* Posts by Roj Blake

1654 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Aug 2013

Jeremy Corbyn wins Labour leadership election

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Joke

Re: Senior labour figures

Yvette Cooper's Balls was already at home.

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Re: So this is what the party of No Platform has become...

"Or the treatment of residents of Diego Garcia."

Actually, Corbyn has been one of the few politicians speaking in favour of the Chagos Islanders right of return.

He wants the Americans off Diego Garcia.

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Re: Congratulations!

"The Labour party, particularly the left leaning versions, have done nothing but bring misery to the working man, through systematically and repeatedly fucking up the British economy. They've achieved that four times in my life time."

Yes, having a free NHS, a minimum wage, guaranteed holidays and the right not to be sacked arbitrarily have brought nothing but misery to millions of hard working people.

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Re: Proportional representation

Ed Miliband's fence-sitting also had a lot to do with the AV referendum defeat.

Don't want to upgrade to Windows 10? You'll download it WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT

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Re: oh nos!

And on top of everything else, Windows 10 isn't finished so its users are essentially guinea pigs.

SPACE WHISKY: Astro malt pongs of 'rubber and smoked fish'

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Re: Scientific newbies

"Isle of Islay malt from good old M&S smells and tastes like TCP.

"Its the single best whisky i have ever tasted... Sadly i dont seem to be able to get it anymore..."

Try the 16yo Lagavulin. Not only is it the finest whisky known to mankind, it reeks of TCP.

Turkey cites crypto software find in terror charges against TV crew

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Re: ban mathematics...

"As far as banning the lottery wasn't the Catholic church against gambling for the longest time because it showed the concept of randomness to the laypeople?"

In my experience people who gamble have the worst grasp of what randomness is.

C For Hell – Day Two: Outage misery continues for furious C4L customers

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Re: Reminds of Southampton General..

Why chase an ambulance when you know where it's going?

Visitors no longer welcomed to Scotland's 'Penis Island'

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Headmaster

"How refreshing for a counsellor to actually say there's a problem, and get it sorted quickly."

In all fairness, counsellors often do work hard. It's councillors who take ages to sort something out unless there's a vote or backhander in it for them.

C For Hell: Data centre meltdown for irate customers as C4L GOES TITSUP

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Re: More fool the idiots...

Outages not only happen at in-house facilities, but are typically more likely to happen there.

FBI probed SciFi author Ray Bradbury for plot to glum-down America

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Re: The historical irony of two major obssesions and the law of unintended consequences.

"they really are insane, they keep doing the same thing over and over and expect different results"

Or maybe they expect, and intend, the same results as before.

Without enemies, there is no need for them to exist.

Yet another Android app security bug: This time 'everything is affected'

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USENIX

Why do I always read this as UNISEX?

Budget UHD TVs arrive – but were the 4Kasts worth listening to?

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Polaroid

I'd advise going for the smaller of the Polaroid TV models, as having to shake the screen to get a picture on the larger ones might prove tiring.

Labour Party website DDoS'd by ruly democratic mob

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Re: Sky TV is in no way "formerly the BBC".

How can the BBC be considered left-wing when its main political pundit is a former national chair of the Young Conservatives and its main political presenter is a former Bullingdon boy?

AIDS? Ebola? Nah – ELECTRO SMOG is our 'biggest problem', says Noel Edmonds

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Brass Eye

For some, I can't help wondering if Edmonds has been given his comments by Chris Morris

Hawking, Musk, Woz (and others): Robots will kill us all

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"Hawking is smart.

Compared to him, the rest are just famous."

---------------

You may say that, but I've won as many Nobels as him.

NASA: 'Closest thing yet to ANOTHER EARTH' - FOUND

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Re: 1400 light years

Just to be clear, with today's propulsion (say 60,000 km/hour), that's 25 MILLION years away.

"Bored, bored, bored, tedious, ..."

------------------------

Sounds a bit like driving down the A303 to a holiday in the the West Country

PEAK PLUTO: Stunning mountain ridge snapped by New Horizons craft

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Re: Cryovulcanism

The whole planet should be renamed as Yuggoth.

Are you a Tory-voting IT contractor? Congrats! Osborne is hiking your taxes

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Re: Yes, they will emigrate

As Sideshow Bob might say...

Die computer, Die. It's German for the computer, the.

You care about TIN? Why the Open Compute Project is irrelevant

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Amazon, Microsoft and Google?

You do know that there are other IaaS/PaaS companies out there at least as good and at least as cheap as those three, right? And the ones that aren't US-based don't give your data to the NSA either.

Behold: Pluto's huge ICE MOUNTAINS ... and signs of cryovolcanoes?

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Alien

Yuggoth

Why is NASA not showing us the images of the Mi-Go cities?

Open Compute Project testing is a 'complete and total joke'

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Yeah, but the hardware's so awful that an OCP ED-209 can be hacked by a small child.

Dormant ALIEN SLIME LIFE frozen in SPEEDING comet will AWAKEN - boffins

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Re: The Blob

"I've had it with this m..."

Cloud provider goes TITSUP? Will someone think of the data!

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Every Solution has Problems

Yes, if you move some or all of your IT to a cloud you need to be aware of the potential pitfalls, and yes, your provider going bankrupt is one of those, but as the article suggests there are ways to mitigate the impact of this.

However, not moving to a cloud also has its pitfalls. People who don't perform the necessary checks have been losing data since about an hour after the first electronic computer was switched on. If you do things yourself then a variety of things go wrong: your server room could burn down; your servers could break down; your sysadmins could become disgruntled and screw you over.

'Backronym' crowdfunds itself into Oxford English Dictionary

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Re: For all those pedantic bastards out there....

Good grammar is the difference between knowing your shit and knowing you're shit.

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Twerk

Twerk (noun) -

Where a Yorkshireman goes every day to earn some money.

GCHQ: Security software? We'll soon see about THAT

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"Any idea why...."

Presumably because products created by those companies have built-in back doors.

FBI says in secret that secret spy Cessnas aren't secret

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Contempt

If you tell Congress that it's not secret and then refuse to answer further questions, aren't you guilty of contempt?

Use snooped data in court? Nah, says UK.gov - folk might be cleared

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Re: It used to be

But that's the point - the data isn't classed as evidence. It's likely that the prosecution don't even get to look at it and even if the defence had a look they couldn't use it in court.

Indie review of UK surveillance laws: As you were, GCHQ

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Re: Relatively good on Encryption

That's fine, as long as GCHQ aren't allowed to do any of the above without a judge-issued warrant.

A 16 Petaflop Cray: The key to fantastic summer barbecues

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Re: 2 million lines of FORTRAN code

"... doing Monte Carlo simulation. Oh my, I feel 25 years younger now."

I know the feeling. In 1993 the third year project for my degree involved using Fortran to run Monte Carlo simulations to work out how lead atoms behave.

Those were the days when I still knew how to do quantum stuff.

NSA slapdown prompts Privacy Int'l to file new lawsuit against GCHQ

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Re: Gordon 10 Talking thru their arses

You're far more likely to be killed by a drunk driver than you are by a terrorist.

Maybe there should be a road block on every road manned by a plod with a breathalyser?

You're far more likely to be killed by a spouse than you are by a terrorist.

Maybe the police should put cameras in every room of every house to stop domestic abuse?

You're far more likely to die in police custody than you are as a result of terrorism.

Maybe the security services should crack down on police brutality rather than read my emails?

SpaceX asks to test broadband in SPAAACE

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Aramiska

Let's hope that it works better than previous attempts at satellite broadband. Aramiska's latency was truly awful.

Mad John McAfee: 'Can you live in a society that is more paranoid than I'm supposed to be?'

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Coat

Re: Paranoid consumers and schizophrenic vendors

"We are all individual"

I'm not.

HP haters: Get ready to rage against THE MACHINE 'next year'

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Obligatory Person of Interest Comment

According to documentary I saw recently, the Machine has already been built by a reclusive billionaire with a limp.

Second-hand IT alliance forms to combat 'bully' vendors

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Re: 2nd hand market?

Nope, it's "refurbished"

And by "refurbished" they mean cleaned and tested (if you're lucky)

US Patriot Act's phone spying rules are dead – but that means very little

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Remember October 2013?

That's when the boss of MI5 claimed that the terrorists could hit the UK at will.

They subsequently didn't.

This scaremongering that not being able to collect metadata will imperil the US reminds me of that.

Windows 10 upgrade ADWARE forces its way on to Windows 7 and 8.1

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Re: I'm confused

"This bit of I-70 has signs saying 'Eagles on Road'. Now that would be something worth seeing."

It's good of them to let you know about another Eagles comeback tour.

Hardcore creationist finds 60-million-year-old fossils in backyard ... 'No, it hasn’t changed my mind about the Bible'

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Re: Why does God HIDE?

He does have several Twitter accounts though.

Airplane HACK PANIC! Hold on, it's surely a STORM in a TEACUP

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Re: Strange

Of course! After all, using a perpetual motion machine is against the law(s of thermodynamics).

Law changed to allow GCHQ hacking ... just as GCHQ hauled into court for hacking

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Re: If you can't win...

They're learning from the badgers

Look out, law abiding folk: UK’s Counter-Extremism Bill slithers into view

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Re: 800th Anniversary of the Maga Carta

"Does Magna Carta mean nothing to you? Did she die in vain? That brave Hungarian peasant girl who forced King John to sign the pledge at Runnymede and close the boozers at half past ten"

- A.A. Hancock

Election? Pah. Here's the REAL question: Who’s the SEXIEST MP?

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Re: Conservative Majority again.

---- But they're also Conservatives, so goodness knows what they might be into. :( ----

George Osborne's alleged pecadilloes are quite well documented.

Lies, damn lies and election polls: Why GE2015 pundits fluffed the numbers so badly

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Re: Shy Tory

"shy during the before polls, but apparently not the exit polls?"

Exit polls are conducted differently.

Normally you're asked who you're going to vote for.

But on election day the pollster gives you a ballot paper outside the station and you pop it into a ballot box, just like you've already done a minute or two before.

Therefore, exit polls have the advantage of anonymity.

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Re: a 48 year-old writes

It's more a case that traditionally the left-of-centre vote has been split between different parties.

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Re: "Shy Tories"

"As for PR that was unfortunately voted down in the referendum a few years back (The death knell of Lib Dems in my 20-20 hindsight opinion.)"

Except of course that PR wasn't an option on the referendum's ballot paper.

AV is not PR.

Theresa May: Right, THIS time we're getting the Snoopers' Charter in

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Re: If you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear.

---- As for our "friends in Syria" - you're much more likely to be killed in a motor vehicle accident. ----

You're also more like to die as a result of domestic violence or die in whilst in police custody than you are to die from terrorism.

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Re: Willfully-dim Godfrey

---- "....It's clear we all lost." Well, all except us Tory voters. Would you like some cheese to go with that last post? ----

Even the majority of you Tory voters will be losers, you just don't realise it yet.

iPhone case uses phone's OWN SIGNAL to charge it (forever, presumably)

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Re: Err...

As Homer Simpson once said, "Lisa, in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics"