Posts by Danny 2

'Sophisticated' cyber attack on UK Labour Party platforms was probably just a DDoS, says official

Well, the Russians have been funding the Tories so they must have a reason.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/nov/06/no-10-accused-of-ignoring-evidence-of-russian-interference

Beardy biologist's withering takedown of creationism fetches $564,500 at auction

Re: H. Sapiens vs. the strong, capable H. Neandnerthalensis...

@Tikimon

I suspect ever more these days that genus Homo's initial success was due to throwing ability - rocks first, then spears

I heard the spear thing too from the BBC so it must be true. We could throw them, they couldn't

I have a good enough story. I had a gay childhood pal who died last year from heart failure due to HIV drug side effects,

He attacked me when we were five or six by throwing stones at me. At the time I was among the best three fighters in my year, and certainly the best stone thrower. I skipped his heels with stones a few times to warn him off.

He said, "I'm not you fighting any more". Because he'd stupidly started it and I was easily beating him. I didn't want to fight a gay, it was like fighting a girl. We always knew who the gays were and never attacked them.

He turned around back to me and threw his stone over his head. He didn't aim it. Struck me on the bridge of my nose. Split it open, blood everywhere. He didn't even know. He burst out laughing when I told him when I met him when I told him that when we was 21.

Re: Escherichia coli is just at the top of its own pinnacle as is man.

E.Q. stands for encephalization quotient? Damn, a nightmare hippy chick convinced me it meant emotional intelligence.

237 UK police force staff punished for misusing IT systems in last 2 years

ACAB

There is an anarchist phrase, All Cops Are, but they aren't all. The fact we even know that some are is because some aren't. The worst ones get promoted though. Their training is awful, their culture is awful. A lovely young relative who completed the training started complaining about "human rights" because they stopped them doing their job 'properly'.

I've witnessed, or been subjected to, some nasty police abuses and it's the one time I appreciate my awful brother in law being a lawyer. I was arrested with a girl in a wheelchair who was being hurt by a MoD plod. I told the cop arresting me to stop his mate hurting her. Typical escalating cop response, "Why, are you going to do something about it?"

They are always looking to start a fight.

"Yes, I will. My brother in law is a QC, my family is well off, and I will have both of you in court. Unless you stop him hurting her now you'll both lose your jobs and face prison".

I know, posh privilege.

Police get trained to have a sense of entitlement and empowerment. I'd trust anyone here with my data rather any police officer. I'm not anti-police, they have a far worse job than any of us. My cop relative came late to Christmas once because they had to deal with a woman who'd killed her kids and jumped out the window without killing herself. My worst Christmas at work was swapping out the server hard disks at Sky TV, for far more money.

Ex from Hell gets six years for online stalking, revenge pics campaign against two women

Re: My guess, he's lucky to be alive

@MachDiamond

I've known some girls (women) that go from one abusive relationship to the next. They seem to be attracted to "bad boys" and never figure out why they wind up with complete tossers.

Misleadingly sexist. I was in an relationship from 18 to 24 with an abusive girlfriend. At the time I never recognised that, and indeed wondered at the time why so many women stay in abusive relationships without realising I was. I've since read about the psychology behind it, covert NPDs, traumatic bonding, and isolating the victim from family and friends. It's interesting reading even if it hasn't affected you personally - certainly I noticed it straight away when my nephew started dating an NPD. He didn't have to suffer for six years, just one, but he did get stabbed and lost his career.

It is important to process it and learn from it or else you'll never trust anyone again.

Here are some deadhead jobs any chatbot could take over right now

French folk are cons

I had a chic Parisian girlfriend and was trying to get an IT job there but my French was too awful. I had Grenoble French, not Paris French. So I was with her and I swore in French to impress her, and she slapped me hard. I said what, I swear in English all the time. "In English it is funny, in French it is rude". So I said you love Serge Gainsbourg and Jaques Brel, and they swear all the time, and she replied, "You are no Brel or Gainsbourg".

I was working in an international organisation in the Netherlands, officially everyone talked English but unofficially nobody did, not even me apparently. A French guy asked me to call Paul Andrews. I didn't know the guy and had to look up the internal phone book, but because French people can't speak properly I was trying to look up Poland Roos. Roos is a common surname in the Netherlands.

Everyone, all nationalities, hated the French employees when I started there. Which surprised me because I preferred them. A few months in I totally got it.

Morrisons is to blame for 100k payroll theft and leak, say 9,000 workers

How do you get two whales in a supermarket trolley?

You take the S from Safe and the F from way.

It's at least a decade since I told that joke here. Honestly, it was funny in the nineties.

[Edit: So there was a pre-existing joke with the same setup but a different punchline. The first punchline was "Down the M5". A pun on "To Wales". I won't explain the second joke because you are all smart enough to figure it out. ]

[Edit: To give youngsters a fair chance I should add that in the UK Morrisons used to be called Safeways. The past is a foreign country: they code things differently there.]

It's almost as if IT staff should be properly paid, trained, funded, respected and listened to. And you know, or may not know, we actually are in most of Europe. Britain is an outlier for promoting wide-boy accountants over actual engineers.

I'm having a bad day, I just learned my niece is going to become a lawyer. I had hopes for her. "An environmental lawyer"...aye, spin it how you want it. If Britain has a fault then it is not a lack of lawyers.

Remember the Uber self-driving car that killed a woman crossing the street? The AI had no clue about jaywalkers

It's a shame that someone was killed, but it was advertised

Oh, Cyril, that is cold. If I advertise I will be releasing a chlorine gas cloud in my neighbourhood then who is to blame?

It's scary how many roadkill anecdotes I have, this one is meta. I was a passenger when my friend ran down an Alsatian that ran out in front of him. He jumped out his car to check if it was dead, and it sprang up and bit his hand before running away. Served him right, well, I laughed.

I told that story at a dinner party and it prompted confessionals from everyone in the room. The first person admitted running down a rabbit. The next person admitted to running down a cat. And then the animals got bigger and the stories more gory. The last guy in the room said nothing but he started crying. His fiancee said, "Last year Paul ran down and killed an OAP. He wasn't prosecuted because the man just walked out between parked cars in front of him, but..."

I burst out laughing myself. Literally by myself, nobody in my house saw the funny side.

I was a schoolchild when I saw a girl my age flying though the air after being hit by a car. About 15 feet high, tumbling through the air, survived with only one broken leg. She was screaming but what I remember more is the frozen look on the drivers face.

I used to hate car drivers and would terrify them with awful stunts I won't list now.

Re: What about the driver?

The driver was playing Frogger.

A car either drives itself safely or it doesn't, a human in a driving seat is just a scape goat.

I used to drive 100,000+ miles a year as a tech support engineer and half the time I was on autopilot, sometimes with bad results. I never hurt anyone else but I could have. Being driven by a car that seems to know what it is doing will just lull the driver into a false sense of security and they'll lose attention.

It'd be better the other way around, the human drives the car and the computer intervenes if the human makes a mistake.

Re: Surely

@MW

It was a blind bend in the road so I had to choose in less than a second. I maybe would've chosen to hit the baby deer if there was a passenger I valued in the car. I hate to admit this but maybe a different choice if it was my car.

I think there are far too many wild deer in the UK today, but I also watched Bambi a lot when I was a bairn so, well, I'd trust a self-driving car made by Disney more than one made by Uber.

Re: Surely

I was driving a company car on a country road near West Calder and there was a deer and a bambi in the middle of the road. The deer sprang off but the bambi slipped. I had no time to brake so I drove the car into a ditch. My reasoning was it was just a company car and it was just me.

I wish the software engineers behind autonomous cars prioritise saving pedestrians over passengers.

The roads in the area were also filled with wabbits. The thing about wabbits is they don't run off to the side of the road, they run straight down the road expecting to out-run the danger. You have to pull over so they feel safe enough to run to the fields, or drive slowly along behind them.

NSA to Congress: Our spy programs don’t work, aren’t used, or have gone wrong – now can you permanently reauthorize them?

Re: Deleted the data....

I may be gullible and stupid, but I'm not buying that.

I've seen TV programmes and films where someone pays off a blackmailer on condition that is the only copy of the video/photos/data. As if you can trust the word of any blackmailer.

Re: No such thing as innocent anymore. Just "Not yet guilty".

I was thinking that when Matt Hancock announced the NHS would test all babies DNA.

Every murderer and terrorist was once a baby.

What is this, 1989? Laplink is still a thing and wants to help with Windows 7 migrations

Boundary Event

I need to preface this by saying I don't know if it is true, or if I'm recalling it correctly, but I this heard once from a reliable source, like a TV or radio, and I like the idea.

Apparently every time you walk through a door way your short term memory is downloaded into your medium term memory and your short term memory is erased. That's why we keep walking into rooms and forgetting why we were going in there. The theory was it's an evolutionary throwback to when we were hairier and we left tall grass or a forest and had to have our wits around us to be alert for predators.

Even if it isn't true, it's a great excuse for being absent minded at work.

Re: external USB hard drives

Your voice is made of the six elements, but it is truly lovely.

Should I try to make it mine? Should I record it?

But I know that what I can hold on to or record would not be your true voice.

What I get may only be a picture,

a magnetic tape,

a painting,

or a book.

Your smile is made of the six elements,

but it is truly wonderful.

Should I try to make it mine?

Should I try to make it last for a long time?

Should I try to own or record it?

But I know that what I can own or record could not be your true smile.

It would only be some of the elements.

Your eyes are impermanent.

Your eyes are not you.

Yes, I have been told, and I have seen it,

yet they are still beautiful.

Just because they are impermanent,

they are all the more beautiful.

The things that do not last long

are the most beautiful things -

a shooting star, a firework.

Boffins hand in their homework on Voyager 2's first readings from beyond Solar System

Re: But what about Brexit?

Apparently we are going to have to have a customs border between us and the Oort Cloud.

The Lion, The Witch and The Backstop

https://xkcd.com/2218/

'Peregrine falcon'-style drone swarms could help defend UK against Gatwick copycat attacks

Love this site

The first, and best, forum for IT ornithologists.

I'm listening to awful fireworks, scaring animals for no good reason. New Year in Amsterdam, 1999, and I passed a tree full of terrified parrots. The Dutch are really violent with their fireworks, they fire them at each other.

The Guy Fawkes mask from the Alan Moore graphic novel 'V For Vendetta' is now synonymous with protesters, but purely by chance.

It was first used at a protest about 15 years ago by Anonymous, protesting against Scientology outside a London court. To hide their identities because Scientology is OCD evil.

Alan Moore was very proud when he heard, even though he hated the movie. It was utterly accidental though. I knew the comic and recognised the mask so I asked the protesters if they knew it's providence. They didn't, hadn't heard of V For Vendetta, just chose it because a local shop was selling them cheaply.

It is a very good comic book.

Apparently Fawkes would have blown up the whole of Westminster, the district not just the palace.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/11/guy-fawkess-misunderstood-legacy/601336/

Re: So you have a drone...

Ah, the 2013 horse meat scandal.

Re: It would be much more spectacular...

Millennial Falcon: an adult bird who can't afford to leave the nest

Are you as handy with privacy certs as you are with a screwdriver? Ikea has the perfect vacancy

Re: I work there...

"The building in question was a former bank"

I had to run a short cable in a district (minor) court building that used to be a bank. Nobody told me it used to be a bank. I ruined 1, 2, 3, 4 drill bits then burned out my electric hand drill. We were a council though and had heavy equipment. We got in two guys with a drill up to my chest, and they couldn't get through it either.

Then it occurred to me we could just run the cable under the door against regulations, and we went that way.

I have so much respect for bank burglars. If you can get through an armoured wall without explosives then you kind of deserve whatever is behind it. That is a serious engineering challenge requiring specialist equipment.

Re: I work there...

Plus they are gorgeous, boy band /girl group good looking. I'm glad you have to have Ä and ö on your keyboard, punishment for your smug hygge. Enjoy your rotten herring.

Oh, and El Reg, it's an Allen key, not a screwdriver. Effing software engineers.

That's not long division, Timmy! China school experimented on pupils with mind-reading tech

Re: Hummmm... wut ?

It's dubious. It seems to be based upon a 2018 "market research report" by an Indian/American company called Grandview Research.

This looks like a peer researched science paper, but it obviously isn't and even it doesn't conclude what is claimed:

https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/brain-computer-interfaces-market

Re: Dementia?

Locked in Syndrome.

We've always been in a trade war with East Asia.

I cannae do it, captain, I'm giving it all she's got, but she just cannae take another dose of bullsh!t

Whisky tasting using a bimetallic nanoplasmonictongue

https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlepdf/2019/nr/c9nr04583j

They built a cheap device that can taste any whisky and tell you if it is genuine. They only chose whisky because it's Glasgow Uni and they knew that would make headlines here, it'd work with anything. The principle is it compares a map of known characteristics to a new substance, so in their press release they call it a 'tongue'.

We have trained dogs that sniff out diseases such as cancer more accurately than cheap devices can, indeed one Perth woman can sniff Parkinson's better than any cheap diagnostic device. My first manager started up a medical diagnostics electronics firm nearly thirty years ago, and I regret not going with him. Not that he made a lot of money, he had a few failed 'tricorder' type products, but because the field is so fertile today.

Re: "People will always argue over truth"

Debatable, Dan. Remember the dodgy dossier, Saddam's 45 minutes away from yellowcaking us? In fact, isn't that yellowcake in your post?

Boffins don bad 1980s fashion to avoid being detected by object-recognizing AI cameras

Face paint / IR led glasses

I was an activist for a bit. There was one protest where everyone wore identical face paint, mainly reflective white. The arresting cops couldn't identify the protesters in court, because they were all identical, so no convictions. I note that the Hong Kong face mask protesters were mixing with Hong Kong trick and treaters.

To avoid all CCTV, yet remain inconspicuous to humans, we later put IR leds into £1 glasses to dazzle the cameras.

Not just adhesive, but alcohol-resistant adhesive: Well done, Apple. Airpods Pro repairability is a zero

alcohol-resistant adhesive

So, Scotch tape?

Cubans launching sonic attacks on US embassy? Not what we're hearing, say medical boffins

Re: I have no idea

"please God no, bagpipes"

I shouldn't say this as a Scot, I'm likely to be excommunicated, exiled, or discombobulated, but I loathe public pipes. I much prefer the gentler, quieter Northumberland pipes.

That being admitted, funk. African Americans seem to have made them work.

Parliament- The Silent Boatman

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CK8KPh167g

(Thanks to Northumbria for the Unthanks. We always preferred you to Cumbria. Any time you feel like getting together, well, Scotland is here, arms open]

Rachel Unthank & The Winterset - Blue Bleezin' Blind Drunk (live at Abbey Road)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHN4XTQKf2k

My local pub is the Blue Blazer,

Congratulations on England for coming second in the Rubgy World Cup

Some of you will read that as an attack, some of you will ignore it, some of you will be googling 'rugby'. More football players though.

"Football is not just a simple game. It is also a weapon of the revolution."

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/2393299/Football-Diary-Only-one-Che-Guevara.html

Just take a look at the carnage on Notepad++'s GitHub: 'Free Uyghur' release sparks spam tsunami by pro-Chinese

Re: were branded "criminals" by Spanish officials

I'm Danny 2 here. Two isn't my actual name, so why the anon cow. I'm not SNP, I am an anarchist. Pro independence, not anti English. Anti nuclear, aye.

"In case you haven't noticed" there are a fair few fake posters flooding decent websites with foreign propaganda designed to rile us up and cause violent divisions where there were just disagreements.

Post under a name so you can be held accountable for your comments. You are not a whistle-blower here so your "The original AC, no matter how badly he worded it, has a valid point" is laughable. How can I know you from "the original AC"?

Re: were branded "criminals" by Spanish officials

Thankin' you Veti! I disagree slightly that there is no comparison. Catalonia is one of the wealthiest areas of Spain, Scotland is one of the poorer in the UK - would be as rich as Norway though if we'd invested our oil though. Scotland always was a nation with an independent legal system, et cetera, Catalonia not so much.

I have Catalan neighbours in Edinburgh who hung their flags out their windows. They don't do that now, scared of European Arrest Warrants.

I love most English people, really lovely neighbours, just terrible landlords. Centuries ago it used to be a fight to the death, now it's a civil dispute with the emphasis on civil. Spain should grow the muck up and realise democracy is more than just a majority, it's also about checks and balances.

Re: were branded "criminals" by Spanish officials

Life long pro-independence Scot, anti-war protester, arrested at Faslane, harassed on fake terrorism charges, and I've posted about all that here before plus the journalists here can question me.

You smell fake to me. You smell foul. You smell like cheap vodka.

Re: The problem with spreading "Freedom and Democracy"......

England isn't a nation state, it's a nation within the UK. Sussex would have to try to leave the UK, and Scotland showed the way. First devolution, then a Scottish government recommending independence, then a referendum. I personally wanted Scottish independence from the UK, but I admire the British government, the UK state, for providing a peaceful legitimate vote on the issue.

There were no arrests of politicians here, no street violence to speak of, we conducted ourselves civilly. That's not the case in Spain and Catalonia today, and I think the most obvious reason for the difference is Spain has only been a democracy since 1975 and many fascists are still in power.

You could post under your actual username here and I'd treat you more seriously, but you smack of propaganda tonight.

Aye, right, or should I say Alt Right. We are British, across the political spectrum but still polite and rational to each other, and we maintain our pseudonym's integrity.

I can see no utility or credibility in posting an inflammatory, accusatory comment under Anon Cow. Playground stuff, and please cease and desist.

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

Re: SunOS 4.1.3 yeeuch.

I appreciate the sentiment. I only knew 7, and everything before it and after it was grief. Sometimes you want to tell developers to have a year off, step away from the keyboard, put down the knife.

You should maybe give seven a chance, you can have my books if you want because they are museum or landfill ready.

My last serious job interview was an offshoot of Sun in Linlithgow, I just got a flashback to the casually dressed young woman who greeted me, and it was for an offshoot developing a high density storage drive. The offshoot was blown away by a cloud.

Bet you can't guess what I'm wearing, or where I'm wearing it

Re: Identity theft is a bummer

It was my birthday recently, and both my first love and my ex-fiancee sent me congratulations three days later. I'd been sad for three days, then confused until I remembered I always used to lie about my birthday. To avoid dumps. And my first pet was my mums maiden name. And I don't have a bank account. I'm a honeypot trap for scammers.

[Edit: Oh Muscleguy, I bought frozen Durian fruit from the Leith Walk Chinese supermarket and left it in the High Riggs Job Centre. It doesn't smell when it is frozen, just when it thaws. Trust me, they deserved it]

"People in wheelchairs have climbed Kilimanjaro"

Climbed? A woman in the New York Times, she had some horrible illness and to illustrate how fit she used to be she said she had climbed Kilimanjaro twice. I commented, "Did you drop your car keys up there?" and over 200 people liked my comment. My most liked comment of all time.

My mates sister climbed a Monro 8½ months pregnant, when most women claim they can't get out of a chair. There is a fine line between mountaineering and illegal termination.

Re: So, Adobe publishes your personal details and that is not sensitive data ?

The German Democratic People's Republic is gone, it's history. I like communism as much as the next man but why keep bringing it up. They had a referendum and built down the wall.

Dammit.

Drunk Danny is smarter than me, he's better looking than me, he's a better fighter than me, he's a much better dancer and lover, and I get all that, I've learned to live in his shadow. What annoys me is he is much better at hiding things than I am at finding them. Car keys, telephone, quarter bottle of gin. It's as if he knows how I think.

Top American watchdog refuses to release infamous 2012 dossier into Google’s anti-competitive behavior

There is no Internet B

We need to act now. Already some parts of the internet are uninhabitable, in less than twenty years we will reach a tipping point of inanity, and that is only one letter away from insanity.

Astroboffins rethink black hole theory after spotting tiny example with its own star buddy

Re: 4 Msol limit?

You missed the latest episode of Young Sheldon when he fact checks The Lord of The Rings, while trying not to think about science in case it drove him crazy.

The Littlest Hobo?

ProtonMail shoves its iOS app's source code on GitHub for world+dog to rummage around in

Alternative way of thinking about it is the more we promote and recommend encrypted email then the more secure our email becomes.

Don't rule out a tin foil hat, tin foil does. https://emfacademy.com/aluminum-foil-emf-radiation/

Since when did saying you mucked someone's mum make you a "terrorist"?

A younger posh peace protester invited me to an upper class dinner party, and then mocked me by saying the obvious in front of her young posh pals, that I was old enough to be her father.

"That is very true. Where exactly was your mother living in 1986?"

I honestly said that in cadence, she threw a punch at me but I was expecting it and she missed.

She had punched me earlier after she'd boasted her mum was in Wickerman. She said her mum was one of the nude young girls dancing, and I admitted I'd wanked over her mother on TV when I was a teen. That was a solid punch to my jaw that I should have anticipated in retrospect, but I quickly learned my lesson.

Posh girls. Can't live with them, never really wanted to live with them.

I discovered the world's last video rental kiosk and it would make a great spaceship

Re: Baby boxes

I know the Scottish Government has introduced baby boxes full of goodies such as a soft toy, a onesie, and a wee bottle of Buckie,

My main point was Finnish parents are alleged to leave their babies in their boxes outdoors or on window sills.

The babies who nap in sub-zero temperatures

"Babies clearly slept longer outdoors than indoors," says Marjo Tourula. While indoor naps lasted between one and two hours, outdoor naps lasted from 1.5 to three hours.

"Probably the restriction of movements by clothing could increase the length of sleep, and a cold environment makes swaddling possible without overheating," she says.

According to her research, -5C is the best temperature for an outdoor nap - though some parents she spoke to even put their children out at -30C.

WARNING! If a Scottish parent puts their baby outside in a box even in above zero temperatures then you will likely face arrest and lose your child.

So how well did you block fake news, Google? Facebook? Web goliaths turn in self-assessment homework to Europe

Re: Clickbait!

I'd like to point out Danny 5 is just Danny 2 upside down. I'd like to claim to be the original Danny, but I have yet to see a Danny or Danny 1 here.

Oh, and I'm not click bait but my Scottish brogue is American chick bait.

Shout out to Dan the Old 55, and all the Dans, Dannys, Daniels and Danes here. Once we can accelerate the cloning process then this forum is ours.

You'e yping i wong: macOS Catalina stops Twitter desktop app from accepting B, L, M, R, and T in passwords

Win10 'upgrade'

One of the first Windows 10 upgrades disabled six keys on my mum's HP laptop. My first thought was she'd spilled liquid on it, but the keys weren't located next to each other so the update was the next most obvious culprit. I updated the drivers from HP to no effect. Luckily all the keys needed for my password worked, though I had to teach her how to cut and paste characters, which is obviously a pain. I was just about to strip and clean the machine when the next update came, and hey presto, all the keys worked again.

Come on, you can't be serious: Now Australia mulls face-recog tech for p0rno site age checks

Re: Hmmmm... Bruce?

I met a guy who was introduced to me as a world expert on crayfish. I told him I'd never met a world expert on anything, and asked how many world experts on crayfish were there globally? He estimated two hundred. I asked him which songs about crayfish he knew and he didn't know any, while off the top of my head I named a dozen. I told him not to go onto Mastermind until I had time to make him a compilation CD.

UK ads watchdog slaps Amazon for UX dark arts after folk bought Prime subs they didn't want

Video 'partner' channels scam

My mum is used to Netflix so when Prime Video recommended a series for her she clicked on it without realising it was on Starz, costing an extra £8 or so a month. She didn't like that programme and never finished watching the first episode, but was charged each month for almost a year before she noticed it on her credit card bill. Or rather she had noticed it but ignored it because she assumed it was something my father or I had done.