Posts by Rich 11

In-flight movies via BYOD? Just what I always wan... argh no we’re all going to die!

Re: "All they have to do is ensure the Wi-Fi is secure enough to stop Reg readers from...........

Series I-VI for the plebs in Economy, series VII-X for the posh wankers in Business and First. Serve 'em right.

I'd only use the on-board WiFi to log on to Flightradar anyway...

Although if you've got a beard or any melanin in your skin there's a good chance that the moron you're sitting next to will think you're trying to down the aircraft by remote control...

Mars' poles shrink during ice ages, boffins say

Glacial progress

Obviously the Ice Warriors will be using this to cover their advance south. The Utopia Planitia colony's days are numbered.

UK eyes frikkin' Laser Directed Energy Weapon

Do you also have a grey Nehru jacket? Is a henchman obligatory?

Gillian Anderson: The next James Jane Bond?

No, since she's not British.

She grew up here. She does a better British accent than any American actress (with the possible exception of Maggie Gyllenhall).

Re: " will have to to beat off stiff competition"

The best Lewis looks like he could do would offer someone a limp handshake and ask if they'd like a cup of tea. . .

I dunno. He made a good job of playing a menacing psycho in The Escapist.

Don't tell the Cabinet Office: HMRC is building its own online ID system

Re: "..will yield £1bn in extra tax revenue.."

But then Bernie and co wouldn't dip into their wallets* and donate some trifling sum** to swell the coffers of whichever bland and obsequious party happens to be in power this decade.

* Which are kept in an offshore jacket pocket, for obvious reasons

** Trifling in their minds, not those of anyone else

Watchdog snaps: Privatise the Land Registry? What a terrible idea!

Private monopolies made from essential services that we have no choice about using are what our caring government is all about.

Or they'll create an artificial internal market in which two registries compete for, um, registrations and we can sit on the sidelines and watch as the data gets ever more uncertain and fragmentary. Which, once the FOI requirements have lapsed (or have been abolished by the next industry-cocksucking Parliament), will suit all the offshore buyers who want to hide their billions in tax-friendly brassplate land-purchase companies.

Scum.

Safety, pah! Digital Dukes of Hazzard have robot cars powersliding

Re: Wrong solution

The fundamental problem with public transport is that it is costly and inconvenient for areas of low population densities.

No-one is suggesting otherwise. However, like the postal service and so many other things in life, there are advantages in having the many support the few to at least a basic degree.

I've got a cousin who is in her 80s yet is still able once a week to take the bus from her village of 100 into the nearest town, where -- amongst other activities -- she can buy a load of stuff from Iceland and get them to deliver it to her cottage half an hour after the bus gets her home. That sort of independence makes all the difference to her. One day she'll end up in a nursing home (like most of us will), but until then it's things like the bus service which helps keep her active and independent, rather than sitting in an armchair all day at a cost of £600 a week to the local care budget. Call me a bleeding-heart socialist, but that seems like a good investment to me.

Well...

That, and the software algorithms developed by Georgia Tech, enables the car to game out over 2,000 projections of where it'll head in the next 2.5 seconds.

That's certainly a new definition for a Monte Carlo rally.

Flying filers and Game of Thrones: Jon Snow? No, latency is dead

A Monster Calls

Well, the most useful piece of information I took away from that article was the fact that a film is being made of A Monster Calls. For anyone who hasn't read it, it's a kids' book which is just as terrifying and as relevant to adults.

'Acts of war in a combat zone are not covered by your laptop warranty'

Re: underwater.....

Presumbly some kind of secure satellite link tied into the phone system.

Or to a land station, if they had a two-kilometre ULF aerial trailing out behind them.

I was rather amused to see that the insurance explicitly stated that if the craft was used in acts of war, they would not cover any resulting damage.

That would be an insurance beancounter trying to allow for a repeat of Operation Dynamo.

Re: For insurance purposes...

I don't think that NATO, especially the US, were too keen to get involved with the politics of it all.

Either way, it didn't stop the fucking French from selling Exocets until it was too late.

Re: sceptic

The job was installing satellite communications into war zones for news teams.

If the news teams don't already know that the rebels are so close that it's too late to be worrying about installing satellite communications, you'd probably be better off declining the job anyway.

UK digital minister denies legal right to 10Mbps is 'damp squib'

Re: Upload speed?

I expect he has a butler to upload everything for him.

Would we want to regenerate brains of patients who are clinically dead?

Could be good...

...as long as the reanimated patients don't wake up with an overriding urge to acquire additional replacement brain tissue via the oral route.

Boffins achieve 'breakthrough' in random number generation

Re: How new is this idea?

Also, if you need only modest quantities, include a 'one-time pad'-like store of random bits as a file.

But how do you generate those random bits? It's unlikely to be a modest quantity, either. You're going to need a lot of bits for the lifespan of each installation of your software. That could require many days of a human moving a mouse around at random (which wouldn't be a good method for this purpose anyway, for many reasons).

5% of drivers want Nigel Farage to be their in-car robo butler

Re: Soothing

Disclaimer: I'm in the States so Mr. Freeman's voice may not go over too well in Blighty.

No, he'd be fine. He's one of those Americans who doesn't speak in a grating nasal whine.

Farage No Garage

5% of drivers want Nigel Farage to be their in-car robo butler

And I'd like him to clean my toilet with his tongue, but I don't think a poll would see it happen.

Re: No Tomtom Baker?

If Tom Baker voiced a satnav, you'd end up sailing around in circles in the English Channel for seven weeks, drinking your own wee. And he'd have started drinking his own wee before the car was even out of the garage.

Brit twitchers a-tizz at bearded vulture sighting

Re: That's nothing

Nah, he'll just get the Mexicans to build the wall high enough to stop the birds flying over it.

Re: IT angle?

Iain M. Banks do?

That man really knew how to write.

Politician claims porn tabs a malware experiment, then finds God

Re: I don't see the problem

or even got much notice outside the state of Virginia if he'd simply said "I apologize to my supporters for that, I experienced a moment of weakness and will pray for the strength to do better" and left it at that.

Or he could actually have been honest and said, "Sorry about that, folks. I was having a wank when my press officer called and suggested I upload a screenshot for the staffing story. I should have closed the tabs first but I really wanted to get back to them while I was still in the mood."

Iraq shuts down internet to prevent exam cheating. The country's entire internet

The shutdown of Egypt's internet during its struggle for greater democracy back in 2011 is largely seen as the spark for other authoritarian governments to do the same.

Please, nobody tell Theresa May.

Chaps make working 6502 CPU by hand. Because why not?

Re: Vacuum tube (aka valve)

Hand-positioning jumper links would be a bit more tedious (but perhaps could be automated with a pick-and-place robot?)

That would be cheating (unless you programmed the robot with Jacquard-loom cards).

China's new rules may break the internet warns US government

Re: China: Criminal Nation, Is Totalitarian. Surprise.

Why he had a pencil in each nostril has yet to be explained.

Because the pencils give balance to the underpants on his head, obviously.

'Knucklehead' Kansas bloke shoots self in foot

Re: +Gordon 10

Or is 'tinker's damn' joining 'reign in'?

It's doing penance in Illiteracy Corner, along with 'tow the line' and 'could of'.

a prominent sign -- and whether or not someone saw it

Does this mean that sock-holster-gun-fondler-guy could be judged blameless if he turns out to be functionally illiterate?

Is uBeam the new Theranos?

Re: It's possible to get energy from sound, just not very much

a football stadium full of fans for a full 3 hour game

You must be talking about American football. But I agree with you on the energy collection. By building a piezoelectric layer into the astroturf you could probably collect more energy from the 14 minutes of actual play in those three hours than from the fans cheering.

UK.gov is about to fling your data at anyone who wants it. How? Why? Shut up, pleb

Full steam ahead

"The proposals could end up adding more legal complexity, with inevitable mistakes and loopholes, rather than simplifying and improving what we have."

I expect that's the plan. Just the same as the unclear questions are designed to put off responses, or to encourage rambling and uncertain answers.

Be proud of your commodity status, citizen! You are enrichening the prosperitousness of the glorious nation.

US work visas for international tech talent? 'If Donald Trump is elected all bets are off'

Re: "We'll see how well that goes"

Modern electronics rely on the transistor.

If it wasn't for Paul Dirac, no-one would have known that such things were possible.

which helped the US save Europe's ass again

Ah, the US. Twice late to the game. Remind me why that was.

Apple computers. IBM computers. UNIX. C. Windows. Total Quality Management. GPS (another DOD project.) FAX (in 1925!) Solar cells. Digital networks.

Telephone. Radio. Film cameras. Television. And most of the underlying theories which allowed the development of technologies based on electromagnetism.

See? Two can play that game.

And if American companies are stopped from bringing in foreign workers under false pretenses to drop wages, you'll see a lot more of this.

If that were so certain, you'd imagine the big tech companies would already have stopped hiring foreign workers and let the likes of Liberty U take up the slack...

Re: Good for competition?

Why not have everyone confined to their parish at birth, to eliminate the risk of their jobs being taken away by "scabs" from the next village who can do these jobs better than the inbred locals ?

Ah, serfdom, how I miss it. At least everyone knew their place. Take Gobbo the village idiot, for example. He could sleep safe at night, confident that no other village idiot would creep across the parish boundary at sunrise and dance for scraps at the manorial breakfast table before Gobbo had even worked out how to put his boots on. Happy days.

But it's all gone now. I blame the Black Death. We never had it so good.

FBI director claims that videoing police is causing crime uptick

When the cops shoot someone it's rarely a murder. The system much prefers to describe it as a justifiable homicide.

UK.gov pays four fellows £35k to do nothing for three months

Re: Not just money

Couldn't you have sold the ammo off on the black market instead? Or was it just too much fun having a 'mad minute' 200 times in one day?

Re: Pause for thought

Project Planning Rules

Budget Rule #1:

Pick a number, double it and add three.

Project Duration Rule #1:

Pick a number, double it and add three.

---

Edit: Oh shit, I meant to post that AC!

Ireland's international tech sector bumps up against language barrier

Latin? It once was the lingua franca all over Europe...

Ita vero.

Re: re: it strikes me...

How about High Valerian?

Don't you mean High Valyrian? Valerian is a herb...

Re: Languages

and being capable of writing perfect grammatical documentation in it.

Have you ever read any technical documentation which is grammatically perfect?

Valley VC Peter Thiel becomes an official Trump delegate

Asshole magnetism.

Re: When do the REAL candidates show up?

2020. Although at least one of them will have the surname Kardashian (or be married to one, or play one on television).

Re: Makes sense

As they say, the whole thing has been reduced to a multi-network reality television shit show, and Trump is winning based on experience...

FTFY.

IE and Graphics head Microsoft's Patch Tuesday critical list

No ifs, just buttheads

Internet Information Services gets an important fix that would stop an infection if a user is dumb enough to download a malicious app and try to run it on their machine.

Internet Information Services gets an important fix that would stop an infection if a user is dumb enough to download when a user downloads a malicious app and try to run runs it on their machine.

Archaeologists find oldest ever ground-edge stone axe

I think some of the Aussie spiders will have been around a lot longer than that. Waiting. Waiting for us. They've been honing their skills ever since. Waiting for shoes to be invented. Waiting for dunnies to be invented. They knew we'd stupidly give them places from which to ambush us, the patient little eight-legged bastards.

Did Spotify hire Alan Partridge to run its Netflix-style video push?

Fall of the House of Usher

A spin-off from Usher on Usher, where Usher hastily attempts to renovate a derelict home before the newlyweds return from the honeymoon.

Re: Phil Collins apology roadtrip

Except for that choc-advert gorilla. That was the only good thing Collins ever contributed to after 1980.

Russia poised to unleash 'Son of Satan' ICBM

NATO code name: Carter (Unstoppable Supersonic Missile)

The allegedly unstoppable missile is "capable of wiping out parts of the earth the size of Texas or France", Zvezda cheerfully explains.

Choices, choices...

Malware scan stalled misconfigured med software, mid-procedure

Re: Medico's expertise

and therefore

Really can't agree with this. Setting aside all formal knowledge, experience and opportunity are greater indicators than intelligence.

Experian Audience Engine knows almost as much about you as Google

Re: "decisioning"

It started with 'burglarizing' and it's all been downhill since...

Re: Former Experian developer here

I used to work for Experian and I was shocked how much data they have on every person and household in the UK.

Do you have anything to share on where the flaws in their disaster recovery plans might lie?