* Posts by N000dles

37 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Aug 2010

Apollo at 50? How about 40 years since Skylab smacked into Australia

N000dles
Black Helicopters

Why Australia?

I've always wondered why they chose to dump it on Australia. I've never heard it officially confirmed but I'd imagine that Skylab had quite a bit of technology that the Americans would not have wanted being distributed over a "non-friendly" nation. I wouldn't mind betting they were aiming to de-orbit Skylab so it ended up crashing into the nearby Woomera Rocket Range and just ended up falling short instead. This is where lots of secret stuff that the Americans and British wanted to play with ended up being tested. Even today you're not allowed to deviate from the main highway and go through this area. I was just a kid in those days and we were worried they would drop it on a larger east coast city.

UK spy overseer: Snooper's Charter cockups are still getting innocents arrested

N000dles
Black Helicopters

"If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear"

We certainly do have something to fear as the evidence here points out. The same people selling this line to us are still human and therefore prone to mistakes. We got to thank them for thinking of the kiddies but who's looking out for them and those slim percentages where they get it wrong?

Motorised robo-coolbox biz Starship makes lunchtime pitch to campus-dwellers

N000dles

These little robots have been getting around Lewisham now for quite some time. Considering the school kids are banned around here from McDonalds, Burger King, Pound Stretcher and Sainsburys these little guys must be holding their own quite well. Whether the chaperone that normally accompanies the robot has been mugged for their phone and any other gadgets they are carrying is a different story :)

Baywatch hero drone saves silly struggling swimmers Down Under from going down under

N000dles

Re: All sounds very good

Just like the old F-111 crews used to turn off their military grade reconnaissance camera when they used to fly down the beaches......

nbn™ pauses hybrid fibre-coax build and will fix current connections

N000dles

From what you describe the problem with your connection isn't whether you are running HFC or FTTP but the ISP you have chosen. If you're losing speed during peak times then it's the backhaul line used by the ISP. You would have the same problem if you had fibre all the way to your house.

BA's 'global IT system failure' was due to 'power surge'

N000dles

Re: Cynical Me

I've experienced a toilet taking down a whole DC installed with all the bells and whistles for failing over to generators and UPS systems. It was leaking from a downpipe within the lagging which caused water build up in the basement in the cabinet where the system would switch from the mains feed to the backup UPS and generators. We tested the generators and UPS regularly but management were always scared to pull the plug on the mains for testing. One day when the mains did go out the switch-over to the UPS and generator did not happen continuously and the few seconds delay from on to off to back on again with 240 cabinets turned on blew all the breakers in the PDUs. Try buying 120 x 63amp breakers at 2am, even in London to bring back the DC from the dead.

The only way to ensure systems like this stay up are geographically dispersed sites and ruthless operations management that ensures everything is duplicated religiously. You should be able to have a physical chaos monkey choose any cable they like and the confidence fail over occurs without disruption like seen today. Otherwise, you just don't have a backup until it's been tested...

Plastic fiver: 28 years' work, saves acres of cotton... may have killed less than ONE cow*

N000dles
Facepalm

Re: Pandora's box?

"Another comment is oft heard coming from the less well educated in this field (a major majority of people ) - the "animals dead anyway" - clearly, not the point !"

And here lies the hypocrisy in those who are demanding a vegetable based alternative. The paddock where the vegetable based alternative is grown has already been cleared and the animals living there removed or killed. What is more ethical? Finding a use for what is effectively a waste product or roasting Orang-utans in land clearing to make way for a Palm Oil plantation. Sure, there is such a thing as sustainable Palm Oil but these are just the plantations that got into the game early and animals have already paid the price for people to get that warm and fuzzy feeling they're doing the right thing..

Ireland to fight against billing Apple for back-taxes

N000dles

I'd hope now there is similar investigation on how companies operating out of Luxembourg could have been offered sweetheart deals as well. Mr Junker seemed pretty good at signing companies up to these deals in his time running that tax haven.

Blighty's National Pupil Database has been used to control immigration

N000dles

I'm a foreigner to this country and have been for over a decade. They already track our details and you are required to fill in enough information on the landing cards each time you cross a border that allows them enough detail to track you down. For all you out there talking about sinister plots, the data is already there in their hands.

Here's something for you to consider.... We are about to embark on a process of negotiation around Brexit. Why shouldn't the government know the costs associated with educating EU citizens when a huge exercise around how much money should be moved around EU and UK expenditures is coming up? I think it's legitimate personally for the negotiators to know how much cost we will be left with to continue to educate students of EU citizens who are allowed to remain. The EC are very shortly going to throw the British pensioners living on the continent into the frying pan when it comes to how much it costs to access services in the EU post Brexit. These are all costs that need to be known for Brexit to be fair for taxpayers on both sides.

What's Brexit? How Tech UK tore up its plans after June 23

N000dles
Mushroom

Trade deals?

I can’t see any reason other than political for the rush to sign up the Ukraine to closer integration when EU member states have said no to it. You then have the deal that was on the table with Canada kicked into touch. This was a deal that would have helped the problem of Europe not growing. In this context how one can say the EU is great for European peace when it doesn’t sign the deals that offer economic benefits but will rush and ignore it’s citizens to cement a deal that is a huge fat finger poked in Putin’s eye.

Don’t let the Barmy Brexiteers wreck #digital #europe

N000dles

Margot Wallström

Not to mention our Swedish Foreign Minister (ex EU Commissioner & Vice President) Margot Wallström saying how bad it was for European democracy that the British people getting a chance to vote could be catastrophic and lead to other members of the EU actually wanting to vote too. Lets hope we stay in and nobody else in the EU gets a chance to vote so we can protect this democracy at all costs.

Microsoft releases Windows 10 preview for Raspberry Pi 3

N000dles

Re: PCs fading away...

I never got to see one but there was an Apple Lisa. I was lucky enough to own a //c while the school had the TRS-80. It's been a well trodden concept well before the iMac.

Cops hacked the Police National Computer to unlawfully retain suspects' biometric data

N000dles

Re: Just treat them the same

They lost my trust when they said they had no manpower to come out and investigate a burglary at my house. When they found out no insurance claim would be going in they even tried to not record a crime number.

Meanwhile the real criminals in my street (the ones illegally parked buying Nandos) seem to always get a visit and a ticket for their trouble. The most annoying part is the said officers are normally parked on a double red and when they have finished handing out their tickets they too often go in and order their chicken while parked in a worse manner than the people they have just handed the tickets out to. One even came out and tried to have me for photographing a police officer while he was inside and I was taking a photo of their illegally parked car. The first line trotted out was it being illegal to photograph anything to do with the Police. When I responded I was just taking a photo of the car and not a police officer it turned into not following a Police direction until the older one came out and realised that it was not in their interests to have me complaining.

FBI v Apple spat latest: Bill Gates is really upset that you all thought he was on the Feds' side

N000dles

Re: Wrong battle Tim

Well said. This isn't the police or a politician it is a judge who has ordered access. All our laws come back to having this person look at the case on its merits and then make a judgement. We have been doing it this way for 100's of years. I can't believe Apple want to protect the rights of someone suspected of multiple murders when a judge has looked at the balance of evidence available and believed that this request is a valid one.

And all this crap about Skeleton keys and weakening the IOS is rubbish. Apple sign each version of IOS on each handset individually as anyone who has jailbroken their iPhone will know. They could load their modified IOS on the said phone, sign it with a short expiry time and recover the passcode in their own offices (the same place the damn source code is accessible) and give the FBI 6 digits. No need to let anything out of their sight or share any code/keys.

Infusion pump is hackable … but rumours of death are exaggerated

N000dles
Black Helicopters

And if you wanted to bring it all down...

Operating on wireless at a relatively low power means connectivity could easily be swamped by someone with Amateur Radio experience. Not sure how long they could cause a disruption before the transmitter is triangulated but if you knew someone of importance was going under at a set time.......

This is why we CAN have nice things: Samsung Galaxy Alpha

N000dles
Happy

Why would you not just buy a One Plus One?

Okay, it doesn't have a fingerprint scanner.....

The external design looks and feels great. It is 64gb, 3gb of RAM and as I sit here typing at 4pm I've only gone through 23% of my battery since 7am. Current uptime is 486 hours and it has never looked like needing a reboot. Sure it doesn't have an internal SD slot but a micro sized USB OnTheGo adapter means I can slave whatever storage I want to the thing. That part is awesome and works so damn well. I keep a card reader in my camera bag and with the USB OnTheGo I was able to swap photos at a recent wedding with half a dozen people using just my phone and our cameras while holding our glasses of Champagne standing in the sunny courtyard. Want to run better software? It is already Cyanogenmod..... Forget 720p and record your video in 4K too.

And the best feature is the unlocked £269 price tag.

Virgin Media boss AND ex-Murdoch man: BSkyB broadband is 'lousy'

N000dles

VM are rubbish too

We used to use a bunch of VM Business broadband connections for remote access for our workers. Our first order they only managed to get 2/3 of the users connected within 2 months. 1/5 were left at not even getting to the site survey stage while being billed for an "active" service. Even the business accounts suffered from slowdown in the evenings and the support was woeful. I reckon I have been promised about 50 return calls in our time with them to only ever have received 2 calls back. We had one line not functioning for a week while our support ticket was put on hold due to the support rep getting upset that a Cisco router did not fit his script and he couldn't tick IOS as the operating system. He refused to progress the ticket until I told him which version of Windows or OSX the router was running. Explaining that direct from the router every alternate ping was being dropped when pinging the VM gateway was too much outside the script for him. Their reliance on call scripts and assumptions that nothing is wrong with the network until it says so on their service page was their downfall with us. They are also expensive with some of their leased line quotes coming in at £2600 p/m versus £850p/m with Verizon

BT were able to take over with Infinity but their billing is such a nightmare we have just about finished moving the entire lot of FTTC connections over to Zen. It really does do what it says on the tin with them.

On the matter of shooting down Amazon delivery drones with shotguns

N000dles

Could save shooting something else though....

I normally only think of needing a gun in my yard for one reason. A bit off tangent but I could definitely see a use here that does away with the need for a firearms. Instead of shooting at the drones or the neighbourhood cats who kill all the local fauna there could be a dual use here. Just capture the offending cats instead and rig them up to the drone for the return journey back to the warehouse. I for one would accept drones buzzing around if it meant no more shredded pigeons to clean up.

OWN GOAL! 100s of websites blocked after UK Premier League drops ball

N000dles
Black Helicopters

Re: @ VinceH -

You can be damn sure the technology will improve. The current thinking will turn out to be a massive fail and the only way we will be able to protects the kiddies from the pedophile terrorists is to mandate Deep Packet Inspection on everything. This whole thing is just the first stage in getting us all to accept that ALL our communications will be logged, filtered and approved by the thought police in future.

Jimbo Wales: ISP smut blocking systems simply 'ridiculous'

N000dles
Black Helicopters

Meanwhile..... lurking the in the shadows.....

I somehow think the government technical people that are advising Cameron on what is and isn't possible know full well what they are doing here.

Step 1: Educate and convince the public into accepting a simple non intrusive filter you can turn on or off that will filter them off from 100% of all adult rated nasties.

Step 2: A tragic newsworthy story appears in the future showing it's a failure. The masses realise that the solution put forward by the government has great intentions but is technically flawed.

Step 3: The experts within government and the security services recommend that Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) is the only way forward to stop what happened at Step 2

Step 4: They have it legislated that every piece of data be categorised by DPI so it can now be diverted off through via the security services. Everything can now be read by these people who Edward Snowden has shown us can be completely trusted to do the right thing!!!

WAR ON PORN: UK flicks switch on 'I am a pervert' web filters

N000dles
Black Helicopters

Re: Gesture politics at its worst

The worst part is if it is mandated by law that the ISP's must implement the blocks by Deep Packet Inspection as opposed to DNS blocking. If it is DPI how do they justify reading all the communications of a household where nobody works with children or has any living there? Our parents and grandparents would never have accepted our mail or phone calls being monitored like this in the past why should we allow it today. We know government cannot be trusted with this data already.

Review: Beagleboard Beaglebone Black

N000dles
Facepalm

Re: Cost.

@km123..... Can you please send me your Paypal address. I want to send you £50 so you can buy me a bag of whatever it is you have been smoking. It will save me an airfare to Amsterdam cause it must be better than anything they have over there.....

Home Sec: Let us have Snoop Charter or PEOPLE WILL DIE

N000dles
Stop

What of the UKIP Rotherham couple....

I'm willing to bet that if the legislation was in place already you would have seen the electronic communications of that heinous UKIP couple monitored by the Labour run council. After all, they are a massive threat to disadvantaged children by taking them in and trying to give them a life where they don't have to rely on the state. A future life time of not living off the state might even lead them to becoming Tory voters and Daily Mail readers which is reason enough to throw everything in the arsenal at them......

Are we sleepwalking into a situation where YOUR email could be read for party political purposes?

'No cutting off people's internet based on secret evidence'

N000dles
WTF?

Re: Punishment

I suppose you are the same person that agrees everyone should submit their DNA to a database so the good lemmings who let our capitalist society leach off them can be protected from the bad ones who don't agree with the system. I really thought that prisons were for people who need to be locked up to protect society from them. I suppose those who download next weeks episodes early are just the sort of people we need locked up to keep society safe for the consumers.

Queen unveils draft internet super-snoop bill - with clauses

N000dles
Black Helicopters

Nothing to worry about here!!!

We have been told that this is only to catch terrorists, child molesters and serious criminals. I don't see what it is you are all moaning about. After all, this is the same reason we all agreed to the extradition law to send these same heinous people to the US. It isn't like you are going to ever have the plod bash your door down for helping your mates share a few TV programs.

Stray SMS leads to aborted landing

N000dles
Alert

Interference.....

Ignoring the warnings to turn off portable electronic devices could seriously endanger a flight if the right circumstances all come together. No doubt the newer aircraft has better shielding of important components but I for one would not want to be flying into Tegucigalpa in an near retired aircraft maintained by a cash strapped operator in heavy rain, high winds and thick cloud with someone using a non CE tested device with RF circuitry creating harmonics over many bands. There have been plenty of incidents filed where the Course Deviation Indicator (CDI), VOR navigation systems and electronic flight displays have been subject to interference that wouldn’t make an instrument approach in the above scenario as safe as it should be. Especially (hypothetically) an operator hasn’t changed a dodgy instrument as quickly as they would have if they were based in the EU, USA etc... and the pilot trusts the interfered instrument over the one he has experienced quirks with before. All something we could see realistically come together on an episode of Air Crash Investigator one day.

As for the touch and go, try London City airport on a really hot summer day with no wind and a full plane to see if passengers just think it is routine. The standard approach and take off is already hairy at 5.5 degrees so you do see some great facial expressions when it happens. It happened to me once where the pilot had to do it from both directions before he managed to put in down on the third try. A lot of passengers were really bricking it that day.

Schools IT supplier RM swings to full year loss after sales dive

N000dles
WTF?

My wife is a teacher...

And I wish the bloody hell RM could stop her bringing home a virus every time she has plugged her memory stick into a school computer. I know conficker was a bitch but near 3 years on they still haven't managed to remove it.

After hearing how much these bastards charge I'm sure someone like Halliburton could do the job cheaper and better by charging what they do for IT network infrastructure support in Iraq.

Crossley cops two-year suspension

N000dles
FAIL

Thats a whole lot more than his train journey and the costly season travelcard that he once claimed caused him more stress than hackers did.

Murdoch slams White House over SOPA in Twitter row

N000dles
WTF?

@ac

quote: "Are you really suggesting he should die? That is a deplorable sentiment if you are."

I would suggest something more like he should F**k off and die would be more appropriate.

Did Myspace ever host any copyright material? Did Vint Cerf, Paul Vixie and Tony Li hold us all to ransom and ass rape us over the years to become billionaires? If ever there was a freetard making a fortune out of someone else's intellect it is News Corp. I'm sure Sky never paid a penny to the engineers that gave Murdoch the ability to sprout his crap over the internet. Phone hacking, Murdoch, Morality (pick the word that doesn't belong)

Amateur balloonists hit record 40,575m above East Anglia

N000dles
Pint

Australian beer is rubbish

Pretty much all Aussie beer would have Buckley's chance of beating a Belgium, German or English beer. I am an Aussie living in Europe and have been for many years. Previous comments are spot on about Aussie beer. It has a massive shelf life compared to over here and 6 x 375ml cans of mid strength (XXXX. Carlton et al.) will wipe you out twice as bad the next morning than 6 x 568ml glasses of Staropramen, Haufbrau, Amstel, or even Becks.

As for the price, Perth, Sydney and Gold Coast are all just short of $10 (£6.35) a normal size bottle out on the town now, even at places non-exclusive with no queues or cover charges.

To think I was actually proud of my compatriot and his accomplishment here until he had to mention the beer.

Australia toughens cybercrime laws

N000dles
Black Helicopters

Let me get this right.....

Foreign governments will be able to place an Australian's internet communication under a microscope without applying for a warrant?

So my grandfather fought the communicsts and the fascists to stop them from doing things like opening his mail only for the government to completely sell out in this modern 'enlightened' era?

I thought democracies had a small thing called judicial oversight.

Media, industry and cops baffled as Qld Police return hack’s iPad

N000dles
FAIL

Wrong phone book

I think the Qld police realised that the phonebook contained in the ipad was useless for laying across the chest of the suspect and beating the crap out of him with a mag light till he confessed. They gave up and left moaning how paper 20th century phone books were so much better for using when interrogating citizens.

Facebook planking game claims its first victim

N000dles
WTF?

hmmmmm

Correct me if I am wrong but this whole craze seems quite pointless. I would have thought you would find it more amusing farting in elevators.

Apple 'greed' tax spreads beyond music, movies, magazines

N000dles
Jobs Horns

Greed

I'd be more than happy to let Apple continue with their self destruction if they allowed users to download their apps from another marketplace. I can't see how restricting users to only using the Apple Apps store and then forcing them to pay what I see is too much money for such little work is not falling foul of trading practices laws.

If their Apps Store offers such great value that it deserves to take 30% then why would they need to block any other software loaded onto the OWNERS handsets? The old excuse of enhancing the overall "experience" of these devices by controlling what you do with it is treading a fine line with corporate greed nowadays.

Boris bikes for all from next week

N000dles
Dead Vulture

@ Andrew16

As an everyday London cyclist of 7 years I have a little experience to comment on your suggestions...

(i) Pedestrians do not stop when they see a "Red Man". You don't walk out in front of a car so why do it to a bike. As a guess for every cyclist who runs lights there would be 5 pedestrians that do the same. Technically I run them as I have crossed the stop line but it is far safer to get right to the edge of the intersection and wait there for the green light as opposed to waiting at the stop line. I'm not condoning it but I have never seen a cyclist get hit running a light. I've seen numerous incidents though when they have been setting off on a green after waiting for a red at the stop line. One girl I vividly remember was lucky just to have her legs crushed beyond use.

(ii) I doubt this has any statistical impact with regards to accidents and is rarely seen on my journeys.

(iii) Agreed, the Police however actively get involved with this so these idiots are quickly "educated".

(iv) Bus drivers (not the majority) feel that if they can get their front door level with you then they are free to pull over. Every week I encounter a bus overtaking that if I were in a car it would be crushed or shunted up onto the pavement. Some bus drivers just have the attitude "f**k you, I'm pulling over here". We share the lane with buses so you have to expect overtaking but both parties need to do this safely. Why they roar past only to slam on the brakes 5 seconds later throwing all of their passengers through the front windows is beyond me. Don't get me started on the black taxis.....

By far the best safety project they can do for cycling in London is hi-viz fire marshall type jackets given out with a sponser logo for free. As for the main topic of the article I would not be surprised if boris bikers made up a higher statistical percentage for accidents as they have me shaking my head way more than private bike cyclists.

Data protection and surveillance: Swapping the speed camera for ANPR?

N000dles
Black Helicopters

Not only for speeding......

You're a ramraider in a stolen car. You and your fellow ramraiders drive to another town 200 miles from your house with someone following you in another car for the getaway. You get to your destination, drive through the door, load up and go. Find your nearest quiet place to transfer the load and set fire to the stolen car. You escape in the car that was never near the scene and you can't work out why old bill are knocking at your door a few hours later. You've been done by ANPR and the tools associated with data mining the database with all the recorded hits logged. This isn't something the Police will be looking to do in the future..... The future is now!

Iran unveils 'robot bomber'

N000dles
Flame

Militaries need not be targeted

To make a mess of western economies at the moment they only need to sink a few bulk carriers in the Strait of Hormuz. The sinking of a handful of vessels in the right places would effectively shut the channel down for a rather large percentage of the world's oil supply. Goldman Sach's and the rest of the parasites would then wreck our economies speculating on the price of oil to the point we were all in a pretty major depression. The US will backpedal quite quickly in support of Israel if it has half it's supply of oil cut off. Most Americans are happy to support the mess in the Middle East perpetuating while they can drive their SUV's where they choose.