Posts by Sanguma

Hundreds of orgs urge Microsoft: don’t kill off free Windows 10 updates

Re: Nothing In The UK News About This

All of which was covered by the fearless documentary Keeping Up Appearances ...

There's no international protocol on what to do if an asteroid strikes Earth

Re: That's not all...

Bah! Rats! Foiled! Damn it all! Beaten to the punch! I was going to suggest that the Zombie film apocalypse had been a preparation for a Trump Presi-Dent-sy - Dent as in the late Arthur Dent - but A: the US voting public elected the Zombie, and B: you connected the dots before I did! Bah! Rats! Foiled again! Now what have I done with my whiskers, in order to twirl them effectively? Josephine? Josephine! Josephine!?! What have you done with my whiskers!?!?

SpaceX's Starship explodes again ... while still on the ground

What I understand from all this

... is that Elon Musk and crew and having a BLAST of a time!

The ant, Sir, my friend, is exploding in the wind

The Ant, Sir, is exploding in the wind!

Trump announces $175B for Golden Dome defense shield over America

Re: Another way around the golden dome

In other words: Special Bulletin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDZQsVNZ3SE

And you know the really good thing about the law suit the Reagan Administration brought against the city of Oakland in California? Let me quote:

https://www.csmonitor.com/1989/0921/aoak.html

"The [DoJ] complaint claims that the Oakland ordinance's attempt to regulate nuclear weapons work is an unconstitutional infringement on interstate commerce, that the city has no right to try to regulate actions taken on federal property, and that the Atomic Energy Act gives Washington exclusive control over atomic energy, both military and civilian."

And the US Supreme Court ruled it was invalid:

https://www.nytimes.com/1990/04/28/us/a-nuclear-free-zone-is-ruled-to-be-invalid.html

ergo, the US Supreme Court has validated the concept of the legality of trade in Nuclear Weapons. Which substantially violates the US commitment in its ratification of the Non-Nuclear Weapons Proliferation Treaty, doesn't it?

Well, as a hat-rack he will be even more effective!

Re: May not repeat but it rhymes

The one and only reason why the "Big Beautiful Wall" never got built was Trump never got down and did it himself. Mexico would've paid for it, if only he'd thought to impresarios to set up tours to show well-heeled Mexicans the US Presi Dent (Dent as in the late Arthur Dent) fitting brick to brick to make a wall ... plus of course, the provision of peanuts, so they would have something to throw at him, even though there would be plenty of signs up saying "No alimentar a los animales", and "No comer los animales".

for additional reasons why it wouldn't work

see https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/22/space_force_tech_mission_threatened/

"The US Space Force has been struggling to achieve its technological goals, and Chief of Space Operations General B. Chance Saltzman told senators this week that civilian layoffs and budget cuts aren't helping matters at all."

The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, and do you seriously think such a system would be secure, in the light of the Trump (mal)administration trashing CVEs and the like?

It's just a rerun of countless other examples of fraud by Trump over the years. I'm going to listen to Godley and Creme's Consequences tonight.

and a simple test firing of just one such nuclear-primed X-ray laser above the Atlantic Ocean would've killed so many air travelers through EMP killing off their aircraft's electrical systems, never mind the electronic systems as well, that the Third Ronnie would've gone down in history as one of the great killers of innocent travelers ...

akshually

"Superiority" was written by Arthur C. Clarke - see:

https://archive.org/details/Fantasy_Science_Fiction_v002n04_1951-08_AK/page/n3/mode/2up?view=theater

and

https://metallicman.com/laoban4site/superiority-by-arthur-c-clarke-full-text/

Yep, things aren't always as they seem, skim milk masquerades as cream ...

China hits back at America with retaliatory tariffs, export controls on rare earth minerals

Re: Trump is “The Loaded Dog” *

Found here - https://www.libraryofshortstories.com/onlinereader/the-loaded-dog Except of course, there's no way in $ChosenLocation that Trump could ever be lovable - goofy, yes, lovable, no.

"So how's the fishing?"

Is this a Peking Trump I see before me?

Is that an apple I see in its mouth? No, it's both feet, right up to the pelvis!

National Science Foundation staff axed by Trump fear for US scientific future

Re: Pi = 3

Actually, you're forgetting the Mickey Mouse March ... and Beck's Loser, and Dennis Leary's Asshole, all of which could represent Trump's America as national anthems ...

Trump Marks 1 and 2 = US's long suicide note to the world

Always happens when people take themselves for granted. So the US will get rid of everything requiring an intellect greater than Homer Simpson's ... any chance we could export Trump to Mars? and Elon Musk, while we're at it, minus those expensive money-wasters, the space suits and pressure suits and oxygen ... He's a very stable genius, he'll work out something, since he knows so much ...

Trump’s tariffs, cuts may well put tech in a chokehold, say analysts

Dunno about youse, but whenever I see that Trump face, I'm reminded of Baron Harkonnen of Dune fame. 'nuff sed. I suspect he thinks he's on a one-way mission from $DEITY to bring down the United States of America, 'cause I can't see any other result from this "mission" of his.

Gang of monkeys escape South Carolina biomedical research facility

Just as long

as there are no time machines invovled, or at least according to this author:

https://www.michaelmoorcock.net/forum/the-miscellany/enclave-at-the-end-of-time-%E2%97%A6-members-work/enclave-story-challenge-2011/14942-why-time-machines-are-scarce

Tesla that killed motorcyclist was in Full Self-Driving mode

ancient 70s joke

about the self-flying airliner: "This is your autopilot speaking to the passengers. Rest assured that owing to the care with which I am programmed, nothing can got wrong go wrong go wrong go wrong go wrong ..."

Destroying offshore wind farms is top priority for Trump if he returns to presidency

Is there any truth in the rumour that Donald J. Trump is in truth the lovechild of Heath Robinson and Rube Goldberg? This reminds me so very much of some of Heath Robinson's work I'm beginning to believe the rumour. Oh well, someone should ask him.

Father of SQL says yes to NoSQL

Re: What is this NoSQL movement of which he speaks?

It's actually a query that's been archived, you might say.

Here's some references to it:

https://www.essentialsql.com/what-is-a-relational-database-view/

https://learnsql.com/blog/sql-view/

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/views/views?view=sql-server-ver16

Re: What is this NoSQL movement of which he speaks?

Just to be obnoxious, I spent a few years trying to work out what an Object-Orientated Database was. I finally owkred that out, and the entire hoo-haa about Object-Orientated Database was an attempt to combine database services with the Object-Orientated languages such as C++. Some time later, after realizing that, I had a second look at the View construct of relational database, which is an effort to set up an independent Query, so you can use it in programming applications.

I spent the least few years of the 90s wondering why others didn't see the (potential) interaction of those two constructs - database services for OOlangs like C++ and such, and programmable views that could be made Object Orientated. I still haven't worked that out. But it still seems to be the solution.

Re: Got to pick the right tool for the job

So basically NoSQL is a high-performance front-end to relational databases, If you're serious.

Re: The long view

Neither Codd nor Date were fond of SQL. SQL's dominance is the result of IBM's then market dominance.

Google fires 28 staff after sit-in protest against Israeli cloud deal ends in arrests

Re: Whatever happened to "Don't be evil".

You know anything about the Jewish populations of those places? Do you know about something called the "Lavon Affair", where Israel employed some Egyptian Jews to cover the terrorist actions of the Mossad, with the consequence that the Egyptian govt cracked down on ithe Egyptian Jews? Or for that matter, are you aware that one American Jewish pro-Israel billionaire, Sheldon Adelson, called on the then-US govt to nuke part of the Iranian desert and then nuke Tehran if they didn't stop their nuclear program? At that time Tehran had 10 000 Iranian Jews living there. An American Jewish pro-Israel billionaire quite openly called for the killing of all those Jews, without any compunction - and nobody opened their mouths to protest, including you, Ian Johnston. Why do you hate Jews so much?

Re: Take this as a lesson

What "acts of genocide"? Spell this out for us. How is killing 1200 out of about 7 000 000 genocide? (And even then, the total number actually killed by Hamas is far from clear. And a number of the Israelis killed were servicemen and -women on active duty. Not civilians)

Re: > punishing people for their political beliefs

Your numbers are inaccurate. The J'Post declared the number was 1400, then mysteriously altered that to 1200, without giving any explanation. It turns out that 200 Hamas fighters had been granted Israeli Jewish citizenship posthumously, until the coroners found they were actually Hamas fighters. Thus the inelegant backtrack.

Then there's the as-yet unclarified number of Israelis actually killed by the IDF during its counterattack - we know that unless Hamas fighters have been enlisted in the IDF tank units, at least 12 of those 1200 were killed in Kibbutz Be'eri by IDF tank fire. It's that old "F around and find out" - up to half those 1200 may well owe their "deceased" status to the incompetence of the IDF. And this is the armed force that the US and the UK are so adamant about supplying with armaments? If Fiji, for example, or Kenya was in a similar situation where their armed forces quite possibly killed half the number of those they claimed were killed by insurgents, don't you think those supplying the armaments would have the decency to ask questions? It appears neither the UK nor the US has that elementary decency.

Re: > punishing people for their political beliefs

This is such an old, worn-out half-dead argument, that "Zionism equals Jewishness". It has the side-effect of demoting Jews to subhuman automatons, the sort that can only be what they have been programmed as, ie, Zionists - and is thus itself antisemitic. It's admittedly a very popular form of antisemitism, among Zionist Jews in particular.

It's a Category Error/Mistake, one of Philosophy and Logic and Computer Science profs' biggest bugbears, I suspect. It's a Category Error/Mistake of truly epic proportions, particularly when you consider a very similar category mistake, that of considering "Communism equals Jewishness" led to the death of six million European Jewish non-combatants between 1939-1945.

Consider the joys of another category error, that of confusing metric with Imperial, led to NASA losing its Mars Climate Orbiter in 1999.

Boffins propose fiber-optic network for the Moon

So the inhabitants of Earth's large natural satellite - Lunarians? Lunatics? - have requested cat videos?

Speaking facetiously, it sounds interesting. I'm wondering how they'd get the radio telescope to the moon first. A fibre network for relaying observations back to Earth, would be small potatoes after that.

Judge orders NSO to cough up Pegasus super-spyware source code

Re: Structure matters

a states jurisdiction ends at its internationally recognised borders.

Not for crimes of universal jurisdiction, which any state can try. And it's beginning to look as though this sort of thing is considered a crime of universal jurisdiction, because it is being done by citizens and the state apparatchiks of one state against many others.

Re: "It has helped to save thousands of lives over recent years."

By that they don't appear to mean Kashoggi or so. They are Arabs, so they don't count.

Software troubles delay F-35 fighter jet deliveries ... again

Re: Billions

The USN's lost what balls it had back in the day, when it took over Brewster Aeronautical Corps

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewster_Aeronautical_Corporation

and shuttered it in the end.

But of course, if the USN were to take over Lockheed-(whatever), it'd face a massive turf fight with the USM and the USAF over how to best mismanage the manufacturer, in a manner befitting the current best practices mismanagement guide/s Lockheed is currently using.

Re: "upgrades"

Nah, more sophisticated that that. It will have a pop-up display offering hotel suites with an ensuite for the master bedroom in the priciest hotel in London Town (The Tower); it'll even allow you to stay if you've stolen your Dad's credit card and are running up a massive bill enjoying Christmas all on your own in New York while your family swelters in Florida.

Logitech warns of logistical impact of Houthi attacks in Red Sea

Re: Is this historical revision in real time?

Well, according to some of the earliest reports, Hamas had beheaded 40 babies. Then when people started asking questions, the "40 beheaded babies" vanished into thin air. Also according to earliest reports, Hamas had killed 1400 Israelis. Fast forward a couple of weeks or so, and mysteriously, without any explanation, Hamas has killed 1200 Israelis. Apparently 200 of those Israelis who Hamas had apparently killed were actually Hamas fighters themselves ... meanwhile there are some very, very angry Israelis wanting to know about an IDF tank unit that fired into a Kibbutz Be'eri house where some Hamas fighters and their detainees, relatives of the angry Israelis, were holed up. So unless the IDF has been enlisting Hamas fighters into their tank units, we can safely say those Israelis were not killed by Hamas, but by the IDF. And again, other people have brought up the act that those 200 Hamas fighters were so badly burnt that at first they could not be identified, and have pointed out that the IDF Apache strike helicopter units were in action on the day, and while assault rifles do not have the general effect of burning someone alive so badly they cannot be identified, 30cm explosive rounds fired into groups of people will do the trick.

The difficulty is the number of News Agencies containing people who can't count. And state officials who can't tell the truth.

Take a look at the following

https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israel-palestine-war-media-ignoring-evidence-actions-7-october

https://mondoweiss.net/2023/10/a-growing-number-of-reports-indicate-israeli-forces-responsible-for-israeli-civilian-and-military-deaths-following-october-7-attack/

https://electronicintifada.net/content/israeli-forces-shot-their-own-civilians-kibbutz-survivor-says/38861#transcript

https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/shoot-everything-how-israeli-pilots-killed-their-own-civilians

https://thegrayzone.com/2023/10/27/israels-military-shelled-burning-tanks-helicopters/

Itmighthelp.

Swarms of laser-flown bots visiting a planet light years away – and more NASA-funded projects revealed

Re: A couple of issues to be sorted?

Proxima's a M-class star, which means it's flares, flares, flares, all the way down. No bell-bottoms.

I wonder, are they taking ideas from elsewhere, or is that only for boffins States-side? I've got this pesky little idea for a probe that'll last in a gas giant's atmosphere for the next decade or so, assuming it doesn't get eaten by one of Arthur C. Clarke's Medusas ...

Microsoft opens sources ThreadX under MIT license

de-blobbing firmware

is good. It should mean that there are no gotchas in the firmware, no hidden traps to catch you unawares, no IOT-Call-Home to catch you out, no unexplained behaviour from what is alleged to be single-purpose hardware, etc.

I look forward to seeing what can be done with it. I commend Microsoft for doing this. It's a good move.

Hacktivist attacks erupt in Middle East following Hamas assault on Israel

Re: Unwanted fall out from Israel/Hamas conflict - Preperation for Genocide

For what it's worth, the cut-off of water triggers an aspect of the Genocide Convention; article 2, (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/convention-prevention-and-punishment-crime-genocide

I may not like Hamas as a political organization, but it is entitled to self-defense, and retaliation if self-defense has been by-passed. BTW, have you noticed one thing about the West's leaders on Israel and Palestine? They always claim to support Israel's right to self-defense, and if pressed, tehy would argue it's a common human right. Then they go silent on the question of if it is a common human right, why are the Palestinians not permitted it? Why are Palestinians exercising it, libelled as "terrorist"?

And then, to make matters even more murky, there's the little detail that the Palestinians have been in Palestine for over two thousand years - as evidenced by the existence of the Samaritan community in the same area they'd been living in during the 1st century CE. Romans didn't exile any more than they needed to, so most of the villages would have stayed there after the Great Revolt 70CE, as long as they didn't actively get involved. So back in the 1st century CE they were Jewish, circumcized their sons, celebrated Passover, etc. So if the West's leaders - and the Israelis - deny their humanity by denying them the right of self-defense, it gets remarkably reentrant and recursive - the people who today's Jews claim descent from, today's Zionists claim are less than human ... so where does that leave today's Jewish communities? Zionists appear positively antisemitic. Little wonder I don't have much patience for Zionists.

Re: Unwanted fall out from Israel/Hamas conflict

Oh yawn. You rabid fascists are the worst. You're not pro-Israel so much as you are anti-Arab and anti-Muslim. Tell me, why do you hate Jews so much?

Nuclear-powered datacenters: What could go wrong?

Reminds me of a certain group in NZ who used to make noises about New Zealand needing nuclear power, and whatnot. Then there was a massive power outage in Auckland, and they piped up and said their bit about how all this would not have happened if New Zealand had Nuclear Power.

Then people discovered the outage had been caused by a faulty insulator which hadn't been replaced, and we've never heard from them since.

Consider the mental health of all those whose ability to snigger mercilessly at the sight and sound of lobbyists putting both feet in their mouths at once, has been curtailed by lobbyists deciding to shut up!!! It's a mental health crisis, I tell you.

Save the Children hit by ransomware, 7TB stolen

Re: Utter Bastards

I'm in full agreement. I think most people's views would be exactly the same. Though we need not get our own hands dirty in offering them physical violence - I'd suggest they'd enjoy an environmentally friendly session of feeding the piranha in the Amazon basin. The full immersion feeding session.

ArcaOS 5.1 gives vintage OS/2 a UEFI facelift for the 21st century

Some time ago, I read online that one of the OS/2 developers had leaked his copy of the OS/2 source tree in protest at IBM's burying OS/2. Does anyone know if this was ever true, or just a rumour?

IT needs more brains, so why is it being such a zombie about getting them?

Personal story here: during my first year as a BA (Classics(Latin)) at the Uni of Canterbury (NZ), I was knocked off my bicycle and came to, more or less, almost a full week later with a Traumatic Brain Injury, an Extradural Haematoma they cleaned out an hour or so before I shuffled off the mortal coil. As the information the hospital gave me was decidedly inadequate, I picked up Dr Oliver Sack's The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, discovered that there was a whole heap of material about people in my situation, and promptly ordered some of the books he mentions in it. I later worked out that I'd given myself the equivalent of Third and Fourth Year papers in Neuropsychology, and a paper in the medical science of Neurology (Surgery). The books included Guyton's Basic Neuroscience: Anatomy and Physiology, AR Luria's The Working Brain, Dr Muriel Lezak's Neuropsychological Assessment, and Springer and Deutsch's Left Brain Right Brain. Most neuropsychologists, starting with the neuropsychologist who managed my recovery, have treated me rather as an ungraduated colleague - and you know, the rule is it's when the professionals treat you as one of them, that you're actually one of them. But it means nothing, because although it helped me mightily in conquering the subsequent 5 years of clinical depression - easier to deal with the "personal demons" when you know they are not real - the work I did, didn't involve pieces of paper bearing the title of BA or BSc in Psychology.

During those five years I did some largely voluntary work computer-cataloguing school libraries. Finding I couldn't get any work in spite of proving I had the attitude to get up and enter the details, I thought I'd learned enough to get and make my own work as a programmer of library systems. To do that, I needed to know a lot more about databases, and the like. So again, I bought simple nightime reading, books like Andrew Tanenbaum's Operating Systems: Design and Implementation, Comer's Operating Systems Design: The Xinu Approach, CJ Date's Database Systems: An Introduction, and Elmasri and Navathe's The Fundamentals of Database Systems. I read but didn't buy, Tanenbaum's Computer Networks. I thought after reading all that, that since the daily rag and the computer press were moaning about computer network skills shortages, that I should do this short course on networks. My bank wouldn't loan unless I had work at the end of it; none of the HR companies would suggest any company who might offer me a part-time job as an assistant network administrator. Etc.

So that's my life story. It doesn't seem to matter if you actually know the material - and as an ungraduated neuropsychologist, I might have some professional opinions on the meaningfulness of the postgrad Organizational Psychology Diploma ... Clueless seems to be too tame to describe HR policies.

Re: Exams as a system

Passing an exam's a skill in itself. To pass an exam indicates two things to me:

a: You've gained the skill of passing the exam; and

b: you may have some knowledge of the subject the exam was about.

Does it indicate anything else? Clever Hans, anybody?

Re: Plenty of specialists, massive shortist of generalists

Human Resources is a subset of the scientific discipline of Psychology. You'll see it in University calendars marked as Organizational Psychology. And, to the best of my knowledge, it is the only subset of said Psychology discipline that does not generate a large number of research papers, so I take it that most Psychology professors regard it as a waste of time and money. (Disclaimer, I am not myself a Psychology professor nor have I asked any who I might know, about their opinions on Organizational psychology, but the general theme in the sciences, is that research is what everything's about: Organizational Psychology in that mindset's of the same order as a Mills&Boon to Nobel Prize Literature winner.)

USENET, the OG social network, rises again like a text-only phoenix

finally back on it

but where is everybody? Reminds me of the time I jumped on usenet using knode, c. 2004, subscribed to a number of newsgroups, popped in to see what was doing on one, and woe and behold, the only action was a posting by someone cursing someone else in frankly not very interesting terms of unendearment ...

There's a lot more newsgroups in existence than there are people on them. It's almost zenlike in its absences. The sound of one hand clapping is the sound of usenet ghosts reminiscing about their past histories ...

antiX 23: Anarchic for sure, but 'design by committee' isn't always the best for Linux

very useful with earlier tech

I made good use of the antiX 19 386 when we were in lockdown in 2020. I was at Mum's, to help her in case anything needed to be done, away from my PC, and with only an aged Pentium laptop, where the original MS Win XP installation had bitrotted off the HD. With antiX 19 I was able to keep in touch with my email and keep up with the news.

That's what antiX is aimed at, and it's probably the best distro for the job. It's not something you'll find many other distros capable of doing.

Moscow makes a mess on the Moon as Luna 25 probe misses orbit, lands with a thud

Crashing good landing, eh what, old chap?

I'm actually not surprised. Russia once had the second most powerful army in the world; now it has the second most powerful army in Ukraine.

US Space Force finally creates targeting unit – better late than never, right?

Re: the 75th?

Pete Seeger's got the explanation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXnJVkEX8O4

Re: "Today is a monumental time in the history of our service."

"monumental" is a term often used to describe mausoleums. I'm sure that was not the meaning intended, though it's likely that I'm not the only one to have noticed this.

Problem with Weapons in Earth Orbit

You can shoot them up; you can never shoot them down. It's the atmosphere in its thinness that'll do that, eventually.

Lack of understanding of orbital dynamics should be a disqualifier for any role in any such "Space Force"; except this is a Donald Trump establishment, and like Donald Trump's casinos in Atlanta, I'm not expecting it to either last, or do anything of any use.

Even disabling some random opponent's military satellite's fraught with risk - if you haven't "shot it up" because it can't come down like an aircraft, and won't go down like a ship, and instead you've just rendered it "harmless", in the same way Kosmos 2251 was "harmless", you've left it around to take out some future Iridium 33. You've put a certain number of communications and remote sensing satellites at risk, which means you might find them missing when you need them.

Earth Orbit's more in need of some Hague Convention of the Neutrality sort, recognizing it as covered by the same sort of neutrality the Antarctic's covered by, than any muscle-pumping, fist-thumping Rambo All-American Can't Do!!!

Internet Archive sued by record labels as battle with book publishers intensifies

Re: "artists such as Frank Sinatra .." etc

Read any biography of Beethoven, for example, and you'll find publishers wanting to kill the goose that laid the golden egg. It's endemic to the point of being pandemic.

and the booby prize is ...

an evening with Russ Meyer ... not quite. (Thank $DEITY) The US Constitution gives an admirably succinct reason for protecting creative output, and I quote:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

Or in other words, to provide an incentive for authors and inventors to keep working by ensuring that they get paid for keeping on writing and inventing. I would dearly love to see the cheques paid to Walter Elias Disney for his posthumous output; who wouldn't? By extending the copyright to life plus 90 years, the Disney Corp has solemnly informed us that they are continuing to employ Walter Elias Disney; is it possible that they have not in fact been paying him? If so, the founder of Disney Corp et al., is posthumously enslaved. Is it possible that Walter Elias Disney is having his work continuously rejected? In which case, since no discernable NDA or non-compete agreement was ever signed, why has not the Disney Corp permitted him to seek work elsewhere?

And if Disney Corp has neither been paying Walter Elias Disney nor employing him, then they have been defrauding him of the posthumous payments he is due for the use of his creative works. And if Disney Corp has in fact employed Walter Elias Disney posthumously without paying him, it has violated any number of anti-slavery laws by continuing to employ him posthumously without payment.

"limited times" is just the tip of the iceberg.