* Posts by Danny 2

2212 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jul 2009

Spain's highway agency is monitoring speeding hotspots using bulk phone location data

Danny 2

Re: Perhaps the answer...

"We literally have the technology"

Aye, we do. My parents car sounds an alarm if anyone in the passenger seat isn't wearing their seat belt, presumably a weight sensor in the seat. The Netherlands has average speed sensors on all their motorways. The trouble is these measures cut human involvement.

My dad couldn't wear a seat belt for medical reasons and the alarm can't be turned off. And when me and my girlfriend were being chased up a Dutch motorway by a gang of thugs we were speeding but desperate for police intervention that never came. Just because tech can replace humans doesn't mean it's good technology.

Danny 2

Re: The origin of Field Service Engineers...

Same job, I had to drive up a mountain in Cumbria to sort a computer in a radar station. Single track road, and I'd just driven above the clouds at a 60° incline when I encountered a landrover coming down. It obviously wasn't for reversing, so I had to reverse back into the clouds to find a passing place. I've vertigo. I can walk up a mountain but I felt sick driving over the Forth road bridge. Reversing down a steep mountain road with no visibility was stomach churning.

Danny 2

The origin of Field Service Engineers...

is because so many service engineers drove into fields.

My worst job was field service engineer for a company (Not Saying it)that had the CAA contract for Scotland and the north of England. Due to underfunding, corrupt employees and awful management I was driving 100,000 miles a year between airports, probably the same in flights. That should have been a red flag, preferably waved by someone walking in front of my company car.

The midlands based control centre had no idea Scottish A-class roads aren't quite English A-class roads, so they'd berate me if I couldn't drive from Prestwick to Aberdeen in 90 minutes. Edinburgh to Dundee is doable in 90 minutes, sometimes. Prestwick to Aberdeen is a nice day trip with plenty of stops.

So I became quite a "good" driver, in an F1 or GTA sense of good. I'd learned how to avoid speed cameras by timing me speeding past them just as a lorry was between us.

One motorway cop car caught me, pulled me over, and I was bang to rights as we both knew I was doing 110mph. The cop congratulated me on my strategy of using lorries to block the cameras, but it was obviously cop sarcasm relishing the bust. He asked why I was in such a rush, and I explained Aberdeen Airport Air Traffic Control needed sudden replacement equipment.

He asked me why I didn't just phone ahead to warn them I'd be late, and I explained my employer only issued us pagers, not mobile phones. At that point he took pity on me and decided to help. He said, "Follow me", turned on his lights and sirens and led me at 110mph to the airport gate. He would've driven faster but I couldn't keep up.

When I replaced the dot-matrix printer in the control tower all they said was, "Oh, aye, we'd forgotten about that."

First they came for chess, then Go... and now, oh for crying out loud, AI systems can beat us at curling

Danny 2

Re: Hmm

I'm afraid not. And elephant curling was a bloodbath, they are not good on ice.

Danny 2

Re: Hmm

I see my future career is sweeping for our robotic curling overlords. Honestly that gives me hope, it's the one sport Scots still excel at.

IT guy whose job was to stop ex-staff running amok on the network is jailed for running amok on the network

Danny 2

Je suis Shannon

A fair few folk have acted like this and we don't get to hear their sides of the stories.

"and is unlikely to be hired again as an IT worker" - only because he was caught.

I stumbled into a SysAdmin role for a European firm and encountered weird tech problems that seemed to be internal. Nobody knew the passcodes for any of the routers and servers, because the previous SysAdmin had changed them all and hadn't told anyone or written them down.

I asked why the previous SysAdmin had left, and it wasn't pretty. I had to take a weekend to reset, reconfigure, and reboot all the kit. And I wrote it all down.

Happy Hacking Professional Hybrid mechanical keyboard: Weird, powerful, comfortable ... and did we mention weird?

Danny 2

Aye, my sentiment exactly.

I have typed a lot of crap here this year, mostly through the mouse Microsoft Accessibility On Screen Keyboard. That is real dedication! Not a keyboard that costs more than my awful laptop did.

I admit a decade ago I bought a £10 keyboard whose keys changed colours, and I loved it, before it broke the very next month. I still got a fun LED strip from it.

She was praised by the CEO and promoted. After her brother and mom died, she returned from compassionate leave. IBM laid her off

Danny 2

Re: Old~ish joke

Doc,

I have been cut off from the internet several times in the past year simply because I can't afford NHS specs without claiming state benefits, and the cheapo shop I bought magnifying glasses from was closed due to the plague. I get your meaning. I can see shit, but to look at at 3.5 mag. burns my brain.

Plus my last remaining front tooth is flapping in the wind. Can't get that fixed on the NHS today, thank god for facemasks.

Danny 2
Joke

Old~ish joke

Laurence Fishburne was asked about his new comedy,"Oldish" on the Colbert show.

Colbert : I'm 56, am I oldish?

Fishburne : Well, if you have CRS then you're probably oldish.

Colbert : What's CRS?

Fishburne : Can't remember shit. If you've got CSS -

Colbert : What's that?

Fishburne : Can't see shit.

Just because I'm old doesn't mean I don't appreciate a good joke. I just have to post it to a website so I can find it again.

Danny 2

The first ageism I encountered was at an interview at Dell. First question: "You're 32. The average age here is 27 - do you really think you could fit in?"

Well, not now!

I always thought of IBM as better. It was once. I was made redundant from my first job, and an IBM pal asked me how long I'd worked there. Five years. "So at least you'll have your five months redundancy money."

No, four weeks.

I'm sorry to learn MBAs have ruined the old girl.

I heartily recommend working in Germany or the Netherlands if you get the chance, their management style is why they outperform us.

Brexit travel permits designed to avoid 7,000-lorry jams come January depend on software that won't be finished till April

Danny 2

Re: The other question

It could lead to more violence from the KLF (Kent Liberation Front), who last fired a machine gun in London in 1992.

TikTok seeks injunction to halt Trump ban, claims it would break America's own First and Fifth Amendments

Danny 2

Repent, Harlequin! Said the Tiktok man

Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktock man

"Get stuffed!" the Harlequin replied, sneering.

"You've been late a total of sixty-three years, five months, three weeks, two days, twelve hours, forty-one minutes, fifty-nine seconds, point oh three six one one one microseconds. You've used up everything you can, and more. I'm going to turn you off."

"Scare someone else. I'd rather be dead than live in a dumb world with a bogey man like you."

UK Parliament's human rights committee pushes for better protections of coronavirus contact-tracing data in law

Danny 2

I'm not a Trump fan but sometimes his policies just make sense and should be applauded.

Designating New York, Portland and Seattle as anarchist cities is a bold and progressive move.  Hopefully he'll liberate more US cities before January.

Danny 2

@BebopWeBop

It's actually an Irish app that NI adopted first.

I'm glad people are using it but I fear it will give a false sense of security. It only alerts you if everyone has their phone with the app and bluetooth on, and been close for 15 minutes. I rarely know where my phone is, and the couple of folk I've been close to for 15 minutes this year would tell me if they were sick.

I bought HEPA 85 air-filter material to build masks for prisoners, but the prisons ignored me as I used to do anarchist prisoner support. Masks are easy to buy now but I'm using it to put on air-blowers to turn them into air-filters.

A clever American pal told me she'd been told the best type of face mask material was cotton - worryingly wrong. I don't think people are paying proper attention.

The charity AgeUK said old folk would be devastated if Christmas was cancelled and their families couldn't visit them. My parents are delighted and relieved - they just aren't that into you!

FBI boasts of dark-web drug bust: 179 collared around the world, $6.5m in cash and 500kg of narcotics seized

Danny 2

Hiya Peter,

That is funny, and the guy obviously is an idiot. Crashing his van full of drugs into a police car and then not emptying it.

OTOH, there was a local service called "Dial A Drink" where you could phone up to get booze at inflated prices. Initially I thought that was a sign of societal decline but I realised it was probably keeping a lot of drunk drivers off the road. I have no idea what methamphetamine does to folk, but I'd prefer they did it in their own homes.

Danny 2

TOR ≠ Dark Web

My daftie relatives spotted the TOR browser on my parents laptop, and exclaimed, "Granny is on the Dark Web!"

Not the same thing. I put it there so they could view embarrassing things without their ISP knowing, like pornography or the Daily Mail website. So far the police haven't raided them.

(I just learned that US white supremacists are trying to abuse the 'not equal' sign. Not my intent. Who put stupid pills in US reservoirs?)

Microsoft will release a web browser for Linux next month. Repeat, Microsoft will release a browser for Linux – and it uses Google's technology

Danny 2

Re: The end really is Nigh

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiss,_Marry,_Kill

Avoid is terribly polite. Kill!

Top 5 billionaires find that global pandemics are good for business – and their wallets

Danny 2

Re: going viral

Those aren't slang words in Scotland. Stop-out I guess is slut-shaming which I would never normally do, but c'mon, during a pandemic? Today Liverpool Uni announced 87 students and staff had tested positive and I'd bet my niece responsible for at least 20 of them.

It must be a horrible year to be a teenager, but it's a worse year to be an octogenarian. Don't kill Gran!

Danny 2

going viral

My youngest niece just caught the plague at Liverpool Uni. She says she's fine and it's no big deal, she just dated a boy with no sense of taste. My sister told her, "Well, I can't help you if you date men with no taste."

We're well into the second Autumn wave, and the third Winter wave will be deadlier. So no relatives at Christmas, certainly not my stop-out, minging, clarty niece.

We're not getting back with Galileo, UK govt tells The Reg, as question marks sprout above its BS*

Danny 2

Re: Hoots Mon

I honestly thought foreigners were being sarcastic when they described the Scottish accent as sexy, I never have, but apparently lots of sex dolls are given Scottish accents.

"How de ye ken when a lass from Paisley has come? She drops her chips." Told to me by a lass from Paisley. "So...are you asking for chips?"

The SNP won't run in England but we donated some of your better MPs. Even our Tories are better than your Tories! Rory Stewart, he isn't awful. Malcolm Rifkind, well, he maybe awful but he's far more competent than the current cabinet. Tell you what, grant us another vote on independence and we'll deport Ruth Davidson to London.

[Anecdote: I once had to email Rifkind about something and I finished the email at 3am on a Saturday. I thought I shouldn't send this until Monday morning as he'll assume I am a weirdo, but I sent it anyway. I got a cogent reply five minutes later. He may be an android. ]

Danny 2

Re: Bertrand

Russell was physically attacked for advocating peace in 1914. His pals asked the police to intervene, and they wouldn't. They said, "But he's a famous philosopher!" and the police shrugged. "He's a Cambridge maths professor!" and the police snorted. "He's the brother of a Lord!"

"Right lads, rescue him."

Danny 2

Re: Hoots Mon

@Eclectic Man

I don't hate the English, you'll make great neighbours, just not landlords.

I'm not exactly to blame for Brexit since I didn't vote for a Brexit party. In fact since it was the English who overwhelmingly voted for Boris it seems more fair to ask why you hate us?

Danny 2

Re: Hoots Mon

It's spelt AyeScotland, not iScotland.

Eclectic Man wrote he voted remain as he didn't think the politicians in Westminster were capable of negotiating a sensible exit agreement, or indeed organising a piss up in a brewery.

I voted leave for the same reason. I want an independent Scotland and Boris running Brexit seems certain to cause the breakup of the UK.

Oracle Zooms past rivals to run TikTok’s cloud, take stake alongside WalMart and ByteDance investors

Danny 2

Re: Missed a bit

Well, Trump promised a wall on the Chinese border, and the Chinese would pay for it.

Tencent in talks for 'longterm solution' to WeChat mess as injunction keeps the app alive

Danny 2

Above the Law - Freedom of Speech

I know many of you will hate this new music, but how many songs quote the First Amendment? I, for one, am down with the 1990 kids.

Above the Law - Freedom of Speech

Your anti-phishing test emails may be too easy to spot. NIST has a training tool for that

Danny 2

idiot users

Please don't (all) take this personally, but my posts here that I am proudest of get 3-6 votes. My daftest posts get 30-60 votes.

I propose a system where we can swap ten votes from our silliest posts for one vote on a post we are actually proud of.

I've never fallen for a phishing scam, but I did once fail badly when trying to email, phone and mobile phone different people at the same time. And I was probably chewing gum. Stupid is as stupid does too much.

Elecrow CrowPi2: Neat way to get your boffins-to-be hooked on Linux from an early age and tinkering in no time

Danny 2

Re: "The kiddiwonks won't even know they're learning"

@Lee D

I stupidly let my three year old godson taste my Irn Bru. He'd never tasted a carbonated beverage before and spat it out saying, "Biting ants! Biting ants!"

I was given sugar sandwiches at his age, I suspect his teeth will be better when he's my age.

Amazon Lex can now speak British English... or simply 'English' if you're British

Danny 2

Re: American English is English

@lybad

I worked for Hamilton District Council and played works football. The highlight was I once played against a Lisbon Lion - we lost, but still. The lowlight was a stranger came up and punched me because I was wearing a French strip in Blantyre. Apparently too close to a Rangers strip.

Danny 2

Re: American English is English

@Jake

"all Joisey on their ass"

https://allpoetry.com/ygUDuh

Danny 2

Re: Don't moan, organ eyes

It's a black American communist singing an anarchist anthem to striking Scottish miners, so no, it's probably not suitable for work. Just not for the reason you thought.

Danny 2

Re: Correct

I met a German football fan who claimed, "I've seen all the great Scottish football clubs. Glasgow Celtic, Glasgow Rangers, Glasgow Aberdeen."

Presumably he thought Glasgow meant football club.

Danny 2

Don't moan, organ eyes

Why does the OED spell verbs such as organize and recognize in this way?

The suffix -ize comes ultimately from the Greek verb stem -izein. In both English and French, many words with this ending have been adopted (usually via Latin), and many more have been invented by adding the suffix to existing words. In modern French the verb stem has become -iser, and this may have encouraged the use of -ise in English, especially in verbs that have reached English via French. The -ise spelling of verbs is now very common in British use, and Oxford dictionaries published in the UK generally show both forms where they are in use, but give -ize first as it reflects both the origin and the pronunciation more closely, while indicating that -ise is an allowable variant. Usage varies across the English-speaking world, so it is important to record both spellings where they exist. There are a number of verbs with only one accepted spelling – advise and capsize, for example. This is not just perverse: they have different etymologies. The important thing is that people should be consistent in the form they use in a given document.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0bezsMVU7c

Danny 2

Re: It's not so much spellings...

When I first moved to the Netherlands I was dared to ask the prettiest girl on the dance floor if she wanted a shag. "No, sorry, I don't smoke"

Austin Powers ruined that for all us fat Scottish bastards.

Danny 2

Dragon Dictator

My dad was never good with a keyboard so I bought him Dragon Dictate, like half a lifetime ago. He got on fine with it, but it couldn't understand a word I said. Everyone says we speak identically, but Dragon Dictate disagreed.

More recently I bought him a Google Home for him to chat to. He wasn't impressed. He asked it, "Okay Google, who were the Famous Five?", and it correctly listed the five Hibs players from the 1950s (Smith, Johnstone, Reilly, Turnbull and Ormond). I asked it, "Okay Google, who were the Famous Five?", and it repeated the Enid Blyton stories.

I concluded it had picked up on his Leith accent, and thought mine a wee bit English.

[Or it just knew I was a bigger fan of Blyton than Hibs]

It's IPO week and one of Wall Street's own is raising the spectre of a stock market crash

Danny 2

Light relief for our non-British pals

Woman falls from car on M25 filming Snapchat video

"It is only by luck she wasn't seriously injured or killed. #nowords"

I'm just disappointed it wasn't a TikTok video, missed zeitgeist opportunity. I'd offer my opinion on a financial crash (I'm for it) but I've not had a bank account since 2008 so I'm best ignored.

Did this airliner land in the North Sea? No. So what happened? El Reg probes flight tracker site oddity

Danny 2

Qinetic

Qinetic West Freugh?

I went for a job interview at Serco Kyle of Lochalsh, early nineties. It soon became Qinetic to further enrich Tories. It was to test missiles and torpedoes on Benbecula, 10 weeks on and 7 weeks off.

I drove into the factory in my girlfriend's Fiat Panda which had Greenpeace stickers on it, causing quite a commotion among the security guards. They could have just put the guard rail down.

The thrust of my interview was why I had the terrorist group Greenpeace stickers on my car. I explained it wasn't my car or stickers, and anyway Greenpeace were hardly terrorists compared to the French government who had just sunk their Rainbow Warrior ship in New Zealand.

To their credit they offered me the job. To my credit I refused it.

I wouldn't trust Serco or Qinetic employees with a long dirty pole.

Let's go space truckin': 1970s probe Voyager 1 is now 14 billion miles from home

Danny 2

Arguably the greatest tech achievement.

Although I still think it was a mistake to include a picture of a naked man and woman, too much like a menu selection for hungry aliens.

Bad news for 'cool dads' trying to bond with their teens: China-owned TikTok and WeChat face US download ban by Sunday

Danny 2

Re: First they came for the tweenagers, and I did nothing

I can't do any of those things.

I can glower like Paddington Bear. In the 1980s that was a career skill.

Danny 2

First they came for the tweenagers, and I did nothing

I would download TikTok out of solidarity, but much like the President I am fugly and can't dance and don't understand it.

Amazon gets its tax excuses in early amid rising UK profits – but leaves El Reg off the press list. Can't think why

Danny 2
Pint

"It's almost as if somebody had a guilty conscience, though to have a guilty conscience, one must have a conscience in the first place."

Wonderful writing Richard, have a pint on me. Although for tax reasons you have to buy it yourself.

Woman dies after hospital is unable to treat her during crippling ransomware infection, cops launch probe

Danny 2

Re: RE hospital IT

" they have a computer system that has your details"

You can ask for a printout of that under DP laws. I did. They posted them to my neighbour.

Danny 2

Failure is not an option

I worked in an organisation whose mantra was "Failure is not an option". Of course it's not because nobody would choose it, it's just the likely outcome if you don't anticipate every possibility of it.

Google bans stalkerware apps from Android store. Which is cool but... why were they allowed in the first place?

Danny 2

Stasi

I lived in a wee miners village in Scotland, 47 houses, 104 cats. A local woman (that's me being polite) teamed up with a developer to turn it into a town and a rally track. Everyone else objected.

We caught her using a tape recorder in her handbag to record private conversations to blackmail folk. Only because we heard it click off.

My first thought was I am techie, I could easily record every house without being caught. My second thought was, Jeez, that was a horrific first thought.

We stopped the development using the normal, banal, moral means.

Not content with distorting actual reality, Facebook now wants to build a digital layer for the world

Danny 2

Re: They never saw it coming

I have glasses from a Christmas cracker that have mirrored reflective strips on the outside edge. They make me look like a twat, but I can see behind me.

Proof of concept is good, there's no reason not to have rear-viewing cameras in the specs. Probably radar too since children will throw rocks at you.

Danny 2

Re: David Eggers "The Circle"

Excuse my unforgivable sin of misquoting something I can't source, but during the French revolution an English Earl said he'd rather see a dozen murders on the old Kent Road than suffer from state surveillance.

Current surveillance in the UK is bad enough, and it's a one edged sword. Sure, if I commit a crime then the police have the footage, but if I'm the victim of crime (esp police crime) then I have no access.

I appreciate that increasing video access among the public has held police slightly accountable, from Rodney King to whoever their latest victim is.

I just recall walking through the local cop shop in the mid nineties, it had a wall of about sixty screens showing live footage around my wee town.

I'm open to persuasive argument. I used to be against mass DNA collection, when I didn't know how commonplace sexual assault is.

The Battle of Britain couldn't have been won without UK's homegrown tech innovations

Danny 2

Re: Y Service

"Dresden was a reprisal."

I was in Dresden before the GDR fell. Not nice. A surprising amount of neo-Nazis.

A year ago I gave my Edinburgh flat to a female student from Dresden, free of charge. We didn't interact much but we had an awkward hour discussing the whole "SlaughterHouse 5" thing. We agreed I wasn't to blame for the firebombing, and she wasn't to blame for Nazism.

She said she came to Edinburgh to study because there were too many nationalists in Dresden. I told her I was a nationalist, but not that sort.

I am, or was, a peace protester. I'm also an antifascist. I am utterly torn about the bombing of Germany, but secretly I think they deserved it due to their failure to respect democracy, human rights and international laws. But Dresden was hellish.

Danny 2

Re: Polish Air Force War Memorial

Ha! I didn't know that about Conti, yet another good-looking talented Paisley Italian.

Ur ye gallus? Do ye come from Paisley? Then yer gran shagged an Italian.

Danny 2

Ironic Obit

Wilhelm Messerschmitt died on 15/9/1978 - the anniversary of Battle of Britain day. I am confident Britain's armed forces are fully prepared to take on Germany when they start WWIII.

When Gavin Williamson was defence secretary he threatened to deploy our aircraft carriers to intimidate China, despite having no aircraft. I suggested putting our remaining Spitfires on them as a gesture.

Danny 2

Re: Polish Air Force War Memorial

There's a memorial to General Sikorski in St Andrews, Fife. A local man taught me some Polish, amusingly he had no respect for recent Polish immigrants. I asked him why he'd come here and he said, "The Nazis murdered our village and all my family, only my mother escaped".

Weirdly in Scotland we also have a large Italian community that mostly came from prisoners of war that didn't want to return to Italy after the war. That left us a thriving network of ice cream cafes, and Paolo Nutini.

Danny 2

Re: The war is over, the empire is gone

"You started it"