Posts by Steeev

Three middle-aged Dutch hackers slipped into Donald Trump's Twitter account days before 2016 US election

And if you have any doubt

Use https://haveibeenpwned.com/

Borky shark: A deserted airport and a Raspberry Pi feeling poorly at baggage claim. Welcome to 2020

SD card gone bad probably. (I've mitigated this in the past by putting logs on a ramdisk.)

Latest Windows 10 build loves up cloud, banishes 'strange grey bar'

"which improves DockerFile syntax"

Microsoft up to its old tricks again: embrace, extend, extinguish!

Bitcoin fixes a Greek problem – but not the Greek debt problem

"This is the same model that was used in Ireland. Where Irish taxpayers were put on the hook for their banks, with the threat of Ireland being chucked out of the Euro if they didn't."

Unfortunately that was only part of the story in Ireland. Ireland's banking problems were compounded by a structural government deficit of about 20%, which had been masked by stamp duty receipts. When these vanished with the banks going bust, so did its government's room for manoeuvre.

It was closing this deficit over 5 years of "austerity" which has resulted in Ireland's enormous national debt (110% of GDP or €200B) not bailing out the banks, which looks like it will "only" have cost €20B when all's said and done.

Had the government run its affairs properly and used taxation to halt the property boom, it would have been able to tell the ECB to piss off and let the banks go bust as they should have. However it was too busy buying the electorate's votes with their own money, as usual.

PLUTO FLYBY: Here's your IT angle, all you stargazing pedants

Oblig Pedantry

"a newton, of course, being the unit of force needed to accelerate one kilogram of mass to a speed of one metre per second in one second"

Err, you mean _by_ one metre per second, per second. (Otherwise how did it make it to 16km/sec?)

US threatened Berlin with intel blackout over Snowden asylum: report

Re: Sir

Shockingly this could be construed as evidence of a classical education; I believe Robert Brown (of Brownian motion fame) first used the word nucleus in a modern sense, "...from the Latin nucula, meaning little nut or kernel." (A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson.)

NSA: Inside the FIVE-EYED VAMPIRE SQUID of the INTERNET

"The only European countries apparently not signed up to help break the internet are Luxembourg, Switzerland, Monaco, and Ireland. And Iceland."

Well I'd imagine Ireland has nothing to offer which the NSA can't already get from either the UK or a multinational. Otherwise we'd be eagerly bent over the desk with the rest of them.

NSA: It's TRUE, we grab 200 MILLION of your text messages A DAY globally

Six Billion?

"bear in mind US mobile users alone send an estimated six billion texts a day"

Eh? That's 20 texts per day for _everyone_ in the USA. Shurely shome mishtake!

Ten classic electronic calculators from the 1970s and 1980s

Re: FX 502-P

Ah the FX-502! And its cassette cradle. And the Kraftwerk track, supposedly composed on one. ("I am the operator of my pocket calculator")

In order, I learned programming on: the Sinclair Cambridge, TI-57 and finally the FX502-P before graduating to "real" computers. I remember being shocked at the 6502 processor in a SYM-1 not having multiply and divide instructions (not to mention trig) while the lowly TI-57 had.

O tempora, o mores!