Posts by cyberdemon

Linux kernel coders propose inclusive terminology coding guidelines, note: 'Arguments about why people should not be offended do not scale'

Re: I am obviously a horrible person and possibly racist...

No, you should be apologising for flattening off the peaks of your audio to make it sound "louder" instead of just choosing a level for each channel and sticking to it, so that the final mix doesn't "clip" in the loudest part, even if that sounds "quiet" to you. Good recordings should obey the superposition principle. Turn off your compressors and limiters.

Pisses me off when what should be loud drum beats instead seem to "subtract" from the rest of the music (i.e. the music fades away either side of the drum beat) because some twat "audio engineer" thought it sounded louder that way.

REALLY pisses me off when stations like Classic FM try to play something like the 1812 overture, and due to the compressors and limiters they use, at the very end it's nothing but a pathetic grey mush as the orchestra is supposed to reach its fortissimo peak and the cannons fire.

If I want it louder I'll turn it up. Go away. You ARE a horrible person. But not a racist.

Re: Do non African slaves not matter ?

@claptrapp314 I'm not sure who you are implying is acting deliberately there..

But TBH, I think this sort of thing is something that only the Gooogles, Amazons, Microsofts and Apples of this world have the ability to implement efficiently (after all, most of their code is closed source anyway, and snap decisions can always be made by diktat). While it severely hurts open source having this sort of moral panic in public, causing a schism amongst their developers, over something that no-one really cares about.

And guess who are most in favour? Oh, the big corporates. Makes their CSR look so wonderful, and scatters those pesky penguins.

Re: Thin end of the wedge?

> "The proposal has allowed for exceptions when maintaining a userspace API or when updating a code for a specification that mandates those terms. "

And what about when maintaining a kernel space API?

ERROR Unresolved Symbol PCI_MASTER_READ

Pretty sure that developers of proprietary kernel space drivers (e.g. NVIDIA, Intel) will be tearing their hair out at this

Re: Thin end of the wedge?

After all none of us are really black at all - nor are any of us white. We are all (in varying shades) Brown.

The only thing that it is reasonable to do to repay the horrors of the past, is to stand up against those horrors when they appear in the present. Like (as someone mentioned above) the treatment of ethnic Libyans, Palestinians, Uighurs, Cantonese. We should be taking a stand against the actual oppression that exists today, not trying to white-wash (oh no! I said white) history - that only serves to demean those who continue to suffer.

Not making bizarre, pointless and counter-productive changes to a piece of software that has bugger all to do with any of it!

Re: Thin end of the wedge?

wtf? I nominate YAAC for the hyperbole of the year award. Is there an ignobel for that?

Re: Sexism too?

@smooth newt

I think the sarcasm in your post was lost on some people.

Should this icon be banned? And the one with the helicopter on it too, because the colour of the helicopter is associated with the negative emotion of impending doom

Re: Thin end of the wedge?

You mean whitelist/blacklist?

Even these terms I doubt had any malign intent when they were used or even coined. It's like with an optical filter - a white one lets through photons while a black one does not. A whitelist lets through the specified packet types, like a list of holes in a punched card, while a blacklist blocks the specified types, like a list of un-punched "black" positions on the card.

Are we to expunge all emotional reference to colour from our language then? Dark times ahead, I fear. (oops)

All sounds like Newspeak to me..

Re: Loaded words replaced by euphemisms

Couldn't agree more. To virtue signal is to claim that you "care", but you are too lazy or selfish to do anything meaningful about the problem.

Call me cynical, but this sort of thing could also be used to deliberately divide and disrupt an open source community or organisation..

Oh well, I'm glad I am out of the nuclear remote handling industry, where I was working on a "Master/Slave Manipulator" (commonly abbreviated to MSM)

Thin end of the wedge?

While I support the BLM movement, I think going back and refactoring a huge codebase to remove banned words that were used without any malign connotation, could have ununtended consequences. Such as serious bugs being introduced into the code, or API compatibility issues.

For example, grepping the linux kernel headers (just the headers, which all have API compatibility implications) there are 1645 lines containing the word "master" and 1550 lines containing the word "slave". Think of all the code reviews needed to expunge just two banned terms arising from today's moral panic. What about all the others, and what about tomorrow's moral panic?

I highly doubt that anyone was intending any malice when they used these terms, no more than the inventor of the "kill" command, which "kills" a process along with all of its "children" had murderous intent. Or perhaps we should expunge that too, out of solidarity for victims of mass murder.

I really don't see how borking the Linux kernel helps anyone?

How about doing something real and tangible to address poverty, race and class inequality instead? Donate to education charities, support minority ethnic inclusion in tech outreach programs, vote Labour...

Virtue signaling is one thing, but imposing it on the world's most well-established codebase is both worthless and self-defeating.

Detroit cops employed facial recognition algos that only misidentifies suspects 96 per cent of the time

Re: Facial recognition works 100% of the time

^ This.

Very much hits the nail.

Facial recognition is "just good enough" that it can be used as a smokescreen for a police state.

It basically says 96% of us are suspected ne'er do-wells. The 4% being those who fall into the statistical category of "highly affluent white folk who might be in a position to sue the police if falsely accused".

The 96% are then subject to the individual police officer's prejudices and ulterior motives, and if you happen to be in a category who probably doesn't have the resources to defend themselves adequately, then you can be convicted of whatever the hell they want.

Analogue radio given 10-year stay of execution as the UK U-turns on DAB digital future

Re: The future is behind you ....

> I do the same as AndueC but it's piped through my ICE.

Piped through your Internal Combustion Engine?

Sounds like a recipe for Carbon Monoxide poisoning if you ask me..

Ofcom..

So you're saying that Ofcom believed that analogue radio was going to die out very soon (despite massive opposition for a switch off) and so they reduced the analogue license fees to essentially zero for an entire decade?

Trebles all round at Classic FM then! Sucks to be a new national DAB station like Union JACK in that case.

I seem to remember multiple Beeellions being involved in the 2004 analogue TV spectrum auction..

Presumably Vodafone et al must have realised by now that 200MHz wavelength is a bit long for a handset (unless they wanted it for backhaul) but while switching off analogue TV made sense with the compression ratio that digital video affords, doing the same for radio is and always was stupid. It occupies very little bandwidth anyway, and the costs outweigh the benefits in every area. e.g. people listen to radio on the move, whereas TVs are usually static, so they don't need to re-establish a link. Once the antenna is tweaked enough to work, it usually stays that way.

Whereas driving around with a DAB radio in the car going on and off is beyond annoying.

GitHub to replace master with main across its services

INEQUALITY IS THE PROBLEM, NOT RACISM

It's epitomised by the phrase "something must be seen to be done"!

As if being seen to be doing "something" is more important than what is actually done.

In contrast with the US (which in many parts is actually racist), the UK has very little racism in its culture. The real problem in the UK is classism- plutocratic inequality - discrimination against the poor - the ability of the super-rich to make themselves richer at the expense of the poor, and discrimination against anyone from a poor background, preventing any upward social mobility.

This move by MS does absolutely nothing to address racism - instead it continues to sow division among the middle and lower classes, letting them fight among themselves while the super rich get richer and yet more powerful.

Not only is Zoom's strong end-to-end encryption not actually end-to-end, its encryption isn't even that strong

Their own users and devs have been moaning about the borked web client for three days now

https://devforum.zoom.us/t/in-progress-web-sdk-web-client-from-browser-403-forbidden/10782/110

They still haven't fessed up on their own forums that its because of this security TITSUP

Dual screens, fast updates, no registry cruft and security in mind: Microsoft gives devs the lowdown on Windows 10X

My only reason to run Windows natively..

is the small subset of applications which fail to run properly in a VM.

Namely games, the occasional CAD package, certain f*cking .NET apps, and anything else that can't run under either Wine, Mono or VirtualBox. VR tends to be the only reason to dig out my SSD-with-windows-on and boot it

So, how exactly does putting all win32 apps into VMs with RDP routing help Windows' case for continued existence? Certainly i'm not going to be able to run any VR games like that..

I don't know but it's been said, Amphenol plugs are made with lead

From the title, I thought this was going to be a shock story about ROHS compliance

But instead it was about swinging the lead

Brexit? HP Inc laughs in the face of Brexit! Hard or soft, PC maker claims it's 'no significant risk'

Hello, investors

Our business is doomed.

Would you like to buy some shares?

(I think that's why most companies publicly to shrug off the risks of Brexit - along with any other risk that they can't actually do anything about.. including british car manufacturers etc.)

Let's talk about April Fools' Day jokes. Are they ever really harmless?

I had expected NaN to be a problem, too..

It is in Ruby, for example:

cyberdemon:~$ irb

irb(main):001:0> a = Float::NAN

=> NaN

irb(main):002:0> a > 0

=> false

irb(main):003:0> a < 0

=> false

irb(main):004:0> a == 0

=> false

Must watch: GE's smart light bulb reset process is a masterpiece... of modern techno-insanity

Re: "smarter lighting in every way"

That's nothing.

I have installed IP cameras in every room in my house, connected to a combination of Microsoft Cloud, AWS and Google, which all run an AI machine-learning computer vision system to model my whereabouts thoughts and and intentions at all times, just so my arduino can know if I would like the hall light on, or off.

</topper>

Behold the might of dynamic crimefighting duo Captain Met Police and the Microsoft Kid

Re: One hopes...

So long as it's not on Chinese infrastructure, it's fine, right?

Like using the latest version of Microsoft Office? Love Offline Files? Not for long!

This aint no technological breakdown..

Reminds me of the Chris Rea song..

But seriously, good intentions or not, I worry for the stability of western society (especially in poor soon-to-be-isolated little Britain) when so much of it depends on this shaky infrastructure designed in California.

Shops like Tesco can't even take cash now, without a connection to some Cloud ERP server.. Certainly no logistics or distribution company can work without the Cloud these days - they wouldn't even be able to ind their way to the delivery location, never mind know what to load onto the lorry.

I seriously think that society is so fragile now that it would collapse if the internet went off for a week. They probably wouldn't be able to supply amazonian wood pellets to our converted coal power stations anymore, let alone fill up the petrol stations... If you thought Brexit would be bad for our "just in time" economy..!

A month and we'd be stabbing eachother over a tin of baked beans.

Re: isn't a good look for Microsoft

MS have sat and watched Apple, Google, Dropbox et al for a while now, and come to the realisation that all their competitors seem to be going a little bit evil. But they have a monopoly on that since 1995, so naturally the best course of action is to copy what they do, but ramp up the evil. It's a niche that only Microsoft can fill, just watch while they corner the market!

Re: Clouds rule OK!

> LibreOffice is crap for business work. I say this as a StarOffice+++ home user since 1998.

You forgot the troll icon --->

Google relents slightly in ad-blocker crackdown – for paid-up enterprise Chrome users, everyone else not so much

Chromium?

So what about the "open source" version of chrome? Will that remain anti-feature free?

The Year Of Linux On The Desktop – at last! Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 brings the Linux kernel into Windows

Re: MS SOP: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

Exactly.

While conspiring with Intel to create a secure-boot spec that makes it very difficult in some/most cases (especially corporate environments) to run Linux natively, Microsoft have conveniently taken much of what makes Linux great and integrated it into their own paid-for shitty spyware OS. Great news, for Microsoft shareholders, but I can imagine a lot of the open-source devs who created the whole GNU/Linux ecosystem being a bit upset about this.

The reason I and people like me use Linux is not about money, it's about control and a sense of (healthy, I say) paranoia. We have a massive distrust of software vendors like Microsoft, who with their inscrutable closed-source code, snoop and slurp, and push unknown updates onto you, all the while collecting a hefty tax. It really is not about the money, far from it: If there were an OS I could truly trust, I would happily pay for it. But as it happens, the only OS I can trust is free, in both senses.

Internet industry freaks out over proposed unlimited price hikes on .org domain names

who cares?

> Who cares?? No one on the internet, they could just as easily use .com

I'm sure any person or small business who already has a .org address cares a lot about this.

And of course, this is the thin-end of the wedge. If this passes, then .com will be next.

We could end up in the situation where anyone can be held to ransom by the registrars. Oops, looks like your domain has become "popular", judging by the number of DNS queries for it. Therefore, the renewal price has just gone up 100x.

Without a cap, that's possible. The only reason it doesn't happen already on the uncapped TLDs is because the main ones are still capped.

It would turn the registrars, who are already barons with far too much power, into a mafia who can levy unlimited "taxes" against whomsoever they choose. And tbh, I'm sick of ICANN just bending over and doing whatever GoDaddy tells them to.

And in current affairs... Apple recalls three-prong AC adapters after some shocking behavior

Duckhead?

First I've heard of a duckhead. I don't see the resemblance to a duck. I've heard of something similar that I nearly typed though, especially when considering Apple employees & fanbois

Actually, even chrome's spellchecker suggests that I should have typed "dickhead".

UK comms watchdog mulls 5G tweaks: Operators want moooooar power

Re: Now We Will Need Tin Hats

So to reply to my own post, 28dBm (which is what they are asking for) is apparently about 600mW radiated power. That's not much use as a death ray, much less to cook the christmas turkey..

However, I'm not sure what that really means in terms of an array of antennas. Is it 600mW per antenna (in which case, it goes back to death ray territory)? 600mW per beam, or does dBm not translate to radiated power anymore (because it's not uniformly radiated)

In any case, I wonder how many beams it can support, what radiated power each beam can have, and if they can all be focused on the same place?

Re: Now We Will Need Tin Hats

I must say it is slightly worrying. Would it be possible for the beam-forming technology to be used to form a very-high-powered narrow beam?

Could a miscreant or some future totalitarian state decide to boil someone's brain as they walked past the antenna, by directing a death-ray at their head?

Maybe that's OK, if the person's crime-coefficient is deemed to be high..

Social Media buttons

What buttons?

I don't see any..

What, you mean your browser runs arbitrary Javascript from untrusted sources? You should fix that.

Excite Email!

Re: Excite Email!

I'm struggling to read your post.. Did you work for Yahoo! at some point in your life?

In the West, we're worried about shooting down drones. In Russia, drones shoot you

Re: We're doomed.

Well, if it's 'History repeating itself' as you say, then will it be Revolutionary France, Nazi Germany, Stalin's Russia, Cultural Revolution China, Pol Pot's Cambodia, or Slobodan Milosevic's Yugoslavia?

In each case, it's always the educated people like you and I (the so-called 'liberal elite' this time) who get murdered by the uneducated masses and their populist leaders, while the real rich & powerful who have actually caused the major fuck-ups (e.g. rees-mogg, farage, raaaab & co) generally get to flee.

Honestly, I would prefer to be annihilated in a nuclear blast than get hacked to death by a machete-wielding mob, or my starving neighbour who wants the contents of my cupboard. Nuclear war is optimistic, as far as I'm concerned :(

Our society is so fragile now, you'd only need to kill the Internet for society to collapse. Drag an anchor across the Bristol channel, and suddenly nobody can do their jobs due to reliance on Cloud services, nobody gets paid, cards don't work, supermarkets like Tesco can't even take cash when the Internet is down, thanks to their cloud-based ERP, etc etc.

BTW: Austerity was just a way to try to put the brakes on a lending system that had got out of hand. It's only a halfway point between the pre-2008 circle-jerk and actual reality, whereby countries have to actually produce stuff to be rich and plentiful.

In said actual reality, the Pound is worth less than a Zimbabwean Dollar, and industrialised nations like Germany, Russia and China can walk all over us.

The basic problem is that humanity has grown too numerous to be stable. World War is inevitable, and in Britain, we're fucked.

Re: Personally

> Oh, and as for the Illuminati - we're not interested. It's so much easier and so much more fun to see just what direly incompetent politicians we can inflict on people. World domination? We're in it for the lulz. It's funny watching people vote to be kept poor, ignorant and powerless.

Remind me who the ukranian presidential favourite is?

Then again, an airhead actor is probably better than a self-righteous "businessman" with serious vested interests.

Mary McDonnell for US president anyone?

Re: We're doomed.

@jellied Eel

I'm not so much worried about re-purposed RC aircraft (actually the one in the video was a lot more than that, given that it incorporated the gun as a structural element into a quite innovative fixed-wing VTOL design, with an unusual control scheme, which I suspect is what's behind the patent).

I'm far more worried about what well-resourced large corporations can do with government backing and a manufacturing supply chain geared up to produce by the millions. Imagine that thing, but with the same on-board AI computing power, "thoughtful product design" and mass-production efficiency of the DJI Mavic.

* ActiveTrack allows you to track "subjects" effortlessly * Utilises FlightAutonomy technology to sense obstacles up to 15m away, so the Mavic can "avoid" accidents * Forward & downward vision sensors let the Mavic hover precisely indoors or in places without GPS * New OcuSync transmission technology with a range of 4.3miles for video streaming * all for a bargain price of £900 * just add explosives

Those things are quite terrifying in terms of what they could do if someone decided to turn them into a weapon. (imagine a swarm of them coming at you like a Cylon missile strike, each one independently picking and tracking its own target)

Luckily though, DJI have made them into "unhackable black boxes" that always obey local government airspace restrictions, and could never ever be used for anything nefarious. Isn't that nice of them?

Actually, DJI drones cannot be used in any UK defence contracts, since the things are so murky in terms of what they are really doing inside.. plus of course they are in constant encrypted communication with China via the phone app that you MUST use if you want anything beyond basic manual 2-stick control. When you consider that all major chinese companies are "encouraged" to have a "party committee" at board level to ensure the company is serving the interests of the party, you can see why the UK/US militaries are worried about using their tech.

There's been an arms race going on, but because we were so distracted by those pesky terrists stealing our oil, we have failed to notice the starting gun.

Like I said, we're doomed.

We're doomed.

In the west, this kind of "innovation" is gets you thrown in jail. In russia, you can be granted a patent on this shit and the state will buy it.

I dread to think what's going on in China.. Since they don't post on YouTube we won't know until they come humming round the corner.

What brexiting twats like Gavin Williamson fail to realise is, we have no "hard power" to use. If it came to war, we would stand a snowball's chance in hell. It's one thing shooting at poor uneducated arabs who have nothing but antique and makeshift weaponry, but we really have no idea what it's like fighting a war with modern weaponry on both sides. WWII is almost gone from living memory.

Call me a tinfoil-hat-wearer, but I'm pretty convinced that there's a little club of powerful russian and chinese men somewhere, who are rubbing their hands with glee after their little game of psychological operations and divide-and-rule.

Britain's "sovereign" parliament is in complete disarray and will probably never be able to make a decision on anything ever again, America is still trying to impeach its lunatic president, and little fascist parties are gaining ground all over Europe.

Honestly, I can see western society collapsing all on its own even without direct foreign intervention. Then someone steps in to "keep the peace".

When it all stabilises, we will wonder what this notion of "freedom" was, before quickly putting it out of our minds for fear of being flagged for unusual behaviour by the AI powered surveillance state, and getting a visit from the thought police.

Facebook blames 'server config change' for 14-hour outage. Someone run that through the universal liar translator

re: downvotes

The downvotes are from people who know full well that Facebook and Whatsapp have voice calling, but still insist on using traditional calls because they are a) more reliable and b) aren't being slurped by Facebook to build a dataset for the next robo-caller AI.

We prefer that only GCHQ gets to spy on us, with their low-tech wire-tapping systems that they installed at Vodafone et al a decade or three ago, which only records people they are already interested in, rather than -everyone-.

Bloke thrown in the cooler for eight years after 3D-printing gun to dodge weapon ban

If he is barred from owning a gun, how can he legally buy ammo?

You know, those explosives wrapped in brass, with the bullets wot kill people.

Surely that's more important than a piece of plastic that he downloaded?

Paris, cos even she can see this glaring loophole..

xHamster reports spike in UK users getting their five-knuckle shuffle on before pr0n age checks

Re: Reason?

No, the reason is that Mrs. May and her ilk believe in stable government, 1984 style. That means mass surveillance so that they can arrest anyone who disagrees with them.

This is just an excuse to further that cause.

Wow, what a lovely early Christmas present for Australians: A crypto-busting super-snoop law passes just in time

Re: "Ship! Come back!"

Unfortunately Adam, I don't think the government really cares THAT much about the 'bad guys' :(

What governments REALLY worry about are the masses. If people en-masse got angry, they could make themselves a completely new government.

If some 'bad guy' blows up a hundred, or even a thousand people, it's not really a problem for a government, in the grand scheme of things. It may even help them, by keeping the masses afraid of such things and persuade them to give up some of their freedoms.

The kinds of people who do mass surveillance are only interested in the software used by the masses, i.e. facebook and whatsapp (at the moment).. If you went and used some third-party app that implemented the Signal protocol but didn't pass on your keystrokes to GCHQ, then you would perhaps be flagged on some watch-list or learning system for being an 'abnormal' person, but really they are not that interested in you unless you can communicate with millions of people..

London Gatwick Airport reopens but drone chaos perps still not found

Re: "environmental rights terrorists"

No, the last two do not apply to these jokers. All of those bullet points come under the heading:

Terrorism is a violent action that:

IANAL, but this reads to me that they must all be "violent actions". If there is no violence, or at least wanton destruction, then it can't be "terrorism".

- Interferes with or seriously disrupts an electronic system

e.g. blowing up subsea internet cables in the Bristol Channel or deliberately dragging an anchor to destroy them. (I worry about this sort of thing bringing the UK to a standstill at some point.. No more "cloud"! Most big shops can't even take Cash without the Internet.)

- Creates a serious risk to the public’s health and safety

e.g. throwing caltrops or burning bin bags off of motorway bridges. The M25 turns into a car park with just one breakdown.. Imagine the chaos someone could cause deliberately.

--

Whereas this drone, if there even was a drone, was just flying somewhere in the vicinity of an airport, probably minding its own business. It's illegal, due to the proximity to the airport, but not "terrorism" by a long shot. The only "terror" was caused by the media and airport management when they shut the whole place down at Christmas on a knee-jerk!

TBH, all of this sounds to me like an excuse to "crack down" on drones in general, because the government sees them as a hazard. I think Mrs. May would like all of them banned except for her own manhacks authorised police drones.

Re: Fire and forget ...?

An inductive charging mat might come in handy?

Resident evil: Inside a UEFI rootkit used to spy on govts, made by you-know-who (hi, Russia)

Hardware button?

Most UEFI motherboards (certainly mine) have a dedicated hardware button at the rear I/O panel which is something to do with flashing firmware. I believe one can insert a USB stick with a firmware image, and hold the button down at boot to flash it without a screen attached.

Would it not therefore be trivial to require this pre-existing hardware button to be pressed EVERY TIME the firmware is flashed? I.e. if you try to flash it from windows, it lights up the button and says "please press the button on the motherboard to continue with firmware update".

Would this not thwart (almost) all malicious UEFI firmware images? (perhaps not the kind installed into laptops by security services as they pass through airports in the more dodgy countries i.e. China, Russia, Israel I am looking at you..) but certainly it would no longer be possible to do this remotely..

Yes it might make it very slightly more annoying for the PFY in the data centre who has to update 1000 racks with a new firmware, but at least he gets overtime for it!

UKIP flogs latex love gloves: Because Brexit means Brexit

Non-binding it may be, but we're still doomed.

With the amount of vitriol swirling round since the vote leave campaign, if the government tried to back-pedal now there would be civil unrest..

But then again, when we actually leave, there will still be civil unrest because we won't be able to buy enough gas to keep the power on, and the price of food will have doubled because we fundamentally don't have enough land to grow our own, and we can't import spanish grain to make our supposedly 'british' meat & dairy..

In a country so precariously balanced that it risks societal collapse if the Internet went off for a few weeks (in my humble opinion), this is a truly horrifying prospect!

At which point, thanks to the wonderful way global finance now works, the pound could go the way of the zimbabwean dollar.

The only answer is to build yourself a fortress, buy up all the property at rock-bottom prices with your off-shore assets, and then wait it out while the proles murder their neighbours for the last tin of baked beans. But that only works if you're rich like rees-mogg.

No, seriously, why are you holding your phone like that?

(deliberately?) stupid meters

Apart from the reasons discussed already (1: being switched off remotely, either for "load-shaping" by your supplier, or "cyberattack" by anyone else.. 2: having my data slurped and sold to any and all interested parties 3: being locked into a particular supplier 4: being made to pay a variable rate depending on the suppliers's ability to supply...)

The other reason I hate smart meters, and would never consensually have one installed, is that I don't trust them to read accurately.

The old electromagnetic meters read "true RMS" by virtue of a magnetic force acting on a spinning disc -the moment of inertia of the disc will ultimately average out any transients.

Smart Meters on the other hand, are purely electronic, and don't necessarily read True RMS (because they employ discrete sampling).

There was a huge fiasco last year with Smart Meters over-reading. I don't know how much of it has been fixed now, and which meters are OK..

They would sample only at the peak of the mains voltage sine-wave. This is a problem for any device whose front-end component is a bridge rectifier (this includes most LED lights, most laptop power supplies, and cheaper desktop power supplies without PFC).

Current only flows through the diode bridge when the mains voltage is higher than the DC capacitor voltage, and that only happens at the peak of the mains waveform. But the "smart" meter would sample the peak current, and assume that it was sinusoidal and in-phase with the voltage. But in reality, the current at everywhere else but the sampling point, is near zero.

Thus, smart meters would over-read by several times for LED lighting in particular.

see: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/06/smart_meters_prove_dim/

Foot lose: Idiot perv's shoe-mounted upskirt vid camera explodes

Smoking boots

Congrats to El Reg for finding this gem for the 'Bootnotes' section.

Git365. Git for Teams. Quatermass and the Git Pit. GitHub simply won't do now Microsoft has it

Git for Business

Which obviously is totally incompatible with actual Git, and requires Silverlight. But it has an app for your Zune.

Dinosaurs permitted to mate: But what does AT&T Time merger mean for antitrust – and you?

Re: "The US approach maximises consumer welfare"

@Andrew: Even with that simplistic definition of Consumer Welfare, it does not necessarily follow that prices will be lower under a monopoly.

Russia appears to be 'live testing' cyber attacks – Former UK spy boss Robert Hannigan

Ivan, it's called sarcasm.

Is Microsoft about to git-merge with GitHub? Rumors suggest: Yes

Re: GitLab

First I've heard of Gogs. It sounds interesting.. I will give it a try.

Also, please forgive my above posts in favour of GitLab, as it's the only good (though admittedly slow) not-GitHub I know/knew.