Posts by John F***ing Stepp

Broken lab equipment led boffins to solve a 58-year-old physics problem by mistake

in re this

Comes down to the measuring. stick.

Okay my favorite equation ever is that one whre you take the curl of the magnetic and electric fields do some simple math on them and devide the result into one.

gives you the speed of light. which is a Constant, because. . .because they say it is.

well, the two curls are constants, kinda. The magnetic one is based one Pi (take your calculator ot and devide Pi by four; now put a buch of zeros in front of that; you will be close).

Pi should not change.

the other is just some arbitrary number (I think) found by measurement or calculation and could change (like inside of a strong EM or gravity field ).

But our measuring stick cannot change, so everything about it must.

So the speed of lighi on mars must be the same as is on earth and time itself is different.

Eye. begins. to. twich.

Then you see that the damn stick is sometimes longer on one end than it is the other.

Realize that you are going mad anyway; might as well study quantum physics.

Eggheads confirm it's not a bug – the universe really is expanding 9% faster than expected

I really think my fruit loop theory is

Better than your fruit loop theory.

And being old now I can summerize it thusly. . .

Get off my lawn!

In the West, we're worried about shooting down drones. In Russia, drones shoot you

Actually, been done

With an AA12, a fully automatic shotgun; the results, kind of impressive. (left a mark)

More DAKA

From Red Planet to deep into the red: Suicidal extrovert magnet Mars One finally implodes

Hell, I would have gone.

(but being as I am 71 I seem to be "over qualified" for most everything now)

Florida man stumbles on biggest prime number after working plucky i5 CPU for 12 days straight

Re: Downvote time

Oh scratch that. Damn calculater was wrong.

One followed by 2239733 Fs in hex.

(Goddamned smart phone

Downvote time

I just checked, it does not calculate correctly.

OK, devide the exponate by 4 this gives you the number in hex with the fractional part (.25 or .75) determening the leading diget (a 1 or a 7) the rest being the hex diget F.

This one has a fractional part of .3 so it is not a Mersenne.

(I could show the math on that but it is kind of long)

Oh Deer! Poacher sentenced to 12 months of regular Bambi screenings in the cooler

Re: 'Murica never ceases...

'If Everyone potentially has a firearm, the Police will remain jumpy on the trigger when confronting members of the public, criminal or otherwise.'

Actually; no.

In Indiana, where one can get a lifetime CCW, the police do expect you to be armed; it is no big deal.

In other states it is very possible to be shot down if you are suspected of carrying a weapon.

Because in those states you would be a dangerous felon and legal to be taken without a game tag.

So, safer to live in Indiana armed or not.

Microsoft gives Windows 10 a name, throws folks a bone

Re: use of 'goto'

In school (a iong time ago) goto was concidered a no no in COBOL, while I agreed in principal I made the comment that we could do without the if then statement if we wanted to. Being called on that, I wrote the next semester's programs without if then statements. Not easy but worth it when my instuctor had to wade through 24 pages of flow chart per program.

(also made the line printer play the rumba as a side affect)

Boss regrets pointing finger at chilled out techie who finished upgrade early

Re: Oh so familiar (define GAAP)

Generally accepted accounting practice.

Probably getting downvoted for being a bean counter; sorry.

Ever seen printer malware in action? Install this HP Ink patch – or you may find out

Have I ever seen printer malware?

Why yes, I once installed a driver set from HP (some brand) that required a complete reload of the OS; I then opened the office door, the door to the dumpster, and gave the printer the freedom it deserved.

(Yes, I released a feral printer into the wild)

Birds can feel Earth's magnetic fields? Yeah, that might fly. Bioboffins find vital sense proteins

Using a watch

Covered in most survival manuals (not going to look it up) or just seeing which way the sun rises or sets. . .

Sun sets in the west south west, that way must be north, and directly behind me must be Drackula. . .

Holy helmets, Batman! Bane-like mask lets you 'talk' to computers without making a sound

Re: Looks like a...

Three days later the newest Intel chip bursts out of your chest. . .

(always wondered where those came from)

FCC boss to block 'national security risk' companies (cough, Huawei, ZTE) from US's $8.5bn broadband pot

Well

My other tablet does have a bit of China ware.

Annoying as hell; I don't use it much anymore.

Uber breaks self-driving car record: First robo-ride to kill a pedestrian

When I was very young

In a time before seatbelts, that long ago.

I was driving through town when a child darted out in front of me; less than three feet (less than a meter)

I think I heard the front bumper hit the pavement, and the child ran on never noticeing.

OK, I have fast reflexes, but this has kept my speed way down through occupied areas.

(I might have missed the little fellow by six inches)

Sysadmin held a rack of servers off the ground for 15 mins, crashed ISP when he put them down

My very first mess with that. The supplyer gave us a combo of various cable. One week of testing before anyone looked.

(all just co-ax, right?)

"The air likes you," I told the supplyer, "the ground likes you but if I throw you of the top of this building the impedance missmatch between the air and the ground might cause you some problems."

He actually thought I was making a joke.

Researchers create AI attacker to defeat AI malware defender

Re: The Stealthy Virgin Source vs Intellectually Challenged Moron

^

^

Continues to fail Turing test.

Mobile World Congress: 5 buzzwords, an homage to Windows XP and a smartphone snorefest

Windows XP screen

"It is said, by the elders in the back of the cave, in their cups; that if you stared long enough at the old XP screen, the sacred cows would come into view."

"Don't know about that son, I always fell asleep."

RIP, Swype: Thanks for all the sor--speec--speedy texting

What I use

When I went from using a pc to a tablet, I found out that I would have to learn hunt and peck typing; which was not going to work. So I found this nifty MessagEase thing that everybody else seems to hate (and no one borrows the tablet).

I am still not to the point where I can 'think' the words in (touch typing) but the tablet is going to last longer (there is only so many times they will survive being thrown out a window).

Who's using 2FA? Sweet FA. Less than 10% of Gmail users enable two-factor authentication

acctually, pretty good security. . .

Currently I am completly locked out of a gmail account as I can't seem to prove that I am who I say I am.

I guess that makes it fairly safe; if I can't access the damn thing I suppose no one else can.

I have a phone that won't get a signal where I live or where I work and my reference email died off when the firm that I used to work for went under.

So now Google is competing with Yahoo mail?

(and doing a damn good job at it)

IKEA flat-packs TaskRabbit to crack assembly code

Damn

I was hoping for 80586. . .

Docs ran a simulation of what would happen if really nasty malware hit a city's hospitals. RIP :(

This is really a worse situation

Than you could imagine.

Before IoT hospital care and the machines involved needed a common language, so one was devised (by commitee*) that allowed each machine to talk to another. This language is coded to the point that it would take a person at least a week to be able to read off the codes as if it were plain text.

At least one hospital (one that I know of) uses Perl script to do all of the tasks (nothing wrong with that, right?) because Perl is a get it done language.

All or most of the equipment suppliers are hard codeing in the common language into the various machines, really, I think that the only reason this disaster waiting to happen has not happened is that most hackers would not deam it much of a challenge.

* not naming common language, two letters and a number.

Downloaded CCleaner lately? Oo, awks... it was stuffed with malware

Re: Hopefully el-reg readers are aware of...

This is kind of wierd; there are down votes on every post that disses ccleaner.

You cannot really marry software, but, I quess if you think you have it is nice to know that you are the faithful sort.

(in your heart you know that ccleaner still loves you and won't hit you again.)

Whoosh, there it is: Toshiba bods say 14TB helium-filled disk is coming soon

And the Windows 20 build will only take half a disk!

Future proof!

Thousands of hornets swarm over innocent fire service drone

Works most of the time

Thanks.

Knew something was a bit wrong there; this thing only has spell check when I don't need it.

What I used to do

Take a bunch of freinds round to watch, shoot the nest with a slingshot, stand very still while wasps chase freinds.

Ran out of freinds; had to quit.

User thanked IT department for fast new server, but it had never left its box

Re: You can't reliably clean malware

I had one once that had 679 actual examples of (il)legitiment malware; some requiring a trip into regedit to kill entirely. The user was some kind of savant about clicking on the wrong thing.

(But kept me in extra spending money for years, so there was that.)

We all deserve a break. Pack your bags. Four Earth-like worlds found around nearby Tau Ceti

No, the cat is probably fine; humans, however, are likely to be considered an invasive species.

Want to visit your loved one in jail? How about Skype instead?

At the moment

Under the private prison system, profit rules. So if it is cheaper to keep someone in a 5 by 5 box than a 10 by 10 box then the box gets smaller. Eventually, once AI becomes really good, the box will shrink to 2 by 2 by 6 and feeding costs will go way down.

So yeah, don't do the crime and probably don't make posts like this one.

Oops.

Breathless F-35 pilots to get oxygen boost via algorithm tweak

Well actually.

I could be wrong but the problem as I remember it was a reduced partial pressure of CO; you would have plenty of oxigen but without the carbon dioxide in your lungs you just don't feel the need to take a breath.

Which would mean that in some situations pure oxigen would not help.

Perhaps a "breath stupid" light could be installed on the heads up display

You wait ages for a sun, then two come along at once: All stars have twins, say astroboffins

Well,

No goatee?

Discredit a journo? Easy, that'll be $55k. Fix an election? Oh, I can do that for just $400k

I just filter everything through what Abe Lincoln said about the internet. . .

Or maybe that was Washington, I will have to research this.

. . .

. . .

No, it was Lincoln's; the quote was "Go to the theatre".

Live blog: Fired FBI boss spills the beans to US Senate committee

I've been wondering for some time . . .

If someone laid out a deck of cards, all of them the queen of spades, in front of the head Ompa Loopa; would it change anything? Probably not; that sort of thing only happens in books and movies.

(Stiill, the moscovien cantidate would make for a good title.)

No icon because I don't know whether I am making a joke or not.

WannaLaugh? Funsters port WannaCrypt to Commodore, Cisco, Nintendo and Tesla

Now I'm

Kind of afraid to fire up my old Amiga. . .

(or the TI99-4a for that matter)

Police anti-ransomware warning is hotlinked to 'ransomware.pdf'

Thinking this might be the way to go

pine

Configure notepad (or dos edit, linux nano) to open attachments.

Or tell your friends that all future comunications must be by medium as you are spending the next couple of years being legally dead (for tax purposes).

Ransomware scum have already unleashed kill-switch-free WannaCry‬pt‪ variant

I would guess about now

Some one will be bragging about how fast Skynet will take this crap out as soon as we hit the big red switch. . .

Opposable thumbs make tablets more useful says Microsoft Research

Next up

They find out that most people have noses.

US copyright law shake-up: Days of flinging stuff on the web and waiting for a DMCA may be over

It was an Apple *

Point being, David was supposed to have been a mega genious who programmed in machine code and had access to a captured processor. There are only so many instructions availible on what we build and he only had to sabotage one interrupt; the one conrolling the shields.

Put that way, most of us could have done that but it would have taken a lot longer.

Since the script did not allow for a week of no sleep and ld50 levels of coffee, they wrote him in as super smart.

*windows, bsd and linux myself but apple has progrmmers too; comes to that the first time I messed with assembly it was on an apple ii, 6502.

Stanford Uni's intro to CompSci course adopts JavaScript, bins Java

Advatage/disadvantge

Almost same syntax as C C++ but has way too much DWIM built in; I have seen far to many Javascript programs missing simicolons that still ran.

The language will turn your arrays into objects on a moments notice causeing hard to debug errors (at least at first) and has hard to find different gottchas from one browser to another. What it will teach very well is that life is unfair and that you need to take notes.

NASA agent faces heat for 'degrading' moon rock sting during which grandmother wet herself

Moonstone Kops

All hanging off the side of a lunar rover and wagging what we can only hope are pool noodles.

(now I've that image in my head the rest of the night)

Far out: Dark matter bridges millions of light-years long spotted between galaxies

Re: False false colours

One or two more frog pills should take care of it.

Troll it your way: Burger King ad tries to hijack Google Home gadgets

I got so tired of this damned app

That I completly removed it after I got root access on this tablet.

(If I want something misspelled I can do that on my own)

Is that a phone in your hand – or a gun? This neural network reckons it has it all figured out

I think I have a derringer; and if I had a horse, I would definatly buy it a pistol.

You're Donald Trump's sysadmin. You've got data leaks coming out the *ss. What to do

Simple enough

Just make every bit of leakable news so damned nonsensable that any reasonable person would disbelive it.

(They might be doing this by accident)

The Mail vs Wikipedia: They're more alike than they'd ever admit

I think they did this under the radar

Wikipedia is a synonym for "crowdsourced knowledge"

Actually, wiki-wiki translates as fast so-

Wikipedia translates as half-fast encyclopedia.

Want to come to the US? Be prepared to hand over your passwords if you're on Trump's hit list

A natural progression

Extream 'bed' vetting.

Enhanced 'bed' vetting.

Digital 'bed' vetting.

Someone must have been 'abused' as a child.

Naughty sysadmins use dark magic to fix PCs for clueless users

The hard one

Is to do this kind of nonsense over the phone.

"My boss is watching"

Never mind him, just lay your hand on the top of the case and repeat after me; loudly.

Smart guns are a neat idea on paper. They'll never survive reality

Oh crap moment

I just had a disturbing realization; this d**n thing teaches bad habits.

You are supposed to keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.

Re: A really really smart gun

No, that is funny, and I would buy one. Have another upvote.

You know what, maybe Tabby's star ate a planet, ponder space eggheads

Obvious

And the planet we shall name Mickey . . .

Render crashing PCs back to their component silicon: They deserve it

You get that look. . .

Me

Tieing a hard drive to a tree and preparing to empty a 1911 at it.

My Wife

"What the hell?"

Me

"Help me find the shovel; still have to dig a shallow grave". . .