Posts by handleoclast 1287 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jan 2012
@Ledswinger
You deserve several pints for that.
As does H L Mencken with this remarkably prescient quote:
As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
Hmmm, you think it's unlikely to be aliens?
I remember (in the dim and distant past) being at university (studying pinball). Back in those days, roadworks had flashing yellow lamps (simple circuitry, big 9V battery, and no security on the mounting). I remember the night we'd been drinking and several of those lamps appeared in somebody's room, facing ceilingwards, flashing away while we sat there in the dark looking upwards enjoying the show.
Just sayin'.
@Anonymous Coward
because the ongoing optical illusion delighted me that much.
If you liked that, you'll love this. If you're looking at it one a phone, it's not using the front-facing camera to track your eyes; it works on a desktop setup with no cam. Doesn't work in a printout, though. :)
Looking at the pic, it appears that each pair of contra-rotating blades has one blade atop the strut and one blade below. The lower blade doesn't seem very far above the landing legs. The lower blade certainly appears to be less than a blade length above the landing leg, but that could just be the angle of the photo.
Conclusion: if it lands at an angle (possibly because of a gust of wind) that's a knackered blade. A better design (although more complicated mechanically) would have both contra-rotating blades at the top of the strut.
As a proof-of-concept prototype (is there enough lift and a reasonable flight time?) it's fine. I don't think it's even close to a final, practical, configuration.
Too low and the blades might take your eye out and/or the noise is irritating.
Too high and you worry about a failure causing it to fly like a brick onto your head.
Is there a sweet spot in the middle? Or could you persuade a court that "too low" and "too high" overlap?
I wonder if lawyers are funding drone development. They'll be able to spend many a happy hour coining it in court over this.
Actually given that he allegedly can't remember the words of the Star Spangled Banner I wouldn't be surprised at all.
It wasn't that he couldn't remember the words, it was that he misremembered one word. Every time he got to the bit about the "Star Spangled Bannon" he felt ill.
The antipathy towards Gnome 3 is because it's a phone interface.
I look at all the things I can do with right- and middle-clicks on Gnome 2. Things I use a lot, like right-clicking on stuff in the task bar. Can't do them on Gnome 3 because it's a phone interface and so only left-click does anything. Not even some indirect method (such as drilling down through a menu or even going to a control panel) of getting to the same functionality (if there is, I haven't found it).
Lots of magic areas on screen. Stuff is hiding until it magically decides to pop up, or I accidentally move the pointer to a magic zone (when something I didn't want to pop up does pop up) because it's a phone interface. An interface for a phone with a tiny screen where you can't afford the luxury of a taskbar.
Most apps don't have menu bars but have a hamburger icon. So more clicks to do anything. Because it's a phone interface for phones with tiny screens.
They could have made it bi-modal. "I'm running on a proper computer so I'll give you a rich interface" and "I'm running on a phone so I'll give you a minimal interface." They could also have had a config option to say "Give me a phone interface even on a proper computer so I always see the same thing." At the very least they could have made it possible to do the same things that you can with middle- and right-clicks in a roundabout way. They didn't do any of those things.
You know what really annoys me? When the idle lockout kicks in. On Gnome 2 I can press a key or move the mouse to make it wake up and give me a login box. On Gnome 3 I have to click with the mouse and drag upwards, just like on a phone. This is to protect me from putting my desktop and monitor in my pocket and accidentally waking up the computer as I walk. That is fucking insane.
I have nothing but contempt for Gnome 3 and the people who developed it. Even after all the complaints, even after the Mate/Cinnamon forks, they insist on doing things a fucking stupid way so it works on phones. How many commercial phones have Gnome 3 as the UI? How many are ever likely to?
Consistently doing something in a stupid, counter-productive way is no virtue.
how difficult is it to make normal thermite in large quantities?
Take quantity X of finely-powdered ingredient A and mix thoroughly with quantity Y of finely-powdered ingredient B. Piece of piss.
It's not hard to find out what the ingredients are. Actually, there are several variations, but one is cheaper than the others.
It's not hard to work out the appropriate quantities.
Mixing is dead easy.
Getting the ingredients in finely-powdered form is more work.
You can't ignite it easily. A match won't do it. You need a higher temperature than you can get from a match.
Even so, it's not beyond the bounds of your average terrorist. Well, apart from the intelligence required to figure out some of the steps. And having a mind-set that relies on facts and logic rather than belief in fairy tales.
That said, thermite isn't explosive. So not of much interest to terrorists. There are possible terrorist applications but the terrorists don't seem to have thought of them.
@raving angry loony
When you introduced your truck metaphor, it reminded me more of something. The strength and stability of the Tory party is illusory, much as the strength of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxVQ7ZEG1RU>this truck</a> is. I think this metaphor is better than yours: the wilful ignorance of reality, the inevitable crash, etc.
Some common sense there, maybe one day the WORLD will wake up to the fact that trawling everybody's data for every detail is an ideal not worth pursuing.
It won't achieve the stated objective of protecting us from terrorists. But that's only the story used to sell it to us.
What it will achieve (and this was always its true purpose) is to ferret out any signs of internal dissent, allowing it to be quashed. It works very well for that. The Stasi (back when it existed) could only have dreamed of the day when everyone would carry around their own surveillance devices, voluntarily. Of course, the Stasi were quite open about surveilling people to pick up signs of dissent (obviously caused by mental illness, which had to be rooted out for the individual's own good) whereas our governments have to invent stories about protecting us from paedo-terrorists.
What the world has to wake up to is why these cunts really want full access to our phones and computers. Maybe it's not too late for at least a few countries to avoid letting their governments do this, and the rest will just have to learn to conduct their lives more carefully.
My... not that this was unexpected but the lawyers seem to be approaching lightspeed these days.
It's not so much that the lawyers are clocked any faster but that they employ pipelineing, branch prediction and speculative execution.
I wonder when the equivalent of meltdown/spectre hacks will appear for lawyers.
We're constantly told that the only effective bitcoin mining now is done with asics.
Some cryptocurrencies are designed to work best on ordinary CPUs and to not benefit from ASICs and/or GPUs. Monero, for one. Which is the one that most frequently crops up in those JavaScript exploits. Strange coincidence, that.
The government is pressing ahead with its proposal to make hedges illegal. Said a government spokesman "Many schoolboys find pornographic magazines in hedges. Because the opposition refused to consider our proposal to require age verification in order to access hedges, our only option is to make hedges illegal." The spokesman also noted that Amber Rudd's suggestion that it could all be fixed using "hedgetags" was fucking insane, as is everything she utters.
@AC
Never heard of it.
They used to have good TV adverts. Good enough to make you try it once. Not good enough, in my mind, to make me drink the stuff a second time (too much vanilla in it for my taste).
See, for example, this classic or this older advert. Or this more recent one (a bit close to the bone for some people).
I and my neighbours had similar problems with the shoddy doors fitted by the builder. We complained to the landlord, but he basically told us to fuck off (since he was also the builder). So at various points throughout the year, you'd hear doors slamming as people tried to get their locks to work (sometimes slamming helped a little, but mostly it was wasted effort). Usually it was no problem from the inside (thumb latch) but a bugger with the key (so much so that we were afraid that applying too much force would snap the key)..
I eventually found the trick was to push up on the handle, raising the door slightly. One of my neighbours tried a similar trick, lifting at the letter slot. Whereby he found out that the design of the flap meant it instantly snapped the plastic pivot/springy thing, irreparably detaching the flap. Well, you could repair it with wood screws into the pivot holes, but it no longer sprang closed.
Eventually the builder/landlord sent one of his guys around to drop the striker plates a quarter inch.
If I were the general public (oh, I am, at least by some definitions) and inclined to jam drones (I probably would be so inclined if the drone annoyed me) then I'd be less worried about the civil penalties for jamming as the possible outcome of pointing a device that looks like a rifle. In some places that can get you shot. Especially if you're black. Or appear to be Muslim (or have a long beard). Or, if on the London Underground, you're Brazilian.
A great design for appealing to the mass (stupid) market. Evolution in action, perhaps?
Oh, and if you want all (well, some of) the thrills of a drone without the hassle of remote control, I suggest the random trajectory flying disco eyeball chopper (Big Clive demo & teardown). Mine is on its way from China as I type, at a cost of £3.12.
@Mephistro
You'll find there is also a Wikipedia entry for EATOIN SHRDLU, giving its origins.
It seems that the Linotype keyboard has inspired a few things. Whether directly or indirectly is hard to determine. Your "AI" program may have been named directly (as Wikipedia claims) after an obscure typographic fact of Linotype keyboards but may actually have been named (based indirectly on Linotype keyboards) after an SF story by Fredric Brown with the title "ETAION SHRDLU" about a Linotype machine that exhibited AI.
30 {even more obscure journalistic convention]
Sheesh, am I that drunk? Already?
I could have sworn I just saw somebody thanking Andrew Orlowski for one of his phone(ish) reviews. I must have stumbled into a different universe when I staggered to the toilet. Back in my old universe, Andrew usually gets slagged for his phone reviews. :)
Upvoted for "ETAOIN SHRDLU." Some of us remember the old days of typography. Others (like me) just remember reading about the old days of typography. Well, I did actually see a typecase in use in a working environment, but I was too young at the time to bother noticing the arrangement of the letters, and wouldn't have figured out why they were arranged that way if I had noticed.
Bonus points if you can name one of the SF authors who used ETAOIN SHRDLU in a story.
Actually, my increasingly faulty memory tells me that one of those SF authors used it in two very different stories. Google confirms one of them, but not the other (which wasn't SF, although it read most of the way through like fantasy). Extra bonus points (and mystery biscuits) if you confirm that memory.
Ob trivia: ETAOIN SHRDLU approximates the order of frequency of the twelve most commonly-used letters in English, so were arranged in that order on a Linotype machine, which meant authors with a background of journalism and/or printing used them in a story. Those relative frequencies makes it a good strategy to use them in that order if you're playing hangman.
Wow. That's complicated.
I simplified the recipe a little.
First, I kept the vodka in the freezer so I didn't have to add ice (which dilutes things and ruins the taste).
Second, I reduced the number of ingredients by not bothering with gin, rum, tequila, and triple sec.
Third, I avoided dilution by not bothering with cola or lemon juice.
Fourth, I did away with the fruit (I avoid anything the medical profession claims is healthy).
Which left me with cold vodka.
I retained the instructions to fall down stairs and sleep in the stairwell. After greatly simplifying the process the end result was the same.
In my opinion (for what it's worth) PEBKAC is over-reported. The person at the keyboard may be the proximate cause of the problem but the ultimate cause is usually manglement. Manglement that puts people in front of a computer without adequate training. Manglement that puts people in front of a computer who are barely capable of working out what 2+2 equals (yes, those people are stupid, but manglement who give people tasks they are incapable of performing are even more stupid and the root cause of the problem).
Boss Is The Cause Of Idiotic Nuisance...
That said, there was a time a customer reported that two users couldn't send/receive e-mail and asked me to give them new passwords. The mailboxes didn't exist on the server. I checked the backups, and the users were there the day before. Customer finally admitted to having deleted two different users the day before, using a (very simple and hard to fuck up) web-based admin of their mail accounts. Different users whose mailboxes were still on the server, despite supposedly being deleted. However, I got the impression that the person who did the deleting wasn't the usual person who administered their mail accounts, so still maybe not a PEBCAK, but a PEWSOPAK (problem exists with supervisor of person at keyboard).
I can only think of one true PEBCAK I encountered. But that was a one-person operation relying on a relative to handle IT matters more complex than browsing the web. So if something went wrong when the relative was ill or on holiday, we got a call. But that person cheerfully admitted to not having a clue, so not exactly a case of management putting an incompetent in front of a computer and expecting it all to go swimmingly.
Bathtub gin killed because it was contaminated with things like solvents and methanol
It was mainly the methanol. All fermentation produces methanol as well as ethanol. It is not the methanol itself that is particularly toxic, it is the breakdown products when the body disposes of it. Too high a concentration of those breakdown products causes the problem. Fortuitously the same breakdown mechanisms tackle both methanol and ethanol, and the relative concentrations are such that dealing with the ethanol slows down the rate at which methanol is broken down, to the point where the body can deal with methanol's breakdown products fast enough that they don't cause problems.
Those relative concentrations can change during distillation, because methanol boils off first. Do a good job (use a thermometer and discard the low boiling-temp fraction) and the resulting spirits have an even higher ethanol/methanol ratio. Do a sloppy job (where you don't bother bleeding off the methanol) and you leave the relative concentrations the same, as long as you dump the entire output into a single container before bottling and it's still safe (well, as safe as alcohol ever is).
Do a really bad job, where you don't take steps to discard the methanol and where you put small bottles to the outlet, one at a time, and the first bottle can have a very high ratio of methanol to ethanol. Maybe the first few bottles. Or, if your still is big enough, the first dozen bottles. And that's where the problem lies. Some bottles in your run will be relatively lower in methanol than the feedstock and some will be higher.
Note that it is illegal to distil alcohol unless you have the relevant licence, so don't try this at home. But if you do, make sure you do it right.
An Embassy spokeswoman said: "It is not a very nice name and it is certainly not nice to be called a name related to cabbage.
He sounds like a bit of a sour kraut.
There, there, mon petit chouchou.
Mine's the one with a cream puff in the pocket.
Wow! Just wow!
Three downthumbs. For what? Who are these people?
People who think we really should give the emergency services Xmas off because nothing bad ever happens then? It's actually one of the worst times of the year for emergency call-outs.
People who think we really should give the armed services Xmas off because no enemy would ever think of taking action against us when we're known to be below strength? It's the best time to start something.
People who think it's sensible to spend all that money on defence yet leave ourselves undefended for two weeks? It's like building the great wall of Mexico and leaving big gaps in it. If you're going to do it at all it has to be continuous or you may as well not bother.
We should extend the idea to the emergency services. Let the police, fire service and hospital staff spend the holiday season with their families.
It's not as if people this time of year choke on what they're eating, get hammered and start fights in pubs, or set fire to their home in oh, so many festive ways. And it's not like Kim Jong Un can figure out if he wanted to attack, the best time of year would be when most of the military are on holiday.
Either we're prepared 24 hours a day, 365.25 days a year or we're just playing very expensive games.
@unwanted numpty
If you've got nothing to hide you've got nothing to fear. Only criminals need fear these sensible measures.
Time to put your money where your mouth is. Drop your own dox. With proof. Let us all know who you are in real life, with a way of proving the entity posting as unwarranted triumpahlism is indeed that real life person.
After all, you have nothing to hide, right?
@DRendar
I'm on £15/month for 30G (but all hotspottable). Since most of the data gets used at home on a real computer with a real keyboard (phone k/b is too fiddly) the extra £3/month for unlimited (but all bar 30G of it only usable on the phone) wouldn't really be worth it.
For those looking for the £15/month SIM, you're out of luck. Three no longer offer it, but if you already have that package you can continue with it.
Oh yeah, I only get 200 minutes of talk time, but since I'm an antisocial bastard and never call anybody, the unlimited talk time for an extra £3/month isn't much use either.
The Amazon drone records video providing proof of delivery, the hapless recipient is left out of pocket and considering forking out for CCTV cameras after claiming the delivery wasn't made.
I foresee a slight problem here...
Dear Amazon, the CCTV cameras I ordered from you have not yet been delivered.
Oh yes they have.
Oh no they haven't.
Behind you! It's Crook Drone!
Where? I can't see Crook Drone.
Etc.
@Milton
You can buy bismuth ingots on Amazon. Only 86% of the density of lead, but it's nowhere near as soft. I wouldn't want 2kg of that dropped on my head.
Why would anyone even think of buying bismuth? Well, if you know what you're doing, you can grow some very funky crystals. Try a google image search on bismuth crystals.
The source quoted in the article says "increasing overall average after-tax income by 2.2 percent", and yet the entire article is full of snarkiness about how great is it for the companies. Isn't having 2.2% more income great for EVERYBODY?
See that bit you quoted about it being an average of 2.2%?
It isn't distributed evenly. It's distributed unevenly at first. Later on, some provisions expire and then it will be distributed very unevenly. There are also other provisions that are set to expire that will redress the balance somewhat, but the Republicans in Congress have all cheerily admitted that those "temporary" provisions will stay in place as long as they have control, because they'll keep renewing them.
Oh, and there are tax cuts for the rich. Big tax cuts. But if you're rich because you own companies rather than rich because you run companies, you get even bigger tax cuts. So they're not giving an incentive to the CEOs, they're giving incentives to the parasitical major shareholders. If you work your balls off running a big company you get a tax cut. The guy who owns the company and does fuck-all gets a much bigger tax cut.
Oh, and the property/state tax thing adversely affects those in states with high property/state taxes. They won't be able to write off as much of those against federal taxes. Big John and bombastic bob will be along to say that's a good thing, because why should people in Shithole, Alabama subsidize people in New York? Except. New York pays more in federal taxes than it receives (as do most Democratic states). Alabama receives more in federal taxes than it receives (as do most Republican states). So New York already subsidizes Alabama, but now New Yorkers are going to subsidize Alabamians even more.
Oh, and the estate tax thing affects only the incredibly rich.
So yes, it's 2.2% on average. Right now, but not in future years. And the vast bulk of that will end up in the pockets of 0.1% if the population.
Do you get it now?
How about Senator Bob Corker saying he was going to vote against the bill because it would balloon the deficit and Corker is very much against increasing the deficit. Then a provision got added to give more breaks to real estate companies. Then Bob Corker changed his mind for no discernible reason and voted for the bill. It's pure coincidence that he owns a very big real estate company.
Do you get it now?
The maths behind saying the bill will only add $1.5 trillion to the deficit is based on a very unrealistic assumption for growth that sane economists everywhere (and even some of the insane ones at the Chicago School of Economics) say cannot happen.
Do you get it now?
It was written in secret and rammed through Congress with almost no debate, because if the public had chance to learn the full implications they'd have been hanging Congresscritters from lamp posts.
Do you get it now?
I admit it, I have a Farcebook account. Purely to see what WileyFox are up to and then complain about it, since they use Farcebook for their announcements instead of using their own website.
Over the months, Farcebook kept nagging me to upload a profile pic. I finally complied. After having taken some anti-recognition measures.
First, the account is not in my real name.
Second, I carefully avoided having my hair cut or shaving for 20 years. Let's see your algorithms figure out where the tops and bottoms of my ears are, or where my chin is.
Third, the picture I uploaded was of my cat.
Fourth, the cat died four years ago.
One of my neighbours might recognize me from the picture of my cat, since it was originally her cat. However, the pic is taken from an unusual angle. And the neighbour died over a year ago.
So I think I'm pretty safe from recognition.
No icon indicating a joke, because everything stated above is absolutely true.
@Denarius
Flame away with the latest propaganda from the 18th and 19th century...
An interesting viewpoint you have there. Is it based upon the idea that facts deteriorate with age or is it based upon the idea that logic deteriorates with age?
It must be that facts deteriorate with age. Because new facts may turn up. But if new facts don't turn up then the existing conclusions stand.
So if you'd pointed me at newer research showing the reading I cited to be factually incorrect, I'd agree with you. Instead you're using a fallacy that could be used to dismiss Boolean algebra (invented in 1847) for designing logic circuits.
BTW, Remsburg did get one thing wrong that I know of. Where he claimed that OT patriarchs were named after Babylonian kings. Feel free to point out any other errors you find. But even if you manage to discredit every bit of his historical research, the internal contradictions in the Bible that he pointed out are still valid.
Oh, and irony of ironies (how ironic, given this thread), I'll just turn your argument back on you: Flame away with the latest propaganda from the 3rd century...
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