Eating for two?
When my wife was pregnant she gave up caffeine and alcohol, so I had to drink for two. Honestly, there were some nights I wasn't sure I could finish the whole bottle. And was she grateful?
Seven Dwarfs password gag declared Fringe's best
Comedian Nick Helm has secured the Funniest Joke of the Fringe 2011 title, after entertaining the Edinburgh crowds with this rib-tickler: "I needed a password with eight characters so I picked Snow White and the Seven Dwarves."* Nick Helm with his Dave TV award Nick Helm with his award. Photo: DAVE/PA A triumphant Helm ( …
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Friday 26th August 2011 08:28 GMT Steven Roper
Re: Pardon my ignorance
The rule is, I before E except after C or before G. Here's some examples:
I before E: piece, retrieve, belief
except after C: deceive, conceit, receipt
or before G: neighbour, foreign, inveigle
That's the way I was taught by my English teacher (about 35 years ago mind!) and yes, there are exceptions - reins, villein, and so on - but as a rule of thumb I've found it quite effective for remembering the correct spelling of these words.
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Thursday 25th August 2011 13:42 GMT Anonymous Coward
Funny but not original
The Nick Helm joke is funny but not original - I came across it on the net at more than 4 years ago.
It was originally reported as a true story (in the Urban Myth vein) from a tech support guy in LA who received a complaint from a secretary in LA "that her password didn't work". He could see repeated failed logins. He went to observe what she was doing and noticed she was typing this long string; he asked her why she chose such a long password, she replied "well it has to be 8 characters - and the shortest one I could think of was snowwhite+the7dwarfs"
The fact that so many people voted for this one highlights the widespread suffering from the password insanity, though - people vote for things they can relate to.
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Thursday 25th August 2011 21:09 GMT Robert Carnegie
The trouble with memorable long passwords...
...is when you need ten or twenty different ones.
Using the same password on different systems means that you have to trust each of them not to try it out on the other systems that you use - and they may be not all equally trustworthy.
So, you write them down. And in my case, don't participate in places where you need to create a new account and password, usually - and may not even come that way again. Instead, please welcome guests, and also portable externally authenticated IDs, if you need to protect yourself from spammers.
As for the jokes, humour is very subjective, something that isn't funny to you at all will have your neighbour rolling on the floor or vice versa, but I agree that "I like to fart in lifts - that's wrong on so many levels" is my favourite of the list and it isn't on the list. (Of course, in car park lifts that's the least of what they do.) And Paul Daniels is unfairly penalised. He's making an effort and it isn't bad, at least compared to some of the others - again I say, subjective.
And my favourite joke found in spam is, as far as I remember, "Attract men with large breasts".
"Do you want lager breasts" is second favourite.
I expect some people think those are the wrong way round.
(As the bishop said to the actress.)
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Thursday 25th August 2011 22:55 GMT Random Poster
Correct horse > incorrect math
Unfortunately, Randall has flawed math in that comic. An ATI Radeon HD 5770 running ighashgpu can check over 3.3 billion NTLM hashes/sec. That's 3.3 million times faster than the rate he assumes in the comic. Instead of 44 bits of entropy being 550 years, 44 bits takes less than an hour and a half on a $99 video card.
(550yrs) x (365 days/yrs) x (24 hrs/day) = 4,818,000hrs at 1,000pwd/sec (Randall's calc)
(4,818,000hrs) / (3,300,000) = 1.46hrs at 3.3B pwd/sec (GPU-cracking reality)
And that is for an attacker that resorts to a brute force attack. If you know the password is based off of words, the entropy drops sharply due to shared word roots and letter combinations.
I'm not even going to calculate the effect of renting time on a multi-GPU monster from Amazon, or throwing a botnet at the task.
If you want to really secure something, you can't just use a password anymore. You use multi-factor authentication.
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Thursday 25th August 2011 13:42 GMT Bill Fresher
Old and not a one liner
A drunk's wife told him that she'd leave him if he came home smashed again.
One evening he bumps into a good friend he hasn't seen in a long time.
He has much too much to drink and ends up getting sick on himself.
"What am I going to do?" he asks his friend, "If I go home like this she'll leave me".
"Don't worry" his friend tells him, "take this £20 note, put it in your pocket and when your wife asks, tell her some drunk got sick on you and gave you £20 for the dry cleaning".
When he gets home his wife's waiting at the door. "No, no, no! That's it, I'm leaving" she shouts.
"Wait, wait, I didn't drink anything. Some drunk got sick on me, look he gave me £20 for the dry cleaning" the man explains.
"You're holding £40" his wife observes, "what's the other £20 for?"
"That's from the man who shat in my pants".
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Thursday 25th August 2011 21:10 GMT Aaron Em
Another version I've heard
has the drunk as a judge, and the claim being that the drunk threw up all over him on the train. "What'd you do with that drunk who threw up on you?" she asks a while later. "Oh, I gave him thirty days." "Better give him sixty, he shit your pants too."
Honestly, no matter how it's told, it's always struck me as being one of those jokes that's only funny when you're drunk.
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Friday 26th August 2011 13:20 GMT Patrick R
What else then ?
Just cancer ? So is it alright for you to laugh at everything else that is not touching your own personal sensitibity ? Concentration camps ? Disabled people ? Racist jokes ? Dead people? Bin Laden ? People do.
I think you can have a laugh with everything as long as you do not blatantly ignore the sensibility of your precise audience (that is to say ... don't laugh at it, but laugh with it, and not in the face of people you know would be hurt). My sister died from cancer 3 months ago and it wasn't nice to see either. I might laugh at a cancer joke in a few years. Just not now. (And only if it's a good one).
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Thursday 25th August 2011 14:51 GMT Dropper
Dwarfs
Dwarfs is the correct spelling, there's even notes to that effect in some of Tolkien's work - stating how annoyed he got when he received new editions of his books back from the printers and found they'd corrected his spelling. He chose the spelling for his own reasons and acknowledged the spelling was incorrect. Same thing with Elfs (Elves), Efin (Elven) and so on.
Hope that's anal enough for you.
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Thursday 25th August 2011 21:29 GMT Steve Campbell
Dwarves, dwarves, always dwarves.....
Always was Dwarves, long, long time before Tolkien. Just the same with roof and rooves - except for Tolkien having anything to do with it.
I understood that it was Disney's use of the term dwarfs which kick-started that little neologism, tho' it may have been around earlier in the US.
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Thursday 25th August 2011 21:41 GMT Anonymous Coward
Others are OK, but #1 is pretty dead.
I liked one Ken Bruce read out (would that man really have a job if he didn't sound exactly like Wogan?), where a Geordie/Irish lad (whichever you prefer) takes his new girlfriend home to meet his father. He says "This is Amanda". He says "She's a WHAT?". Although I've still got a soft spot for Jethro's "Are you shearin' 'aat sheep?" / "No, git yer oown!" routine.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
