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Comment: Re:Mythbusters show just how impaired you are at . (Score 1) 984

I can assure you, on a real road, people tend to stay a bit more alert after consuming a few drinks.

Assure me by citing evidence supporting your case.

In the 1950's and 60's, before any serious drink-driving laws, all those bar-propping, Harris-Tweed jacket wearing, pink-gin drinking, pipe-smoking, Jaguar driving, David-Niven-moustache wearing, ex-Army major types said it. What more evidence do you want ?

Comment: Re:Particular diet. (Score 1) 417

All foods are atheist. At least, I've never met or heard of any food that claimed that it believed in a god. Feel free to provide evidence that theist foods exist - after all - extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

Ambrosia believes in God, and I eat nothing else.

Comment: Re:Particular diet. (Score 1) 417

I've tried home delivery shopping here in the UK and unfortunately that certainly appears to be the case.

It's fine for stocking up on things like cases of beer or boxes of baked beans and cat food, not so great for fresh meat, vegetable and dairy products.

I've tried it too, and found even worse. If they are "out of stock" they substitute what they think is "equivalent", like Greene King beer instead of London Pride, and own-brand tinned beans instead of Heinz, . Also, you might order something only because it is on half-price offer, but you get a full price "alternative" because (they say) the special offer sold out.

As for being "green", when living in Hereford my wife ordered from Tescos (there is a branch in Hereford, 2 miles from us). Talking to the driver it transpired his depot was in North London! [For US readers, that's about 140 miles each way]. He made that London - Hereford area delivery run routinely.

Comment: Re:Gorilla arm is bad! (Score 1) 98

by nukenerd (#43572685) Attached to: $5 Sensor Turns LCD Monitors Into Touchscreens
AC @ 16:43 wrote :-

What are you talking about? . Even if I leave the game at x1.0 mouse speed I hardly have to move my hand. ..... any decent mouse should move across the screen with a very small movement.

Not sure who you are replying to, or which side you are on in "touch" vs "mouse/trackball", but your comment underlines that waving an arm around a screen cannot be possibly be faster or more convenient than using either a mouse or a trackball.

I believe that the move of touchscreen tech out of the realm of small portable devices and kiosks to larger displays is part of the general dumbing down in human affairs. Retro-evolution cannot have occurred in just a generation, but it is an attitude (preceding real retro-evolution?), similar to "I refuse to read instructions!", "I do not want to use a scewdriver to open my PC case!" and "I do not wish to see any sign of how my IPod was made!". It is even like the Japanese uninventing the wheel in the 1400's, just as the green movement wishes us to uninvent many technologies today. The use of tools is one of the distinguishing features of higher animals, but there is a large section of society who consider it degrading to touch one, even a PC mouse, even if it means waving their arms like a demented monkey instead.

Comment: Re:Sure society may adapt ... (Score 1) 331

I'd say exactly the opposite.... there have been planes taking ariel photography too. People's reaction? "Can I buy an aerial photo of my house?"

Sorry, no. I had a guy trying to sell me an ariel photo of my house knock at the door the other day. I told him to f#@k off.

Comment: @Billly Gates - Re:Afraid of change (Score 1) 331

Billly Gates wrote :-

The .. geeks laughed at the PC like we do the IPAD when it came out because it was not as cool as the mainframe when doing word processing. Look whom won? .... The geeks are afraid of change which is Windows.

So you really are Bill gates !

Comment: Re:Gorilla arm is bad! (Score 1) 98

by nukenerd (#43566453) Attached to: $5 Sensor Turns LCD Monitors Into Touchscreens

Clearly, your mental conception of "mouse" hasn't changed from the offerings of the 90s ... You can turn a modern optical mouse's sensitivity up to the point where a simple twitch of the wrist is able to achieve this same result

I am well aware that mouse sensitivity can be changed. I do have to use a mouse sometimes, and of course I adjust the sensitivity of my trackball in exactly the same way. But you still need to move your forearm to move the mouse (not just wrist in my experince). I would compare a trackball vs mouse as like a bicycle vs tricycle (respectively). The mouse/trike is deceptively easier to use first time (it took me a couple of weeks to first "learn" a trackball - like learning to ride a bike), but once your reflexes are trained the trackball/bike is vastly superior in use.

(A trackball would suffer the same issues that the trackballs in real 80s acrade cabinets had: getting funk all up inside them, having the sensors wear out, and all that fun.)

WTF?! You seriously think that issues with amusment arcade controls are relevant to home use?! Don't know about you, but at home I do not spill coke over it, drop fag ash on it, stub my fag out on it, spit on it, stick chewing gum on it, or even (I've heard from arcade owners) have girls smear their menstrural discharge over it. As for "sensors wearing out" they are optical, seeing the ball rolling past. I have been using the same trackball for 12 years now. The very fact that trackballs are used for amusement arcade machines is a testament to their robustness.

Comment: Re:Gorilla arm is bad! (Score 2) 98

by nukenerd (#43560003) Attached to: $5 Sensor Turns LCD Monitors Into Touchscreens
I've been stting here wondering how on earth anyone could claim that touching the screen is faster or more convenient than a "mouse".

It has just dawned on me why - most of you people use an actual mouse. I use a trackball.

When I see "mouse" in instructions or in these discussions I subconciously translate to "trackball" for my own situation. But here the difference really matters. With a flick of my thumb I can spin my trackball and move across the screen much faster and with far less effort than someone can move their whole arm, or mouse. Even if the mouse does not first run up against the edge of the mouspad or that pile of books.

Just as a trial, I just waved my arm around my screen as if I were using touch. It's lousy, no way would I prefer to that to a trackball, even ignoring the greasy screen issue.

Comment: Re:Did it really work? (Score 1) 332

by nukenerd (#43523857) Attached to: 64-bit x86 Computing Reaches 10th Anniversary
Beyond me why they are having this argument at all. Is it even possible to buy a 32-bit PC any more? I have had 64-bit PCs for the last 5 years, running 64-bit software. I don't "need" 64-bit over 32-bit and I am sure that some of what I do, like editing, could be on 8-bit. It's not for any performance gain, 64-bit is just the current standard as far as I am concerned.

Yet there are millions of people out there running 32-bit OS's on 64 bit PCs - why?

Comment: Re:The Flying Pulpit (Score 1) 96

by nukenerd (#43509049) Attached to: Hyundai's Flying Car Flies For an Audience

There is such a thing as a personal flying device, it has existed since the 70s. It's called the Williams X-Jet or WASP
.........
I won't go into a political tangent, but you've got to ask yourself why it's not being sold to the public..

I love these conspiracy theories ! Unless you are extremely rich yourself you are never going to have one of these, so why get so hot under the collar about it ? I don't know where to start with the problems this WASP raises. Here are some :-

1) Using a jet engine's thrust for all your lift (as opposed to wings or a rotor) is horribly inefficient. What mileage did this thing get, and what range?

2) There is no escape from engine failure or even slight malfunction. Leading to :

3) As TFA talks about "use in congested cities across the globe" (not the open country in your videos) the effect of one of these coming down would be catastrophic. Leading to :

4) If they are to make any difference to that congestion, there are going to be enough of them above a city to have high risk of collisions (OK, let's just leave them to very rich people). leading to :

5) How will the pilots be trained and qualified? While the controls might be "easy" (just leaning) there are still the matters of traffic discipline, lapses of concentration, maintaining the things, going beyond your capablities - you know, the things that cause most road accidents, but will be even more catastrophic.

6) Out of town, if they get there, setting fire to forests and crops.

7) Noise. Where I live there is already enough racket from motorbikes and microlights. These flying pulpits will spread their even greater noise, and being above any screening, over a far wider area. It is telling that in the videos the noise was replaced by soft music (or a commentator against a background that sounded like a school hall - odd).

They sound ideal for the military - like a very short-range-parachute drop but with greater accuracy. A lot more expensive than a parachute though - only for very special operations perhaps.

Comment: Re:Shrug... (Score 1) 737

by nukenerd (#43502559) Attached to: Windows: Not Doomed Yet
That's odd, Hairyfeet, but your GP post was quite sensible. Then when Alex Belits' comment comes along you go off the rails.

go back to the Linux articles where you can join in the circlejerk about how having less than 1% of the market makes you leet, this is a Windows article here

In fact Alex did not mention Linux. He is talking about Windows only. And as you say, this is a Windows article here.

As for bringing RMS into it, why assume that all FOSSes regard him as great and good? Frankly, he is sidelined these days. He moved things, but his day is gone now, and as he has changed from development to advocacy it is apparent that most of his ideas are crackpot. Things like persistently using "she" as the default third person pronoun. I think he has lost it.

Comment: Re:nope (Score 1) 737

by nukenerd (#43502499) Attached to: Windows: Not Doomed Yet

the only reason MS became accepted into the enterprise is because that is what consumers were familiar with,

No. At the time we are talking about (c1990) most people first met MS and Windows at work. The path to using Windows on the desktop in the corporate area was like this :-

IBM mainframe --> IBM PC with PC DOS --> IBM PC (or clone) with MS DOS & Win 3.x

At the time, few people had a PC at home, least of all PHB's. The guys who did have home computers were on things like Amiga, Amstrad, Sinclair - the consumer "PCs" at the time. I was there, and remember some arguments at work against IBM PCs and in favour of eg Amigas because that was what the techies were familiar with - but the PHBs were afraid of being sacked for not buying IBM. In any case the PHBs thought the PCs would mainly be used as terminals for the mainframe (and they were for some time) and came with terminal emulation software.

Comment: Re:bruce schneier was right. (Score 1) 1109

if we allow ourselves to be terrorized, the point of the action was successful. Locking down the entire city .... is the very definition of "successful terrorist attack."

No it isn't. The definition of a successful terrorist attack is for the target government to agree, supposedly from public pressure, to what the terrorists want (eg to withdraw troops from somewhere or other). Actually, the public don't react that way. Or, if the terrorists just enjoy seeing people killed (some people do), then their success has already been achieved at this point

Taking precautions against terrorists is not "allowing ourselves to be terrorised". As a parallel, I have a fire extinguisher in my kitchen, but that is not indicative that I spend my life shaking in fear of a kitchen fire, or did so before I put it there; it is just a wise precaution.

I am for doing what ever it takes to bring these bastards to book and reducing the chance of it happening again. In fact I'd like to tear them apart with my own hands. That feeling is anger, not terror.

Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them. - Oscar Wilde

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