Posts by BebopWeBop

You had ONE job: Italian firefighters suspected of starting blazes for cash

Re: GNU TERRY PRATCHETT

I seem to remember that Crassus came to a sticky end - with his head used as decoration by the Parthians(?)

Slacking off? ICO probe throws up concerns over instant messaging

To be fair, just like Clinton (in the US) amongst others and Gove plus gawd nows how many other politicians in the UK.

Forget Iran and North Korea. Now there's another uranium source

or 900 times the mass of the Great Pyramid of Giza

as an aside - is this an extension of el Reg standards?

Browser trust test: Would you let Chrome block ads? Or Firefox share and encrypt files?

Re: Trust Google's ad-blocker...

So do you not expect Google to retain tracking code on their/their advertiser's behalf? No thanks, in the words of a previous commentard "noad ublock"

The Telegraph has killed Prince Philip

Re: Telegraph

A spokesman for His Royal Highness said "Bloody Tory Rag"

"Bloody Socialist Rag"

TFTFY

And then called for his whip and a horse....

Zuck sucks up upstart Ozlo so it can stop sucking at chatbots

Re: Chatbot AI

A Turing Halting problem?

Petition calls for Adobe Flash to survive as open source zombie

Re: Please, No!

So record all of the possible permutations and combinations separately, and edit them together into a different format of media with the necessary links? It should be possible with HTML5...

And while you have solved the combinatorial explosion you will move on to the Halting problem?

Everything you never knew about mail: The Postal Museum opens

Pentacycle

I assume one of these bizarre beauties? https://postalheritage.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/2010_0541front-e1432290221169.jpg

Pre-order your early-bird pre-sale product today! (Oh did we mention the shipping date has slipped AGAIN?)

Re: Excellent HHGTG reference

I did that as well but found it difficult to read the small print

Cellphone kill switches kill cellphone snatchers

Re: Simple and effective

Well, they and others seem to have perfected the 'deliver a parcel' to mobile telephones that make Amazon drones look positively conservative.

Jodie Who-ttaker? The Doctor is in

I for one welcome our new womanly overlord (got to say I have not the faintest idea who she is(

Google unleashes 20m lab-created blood-thirsty freaks on a city. And this is a good thing, it says

Re: Accuracy is important.

Mansplaining I am told.

Media mogul Murdoch's 'Sky dataset' swallow poses 'grave threat'

Well Murdoch is not necessarily a Conservative supporter either - it depends on the tone they are taking towards his busineess. While the conservative party seem to have lost the plot recently (taling iona purely 'hang opn to power policy') I can't believe they are so silly as to actually *trust* him

Pretty fly for an AI: Bioboffins use machine learning to decipher fruit flies' brains

Re: Not much action in the female-chasing brain

Buy t notice how much effort they pull t into backing away...

Electric driverless cars could make petrol and diesel motors 'socially unacceptable'

Re: "Electric vehicles are the obvious solution to that particular problem"

Your point on power is difficult to refute - well at the moment, and given government competence for a wee while to come. On the trailing wires, a program to install kerbside chargers might just work (confession, I have just applied to be allowed to do so outside my Edinburgh house - subsidised at the moment anyway).

Good luck building a VR PC: Ethereum miners are buying all the GPUs

Re: "Why would anyone need two graphics cards?"

I seem to remember that she had already tried the mainframe approach (a castle?)

Is this a hotdog? What it takes for an AI to answer that might surprise you

Re: As Rene Magritte might say

No one said that recognising a hot dog is for the purpose of selecting it - rejection is a very good motivation!

Well, that escalated quickly: Qualcomm demands iPhone, iPad sales ban in America

Re: Apple's hypocritical

Because the comment was about Apple's software pricing/share model maybe?

It's time for a long, hard mass debate over sex robots, experts conclude

Re: My God! You're a machine!

It's when she starts taking an interest in our education that you have to start worrying - "hey Rex, I'm off to the vets to get tutored'

How to pwn phones with shady replacement parts

Having bust the screen on my iPhone (OK....) before taking ti to be repaired at the local moderately cheap screen repairer I was careful to wipe the phone (not that any dodgy images I might have had would titillate anyone other than a landscape fetishist). I was very pleased to see them ask whether I had and suggest that if I had not I should do so and then bring it back. Now they might have been careful make them wary because of previous problems with their own staff (small), but I like to think that they were simply covering their (and their customers) backs.

Civil rights warriors get green light to challenge UK mass surveillance

Re: Problem for Banks

Wull (as letters are required in a post) :-)

Re: IPA Could Work ???

There is a lot to be said for no new law without repealing an existing one.

Much to be said for it - especially with much archaic (truly) British legislation that can be reinterpreted in new and often sinister (I use the terms carefully) ways. However as the recent 'repeal one bit of safety legislation, before we enact another 'Tory' approach, it does have problems.

Met Police laggards still have 18,000 Windows XP machines in use

Though the force appears to have met its revised target of getting 14,000 machines running Windows 8.1 – 14,450 are now running the OS – another 2,458 are still running XP, 7, 8.1 and 10. These are said to not be networked, and police sysadmins are apparently unable to separate out which ones are running what.

A remarkable precise number for non networked PCs (and don't try to persuade me that their inventory is up to date)

Re: Why?

You never know - they might include attempting to wrest a few shekels from people based in the UK hiding their funds overseas?

But maybe not - a step too far?

HMS Windows XP: Britain's newest warship running Swiss Cheese OS

Well unlikely for so many reasons, the first being that there is little chance they will ever be used operationally by the UK.

Tory-commissioned call centres 'might have bent data protection laws'

Re: To summarize

I think you will find they are remarkable similar. (I also have investments in companies that seem to pay no attention to their shareholders but do lionne to promote their execs chances at a gong)

BOFH: Putting the commitment into committee

Don't get me wrong, I love committees - they're a great way of getting the troublemakers all in one place. A small office with a lockable door and inadequate fresh air supply for instance - or even just up against a heavily pockmarked wall...

Sheer brilliance and good tactical thinking as well.

PC rebooted every time user flushed the toilet

Trondheim or Tromso?

Breach at UK.gov's Cyber Essentials scheme exposes users to phishing attacks

Re: the Morissette Scale?

Actually, these days, its pretty much confirmed as having nothing to do with the Plague.

Ahh well another misconception shattered by people looking at the evidence!

TalkTalk customers complain of being unable to load Amazon website

Re: normally

I would mock people on talk talk, but I logged into my Zen account page for the first time in years and it says I'm on talk talk business. I've always had great service from Zen, but this worries me.

Where did you see this - my Zen account says nothing of the sort - but may be I am not looking in the right place?

Re: Rule #1

Yes, another very happy Zen user here. Not the cheapest, but service is second to none (although I have not tried talk talk :-)

US Air Force resumes F-35A flights despite not knowing why pilot oxygen systems failed

Re: Procurement Choices and Pork

Not fair at all. While having no beef on the aircraft ugly!=effectiveness. Just look at the Warthog.

Cheeky IT rival parks 'we're hiring' van outside 'vote Tory' firm Storm Technologies

Well I appreciate both the daily rate (short term contracts - often only a few day but extremely well paid) and the fact that I can take my expenses (considerable) off my tax bill - both reasonable. I did recently refuse (it was subsequently re-offered) on a short government analytics contract where they wanted to put my on IR35 for 7 working days.

Numbers war: How Bayesian vs frequentist statistics influence AI

Let us assume we have a certain amount of money to spend on the issue, which essentially can be converted into putting people into isolation, quarantine and/or providing good separation between arbitrarily sized groups in the community (i.e. building walls and guarding access-gates). Plus further testing beyond the initial screen.

Ahh you don't fool me - I've seen all of the Zombie films and the inevitable consequence of locking them out....

Re: "How can you possibly do statistics on a guess!?"

Well conspiracy aside, the Grauniad is not exactly filled with joy about the prospect Corbyn (not that I am either - Hobson's choice to some extent) and a lot of the pieces they have published have been somewhat ignorant of facts and statements.

Labour give an impression about being equally gung-ho (if a little reserved on a few issues) on cutting or ties with Europe as a number of the hard-liners in the Conservative party.

And I say that with regret - we have just achieved a larger European-based workforce (OK by 1 it is a small workforce) than UK.

Homeland Security: Putin’s hackers tried to crack electoral networks in 21 US states

Re: In half the espionage thrillers of the 1970s and 80s...

Except he is not exactly sleeping (except maybe on the job)

FOIA documents show the Kafkaesque state of US mass surveillance

Re: To Constitute or not to Constitute...

"At least communism you knew where you stood!"

Yes, normally in a field.

Or against a wall.

EU regulators gearing up to slap Google with €1bn fine – reports

Re: Parasites

The US would never allow it's own citizens to become slaves to some foreign country.

You think?

Teen girl who texted boyfriend to kill himself guilty of manslaughter

Mrs May did it in the conservative party with a lead pipe.

That minutes-long power glitch? It's going to cost British Airways £80m, IAG investors told

Re: Failure to prepare etc.

Well their insurance costs will rocket - possibly become unaffordable unless they can demonstrate measures to improve resilience and DR. Secondly, their reputation is suffering badly - they are protected, for the moment, by their historical status and position (i.e. owning slots at Heathrow) - the reputation loss must be damaging in both the medium and long term, I am not aware the 80M covers that?

Please do not scare the pigeons – they'll crash the network

Re: @Grumpy, re: shooting pigeons...

And a few dead squirrels in the pockets?

squrrels shurely?

Vodafone to block its ads from appearing next to 'fake news'

Re: How?

My understanding id that there is a 'MK1 eyeball' being used and they are whitelisting organisations and maybe individuals - which might be a little difficult if applied across Twitter and Vodaphone's estates.

The internet may well be the root cause of today's problems… but not in the way you think

Re: The problem isn't ideologies spreading on the Internet

May I commend -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxN1STgQXW8&feature=youtu.be - (c/o my kids)

UK PM Theresa May's response to terror attacks 'shortsighted'

Re: FFS!

Forced on her by the much maligned LibDems actually. Teresa wanted all of it - see her subsequent actions.

IBM: ALL travel must be approved now, and shut up about the copter

Re: Again

surely 2 - one for the northern hemisphere and one for the southern....

At the feet of the Great Monad, or, How the functional programming craze plays out

Ahh the carriage return - a great innovation.

Re: Been there, done that

I remember Dave at Kent - he was still teaching Fortran occasionally) - actually mine was quite good. I really remember the SBNOBOL4 courses - run for arts students - mainly English who wanted to do analysis on texts - very popular with CS students for some reason (nothing whatsoever to do with the large number of women who attended of course)

Your job might be automated within 120 years, AI experts reckon

But for more creative tasks it’ll take longer. It was predicted that machines will be able to write a high school essay by 2026, create a top 40 pop song by 2028, and write a New York Times Best Seller by 2049.

Well (2), (3), (3) would seem well within reach ((1) probably as well)

UK ministers to push anti-encryption laws after election

Re: no place for terrorists to hide

Yes, but then I was not speaking up for the terrorists through deliberate choice not apathy!

Euro Patent Office staff warns board of internal rule changes

Re: Good to see a snout in the trough of public funds

While I have little time for golf (waste of a good walk and all of that), living half of my time in Scotland, I can assure you that Play Golf != 1%