Posts by Pascal Monett

Global chocolate crisis looms

You'll notice because the chocolate-deprived women will also be frantic, screeching and totally hyper-stressed.

In these conditions, the only comfort you'll give will be that of a scratching pad for cats.

I wish you lots of fun.

CAPITALISM without PROFITS - Welcome to the Instagram Era!

Indeed, I think the gist of the sentence means that, going forward, we need 21st Century fraud.

Undoubtedly the greatest regret of satire sites all over the Internet.

Valve seeks geek to design 'platform hardware'

I've said it before and I'll say it again : I have had nothing but an excellent experience with Steam in general. It is user-friendly, there are good deals to be found, it is robust and doesn't bother me, and it survives hard disk changes and OS wipes/reinstalls/upgrades without any complaint.

I have tried other platforms and they are almost universally trolling the sewers next to Valve (EA Games, I am looking VERY HARD in your particular direction).

If Valve manages to put out some hardware to go along with its service, I'm willing to consider it favorably. That said, I fail to see just what kind of hardware Valve could put out that would be any kind of use. USB disk storage is already widely available, Valve will not replace my ISP and I already have loads of hardware on my PC for what I need. If it's just a dongle, I will be quite disappointed.

New fake anti-virus shakes down frightened file-sharers

Hey, at least I'm a SMARTarse ! :)

Uh, please ?

I f a COURT wants to talk to you, you'll find a police officer (or three) at your door and the court WILL talk to you.

The Court doesn't need to waste time fiddling with popup messages on a PC.

Facebook updates data archive tool, upsets privacy warriors

Re: Where's my cut?

You ARE the cut.

New ZeuS-based Trojan leeches cash from cloud-based payrolls

One question

I would really, really like to know which companies have been affected by this issue - so as to make sure I never, ever work with them.

Putting payrolls on a cloud ? There isn't a company I know that would do that. Payroll is the one thing that is even more important and secured than even customer lists or industrial secrets. You never hear of anything coming out of a proper HR department, those people are tombs when it comes to communication.

So, payrolls in the cloud ? Come on, tell me who, I practically dare you to justify that statement.

Wellcome Trust backs boffins in open publishing row

What I cannot understand

Why oh why do scientists not simply buy a web site address and "publish" themselves ?

It's not rocket science, and Google will find them soon enough (with a tiny effort).

Sony 2011 losses are TWICE as bad as expected

Amen to that !

Personally, I will never forgive them for having crowbar'd Java in the Blu-Ray specs. I was offered a Sony DVD player with HDD and, although I admit it is practical for recording and burning TV shows on DVD, it somehow cannot read or write DVD-RWs (although it says it can in the manual), it sticks a stupid Sony menu on any DVD you burn (which, on some other DVD readers prevents going beyond the first title element) and it takes a whole 90 seconds to start up when you press the bloomin' ON button (even though it's never really OFF in the first place).

This poor experience, plus SONY's documented history of taking large dumps on its customers' rights with sodding DRM schemes and somehow believing that they have the divine right to spy on what I watch and decide in my place if I have the right to watch it has been the drop that maketh the cup overflow.

Sod SONY. I know it'll be hard for those who work there, but I am not buying another SONY product as long as I live.

I might go BluRay one day, but it'll be with a knockoff brand that allows me to view what I put in it and doesn't decide on my rights in my stead.

Star's guts turned INSIDE OUT in supernova mega-blast

Just a heads-up

If I'm not mistaken, 13% of the mass of our friendly local star is nothing less than over 400 billion times the mass of our lowly planet.

And our Sun is rather smallish as far as stars are concerned.

Oh, and our galaxy alone contains 400 billion of the things.

Thank you for your time, you may now go and blow your mind mulling over all this :)

Google ads 'misleading and deceptive'

"[Google] feels it is unfair it is held responsible for advertisers' actions"

Google needs to shut up and put up. A dead tree publication could never pull that off, why should Google be allowed to ?

Mistakes over GCHQ codebreaker's death crippled inquiry

"experts in the dark arts"

Looks like a job for Mad-Eye Moody and his Aurors, then.

Re: It's my guess there are three types of assassination.

Would you care to list the types, since you seem to be aware of the subject ?

Visa and MasterCard warn of credit card data breach

"It is reassuring that our security processes detected an intrusion"

Yeah, just like a fireman could say "it was useful that we saw the smoke - it helped alert us to the fact that there was a fire".

Come on, guys, an intrusion detection system would have given the alert in time for sysadmins to actually do something about it.

What we have here is most probably forensic deductions from the analysis of access data. That's not what I call an "intrusion detection system", merely good sysadmins digging through the mounds of data on the trail of the perps.

If the hackers had inside help for their access, which is what seems to be rather commonly accepted, then they didn't trip any of the wires that the so-called "intrusion detection system" would have flagged.

On the other hand, kudos to the keyboard sleuths that found the trail and followed it. That is no mean feat - especially in a banking environment that is just about as complex as it can get.

'Thermal cloak' designed, could solve major chip, spacecraft issues

I agree, Hot or Cold ...

space travel takes a lot of balls.

AVG nukes stalking ads at press of BIG SHINY BUTTON

Um,

If I'm using AdBlock Plus and NoScript, why do I need anything else ?

Microsoft tarts up custom Mustang Muscle Microserfmobile

"Microsoft is hoping [it] will inspire designers to develop [..] systems running Redmond's code"

While the rest of us pray that it won't, because we can all imagine the mayhem that a fleet of such road rage-inducing BSODding bugheaps would create - and I'm not talking about the blue lights.

Verizon spectrum deal savaged in Senate hearing

"Wall Street prefers firms that immunize themselves from competitive attack"

What a wonderfully delicate way of saying "firms that crush the competition and monopolize the market"

Electronic patient records rollout cocks up hospital clinics

Who is surprised ?

Flintstones was (sort of) true: Mammals did well alongside dinosaurs

Re: "people do feel justified in questioning the science"

There is no problem in questioning the science, science itself is doing that every day.

The problem is when you question the science, refuse to even try to understand the answers and go back to whacking a log in search of your own version.

The argument that science presupposes that there is no God is getting stale. Whether there is a God or not (and I am convinced that there is), this Universe has rules that demand to be understood. Saying "God did it" is something the Romans did to explain volcanoes, lightning and the rest of the things they could not comprehend. It does not help in understanding those phenomena.

Therefor creationists are the Romans of our time, and they should be rightfully scorned for the pathetically limited view they have of the Universe.

The Universe is complex, deal with it.

Rising China costs get manufacturers moving

Re: the fucking Chinese steal it

They don't have to, because you're going to ask them to make it and because your IP means nothing to them.

Right now, I agree that they will make it cheaper, but also crappier. However, as the Chinese industry grows its own experience (and that is happening faster than anyone wants to acknowledge), they will end up not only copying, but improving on the design and quality and STILL sell theirs for less.

It's time to realize that we need to bring industry fabrication back to our own soil, otherwise our IP will mean nothing.

Boffins render fibre obsolete

Re: Boffin, Boffin, Boffin...

There will be no clamping.

We like "boffin" and we come here to read about boffins because this is the only place where we can read about boffins and what they boffinate. Of course, sometimes boffins can make themselves look like buffoons, but we like that too.

Marvel to animate comic action with AR app

"wow those who are easily impressed"

Once again we get a usage of a new tech that is no better than the train coming into the station that panicked people who first saw a film back when film was invented.

Could someone please do something USEFUL with this 3D malarkey that we are incessantly being subject to ? Like, I don't know, use it to forward the STORY or something, instead of just adding to the special effects department ?

I know, I'm asking too much. Sorry.

Peter Molyneux parts with Microsoft and Lionhead

And the chickens !

Don't forget the exploding chickens !

Ah, the terrified squawks, the puff of yellow feathers . . .

Good times.

SUNKEN LINER Titanic iceberg riddle answer FOUND ON MOON

The lack of lifeboats was no issue at the time - nobody had enough lifeboats because nobody bothered to include a place for every passenger on board.

Maybe, just maybe, the Titanic was what was needed to ensure that this approach changed - because it was the freezing death of those poor people that made the rest of the world react and demand more lifeboats.

Otherwise, today we'd still have cruise ships taking 4000 people on board with only 10 20-seat lifeboats for decoration (one reserved for the bridge crew, obviously). Hey, lifeboats take up space and they're not nice to look at right ? You really think shipping cartels would bother putting enough of them if it weren't mandatory in every country in the world ?

Foxconn pay hikes 'driving tech titans into Philippines'

Re: "how do we get the poor to become rich?"

Are you sure you're asking the right question ?

From where I sit, it looks more like how do we get the poor to stay happy being poor.

Sorry, I'm being cynical again. My only excuse is that it's an election year.

Mammoths, sabre-tooths MURDERED by second giant space boulder

Re: "a nice smash mark on the ocean floor"

Really ? For a rock that's only several hundred meters wide, you expect it to plunge full speed through at least 3000 meters of increasingly dense water and only be stopped by the ocean floor ?

You've never done a belly flop before, have you ? You should try it. It'll give you some new respect for the resistance of water.

Social networks breeding spatial junk

seems like their regular users are already doing that :)

Android Market morphs into 'Google Play'

"the cloud service cannot [..] deny access to those items without [..] a court order"

Amen to that !

I think it is high time somebody bring the attention of the courts to the fact that said deletions are a violation of normal commercial contracts. Nowhere is it lawful to come and take back a book I bought - why should a digital version be different ?

It's not because you have the ability to do something that you have the right to do it. I thought that was the whole point of law - to remove the advantage of power and level the field. On the Internet, and especially in the cloud, the field is far from level.

Bring back the court orders !

Handbags at dawn: Hermes loses Chinese trademark battle

"what China would do if big manufacturers started pulling out"

You know, in a country that happens to represent no less than one sixth of the entire world population, that is waking up industrially speaking and whose population is yet to become middle-class for its vast majority (ensuring a growth market of the kind that makes marketing execs foam at the mouth), I think a few gwai-lo companies pulling out is not really going to make all that much of a difference. They are the ones with the industrial know-how these days.

To us, on the other hand, China no longer making our goods is going to hurt immeasurably. The Chinese government knows that, and I dare say all "First-World" governments know it as well.

Get used to it, because it is not going away any time soon. Occidental countries have forfeited their production industry, obeying the siren calls of pure capitalism, and that situation is going to take more than just a generation to reverse. Whatever you may think of the Chinese, they have the upper hand now, and they know it. So Hermès can get stuffed, and others with it. They will do as they damn well please (which is what multinational companies of all kinds have been doing up to now), and nobody can do anything about it - including said multinationals.

That is just about the only funny thing in all this : that multinational companies who have always operated in total disregard of anything they could not benefit from, who have pressured and lobbied and paid and subverted anyone and anything that could possibly get in their way, suddenly find themselves in front of a cultural brick wall without any means of pressure or influence.

Watching them squirm will be a small measure of payback for all the jobs they have taken without a thought for the people who depended on them for a living.

That said, it won't solve our economic issues either, but at least they'll be suffering with us for a change, in a manner of speaking.

Apple files patent for 'polished meteorite' keyboard

Dead flesh keyboard ?

The ZX-81 had a zombieskin keyboard ? Damn ! Why didn't I know that before ? I would have bought one just for the unique ability to blast pixels with an already-undead interface.

Ah, yet another missed opportunity in my life.

Cloud altitude changing with climate: NZ study

"ten years is too short a time to draw hard conclusions"

I'd say that two centuries of incomplete data is not enough to draw hard conclusions either, given that the climate obeys the laws of thermodynamics and the fact that thermodynamics is the hardest domain of science that humanity is required to understand - bar none.

But we still have to progress, even if it is only in baby steps, one at a time. Maybe in a millennia or two, we'll have a proper understanding of what climatology really is and we'll be able to properly predict weather patterns on a global scale. Meanwhile, there's a market for doomsayers and naysayers alike. We'll just have to live with it.

Just a thought : what makes you sure that it is his "own" language ?

It might be, and paradoxically, I'd think that the very poor level of spelling just might be a demonstration that it is, but maybe he's a foreigner who recently started learning English.

Just a thought.

That said, I totally agree with your conclusion. If you don't know how to formulate your ideas correctly, it gives a poor mark to the validity of said ideas.

Who's adding DRM to HTML5? Microsoft, Google and Netflix

There is only one thing to understand

That Microsoft tries to infect something with DRM is par for the course. That Netflix does so is not really any concern of mine.

That Google puts its name to such a proposal is the proverbial final nail in the coffin of "do no evil".

The next time anyone comes in defense of Google I will from now on be forced to remember that it proposed DRM. The two are now irrevocably associated : Google = DRM.

Thanks Google, it was nice while it lasted.

Foxconn allegedly hid underage workers from inspectors

Apple officials

Just like every other industrial multinational corporation, Apple officials are there to ensure that production of shiny objects is not impeded by unforeseen obstacles and progresses at minimal cost.

Company officials are not visiting to ensure that sub-contractors are working in the most comfortable, plush environment possible, because every additional comfort affects the bottom line and thus reduces margins.

And reducing the margin is a capital offense, in every sense of the word.

RIP: Peak Oil - we won't be running out any time soon

Well, given the rate at which the Chinese are buying new cars . . .

We'll all soon be paying oil at prices where just about any production method will be economically viable.

Smart animals have no forecast committee to tell them where to go or when to limit their consumption, they're animals.

So even smart animals can die of hunger if they're out of luck.

Grumble-flick chat site exposes flirts' privates

One can never be too careful. I'm going to go and watch every one of their videos to make sure.

Planet-wide cloud dream burst by nations' laws - BSA

Indeed, the only thing BSA is really saying is that the law is getting in the way of its profits.

Oh ! What a pesky thing, law. Big companies really should be above it, eh BSA ?

Pakistan blocks 13,000 grumble flick sites

"ultimately wouldn't deal with the root cause"

Yep, because the "root cause" is simply that sex sells.

Always has, always will, and I don't care what your religion is 'cause it don't matter.

You wanna address the "root cause" ? Educate your people. Elevate them intellectually beyond the instinctual level and make them appreciate the more sophisticated pleasures of women in stockings instead of just bare flesh.

But whatever you do, don't ever believe that you can eradicate porn. It just won't happen.

Ever.

Megastar personalities are intellectual property in draft law

So, basically

Egotistical twats can now add another layer of varnish on their glistening turds in some totally unimportant piece of emerged landmass with laws that do not concern 99.9% of the world.

That's really news that only a media whore could be interested in.

Zuckerberg: Facebook rakes in cash... to make world a better place

Facebook on mobile ?

Let's be clear about one thing : as long as mobile internet costs an arm and a leg, nobody is going to view mobile ads as anything but the greatest annoyance.

Things are changing in that sector, but slowly (heh, operators are not going to just let data flow freely, now are they ?). I predict that, until mobile internet data usage is freed from counting and billing bytes, Facebook is not going to be able to make any meaningful ad money out of it.

Microsoft ad campaign savages Google over privacy

I prefer opting out with NoScript - that way I'm sure that there is no record in the first place.

Facebook, MySpace, Twitter expose Google's 'evil'

Two words

Who cares ?

No, frankly, is there any reason at all to pay attention to what Facebook, MySpace and Twitter have to say about anything ? One is a company creating ADD patients, the second is well on its way to irrelevance and the third has the brainpower of a canary.

Now I agree that Google has become the Microsoft of the Internet, but frankly the Three Stooges are the last people I would go to for a discussion on anything.

hypocracy ?

What is that, government by hype ?

That would be Fox news, then.

I believe the word you're looking for is hypocrisy.

As a Vorlon, moreover a confused one, you are forgiven.

Data centers to cut LAN cord?

Gigabit Ethernet ?

Isn't that over copper ?

Doesn't fibre give largely superior speeds, with additional immunity from electromagnetic interference ?

Why are we even talking about wireless ?

Darwin's lost fossils found down the back of a cupboard

"To find a treasure trove of lost Darwin specimens from the Beagle voyage is just extraordinary"

Yes, but to find them already stored and still waiting for analysis after over a century and a half is a darn shame.

Might be time to get a few interns to go through all storage areas and see what else needs to be "rediscovered".

10 years ago today: Bill Gates kicks arse over security

Did I read that right ?

Microsoft a security leader ? Since when ?

Okay, I'll admit that Windows 7 has a slightly different approach to kernel management than any other Microsoft OS ever made, but that does not change the fact that most driver installations still end up in a reboot of the PC.

Whatever Microsoft does with Windows won't change the fact that it's entire structure is a security hazard. UAC does not change the efficiency of rootkits, and anything that fools the user can turn the PC into a zombie.

Not to turn into a penguinista, but one has to admit that zombifying a Linux computer is a rather difficult proposition, next to the ease with which a Windows platform can be owned, as they say.

So no, sorry. It's not the noise you make that makes you a musician, and it's not the blaring PR coming out of Redmond that makes a leader in security. A leader in security is secure by design, and Windows is shot to pieces from the ground up on that subject.

But Windows is getting better, that I admit. Windows 7 is the best Windows I've had yet, and much more stable than XP was, even in its SP2 configuration.