Posts by staggers

Google parks old pay-to-play auction in front of European Commission – reports

Re: If Google is a Ford, where be the Rolls Royces of AIReality Placement Engines?

Did you forget your tablets again?

Mine are in my pocket. I hope.

'Don't Google Google, Googling Google is wrong', says Google

Re: For techincal documentation we need

Tee hee. Saw what you did there! Isn't the English language wonderful? (Unless you aren't a native speaker - or even if you are, come to think of it.)

Re: Because It's Not Google

And you wouldn't believe how hard Hoover tried to stop being used as the name for all vacuum cleaners, since most of the cleaners sold are not Hoovers at all.

Users shop cold-calling telco to ICO: 'She said she was from Openreach'

If the caller asked for my father by name he would tell them he's dead. How we laughed. He is now, but no one calls him. Still, I suppose that since he can't answer it doesn't matter. But still a bit of someone's time wasted.

Facebook claims a third more users in the US than people who exist

Re: "...18 to 24-year-olds..."

I think the World Series was created by a newspaper of that name.

BUT they seem happy to let everyone else think it means the whole planet.

Or maybe they aren't aware of the confusion in the rest of the world!

Re: insular prejudices

Yes.

Oracle 'systematically denies' its sales reps their commissions, forces them to work to pay off 'debts', court told

Re: To be clear...

The difference is simple. In one case you are advanced money for a contract that was cancelled, so you are not owed money for it and must pay it back. It's usually the sales person's fault for not firming up the deal properly in the first place. A firmed deal doesn't get cancelled. That's legal.

In the other case the deal is fine, but the employer is now saying he's decided to pay you less than was agreed, and since he paid you in advance he's now taking some back.

That's not OK on this side of the pond. And presumably not in the US either.

80% of IT projects in public sector delayed due to IR35 – report

Re: Per cent

Bugger. I've been using 'percent' all my life. Oh well.

Headless body found near topless beach: Missing private sub journalist identified

Re: Reg fail

Hopefully you now know why they used that headline.

British snoops at GCHQ knew FBI was going to arrest Marcus Hutchins

Re: Rules

@Robb

Saw what you did there!

Re: "Be interesting to see if he trusts GCHQ ever again."

Quite.

Given how important Turing had been, surely a string or two could have been pulled. I doubt if the public would have cared, not that they'd have known. But no, they let him sink.

It's also hypocritical, given that there were standing orders never to arrest John Gielgud when he was caught at it.

You truly never can trust the bastards.

Revealed: The naughty tricks used by web ads to bypass blockers

Re: Gotta be honest here...

Hi.

I don't think you should be behind a PAYWALL - as I think all National 'news' sites should be, to remove the 99% that's crap.

If you aren't one of them, or if you're a niche news outfit then yes you need ads. But ads targeted to your readership, and not intrusive. I can't see anyone minding that.

It's this whole clickbait fake news stuff, where a page exists for ads to go on, and no other reason that we all hate.

Also, on a side note; if a manufacturer wants to sell their stuff, and then a bunch of shysters do a Web campaign for them, surely the manufacturer can find if they have increased sales, and if they made a profit?

Please, please, I am begging you,

PLEASE DO GO BEHIND A PAYWALL.

That way, we can all realise that the 'content' is crap and deserves to die because no one's willing to pay.

BUT, I bet you don't, because you'd rather not be found out to be just an advertising platform. And your revenue would vanish.

Or, if the content is good, you have a willing audience and a source of revenue - AND AN AUDIENCE TO WHOM YOU COULD SHOW VETTED ADS THAT THEY WOULD APPRECIATE. Not agency crap.

Re: Paying for content

@H4rm0ny

Excellent idea. I see others think so too.

It could literally be called The No Ad Fund (but with a snappier title!)

It could run along the lines of the PRS. Interested sites join. Number one condition of joining is NO ADS, which could be modified to allow agreed major or niche charity ads.

Money is then distributed as your share of total fund /number of views. You'd still need the software to detect click farming, etc.

It all reminds me of the joke about PRS Distribution. When asked that bearing in mind there were so many members, so many places in the world to collect revenue from, and so much difficulty working out who had what airplay, how did they manage?

They replied that a large percentage of members had earned no noticeable royalties.

Then they divided the fund into two halves.

Then they spent ages working out who should get what out of the first half, and distributed it.

They were then asked what they did with the other half.

That's the easy bit ; we give it to Paul McCartney.

Lauri Love and Gary McKinnon's lawyer, UK supporters rally around Marcus Hutchins

Re: But...

Err, you don't think 20 years is a super long sentence. You know, given that no one outside the continental USA thinks he has done anything wrong in the first place?

Re: "98 per cent of people charged in America take a plea deal."

Jesus. That, as stated earlier, truly IS terrifying.

And as I've said in other posts, the US is going to hell in a handbasket. Although I think it's largely there now.

I don't suppose I'll live to see it, but I can't help wondering if there won't be another American civil war. Both sides are heavily armed. Would troops shoot their own people (whites, obviously, since blacks demonstrably don't count).

Back in the 70s, we had relatives in Ohio farming country. Back of beyond. Near the Canadian border. Family went there for holiday. At weekends everyone piled into the Winebago and went... to Canada. No border crossing rubbish. At the destination all the Canadians knew these were Yanks, they were all friends, and no passports were ever involved, because no official crossings were ever used. Canadians went the other way, too, to see bands and things like that. Authorities knew, didn't care. Because they knew that if something nasty was going on, they would be told.

Those were the days. When authorities could be trusted by people and the authorities didn't view their own citizens as the enemy. In the US they say you can't fight city hall. Well, if politicians keep treating you like their servants, sooner or later something unpleasant will happen.

Here in the UK we're probably too polite. But l can't help thinking something will happen over there.

And I thought our justice system was crap, because we don't have a written constitution, so we keep being told.

Having a written one doesn't seem to make a lot of difference.

Make America, wait, what again? US Army may need foreign weapons to keep up

Re: Military-industrial 101

Don't call me Hedy.

Re: Military-industrial 101

Dear Mngrrrl.

Please go and find out some real history. Almost every sentence you wrote is factually incorrect. And in the case of Enigma, deeply offensive.

At the time, before the war, the Enigma machine was freely on sale for use by companies to use for security of communications.

As usual, we in Blighty were very slow to do a lot in the way of realising the potential it held.

Thanks to the Poles, we did end up in possession of these machines, and then came the fun of trying to decrypt their output, closer to real time the better.

A lot of that involved a guy called Alan Turing. Perhaps you have heard of him? And along the way this involved building what is considered to be the world's first modern computer. The Americans later thought they had, but this was because the British one was so secret that US companies had no need to know, and so they didn't. And everyone in Britain who worked on it was forbidden to ever mention it. It's mainly because, should it ever happen again, Churchill didn't want anyone to know how we did it, so we could do it again.

That computer, incidentally, was built by a genius Post Office engineer by the name of Tommy Flowers.

As for your Military Industrial Complex, that term was used by the Supreme Allied Commander. His name was Eisenhower. Have you heard of him? He became your president. He warned us all against that Complex, and he was right.

I'll make 3 predictions. Think of them as a get out clause for you.

1. You're young.

2. You're Republican.

3. You've never read a history book.

If I'm wrong on any of them, then you have no excuse.

WannaCry-killer Marcus Hutchins denies Feds' malware claims

Re: "You wanted a miracle, I give you F.B.I.!"

@ D. A. M.

When I was a kid, we used to read about Scotland Yard, The Mounties, and the FBI. About how incorruptible they all were.

I remember the genuine shock in the UK when there was some big scandal in the RCMP back in the 70s. As for the Yard, I'm from London, so no surprises there.

In the 70s I found out about the fact that J. Edgar Hoover was gay, and living with his boyfriend at US government expense. And therefore a fucking hypocrite.

But that seems to be the way of the world these days. They break every conceivable law, give a mealy-mouthed and grudging non-apology when found out, and then carry on. They never suffer any consequences.

It really seems that the FBI is going insane at the top. Is it just because it's run by politicians now - apparently, or is the quality of the organisation itself actually going to hell?

Re: Oh dear... maybe

'No wonder you used an AC identity.'

What, Commswonk is your real name?

That explains a lot.

Re: America is mad!

Dear Big John

You truly are a prick of the first order.

I'm British, so you can imagine how it must have felt for me to get really rather cross.

A few months ago on YouTube I saw a video of cop v. Black guy. The black guy was drunk out of his mind. He was being loud, aggressive, unarmed .... and very uncoordinated.

The cop was alone. They were one on one.

In the UK, the cop would have called for a few large people for backup. Maybe use a taser as a last resort. In the meantime, all he had to do was be like Ali and dance away out of reach.

What did the US cop do? Well, he shot and killed him, naturally.

America really is going to hell. I'm starting to think that the Chinese aren't so bad after all. Very friendly, Hong-Kong and Shangai are spectacular, and you won't get caught up in gun battles in the street.

I know the US has a huge number of intelligent, good and wonderful people. It's just a terrible shame that none of them seem to want to be involved in politics. Can't blame them really. And I don't mean Hillary would have been any better than The Donald. A plague on both their houses.

Don't mention the political system. Is the current US system much better?

Re: Let's make a deal

'nasty, brutish and short.'

Oh, you've met the wife?

China censors drop the soap operas, sitcoms

Re: Prison populations

It's obvious why the Chinese one is so low. Most of them get executed.

The Saudi one would be interesting to know.

UK spookhaus GCHQ can crack end-to-end encryption, claims Australian A-G

Re: Wait for it...

Wasn't pi set to 4 somewhere? I have this vague memory of that being the case.

I know I could look it up. When I were a lad either someone knew the answer, or you had to nip to the library for an answer.

There's no such thing as 'general knowledge' anymore.

My grandfather was an 8 year old boy when Jack the Ripper was doing his stuff. Because of that, I know about Vesta Tilly, to mention an example.

I was giving a colleague a lift home once. On the radio came a song I'd never heard. It was obvious who it was. I said that it must be a new single by George Harrison.

You can guess the reply. And mine.

Sennheiser announces €50,000 headphones (we checked, no typos)

And anyway, it's Murphy', not 'Murphey'.

€100 'typewriter' turns out to be €45,000 Enigma machine

Re: There is quite a bit of that floating around Eastern Europe

@Dr Who

So, your friend was Peter Lorre then! Except, in the original movie all those decades ago he said 'damn'!

Brit cops can keep millions of mugshots of innocent folks on file

@Grapebunch.

Laughing stock is two words.

Sorry.

The life and times of Surface, Microsoft's odds-defying fondleslab

Re: Settings and Control panel

@Soulrideuk

I would love to leave my settings alone. If only Ms would promise to do the same.

LHC finds a new and very charming particle: the Xi_cc⁺⁺ baryon

Careful, Sir Runcible

If they know you can count they'll have you chalking up all night.

Not that being a physicist means you can count, of course. Too human.

At least physics is capable of being explained to the layman such that the gist of something can be grasped. J. G. made a certain cat the most famous thing in quantum physics, as far as the layman is concerned. And a good job he did too.

But explaining, for example, how the solution to FLT was finally arrived at, well I read the book, and it's still a fog to me. I had a close relative who was a mathematician. He was always trying to explain things. You see, I am genuinely interested, but I just can't get my head around it.

Is there out there such a thing as a very abstract 'overview' of what all these different things are 'for' in their own right?

I'm starting to think that they walk among us, they look like us, but they are not us! Or am I just thick?!

Constant work makes the kilo walk the Planck

Re: Confused

@ Ken Hagen,

Sorry, I should have been more specific.

I was actually thinking of length measurements (where they were using feet and inches, etc) rather than volumes, which we didn't use.

And while I'm here, someone in an earlier post said that a ton was 2000 lbs. When the hell did they change that?

A 'ton' was 2240 lbs (we learnt all these at school by rote, like the times tables).

I think the 'short ton' became 2000 lbs, to make calculation easier.

And then when the EEC came along we used 1000 kilos, which was very close to the British ton, and called that the 'metric ton' and spelt it 'tonne'.

But the ordinary original 'ton' was only ever 2240 lbs.

Re: Confused

Please tell me you're not British!

Re: Confused

@ Terry 6

How right you are.

Basically, to all the pedants here, yes, the metric system is a truly wonderful thing. But humans aren't robots. They use what's familiar, comfortable, *and relevant under the circumstances *.

The reason we don't pop down to the pub for a *shudder * 0.5 litre of beer is because we're British, and we still have pint glasses. When the EU (or whatever it was called at the time) cheese-eating surrender monkeys suggested making the litre the standard unit for measurement of alcoholic drinks, there was uproar, and we and the Germans made them an offer they couldn't refuse!

And yes, I've got used to car tanks being in litres, because it doesn't matter what that measurement is.

All that's pertinent there is if it's full or not. But we use MPG because we've spent our lives getting to instinctively know how far away various places are in miles, all our signposts are in miles, as are our speedos, and so MPG is obvious.

My (foreign) mother was brought up on the metric system and although she lived in the UK from the mid 50s onwards, she could never quite get the hang of 'miles' and was always happier describing places as being so many kilometres away.

As for engineering, we always used metric. When we first came across American stuff we were having trouble with it all until we realised they were the ones using imperial measurements - and if NASA's various mishaps are anything to go by, they still seem a bit schizophrenic about it.

In England I want to drink pints and drive cars using MPG (not in that order!) and have a back yard.

In Germany I want to drink out of steins, have bratwurst of indeterminate weight, size, or origin.

In short, you pedants are arguing about nothing. I know most of you are just being jocular, but for those of you who aren't, I would simply say, get a fucking life.

For important stuff, of course you need SI. For everything else then, as the above - mentioned surrender monkeys would say, 'vive la difference, Rosbif'

Mine's the one in 2XL size, UK 48. Allegedly.

Re: Confused

No.

May I be the 94th person to point out that the gram is a subdivision of the standard unit, which is the kilogram.

One thought equivalent to less than a single proton in mass

Re: Dark energy?

@ aeonturnip

If I could give you a decaupdate I would.

Re: "Well, having never heard of her, I had to resort to Google."

So, maybe we could get Mr Clarkson to render the world another service!

Re: "Well, having never heard of her, I had to resort to Google."

And presumably that dark matter would be a bit smelly?

Well, having never heard of her, I had to resort to Google.

Sounds like a lovely person. Not.

Oz government says UK's backdoor will be its not-a-backdoor model

Re: Stop the trade in idiots

Oh, I dunno. As a Brit, I'm ashamed to say that I think we still have the edge, sadly. Please, can anyone who lives in a 5 Eyes country give us all an example of a politician who knows about IT, is not a swivel - eyed lunatic, who values democracy, and understands that what they're doing is wrong on a million levels.

I'm old. But I truly see a Ceaucescu eventually for these leaders.

At no time, ever, in the history of the 5 Eyes nations was there a clause in their constitution that stated that the people are the servants of the government. Of course, we don't even have a written constitution, not that it seems to make any difference.

Government quangos talk about 'loss of income' on their balance sheets. It isn't income, it's money from the public that those fuckers are lucky enough to have in the first place.

We have truly become the servants of our respective governments, and not the other way around.

Glad I won't be around to see what happens. And remember about Jeremy Corbyn, he has been a genuine Trotskyist all his life. If you thought the last Labour government left the country skint (which it did, thanks to an obviously mentally ill Chancellor / Prime Minister) Corbyn would leave us broke, but since we'd be a smoking hole in the ground, it wouldn't much matter.

US Senators want Kaspersky shut out of military contracts

Re: If their computers run fast enough to let them

@ramazan

Last time you saw it running was 10 years ago?

So what possible basis do you have to comment?

Wanna tap 3 million phone calls? All it takes is one measly warrant

@Jeffrey Nonken

You must be from the north!

NHS WannaCrypt postmortem: Outbreak blamed on lack of accountability

Re: Chartered Institute For IT?

I have a true propeller head friend at a top computer research lab who says that neither he nor any of his colleagues would touch the BCS with a barge pole. I know he thinks they're something that begins with 't' and rhymes with bats.

I have no personal knowledge one way or t' other. What's the general opinion here?

Australian govt promises to push Five Eyes nations to break encryption

Re: Conservative = tech-illiterate ?

@Peter2

'Rulers'

Surely you mean 'humble elected representatives'?

I think you need re-education. I know this nice little archipelago.

Re: Imminent danger.

Hear hear. And I refer all readers to the works of M. Bastiat. About what government should be. And should ONLY be. But then, he was a Libertarian, as am I, and as anyone with a brain should be, if they aren't naturally inclined to be dictators.

The biggest British Airways IT meltdown WTF: 200 systems in the critical path?

Re: " His writing is hugely entertaining as well as educational."

I think he was born at the southern end of NY, but with that accent he should be from Noo Joizy.

I always fondly imagine him wearing a zoot suit and spats, carrying a violin case.

One unarguably great thing Bill Gates did was to buy the rights to the lecture series so we can all watch them for free.

NASA honors Apollo 1 crew 50 years after deadly launchpad fire

Important nitpick

Er, why is it important? This is a sombre thing, which I remember well. I was a teenager then, and very shocked, at a time when this was huge news. We all knew what was meant in this article.

Just like General Groves berating people far more brilliant than himself for missing zeroes on a blackboard, the intended recipients knew what was meant.

And now we know you do, too. Ask yourself this; if the press said it more correctly what would be different now?

Nothing, except your nitpick. And surely here of all places it wasn't needed.

Airbus developing inkjet printer for planes

Re: Silly idea

When that finally happens we'll all come back here and haunt you for mentioning it first!

Online tat bazaar eBay coughs to YET ANOTHER outage

Yup. Down for me in S. London at lunchtime.

Naturally, I need it urgently today. <sigh>

Brits stung for up to £625 when they try to cancel broadband

Re: Dodgy ISPs

Supanet! Do they still exist?

They were truly dreadful. Al Capone would have been proud of the way they operated.

Sony on the ropes after revising losses UP to $1.3 BEEELLION

Re: Sad

"The influence of the Media division from the days of Mini-Disc has crippled Sony Electronics."

Agree 100%.

They were a high quality ethical company before that. The Media div and its morals have a lot to answer for.

Voyager probe reaches edge of Solar System's 'bubble'

Spotted your last name

Wish I was in the land of your forefathers (and you?) right now. But they've had rocky weather the last couple of weeks.

Did either V'ger carry stuff that it would be nice to have working but can't power up, does anyone know?