Re: Ethics failure?
So anyone who makes a profit on something is ethically obligated to share the proceeds with the previous owner? What planet are you from?
€100 'typewriter' turns out to be €45,000 Enigma machine
A cryptography professor wandering through a Romanian flea market has turned a nice ROI on his €100 investment: €45,000. That's because what was on offer was a 1941-manufacture German Army three-rotor Enigma I. The unnamed collector who picked it up sold it through Bucharest auction house Artmark, and the unit beat its €9,000 …
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Thursday 13th July 2017 11:18 GMT magickmark
My Find
Many years ago I came across a box full of 1st Ed's by the Irish author Lord Dunsany* at a book fair. Each one was just a few pounds each, not sure of the exact price but £2-£5 range. I hummed and hared but eventually moved on, but taking a card from the stall holder.
A few weeks latter regretting that I did not buy them I called him up and brought the whole box for something like £15 or so including postage.
On arrival I saw that each one had a book plate in the inside cover for a "Frances Perry" and hand written date that matched the publication dates and also some also had a second date for the late 70's in the same hand.
Intrigued I did some research and found out that there was a Frances Perry** who was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and that she was also an associate of Aleister Crowley.
I have no way of knowing if my books belonged to the same Frances Perry but as Dunsany's works are mainly fantasy of an esoteric nature it would fit.
Dunsany 1st Ed's now sell for £90-£150 and with the possible connections to Crowley and the Golden Dawn maybe even more if I could prove the provenance.
I still have them all and would never sell them.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Plunkett,_18th_Baron_of_Dunsany
** A Google search for that name now finds information for "Frances Mary Perry MBE VMH (19 February 1907 – 11 October 1993)[1] was a gardener, administrator, writer and broadcaster." I'd assume a different Frances Perry but her birth date would fit.
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Thursday 13th July 2017 16:07 GMT SteveK
Re: My Find
Well I have all the HHGTTG books in their original covers :p
I don't. When I went to University, my parents decided to take a bunch of my old 'kids things' to the charity shop and/or dump while redecorating.
Mostly books, including my HHG set and the original Steve Jackson/Ian Livingstone fighting fantasy books, but also a 1970s Dalek (although to be fair I think it had lost one of its arms, and batteries had leaked) and a few other things that now would have been collectable.. To be fair, at the time they probably would have just seemed to be clutter.
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Friday 14th July 2017 16:15 GMT Stevie
Re: My Find (When I went to University)
I had a friend who, back in 1987, decided to collect an entire chapter of "beaky" Space Marines for the Goons Wonkshop game Wonkhammer 401K Rogue Trader.
He accordingly set about buying up all the $22, 30 minis per box sets he could find until he had the requisite 1000. He gave up at around 500, deciding half a chapter would do for now. He washed the sprues and left them to dry so that he could paint them. While he was at it he acquired a few hundred Space Hulk Genestealers for another Wonkhammer 401K project.
Some of these Marine sprues were the ultra-rare blue styrene ones from the very first production runs.
Whereupon dear old Mom decided to clean out the basement and tossed them all in the garbage.
Months of effort. almost $600 of investment, chewed up in hydraulic masher in the back of a dustcart.
He was pissed-off for weeks.
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Friday 14th July 2017 16:26 GMT jelabarre59
I have a complete set of rare *unautographed* Pratchetts.
At some Lunacon in the late '80s, looking at the long autograph line awaiting him, Isaac Asimov commented to my brother and I that someday an *UNautographed* Asimov book would be rarer than an autographed one (I was ConCom, so we were making he was set up with water & pens, etc.).
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Thursday 13th July 2017 17:30 GMT Mike 125
Typical
What an embarrassing wasted morning that was: on a new contract in Austria, I entered a default password, prior to a boot script changing the input language to German. To this day, I have to occasionally type 'Vozager123' to gain entry. Confound those Germans and their tricky keyboard mappings...
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Thursday 13th July 2017 18:13 GMT steve 124
Breaking news....
Parliament just called an emergency session to discuss the threat this new encryption method presents to the UK. Back room discussions regarding quietly installing a backdoor universal key on all the remaining undiscovered enigma machines are expected to be pushed through the House later this week.
Meanwhile, 3D printing schematics for the device have surfaced on several "Dark Web" sites including 4chan and something called Reddit (which obviously sounds Russian, I mean it starts with a capital R).
A recently leaked document showing that the Trump administration was involved in the design, use and distribution of these now Russian devices during the campaign, which obviously allowed him to secretly collude with his KGB handlers... (Oh, and here's a video where he admits to this entire scheme... please ignore the lip artifacts, we're still working the bugs out of the software).
Oh, and we never went to the moon.
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Friday 14th July 2017 07:15 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Romanian
> I am not particularly fluent in any Romance language, but I was amazed how much of that I could read.
With a bit of practice and knowledge of a Romance language or two¹, Romanian is fairly easy to read. Understanding *spoken* Romanian, on the other hand, is a bit more of a challenge.
¹ Knowing Romance *and* Slavic languages makes it even easier, as many turns of phrase as borrowed from their Slavic neighbours.
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Friday 14th July 2017 10:13 GMT ICPurvis47
Parental Chuckouts
Whilst I was away at Uni, my mother passed my huge collection of Meccano (Put together over many years from my pocket money) and my collection of Dinky and Corgi cars and lorries, to my cousins. The next time I visited my uncle on his farm in Devon, the farmyard was littered with Meccano pieces, mostly rusty and crushed by the passing of the tractor and other implements. Broke my heart. On the other hand, I now regret getting rid of several collectable cars that were, at the time, beyond economic repair but now would be priceless. Such as a 1959 Chevrolet "Gull-Wing" station wagon, a 1961 Van Den Plas Princess 3 litre, a 1947 Austin 10 (the same age as myself), two 1960ish Goggomobils, and a 1961 BMW Isetta bubble car. 20-20 hindsight is no substitute for a glimpse into the future.
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Friday 14th July 2017 13:00 GMT magickmark
@ whileI'mhere :)
Commas, in, comments, should, not, be, missed,
But, once, in, a, while, what, happens, is, this,
A, quick, remark, is, all, that, is, needed,
Grammar, and, punctuation, tends, not, to, be, heeded,
Forgive, me, my, sins, I'll, try, not, to, repeat,
I, feel, the, shame, right, down, to, my, feet
But, just, in, case, it, happens, again,
Here, are, a, few, spare, you, can, just, slip, them, in,
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Friday 14th July 2017 13:46 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: @ whileI'mhere :)
"Commas, in, comments, should, not, be, missed,"
I was once on a course where one of the lecturers was a former director of Macmillan. He remarked that commas are perhaps the most contentious thing in all punctuation. Americans tend to use them more than the British. Normally the ideal is to have the fewest commas compatible with the text being understandable, as each one represents a small hesitation.
And lawyers, of course, used to like to avoid commas if at all possible due to the risk of a comma getting lost in transcription or printing.
"The Panda eats, shoots, and leaves" is of course an example of superfluous commas, not the absence thereof.
Icon to indicate where unwanted commas should end up.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
