* Posts by Rich 11

4575 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Jul 2009

Mayday in Moscow as devs will be Russian to Putin mandatory apps on phones, laptops, TVs

Rich 11

Re: What next?

Foreign travelers to install a "Visit Russia" App during their stay?

When I visited Russia a dozen years ago foreign visitors were supposed to register their mobile phones upon entry. No-one ever asked me for my number at any stage so I didn't go looking for a kindly policeman* to report myself to. My phone automatically picked up a connection (presumably due to whatever roaming agreement my provider had at the time) and I assumed that would give them all the info on me they wanted.

* The joke goes that if you want to tell a kind Russian militsia from an unkind one, pick the one who spends his day harassing gypsies rather than the one who is stopping motorists to extort a bribe.

Larry leaves, Sergey splits: Google lads hand over Alphabet reins to Sundar Pichai

Rich 11

Cast into the memory hole

Thanks to them, we have a timeless mission, enduring values, and a culture of collaboration and exploration.

Timeless mission and enduring values? 'Don't be evil' didn't exactly endure. And while they may have started off with a culture of collaboration and exploration, it quickly turned into monopolisation and exploitation.

Maybe Pichai should have done a bit of a search before writing that. Or maybe he did and Google showed him the results it thought he needed to see.

Den Automation raised millions to 'reinvent' the light switch. Now it's lights out for startup

Rich 11

Re: Of course

IoT devices that require the manufacturer's active support in order to continue functioning are simply brain dead.

And I'm sure the sales bumph clearly stated that risk, in very small print on the final page underneath an aluminium-tape sticker labelled 'Beware of the Leopard'.

Internet Society says opportunity to sell .org to private equity biz for $1.14bn came out of the blue. Wow, really?

Rich 11

Captive market about to be shafted

unknown private equity company Ethos Capital, funded by the investment vehicles of US billionaires

I think I can guess what their ethos is.

UK parcel firm Yodel plugs tracking app's random yaps about where on map to snap up strangers' tat

Rich 11

Oopsie

although it would probably point out that it does not get much credit for delivering several hundreds of thousands of parcels a day successfully.

Maybe all those compliments were delivered to the wrong address.

BBC tells Conservative Party to remove edited Facebook ad featuring its reporters

Rich 11

Dear Sir,

That's clearly demonstrating a bias in favour of brassicas.

Yours sincerely,

Mr Potatohead

Rich 11

this is after all an organisation that spent decades with a so-called 'globe' as its logo, without ever allowing the flat-earth society a right of rebuttal.

I would expect flat-earthers to be overjoyed at seeing a 2D 'globe' on their television screen. Their only complaint would be that it wasn't accelerating upwards at 9.81m/s.

Vote rigging, election fixing, ballot stuffing: Just another day in the life of a Register reader

Rich 11

The prize was tickets to one of the biggest bands of the time (a band originating from the, er, very green isle celebrated by the festival).

A band also famous for their global tax evasion strategies?

Go champion retires after losing to AI, Richard Nixon deepfake gives a different kind of Moon-landing speech...

Rich 11

Re: @ Chris the BeanCounter

That's why Mike Pence needs to be impeached alongside his boss. We don't want him to have the wrong sort of come-to-Jesus moment.

Rich 11

Re: @ Chris the BeanCounter

Presence of technology doesn't imply usage.

We have used nukes. Not to kill anyone (well, not directly) but to threaten to kill. That's the intended purpose of nuclear weapons; if they were actually used to kill then they would have failed in their purpose. That's MAD for you.

Why can't passport biometrics see through my cunning disguise?

Rich 11

Re: Habitual glasses wearer

I’m 54 but have the heart of a 30 years old

Jammy bastard. I'm 55 and I only have the heart of a 40 year old. I think Mephistopheles stiffed me, or maybe I didn't sacrifice the right number of goats. How many did you slaughter?

You're drinking morning coffee in 2019. These eggheads are in 2119 landing drones on their arms like robo-falconers

Rich 11

Hmm...

"In this case, the swarm, which is capable of tactile interaction with a user in VR, might represent the skeleton structure of the human body flying in the air. This may bring a new level of immersion of VR communication and teleconferencing."

On the one hand these sound like spurious excuses for a few engineers to play with new toys and pretend there's some practical use, but on the other hand I'd be happy to see almost anything that would liven up yet another ball-achingly dull teleconference.

Dead or alive, you're camming with me, says RoboPup: Bomb squad hires Boston Dynamics Spot to snoop on suspects, packages

Rich 11

Re: Sheesh

Then strap half a dozen of them to the underside of a drone and HALO them into the riot zone.

Planets may lurk in harshest environments. Not that Novell NetWare server you can't unplug – black holes

Rich 11

Re: Okay, planets. Why not ?

Black holes suck in everything, including any energy that might be around.

But only at the event horizon. Imagine a photon generated at a point somewhere in the accretion disk. If it happens to be emitted directly towards the black hole it will end up being sucked in (assuming it doesn't strike anything else first). If it is emitted in a direction that will just miss the event horizon it will swing around the black hole and maybe even head back almost towards the point where it was generated. If it is emitted off to one side it could pass round the black hole and head out into space, possibly even appearing to a distant observer as if it had passed through the black hole. But if it is emitted directly away from the black hole then it will escape quite comfortably, even though to an observer higher up the gravity well it will appear to take longer than a simple distance-over-velocity calculation would suggest. So a gamma ray emitted from the accretion disc could end up striking a planet in the outer disc, generating a particle shower and ultimately heat.

(All of the above is a simplistic treatment; the photon's path would also be affected by the frame-dragging effect caused by a spinning black hole.)

Taxi for Uber: Ride-hailing app giant stripped of licence to operate in London

Rich 11

They should be overjoyed by the disruption.

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

Rich 11

Re: There but for the grace not so much

I'm sure Den Haag is a wonderful city but I only ever want to visit it as a tourist.

Rich 11

Re: Interesting HR Interviews

"Ordering the summary execution of terrorists and lusers."

Beware the trainee with time on his hands and an Acorn manual on his desk

Rich 11

Re: Oh, the joys

Get rid of net send or get rid of students?

Found on Mars: Alien insects... or whatever the hell this smudge is supposed to be, anyway

Rich 11

Re: 20/20

I was fine until I lay down to sleep and found the room refused to stay still.

Lightweight. 400ml of Glenfiddich is breakfast.

Rich 11

Re: No oxygen

If you can metabolize in a near-vacuum of carbon dioxide at -60C, good luck to you. You're probably single-celled and not very good at repairing UV damage.

Rich 11

Re: Show me more

You see what you want to see.

Pareidolia. If this professor emeritus had spent the last 50 years studying mosses instead of insects he'd be telling us that Mars is packed full of fossilised moss.

BOFH: Trying to go after IT's budget again?

Rich 11

This day I have decided not to hire someone big to punch my boss.

(My mate in the next cubic-hell is sufficiently motivated to do it for free.)

Bad news: 'Unblockable' web trackers emerge. Good news: Firefox with uBlock Origin can stop it. Chrome, not so much

Rich 11

Re: Build a List?

There's always the lampposts.

No wonder cops are so keen on Ring – they can slurp your doorbell footage with few limits, US senators complain

Rich 11

Re: The un-named PR gave half an answer of course

If the camera is recording, it can record a maximum of 30 seconds or so, before it has to overwrite the video, you can then use the override switch in the case of an accident to keep it rolling and recording.

Yeah, my first thought after an accident would be to hit the dashcam override rather than check for fractures or serious bleeding before hauling myself out of the overturned car ready to help the other occupants get free.

Space-wrecks: Elon's prototype Moon ferry Starship blows its top during fuel tank test

Rich 11

Re: "anomaly"

It wasn't an "anomaly", it was a "novel exothermic excursion".

Video-editing upstart bares users' raunchy flicks to world+dog via leaky AWS bucket

Rich 11

Rule 34

All you can do is hope that nobody's downloaded your self-starring grumble flicks and recognised you.

This is why I always wrap a plastic bag tightly around my head when starring in a porn film.

Interpol: Strong encryption helps online predators. Build backdoors

Rich 11

It would certainly be a punishment to be assigned that task! I struggle to understand Trump's tweets at the best of times and I have the advantage of English being my first language. Or maybe that's a disadvantage...

Rich 11

There's no need for the Chinese intelligence agencies to have a backdoor to President Trump's iPhone. They only have to remember to check Twitter every ten minutes to learn everything that's going on in the White House.

Rich 11

Here we go again...

"Service providers, application developers and device manufacturers are developing and deploying products and services with encryption which effectively conceals sexual exploitation of children occurring on their platforms,"

Abducted children are driven away in cars and molested in buildings. Ban all cars and demolish all buildings which are not made entirely of glass.

Pack your bags, you're going to America, Lord Chief Justice tells accused Brit hacker

Rich 11

Re: Odd thought

Iran is already capable of jailing people they don't like, in one instance ably assisted by a UK Foreign Secretary.

Bloodhound gang hits 1,010kph, retreats to lab to work on smashing the land speed record

Rich 11

250mph? I get the runs when my bicycle starts wobbling downhill.

Rich 11

For 44 of those hours the bulldozers are going to be kept very busy filling in the Don Valley from a depth of just over a half a mile.

Welcome to cultured meat – not pigs reading Proust but a viable alternative to slaughter

Rich 11

Plus ca change

Cheap in this context means mass-produced in giant vats of slurry with the minimum hygiene standards they can get away it.

So just like a saveloy sausage, then?

Like a BAT outta hell, Brave browser hits 1.0 with crypto-coin rewards for your fave websites

Rich 11

Did somebody just hurt your feelings, Snowflake Bob?

Can't you hear me knocking? But I installed a smart knocker

Rich 11

Re: (which I can then change when I get back home).

Pfft. These dimensions are one too small for me.

Rich 11

Re: Automatic cat flaps are all the rubbish...

and left with nary a backward glance

Except to check that it had left a giant dump smack in the centre of your kitchen.

Rich 11

We all know warnings on small screens are meant to be ignored.

Rich 11

Re: (which I can then change when I get back home).

Safer still to also change your family and friends.

What a load of bollards! Object of bloke's street furniture romp run over

Rich 11

Nah, don' do it. Leave 'im, Pete, he's not worf it!

NASA boffins tackle Nazi alien in space – with the help of Native American tribal elders

Rich 11

This just seems to be carrying political correctness a bit too far.

Rubbish. It was a nickname due for replacement as usual, that's all. Your response tells us more about your mindset than it does about NASA's.

I've had it with these motherflipping eggs on this motherflipping train

Rich 11

Re: Legality

The police have indeed been known to execute suspected criminals on the spot.

Google brings its secret health data stockpiling systems to the US

Rich 11

Re: Nothing surprises me about Google anymore....

Third world? New World and Old World countries would be more profitable.

Anyway, let's not go giving them ideas.

Is this paragraph from Trump or an AI bot? You decide, plus buy your own AI for $399

Rich 11

Re: I thought that Donald 'I cheat at Golf' Trump

What's wrong with electing a three-toed sloth? It'd do far less harm both at home and abroad than any of the post-war American presidents have done.

One man's mistake, missing backups and complete reboot: The tale of Europe's Galileo satellites going dark

Rich 11

Re: It's Phil's fault!

The end-of-year leap-second added most years (assuming no earthquakes) will be the next to go.

Rich 11

Re: So in short...

These friendly vendors, would they be ones in which the managers making decisions, happen to end up with non-executive directorships in, by any chance would they?

Those managers don't make decisions. They call in management consultants to do that for them, consultants who belong to one of the Big Four and who have a healthy rotating-door policy with regard to industry executives looking for a two-year placement position.

Hyphens of mass destruction: When a clumsy finger meant the end for hundreds of jobs

Rich 11

(same place now calls itself a University!)

You make this sound like a name change made on a whim for marketing purposes. A college has to offer a sufficient range and quality of courses, postgraduate and research as well as undergraduate, to qualify and it also has to earn degree-awarding powers. It's a rigorous process of qualification and assessment which usually takes five years or more to attain, even once the minimum academic provision is in place. A successful result culminates in the grant of a Royal Charter and the right to call itself a university

Blood, snot and fear: Why the travelling lone tech reporter should always knock twice

Rich 11

Re: Wait, Wut?

It's not what you expect on a plane!

I only ever expect snakes.

UK Home Office: We will register thousands of deactivated firearms with no database

Rich 11

Re: Sounds like a job for...

Please don't swear like that. I can put up with terms like frigging felching bollock-fucked motherfister, but not that.

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

Rich 11

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

Drop rule 4. You're not helping anyone there.

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

Rich 11

Re: I don't understand the diagram

So why the gigantically-disproportioned tail ?

Artists like doing impressions. Especially when they get Monet for it.