Posts by Benegesserict Cumbersomberbatch

Potential sat-bothering cannibal coronal mass ejection slams into Earth's atmo tonight

They can see it in Mallacoota.

Data-destroying defect found after OpenZFS 2.2.0 release

Re: ZFS here we go again

When you can tell me how the hardware or other tooling (not built into the fs code) will tell you if your data has been corrupted, we can continue the conversation.

That time a JPL engineer almost killed a Mars Rover before it left Earth

Re: Measure twice, cut once.

Isn't that the first rule of government contracting? Why build one when you can have two at twice the price?

Vote now on who should take the lead in Musk: The Movie

Re: Ugly bags of water

AI generated CGI of the poo emoji.

X/Twitter booted out of Australia's disinformation-fighting club

Re: So, Musk is digging the hole ever deeper

Check out Musk's recent comments about governments in South America. His line "We'll coup whoever we want" pretty much sums it up. Free speech might be the altar at which he worships, but democracy, in whichever country, is something he uses to wipe his backside.

So you're saying they're basically /sbin/fscked.

Datacenter architect creates bonkers designs to illustrate the craft, and quirks, of building bit barns

Can anyone else hear the words "The fools! I'll show them! I'll show them all!” followed by maniacal laughter?

Once they get planning permission to change the colour of the Sydney Opera House tiles from white to black, it will be easy. At least there's a guarantee that there will be some part of the roof that the sun is directly overhead every hour of the day.

Tesla sues Swedish government after worker rebellion cripples car biz

All organisations instituted for the benefit of a group to the exclusion of an outgroup are like the Mafia, including corporations, unions, and governments.

How legally and ethically they achieve their aims is sometimes different.

Probably a relative of Junior Postman Groat.

Just as Elon is probably a relative of Reacher Gilt.

FFmpeg 6.1 drops a Heaviside dose of codec magic

Re: Version numbers are not what you think

Turn off the auto-crop option in Handbrake, then.

Handbrake takes the native resolution, aspect ratio, and crop parameters provided by the original medium. Its default behaviour then is to abolish letterboxing and whatever it's called when it happens to the left/right borders. Sure it gives odd resolutions but you can't do it both ways.

Another good reason to turn it off is that some codecs give strange artefacts on resolutions that don't have nice aspect ratios.

USB Cart of Death: The wheeled scourge that drove Windows devs to despair

Re: The dodgy cart driver had a dodgy cart driver?

Bill Gates dies on stage in horrific bus crash - film at 11.

There's definitely YT of that out there.

Sam Altman set to rejoin OpenAI as CEO – seemingly with Microsoft's blessing

Let's leave aside your assertion that competence has something to do with whether or not someone has a Y-chromosome.

Helen Toner was on the board essentially to be the ethicist on the board. She appears to have convinced a majority of the board that ethical considerations were being neglected because they weren't compatible with share price targets, a situation ethicists are probably more adept at recognising than most board members. This had consequences according to usual corporate governance, which then got overruled by billionaires when they sensed their power stakes were in jeopardy.

It's like saying Jeff Goldblum was being incompetent for urging caution before the hurricane hit Jurassic Park. Now the lawyer has come in and taken control away from Dickie Attenborough. Let's see if the lawyer gets eaten by a T rex - only the park is the whole planet.

Re: Tail eating

What they are capable of is generating pseudo-references, names of made-up articles in made-up journals, which while being total hogswallop, give the appearance of authority to something which also is likely to be total hogswallop, especially to someone with no ability or desire to check references.

OpenAI meltdown: Where does this leave the upstart, Microsoft, and you?

Re: new BLLASSED shmuture?

aManfromMars1, is that you?

Singapore to deter crypto investors with tactics like those used on smokers, gamblers

Singapore is a fine country. For selling gum, fine $2000.

(Ok, so I saw that one on a t-shirt in Johor.)

US nuke reactor lab hit by 'gay furry hackers' demanding cat-human mutants

Re: Idaho National laboratory

AKA The Evil of Banality.

Re: I met a catgirl once.

Cats often start from scratch.

Mad Max Furry Road

Long-term space missions may make liftoff harder for male astronauts

Re: Issue jock straps with lead cups

I think you'll find cosmic rays laugh as they go lancinating through trivial barriers like that - and the things they're there to protect.

Lenovo's USB-C Power Banks pack more heat than expected

With this one simple hack and enough ²³⁹Pu for a fission primary you become the owner of a fusion bomb.

FTFY.

Binance and CEO admit financial crimes, billions coughed up to US govt

Re: The cost of a jail-out card

A prosecutor worth a shred of integrity would have made the penalty a fine, plus disclosure of where the hard currency came from, and where it went.

Time for the corporate death penalty. All your shares are belong to US(A).

Remembering the time Windows accidentally sent Poland to the bottom of the sea

Re: Rome or Vatican?

Until Mussolini came along, Vatican City did not have any of the characteristics of a nation and it can strongly be argued that it still doesn't. Statehood was a legal fiction invented to resolve the "Prisoner in the Vatican" status of consecutive popes after the sovereignty of the Papal States was subsumed into the (then) Kingdom of Italy. Just like deposed heads of state of other countries were often given a legal status equivalent to ambassadors to avoid embarrassing legal questions being asked, being made head of state of a few ornately decorated buildings was a convenient solution to a diplomatic problem.

Unfortunately it conferred on a politico-religious interest group diplomatic influence hitherto only reserved for real nations, like the right to issue passports, the ability to sign and be party to treaties, to claim diplomatic immunity, to levy its own and avoid other nations taxes, and later, representation in the UN and its committees - something no other religion has, nor deserves.

No one has ever been born, grown up and lived, and died as a citizen of the Vatican City. The idea is inconceivable (pun intended). If every nation in the world cut off diplomatic relations with it tomorrow, nothing would disappear except some unearned privileges. It would also expose whatever is being concealed in certain archives to secular civil law, financial regulation and courts of human rights, something many religious institutions have painstakingly avoided for centuries.

Telco CEO quits after admitting she needs to carry rivals' SIM cards to stay in touch

Re: Gladys Berejiklian

Because nothing says integrity like a former politician who resigned due to a corruption investigation.

Must have a short memory as well as low bandwidth.

Lawyer guilty of arrogance after ignoring tech support

Re: Seems to me that ...

PS: Pluto is a planet, dammit.

Either explain your reasoning or clear the neighbourhood.

Australian video-streamer lets users opt out of ads for burgers, booze, and betting

Re: Fine control over ads would be great

SBS= Sex Before Soccer

'Corrupt' cop jailed for tipping off pal to EncroChat dragnet

Re: Corrupt cops...

His name was Chappie.

Re: She should get a medal!

The team that developed EncroChat should get a medal. Culture-hacking the criminal class - "Oh, there's an app / a phone for that, and I got it from a mate so it must be legit" - was an act of genius. They were literally pyramid selling compromised comms word-of-mouth from crim to crim. No-one who was not a crim was compromised by this, because only crims a) needed it and b) found out about it.

I suspect they hit this individual with as hard a sentence as they could because it was like the Enigma secret. Once it got out that it was compromised, the word was out, the system would change and any advantage would be lost, possibly compromising operations in progress.

Great while it lasted, though.

You must have sent your previous comment from your burner phone.

Microsoft's 11-year itch: The uncelebrated anniversary of Windows 8

Re: Not just that

All of what you describe is a subset of Micros~1's ruling philosophy - it's not your computer. Use of their software renders it their computer, which they are allowing you to use for a license fee.

Everything from telemetry and advertising embedded in the browser and OS, to updates forced upon users at arbitrary times, to forced overrides of users' autonomy just as you describe: the sign of the arrogance of a rent-seeking landlord that has successfully turned itself into an overlord.

Meta's ad-free scheme dares you to buy your privacy back, one euro at a time

506 years later...

82. Why does not the Zuck empty his profiles, for the sake of holy love and of the dire need of the users that are there, if he redeems an infinite number of users for the sake of miserable money with which to build a Website? The former reasons would be most just; the latter is most trivial.

Pope tempted by Python! Signs off on coding scheme for kids

Nobody

expects the Spanish Inquisition!

It is 20 years since the last commercial flight of Concorde

Not so bad now you can get on at Heathrow and get off in Perth.

Sure it's the same hours in the air, but at least you don't have to stopover with kids. And a great place to get off a plane in, too.

First Brexit, now X-it: Musk 'considering' pulling platform from EU over probe

Re: Hmm

Show me an instance where intubating a COVID-19 patient in type 1 respiratory failure killed them, rather than the cause of their hypoxia.

If someone in that situation dies because of failed intubation, they were probably

- predictably difficult airways to begin with

- already had underlying airways disease

- already had other immune compromise

- in the hands of an inexperienced operator (tends to happen when the demand for people who need it increases more than 10-fold)

and most importantly

- incipiently or already in respiratory arrest

If there's one lesson critical care specialists took out of managing COVID in the setting of respiratory failure, it was to intubate while there is still enough respiratory reserve to manage the stress of intubation. It gets really hard to do that when every ventilator in the hospital, including the old retired anaesthetic machines from the cupboard out the back, are in use. Hence lockdowns. One of the lives they saved might have been yours. Dead people don't get angry about their "rights" being taken away.

Re: Hmm

It's the red team's fault!

It's the blue team's fault!

Engage with any of them and you're being distracted from the reality: it's the fault of people who think that armed aggression is the solution to anything.

'Influencer' gets 7 months in prison for plot to interfere with 2016 US election

Re: Darwin in action

About 50% of the population have an IQ < 100. Their votes are worth the same as those of any highly stable geniuses out there.

If you have an argument that says they shouldn't be, I'd love to hear how it's different from valuing votes differently based on place of residence, money/property, heredity, skin colour, religion, or any other suspect categorisation.

Fraud doesn't get any less criminal for being less difficult.

Biotech exec sentenced to eight years for COVID-19 testing finger-stick fraud

I have a perfect test

My nose is a 100% sensitive COVID detector.

If I sniff anyone who asks and say "you have COVID", my test will be positive in 100% of people who have the disease and I would not be defrauding anyone by saying my nose is 100% COVID sensitive, nor even by marketing as such.

My specificity would be horrible, though. Don't believe me as the inventor of my test - do your research and understand your subject.

Musk in hot water with SEC for failure to comply with subpoena

Re: Musk had failed to adequately disclose Twitter stock purchase?

Painting a target on your back with "Shoot Me" written underneath doesn't qualify as martyrdom. His idea of freedom ends when it stops applying to him.

"Not me, because rich" is a cry for sympathy from someone who thinks the rules are there to persecute those without power, not protect the less powerful. Sympathy comes to the likes of Musk from people who have a problem with rules in general. They tend to forget that the rules are there to protect everybody, even them, and even the billionaires, who incidentally won't hesitate to run to a court if they feel someone has hurt their feelings, let alone their interests.

You have to be careful in your choice of heroes, they might turn out to be ordinary people.

One door opens, another one closes, and this one kills a mainframe

And it fits on a USB dongle now, too. Much less problem when it tips over.

Gas supplier blames 'rogue' code for Channel Island outage

Re: Days or even weeks to turn it back on?

Well, the gas appliances around here have pilot sensors in the flame which cool down when the pilot goes out and shuts off the gas valve.

Holding open the ignition valve button while it heats up again can make your fingers really tired.

0 <= Pr(anything) <= 1

(Something happening twice is a thing. Something that happens then unhappens is also a thing.)

Engineers pave the way for building lunar roads with Moon dust

Re: And how long before

BMXers will make a very functional half-pipe out of some of the smaller craters one day. And so much more time in the air before you land, too

Workload written by student made millions, ran on unsupported hardware, with zero maintenance

Is that the Looney Tunes episode where the sheep and the coyote clock on at the machine stuck to a tree at the beginning then clock off again at the end of the day? Sounds like that's where the fire list system is getting its data from.

No, how the surgeons behave is called ethics.

Excel recruitment time bomb makes top trainee doctors 'unappointable'

Re: "The NHS suffers from a chronic shortage of anesthetists"

You can't even talk to the Rottweilers without listening to the voice on hold telling you, "If this is an emergency, dial 000 and ask for an ambulance, or proceed to your nearest emergency department."

So then you have the paradox of the underinformed and sometimes misinformed, seeking information, being told to use their own judgement about whether or not what is happening to them is an emergency.

Speaking as one who runs an ED and fields the phone calls to hospitals, I get very used to saying "I can't tell how serious things are over the phone, so if you're worried come in and we'll check it out."

If they're worried enough to call, it deserves at least that much careful consideration. It can take some time and effort to work out if it is an emergency or not, even once you get to see a doctor. Trying to explain the 4-hour waiting times is a whole other story.

New information physics theory is evidence 'we're living in a simulation,' says author

Karl Popper says

The full expansion of this story is:

Observation has failed to refute the hypothesis that we are living in a simulation. If this hypothesis is true, however, the design of the simulation has thus far failed to give the game away by demonstrating a repeatable programming error that manifests as a hard contradiction, rather than a weird quirk of existence. No one has yet worked out how one might tell these two apart.

Re: RE: what are we a simulation of?

Just go the Flying Spaghetti Monster route: the creator wasn't young, old, or bored, but hung over. It's a great explanation for all the mistakes in reality.

SBF on trial: The Python code that allegedly let Alameda hedge fund spend people's FTX deposits

If the defense's claim is accurate, there'll be an else: clause making sure that these transactions are duly handled according to their special status as farting around with stablecoins or whatever this week's crypto bro buzzword indicates. Otherwise the flag is a get into jail free.

AI girlfriend encouraged man to attempt crossbow assassination of Queen

Re: In Other News ...

Or just cut out the middle-man - I was thinking of We Can Get Them For You Wholesale by Neil Gaiman. (tl;dr - bloke negotiating a bulk discount with contract killers)