* Posts by casaloco

265 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Dec 2012

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Share your 2024 tech forecasts (wrong answers only) to win a terrible sweater

casaloco
Alert

Speculation in crypto currencies by big investors causes the prices to rocket until eventually the only business activity worth using energy for is crypto mining.

Energy gets a better return when used to power crypto miners than tractors.

All farming stops and the entire human race wipes itself in a whirlwind of crypto profit making.

casaloco
Mushroom

The world's government's realise that mining crypto currency is incredibly wasteful in terms of energy and water, is the biggest threat to the global climate, and that if they simply ban crypto currencies they don't have to bother with all the net zero nonsense.

This causes a global war.

FCC plans to restore net neutrality rules tossed out under Trump

casaloco

Counterproductive

The problem is "net neutrality" discourages investment in new capacity, as there is no way to monetise it.

You are simply creating capacity for anyone - including your direct competitors - to use.

In the UK, laws like this held up the rollout of high speed broadband for more than a decade.

NYC rights groups say no to grocery store spycams and snooping landlords

casaloco

I like this bit:

"where lawyer Kelly Conlon got turned away at the door of Radio City Music Hall after a facial recognition system pinned her as a prohibited person"

Which she ABSOLUTELY WAS, and she would have known perfectly well she was, when she attempted to access the building.

Micron revenue halved in FY23 as China ban bites

casaloco

There are two options

There are two options... either the ban was simply retaliation for US bands, or more likely, Micron know EXACTLY why they were banned, but aren't going to own up to putting back doors in to their hardware for the Americans.

Ukraine accuses Russian spies of hunting for war-crime info on its servers

casaloco

Ukraine think Russia wanted to delete data on war crimes

Ukraine think Russia wanted to delete data on war crimes.

If only there was some way to copy that to an offline source as a backup.

Something that plugs in to a existing socket on the computer.

Lawsuit accusing Robinhood and Citadel Securities of colluding to stop GameStop shares from skyrocketing thrown out by judge

casaloco

Re: But RobinHood did block buying Gamestop

The people he shot were WHITE.

Well known dangerous WHITE criminals with long histories of violence.

White criminals who simply came out for a night of looting and destruction for fun and profit.

Amazon India execs questioned after sellers allegedly use site to smuggle marijuana

casaloco

Fixed:

Amazon got in touch to say: "Amazon, as a matter of company policy, will be pushing the local executives under a bus"

casaloco

Re: Amazon has vast artificial intelligence capabilities and should therefore have been able to...

They should have a team responsible for adding and updating keywords.

Russia's orbital insanity is almost beyond redemption – but there's space for improvement

casaloco

Wait... wut?

No, this was RUSSIA, not America.

casaloco

Use them?

Russia doesn't have these missiles so it can use them.

It has them so America can't use theirs.

Server errors plague app used by Tesla drivers to unlock their MuskMobiles

casaloco

Supposed to be the future?

Tesla is supposed to be the future, so why doesn't it open using a palm reader built in tot the drivers window?

Junior dev decides to clear space for brewing boss, doesn't know what 'LDF' is, sooo...

casaloco

I'm calling BS

I'm calling BS on this entire story. You can't delete the LDF file while SQL server is running as the file is in use and thus locked. If you delete it while SQL isn't running, SQL server just creates a new one when it starts.

Florida man won't be compelled to reveal iPhone passcode, yet

casaloco

Re: Files are not testimony

This isn't the police using your key to search your house. It's the police legally demanding you tell them where the body is buried, and sending you to jail if you don't tell them. Or don't know.

No hypersonic railguns on our ships this year, says US Navy

casaloco

When the missile is doing mach 8...

When the missile is doing mach 8 shooting it with bullets is pointless.

It has enough kinetic energy to punch through one side of the ship and out the other.

Unless you hit it with something of greater mass, it's still going to hit you.

Don't gripe if you hand your PC to Geek Squad and they rat you out to the Feds – judge

casaloco

His lawyer must suck donkey balls.

"The doctor also verbally consented to an engineer checking his hard drive." - His lawyer must be utterly useless. He consented for them to CHECK his hard drive. Check it. For the purposes of conducting a repair. Not browse it. Not search it. Not copy it. Not recover deleted data from it.

If they do anything more than run HDTune Pro they've committed an offense and the evidence and statement are only valid for one case - the one against the geek squad employee who did it.

For his lawyer not to get the case throw out on day 1 is ridiculous.

Blighty's buying another 17 F-35s, confirms the American government

casaloco

Re: ...set in stone...

"Really hope they're not set in stone. That would be detrimental to their already debatable flight capabilities." - Not by very much.,

Ur dumped lol: Folk may be able to leave mobile contracts via text

casaloco

Why not?

This is one of those "why can't you request a PAC number by text already" things.

China launches aircraft carrier the length of 13.6 brontosauruses

casaloco

Why not?

All aircraft carriers should be built with a bullseye painted on the side of them.

At least the old UK carriers were small enough to have a chance of being missed.

Hence why the larger Atlantic Conveyor took the hit instead.

College fires IT admin, loses access to Google email, successfully sues IT admin for $250,000

casaloco

Well of course...

Well of course he had a non-work account setup as the administrator account. If something went wrong with the system, if all the logins were bound to his work google account, he wouldn't be able to get it to resolve it. For example if one of the muppets in finance did what they usually do and delayed paying an invoice for 8 weeks, and the email accounts got locked out for non-payment, he'd have no way to check the emails (or even communicate with google) to address the problem.

Mr Angry pays taxman with five wheelbarrows worth of loose change

casaloco

Re: He'd be shit out of luck in the UK

"Makes me wonder what will happen if their plans to put an end to cheques ever happen, since they will still be bound by the legal requirement to accept written instructions." - Banks aren't stopping ACCEPTING cheques, they are stopping ISSUING them. Specifically many banks don't issue a check-book unless you explicitly ask for it and even then they wont give you a cheque guaranty card, so no-one will take them. Cheques are problematic for banks, since they could be cashed at any time in future. It's an unexpected debt.

Insane blackhats behind world's most expensive ransomware 'forget' to backup crypto keys

casaloco

They failed at step 1...

They failed at step 1... make paying less hassle than recovering from backups.

For Randsomware to be effective, the price needs to be about £50. That's the amount most people would pay in the hope of getting their data back. When you get beyond that it becomes less and less likely they will pay. Technical-ish people will have backups, non-technical people will trash the Malware and make the files unrecoverable trying to fix it. On top of this, the more you demand, greater the chances of law enforcement becoming involved.

Essentially they need to target a price-point that is about the same as a years licence to a quality anti-virus/anti-malware suite.

At £50, if people are reasonably sure they will get their files back, they will just pay.

Switzerland says Uber's an employer, sends social security bill

casaloco

eh?

"If Uber simply set some minimum standards, and allowed drivers to bid for a job at a rate the driver offered, when they felt like doing a job, then they might get away with it" - isn't that effectively what Uber do... maybe I misunderstand... I thought the point was Uber set the rates based on demand and drivers chose to work when rates reach a level of interest? I though Uber drivers didn't have fixed hours, and could reject jobs if they wanted to? Has the way it works changed?

casaloco

I'm pretty sure...

I'm pretty sure that is already covered under the rules on self-employed workers.

Boy, 12, gets €100k bill from Google after confusing Adwords with Adsense

casaloco

Re: RE: "Why did the kid know the family bank account details?"

I can't tell if you are an idiot or being ironic. (Post Fry meme here)

I suppose he could have checked any one of the 12 bank statements he parents get each year, and are probably sat n the sideboard in a pile.

Bloke gets six years in slammer after fessing up to £4.75m tax scam

casaloco

Another Example...

Another example of where someone would have got away with a crime if they had just stopped doing it slightly earlier. But they got greedy and kept going until someone noticed.

Ludicrous Patent of the Week: Rectangles on a computer screen

casaloco

I'm gonna patent the same thing...

I'm gonna patent the same thing... but "on a mobile device".

US Marine Corps to fly F-35s from HMS Queen Lizzie as UK won't have enough jets

casaloco

Re: "...as the crash record of the Harrier showed..."

The harriers DID have an appalling accident loss rate. This way due to pilot error during the transition from hover to fly, where pilots moved the nozzles from the down position to the back position before the aircraft had enough forward speed to generate enough lift with the wings to maintain controlled flight. It didn't help that you only had enough water to cool the nozzles for about a minute so people had to rush.

The issues were largely resolved though in the later years, after they put a computer in charge of the process so you couldn't screw it up. That was part of the upgrade they did where they also upgraded the engines, avionics, weapons management etc.

casaloco

They should save time...

They should save time and just paint a huge bullseye on the side of the new carriers.

One of the big advantages of the old carriers is they were small... harder to see and hit.

These new carriers are effectively "putting all your eggs in one basket". We would have been better off with a big fleet of frigates and no aircraft carriers... at least they could spread out.

These carriers were little more that a donation to the US Navy. We should just sell them to them and be done with it.

UK military buys third £4m Zephyr drone for 'persistent surveillance' trials

casaloco

Well at least you know

Well at least you know they wont be using it to spy on you. 70,000ft up, above all the clouds, chance of seeing anything in the UK.... mostly zero.

"What's the terrorist doing Dave"

"Dunno Steve it's cloudy"

2 days later...

"Nope, still cloudy".

'Flying Bum's' first flight was a gas, gas, gas

casaloco

It's not what if can lift

It's not what if can lift that matters, it's how long the spy platform can stay up for.

Tech support scammers mess with hacker's mother, so he retaliated with ransomware

casaloco

Re: Extension

First thing I turn off on any PC I use.

They kept that quiet: Toshiba unsheathes FlashBlade rival

casaloco

Obvious but...

Pics, or it didn't happen.

The developer died 14 years ago, here's a print out of his source code

casaloco

How?

How did he expect them to pay him the $5000 when their accounting system was down?

US Air Force declares F-35 'combat-ready'

casaloco

Re: but how about *really* bright LED torches with a strobe mode?

This concept is based on a WW2 weapon that used a very powerful spotlight and series of triangular mirrors that span in concentric circles creating hundreds of rays of light that dazzled and disoriented pilots, causing they to either call off their attack runs or crash. They were used to protect the Suez Canal and were so effective that the technology is still 100% classified top secret EVEN TODAY. If the details of the tech ever leaked it would cripple air travel world wide as terrorists could place them anywhere within 10 miles of an airport and bring down planes ad lib. Planes worlwide would have to have curtains fitted in the cockpit and approach and land every flight on instruments.

Electric Babel Fish swims into crowdfunding

casaloco

EH?

So it's a pair of bluetooth headsets and a translation app?

White hats bake TeslaCrypt master key into universal decryptor

casaloco

I would suggest...

I would suggest they held the wrong people to ransom, and someone made it rather clear they should leave quietly if they wanted to live. Imagine someone high-up in the Russian Mafia getting one of these demands. "Find him, cut his balls off and stuff they in his mouth".

Volvo offloads IT biz to HCL, then outsources own IT to.... HCL

casaloco

Anyone remember EDS

This is kind of what GM (Vauxhall/Opel etc) did with EDS... it floated it's own IT department as a separate company. It was eventually a part of why the company went bust... with all the companies IT effectively outsourced, the company was crippled, unable to make the changes needed to keep up with the market without spending months of negotiation, after which they realised they hadn't ordered what they needed because they couldn't tell what they needed as all the analysts had been outsourced too. They ended up spending more on project managers etc to negotiate the contracts than they used to spend on IT, plus the over-priced cost of the IT work as well. outsourcing IT almost never works... outsourcing you whole IT department is little more than corporate suicide.

New Monopoly version features an Automatic Teller Machine

casaloco

Re: Misses the point entirely

No it's supposed to teach kids of the evils of landlordism. The game shows that no matter how many time you go round, collecting your salary, you eventually end up paying it all in rent, and the person who buys the most property wins. Even buying public utilities, which provide a service tot he public wont provide as much income as simply buying houses and charging rent. Landlordism, uncontrolled, eventually bankrupts society.

Reminder: iPhones commit suicide if you repair them on the cheap

casaloco

A short list of solutions

Computer misuse act, prevention of terrorism act, arrest all the senior staff, bail denied due to flight risk to non extradition country....

That's cute, Germany – China shows the world how fusion is done

casaloco

Re: Mr. Fusion era

"A few years later everyone else will have it." - of course they will. Chinese companies will be producing knock-offs and selling them on eBay within months. We all know how this works. I'm waiting until the Chinese start producing copies of the space shuttle. £99.99 including delivery...

Boeing's X-Wing 737 makes first flight

casaloco

IIRC...

IIRC, the wingtips stop lift "bleeding off" the end of the wing. Essentially some of the air that would go under/over the wing to generate lift goes sideways off the end of the wing instead. The odd wingtips reduce that. IIRC it wasn't some egghead in a design office who came up the the idea, it was some common Joe on the factory floor. There was a "how do they do that" on Discovery channel a while back about it.

Intel lobs out new Core m3/m5 Compute Sticks, shouts 'Fetch!'

casaloco

"so you charge them without having to disconnect keyboard or mouse"

"so you charge them without having to disconnect keyboard or mouse".

You don't "charge" it at all, it has no battery. It may be USB powered like the first version. (Intel planned to allow gen2 devices to power from the HDMI port if the HDMI port supports this, I don't know if this made it to production.) In terms of blocking HDMI ports, the first version can with a short HDMI extension cable.

Note: I tried the first gen one, but then a windows update bricked it. Re-installing windows 10 resulted in it working, then automatically updating itself, then becoming bricked again. There is a known flaw with the custom chipset drivers that intel don't know how to fix. Needless to say I returned it.

Assange inquisition closer after Sweden, Ecuador sign pact

casaloco

Charges?

Charges? Last time I checked he hadn't been CHARGED with anything, he is wanted to face QUESTIONING into POSSIBLE rape allegations. Allegations which, unless he outright signs a confession, will go precisely NOWHERE. The problem is he believed once his was back in Sweden he would suffer extraordinary rendition over to the states. Yes it would probably be illegal under Swedish law, but that wont matter, he'll just disappear and they'll make up some excuse. Once he's in US custody he'll be i no position to sue the Swedish government for breaking the law will he?

To sum it up, he offered to hand himself over to the Swedish authorities if they agreed to absolutely would not hand him over to the Americans. They agreed. He asked to it in writing. They said no, we can't do that, that would make it official... basically they little short of admitted that they planned to hand him straight over to the Americans.

Ofcom retreats from 4G spectrum auction after legal threat from Three, O2

casaloco

So basically

So basically ofcom put the sale off until after the merger is decided. The merger might be rejecte dif they control too much spectrum, but at the same time if they held of buying the spectrum to avoid upsetting the merger and the merger failed... they would be unfairly disadvantaged. More importantly for ofcom, if the spectrum sale went ahead and they chose not to bd to avoid affecting the merger, ofcom would get far less money for the spectrum.

US military readies drone submarine hunter

casaloco

Salvage?

Under the laws of the sea, isn't any unmanned vessel eligible for salvage? Couldn't someone just turn up, board the ship and make off with it... perfectly legally? You couldn't even cover it with guns to keep salvagers away as the right to defend yourself against pirates wont apply against salvagers?

Judge bins Apple Store end-of-shift shakedown lawsuit

casaloco

Wrong argument

They should have argued on the basis that they weren't being paid for that time. If the company want to search them while they are on the clock then that's fine, but the second their shift ends the company has no lawful right to require them to do anything... it's forced unpaid overtime, which is, IIRC illegal.

Russian subs prowling near submarine cables: report

casaloco

Russian subs prowling "near submarine cables" - or "Underwater" as it used to be know.

Hacker mag 2600 laughs off Getty Images inkspots copyright claim

casaloco

Defamation?

Just sue "Trunk Archive" for defamation/slander/etc.

Request $100m. Agree to take a lower figure in exchange for a cease and desist agreement. Then if they contact anyone else they'll be in contempt of court.... jail time.

If they refuse the deal they'll lose the case.... they can't say "we know it's defamatory but we reserve the right to do it again". Blaming their software isn't a defence.

Russian regulator bans PornHub for its ‘illegal pornography’

casaloco

Re: There is prob a gay video

He goes on about "the evils of homosexuality" because it wins him votes. I really doubt he actually cares.

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