Archive for the 'Rambles' Category

The invasion of Netflix

January 13th, 2012

A few times in the past week I have heard mention of Netflix.

Some people seem to think this is a Good Thing so I decided yesterday to have a look at them.  I just wanted to see what the fuss was about.

I typed the name into the browser and it came up with a company that makes clips to fix a net to a goalpost.  I pondered this for a moment and decided something was wrong.  I was right.  I had misspelled their name.

I got into the site and had a look around.

OK, so it’s another variation on the video shop theme.  I have had membership of a video shop in the past, and have also been a member of one of those places that sends you your DVD of choice through the post.

I had a poke around the offerings of this latest crowd and as I suspected, it’s a load of crap.  I’m not blaming the company, but there just aren’t many decent films out there.  There are some, but I have either seen them or I can live without them.  There wasn’t a single offering in Netflix that I wanted to see.

Then I noticed something strange.

netflix

That white square on their front page is trying to entice me to sign up.  And the strange thing is that it lists four of my Facebook contacts.  I thought that this must be just a remarkable coincidence that they should happen to pick four people that I know.

I reloaded the page.  The four “friends” changed all right but I still knew them all.  Each time I loaded the page it threw up people I know.

I have a very simple question at this point.

To list my Facebook “friends” they must know who I am.

How?

How the fuck do they know that it’s me looking at their site?  I never gave them my name, address or anything.  I just typed their address into the browser without giving any hint as to who I am.  I didn’t follow a link that might have all those strings of letters that let the site know my identity.

I can only come up with one answer and that is that somewhere I have one of those “cookie” yokes belonging to Facebook sitting on my puter, and somehow Netflix have managed to read it, which I thought wasn’t possible.

One way or another, I find it rather creepy.

And no.  I won’t be joining.

Reinventing the pencil

January 11th, 2012

Back in 2002 our gubmint of the day decided to make an investment.

Supreme Cunt Bertie Ahern ordered 7,000 electronic voting machines.

No one really knows why he did this.  He claimed that if we didn’t have them that we would be the laughing stock of Europe, which seems a little off beam as most other countries don’t have them either.  But then logic was never Ahern’s strong point.  He maintained that for people to vote using a pen and ballot paper was old hat and he wanted to brag to all his pals in Brussels that we were a high-tech country.  Now the wish to brag sounds a lot more like Ahern.  The little shit always did like the limelight.

What Ahern failed to realise is that the old system works.  Pens don’t get viruses and rarely break down.  They are pretty much fool proof.

The new voting machines were a different kettle of maggots altogether.  They were flaky.  They were unreliable.  Worst of all, they were wide open to tampering.  In short, they were the last thing people wanted to use when dealing with a totally corrupt system like our gubmint.

So for the last ten years all 7,000 machines have been sitting around cluttering up the place in various storage depots.

Our current gubmint has decided to dump the machines as the storage fees are mounting.  They now have to find a way of dumping them.

Total cost of this fiasco – €55,000,000

Current value – €0

*Sigh*

Bad news is no news

January 8th, 2012

It’s all over.

Sharon and myself are no longer an item.

She took it very badly and of course there were tears and recriminations.  I told her it was nothing she did, or for that matter it was nothing I did.  I told her it was a simply matter of my not being able to see her any more.

She begged me to think again.  She pleaded with me to give her another chance, but I pointed out that it wasn’t up to either of us.  What finally broke us apart was the news itself.  I told her I could no longer watch the news as it was too fucking depressing. 

I told her that for a long time now the joy of seeing her had been overshadowed by the depressing shit she was pouring out every evening.  All those murders, tax hikes, strikes and redundancies had finally taken their toll and I just couldn’t take it any more. 

She pleaded on bended knees [and very fetching knees they are – I’ll miss them] and swore she would only read happy news from now on, but I had to point out to the poor girl that it wasn’t up to her.  The news is the news and she would just have to accept that life is pretty miserable at the moment.

I admit I will miss her.  I’ll miss that little secret smile she used to give me at the end of each bulletin.  Life will be depressing without her, but it would be a lot more depressing if I continued to see her.   A classic example of the devil and the deep blue sea.

So if you catch sight of a little tear trickling down her cheek as she reads the news. you’ll know the reason.

She’s just another victim of the miserable times we live in.

Trust me, it’s science

January 6th, 2012

I have maintained for some time now that some areas of science are rotten to the core.

Areas such as climate, tobacco, obesity and alcohol which are high profile and politically correct are crawling with “studies” that make claims based on false, distorted and just plain invented figures.  So called scientists produce results which are designed solely to attract further funding without any regard for the truth.

You almost have to feel sorry for this bugger.  Here is a psychologist who was faking his results left right and centre, and why shouldn’t he?  After all, everyone else is doing it and it does make research a lot easier when you know the result before you start the study.  However, he made one massive mistake – he falsified results in an area that was trivial, where no other “scientists” would be embarrassed or where there was no massive financial investment involved.  It was therefore easy to expose his research as it didn’t upset any of the great modern religions of climate, tobacco, obesity or alcohol.

Reading that article is quite interesting if you study it with the great religions in mind.  Take for example the statement

“The answer, according to a growing number of statistical skeptics, is that without release of raw data and methodology, this kind of research amounts to little more than “‘trust me’ science,” in which intentional fraud and unintentional bias remain hidden behind the numbers. Only the illusion of significance remains.”

I would interpret this to mean that any research where the figures are deliberately hidden is suspect.  And there are examples of this in both the anti-smoking and climate fields, where freedom of information requests are being treated with blind panic.

So next time you read about how sitting next to an obese person will make you fat, or how one cigarette can cause a thousand deaths, think on.  What led to those conclusions?  How were the results achieved?

Trust me, it’s not science.

The Nannyphone

January 4th, 2012

There are times when I really wonder at the sanity of the modern generation.

I was poking around last night and came across one of the strangest things I have seen in a while.

Apparently there is an application [and I refuse to use that tacky term ‘app’] for your mobile phone that rewards you for going to the gym and penalises you if you miss a session.

Within two seconds of reading about it, I thought up enough flaws to make this idea completely unworkable, unless of course you have either an IQ in single digits or are a member of the iPhone generation, which amounts to the same thing.

First of all, how does the phone know you are in the gym?  It can’t possibly know the location of every gym in the world so what is to stop me registering the back bedroom as my gym?  All I have to do then is to stay in that room for half an hour and I get my reward.

Suppose I don’t particularly enjoy the gym and have only joined to watch wimmin in tight leotards?  The chances are I am going to be regularly fined, so am I really so fucking thick that it doesn’t occur to me to remove the application from my phone?  No application, no fine.

Finally, what kind of brain-dead moron wants his mobile phone to nag or chastise him?  What kind of idiot is going to shell out hard cash for something that is going to cost him money?  What kind of imbecile thinks it is fun to be ruled by a mobile phone?

I really despair for the modern generation.

All those thousands of years of evolution and look what we end up with.

It wouldn’t surprise me if they discovered that the dinosaurs had invented the mobile phone.

It would explain why they are extinct.

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