Posts by mhenriday 1222 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Dec 2009
Eggheads suggested these powerful emissions go hand in hand with gamma ray bursts typically seen from neutron star mergers.«Eggheads» ?!! «Scientists» OK, «boffins» OK, but «eggheads» ? Is the urge to be cute from which Ms Quach obviously suffers the result of original sin, or merely due to writing for the Reg ?...
Henri
«What is this neocon propaganda doing on a technology website?» Because the neocons and the neolibs - there seems to be little difference nowadays - actively recruit technology websites to participate in their attempts to convince everyone, including not least techies, of their Weltanschauung, in which all the evil in the world is due to those dastardly Russians (i e, when it is not due to those equally dastardly - but far more profitable - Chinese). Whinging about alleged «Russian hacking», presented as iron-clad facts, will continue to be a prominent feature of sites like the present....
Henri
US prosecutors have extradited an Irish man to America, where he will face charges of allegedly overseeing the infamous Silk Road drugs e-souk.What I like about the Reg is that on occasion it cuts to the quick , while the Irish authorities may claim not to see it that way, the description above is accurate. As we all know, the US enjoys universal jurisdiction....
Davis has been held in Ireland since his 2014 arrest by authorities there. Having now been extradited, his next stop will be in the Manhattan Federal Court to face trial.In the event
helping to run [...] a secret online marketplace for illegal drugs, hacking services, and an assortment of other criminal activitiesconstitutes a crime under Irish law - and I find it difficult to believe that it does not, but piously hope that some more knowledgeable reader here will disabuse me if I am in error - why wasn't Mr Davis tried and if found guilty, sentenced in Ireland ? Under the Atlanticist disposition, must all European countries (and the UK, which seems to be unsure of its status) constantly be demonstrating their fealty to the liege lord in Washington ?...
Henri
for warning us about how baaaad that Chinese kit is - after all, aside from being condemned by certain authorities in the US and Australia, whose reputations for impartiality and lack of bias are beyond reproach - it is the only kit ever to suffer from a security breach (which, in this case, have been patched). I suspect you typed this post on a computer with a Microsoft OS....
Henri
Sounds like a case study from Gilens and Page's Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens. Is anyone surprised ?...
Henri
«All of which strikes us as a very light and lucky punishment given who he had targeted and what he did.» Those agencies hack us all the time, but they're just doing their jobs, while when they themselves are hacked it's a dastardly deed - and passing the documents to Wikileaks obviously exacerbated the crime. Drawing and quartering and having his head impaled on a pike would no doubt have been too good for Mr Gamble....
Henri
AliC33 ; as far as I know, if one has opened an account - say ali.c@gmail.com - no one will be able to open a similar «dotless» account, of type «alic@gmail.com». Your experience seems to differ from my own and from my understanding of the manner in which Gmail accounts are supposed to work....
Henri
I've always regarded Gmail's refusal to recognise dots in email addresses - or rather, refusal to allow a new account with the address «john.doe@gmail.com» to be opened in the event that an account with address «johndoe@gmail.com» already exists - as a valuable safety feature, given that inadvertent omission or adding of dots in such addresses is one of the most common errors made by users. Gmail's praxis renders it impossible for someone who notes that John Doe can be reached at johndoe@gmail.com to open new accounts with such addresses as «john.doe@gmail.com» or «j.ohndoe@gmail.com», etc, etc, and thereby intercept post meant for the first-named....
Rather than Gmail ceasing this practice, it would, to my mind, be far better were other email and other service providers to introduce it....
Henri
Not a big problem: in the immediate afterglow, everyone who could rushed to buy some Patriots. Mission Accomplished ;-)Indeed, which no doubt is why we Swedish taxpayers are soon to have the privilege of paying some 25 thousand million SEK (do your own conversion to other currencies) for Patriot missiles which will protect us from those dastardly Russians, who just, we are told, long to attack us....
Ain't capitalism grand ?...
Henri
Doing China's bidding seems to have rubbed off on CupertinoLove the whinging which seems to be the USA's primary export product these days ! If the right person doesn't win the office of US president, it's all the fault of those dastardly Russians, while not only the US trade deficit, but the fact that a US corporation like Apple threatens leakers with «jail time and massive fines», is the fault of those equally dastardly (but rather more profitable) Chinese....
The late US president Harry S Truman used to say that «the buck stops here», but as Leslie Poles Hartley famously observed : «The past is a foreign country ; they do things differently there». Things have changed in the US....
Henri
With respect to capital punishment in Russia, the English-language version of Wikipedia has the following to say :
The current Penal Code[11] permits death penalty for five crimes:According to the same source, the death penalty has not been imposed in Russia since 1999....murder, with certain aggravating circumstances (article 105.2)
encroachment on the Life of a Person Administering Justice or Engaged in a Preliminary Investigation (article 295)
encroachment on the Life of an Officer of a Law-enforcement Agency (article 317)
encroachment on the Life of a Statesman or a Public Figure (article 277)
genocide (section 357).
The article on the corresponding situation in the United States starts as follows :
Capital punishment is a legal penalty in the United States, currently used by 31 states, the federal government, and the military. ... The United States is the only Western country currently applying the death penalty,one of 57 countries worldwide applying it.Under these circumstances, perhaps Gospodin Vinnik's preference for being tried in a Russian court is understandable.......
Since then [i e, 1976], more than 7,800 defendants have been sentenced to death; of these, more than 1,400 have been executed, 159 were exonerated before their execution, and more than 2,900 are still on death row.
But, of course, Wikipedia is a «Putinbot» and boring anonymous cowards only speak the truth....
Henri
Rather than some kind of high-tech interference, the main fear is that the Russians will simply drop anchor over a cable site and drag it through in order to sever the cable – as happened accidentally off the coast of Jersey last year thanks to the careless crew of an Italian-flagged gas tanker.Should not then Mr Peach, rather than towards the Russians who, even if they are dastardly, seem to have other fish to fry, direct his efforts towards preventing those inadvertent Italians from doing something which plunges the country into irreparable darkness, as we all recall happened last year ?...
Henri
«Without a proper destroyer (anti-air) or frigate (anti-submarine) on the scene, the five British naval vessels in the region are at increased risk of, if not an outright attack, something provocative and cheeky – such as when Iran snatched a boat containing more than a dozen British sailors.» Of course, the provocative and cheeky act committed 10 years ago was not 15 personnel from HMS Cornwall searching a merchant vessel off Iran's coast, but rather Iranian forces taking them captive for intruding, as was claimed, intruding on Iranian waters. Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi....
Henri
I'm old enough to remember when governments had scruples.Pretty sure you're not that old, sitta europea - the first governments formed several thousands of years ago and which of them ever had scruples ?...
Or perhaps you meant to write that you were old enough to remember when governments could convince the more naive of their citizens that they had scruples ?...
Henri
As Mr Nichols put it in what is obviously his favourite language, well done, Julian (and others) ! Keep up the good work ; we very much need to know what criminal organisations like the CIA, NSA, and the rest of the US alphabet soup are doing to intercept and monitor our communications....
Henri
Installation of Classic Shell remedies a great deal of what went wrong with Windows 8.x and saved a lot of retirees I know from throwing their computers out the (other type of) window, thereby saving them from littering or, for that matter, bodily injury or involuntary manslaughter charges....
Henri
But which Linux?Allow me to suggest Linux Mint with the Cinnamon desktop. Intuitive for all who have ever used Windows and extremely user-friendly - and, as noted above it takes about five minutes to download and install with a decent connexion and a fairly recent machine. (You might want to put off downloading and installing until the end of this month, by which time version 18.3 is likely to have been released....)Seriously, which Linux to switch to?
Henri
«I am not anti-Linux but I have battled with Linux enough to know it's not fit for purpose for the overwhelming majority of users out there.» Which purpose would that be, pray tell, which the overwhelming majority of users would find a Linux distro like, e g, Linux Mint, unfit ? Just what were those «battle[s]» you found yourself engaged in with «Linux» and with which distro did those struggles, no doubt epic, take place ? Or is your post simply yet another example of FUDD ?...
Henri
After «upgrading» to Windows 10 (Pro, in my case), version 1709 (which Microsoft, which is famed for its low-keyed modesty, calls «Fall Creators Update»), users with the latest version (4.3.1) of Classic Shell will see the following message displayed on their screen (translation from the Swedish, my apologies for any discrepancies) :
Classic Start MenuClassic Shell need to configure itself for the new operating system.
OK
Clicking «OK» does the trick.....
Henri
After «upgrading» till Windows 10 (Pro, in my case), version 1709 (the so-called «Creators Update» ; Microsoft is known for its low-keyed modesty), the following message is displayed on the desktop of users who have Classic Shell (version 4.3.1) installed translation from the Swedish, apologies for any discrepancies) :
Classic Start MenuClassic Shell needs to configure itself for the new operating system.
OK
Pressing «OK» does the trick....
Henri
But look, obviously either the Russians did it or the Chinese did, and perhaps it's the Russians turn this time 'round ? After all, nothing that goes wrong in the USA can possibly be due to problems or people native to that Shining City on a Hill....
Reminds me of an old Japanese saying I learned there more than half a century ago :
郵便ポストが赤い
電信柱が高い
皆僕の悪いです。。。。
Henri
which presumably involves bending from the waist, again, and again, and again, is no doubt just the exercise regime many of the less fit members of the US Senate - think John McCain and Lindsey Graham, for a start - need, and the fact that they never find anything there a feature, not a bug.... ;-)
Henri
It would seem that China has already made its choice....
Myself, I'll stick with my fibre cable network (nominally 250/100 Mb/s), but then, I'm a troglodyte.... ;-)
Henri
«China may be behind now but it is well ahead in spend and manpower. » Not so sure that China can be considered to be «behind» in super computing ; according to the Top500 website, as of November 2016, both China and the United States had 171 systems among the top 500, with the former having the two fastest....
But of course, it's all piracy on the part of the Chinese (and no piracy on the part of the US) ; everybody knows that Chinese people are constitutionally incapable of performing original work, now don't we ?...
(Sarcasm warning)
Henri
but we are unlikely to find out, as 498 of the top 500 supercomputers run on Linux (from what I am given to understand, the other 2 on Unix) systems....
Henri
regarding Space X as a «very very profitable firm» may, according to this article, be something of an exaggeration, Anonymous Coward, so perhaps your putative experience is not entirely relevant ?...
Henri
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