Posts by 4ecks

Oh my God, 911 is down. Quick, call… aaargh!

Re: Free market fail.

Read a little bit of history - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_insurance_mark ,it was the "free market" that started the Fire Brigades.

LOST IN SPAAAAAACE! SpaceX aborts Space Station podule berthing

incorrect playlist selected

They weren't playing the Blue Danube waltz in mission control.

Panicked WH Smith kills website to stop sales of how-to terrorism manuals

Re: TNT

Easier to make things that go boom i.e. Nitric and Sulphuric acids, Glycerin, a bowl of Ice Water, and optional extra of cat litter.

Cats understand the laws of physics, researchers claim

The real story -

Several scientists participated in an experiment conducted by 30 cats.

State should run power firm spam database, says... competition watchdog

I'm on the tariff I want.

I'm on PAYG with British Gas, not the cheapest by far, but what it does offer is the ability to top-up at home when I want, using a debit or credit card. No hunting round for a cash point and open shop or petrol station in order to get credit at 11:30 at night when it's cold and rainy, no it's all done from the comfort of my sofa, that's the service I pay a bit more for.

Patent Troll Unit set up by Virginia government to slay lawsuits

New TV series

Law and Order - Specious Patents Unit.

Trolls defeated in 44 minutes excluding adverts. ;-)

SpaceX: launch, check. Landing? Needs work

Get rid of the legs..

Weebles wobble, but they don't fall down!

For the youngsters :- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weeble

SPACED OUT: NASA's manned Orion podule pushed back to 2023

Re: A bit odd?

... the HAL9000 flight control computer.

Contactless card fraud? Easy. All you need is an off-the-shelf scanner

Re: Still not for me.

HSBC did that for me. Card came with contactless, phoned them and got it disabled that day, new non-contactless card received a few days later.

Still upset with their new less secure password only internet/phone banking logon facility that can't be disabled.

I don't want it to be easy to make a payment or access my account, a minimum of 2FA please - something I have & something I know.

Citizenfour director Laura Poitras sues US for years of border security harassment

Good luck girl

You're going to need it. The PTB have ways and means of getting rid of annoyances.

Tim Worstall: Metals, mining and my heavyweight book

Re: This book going to be on Kindle?

I thought that $6.99 usually comes out at something between £7.99 and £14.99 :-P

Power, internet access knackered in London after exploding kit burps fire into capital's streets

teh interwebs is borken

The "Magic Blue Smoke" leaked out in a big way.

Sir Terry remembered: Dickens' fire, Tolkien's imagination, and the wit of Wodehouse

Farewell dear friend.

Although I never met him personally, he has been with me all my adult life.

I'm saddened by his passing, but still chuckling at the jokes that I'm remembering.

I fondly remember being able to tell when there were other fans of his on the train in the morning by the massive increase of laughter and giggles I could hear whenever a new book came out.

I still can't get the name of the local school right - Bangabandhu Primary always comes out as Bhangbhangduc.

The handle 4ecks was pilfered from The Last Continent.

Another beer in your honour Sir!

In assault on American values, Lockheed blasts pickup with raygun

Re: @ Graham Marsden - If we can solve the power supply issue…

That sounds like a good idea, maybe even Darwin would approve, after all it would remove some of the dumb-as-f*** pedestrians who seem to own phones that are smarter than they are.

If it was powerful enough it may even be able to take out the black-cab drivers who u-turn without warning.

Re: If we can solve the power supply issue…

I'd like one mounted to the traffic lights. That'll ensure the cyclists stop at the red lights when I'm using the crossings on my walk to work.

Got one ! -->

Hilton, Marriott and co want permission to JAM guests' personal Wi-Fi

Do wireless signals know the boundaries?

Unless they turn all their hotels into Faraday cages, what's to stop the de-auth broadcast from interfering with Joe public on the street, the internet café, or other business next door?

Just wait for the "Willful and Malicious Interference" suits to start flying.

Money grabbing pickpocket icon ->

Kaspersky: That 2 years we took to warn you about Regin ? We had good reason

Re. Legspin

I think it points towards a global company...

From Wikipedia "The GOOGLY is a major weapon in the arsenal of a leg spin bowler, and can be one of the bowler's most effective wicket-taking balls. It is used infrequently, because its effectiveness comes mostly from its surprise value."

Mystery Russian satellite: orbital weapon? Sat gobbler? What?

Re: take a look

What I think :- the Russian sat. is specially equipped to look at the X-37B and they are just waiting for the Americans to take the bait.

Doctor Who trashing the TARDIS, Clara alone, useless UNIT – Death in Heaven

Re: Clara as The Doctor...

ditto, and as for the Christmas teaser - AvP meets a Pudsey special?

Clara goes to the dark side, with dark secrets revealed in Dark Water

Well I didn't see that coming

Now that's how to do a good Dr Who episode.

Fast paced, but no running around.

Witty and menacing.

And... two of the great Baddies at the same time!

Reg hacks see the woods or the trees In the Forest of the Night

I see parallels here

If you substitute "Dr Who episode" for "Windows version" ...

"Kill the Moon" = Vista = crap

"Mummy on the Orient Express" = Vista + SP's = getting better

"Flatline" = 7 = good

"In the Forest of the Night" = 8 = nausea inducing, trying to merge desktop & mobile = Dr Who & S.J. Chronicles

I wonder if it will continue with the next episodes?

Sign off my IT project or I’ll PHONE your MUM

Re: Nomenclature

"Fungibility" - (def.) the ability to treat staff like mushrooms, kept in the dark and fed on bs.

Flies WANT beer booze and now we know why - yeast

Evolution

Now all they need to do is explain why Drosophila bibitor can still fly with a blood alcohol level that would floor most humans.

Grooveshark caught in a net of its own making

Re. "Idiots"

Agreed, what they should have done was send an e-mail to all employees expressly stating that no uploading should be done on company IP addresses as it would invalidate the Safe Harbour provisions, but that what employees choose do in their own time/premises as a private individual is their own business.

Infer what you will.

Moon landing was real and WE CAN PROVE IT, says Nvidia

Re: models

I call fake ;(_ The shadows are wrong!

http://www.scifiairshow.com/images/ships/boneyard/BY05A_large.jpg

Yawn, Wikileaks, we already knew about FinFisher. But these software binaries...

Malware

So which AV vendor will be the first to De-Whitelist this?

Scottish independence: Will it really TEAR the HEART from IT firms?

Sub bases

"there isn't any other site in the UK that meets the criteria. ie. It needs to have deep water, easy access to the ocean, and most importantly be as far as possible from London in case it gets attacked or there's a nuclear accident."

So Milford Haven doesn't exist then?

Satellite weather forecast: Cloudy with a chance of p0wnage

Re: Internet Access?

Only one - the Win98 box they use for e-mail, but it is networked to everything else with no firewall.

I hope this is the right icon!

Chelyabinsk-sized SURPRISE asteroid to skim Earth, satnav birds

Re: Practice makes perfect

Want to know more ?.....

Remember Service guarantees Citizenship!

Cracking copyright law: How a simian selfie stunt could make a monkey out of Wikipedia

I'll let the jury decide...

"Sigret! Sigret! Preese, Missy! Preese, Boss! Sigret!"

UK fuzz want PINCODES on ALL mobile phones

Re: All well and good...

"I also have an app that takes a photo and emails me mugshots of people who try to unlock my phone and fail which sounded like a good idea at the time!"

Any idea what the app is called? Sounds like a good idea.

Take the shame: Microsofties ADMIT to playing Internet Explorer name-change game

BOLR

Browser of Last Resort - I only use it for a couple of sites that still don't play nicely with FF or Chrome.

Boffins find hundreds of thousands of woefully insecure IoT devices

I refer to my previous post exactly 1 year ago....

http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2011/08/18/linux_kernel_long_term_support/

Doesn't allow for the stupidity of hard-coded passwords though!

NASA tests crazytech flying saucer thruster, could reach Mars in days

Re: I like it, but I just don't trust it (yet)

I agree, this would need to be tested in a "Hard Vacuum" with to eliminate the possibility that you are just microwaving the gas particles in the air, also some method of testing that ablation of the chamber walls is not contributing reaction mass to the engine.

Cool.

That's the Impulse Engines sorted, now what about the Warp Drive?

Android busted for carrying Fake ID: OS doesn't check who really made that 'Adobe' plugin

Re: Patch cycle

When I finally got round to updating my mk1 model ME370T Nexus7 to 4.4.3 last week it immediately wanted to update to 4.4.4.

You can always go to "Settings", "About Tablet", "System updates" and perform a manual check.

Watch: DARPA shows off first successful test of STEERABLE bullet

Made me think of

The "Homer" from Logan's Run

Read the proposed US ASTEROIDS Act to green-light mining IN SPAAAACE

Made me think of

Heavy Time by C J Cherryh. Just like the Gold Rush, the ones that supply the miners really make the money.

F1? No, it's Formula E as electric racing cars hit the track

Re: No Noise...???

oooh, me wants the sound of a RR Merlin, with a touch of the Avro Vulcan howl for the overtake button, and speakers that go up 11!

You 'posted' a 'letter' with Outlook... No, NO, that's the MONITOR

Re: All too familiar

Been through this too, last time I spent 10min talking them through installing TeamViewer, and 2-3hrs scanning for & cleaning all the malware toolbars and other crap off their system. The good part is I'll be in their country soon and collecting on the promised beer.

Speed of light slower than we thought? Probably not

Maybe

Neutrinos are less flamboyant than Photons, perhaps they don't slow down for every paparazzi opportunity or stop to take selfies, hence the difference in arrival time. ;)_

US spanks phone-jamming vendor with $34.9 MEEELLION fine

Re: "quis custodiet ipsos custodes"

Since the days of Genesis, why does it always seem to be me looking at you,

you looking at me. Its' always the same, it's just a shame, that's all.

Tor is '90 per cent of the net' claims City of London Police Commish – and he's dead wrong

Re: 90%

you forgot that it all runs over dark-fibre.

Internet of Things fridges? Pfft. So how does my milk carton know when it's empty?

How about this, keep your current fridge :-

ASDA already have a record of what you bought - the unique till receipt no. links to a list that itemises your purchases, you can even use this yourself for their price guarantee, and I suppose other retailers must have the same data capabilities for their own stock control purposes, we just need access to this data ourselves.

Most supermarket produce has a barcode/qr/rfid tag.

I propose a standalone tablet style display-multiscanner (bar+qr+rfid+scales+imaging camera) that you can quickly book-in stock by entering the till receipt id, the shop has already scanned the items anyway.

Also, the ability to :-

1) enter items bought elsewhere by either scanning in or manually entering them by text or image.

2) define a storage location i.e storecupboard, fridge, freezer etc. (when I buy butter 1 goes in the fridge, the rest go in the freezer, same with bread).

3) set a re-order preference for a particular brand or generic/own brand i.e Fairy or any washing-up liquid.

4) record/set a date of entry - can be used to alert expiry date/age of produce.

On usage the items can be easily scanned or weighed to deduct them from the stock inventory, allowing for either unit or partial pack deduction i.e. 1 apple, 1 box of dishwasher salt, 87g frozen of peas from a 1kg bag, or 2 OXO cubes from a box of 12.

If you can set max/min & over time the mean stock levels for items then eventually you should be able to predict daily, weekly and monthly shopping lists, as well as getting reminders that you might want to transfer butter from the freezer to the fridge so it's defrosted before the current pack runs out, and that you've still got that tin of chickpeas in the cupboard from 5 years ago (do not re-order flag set!) :)

For an IoT angle, the ability to link to a price comparison site could give you a preferred supplier & estimated budget planner, with the ability to generate a tailored shopping list that could be placed for collection or delivery if required. You could even have a meal planner and get the system to suggest ideas based on the available ingredients, it could even calorie count your meals.

Shouldn't be too difficult to use current information processing & hardware technology to put this in a domestic setting at the sub-£100 mark, at the end of the day it's really just an epos type till entry system without the cash handling and small database stock management system, you could even have some of it "in the cloud", I'm sure that Google or Facebook etc. would love to have more information about you.

L337 crackrz use dumb passwords too

Ok, I'll start you off..

nimda or 64632, the admin password for the PBX system where I used to work, at least they changed it from the default 23646. ;)

Re: Re: Policies

Thanks for the randomly generated new Ebay password, but are the 14th and 34th characters I's or l's ?

You know it's damned hard to read the invisible ink on these post-it notes that I use for keeping track of all the different passwords. ;)

Cunning Reg reader cracks LOHAN hot coupling condundrum

Re: Conductive Grease

Try these :- http://www.electrolube.com

Available from CPC and much cheaper than cool-amp by the looks of it.

What is the voltage + current

expected to go through these connectors? You don't want hot-spots welding them together, low temperature conductive grease sounds like a good idea.

US escalates Stingray mobe-snooping secrecy battle as judge unseals evidence

Re: "Burn Notice" was a documentary series

And so is "Person of Interest".

SpaceX 'Dragon V2' rocket podule can hover-land on Earth - or MARS

Re: A thing of beauty

Well they've got the skill set & technology to do a "Carlsberg" of a BBQ, cryonics for the beer chiller & rocket thrusters for the grill.

But seriously, well done to them for what's been achieved so far, and good luck for the future.

Cheap(er) launch costs and fast turn-around of re-useable launch vehicles was what the Shuttle was supposed to be about, but with no real aim or ability to go above low earth orbit it didn't really have much of a use once the ISS was finished and the supply & ferry duties could be done by the Russians.

Elon has the aim of Mars, and being a private company isn't subject to the whims of politicians and the pork-barrel price gouging of the military-industrial complex, a man with vision and the resources to see it made real.