Posts by Stoneshop

New satellites could cause catastrophic space junk collisions

Re: Don't let the Germans do the cleanup

Indians will get them down, then put them on a beach, have them stripped by the local population and burn wha's left.

Apple nabs permit to experiment with self-driving iCars in Cali

“Collision Avoidance Of Arbitrary Polygonal Obstacles.”

So it prevents collisions with random absent* parrots? Looks easy to me.

* alternative: dead. Stiff, deceased, etc.

US military makes first drop of Mother-of-All-Bombs on Daesh-bags

Re: Gather Dust?

If that was medium, I'd hate to see a big one!

In naming things that come in a range of sizes, you leave room for expansion so that you can add items at both ends of the range without getting into rather convoluted names.

Sensible: bomb, medium capacity.

Daft: Mother/Father of all bombs

Inbetween: Very Large Telescope. Because that would need to expand upwards as Even Larger Telescope, and after that you get into names like Humongous* Telescope and Brobdignagian Telescope or you have to resort to expletives, and in both cases you have to supply a reference list sorted by size.

* Huge (pron. Yuuge) is a registered trademark of the Trump Dynasty, and may not be used without permissionpayment.

Barnes Wallace

Another British inventor, with his dog Barnes Gromit

Re: "Derek Lowe, on the properties of ClF3: "

IIRC "Ignition" described a 50 ton mishap in the 1950's.

No, just one ton.

"And even if you don't have a fire, the results can be devastating enough when chlorine trifluoride gets loose, as the General Chemical Co. discovered when they had a big spill. Their salesmen were awfully coy about discussing the matter, and it wasn't until I threatened to buy my RFNA from Du Pont that one of them would come across with the details.

It happened at their Shreveport, Louisiana, installation, while they were preparing to ship out, for the first time, a one-ton steel cylinder of CTF. The cylinder had been cooled with dry ice to make it easier to load the material into it, and the cold had apparently embrittled the steel. For as they were maneuvering the cylinder onto a dolly, it split and dumped one ton of chlorine trifluoride onto the floor. It chewed its way through twelve inches of concrete and dug a three-foot hole in the gravel underneath, filled the place with fumes which corroded everything in sight, and, in general, made one hell of a mess.

Civil Defense turned out, and started to evacuate the neighborhood, and to put it mildly, there was quite a brouhaha before things quieted down. Miraculously, nobody was killed, but there was one casualty — the man who had been steadying the cylinder when it split. He was found some five hundred feet away, where he had reached Mach 2 and was still picking up speed when he was stopped by a heart attack."

Re: The entire project was $314 million to develop with a unit cost of $16 million.

I've even seen people suggest a "21,000 tonne bomb" has been dropped,

It wouldn't even need an explosive charge; if you manage to drop it from, say, 3000m you'll get a rather impressive dent anyway.

Re-open the Avro Lancaster and Grand Slam production lines !

The Handley Page Victor was designed to carry two Tallboys, or one Grand Slam plus some other stuff.

There's something worse than being dead?

Being not quite dead. This also burdens their even less dead mates to get the not quite dead ones out and to some sort of hospital.requiring medical staff to make an effort to fix them up a bit, then their relatives etc. to continue that process as far as that would be possible.

But that's probably not what the article author intended.

Oxygen is not the only oxidising agent

if you suck all the oxygen out, it'll be very difficult to set the air on fire

Derek Lowe, on the properties of ClF3: "The compound also a stronger oxidizing agent than oxygen itself, which also puts it into rare territory. That means that it can potentially go on to “burn” things that you would normally consider already burnt to hell and gone, and a practical consequence of that is that it’ll start roaring reactions with things like bricks and asbestos tile. " (doesn't apply to this bomb, this is just to enlighten people who think you need oxygen to 'burn' stuff)

Re: Gather Dust?

The MOAB is the stupidest thing ever built since a very large portion of its energy ends up just going straight up at the atmosphere,

Go read up on the WWII Tallboy and Grand Slam bombs designed by Barnes Wallis, and look at some of the pictures of the damage done by those.

You don't blow a hole in a 3.5m thick reinforced concrete U-boot pen or penetrate a hillside to have the explosion take out a railway tunnel for the rest of the war with 1000lb bombs. Trying to seriously damage a tunnel/cave complex that way is a similarly futile endeavour.

Re: Gather Dust?

Barnes Wallace

Barnes Wallis.

Sysadmin 'trashed old bosses' Oracle database with ticking logic bomb'

Re: Proof?

One other idea is the hard drive could be copied onto other. But there are a couple of problems with this case. Laptops have serial numbers and probably company inventory numbers assigned.

That's why you get another one that matches one of the company lappies, image that one's disk on to the one you just got (and the other one's disk image you save somewhere), then hand back both company machines unspindled, unfolded and unmutilated.

Re: Proof?

Let's assume this guy is similar to me - knows a company laptop can connect to the company network, but wouldn't know where to start to get another laptop to.

Really? Wouldn't you just start by dropping "buy laptop $BRAND $MODEL" into your favourite search engine? And there'll be several eBay links on the first results page.

Stupid

Patel gave back one of the original laptops, and another unissued laptop, after completely wiping the hard drive.

Get another laptop, same model and specs as one of the ones you're about to hand back, then image that disk onto the new one. Hand back both company lappies.

Free health apps laugh in the face of privacy, sell your wheezing data

Re: Perhaps this is all just first-gen nonsense

there is nothing new under the sun.

Tell that to what started as a puddle of coffee under the Ultra 10, now growing blueish-green tendrils and hissing menacingly at the cleaning rag.

Boss swore by 'For Dummies' book about an OS his org didn't run

Re: But the real issue is

Jehova's Witnesses and the like will never ever call on you again after one little chat.

The one little chat that stopped JWs darkening my doorstep was made one early Saturday morning around ten, just a mere two hours after I had come home from a very worthwhile party and getting into bed. Their ringing my doorbell did not put me in a state accommodating a polite discussion vis-a-vis our respective views on life, the universe and everything; my slamming the door must have registered with the Meteorological Institute 80km away, and the preceding admonishment is unfit to be reproduced in a respected publication like El Reg. But clearly it was effective, in the 30 years since no JW has indeed darkened my doorstep.

Half-baked security: Hackers can hijack your smart Aga oven 'with a text message'

Not even half-baked security

Let's hope the developers get roasted (but I'm not holding my breath)

Prisoners built two PCs from parts, hid them in ceiling, connected to the state's network and did cybershenanigans

Re: Odd that there were network ports available inside the secure area

One thing I'm wondering though; how did they manage to sneak out an entire monitor or 2 on which to use said PCs?

Headless systems that they could connect to from the inmate area? The systems were in a false ceiling, not a place where you would usually be able to go and sit to view a monitor. For the system in the inmate area they would initially probably needed just Putty to get to their hidden systems. And apparently they had found some of the tools they needed on disks of systems they were taking apart, so that they could bootstrap their toolkit.

Startup remotely 'bricks' grumpy bloke's IoT car garage door – then hits reverse gear

Re: There's a reason some of us call this stuff IoS.

I've never understood why people fill their garages with junk and then leave their next most expensive purchase sitting on the drive.

Exactly. Tthat's why the motorcycles are in the garage, neatly leaving room for the concrete premix, the pinball machines and the MIG welder, and the car is outside.

Re: There's a reason some of us call this stuff IoS.

This process also works with Spare rooms, Attics (Lofts) and Car boots (Trunks) :)

If it wasn't filled with junk you would put your car in its own boot? Is your name Maurits Escher, perchance?

(Spare rooms and attics are rarely designed to allow getting a car in. And out)

At some point The Cloud is always another person's cluster.

In no small number of cases, that last word is actually four letters longer and now rhymes with 'duck'.

Re: "this is a lesson in relying on remote systems for important stuff"

Must thank that company for the important lesson they have taught consumers

You'd think that that lesson would have already been learned after the Revolver fiasco, and the Nest fiasco, and the numerous other fiascos, but no.

With only very few exceptions, consumers are unable and/or unwilling to learn.

Re: There's a reason some of us call this stuff IoS.

My kids are long flown the nest but that makes no difference. Who has a garage with space in it for a car?

Let's see: two and a half pallets of concrete premix, a concrete mixer, five motorcycles* of which one with sidecar, two pinball machines, two pallets with crates with spare parts, a drill press, a MIG welder and eleven 19x8 cm wooden beams, five meters long.

And I didn't need kids for that.

* three more are in a shed, and one is 500km away.

Re: Re:Sounds completely - completely - pointless

Well, the user requirement is to turn the heating down when she goes to bed, which is randomly any time from 10:30 pm to 1:30 am, so its kinda tricky to schedule on a timer.

As well as the options mentioned already, there are also thermostats with a PIR sensor, so that it stays at the high preset as long as it detects a body*.

* Doesn't work for people huddled in a blanket and stiff from the cold due to an improperly set thermostat.

Printer blown to bits by compressed air

Re: this must have been ...

Well, someone who was in DEC FS with me specialised on printers. Of course that makes sense when you're running multi page per second band and drum printers, but he was the only one willing and able to deal with the LCP01 inkjet. Which didn't yet have the throw-out-and-replace-with-new-printhead-with-cartridge way of 'cleaning', it had tubes and reservoirs and pumps and gubbins and doodads that invariably gummed up three days after your latest print. He was known as Johan Dammit because of his way of expressing his opinion of all things printer (and most other things electromechanical), but he was the guy who managed to *fix* your printer. Which, in the case of the LCP01 was no mean feat, and involved him ending up like a Jackson Pollock canvas.

Customer satisfaction is our highest priority… OK, maybe second-highest… or third...

Re: You lost my sympathy right here:

(Being of a sensible disposition, I never buy coffee from coffee shops in the first place, because it's five times the price of making it at home and isn't as nice.)

That would mean that after sitting on trains for close to an hour, I would have to retrace my steps and travel another hour before I can enjoy coffee. So no. And the place I get coffee is serving a proper Italian espresso roast, available in fluid form as standard coffee, espresso and ristretto.

Re: Programmers should code for failures

In the past, coders had to build their own environments from the ground up - hardware, networking, o/s, development tools

with their bare hands, scratching the required bits from slabs of granite twenty-eight hours a day, while sitting in a hole in the middle of a busy road with only a handful of cold, poisonous gravel for food.

Crafty Fokker: Norfolk surgeon builds Red Baron triplane replica

Re: Not enough wings

http://www.oobject.com/category/15-aircraft-with-lots-of-wings/

Manchester pulls £750 public crucifixion offer

Re: No nails required

Someone fetch me 10 sets of identical twins, 20 crosses, a bag of 6 inch nails and a big 'ammer.

Be sure to wear appropriate safety gear, because dropping that hammer on your toes when not wearing S3-class boots is sure to be painful. Also, best to use a nailgun, for repeatability as well as preventing RSI.

(seen in an Usenet .signature: "When all you have is a nailgun, every problem looks like a messiah."

Alabama man gets electrocuted after sleeping with iPhone

Re: so much wrong here...

Is it a rule that folks in Britain and Europe MUST find fault in everything American?

Well, one more fault: Britain is part of Europe. And it will be even after Brexit finalises, because Europe refers to the continent, not the economic and political union.

Re: so much wrong here...

Many non metallic things conduct, such as wet string.

The principal reason why most landline phone systems happen to work.

Re: "And the ones I've used seem prone to slipping out of the receptacle"

safety shutters (which require some force to be opened when a plug is inserted),

The shutters are designed to open only when you stick two roughly prong-shaped items into both holes simultaneously; they need to slide or rotate, and jam when you only press against one.

Re: so much wrong here...

Actually, I feel the same about European plugs - I don't have a lot of experience with them, but they scare me.

So much wrong there, indeed.

First, there's no such thing as 'an' European plug. There are Europlugs, a two-prong non-grounded plug that fits most continental wall sockets, despite their differing configurations regarding grounding. Nearly all of these plugs have plastic prongs with metal tips, even the DIY ones. Then, for grounded appliances there's Schuko, recessed, with cutouts and two earthing clips, French, also recessed with a protruding earth pin, Danish, Swiss and Italian (additional ground via third pin on plug, different configurations). Non-Europlug two-pin plugs tend not to fit Schuko and French, because theu lack the appropriate cutouts and are unable to accommodate the ground pin. They also have a sufficiently large plug body that it's hard (though not impossible) to touch the pins on a half-inserted plug. Ungrounded wall sockets tend to be recessed to make touching even harder.

And if you're using travel conversion plugs: those are the ones that tend to go from 'iffy' via 'downright dangerous' to 'the designer should have used the prototype before submitting it for production (see icon)'.

Wi-Fi sex toy with built-in camera fails penetration test

these jokes just write themselves, really

They missed out on using Bluetooth, with its pairing of devices.

Trump sets sights on net neutrality

Re: "You're just a forum troll - why even bother picking an icon?"

Ahh. I have seen the light,

s/light/date/ , is it?

Forget robot overlords, humankind will get finished off by IoT

Drinkable pizza?

I'm not sure I want to know.

Something less conspicuous and deniable

Pizza laced with a strong laxative, for instance. Or, if the deliverybot is carrying the Boss's newest electronic toy, refitting it with a set of batteries from s Samsung Note 7, loading the toy's navigation aid with directions to the stairwell leading down to the carpet roll storage ... the possibilities are endless.

PC survived lightning strike thanks to a good kicking

Re: Lightning.

About two decades back I had a lightning strike right across the street, about 30m away. And kind of out of the black*, there had been a few very distant rumblings some minutes earlier, then a single almighty explosion-like clap, with an eerie silence afterwards. Also, the street lighting was out, my GFI had tripped, as clearly had quite a few others down the street. Landline phone was out, and after I had reset the GFI it turned out that cable TV was dead too.

Damage to my PC** was a blown-up soundcard and a dead external modem. The soundcard was literally blown up: around the connectors the circuit board was at least twice as thick as it had been before, but not otherwise visibly damaged or scorched.

* it was just past midnight, so not blue.

** I had just the one, back then.

How to leak data from an air-gapped PC – using, er, a humble scanner

Re: re: slip a 4g dongle

Then you would two radishes.

Two quantum-spinlocked radishes. You keep one, and offer the other to your target to eat. Then after a while, some of the radish molecules will end up in the target's brain, in particular the vision cortex. Then, through the quantum coupling, the other radish will receive a duplicate of what the target sees: computer screens, printouts, even the entire interior of the secure facilities. Then all that's left is turning that information into a format that can be stored and processed further.

Ten bidders sniffing around Toshiba's memory biz – reports

One of the parties

appears to be El Reg itself, having apparently found some spare change down the back of the sofa.

(Threefifty and a kick in the nuts, and only if Toshiba can show a valid MoT)

Cheap, flimsy, breakable and replaceable – yup, Ikea, you'll be right at home in the IoT world

Runlevels

KNX has what they call 'scenes', which are basically stored settings for whatever is connected through the appropriate controllers. Other home control systems likely have something similar. Adding wall socket adapters (or having all applicable sockets wired up through your control system of choice) would offer what you want.

Re: Why?

Those are infrequent, and in any event, just about anything that could make the mains dangerous could make the emergency lights dangerous, too (because they're also electric).

Proper emergency lights are battery powered, and do not pose additional fire hazards because of their mains connection (if they even have one). So if you have those you can cut the mains if you need to, which will make the mains-connected emergency lights come on. And emergency lighting is often a feature on upmarket smoke/heat detectors.

Re: Why?

Flicky switch on wall does that.

Only those bulbs connected directly to that particular switch.

Re: Racing towards the next 3D TV

A smart light knows when it should be on.

Beware the introduction of defocused temporal perception. Especially if you don't have a basement.

Re: Why?

Definitely more entertaining

You missepled "frustrating"

Re: Why?

And, if it's anything like their other stuff, Ikea tend to retire product lines after a while

For values of "a while" that equate to "not yet" even after nearly four decades for Billy bookcases, and at least three for Ivar racks.

Re: Lightswitches...

The reason being presence switches work like dimmers, and many modern lights don't work well with dimmers (thus the label "non-dimmable").

Not because they "work like dimmers", but the way those presence switches and dimmers are built the cheaper ones need a minimum, resistive, load. And LED bulbs (CFL too) are not resistive, and don't satisfy the minimum load.

PS. As for being able to get up and flick a switch. there are handicapped people out there who CAN'T.

Those who are disabled like that already have been using remote controls, fitted to their wheelchair or about their body on a lanyard, since they became available, decades before IoT.

Wired ports

"On top of which, no one but no one wants to have five different gateways all plugged into your modem or router. Most households have a router that takes, at most, four Ethernet cables."

I would expect at least some of those gateways to be able to connect wirelessly. Especially Apple's, because cables are sooooo ugly. The other option, adding a 5..8 port desktop switch should be something most salesdroids, even those with a zits/IQ ratio of over 2.3, should be able to suggest.

Re: Not Ikea, but Lego

Causing excruciating pain when you step on it barefoot is optional.

Pah. DIL chips, and especially their sockets with turned pins. And they never lay on the floor pins down.

USA can afford golf for Trump. Can't afford .com for FBI infosec service

Re: @James 51 .... WRONG!

Trump and Abe golfed 27 holes at the president's courses in Jupiter

Pretty sure that wasn't the actual planet.

Unfortunately.