Posts by Pascal Monett

Tiny, invisible EXTRATERRESTRIAL INVADERS appear at South Pole

You wish me to have Michigan beer ?

I'd rather have a Duvel, thank you.

Hello Warsaw: Greenland ice loss will be OK 'even under extreme scenarios'

Re: The Science IS Settled ..

True that. The atmosphere will be blasted away and the seas will boil off the surface of the Earth.

Oh, I thought you were talking about the catastrophic global warming event that is our Sun transforming into a red giant in a few billion years.

Because that is the only science that is "settled" as far as our climate is concerned.

Intel on the alert: Thick, acrid smog in China, India is EATING servers

Re: dan 1980 Won't someone think of the children . . . (no, really)

Come now, Mr. Bryant. The West does not hold the high moral ground here. The only reason we're not choking ourselves to death on coal particles is because we starting using nuclear. Oh, and because we have attained a level of revenue that allows us to pay others to pollute in our place. Indeed, we have simply moved our factories to other countries, leaving them to deal with the issues while we gorge on the produce in our shiny, clean cities (well, ahem, mostly clean).

But all those factories are not making things for them, they're making things for us. That we throw away after a year or less, or stow in the attack and forget about until the next garage sale.

Asia may have a pollution problem, but we are part of it.

Re: the full uranium time/space ecosystem

Wow !

Thank you for that mouthful. I will keep that kind of argument in mind for future use.

Re: urban use of coal for heating and cooking

Seems to me that if those people could use electricity (meaning nuclear power) for their heating and cooking needs, they'd not need the coal, thereby removing most of the atmospheric SO2.

So yes, nuclear is still the best option, despite your concerns about cost overruns, time to build and expertise required.

Super-stealth FLYING CAR prototype seen outside GOOGLE HQ

Re: Moller Skycar - been in development longer, too

Yup.

And it's still not finished, nor is it available.

So no, actually.

The only problem I have with this model is the number of possible failure points. Eight rotors on the top, plus two in the back, plus another engine for wheel motorisation . . . That makes for one heck of a maintenance list.

Native Americans were actually European - BEFORE the Europeans arrived!

Re: Racism is a modern sin

So for you, anything that exists since, oh, around at least 2000 years is modern ?

Or have you never heard of that obscure book called the Bible, where Jews were enslaved by the Egyptians of the time ?

Just saying.

Star Wars exec: These ARE THE DROIDS I was LOOKING FOR

They most likely will, at some point.

Re: Martial Arts groups aren't as good as you might think

You obviously haven't met the good ones ;) That said, generally I can agree with you, but I think I know why.

Karate is not what you see on TV. One of my best friends is a karateka. He told me that getting a recruit to continue training after the third year is a problem, because the first two years are devoted to basics, and the third year you actually carry out the attacks.

That means you get pummeled, and that means you get hurt. People don't like getting hurt, so they abandon. Some clubs don't like losing people, so they avoid forcing them to get hurt. But if they do that, the students don't learn to avoid attacks properly, and don't carry them out properly.

I train in Aikido, a martial art devoted to defense only. We have trouble getting people to attack properly (yes, even if you train defensively, you still have to defend against an attack) because students are generally afraid of hurting their partners. That is normal human behavior. It takes some time (you can count that in years) for a normal person to understand that by holding back their attack, they are putting you in danger and risking more hurt than if they would actually attack properly.

I think that most people don't like hurting others, so they do not attack well, so the partner cannot properly learn to defend/block.

That is most likely why most Martial Arts students are not all that impressive.

Decades ago, computing was saved by CMOS. Today, no hero is in sight

I know that one

It's the old saw : "I can do quality, quick or cheap. Choose two".

It's always the last two that are chosen.

Supreme Court can't find barge pole long enough to touch NSA lawsuit

Well, technically, once a judge is appointed, no one can get rid of him (source), so they do not necessarily have "loyalty" towards anyone since nobody can touch them once they are in position.

Obviously, I understand that this is not the way the world works, and quite a few SCOTUS judges have been known, and some are known, for specific positions on various subjects that are in line with the president who placed them there.

PlayStation 4 BLUE LIGHT OF DEATH blamed on power cords, TV sets, butterflies in China

Re: The fact is, the vast majority of users have no issues whatsoever.

How can you possibly know that without numbers?

Ahem.

Yeah, but that is so last millenium.

This millenium, you're supposed to replace all standard living-room equipment that does not agree with a superfluous plaything.

And the day they thought of including a hard drive, you were back on a PC without even realizing it !

Of course they can make a difference !

May I interest you in our special Premium Line of power cords ? The copper wires have been enhanced with synthetic conductive materials in a special nanotube lattice that improves global conductivity, and the cord is now gold-plated to ensure that all the electrons go in the same direction. We guarantee a 20% improvement in electrical conductivity, at the low, low price of $300 per foot of Premium Line cording.

Get yours now, while supplies last !

Barclays Online OFFLINE: UK bank site, mobile app go titsup for the evening

Good Old Customer Service

I love it when Twits moan about the "good old days".

You want good ol' customer service ? Get away from the PC and go to the nearest Barclay office, you'll get it there.

Not at all, he is perfectly up to date on his inventions.

He did, however, forget to pay rent on the tubes.

FBI sends memo to US.gov sysadmins: You've been hacked... for the past YEAR

Speaking for the devil . . .

I'm going to make a gardening analogy to explain my position : if you have dandelions in your lawn, it's useless to just cut off the head - you need to dig out the root to put an end to it.

Similarly, from the FBI point of view, it may actually be justifiable to let crime continue until you can nail down the entity that is actually responsible for the actions, not just grab the thug doing the job. This supposes, of course, that it is a known fact that the thug is not acting on his own, and that the entity he his taking jobs from is worth pursuing.

I doubt that it takes months to check if illegal net activity comes from inside the country or outside, though, and it seems to me that, if it comes from outside, there's no reason not to come foreward about it.

It's not like the FBI can go arrest someone in another country, right ? Not yet, at least.

JESUS battery HEALS itself - might make electric cars more practical

Wonderful

Yet another milestone in battery technology. I am so happy.

So now, bets are open as to when we'll actually be able to see something come out with this or any other new battery tech we've been told of in the past ten years.

I'm still waiting for those batteries that can recharge in ten seconds and carry several times the power that a regular Li-ion triple A carries now.

Investors on Microsoft: What, Ballmer, leaving? Hand me my wallet

Heh, I never said the book would be a nice one.

But you have to admit, the utter gall of MS lawyers and management in the DoD trials was a jaw-dropper. I still do not understand how it is that no judge sent Gates to jail for contempt of court.

So yes, MS did write the book for global business ethics.

And when you look at Ryan Air, Easy Jet, the late-but-still-twitching SCO and a few others, well one must admit that others are reading said book.

return the firm to the golden days

That is not possible, because the "golden days" were the days when nobody knew what a PC was, nobody understood just how important it could be, and Microsoft was the only game on the market.

Those days were golden because the market was in constant expansion, the hardware was constantly improving, and people were constantly in awe of the possibilities. Microsoft deserves recognition for having wrote the book on how to create and maintain a monopoly position in an emerging market.

Today the market is pretty much saturated, user are much more computer-literate and have become jaded, and the competition is there (and fiercly there where the desktop is not concerned). Now that the market has matured, Microsoft doesn't have a hope in Hell of maintaining its dominant position no matter what CEO they choose. The manipulations and lies that MS has been consistantly trying to pass on Open Source and its own sales figures do not wash anymore, and its image is now becoming that of a company that people should be wary of. And pissing on Joe User - which has become the norm for MS since Vista - is not going to improve things.

So Microsoft is not going to return to the glory days, those days are gone. The only thing the CEO can hope to achieve is delay the now inevitable slide into irrelevance - slide which will not be short due to the immense mattress of cash that is still maintaining the company afloat.

But killing Technet and all but forcing users to online subscription models have the potential of poking leaks in said mattress, and we all know that a leak in a dam is a sure harbringer of doom.

'Planned maintenance' CRIPPLES nearly HALF of all Salesforce instances in Europe, US

Dreamforce

There will be force, but I have a hunch that there will be little to dream about.

And yes, crashing your product because of planned network maintenance is a really bad sales point.

But the cloud marches on, oblivious of its problems.

MANUAL STIMULATION: Whack me with some proper documentation

Re: Needless to say my Banking sites etc use a different stronger scheme

Doesn't make a difference. You have a FaceBook site therefor all your banking details are belong to them.

It's because that's how he learned to comment his code : put in writing what any moron can see the code is doing.

When I give programming courses, I always harp on code commenting at some point, and when I do so, I give specific examples of what commenting should be. Don't tell me that you are offsetting to position r,c - I can see that in the code, you dolt.

Tell me that you start in the first cell of the table, and then you offset to the current position defined by the r and c loops that are in the sub that called this function. THAT is a useful comment because it tells my why the hell you offset when you have already set the cell you could logically be wanting to work on.

A useful comment tells me why you wrote the code so I don't have to waste an hour or two figuring it out on my own. A useless comment tells me something I can deduce three seconds after having read the code that is being commented.

Writing useful comments, just like writing useful documentation, is apparently something that requires more brain cells than the average developer has.

I totally agree. Looking at my DOS 1.0 manuals I got with my (now defunct) IBM PC back in the day, I have to say that I await eagerly the day where I will find another supplier manual with that level of quality and dedication to the subject.

"pharcical phucking phanboi phondleslab"

Phabulous !

Google spaffs $80m on Sun-powered kit: Calm down, Oracle. It's SOLAR

"a facility in Iowa that will rely entirely on wind power"

So, it'll only be online one hour out of every four then ?

I hope they don't forget to source the hundreds of litres of oil for the gears of the wind turbines from eco-friendly sources !

Boffin says astronauts could hitch to Jupiter on passing asteroids

Honestly, I think the problem is less with exploding a nuclear bomb in space than it is with exploding multiple bombs in atmosphere during take-off.

Today's rockets may pollute, but I still prefer them to the large swaths of fallout an Orion take-off would generate.

Google SO CAN scan ALL BOOKS onto its sites - judge

Re: without even going to look at a copy in the Library

What, you want to ban libraries too ?

Way to completely miss the point.

Napster was sharing whole "songs". Google is publishing a tiny portion of a book on demand.

There really is no comparison.

Dodgy Kaspersky update borks THOUSANDS of NHS computers

Indeed, this is far from being the first time such a thing has happened, and far from the first vendor to which it has happened as well.

It is clear that there is no basic vendor test for an update against standard Windows files. In this particular case, it is equally clear that the vendor did NOT test it before rolling it out, which smacks very much of lax control procedures.

But given that their LiveDisk was not even able to boot the last time I tried it, I cannot say I am surprised.

Actually, I am surprised. I'm surprised this kind of thing doesn't happen more often.

Blood king of the tyrannosaurus, grandad of T-Rex

Machine gun ?

You can shoot an elephant with an AK-47, but I'm not convinced you can kill it faster that way. For a T-Rex-sized animal, a machine gun would probably just wound and enrage it, and you wouldn't have time to reload before it tore (or trampled) you to pieces.

Hunting big game requires big guns, the double-barrelled shotgun type. Of course, a 12.7 would do wonders to kill just about any dino, I think, but there would not be much as far as leftover meat to cook is concerned.

MPs blast 'alarmingly weak' management of one-dole-to-rule-them-all

Managing a Government IT project (in the UK)

I honestly think that there is only one way to properly manage an IT project in a government environment : name a project responsible (minister, or whatever other useless head figure you have lying around), and have him nominate a Project Manager, to run the project, and a Project Saboteur, to undermine it.

Since the current culture is that the Project Manager will do everything he can to hide issues and pretend everything is fine until it blows up in his face, it is imperative that an official Saboteur be around to act as a whistleblower and stop the show before it blows up.

Of course, if the project succeeds, the Project Manager gets the OBE, but if it fails, the Project Saboteur gets it, so it seems like a fair deal. In both cases, the Minister gets off spotless because his management of the whole thing went just as planned, which encourages him to actually pay attention to both (giving the Saboteur a fighting chance).

I can't see how this can't work and result in better IT project management overall. On the other hand, I have little experience in political backstabbing outside of having viewed Yes Minister, so I most probably haven't the faintest idea of what I'm talking about.

They most definitely are, but here they run straight into the "hand that feeds you" wall and stop short.

After all, you're not going to jeapordize that OBE and improved pension we have waiting for you for some silly IT project, now are you ? Of course not. That's a good man. Carry on then, chop chop !

How Google paved the way for NSA's intercepts - just as The Register predicted 9 years ago

Not to brutally disagree with your post overall, but replacing Google/NSA with Putin/SVR does not strike me to be a very good idea.

WAIT! What's that sound? It's Intel stomping into the 'Internet of Things'

Re: wait a few minutes for my toaster to boot

If it's a Sony toaster you'll not only have to wait for it boot, but you'll also have to wait for the latest Java update to download and your toaster to reboot before you can hope for a piece of toast.

And God help you if the screen uses Flash animations . . .

@KitD

I see no issue with that kind of "Things" in the Internet of Things. On the contrary, I understand perfectly well that oversight of basic public/industrial infrastructure is an ongoing issue, and making it easier is a very welcome goal.

But that is not how this Internet of Things is being marketed. We are not being told about monitoring streetlights, we're being told about how wonderful it will be to have a skiddie shut our fridge down without our knowing about it.

And most of us just do not accept that that is a useful development for us, individually.

As far as I am concerned, making public or industrial infrastructure report to its control center may be a good idea, but even in that case, I can't help thinking that we're getting that much closer to living in an Eagle Eye world, or worse, a Die Harder one. I don't like that perspective any better, but to avoid that means implementing security measures including encryption, and that means much more processing power and energy consumption for a lowly streetlamp than might be economically feasible.

So, one way or the other, I still don't see this happening. Not unless those streetlamps/streetlights/whatever are on a closed network, isolated from the WWW. And that seems unlikely, given the costs and the historical record of public authorities not giving a hoot about security until the horse had bolted and the barn had been burned to the ground.

Facebook gives THUMBS DOWN to its OWN design makeover

You don't have to have a FB account to have friends. You do know that, so your own post is just as useless to the discussion - and that by your own criteria.

Another DEVASTATING Chelyabinsk METEOR STRIKE: '7x as likely' as thought

Quick and painless ? Hardly.

For those not in the blast zone, there would be waiting for the fallout to drop, waiting for the sky to darken, waiting for the crops to die, waiting for the food riots to start while donning a 4th blanket to try to keep warm, and, after all that, dying of hunger/thirst.

So no, quick and painless it would certainly not be.

Twitter, Facebook and pals keep BEELLIONS from treasury with exec pay tax break – report

Re: "designed to benefit employees"

Fine then, make it tax deductible for employees only.

The CEO is not an "employee". Yes, I know, he is under the employ of the board, but there isn't a person in Microsoft, HP or any other Fortune 500 company that is going to refer to the CEO as en employee. He's the Boss, and his word is God's will (as long as the Board is happy, or, in Microsoft's case, not too unhappy).

So I think that stock options for CEOs should NOT be tax deductible. That would solve part of this issue, and make things fairer for everyone.

It's the Inter-THREAT of THINGS: Lightbulb ARMY could turn on HUMANITY

"an army of 8 billion"

With the computing power of .. a gnat ?

Come on, could someone please tell me what service this can render ME ? Oh, right, randomly turning lights on and off when I'm on holiday.

Bollocks.

I find a security contract is a much better deterrent, and it's not expensive anymore. Get those detectors, put that sign up, and watch as the crooks decide they rather try a house without an alarm system.

So, what's the use of those connected lightbulbs again ? Predicting failure ? When the light doesn't come on, it has failed. I have spares. I go get one, put it in, light is on. Then I write down getting a replacement in my next shopping run. Where's the difficulty in that ? Is it really THAT important to be forewarned that tomorrow I'm going to have to do that, rather than just flipping the switch, getting no light, and doing it anyway ?

Could the nannies of this world please leave us the fuck alone ? I've outgrown the need for diapers, thank you.

Microsoft's so keen on touch some mice FAIL under Windows 8.1

Well, looks like I'll be sticking with Win7/64 for a few more years then.

It doesn't lose its USB connections, nor does it choke with 3 or 4 (or 7) elements slotted in.

Talk about ridiculous issues. I thought USB was a mature protocol.

Maybe that's the issue. It is a mature protocol, therefor somebody let the summer intern take care of its implementation in the latest version.

ZOMBIE apocalypse! The 'LIVING DEAD' are HERE – Fox News confirmed it

I'm glad you are secure.

However, Murphy's Law states that : if you think everything is going fine, you obviously don't have the slightest idea what's going on.

Playtime's over: Next NSA boss may be torn away from US cyber-war effort

The real power in America - apathy - couldn't care less.

Secrets of Apple's mysterious Arizona sapphire factory: Our expert whispers all

Upvoted for the curse.

I'll keep that in reserve for when I'm eighty :).

ask for a pay rise

Go for it. I'll give you another +1 to encourage him.

And I'll keep your name in mind if I find a bulk supplier of refined scandium. We can split the profits ;).

Reding: NSA, friends don't spy on friends. Europe, let's team up for our own SPOOK CLUB

Yeah, but then we have those pesky Human Rights issues that'll crop up.

Then again, all we have to do is pull a Dubya and say that he's a terrist, therefor not human, therefor we can chop his head off.

Somehow, I don't think that'll pass muster.

That was last month's issue.

Get with the program, man ! This is the Internet. We don't waste our time with yesterday's problems - only with today's.

Not at all, it would make it much easier for everyone to spy on them, what with the bureaucratic issues and "mentalité de fonctionnaire" that would inevitably install themselves in such an environment.

That's most likely why Germany is against such an idea. Knowing the dismal security record of absolutely every country in Europe, a single European Intelligence Agency would much more likely become a hive of treason, backstabbing and office politics that would make Yes Minister blush with envy.

And it would make the NSA useless for spying on European stuff - all they'd have to do is request the morning summary from the American department head at EIA HQ. Because yes, I would fully expect the USA to have an official presence at such an agency, to "ensure international cooperation" or some other heartwarming bull.

Microsoft's Windows Azure Plan B: A hard drive, a courier and a data-centre monkey

Nothing is wrong with the tool - it just needs to be used.