Posts by codger

Microsoft menaced with GDPR mega-fines in Europe for 'large scale and covert' gathering of people's info via Office

Re: Zero Exhaust?

Permanently disconnect your PC from the internet. That would do it.

FAIL icon because teacher doesn't accept this answer.

Clunk, bang, rattle: Is that a ghost inside your machine?

Re: There is only one zero (easily provable by 1 line of set theory) ...

Control Data ones complement machines had two values for zero, positive zero which we all know and love, and negative zero.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ones%27_complement

Blast from the past: Boffins find the fastest exploding non-supernova star

"When it exploded in the 19th century" was: pedantry ...

With all respect, "When it exploded in the 19th century" is correct.

If you wanted to reformulate all such statements with a distance correction, you would need to know the exact distance to every object

I'm OK with "The light from the explosion left Eta Carinae 7,500 years ago when humans only had black and white television" in popular articles but as far as scientists are concerned, time of events witnessed on our earth is only to be measured with clocks and calendars here on earth.

Have a great day (as measured by an earthly clock, of course)

Neil Young slams Google, after you log in to read his rant with Google or Facebook

Re: Anti-GMO "GMOs ...The fact is we need them to feed the world "

It may possibly, barely be true that we need GMOs to feed the world and to drench formerly rich and diverse biomes with Glyphosate and consequently shovel billions to Monsanto forever for the privilege .

Can ANYBODY quote a genuine non-paid-for-by-Monsanto scientific study by disinterested agricultural experts that supports this much-repeated propaganda assertion? Or have they all been silenced?

ESA trying to 'bake, rattle and roll' gravity wave space probe

million kilometers or 2.5km ?

2.5km = 1 million km for very large values of 2.5

The life and times of Surface, Microsoft's odds-defying fondleslab

Re: "The default slurp everything to MS kills it."

Yep, you can avoid the Microsoft slurp by avoiding Microsoft products. That only leaves the Google slurp, the Facebook slurp, the Telco slurp, <insert your national security agency here> slurp, credit agencies, banks, utility providers, ...

Straight face icon because that's how North Koreans avoid being picked off the street and interrogated

Firefox Quantum: BIG browser project, huh? I share your concern

Secure way to browse the web - old idea, any takers?

Hi all,

If the problem to be solved is a secure way to browse the web regardless of what it runs on your computer, javascript / other, then how about

- on your real computer, burn a live image of your favourite Linux to a DVD

- insert into a hard-drive-less old box and boot it up.

-your isolated browser computer is connected to the internet but hopefully not to your private network

- browse to your heart's content

- when you turn off this dedicated device, any nasties evaporate into the bit bucket.

- this does not solve/avoid root-kits in your EFI firmware, I'll let someone else advise on how to prevent that

- one would avoid doing internet banking on this device.

Is that secure? Comments welcome, flames not so much

Have a great day

Chinese hackers switch tactics for spying on Russian jet makers

Re: You can't just go any copy high tech without a long-term investment

With all respect, no-one has a longer investment horizon than the Chinese.

Think of a typical large Western industrial corporation with a thousand engineers.

Think of the equivalent Chinese corporation, with TEN thousand engineers. Really big state-funded research-y type places comparable to IBM, Boeing, General Dynamics, Microsoft, General Electric , could have a hundred thousand engineers, all growing by leaps and bounds as we in the West retrench.

And Chinese engineers have high IQs, do not consider Crystal meth as a type of sweet, and probably have management that is allowed to manage smart people instead of <quote>"micromanaging every half-wit I can afford"</quote>, see Scott Adams Dilbert 2013-11-23

Being common is tragic, but the tragedy of the commons is still true

Re: Scooping up as many fish as you can now would massively depress the price of fish

By your logic, there is no such thing as overfishing, and the world is not looking at having no fish by 2035.

I hope your kids enjoy their plates of jellyfish.

Get ready: 'Critical' Adobe Reader patches coming on Tuesday 12 May

Security - whose?

We all agree to install "Security Updates" to get our products. That would be the security of the US, right? Sleep well.

Spotty Ceres baffles boffins with bright patches

Volcanic glass?

Could conditions on solar system's largest asteroid permit spewing of obsidian or volcanic glass?

Although why their temperature should vary on a presumably dead-for-billions-of-years ball of rock, I don't know

If this doesn't terrify you... Google's computers OUTWIT their humans

Too obvious ?

Shredders are SO boring that the ONLY photos (images if you are under 40) of them right across the internet are from shredder vendors. Google's BRAINIAC already has seen ALL the images of shredders that exist. Is it any surprise that it recognises them?

Beer, because I am about to reward myself with one regardless of whether I'm right