Posts by Steven Roper 1832 publicly visible posts • joined 10 May 2011
After reading your post, I had to go to a meeting. Because of "like having a wank in a meeting it's just sheer fucking bad manners", the image of one of those present quietly rubbing one out under the table, and what I would say in response if it happened, dogged me the entire meeting, and it was all I could do not to explode in laughter every time it crossed my mind. Everyone must have thought I was on something...
I hate you.
When the Wrath of the Lich King expansion came out for World of Warcraft, I looked at how much it would be to to buy it direct from Blizzard rather than going through an Australian e-tailer. At first glance it was about two-thirds the price - Blizzard wanted $40 for a DVD copy of the game and local e-tailer Game Planet wanted $65. So there's your Aussie ripoff markup.
So what made me buy it from Game Planet? The fact that Blizzard wanted a HUNDRED FUCKING DOLLARS in postage and handling fees over and above the cost of the game. I mean, what the fuck? Did they think they were shipping it to Alpha Centauri or something? Since buying the game direct from Blizzard would thus have cost me $140, while buying it from Game Planet cost me $65 shipping included ($60 for the game and $5 to post it!), I went with the locals.
I still haven't gotten over that to this day. And people reckon Australian retailers are ripoff merchants! Where the fuck do Blizzard get the gall to charge that kind of money for posting a fucking game box across the Pacific?
So the moral of the story is, check what you're paying for shipping. While buying from overseas retailers may seem cheaper, when you add the shipping charges it doesn't always work out that way. Buyers should check how much their savings buying that cheap tat from china are actually worth once they add the shipping costs in.
As the senior IT manager in my company, it falls to me to make sure everything works and continues working, while making sure our trade secrets don't get leaked to our competitors and that some phishing scammer in China doesn't rip off all our employees' and customers' credit cards. If I fail in that duty, I can expect to be sacked and even charged with criminal negligence.
The likes of me are not here to make life easier for the likes of you. My job is to make sure everything keeps working in a stable and secure manner. If you can guarantee to me, from your at least degree-level IT education, that any personal device you bring in and connect to my company network is 100% free of spyware, malware and other unwanted goodies, and I can have it from you in writing that you alone accept full and sole liability for any damages occurring as a result of you plugging your device into my network, I'll let you connect it.
Otherwise, while I bear the responsibility and the liability if something goes wrong, all the users on my network can abide by the rules I've put in place for it, rules which are ultimately designed to protect everyone who works here from both criminals and competitors.
You're forgetting that besides those watching for "artistic merit", the double-wristers are also compensated for on average by the "look Mum no hands!" mattress- and pillow-humping crowd, who don't use their wrists at all. Over all, it most likely comes out at an average of 1 wrist per individual smut hose, so the kilowrist is a valid unit within measurable accuracy.
Post in reply to this comment the number of goes it took you to pronounce the chemical name of that molecule without stumbling over it.
My count is 6 tries before I was able to say it out loud without tripping up. Anyone do any better?
The part where data stays uncorrupted on your drive year after year. Flash/SS Drives are notoriously unreliable for long-term data storage. My own experience with an SSD which, while blindingly fast, fucked itself after 8 months, is less than optimal so far. When we see that the technology can store data reliably for longer than the lifespan of a butterfly more people might start taking it seriously. Until then, I'll keep my decade-plus-old MP3 collection on spinning media where I know it'll still be in 10 years time, thanks.
was the elimination of the very end-user orthogonality you're talking about. Back in the 90s, HTML was designed to be orthogonal to the user - that is, the user had control over the text flow, colours, layout and so on. If the page author created his page in 8 pt black Arial with images floating to the left and you wanted to view it in 72 pt pink Garamond with non-floating images, there was nothing he could do about that. Consequently it was difficult for designers who wanted fixed-format, predictable document layouts to achieve that in HTML. Adobe, seeing a market for a fixed-layout document format that removed any end-user control over presentation, invented PDF for that very reason.
So PDF is not designed to appear any way other than the author intended it to. Ironically, HTML, which is a format that would have lent itself perfectly to ebook formatting back in the 90s, is becoming, in its current designer-oriented incarnation of HTML 5 and CSS 3, more restrictive of end-user orthogonality than PDF is!
"If you can't read chinese just put the URL into Google translator.and the squiggle lines will turn into English.You would be surprised at what Baidu will turn up compared to Google sometimes."
Let me get this straight: You can find something from Baidu that has been censored by Google by putting it into a Google service (in the certain knowledge that said service won't, you know, mess up the translation for any particular reason)? Yeah, that'll work. Genius.
more of the readership becoming aware of the toxicity of modern feminism, not just by the comments but the upvotes they get. I enjoyed reading this comments column. Well done Reg readers! Now we just have to turn this awareness into real change and justice.
And Sarah, your glib dismissal of the AC speaks volumes about the methods of the modern feminist. The whole "X is getting old" technique is getting old as well. You might be on top now, but generations of women unborn will pay the price for the hypocrisy and double standards of feminism today, when the backlash comes full circle and women don't even have chivalry left any more to gain respect from men. You only need to see all the modern rap lyrics, "tits or gtfo", and "back in the kitchen bitch" expressions on the Internet to see it coming. And that will be the real tragedy.
Digging through your very impressive word salad has left me with the distinct impression that you think the argument for an intelligent Creator fulfills Occam's Razor more than the argument that mathematics and logic represent the real world. Since Occam's Razor is a statement about creating the minimum possible entities to explain a phenomenon, how does positing a Creator more uphold Occam's Razor than explaining it through commonly observable natural forces?
Bear in mind that any physical object exists in and of itself, and exhibits the same behaviour in relation to the universe reqardless of how it is observed. For example, a rock falling from a high place will accelerate towards the ground even if nobody or nothing else is there to observe it. Just as 2 plus 2 equals 4 to any sapient creature in the Universe. By this commonality of perception, which must by definition represent the real world since the phenomenon will have the same predictable effect upon anyone influenced by it, we can accurately predict such things as the motions of celestial bodies and the behaviour of certain materials under stress, which is something your creationist cannot do anywhere near as reliably or accurately by appealing to his creator entity.
Is there oil?
Because America and China will reignite the space race funded by the oil barons and we'll have warp drive in 15 years if there is. Hopefully the indigent lifeforms bear more resemblance to Daleks than Na'vi, because the last thing we want is human shitbags pissing all over the universe...
Interesting that you use an Australian word to describe us. Mind you, I'm inclined to agree with you - most Australians are poofters that won't fight for their freedoms, even to the point of letting our government tax us for rainwater - something that even impoverished Bolivians wouldn't tolerate.
To anyone thinking of coming here - don't. Visit China instead. The scenery's better and the government is much more freedom-oriented than here.
When I look at my phone bill, what I see is something like this:
Metered calls: $5.60
Metered calls to mobiles: $32.85
Metered calls to international numbers: $6.85
Administration Fees: $22.50
Line Rental: $26.50
Service Charges: $12.50
GST: $10.70
Metered calls I get. It's all the other bullshit scalpings that piss me and my countrymen off.
I'm trying to understand what it is about this activity that excites people. In my experience, lying face-down on the pavement is something you do after you've had too many tequila slammers and been kicked down stairs by the bouncers. That's not something you'd want recorded for posterity, much less publication on the Internet. I believe in live and let live (die?), so people should be free to do it if they wish, but I'll never be able to get my head into this space myself.
Nice Warlock reference in the byline there, shows how old you are (and I am)...
Now that's more like the BOFH I've come to know and love. The kind that has colleagues knocking on my office door asking if I'm OK, in response to the maniacal laughter issuing from herein.
">Kzzzzeert< >Kzert< >thud< >thud<", has me in stitches and my colleagues looking worried. Great work Simon!
1. The HTTP_REFERER variable is extremely unreliable - it's trivially easy to spoof, and in addition, many proxy servers strip it out. Any bandwidth thief with any technical conpetence would already mask it out when fetching it for their site or email.
2. A slightly better way to ensure requests for images originate from your own site is to set up a mod_rewrite in your .htaccess script (this is how some sites were famously able to substitute the well-known goatse.cx image for their real images whenever someone tried hotlinking them). However, not all web hosts offer access to .htaccess, and even fewer webmasters know how to set it up. Finally, it too can be circumvented by a determined image bandwidth thief.
I might add that the best way I've found to protect images from bandwidth theft is to bury them as binary data in a SQL database, and embed them into a page on-the-fly using PHP. Thus, any access to an image requires a login to the database plus a valid session id. As to why this hasn't been more widely adopted: 1) it's a lot more work than just using <img> tags and 2) a lot of people probably haven't figured out that, or how, you can do it that way.
And in other news, the recent volcanic eruption near Shenzhen has irradiated an area the size of Australia after it released more than 50,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste into the atmosphere, which had been buried there by Japanese burrowing machines for the past 20 years. UN secretary-general Wadda Fukizat says more than five million square miles of central Asia will be uninhabitable for at least the next 275 millennia, and we can expect to see a sharp increase in the number of two-headed goats, kittens and babies born around the world over the coming decades. More at 11.
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