Posts by I am David Jones

Geico tells El Reg, no, it's not canceling all Cybertruck insurance

Re: More Reg bashing, yawn.

I totally agree. There has been absolute radio silence from The Reg on all the other instances of an insurer indicating an unwillingness to insure a particular make and model of a production vehicle.

Revenge for being fired is best served profitably

Re: If you need a Merlin ...

Interesting… thanks for sharing!

NASA switches off Voyager 2 plasma instrument to stretch out juice

Not even on-street parking.

Why didn’t they use modern electronics? They’re so much more efficient it would go on for ages!

Two British-Nigerian men sentenced over multimillion-dollar business email scam

I don’t think we Brits do that.

For me a British-Nigerian man just has two nationalities and no information about his familial roots is given.

For what you are describing I would say a British man of Nigerian origin or with a Nigerian background.

Geopolitical context, my dear fellow.

Cruise fined $1.5M for failing to report right away its robo-car dragged a pedestrian

I don’t know why they haven’t already mandated that all telemetry data surrounding an incident be instantly and securely made available to authorities. Isn’t it obvious that the manufacturers will massage or remove any inconvenient data?

No doubt they will shout “commercially sensitive!” but there are ways to handle that.

Got an idea for dealing with space waste? NASA wants to hear from you

Re: Name change

Even if we never use it the trash, there is already a disposal plan in place: effortless, cheap and green incineration within 7 billion years.

Earth's new mini-moon swings by, then ghosts us by late November

Re: explode harmlessly in the upper atmosphere

Chelyabinsk injured only 1000 people out of over 3 million.

Compare

18 vs 11 m diameter (a fifth of the volume)

42,690 mph vs 3,100 mph

Even if both were the same mass, the Chelyabinsk meteor would have had 200 times more kinetic energy than 2024 PT5.

So yes, I think it’s pretty accurate to call it harmless.

Oracle settles customer NetSuite dispute out of court

And the dirty washing stays safely hidden under the bed

Bending the rules with flexible non-silicon 32-bit RISC-V chip

No Crysis?

Not interested

Bring the joy of train delays home with your very own departure board

Re: Cool.

“The train arriving at platforms 1, 2, 3 and 4 is coming in sideways”

A look under the hood of the 3D-printed, Raspberry Pi powered 'suicide pod'

I heard about a pilot who killer himself with nitrogen. He died peacefully in his sleep, unlike all his passengers. Bazinga!

UPS supplier's password policy flip-flops from unlimited, to 32, then 64 characters

My “favourite” is the iterative error messages, with no information that covers all requirements. (Thankfully I haven’t seen it for a while.)

1st attempt: too short

2nd attempt: you need both lower- and uppercase letters

3rd attempt: you need a special character

4th attempt ‘/‘ is not permitted.

Etc etc

The icing on the cake is when you have to do a puzzle captcha puzzle for each iteration

IBM scores $45M zinger from Zynga in patent wringer

Re: Seriously?

Most patents are valid for max 20 years (pharma gets more time). But, unless barred by a statute of limitation, you can sue for past infringements.

Lebanon: At least nine dead, thousands hurt after Hezbollah pagers explode

Fun fact*: At one point the NHS owned 10% of the world‘s pagers.

*disputed but not disproven AFAIK.

On Call’s Greatest Hits, as voted for by you, the readers

Someone didn’t check their numbers!

The number of comments of the nr 1 entry should actually be 438. Tsk, tsk, quality is going right downhill…

ps I utterly refute any suggestion that I have just added a comment on that article!

Did I or did I not ask you to double-check that the socket was on? Now I've driven 15 miles, what have we found?

The on-call greatest hits article incorrectly states the number of comments in this thread.

SpaceX faces $663K FAA fine for Musk's alleged launch impatience

And the next time?

I hope the fines for repeat offences quickly become painfully high otherwise it just broadcasts the FAA’s impotence.

China claims Starlink signals can reveal stealth aircraft – and what that really means

Re: I'm skeptical

Are you sure a warship is bigger than an F22 and not just closer?

Re: I'm skeptical

I understood it as sensors on the ground measuring disturbances in the signal coming from Starlink satellites. However stealth an aircraft is, EM signals won’t pass through it (yet!) and apparently this can be detected.

Maybe it is a bit like detecting planets passing across their stars? That’s always seemed a bit black-magicky to me, measuring such small differences.

Elon Musk's assassination 'joke' bombs, internet calls for his deportation

Re: Hypothetically

It’d take a heart of stone to not laugh at a burning orphanage.

The Europa Clipper stretches its wings as launch nears

Re: Mirowave oven efficiency

Is that right? I always assumed the headline power rating would be the bigger number, ie the input voltage rather than the microwave output power. Too lazy to stand up and check my own though…

Well I never!

Transistors can heal from radiation damage? That’s a new one on me. Jolly good show!

Pretending to be a badger wins Oxford Don 10 TRILLION DOLLARS

Re: good reminder

It is a little understood problem, in particular the hyperlocalised acceleration of entropy in areas where cables are present has not been observed anywhere with any other objects. Although my bedroom comes close.

Muppet broke the datacenter every day, in its own weighty way

That is disgustingly racialist against persons of lesser sight.

Keep out all gingers!

ps I married one so insulting them is second nature :)

Boeing union workers in US reject contract: 96% vote to strike

Is a company that increases your salary by just 2% over 5 years really a “good” company? For the employees?

Are profits, executive pay and dividends also so meagre?

Well there’ll be commercial deadlines/penalties and the customers will now be checking quality with an even finer toothcomb so not exactly plain sailing for Boeing.

You should join or create a union and consider industrial action then!

NASA engineers play space surgeon in bid to unclog Voyager 1's arteries

Re: Nothing but respect

Glass half empty huh? ;)

Re: Nothing but respect

It’s not going to die, it’ll just be sleeping!

Sometime, somewhere, I’m sure some curious things will grab it and try to fire it up.

Russia's top-secret military unit reportedly plots undersea cable 'sabotage'

Re: Russian activity damaging undersea critical infrastructure

Point of order, M’lud. American involvement in the Vietnam war ended more than 50 years ago.

Thanks, Edward Snowden: You propelled China to quantum networking leadership

Re: Not Snowden

I’m not sure… facts are not absolute but are at best assumed (believed?) to be true according to our understanding of the world.

So I tend to see myself as a strong/devoted/zealous believer of the scientific method. I find this state of mind makes it easy to curtail interactions with people of esoteric views such as flat-earthers and homeopathists (I’ve given up trying to convince them that they’re wrong): „you believe in homeopathy? Well I believe in science. Let‘s talk about films“

Re: Not Snowden

You have totally misunderstood the premise of that book, unless the title is totally misleading (I haven’t read it).

It is saying that facts have a half-life, which is something I had already heard about. The half-life that was mentioned back then was 50 years.

This says nothing about which proportion of today’s accepted facts are true. To take the example of 50 years, it means that half of all facts that were accepted as such 50 years ago will have turned out to be incorrect.

Top EU court crushes Google appeal against $2.65B Shopping antitrust ruling

Re: "We made changes back in 2017"

The changes being that you started stealing beer in a different country?

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch could be gone in ten years – for chump change

Re: Recurrence

What I don’t understand, and which in German fan-zones seems to be getting more common, is lobbing your beer somewhere as soon as your team scores.

Even from a purely selfish point of view it makes no sense to me:

- the beer is very expensive

- the Pfand is very expensive

- there are often big queues to buy a new beer and you have to miss some of the match

So why oh why?!

Cluster II spacecraft reenters and burns up with a nod to its controllers

XKCD arguably did it best?

There’s no argument, of course it did!

See also: Opportunity (https://xkcd.com/1504/)

We're in the brute force phase of AI – once it ends, demand for GPUs will too

Re: "Generative AI is"

Quickly discovering what you don’t know?

I just use Wikipedia for that, it’s very good and comparatively easy-going on resources.

Scientists find a common food dye can make a live mouse's skin transparent

Re: Tartrazine is pretty awful stuff

Maybe harmful, maybe not. Ingesting a substance is very different to smearing it on your skin.

Re: An old friend of mine named Jones

Thanks for that. I do have a friend called Jones and it fits perfectly :)

Re: Tartrazine is pretty awful stuff

Did you not read the bit about very useful biomedical applications?

Re: See right through you

That’s exactly what it does. But now you have to worry about getting your bones bleached and maybe a vein vejazzle!

Despite cyberattacks, water security standards remain a pipe dream

Re: Making money is more important than infrastructure

The Russians?

Copilot for Microsoft 365 might boost productivity if you survive the compliance minefield

Sounds good

Microsoft is examining regulatory requirements … and addressing them within the product through a process of continuous improvement”

That just sounds like the product will never be fully compliant.

US govt halts medical study into Havana Syndrome, cites 'coercion' of participants

Americans will do anything to enjoy free not to be bankrupted by health care.

FTFY

Microsoft decides it's a good time for bad UI to die

Re: Tesla

I learnt that a fuse blowing once can be just one of those things. If it blows twice then you need to find the cause before replacing it again.

Re: Tesla

Unless, coward, you are talking about the car Hitler drove round in, calling a car a nazi mobile is just a thoughtless, childish playground insult.

Re: Tesla

Go on then downvoter, tell me all about the useful things I can do at the side of a road with a toolbox. I’m willing to learn!

Re: Tesla

I’m no mechanical genius but I can’t really think of anything that I could, or would want to, potentially fix on the road providing I had a spanner or screwdriver. And even less so with an electric motor, which really does get rid of most of the mechanical gubbins that can be tinkered with.

Most faults will be sensors which even if you could repair would likely require the error flag to be reset. There’s no spare tyre, and changing lightbulbs on the go is a non starter, Maybe changing a fuse but you could probably get away with a key or coin to access the panel (if you even carry fuses - who does?).

Which just leaves duct tape and cable ties which will fix broken bodywork and leaks. But everyone carries those all the time anyway, right?

Re: MS has history of fixing what is not broke

And the amount of scrolling needed is inversely proportional to the width of the scroll bars