Re: I think you missed this bit..
And also the part where it is clearly stated: "Quan was charged this week with being a felon in possession of a firearm"
Posts by Ugotta B. Kiddingme
1238 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Dec 2009
Watch as 10 cops with guns and military camo storm suspected Capital One hacker's house…
The Register taps a foot with boffins under the Lovell Telescope at Bluedot Festival
Fantastic Mr Fox? Not when he sh*ts on your lawn, kids' trampoline and your soul
Monday 29th July 2019 13:06 GMT
Re: Need to really P!$$ them off so they go elsewhere
"I assume these multiple things need to be coordinated and triggered by some Heath-Robinson-esque contraption linked to a Raspberry Pi, preferably running an AI to detect the fox and learn which strategy is the most effective"
Guess who reserved their seat on the first Moon flight? My mum, that's who
Friday 19th July 2019 18:22 GMT
what a cool story
I experienced similar when going through my mother's things after her passing a few years ago. On the one hand, losing a parent is always difficult. On the other, finding treasures from your childhood or even ones you never knew about is both heartwarming and somewhat of a balm to ease the pain of loss.
Incognito mode won't stop smut sites sharing your pervy preferences with Facebook, Google and, er, Oracle
All change at NASA while Proton launches and India's Moon dream suffers a snag
Grav-wave eggheads come closer to nailing down Hubble's Constant – the universe's speedy rate of expansion
Wednesday 10th July 2019 21:09 GMT
potentially stupid question
A statement higher up in the thread gave me an idea - probably a stupid idea long ago considered and rejected by those far smarter than me. However, since a casual search reveals no evidence of such consideration and subsequent rejection, I must ask:
Stated above: 'If everything were getting smaller then the gap between things (e.g. the atoms in your body) would also be getting smaller." So why can't we measure the expansion rate more locally with, for instance, some mundane object of normal matter? Does the local gravity well slow the expansion rate OR is the difference simply too infinitesimal to measure with current instruments?
Who cares about a Soyuz launch or a Vega delay when there's space gin to be had?
Finally in the UK: Apollo 11 lands... in a cinema near you
Jodrell Bank goes full UNESCO while Dundee awaits the decomissioners
Has NASA's Mars Insight lander hit rock bottom? Heat probe struggles to penetrate Red Planet
That this AI can simulate universes in 30ms is not the scary part. It's that its creators don't know why it works so well
Observation: Slow-burn space HAL 'em up fires adventure game genre into the exosphere
Monday 1st July 2019 12:13 GMT
Observation sounds a bit like...
... Bulkhead Interactive's interesting puzzler, 'The Turing Test' but from the opposite perspective - you are the human, not the AI.
The person who provides the voice for the AI sounds remarkably like (but isn't) Jeremy Irons. And it's available on Steam as well as XBox Live.
Drone fliers are either 'clueless, careless or criminal' says air traffic gros fromage
Your server remote login isn't root:password, right? Cool. You can keep your data. Oh sh... your IoT gear, though?
Bill G on Microsoft's biggest blunder... Was it Bing, Internet Explorer, Vista, the antitrust row?
Curioser and curioser: Little Mars rover sniffs out highest ever levels of methane
Bollocks or brutal truth: Do smart-mobes make us grow skull horns? We take a closer look at boffins' startling claims
*Spits out coffee* £4m for a database of drone fliers, UK.gov? Defra did game shooters for £300k
Atari finally launches its VCS console. Again.
Greatest threat facing IT? Not the latest tech giant cockwomblery – it's just tired engineers
Inflatables, solids, strap-ons and riders – oh my, it's the week in space
Hate your IT job? Sick of computers? Good news: An electronics-frying Sun superflare may hit 'in next 100 years'
Thursday 13th June 2019 12:36 GMT
Re: Yeah let's frrrryyyyyyy
in theory, you wouldn't have to remove the battery IF...
1. the phone is bubble-wrapped* and the bubble wrap is encased in tin or aluminium foil AND
2. the foil-wrapped phone is placed in foam/towel/etc* which is placed inside a closed metal ammunition box AND
3. the metal ammunition box is placed on a wooden shelf inside a steel safe which is then closed.
Any one of those three things is insufficient. Two of them MIGHT be enough. All three probably would. Of course, you would also need a hand-cranked or bicycle-powered generator (similarly protected) to charge the phone once you unwrapped it, but still.
* to insulate the item from the shielding. If they touch, the shielding is useless.
Mystery GPS glitch grounds flights, leaves passengers in the bar
Tuesday 11th June 2019 13:37 GMT
back in MY day...
long before GPS was anything more than a military wet-dream we were taught to navigate using, among other things, an E6B flight computer. Pretty sure I still have one in a closet somewhere. Many modern commercial pilots probably have no clue how to use one.
Idle Computer Science skills are the Devil's playthings
Neptune-sized oddball baffles astroboffins: It has a good atmosphere despite star-lashing
Introducing 'freedom gas' – a bit like the 2003 deep-fried potato variety, only even worse for you
Thursday 30th May 2019 12:10 GMT
Re: *pure*
interesting. I always thought it was Methanethiol but perhaps not. In fact, it largely depends upon the information source. Some say definitely methanethiol, aka methyl mercaptan. Others just say mercaptan, which could mean ethyl or methyl or some other variant like t-butyl mercaptan. One source says thiophane. And one or two flat out say NOT methyl but don't specify what IS added. Strange.
Infosec bloke claims: Pornhub owner shafted me after I exposed gaping holes in its cartoon smut platform
If servers go down but no one hears them, did they really fail? Think about it over lunch
Tuesday 28th May 2019 12:55 GMT
Re: re One should always check the current standards for voltage before plugging in
"There's a trap here in that a device (such as a phone, tablet or laptop) sold in 'rest of world' will typically come with a power supply that can handle 110 or 230/240 volts, but the exact same device in the US market will often come with a purely 110 volt power supply."
That has not been my experience at all for the cited items. Appliances/networking gear, yes, but not portable tech. I've not seen a 110VAC-only phone, tablet, or laptop in years.
This is a sett-up! Mum catches badger feasting on contents of freezer
Last week in space: Giant aircraft, asteroid impacts and exploding satellites
Israeli Moon probe crashes at the last minute but SpaceX scores with Falcon Heavy launch
Humanity gazes into the abyss to get its first glimpse of a black hole
Wednesday 10th April 2019 18:06 GMT
"That's not a hole..."
Perhaps it IS a hole, just not the one we thought. Maybe the Great Green Arkleseizure is mooning us.
Hopefully the Coming of Great White Toilet Paper isn't nigh...
Free online tax filing? Yeah, that'll soon be illegal thanks to rare US Congressional unity
Wednesday 10th April 2019 15:48 GMT
Re: "the IRS is in a position to simplify tax filing for millions of Americans"
"You DO know that Form 1040 has just become tremendously SIMPLER this year"
My fresh-out-of-university son who had been filing 1040EZ the last few years would disagree with that statement. My own experience is that the "new" 1040 seems simpler because the threshold for itemizing deductions is now harder to reach and therefore many more people than before just take the standard deduction. That has the net effect of simplifying the process and shaving hours off required completion time. However, the actual 1040 form itself was only slightly simpler to me while the new W4 adds three extra pages of worksheet/instructions than before.
Wednesday 10th April 2019 11:13 GMT
"the IRS is in a position to simplify tax filing for millions of Americans"
Yeah, that would be nice. Instead, I shall be submitting a request for reimbursement of medical expenses incurred when I slipped in the irony dripping from that title statement.
Not only is the US Tax system "unnecessarily complex" as you succinctly put it, but it's about to get even MORE ridiculous. Form W4 is what one fills out when beginning or changing employment and when filing conditions change such as marriage, the birth of a child, etc. This form is WAS a simple card to indicate how many individual deductions you are claiming so that your tax witholding can be calculated as reasonably close as possible. Beginning this year, that form becomes nearly as complex as the annual 1040 Tax Return form we all must fill out every April. And instead of simpler 1040 versions for simple tax situations, there is now only one form version - the long one, of course.
Town admits 'a poor decision was made' after baseball field set on fire to 'dry' it more quickly
Boffins baffled by planet nugget whizzing round white dwarf that should have killed it
NASA 'nauts do what flagship smartphone fans can only dream of: Change the batteries
There are pictures all over the internet of a big dark spot on Uranu... Oh no, wait, it's Neptune
Ethiopian Airlines boss confirms suspect flight software was in use as Boeing 737 Max crashed
Tuesday 26th March 2019 13:29 GMT
It seems to me there is a relatively simple temporary solution
I am NEITHER an engineer nor professional pilot and therefore lay NO claim to any authoritative knowledge on the matter. If you are a professional pilot and/or aeronautical engineer, feel free to correct me. This idea, however, seems logical to me:
Until a more permanent solution is devised, instead of having the MCAS system actually force the airplane to pitch down when it thinks it detects an impending stall, have it blare an unignorable alarm WITH an audible voice giving instructions such as "pitch down immediately to prevent impending stall!" or something appropriately similar. The humans at the controls are ultimately responsible for the aircraft and its contents. Provide them with the urgent data and corrective course of action but let them actually PERFORM that action. Not a perfect solution, but it is a quick one that will prevent this specific type of tragedy from recurring.
Welcome. You're now in a timeline in which US presidential hopeful Beto was a member of a legendary hacker crew
Monday 18th March 2019 17:18 GMT
Re: Alan Brown
You are confusing Medicare with Medicaid. Medicare is quasi-government health care for pensioners. Medicaid is the program for the indigent. Medicaid definitely fits your description of "compulsary medical insurance which many low age earners can't afford to have taken out of their pay packet".
My own opinion is that we probably won't see an NHS-like system for the same reason we'll never see a simplified Federal tax code: because it takes power out of the hands of the politicians and those who stuff the politicians' pockets.
Science says death metal fans delightful and intelligent people, great at dinner parties
Friday 15th March 2019 10:54 GMT
Re: On the one hand
"I'm a Barbie girl, in a Barbie world. Life in plastic, it's fantastic..."
"Go on, get that out of your head. :D"
Easy. All I need is A Little Piece of Heaven
'It's like painting with atoms'... Watch how boffins form armies of simple micron-sized bots from a silicon wafer
Racist self-driving car scare debunked, inside AI black boxes, Google helps folks go with the TensorFlow...
Monday 11th March 2019 13:11 GMT 
applause for Liz O'Sullivan but...
there are plenty of folks without such a moral compass who would gladly step in and complete the work she refused. The sad truth is that unless humanity overcomes basic urges to hurt/kill/maim/dominate others, and fairly quickly, this will end badly - most likely extinction by our own hand...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
