Posts by Anomalous Cowshed 607 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Aug 2012
"Boxers? That's dangerous, against health and safety. I hope you have a boxing license on you Sir!"
"Boxing license? What are you talking about? I never..."
"I see you are trying to mislead the forces of law and order. Such behaviour might constitute an attempt to conceal terrorist activities. Grab him and strip search him, right now!"
A small group of very smartly dressed, tall and well-spoken people loitering around the corner of a suburban street after dark. The signal is given. They jump over fences and into a garden, inspect the briefs on the washing lines, snatch one pair and disappear into the night.
Later on, at a lab back at HQ, the briefs are analysed, and a report is tendered to N (the head of GCHQ).
"Fine work, men, and you too, women" says N. "Now we know what brand of washing powder they use, which was our first objective. However, our next step has to be to get a pair of unwashed briefs. This will give us clues as to their personal hygiene and where they shop for their underwear. Any suggestions on how we might go about it?"
"We could arrange for a burglary of the premises while everyone is out, and take a pair of briefs out of the washing basket" suggests agent 003.
"Too risky" says M. "What if they've just done the washing? There won't be any briefs in the basket. No, we need something which is less likely to end up in failure."
"How about using one of our Page 4 (TM) girls to lure them away to a sleazy hotel, and while they are having sex, one of our team sneaks into the room and removes the suspect's briefs from the floor."
"What if the briefs are not on the floor though?" asks N. "What if the suspect merely dropped them rather than taking them off altogether? It won't do. Besides what about the women and children? You are not suggesting that we deal with them in the same way are you? We need something more creative.
"How about an evening-time burglary while the family is having dinner" suggests 0021234. "We go in with a full swat team, including a Page 4 (TM) girl. We get the Page 4 (TM) girl and two of our special forces operatives to drag away the father to a sleazy hotel, with strict instructions that he's not to come out of that hotel with his underpants on. The rest of the family we arrest on charges of committing offences likely to foster terrorism: parking on a yellow line in the case of the mother, and being rude to teacher / not doing one's homework in the case of the children. We take them to court right away. They'll have to file their briefs. We switch them there and then, sight unseen, for other briefs that we will have just brought with us. Job done"
"Excellent" says N, patting the brilliant young recruit on the head. "Well done. Let's do it. I'm putting you in charge of this operation!"
It is free to use Facebook.
Therefore, the users of Facebook aren't customers.
If they are not customers, what are they?
Bystanders? Not likely.
Freeloaders? Doubtful, it wouldn't be tolerated for long.
Partners? What a whimsical thought.
The users of Facebook are, in fact, products. They are Facebook's product. As in: "What can we offer you? We can enable you to reach out to 1.2 billion consumers" or "We can offer you lists drawn from our database of 1.2 billion consumers, with extensive consumer / behaviour profiles and other data".
It is the people who 'reach out' to these consumers who are the customers of Facebook.
...is a good thing for the perpetuation of human knowledge, because the average Western person's blind reliance on Google as a universal arbiter of all knowledge is frightening.
However, on a completely unrelated topic, doesn't it look like the gentleman in the photo loves his hair so much, that like noblemen in the 17th century, he hasn't had a shampoo in years? It looks like there's a worm crawling down the right side of his face...
You can just imagine this becoming widespread, and scientists, even normal ones, having a second, evening job in show business, advising film-makers, TV production companies, theatre impresarios, writers...it would be cool to be a scientist and loads of kids would want to get into it...instead of studying things like Media and Marketing studies*...that would be good for the kids, for the films / TV shows, and for the world as a whole!
*subject to availability of the requisite level of intelligence to cope with all those pesky equations, graphs, variables, concepts, some of which may be significantly different from what's taught on the Media & Marketing course at your local Mickey Mouse University.
I wonder whether the top people at Microsoft feel pride at the fact that one of their products was so good that millions of people and companies are hanging on to it years down the line, in spite of all the improvements offered by the new versions...
Or perhaps they are saying to themselves: darn, that XP was too good, it's bad for our bottom line, we need to come up with something that's not so good, to make sure that people are willing to switch over to the next best thing at the drop of a hat...
er...OK. I'll get my coat, sorry.
This is not about space exploration, this is a rich man putting good men at risk in order to develop a sham space experience for other rich men (and women).
Is he saying that it's worth killing off a few pilots for this? In that case he should be with them on every flight of that bogus space plane, to lend moral support. Then he would earn the right to speak like that.
If they could live for longer and travel on land, or worse, in the air, then they might indeed supersede humanity. There is in fact already one intelligent octopus-like Being with tentacles, or Noodly Appendages, as they are known among his priests. Fortunately, it is benevolent to us lesser mortals.
It's a rabbit hunting expedition. They're bad them rabbits around 'ere. Worse than fish, much worse. You've all seen what they can do, in that documentary...what was it called? Something about a holy grail. That's who we're hunting. Did I say 'who'? I meant 'what'. Run along, now. Nothing to see here, tally ho!
How to get a quantum memory in the first place, for all you eager amateur quantum computer buffs out there.
Insert conventional memory chip into blender. Best use DRAM chip, but if you cannot get one, Micro SD card with Flash memory is ok.
Blend on hyperfine setting until you obtain a fine powder
Immerse powder in sulphuric acid for several days until all the powder has dissolved
Dilute repeatedly to 1:1000000000, until there is no absolute certainty, but a definite possibility of the residual presence of any molecules of DRAM in any given quantifiable volume of the solution.
Remove 10cc of the diluted solution (the Quantum Fraction)
Pour into sturdy plastic vat.
Wear appropriate clothing, something that reflects the reverence of the proceedings and turn any lights down using a dimmer or an on/off switch if no dimmer is available.
Smack the vat hard with a sledgehammer while chanting lines from the officially sanctioned abridged biography of Max Planck to an appropriate Plainchant tune.
Continue as long as possible, until the vat shows signs of impending cracking.
Voila, your qbit is ready! All you now need to do is extract it from the plastic vat, but that's a specialist job full of uncertainties, and we couldn't definitely tell you how to do it.
If I remember correctly, in 1996 i bought a 4 Megabyte memory expansion for a Toshiba portable, and it was £400, that's £100 per Mb, i.e. £100,000 per Gb. In those days, a 1 bedroom apartment in central London (30-40 m2) was around the same price as a Gb of memory. Now memory is less than £10 per Gb (I mean RAM) and the apartment is close to £1 million...you can buy a small super computer for that price.
The moment of truth had arrived. The bell rang, and thousands of heads turned towards the podium at the centre of the huge hall.
The Great Council was suddenly hushed.
The ballot on permitting the use of nuclear energy in space exploration had ended in a tie, it was now up to the Chairman of the Council to wield the casting vote.
He rose, in a cold sweat, his hands shaking slightly from his heightened awareness of the momentous import of the occasion.
For a moment, he struggled against a sudden flare-up of the dyslexia that had troubled him from childhood. Thanks to his tremendous mental training, he soon had it under control. He cleared his throat, and spoke...and in the process, forever buried the hopes of mankind:
"You ask me to decide whether we should permit the use of unclear energy in space exploration" said he. "Well, I vote against it. It's very name spells risk and uncertainty".
The Zwigillian embassador rubbed two of his tentacles together. For the foreseeable future, Deep Space, and the tremendous survival and trading benefits that it held for whomsoever would control it, would belong to Zwigill alone. Mankind would be relegated to watching TV and working in marketing and other paper shuffling jobs. And the Zwigillians would turn them into slaveeeeeees...
Zwigill the squid awoke with a sudden start. That old dotard Wang Wong had just noisily unlocked the door to the kitchen of the tacky little restaurant. What a weird dream, thought Zwigill, dazed, staring out of his glass tank. Little did he know that Wong's lunchtime menu that day was "fried squid noodles".
Big Blue must look to Apple and dream...
Dreams of shuffling papers, doing a bit of design, marketing...and selling stuff made by a Chinese company and rebranded IBM...Life would be much easier, without all those pesky blue-collar workers, clean rooms, engineers...Just a bit of paperwork, and cash, sweet cash...Mountains of cash. Why can't we also have that?
The lady who said (more or less) that most women on the mission had a calorie intake of less than 2000 versus more than 3000 for the men, did not say what the women were doing and what the men were doing.
If they were all doing more or less the same thing on average, then the difference is significant. But if the women were sat watching videos and polishing their nails, while the men were spending most of their time on space walks and repairing extremely complex bits of kit requiring enormous concentration and tremendous dexterity, then this is merely lying with statistics, and the sexism is on the other side.
The wrist has been a significant competitor to the fanny (meaning of course the fanny in the American sense, as in a snug little pouch into which you might slip your, er, mobile phone). At times, the wrist has won out, and this currently seems to be the case, with a huge volume of pornnew smart watches competing for our attention on the market.
When asked to comment about this, a former senior UK politician said that it was "fanny business", and then proceeded to claim her husband's wrist-related pay-tv bill as parliamentary expenses.
Choose whichever definition of terrorist you like best:
Broad definition of terrorist: all of you lot.
Narrow definition of terrorist: you, and you, and you over there, and you on the right, and you in front, and you...ok this is taking too long, so...all of you lot.
I'm not sure that everyone having access to their own private 100 Mw reactor in their 1-bed flat or in their backyard would be beneficial for humanity. This kind of thing needs to be thought over a little. What impact would near limitless energy have on our lives and surroundings? It might change everything, and we might not want everything to change, not so fast anyway. Maybe it's not such a bad thing that the technology is taking a long time to develop, Lockheed or no Lockheed.
Based on the examples stated in this article, that's the same as saying "without men there wouldn't be babies". Or "Britain's space programme received a tremendous boost yesterday when NASA agreed to authorise the use of McVities biscuits at its astronaut training centre in Florida".
I like programming, I know many men who do too, but the vast majority of the women I've ever met did not (except for one, absolutely brilliant girl who was in the year above me in school). Is that weird, or what?
There are some talented women programmers. Just like there are some women who are really good at football. But on AVERAGE, in most cases, this is something that is more suited to men - or at least, has been until now, lovelace or no lovelace. Men tend to be better at it than women.
Most women would rather leave such things to men and concentrate on other activities, like building careers in other kinds of jobs or looking for a mate before the biological clock runs out. They are too busy to bury themselves in a basement for days on end, wearing dirty T-shirts and eating stale pizza while testing algorithms in front of a monitor.
We in the enlightened West reached our lofty quality of life and morality, of paper pushing, McDonalds, Mickey Mouse holiday campsuniversities, and reality TV, on the back of the exploitation and death of millions of workers in sweatshops and mines in the Victorian era. So perhaps the same process is happening in China...
I totally agree.
I recently dated a gorgeous pole dancer / stripppp.... Oh no, I didn't realise the wife was in the room, I hope she didn't see me writing this comme...OMG, she did!!! got to gooooo...
(Smash, bash, crash, squeeze balls...Did I write "recently"? It was a typo! It was that damn autocorrect! I meant to write "a long time ago"!!!)
Well, there are some among the more extreme vegan sects who would take offence to you doing all the dastardly things you've described...to a tomato or a lettuce in its prime.
We'll have none of your genocidal picking, harvesting and other barbaric practices.
Only fruits and vegetables which have already died a natural death may be eaten.
I say - show some respect to Tommy Tomato and Lisa Lettuce.
...and whether sapphire glass is the future or not...
But one thing is sure: the only people who will benefit now from this story are the lawyers.
At times like this, it must be good to be a lawyer. The longer the fighting, the pain and the trouble lasts, the greater your fee, the bigger your house, the most expensive your new suit and the diamond ring for the wife.
Technology? Shmecknology! <corny cash register sound>
I love LED lamps, but:
1. How can these Swedes be so sure that "the 21st century will be lit by LED lamps"?
2. LED lamps have begun to replace other lamps MAINLY because the low-energy fluorescent lamps that were forced upon us over the past few years are so crap, and because the simple, straight-forward and cheap filament bulbs are gradually being banned by Western governments. The cost/benefit analysis for most people, who think short-term, will be negative.
The onset of LED lamps is not a 'revolution'. Most applications could have been covered by existing technology. This is merely a useful and beneficial incremental improvement in the struggle to cut energy use.
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