Posts by mickey mouse the fith 345 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Feb 2012
"Shopping centres become 'malls' is this another sympton of the American disease?"
Probably the same time chips became fries and films became movies.
And yes, it makes me cringe and shake my fist at the god of Englishness for failing me and letting ghastly deeds like this go unpunished.
Ahh, the high street shopping experience, surly shopkeepers, pouncing salesmen, bored disinterested minimum wage assistants, inflated prices and shit choice, coupled with rain, overcrowded public transport, bags that rip 5 feet from the bloody store (yes tesco, im looking at you), drunks shouting abuse and the ever present threat of airbourne viral infection. No amount of free (and probably cripplingly slow when more than 5 people use it) wifi could drag me into town unless i needed something so desprately that i couldnt wait a few days for postie to arrive.
"If it's provided by "The Cloud" - forget it. My local pub has it and it takes so long to fill in the login form with my usual wrong information that it's not worth it. You also need to do this every time you visit. I just turn Wi-Fi off and use my 3G data instead."
Use opera mini, the one that prerenders the pages on operas servers, last time i tried at a local mcdonalds, it bypassed all the sign in crap and just connected. I suppose the cloud`s servers look for something in the http protocol that operas vpn sneaks past. It doesnt work on all cloud hotspots though, i wonder if there are a few different versions of the gateway software on the retailers end and some havn`t upgraded?
I thought that as well, it would make a nice kinetic weapon, although you want to make sure it disintergrates into unrecoverable bits and theres no tech left for the enemy to reverse engineer. So no aiming it at lakes or matress factorys.
Another thought springs to mind, Is there any reason they cant design these to be recovered and reused?, seems a bit of a waste to discard them after a few months.
"but refused to acknowledge anything between 1939-1945"
Bit like those banned cartoons from the 40`s that disney and warner keep trying to forget ever existed. Donald duck as hitler and Bugs bunny in blackface. Their portrail of japanese people is pretty funny as well.
As for this, who gives a shit really, the target audience wont get the reference, to them its just a funny man presenting songs and the program was made before ol cigar fiddler was caught with his pants down.
These stupid, daily mailesque parents are really getting worked up over a non-event and should stop being offended and shocked by every random slipup on the telly.
Ironically, their complaining has probably made sure that this particular episode of the program will be the most watched ever. Well done...
"Really? They ship them live you know.... They don't drop them dead in the farm yard and then decide to drag 600+ kgs of dead animal up the ramp of the truck...."
If your refering to my stumbling cow , the farmer sometimes supplied meat to the local community directly, he slaughtered onsite (not in the farmyard mind, he had a nice shed for the purpose) and offloaded it to locals by word of mouth in the pub or the farmers market etc.
hmm, 3 thoughts spring to mind, 1) is it even legal to do that? 2) Did he sell to the locals because he knew the slaughterhouse wouldnt take an obviously sick animal? and 3) I probably ate some of his produce back in the day, bugger.
Back in the 80`s, I recall seeing a cow stumbling and falling about in the yard of a local farm. The farmer just killed it and sent it into the food chain. I remember him saying that a few of his cows behaved like this and he had no idea why and presumed it had got brain or nerve damage from falling or fighting. It was only later that we found out about bse, I bet the farmer shat himself knowing how many infected cattle he put on peoples plates. Hindsight eh.
As for Mickey d`s, Apart from the creepy paedoclown mascot and dodgy business practices, i always asumed their food was just average quality with loads of salt added to fuel the demand for shakes and cola`s.
I ment when they can do it properly, all those systems mentioned either dont fully encompass the visual field or are wildly impractical/dangerous.
I dont want a display appearing to hover in front of me either, i want total visual immersion.
From the hackaday article....
"[Nirav]‘s build isn’t without its drawbacks, though. The exit pupil, or the apparent size of the image, is only about 1.5 mm wide and much too small to be of any real use."
Im glad people are working on this though, hopefully someone will suss it out before i die.
What about using an array of lasers to project an image directly onto the retina?, proper argumented/virtual reality. I suppose you could use 3 beams (rgb) and have them track across and down the retina at a high enough rate that persistence of vision enables a full frame to be percieved. Have the tracking complete a full top/bottom scan in 60ms and the jobs a good un.
Imagine looking out on a rendered world rather than looking at a screen displaying a rendered world, it would be aces.
hmm, i wonder if a small projector could mimic the effect?
If they gave you the option to loose all the stupid tiles and other metro crap and have a proper start menu (without pissing about with patches and hacks) i might have been interested as its actually quite snappy performance wise, but they havnt and its bound to be nearly 100 notes for the cheapo version, so i think il pass until its forced on me during my next laptop upgrade.
And why the blue blazes dont they listen to their customers?, noone wants a bastardised phone ui tacked onto the desktop bit on a pc, so why didnt they at least put the option there to disable the bloody thing? I, for one would have upgraded if they had, as im sure many others would.
"Why do you want to rob your friends houses?"
Look down that list of 100`s of `friends`, how many are actual friends and how many are just random people you added for no obvious reason other than to boast how many facebook friends you have?
Thats why.
I dont mean I would personally rob people , but il wager quite a few ner-do-wells eyes lit up at the prospect.
There are so many idiots that just accept random friend requests that this is like a goldmine for the dishonest.
So I can search for everyone in my area who`s on holiday at the moment.....then rob their house*?
Probably makes paedos lives easier as well, what with the age search thing.
Also, I bet advertisers/spammers are feaverishly pissing about with tags as we speak.
Never understood why people prostitute their boring lives and personal details on facebook without a thought to why it doesnt cost them anything. Hint: those servers are paid for with these peoples stupidity.
"Then again tesco tills and cash points run on windows (I have seen the windows error reporting screens), that is more worrying than a phone OS I will never go near."
Heh, i managed to crash one of those back to the xp desktop, complete with windows error message. I kept jabbing the touchscreen until it froze playing a continual loop of the "please place item in the bagging area" sound at quite a volume. The assistant didnt see the funny side as she didnt know how to reboot it and had to put up with the sound for about 5 minutes until a tech arrived and sorted it out. She got really pissed off, probably not helped by me laughing.
I do wonder how secure these things are to tampering. Could a keylogger be installed by a corrupt employee to pinch cc details and pin numbers? I would like to think the payment side was isolated from the crashy insecure windows bit and i prey to god they are not internet connected in any shape or form.
Amphetamines work pretty good for weight loss, they were commonly used for this purpose up until the 60`s. Pity they are a) illegal and b) prone to wreck your body after a while. They do work an absolute treat though.
Tapeworms also work, just remember to kill the bugger before it burrows out of the intestinal tract.
Of course, the best way to not put on weight is to stop fucking troughing pies and burgers down like a gannet in a fish warehouse.
Way back when i first got a bt landline with the bbtalk package, you could install an app on a win xp (only xp alas, not compatable with vista/7/8) machine and could make and recieve calls using your landline number.
There are a few guides floating about online that explain how you set the service up on a rooted android phone. It involves some file editing and quite a bit of faffing about to get it up n running, but it works a treat.
You basically have to clone the bbtalk handsets unique id from your bbtalk account along with all the server details, and then edit a few config files in the Android phones sip settings, than it works on any data connection and doesnt have to be paired with a bt homehub.
Unfortunately, bt are killing the bbtalk service in 2 months time which is a pisser as the new service sounds worse and more restricted (no incoming calls, really?) than the perfectly good old one.
Android firefox is a lot better than it was a few months ago, I actually quite like the ui. Its still a bit of a memory hog though and it does like crashing on certain webpages.
Best Android browser for me is Naked Browser, its really fast n lightweight with a minamalist ui.
Dolphin,Boat and most of the other browsers on the play store seem to snoop on your browsing habits and god knows what else (Dolphin keep getting caught snooping, issue an apology and promise not to do it again, then promptly do it again anyway) . A lot of those browsers are sending snooped data back to servers in China so i wouldnt trust them an inch.
"And if it goes to someone like Talk Talk then its game over and you might as well tie your data packets to a directionally challenged pigeon!"
Oh dear god, Talktalk <shudder>. I know someone who lives right next to the exchange (its the other side of their garden fence, less than 30 metres from the router), and yet it still only downloads at half the advertised speed or less. SNR, line attunation and sync speed are all a+ and the bt speedcheck thing says it should be going full pelt, but its not because of Talktalks penny pinching throttling. Customer service is a hoot as well, can any of these people even understand the English language properly?
If they do release a cheapo iphone it would deffo lower the brands value. Iphones are seen as a bit of a status symbol amongst the less intelligent consumers and Apple in general are percieved as a `premium` brand. Infact its probably their best usp, take that away and they are just another generic seller of Chinese manufactured tat.
And what would they cripple in the cheap device in order to tempt people to still buy the more expensive version? It still has to run most ios apps unless they want to be in the same empty appstore boat as winphone8/blackberry so cpu,gpu,memory etc cant be knobbled too much. I suppose the battery, gps and screen could be skimped on, but considering cheap Android phones now have pretty good specs in this area they would be hard pushed to make it look like a bargain.
So no, I dont think they will release a peasant edition iphone in the near future.
"Always considered DS9 as Star Trek meets Little House on the Prairie."
Yup, DS9 was a cross between a panto and Eastenders. Every time i caught it on its origional run it was an utter soapy snoozefest. It was like all the shit episodes of TNG (Worfs son troubles, Troi`s mothers romances etc) bought together in a boring soap opera, with a few spaceships and a neon Queen Vic thrown in.
Take away the spaceships and the stupid looking aliens and it could be a whimsical drama set in the Cotswalds or any generic soap type thing.
Voyager was much better, more action, less soap (although still too much).
Babylon 5 might have been the best thing ever, but I couldnt get past the wooden acting and sub-par special effects.
Firefly,Serenity,Lexx,Andromeda and all the other low budget American scifi miniseries are also pretty crap.
The Battlestar reboot was ok, although the space battles looked more like a game cutscene than proper footage (compare the solidness of the models in the 70`s version to the rendered ones in the reboot). Also, having human looking cylons is a budget saving cop out.
I always thought the puppets looked crap, but the modelwork was superb.
I loved the designs of things like the passenger planes in thunderbirds, and the futuristic buildings and vehicles in captain scarlet.
Didnt he do a liveaction series called space cops or something in the mid 90`s? It had roy shneider in it and loads of animatronic aliens.
"I shudder to think how long it would take online with my current 14kb/s upload speed."
Haha, Someone asked me if I could help them upload their music and photo collection to a cloudy service recently. We decided not to bother when it transpired it would take over a week of non-stop data transfer to upload it all.
I was also bitten by the megaupload fiasco and locked out of over 100 files i had uploaded (mostly utilities and tools for quick access incase i had to fix something pc related for someone and didnt have my utility filled usb sticks with me). Luckily i also had local copies, but if i had uploaded important stuff, i would be both screwed and very, very annoyed indeed (i am fucking annoyed actually, it was a fantastic service and i still had 3 months left to run on my sub, so cheers for that America, I take it my refund is in the post eh?).
What with all the snooping, data caps, glacial broadband speed and patchy 3g coverage, i really cant see a valid use for these services in the current climate tbh. There just not reliable,fast or secure enough for anything other than (very)short term emergency use.
I really worry about the amount of people who use these things to store pictures from their phone etc without making local backups, its a disaster waiting to happen.
Imagine bt including femtocell tech in their homehub and bundling a mobile handset locked to their network with every one (as a replacement for the soon to die bbtalk service maybe). It could detect when the handset is connected to the homehub and offer cheaper rates and a 5 bar signal in the house, then when you leave your house it hands back to the normal network.
If marketed right, they could make a killing and build up a large userbase pretty quickly.
Im sure theres a flaw in this idea, but its interesting nontheless
"Recently had cause to visit the job centre. Thoroughly depressing and I imagine to prove of little use (the comments here seem to bare that out). Fun!"
Wait till you get to the pointless courses, useless jobs you cant do but must apply for to make up the quota and the gestapo like interrogation they subject you to every 2 weeks, its a scream.
And no, they rarely help, in fact there more likely to hinder as their job is to get people off benefit, not necessarily into work, just off benefit. So woe betide if theres a minor discrepancy in your paperwork.
I have never had a problem with flash on any of my many devices, and i dont know anyone who has on any of theirs either. Video streaming,games etc always run fine.
Is it just the Apple users that see flash as the great satan and slag it off, or have i, and everyone i know just been very lucky in our device choices?
The html 5 alternative sounds like an awkward hodgepodge of different elements and scripts rather than a single unified player that looks the same across all devices.
Dont get me wrong, native h264 playing is a good development, and i applaud mozilla for doing this, but i fear that replacing flash with html 5 on the web in general will be a downgrade in many cases (can you do complex games in html 5?).
I really cant see any use for an obscure language pack like this. Any useful work (websites,email,whatever productivity needs to be done) will need to be in a common language that the masses can read, unless you want to limit your audience to a few thousand indians. I presume all cherokee can speak english anyway, so really, whats the point?
Welsh is the same, its a dead, pretty useless language thats only survived this long because the welsh govt have forced it on kids at school. It serves no purpose beyond academic curiosity in the 21st century, as evidenced by all the english words the welsh need to use for modern items/concepts.
I used to suffer s4c before freesat liberated my telly, and the ridiculousness of it was evident in interviews where the presenter sometimes asked questions in welsh, and got a reply in english. So why not just use bloody english in the first place?
As an aside, there was a survey done by a tv ratings company a while back and they estimated that quite a few welsh language programs on s4c didnt receive a single viewer. I imagine cornish programming on bbc alba is much the same.
As a poster above said, document these dead languages, archive them, then let them die. Certainly dont prop them up with govt funding and forced learning at school.
"So when he says they will show you how to differentiate between individual offspring and the times and sites they casn access, how are ISPs going to do that then with a multitude of web enabled kit like PC, Tablet, phone?
I've looked in my router settings and there is nothing in there that will allow me to limit such things with that level of finesse"
My router (bt homehub v2) can limit access to individual devices to certain times of the day, but thats really not much good for anything other than kicking little timmy off call of duty come bedtime. I have seen business routers that do individual device based app and url filtering (including access times), but most households dont tend to have £150+ routers thrown in with their i.s.p.`s package.
I suppose a parent could register a device by mac code or whatever and the i.s.p could keep a database of who uses what device connected to each router and provide filtering based on that. Dont let any device connect until its registered and your all set.
This all sounds too complicated to set up and maintain for the average facebook/farmville/mumsnet using parent though, and they wont use it, they will just complain, so isp`s will probably go with a master toggle at the isp end that fires up a bloody great block list for all devices connected to the router with it enabled (like aol were doing a decade ago). Oh, and it will be trivial to bypass by any kid with an iq over 90.
I seem to remember 02 pissing loads of people off by blocking google translate, as you could use it to bypass their smut filter. I think I actually had to go into an 02 store and ask them to remove the filter from my account as it blocked all sorts of sites other than porn. The woman behind the counter looked at me like i was a right perv as she did it, but i guess thats the idea, embarrass people into leaving it on.
Opera mini bypassed it anyway as it uses a secure connection to their own servers, but wouldnt serve video.
This guy should have got community service and a stern telling off 10 years ago after attending a U.K. courthouse.
And the admins of those systems he compromised with bloody default passwords should be tried for putting national security at risk and allowing this pathetic charade to happen in the first place. If I did that at pretty much any private company, I would rightly be sacked, but these guys, in charge of sensitive defence systems, get no comeback for blatent disregard of security protocols.
I wonder how many years Russian and Chinese hackers had been strolling around those systems before mckinnon blundered through them like an Elephant at an exhibition of fine vases?
My Amiga a500 ocs used to almost blanket the entire radio spectrum for about a foot around it with its interference . The ecs one I got later wasnt nearly as bad. I think the later Amiga had an rf shield encasing the top of the motherboard that the old one was missing.
Dont recall the speccy 48k chucking out much interference though.
Wonder how long before their little sat drops out of orbit and lands in someones backyard?. Make it out of something that could survive reentry and you have a nice little kinetic weapon. Make the excuse that it was an accident and you have valuable targeting data without comeback.
As to the norks being any threat to us, there not, most of the millitary personal are only conscripted to stop them getting uppity. They are poorly trained and have old,obsolete equipment. The U.S could flatten the entire country remotely if it wanted to, its only China`s influence stopping them, much like all the politics behind the scenes in the Vietnam war (you cant bomb that airbase, theres a chinese observer there and we will be very annoyed if you do etc).
For a lot of the populace, its only fear of the regime that stops them legging it across the border. Remove the regime and put food on peoples plates and the people will soon forget the propoganda and indoctrination.
Trouble with openstreetmaps is that its woefully incomplete around my neck of the woods, and thus not much use for anything. There are a number of local B roads not listed, and some just stop dead for no obvious reason which is pretty poor really.
I use an old htc desire lashed to the handlebars and encased in a waterproof sleeve. Google maps is my mapping app of choice as i can preload all the satellite/terrain imagery before i set off into the wilds. As most of my riding is done offroad and off trail, roadmaps arnt much use, i need an overview of the topography, which only gmaps seems to provide properly (thats also free, im a cheapskate as well).
Keeping the screen off until some nav data is required, I get a good 6-7 hours out of each battery (I always carry a spare).
"If you live in a mud hut or similar as the people in the video did you don't need a gravity light to attract mosquito's harboring malaria or such like. You simply go to bed and get up when the sun comes up."
Sounds pretty defeatist to me, why would you want to be a slave to the environment like that?
I have never understood why traditionalists try and preserve something not worth preserving.
If modern tech can improve lives (as this lighting system can) then it should absolutely be used, I mean, who the fuck would prefer to live in a smoky, carcinogen filled hut when a clean source that fufills the same purpose exists?. Yes, i know they cook with the fire as well as use it for light, but there is better tech for that as well (solar oven).
Incorporate a bug zapper and the mosquito problem is reduced as well.
Why are people getting so worked up over a humorous stock photo acompanying a lighthearted piece?
And where would you have to be employed for the pic to be considered nsfw?, puritan industries inc.?
Sexist?, pffft, its usually fat munters and lesbo`s that cry sexist out of petty jealousy because noone wants to drool over em.
Some people just have to read too much into everything.
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