* Posts by Paul Hovnanian

1995 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Mar 2008

British data watchdog brings cookies to G7 meeting – pop-up consent requests, not the delicious baked treats

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"fingerprint.js"

lynx doesn't run Javasvript.

Not too bright, are you? Your laptop, I mean... Not you

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Re: me too

"turns off the wifi somehow, but doesn't report the fact back to Windows"

Hmm. My Lenovo has such a switch. But Linux has no problem detecting it and announcing it with a "wireless is disabled by a hardware switch" message. Stranger yet, it uses a "Windows" RF driver through a special kernel module. So the information is there. Windows could have known, should have known, but chose not to check.

Music festivals are back in the UK. So is the background bork

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This was a music festival

So wouldn't it be:" Björk! Björk! Björk!"?

Amazon to cover 100%* of college* tuition* for hourly employees* in the US

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Great

I can attend classes and do my course work after I put in my 12 hours x 7 days at the warehouse.

Miscreants fling booby-trapped Office files at victims, no patch yet, says Microsoft

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'sudo'

Not really needed if you plan ahead*. But unlike Windows UAC, I've never seen a 'sudo' popup magically appear in my daily work flow. UAC is, in my opinion, a sign that something is mis-configured or trying to gain access that it really shouldn't have. (No. I'm not installing your codec or viewer just to watch 'Hot Cheerleader Action'. Publish your porn with Flash like all the other sites do.) And that's where my claim of needing to tweak Windows on the fly so often comes from. I don't use Windows personally, but so many people I know that do spend more than insignificant amounts of time 'making the nasty popups go away'.

*About the only thing I use sudo for is the occasional need to mount an NTFS drive to my Linux box (which requires root).

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It think it is because there is too much stuff in Windows that has to be tweaked 'on the fly' to get work done. So Windows is set up not to treat 'admin' as a separate user (where you'd have to close your work, log off and then log on as admin) but an attribute you can attach to a normal user. Just to nudge the OS along as a normal part of your work flow.

*NIXes encourage you to think things through and get everything properly configured as a separate process.

Report details how Airbus pilots saved the day when all three flight computers failed on landing

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Re: Automation Issue

Sometimes there are obstacles on some of the best runways.

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Re: Automation Issue

"Even with 'AI' or humans sometimes, the unexpected, unanticipated require an almost instinctive reaction"

Or one could put some people who actually know how to fly on the development teams.

SW Dev: "Are there any instances where control inputs might change coincident with a switch from air to ground modes?"

Pilot: "Um ... yeah."

Virginia school board learns a hard lesson... and other stories

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Only 'natural persons' can be recognized as patent inventors, not AI systems, US judge rules

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Re: Rivers *are* people

Can I sue a river for overrunning its banks and trespassing on my property? What about that tree that assaulted my house during a windstorm?

Alpha adds to tally of exploding rockets, takes out space sail prototype with it

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Re: Close

Or pieces of a hypergolic fuel tank.

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Re: First Launch? And with cargo?

"They could either just put a big rock in there"

And when the flight is aborted? Big rocks dropping from high altitudes. No thanks.

The space sail was more appropriate.

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Re: Aw, That's Nuttin

Manhole cover and a nuke.

Confessions of a ransomware negotiator: Well, somebody's got to talk to the criminals holding data hostage

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Re: Mild understatement

With a hostage, it's called 'proof of life'.

Banned: The 1,170 words you can't use with GitHub Copilot

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George Carlin

... is rolling in his grave. Trying to imaging how he'd rewrite his "Seven Dirty Words" skit to cover 1170 entries.

Imaginary numbers help AIs solve the very real problem of adversarial imagery

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In the training data ...

... and the neural net, it sort of makes sense. Instead of representing each point in solution space as a magnitude, it is now a vector (magnitude plus direction) to the next most probable step in that space.

Once you hit the network with real data, it saves time (processor steps) by proceeding along the most probable path.

Power users of Microsoft OneDrive suffer massive inconvenience: Read-only files

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Sorry about that

We apologize again for the fault in OneDrive.

Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked have been sacked.

Volkswagen to stop making its best-selling product for Wolfsburg workers: VW-branded sausages

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Everything has an end

Alles hat ein Ende nur die Wurst hat zwei.

Samsung: We will remotely brick smart TVs looted from our warehouse

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Re: Seems pretty lenient

"I am not so sure that South Africa is really any different for most poor people."

In Seattle, the poor people burn the cars. Including occupied police cars.

Google's newest cloud region taken out by 'transient voltage' that rebooted network kit

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Re: Sutpid

They lease server capacity from the cloud.

We spoke to a Stanford prof on the tech and social impact of AI's powerful, emerging 'foundation models'

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Re: Who decides?

So then someone is in charge of periodically checking NPM to make sure a SkyNet.js package hasn't been released?

By the time the 'who' has been determined and a suitable set of rules established, the horse will have left the barn.

A man spent a year in jail on a murder charge involving disputed AI evidence. Now the case has been dropped

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Not so much rude. Search for Greek phallus sculptures (on Delos Island for example). Theses were a bit more public than something a teenager would scribble on the wall when no one was looking. They just didn't have our well developed sense of prudery.

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"Imagine living somewhere there are so many guns being fired."

Yeah. A rifle range near me. There's a new housing development adjacent to it which seems to be pretty popular.

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Re: Really?

Right. The 'crack' that one associates with a gunshot is the shock wave produced by the supersonic travel of the projectile. So firing a blank: no bullet, no crack.

Internet Explorer 3.0 turns 25. One of its devs recalls how it ended marriages – and launched amazing careers

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Re: Sadly, there were divorces and broken families and bad things

When I saw that on the subject line, I was thinking along the lines of the wife finding the browsing history tab.

Dallas cops lost 8TB of criminal case data during bungled migration, says the DA... four months later

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Including

" ... case files in a murder trial"

They need to check the names of some other suspects due for trial. Like a buddy of someone in IT.

It wouldn't be the first time a convenient deletion occured.

NASA blames the wrong kind of Martian rock for Perseverance sample failure

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Alien

The sample ...

... crawled away before they could get the cap on the tube.

If some alien ship landed, pulled you out of your comfy hole, tried to stuff you in a container for later delivery to a mother ship and then their home planet, I'd guess that you'd try and escape as well.

See that last line in the access list? Yeah, that means you don't have an access list

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It could have been worse

They could have made everyone an admin.

Starliner takes off ... back to the factory and not space

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Bezos and Branson

Both went up on their first 'commercial' flights. I wonder when Calhoun will be hopping aboard this thing?

It's time to decentralize the internet, again: What was distributed is now centralized by Google, Facebook, etc

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Re: Shepherds and sheep

The acid test will be whether the Internet survives Zuckerberg. Nukes are easy.

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Re: Facebook

"To a greater or lesser degree, we're probably all a little guilty of it. I know I am, particularly here at El Reg. I frequently go back over recent comments I've made to see if anyone has replied to something I've posted."

That's just human nature. The desire to engage other people in a conversation on some topic of mutual interest. Instead of a bunch of crazy people, each on their own street corner soap box. Screaming their words of wisdom at the passers-by. Bloggers I think we call them now.

Taiwan president pokes the bear by saying the nation needs to lessen its supply chain dependency on China

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Oh bother!

Said Winnie the Pooh.

Microsoft responds to PrintNightmare by making life that little bit harder for admins

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Coat

Re: I got my mom a Brother printer

Wouldn't that be your dad?

SpaceX Starship struts its stack to show it has the right stuff

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Re: Chemistry lesson too

"I can't work out whether you are just hugely uninformed or a troll."

You posted the link to the data yourself (Mauna Loa CO2 measurements). Take a look at the slope of the AGW increase over time and compare it to the slope of the seasonal variation (the effect of plant respiration given the greater uptake by the ecosystem). There is little if any lag between the seasons and the seasonal CO2 signal. The upward/downward slope of the long term trend is completely dependent on the difference between our CO2 production and the ability of the ecosystem. If humans were to turn everything off and walk away (not very likely), the initial slope of the drop in CO2 would be greater than the slope of the increase since the beginning of the industrial age. Most of the drop would occur in a few decades, with the system reaching equilibrium asymptotically, but in a shorter time period than since the beginning of the industrial revolution.

That paper on volcanism (not vulcanism) cites CO2 lifetimes from 35 to 100 years based on their calculations. Not 'centuries'.

And if you think that climate doesn't respond to control system theory like every other branch of physics, then what you have is a religion, not science. And your climate scientists have taken the same position that clergy has, believe or else.

And finally: watch your language. This may be why so few people take you climate scientists seriously.

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Re: Chemistry lesson too

"CO2 lasts for several centuries"

4 billion years. This planet hasn't had a significant period without CO2 in its atmosphere. Processes that produce and consume CO2 are ongoing and interdependent. You can't get rid of it without producing more (in varying degrees).

That said, the 'centuries' PR is just designed to promote panic. CO2 levels respond very quickly to seasonal changes with time lags on the order of weeks. Not centuries. It's just a matter of altering the production vs consumption rates.

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"there is no incentive to worry about such as small amount of NOx."

True. NOx reduction isn't a design goal. It's just a (welcome) side effect of engine design. Hotter gas still has energy in it. And if the thermodynamics allow for more expansion, that is preferred.

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Re: Chemistry lesson too

"tapping the excess pig and cow flatulence"

I can't get rid of the image of livestock wandering around with hoses attached to their back ends.

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"NOx will typically be produced from any combustion event at temperatures over 1300c"

At the nozzle exit. It's a pretty simple matter to design a nozzle that creates sufficient expansion to cool gasses below that point. As a side effect of accelerating them. Most first stage engines are over expanded at sea level (more cooling) so as to match higher altitude atmospheric pressure and obtain better efficiency.

http://braeunig.us/space/thermo.htm

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Boffin

"most notably Nitrous Oxides from burning the surrounding air"

Rockets don't burn the surrounding air. They bring their own oxidizer with them

Hey, AI software developers, you are taking Unicode into account, right ... right?

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That was just to keep from getting caught by the P.C. N@zis.

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Poor error handling

If the AI or display app doesn't know how to handle a character, it shouldn't ignore it. There are "unknown encoding" symbols (question mark in a diamond or rectangle with hex bytes) made just for this purpose. AI can be written to kick stuff out that it can't parse rathet than sending people to the wrong Arabic street number.

Google translate is sh*t because it doesn't highlight single words that it fails to translate when leaving them in the source language.

US labor official suggests Amazon's Alabama workers rerun that unionization vote

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Re: Massive rejection?

"Considering that the fact the location used was under Amazon's surveillance coverage,"

That US Postal service box isn't the only one in existance. And surveillance would only indicate a vote. Not which way.

People must think voters are idiots. They can be swayed by handing out water in the voting line. And if I want people to assume I vote GOP, I'm not smart enough to drop my ballot in the mailbox in the rich part of town.

Tesla battery fire finally flamed out after four-day conflagration

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Re: Used batteries?

This needs to be configured as an actual wall. Two dimensional, where smaller battery subassemblies are all on an external surface. And can be released and ejected by thermal fuse links. Mount it over a sand pit and when one unit catches fire, drop it and let it burn.

Better cooling as well if there are no marginal units buried in the middle of a bank.

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Re: Flow batteries?

You need a hill. And you need water.

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It's true

Everything in Australia is trying to kill you.

International Space Station actually spun one-and-a-half times by errant Russian module's thrusters

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Re: Additional bits

"And he was soon told that the module could only receive direct commands from a ground station in Russia,"

Seems like a very poor design. I would expect that local control of an approaching craft would be far more responsive than waiting for ground controllers to interpret data. Lacking a qualified pilot (if this was the case), I'd at least like a Big Red Button on the ISS to shut things down.

Failing all of that, just don't do any maneuvering when not in sight of a ground control up/down link.

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Re: A new Olympic sport

Station had the twisties and will have to sit out the next event.

(Apologies to Simone)

On this most auspicious of days, we ask: How many sysadmins does it take to change a lightbulb?

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It has a cord

At a previous employer, our illustrious facilities management group made a "sucessfull" play to take over the IT department. Selling the idea to management that a centralized dispatch system would increase efficiency. Until the day that we had a network problem and they sent a plant electrician. Poor guy just stared at the network jack with his lineman's pliers in hand, shook his head and walked away.

After the incident was suitably resolved (by the dispatch of the correct person), I posted a summary on the internal company gossip board. Referring to facilities as Central Services may have gone over their heads. But the new motto for the org. did not. "One number to call if your toilet backs up or your server doesn't."

Google Play puts Android apps on notice: No naughty JavaScript, Python, Lua

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Re: Wandavision Agnes Wink.jpg

Google reserves the sole right to stuff privacy violating scripts down your throat for its own services.

Try turning JavaScript off and see how well Google stuff still runs.

Scam-baiting YouTube channel Tech Support Scams taken offline by tech support scam

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Devil

Re: not for publicity

We could ask him. But by now, I fear that he has already deleted his System32 folder and may be difficult to contact.