Posts by Nigel The Pigeon

NASA plans electrolysis-powered ROBOT EEL for Europa's oceans

Ice

I would think it would have to be more like a Mole, or bunker-busting nuke, than an eel, to get through the 10 kilometres of Ice that is above the ocean!

SECRET PROTOTYPE iPAD 'stolen from RANDY Apple employee'

Re: Legalise Prostitution

"Buying sex involves paying someone to pretend to like you."

No it doesnt. It involves paying someone having sex with you. Many people would pay extra for someone to pretend *not* to like you.

"Its safer not use prostitutes."

At the moment, Yes... because it is illegal and unregulated...

Legalise Prostitution

Then it will be less of a taboo and everyone involved can be a little bit safer on both sides.

RADIOACTIVE WWII aircraft carrier FOUND OFF CALIFORNIA

Re: No shit. We've known this for over half a century.

@phile dude

In that article it mentions -

"....Last month, Cox and Jong-Il Kim, also of Wisconsin, compared the functions of the RecA protein...."

Clearly there is more going on here, when the former North Korean head of state has been resurrected to research the minutiae of radiation-resistant micro biology.

Tinfoil hats on stand by.

Let’s pull Augmented Reality and climax with JISM

“is there an engineer in the house?”

If the bar to being an engineer is the successful operation of a projector, then that means that half of the sales and HR team here are in-fact bone-fide, highly qualified, engineers. Whereas most of the people with Engineering degrees are here on false pretences.

Be right back.. Gone to get security!

Gwyneth Paltrow flubs $29 food stamp dare, swallows pride instead

That is an amazing article. Very interesting.

NASA to put the stars in your hands with coming-soon-now API portal

Another Eath

Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaase NASA can we get some new Earth and Night-time Earth images! The same popular ones are used in *every* frickin' demo and tool and 3d spinning map thing!

Grandmaster FLUSH: Chess champ booted for allegedly cheating with iPod app in the loo

So he went to the toilet..

to bash his opponents Bishop?

Lenovo: We SWEAR we're done with bloatware, adware and scumware

Re: Ingredients

haha. I hope it would be at least 90% zeros when you first purchase it!

Ingredients

There ought to be laws, similar to what you see on food packaging, that list the ingredients of your laptop / device. I for one don't eat anything with Aspartame in it, and would love to be able to make the same choice about my laptops.

I have no idea what variety of spyware came bundled onto my cheap touchscreen Acer (bought in US), but I have had to abandon it because it was clearly riddled with something that is underlining words in html pages and putting ads in. I need to find a shop somewhere that can do a clean install - with linux this time and not windows surface!

Hellooo, NSA? The US State Department can't kick hackers out of its networks – report

$500 Billion!?...

Thats enough for... 1.5 TRILLION chicken nuggets! (if you buy the 20 piece boxes and don't get a Coke).

Now, I suggest we get the FBI to look into this mess, which we could bribe at a rate of say 117,000 nuggets per employee, per day? OK, true, nearly all of them would die pretty soon... eating at a steady rate of 4875 nuggets per hour, this would kill the average employee in 90 seconds from salt poisoning (that is if they could keep scoffing the 1.3 nuggets per second required to do so)... but.. but... Such a waste...

$500 Bn/annum = ~ 1.3440 chicken nuggets per FBI employee per second.

Obama turns back on spooks: 'I'm on the side of strong encryption'

Re: UK

"The only time he comes off as knowledgable, is when he has a script to read from. Cameron or Milliband could buy similar consultants."

I disagree. There is an aspect of that involved for sure. But I can easily find examples of Obama (and many other democrats/republicans too btw) talking about technology unscripted which show they have a decent understanding of it. Whereas I doubt I could find a single example (even scripted ones) where Cameron or Miliband have a clue what they are talking about when it comes to tech.

The UK is a backward, cave-dwelling, retarded, stick and stone wielding nation where it's government are concerned.

Atlassian HipChat service popped

Re: @ Nigel The Pigeon (was: Popped)

Or, "I rooted my load"

Re: Popped

As in "I rooted her cherry"

Earth's soil moisture to be sniffed by DIRTY-MINDED satellite

Land Mines

How far off is something like this from being able to produce land mine maps??

I gather they are buried a bit deeper, but it seems like a viable way of scanning for them.

Dodgy thruster won't stop Philae hurtling toward comet showdown

Re: Approved standards

I'd like to know what the surface temperature is on the comet (... in Gas Marks) ?

Bona-fide science: Which forms of unusual sex are mainstream?

'Rare'

"...a sample of adults willing to describe their sexual fantasies"

Presumably the results are skewed by sample selection, and towards what people perceive as being a normal fantasy.

I would wager that if you asked the survey in a rectal Cricetine cadaver appreciation society, you would still get the same results -- ie that some fantasies are so 'rare' that most owners won't even describe them!

Kill off SSL 3.0 NOW: HTTPS savaged by vicious POODLE

easy to perform

Someone please correct me where I'm wrong, but from reading that paper it appears to be...

1. A hacker sits in a cafe with a laptop, and injects an IFRAME into some plaintext HTTP data flowing through the airwaves. The IFRAME contains Javascript.

2. The Javascript then requests something from a secure server, say with a HTTPS cookie.

3. The hacker intercepts the request / or server handshake response, causing the connection to drop.

4. After a few dropped connections, the browser, in an attempt to connect at any cost, starts downgrading the protocol it's using until it ends up on SSL3.0 - which is really old and buggy.

5. The Javascript repeatedly requests the same HTTPS data from the server. (Now using SSL3.0).

6. The hacker intercepts each of the browser's requests, and modifies one of the (already encrypted) bytes in a certain position (called the oracle block padding byte).

7. From the server's response (failed or success) the hacker is able to judge whether their modified byte was actually part of the plaintext request before it was encrypted.

8. Because the encrypted data is essentially random, only 1 out of every 256 attempts will get the correct byte, so for each character the hacker has to intercept up to 256 requests.

It sounds like a pain in the ass, but I can certainly see how a few bits of code will make short work of it.

SMASH the Bash bug! Apple and Red Hat scramble for patch batches

Re: Because the flaws were very different

What a great and informative comment. It is better than most of the articles about the bug.

Not sure why anyone would downvote it?

Intel says NO MORE BLOOD PENTIUMS by 2016

robots

How long until the miners can be replaced by robots?

(It would be a cool step toward robotic life - so they are mining the minerals that get put in their brains.)

NASA finds ancient films that extend Arctic ice record by 15 years

Conclusions

Amazing how some people have already made up their minds that the new data is worthless, or will not change their minds, before it has even properly been analysed.

'Enterprise' ends ten-year mission: Choc Factory's biz services now Google for Work

And maybe it would be a neat idea to differentiate the customers that are using all of the services, from those that are using only a smaller subset or 'micro' version of the suite, resulting in "Micro- Google Office 2015"

Virgin Media blocks 'wankers' from permissible passwords

Bollock, Bollocks

Sloppy javascript at it's finest.

If the list includes the word "bollock" and the regex match excludes all words containing the term, there is no need to include the word "bollocks", since it is excluded by default. Same for all variations of "f*ck", and "clit".

The list also appears to taken from an American script, because of the spelling of words such as "pedo".

Come on Virgin, get yourself some proper developers! - or, pass this on to your webdev agency.

Major cyber attack hits Norwegian oil industry

Re: On second thought...

The thought of having to use the in-flight seek bar on a 7 hour video to get back to where I left off, every time the PA kicks in or system gets rebooted...

!Forelsket

Who needs hackers? 'Password1' opens a third of all biz doors

Re: @J.G.Harston

"The fact that they can validate the individual characters means that they hold the password in a way which is not oneway hashed"

Not necessarily. They could store all combinations of 3 chars of your password pre-hashed.

Which on a 12 digit password is.... 12! / (3! (12 - 3)!) ....only 220 hashes!

Stephen Hawking biopic: Big on romance, not so much with the science?

Re: Mr Hawking – Over-rated - Big Bang Mythology

"He believes that this all came from a single explosion!"

Not did any scientist, ever, claim or believe that the Big Bang was an explosion. That is just what people who watch Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity believe.

<sarc>And as for Hawking radiation, yeah sure, any common or garden peasant could think of that, so whats all the hype about?</sarc>

Maybe we revere him because he is an internationally famous, lucasian professor of mathematics, and self-made multimillionaire author, who is also a paraplegic?

Robot snaps on yellow RUBBER GLOVES, preps to invade Canada

Advice for the robot

Bring a towel, and.. "Don't Panic"

World Meteorological Organization says climate data is uncool

Re: Pedantry misses the point

@Sailfish

Ok, so then lets say there's 10 kilotons of plastic floating in the ocean. Great. The figure used to be zero. What will the figure be in 50 years? Do you care? I do.

We are not winning when someone can prove that we have only f-cked something up 50% instead of 500% (or whatever). Stop treating it like a victory. That is not a win, and a reason to continue f-cking things up by refusing to acknowledge it!

(*) I presume you will now calculate the exact percentage figure, and entirely miss the point again.

Yay. Blinkers on. Let's get cancer!

Re: Pedantry misses the point

@BigJohn

Your attitude is all wrong, and you miss the point. Every. Single. Time.

So, lets assume that your strange conclusion of that article is correct, and 99% of all the plastic we know is being dumped in the ocean, has infact magically disappeared (not what the article says at all, but anyways..) ....

...that still leaves 1% of... millions of tons.

It is clear that you couldn't care less. Or, if you dispute that figure then why even link to the article at all?

Re: Pedantry misses the point

@codejunky

Yes, fair enough. That's actually a good response and a decent point.

Re: Pedantry misses the point

wow. thanks for the response. you certainly cleared up all those issues. <ultra sarcasm>

that article you linked to suggests that 99% of ocean plastic may be being eaten by fish. did you read it?.. or are you saying thats a good thing?..

Pedantry misses the point

Let's assume for the moment that all the climate change deniers are right. Ok, forget about climate issues. Next.

So, what about all the... heavy metals in the ocean? depletion of nutrients in the soil? drilling? fracking? destruction of rain forests and habitats? species? cancerous levels of smog in asia? poisonous rivers in india? huge plastic rubbish island floating in the ocean? etc, etc...

You are using your scepticism about climate change to completely ignore the myriads of other (completely obvious) data about how the world is being frcked up by people, And almost using that position to endorse all sorts of completely idiotic and destructive policies.

It's not just about the climate change.

No need to worry: US blows $174m on new Cray to simulate nukes

The machine's main job

"will be to conduct simulations of the US nuke stockpile, helping it to understand how its weapons are holding up as they age"

...helping it to understand when its weapons should be sold before they age.