obligatory xkcd
https://xkcd.com/1628
Posts by Precordial thump
163 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Jun 2019
Choose your fighter! March Mammal Madness pits poor, innocent critters against each other in mortal combat
BOFH: 7 jars of Marmite, a laptop and a good time
Microsoft spearheads a whole new genre with installation on the side of a Lyon tunnel
The perils of non-disclosure? China 'cloned and used' NSA zero-day exploit for years before it was made public
Tuesday 23rd February 2021 10:52 GMT 
Re: failure to take long view
OP was about the long view. The WWII advantage was a monumental achievement and exploited judiciously and intelligently.
The long view is the dichotomy between keeping a intelligence-military advantage, or converting that to an industrial-economic advantage, which has at least some exclusive-or component.
We don't know how much, if at all, the GCCS/GCHQ foundations advantaged the UK in the 50s - 70s (Suez? Cambridge Five? Empire? Iran? HK?), but we do know the momentum reflected in Manchester, Ferranti etc. could have been greater, but was not.
We'd rather go down in Down Under, says Google: Search biz threatens to quit Australia if forced to pay for news
Sunday 24th January 2021 10:18 GMT
Re: Google
So the Chinese would be paying Murdoch to criticise the Chinese government? Umm..... Have you taken your pills today?
And tell me that if Gladys had been running the show per Rupert's instructions in July and August, that the whole of Australia would not be in the same pile of cacky most of the other English-speaking nations find themselves in now. Victoria's last community transmission (not hitch-hiking from NSW) was three months ago. It doesn't take a dictator to do that. But you do have to listen to the science.
BOFH: Time for the MMOCC. You know, the Massively Moronic Online Christmas Call
Reports of one's death have been greatly exaggerated: French radio station splurges obituary bank over interwebs
Thursday 19th November 2020 03:09 GMT
Re: Wouldnt mind, though
As well as for the 68M subjects in the British Isles, Her Madge is also Head of State for 38M Canadian citizens, 25M Aussies, 5M Kiwis and numerous other nationalities. So for every day that you put a Michael or Judi on the throne, you could put one of us there, to balance the books for two and a half centuries of colonial imperialism.
Taika Waititi day alone would make it worthwhile.
(Icon for Korg)
Mr President? Donald?! Any chance you can actually decide if Oracle can buy us or do we have to leave?
The day I took down the data centre- I mean, the day I saved the day. Right, boss?
South Park creators have a new political satire series with some of the best AI-generated deepfakes on the internet yet
X.Org is now pretty much an ex-org: Maintainer declares the open-source windowing system largely abandoned
Why, yes, you can register an XSS attack as a UK company name. How do we know that? Someone actually did it
Monday 2nd November 2020 00:48 GMT
Re: No, this computer is not for personal use - it's my woke one.
Thanks be to Cory Doctorow, Randall licences his work under CC 2.0.
Frequently missed, but you'll find it just underneath his advice that reads:
xkcd.com is best viewed with Netscape Navigator 4.0 or below on a Pentium 3±1 emulated in Javascript on an Apple IIGS at a screen resolution of 1024x1. Please enable your ad blockers, disable high-heat drying, and remove your device from Airplane Mode and set it to Boat Mode. For security reasons, please leave caps lock on while browsing.
Sound advice!
Hey Reg readers, Happy Spreadsheet day! Because there ain't no party like an Excel party
Saturday 17th October 2020 00:50 GMT
Re: Grammar, please!
Correct. Google Sheets is singular.
Simple check: mentally substitute "not one" for "none" and re-read to see if your sentence still makes sense.
The errors come when you get hung up on using a singular verb immediately after a plural pronoun; it's right to do that sometimes.
BOFH: Rome, I have been thy soldier 40 years... give me a staff of honour for mine age
0ops. 1,OOO-plus parking fine refunds ordered after drivers typed 'O' instead of '0'
Wednesday 16th September 2020 23:42 GMT
Re: And this ladies and gentlemen...
My parents' cars were LNG070 and IOZ782. They upgraded in 1983 when I was 6 and I can still remember them.
As a Victorian, number plates have been letter-letter-letter-number-number-number since the 1950s, and they changed to number-letter-letter number-letter-letter about 5 years ago. Unless, of course, you choose your own. So if you get it wrong, you get it wrong by choice and not by chance.
So... just 'Good' then? KFC pulls Finger Lickin' slogan while pandemic rumbles on
You *bang* will never *smash* humiliate me *whack* in front of *clang* the teen computer whizz *crunch* EVER AGAIN
Sun welcomes vampire dating website company: Arrgh! No! It burns! It buuurrrrnsss!
You had one job... Just two lines of code, and now the customer's Inventory Master File has bitten the biscuit
Wednesday 12th August 2020 04:27 GMT
Re: The House of Lords
Should have imported your senate model from much further south, then.
Australian senators are elected from each of the states by proportional representation, six (sometimes twelve, it gets silly, don't ask...) of them elected each time around, for twice as long as the ones in the green house. Anyone who can muster about 15% of one state gets a seat.
Practical upshot is that it's exceedingly rare for any of the two dominant groupings to get an absolute majority, and compromise becomes a necessity. Sometimes it's with centrists, sometimes with fringe nut-jobs (witness the Motoring Enthusiasts Party), but unless an idea has consensus appeal, it's likely to be voted down.
Listening to leaders of a megalomaniac tendency (e.g. the one with the Italian suits, or the one with the eyebrows) rail against brutal reality has at least the entertainment value of watching a toddler throwing rubber toys out of the playpen, and for much the same reason.
Architect of tech contractor tax fraud scheme jailed for at least five years
Everything must go! Distributors clear shelves of ALL notebooks in Q2, even ones gathering dust over last 12 months
Trump reveals US cyber-attack on Russian election-misdirection troll farms
Wednesday 15th July 2020 07:07 GMT
Re: Has anyone checked the Tea Leaves?
His Orangeness was impeached for bringing influence to bear on Ukraine in 2018 to make it appear as if Joe Biden was linked to allegedly corrupt activities.
Allegations of back channel communications between Russia and Trump Tower during the 2016 election campaign have never been tested in court. This might have something to do with the effects investigating those events might have on the employment prospects of certain DoJ officials.
Whether soliciting foreign aid to influence the result of a democratic process in one's own country is treason is therefore left as an exercise for the voter.
Linux kernel coders propose inclusive terminology coding guidelines, note: 'Arguments about why people should not be offended do not scale'
Well bork me sideways: A railway ticket machine lies down for a little Windoze
Sunday 5th July 2020 04:31 GMT
Recently made the journey from Singapore to Penang by rail. All of the stations were purely functional modern architecture except Kuala Lumpur. While the main KL Sentral was a cavernous concrete and steel multi level thing, the original Kuala Lumpur station, I think Edwardian vintage, is a fascinating pseudo-Indian Mughal architecture, combined with the KTMB (Malaysian Railways) headquarters across the road, quite astonishing.
Linux Mint 20 isn't exactly bursting with freshness but, hey, there's kernel 5.4 and it's a long-term support release
CompSci student bitten by fox after feeding it McNuggets
GitHub to replace master with main across its services
Mortal wombat: 4 generations of women fight for their lives against murderous marsupial
Monday 8th June 2020 12:39 GMT
Quoted as FreeBSD fortunes 3, 1562 of 2181
First there was Dial-A-Prayer, then Dial-A-Recipe, and even Dial-A-Footballer.
But the south-east Victorian town of Sale has produced one to top them all.
Dial-A-Wombat.
It all began early yesterday when Sale police received a telephone call: "You won't believe this, and I'm not drunk, but there's a wombat in the phone booth outside the town hall," the caller said.
Not firmly convinced about the caller's claim to sobriety, members of the constabulary drove to the scene, expecting to pick up a drunk.
But there it was, an annoyed wombat, trapped in a telephone booth.
The wombat, determined not to be had the better of again, threw its bulk into the fray. It was eventually lassoed and released in a nearby scrub.
Then the officers received another message ... another wombat in another phone booth.
There it was: *Another* angry wombat trapped in a telephone booth.
The constables took the miffed marsupial into temporary custody and released it, too, in the scrub.
But on their way back to the station they happened to pass another telephone booth, and -- you guessed it -- another imprisoned wombat.
After some serious detective work, the lads in blue found a suspect, and after questioning, released him to be charged on summons.
Their problem ... they cannot find a law against placing wombats in telephone booths.
-- "Newcastle Morning Herald", NSW Australia, Aug 1980.
Made-up murder claims, threats to kill Twitter, rants about NSA spying – anything but mention 100,000 US virus deaths, right, Mr President?
Behold: The ghastly, preening, lesser-spotted Incredible Bullsh*tting Customer
Australian contact-tracing app leaks telling info and increases chances of third-party tracking, say security folks
Wednesday 29th April 2020 05:57 GMT
Re: Lockdowns aside
-a bus commute home is a very big exception
-who have your students been near today?
-who has your wife been near today?
Some people (such as essential service workers) still have a normal work day's exposure to a random selection of our community even with a lockdown in force. Can you tell me who on your bus is a nurse? An ambo? The bloke who cleans the public toilet? If we could predict modes of transmission we would not have gotten into this mess in the first place. Meanwhile, we need data.
Wednesday 29th April 2020 02:20 GMT
Speaking as a front-line health care worker who does know what the app claims to do and how it claims to do it, I'm prepared to recognise its imperfections and say to everyone in this country who can: download it. Use it.
Australia is tantalisingly close to completely suppressing this thing. Yes, the epidemiology that the app is based on is probabilistic, but, guess what: transmission of the virus is probabilistic over a population.
And if, $deity forbid, clusters start popping up again, then we need to put data into the hands of public health physicians quickly. Contact tracing stops small clusters becoming big ones. That is the sole function of the app.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
