Posts by Wzrd1

Boffins working on debris float models to track MH370 wreckage

Re: Australia anyone?

Not *quite* enough fuel to make that trip.

But, it's better than CNN's headline news has been suggesting. Wonderful notions, such as "Maybe it was hit by a black hole", "Maybe God took the airplane" and "Maybe a UFO abducted the airplane". Such is the mindless drivel served to we Americans.

Also potentially likely is that the radio went on the fritz, an emergency occurred (such as a cabin decompression), which necessitated an emergency descent and a triangular course to alert ATC to the malfunctioning radio. The misprogrammed autopilot then resumed a random course that ended up out to sea before the pilots could regain consciousness and control of the aircraft and at altitude, were unable to do so again.

It's as likely as every other guess and it's quite likely that all of those guesses and this guess are all equally wrong.

What is known is, the aircraft went wildly off course, made some bizarre course and altitude changes and is missing. What is certain is that it is on Earth. Somewhere. Quite likely on the bottom of the ocean.

Google grabs Gmail-using HTTPS refuseniks and coats them with SSL

Re: What's the Point of Encryption?

You started to lose me when you started foaming at the mouth.

You totally lost me when you blathered "risked his life".

Risked imprisonment, yes, his life, no.

But, I don't expect a paranoid person to comprehend that modest difference. Or to seek professional mental health care guidance.

Planes fail to find 'credible' candidate for flight MH370 wreckage

Re: @p_0

"Why did the plane fly to a set of waypoints that were neither in the flight plan nor were a divert?"

To commentard it away, consider this:

Explosive decompression, loss of comms due to condensation, attempt to alter course for triangle distress course and loss of consciousness.

Autopilot resumes altitude, possibly due to incorrect action on the part of hypoxic flight crew and the rest is history.

The pilot suicide theory is a really big stretch, it involves seven hours of flying, that's pretty damned determined when the act could have been performed at any point in the flight and would've been easiest during takeoff.

Fire isn't so plausible, as flash fires are extremely rare and nearly impossible in a commercial aircraft, slower fires would give time to send a distress call.

Slow decompression should set off alarms, but alarms have been ignored in the past and resulted in disaster.

Rapid decompression would give around 8 seconds to get a mask on before severe impairment and eventual disability would occur.

Oh well, we'll have to wait for the aircraft to be found and the investigation to be concluded. Any way you slice it though, it's not a good thing for the families involved.

Re: @p_0

"From the flightpath, it is known that the autopilot was reprogrammed..."

"The pilots are equipped with their own personal oxygen supplies..."

Do you mean like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_South_Dakota_Learjet_crash

Off course, wearing oxygen masks, but still went down due to air crew oxygen starvation.

Personally, I'll await finding the aircraft and the subsequent investigation results. Anything else is simply guessing and uneducated guessing at that.

Re: If it flew with the pilots disabled

"You could substitute a knockout/killer gas for the virus and then you have a plane that will fly on autopilot until the fuel runs out."

No need for a gas, only a lack of gas-air.

Gradual decompression would more than suffice. Though, there are alarms that should go off in the case of low cabin pressure.

QUIDOCALYPSE: Blighty braces for £100 MILLION cost of new £1 coin

Re: £500 to update each parking machine?

"If public transport was efficient it would be used, but it is systemically impossible to have efficient public transport with a dispersed population."

I'll call bullshit on that one.

Here near Philadelphia, PA, we have public transportation in extremely heavy use every single day of the week.

But, for elders, a motor vehicle is the way to go. It's hard enough getting into and out of one's own car, climbing onto a bus or train is a herculean effort in the extreme.

As for me, I tend to purchase a month's worth of groceries in one go. That is a non-starter if I were taking public transportation.

Each method of transport to its task, for each excels at their task. But, to go to "the shops", it's largely the motor vehicle that accomplishes the task.

With human parking enforcement excelling at enforcement.

Re: £500 to update each parking machine?

"Cars are horribly inefficient ways of getting lots of people into a small area."

Unless you're an old fart, who is unable to get around in any other manner.

Or don't we old farts have rights in Old Blighty now? :P

Re: It has one face...

Not inbreeding, only the effects of being an old army lorry driver.

Previously stable Greenland glaciers now rushing to the sea

Re: "after more than a quarter of a century of stability."

Not as impressive as El Reg insisting in article after article how the glaciers were fine on Greenland and indeed, were growing.

Target ignored hacker alarms as crooks took 40m credit cards – claim

"I hope some government regulator gives them such a good reaming over this that the CEO can't sit down for a month."

Any regulatory reaming will be secondary to the crater generating reaming the civil legal action from customers whose data was compromised will be.

Watch the MIT MER-BOT – half droid, half soft 'fish' – swim by itself

Re: Can a head mounted laser be far behind?

Haven't a bit of trouble stabilizing the laser on target yet. The fishy motion is throwing the targeting scanners off a bit.

Behold, the TITCHY T-REX that prowled the warm Arctic of long ago

Re: Lets clone it.

"You need lots of time and space, and it will eat you out of house and home."

And its leavings are probably far, far worse. And substantially larger than what a domestic cat would leave.

Or a great cat, for that matter.

So, you'd be trading little cat for big scat.

That doesn't sound like a really great deal.

Ethical hacker backer hacked, warns of email ransack

Re: "EC-Council uses a cloud service provider for enterprise email"

"You outsource your security to someone else = you're only as secure as they are."

You insource, your security is as good as your staff and CIO budget.

Six of one, half dozen of the other. At least with a cloud provider, there is incentive to spend more on security, as the provider would lose many clients if they failed in security.

UK.gov to train up 11-year-old cyberwarriors

Re: If it works.... double edged sword much?

"...and these are probably immature children..."

True, rather like the military. Minimal adult supervision.

What did you see, Elder Galaxies? What made you age so quickly?

Re: Sun damage

Hypernovae cause *really* bad aging, moisturizer won't help at all, might as well use petrol.

Re: Run that by me again...

"Don't worry if it makes your head hurt - at these kinds of distances astrophysicists use redshifts almost exclusively, in part because it's a single metric that avoids these kinds of ambiguities."

True enough, the real headaches comes in with gravitational lensing shifting the already red shifted light.

For this, I consider the age, the time scale involved since the big bang, then consider initial density, increasing rarification, toss in a ton of supernovae from supergiants, hypergiants and likely, ridiculous-giants altering star growth via their extinction.

Anybody have time on a supercomputer? I have some interesting modeling to play about with.

If my guesstimate is right, you take the credit, I'll take 10% of the prize money. ;)

X marks the... They SAID there was a mystery planet there – NASA

Re: Don't see how this helps any

"Firstly you choose to ignore the fossil evidence that led to the hypothesis being proposed in the first instance."

Not at all. Small sample size and more noise than signal in the data suggests that the most likely cause was not some invisible gas giant that has now been observationally shown to not be within one light year.

It's as likely that a rouge planet passed on occasion and tossed a comet or two about, changes in the geography of the planet altered the environment and the occasional oversuccessful pathogen could have caused many of the mass extinctions or any combination thereof.

The problem is small sample size and a lot of noise.

People see patterns everywhere. But, seeing a pattern does not make it so. There really aren't white dragons flying about, they're still only clouds.

Boffins build bendy screen using LEDs just THREE atoms thick

Re: And how long before this is ready for market?

"Well I agree with the sentiment you're probably subscribed to the wrong news outlet if you want to see consumer goods as they arrive."

While that is true enough, I'd not be surprised to see the kinks ironed out for commercial processing techniques within a few years and production of circuits in a 5-7 year time frame.

Optical signalling in molecular size arrays is rather a holy grail quest as frequencies rise, capacitive and inductive losses accumulate.

Still, if it pans out as practical and efficient, let's call it a decade so that high efficiency devices are available.

Or, the entire deal may prove impractical for production and nothing will ever see the light of day.

Distro diaspora: Four flavours of Ubuntu unpacked

Re: Gnome vs Unity

My Trusty xbuntu test box has zero Amazon crap on it (thankfully).

For alpha software, it's surprisingly stable! Especially considering that it's running on an old Acer Apire One ZG5, with 8 gig SSD.

Saucy had all kinds of Amazon crappage to disable/remove. I'll not even go into the idiocy of the DM, having to install classic menu and avoiding that idiotic sidebar. That one is on my old Toughbook. Nearly installed Fedora...

Twin GEEKS: NASA studies identical brothers – one on Earth, one IN SPAAAACE

"Surely, the only variable (as far as possible) should be gravity or the lack of it."

You forgot about radiation.

So, that is two variables to consider.

Now, add in lower atmospheric pressure in the space station, you have three variables.

"It looks looks like a classical thought experiment about one twin flying on a relativistic spaceship and the other staying home."

True enough, but the effect is miniscule in comparison to the human lifespan.

More telling would be radiation and microgravity effects upon physiology. Those effects, while understood, are still active fields of study in order to fully understand the implications of long term space missions.

"Mind you, you wouldn't want to be the one left behind."

Mark won't mind being on the ground at all. He is married to Gabby Giffords, the US representative that was shot in the head.

She attended his final launch in the space shuttle and he has since retired from the astronaut program.

Microsoft to push out penultimate XP patch on March Patch Tuesday

"Most laptops and desktops currently running XP were built to run XP only."

Of my laptops and desktop that were running XP, they were also capable of running Vista.

That said, they all run Linux right now. Even with my WSUS server doing its job, patching everything else on the system was a time sapper.

Meanwhile, my wife's machine runs 64 bit Vista, which was always... cumbersome in operation. She's tired enough of it that she's actually seriously considering having Linux on it.

Once she finally decides, I can retire one ancient DC and WSUS server and dedicate them to something useful, such as serving media to the house (what I did for the other DC).

Squidge-droids maker updates iRobot for SUCK, SCRUB action

"its great for that, and I'm grateful for the reduced workload"

Yes, but if you have to disassemble it monthly to clean out optical sensors, replace a filter monthly and clear the bin often (actually, I'm cool with that!), it becomes an issue.

The sensors gave it circle dance. The sensors were overridden in later models, but the filter remained and issues remained.

I have four of them. One suffers from circle dance until I open up the wheels to clean it, as an update is not available any longer (I was delayed in trying to get it, courtesy of redeploying home), another is spotty at best, due to shitty batteries that were replaced by shitty batteries that are generic (the brand batteries being twice the price) and it still doesn't pick up much refuse, such as straw particles from a straw broom that swept a Persian carpet.

The military/police models are good. I've used the military models (OK, my men used them and swore their lives being continued, courtesy of their robots), but the home model is shit. Well, has been shit.

Nothing here has convinced me otherwise.

Just another paid for advertisement.

Re: Skutters

As an owner of four, with three remaining nearly functional iRobot units, I'll agree.

They're shitters.

They converted an unmitigated piece of shit into a mitigated piece of shit.

The shit is likely to remain operational.

So, is the new model immune to circle dance, leaks and the other assortments of maladies and possibly even work properly?

I'll not risk a penny to find out. If they want to provide a free upgrade for two new models, I'll consider it.

But, I'm willing to guess that that is not an option.

Hubble 'scope snaps 200,000-ton chunky crumble conundrum

"It is called ice and it gets a little slick."

Need one say any more?

OK, I shall.

Near absolute zero center components meet modest heat, then finally get to describe what volatile means.

CIA snoops snooped on Senate to spy spy torture report – report

Re: Tail wagging the dog.

"does not for long go far beyond what the top level executives and the President approve if the Congress takes issue with it. "

Three words: Bay of Pigs. One example out of many of an out of control CIA back in the 1960's. Congress brought them under control, as the POTUS suffered from high velocity lead poisoning before he could try to get them under control.

Never piss of the folks who hold the pen that signs your paycheck.

Re: Tail wagging the dog.

So, another fanboy who insists that the POTUS micromanages every agency he's in charge of.

I've heard the same bullshit over soldiers murdering civilians, where apparently, the POTUS must've failed to directly supervise Privates in the middle of a war.

The reality is, the CIA has gotten out of control in the past, Congress brought them back under control by power of the budget.

Re: Tail wagging the dog.

"Oh, come on, there is *no* question as to who really runs the place, but like Dracula their power only functions in the shadows ..."

I see! So, you hold that the CIA writes laws and also authorizes their own budget, not Congress?

Wrong and wrong.

Indeed, that was how the CIA was brought to heel back in the 1960's. The power of the pen held by a lot of pissed of Congresscritters.

Re: Tail wagging the dog.

First, the CIA is not permitted, by charter approved by Congress, to operate within the United States of America. Not even to investigate a leak to Congress. That is the job of the FBI.

Second, the CIA may not investigate their oversight authority. That undermines the entirety of oversight, as does forbidding the oversight authority to perform their Constitutionally mandated oversight from their own offices (each house of Congress has its own SCIF to read TS and SCI data).

So, we've seem to have come full circle from the 1960's, when the CIA had to be reined in due to unlawful domestic activities.

Most likely via the budget axe.

WHOA: Get a load of Asteroid DX110 JUST MISSING planet EARTH

Re: Fuck a duck...

"Whilst you concentrate on the sky, the NSA takes your data"

Good, I don't need to make backups any longer, I'll just download the NSA's copy of my data.

Thanks for reminding me that my data is safe.

GNU security library GnuTLS fails on cert checks: Patch now

Re: Goto considered harmful

I've found that the gosub type routine tends to cause far more harm, as lousy coders then don't return from the subroutine properly and leave garbage in the stack to accumulate.

Indeed, the errors I see in flash crap out there act the same way that older software did with crapped up stacks lousy with garbage.

Security researchers uncover three-year-old 'RUSSIAN SPYware'

Re: Until proven otherwise...

"And due to our own activities we can't get too angry about it."

Agent.BTZ was Chinese, run by the PRC Army. It directly targeted US DoD assets. Other PRC based compromises were plentiful between 2005-present, with Russian compromises as well.

Frankly, the only nation I'm aware of who doesn't have cyber-espionage and cyber-warfare units is Somalia.

There are no saints, but there are loads and loads of sinners out there. Not just the US with its massive data scoops running all over the place attempting to find terrorists.

Re: Which OS?

Not *quite* true. Linux desktop penetration is slightly greater, but as a server the penetration is much, much higher. The US government also has support contracts with RedHat.

Re: Which OS?

"... but can it run on Wine?"

With some tweaking, if it's half like Agent.BTZ.

Re: Don't be daft!

"Russia has an extremely competent and well funded spying agency."

True enough, they also contract out with RBN for "services rendered", such as the Georgia attacks.

But, Agent.BTZ wasn't Russian, it was PRC Army written and operated.

We'll suffice it to say that US operatives know quite a lot about who did what to whom, when and how.

Reg reader rattles tin for GoPro camera 'Stubilizer'

Re: Great idea but not sure about using for PG.

"I'm sure these would be brilliant for other activities though. Ones without strings and necks involved."

Just what we need. More JackAss videos. :P:p:P:p

Boffins say dark matter found with X-ray

Re: Did they overlook the obvious here?

"When I went to infant school, erroneously called elementary school across the pond..."

We call infants creatures that are in diapers and incapable of walking yet.

So, either we have a terminology problem or your pre-toddlers are in school.

As I know far better from experience with British people and their education, it's obvious that infancy isn't when one is educated in a school.

I'll refrain from insulting the insult that is my home in the US poor excuse for an educational system.

My vast vocabulary fails to grant me the proper ability to do so.

In simpler terms, in the US, an infant is essentially capable of only suckling. Hence, an infant school is rather laughable.

Though, our schools qualities of late are also quite laughable.

In a sad laughter way.

Though, I did toy with the notion of teaching UK students about US federal, state and community law, upon proper consideration, I decided it wasn't worthy of doing so, lest the students become insane. ;)

Maybe, maybe not. It could and quite likely is a red herring. But, one learns by observation, experimentation and theorizing.

One learns nothing by ignoring things.

Meanwhile, I recall some Solar neutrinos doing weird things that was unexpected at the time...

"Yet all of the claims about what dark matter does/constitutes suggest that it doesn't have any EM properties."

Not quite. Indeed, the Oort cloud is dark matter. It isn't glowing, it isn't shiny, we find what is found by looking for faint traces. The same is true for all distant, dull objects of debris.

It's rather likely that dark matter is just dust that was blasted away from stars entering main sequence and is quite diffuse, but it'd not *quite* explain the *quantity* required by gravitation laws as we know them.

Re: Paranoia

"Agree. The same skepticism applies to attempts to find "meaning" in CP violation, or cosmological findings."

CP violation exists. Finding a reason for it helps explain the most fundamental factors of our universe. If CP parity existed, why isn't Venus made of antimatter?

Or Jupiter.

Obviously not even Mars.

Still, great claims require great proofs. One can only prove or disprove something by examination and experimentation. One does *not* prove or disprove by dismissal.

We'd still be in the dark ages were that true!

Re: Paranoia

"Even Hawking has been caught in speculative metaphysics."

Hawking pulled black hole theories out of his buttocks, but made them work and observation has proved quite a bit of his theories. So, speculative "metaphysics" is just speculative *physics*.

"For that reason it has to be a bit suspect, as it postulates things that are unobservable."

Nuclear physics started out postulating things that were unobservable, then clever men and women invented ways to observe the nuclear, then sub-nuclear.

If we had adopted your view, even germ theory would've been ignored!

Re: Paranoia

"I read the first one a while back, and it's coquettish but will probably turn out to be misunderstood astrophysical process. :("

Maybe, maybe not. Solar neutrinos change flavor seven ways till Sunday. It is possible that another state exists that is at a longer time factor till change.

They're not *that* well understood yet. Only reasonably understood.

But, it's equally possible that you're correct.

Only time and tons of effort in research will tell.

But, I find that cool. After all, if we understood *everything*, life would be infinitely boring! :)

Anti-snoop Blackphone hits shelves in June: NOW we'll see how much you value privacy

"Why not just use a Silent Circle app on our current, cheaper phones?"

Note the bit about trimmed down, secured OS.

Android is notorious for its lack of security and generosity to app developers in terms of information being given by users.

I've already dismissed 50 different apps due to their excessive data gathering requirements to install. That number will grow, as I only have had my android for a month.

"It's made by a major US defence contractor, it's main customers are US govt agencies who want to drop Blackberry."

The US DoD, which counts the NSA, all have secure cell phones already, both Blackberry and non-Blackberry units.

I loved the crap about "jumping through hoops" over the use of crypto. If the military can use it, anyone can. I know that one well enough, I spent nearly 28 years of my life in the US military.

The NSA isn't the only game in town in defending "the motherland" (damn, but I hate that word, it reminds me of fascism). The DoD has plenty of cyberwarfare and cyberintelligence about, they're quite good at what they do, as are the folks in Russia and the PRC (and pretty much every other nation on the planet).

I know that firsthand as well, courtesy of my IASO duties and briefings.

My only real worry is that cyberwarfare might become too tempting, which would result in *real* harm to infrastructure and result in a reprisal via WMD retaliation.

In 2008 we already saw cyberwarfare used by the Russians in Georgia.

What could happen if such an event was exchanged between nuclear armed nations makes one shudder.

Miscreant menaces Meetup, minuscule money mania mashed

Re: 'Give me your wallet'

"To think, the internet used to be such a nice place before the public and ad men were allowed in."

It's funny, I actually found a Viagra ad in my spam folder. I chuckled over it after I deleted the rubbish.

We used to build stories out of SPAM captured by our mail filters. Such as enjoying our all expense paid vacation in the Virgin Islands, enjoying the fruits of our Nigerian investments and enjoying our discounted Viagra, with assorted additions to make the story flow better, but all from that crap inundating our filters.

One finds stress relief somehow, as we can't shoot the bastards out of a cannon and into a midden heap.

Re: It's easy enough

"An open wifi connection and a device with a spoofed MAC address is enough to avoid being traced and to send a target IP address to a C&C server."

True enough, but if every ISP actually configured their network properly, such an attack would be more difficult to pull off with spoofing. A spoofed MAC address is one thing, but one has to have an IP. Many spoofers still spoof an IP that is not part of the ISP network, hence should not have routing accepted.

Well done on the privacy lawsuit. Now NSA will keep your phone records INDEFINITELY

Re: In the words of John Mckenroe

Let's review this now.

If the NSA destroys the records and the court later wants those records, you'll cry foul.

If the NSA retains the records in case the court later wants those records, you'll cry foul.

Some people just can't be pleased!

LOHAN chap brews up 18% ABV 'V2' rocket fuel

Re: No Duty on Brewing

"Sounds a lot like the general rules in America (it varies from state to state). "

Save for distillation, which is under federal licensing for taxation purposes only.

The US government doesn't give a tinkers damn if it's toxic, they care about the tax revenue.

In this case, the US government can have it permitted *if* the alcohol is denatured with a toxic substance, then no tax is due.

Boeing going ... GONE: Black phone will SELF-DESTRUCT in 30 secs

"Oh, Security through obscurity? Should be cracked within a week of release."

Between that and having open WiFi and bluetooth, security through what, exactly?