Posts by allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

On her microphone's secret service: How spies, anyone can grab crypto keys from the air

Re: OT

If you get the jewel-encrusted badge, will you add a coat of black enamel for stealth?

GNU cryptocurrency aims at 'the mainstream economy not the black market'

I like the name.

'Massive great big' vulture goes AWOL in Somerset

Re: Optimism required

There is an old cartoon by 'Pont' which shows a tweedy ex-major type rushing through his drawing romm while enthusiastically readying his shotgun.

Caption: "There is a most unusual looking bird on the lawn!"

Latin-quoting Linus Torvalds plays God by not abusing mortals

Re: Iupiter salva reginam

Yeah, but they brexited around 440 AD.

Mark Zuckerberg's Twitter and Pinterest password was 'dadada'

Re: Must be...

What are you, under 40? Seriously...

Trio - Da Da Da

Trio - Da Da Da (english version)

Trio on Wickedpedia

Belgian brewery lays 3.2km beer pipeline

The 'Veltins Arena', home of FC Schalke '04, has about 5 km of beer pipelines from a central storage tank to the various outlets.

Any civil engineer who did the coursework on sanitary engineering will tell you that there is a special breed of dog for jobs like that, the sewer hound. Looks a bit like a cross between a dachshound and a bottle brush - long, slim body, short legs, very long and very bushy tail.

Storage greybeard: DevOps, plagiarism and horrible wrongness

Re: Holy crap!

OpsDev. It's the next big thing, I've been saying it for weeks now.

Or possibly OopsDev.

Recycled malware code 'links' SWIFT bank heist to Sony ransackers

Kim was officially declared the supreme leader, following the state funeral of his father on 28 December 2011. Kim holds the titles of Chairman of the Workers' Party of Korea, Chairman of the Central Military Commission, Chairman of the National Defence Commission, Supreme Commander of the Korean People's Army, and presidium member of the Politburo of the Workers' Party of Korea. Kim was promoted to the rank of Marshal of North Korea in the Korean People's Army on 18 July 2012, consolidating his position as the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces and is often referred to as Marshal Kim Jong-un or "the Marshal" by state media.

Take that, Mom! Turns out Super Mario Bros was all about solving complex math problems

Re: Guffawed, then fell silent

Heh, you should have seen my dad loading our car before setting of for the annual family holiday.

Aquaboffins sink lost Greek city theory

"The scientists' findings - Exhumed hydrocarbon-seep authigenic carbonates from Zakynthos Island (Greece): Concretions not archaeological remains - can be found in the journal Marine and Petroleum Geology."

Spoiler alert - paywall. The abstract is free, the rest will cost you $41,95.

Still, amazing.

Sources! say! Twitter's! after! you! Yahoo!

Re: Sounds good

Looks like someone misunderstood that "two-negatives-make-one-positive" thing.

Air-gapping SCADA systems won't help you, says man who knows

Make sure you use the right kind of air for airgapping.

Computerised stock management? Nah, let’s use walkie-talkies

Re: Stock Control

It's tricky. There is an office supplies/stationary retailer in Krautistan called McPaper (oh, how brilliant marketing guys can get). They expanded quite successfully in the mid 1990ies. In the late 1990ies they almost went bellyup because of their new stock control system. The idea was to use the data from the computerized checkout to keep a 'live' inventory and automatically re-order items from the depot when the number of any item in the shop dropped below a defined limit. Not a bad idea. But the way they implemented it, or rather the logistics bit of it, wasn't exactly brilliant. They literally ended up with dispatching a lorry to haul one 10 pack of sellotape to one store (but nothing else) and stuff like that.

Re: Floor standing foot measurers

You can see one of those x-ray machines in The Billion Dollar Brain. Michael Caine (Harry Palmer) uses it to check a dodgy thermos he is supposed to bring to Finland.

The Billion Dollar Brain is a gigantic computer centre full of late 1960ies state-of-the-art machines. Tape reels, punch cards, TTY terminals, blinkenlights - the lot!

Re: Feet like flippers?

"Clarkes have a few wide fitting shoes."

Try this for size.

Re: Feet like flippers?

Okay, now I have to ask:

Oh great and mighty Aleister Dabbs, are thy toes webbed as well?

But yeah, can't shop for shoes online if you want them to be a comfy fit. Wasn't there a startup or a kickstarter for a 3D feet scanning device to fix that a couple of years ago, or am I imagening things?

Universe's shock rapidly expanding waistline may squash Einstein flat

Did they (Team Riess*, WMAP, PlanckSat) all look in the same place? (Yes I know, they all looked at the ovservable universe, duh.) The point I'm trying to make is: the universe might not be expanding in a homogenous way. Some parts of it may be travelling at other speeds than other parts, so to speak. After all, the observable matter in the universe isn't distributed equally/homogenuous; it seems the Big Bang didn't create a perfect sphere of expanding spacetime and matter but something a bit irregular and, in search of a better word, bubbly.

^{* Adam Riess - I always read that as 'Adam Riese' first, and keep having flashbacks from my time in primary school. Is it just me?}

You've gotta fight... for your right... to IT

Re: let us go forth and plot global domination

Well, okay then.

What's the safe word?

Trevor, I'm roughly 68,3% with you. But please, tread lighly around the 'tomorrow the world' references, mkay?

'Irongate' attack looks like Stuxnet, quacks like Stuxnet ...

"Industrial control system malware are complex beasts in large part because exploitation requires knowledge of often weird, archaic, and proprietary systems."

True, based in no small part on the desire of the makes to keep their stuff proprietary and on the fact that quite often a new proprietary system is based on an old proprietary system. Which often has the effect that something that started as a crude workaround in V1.0 has mutated into an internal standard by V4.0 or whatever.

That being said, once you know something about one system it's relatively easy to spot the similarities in other systems by the same maker. Or systems that use components made by that maker.

Plus, there is a lot of documentation 'out there' that should have remained proprietary, but isn't. There are just too many people involved.

As to Siemens, there is a very old joke: "Muß es funktionieren, oder darf's auch was von Siemens sein?"

Uber, AirBNB: Lay off 'em, EC tells member states

Re: Same Regulation or "It's the economy stupid"

"... today's socialist-liberal utopia ..."

Would you please be so kind as to post directions to that place? I'd like to take a close look at it in order to formulate a personal evaluation.

King Tut's iron dagger of extraterrestrial origin

Lasers on crocodiles?

As if Australia wasn't dangerous enough already...

Re: First thought

Yes! Only I couldn't remember the name. Thanks, this has been bugging me for hours, on and off. Cheers!

Winston Churchill glowers from Blighty's plastic fiver

Life in plastic, it's fantastic...

BTW, how do the new notes handle being rolled up?

Oracle to sue cloud sales 'whistleblower' for 'malicious prosecution'

Yeah, right, shoot the messenger.

Plutonian 'lava lamp' seas give dwarf planet a regular face lift

Re: Fox News

See icon.

Also, with your permission, I guess I'll print that on a t-shirt.

Smartwatches: I hate to say ‘I told you so’. But I told you so.

Serious Dick Tracy cosplay aside - I just can't find a reason, any reason, to buy a smartwatch. And I buy a lot of gadgets.

Orbital ATK fires up revamped Antares rocket

This reminds me of the heady days of Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin when the world trembled at the sound of our rockets.

Kraftwerk versus a cheesy copycat: How did the copycat win?

Re: What the court did examine, though, ...

Frank, you've beat me to it. This one is for you --->

Planet 9 a captured alien, astroboffins suggest

So, in other words, a job for "INS, divison six"?

Swiss effectively disappear Alps: World's largest tunnel opens

Re: 73 different kinds of rock...

Including asbestos. I've met one of the 'drivers' of the tunnelling machine in 2007 or so in a seminar on the safety regulations regarding working with/handling the stuff.

Re: What's a couple of hundred meters between friends?

Both. Plus all the other values between 0 and 2,500 m.

No, I am NOT a bot.

What's going on, did I miss something?

Did someone suggest that jake is a bot?!?

If so, that's on the shortlist for my personal, informal 'Joke of the Year' award.

Nutanix goes cap in hand to Goldman Sachs for $75m loan

Hmm. Not a bad interest rate, a lot cheaper than using the overdraft facility...

ISS 'nauts to face Mark Zuckerberg grilling

Re: USA having to rely on Russian rockets for manned space flight

1. Don't worry. In a couple of years they can hitch a ride. From China.

2. "It reminds me of the heady days of Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin when the world trembled at the sound of our rockets." - Captain Ramius, The Hunt for Red October

Jaxa's litany of errors spun Hitomi to pieces

Re: This is why Japan prefers to fire refurbished WWII dreadnoughts into orbit

But who is the Japanese version of Feynman?

ISS pump-up space podule fully engorged

Re: Playroom?

Actually, there are studies regarding the feasibility of human coitus in space. Which should surprise nobody. Well, if anything it should be much, much easier to roll away from the wet patch on the sheet.

[Link to thingy on Wickedpedia]

As always, Rule 34 applies.

Re: The important thing we need to know is... / bendy bus

"Bendy Bus" made me think of this.

Also, any chance a micro-meteorite hit could look anything like this? (God forbid, but you know what it's like - once the idea is is in your head...)

Re: Imploding fireball

You're thinking of a submarine, I think.

Norks' parade rocket fails to fly, again

Re: Rocket scientist attrition rate

I've just remembered: there is a scene in Billy Wilder's brilliant 'One Two Three' where the recently defected commissar Peripetchikoff explains that in the American space programme launch control has one button on their console to blow up a faulty rocket, whereas in the soviet space programme launch control has two buttons - one to blow up the rocket and one to blow up its designer.

Couldn't find the exact quote, sorry. Just watch the movie, it's really good.

Re: Rocket scientist attrition rate

You work in HR, and I claim my 6,5562 EUR (at current excange rate)!

But seriously, who will build the jetpack for the beloved leader if they keep killing the rocket scientists?

P0rnHub revamps bug bounty, back pays cash, hires staff, after criticism

"Bug hunters will also be able to rock an exclusive Pornhub bug hunter tshirt."

How about adding an exclusive Pornhub bug hunter necktie for formal occasions?

North Korea clones Facebook, forgot to change default creds

Wow, first their own* OS, now their own* 'social network'** - what's happening?

^{* Where 'own' means copying something freely availiable and revamping it a bit.}

^{** Not a new idea for North Korea per se, it's just that up until now 'social network' meant the queue in front of the grocery store.}

Earth's core is younger than its crust surface

So Feynman was a bit off - probably because he never got around to sit down and do the math properly. Which, in the 1960ies, may have been based on a different perception of the solar system's age, so even his proper math might have been off by today's baselines.

The amazing thing is to come up with this in the first place. Honestly, who even thinks about stuff like this? Gravitational effects, yes, but the focus there usually is black holes or other singularities* or space travel. But thinking about the effects on the very rock you're standing on - that guy was one serious thinker.

^{* A plural for singularity, now that feels kinda funny.}

Feinstein-Burr's bonkers backdoor crypto law is dead in the water

That bill may be or may not be 'dead', but they are still at it anyway: Someone just snuck warrantless email access into the Senate's secret intelligence bill.

Forget infrasound, now it's ultrasound that's making you ill (allegedly)

Re: This is real, at least for some people.

Over here, we have PAL, pal.

Which reminds me, my parent's first colour TV had an ultrasound remote control - and I could hear that thing. Then. Bet I couldn't now.

That being said, high frequency sounds are being used to keep youths away from certain locations. Although recent tests show that flooding the area with elevator-style muzak or classical music works even better. As long as they can't reach and smash the speakers, that is.

In-flight movies via BYOD? Just what I always wan... argh no we’re all going to die!

Re: Why paper beats electronics

"... one of those is off interviewing for a better job and the other is too busy posting smartarsed remarks on El Reg ... "

I think you're on to something here...

Re: Type some shit here, please.

No, 8.1 = 9.

According to the the guys that brought you Excel, anyway.