Posts by phuzz 6734 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Feb 2010
Modern USB chargers allow the device to request more power than standard, which means they need more smarts than just a dumb charger.
I suspect that not many chargers will actually be vulnerable to malicious fiddling, but it's easy enough to build a whole computer into a power brick now, so just because your charger looks normal, it could still have been replaced by a malicious one.
Small Town USA is different from Small Town UK though, for the simple reason that the UK is much smaller. It's much easier and cheaper to cover, say, 95% of the UK population because the population density is much higher (263 people/km² for the UK vs 35.2 people/km² for the USA). A better comparison would be with Germany (234 people/km²).
tl/dr population density is seven times higher in the UK, you shouldn't compare it with the US.
The state knows it can trust you if they have the implied threat of prison to hold over your head all the time.
I assume the Russian government is like all the other government departments I've seen, in that they would prefer someone who is average and controllable over someone who is brilliant but unpredictable.
A particularly big object, wizzing past in the right direction could speed up the rotation of the Earth enough to require a negative leap second.
I may now spend the rest of the afternoon working out exactly how big of an object, how close, and if there would be any other effects...
"And preparing, cooking and eating food is a pleasure"
For you maybe, personally, of those three only eating it brings me any pleasure and only some of the time at that. Most of the time it's about as much fun as filling my car up with petrol, but slightly cheaper.
If you enjoy preparing food, great! Just don't assume that everyone else enjoys it too.
There's also a whole bunch of people who work in advertising, and if they're not making adverts, why would anyone bother paying them?
So the marketing people make adverts because that's what their job is, and the companies put the adverts everywhere because otherwise they've wasted the money they've spent on the marketing people.
Nobody in this loop benefits from finding out how effective the adverts actually are, instead it's better to spend the time working out how to spend the bonuses they'll get for whatever artificial metric they picked.
Charlie Stross has an interesting set of predictions for the start of next year, which will make you really, really hope he's wrong.
"There is something wrong with the system when a [...] President can be issuing Executive Orders [...] three weeks before he is made redundant."
There's only one president at a time, and there is a formal handover ceremony which in this case is in a few weeks. How else do you expect the system to work?
It takes a long time to count all the votes in the US, so naturally the presidents can't be swapped straight after election day, as the result is still uncertain at that point.
It would be possible to swap once the Electoral college votes are all in, but the US loves it's spectacle and rallies, and those take some time to organise (catering has to be organised, musicians have to be booked etc.), and so there's a period of time to allow this organisation to happen.
Assuming Trump makes it to the end of his term, he also will continue to be the president, with all the powers that entails, until the next one is sworn in. This is normal.
MRI machines can be dangerous if you have bits of metal inside you for two reasons.
The obvious one is that if you have iron/steel/ferrous metal inside you, then it will do it's best to go with the magnetic field, and soon it will not be inside you any more. This is not usually a problem.
The other problem is that MRI machines dump energy in the form of radio waves into the sample (ie you), in order to flip polarised atoms around. If you have metal inside you, it might end up acting as an antenna, and heating up. This is more localised, so it's generally not a problem, but this is why typically you'll receive an X-ray just to check what's inside you, before you're allowed in the MRI machine.
Sorry to disappoint you, but 'candy bar phone' is usually used to mean something like an old school nokia in order to differentiate them from the flip phones which came before. I assume because one of those Nokias is approximately the dimensions of a chocolate bar (ish).
"Seriously, this is the 300 kg gorilla that never seems to get mentioned here: you can't spy on terrorists and kiddie fiddlers without also spying on you and me."
But you can have processes in place to make sure the information they get is proportional and not too invasive, if it turns out that the suspect is innocent.
It's called a warrant.
The police can't just wander into your house, but if they suspect that they need to, they can apply for a warrant, and someone outside the police will decide if the need is justified.
Most people's objection to the snooper's charter is that in a lot of cases there is little to no oversight, and if there is, it's behind closed doors.
I did like that we get only one short bit of light-sabre swinging in the the entire film, and it's scarcity makes it look so much more cool.
After an entire film of more or less normal people shooting at each other, to see a single character breeze through half a dozen opponents, making it look easy, even showing off a bit, really emphasises quite how powerful the Force is.
I've heard a bunch of people complaining about the CGI characters (well, the human ones, nobody has had a bad word to say about K2SO yet), but I've heard an equally large number of people who never even noticed that Tarkin was CG.
A question; did it bother you as much that some of the other characters were just people in rubber masks?
If I stared closely I could tell he wasn't real, but I was too busy watching the film to want to do that.
At my last job, only one other person had a key to the server room, my boss.
If he was away, and I had a particularly boring day, without much work on, I'd go and have a nice kip in there.
If it was a hot day, I'd roll a chair right under the aircon and doze there. On a cold day, I'd curl up behind the main rack, gently drifting off to the sound of a bunch of fans screaming along, wafting warm air over me.
I give it a quick test every few months, including jsut the toher day, and on my Win10 x64 machine Firefox uses slightly less than Chrome, and both use quite a lot less than Edge and IE (Edge uses less, but neither are running an adblocker).
As for giving memory back, usually Firefox will end up taking 1-2GB of RAM on my system after a few hours of opening and closing various different tabs. If I close it and reopen it goes back down. I assume Chrome is the same, I just can't be bothered to spend all morning finding out.
The drone in question is an oceanographic drone. It measures the temperature and salinity of the sea at different positions and depths. This is very useful information for the US Navy 's submarines, as it gives them a much better idea of how, and how far sounds will travel through that particular bit of ocean.
So it's not exactly spying, but it is information that's intended for a military purpose.
First there has to be a porn blocking chip to disable, that's the main objection here. How exactly do you prevent a device from accessing porn? Sure, you can block known porn sites easily (eg blacklist playboy.com), but what about unknown sites?
You could try to create a filter which would programatically guess if an image is porn, but that's going to be flagging up your beach photos, while missing someone in bondage gear.
What if, instead of just browsing to a porn site, you download an encrypted file, which contains porn? Are they going to have a magic porn chip that views everything on the screen?
And finally, what is porn? There's no coherent argument that covers why Michelangelo's David is art, and (for example) the picture at the top of the article is not.
"the in your face begging letters on there is really getting on peoples tits."
I just had to go check and see if my adblocker was blocking them. It wasn't, so it must have been the adblocker in my brain filtering them out. I swear I did not notice they were asking for money again, I just didn't consciously notice.
Agggghhhh!
You just reminded me, I logged onto a customer's system the other day, to reacquaint myself with the firewall config, and had an urge to check out the backup system I'd set up a year or so ago.
Backups are made of a bunch of different directories, and a couple of databases, before being archived and finally rsynced across to a central server where they'll be included in the off site backup.
Now this customer had moved offices recently, and changed their IP range as well, and clearly someone had though ahead and to avoid getting errors, they'd commented out the entire section of my backup script that copied the backups off the machine to the other server. Of course, they'd never un-commented those lines...
So, for about ten moths, this server had been carefully backing up everything, but never copying the data off itself.
(yes I fixed the script, and no, I didn't bother telling the customer, they'll only find a different way to bugger it up)
Ha! You plebs, my folks get a whopping 600k (ish)!
That said, BT have promised to install FTTC in the next six months, so finally both me and my two brothers can go home at the same time, without our three phones taking all the bandwidth as soon as we walk through the door!
You could think of it as a traditional multi-stage rocket, only in this case the first stage is powered by jet engines, not rockets, and is reuseable.
(Jet engines get a much better specific impulse than conventional chemical rockets.)
The number of computers I've sent out (after making sure they were working), only to have them mysteriously fail (the most recent one they even tried plugging it into a different PSU to check if that was the problem). So they get sent back to me (after I've scrambled to send out a replacement), only to have the 'broken' machine fire straight up on my workbench.
Occasionally people wonder why those of us who work in IT assume that users are idiots. This is one of those reasons.
There's another factor to it as well. Positioning systems rely on a model of the Earth known as a 'geodetic datum', which is a fancy way of saying 'a model of the shape of the Earth'.
There are several different models, which tend to be more accurate to the actual shape of the Earth in certain places. GPS uses WGS 84, which tends to be more accurate over the continental US, so when the best accuracy of 1.5m is quoted for GPS, this is almost certainly only true in the US, the accuracy in Europe will not be quite as good (because the datum there is less correct).
Galileo uses it's own datum (GTRF) which is likely to be more accurate over Europe than WGS80, so the quoted best precision for Galileo will be somewhere in Europe.
tl/dr GPS is most precise in the US, Galileo will be most precise in Europe.
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