Posts by Dave 125

Deepfake 3.0 (beta), the bad news: This AI can turn ONE photo of you into a talking head. Good news: There is none

Can't believe they made Rasputin sing and didn't use Rah Rah Rasputin

Heard the one where the boss calls in an Oracle consultant who couldn't fix the database?

Re: Number of people

And in general, there are 10 kinds of people: those that understand n-ary, those that understand (n-1)-ary, those that understand (n-2)-ary, ..., those that understand ternary, those that understand binary, and those that don't understand any of this.

End all the 'up to' broadband speed bull. Release proper data – LGA

There is a very simple solution. They want to sell "up to 17Mb" for £35/month - that's fine; the customers do speed tests from time to time and use that to pay "up to" £35/month. If I get on average 8.5Mb then I pay £17.50/month.

There's a very simple solution: allow the customer to pay "up to" the line rental. So if I'm getting "up to 8Mb" for £8/month, but in reality I'm only getting 1Mb, then I should be able to claim back £7/month.

Amazon admits flouting sanctions by flogging consumer tat to Iran

Automotive goods?

What, like batteries, for Haw....er...cars?

Let's hope Bezos gets strung up more than Chris Tappin was.

Google's Chrome cloaks Pirate Bay in red screen of malware death

Re: They need to be careful with this

"The content they've created" - is that the content they won't let you listen to before you buy it then refuse to give you a refund after you've bought it and found out that it only contains that one good track off the radio plus 55 minutes of identical filler shite?

Personally this freetard torrents stuff to get round their crappy business model. If their business depends on selling crap and refusing to give refunds then I have NO qualms about torrenting it first. This freetard has avoided buying dozens of hours of filler shite, but on the other hand has also bought stuff I found I liked that I wouldn't have otherwise bought.

Evil computers sense you’re in a hurry and mess with your head

Money

He's probably giving that church work up for extra money. Churches are invariably short of funds so you'll drive 500 miles a day and pour 60 hours of BS&T into the job, only to be paid wages a Chinese sweat shop worker would turn down, whereas that poncy City tw@t isn't going to give a monkey's about giving you 30K of that 50 million he's just made by sending Greece even further up the swanee.

Bible THUMP: Good Book beats Darwin to most influential tome title

A book on basic maths.

Since the question was which is THE most influential book, which by definition is a one-answer question, and the percentages add up to more than 100%, the journo who wrote this needs to revisit his maths skills. The percentages work if the question was to name the top few most influential books, but the article doesn't say that.

Microsoft WINDOWS 10: Seven ATE Nine. Or Eight did really

Popups.

"When the screen is detached to become a tablet, a prompt pops up asking the user if they want to switch to tablet mode."

Brilliant. And I suppose if I were to click on the Yes button, would a prompt pop up to ask me if I want to click the Yes button? And if I move the mouse to click that second Yes button, will another prompt pop up to ask me if I want to use the mouse?

I really hope so cos I can't get used to these computer thangs without all these popups asking me to do what I already appear to be doing. I'm already quite confused about how there isn't a popup asking me if I want to post this comment. Alt-Y.

Lego is the TOOL OF SATAN, thunders Polish priest

Reporting April Fool stories as news?

Or is it only me that thinks there's something significant in "Publikacja: 01.04.2014".

Microsoft's EAT-your-OWN-YOUNG management system AXED

I can't believe....

...nobody has cracked the obvious joke about the number of bell ends at Microsoft.

Dr Who scores new companion from Emmerdale

Welly rack?

Made me lol (in the traditional sense) but I have no idea why. What's a welly rack?

German court tosses out Samsung AND Apple patent sueballs

Re: Sigh...

>>It still beggars belief that one can even patent 'slide to unlock'

No, because of the "with a computer" thing. Anything obvious plus "with a computer" means you can get a patent on it. Propped a door open with a computer? Have a patent. Found a way of picking your nose with a computer? Patent it. Worked out how to unlock something with a computer? The patent office is just waiting for you.

'Kill yourself now' - Torvalds throws openSUSE security tantrum

He has[enter password to continue]

a point[you must click "Agree" to continue].

These[enter password to continue]

security fea-[you must click "Agree" to continue].

tures can[enter password to continue]

be very[you must click "Agree" to continue].

intrusive[enter password to continue]

and[you must click "Agree" to continue].

slow you[enter password to continue]

down a[you must click "Agree" to continue].

lot.[enter password to continue]

SanDisk daddy: Flash to 'checkmate' hard drives by 2020

Prices

I'll gladly replace all my spinning disks with SSDs, but not at current prices. I can get 1.5TB of HDD for less than £100 from PC World. Ebuyer's best prices on SSD seem to be about £1/GB, so that's £1500 for the same amount of storage. Yes I would pay a premium for the better performance of SSD, but not 15 times the price.

Get the prices down and you can have a billion times the market you have today.

Billions of potentially populated planets in the galaxy

Alien religions

It's not those asking if we've received Glub as our personal saviour we need to worry about, it's those whose Prophet Fnergle (peace be upon him) demands conversion, subjugation or death.

Future of computing crystal-balled by top chip boffins

Mimicking the human brain isn't necessarily a good target

We can't do 10 million floating point operations per second; the brain simply isn't designed for that kind of stuff. Some people I know couldn't do one floating point operation per ten million seconds. The brain is good at what it's good at, but it's not good at what it's not good at, and the reason we have tools is to complement our natural abilities. A hammer is made of metal so that it can bash nails in. If a hammer "mimicked a human fist" then it would be useless - we can't punch nails into the wall (with the possible exception of Chuck Norris).

Have everything. Own nothing. Learn the difference

IP

"Really, if I pay for something, and later decide I don't want/need it anymore, why can't I re-sell it?"

Because it's a licence, which legally is a different thing from physical goods. Licences are subject to licencing laws. If you qualify and pay for a gun licence, then sell your gun and don't need the licence any more, you can't sell that gun licence on. Neither can you sell your driving licence (which you paid for) when you stop driving; in both cases, the licence is granted not just for the payment but for qualifying conditions (such as having passed a driving test). A music licence is no different. A pub that is licenced to broadcast music cannot sell that license on if they change their business practices, even if they had to pay for it.

Of course, you *can* renegotiate the terms of a licence so that it is resellable later, and refuse to enter into it unless the other party agrees. Good luck with that.

Even when you buy a CD it's not as clear cut as you think. You own and have complete freedom with the plastic disk. You *don't* own the music that is represented by the bit-patterns etched into the surface. So you can sell the disk, and the music goes with it. But you can't sell the music without the disk; that breaks copyright laws.

Apple's iPad not so shiny once you get it home

I use mine for music

iGigBook to save lugging tons of RealBooks to every jazz gig I play at.

OnSong for all the chord charts I use at church (transposable too!)

iRealb is considerably cheaper and easier to use than Band In A Box.

Ten hour battery life guarantees that it won't run flat half way through a gig, even after it's aged a bit and this is down to 5-6 hours.

Decent sized screen means it's readable on a music stand, and it's light enough not to cause the less solid music stands to collapse under its weight.

Everything above but OnSong got me interested, but you can get PDF viewers on other tablets (although there's more to iGigBook than simply viewing PDFs), and I have BiaB on my PC. OnSong was the tipping point.

Obviously you only buy hardware for the software you can run on it. If you can do everything you want on a laptop, get a laptop. No point buying an iPad if you don't know what you plan to do with it. It's a heck of a lot to spend "just to see what it can do".

Fringe benefits but I wouldn't buy an iPad for any of these (unless it was around half the price): several games, net usage, email if I switch to GMail but I still do this on my main PC, downloaded several Bible translations (YouVersion), got my entire photo album on it too, and still exploring. There's loads of free stuff on the App store.

Australia, give up your fixed broadband!

@Robert Heffernan

Well done for completely missing the irony. Look again for the words "spend a couple of thousand" and re-read the article.

Data-mining technique outs authors of anonymous email

1 in 5 failure

And a lawyer that can't turn a 20% failure rate into "reasonable doubt" isn't worth his money. Heck, I could probably do it.

Illinois scrubs death penalty

Re: Death Penalty for Titles

> So which is it? Christianity favors the death penalty, or not?

Definitely Not. See Matt 26:52. If Christianity was all about death to non-believers, that would have been the flashpoint (which could have been the swordsman's intention). But Jesus was there and he said the equivalent of "put it away stupid", and in another account of the same event healed the servant's ear.

Jesus said the two greatest commandments were to love God and to love your neighbour, and that everything in the Law and Prophets hangs off those two (Matt 22:37-40), and gave a new commandment which is (for Christians) to love each other and that the world would know we are his disciples from that (John 13:34-35). That's it. Nothing about death in any of those, and they're the top three, which means everything else must be read in the context of those, so if you DO find anything about death, it doesn't overrule or contradict those.

While I feel for the lady in question it's not God's best choice for death to be repaid with death but to repay evil with good. Grace and forgiveness are the only option for Christians; Jesus made that abundantly clear, and if she's demanding the death penalty then she's not operating according to the faith but according to her old carnal nature (and worse, if she's not prepared to forgive then she's putting her own forgiveness from God at risk).

iPhone owners get walked through confessional

Great questions

"Do I not give God time every day in prayer?"

OK, so does a tick mean yes I do, or yes I do not?

Actually I shouldn't complain. One of my favourite tricks is to answer questions asked in the negative sense with the logically correct answer, e.g. if I _have_ given God time every day in prayer, then the answer to the above is No. (Or does No mean that I have given God time only some days in prayer, as opposed to every day and no days? I'm confused...)

Channel Five reborn as Channel Five

Nude cheggers

Channel 5 is dire; I don't know why they even bother. Last time I accidentally switched to 5, there was some sort of bizarre program where Keith Chegwin was the host. What's the problem with that? He was naked. Yep, a naked Cheggers. Unbelievable. And very sad to see his career has sunk to a depth where he would even consider accepting that assignment.

BBC1 and BBC2 are pretty good. ITV is BBC without the good bits; Channel 4 is ITV without the good bits, and Channel 5 is Channel 4 without the good bits. And Sky is bazillions of adverts that you have to pay for, with occasional brief program breaks.

Liverpudlians headbutt Cameron's 'big society'

Maybe Cameron should have been a bit more obvious

that when he said "volunteers" he meant "unpaid volunteers". Bit of a tautology I know, volunteers are by definition unpaid, but it doesn't take a genius to get from "big society implemented by volunteers" to "therefore we can stop paying you, can't we". Clearly Anderson is no genius, so what's he doing being a council leader?

Tape business shows steep decline

Priced out of market

Tape might be $15 for 72GB but what about the drives? A quick Google ("tape backup") fetches back Shopping results of £690.76, £590,04, £1150.33 - haha, yeah right, when I can buy a DVD writer for £28 and DVDs for 35p each (Maplin) or less (10p at Ebuyer).

I'd be happy to use tape backup at home *if* I could get a drive for £30-£40 plus £12/72GB per 72G of tape (providing that's not "only if you buy a gazillion petabytes of the stuff at once, i.e. minimum spend £12million"), but no such solutions exist. They're priced at deep-pocketed businesses with a "tape is the only backup option" policy, which is a rapidly shrinking market.

Tape backup people need to get a real world head on and price themselves back into the market if they want a future.

Balinese lad seduced by bovine temptress

Reg missed a trick there

Unemployed youth Ngurah (pronounced "moo") Alit...claimed the cow called his name

Copernicus reburied with full Catholic honours

@Tequila Joe

> So, any reproducible evidence open to scrutiny for that , or is that simply your belief?

I'll make a giant assumption here that you believe - oops, wrong word, but I can't think of a better one - that life started on this planet within a primordial soup, or something along those lines.

If my assumption is correct, then out of interest, what reproducible evidence open to scrutiny do you have for that? Or is that simply your belief?

More than you think

"The Bible explains (reliably) precisely this much about the universe ->"

More than you think.

It predicted a spherical earth while many people were flat earthers.

Genesis states God created light before the sun and stars which is consistent with the Big Bang Theory. The timing's a bit different of course but one way many Christians reconcile the two is to say the six days of creation were not six 24-hour periods but six ages.

It describes cities that don't exist (for which it has been criticised), but archaeologists continue to dig them up. OK, this is archaeology not astronomy, but it reinforces the point that the Bible increases in accuracy as we discover more about the universe and the world we live in.

And if we're so advanced, why is it that we still refer to such archaic and outdated terms like "sunrise" and "sunset" which both imply it's the sun that moves, not us. Even my satnav uses these terms.

Jodrell Bank gets swanky visitor centre, infuriating maze

Looking forward to the improvements

There was all sorts of cool stuff there when I went as a kid. Went last year with the missus and was VERY disappointed - just a couple of video screens, a bunch of printed stuff for you to read and a shop with low nerdy content (JB branded pencils and the like). But on the upside there was a woman there doing surveys of attendee (singular intended - it would be an exaggeration to use the plural, even though there were technically two of us there) so let's hope the next installment of Jodrell Bank Visitors Centre becomes worthwhile again. Maze probably not a bad idea for catering for the non-nerdy family members so the others can nerd-out for the day.

Hardly surprising the funding for JB is non-existent if most peoples' memories of it are "went there, it was crap".

Solid state drives set for huge growth

Huge growth immediately available

Can't believe they are keeping prices as high as they are. I have 2TB of HDD space in my PC which I would replace with SSD *today* if I could get it for £150 or less. But at the current silly prices of a small defence budget per byte their market is *GOING* to stay tiny. Simply ramp up production - whatever that takes, and I would recommend such a switch to *everyone* I know. Multiply that by all the geeks on the planet and you have an instant market of trillions (and I mean proper British trillions, not those namby pamby US trillions where 1tr=about 3 and a half).

McKinnon campaign urges coalition to block extradition

Penalty

The issue is not whether or not he should suffer a penalty. The issues are fairness and appropriation of blame.

First Gary allegedly caused $700,000 worth of damage. Whether or not those numbers are completely made up, his punishment should be appropriate to that damage. Let's look at the damage done to the economy by bankers. $7,000,000,000,000 if I remember correctly. So Gary's MAXIMUM punishment should be one ten-thousandth of the punishment meted out to the bankers.

If those numbers aren't completely made up then let's see a breakdown. How much of that bill was for the sysadmin to secure the system? That should obviously be deducted, as the sysadmin should have done that anyway. What exactly was damaged? Was some backed up data damaged? How does it cost over half a million dollars to recover stuff from backup? Was some non-backed up data damaged? Why would it be Gary's fault that data was not backed up? Why would it be Gary's fault that the data was not at least read-only for non-authenticated users? Did he cause some hardware damage? How would that be possible?

Secondly Gary wandered in to an unprotected system. The password was either non-existent or dead simple to guess. The sysadmin should be held responsible for not securing a system containing supposedly top secret info and that could suffer damage worth $700,000. But where is the news on the sysadmins of that system being punished? And why was that computer attached to the internet in the first place? There are two parties responsible for a hacker entering an unprotected system, just as any homeowner who left a door wide open and complained about getting burgled would expect the insurance company to be less than sympathetic. Plus this happened AFTER 11/9, remember, when the US was allegedly on high alert. So was this a honeypot system?

Thirdly the US wants to "make an example" of him, and punish him yet more for "not co-operating". Gary's perfectly valid fear is that if extradited to the US and put on trial there, he will be subjected to a mock trial and thrown away basically for life, and stuck in a jail thousands of miles from his loved ones. That is an inhuman result that the US have not ruled out. We know the US already has a number of inhuman and possibly illegal measures: the death penalty, and Guantanamo Bay. Gary might not get either of those, but he will be subjected to the whims of an unnecessarily harsh regime.

And as has already been mentioned the extradition treaty with the US is very one sided. They just have to ask. We have to prove our case in one of their courts of law. So the treaty must be renegotiated. And in general we have to stop being the US's lapdog; we are a sovereign state in our own right and until not long ago far more powerful than the US, things have changed, but as a British Citizen I hate the way our government gets ordered around by the US and just takes it all.

Nobody says Gary should not face trial. Let the US prosecutors come to a British court and make their case, including explaining why Gary gets all the flak and the sysadmin gets none, and have a UK judge decide Gary's fate based on the sysadmin's failure. The internet changes stuff but it doesn't change everything: this is a British citizen committing an offence while on British soil. If you want a comparison, what if you were to make a mucky phone call to a Yank? Would you be prosecuted for that here or in the US? Here, of course.

Virtualisation and vendor support

A VM is essentially new hardware

From a certification perspective a VM is essentially new hardware, and new hardware certification isn't something that is just done in 5 minutes. Running software on a VM is -NOT- the same thing as running that same software on a non-virtualised machine, no matter how accurate the VM emulation is, and it is not possible for software vendors to guarantee that software designed for a non-virtualised environment will work equally well in a virtualised environment, especially when you start doing things with the VM that you can't do in a non-VM like pause the machine and wake it up again several days later: from the software's perspective the clock just jumped forward by several days for no obvious reason and any time-dependent software (job scheduler etc) will need extra testing to make sure it still works fine and does what it's supposed to do when that sort of thing happens like catching up with jobs it might have missed while it wasn't awake, or if it was in the middle of a job when the clock jumped forward that the sudden time change doesn't have any adverse effects.

Let us legally rip discs, campaigner tells govt

Already provided for

It's been a while since I last read the Copyright Act but I distinctly remember reading that the plaintiff has to be able to prove material loss if he wants to open a case against you. Not difficult if you make stuff available generally for download for free, but very difficult to prove if you just "media shift" your recordings.

Belkin Powerline HD Gigabit mains Ethernet adaptor

No slap down despite misleading advertising?

"Slap it down hard because it doesn't get anywhere near the 1Gb/s headline data-transfer speed? No..."

WTF? Absolutely yes that is worth a hard slap down. Why should these people get away with false advertising? Imagine "This hard drive is advertised as storing 1GB but in reality you can only get 200MB on it"....THEN IT'S NOT A 1GB HARD DRIVE IS IT.

Stop allowing companies to get away with advertising what they're clearly not selling. The fact that "oh it's OK cos everyone does it" is NO EXCUSE - it is STILL misleading advertising. If they say this should achieve 1Gb then it should achieve 1Gb -- accepted, there will be variations due to non-ideal conditions and that is fair enough, but if under absolutely ideal perfect conditions it won't get over 200Mb then it shouldn't be advertised as achieving five times that rate.

Anyway one thing you didn't test in the review was the reliability of this thing. IME Belkin stuff is shite, I had a wireless dongle that not only couldn't stay up but to get it back online you had to REINSTALL the drivers!!!!! Yes - not just tell it to reconnect, but actually reinstall everything. Anything else I've ever touched with the Belkin name on it has been a complete waste of money.

Alleged Romanian phishers (finally) hauled into US courts

How awful...

How awful for the US prosecutors to have to build a strong case before wrenching people out of their homelands and chucking them into the slammer for 37 years thousands of miles away from family and friends.

Maybe that's why the US policy is that foreign countries who want to do that, have to build a strong case against a US national that is verified by a US court before extradition will be permitted.

Daily Mail launches McKinnon campaign

British citizens on British soil are subject to British law *only*

> he did, did he not, commit various offences under the Misuse of Computers Act

While in Britain, yes.

> and corresponding legislation on the other side of the pond?

Irrelevant. British citizens are not subject to American law.

> He did, did he not, intrude into secret databases where he had no right to be?

Secret databases with absolutely no basic protection against intrusion. One wonders why on earth secret databases would be put onto the public internet with no protection. This was post 11/9 (2001 if you've forgotten) and not exactly before people in the industry should have been aware of simple security measures. The people responsible for the damages are the "secret databases" sys admins for not securing the systems.

> He did, did he not, confess to having done this?

Yes.

> I'm a regular reader of the titless wonder in quesdtion, but I must disagree with its stand on this case. He has committed offences in the USA, despite being on British soil at the time, so it's to the USA he should be made to go to answer for it.

So if you made a dirty phone call to a US citizen and they pressed charges, should you be extradited for that or tried locally?

Regardless of your answer to the above, it is my opinion that since he committed the offence on British soil he should therefore be tried in Britain. Let the US investigators come here to present their case. It is not purely Gary's fault this happened; his ISP allowed traffic out of the country; some US ISP allowed it in, and the allegedly "secret databases" didn't stop him either. A British Citizen breaking what would be American law if he were subject to it, which he is not, while not located in American jurisdiction, cannot be tried under that (American) law.

Otherwise we would have to deport all the gays to Iran, because it's an offence in Iran to be gay. Especially if any of our gays fancy Iranians.

Glasgow unbans Life of Brian

I've never seen the problem

I've never seen the problem with Life Of Brian, and I am a Christian (and for those that need disclaimers: this is my opinion and not necessarily in line with the official opinion of anyone or anything else). It's clear in the opening sequence that Brian isn't Jesus - the 3 wise men turn up in the wrong tent and after discovering their mistake go on to retrieve the GFM and go on to the right one. After the opening credits there's a shot of Jesus giving the Sermon on the Mount and the camera pans back, and back, and back....to Brian. Plus who can forget:

He's not the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy.

I'm not the Messiah!

Only the true messiah would deny that he is!

OK then, I AM the messiah.

He is the messiah!

If there's any valid criticism it's that the film solidly takes the mickey out of the Jews, having them chasing after messiahs left right and centre, not knowing their Latin, having loads of anti-Roman factions with similar names (People's Front Of Judaea, Judaean People's Front etc) that are all against each other (Where's the Popular People's Front? He's over there) and so on.

Seriously I've watched the film several times and I can't spot a single nanosecond of blasphemy in the whole lot. The only blasphemy IMHO is in the minds of the people who assume that Brian==Jesus and it's made absolutely clear right from the beginning that he's not.

And that mock interview where the Python crew were complaining about Life of Jesus being a mickey-take of Life Of Brian was absolutely hilarious.