Posts by onefang

Fleeing Facebook app users realise what they agreed to in apps years ago – total slurpage

Re: Facebook and Google are the revenue generating part of the NSA

Ah, so what you are saying is that FaceBook Incorporated are really Federal Bureau of Investigation. Fucking Bastard Ingrates the lot of them.

Re: Most people do not care

The only reason I created a FaceBook account is that ALL the activist groups I was working with use it to coordinate their activities. Despite me installing several open source alternatives on my server for us all to try out, they still all use FB. Some where actively hostile to my efforts, so there's a few activist groups I'm no longer involved in.

Parents blame brats' slipping school grades on crap internet speeds

Games consoles, phones, and tablets work fine for education. Videos not so much.

I own a PlayStation 3 that was sold with a proper Linux pre installed on it. I've managed to avoid the firmware update from Sony that removed the ability to use that. So nothing wrong with using a games console for homework, if you run a real operating system on it.

I have stored on my Android phone a large subset of WikiPedia, and several other educational resources of varying reliability, including some written for children. These apps would work just as well on a tablet, I just don't own one. No Internet needed to read them.

The last time the government tried to get me to do some bullshit online course that wasn't gonna teach me anything, all the course material was half hour videos, instead of text that I could read in five minutes, that wouldn't eat into my expensive and limited bandwidth quota like useless videos. Not to mention requiring me to spend money I didn't have on a copy of Microsoft Office. After I complained, the government backed off and tried something else. FFS I have taught that subject to others, professionally and otherwise.

I prefer to read than watch a video, even if I had the bandwidth to spare. So YouTube isn't something I'd watch to learn stuff. I read faster than any video could impart information, easily skip bits that are not relevant, and you can copy and paste stuff from a text document better than you can from a YouTube video trying to teach you how to install Linux on an electric toothbrush.

El Reg deep dive: Everything you need to know about UK.gov's pr0n block

Re: "Parents and schools need to be having discussions with their children about programming"

"The problems incumbent on the Netherlands attitude towards computer programming are linked with this in a significant manner. On the one hand, you might say, "allowing coders to sell their minds empowers them". On the other hand, allowing managers to coerce and control coders legally, and users to treat coder's minds as a commodity isn't exactly a shining example of empowerment and equality. So, I'd question whether they have problems with their approach towards IT education in the Netherlands, which almost certainly normalises this harmful attitude towards coders."

Works for many other professions to.

Re: Still at it

"I have nothing to hide."

Other than your genitals.

Re: Still at it

"Maybe you should take a close look at yourself in the mirror. I'll understand if you don't want to - it might reveal some things about yourself that you don't want to acknowledge."

I had a very close look at myself in the mirror, and what I saw I want to acknowledge, but the UK grubbyment insists you pass Age Verification to see my acknowledgment.

No, Stephen Hawking's last paper didn't prove the existence of a multiverse

Re: Cognito ergo universi?

"Hence Schroedinger's cat paradox. "

If a cat dies in a box, and no one is around to hear it, did it meow pitifully first?

Here is how Google handles Right To Be Forgotten requests

Re: " I can't put cheese in my cup of tea."

I've always said that any cheese can be made yummy by melting it. Haven't tried melting cheese in tea, but then again, I only drink iced tea, so that wont work.

Swiss cheesed off after Apple store iPhone does Samsung Galaxy Note 7 impersonation

Re: Puns?

"I'm disappointed with the lack of cheesy puns under this story..."

So you are cheesed off?

I think this story is full of holes.

I know, I'm late to this party, but I did bring a cheese platter.

Addicts of Facebook and pals are easy prey for manipulative scumbags – thanks to tech giants' 'extraordinary reach'

Re: As a Facebook NON

Last year I joined Facebook, coz I had to not coz I wanted to. I did a search for my family members, and didn't find any of them. Though they could have been doing the exact same thing I was doing, and using a fake name. I didn't bother asking any of them about this, or informing them of my fake name.

Are you Falcon sure, Elon? Musk vows Big Rocket will go up 2019

Re: Spring is coming, the Pascal is starting to blow

If they drive like normal people, they'd have the same amount of accidents as normal people do, and would have to be programmed to be able to do road rage, and fake drunk driving every now and then.

Re: "Perplexing Apollo Questions for NASA" at FauxScienceSlayer

I'm curious to know, has Faux Science Slayer ever gotten an up vote? Or has s/he/it slayed all the other faux scientists?

Re: Closing down sale?

WTFWT - What The Fuck Was That.

OMGIAR - Oh My God It's A Rocket.

MBTY - Mines Bigger Than Yours.

Rama, Rama II, and Rama III.

AWTY - Are We There Yet.

AWTY2 - Are We There Yet, Are We There Yet.

That last one can keep going on forever, just like Simpsons children.

Re: Musk really does see himself as the Saviour of Mankind

"The Americans could have Moonbase 1, the Russians Moonbase 2...."

And Musk would then have Moonbase 0.

Re: Musk really does see himself as the Saviour of Mankind

"If you need replacement personnel, that's 3-9 months away."

It usually takes 9 months to make a human, and a lot longer to educate them to the level where they can do something useful for a Mars colony. With sufficient humans, they can become self sufficient for replacement personnel, just not quickly.

So we have Big Fucking Rocket, how about Space Launch Shit (SLS)?

Elon Musk invents bus stop, waits for applause, internet LOLs

Re: Even the greatest minds have a few failures

"Anyone know what a sonic boom at 30,000' sounds like at ground level? I don't believe I've heard an aircraft produce a sonic boom so have no idea what the reality is."

I used to live on an Air Force base. The F-111 pilots where not supposed to sonic boom near the base, but often did. There's a loud bang or three, and the windows rattle. They where usually a lot closer to the ground though.

Re: If the busses could borrow the rails

"this all depends on the practicality of getting the busses up and down quickly enough."

And a steady supply of barf bags, and inflatable casts for the brittle of bone.

Re: What I find funny is...

'They'll claim the "things" before where "shelters" not Apple iBus Stops. The almighty and holy Steve does bring us the amazing "iBus Stop"'

FTFY

Re: Stupid idea that needs to go where stupid goes.

"We need to breed legions of mole-people to deal with the allans aliens and wacky ancient races. They could also build the tunnels...

"After that? Well, they can be just another ethnic group for the mail to complain about 'getting glasses prescriptions'."

I think after that the get called morlocks.

FYI: There's a cop tool called GrayKey that force unlocks iPhones. Let's hope it doesn't fall into the wrong hands!

Re: "...when the device, a 4x4x2-inch box, is stolen from police..."

Yeah, that's a "when" not an "if". I recall when all the security cameras where stolen from a major cities central police station.

Taxpayers chuck burnt-out Bongs* millions of pounds to 'decelerate'

"There's an irony to knocking down a lot of live/work artistic units just to build live/work artistic units that are a lot more expensive."

I think that's called gentrification, it's not irony, it's increased profits.

Cyborg fined for riding train without valid ticket

Re: Did he pay the appropriate fare for the journey?

"Is it just me or has the quality of the comments on here taken a huge dive?"

I've noticed a big increase in the number of Anonymous Cowards commenting. Makes it hard to follow when a few of them get into an argument.

Mulled EU copyright shakeup will turn us into robo-censors – GitHub

The big problem is that all the code monkeys out there are copy pasting the same bits of code from Stack Overflow, all that crap code gets copyrighted, and it all looks the same.

Another anonymous coward commentarding about yet another anonymous coward.

Intel: Our next chips won't have data leak flaws we told you totally not to worry about

Re: So...a whole new computer?

"Keyboards last about a year max."

And I thought I was hard on keyboards. You type with a sledge hammer? Or do all your keys look like that all the time? -->

Developer mistakenly deleted data - so thoroughly nobody could pin it on him!

"Up and down arrow keys and the like on terminals issued escape sequence which tended to contain tildes."

Modern USB keyboards on desktops running Unix variants still do that in the terminal program. Dunno about Windows.

"Back in the day I remember a salesman dropping a Fortune (also a 68k box) from waist height - and it survived. I still can't understand how although the fact that it wasn't running probably helped."

I remember an ancient hardware fixing technique, drop a computer from a height of about six inches. If some of the socketed chips (in those days that would be most of them) where a little loose, this reseated them, thus fixing the problem. Have to do it the correct way around, or the chips did the opposite and fell out. Yes, you do this while the rust isn't spinning.

Some time last century a client was complaining to me about some rather important specialised OS they where using, that had managed to resist all methods he had tried to back it up. Penguinista that I am, I boasted that I could do it using what ever version of Linux I was running at the time. So he hands me his one and only copy of said impossible to backup OS on it's hard drive, and a suitably sized new and empty hard drive on which to back it up. Naturally while typing the dd command I thought would do the trick, I got i and o the wrong way around...

Re: Penny pinching...

Or just count them as test restores, a backup system isn't a real backup system until you regularly succeed at test restores.

Re: Two years ago

"Why the hell does rm not return an error when an argument is empty?"

I'm still wondering why rm returns an error when the thing you are trying to delete doesn't exist. If it had existed, it would no longer exist afterwards, so the result is the same.

Re: Never edit the fstab table on a production system...

"The number of dynamically linked executables on a Linux system is quite high and, unfortunately, includes the "mv" command. Best laid plans and all that."

This is why you keep a statically linked busybox or toybox around.

A smartphone recession is coming and animated poo emojis can't stop it

"Except, of course, when the object of removing the battery is to guaranteed downtime for security purposes"

Or in the case of my old Galaxy S3 phone as it was slowly becoming an inert slab, sometimes the only way to fix the current problem is to kill the power, much easier when you can quickly pull out the easily removable battery. For several months that was the only way I could hang up after a phone call. The proximity sensor that tells the phone to blank the screen when you hold it against your ear, had died and was stuck on, so all phone calls had to be done with a turned off screen, no way to fondle the "hang up" button. I just didn't bother with DTMF phone menus, luckily I rarely encounter them anyway. Another reason why I now use a dumb phone for phone stuff. Alas that can't be done to my new Moto Z, it was a trade off for other features. sigh

Re: Back to basics

"Absolutely, and a phone that you can drop and it still works."

Reminds me of when I was demonstrating why I tend to keep two phones in my pocket. "These cheap dumb phones tend to be tough beasts." I say as I bounce it across the table to them, "These expensive smart phones tend to be fragile." I say as I show the fondle slab encased in it's armour, carefully laying it gently on the table in front of them. I use the dumb phone for phone uses, the fondle slab for everything else.

"I just sit it under a bright light for a day as it's solar powered. It only happens a couple of times a year these days, but a downside is that Citizen no longer service it..."

That's the reason why I eventually got rid of my solar powered watch, could no longer get the battery replaced. These days I no longer wear a watch, I have two perfectly good phones in my pocket, both get synced to network time one way or another. Oddly enough, I use a large solar powered battery to charge them.

Tim Berners-Lee says regulation of the web may be needed

Re: Who is the she

"Must be a transexual then. Seeing as he was father to Jesus according to the bible."

Parthenogenesis is a thing, it's the most common form of virgin birth. Maybe that's why there is a Parthenon in Greece.

"What did your family do before the internet?"

Lived in the same house. We have moved on since then, the two hour flight each way means I don't visit them quite so often as when it was just a two second walk to the living room.

Re: 'Not a good reputation for data protection'

"We need baby Googles:"

Googie eggs?

"It's almost at the point where if the W3C thinks something is a good idea, that looks like a red flag."

I had that feeling when HTML 5 came out, and I looked at the many pages used just to LIST the new technologies it brought with it.

Re: What's the problem?

"Male 'roo don't like male humans especially during mating season - what they think of female humans hasn't been imparted to me.."

This particular Aussie male human however thinks that 'roos are delicious, especially with Vegemite. Being a male human, apparently mating season is every six seconds, so I don't think that comes into it, I'm not hungry that often.

I see you're writing a résumé?!.. LinkedIn parked in MS Word

I just got another "Dear Deleted" email today, suggesting that if I didn't want to agree to their new terms and conditions, I can close my account.

Google 'screwed over' its non-millennials – now they can all fight back

Which is the main reason I turn down Google every time they want to hire me.

Re: The youthful white and Asian monoculture

I think there's a few more, they are just really small minorities that no one has heard about, thus are safe to discriminate against. I fall into a few of those, which is why I'm currently unemployed and poor, despite being very talented and experienced. Oh, and I'm on the wrong side of 50 as well.

On the plus side, I'm now old enough that Google headhunters no longer call me.

UK.gov admits porn age checks could harm small ISPs and encourage risky online behaviour

"Is UK generally more prude than the rest of Europe, or is it just a small fraction of vocal prudes pushing this through?"

Yes.

SpaceX's internet satellites to beam down 'Hello world' from orbit

Re: Parachutes

"I assumed when I read this that SpaceX was using a parafoil due to their steerability."

No need to make that assumption, the article said - "The new fairing has a parafoil added,"

Half the world warned 'Chinese space station will fall on you'

The slow-moving vessels from China are even slower, or so I hear.

I'll get my coat, it's the one with the rocket powered rubber ducks in each pocket.

Boffins discover chemistry that could have produced building blocks of life in space

Re: DNA

Ah but first they had to have a meeting to form the committee to create the bureaucrazy to have more meetings to create the conference, then many more meetings coming up with the logo, and much money advertising it, then postponing it at the last minute coz the new gubermit decided that atoms from the east side of the periodic table are no longer allowed to travel to the west side, so now we have to have meetings and planning to move the conference somewhere in the middle, with more advertising, before they could actually have that conference you mentioned.

No wonder it took billions of years.

Fear the wrath of robots, for their judgement is final and irrevocable

Re: The rise of the machines

The computer says no.

With more and more interracial couples breeding, race might be getting harder and harder to determine. I think there has recently been very white looking people in USA and Australia at least, claiming African or Australian Aboriginal descent. If the out of Africa theory is correct, we are all descended from Africans.