Posts by MJB7 481 posts • joined 27 Nov 2013
"People getting bombed on a daily basis don't buy new consumer electronics...."
This is true, but while Ukraine is a big country (40M approx), it's about a tenth the size of the EU or USA+UK, and while probably fewer Indians etc buy consumer electronics than Europeans, there are an awful lot of them.
So why is the war in Ukraine having an impact on global demand for consumer electronics?
_You_ hated the movie because it was so much worse than the original radio series or the books. On the other hand, I have a friend who thinks HHGTTG is brilliant _despite_ only ever have seen the movie.
DNA had so much of genius, that even when you filter out 90% of it, the result is still brilliant!
What sort of shield would you suggest to protect against material moving faster than the stuff coming out of a shaped explosive charge (as used for making holes in tanks)?
The mitigation is to make sure (as best as possible) that the result is a mirror with a small hole, rather than a mirror with a bent surface.
Asking "what is <whatever>" absolutely _is_ ignorance. (The asker was ignorant of a fact.) However there's no shame in not knowing everything provided you ask for clarification, _and then remember it_.
(Forgetting something which you asked about a long time ago and haven't used since is OK too.)
Where do you get the idea that journalist has descended into SJW conspiracy theories? They report that some people object to Codes of Conduct on the basis that they are designed by SJWs. (I haven't checked the authenticity of the quote, but it seems entirely plausible.)
Full disclosure: I would be delighted if someone called me a social justice warrior.
Feast your eyes on https://www.benz-holz.de/ then.
I haven't used them for a couple of years, but they are an entirely legitimate business. They are one of my potential suppliers for firewood and wood-pellets.
(I suspect somebody's child threw the website together for them 20 years ago, and it hasn't been changed since.)
Firstly, I am _amazed_ you managed to find a Dutch person who didn't speak excellent English - usually they are only to be found in pre-school.
Secondly, a Dutch restaurant needs an English menu to give to the German, French, Danish, Spanish, Italian, Polish, etc speakers who come in and can't read Dutch.
I agree that London is definitely in the South of England rather than the East - but not because the 0 meridian goes through London. The zero meridian is irrelevant. England is more to the west of the 0 meridian than to the east; Scotland _entirely_ so. It still makes sense to talk about eastern Scotland and the East Riding of Yorkshire (again, almost entirely in the western hemisphere)
No. EC crypto is faster, both to sign and to verify, and _much_ faster than RSA for key generation (which matters if eg you generate an ephemeral key for each connection)
There is _no_ evidence that the NSA has found how to break EC in general. The dual-EC RBG back door was a very specific hack - and not applicable to EC in general. It's the difference between knowing the factors of a single large number (easy - because you generated it yourself from a couple of smaller primes), and being able to factor large numbers in general (hard).
Of course, I accept that if the NSA _had_ found how to break EC in general, they would do their damndest to keep that fact a secret - so absence of evidence is not proof of absence.
"I say partial for the bank, can as it wants you to authorise using their app. But after about thirty seconds it will offer to send a code via SMS instead."
You do know criminals have actively exploited banking login via SMS right? As in, this is not a theoretical exploit, real money has been removed from real bank accounts. You are _probably_ OK because there are now few enough people using SMS that it isn't worth the scammers while to pursue it - but suggesting SMS is more secure than a TOTP app is a joke.
It's complicated, but it's really not unethical (at least in my view). It becomes sensible when the cost is predominantly in the development, not the manufacturing. Say there are two features A and B. There are X people who will pay x for both features, and an additional Y people who will pay y (y < x) for just feature A, but who won't pay x. It is quite often the case that Xx > (X+Y)y. If you _don't_ give the Y people feature B, but disable it somehow, you end up with just charging the higher price for the full featured option and the Y people get nothing.
Of course, it is _always_ the case the Xx + Yy >= (X+Y)y, (and equality only if X=0) so this is also a way for greedy manufacturers to extract every last penny - but people _do_ get the benefit of what they pay for.
The launcher is not the problem. Elon would _love_ the publicity of a Falcon Heavy launch to Mars, and I'm pretty sure he could make logistics problems for a 2024 launch "go away".
The problem is the lander and descent stage. Remember that Mars has a 50% success rate at passively repelling invaders.
Icon: Lots of fuel required (and oxidizer)
Negative comments about Cloudfare and El Reg are fine. Accusations of criminal activity by Cloudfare are likely to get taken down before El Reg gets a letter from m'learned friends. (They may be prepared to defend a libel action, but it'll be for an above-the-line story where the editor has had a chance to look at the evidence _before_ publishing.)
Exactly as Pascal says: they can't withdraw their money from Toshiba, they can only sell their shares. If they do that all at once, the share price will fall. That will mean:
However, from the point of view of the activist shareholders, the most important effect, and the reason it won't happen, is that they will lose a lot of money. Remember these investors don't care about truth, transparency, or justice - they just want to make money. (Tosh has a market cap of about $16B. 17% of that is ~ $3B, even a 1% fall in the share price is $30M !).
Footnote: Ye gods and little fishes but formatting a post with HTML is painful. When is El Reg going to get with the program and use markdown?
"but that's not a long term solution." Yes it is. We know how to halve the effective key length of a symmetric key with a quantum computer - but that still leaves AES-256 (halved to 128 bit security) taking universe life-times to crack with an arbitrarily large computer.
"haven't heard of anyone producing even a theoretical model for the properties such an algorithm would have."
Then I don't think you have been paying attention. The NIST post-quantum algorithm competition reached the final stage last year, and has four key agreement algorithms and three signature algorithms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIST_Post-Quantum_Cryptography_Standardization#Finalists
The concern of course is that quantum algorithms is a _fairly_ new field, and somebody might come up with an approach that completely breaks one of them. On the other hand, somebody might come up with an algorithm to factor large numbers quickly tomorrow (which completely breaks RSA).
You quotation does not back up your assertion that what the OP described is illegal in your jurisdiction.
"BRAKE CHECKING is an illegal action. It is when a driver ahead of you deliberately and unnecessarily brakes *hard*" (my emphasis).
The OP referred to a very light tap on the brakes - enough to flash the brake lights, not enough to slow the care. That cannot be described as "braking hard".
They didn't have a choice. Raspbian never belonged to the RasPi foundation, and they wanted to tweak it (a lot). The original distro owner wasn't happy with them distributing something that _wasn't_ Raspbian _as_ Raspbian - so they changed the name.
(I will leave it to IP lawyers to decide whether they _legally_ had a choice. Even if it would have been legal to keep the name, it would have been a dick move.)
Even better if they _reduced_ the default (and maximum) lifetime to 5 days. This would have several effects:
- Firstly, they wouldn't have to do anything in order to meet their five day deadline (because all the affected certificates would expire anyway.
- Secondly, even lazy verifiers that don't bother checking the CRL/OCSP will pick up the cancellation.
- Thirdly, _everybody_ would have to automate their certificate renewals (like you should anyway, but the automation may not handle an out-of-cycle renewal).
The only downsides I can see are:
- Let's Encrypt would need a _lot_ more servers. (Renewing every ?3? days instead of every ?80? is an almost 30-fold increase). (But they don't need to support CRL or OCSP.)
- If someone could take Let's Encrypt offline for a few days, it would wipe out a large chunk of the web.
I think the test is actually `if number in {999, 911, 112, etc}`. In other words, if a Brit goes to Europe and dials 999, they will still get connected to emergency services. (And visa versa). This strikes me as a VERY GOOD THING; people dialling emergency services are extremely likely to be panicing.
THANK you! My German has mostly been learnt at evening classes and in polite conversation with my neighbours, so my knowledge of profanity etc is a bit limited, and I was trying to work out what was wrong with "vixen", neither Leo nor Google were being any help - and I checked that they knew rude words but I was completely failing to pronounce "vixen" in my head as a German would.
There are some people (I've lived with one for >30 years) who are completely unable to understand anything in the phonetic alphabet. I think the problem is that the part of the brain which processes _words_ doesn't connect with the part that processes _letters_ (or at least not to send info _to_ "letters"). So if you ask them to type "Quebec Echo Delta" they can't untangle those words to get at the initial letter.
If you haven't met this before, it is _very_ confusing. "Q for Quebec, E for Echo, D for Delta" is better - but even then the flip-flop between letters and words is confusing for them.
Yup. ASCII was 7-bit. And for some reason Prime engineers decided to fill the extra bit in an 8-bit byte with '1' - so text was always negative if treated as an integer. (I think this was to make bugs more obvious. Negative numbers tend to fail faster.)
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