Posts by Swarthy

US declares emergency after ransomware shuts oil pipeline that pumps 100 million gallons a day

Re: Presumably the fuckwits in charge ...

The Trumpists are nothing more than distilled Reagonistas.

It's the same mind-set, except they care even less don't even pretend to care about other people.

Basecamp CEO issues apology after 'no political discussions at work' edict blows up in his face

Re: Sex, Religion and Politics

Hell, in some world-views discussing COVID, or even wearing a face covering counts as "political".

All because some trumped-up rotted orange decided to politicize a plague.

Re: Sex, Religion and Politics

Why did you put religion down twice?

Microsoft's Edge browser for Linux hits the Beta Channel ... if you're into that kind of thing

Settings Synch and Vertical Tabs

Can I talk you you about Our Lord and Saviour Vivaldi?

Not only were half of an AI text adventure generator's sessions NSFW but some involved depictions of sex with children

Re: Flaky AIs all the way down...

It's AI all the way down!

A trip to the dole queue: CEO of $2bn Bay Area tech biz says he was fired for taking LSD before company meeting

Re: There are studies underway...

I believe the testing has been quite extensive, if not formalized, for retro-phrenology.

Good: Water vapor signal detected for first time on distant planet. Bad: Er, we'll let one of the boffins explain

Re: "Vapor"?

Changed? It's always been a red-top. You can tell by the err.. Red Top.

Traffic lights, who needs 'em? Lucky Kentucky residents up in arms over first roundabout

Re: Boston MA Roundabout rules

I frequently subscribe to "The law of gross tonnage". Alternately: "If their tires are bigger than your vehicle, they go first."

BOFH: Postman BOFH's Special Delivery Service

Re: Yep

Think of Crisco as "Vegan Lard", and you will only be wrong in ways that do not matter.

Beware the Friday afternoon 'Could you just..?' from the muppet who wants to come between you and your beer

That's your problem: It was missing all of the semicolons.

BOFH: You brought nothing to the party but a six-pack of regret

Re: Posters with platitudes

Half Empty? Half Full?

Nah, I'm half-way to my next drink.

There's something fishy going down in the computer lab

Re: As man tunefs says:

Only if you know the scales.

Pack your bags! NASA's latest exoplanet hunter satellite finds its first Earth-sized world in a habitable zone – and it's only 100 light years away

Re: How many planets?

"Let's eat Grandma!" vs. "Let's eat, Grandma!"

PSA: You are now in the timeline where Facebook and pals are torn a new one by, er, Borat star Sacha Baron Cohen

Re: False equivalance

Man, that is a great example of the aforementioned "false equivalence".

"I don't give pub rants the same weight as expert opinion; but that so-called expert disagrees with me, so obviously they are not any more an expert than the loudmouth in the pub."

From humble Unix sysadmin to brutal separatist suppressor to president of Sri Lanka

Working your way up

With nothing more than Hard Work, Dedication, _{family connections, a family fortune,} and Ruthless Drive to "See the job done", you too could be come President!

Socket to the energy bill: 5-bed home with stupid number of power outlets leaves us asking... why?

YOU MUST CONSTRUCT ADDITIONAL PYLONS

The .amazon argy-bargy is STILL going on – and Uncle Sam has had enough with ICANN

Does Brazil stil have a claim to .amazon

considering how much of it they are burning, and their government's active antipathy towards anyone who views the Forest as anything other than "land in need of development"?

IT protip: Never try to be too helpful lest someone puts your contact details next to unruly boxen

Re: Overtime

<soothing voice>There, Their, They're.</soothing voice>

The mod firing squad: Stack Exchange embroiled in 'he said, she said, they said' row

Re: Good riddance!

"Look. I'd had a lovely supper, and all I said to my wife was 'That piece of halibut was good enough for Jehovah.'"

Behold the perils of trying to turn the family and friends support line into a sideline

My standard caveat in those cases is "I will either fix it, or it will never work again. Do you really want me to do this?"

Icon, for how those projects usually end.

Calling all the Visual Basic snitches: Keep quiet about it and so will he...

A computerized board game is still a board game. The story took place when financial traitorstraders didn't have any concept of risk, as it applied to them. IE before the collective noun for bankers became "a wunch".

That time Windows got blindsided by a ball of plasma, 150 million kilometres away

Re: Sticky backed plastic

"you think you're a real wit! Well, you're half-right."

It will never be safe to turn off your computer: Prankster harnesses the power of Windows 95 to torment fellow students

Re: My favourite Windows 95 prank...

I enjoyed using the same technique to move the Start button to the middle of the taskbar.

That slight difference, without any loss of usability, really creeped people out.

Fantastic Mr Fox? Not when he sh*ts on your lawn, kids' trampoline and your soul

Re: RTFA

If FOOF is the answer, you are asking the wrong question.

Also, rather than the hydrazine/H₂O₂ mixer/sprayer, just get yourself a ClF₃ sprayer, no mixing necessary. Opposed to the Hydrazine/H₂O₂, it is not hypergolic with itself, but only hypergolic with the fox (or whatever else it lands on).

Re: My Two Cents...

Especially noting that foxes weren't native to the UK and had to be imported/bred for the fox hunts.

These urban foxes are the descendants of the ones that could out-wit nobles and their dogs.

Hell hath no fury like a radar engineer scorned

Re: Can this inform the 5G debate?

Harry's health shouldn't be too bad, aside from age. But it would only be polite to ask after the health of his daughters. (Of all the radar techs I have known, none of them ever had sons while they were working on radar).

The dread sound of the squeaking caster in the humming data centre

Re: Stan, Sid, let's make it simple, okay ?

I like the idea, but I think that Monday's character should be Brian, because he's just a very naughty boy.

FedEx fed up playing box cop, sues Uncle Sam to make it stop: 'We do transportation, not law enforcement'

Re: Damn

...And even more grief for the teenage girls that weren't ready to break the news to their folks.

Boffins' neural network can work out from your speech whether you'll develop psychosis

Re: Language?

I think it is less about the vocabulary and more about the density of meaning.

An expanded vocabulary empowers you to leverage synergies and blue-sky to obfuscate your dialog, putting lipstick on the porcine and metaforming the narrative. Or you can speak clearly and get your message across.

Monster magnet in my pocket: Boffins' gizmo packs 45.5-tesla punch and weighs just 390g

Re: Is it just me?

a Klein magnet? Could that be used to generate a monopole?

Atari finally launches its VCS console. Again.

Re: StellaX

Wow, it seems to have been rated even worse than ET. Ooof!

Microsoft throws lifeline to .NET orphans in the brave new Core world

Re: Brave new confusing Core world

It also helps keep .Net trainers in business. If you haven't worked in .Net et al for more than a year or two, you need to go back to school, or at least spend about as long as you've been out, re-learning all the crap they've changed.

On a positive not, I did get a very pushy recruiter to leave me alone after I informed them that I was five years out of date on .Net. ("We'll have to get you trained up again then, let me sort out the details..." and never called back. I call that a result!)

Praise the lard! Police hook up with Microsoft to school us on National Phish and Chip Day

Re: Eel be sorry

The puns got out-of-hand, without a trout. Adding more feels like gill-ding the lily, they should be fin-ished by now, but the commentards will flake out and keep carping along, just for the halibut.

There's a reason why my cat doesn't need two-factor authentication

IT people forgetting that security can be by-passed? Not around here: we're usually the ones by-passing it.

Wholesome: Waste heat from coal power station turned data centre to help grow veggies

At first, this idea left me cold, but I'm starting to warm up to it.

Finally, people who actually understand global trade to probe Trump's tariffs on Chinese goods

Re: Looking through the wrong end of the telescope

Not should, did. Now that the US is on top, they don't want anyone else pulling the same tricks.

Church roofs? Nyet, say Russian scrap thieves, we're taking this bridge

if the copper was energized, the thief would have de rigor.

Musk loves his Starlink sat constellation – but astroboffins are less than dazzled by them

Re: Far Side of the Moon

Time and Money are getting in the way of The Great Gig in the Sky. Satellites being On the Run are causing Astroboffins to fall in to an Us and Them mindset, which may cause Brain Damage.

Malware spotted doing unspeakable, filthy things to infected Macs – injecting Bing results into Google searches

I was thinking that this was Proof-of-Concept in the wild. Maybe the malware writers profiteers stiffed one of their developers, and this got released so that when the real one (that skims bank info) comes out, it's already blocked by AV.

Apple kills iTunes, preps pricey Mac Pro, gives iPad its own OS – plus: That $999 monitor stand

Re: @Dave 126 ... you know someone

Considering you can buy a CNC mill for less than the price of that stand...

Planes, fails and automobiles: Overseas callout saved by gentle thrust of server CD tray

Re: airport security

Something tells me it was less confiscated for security and more confiscated for "that looks cool, and I want it.", or in short "security".

That's a hell of Huawei to run a business, Chinese giant scolds FedEx after internal files routed via America

Re: the real enemy

What is the objection to "Social Credit"? Every one I've talked to about China mentions it, but no-one can (or bothers to try to) explain why it's bad. "It's Communist!" is about as clear a response as I get.

Considering that a lot of the issues in the US is people with power/money breaking social contracts and then buying favorable coverage to get no blow-back. Something like Social Credit may be an equalizing force.

Oh, that is communism.

Let's make laptops from radium. How's that for planned obsolescence?

Re: Stop it.

But plastic is a long-term carbon sink. The plastic in our oceans is oil that didn't get turned into carbon in our air.

Now, admittedly, a good solution for both would be to leave the oil in the ground; but where's the profit in that?

Honey, hive had it with this drone: Couple lived for years with thousands of bees in bedroom wall

Re: None of your beeswax, said Guerrero

And the reproductive period (mentioned in TFA) of 2-6 months.

UK's planned Espionage Act will crack down on Snowden-style Brit whistleblowers, suspected backdoored gear (cough, Huawei)

Lucky You

You still have most of Europe you can bugger off to, and all of the Commonwealth countries. Us poor USAians are pretty well stuck with our shower, who are doing the same things; and our "government" has shat on the rest of the world from such a great height that us citizens are all tarred (well, it is a dark, tar-like substance) with the same brush, and no-one wants us.

Or is that just another lie perpetuated by our so-called leaders, to keep the sheep in line?

Long-distance dildo devotee deploys ding-dong over data deceit

Re: Advancements in AI

Debuggering?

Giga-hurts radio: Terrorists build Wi-Fi bombs to dodge cops' cellphone jammers

Re: Diretional antenna

Ah, the Pringles Cantenna, and also Wok-Fi. That brings back memories.

Exclusive: Windows for Workgroups terror the Tartan Bandit confesses all to The Register

Re: Aye laddie...

How long before someone e-mailed the boss a virus?

Freed whistleblower Chelsea Manning back in jail for refusing to testify before secret grand jury

Re: They really don't want her to be free

Yes, the US has Habeas Corpus. We were taught that the US (more-or-less) invented Habeas Corpus.

We have ALL of the bodies!

Hours before Congress backs robocall blocking law, guess what the FCC boss suddenly decides?

Re: Give the carriers (phone companies) a piece of the fines...

If they can't be identified for billing, then their calls don't get connected. No corporate entity does free work (counting tax deductions, "good will" advertising, and "brand-name recognition" as having monetary value - a corporate accountant can give you dollar figures for each). Hell, they try not to do work unless they can get paid 2+ times for it; even if it's not work, they still won't do it for free.

Lets say, for a worst-case example, Scams 'R' Us, based out of Russia, uses a dodgy VOIP provider to connect to Tata Docomo in India, which routes the call through Bouygues in France, who directs the call to Verizon in the US. Verizon bills Bouygues, who bills Tata, who bills the VOIP provider, who bills SRU (possibly as part of their subscription). Bouygues may not tell Verizon where the call originated, but they sure as hell know who to charge. If most of the calls coming into Verizon from Bouygues are scam/nuisance/robocalls, then Verizon could tell them to clean up who they accept calls from, or their rates will increase they will stop connecting those calls. Bouygues tells Tata the same, Tata may well drop the dodgy VOIP provider, or bill them extra, which would raise the price of Scams 'R' Us's subscription, possibly making them uneconomical as a scammer.

To restate: If they can be identified for billing, they can be identified for blocking.