Posts by Pascal Monett

China in MASSIVE rare earths industry consolidation

"The country’s illegal rare earth ore production reached 40,000 tons in 2012"

Interesting. They know exactly how much illegal stuff was produced, despite the fact that illegal should also be unrecorded.

We can find how much illegal meth was sold during a time period, but I doubt we can know how much was produced.

Not without having an inside line on the meth production industry, that is.

So how do they know how much rare earth was produced illegally ? Are they just totalling the bribes and inferring from there ?

Snowden docs: NSA building encryption-cracking quantum computer

"It is, on the other hand, quite reassuring if you think that the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary are composed of men and women who, on average, are not greatly different from the population mean in most ways."

Sorry, but I am hardly reassured to think that my privacy and security are being handled by people like that numbskull at the other end of my street.

HP: A firmware update is just for Christmas, not for EVA

HP, the nickel-and-diming store of technology

Now that you've got them locked, set grip to strangle.

It's all about maximizing revenue, baby.

HP: This Xmas, get the SACK... and not the one filled with presents

"Your leaders are all working very hard ...

to maximise shareholder value by slicing into the very fabric that actually creates value - the workforce. Because next year's bonuses are next year's problem."

There, fixed that for you.

We don't need no STEENKIN' exploit brokers: Let's FLATTEN all bug bounties

"companies would most likely rather employ full-time vulnerability researchers"

And I am to understand that that would be a bad thing ?

How would that keep white-hat searchers from finding bugs ?

I think that the more eyes are watching the more secure the product will be (except if those eyes belong to the NSA, obviously).

Asteroid-hunting beauty AWAKENS, takes cheeky snaps of neighbours

Re: I don't understand why this is a bad thing

Here's a tip : hardened criminal psychopath escapes prison with nothing to lose and two weeks to kill before everyone dies. What do think his party will be like ?

Do you really think he's going to stop at just going after people who have "wronged" him ?

I understand that a lot of people think that we will not be told. If I were in a position of power, I would most likely take exactly that decision. I also think that we'll find out anyway, because someone who knows will make a mistake and text/tweet/FBpost something that gives away the secret.

Governments are good at keeping secrets. People are terrible at it.

United Nations signs off on 'right to privacy in the digital age'

Even if they try, someone will veto it.

And since the UN must pass all of its resolutions without any veto, it will be buried.

And that is why the UN is powerless : it is not the fact that it is the UN, it is the fact that there will always be someone to step up and veto something someone else doesn't want.

If the UN had existed in 1939, it would have pressed for a motion to condemn Hitler for invading Poland - but Russia would have vetoed it (or Italy, or Japan, or whoever).

It is not the UN that is powerless - it is our own damn incapability to work for higher goals instead of working for personal interests.

Go on, buy Bitcoin. But DON'T say we didn't WARN YOU

Re: should do some thorough reading up on it

I'll read up on it the day I have to use Bitcoins to fill my gas tank.

It won't happen in my my lifetime, I'll wager.

Re: dollars and pounds that the central bankers have been printing $£Trilions of

Yup. Those work in 99.9% of the stores that sell stuff.

The fact that russian gangsters have some as well is just proof that it is good. They are professionals, after all. They won't go after something that has bad returns on investment.

So call me when a russian mobster is hoarding Bitcoins - that's when I'll believe it has value.

James Bond's 'shaken not stirred': Down to trembling boozer's hands, claim boffins

I like the part where the report states : "This is likely to be pure fiction ..."

No shit, Sherlock ?

Lovers of Tor can now sprinkle Bitcoins on its developers as thanks

Did I read that right ? $40,000 per coin ?

Looks like the ones who started bitcoining at the beginning are the ones who will cash in on the whole thing the best.

Beauty firm Avon sticks spike heel into $125m SAP-based sales project

Re: our implementation project is going pretty well by all accounts

Reminds me of an old Murphy's Law :

If you think everything is going fine, you don't have the faintest idea of what's going on.

Re: Avon should be publicly applauded

Absolutely.

We need more companies like Avon to step forward and admit that SAP is not a solution.

Then we'll get a proper idea of just how many "award-winning" cases are actually a success.

PEBKAC, really ?

So you log on to ElReg, click a link that sends you to the channel and have to log on again, and you find that normal ?

I don't.

And I'm glad to see that there are others in that case.

Facebook to BLAST the web with AUTO-PLAYING VIDEO ads

Re: allow a whole load of Google related ads through as exceptions

That depends on what list you use.

I see no Google ads, nor any other ads.

Zuck you! Facebook introduces 'Dislike' button... in Messenger

I sympathize with you

Indeed, especially to a small business, FB can be a boon and is a useful platform to get known.

But my private life is mine, and Zuck will never have any data on me by my fault.

Re: sometimes you don't know what to say

And clicking on an icon instead of making actual contact to just say "I don't know to say" is better ?

I lost my mother to cancer in 2010. I can tell you that I much prefer the people who called and said exactly that to people who would have clicked a fucking button and done nothing else.

But I don't have a Facebook account anyway, so my friends actually do make the effort to phone and talk to me.

Re: "who we would otherwise lose touch with"

I've heard of this absconse technology - it's something called "e-mail", or somesuch.

It seems that there are actually people able to use it to keep in touch.

Pirate Bay ties up in Peru

Re: They've grown up with it and see it as perfectly OK behaviour

Well if a billion people see something as perfectly OK, then I guess it should be.

The media industry has only itself to blame for this situation. It has been dragged screaming, kicking and resisting all the way into the digital age, and since it did absolutely nothing to adapt, the only thing it can do now is rear-guard harassment.

Do you honestly think that I am going to think about copyright when I download a torrent of a film that I have already paid for in order to get a proper digital-friendly copy that I can put on my personal media store ? No, I don't and I won't.

You can throw any legal argument at me that you wish to, the fact remains that I have paid my lifetime license to own a the right to view a film in my house. From that point on, how I view said film is my business and mine only. And if I want to have my video library on a handy personal NAS hooked up to my TV, then nobody has a pipsqueak to say about it.

So, in your view having copyrighted material in one's possession is proof of piracy ?

I have bought over 1000 books (dead tree prints, not PDFs), and they're all copyrighted.

I have a video library of over 500 DVDs bought in stores - all copyrighted. And most of them impose upon me that wonderful anti-piracy video. I hear that, when you actually pirate a film, you're not bothered with that and you get to see the film directly.

I have a games library also in the two hundreds. Store bought, every one of them.

Damn, I must be a 1st-class pirate with all that copyrighted material lying around.

I wonder when I'll be getting that endorphin rush you mention ? That's going to be one hell of a ride.

Is Google prepping an ARMY of WALKING ROBOTS?

Forget about tanks. A swarm of lethal needle-carrying flying drones the size of a dragonfly is all you need to overcome anything that is not already fully armored.

Once you've done away with the unarmored grunts, you can pick off the armored stuff easily with your own army of grunts, who can then hold the territory.

US military's RAY-GUN truck BLASTS DRONES, mortars OUT OF THE SKY

Re: Taking out a faster than light weapon

It's not a faster than light weapon, it is a lightspeed weapon.

Other than that, I agree with your post.

Marketing told us: 'Justin Bieber is a fad. He’s not going to last.' – Company formerly known as RIM

The one good thing I will take from that particular piece of news is that there are now so many spies on them thar Intartubes that they're worried about spying on themselves.

That, at least, is good for a laugh.

Cryptolocker copycat ransomware emerges – but an antidote is possible

"if they harass or threaten the extortionist"

Okay, so no threatening then.

Direct to kill it is.

Boffins: On my command, unleash REMOTE CONTROL BULL SPERM

Just a second there

And just exactly how are we getting all that bull stuff in the first place ?

Do bulls just dribble it all around ?

Or is there some icky fetish nobody is talking about ?

On second thought, I'm not sure I want to know.

Cassini spots MEGA-METHANE SEAS on the north pole of Titan

"200 times larger than all the proven hydrocarbon reserves here on Earth"

That's it ! We're invading liberating that planet NOW !

Call CNN and Fox News. We'll have to embed the journalists for the duration this time.

In carbonite, preferably.

Massive! Yahoo! Mail! outage! going! on! FOURTH! straight! day!

Re: "I kinda feel left out"

That's normal, you're on Yahoo!

(ducks and runs)

Yeah, especially NSA's access to your data.

Re: This is a symptom, not a problem

Brutal assessment, but I can't really disagree with your post.

Not for a company that size.

Google's patent chief slammed the US patent office – now she's the agency's acting director

"the ability and extent to which software can be patented"

That's easy : nil. Nowhere. None. There is nothing done in software which justifies a patent. A copyright, sure, but not a patent.

And as for non-practicing entities, they can fuck right off out of the tribunal. If they're not practicing, they have no right to burden the economy with lawsuits.

My solution to patent trolls is simple : what they stand to gain should be based directly on how much money they lost in sales. Not selling anything ? No loss, get out.

And do not pass Go.

Snowden latest: NSA stalks the human race using Google, ad cookies

If that's the case, then could they please arrange for a bit more stockings ?

Black stockings.

Thank you.

Shh ! Don't start giving them confirmation that they can implement plan White Sheep !

Because they must have that plan ready already. They're just waiting for the "appropriate time".

I looked for some other search provider, and I found Ixquick.

They at least pretend to have a strict privacy policy, and they promise that they don't record your IP address.

For the moment, until I've found better, I'll trust them.

Google is no longer my home page in any case.

Facebook-owned Instagram morphs into messaging service to please admen

Re : "Only old people are using it, which is interesting because they should know better"

Sorry but bollocks. You're talking about the children of the 60's generation who saw computers invade their lives without them knowing either what they could do (the computers) or what they should do about it (the people).

Everyone I know that talks about computers only talks about the one or two programs they know. Most of the time, it's Outlook and Word, plus maybe this one web site (obviously Facebook).

They don't know computers, they manage to putter around in one or two programs. And as soon as something goes wrong, they're lost like a babe in the woods.

Youngsters fare not much better, actually. The only difference is that they know 10 or more programs, and are much less reluctant at clicking here or there to find something out. Good on them, but they still don't know about computers, they just barely know how to use them.

It's not going to get better, by the way. Tablets and smartphones are placing the computer squarely in the consumer (aka idiot) space, meaning that soon, nobody will know what a backup even is, let alone how to go about doing it.

At that point, I'm no longer telling anyone I'm a programmer. I'll tell them I work in a sewage treatment plant. That should ensure that I never get any questions about my job, or about computers.

Enraged by lengthy Sky broadband outage? Blame BT Openreach cable thieves

Ah, the beautiful simplicity of intolerance.

Until you're the one being hanged, that is. Then it's much less fun.

Don't want to get locked into IBM's cloud? Um... IBM has a toolkit for you

A cloud of clouds

I'm quite sure that the suits are being adequately impressive about this technology. Redundancy and availability are sprinkled all over this.

But privacy and security ?

Absent, pure and simple.

Welcome to the future, where you can truly be shafted in multiple ways at the same time. Or asynchronously, if you prefer !

Cops cuff 4 in £1m banking fraud malware case

"hoodwinked by malware-carrying emails purporting to be from their banks"

And to think that my bank has a declaration on its home page saying that they will never ask you for your banking details either by phone or by mail. It must be the only one, I guess.

Not to mention the fact that the body of the mail may have been properly engineered to resemble an official mail, but I'm pretty sure that a quick check of the replyTo address would/should have raised some red flags.

There is a disturbingly high need for mail training these days.

Samsung loses against Apple ... this time in SOUTH KOREA

Aluminum casing makes some sense on a laptop since it improves the heat exchange between the laptop's innards and the exterior. So better cooling than plastic. There is, therefor, a technically justified reason to adopt aluminum.

Keyboard keys have always been black on laptops.

Those are not enough to claim any sort of resemblance.

Cheap 3D printer works with steel

Re: solar power will be the limiting factor on what humans can do in the long run

I was with you right up to that sentence.

Solar power is not the future of Humanity, fusion is. Solar power is, in the best of cases, limited to the amount of energy that reaches the surface of the Earth. That is measured in KW per square meter. It will not increase.

Todays nuclear reactors have outputs that reach the MW range on a surface that would take a solar farm half a continent to replicate. Tomorrow's fusion reactors will do even better. And, with more energy available, we might discover new methods of energy generation, leading to even more energy available, leading to God only knows what (interstellar travel within a human lifetime, maybe ?).

What matters is that Humanity is in need of much, much more energy than Solar, Wind or Hydro can possibly give. Fusion is the future.

Google: Tell the feds they have to get a warrant for us to hand over your stuff

Mandatory Franklin quote : "They who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

Yup, the USA has forgotten the lessons of its Founding Fathers, ignored the warnings of President Eisenhower and will soon be a totalitarian government.

And to think that I took Person of Interest for a fiction...

Inside Steve Ballmer’s fondleslab rear-guard action

Re: If you give an infant a fondleslap

You do that in front of me and I'm calling the cops.

Amen to that

I absolutely agree.

Fondleslabs for time-wasting (YouTube viewing, Twittering and Facebook updating). I'm sure billions will do nothing but that.

Proper PCs with a working UI for actual work. And high-level gaming. There's only a few hundred million of people doing that, but that is still one heck of a market.

And don't get me started on the cloud...

BlackBerry rejected Justin Bieber as brand ambassador

"This kid might outlive RIM.” Everyone laughed

Don't think they're laughing much now.

Don't care for Bieber myself, but it does seem like a missed opportunity.

Of course, on the other hand they could have taken him up on his offer and been ridiculed anyway. I suspect that Blackberry was much too entrenched in corporate suit-land to take on such an ambassador. They probably thought it would taint their "professional" image.

Well, bankruptcy taints your image a lot more, doesn't it ?

Ah, hindsight.

Australian State to sue IBM over $AUD1bn project blowout

I don't know who Moaner is, but I agree with you on the why.

That does not contradict my opinion that some Project Managers should grow a pair and walk out on a project that is obviously heading for the wall.

I know a guy who did just that. The client was incensed, promised fire and brimstone, swore to trash his reputation and went elsewhere. After a year and half, the client meekly called him back to set things straight.

Of course, this was in the private sector, where money is not infinite and must generally be spent in order to generate profit.

This is going to be good

I look forward to seeing IBMs (lengthy) exposition of how the project was derailed by continued and repeated government official incompetence, indecision and meddling.

All of that will have been duly recorded in the meeting minutes, and their lecture will be a feast for everyone who enjoys seeing yet another shameful government debacle come to light.

Sure, IBM project managers will have made some mistakes, but we all know that their most grevious mistake was not pounding their fist on the table and saying "NO!" to the umpteenth scope change.

They should have walked out.

Nobody ever walks out of a government contract.

No government contract ever gets done right.

Could someone please set a precedent ?

Apple: 'Court-appointed antitrust regulator is taking advantage of us'

some of these decisions may affect our workforce

That is a mastery of understatement.

FTC torches Android flashlight app for spying on users

"a user's preferences not to have their data shared were ignored"

So an app can tell you (or not) what it is going to do, then proceed to do whatever it wants anyway ?

That is just ridiculous. I should have the possibility to DENY access to a functionality for an app and the app should not have the possibility to ignore that.

Google, please fix that. NOW.

Microsoft 'cautiously optimistic' about Christmas sales

Oh but Microsoft should be concerned.

The question is : is it ?

Oh no, RBS has gone titsup again... but is it JUST BAD LUCK?

That's an interesting picture you paint there.

I see the core systems becoming something of a religious practice in the coming decades. Maybe even with rituals and sacrifices to ensure proper functioning.

And the sysadmin in a long red robe, holding a dead chicken and chanting in front of the blinkenlichten...