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00:00 - 14:0014:00 - 00:00

2:00 PM
just a chaos god
 
user226528
So, basically, the same stuff as WarCraft III and StarCraft II? Hmm...
 
@FleetCommand its better
especially DOW2 with its hero units
 
2:19 PM
My dad will keep all his money with himself and won't help his family out and then be like
"My 6S is your success"
Sorry, crappy pun
 
thats a bummer dude
 
@Burgi Meh, I've come to terms with it
Mom and sister met him yesterday to try and settle and get a peaceful separation and end all the fighting
He refused
 
it takes some people their entire lives, spent in awe of their parents, before eventually realizing they too are human.
 
Bleeehhhhhhhhhhh
MOT → £500 (welding, bushes, brake)
>:(
Focus, I trusted you dawg
 
what age?
 
2:32 PM
'05
 
o:
gonna fix it up?
 
@djsmiley2k what age is your focus?
 
shush, wife's problem now :P
'55 plate
 
i'm spotting a pattern here
 
Tho I swear there's a garage here who just ignore obvious problems.
 
2:34 PM
Aye, need it for placement and can't buy much car for that money
 
@bertieb that's my problem
 
If you know what I mean
 
garage were like 'car aint worth spending X on to fix it'
i'm like yeah, but I can't buy a car for X.
 
Yeah.. :-/
 
you can buy a car for X
 
2:35 PM
sure, something else is going to go wrong shortly after, I realise that
@Burgi :O
 
its just worse than your existing car
 
The Same Vimes 'Boot' Theory of Economic Inequalities
 
... that's kinda almost the problem I have with my phone ;p
 
sure you can. ;D
 
Fixed again btw. Just too damned scared to take it out ._.
 
2:36 PM
@bertieb something about cardboard soles you can feel the cobbles through
 
@djsmiley2k Pretty much
 
@JourneymanGeek I'm guessing you're talking about a phone or c amera
 
@djsmiley2k phone
replaced the screen a second time
 
> Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
@bertieb not exactly true either.... my doc martins soles wore out after about 4 years
 
2:37 PM
@djsmiley2k Ah, but the theory is sound :P
 
oh yus
 
@djsmiley2k more that the rich spent more, less often, so they had more money
 
resoleing them would of been a good idea, but no idea where they are now
Just, I'm trying to imagine a pair of boots lasting 10 years
they'd have to have like carbon fibre soles
 
(do those exist btw? I want some!) -- not motorcycle bvoots iether./
 
2:38 PM
wouldn't work
 
Kevlar soles, maybe?
Not much flex tho
 
tbh, something like what they use for cat tires - reinforced vulcanised, solid rubber makes a lot of sense
... car tires
 
lol
Was going to say something but didn't want to trigger an edit because I am having fun imaging cat tyres :D
 
@JourneymanGeek cat tires...?
 
@Burgi was too amusing an error to edit out
 
2:40 PM
 
heh
 
GIS did not disappoint
(apart from, y'know, the whole Getty button thing)
 
but more or less, rubber reinforced with nylon or steel, and with a replacable 'tread'
eh, there's an addon that fixes that
 
I thought you meant a CAT CV6 truck tyre
they are like 2m tall
 
Hmmm
 
2:41 PM
cause being able to yonk images off GIS is essential for humour here.
 
A tread you can remove and replace
Not a bad idea, if it could be made sturdy enough...
 
rubber cement is ... really really strong used correctly
 
Anyway, off for a quick cycle to rid myself of the cat car-grump
 
hmmm that's more like 4m ;D
 
2:50 PM
anyone ever come across the protocol firehose://?
 
Bob
@JourneymanGeek third time's the charm? :P
 
3:45 PM
@bertieb Baader-Meihoff feelings.
I was reading about it yesterday.
Although it was probably copied from some reddit post from a few days prior :P
 
BM? Didn't they commit certain deeds? My recall is rusty
 
FINALLY!
 
Or, wait, the phenomenon?
 
> the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, otherwise known as frequency illusion or recency illusion. This phenomenon occurs when the thing you've just noticed, experienced or been told about suddenly crops up constantly. It gives you the feeling that out of nowhere, pretty much everyone and their cousin are talking (...)
Yeah, that
@Burgi A decent minion?
 
Same wavelength now :)
 
3:49 PM
our customer has finally changed the DNS record for a site
 
I thought @djsmiley needed a minion/PFY too?
 
Hello @RogUE, welcome to RA, this may or may not be an automatic greeting.
@bertieb Really? I wasn't aware.
I haven't kept up much with the chat lately. Real life and stuff.
 
Jan 10 at 19:00, by djsmiley2k
i kinda am the pfy in this case.
 
they only did it after we charged them 3 times as much for hosting since december
 
4:05 PM
The only firehouse thing I've heard of is twitter's
 
@djsmiley2k And slashdot!
 
4:31 PM
I quite enjoyed today's XKCD
Has it been bot'd into chat yet?
Also in webcominc-related news, TIL there's a short film Lookouts, based on the Penny Arcade stories/concept
 
4:50 PM
So, how often do you guys folks have power and / or network outages on your offices and what happens in the event of one? You get sent home?
 
5:39 PM
um...
never
 
Sigh. Third-world problems much?
@Burgi Even after heavy rains, hurricanes, etc?
 
when they upgraded our office electricity meter to one not installed in the 1980s we were off for about 2 hours but it was over lunch
 
It feels almost like an alternate reality. (although maybe working for the government influencies this a lot)
 
@ThatREDACTEDGuy when we lose power or water, we get sent home pretty quickly after the event itself happens; when we lose network, people have to keep trying to work locally, using the phone, paper, etc. or drive over to the customer site and work there
 
if we had no water they have to send us home by law
i think if the power was due to be out for 4 hours or more they would send us home
 
5:45 PM
we haven't gotten like world-ending ultra-severe heavy rains, hurricanes, earthquakes or anything like that, but in the 6 years I've been salaried, we were sent home: (1) one day for a water main break (no water); (2) one or two days for power outages; (3) one day due to a minor earthquake; (4) one day because the A/C was broken and it was hot and they couldn't fix it in time
5 days in 6 years
 
heavy rain is what manchester does
 
however, they've closed the office on a couple of occasions where we never went in to begin with because we got a really bad snow storm - maybe twice for that too
 
i was 10 before i found out that people aren't born with wellies
after the terrorist attack they asked us to work from home "if possible"
 
6:36 PM
@Burgi Misread that last word when I switched back to chat tab 0_0
 
7:10 PM
what'd you think it was?
 
O/
PARTY SURVIVED
errr why does caplock now cause a bleep?>
@ThatREDACTEDGuy we have backups...
@bertieb nope.
 
7:37 PM
@djsmiley2k Ah, maybe I misremembered based on your "I'm kinda the PFY" staqtement :P
 
I am ;D
 
Fair enough :P
Can someone explain (or should I ask on travel.SE/etc) how an airport car rental can hire me a car for 3ish days (tomorrow evening till Friday evening) for about ~£13
As in, what's the catch?
(other than a stonkingly high excess)
I mean £13 total, as opposed to per day
I can't even get a taxi to the airport for £13
(looking to get cover while Focus is having car surgery)
 
how much milage allowed?
(I don't know)
(but that seems v.cheap!)
garage not lend you something?
 
96 miles per day (enough to get me to placement and back, which is ~60)
Garage is pretty no-frills :P
In line with my impecunious studentary nature :P
One of the airport rental places has awful Google reviews, sounds like they are changing their arm and charging people for pre-existing damage on he basis that if they stay to argue, they will miss their flight
But this one has pretty decent looking reviews
 
lol
 
7:45 PM
My brain does not accept that they can offer a car for several days for £13 (less if I went for a Fiat 500 or something) and not take a loss
If it's too good to be true and all that
I mean, I don't want to go go return the car and end up waking up in a tub of ice missing a kidney
 
lol
 
And I can kind of hand-wave justify it by saying "who in their right mind would want to visit Glasgow in February anyway; maybe they have excess stock"
But spidey-sense is tingling, and not in a good way
> Rip-off #1: Sky-high excess costs
I guess that's the bit
Seems like standalone excess insurance is the way to go shrug
 
8:01 PM
I was gonna say that the car could be filled with dodgy gas, but that wouldn't really benefit them, unless they were making you fill it to full before returning so they have a full tank of good gas to siphon off.
 
@djsmiley2k You mean a generator backup?
 
@MichaelFrank Otto, go get some gas, here's the 'credit card'; you say
Huh, bank 'secure' verification dealie texted me a OTP when I went to pay for the car hire
Haven't seen that in a long, long long time
Red flag? :P
 
@ThatREDACTEDGuy and redundant internet links
@bertieb that maybe becuase they are checking they can charge you the full amount for insurance etc
same way hotels do
'precharge' on the card, so if they need to they cna get your moneys.
 
@djsmiley2k Oh, we have those. We have five fiber links. Oh, you meant working links?
 
@djsmiley2k Possibly, or because they were charging £0.00 because they forgot which car I had selected
 
8:13 PM
;D
5 which all broke at once?
 
But yeah, quite possibly that!
 
@bertieb lol
there's a petrol station here, all automated, you select a charge first (£50, £100, etc)
it charges you that there and then, and you get a refund for anything unused a few days later :/
 
@djsmiley2k Ah, like ones in the 'States
 
is that?
pffft the states are so backwards tho
 
Confused the heck out of me at first
 
8:14 PM
'if you ban guns we all gonna get shot herp derp!'
 
'dems fightin' words :P
 
@djsmiley2k No, you see. We had five. One broke. Why bother? We have four more. Another broke. Why bother? There's three yet. One more broke. Meh, two still, if one breaks there's another. Well, one more broke. But we're still up, no fires falling from the sky, everything is good, right?
 
lol
how did 5 break tho,
i mean unless that's over like a 20 year period
we have 2, neither has ever broke
of course things have happened that has caused traffic to stop flowing, but the physical fibre has never had a problem.
 
@djsmiley2k Excavators, manglement and no IT budgets.
 
joys
we had an excavator go through one of our unlit cables between our two DC's
it was fixed in ~4 hrs
 
8:17 PM
@djsmiley2k I don't know how long was the period. But my bet would be five(ish) years. Of course, once one is broken they don't repair it, unless it's the last one, which broke twice in the last 6 months.
It usually takes a couple days (and I guess tens of thousands) to fix.
 
now, real fun is water mains
you hit on e of them, you're in trouble
 
Didn't our Defence Secretary warn about Russians cutting cables? Maybe 1 of the 5 went down because of that :P
 
@djsmiley2k Someone hit the jetfuel supply line for Auckland Airport here in NZ while work on their field... covered it back over with dirt and pretended it never happened.
A few years later it burst and the airport had to shutdown for a couple of days.
 
haha
 
The pipeline is 157km long.
 
8:24 PM
we've had farmers try that
 
Imagine finding that leak.
 
problem is, 250psi water mains..... when their hoe goes into the pipe and gets stuck, it's fine
@MichaelFrank :D
i'm guessing the line is pressurised, you'd see it.
when they try and remove their hoe...... and it's launched 300m into the air at 150mph, then they know about it XD
 
 
1 hour later…
9:29 PM
Welp, excess repayment insurance dealie was less than ten of your Earth pounds
And off the top of my head, even with the two (rental+excess insurance) taken together, it's cheaper than commuting by public transport would be for the three days
 
Bob
9:49 PM
morn
 
o/
 
That is really, really crazy.
Pirate or not, a developer does not have the right to obtain access to password data like this. This is almost certainly a CFAA violation, and any information the developer obtained this way is unlikely to be admissible in court because of unclean hands.
You cannot take the law into your own hands.
 
Precedent is not on their side.
 
@bwDraco Try telling that to POTUS ;)
 
9:57 PM
↑ just be sure you're in a free speech zone when you do :)
 
If they're doing this to obtain information about pirates for use in copyright infringement lawsuits... once it becomes known that they're basically stealing this information, it becomes inadmissible in court.
!!/wiki Clean hands
 
Clean hands, sometimes called the clean hands doctrine or the dirty hands doctrine, is an equitable defense in which the defendant argues that the plaintiff is not entitled to obtain an equitable remedy because the plaintiff is acting unethically or has acted in bad faith with respect to the subject of the complaint—that is, with "unclean hands". The defendant has the burden of proof to show the plaintiff is not acting in good faith. The doctrine is often stated as "those seeking equity must do equity" or "equity must come with clean hands". This is a matter of protocol, characterised by A. P....
 
...more accurately:
In the United States, the exclusionary rule is a legal rule, based on constitutional law, that precludes evidence collected or analyzed in violation of the defendant's constitutional rights from being adduced in a court of law. This may be considered an example of a prophylactic rule formulated by the judiciary in order to protect a constitutional right. The exclusionary rule may also, in some circumstances at least, be considered to follow directly from the constitutional language, such as the Fifth Amendment's command that no person "shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against...
Fruit of the poisonous tree is a legal metaphor in the United States used to describe evidence that is obtained illegally. The logic of the terminology is that if the source (the "tree") of the evidence or evidence itself is tainted, then anything gained (the "fruit") from it is tainted as well. == History == The fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine was first described in Silverthorne Lumber Co. v. United States, 251 U.S. 385 (1920). The term's first use was by Justice Felix Frankfurter in Nardone v. United States (1939). Such evidence is not generally admissible in court. For example, if a police...
Well... at minimum, this will lead to a class action lawsuit under the CFAA.
 
ffs
parents phone me "the tv is quiet"
"have you tried turning it off and back on again?"
"oh its working now"
 
10:14 PM
At least it was a quick fix :D
 
Gotta love sights like this...
 
Bob
I smell burning
 
10:34 PM
0_o
Speaking of tech support
(few images coming warning)
At this point I was trying to remember data recovery tools
Fortunately, another quick 'fix' :D
All's well that ends well
 
So, I have this homework (yeah... long story short I'm at Uni again) where they ask for examples of (a) input and (b) output devices that convert analog to digital, but they already list scanners, microphones and mice for input and video screens, sound cards, printers and dial-up modems as output devices. This narrows down a bit what I can mention...
I need three examples for input and three for output 'm thinking keyboards, touchscreens and (???) for input, but keyboards don't digitize an analog signal.
As for output, I'm stuck. Unless you consider the optical head of CD-ROMs and DVDs to be performing an analog read. But it still leaves me with two examples missing.
 
10:49 PM
Keyboards arguably do digitise an analogue signal (pressure → on/off)
 
Depends on how you define these things, of course
Also hang on
sound card as digital output?
 
@bertieb Yeah. One would've to be able to read the mind of the professor. A way where only madness lies.
They want 3 examples of analog -> digital input and 3 more of digital -> analog output
 
Ah, I guess you could say that a SPDIF output is digital?
Anyhoo
 
@bertieb Yes, but it's not a digital -> analog output, it's digital -> digital.
 
10:53 PM
Inkjet printer for digital output?
 
They use printers as digital -> analog example (because paper and paint)
 
Oh wait, D→A out? Sound card is grand then, if I understand how speakers work, which I... don't
Ah, missed that in the example
Thought I was being clever
 
Yeah, they pretty much cover almost everything with their own example.
 
CNC machine?
 
I'd consider EVERY output to be analog... Light is made up of photons, which are on wave lengths... Kind of analog, right?
 
10:55 PM
I mean, for A→D input you could list three types of sensors I guess :P
 
Sound is vibrations....
 
@CanadianLuke I guess for eg printer you can't print a fraction of a dot, they exist in discrete quanta
 
Oh I know, for input: keyboards, touchscreens and cameras (those are not scanners, right? They use CMOS instead of CCDs)
@bertieb What are those?
 
I kind of think that either the original questioner is not competent, or they want you to think outside the box and see other devices as being analog vs digital...
 
!!/wiki Numerical control
 
10:57 PM
Computer numerical control (CNC) is the automation of machine tools by means of computers executing pre-programmed sequences of machine control commands. This is in contrast to machines that are manually controlled by hand wheels or levers, or mechanically automated by cams alone. In modern CNC systems, the design of a mechanical part and its manufacturing program is highly automated. The part's mechanical dimensions are defined using computer-aided design (CAD) software, and then translated into manufacturing directives by computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) software. The resulting directives are...
 
@ThatREDACTEDGuy ↑
Yeah, output should be grand
 
Hm. As for output... 3D printers aren't paper printers, right? ;P
 
I think we are I am overthinking the examples
As Luke said, nearly any kind of output would be analogue
 
And wi-fi are radiomagnetic waves
 
Stepper motor in a robot
etc etc
 
11:00 PM
@bertieb If it weren't for those pesky humans, we could get rid of the analog gap and optimize so much!
 
It's been a while since I did any serious (for given values of 'serious') neuroscience but I'm not sure we're that great at analogue input either
For massive had-waving values of "not that great"
Something something something, receptor cells
Something something something nerve impulses
Something something something, perceptual threshold
etc
Bed time, in tomorrow's episode: will bertieb be scammed by the place that is renting him a car for less than a bottle of spirits? will he decide whether to renew the second of two .eu domains?
same bat time, same bat channel
 
omg! euro truck sim has just stolen my life!
i can cruise the UK listening to the real radio!
 
ETS2 is great fun :D Even better with a wheel input
 
You guys are crazy.
 
Hey! @ThatREDACTEDGuy did they have joystick as an A→D input? :D
 
11:08 PM
i have the steam controller so i guess i could play on the sofa...
 
@Burgi Wheeeeeellllll
 
@bertieb Oh that! I had thought that and promptly forgotten. Thank you!
 
nudge, nudge
 
i have a mission, carlise to glasgow... can i pop in for a brew @bertieb?
 
11:09 PM
@ThatREDACTEDGuy Nae prob, nae prob. Can do stick, wheel, pedals, uh... trackball
@Burgi 👍
 
winner
 
@allquixotic o/
 
These simulators are getting ridiculous. Someone should make a "PC gaming simulator" where it simulates a desktop PC inside your PC.
 
see you in 3 virtual hours!
 
Or a "simulator simulator" where you simulate.... stuff??
 
11:10 PM
Though neither look terribly like their real life counterpart D:
 
@ThatREDACTEDGuy its due out on 27th march
 
@Burgi Wait, what? For real?
 
What's next? "Grass simulator: watch weed grow"? "Stone simulator: you rock!"?
 
11:12 PM
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
Next thing you gonna tell me is there's a "nothing simulator" and it's been greenlighted.
@CanadianLuke I'm more inclined to the first theory.
The question is so poorly enunciated:
> It is well known that today's computers work with digital data in their memories and that the (real) external world is made up of analog data. On the other hand, the computer needs to interact with the outside world. Describe three analog data that can be stored on computers.

a) Inform how these data are converted from the analogue format to the
(including the description of devices and not just their name).

b) Describe three digital data stored on the computer that are
transformed into analog and exported to the outside world
 
11:37 PM
@bertieb here! tea, milk, 1 sugar please!
and a filthy truckers breakfast on a barm
 
Bob
@ThatREDACTEDGuy That already exists. It's called VMware.
 
@bwDraco hah. I was going to mention that ;p
 
haven't figured out indicators yet...
 
@bwDraco The developers themselves should be taken to the law instead.
 
getting pirate serial keys, eh, maybe. Stealing passwords (or mining bitcoin) crosses the line.
 
Bob
11:58 PM
I didn't believe that the USA could have >80 guns per 100 people. Aaand it seems like that's actually a fairly conservative estimate. Did they start putting them in Happy Meals or something? — Michael 8 hours ago
 
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