Posts by Dave P

Scientists: Tasers work, but we don't know how

Taser's safe?

Take one Polish traveller, without sleep for more than 24 hours, lost in a supposedly secure area of an airport for more than 10 hours, confronted by 3 police officers who cannot communicate with him and you have a recipe for disaster. Tasered 5 times for a total of over 2 minutes; is it a surprise he died? The cops big fault? Getting caught on video for the world to see.

Suggested test method for Taser testing:

Take one very senior police officer, face down on concrete

Stand one sumo wrestler on officers back

Taser officer for two minutes, wait five minutes and repeat two more times

This test should also be applied to the manufacturers CEO, and to any politician voting in favour of the device. It is perfectly safe after all, the manufacturer guarantees it.

BOFH: Spontaneous Legal Combustion

BOFH

That is both wild and wonderful. A great start to the month,

Microsoft kills MSN Encarta

School course

First lesson in class: Never trust Wackypedia, always search elsewhere for the truth.

Second lesson: Don't plagarize Wackypedia, you will get a big fat "0" when the teacher does a compare.

War, Web 2.0 and the Fail Loop

GIGO

Garbage In, Garbage Out. Most of what I see on the web is garbage; purposely placed there or ignorantly placed there.

BOFH: Aspie no questions

Oh yes!

Ah well, I feel MUCH better about this month now that I've had a fix of BOFH.

Now, what mischief can I get up to?

Man faces $52k bill after voicemail breach

Reverse Charges

I cases like this, if the recipient # is known, then reverse the billing (plus a service charge). That would tend to stop this type of hacking very quickly.

BOFH: Radiating sincerity

Excellent

The last bit about exploding pistons really got my funny bone.

BOFH: What GPS is for

Re: GPS?

Ah, like the bloke in California who turned onto the tracks in front of a commuter train because the GPS told him so. Then had the brilliance to stand on the tracks, waving, to try and get the train to stop.

Remembering the CDC 6600

CDC6400 & Cyber 170

I was a university student from 1970 through 1978, and followed up as a research assistant. I used a 6400 to run Fortran and Iftran using a card punch. I rewrote an analysis program originally written for an IBM 360 and the first thing I did was dump all the double precision references since the 6400 with its 60 bit word was equivalent to that to begin with. Once it got the program running correctly it was OPT=2; can you do that anymore? Then on to another location with the 170 where I had full resources open to me since the researcher I worked for had a project that justified the purchase of the machine. The card database filled a good sized room, but I worked from a tape copy. Well those card punch tab cards wore out fast on the clerks entering the data, and sometimes they got punched wrong. I had to shift columns of data to get the decimal point where it belonged; probably in excess of 250,000 data points were corrected long after they thought they had a clean database. It sure was fun.