Posts by Afernie 397 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Dec 2014
LCD screens have been around for a long time, only becoming ubiquitous once prices came down - using them in a vehicle with confined space would make sense regardless of cost. DVD as a format has existed since 1995, but nobody said the van never received any upgrades during its service life, did they?
""Prime Minister Corbyn will sort all this nonsense out. ;)"
HA HA HA HA HA HA
If you think any of the major parties are going to disassemble anything that's already in place then you're seriously delusional. Can I just remind you of Labour's National Identity Card..."
Actually, whatever his other faults may be, Corbyn opposed ID cards, saying they "will not solve crime, fraud or terrorism":
https://www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/10133/jeremy_corbyn/islington_north/divisions?policy=1051
"The US wan't this paranoid during the War. Sheesh! Welcome to conservative politics."
Probably because Russia wasn't interfering in America's electoral process back then, and America was way more comfortable when it was mainly them doing precisely that to other countries.
"Not the originator I guess but surely one of the main sources that popularised the "heavy files" thing?"
My favourite Dibert strip in that vein remains the one where he has the PHB crawling around on his hands and knees in his office all afternoon looking for the token that fell out of the token ring network...
"Apparently you don't understand the difference between using a common word and quoting someone else's thoughts & ideas. Given how clueless and wet a lot of people on here seem to be doesn't that surprise me in the least."
Yes, common words in the context of only one group of people, specifically right-wing mouthbreathers. As such, when an individual uses them in any context, my respect for them drops to a level almost as low as my assessment of their intelligence.
"Ah, quoting someone else. The "I'm not smart enough to think up my own retort" retort. Never mind, keep trying, better luck next time eh? Chin up!"
Said the man who learned his favourite insults from Breitbart and "Fight Club". Unless of course you invented those first resorts of the terminally unimaginative, "snowflake" and "libtard".
I don't believe for a moment that GCHQ tapped the blowhard-in-chief's phones; the problem is the credibility of the NSA and GCHQ when it comes to telling the truth is so damaged (James Clapper, I'm looking at you) that he can say it and what would have been laughed at five years ago actually has to be investigated. Not a healthy state of affairs.
Hmm. That's one school of thought, but there are rather a lot of opposing views, and their stance is that until the DF-21 is tested against an underway and evading target (and it never has been) any real threat it represents to the carrier groups is purest conjecture. If I were the Chinese, I'd be working on a very public demonstration of its effectiveness against a manoeuvring drone ship smaller than said carrier. That sends the kind of message and provides the kind of propaganda they desire.
"Cool office!"
Well, we're probably already "those misfits in IT" so quirky play lists just add the image. A typical exchange with travellers from other reaches of the empire goes along these lines:
"What on earth is that?"
""Psychic Warfare", by Clutch"
"Got any Justin Bieber?"
"No."
I don't think the cost of the propulsion system is the reason for the eye-watering price tag. How the Hell will 12 subs cost $50bn when the Germans were able to knock out the Dolphin Class for the Israelis for $1bn a pop?
I suspect the gravy train is pulling into the station again.
But let's start with Betteridge's Law and remove all headlines ending with a question mark. Follow up with all headlines that use the Clickbait algorithm:
"You won't believe how...""50 people who...", "10 ways to"...
That kind of thing. Then we can at least give the fake news killer AI a healthy diet to ingest.
"Professional video trailers and programming often include hypnotic moving symbolic imagery (Sigel Magick), and weave destructive cultural conditioning into the content; this is dangerous because this 'entertainment' can enable direct programming of your sub-conscious,"
Seek medical help.
"Most of you look like stupid commentards, because you dont know what is going on.
Perhaps a better title would be "Billions overturn truth in US Court system".
Our only hope is that PT will get the courts to declare that black is white - and then get run over on a pedestrian crossing."
I've been following this little saga for as long as it's been running but go on, tell us all what we missed.
"How long before he stands too close to a grassy knoll?"
Sadly Trump's behaviour seems to disprove Bill Hicks' theory about what happens to new Presidents on their first day:
"I have this feeling that whoever is elected president, like Clinton was, no matter what you promise on the campaign trail when you win, you go into this smoke-filled room with the twelve industrialist capitalist scum-f***s who got you in there. And you're in this smoky room, and this little film screen comes down … and a big guy with a cigar goes, "Roll the film." And it's a shot of the Kennedy assassination from an angle you've never seen before … that looks suspiciously like it's from the grassy knoll. And then the screen goes up and the lights come up, and they go to the new president, "Any questions?" "Er, just what my agenda is." "First we bomb Baghdad." "You got it …""
Or maybe they did that and he's too stupid or insane to comply.
"Well, for starters: there are no Trump hotels, resorts or golf courses in Iran."
On the plus side, if they keep losing cash at the spectacular rate they have, there won't be any Trump golf courses in Scotland either. Not that that should concern the tangerine tool, because of course he's supposedly "divested" himself of those interests...
"Remember, this is also the same country that believes that they can get rid of all the gay people by banning anything that even remotely suggests that its fine to be anything other than purely heterosexual."
And here was me thinking that famous picture of bare-chested Vlad on a horse was the most "Brokeback Mountain" thing I'd ever seen.
"Seems to be an argument for security through obscurity. "We can't release the details of how these control boxes work, because then the bad guys might figure out how to hack them"."
Surely, the argument is as much "We can't release the details of how these control boxes work because then stupid people might figure out how to break them in a potentially deadly manner that would leave us wide open to litigation for facilitating their screwups"."
"In hindsight, would a cheaper backup system (i5 workstation with a single external USB hard drive which gets swapped out with other externals as the week progresses) have been more sufficient than a bells-and-whistles backup system that tend to bork horribly just by looking at it the wrong way?"
The thing is, the only reason they would be attempting to recover data from the borked RAID array is if they were treating it as their backup system (repeat it with me: "RAID is not NOT backup - never treat it as such") and don't have a regular backup regimen to tape or other media.
My understanding is that the system failed during a critical upgrade. It seems unlikely that a mirrored array would have both drives just die - it seems more likely that that someone failed to replace an already degraded drive, and then casually kicked off the upgrade with only one drive in the mirror working.
If so, a classic example of accidents tending to be the culmination of a series of errors, rather than one isolated issue.
"Hm. There was no internet available in the Falklands, IIRC. And pretty much still isn't."
And? Since when was Argentina a major power at any level? Their air force today bears a distinct resemblance to the one they lost the war with, only with significantly more airframes providing natural reef habitats at the bottom of the South Atlantic.
"So sorry, no Internet (or any other net) for you once the shooting starts."
I doubt that very much. Future wars with major power involvement are liable to be localised, goal-orientated and non-nuclear. Why? Because Russian oligarchs really don't want to nuke the foreign boarding schools they send their sprogs to, the Chinese don't want to send their trillion dollar-scale interests in the US up in a mushroom cloud, and the US doesn't want to destroy its Chinese Walmart suppliers.
Globalisation may be admirably suited to fucking over anyone other than the 1%, but it's also a powerful argument for not destroying the global infrastructure (physical and virtual) on which your nation's economy inter-depends.
Note: Deranged behaviour from one-party state nutters not withstanding. I'm looking at you North Korea.
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