Posts by Steven Roper

Re: You'd think there would be a vegetation free zone around this expensive sensitive equipment

Part of the problem as well with clearing vegetation, is that we have a huge number of tree-hugging greenie do-gooders in this country who kick up stinking blue murder every time even one tree gets cut down, let alone clearing a 200m exclusion zone.

Never mind that there might be a billion other trees just like it, or that peoples' lives and property might be at stake; according to these hippy fuckwads, not a single tree must be allowed to fall, for any reason whatsoever. In fact, more trees must be planted, preferably at any hilltop lookout with a view, because to these idiots, more trees are more important than anyone actually being able to enjoy a view of the countryside - or even the night sky.

Well, while we're being pedantic...

...365.256 days is only true if you're measuring the sidereal year (fixed star to fixed star). And it's 365.256363004 as of epoch J2000.0 to be precise... a ten-millionth of a second's accuracy is still a measurable period of time after all! And what about the tropical (equinox to equinox) year of 365.24219 days, or the anomalistic (aphelion to aphelion, or more generally any apsis to apsis) year of 365.259636 days? Which "year" are we referring to exactly?

No wonder Pen-y-gors can't remember! ;-)

Re: I despair at the number of people that want to remain stuck in the past when it comes to UI.

I know, right? I mean, steering wheels and accelerator/brake pedals are just so 1890s aren't they?

Car manufacturers should get with the program and build cars that you steer by sliding your finger left and right, and accelerate and brake by sliding your finger up and down, on a touch-sensitive pad hidden conveniently out of sight under the dashboard. Then you can control the car with just ONE FINGER leaving your other hand and both legs free for more important things than driving!

So much more efficient and innovative than the ancient and antiquated steering wheel and pedal crap, no?

And don't even get me started on that goddamned stone-age circular design shit we're STILL using for wheels...

Re: Putting the phone down and leaving them waiting

This is the right idea, but the problem is these people are running on a timer and if you haven't come back after 30 seconds, they'll hang up and move on to the next one. While many people doing this to them does add up, I have a more fun, time-wasting and effective method.

I take calls on my computer hands-free so I can keep working while someone is on the phone. Now these telemarketers speak from a script, which means that they say predictable things at predictable intervals. Based on this principle, I've created an MP3 file which runs something like this:

"Oh I see...[5 second delay]...Uh huh...[2 seconds]...Really?...[4 seconds]...I sorry, I missed that, say again?...[6 seconds]...Sounds interesting..." etc. etc.

As soon as I cop a telemarketer, charity/political caller, or whatever, I simply switch the phone input to this MP3 and cut the output sound off so I can't hear it, and return to whatever I was doing. My phone software has an icon in the systray that indicates when the person hangs up, and also records the length of time of the call.

It's quite entertaining seeing how long my MP3 can keep the caller on the line before they realise they are talking to a recorded message. Most seem to figure it out and hang up after two or three minutes, but I've seen at least one run over 15 minutes before he caught on!

The fun is in tweaking the MP3 so my responses are statistically more likely to time with the pauses in the telemarketer's pitch, thus keeping them convinced they're talking to a real person for that much longer. This is a much more satisfactory wastage of their time than simply putting the phone down, since I've had very few hang up in less than the 30 seconds they give you waiting for you to come back.

One thing to keep in mind if you try this, though - make sure your sound file DOES NOT have you saying "yes" or "I agree" or anything like that, or it just might be taken as an agreement to whatever they're pushing and lumber you with something you don't want!

Re: Nobody can get any traction against Apple

This is exactly why judges, magistrates, and those selected for jury service, should not be allowed to own shares in private or public companies.

Re: The business model isn't the issue

A. Coward, may I point you to a particularly apposite line in Star Wars: "The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers!"

It is clear and evident that harsh punishments, like those inflicted on Jammie Thomas et. al, have done nothing to deter piracy. Hadopi laws, such as have been enacted in France and New Zealand, have done nothing to deter piracy. History clearly shows us that oppression and tyranny of the sort you are advocating merely results in resistance, underground networks, and the inevitable undermining and collapse of the empire that has instituted it. Your belief that human nature can be cowed into submission by threat of force and punishment would be sad if it were not so fucking pathetic.

So please piss off, grow yourself a few brain cells, learn a few things about human nature and elementary psychology, and if and when you are capable of understanding the concept of human beings existing as something more than programmable robots, you might find that some of us humans might actually give ear to your rantings.

Until then, enjoy your downvotes.

Why bother with the trial?

You've already decided the man's guilty. You know, "men" like you make me sick.

Enemy mine has its limits

Look, I know our politicians suck. I know they're in the pockets of amoral and corrupt corporations, I know our governments are liars and crooks, I know the greedy bankers etc. etc. etc. I share your anger and your pain.

But just stop and take a look at what NK's leadership actually is compared to ours before you start proclaiming that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Answer me this: If you're going to be bitten, would you rather be bitten by a dog, or by a viper?

Re: ReVuln seem like nice people

Agreed. It would be a nice case of poetic justice if someone from ReVuln fell victim to an exploit that some other profiteer decided to sell to the lads from Lagos, and had their identity stolen, their credit cards maxed and their life ruined.

I've seen what identity theft does to someone's life, and I can only say that anyone who discovers such a vulnerability and fails to report it should be charged as an accessory, in the same way that (in Australia at least) someone who becomes aware that a child is being abused and fails to report it is charged as an accessory.

I'm also adamantly against the death penalty, but I must say that identity theft sorely tempts me to make an exception to that principle.

That would be

because Uranus / arse jokes are such old and obvious cliches that they've passed beyond boredom, let alone funny...

@ Field Marshal Von Krakenfart

"...the mere mention of crApple or an iProduct creates the same level of revulsion in me that walking on dog shit does..."

An upvote and Reg Literary Merit award to you, sir, for the most effective and truthful use of the words "Apple", "iProduct" and "dog shit" in one sentence. Well done!

"Top-three are horses, then cattle, then dogs."

As a long-time resident of Australia, I must respectfully disagree. You forgot Australia's deadliest critter.

"Top-three are drop-bears, horses and cattle..."

Remember, drop-bears kill more Australians than any other creature here. Too many people make light of this grave threat and forget to wear upturned forks in their hats for protection.

Re: @Nuke: (was: @Jake - @AC 07:19 (was: Phone booth?))

"Ironically, 999 used the second longest trip of all, just when you would want it fast."

Back in the 1970s, when I was a lad, rotary-dial phones were commonplace, and our family emigrated from England to Australia, one of the things that really bugged me as a 7 year old was why they made the emergency numbers the longest ones to dial.

This came up because Mum and Dad had taught my sister and I how to call for emergency and what to say if they weren't home. So Dad had taught me in England to dial 999 and to say my name, address and what was wrong.

Australia's is even worse - 000 is the emergency number here. So when we'd arrived here and Dad explained that the emergency number was now 000, I asked him, "Dad, if I have to ring these numbers fast because I'm in trouble, why do they make them the longest numbers to dial? Shouldn't they make it 111 so you can ring it faster?"

Dad, of course, didn't know. He guessed it was to stop people from dialling it by accident, but that didn't make sense to me, since dialling 111 on a rotary phone was just as deliberate an act as dialling 000, and not something you were likely to do "by accident."

These days with keypads everywhere of course it no longer matters, but I never did find out the answer!

Re: Mandarin for triffid

That one piqued my interest.

Google Translate didn't produce anything for "triffid" when I tried (I assume its inability to do so is why you're asking!).

So I asked a Chinese colleague (who also happens to be a sci-fi buff) and she gave me 三個根 for triffid. Plugging that into Google Translate produces "three root" so I suppose that's as close as you're going to get!

Re: This is victim blaming!

...and tell thieves not to steal, and rapists not to rape, and killers not to kill. Unfortunately, the real world has a propensity to ignore the proprieties. So people should still be prepared to defend themselves, be educated about the dangers of weak passwords, and the consequences of the potential identity theft that can result. That's not victim blaming, it's victim empowerment. Because identity theft is catastrophic and life-changing.

I've spoken with someone it's happened to, and having your identity stolen destroys your life. This person lost his job, faced charges including extortion, money laundering, attempting to import illegal weapons among others, which took him years to be acquitted of; he had to sell his house to pay the court and lawyer costs, and had to move cities because of the offences he'd been charged with. All because someone cracked an account and stole his credit card details and contact info.

It happens. So it's important that people be aware of the issues and take reasonable steps to protect themselves. It's just common sense.

Re: Go on....credit Stellarium for the pic!

Stellarium is good, but I prefer Celestia myself. If I want to look at Venus and Saturn from an Earth-centric perspective, I need only go outside of an evening, as much as look it up on Stellarium. But if I then want to actually fly to Venus or Saturn and explore them in detail, Celestia is the way to go! (It also has very nice models of the ISS, Hubble, Cassini and Voyager for you to travel to / with.)

Not to mention its usefulness in checking out all the known exoplanets as well...

@ J. R. Hartley

"Really does annoy me to see the Amiga airbrushed from history though."

It infuriates me personally. I'd rate this article as almost Orwellian revisionist bullshit because of it. I also recently watched a "documentary" (I use the term very loosely) about how Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were the gods and founders of home computing. No mention of Jack Tramiel or Jay Miner or any of the other real founding fathers of home computing, of course. And that so-called "doco" made my gorge rise in exactly the same way this article did, and for the same reason.

Maybe Apple and IBM might have been big in the USA, and in business, but everywhere outside the USA they most definitely were not the machines that brought computing into the home. They were out of most peoples' price range, for starters, and they were primarily business-oriented than family-oriented.

The Commodore 64, more than any other computer was the machine that brought home computing into the mainstream. I grant that in the UK, the ZX Spectrum was also a major player which deserves its credit too, but the C64 was truly global in its reach. Back in the early 80s, IBM PCs and Apples were way too expensive for the average home user - I clearly remember disk drives selling for around 3 grand and complete systems in the 5-digit price range (bear in mind this is Australia, where everything is three times the price charged elsewhere.)

The C64 retailed at $500 when it first came out, and had dropped to $300 within a year. These were prices that your average family could afford, and the huge range of software available for it meant it was usable by the whole family. And perhaps its most important advantage over PCs and Apples of the day was that it could be plugged into the family TV set, obviating the need to buy an expensive (and usually monochrome) monitor and enabling colour computing on the cheap.

The Amiga was itself revolutionary, being far ahead of its time, and with its rival the Atari ST had a profound impact on home computing in the late 80s and early 90s. It was instrumental in bringing the home user up from the 8-bit into the modern 16- and 32- bit world, which was the norm right up until only a few years ago with the advent of 64-bit computing. Yet even the Amiga and Atari were successors, which would not have gained the penetration they did but for the home ground broken by the Commodore 64 - the little computer that could.

But now we have techno-snobs rewriting history, the same arrogant techno-snobbery that dismissed the Amiga and the C64 back in the day simply because they could play games, glorifying Apple and IBM, and not even granting a fucking footnote to the venerable C64. I tend to treat such articles with the same disdain and horror that Winston Smith reserved for stories about the war with Eurasia Eastasia. Show me an article that tells it how it really happened, and I'll give it a lot more credence.

Re: What is a "natural right"?

Putting me in Robert Heinlein's shoes is a signal honour, for which I thank you, sir. Have a beer!

Re: He is right.

Absolutely. There should be four versions of Windows for each of the kind of devices you describe. They could be called, respectively:

Windows Phone 8

Windows Surface 8

Windows Desktop 8

Windows Media Center 8

And Microsoft could then do us the huge favour of making them interoperable as well. What a novel idea...!

Re: Another intelligene challenged employer ... and employee

"And the employee should have known about the risks associated with posting politically incorrect opinions in public forums."

Fixed that for you.

@ Lee Dowling, Jaffa Man and others

In regard to the lack of low-blur, high-res zoomed-in images of UFOs:

Guys, I'm as skeptical about UFOs as anyone, but - have you guys ever actually tried focusing a mobile phone or pocket camera on a small flying object at a distance with enough precision to meet this requirement? Especially at a zoom level high enough to positively identify it. It's damn near impossible for anyone who isn't a professional photographer. Maybe a Hollywood-qualified cameraman with a studio-grade dolly camera could pull it off, but your average joe or jill with a mobile phone has Buckley's chance.

A few years ago, my brother and I bought a pair of those cheap RC helicopters that have been coming out of China of late. We flew them in a nearby park on a clear, sunny day with only a light breeze, and I attempted to film them using a $500 7 MP pocket camera with 5X optical zoom lens mounted on a tripod. My brother flew his helicopter, and I tried to film it.

Despite knowing exactly where the helicopter was and what direction it was moving in I could not capture anything other than a shaky pixelated blur even at full zoom - when I was actually able to track or frame the helicopter at all. Even the slight wind added enough random motion to the thing that it was impossible to track it with any real degree of accuracy. And I was using a tripod, remember. Filming an erratically moving distant object at high zoom is an extremely difficult endeavour at best. How much harder is it for someone with a hand held mobile phone trying to film a flying object whose size, trajectory and location isn't even known or predictable, at the same time as they might be freaking out going "WTF is that thing?"

Try it yourselves - have a go at filming passing birds or low-flying planes and see how good your footage is, and how well you can track them. It's not easy, as you'll find out if you give it a go.

If I ever saw clean, sharp, perfectly-tracked zoomed-in footage of a UFO I would call fake for precisely this reason. I'm more likely to give credence to a blurry, shaky video just because that's what anyone trying to film a 'real' UFO zipping about the sky would get.

@ The Big Yin

Absolutely. I have the same attitude as you do there. As I've posted elsewhere, my approach to Facebook is that I post nothing on there that I wouldn't sign on the countertop of a police station in front of an officer.

What I might post in El Reg comments threads, on the other hand...

@ symbol_soup

You care too much about what strangers think of you. I take Aussie pride in being a pig in public.

When I drop my guts in public, I let it roar load and proud. Leaning to one side and lifting a leg during the release clearly identifies me to bystanders as the source as well as giving vastly improved echo and reverb. I do agree with your prognosis, though, that those plastic chairs are absolutely the best sounding boards for amplifying the anal rattle.

Given that this is behaviour one would normally expect of bogan (chav) schoolboys, seeing a 46 year old man (usually wearing office clothes) carrying on like this definitely gets a reaction. It works a treat when you're in a crowded bus or train and need a bit of space...

Re: This is why

Unfortunately you're going to have to put up with the likes of me whether you like it or not, while there's any semblance of freedom left. My ancestors fought and died so that I did not have to be afraid to speak my mind, even if doing so offended some people. Just as they also fought and died for your right to call me a spiteful little prick just because you don't agree with my views.

But you do not have the right to ostracise me from a community or force me into military service just because I don't conform to your specific brand of arrogance and self-righteousness, not to mention your gutlessness in not posting under a trackable ID when you attack me. I put my money where my mouth is. Where's yours?

I agree, however...

...there should be a standard for these authenticators so you only buy one and they can be used on mutliple websites. Otherwise, what happens if everyone were to follow your idea as it stands, we'd end up with a thousand little digital dongles on our desks, carry bags and keyrings, and spend ages sorting out which one is supposed to be for which site/service. We need someone like ISO, ICANN or the W3C to define and design a standard two-factor authentication dongle that works everywhere via a set API.

Re: punishment?

Wow. I'm glad I don't live in your world.

Make them pay for their stupidity, absolutely. Sack them even. But 15 - 20 years in prison for a bit of foolishness? You don't think that's even a teensy bit extreme? What do you advocate for people who write on toilet walls then? Death?