Posts by Eugene Goodrich

Is this the most puzzling DEF CON attendee badge yet on record?

Both sides together?

It would be lovely if the numbers in the first side were indexes into pieces of the second side which must be snipped out and laid together.

Elon Musk: Hover rocket? Check. Hover ship? Check. Let's DO THIS

Re: Who picks up the 'tab' when these things crash?

[[Although realistically they'll have to offer a steep discount to get someone to be the first customer of a refurbished Falcon 9.]]

Since SpaceX have said something like 98% of the price of a launch are the rocket parts they have to throw away after several minutes' use, I think they'll find it quite easy to set an attractive sale price on a light-used rocket*. ;)

(* Well, first-stage. They're not recovering the second stage yet.)

Personally, I'm keen to see them land this because I want to see the ULA folk sweat.

Boffin imagines Wi-Fi-defined no-shoot zones for wireless weapons

These can't be DoSed, right?

The regular network transmitters won't be low-power and distributed at sufficient intervals that someone can carry a portable transmitter with them for jamming purposes?

Related: will there be zone leakage? Will an "authorized citizen" get stabbed or gunned down in the alley behind the courthouse because his gun thought it was inside the courthouse?

I think even attempting to make these devices will deliver good advancement in durable electronics.

Hello, police, El Reg here. Are we a bunch of terrorists now?

Terrorgister.co.uk...

I knew it was just a matter of time before El Reg's editorial board got radicalized. (I think we can all agree Lester Haines had the shortest way to go.)

Australia's metadata debate is an utter shambles

Civil liberties not part of his job?

"I have no doubt that the civil libertarian brigade will do their best to stop this, but my responsibility as prime minister is to keep our country safe."

Shame it's not his responsibility to safeguard the citizens' civil liberties. It would be quite handy for the citizens to have someone in elected office sticking up for them like that.

Sit back down, Julian Assange™, you're not going anywhere just yet

Couldn't the UK and Swedish police solve all this?

Couldn't the UK and Swedish police make some sort of binding assurance to Assange that he won't be handed off to the USA? Then he can offer himself up for justice for his sex crimes (and bail jumping*) as discussed without worry of being punished by another country for the leaks.

If Sweden still wants to prosecute him for those sex crimes, that is. Isn't it a big question whether they actually care or it's just an excuse to render him to the USA?

(* Not sure if it will be a good bail jumping defense in the UK that if he hadn't done it, he'd get a life sentence or death in the USA.)

Wolfenstein: The New Order ... BLAM-BLAM! That guard did Nazi that coming

Re: Structure?

I believe their structure is roughly like this for the average just-out game review:

* Headline - game title and pun

* Lede - connects the item being reviewed to something completely unrelated and extant, demonstrating also the value of a college English major

* Badass picture

* Starting game up, starting gameplay

* Badass picture

* Initial reviewer experience as they get into the game

* Badass picture

* Brief early plot discussion

* Badass picture (This one similar to one you may have seen in the trailer)

* How game mechanics work / comparisons to previous game versions

* Badass picture

* Technical operation

* Badass picture

* Game mechanics / game content discussion with developer or player point-of-view in mind

* Badass picture

* Discussion of game mechanics nuances or lack thereof

* Technically useful or descriptive picture

* Brief discussion of further gameplay experience of reviewer who is now getting into, or is really into, the swing of things

* Another picture

* Sum up

Note: ideally, each picture should be captioned with a pun pertinent to what's being shown in the picture.

Screw Internet-of-Things: Boffins build Internet-of-Sound UNDERWATER

301, not 404

"Permanently Moved" - amirite?

Coming soon to Twitter: Inboxes BULGING with DMs from world+dog

Premium rate number for TXT!

I've no problem receiving messages from random sources if I'm compensated appropriately.

'Safest car ever made' Tesla Model S EV crashes and burns. Car 'performed as designed'

Email from Tesla says water is correct

From the email they sent me (I'm on their mailing list):

[[When the fire department arrived, they observed standard procedure, which was to

gain access to the source of the fire by puncturing holes in the top of the

battery's protective metal plate and applying water. For the Model S lithium-ion

battery, it was correct to apply water (vs. dry chemical extinguisher), but not to

puncture the metal firewall, as the newly created holes allowed the flames to then

vent upwards into the front trunk section of the Model S. Nonetheless, a

combination of water followed by dry chemical extinguisher quickly brought the fire

to an end.]]

Water may be wrong for an electrical fire, but apparently it's right for a lithium-ion battery fire, I guess.

The Yawhg vs XCOM: Enemy Unknown. How small devs can win against the big boys

Monster Loves You

"Monster Loves You" is another indie game in the choose-your-own-adventure format, like The Yawhg. I saw it as low as $4 (USD) on a Steam sale, I believe. It's short by conventional game standards (I think a play-through is forty minutes the first time and 20 minutes once you've replayed a few times and don't have to read as much.) Most options do seem to appear on subsequent playthroughs. And you go through different age-phases of being a monster, with the culminating event being a humankind/monster meet-up that can turn out various ways based on your influence.

A short, sharp tool kit to get you to the top in financial IT

Lovely article!

Just wanted to say so.

Prankster 'Superhero' takes on robot traffic warden AND WINS

Re: @TeeCee Get yourself issued with two notices for two different car parks at the same time

[[Given your claim is true, the prosecution cannot prove it is not.]]

I believe you are confusing innocence with evidence. One is significantly more powerful in court.

Game designer spills beans on chubby-fancying chap with his stolen Mac

Doing most of the plods' work for them...

... could upset them. What if they feel it's their job and you're telling them how to do it? Or, worse, being a vigilante!

No sheep icon yet, I see.

Are biofuels Europe's sh*ttiest idea ever?

Re: to answer the headline question

I think that throughout Europe's history, many far shittier ideas can be found.

Spanish boffins increase GPS accuracy by 90%

Re: So

If it stops at all it'll be better than some drivers.

UK minister: 'There must be a limit to what the gov knows about its people'

Re: "There must be a limit"

I was going to say:

'There must be a limit to what the gov knows about its people'

"... and we intend to find it."

John McAfee 'captured'

Not actually him, I heard

One of his body doubles, then?

Twitter forced to cough raw feed after PeopleBrowsr wins temporary order

Guarantees and contracts

[[ At the end of the day, it's Twitter data, that is generated by Twitters users, you can't really complain if they then decide to change THEIR business model, and you are stuck because you didn't think that those nice people at Twitter would ever end your cosy agreement. ]]

Sure, unless Twitter made some guarantees at some point. Like, maybe, if they said "our data will always be free and open. Always." Or somesuch.

Word wonks insist GIFs are really JIFs

Pronunciation comes from the words it acronymizes

Yeah, where I come from we knew it must be "jiff" because it stood for "giraffic interchange format". (We primary used it for pictures of giraffes, you see.)

Also, we would trade pictures in this format with friends, but we'd always do it for free - so we considered these were like "Christmas or birthday jifts for your friends." (Only, they could be given on any day of the year.)

Anyway, whatever it's called, it's a jreat format, and I'm so pleased they made it.

Google's Brin: Elected officials should quit political parties

Career (and term limits)

I agree with Pete H when be says politicians want to be re-elected. The teat of other peoples' money grows sweeter the longer you can stay on it. To turn one's back on their party after being elected would likely be fatal politically. It would almost always be a career-limiting move, and almost anyone who wants to move up to the next rung can only do that with the party's help.

Term limits of 1 per level might help.

EU green-lights 'copyright land grab' law on orphan work

Re: Hrm..

Andrew O's works aren't orphaned, they're emancipated. (I kid.)

VW STUNS WORLD+DOG WITH REAL HOVER-CAR!

Obviously fake

A glass car in China with no bumpers or fenders? That'll last.

Steve Jobs' death clears way for Broadway star to play Woz

Peter Boyle!

https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=peter+boyle+frankenstein&gbv=2&oq=peter+boyle+frank

Pity he's passed on.

Nanodot memory smashes RAM, sets new speed record

Re: I dont quite see the progress here

I am similarly confused. Did they mean they have a write cycle time of 1 nanosecond, perhaps?

Google will swap you a box of crisps for your web privacy

So basically you're saying get paid for what you were going to do anyway? Sounds like a plan!

Chrome is an absolutely great web browser, when it works. In that regard, it's rather like all the other web browsers.

Newt Gingrich wants Moon to be 51st US state

Seriously...

This is his plan for smaller government and reducing the debt?

'Space Monkey' craze: Texan students 'get high' by choking each other

Why do this? "Because it makes your orgasms feel super awesome."

Don't forget the BatMan costume.

http://images2.fanpop.com/image/photos/10900000/batman-kenny-south-park-10947088-686-433.jpg

NASA study identifies the ‘low hanging fruit’ in climate change

Worse yet, if we don't eat the cows, they'll reproduce until we're armpit-deep in them, as they have no remaining alternate natural predators. Then we'll have even *more* methane output, as they'll be free to graze and fart nearly the entire world over. (I believe I've seen on the nature channel that they can grasp together to form rafts or bridges, and float or walk across seas to remote lands in large numbers. That was either cows or ants - can't remember which right now.)

Ceglia fined for failing to show evidence of Facebook ownership

A scintilla is just a very shiny iota. Likewise a smidgen is an iota that has been crushed and rubbed into something rather hard.

Paris, because she's shiny and, er, ...

Crap alchemist jailed for poo-into-gold experiment

video

These guys did it: http://dsc.discovery.com/videos/mythbusters-polishing-a-turd.html

US rocketeer thunders to 121,000ft

[[When does a home-project become a Mach-3 missile]]

Looks like about 6 seconds after takeoff.

NASA unveils its chosen Shuttle successor

@Soyuz being proven technology

[[Best of all, there's Soyuz, a proven system.]]

Didn't a Soyuz crash on launch less than a month ago? And this is the same Soyuz system that within the last few years had two ballistic reentries, at least one of them traced to a failed section-separation explosive bolt*?

IMO, the Soyuz has been proven Russian. We can absolutely learn from it, but I don't know if I'd want to depend on it much.

(* Some of the Russians said there were too many women on board. More evidence the system needs work - we need spacecraft that are women-capable because... Mars Needs Women!)

DARPA drops another HTV-2

They dropped it from space.

I could drop a dead dog from sub-orbit and it would hit Mach-something.

(Coat is for ashes of incinerated dead deorbited dogs, which I wouldna want on me.)

BlackBerry blog hacked with riot-related threats

Strong passwords

After that missive, I finally understand why security experts exhort us to use punctuation characters in our passwords to make them harder for hackers to crack. ;)

Italian boffins to robo-grapple space junk

Inconsistent speed?

[[ identified over 60 major threats at an altitude of roughly 850km, the BBC explains. Two-thirds of these weigh in at over three tonnes apiece, and many are whizzing along at up to 27,000 km/h (16,800 mph).]]

Shouldn't all the various things orbiting at a given approximate altitude be whizzing along at about the same speed, as long as gravity and the dimensions of the Earth are relatively constant for all the various things doing the whizzing?

Google points finger at human after robo car accident

I applaud Google's commitment to the safety benefits of self-driving cars.

They've gone so far as to have a real accident while a human was driving to highlight the improvement we're looking forward to.

Paris, because from what I hear about her videos, when she's in for a penny she's in for a pound as well.

Official: Pastafarian strainer titfer is religious headgear

@"dark side of the moon"

[['There is no all-you-can-eat-Burger-King on the dark side of the moon.']]

Technically, there's no dark side of the moon. The moon gets lit pretty much everywhere over the course of a month. You mean the backside of the moon.

Paris, natch.

Wallabies battle cattle farts

Confused...

Do the culinary boffins intend to enhance this gut bacteria among cows, or switch us all to eating travel-size kangaroos?

I'm fine with either, btw.

Paris, because she is also flexible.

Man admits writing script that slurped celebrity iPad data

At some point the creators need to bear responsibility.

I think eventually this will/should change to being an "attractive nuisance" type issue.

Paris, for obvious reasons.

Nintendo: no DVD, BD playback for Wii U

Limited time, money

Nintendo knows they can take the console price and development time and apply it all to making the best game-player possible, or split some of those resources off to making it play discs - that other devices already do.

I think Nintendo thinks their best shot at doing well with the "U" is to make it the best game-player-per-dollar it can be.

Reading backwards won't stop anyone

[[Maybe they've turned round the motor, so it spins the disk the other way, or reads from the outside to the inside instead?]]

I think that would be decoded at such a low level hackers might not even need to code around it.

Facebook's mega-billion-dollar bubble ... will it float?

Whose pockets?

[[>>Capital was undoubtedly wasted. If it had all been spent sensibly we probably would now be better off.

Maybe it was. Money lost isn't destroyed, you know. It just ends up in someone else's pocket.]]

Exactly - and typically it's the "smart" pockets that gain this "lost" money. They've no interest in stopping this system.

Facebook may be worthless a couple years after it IPOs. Will the underwriters likely lament this? Or the existing Facebook investors, including the employees?

Paris - because she knows when a morning-after was totally worth it.

Virgin space rocketship trials 'feather' re-entry system

Not friction heating

[[... and is converted to heat via friction.]]

It is my understanding that friction is not responsible for re-entry heating.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerodynamic_heating

RAF Eurofighters make devastating attack – on Parliament

Spending money to make money - or not

[[I'm a little confused here, surely giving £12 billion to UK citizens working at BAE systems is better than giving £6 billion to America because the UK workers will spend the £12 billion on council tax, VAT, income tax etc etc.]]

If you paid us £6 billion for a bunch of F-18s, where would the other £6 billion not spent go? Wouldn't it possibly remain in the pockets of the UK taxpayers?

Also, I believe part of the problem here is not the question of how much will be spent going forward with the current project vs. switching over to F-18s; it's a question of how much could have been saved if the off-the-shelf jets were purchased at the start, plus also a question not just of pounds cost but also length of serviceability. (I hope I correctly understand Mr. Page's point that the Eurofighters are scheduled to be replaced just about the time they've worn the mold hairs off their tires.)

The one nice thing you can say about all this is that at least this demonstration (probably) didn't kill anyone, as they were nice enough to bomb tanks nobody was capable of using anyway. How perfectly polite! ;)

Operation Ore was based on flawed evidence from the start

Misquoting by the Met?

"Better twenty innocent men be jailed than one pedophile go free."

Blighty's expensive Watchkeeper spy-drone in further delays

@If one of those theoretical £32k jobs for doing nothing for 5 years #

Also to whoever would be looking to staff for these jobs, should they come up: I live in America and I can do that job for 32,000 USD per year. I already have my own sailboat for it (can send pictures).

Paris, obviously.

Conviction overturned for abuse images bought from bookshop

Makes me want to move to England...

... because obviously everything else in the country is so great, these pictures are the level of dangerous threat the police are working to protect you from.

Anna Chapman to design Russian space uniforms

Sub-head

"Uncovered undercover chic chick offers self to cosmonauts"

Shouldn't that be "Uncovered undercover chic chick covets career creating cosmonaut clothing"?

Or "... career covering cosmonauts" or "... career keeping cosmonauts warm".

Paris, because when the couture is haute, she's all over it.