Disqus - Latest Comments for RobertDay

Re: Issue 115 - June 2011 - Page 13

RobertDay — Mon, 30 May 2011 17:42:54 -0000

I was receiving phishing scam messages purporting to be from "my" bank for a year before they finally hit at random on the bank I actually use. In that year, I had messages about "unconfirmed activity on my bank account" supposedly from banks I'd never even heard of in countries far away from my own! It rather gave the game away...

Re: Issue 115 - June 2011 - Page10

RobertDay — Mon, 30 May 2011 17:38:42 -0000

In any case, the Prince of Wales' London residence is Clarence House.

Re: Can You Please Silence Your Shutter?

RobertDay — Thu, 26 May 2011 10:39:06 -0000

The Scottish comedian Billy Connelly used to have a routine about spectacle wearers being able to get prescription windshields for their cars, only to have passers-by recoil in horror as they drove past - "Oh no! Look at that poor man's big head!" (it sounds even funnier in broad Glaswegian..)

Re: Sun changes caption for manipulated Libya photo - Press Gazette

RobertDay — Fri, 13 May 2011 09:24:48 -0000

No, the three planes are probably pukka; they do come off an assembly line, you know, so tend to look the same. And pilots practice formation flying... The middle one has a light grey radome, whilst the other two are black. Looks like an air display shot to me.

Having said that, it looks to me like three images; the planes, the shot of the rebels, and the figure in the foreground badly matted into the main picture. And given that the main figure is celebrating, are we supposed to think that these are rebel aircraft or pro-Gaddafi troops?

The whole thing is a mess, and any half-way intelligent picture editor would bin it. Which either means that political message comes before any attempt at being convincing, or that the picture editor isn't.....what?

Re: Moby’s Destroyed: When Musicians Become Photographers

RobertDay — Thu, 12 May 2011 18:02:04 -0000

As you say, nothing jaw-droppingly good apart from that cover photo (if squinting at the pictures on the wall in your photos is anything to go by). It also helps if you're in environments where someone else has done the stage and set design for you. And crowd shots are difficult to get wrong. Now, putting on a long lens and going into the crowd is a different matter....

Re: Dark Skies Review - Total Sci-Fi

RobertDay — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 11:59:17 -0000

Just working my way through the box set - up to the introduction of Jeri Ryan. Lots of really good stuff in this series, including other genre actors with (sometimes uncredited) walk-on parts, and (as I remember from its UK broadcast showing) the best Ronald Regan impersonation I've ever seen!

I rated this show far higher than X-Files at the time; obviously, with the plot being set out from the beginning, there was always going to be a better focus and yet at the same time the show could work its themes out in a more paced way. Sadly, it seems that that was too much for audiences to be able to sit through. I also suspect that Zabel and Friedman were too influenced by Joe Straczynski's five-year story arc for Babylon 5 and conveniently forgot how that very nearly didn't happen (and how long JMS had to hawk his series around the networks before getting it made).

Re: Issue 114 - April 2011 - Page 13

RobertDay — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 13:02:21 -0000

Because the foreshocks didn't happen in isolation; Japan suffers from regular "small" earthquakes and there is nothing in any one minor earthquake to suggest that the next is going to be any bigger or smaller.

Re: Issue 106 - September 2010 - Page 18

RobertDay — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 17:50:35 -0000

Oh - I was hoping for a story about a giant man eating a catfish!

Re: Issue 106 - September 2010 - Page 6

RobertDay — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 17:41:02 -0000

But how much does the hollowed-out volcano and gang of oriental henchmen in black polo-neck sweaters to go with it cost?

Re: Issue 106 - September 2010 - Page 2

RobertDay — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 17:31:54 -0000

Of course, by recirculating this, it spreads the false impression that Western countries ARE lands flowing with milk and honey, and runs the risk of encouraging more emigrants - the opposite effect to that the writer wants!

Re: Issue 98 - December 2009 - Page 10

RobertDay — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 10:01:57 -0000

Likewise: I went through a phase of getting phishing e-mails which were instantly identifiable as hoaxes, as they all came from banks I had no connection with (and some I'd never heard of!). It was about a year before I got one purporting to come from my own bank, which needless to say was iodentical to all the others except for logos, etc.

Re: Issue 94 - July 2009 - Page 2

RobertDay — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 12:17:49 -0000

And this comes as a surprise?

The biggest clue for me is that phishers just send these messages out without even doing any target research - so I was getting phishing messages for a year purporting to come from every bank I'd ever heard of and plenty I hadn't before I got one supposedly from my own bank. And why should I in the UK be a customer of banks in Podunk VA or Wagga Wagga? Phishers seemed to think I was... So I would be highly unlikely to think I'd got to update my account information for Bell Canada as I don't even live there...

My point is this, though: I once asked our IT Security Manager about this, and said 'surely everyone knows about this by now?'. His reply was illustrative. He said that if only one in 100,000 mailings respond, then it's worth it to the phishers, because they can send millions of these things out and ID details command good prices. So carry on warning us!

Re: Issue 91 - April 2009 - Page 9

RobertDay — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 18:11:59 -0000

American science fiction author Harry Harrison had such a device in his 1981 novel 'Starworld'. The point about it was that in the future, computing devices might become so common that they'd be built into a range of things - jewellry, for example - and no-one would necessarily know they were there.

Re: Issue 87 - November 2008 - Page 12

RobertDay — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 10:19:03 -0000

The answer to the question posed in the origianl mail is "It'll keep the lawyers happy for years!"

More practically: the house owner would have to claim for any damage/consequential loss from the haulage firm (assuming their terms & conditions don't exclude some or all such claims in the small print). The claims/counter-claims betwen the haulier and the local authority or whoever was legally responsible for the road could be very contentious. Of course, in the meantime, the haulier's insurers might decline to pay out to the house owner until any arguments between haulier and road authority were settled so the insurers could work out who to try to counter-claim against to recover their losses.

The only people who would win would be the lawyers, as usual...