Posts by Pascal Monett

Leeds Council loses kids details

advice on using memory sticks

Company-wide policy at the OS level forbidding USB to work, plain and simple.

True security is not leaving any leeway for mistakes to happen.

Green Hills spins out military Integrity for masses

"The military has always had better security than we can get on our computers"

Pity they've never actually used it.

Supersonic fighters could snuff out hurricanes

Energy, turbulence and all that

I don't give this "patent" a snowball's chance in Hell of ever amounting to anything.

First of all, turbulence in storm clouds is something that actual pilots avoid like the plague. Why ? Because it's dangerous at any speed.

Granted, a hurricane is a rotational system which could be more coherent than a basic storm cumulonimbus, but on the other hand its coherency is its most dangerous attribute.

Even if one does believe that a supersonic fighter plane can fly reliably in hurricane conditions - which I doubt (not built for that) - the sonic boom that can occur will be a drop in the ocean of energy that is surrounding the plane already.

I highly suspect that the so-called "scientists" that have applied for this patent haven't the slightest notion of the amount of energy that exists in the most turbulent nature of a hurricane's eye. The simple idea of "disrupting" this raging chaos is laughable.

For me, the only way to snuff out a hurricane would be the application of a comparable amount of energy in a negative manner.

The total kinetic energy of a hurricane is apparently rated at 1.5 x 10^12 Watts (source : http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/D7.html). The strongest ever sonic boom on record is rated at 144 pounds per square foot. Regular booms these days are rated at around 20 pounds per sq. foot.

A hurricane, like Katrina, "strong and very pronounced rotary circulation, closed isobars, a pressure of 17 or more pounds per square foot and winds of 74 miles per hour (64 knots) and higher. The devastating class 5 hurricane exceeds wind speed of 156 miles per hour." (source http://www.webcoast.com/environment/hurricanes.htm).

So one might think that 20 ppsf beats 17 ppsf, but one must also take into account that a sonic boom happens in an instant and disappears, whereas the 17 ppsf of a hurricane is a constant.

If you think that a sonic boom can do a hurricane in, then realize that the Hiroshima bomb was rated at 8600 ppsf.

And that was a measly 15 kilotons. Today, we have megaton bombs.

I say we take off and nuke it from orbit. It's the only way.

Peaches Geldof - she's back!

Born in 1989

So call me when she's actually learned something in life.

If she's lucky, that'll be around 2029.

RISC daddy conjures Moore's Lawless parallel universe

No end to progress in sight

And until the virtual environment of my games is real-world realistic, there will be no end.

As a gamer, I would expect to be able to drive through the side of a house with my tank, but there are precious few games that allow for it, and when they do, it's in a special environment.

I would expect to be able to knock trees over with my tank, but in most games not only does the tree stop me on the spot, it also actually assigns damage to the tank if I try.

I would expect a nice crater to mark the spot where a bomb fell, but there are hardly any games that do that. I would also fully expect the village, and possibly the entire map, to be totally devastated by the time the level ends, but there aren't ANY games that do that at the moment.

In most games, anything that is not a movable game object is, for all practical purposes, indestructible. Walls are impenetrable, roofs never get blown in, trees are there for all eternity. They are, structurally speaking, just as permanent as the ground.

Changing that is going to take humongous amounts of processing power, and probably lots more RAM than the average PC has today, as well as probably a totally new approach to modeling the virtual world.

And when we do have a realistically destructible environment in games, just think of what we will be able to do as far as science and technology are concerned !

So we really do need to get there, and if a 64-core parallel processing environment is what it takes, then bring it on !

Google to jettison 'second class citizens'

10,000 temps ?

For Heaven's sake, how can a company possibly justify using 30% of its workforce on a temporary basis ?

On the other hand, Google is obviously not at pains to pay them, so why not waste some cash like that ? It's deductible, after all.

Facebook spams social networkers with phishy email

Wow. Just wow.

I've made some crazy mistakes in my time, but this one really takes the cake.

Well, at least now it's official : Facebook has absolutely no credibility anymore. From foisting unwanted apps to sending official spam mail, Facebook is now a haven for hardened criminals and their future victims.

If you're in it, get out of it while you can.

Texan prof sees big future for graphene storage

Translation

"This shows a lot of promise"

=

"I'm going to be rich, rich I tell you !"

Unofficial fix issued for Vista networking flaw

@Leo Davidson

"Administrators already have full access to the machine so there's nothing for them to exploit."

Uh, sorry, but I think that since they are Admins of the machine, any exploit they attempt to use will obviously succeed.

So it's not "there's nothing for them to exploit", but more like "there's nothing to protect them from an exploit".

DVLA under scrutiny over penalty notice dating game

legal privilege ?

What the blazes is that ? The right to not tell a victim why he's being shafted ?

Ridiculous. There is no such thing as "legal privilege" in a democracy. The law is the same for everyone.

Oh wait, we're talking about the UK ? Sorry, my bad.

Security breach gives PayPal phish the personal touch

"We contacted PayPal last week"

And you're going to contact them again this week, and next week, and the week after that.

What makes you think that you're going to get more of an answer than the thousands who have already tried ?

Because you're a company using their service ?

Pah !

You're nothing to PayPal. PayPal doesn't care about you, PayPal doesn't care about anything except creaming a share off of every transaction it can get, on both sides.

And if you complain, you'll just get your account frozen.

That is the PayPal way of doing business and handling complaints.

Offshore hosting firm HavenCo lost at sea

All haughty, are we ?

Never sell to a Bittorrent tracker, will we ?

Hope then that you never need to pull a Yang and, hat in hand and tail firmly between legs, go begging a Bittorrent tracker to please give you 20 bucks in exchange for your worthless pile of cement.

SCO ordered to pay Novell $2.5m in Unix royalties (again)

@Chris Thomas

Uh, SCO is not funny.

At least, not unless you happen to think that the schizophrenic bridesmaid who thinks she's the bride at a marriage is funny.

What I call funny is Nvidia's repeated attempts at denying issues and cheating, spreading rumors and spewing baseless FUD that invariably come back to bite them in the rear.

ATI cheats too, of course, it's business as usual.

Meanwhile, and perhaps despite all that, PCs get more powerful every year.

That is funny.

SCO is just pathetic.

US rolls out 'Vicinity RFID' to check IDs in moving vehicles

Internal passports ?

You mean like Soviet Russia ?

Can you hear that ? It's the sound of a whole dynasty of Soviet rulers laughing their coffins off.

eHarmony settles over same-sex dating

The real whopper

There's always somebody who gets offended in Merkinland.

Heidemarie 'Toolbag' Piper set for second spacewalk

@Phreaky

Seems that you primitive and pathetic trolling has not met with the flamewar you obviously expected.

I wonder what your mother would think of your comments ?

Academics warn of EU 'three strikes' back door plan

Legal honeytrap in the making

Given the reasons already outlined here and elsewhere, I believe there is only one solution for those who do not indulge in piracy : set up a server that records all traffic between your computer network and your Internet connection. Have it certified by a notary and have a proper backup procedure for the activity logs.

The day you get your first notice of copyright infringement, respond with a lawsuit for slander or something similar based on your activity logs.

Do not accept any deal - go to trial and PROVE that they cannot prove their allegations, ergo, the law is unjust and should therefor be repealed.

Let's get this ball rolling people - for the sake of all the innocent people who will be cut off because of baseless accusations.

Spacewalking astronaut drops toolbag

A few questions

I want to know what the inertial force of this toolbag is.

More to the point, I want to know just how fast that grease gun is going and whether or not it stands a chance of punching a hole through the side of a satellite or the window of the Shuttle in future orbits.

And how long will it take for the lost items to become shootings stars ? The Shuttle works in low Earth orbit if I'm not mistaken - anything that has mass and no means of maintaining its orbit will plunge back down to the surface in due time. So how long for this bag ?

Follow the Somali pirate scourge via Google mashup

Good on the Indian Navy

Kudos to the ship commander for upholding a long-standing naval tradition in the proper manner and giving the pirates an honest chance to turn themselves in.

And I fully approve of sinking pirate ships, be they motherships or speedboats.

However, even though the thought of eradicating piracy with extreme prejudice makes no never mind to me, it must be said that maybe, just maybe, if we tackled the root of the problem (ie the desperation that drives these men to piracy in the first place) and allowed or even encouraged third-world nations to have a proper economy and become stable and prosperous, then perhaps these problems would go away by themselves ?

If a man has a choice between a legal job that sustains himself and his family, and an illegal, life-threatening "job" that does much better, I believe most men will choose the legal job with relief, and leave the illegal one to the rabid nutters.

When rabid nutters are the only ones left doing piracy on the high seas, THEN we can blow out of the water on sight without remorse.

Meanwhile, could the other warships in the zone at least do things the Indian way ?

MS kills off OneCare to introduce free security software

Won't trust any MS-sponsored security product

My memories on the how and when are shady, but if I recall properly Microsoft was trying to get user approval of its newest security thingamajig with a user beta.

I had installed the beta, and was not disappointed with it. As has been said elsewhere, one security product is never enough - although I won't go up to five, another free checker is generally a good thing for the market.

Then one thing happened that I will never forget : Microsoft acquired this shady company whose product was listed as a critical security risk in the beta - and in less than a week that company's product risk rating was elevated from Critical to something like Mildly Offensive.

Sorry, Microsoft, but that is NOT how you do security.

Conflict of interest and marketing concerns do not a security product make.

In my mind, that is the one point that buried OneCare for all eternity.

Because of that, I will never be able to trust OneCare or any other Microsoft offering concerning security.

Feds shutter one-stop stalker shop

@Frank

You mean to say that you have no idea of what exactly "privacy" covers ?

Such as the right to live your life without being subjected to unlawful surveillance or inquiry outside of the due process of the law ?

Such as the right to not be required to state who you are or what you intend to do in any public area without being presented a proper warrant by an official representative of the law operating in an official capacity ?

Such as the right to lead your life as you intend to without being questioned about it unless your acts can be perceived as unlawful ?

Or the right to not be arrested if you have done nothing wrong ?

It is sadly amazing that people today are so divorced from their own civilization that they have to actually ask these questions.

Jerry! Yang! to! quit! as! Yahoo! CEO!

Much back-slapping at the Board

Of course, I understand that these people still have to talk to each other every day for a while yet, but I doubt that any of the shareholders partake in this rosy view of Yang's involvement at the head of Yahoo!.

Sounds a lot like Dubya's endorsement of the "great job" that the other numbskull did in New Orleans.

China clamps down on miming musos

They're not unwilling

It's just that they don't always have the real-time morphing/fixing/sound better hardware available with the proper settings for every song in the trailer.

Because nearly none of them are actually "singers", i.e. people who can sing their own songs without instrumentation and not not only not be thoroughly ridiculous but also be heard by all the people in the room.

Today's "singers" are more along the line of "performers" - they "perform" the act of singing like a prostitute "performs" love. Some of them even mix the two to a certain extent.

'Meh' makes Collins English Dictionary

Used to be impressed

I used to be quite impressed by the concept of "living language" as opposed to a dead one. I always thought that a living language was a wonderful thing.

Until I got an Internet connection.

At that point I realized that the wonderful changing property of a living language is simply due to the overwhelming numbers of the uneducated masses that mangle parts of it so consistently that it becomes a new part of the language.

Like astronauts drinking their own piss, it really erases the glory from the notion.

Magazine faces legal action for bowing to legal action

Time to set things straight

Links on the Intarweb have nothing to do with accuracy. Putting a link on one's site does not mean the target URL is accurate, it simply means that the site owner believes that the linked site could interest his readers as well.

Supposing defamation because of a removed link goes straight to the "worst excuse ever" box of sad excuses for a lawsuit.

I don't think this one will fly in a court, especially if Wikileaks did nothing to trumpet the fact that it got linked in the first place.

Endeavour launch heralds new dawn for piss-drinking

I say

Kinda takes the glory out of being an astronaut, doesn't it ?

AVG slaps Trojan label on Adobe Flash

It's the nagware that did it for me

AVG fan from v5 to v7. It was small, efficient, and very discreet. I liked it.

Then they changed direction and implemented the nagware update to 7.5, and I dropped it for COMODO.

Tell me once that you've got a selling version, fine. Tell me twice and give me an ignore option, fine. Tell me every time I boot and I can't ignore it and you're hitting the road, bud.

Looks like I was right, too.

Sun pimps out OpenOffice as Microsoft 'clarifies' Office for web

Ads in open software ?

Has he gone stark bonking mad ?

Is he actually trying to convince people that imposing the same market conditions on Open software as there is already on Closed software is Good Thing ?

At the very least, what he says indicates that Sun will stop at nothing to alienate itself from its user base. At the worst, he needs to see a shrink, or remove himself from the gene pool.

Ads in Open software. Why not include some DRM while he's at it ?

Microsoft bets future on search bribery

a means to try and stifle competition ?

Given that Google has 80% of the online search ad market, there is no one but Google that can stifle competition in that market.

I'm all for a good MS-bash on a daily schedule, but if you want to bash them on this subject, stifling competition is hardly the way to go.

Intel rallies rivals on parallel programming education

@John Savard

Now look what you've done.

Your intelligent, thoughtful post has totally quenched any budding troll-based flamewar that could have made this comment section a good read and a hearty chuckle.

Instead, I actually have something to think about.

Euro court blocks Lego trademark bid

Epic fail

No really. Reading the rebuttal from the Court is a laugh at every sentence.

It is eminently clear that a brick is a brick, and the Court stated clearly that making it purple didn't change that fact. Good on them for sticking to essentials

Thank $Deity that there is at least ONE official body that still has a brain and uses it. The Patent Office would do well to thoroughly analyze the situation and derive a few consequences.

Make no mistake, I was brought up on LEGO bricks, and I have long lost the ability to count the days and weeks of my life that were devoted to assembling things with the various pieces, disassembling the results, starting over again and so on. Lego, the brick, will always have a special place in my heart.

But the company has lost it in that attempt. Besides, who doesn't know what a lego is ? Their's is a pointless endevour that fully merits its loser status.

Tragic Twitterers tweet goodbye to family life

Impressive

But sad that a grown man can let his family life go to the dogs because he puts a higher priority on blagging about washing his dog.

As far as I'm concerned, someone who can't let his thoughts stray from the plastic toy he's got in his hand is someone who certainly cannot be asked to pay attention to the world around him, much less do investigative journalism about it.

Think about it for a second : a plastic toy in hand, for an adult.

Yep, it's exactly what it looks like.

Geeks whup Marine ass in Call Of Duty 5

Not really surprising

I would suppose that the Marines started their approach of the game by implementing the same tactics and behavior that they use in real life, meaning keep your head down, save your ammo, short bursts and all that. The Marines are professionals, and approached the matches by identifying primary and secondary targets, setting their well-known tactics in place and following them religiously.

Whereas the geeks went for a par the course game, guns blazing, bunny-hopping and grenading like mad, running willy-nilly all over the place without care for tactics or strategy, jumping in the middle of Marine squads with a detpack to take 'em all out and up the kill count, no matter that they die in the process.

So I am not surprised to learn that the Marines had it a bit hard in the beginning, nor am I surprised to learn that they eventually evened out the score.

As the matches progressed, the Marines certainly learned that, in the game, the geeks do wierd, even stupid things that no sane soldier would ever dream of trying in RL, and adapted their mindset to it. They most probably had lots of fun gunning down the bunny hoppers, like any sane person would. In the end, they evened it out because teamwork and strategy will win over l33t solo skllz any day, and the Marines KNOW teamwork.

The geeks don't, and most likely never will for the most part given the society we live in today.

So yeah, it must have been lots of fun all around, and lets not get all hot and bothered over a few snide comments on either side. Let the geeks think they actually won. Nobody ever looks at the death score, only the kill score counts.

I play a lot of shooters, my current favorite is BF2. It's fun, but if there is one thing to learn from these games, it's that a battlefield is murder, pure and simple, and Justice is on holiday far away. While I have fun shooting pixels and gunning bots or other players, I always realize that, were this a real battle, my life would be hanging by a thread like everyone else's.

It is a frightening thought.

Dutch plan 'Energy Island'

fifty billion cubes of gas

I've never seen a cube of gas. If you can see a cube of gas I'd wager that it's no longer a gas.

I seem to recall that gas is measured in cubic somethings or another, though.

But fifty BILLION cubic whatevers A DAY ? That must surely be wrong.

And how much is that in grapefruits ? Where did the El Reg conversion system go ? Link on homepage please.

Researchers hijack botnet for spam study

@Keith T

The source of spam if free email.

ISP contracts should include limits on email emmission. Low count of like 10 per day is free, after that you get a fixed fee of 1 cent per mail. If you are a business, you can negotiate different rates.

Clueless users will get a clue when they see a $200 mail tax tagged to their monthly contract. Then they will find out what security means right quick.

Okay, the ISP can also send out alerts to warn people, and have a trial period for a few months where they indicate how much the email tax would actually amount to.

If this means the end of spam, I will willingly pay a cent for every mail I send starting from the first.

Visa trials PIN payment card to fight online fraud

Eurovision fever spreading to banks, now ?

Israel, famously part of Europe in the world-renowned Eurovision contest, has now apparently also been declared part of Europe as far as banking is concerned.

What is wrong with journalists these days ? Cal headquarters are located in Givatayim, Israel. Geographically, that is farther from Europe than Istanbul, and anyone actually living in the EU knows what a bag of snakes THAT issue is.

Cal is apparently in the business of managing Visa, MasterCard and Diners Club credit cards, so I accept without problem that Cal probably has a non-negligeable chunk of business in the EU zone.

So does Bank of America. Does that make Obama a President-Elect of a European Union state ?

Don't think so.

US stocks up on semi-automatic rifles

the Second Amendment Family Gun Shop

Associating the notion of "family" with the very word "gun" is an ample demonstration of just how wacky those Merkins really are.

Miscreants hijacking machines via (freshly patched) Adobe flaw

Adobe ?

Who still uses free stuff from Adobe ?

It's invariably bloated, full of holes, and much worse than the independent free version that does the same thing.

If you're not a publisher of PDF files, you have no use for Adobe products. Foxit is the only thing you need - and it is a lot faster and a lot more secure than Adobe products will ever be.

And it's free as well ! What more could you ask for ?

Researchers find more flaws in wireless security

What about filtering ?

My Wifi home port uses MAC address filtering on top of the WPA protocol-thingy.

I would think that it would prevent any sort of "guessing" of the key from any MAC address that is not authorized, wouldn't it ?

Webcast quango: One-third of UK teachers are creationists

@Jamie

"Time is relative and something which we have designed"

I do agree with the first part of your statement. Einstein himself has proven that Time is relative, so I doubt anyone can actually put those words in doubt.

However, any pretense of credibility you might have had falls flat on its face with the last part of your statement.

Nobody in the Human race has "designed" Time. If that were the case, we would have included methods to "wind back" Time and otherwise exert full control over it.

What the Human race has designed is its own understanding of time, yes. But Time will go on whether there is a human being to measure it or not.

I accept the idea that the Universe originated in the Big Bang - until a better scientific theory comes along. I accept the idea that immense and numerous stellar explosions were required to create the various kinds of matter that exist beyond the humble hydrogen atom. I accept that it probably took billions of years and untold trillions upon trillions of events to create the conditions that made life on this planet Earth possible.

And I also accept, and welcome, the idea that there is a God who, in His godly wisdom and intelligence, set the whole thing in motion and made sure to provide all the tools we needed to understand it.

The two items are not mutually exclusive, and I see no reason to consider that Science is diminishing God in any respect. On the contrary, I believe that Science simply demonstrates that God does indeed have a vastly superior intelligence to our own, and we should be in awe of what God has created and thankful to have the ability to take tiny steps in understanding it.

Because if we had designed the Universe, the specs would still be stuck in a committee and the beta version would have blue screened right after the first black hole.

Bloggers getting bigger and messier

No ! No ! Nooo !

Blogs DO NOT need to be optimized !

They NEED to be as precise and as big as possible, because BIG means MORE INFORMATION (and, especially, lots more time to load).

So PLEEAAASE do not tell them to optimize anything. I'm looking forward to upwards of 30 minutes load time on dial-up, and at least 5 minutes on broadband.

Come on guys, you can DO it (no I won't use that other slogan - not yet).

Maybe, just maybe, when their bloated, useless rantings are 100MB a page, maybe those clueless nitwits who have nothing better to do with their time than read inane babblings from nutjobs with nothing important to say will finally decide that it's not worth their cheap time and go watch TV.

At least on TV they might learn something.

And the nutters with too much time on their hands to say nothing in very large; badly punctuated, sentences: will finally just spout their inanities in the virtual desert they deserve.

McKinnon suffers further legal setback in extradition fight

Apart from the jail issue

Quite independently from the actual jail issue (which has already been commented to death and is, as mentioned, in the hands of politicos and out of the hands of Justice anyways), I would rather like this trial to start in order for McKinnon to demonstrate officially just how easy it was for him to become "the biggest military hacker of all time".

Seems to me that his is as big as Saddams' army was the 3rd most powerful.

I'd like to see just how dangerous he was supposed to be.

Of course, I'm expecting that trial to be public.

Martial law planned for Craigslist's red-light district

How can they exist ?

A company that officially proposes 24-hour phone numbers. Is there any legal reason for such a service to exist ?

US airforce online ad theme: 'Horror Meets Comedy'

@Pete mcQuail

Highly skilled ? Do you know how many n00bs crash their plane on take-off in BF1942 and BF2 ? After shooting one of their teammates in the back to get in it first ?

Some are good, of course, some are very, very good. But the majority couldn't pilot their way across the Channel in a straight line.

Training will still be needed, and very much needed.

New cleaning products erase murder stains

sodium carbonate peroxyhydrate

Seems like I'll be stocking up on that in the near future ;-)

Boffins: global warming kills lemmings, not suicide

Global climate changing

I tire of reading the ping pong sessions with large amounts of never-backup-up figures for either side.

Give me references and let me make up my own mind.

Google! aborts! Yahoo! deal!

Back in tone, eh ?

The shipment of exclamation marks has arrived, I see. Good.

Carry on, and so forth.

AT&T feeds metered internet to American gamblers

Amusing

I find hilarious all this hoopla about "paying what you use", bandwidth-capping and the rest.

Where I live, the bandwidth you subscribe to is the bandwidth you get (connection parameters permitting), and if you pay extra for the no-limit contract, THERE IS NO LIMIT.

Such a fact demonstrates clearly that some ISPs are actually capable of factoring an unlimited access contract properly in their workload projections - so when they get 20 new customers on an 8mbps unlimited contract, they actually forecast 20 people downloading all day long at 8mbps and ensure that their network can manage the load.

Given that, I can only imagine that all this arguing is down to the fact that ISPs in some "advanced" countries have advertised more bandwidth than they can handle, and are in trouble because of that.

Blaming users for actually using their contracts along the terms that were agreed to is just hilarious - from afar that is.

Is the internet going down down under?

Material "unsuitable for adults" ?!?

What kind of nonsense is that ? There is no such thing.

There is material that is unsavory, there is material that is downright disgusting, but there is no material that is "unsuitable".

Not for an adult with proper education and a critical mind anyway.

Now there is most definitely material that is "unsuitable" for certain governments, that is something that we can see every day. There is also material that is "unsuitable" for certain people with limited minds, but how those kind of people find themselves in positions of power in a functioning democracy is beyond me.

There is, however, no excuse for imposing content filtering on adults in what is supposed to be a democratic country, and Australia, although apparently a bit south of reason, is still a democracy and a free country.

Shame on the aussie government for once again putting a minority agenda item on top of the list of country-wide preoccupations.

Fisker prevails in Tesla tech theft claim fight

Re:looks like The Joker

I was about to contest, but then I looked at the front image again and I must say you are perfectly right. They should definitely do something about changing that grill.

That said, the rest of the car is gorgeous, just like a supermodel indeed. I wouldn't mind having one.

But with a different grill.