Posts by Pascal Monett

Vive le Act Patriotique: Liberté, égalité, fraternité, pick any two. No, not those

That would be emmerde.

I know, it's counter-intuitive.

"the new French version of the Patriot Act is legal"

Of course it is legal. They made it legal.

Moral it is not.

Jeep breach: Scared? You should be, it could be you next

"plugging directly into a car's network via a port under the dashboard"

That's called cheating. The Golden Rule of Security is if you get physical access, there is no security.

What should obviously be done is to totally separate the critical driving chips, bus and software from the infotainment part.

The only reason that this has not been done is to save $3 on another chip and maybe $20 on the associated infotainment hardware bus.

So, for less than $30 we have this stupid hacking nightmare.

Somebody deserves to be taken out behind the shed and shot.

NASA: 'Closest thing yet to ANOTHER EARTH' - FOUND

Furthermore, if religion abolishes you-got-what-I-want-give-it-or-I-kill-you (which is unproven), it does so in order to substitute you-believe-something-different-convert-or-I-kill-you.

<cough> ISIL, the crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, burning or drowning 'witches' <cough>

Religion does not do that.

Men do that.

But it's okay, we'll get it right in a few millennia.

Re: [...] science being right and religion being bunkus

Religion is not "bunkus", it is a necessary tool in the construction of a society that is not based on you-got-what-I-want-give-it-or-I-kill-you.

Religion is also a tool that can help people be better to themselves and to others. It is not the only tool, but it is a good tool when properly used, like all tools.

Finally, religion is a very good intellectual exercise, and anything that makes people think is a good thing.

Unfortunately, most people don't think. They just repeat endlessly the same words without bothering about the significance. Also, people just love to spout doctrine and feel superior. THAT is bunkus, not religion itself.

Science does no better on that score. You can discuss endlessly with someone who thinks the Moon landings were faked, you will not convince him because he doesn't want to engage the brain and make the effort to understand.

Religion and science stand hand in hand to enlighten us, it is we who are stupid cavemen, mouths agape in our ignorance.

Exciting it is, but I agree, the title is rubbish.

Earth to Scientists : you will be able to declare that you have found a new Earth when you find and Earth-sized rocky planet in the Goldilocks zone.

Five times the size and twice the gravity is NOT Earth-like. It would be very uncomfortable to try and establish a colony there (forgetting all about getting there in the first place), assuming the atmosphere is breathable.

On the other hand, hats off to people who can look at a planet 1400 ly away and determine that it has volcanic activity. They must be wizards.

Choc Factory research shows users just don't get security

Re: Someone bit them in the past

And which company could possibly have borked millions of user PCs with a bad update not once, nor twice, but many times ?

I mean, it's not like that is part of the global consciousness now, is it ?

ROBOT SEEDS to be scattered into upper atmosphere of JUPITER: NASA scheme

Re: Power

I think the idea is to use turbulence as a power source - probably something kind of like self-winding wristwatches, but maybe on a bigger scale.

Must be a fascinating project. I really would like know how that idea cropped up, it's genius.

The issue I see is that these probes won't be able to phone back home properly on their own. I think we'll need a comms satellite orbiting Jupiter to capture the signals and relay them back to Earth with a proper antenna.

Galactic BIRTH: ALMA peers 13 billion years into Dawn of Time Itself

Well, theoretically . . .

We won't be able to see beyond the first stars that started shining.

And they took a bit of time to form.

Scorchio! This June was the sixty-sixth hottest on record

I absolutely disagree with straight manipulation of historical data

That is totally unacceptable.

I understand that there are cases where data must be corrected, but that is not the way to do it.

The only acceptable method is the continued publication of the old data, for reference, and the declaration of a filter used to produce the new data.

The filter needs to be public, quantified and justified. In that way, everyone knows what is being massaged and why, and the issue is out in the open, which is the scientific method.

Anything else is just backroom dealings and cannot be tolerated.

Were the FIRST AMERICANS really FIRST? MYSTERY of vanished 'Population Y'

"If you admit "it helped a lot of other species" why not the predecessors of mankind?"

Because of the list of Extinction Events that include the Chixulub impactor, which caused the K-T extinction of all non-avian dinosaurs, and 75% of the rest of life on the planet's surface 66 million years ago.

Then we have the Eocene–Oligocene extinction event around 40 million years ago, which induced a "large-scale extinction and floral and faunal turnover", essentially in the oceans. Given that the Earth apparently cooled at that time, there must have been an impact on land as well.

Then we can take a look at the Middle Miocene disruption that occured around 15 million years ago and caused "a wave of extinctions of terrestrial and aquatic life forms".

All of this makes it look very dubious that animal life prancing around on Gondwana had any chance of surviving all that and morphing into Humanity, but maybe that's just me.

Re: The super continent Pangea and Gondwana

Said supercontinent existed 150 million years ago.

Humanity as a species has existed only for the past 3 million years at most, which is two orders of magnitude inferior to that possibility. So no, Pangea did not help humanity travel the world. It helped a lot of other species, though.

The ice ages, on the other hand, very well could have.

EMC's turbulent trifecta temporarily ties Tucci to top table

"we're very focussed on opportunities that will enhance shareholder value"

Well duh, if you weren't your ass would be on the street in less time it takes to say so.

Note to Corporate Speakers : it may be useful to state the obvious now and then, but saying anything that general and glaringly obvious is just a waste of breath and fools nobody. Cut it out of the keynote and you'll look smarter.

Parliament wants to splash £6m on network build 'n' run contract

That just might be a great coincidence

If the building itself is renovated entirely, then an entirely new network could be put in place based on modern, top-shelf secured equipment, along with fiber to connect everything and eliminate (or at least seriously hinder) electronic eavesdropping.

May be that this is a blessing in disguise.

Or I may be completely wrong.

SPACE FARMER 'nauts arrive safely at International Space Station

Re: freeze dry

Interesting link. I had no idea bacteria could survive the brutal radiation conditions of outer space.

NSPCC: Two nonces nailed by cops every day

Re: "the only risk to children is fathers and other males"

Well you have to admit that women are rather rarely of the rapey sort.

They can bloody well kill you just as good as men though.

How British spies really spy: Information that didn't come from Snowden

Why are they not more often in the news ?

Apparently this mass surveillance has stopped potential terrorists, kiddie fiddlers and more. Why has that not been trumpeted in the news ? Why do they not tell us that this tool is producing these results ?

With regular news alerts like these, people would be more aware that this surveillance is producing acceptable results. Whether you are for or against, this seems like a miss in PR.

Even Microsoft thinks Outlook is bloated and slow

Brilliant idea, Microsoft

And I'm sure IT managers all over the world will really appreciate the headache of yet another messaging tool that they will have to report on, evaluate, analyze the implementation issues, the use case, install and maintain, and keep track of all the new mailing issues that will inevitably be raised by users who can't find a message in Outlook any more and want a restore.

Talk about throwing a wrench in the works.

Honestly, I doubt that this thing will be installed by anyone or any company. In companies, Outlook is part of the PC's start up list and it stays on all day. People are not going to be switching around and, if they really do have need for an IM client, they most likely already have one. So Send is to replace that IM thing but it crosses over with Outlook.

Gah.

Universal Pictures finds pirated Jurassic World on own localhost, fires off a DMCA takedown

Re: honey pot

Oh come now, they're not smart enough to even think to do that.

Too busy suing schoolgirls for their lunch money.

Jeep hackers broke DMCA, says EFF, and that's stupid

Agreed

The DMCA is a sham destined to provide companies with means to strangle any report that may be deemed hurtful to their image. That is the only way I have ever heard about it being used.

The DMCA should logically take a step back when life and limb are at risk. Hopefully a judge somewhere will have the opportunity to state that in court and make a precedent.

Facebook fails to block NY DA's fat warrants for profiles of suspected September 11 fraudsters

For once, I am somewhat in agreement with Facebook

"We continue to believe that overly broad search warrants – granting the government the ability to keep hundreds of people's account information indefinitely – are unconstitutional and raise important concerns about the privacy of people's online information"

And I continue to believe that the overt hoovering of people's personal details - granting a private company the ability to record hundreds of thousands of people's private information without any judicial oversight whatsoever - is unconstitutional and raises important questions about the morality of such companies when their users have no guarantee that the company will actually delete their information if they delete their profile.

Lottery IT security boss guilty of hacking lotto computer to win $14.3m

Not avarice, greed. Avarice is not spending what money you have, greed is wanting more and more and more.

Interestingly, greed is a cardinal sin, but avarice is not, nor is meanness.

Windows 10 on Mobile under the scope: Flaws, confusion, and going nowhere fast

A kind word of warning to MS

You can stick your "unified experience" up where the sun don't shine.

Let's make one thing clear, since you have obviously totally forgotten the rules, shall we ?

What is the definition of an Operating System ? It is the software that allows the user to use the applications of his choice with the hardware at his disposal.

So let's trim Windows whatthefuckever back down to essentials, ok ? Windows is an OS, the only thing it needs to do is make applications work with the hardware.

All the rest, Cortana, Edge, the cloud, the app store, EVERYTHING ELSE is just a plugin that users can choose to install or not. At least, that's how it should be. Sound Linux to you ? Gosh, how surprising.

Make your OS work flawlessly, lock down that kernel like the proverbial knight's chastity belt, and you'll find that it is a lot easier to add to it and make all the rest work as well. Whereas throw in everything and the kitchen sink before you even have a working product and you will never make it work.

Oh, and the UI does not depend on the OS. It is cosmetic, not part of the core system. So give users the choice, if they are on a platform that allows for it.

That is, if you are at all interested in surviving the 21st century.

Just a friendly warning, is all.

It's the Microsoft Way

Purchase a good product that is appreciated, then bloat the crap out of it until it can barely hobble along on crutches and everyone hates it.

In this case, they've already included the hobbling, the bloat is still to come.

Really, Microsoft is doing the exact same thing it did when it failed to bring a tablet to the world and left Apple the iPad.

The only things Microsoft ever did right on its own was Office 2000 and Windows (following the Star Trek rule, of course). Every other opportunity has been a train wreck, and Windows 1 0 is going to be the collision of a train wreck, an iceberg and the Titanic along with a 5 km asteroid.

At least there will be fireworks.

AI finally understands primitive sketches – aka marketing presentations

So it is 1% better than humans, under specific conditions ?

Well then use it in those conditions, or hire an intern that you don't pay.

Oh well, any bit of progress is good, I guess.

Disaster-gawping cam drones to be blasted out of the sky in California

I agree with both of you

There is ample matter to demonstrate that the government is clearly more interested in passing new laws whether or not they are redundant or actually contrary to public interest, for the goal of making themselves look like they're "doing something".

And existing laws which were made for a specific purpose have been repeatedly abused in order to enforce entirely different purposes (journalist coming back from interviewing Snowdon detained under terrorist laws, really ? And those people still have a job ?).

Nonetheless, when discussing Law, one must objectively assess what the law says, not how it will be misinterpreted. Misinterpretation of the Law should be an affair for judges and sentences passed on those who abuse it.

I am convinced that we have way too many laws, and this situation serves only to muddy the waters and provide opportunities for crooked politicians. We need to simplify our Civil and Criminal code to more direct terms, as in If You Have Harmed Someone's Well-Being, You Must Restore It.

But of course, simplification will only be the delight of the cunning and manipulative. And there is no more cunning and manipulative than a successful politician.

What is the answer ? Better education that promotes critical thinking. But no sane government wants that.

We should, but for now it is simple

The issue at hand is firefighting and interfering with rescue operations.

A demonstration does not come anywhere near these terms and there is no way to confuse the two.

Now, it may be that those hovertoys are used in watching a demonstration as well. It may happen that things get out of hand, people start getting unruly, cops start getting shovy and everything goes suddenly very wrong with people running and screaming, cops beating and shooting, and one or more of them deciding that the toys have nothing to do there and start blasting them out of the sky - if they can.

In such a situation the fallout will be nasty anyway, and the toy owners will most likely have TV video to back up their declarations that the police were shooting their property willy-nilly out of the sky. Freedom of speech and all that jazz. I'm pretty sure that a judge will declare that the hoverthingies should not be shot out and the police will have to pay reparations to the toy owners.

One situation is a risk to life and one simply cannot accept that rescue people be stalled or impeded in their honorable job by some nitwit that really wants something spectacular on his feed.

The other situation is a social event that is already largely covered by existing laws and bringing hovertoys (I just can't bring myself to call them drones) into the mix doesn't really change anything significantly.

That said, I am not a lawyer, much less an American one, so I may be wrong. We shall see in the long run.

Keep your stupid drones away from piloted aircraft, rages CAA

One thing I don't get

These drones operate on radio frequencies, right ?

We can detect where radio signals come from, right ?

So why not just line airports with those famous radio goniometers and we have rapid triangulation of unauthorized radio transmissions near an airport.

Cue the sudden bursting in of burly policeman to the utter suprise of some idiot who then finds out the hard way what it's like to be beaten for 15 minutes with a bobby stick.

Confiscation of hovertoy follows, along with 1000 hours of community service.

I think that would put quite a damper on this kind of activity.

Google, Facebook and chums launch web blacklist to nail ad scammers

Halleluia !

Yes, cut them down and smother them in a burning blanket.

I really hope this will become an industry standard. Anything that cuts into malware revenue is a godsend.

Big Blue bafflement: Anyone in IBM Storage know which way is up?

Re: protect profit by sacrificing revenue

That makes absolutely no sense. You cannot profit if you're not making money, unless you are a wizard.

You can protect profit by cutting loss-makers in your revenue stream, but there is a limit to that. At some point or another, your image as a whole will be impacted if you keep cutting revenue-generators. At some point, people will look at your offerings, remember what you had before, and go order from another company that is not shedding constantly.

Stability is a prime quality in business. You appear unstable, you will become unstable because people won't trust in you any more.

Ashley Madison invites red-faced cheats to bolt stable door for free

"Using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act"

The DMCA has generally been (ab)used by megacorps to stifle Free Speech and generally make artists' lives miserable. People have seen videos THEY RECORDED taken down because some twat working for a media corp thought it might have something to do with the crap his company was selling.

The DMCA has also been copiously used as an excuse to shut someone up when said person was justifiably exposing wrongdoings or something that could make a corporation look ridiculous.

How ironic is it that the one good use of this otherwise nefarious piece of trash is to protect cheaters ?

Driverless cars banished to fake Michigan 'town' until they learn to read

Re: another set of tests (fully virtual) checking the behavior of the car given surroundings

How many projects have been signed off on a list of "complete" specifications, only to fail miserably when actually put into production (that was never included in the specs ! that never should have happened !) ?

Enough to validate real world testing. If your simulator says everything is fine, I'm happy for you. I don't want these things in the streets I drive on until they have proven to be actually capable and reliable. By proof, I obviously mean set in a street and made to go from point A to point B without running over anything but actual road.

We have enough trouble with incompetent/distracted drivers, no need to add incompetent autonomous vehicles to the mix.

The Register's resident space boffin: All you need to know about the Pluto mission

Simply wonderful

This is indeed a treasure trove. The data and the conclusions that it will bring are going to entirely change our view of this little planetoid and its history.

Great times.

Arctic ice returns to 1980s levels of cap cover

Re: The climate models actually predicted this

The climate models are bullcrap. We need to refine them, extend them and ensure that they can actually predict something that is then verified by measurement.

We're not there yet.

Very nice of you to reassure us.

Had you actually put your name to your words, it would have been even more reassuring.

SpaceX's blast shock delays world's MOST POWERFUL ROCKET

So, you've time-traveled from a 1980s eco-forum ?

How quaint.

Would you mind to explain just how your outdated diatribe has anything to do with launching rockets ?

That should prove interesting.

Rise of the swimming machines: US sub launches and recovers a drone

To think they cancelled Baa Baa Black Sheep for real combat footage

And here we are learning that submarines now have new drone capabilities. This is on par with the hydrodynamic thrusters of Search for Red October. In the 1980s, this would be classified Ultra Top Secret and any journalist even trying to publish the information would be black-bagged and never seen again.

Ah, the irony of having to justify a budget.

An EPIC picture of Earth, sunny side up, from one million miles out

"As it happens [..] the satellite sensors were at the higher end of the quality spectrum"

So they didn't buy those sensors from the lowest bidder, then ?

Re: all old expired satellites have been moved off the Langrange points

Um, doesn't that make the location a bit dangerous for new satellites with actual work to do ?

Much more Moore's Law, as boffins assemble atom-level transistor

Single-molecule transistors are on the map now

So, in the time they'll take to nail that process down one can hope that the AI crowd will have made sufficient advances to finally start to work on the positronic brain.

Let's get cracking, men.

The US taxman thinks Microsoft owes billions. Prove it, says Microsoft

Re: You cannot defeat death and you cannot stop sickness

You cannot defeat death. True, but you're alive now and you want to stay that way, don't you ? If something can be done to improve your life expectancy, you're going to refuse it then ? I don't think so.

You cannot stop sickness ? Really ? Since when ? We're stopping sickness all the time. Polio has apparently been almost eradicated. Doctors and researchers around the world are working on all the various cancers round the clock and have found cures to some. Real cures, that stop it in its tracks and prevent it from reactivating. What they cannot outright cure now, they have improved the treatment of to lessen the pain and make what life is left more bearable. And they are regularly finding new avenues of research.

As for corporations not having money, please excuse me but it is Microsoft sitting on a 50-billion dollar bank account, not some people on its board - they just manage the money, it is not theirs. Proof of that is that they cannot take the money and spend it on their houses or cars. So it does not belong to them, it belongs to Microsoft.

Don't blame taxes for what you do not like. Taxes are necessary for the State to function, and their amount should depend on what the People want to have available to everyone. And some things should be available to everyone if we are to call ourselves civilized.

You can, however, blame the People for always wanting more and more from the government hand, and the politicians for abusing that in order to get elected.

I hope this will be useful

I think it is shameful that corporations can evade tax. Everyone has it in against tax but without taxes there would be no hospitals, no roads, and no welfare.

Hospitals, people. Is it worth not paying 25% Income Tax to not see your mother die of sickness ?

But hey, corporations don't have mothers, do they ?

Windows 10 Edge: Standards kinda suck yet better than Chrome?

@Charlie Clark

That is such a relief.

On the other hand, when you're starting from nothing, it's not difficult to improve.

Microsoft has lots of room to improve as far as respecting standards is concerned. Has everyone already forgotten the kerfuffle around the OOXML vote ?

Apparently they have.

The king is dead !

"Windows 10, due in two weeks, will use Microsoft's latest browser creation: Edge"

Long live the king !

Microsoft has never bowed before standards before. The lip service it is paying at this point is because it no longer has any choice.

As soon as it can, it will revert to its true nature. And we all know what that is.

Snowden to the IETF: Please make an internet for users, not the spies

Re: we now know [..] that major governments can monitor anyone they choose to

I support that fact and have zero issues with it. Monitoring a person designated as a suspect in an ongoing investigation is perfectly normal when such monitoring is legally and morally justified and when such monitoring is terminated as soon as it is no longer useful (ie suspect is proven innocent or charges can be brought against him).

What I cannot and will never accept is the blanket surveillance of everyone under the excuse that it is legal. It may be legal in some countries, but that does no make it acceptable and the old excuse of "if you have nothing to hide..." is just wool over the eyes.

I have nothing to hide, and it's nobody's business without a warrant.

Comet-invader Philae goes silent, mothership Rosetta forced to retreat

Fuckin' A !

Microsoft: Hey, you. Done patching Windows this month? WRONG

Professional output, bitmap fonts . . .

Why not add in rasterized vectors ?

You spout a lot of tech, but in the end all we're talking about is displaying text on a screen. If Windows was the only OS that could do that, then your argument might work. Unfortunately, there are plenty of other OSes that can do so as well, without endangering the stability of the whole by using kernel operations.

So find some other argument.

Microsoft sets end date on Windows 10 support. Hey, wait, WHAT?

Well since you're so smart, you certainly know that SteamOS is solely destined to games. SteamOS to game, another Linux distro to work.

Anything but Windows at this point, really.

2025, eh ?

By that time I sincerely hope Steam OS will be all I need.

If not, some flavor of Linux should suffice.

Enough with the treadmill already. An operating system is NOT supposed to define what I can do anymore.

Foxconn to hire a million Indian staff in major base shift

Re: You're missing the point

Am I ?

How many industries have suicide nets ?

Go on, if it's so common, give the figures.

I don't care about the national average. Yes there are suicidal people everywhere. They typicall do not congregate in enough numbers in the same company to make nets a requirement.

Exactly how out-of-touch with life are you ?