keeping electricity affordable for people besides the wealthy, so that more can partake of the benefits of civilisation. If you climate change believers have your way, the only sources of power will be wind, hydro and solar - which will NOT generate enough power to service anyone other than millionaires. Already in Australia electricity prices have become so prohibitive that there are now around 18,000 households (not people, *households*), that cook on open fires and light their homes with oil lamps and candles because they cannot afford electricity any more. That's the world you AGW faithful are creating.
Add to that the increasing body of evidence that climate change is continuous throughout Earth's history and that our contribution to it is minimal at best, and the claims of the climate change believers begin to wear increasingly thin.
Posted in Google+ offers new 'Ignore' feature
And this is textbook example of why
Google's efforts in social networking fail, time and again. Just as with Wave and Buzz, and now with Plus, they make a huge song and dance about it and then make it invitation only. So when people respond to the hype they are stonewalled by the invitation requirement. Seriously, Google's marketing manager must have the IQ of a fucking dormouse.
If you're still only beta testing, then don't make such a huge hype-up about it. Let word of mouth alone build the beta testing userbase, get your beta testers to sign NDAs and keep it under wraps until you're ready to go live. Then, and *only then*, crank up the hype machine when it's ready, exploit all the rumour and secrecy that's built up around it, and let people join up in their millions. Don't wind everyone up with hype and then drive valuable traffic away with an invite wall, which simply causes people to turn away in disgust and either go back to Facebook or on to the next thing. This is the root of Google's social networking problem.
Google will never beat Facebook if they don't consider this fact. In addition, this is their third failed attempt now. People are going to get sick of signing up to these social services only to find their time wasted as yet another one gets cancelled.
Posted in id Software Wolfenstein 3D
The first 3D game I remember seeing
was Atari Battlezone in 1980. You drove a tank around an outline-vector landscape with cubes, pyramids and enemy tanks littered around the place. Other "3D" games that predated Midi Maze were 3D Pacman, Elite, Mercenary: Escape From Targ, and SubLogic Flight Simulator, all of which were released on the Commodore 64 in or before 1985.
I also remember a Wolfenstein lookalike known as Gloom, released on the Amiga in the early 1990s. My friend and I played it for months on our A1200s, until we had choreographed the exact sequence of moves required to clear every level and complete it without losing a life. It had 21 levels, in 3 areas of 7 levels each known as Spacehulk, Gothic Tomb and Hell, and we could do a full clear (that's killing every mob in the game including trash and bosses, rendering the levels what we called "safe for children"!) inside of an hour. Fun days, indeed!
Re: Pardon my ignorance
The rule is, I before E except after C or before G. Here's some examples:
I before E: piece, retrieve, belief
except after C: deceive, conceit, receipt
or before G: neighbour, foreign, inveigle
That's the way I was taught by my English teacher (about 35 years ago mind!) and yes, there are exceptions - reins, villein, and so on - but as a rule of thumb I've found it quite effective for remembering the correct spelling of these words.
Cancer isn't funny - ever
After watching my grandfather die of prostate cancer which metastasized through his body, I wouldn't wish that death on anyone, no matter how evil or deserving they might be. *Nobody* deserves to die like that, and to find humour in it is ignorantly sadistic at best.
Posted in Greyhound spatters Nashville with semen
LN2 can only be transported by road?
Which I assume means it can't be transported by rail or air. But when you consider the relative safety and crash records of air and rail transport compared to road transport, you have to wonder if that's not one of the more idiotic laws on the books.
This is a great example of why
separation of the judiciary and legislature is a founding pillar of any democratic government system. The government legislates, and then the judiciary tells them whether or not they're full of shit.
The way the "In Soviet Russia..." meme works
is that in Soviet Russia, an object you normally do an action to or with, does that action to you instead. For example, "In Soviet Russia, television watches YOU!" - where normally *you* watch television. So a more apropos example for this subject might be something like "In Soviet Russia, the rocket flies into YOU!" - as opposed to you flying in(to?) the rocket. ;)
Posted in Amphibious Nazi raccoons menace Sweden
No, no, no!
Take it from our bitter experience here in Australia. We grow lots of sugar here. A pest, the cane beetle, was devastating our sugar crops. So we imported cane toads to eat the beetles. The problem is that there's not much that can eat cane toads. Which means that football-sized, deadly poisonous toads are now infesting the northern half of the country in their billions, and are threatening to invade the southern half. You can imagine the effect these fuckers are having on our wildlife, not to mention the hazards of driving down a toad-guts-slicked-up road coated with the stinking mangled innards of millions of the things...
So unless you want to potentially end up with a plague of honey badgers, I would venture that that is a bad idea. Badgers of all species are supposedly quite vicious, I believe? Not the sort of creature you want infesting your barns and pantries like rats. Especially considering you have rabies in that part of the world.
Viral/bacteriological warfare is much more effective and can be more precisely controlled. Here, we've used the artificially engineered rabbit-specific diseases myxomatosis and later calicivirus to effectively control our feral rabbit population. Your R&D organisations would be better off looking at a similar solution rather than trying to import feral predators.
@ Sean Baggley Re: Off switch on entertainment devices?
I'm not aware of the existence of *any* modern entertainment device that has an "off" switch. Standby / Sleep / Hibernate / Shutdown / etc switches, sure, that merely *reduce* the power usage, but a real honest-to-goodness, actually-disconnects-the-power OFF switch on an entertainment device? I Haven't seen one of those in ohhh, 20 years?
It is volume of sales
In case you hadn't noticed, countries where people earn $2 a week are also countries whose populations are usually on the high side. So where in England or America you might sell 100 CDs at $10 each, in India and China you'd sell 1000 CDs at $1 each and make the same money.
That's not Andrew
From the self-righteous tone of that post, more likely it's JimC or Doug Glass. Andrew tends to be a bit subtler (albeit no less emphatic) in his anti-piracy rants.
While we are on the subject of anti-piracy ranters, anyone seen PirateSlayer lately? I miss his particular brand of vitriol...
Posted in NASA to work on approved sci-fi books
One of my earliest childhood memories
is of Dad getting me out of bed at night to watch to Armstrong and Aldrin make history on TV. I was three at the time, and it influenced my love of all things space ever since. Like you, I am royally pissed that space program has gone backwards ever since. I remember thinking that the space shuttle, when it started, was the beginning of the road to Mars; we'd been to the moon, and Mars was the logical next step, especially in view of the front-page coverage of the Viking landers that were providing spectacular photos of the Martian surface at the time. And then it all just seemed to... fizzle out, and the dream died.
One more thing: If you want to know where the money's really going, I would change just two letters of your last sentence - "It's not like it even costs that much, compared to the fire-hose of cash spent on wARfare."
Ok...
Vladimir - From your posts it is clear that you are a male feminist. Your use of the word "misogynist" - a favourite of feminists everywhere - to simply mean anyone who doesn't kowtow to feminists, and accusation of me having a "victim mentality" establishes that right off the bat. Seeking justice and a fair go in the face of lies, propaganda and innuendo is not a "victim mentality", it is a perfectly natural human desire to respected and treated with dignity. As to the systematic demonisation of men at the hands of feminists over the last 30 years being "opinion and conjecture", allow me to point you to some resources:
http://baltonorth.blogspot.com/2010/01/martha-coakley-amirault-case-and.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathanson_and_Young
http://www.singularity2050.com/2010/01/the-misandry-bubble.html
To AC: I agree with you that there are many cases where the accusation of domestic violence is true, and I am also personally familiar with two cases where the man did indeed abuse his wife. The problem is, that the large number of women who lie about domestic violence to bolster their divorce cases, seriously undermines the cases of those women who who are genuinely victims of violence. So addressing the issue of false accusations is as much about helping women who are really victims as it is about men who are falsely accused. You are also right about humans exploiting any opportunity available - we all do it. Which is why I do NOT blame *women*, I blame *feminists*.
Let me explain something here. Feminists have for years tried to equate "feminist" with "female" in the public mind. This I call "the first lie of feminism". Female is a sex, a biological form. Feminism is a socio-political movement. Being opposed to feminism is not "misogynist" as they are so fond of pointing out. Hating women is misogynist, and I most certainly don't hate women. Opposing feminism is simply a political stance. During my various campaigns against the excesses of feminism, I've discovered a startling truth: Some of our most staunch supporters have been women themselves, such as Sue Price, the founder of the MRA in Australia. And some of our most bigoted feminist opponents have been men, such as Vladimir above.
So feminist does not equal female. When one understands this point, it becomes easy to see that those of us who simply want justice and equal treatment at the hands of the law are not "misogynists", do not hate women, but simply fairly ask that we are not punished for some imagined misdeeds of our ancestors and that we are given equal respect by the law.
Oh goody
Another privacy settings fiasco in the making. Of course, in the "upgrade" all our current privacy settings will be reset to their default "opt-out", viewable by all mode, so we'll have to keep an eye on FB for the change so we can log in and re-change all our privacy settings back to our preferred levels again.
Also keep in mind that privacy settings merely mean "what you don't want anyone other than Facebook to see", they don't protect you from Facebook itself. So as always, watch what you put on there. A simple rule of thumb is - if you wouldn't declare it in a police station, don't put it on Facebook.
Exactly
This guys statement that he doesn't drink Foster's is merely pointing out the obvious: *Nobody* in this country drinks that horse piss, not even bogans. I don't even know of a pub in Adelaide where they have it on tap. So don't believe their advertising - Australians don't drink it!
I hear you
With only one exception, every single one of my male friends who got married are now divorced, some of them twice. Because of my way with words, and because I have the ability to spot mistakes and contradictions in large bodies of text, many of my friends asked me to help them with their paperwork in divorce cases, and to sit in court with them.
Consequently, I am *very* familiar with Australian Family Law and Family Court procedures, even though I myself have never been married (and after what I've seen, I never bloody will be!), and in the 9 or so cases I'm personally familiar with, I've observed a number of things of interest:
1) Every divorce I've ever been privy to was initiated by the woman. I know of no case personally where the man divorced his wife. It is also notable that in every divorce I am privy to, the woman waited until there was at least one child before initiating the divorce (since a woman divorcing from a childless marriage has far less to gain from doing so.)
2) The woman, without fail, ALWAYS claimed to be a victim of Domestic Violence, even when it's clearly impossible or so completely out of character for the man as to verge on absurdity. In only one case was the woman so good a liar that even I could not fault her affidavits, even though one of her statements had to be false since the man was with me at the time she claimed the incident occurred. All the other women had small inconsistencies in their affidavits that I was able to spot and point out to the respondent husband.
3) Until 2006, with the passage of the shared-parenting legislation (which I and other supporters of the MRA* had spent several years lobbying for), the Family Court in every case I am familiar with, awarded custody of the child(ren) to the mother by default. The only time I saw a father gain custody was when the mother was hospitalized for psychiatric treatment and alcohol abuse, and even then it took several months before we could get the father custody - and that's several months the child was in the care of a mentally-ill, alcoholic woman. All because she had accused him of domestic violence (which I knew to be false) and the court was reluctant to grant the father custody "just in case."
All this is because of the systematic assault on men conducted by feminists over the last 3 or so decades. All men are rapists, all women are victims, a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle - these are the messages that have been hammered into us through media, feminist propaganda, and so-called "equal opportunity" legislation that assumes men are guilty and women are innocent.
Groups such as the MRA have made considerable headway against this scourge in recent years though, so in Australia at least it's not quite as bad now as it was 10 years ago. At least, unless the woman can now PROVE Domestic Violence, children can now spend 1 week with their mother and 1 week with their father, and nobody pays anybody maintenance - the shared parenting laws we lobbied for. Of course, the feminazis (a surprising number of whom are traitorous "manginas") are fighting tooth and nail to get it repealed. So much still remains to be done, but as long as people like you speak out for your divorced friends, the effort remains worthwhile.
*MRA = Men's Rights Agency, http://www.mensrights.com.au. Founded and helmed by a woman, no less ;)
@LaeMing
Right on man. The number of brilliant sci-fi books I've read that would make absolute blockbusters but that Hollywood refuses to touch is staggering. Consider Harry Harrison's "Deathworld" and "To The Stars" trilogies; Julian May's "Galactic Milieu" and "Saga of the Pliocene Exiles" epics; Greg Bear's "Eon", "Eternity", "Forge of God", and "Anvil of Stars"; Vernor Vinge's "Marooned in Realtime"; Brian Aldiss's "Helliconia" trilogy (particularly relevant in this age of environmental awareness and climate change)... .the list is endless, and if handled properly would make the most awesome movies imaginable.
Actually, there's the rub: "if handled properly." Given Hollywood's propensity for butchering books to the point where the only things in common between book and movie are the title and the names of a few characters, perhaps it's better that these books remain only as books. Unless some non-Hollywood filmmaker does it. Australian, Canadian and English filmmakers are all far superior to Hollywood's tripe.
The problem with randomising key positions
as some have suggested, is that it fucks up those of us who, like myself, remember our PINs not as a number sequence, but as a pattern on the keyboard. My PIN forms a regular geometric shape when typed, but I can't remember what the number actually is unless I type out that shape.
I also have a few security measures I have when using ATMs. First, I pull hard on any flanges on the machine, and try to pick the keypad off with my fingers. This is to check for "overlays" - a common scam in Australia where the crooks put a fake keypad and ATM cover on the machine which then copies your card, keylogs what you type, or contains a hidden camera to spy on your PIN. I also cover the keypad with my left hand when typing my PIN, covering my right fingers while typing it. Finally, I always wipe the keypad thoroughly with my sleeve when I'm done, to prevent dusting to see which keys I pressed.) I suppose I'll now be adding pressing random keys before wiping to stop this particular attack vector.
