Posts by StuartMcL

Yukon UFO could have cost unfortunate balloon fan $12

Re: Cost

I suspect that a WW1 biplane would have had difficulty getting to 40,000 ft to fire at that balloon.

Take the morning off because Outlook has already

Re: Mail servers can and should just run and run.

I'll stay with my Pegasus Mail and Mercury Mail Server thanks. Who needs all the other fluff that MS bundles with email?

Lockheed Martin demos 50kW anti-aircraft frickin' laser beam

Re: Stryker

Don't call me Shirley.

(Someone had to say it)

Crypto craziness craps out – and about time too

Re: My favorite new article

NFTs are no more a fraud that Hunter Biden's paintings being offered for half a million dollars`

Girls Who Code books 'banned' in some US classrooms

Re: Politics on mailing lists...

> Unfortunately it's a (the first?) real world example of Orwellian doublethink

You mean you missed the doublethink inherent in the "Infaltion Reduction Act" ?

Mozilla drags Microsoft, Google, Apple for obliterating any form of browser choice

Re: Chrome on desktop

> TFA?

Tea for Two?

or "

T" for "Two"

Two Factor Authentication.

Rest in peace, Queen Elizabeth II – Britain's first high-tech monarch

Re: She was a good one

> I hope her last words were "Over to you Charlie son, don't fuck it up"

More likely "Bugger, I was hoping Charlie would go before me",

Microsoft warns of bugs after nation pushes back DST switchover

Re: Hmmm...

> "My Linux installs updated tzdata a couple of days ago, this was probably why. I didn't bother checking the changelog."

Does it have a separate entry for Chile as opposed to Pacific SA Time? If not, you have the same issue.

Re: Hard Coding Ahoy

It's just a set of Registry values in HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Time Zones\<ZOne name>

The full zone info is stored in a 44 byte TZI structure in each zone's entry

The problem is that Chile doesn't have its own zone entry, it is considered to be under "Pacific SA Standard Time."

It's probably time that MS created a separate Zone entry for Chile considering the number of times they have changed. That's easy enough to roll out with the next update, but every machine in Chile would need to have it's regional settings changed to the new zone.

Soviet-era tech could change the geothermal industry

Re: Is 500°C (932°F) hot enough?

Don't worry about the lizard people. They've already answered that question:

https://newatlas.com/energy/quaise-deep-geothermal-drilling-questions/

Could this unleash the lizard people that inhabit the inner sphere?

How do we know they did not already drill up using this technology and are already amongst us?

Tesla to disable 'self-driving' feature that allowed vehicles to roll past stop signs at junctions

Re: California roll

Strange! I've driven in a lot of countries (including UK, US, Aus, NZ, various SEA and Pacific nations) and everyone one had Stop signs and laws that made it an offence to not obey them.

Time to party like it's 2002: Acura and Honda car clocks knocked back 20 years by bug

And Furuno!

Similar problem with Furuno marine GPS products on 2 Jan 2022. Many of the models have no fix.

https://www.furuno.co.jp/en/news/notice/notice_category.html?itemid=753&dispmid=965

Family wrongly accused of uploading pedo material to Facebook – after US-EU date confusion in IP address log

"h" in 'erbs

And two "a"s in car-a-mel !

Australian government in talks to buy Pacific Islands' top telco

Re: Byzantine?

"If there is a buyout, the Pacific nations will have to revert to cheaper, faster, more reliable HF telephones"

Not in the largest market (PNG). They'll just switch back to Telikom as many former Digicel subscribers have done over the last year or two.

As an aside, the fact that Digicel currently uses Huawei equipment is going to make it an expensive exercise giving the Aus antipathy to it.

It's about time! NASA's orbital atomic clock a boon for deep space navigation – if they can get it working for long enough

10 million year test?

> " NASA's Deep Space Atomic Clock loses one second every 10 million years, as proven in controlled tests on Earth."

Proven? You mean it's been running for 10 million years? It will still be running in 5 million years time and will have lost 1/2 a second?

I suspect they mean "lost time at a rate ot one second per 10 million years over a trial period" which is a very different matter..

Calendly’s new logo perceived as either bog-standard or kind of crappy

"No sign of anyone falling for the cock and balls design yet"

Try a search for "Doughboys and DirtyBird logos" :)

Google proposes Logica data language for building more manageable SQL code

Re: Backticks

So how much code (SQL or anything) is written on an Android device using an OSK?

Turns out humans are leading AI systems astray because we can't agree on labeling

Re: Small off duty ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oB-NnVpvQ78

FBI confirms Zodiac Killer's 340 cipher solved by trio of amateur math and software codebreakers

Re: FBI confirmation

That someone had developed an alogirithm or set of rules that extracted a meaningful and seemingly relevant plain text when applied to the original data

BCC is hard, OK? Quite a lot of orgs blurted your email addresses in GDPR mailouts

In Pegasus Mail:

Options - Sending Mail - Checkbox 'Suppress BCC listings when sending mail" should be checked!

To quote David Harris:

"Suppress BCC field listings in outgoing mail BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) is a useful, but poorly-standardized feature. There are at least four ways a BCC field could be written into a message:

It could be omitted altogether

It could be present, but contain no addresses at all

It could contain only each individual recipient's address

It could contain the addresses of all people receiving the BCC

All of these methods have adherents and detractors. By default, Pegasus Mail lists all the BCC recipients in the BCC field of mail it sends: if you would prefer that no addresses were shown in the field, then check this control. When this option is turned on, the BCC field will simply contain the text "(Suppressed)", without any addresses."

The Sinofsky Letters: Defenestrated Windows overlord corresponds

Re: XTree Gold?

ZTree Win only takes up about 4MB on a USB Drive and feels just like Xtree Gold - it's still my FM of choice.

Omnishambles beats off mummy-porn, becomes English word of 2012

Re: There is only one deserving 'new' word

Nothing new about embuggerance. It;'s been around for 60 odd years.

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-emb1.htm

US trounces UK in climate scepticism jibber-jabber

You have to doubt the competence of a journalist who can write:

"seminal climate-scepticism book by the American reporter Ross Gelbspan, The Heat Is On."

It is, in fact, the "seminal climate alarmist claims of big-oil funded conspiracies book"

McIntyre: Climate policy crippled by pointless feel-good gestures

Re: Simple is best

But why is it warming above 0?

CO2?

Decadal period changes in ocean currents moving warmer water into the area or moving the ice to lower latitudes where the water is warmer and it is exposed to the sun for longer?

Changes in cloud cover/ insolation?

Hidden Grand Canyon-sized ICE-HOLE hastens Antarctic melt

re West Antarctica

I would assume that it was called that because it lies in the western hemisphere

Apple sued for every touchscreen device by Flatworld prof

Where do they find the cash?

They don't. They find a "bottom dwelling scum sucker" prepared to take it on a "contingency basis" for around 30% of any future payout.

Swiss-based Balesio takes the knife to PDF files

<quote>It also says very curious things about all the MS Office applications.

Either they are storing a huge amount of unnecessary data or their output filters are rather poor as regards file size.</quote>

Nothing unusal there. Take a look at the HTML generated by Outllook in an email, the output of Excel and Word's "Save as WebPage" and Access' OutputTo HTML.

Bloated cr*p every time.

Oz journalism award to Assange™

@AC - cutting Julia a little slack.

It would be the best thing that could happen to Australia at the moment if Juliar "was disappeared"

UN set to dump GMT for tech-friendly Atomic Time

"increase at a rate of one second per year" = one hour in 3600 years. Where does the 550 years come from?

CERN: 'Climate models will need to be substantially revised'

More or less cosmic rays?

@Confused

<quote>What this latest research seems to show is more solar activity = more cosmic rays = more particles = more cloud formation.... but doesn't more cloud formation = lower temperatures?

Quite the opposite.

Cosmic radiation doesn't come from the sun. It comes from "the cosmos".

It appears that when the sun is active, the stronger solar wind prevents cosmic rays from entering the earth's atmosphere by sweeping them around the earth. When the sun is inactive, more of them penetrate the atmosphere.

It also appears that increasing clouds have a cooling effect.

Since it now also appears that the more cosmic radiation reaching the atmosphere causes more cloud, the process would be:

Quiet sun = moe cosmic rays reaching the atmosphere = more cloud formation = lower temperature.

NASA to work on approved sci-fi books

NASA Inspired Works of Fiction?

They've got the talent for it. Jim Hansen's been creating fiction for years.

Australian bank to run trial with human teller in ATM

Which Bank?

as a bumper sticker on my mate's car says:

Who cares, they're all b*st*rds!

Boffins shine 800Mbps wireless network from flashlight

Broadcast only?

@GBE. That problem was solved long ago. Google "1-way satellite".

In this situation, you'd probably use something standard like 802.11x as the back-channel.

Interstellar space 'full of Jupiter-size orphan planets'

Drifting?

Are they drifting or are their turtles swimming on deliberate courses?

Australia cuts solar subsidies, and not before time

It's the Currency, not the Current.

I think that you will find that the drastic fall in the the price of solar in Australia over the last few years has more to do with the strength of the Australian Dollar that anything else. All of the kit is imported. In late 2008, the AUD was worth less that 80 US cents. Currently is is worth close to $1.10 US..

Microsoft breaks own world record for IE nonsense

Wot? No .Net?

Native? You mean that IE10 isn't built using .Net and managed code?

I wonder why not.

Thunderstorms found to squirt antimatter into space

Missing Heat?

That must be where all the missing heat goes

Woman charged with stealing nude pics of baseball star

Theft?

Can we please stop calling this sort of thing theft - same with the "Climategate emails".

A common element of theft in its various forms in various jurisdictions is "intent to deprive someone of the use of something". The owner of the images still has them. Making copies is NOT theft.

Defence Minister 'to big up electropulse threat' - report

Coincidence?

Gee, just at the same time as they are pushing the threat, along comes a release of two year old news about a sting by the FBI which involved attempts to sell EMP technology to a "rogue state".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11351535

How convenient

NZ gal's Bulgarian airbags halt traffic

@alyn

See http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/03/bulgarian_airbags/

Court filings are protected by copyright, says lawyer

Who's Copyright?

IANAL but:

Isn't the filing "a work specially ordered or commissioned for use as a contribution to a collective work",

the "collective work" being the court record - with the person commissioning it being the lawyer's client.

ISTM that the copyright should lie with the client, not the lawyer under "work for hire" provisions.