Posts by Rich 11

BOFH: They say you either love it or you hate it. We can confirm you're going to hate it

Re: ... to be continued ...

he would believe anything I told him.

Six impossible things before breakfast. Seven, if you include the marmite.

Ex-health secretary said 'vast majority' were 'onside' with GP data grab. Consumer champion Which? reckons 20 million don't even know what it is

Re: Banging head against a brick wall

Those are for specific and very unusual circumstances. It's not reasonable to draw such a broad conclusion from that example alone.

Re: Opt out?

Remind me who helped start the Iraq War?

And, remind me, which party supported them in doing so? Only two Tory MPs voted against the motion, compared with the 84 Labour MPs who voted no.

Iranian state-backed hackers posed as flirty Scouser called Marcy to target workers in defence and aerospace

Re: Can't believe people

Have Walther PPK, will travel.

D'oh! Misplaced chair shuts down nuclear plant in Taiwan

Well of course they used a server cabinet. What did you expect them to use, a tape rack?

Donuts are on a special today -- buy one hole, get a second hole free.

Re: Homer

Homer would be prouder still of finding a bogey shaped like Moe.

Bill for HMS Vanity Gin Palace swells by £50m in two months

Peanuts and monkeys

The swimmy ginny palace is only expected (currently) to cost twice as much to build and outfit as the Covid Summer Food Fund did to run last year (which existed thanks only to the well-aimed boot of Marcus Rashford). Seeing 1.3m kids in poverty get a decent lunch for 12 weeks or seeing Boris and co swanning around selling more arms to dictators -- which would you support?

What is your greatest weakness? The definitive list of the many kinds of interviewer you will meet in Hell

Re: Dignity

Try imagining any job in Slough.

Somebody is destined for somewhere hot, and definitely not Coventry

Re: Works the other way as well

Depending on how much your employer is willing to pay, you can get monthly updates to the list too.

Snail mail would be a fool-proof way to inform patients about plans to slurp GP data, but UK govt won't commit

why was the organ donor subject not mailed to all?

Because for more than ten years polling had shown that two-thirds of the public were consistently in favour of the idea. In the year before presumed consent became the legal default opt-out forms were made available, and indeed unless you've died in the last fifteen months you can still register your opt-out today and the prior lack of it won't have affected you one iota.

Now contrast that situation with the second health data grab the government have attempted, and how they tried to keep that below the radar, with only the initial six-week period to opt out before consent was presumed. They've done it like that because they know it won't be popular, and that concerns would be raised about selling off the data to US insurers looking to break into the UK. They've done everything exactly the wrong way round, leading everyone to suspect that it all started with the desire to profit from our medical records, with insufficient protection deliberately applied.

How to keep your enterprise up to date by deploying the very latest malware

Re: Been there - on a Nuclear Power Plant

and if the control power was lost, it could be "Goodbye Basingstoke".

An opportunity missed.

Re: this apha code is not fit for production!

It's a very small country.

You're being generous there. In matter of fact, Luxembourg's front drive opens onto Belgium and the gate at the bottom of the garden leads to Germany. If you want to visit France you have to jump over the neighbour's fence.

The lights go off, broadband drops out, the TV freezes … and nobody knows why (spooky music)

'They'are listening

Living in Cheltenham as I do, when talking about an action designed to undermine the state and/or the natural party of government, such as manning a Greenpeace stall in the town centre or distributing half a gross of Green Party flyers during a council election, it's standard practice to preface the deeply suspect part of the telephone conversation with "Hi, GCHQ!".

Re: French water meters

electrical wiring that looked like Napoleon had installed it

No light fittings higher than 5'2"?

(Desolé - 1,57m.)

How many Brits have deleted life-saving track and trace app from their phones? No idea, junior minister tells MPs

Re: The greatest hoax ever

Hi finlaythethinker,

May I quote your original comment, please? I promise to duplicate it faithfully and in full.

I have an article to deliver on the arrogance of ignorance, so you can imagine the joy that coursed through my veins when I saw your choice of nym.

Best wishes,

Rich 11

Re: "We have always been at War with ...

So if the place is full of plague-zombies, the app would be useless.

Well, naturally. By this stage what you really need is a pump-action shotgun and a fire axe.

Boffins find an 'actionable clock' hiding in your blood, ticking away to your death

Re: So? What's his secret?

Being italian it probably means lots of wine, good olive oil and splendid food.

OK, so I've achieved the first of these but I'm not sure I've got the dedication left for the rest. I'll just have to coast through life and hope for the best.

Richard Branson plans to trump Jeff Bezos by 9 days in billionaires' space race

Re: To quote a well known phrase...

Er... Gravity wells extend to infinity.

They do, but "slip the bonds of earth" clearly refers to achieving escape velocity in the context of space flight. Obvious like, innit?

(I've just looked up the author of that sonnet and realised that I used to regularly drive through the village where he's buried, though I can barely picture it now and can't remember ever stopping. Apparently the sonnet is engraved on his headstone.)

UK Cabinet Office's spending on cybersecurity training rises by 500% in a year

Re: Surprise at CCTV....

If you want to encourage participation by people who are driven by greed rather than by public service, yes, you could do that. It's not like a minister -- who gets paid extra on top of their MP's salary -- doesn't still earn upwards of six times the average salary. I know some of them still struggle to find enough spare cash to clean their moats or to buy some fancy wallpaper, but for some unfathomable reason I have difficulty sympathising with those tragic predicaments.

BOFH: Oh for Pete’s sake. Don’t make a spectacle of yourself

Re: Having been

my PFY handed his notice in today :(

Is that going to make your incipient alcoholism better or worse?

What job title would YOU want carved on your gravestone? 'Beloved father, Slayer of Dragons, Register of Domains'

Re: Romanes eunt domus

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.

(I wish I'd known this existed back when I learned Latin. It would have been so much fun quoting it and watching my classmates try to translate it.)

Re: No gravestone for me

One medieval thinker conjectured that the human body must contain a small, invisible, intangible, indestructible bone from which God could reliably recreate and reanimate the entire body, regardless of where the bone ended up. He was worried that good Christians whose remains were destroyed by fire or lost at sea, and therefore never buried in hallowed ground, facing east and ready to rise on the Day of Resurrection, would miss out.

It would have made a lot more sense if he'd just given God an Infinity Gauntlet.

Re: Let's unhook the stirrups

You can be arrested if you have your underpants read Lolita.

Re: Sir Christopher Wren's epitaph

My gravestone will be inscribed with 'Hic iacet nemo' and nothing else. If I can be arsed to arrange a gravestone. Or afford one.

Re: Sir Christopher Wren's epitaph

I'm upvoting you, not because I have any interest in Oxonian transport but for the phrase 'professional bellend Jeremy Clarkson and his snivelling sycophants'.

Deluded medics fail to show Ohio lawmakers that COVID vaccines magnetise patients

Re: Struck off?

but as the individual medications are securely packaged in their blister packs, with clearly discernible writing on the outside, I can see no necessity for the colour coding.

I had to deal with a mix of packagings and jars, which as I said I did find fiddly. Part of that may have been down to the design of the pack; it's the only one I've ever seen so I don't know what might be available. My mum would have 2-5 pills in each compartment, and successive days would not necessarily have the same regimen, so it was absolutely necessary to double-check everything against the prescription labels after the pack had been loaded up, and to make sure that my clumsiness or replacing the sliding cover hadn't knocked one pill into another compartment.

Best of luck.

Re: Strike out!

Or to put it another way, a dim slogger with a decent memory will go further than someone who's bright but with poorer decontextualised recall- especially if they have been able to get through the previous school years by relying on thinking rather than recalling.

This is the excuse (and to some degree it is an excuse rather than a reason) I use for my poor exam results at school. I always did well throughout the year but considerably less well in the exams at the end of the year, which was really bloody demoralising and I never found a way to fix it (though focusing on the subjects I loved helped most). So it really galls me when I then see privately-educated Oxbridge PPE graduates in government who have put themselves forward to be responsible for the running of our society and for supposedly making all our lives better, who despite all their education can't string two joined-up thoughts together and seem to live in an information vacuum, unaware of the consequences of their actions. Then at times like this, they literally kill people.

Re: Heh

Don't worry. The number will reduce at Carousel.

Re: Struck off?

Why do Big Pharma insist on adding these colours, which add nothing to the efficacy of the drug, but increase the cost?

They do it for people who would otherwise be more likely to confuse which drugs they should take and when. It's a real bugger for you, obviously, but the practice is going to benefit more people than it harms.

I used to help my mum sort out her medication for the week ahead into the little compartment trays that are marked by day of the week and by time of day (well, by meal and waking/retiring), so that she was all set up for the times when no-one was there to help her. If it wasn't for all the different colours and shapes and sizes of the pills and capsules, I would have had to really concentrate to get it right. No-one could have asked that of my mum, given the age she was, her occasional lapses of concentration, the limited fine motor control she had and the pain she was sometimes in. It's not like she wasn't aware of the necessity of getting her medication right -- she'd been a nurse for 40 years.

Re: Struck off?

Acupuncture has very good numbers.

Acupuncture is a placebo for those who don't mind bizarre interventions applied to subjective non-specific problems such as pain relief. You can get 'good numbers' by wearing a white lab coat rather than a black t-shirt when telling a patient to take aspirin twice a day. You can get 'good numbers' by packaging an analgesic in a box marked with green stripes rather than blue stripes.

Acupuncture is nothing but a placebo. The pre-scientific justification that needles divert qi flow in the body is utter shite; acupuncture interventions using false needles which don't pierce the skin, or using needles in places other than a particular set of recognised qi points in the body, all produce the same placebo result. It should be telling that different schools of traditional medicine recognise different systems of qi points -- they can't even agree on their superstition because no-one is able to show that qi even exists let alone detect where it supposedly flows.

Re: The tribunal option

Sorry, that was meant as a reply to Rich 2 above.

Re: Struck off?

the flu vaccine can cause meningitis

I think you may have meant to say that the flu vaccine can cause Guillan-Barre Syndrome, which is possible because the flu virus itself (like many other infections) is capable of causing Guillan-Barre Syndrome. Since the annual vaccine is almost always made from an attenuated (ie drastically weakened rather than completely inert) flu virus, there is still a very small chance that the immune response which the vaccine triggers might also lead to a mild form of Guillan-Barre. It's not something you'd want to contract, but you're far more likely to contract it if you leave yourself open to a full-force flu infection, especially if you are elderly (fuck, I'm now in that category!), have a weakened immune system or a pre-existing respiratory condition.

No medical intervention is absolutely guaranteed to be 100% safe. People have died from an allergic reaction to sticking plasters, but far more people have died from leaving a wound open to the risk of infection.

The tribunal option

In many states it is quite difficult to get the State Medical Board to act. Texas, for example, is notorious for its libertarian views on letting any crackpot or grifter who once managed to get a few letters after their name carry on lying about the services they offer, to the point that the SMB there is seriously underfunded and understaffed. Maybe Ohio will be different, but who knows? Ohio does currently have a Republican governor and both houses of the State Assembly are Republican-controlled, but maybe those are the responsible Republicans who care about the health of their citizens and would recoil in horror if they knew that dangerous lies were being spread in the midst of a global pandemic.

Anyway, I can't look to see if a complaint against Tenpenny has been registered because right now the Ohio SMB web site appears to be down.

An anti-drone system that sneezes targets to death? Would that be a DARPA project? You betcha

Re: Loitering/multiple targets?

I suppose you could eventually make these with enough loitering capability to form a mobile screen around your forces while you drive around in places where you're not popular.

The Detroit Police Department has already placed an order.

'Vast majority of people' are onside with a data grab they know next to nothing about, reckons UK health secretary

Re: BBC News 24 talking to a medical researcher last night

How many lives are the Conservatives responsible for taking since they came to power over a decade ago?

To be fair, they did try this six or seven years ago. Then after that it slipped their minds, presumably. Or they were too distracted by all their infighting over Brexit to give a shit about the rest of us.

Re: Theoretically...

Admittedly, I am laying a lot of blame at NHS Digital's door here, when really there's no doubt in my mind that the Secretary of State doesn't have his fingers in this particular pie somewhere.

Are you suggesting that perhaps he's got a mate down the pub who's first in line to buy data access on the cheap? Perish the thought! And I definitely can't see someone as successful and as honourable as our lovely Secretary of State for Health and Social Care being fired as a scapegoat anytime soon, then desperately needing a well-paid non-exec directorship or three to help pay the defence costs in any civil suit which might subsequently be brought against him.

Global Fastly outage takes down many on the wibbly web – but El Reg remains standing

Re: “On-premise”?

Thank you for the clarification. Can you also enlighten us regarding the supposition of suppositories in a supported system?

UK government bows to pressure, agrees to delay NHS Digital grabbing the data of England's GP patients

Re: 1st July, 1st September

There's probably a whole team of people employed to be on the lookout for that sort of day

I'll save them a few dozen Serco consultants costing a grand a day -- the day to make the announcement will be 30th August, for the following reasons:

1) It's a Bank Holiday.

2) Parliament isn't sitting.

3) The news will be full of complaints about this year's scheduled exam results fiasco.

Opt out while your opt-out isn't yet overridden by the next opt-out scheme.

How many remote controls do you really need? Answer: about a bowl-ful

Re: You have my sympathies...

That's not a very sanitary place for storing a child. Won't anyone think of the crumpets?!

Just what is the poop capacity of an unladen sparrow? We ask because one got into the office and left quite a mess

Re: Not just sheds, and not just birds

I've also found a hedgehog in the kitchen and a duck in a room where I'd left the French window open.

Pfft. Where I grew up this was an opportunistic Sunday dinner.

Re: Small guage chicken wire?

It was either that or serve the pigeon an ASBO.

Presumably that's an Anti-Social Bird Order.

Big red buttons and very bad language: A primer for life in the IT world

Practice, practice, practice!

He also learned "that when required I can move pretty quickly whilst also providing a running profanity-loaded commentary."

It's worth practicing for such exigencies by developing these skills separately beforehand. I'd like to say that personally I've worked very hard on improving my reaction times and developing my fast-twitch muscle fibres through many years of fencing and playing squash, but in reality I've not got much further than turning the air blue at every opportunity.

All that Lego has a purpose: Researchers find that spatial memory improves kids' mathematical powers

Hells, hells, hells!

I was about to make a sarky response to your jokey claim, when all of a sudden the image of Priti Patel taking Gavin Williamson aside for an earnest little chat regarding unhealthy Danish cultural influences popped into my head. It won't go away.

Ransomware victim Colonial Pipeline paid $5m to get oil pumping again, restored from backups anyway – report

Re: Pretty cool though

Call me old-fashioned, but I thought the presence of armies indicated that 30% of Ukraine is currently under Russian control.

Do you by any chance think that because Rudy Giuliani didn't dig up the dirt his boss wanted on Hunter Biden, the remaining 70% of Ukraine is firmly under US control? Wasn't his boss in charge of the US at the time?

Re: Criminal to pay Criminals?

If terrorists kidnapped my kids and demanded I pay a ransom of all my liquid cash by the end of today or start receiving dismembered limbs in the post, I'd happily hand over the £13.52 and not give a shit about being prosecuted or the risk of jail time.

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

Re: You ain't serious

26.67768005289034, -80.03704457336461

I might have miscounted the decimal places there (it's too early in the morning), but I think that's a claimed precision on the order of 10 nanometres.

Twat

Uncle Sam will quite happily drop JDAMs on houses for THIS shit, and frankly, it's about time the ransomware crook gang started getting their houses exploded for attacks

How many resident children would you be happy to see 'exploded' along with their houses? Should neighbours or people in the street who also get 'exploded' be seen as unfortunate collateral damage or as entirely the fault of those goddam' cyber turrists for choosing to live in a residential neighbourhood?

Crane horror Reg reader uses his severed finger to unlock Samsung Galaxy phone

Re: finger in glove

Half a litre of Jack Daniels raises the most amazing existential questions...

Sure, no problem. Just tell me who's volunteering the eyeball.