Posts by Pascal Monett

Star Wars revival secret: This isn't the celluloid you're looking for

Re: "I'm really not into CGI for space scenes"

I found that it was done right in the Battlestar Galactice series remake.

Apple's Siri 'hurls insults' at Google Glass

Re: "It's the Germans that don't have a sense of humour"

I think you may need to revise your opinion here.

It is a seriously enlightening read.

Wall Street traders charged with stealing company code via email

I agree with your point entirely, but I am tired of the self-censoring that is continuously going on here.

We're all adults, there are no kids in these forums (much too boring for them, it's all text and no titties). So, if you want to use the word asshole, let's all be adult enough to use it. And reading "f*ck" has always made me cringe. Come on, people, everyone knows what you're writing, so have the balls to write it properly or write something else entirely.

There, PC rant ended.

NASA: Full details on our manned ASTEROID SNATCH mission

Probably because the energy profile of the mission is a lot lower without entering the Moon's gravity well. And a lower energy profile means less fuel to lug around.

After checking, the lunar lander had a bit less than 300kg of propellant. That does not seem much in itself, but that was for a dedicated landing module that only had to get back to the Command/Service Module (that was the module intended to bring the lander to the Moon and bring it back to Earth after).

The lander itself was almost 5 metric tons of mass. The CSM was a bit more than 30 metric tons. So that makes for about 35 tons of mass "just" to land on the Moon.

This mission is not concerned with a Moon landing. Adding that to the list would likely add a fair share of those 35 tons, or more, to the new mission's mass profile. Then you have the issue of bringing that mass into Earth orbit in the first place. The biggest launcher Earth has at the moment is the Ariane 5, which can lug up to 21 metric tons. So we've already lost Moon capacity, since the Saturn V rocket used for the Moon launch could bring at most 120 metric tons into orbit.

Think of that for a minute - in the 1960s we were capable of doing 6 TIMES MORE in space than we are today. We have regressed.

And that is why NASA is not adding a Moon landing to the list. It's not a picnic. Every new mission item has a mass budget, and we just don't have the means any more. Even if we had the money, which we don't either.

And now, if you don't mind, I'm just going to go sob quietly in the corner over there.

Botched court doc outs Google as respondent in national security flap

You're talking about a civil servant. Prison, for those people, is forbidding access to the cappuccino machine for a day. The worse he'll get is a year's delay in the promotion schedule.

And yes, they have word search, but that's just like self-cleaning ovens - you still have to launch the procedure.

And that's hard to do if you've been banned from the cappuccino machine, man ;)

Google cripples Chromecast third party replay

Re: "I don't see any benefit at all for Google in doing this"

Google does.

Google sees all.

And then hands it over to the NSA.

Pulsars: the GPS beacons of the cosmos

Black holes cannot explode. Merging black holes do not explode either - they just suck harder.

I agree that galaxies cannot explode in the Cameron sense - however if you have ever seen those simulations of a galaxy going through another one, well let's just say that your statement can be found incorrect for certain values of explode.

Top 10 Steve Ballmer quotes: '%#&@!!' and so much more

I totally agree with you. The usage of computing has changed.

Once we all used PCs because that is all there was. MS dominated there, no discussion.

Today, people have discoverd that they do not need a PC to do their mail, their monthly spreadsheet and the occasional letter. They have discovered that smartphones can fill their computing gaming/toy needs quite nicely without having to pay for a PC and learn all that boring technical stuff like creating a folder.

Computing has actually left the PC world for the consumer, and MS is not present on that market in any significant manner.

Of course, PCs will still be used for a long time - by developers, "serious" gamers and people who just like tinkering with them. Banks and large organisations will need them for decades to come as well - you won't see a bank teller with a tablet any time soon.

But as far as the consumer market is concerned, the PC is indeed dead, and with it, Microsoft's future.

The next CEO had better have that in mind. Microsoft has an uphill battle to stay relevant, and all its billions will not be enough in its current state.

Re: "have it carried by and passed through MS powered servers around the internet"

That'll be a small part of the Internet then.

As of August 2013, MS has a 22% share of the internet server OS market. More than I thought, I admit.

So one in five, which is already not bad, but hardly enough to justify your sentence. You would have had to be talking about Apache to say that.

BILLION DOLLAR BALLMER: Microsoft chief makes $1bn simply by quitting

What, you don't even have $150 bucks ?

Fiorina would be brilliant

She would gut that bloated whale and make sushi out of it before she finished brushing her hair on the first Monday morning.

Then she'd spend three years making sure that anybody who didn't hate Microsoft yet started doing so.

The she'd leave with a hearty self-congratulatory patting on the back and a ginormous check in her purse.

Russian spyboss brands Tor a crook's paradise, demands a total ban

Re: In soviet russia,

In soviet russia exit nodes ban you ?

Re: "All politicians, government agencies and their employees are lying scum."

I have the solution !

Let's ban them !

Let's not get carried away, hmm ? The United States has seriously tarnished its Medal of Freedom, that is true and a stain of shame that will take a long time to remove.

But in the US you can still criticize your government without having a black van show up in the middle of the night to knock your door down and take you away for extended "leave" without explanation.

So let's refrain from comparing Russia to a "freaking paradise" compared to the US. The US is still better, but it's on a damn slippery slope.

Going down.

BALLMER TO RETIRE FROM MICROSOFT

Nah, universities don't have the kind of office furniture budget Microsoft has.

Report: Secret British spy base in Middle East taps region's internet

Re: "Just release the cache of documents, then lets see where the chips settle"

That would hardly be a responsible thing to do. We're not talking about a cache of cat pictures. There will be names and places and dates in those documents, and neither you nor I have the slightest idea of what could happen if those data points became public knowledge without being carefully overviewed first.

See where the chips settle ? How about a a number of bodybags, is that what you want ? Or do you not care because you don't know them ? Well I'm ready to wager that if anyone did die, it wouldn't be anybody responsible for the NSA or the clusterfuck that this whole thing is heading for. So I'm against doing that.

If, on the other hand, there were only the names of those responsible for flaunting worldwide privacy so casually, well then yeah, let the chips fall...

Germany warns: You just CAN'T TRUST some Windows 8 PCs

Yeah, but judging from Microsoft's past history in the DoD affair (and multiple others), they'd say that anyway.

Now they're just saying that whilst thinking to themselves "and we really can't say anything else this time !".

Tat bazaar eBay takes a rest for 'scheduled maintenance', goes offline

Wow

The NSA is really covering all bases.

Workers at world's largest – and most remote – telescope go on strike

Probably the same day they grow a brain.

In other words, don't hold your breath.

Re: not go too far or "the place will get automated"

I don't think you realize just how difficult it is to automate machinery in a place exposed to wind and dust.

Especially machinery as complex as a telescope. I'd wager that half the work of the technicians on-site is just dusting off and oiling the machinery to keep it running. The other half probably consists of getting the grime out of a jammed piece to get it back online. You're not going to do that with a Roomba.

To compare, our automobile industry is pretty much as fully automated as possible, and you still need a few hundred workers per factory to haul the pieces around and generally oversee the robots and catch the mistakes.

And that in an environment which is as dust-free as is possible without reverting to surgery room procedures.

Ask any automobile production-line worker what he'd think of working in the middle of a desert and he'll die laughing - and not because of the temperatures.

Assange washes hands in election row

I stand corrected

Especially given the publication of this article.

Seems that there is more than meets the eye in this case. Much more.

Breanna Manning ??

Is that Private Bradley Manning's sister ? Mother ? Cousin ?

Why is she in jail ? Are you sure it has something to do with what her bother/son/cousin did ?

Somehow I think you are confused about some details of the Manning issue.

Kim Kardashian's bosom pal in bling snatch Instagram unpleasantness

High-flyer ? Hardly.

Do not confuse genuine VIPs with turds that happen to be temporarily hovering above ground.

Snowden journo's partner wins partial injunction on seized data

Re: Irony strangely uncommented upon

It would have been ironic if it happened in the US, but it did not.

It happened in the UK - and they have no Miranda rights.

So maybe that's why this point was not raised.

Gambling addict IT boss gets 7 years' porridge for £19m swindle

If he was in charge of procurement, then it would have logically gone totally unnoticed.

He might even have made himself a good reputation for running around a lot and controlling everything personally.

@ theblackhand

So what you're saying is that he took advantage of a situational absence of oversight to indulge in his addiction, and got caught when the normal controls fell back into place.

Well that sounds like a much more reasonable explanation.

UK mulls ban on tiny mobiles to block prison smugglers

Yup. And every one of them got a downvote.

I wonder why ? It still is a valid question.

Yeah, but it would seem that there are these pesky things called Rights where prisoners are concerned, and it would seem that governments are more concerned with the rights of people who have been locked up than the rights of people who haven't yet.

Hey ! Maybe that's the solution ! Let's all get ourselves locked up, then they won't spy on us anymore !

Hmm. Something tells me that won't be a good as it seems.

New use for old iPhones: Watch your house get robbed in REAL-TIME

Or the Internet connection is down locally, and the perp just shoves his crowbar into the damn thing.

"We're going to have a picture of you" - fat lot of good that'll do most of the time I guess, what the picture being either mostly black or terrifically overexposed.

But it's good that news of this app gets out - that way the crooks will wear face-hiding headgear, and will smash all that old kit that's lying around to only nick the new stuff.

Oh noes! New 'CRISIS DISASTER' at Fukushima! Oh wait, it's nothing. Again

Re: "that's called Democracy"

No, the system we have today is not democracy, but a parody of democracy.

Decmocracy is where every citizen is called to vote on issues, and every citizen is AWARE of the issue and of its consequences, thus vote IN CONSCIENCE and are willing to be subject to the result of the vote because they are sure that all other voters have done the same.

Instead, we have a system whereby almost nobody has the slightest clue of what is at stake because they are either too stupid to understand or they just toe the party line whatever happens. That, in turn, means that the result of the vote itself has no legitimacy in the eyes of people who voted for something else, because everyone is convinced that all the others didn't give a damn.

And don't get me started on those who the spin the issue until nobody knows what we're voting for anymore...

Bank man: System's down, let's have coffee. Oh SNAP, where's all the CASH?

How can this be continuing ?

"The stolen cash is then passed around between mules until it ends up in the accounts of the cyber criminals."

And how is the money passed around between mules ? With orders given by . . . email. You know, that thing the NSA is supposed to be watching like a hawk, so much so that Groklaw shut down because of it.

So, does this mean that money mules are now out and wire fraud is in ? Nah, the money mules are still very much at work because the NSA doesn't give a damn about financial fraud. The real threat are the people who know something about how crooked our governments really are.

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the sole goal of government to ensure that the life of the people it is responsible for is as well-managed as possible ? Is not the government responsible for the people's safety, which is why we have an army and a police in the first place ? As well as government employees who clean the streets and take care of communal grounds (well, before outsourcing that, that is) ?

I have a message for our governments : I care a lot more about the safety of my bank account than I do about the risk of being killed by a terrorist. Please review your priorities accordingly, else I and a few hundred thousand others might one day review them for you . . . with right bloody prejudice.

Fame-hating planets don't need to hang around STARS – boffins

You're missing a brace of zeros, I think. Two hundred billion is the figure quoted in the article.

That said, it is only a guess. Given that we are still not sure of the percentage of star systems that have planets vs those that don't, I wouldn't put too much stock in that figure.

'Symbolic' Grauniad drive-smash was not just a storage fail

There certainly is matter for inspiration here.

Zuckerberg: I want the WHOLE WORLD in my hands

So The Zuck has a grand plan for humanity

And it all starts with letting the telcos do the heavy lifting, then letting the phone companies find a way to make free phones, and letting everybody else work to push costs down so he can make more billions selling ads.

Yup, sounds like exactly the kind of plan he would think of.

Marissa Mayer in Vogue fashion shoot

Well you don't honestly think that fashionistas at Vogue are going to be able to understand anything about her skills, much less comment objectively on them, now do you ?

Assange's WikiLeaks Party running-mate departs in blaze of glory

Funny that

Someone trying to build an alternative power center, outside of an approved and open process ?

Gosh, I wonder why I see Assange fit absolutely perfectly in that role.

Wow, the future is HERE: Charge your phone (wirelessly) in your CAR

Re: "Not sure how that earned be a downvote."

Simples, you were criticizing something that had the honor of recieving an Iphone.

That's almost as bad as criticizing the Iphone itself.

Brazilians tear strip off NSA in wake of Snowden, mull anti-US-spook law

This is actually brilliant, or not

Seeing all the hoopla brought on by Snowden and his revelations just might reshape the entire Internet landscape.

I see a future where every country jealously guards its national communications, not letting any packet exit its borders without good reason (ie the IP address says so).

You could even imagine, when signing up for Internet access, a question along the lines of "Do you need/intend to access international web sites ? Yes No", and if you check No, you only get access to your country's web servers (and any web server hosted in your country).

Multinationals would then be forced to host servers in each country. More to the point, individual government spook agencies would have to use diplomatic channels if they wanted to access data on a server outside their country.

Man, what a mess this is going to become.

Sorry, why would the data be mirrored anywhere ?

US companies are selling goods all over the world, are you saying that their servers are also mirrored to other countries for that purpose ? I don't think so.

Japan's unwanted IT workers dumped in 'forcing-out rooms'

Shock and outrage are for the US

In Japan, they typically shrug and laugh.

Now and then, a Ninja could knife you in the back, though.

Mighty multi-scope snaps stunning STARBIRTH image

Greenland - was

You know, before all that global warming.

Palestinian Facebook flaw-finder getting $10,000 payday in online appeal

I've got news for you too

This case can be righteously denounced on its technical aspects alone.

Continuously bringing racism in to the picture is not the adult thing to do. It only fuels the fire.

Yes, a lot of people do not like each other. As an adult, however, one simply looks at facts to discuss a matter.

Besides, the Zuck may be a Jew, but he is not involved in this issue. And I doubt very much that the chief of security took time to get him on the phone and ask about the case.

Now, if the chief of security was also Jewish, this entire argument might have a leg to stand on, but it would still be immature and petty.

Re: "very expensive to look this bad"

I agree with your comment, and with your sentiment as well.

However, I have to ask : just exactly how does Facebook look worse now ? I mean, on its bottom line, of course.

Yes Facebook has been shamed, but is that going to change anything in its monthly revenue ? Yes, people are up in arms, but are those people who contribute to Facebook's bottom line in a meaningful manner ?

Facebook has looked very bad before (bitch!), but that has not prevented it from becoming a billion dollar industrial behemoth.

So, regretfully, I must admit that the Zuck probably doesn't give a flying monkey's about this issue.

And that's too bad.

Firefox takes top marks in browser stability tests

Re: "doesn't spy on you for the NSA or GCHQ"

I think you may be confused there.

The NSA doesn't give a flying monkey's what browser you use. It's recording your traffic, and that happens despite any precaution you may take.

Guardian lets UK spooks trash 'Snowden files' PCs to make them feel better

OK, let's sum things up

A whistleblower escapes to another country after revealing publicly damning evidence that world society is under a total surveillance scheme without any regard for individual privacy, contrary to the very legal foundations of said country.

After the initial shock period, spook centers around the world work in concert to lock down the leak, find the whistleblower and silence him.

In order to do so, authorities have demonstrated that they are now willing to :

1) force ambassadorial entities to stop and prove that the whistleblower is not on board

2) harass and intimidate people related to the whistleblower, or that are in professional relations with him, using clearly abusive pretexts

3) abuse state powers and proceed to destroy private equipment without any justification

What is next ? Night visits to anyone who has contacted the whistleblower, with complementary beatings ? Some "unfortunate" accidents ? Waterboarding people who have read about this whole affair on the Web ?

I have the very unfunny feeling that, for the first time in recent history, Goodwin's Law should be invoked.

Because it is starting to look like the Gestapo have not disappeared at all. They have become Gestapo Incorporated, and they are watching you from your local Beating Center.

You will behave, Citizen.

Windows NT: Remember Microsoft's almost perfect 20-year-old?

Re: "everyone bets on Linux today"

You need to get out more.

Linux is taking a bigger piece of the server room, unquestionably, but in offices it is still Windows and only Windows.

I have been a consultant for nigh on twenty years now, and I have still to spot a Linux desktop in the hands of an end-user of any kind. For some engineers, yes, for graphics designers, of course, for some specialist applications, sometimes. But in regular, day-to-day office use ? Windows, obviously.

And that will continue until Outlook runs on Linux boxen. Natively. Which is not going to happen any time soon, apparently.

Okay Bill, we know it's you.

And as for the "scalable database", the inventor of that abomination should take Sysiph's place on the rock. But, in its defence, I will admit that a single point of failure has never been more completely integrated than the Registry has.

Re: "there was no spam"

On the PC, no, but on the fax machine . . .

Re: "they got rid of that login method later on"

Really ? When ? In Win8 ?

Because I'm using W7 right now and I have to use the famous trio every single time my workstation goes into screensaver lock.

Green German gov battles to keep fossil powerplants running

Re: nuclear is not an option

All the better for France, which is making money selling "nuclear" electricity to Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium, Italy, Spain and probably Switzerland as well.

I find the current green arguments in Germany quite hypocritical. If they really don't want anything to do with nuclear, then they should not purchase electricity from a country they know produces it via the process they denounce.

Instead, they just pass off as airhead NIMBYs.

Personally, I am pro-ecology. I do not like seeing useless damage to nature and I would prefer that humans in general treat their only home with a bit more respect.

However, I do not expect our society to exist on anything but nuclear energy in the future. We require much to much power to rely only on solar and wind. Fusion will be the savior, when it comes. In the meantime, instead of grumbling about how nuclear is a danger to future generations, let's find a solution. Thorium reactors, for example.