Posts by DropBear

SpaceX wows world with a ho-hum launch of a reused rocket, landing it on a tiny boring barge

Re: The first reusable?

"The bit that returned to Earth was a small part of the total."

Not to put too fine a point on it (I'm not trying to say the Shuttle was the best thing ever), but you _are_ aware the SRBs were reusable as well, right?

Robo-AI jobs doomsday may, er... not actually happen, say boffins

Re: The tail is wagging the dog

Well yes but that would assume that the machine's owners would have to voluntarily give back at least a teeny-weeny bit of the value the machine generates to the fresh leisure-time millionaire it just replaced (assuming everything didn't just suddenly become free). For example, by paying enough taxes to cover all that stuff taxes tend to cover right now plus a decent wage for every non-working non-robot-owner, just to stay at home. Hell, frost, pigs, wings, etc...

Re: I, for one,

Before going to give them a hug I reckon it would be prudent to listen in just to make sure they aren't muttering "exterminate"...

Re: Where's Fred Pohl when you need him?

I'd wager there are also a LOT fewer people who can repair a broken TV set than say, fifty years ago. The only problem is, there does not seem to be any need for them these days. Maintenance is a redundant concept when reasonable MTBF is coupled with dumping-level availability & price of replacements. Not that I particularly approve of that philosophy, but it is what we already have even today.

"...the chip, chip, chip effect of minor changes becoming one big change."

Absolutely, and that's why this is where I draw the line and make my stand. It's "per se".

BDSM sex rocks Drupal world: Top dev banished for sci-fi hanky-panky

Re: I am surprised...

People tend to fail to realize how often nominative determinism is actually a thing...

Europe to push new laws to access encrypted apps data

Re: No 6...

You really don't get it, do you. Whenever there's a problem that the Powers That Be _really_ want solved that has no good solution, only a choice between no solution and bad solution, the bad solution will end up getting applied, regardless of how bad it is, no exceptions. The denial permeating the place around here is astonishing - this is textbook xkcd "rubberhose cryptanalysis", only instead of a $5 wrench they'll throw the book at anyone who dares using strong encryption on anything, if that's what they want. "Maths" will not help you while you sit behind bars. Yes, I'm aware that is not what this article (or this "law") is about. It's only the next logical step once the this proves as ineffective as expected in preventing bad people from hurting other people.

Miss Misery on hacking Mr Robot and the Missing Sense of Fun

Re: Very meta

...or, if you're a Cool Kid, a "let's play" on Youtube...

Re: prefer Halt and Catch Fire

I'm surprised to see so many likes - I practically had to force myself through all of HaCF after season one, and I didn't even like that one all that much either. To me it seems to be a character drama* that uses (an alternative version of) the modern history of computing merely as a disposable backdrop, with the added "twist" that the protagonists apparently invented pretty much all of it by themselves, before everyone else (then managed to screw each other out of the proceeds. Again.). I'm not sure what I expected, but this seems to be a show about clashing egos, not tech tomfoolery. We're simply watching JR, Sue Ellen and Bobby all over again, except (ZOMG!) s/oil/IT. And as fun as 'Dallas' was in my teens, I certainly wouldn't bother watching it today.

* which can still work admirably by the way, if it's used to mercilessly parody stereotypes fond to us IT folks - as demonstrated in "The IT Crowd" or more recently in "Silicon Valley". HaCF on the other hand takes itself horribly seriously with next to no actual tech content (but lots of buzzwords), successfully destroying (for me) all the fun in the process. That said, if you like it, by all means, absolutely, do carry on...

Ex-military and security firms oppose Home Sec in WhatsApp crypto row

Re: How to end the encryption argument

@ MNGrrrl: well, yes, but the thing is all that data sits there just asking to be collected; the global dragnet is possible. Considering that, do you realize what have you asked of them...?

To exercise restraint. Voluntarily.

Yup, we're doomed...

Why do GUIs jump around like a demented terrier while starting up? Am I on my own?

Proper discombobulation of occasional passers-by necessitates a desktop trackball - bonus points if it's one of the industrial sized ones that you can play Centipede with (extra-double bonus points if it's actually embedded flush into you desk, industrial-style)...

Re: Ah GEM - takes me back...

"I hate computers really."

Well, yes, there's this common misconception that computers don't do what we want them to do, they do what we tell them to do - it's so wrong it's not even funny. What actually happens is computers purposefully pick and execute the specific part of everything we told them to do that lets them gleefully refuse to do what we want them to do...

Re: You hit it Dabbsy

"Am I right or what?"

Don't make me hand in my Grumpy Old Git Card. I'm quite fond of it, but...

Re: Bad GUIs

I have the same problem ever since I use Mate, having been accustomed to Windows. A good deal of "yes/no" and equivalent choices are simply the other way around and I end up second-guessing every click like a neurotic squirrel high on caffeine...

Then again, I SWEAR the little "close tab" buttons on each Firefox tab jump right under my cursor with surgical precision each time I'm simply trying to switch to that tab...

How Ford has slammed the door on Silicon Valley's autonomous vehicles drive

Re: "secure ... air-gapped"

And where exactly do you propose plugging in your "alternative malicious payload" into my car considering not only does it have neither wireless connectivity nor a USB socket, it doesn't even understand OBDII? Unless you're proposing re-chipping the ECU (if you have any idea where it is, of course) what you're going to need to mount an "attack" is a baseball bat...

Re: ... start your vehicle and warm it up from inside the house on a cold day... @Whitter

"You omitted the 'for more than a couple of minutes' - in which you can scrape and brush the windows and the engine has already warmed up a bit."

No, he didn't. That's quite literally exactly what a friend of mine complained of almost getting fined for in Germany this last winter. No idea what the "officially approved" procedure is for scraping your windows, but apparently you're strictly forbidden from doing it with your engine running...

Pure Silicon Valley: Medium asks $5 a month for absolutely nothing

Re: patreon.com/medium

There are huge differences - for instance, while admittedly there always are some Patron-exclusive rewards involved, intended to ratchet up the contributed sum, Patreon-funded ventures still tend to produce content that ends up free for everybody else as well. For me personally this is crucial - I would _never_ contribute a penny to anyone over there if it would _only_ pay for what I get in return, the way a subscription tends to do.

I do understand that it takes money to create things, but I believe the price should be paid (sufficiently and no further) by those that care enough and can afford to contribute, according to what each feels they can spare - everybody else should be able to get to $CreatedThing for absolutely free. And yes, Patreon proved this won't mean "nobody will pay then" time and again already - support from those who do care simply isn't conditioned by whether others donate or not; that's a myth no matter how fond certain vowel-initialed "freetard"-hating people are of that idea. And if you can't make enough people care, if you need to tax every last one of your visitors - well, then maybe you don't really need to exist at all!

Ubuntu 17.04 inches closer to production

Re: Try the next Debian

I AM using Debian at work, and it's definitely a thousand papercuts type affair for me - I can only hope Mint at home (when I _finally_ get around to it) will be delivering me from that...

'Clearance sale' shows Apple's iPad is over. It's done

"Why does every product manager, marketroid and sales person think their product sales are crowing exponentially? They're not."

Apparently getting your brain surgically removed is a requirement before you're allowed to make ANY financial predictions. My pet peeve is the utterly retarded thing Kicktraq does (for those who might not know, it's a companion-site for tracking progress of Kickstarter campaigns, since KS doesn't provide a user-visible funding graph): their only "prediction" is a simple line passing through zero and the latest data-point, which is utterly meaningless considering most KS campaigns follow a characteristic curve of steep rise at the start, flat plateau in the middle, another steep rise in the last 48 hours - the slope of NONE of those being anywhere close to the actual final slope. Sure, it eventually converges on the actual result, but only when the campaign actually ends, showing meaninglessly hyper-inflated predictions all the way up to that point (also failing to account to the final surge). No number coming out of KT has ever had any prediction power, yet for some reason the bloke in charge is convinced everything is just perfect as is, instead of trying to fit early data to a known curve shape to see if it might actually predict anything. Idiots, the lot of them...

Re: Edd China

Any hope for a "Grand Tour" encore...? A show of his own somewhere else...? Please say yes... Decade-long good shows keep ending (Mythbusters etc.) and I see nothing picking up the baton - are these the final days of TV or something?!?

NASA to fire 1Gbps laser 'Wi-Fi' ... into spaaaaace

Re: "requires the optical modules to be perfectly aligned"

The neat thing about optics is that we're pretty good at shaping the beam width to an almost arbitrary size at the destination. Not to say that kilometer-wide beams are a bright idea, but you don't exactly need to hit a coin with another coin...

Re: Latency...

One second...? Who said anything about going halfway to the Moon...?!?

TRAPPIST-1's planets are quiet. Quiet as the grave, in fact

Re: After '000s of years of research-

It's their own damn fault. Nobody forced them to put on _red_ shirts that day...

It's happening! It's happening! W3C erects DRM as web standard

Re: chris121254 - "improve online privacy"

...*sigh* Fine. For cave dwellers, on coffee DRM...

King Battistelli's swish penthouse office the Euro Patent Office doesn't want you to see

I'm all for tarring this guy at the first opportunity (and how the expense gets justified is certainly a legitimate question), but in this case I don't really see any Olympic pool sized jacuzzis with golden faucets - sure a bit flashy but nothing that would be out of place in any top level management bod's office. Okay, sure, this is a public institution but it's not like anybody has ever seen any high ranking "public servant" sitting on a wooden bench (or an IKEA chair for that matter) at work...

$1m Popslate e-ink screen venture tanks, Indiegogo backers flame out

Re: No Working Prototype

Not in mine. Their "requirement" for a "working prototype" is exactly that - they "require" it, and give precisely zero fucks whether anyone was even listening when they did that. Which is why you can get at least three different perpetuum mobile campaigns going at any given time on KS without any difficulty at all.

Wanted: Bot mechanic. New nerds, apply within

Re: Plug and play

I tend to agree. I don't think anyone will bother with "administering" a failed robot past "pull out old SSD, slide in new one, press power button remove padlock from lock-out tag, let corporate CMS stream in current settings".

"That means medical science to crack the ills of old age...

Rightio. I'll set my cryo-chamber to not less than 500-800 years then.

...and ways to enable old people to be independent and productive."

All I'm seeing so far is expensive governmental projects to better monitor senile aunt Jemima falling over (again) in her nursing home. Oh, f### that - make it 2000 years flat...

Nest cameras can be easily blacked out by Bluetooth burglars

Re: Re Adam JC: In other news

So tell me - how many Nest cameras do you reckon are on cellular failover and backed by an UPS...? My quick, off-the-cuff estimate: Not A Single One.

Murder in space: NASA orders astronauts to KILL cripples – then fire bodies back to Earth

Oh, the humanatee...

Why is the Sinclair ZX Spectrum Vega+ project so delayed?

Re: 0/0

"It doesn't help that some some crowd-funded projects and media reports on those give exactly that impression."

As represented by every single crowd-funded project and every single crowd-funding site (as soon as you're out of their obligatory disclaimer section) ever. NOT A SINGLE ONE OF EITHER ever admits to the fact that you're basically leaving money in a brown bag on a bench in a public park hoping for some inexplicable reason to find $Reward in another bag when you come back $Time later, the amount of which has usually just been pulled out of the ass of someone with zero previous experience in any sort of product design or fulfilment. In fact the incredibly complicated rosters of what exactly you become entitled to receive for how much money and in what possible combinations are sending the exact opposite message. It's a store except for the aisles and shelves. Blaming the backers solely, for taking it at face value, is extremely disingenuous.

Even campaigns / sites that mumble something about "not an actual preorder" "campaign might fail" and so on do absolutely everything to nevertheless represent the affair as a somewhat uncertain but otherwise straightforward "give us X money to receive Y merchandise in return" deal. Quite unsurprising to be honest, considering that crowd-funding would be dead and a thing of the past within 24 hours if everyone started saying the truthful "please make a donation to us, we might send you something back in the astonishingly unlikely event of not having squandered (or straight-up embezzled) all your money on irrelevant things in the near future". Nobody ever says "gimme as much as you can so if whatever I think about making ever actually becomes a reality, it arguably possibly maybe does so sooner than otherwise".

So as far as expectations, yeah, you _should_ have your eyes open. But as far as the actual promises go, hell no, it's NOT free money with zero strings attached in any sense according to the deal being peddled, even if in practice, legally, that's exactly what it ends up being. And that won't change until the very first paragraph on the page of every single project on every crowd-funding website does not read:

"what follows below is the declaration of an intent by the project owner to reward you with something in exchange for your voluntarily offered financial support. There are not and there cannot be any guarantees that the intent is practical, feasible, or even genuinely honest - quite often it will fail to be one or more of the above - and there will be no consequences whatsoever for the project owner if they never even talk to any of you again after you pay them. Proceed knowing that you're paying someone you don't know for something they don't have."

User jams up PC. Literally. No, we don't know which flavour

Re: jam

Definitely not devious enough. Should have told the user their password was Anything1" and set the password to "Anbything1"...

Barrister fined after idiot husband slings unencrypted client data onto the internet

Re: Why store them on a shared computer in the first place?

"It may not have even been shared. Maybe hubby was asked to do the IT maintenance and organise backups etc."

And asking a rather incompetent bloke to do maintenance on her laptop would have been no big deal for a wife - as a barrister though she's kinda expected to seek properly competent maintenance if needed. And I'm not even going to ask whether she ever considered what happens if said laptop ever gets lost / stolen.

Spammy Google Home spouts audio ads without warning – now throw yours in the trash

Re: Yay for hardware attached to cloud services

"Oh, and I'd like a unicorn too please, and a perpetual-motion machine."

For the right price, I'm sure we can do that.

...oh wait, you wanted a living unicorn and a working perpetual-motion* machine**?!?

* Well, technically, you're sitting on a giant one right now***

** You never said anything about wanting to actually extract useful work out of it...

*** Relevant commercial regulations allow us to advertise anything spanning over ten times the expected lifespan of the customer as "perpetual"

Re: Easily fixed

Seriously... at the end of the day, you want to find a bunch of hardware sitting in a circle, chanting "OBEY AND CONSUME" in unison...?

Re: A company

"Think about this. You bought the device, you pay for the internet connection and they want to spam you with ads?"

Funnily enough, replace"Google Assistant" with "my PC" and suddenly everything is perfectly normal. Interesting..

To be sure, "new ways to surface unique content" is THE absolute most despicable marketroid euphemism I've ever heard for "pwn your brain". No idea why they think it sounds better than the previous attempt...

Van Allen surprise: fewer nasty particles than NASA expected

Re: Re. Van Allen

Nonsense, no need for a shield at all - just a tiny robotic baseball bat that can swing any nasty high-energy particles straight around...

Canada's privacy watchdog probes US border phone seizures

1) Get one with wireless charging support

2) Epoxy the data connector

3) Watch fireworks (I doubt they'll have something that attaches straight to the NAND handy)

Re: agencies will claim that their storage mechanisms are very secure

Then again, the corollary of that is that any secret can be kept indefinitely as long as you torch the evidence (and possibly some of the key people) involved. Caprica (sorry, caffeine level failure) Capricorn One was a documentary you know...

Hailing frequencies open! WikiLeaks pings Microsoft after promise to share CIA tools

Re: Victims?

"I would assume that potentially means unparalleled ease of timely patch delivery..."

I don't normally reply to myself, but this is ludicrously perfect timing, so there - apparently #ICanSeeTheFuture:

"Nokia has revealed that it will be pushing out monthly security updates to all its smartphones."

Re: Victims?

"If you cared about Android device security and OS upgradability, apart from Google what makers are on the ball here? Not many I'll bet."

Why, how many do you need...? There's Nokia right there - it may not be the exact same friendly Finnish corp you got used to, but at least they did promise to ship their phones with untouched Android; I would assume that potentially means unparalleled ease of timely patch delivery...

Today's WWW is built on pillars of sand: Buggy, exploitable JavaScript libs are everywhere

Go file a complaint with Turing. If any task can be handled by a computer, and if even flawless and immutable code, set in stone, can be used for Purposes Remarkably Different Than Originally Intended (look up 'return oriented programming' some day) then... <$logical_conclusion>

What if this is the Heisenberg principle of coding - you can have complexity or you can have maintainability, but only at the other's expense? Wanna go back to HTML 1.0 and plaintext? Yeah, okay, you first...

Re: choices

In my experience, the exact same <whatever it is I'm shopping for> is never sold on more than a handful of sites that I'm actually able to buy from, and absolutely every single one of them does precisely nothing on any click without JS running. There is no such thing as a "href" link on a commercial site any more. It's not even a matter of conscious effort any more - JS, or you don't shop, end of. And no matter how cantankerous of a curmudgeon I may be, I'm just not prepared to relocate into a cave just to stick it to JS.

Time crystals really do exist, say physicists^*

You're welcome (and not wrong) to call me stupid all you want, but how exactly does that bit work about spinning things radiating energy? How soon are we expecting to need to push-start Earth...? What exactly are we radiating, protons? Photons? Happy Thoughts?

Microsoft nicks one more Apple idea: An ad-supported OS

There are people who equate power over other people with a carte blanche licence to do to them whatever they see fit. They live simpler lives than most, unencumbered by any kind of moral concerns. The rest of us all, we're just Non-Player Characters in the great game they are the heroic protagonist of. If they could, they'd probably be deeply offended that we don't just stop existing and de-spawn when their game ends. I don't think they ever realize the real name of each of them is Ozymandias...

Can you ethically suggest a woman pursue a career in tech?

Re: The portrayal of nerds in the media....

"The women explain to me that they want someone who can "provide" as much as possible"

Yes. And there's my biggest peeve with the whole "mortally offended by me allegedly expecting a woman to be 'tied to the kitchen'" feminist bullshit. In short, I don't. No, really. Raising children, looking after the home, whatever - I absolutely don't expect any of that to be "her job" in any sense. But then time and again real life steps in, slaps you in the face and confirms again and again that quite a few who expect man and woman to share workload equally also kinda expect the man to "provide" - perhaps not exclusively, but definitely in an overwhelming proportion (experience NOT based on internet "wisdom" but plain old Mark I. eyeball and years of life). So quaint...

Re: Is the "tech" sector only?

Dear Sir or Madam, Fuck You for insinuating porn in any way shape or form is a Bad Thing.

Family of technician slain by factory robot sues everyone involved

" The real question is why this safety measure was not applied before the machine was entered."

I think you already answered that - it's always the same thing... peer pressure. In your case, the expectation of not stopping the restarted line again just to retrieve a tool. In the article's case, who knows... what I do know though is that proper procedures are never convenient to properly follow, and the expectation is always, always there for you to just get something done (that proper procedure might make impossible or much delayed) regardless. It's always very hard to point blank refuse such expectations based on nothing but safety concerns - even though one always should. It's not hard to imagine a young, inexperienced technician may have had a much harder time resisting that pressure.