Posts by bugalugs

RIP: Sinclair ZX Spectrum designer Rick Dickinson reaches STOP

Vale, Rick

and sympathy for his family, best wishes to all.

BOFH: Guys? Guys? We need blockchain... can you install blockchain?

Eh Simon

Nice ink bro

UK digi minister Hancock suggests Facebook and pals give your kids a time-out

It's been fashionable here to bag facebook

I've even done my share.

But if you take a closer look

That isn't really fair.

Yes the users data's used

That is how it works

For free and all without that

we'd be paying for the perks.

Like free communication, text and video,

To catch up with the rellies

And others you may know.

Like the chance to publish stuff

That's been sitting in a drawer,

And get your friends opinions

To take on or ignore.

And as for kids participation

Think they have no imagination ?

They'll go on-line as they please,

We all know that it's done with ease.

and the Minister should too !

Does Parliament or Google decide when your criminal past is forgotten?

The problem here

Is that TN1 got convicted of fraud, presumably involving the loss of other people's money. That's a form of theft and there was a time when the penalty for that was Death, not just ostracism. If I was looking to do business with TN1, particularly if it involved me giving any sort of credit, and found that he had a conviction for fraud I would certainly drastically reconsider that business and that is as it should be. The man stole once and was convicted of it and rightly punished. Round here that's known as " form ".

Time to pay, Paypal pal Venmo! Oh no, haha, put away that wallet – just promise to be nice

Fucking Paypal

Fucking Paypal. Sold an item on eBay, specifying Paypal as payment vector. Item sold and buyer paid immediately. I get advised that their payment has gone to a " Pending " account and I have to wait at least 21 days for my money. I had to borrow money to despatch the item. I'm still going to have to wait 2 weeks from sale time. Fucking Paypal. I'll never specify it again.

President Trump-themed escort services may soon open in China

enough rope !

enough said

Australia gets one-quarter of a minister for national infosec

image nazi me

pic is of the PM !

Lester Haines: RIP

Ashes to ashes

Believe it we must

A wee part of me

Has just turned to dust

Thank-you Lester, from all your fans, amen.

Hypersonic flight test hits Mach 7.5

opens in new tab

By the looks of page 3 of the pdf at the link provided in the article the research is into nose-cone shape at hypersonic velocities.

Mumblehard spam-spewing botnet floored

i wish upon a star

that someone would take down the domain shifting botnet that's been flooding my inbox with what seems to be Canadian origin spam ever since elReg got hacked ! signed, bugalugs

Tasmania's Basslink data and power cable cut (on purpose) but fix not until May

WHAT

was the Ile de Re doing cutting the thing in the first place ?

enquiring minds and all that

Ahmed's clock wasn't a bomb, but it blew up the 'net and Zuckerberg, Obama want to meet him

Re: Will this be a good thing for Ahmed?

best thing to come out of this farce. silver lining and all that.

Exetel becomes Exit-tel, shows customers the door without explanation

exetel

never heard of them

Reg readers rise to Vulture 2 paintjob challenge

Ian's Vulture design

in red and white, for me...

SOLAR SECRETS of WSC winner team Nuon

Re: pyramids

a sort of fresnel-ly lens ?

Ye Bug List

New voting

LIKE

Assange: 'I'm fond of your work, Cumberbatch, but let's leave it at that'

Did I read

that Assange's reaction to the film was based on a draft of the script ?

and that Cumberbatch had reacted by saying that the final treatment was more sympathetic ?

I read this somewhere

Brew me up, bro: 11-year-old plans to make BEER IN SPACE

Not a trivial venture -

not trivial at all. Artificial gravity would be required to enable CO2 release, which, were it to the outside, would have to be through a regulator to maintain back-pressure in the vessel. The yeast used will need to operate at space station room temperature, otherwise a heating element of some kind will be needed inside the vessel. The water and wort additives - extra sugar, assuming some kind of pre-packaged wort being used - would have to be introduced to the vessel separately from the yeast solution, or at least stored separately. Some kind of internal agitation, magnetic perhaps, might be required to assist the brownian motions of the brewing wort. When the brew is complete the product would need to be dispensed into the kind of sealed drinks containers already used on the space station, to be drunk through a straw, ( and we all know what happens when you do that - whoopee ! ) The whole process would need to be watertight to avoid any spillage and probably vacuum-proof to be safe in case of de-pressurisation of the brewing compartment. In order to repeat the process, cleaning and sterilising solutions and methodology would be required. None of this is impossible but I'm having difficulty imagining a process that might work in space working on earth. Perhaps I need more imagination but 30 years home brewing prac has me scratching my head on that one.

Good luck, kid. I'll toast you with a ( terrestial ) home-brew if you can make something drinkable !

Burger-rage horse dumps on McDonald's: Rider saddled with fat fine

in south oz

my little CT110 with carrying box is quite welcome at Macca's drive-through. wouldn't try without some carrying capacity but...

US Navy builds master control for military drone ops

I

wanna puke. Management-speak murder. Death is so easy when it's somebody else.

NASA boffins: Space 'scope JUST missed dead Cold War spy sat

@M7S Re: Units.

European or African ?

Bacon sarnies can kill: Official

elReg readers say this about

tea

Wind, solar could provide 99.9% of ALL POWER by 2030

A new meme

" ... cost sweetener in their calculations, however: their cost estimates for that comparison includes the costs related to the human health effects of fossil fuel–caused air polution. "

This meme has been showing up lately. Projections ( for which read modelling ) of putative death-rates associated with any activity is now calculated at $2.5 meeellion per head. This makes really stupendous sounding ecocomic propaganda. Without deprecating the ascription of that value to a human life I'd be interested to see a take on the impact of, say, electric vehicle accidents, latte-induced kidney failure, fugu fatalities, bicycle doorings, solar-panel installer accidents to say nothing of open fires - I think you see where I've headed here. Ignoring duplication cost, networking is the problem with renewables as they stand.

If CO2 is the problem, the answer is nuclear.

File-sharing mom begs US Supremes to void bloated RIAA fine

Someone will want to locking up all our young people next !

If this lady had shop-lifted an album containing these songs ( and perhaps un-attributably copied the disc and shared it with a bunch of friends who then did whatever with the files so what haven't we all ), then been picked up for her light-fingered-ness, she might have done a couple of hours CS and scored a slap on the wrist . Given that the internet has pushed all sorts of shiny at gullible clickers, including historically the likes of Kazaa, Limelight et al which bestowed no benefit other than the files any penalty greater than the retail value of the songs might only be justified as punative damages is outright extortion.

If there real culprit be

the clickbait beneficiary

might be he.

Stephen Hawking pushes for posthumous pardon for Alan Turing

For Pardon also read

Apologise to, Uncharge, Deconvict, whatever OK ? History needn't change.

Parliaments north and south

seem perfectly capable of churning out pick, tick and flick legislation at a rate of knots.

A Bill to Retrospectively and Without Prejudice Pardon Persons and Entities Extant or Deceased Convicted of Offences under Laws Since Repealed

would take no time, cost nothing, add little more than a few foot-notes to history, give enormous relief to family and admirers of those so convicted and at least mollify the consciences of us all.

IANAL but no ?

Happy birthday, transistor

Re: www

and I booted around the footy oval at Niddrie High School in 1968 addressing the problem of referenda debate and voting, proposing the connection of a keyboard (input) and television (GUI) combination in people's homes to a central computer via the domestic telephone network. I'm sure I'm no orphan in this.

I decided against pursuing it when further imagineering yielded something not unlike Twitter !

Australian app inquiry launches

well

they've got some input now. thanks, elReg.

Last moon landing was 40 years ago today

Re: Really?

Would not troll with, must try harder...

CSIRO top brass sent to anti-bully boot camp

What about executive resposibility ?

I wonder whether another CEO would have accepted responsibility having been in office for nearly four years ? But of course former bank directors are never to blame for anything are they.

John McAfee: Let me go to the USA - or old Blighty

Re: No safety net.

It's a good idea, but what would the Belizians charge Mr Bush with ?

This is out of hand now: Apple attempts to trademark the LEAF

Such a shame

that the Intellectual part of this Property grab is filling out a form and paying a fee. How innovative.That is all.

Australian Police say don't use Apple's iOS 6 Maps

Having motorcycled through the Pink Lakes country *

I'm here to say it can be very, very scary. Flat, dry as chips, few geographical references and no locals to speak of **. Being Australia, tourist rip-off mecca that it can be, not a particular flying fuck is given about anyone who doesn't know their way around you are free to go as and where you please. But this police advice needs to be posted in a meter-high font at every entrepot. Failure to carry adequate paperwork, funds, fuel, water, warm clothing, bedding, first-aid kit, rations and excuses on long trips can be fatal ! ON ANY OTHER THAN FIRST CLASS AIR SERVICES, LEAVE ALONE REGIONAL HIGHWAYS !

ps: roads here are generally described as either " made " or " unmade" according to extent of macadamisation.

* before Jobs and Wozniak built their first device, as it happens

** Icon - did I mention HOT ?

Australian Prime Minister: Mayan calendar 'true'

Re: Was it? from the introduction to the Garnaut Report on Climate Change 2011

pp ix (it's still there ) by Ross Garnaut ( Economist and Mining Company Director)

" But then I said something that brought back the prime minister’s attention. ‘If we used the share market’s discount rate to value the lives of future Australians’, I said, ‘and if we knew that doing something would give lots of benefits now but would cause the extinction of our species in half a century, the calculations would tell us to do it.’

The beginnings of a smile on her face became a hearty laugh. ‘You’ve got us there, Ross’, she said, as the others were infected by the lift in spirits and joined the laughter. ‘That’s a unanimous decision of the committee. We’re all against the extinction of the human species.’ "

Or not ?

UK climate expert warns of 3-5 degree warmer world by 2100

Back in the real world

There is still a thriving colony of fairy penguins within 5 km of the heart of Australia's second biggest city. A few km down the coast the beaches I grew up on are more beautiful, cleaner and full of life than when I was a child 50 years ago and the air where I now live is consistently like wine. Subjective perhaps. The screechings of the climate-change alarmists become more ominous and the solutions proffered more bizarre and hideously expensive. The tricks and turns of these propagandists would make any 20th century wartime minister for information green with envy. The latest is " co-ordination" ( why does that word make me shudder ) of all emergency services under a politically appointed supremo - to deal with fire, flood, epidemic or whatever other climate-change induced disaster ( and here it all is ! ) the government of the day wants it to deal with. The platforms of our train system are patrolled by armed "Safety Officers " but you can't buy a ticket or use the toilets as there are no railway staff any more, or anywhere else for that matter, just goons with guns. The public infrastructure is being turned away from the public, given into the control of the cheapest tender to operate a license to print money. Has organised crime taken over ? - The mask keeps slipping...

UK.gov: 'Foreign cyber reconnaissance' underway in UK

Acronym-ising

National Cyber Security Strategy, UK National Computer Emergency Response team, Cyber Reservists for the MoD, GCHQ, The Security Service, Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure, University of Oxford, Cyber Incident Response scheme and National Cyber Crime Unit of the new National Crime Agency gets NCSSUKNCERTCRFTMODGCHQTSSCPNIUOOCIRSNCCUNCA.

William of Occam might have had something to say about such multiplication, but I think I just found my new password !

World's largest miner spooked by climate change

meh

Given Australia's pretensions to world leadership of the Camelot Weather Restoration Movement, the AGCC spin on this announcement is just PR. If these images are anything to go by, an upgrade to cyclone-proof is overdue. And tax-deductible of course...

Real sci-fi space ships coming at last? NASA tests nuclear engine

Re: "That's not even enough to heat up a kettle..."

Sorry Martin, 1Kw for a couple of minutes will boil a kettle. The insignificant Kelvin metric anomaly matters to all who dunk...

85% of Windows 8 users wield the desktop on day one

So, what

is the OEM / retail sale ratio ?

Fujitsu's canine cloud keeps pets petite

Japanese say " wan wan " as English speakers say " woof woof "

and some of the dogs I've seen in Japan could definitely benefit from some better care - being a status symbol doesn't always translate into an ideal life for the poor beggars...

Badges for Commentards

Purple Vulture

To those otherwise unbadged with upvote/downvote ratio better than 2:1 - wounded in combat but not out and all that ?

Of course I'm interested, I luv badgers

Assault on battery

Re: Re: if i could be arsed

would that be necessary ?

if i could be arsed

i'd propose a usb-powered inductive mouse-charging mat. oh, i think i just did...

Sailboat cracks 100 km/h for first time

Video

The pontoons were crossed up most of the time. Fine-tuning should deliver even greater speed !

Asteroid miners hunt for platinum, leave all common sense in glovebox

Spaaaace dream

As a sci-fi lover and IT retiree it pains that a study (PDF here) of South African platinum mines out of Monash University reveals a best energy/coolant performance of 175.1 GJ/kgpgm at one location and 269.3 m^3H20/kgpgm at another location ( PDF page 11 ). So, ~27 barrels of oil or ~48 Mwh and perhaps 80 overweight indian elephants of water to produce a 1 kg piglet of platinum, terrestially.

Whatever these chaps plan to do with whatever they believe they can find, serious innovation in remote / autonomous waterless micro-gravity mining, concentrating, smelting, refining, milling, machining, by-product processing, waste disposal and transportation appears needful. Other challenges might include the inverse square law as applied to solar panels at the orbital distance of the asteroid belt, the limits of political tolerance vis-a-vis the project milestone of hoicking major atomic reactors into departure orbit and the impact on the rocket -fume / breathable-atmosphere ratio that despatching the necessary foundation plant might have.

Nice dream, tho...

Google avoids tax with ‘Double Irish Dutch Sandwich’

Re: Chalk this up to disruptions of the internet

" to take a variation of an old example, if an Australian resident on a British website clicks an ad for a German company brokered by an American company, where is the transaction happening? "

The German company contracts accountable advertising exposure from the American company and makes the appropriate expense claim. The British website contracts accountable content from the American company and makes the appropriate income declaration. The Australian parts with their credit$ for the advertised goods / service. The German company despatches the goods and makes the appropriate income declaration. The Australian has obtained a right in Australia, rightly subject to applicable Australian law, no ?

Props to Mr Bradbury for articulating a difficult issue.

No increase in droughts since 1950, say boffins

Re: Catalyst 13:25

I watched this program on iView last night. BOM statistics were presented, all showed a .7 degrees celsius average increase over 100 years, with which I have no difficulty. Dr.Jonica Newby spoke of the seas around Tasmania getting " hotter and hotter " then put her foot in the aforementioned sea, saying "mmm not too bad " before a wave came in causing her to withdraw her foot with a shrill giggle. The clear implication was that the water there was HOT. According to the program ( as it might be interpreted ), my chances of success in a cooked-prawn-direct-from-the-sea retail sales business based at Port Arthur, Tasmania, were 100,000 to 1.

The program had an agenda. Was it guided by an ABC seminar of 28, whenever that was held ?

Following the link may confirm/deny your prejudices. This program violated scientific integrity for propagandistic purposes, IMHO.

BOFH: Hasta la Vista... luser

tis the festive season

to have 3 in a row !

SECRET 28 'scientific experts' who Greened the BBC - Revealed!

@bugalugs "falsify away"

aweigh, of course