* Posts by ThaumaTechnician

37 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jul 2017

LISA Pathfinder sniffed out gravitational signals down to micro-Hertz

ThaumaTechnician

Re: too many hertz

Yeah, email the corrections instead, 'cuz reading about them here, permanently, hurts.

Accused Brit hacker Lauri Love will NOT be extradited to America

ThaumaTechnician

And he's sporting a Palestinian kufiya. Heh.

Good for him.

User stepped on mouse, complained pedal wasn’t making PC go faster

ThaumaTechnician

Re: Reminds me of a story

"And when pulse dialling was the norm."

And carefully placing a piece of cellophane tape on the pulse speed governor so as to get near-touch-tone speeds when dialing.

ThaumaTechnician

“...to setup and operate a community cyber cafés.”

Aside from the missing "of" - as in "a community of cyber cafés", "setup" is not a verb.

Think it is? Conjugate it in the past tense, eh.

Perv raided college girls' online accounts for nude snaps – by cracking their security questions

ThaumaTechnician

Everytime I see "Mother's maiden name" on the list of security question...

I get all twitchy like Inspector Dreyfus's left eye.

User had no webcam or mic, complained vid conference didn’t work

ThaumaTechnician

Re: This one, every time

"Printing videos. Yeah, I had the same request from an art student 20-odd years ago. She'd even brought in some nice, shiny paper that was actually suitable for our CMYK wax colour printer."...

But, but, but, in the Harry Potter books, they have paper that...

Free gift for all readers: Google's AutoML launch translated into plain English (where possible)

ThaumaTechnician

If we're willing to pay for the gift...

Do we get anything extra?

'Please store the internet on this floppy disk'

ThaumaTechnician

Re: I'm not sure what's worse

"Said screenshot is in a word document."

Count yourself lucky, if it had been management, they would have figured out how to post the screenshots in an Excel spreadsheet, one that was formatted so as to make it impossible to print out in one piece..

HTC U11 Life: Google tries to tame the midmarket

ThaumaTechnician

Re: Mid Range

Uh, came here to ask: In what universe is CDN$899 mid-range?

http://www.htc.com/ca/smartphones/htc-u11/buy/#!color=black

Ghostery, uBlock lead the anti-track pack

ThaumaTechnician

Re: NoScript no work

Switch to uBlock Origin. I give it three thumbs up!

Seagate's lightbulb moment: Make read-write heads operate independently

ThaumaTechnician

Re: Dang!

How? The Signetics 25120 to the rescue.

ThaumaTechnician

Dang!

Here I was, looking at the image thinking: "Wow! They're using a set of write-only platters and another set of read-only platters? I'd like to see a graph of performance vs. cost..."

/really, this is worth a headline?

Engineer named Jason told to re-write the calendar

ThaumaTechnician

Re: July and August must Go!

I told him, Julie, don't go!

https://youtu.be/rR_5h8CzRcI?t=200

UK's map maker Ordnance Survey plays with robo roof detector

ThaumaTechnician

Automated land/house value assessment process?

Been (t)here, done that. Didn't work so well.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/tax-scandal-service-new-brunswick-1.4052233

"In [one] case, the Service New Brunswick [software] concocted a figure of $79,780 in renovations to her tiny 860 square foot home — or "major improvement change" in the parlance of the department — and then raised her tax bill a stunning 52 per cent because of the phantom improvements."

Netflix mulls using AI to craft personalized movie trailers for viewers

ThaumaTechnician

Re: Dear Netflix

Call them to make the comment. The phone will be answered by a person. Rreally!

ThaumaTechnician

"They have some odd ideas about what I might like."

No kidding. If you rate a movie/show as "Hated it", you get a new category "Because you liked xxx".

I wish there was a ratings settings of "Jeebus! If you ever suggest a show like this one again, I'm cancelling my subscription!"

Also: provide a switch to stop the frigging' previews. Geeze, Netflix, just because my cursor is stopped on a show in a list ('cuz I'm trying to see who's in it, or I want to check IMDB first), it doesn't mean I want to see the promo.

While I'm at it: there are times that I want to read the credits. Stop minimizing them! Let the members decide...

Ex-cop who 'kept private copies of data' fingers Cabinet Office minister in pr0nz at work claims

ThaumaTechnician

Re: The issue I have with this

Came here to say the same thing - I carry my personal laptop with me when I travel for longer than overnight so that I don't have to use the work laptop for personal stuff. Are the MPs so poor that they can't afford a 2nd laptop?

Lauri Love appeal: 'If he's dead, no victim's going to get anything'

ThaumaTechnician

Re: 'If he's dead, no victim's going to get anything'

Yeah, well-established but proven to work? Maybe not so much.

WikiLeaks doc dump reveals CIA tools for infecting air-gapped PCs

ThaumaTechnician

Did I read that article too fast?

"Once an infected thumb drive is plugged into a target computer..."

Uh, if a thumb drive is plugged in, it's not considered air-gapped any more, no?

Hardware has never been better, but it isn't a licence for code bloat

ThaumaTechnician

Re: Ah, when I were a lad.....

The old Flight Simulator for Apple ][ used look-up tables for 'solving' calculations because it was faster than doing the math on the, er, fly.

Fine, OK, no backdoors, says Deputy AG. Just keep PLAINTEXT copies of everyone's messages

ThaumaTechnician

Re: what part of end to end doesn't he understand

"K I L L T H E M A L L

"Stand up and place your hands against the wall, citizen." "

Shouldn't the Mall Cops be taking care of this?

ThaumaTechnician

Who's to say whether the plaintext matches the cryptoed text?

The actual nonce/encryption key used should/must be different each time some plaintext is encrypted, no?

Then how can someone disprove that stored plaintext is actually what was sent?

BOFH: Do I smell burning toes, I mean burning toast?

ThaumaTechnician

Maybe you're about have an epiliptic seizure.

https://canadianheritage.org/the-burnt-toast-canadian-heritage-moment/

US voting server in election security probe is mysteriously wiped

ThaumaTechnician

If you think the deletion/wiping is mysterious...

You clearly aren't paying attention.

I love disruptive computer jargon. It's so very William Burroughs

ThaumaTechnician

That is the driest beaver I've even seen.

If I didn't know any better, I'd say it was stuffed.

It sure seems to prefer chopping down trees with an axe rather than by using its teeth, eh.

Blame Canada? $5.7m IBM IT deal balloons to $185m thanks to 'an open bag of money'

ThaumaTechnician

Put the blame where it's deserved: The Harper Government

Incompetence or corruption? Both?

Both.

You lost your ballpoint pen, Slack? Why's your Linux version unsigned?

ThaumaTechnician

That, and they need to ask questions like "the last six times you spoke to us, it turned out that what you said was untrue. Why should we believe you this time?"

Dear rioters: Hiding your face with scarves, hats can't fool this AI system

ThaumaTechnician

Do you mean, "That's in Theory"?

From the article "That's in practice. This thing is still a proof of concept."

I've downloaded the paper, we'll see what it actually says.

P≠NP proof fails, Bonn boffin admits

ThaumaTechnician

I slogged through that paper - for nothing?!!

/didn't really.

Couple fires sueball at Amazon over faulty solar eclipse-viewing goggles

ThaumaTechnician

That's odd, in my case they went above and beyond.

I had purchased a solar filter for my telescope which uses a metalized mylar film a year ago.

A few weeks ago, I got a notice from Amazon:

"Amazon has not received confirmation from the supplier of your order that they sourced the item from a recommended manufacturer. We recommend that you DO NOT use this product to view the sun or the eclipse." And they refunded me my purchase price, no need to return the filter.

I checked the manufacturer of the film's website, which assured me that it was fine for telescope/camera solar use. I got a $60 filter for free!

Vodafone won't pay employee expenses for cups of coffee

ThaumaTechnician

Just make an egg-salad sandwich and leave it in your glove compartment or in the car's trunk on a hot July day. Then drive to the office and offer to trade that sandwich the cube-farm drone's home-made sandwich that has been in a company-supplied refrigerator all morning.

US prosecutors demand data to unmask every visitor to anti-Trump protest website

ThaumaTechnician

I did my bit. Anyone else?

That is, visit the site. Maybe we can get it to a billion IP addresses?

Raising minimum wage will raise something else: An army of robots taking away folks' jobs

ThaumaTechnician

Re: Yup

Came here to say roughly the same thing. Why should I care about the opinions of people who think McDonald's offering qualify a food, eh?

That and: "may have unintended consequences" = "may have zero consequences"

Revealed: The naughty tricks used by web ads to bypass blockers

ThaumaTechnician

Raymond Hill should get the Order of Canada for uBlock Origin

I wouldn't bother surfing the 'Net if it wasn't for his software.

Mid-flight jumbo font smartphone text shock sparks kid abuse arrests

ThaumaTechnician

I read somewhere that the perp's phone was set to display a large font.

What sort of silicon brain do you need for artificial intelligence?

ThaumaTechnician

Maybe you need a brain the size of a small planet?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAA67a2-Klk

IETF moves meeting from USA to Canada to dodge Trump travel ban

ThaumaTechnician

I wonders whether rooms 1738, 1740, 1742 and 1744 will be booked...

Maybe Trudeau, the son, can stop by at the meeting.