Posts by Peter Murphy 283 publicly visible posts • joined 17 May 2009
I hope his testes are metaphorically tungsten. No-one would blame him if wanted to use them immediately afterward. Having them click together like castanets would put anybody off their game.
It's his skull I'm more worried about. When he drops, he's going head first, with only a helmet separating it from the shock wave. Best of luck to the man.
But I'm befuddled by this paragraph:
"When you want to build something for the web, it's surprisingly difficult to find out how you can implement your vision across all browsers and operating systems," writes Google product manager Alex Komoroske in a blog post announcing the site. "You often need to search across various websites and blogs to learn how certain technologies can be used."
But isn't most of what you want to discover at good ol' W3C dot org? Here's the HTML 4.01 spec (which is still current), or here's the working draft for HTML5. The documentation for CSS is available at the same place. For me, that's the first port of call for finding out what elements are available - and we're talking about standard elements, not "innovations" that work with one browser. That's how I learned how to write HTML and CSS in the first place.
Other websites are useful, and I'm not knocking them, but W3C has been invaluable to me over the years.
He decided to speak in front of a wall consisting entirely of deer trophies - all bearing antlers. It looks like hell to me. You might not find it particularly infernal (although I do), but it's certainly creepy, and definitely not aesthetic. It looks like something Hieronymus Bosch or H.R. Giger would dream up during a really depressive episode.
Seriously, who's idea of "good taste" it is? Broun should not only be sacked from the committee, he should lose his own seat for agreeing to speak in front of the wall. Yuck.
(I'm not a shooter, but I have no objection to people shooting bullets or arrows to get their own food, or to keep pests like feral pigs down. But shooting so many animals that it looks like a mediocre skin from Doom? No. Just no.)
NMAP is elegant; so, too, must be our implementation. Our heuristic is composed of a collection of shell scripts, a homegrown database, and a server daemon. Continuing with this rationale, the homegrown database contains about 2371 instructions of SQL. Along these same lines, NMAP requires root access in order to allow B-trees. The code- base of 64 C files contains about 69 instructions of C.
They're smaller (which means less tensile strength), and you don't need the sun in the middle with those bloody shadow squares. Orbitals rotate, but you tilt the axis at an angle to the sun, so you get night and day for the inhabitants. Orbitals sounds a lot more fun - more benevolent robots and less Slaver sunflowers.
The way Zuckerberg thinks, I guess I'm envisioning this sort of chair from Burn After Reading - the one that George Clooney's character built as a hobby. It is definitely NSFW.
It's not really a happy read. After the meteor and and the tidal waves, you have to watch out for the cannibal fundamentalist gangbangers.
(Jerry Pournelle disliked both tele-evangelists and Black Panthers, so in the novel, he decided to ally them together as the adversaries of the good guys. And because there was a shortage of food in the novel, he added long pig as a sacrament for the new "religion".)
... and who they represent are the citizens of inner-city Marrickville. Yes, it would be lovely to have Wi-Fi in the bush, but the Councillors wouldn't be able to do anything about it because it's not in their power to do so. That would be a decision for the relevant local governments, the state or the federal government.
Or to put it another way: Boris Johnson's the mayor of London, is he not? Imagine if he started talking about free Wi-Fi in Manchester or Glasgow. I don't think it would go down well, even if free Wi-Fi is a good thing.
I think you've confused the Green movement with the Australian Greens (a political party which is trying to increase its representation).
The same Barack Hussein Obama whose mother was white? Whose maternal grandparents (whom he chose to stay with for did high school) were white as well? Who doubtlessly has lot of white relatives on that side of the family?
There's a lot of things that Obama deserves flack for - unmanned drones, that sort of thing. Anti-white racism ain't one of those.
"The internet offers a communications system uniquely free from government intervention."
My impression is that Big Government - and there is no Bigger form of Government than the Department of Defense - created the first iteration of the Internet, including the technologies like TCP therein. Distributed communicated network to deal with ICBM attack from the Soviets? That was the big idea.
It's great that the tech then permeated through to civilians both local and foreign. But without government intervention, the Internet would not have existed in the first place.
"Forced to back down"? Bentonville and Cupertino may state their objections, but the only power they have is to take their business elsewhere. This is not the United Fruit Company fucking around with Latin American countries too weak to defend themselves. This is a price hike in the 2nd most powerful state in the world. The only people who can force the Shenzhen folk to back down are the crew in Beijing, and they're pretty hands-off with local economic matters.
Anyway, I'm an "up the workers" sort of guy, so I approve of the wage rise. More spending money is good.
It takes a real political zealot to frame everyday things like webmail as a battle of GOOD versus EEEEVIL. Most of us just use it to email things. Most of us don't care too much if the web mail providers leans Democrat or Republican. Mostly importantly, most of us don't live in the US.
Not many Saudis did the whole Math/Science thing - because Saudi Arabia was fairly well uninhabited before the 20th century. However, there were lots of scientific stuff from other parts of the Muslim world. For example, Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī was from Baghdad, while Omar Khayyám (yes, the "Jug of Wine" guy was also into math) lived in Persia.
It depends how you parse this:
Someone paid me to kill you, get spared, 48hours to pay $5000.00 if you inform police or anybody, death is promised.
It sounds like you have to pay 5 thousand dollars for the privilege of death, but only if you tell others. Bugger that for a game of solders.
Nope. The word "laser" is now in dictionaries, and does not have to be capitalised. Take for example the Cambridge dictionary:
http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/laser?q=laser
Oxford:
http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/laser?q=laser
Merriam-Webster:
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/laser
So Deepak Chopra is implying that P=NP, isn't he?
He's not saying it. He's probably never heard of that conjecture. But if time is one of those limitations we can overcome by willpower, then the implication is that the lengthy time for solving NP-hard problems - like cracking 1024-bit RSA keys - can be reduced to seconds by really, really wanting to. Maybe it helps if you also click your heels together three times and wish on a star.
I think he's full of it, myself.
My comparisons for freedom would be against Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Netherlands, Finland - lots of countries. Hell, take the first 18 from this list.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index
The USA may have been the freest country once upon a time (if you were white, that is). But as Terry Pratchett says: "The price of being the best is having to be the best." That's why a lot of people are lately mocking with "The Land of the Free". Americans can shoot their guns. But any country where people can't hang out their washing or grow their own vegetables in their own front lawn is not truly free.
A lot of grown men feel uncomfortable about getting into fisticuffs with women; it feels ungentlemanly and wrong to even raise their fists.
I'm going to have a go at Mr. Wu for being an intellectual prostitute. Molybdenum and copper can be quite nasty for the environment, even in the first world. For example, there were floods in Queensland some years ago where some of the creeks ran blue with copper tailings. It was not a good look, even in the sparsely populated Outback. Sichuan has more people, and the Chinese government has a worse environmental record. Do I need to say more?
I don't see why anyone should be forced to allow another company to use the gTLD it has paid for and wishes to lawfully use.
Well, that's going to make the expanded domain system unusable.
Consider ".music" - in particular, the hypothetical domain of "radiohead.music". Who should use it? In a just world, it should be used by Thom Yorke and other people in the band. But who else could use "radiohead.music"? Only those companies foolhardy enough to face trademark infringement and domain squatting lawsuits. We see that the value of owning "xyzw.music" is negative if you aren't the actual musical outfit xyzw. And even if you are the music outfit xyzw, it is quite trivial to set up a xyzw.com | .co.uk | .com.au domain anyway. For example Radiohead has radiohead.com for all their fans.
The gTLD system is nonsense, and expensive nonsense as well.
[Rates of sea-level rise] shall only be determined using historical data, and these data shall be limited to the time period following the year 1900. Rates of sea-level rise may be extrapolated linearly to estimate future rates of rise but shall not include scenarios of accelerated rates of sea-level rise.
This is a good sign when great powers go down the drain. Legislators and scientists don't always see eye to eye, but when governments makes it illegal to state actual science, then that's another thing entirely. The behavior reminds me of another former great power: the USSR and its bouts of Lysenkoism.
I'm just glad this is just a state government than the federal government that is pushing this law. At least it can be overrided at a higher level.
If the Tea Party is about fiscal responsibility, where the fuck was the Tea Party in eight years of Bush profligacy? The answer is that there was no Tea Party until a president with extra melanin got elected in November 2008.
"Fiscal responsibility" my ass. It's really "The sherrif's a ni-(CLANG)!" with the Tea Party. As for how the kool-aid tastes... it tastes of Rupert.
Furtunately for astronauts, air is at less pressure in the capsules, so they don't get the smell as bad. Never the less, space comes with its own illness, such as space adaptation sickness (SAS). This is what happened during Apollo 8:
About an hour after starting his sleep shift, Frank Borman requested clearance to take a Seconal sleeping pill. However, the pill had little effect. Frank Borman eventually fell asleep but then awoke feeling ill. He vomited twice and had a bout of diarrhea that left the spacecraft full of small globules of vomit and feces that the crew cleaned up to the best of their ability.
Yes, liquid poo in zero-G. I hope the Taikonauts don't come down with SAS. And congratulations.
China tried invading in 1979. They got about 15-20 km on average into the country before losing momentum. That was at a time where Việt Nam was more diplomatically isolated than it was now: it had just invaded Cambodia, an act which nobody liked, and the Chinese wanted to avenge their Khmer Rouge allies. Technically, the USSR was an ally of Việt Nam, but they didn't help much. The country had to get rid of the Chinese by their lonesome, which they did.
An invasion now would be a diplomatic disaster for China. It would move Việt Nam closer to India and the United States. I don't know if they'd permit bases, but the Vietnamese have been planning to open Cam Ranh Bay for foreign warships for yonks. With a move like that, the warships would be welcome as long as they want. Moreover, a war would confirm a lot of people's negative suspicions about the PRC around the world. People are willing to do business with China, but they don't exactly trust them.
These days, it's a dealbreaker for me: other DBs like Oracle and PostgreSQL+Postgis can do it. Turns out MongoDB can... up to a limited point:
http://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/8991/how-to-store-lines-and-polygons-in-json-documents
"MongoDB doesn't currently support indexing on anything other than points, and its spatial functions are limited to finding within bounds. "
I think that's something that the MongoDB team should really investigate: support lines and polygons like other systems, and have R-tree indexes inside for quicker searches than B-tree indexes.
Someone might want to scrub their presence from the net, but if you make a right ass of yourself, it's hard to erase that from the wetware in people's skulls. Someone might even blog about it - or worse.
For example, about a month ago, one not-so-gentle-man by the name of George Tierney decided to get into a Twitter war with Sandra Fluke - the same woman who testified to US Congress about the Pill, why women take it, and why it should be covered by people's health plans [1, 2]. George started calling her rude names and four letter words beginning with "c". Other people took offense. Then he demanded they remove their observations. A small Twitterwar ensured, where he insulted many people, including Glenn Danzig at one point.
While the dude was a major league asshole, he probably had a few mental health issues, starting from anger mismanagement, and going up from there. Regardless of whether he deserves his presence to be scrubbed from the Net or not - it would be impossible to do so in the near future, because people will remember what he did. Ms. Fluke has grace enough to put it behind her, but a lot of her defenders weren't that generous. Perhaps in 10 years he'll be a footnote. This year he's a teaching moment for teachers:
http://www2.wspa.com/news/2012/may/23/upstate-mans-tweets-go-viral-real-world-impact-ar-3845986/
[1 In the absence of a NHS, of course.]
[2 I should point out that women don't just take the Pill for better sexytime, but - surprising as it may seem - ALSO as a health measure. While I think it would be redundant to educate the sophisticated, urbane, and worldly El Reg commentariat on this (especially females), I just want to prevent any "Rush Limbaugh" moments, if you know what I mean.]
It took lawyers working pro bono to get Facebook to take some action - the major thing being the issuing of a press release. As the article states, the landmark order remains to be served on Facebook in the US where the company stores its data - and we don't know if that's going to be successful.
My uncle-in-law in Maryland knows how overpriced the American system is. Mind you, he's Vietnamese born, got automatic refugee status in 1975, and citizenship some time later. He's also a doctor who spent most of his life working in the FDA. In other words, he knows his shit - about the medical system and about the world outside the country. He's not a "USA! USA! Number One!" kind of bloke.
Truer words were never spoken. Governments come, blather about the changes they want to make, and then go. Ministers are replaced by ministers. Public servants - the people who actually use the software - remain. Software programmers should spend their time asking then what they want before a single line of code is written. It might be something that handles payroll or inventory - unromantic but necessary topics. So make the software fit to use.
Another clue - a bigger clue - is that the email came out just before the end of the financial year. Most people can't file their tax return before the first of July, because they need to get their Group Certificate(s) and other paperwork from their employer or employers. That can be a laborious process.
The scammers jumped the gun popping off their email in June. Many people would wonder "How does one get a tax refund for the financial year when the financial year hasn't ended?" Issue it a month later (when people are struggling with the intricacies of Tax Family Benefits A and B and Work Related Expenses), and more people may have been tempted to click some random email to end the paperwork pain.
Let's look at the article again:
Hackers uploaded a PHP file that posed as a harmless text document and then commandeered the web server to cough up the contents of its user and a hashed password database.
How should that be even possible? The story isn't really "the danger of handling documents uploaded to web apps". Dangers ahoy there are, but that's not the real WTF here.
The problem is that here there's no separation between code and data in the environment, which is bloody stupid. Scripts should only be run by the webserver in the directories that are assigned to code, and uploads should only go to directories that are assigned to data. Moreover, these directories should be completely distinct. If you mix the two, you are asking for trouble.
(And if the language or framework makes it hard to separate the two - I suggest use a new language or framework.)
It's not good enough to just offer PHP or straight HTML any more. My hosting service, Webfaction, also offers Perl, Ruby, and Python as well, as well as their frameworks like Rails and Django. Other firms have similar facilities available.
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