Posts by Flocke Kroes

Re: Evidence you would love to see

Here you go Pat Att(orney?). Evidence of low patent quality being 'sorted out' at great expense in post grant litigation. The patents are for generic data transmission, in this example, from a ventilator.

It took me less than 30 seconds to find this despite cases like this not hitting the news every week ("Dog Bites Postman!"). Wilful ignorance? Fingers in ears while shouting "LA LA LA"? I am sure you know damn well what is going on but it is to your financial advantage to pretend otherwise.

Re: When?

When your legacy applications run on wine, when you friends use libreoffice, when new laptops come with Linux installed by default and when unicorns bring me fresh margaritas when I get out of my swimming pool on the moon to enjoy the rainbows.

If you have not already found it, I think you would enjoy lawcomic.net, a lawyer using comics to explain how the law was supposed to work and what actually happens instead.

Re: Boggle of the Day

Start with a black hole. It is black. Put a star in orbit next to it. The side of the star closest to the hole experiences more gravity and is pulled closer to the black hole. The side of the star further from the black hole experiences less gravity and moves further out. The inside track around the black hole is shorter so stuff on the inside pulls ahead. The outside track is longer so stuff falls behind. Quickly the star becomes a disk around the black hole like the rings around Saturn.

Saturn's rings are in every way on different scales from a black hole accretion disk. Saturn is a huge, a lightweight and it takes hours to days for ice to slowly orbit Saturn. Bits of Saturn's rings occasionally collide with each other. Bits of an accretion disk rub against their neighbours continuously. Lots more mass, tiny distances and everything going really fast. The friction heats the disk up till it glows. We are not talking boring red hot, sun-yellow hot or blue super giant hot. The colour for this temperature is X-rays. Enough X-rays to push stuff away from the accretion disk and limit the rate at which a black hole can grow (yes really - lumps of light pushing stellar masses away from the intense gravity near a black hole).

The black hole is still black but people talk about light 'from a black hole' when they mean light 'from an accretion disk'. No wonder people get confused and think scientists contradict themselves faster than a president.

Re: these services might actually become regulated

Regulation = (Billing information + Complete logs → GCHQ)

Re: Satanism

Church of Satan is not Satanism. The name comes from Christian mythology - God's favourite angel who rebelled against the god's rule. Church of Satan is a collection of atheists disliking rule by a Christian church. They identify with a character in a story without believing the character is real. If you like truth justice and the American Way you could start the Church of Superman without requiring members of your club to believe Superman is real. You can also donate to the Church of Perpetual Exemption without believing John Oliver exists.

Re: policy being legal

Trump never cares if his executive orders are legal. In fact there is a strong advantage to them being illegal. It gives them better news coverage, he can point at the news coverage and say he owns the libs ("look at the crybaby snowflakes scream"), the order will not do any damage and he can say that the constitution is blocking him from making America great again. Get rid of the constitution so he can be the new permanent dictator and really get things done.

I was expecting Trump to cave in as soon as he realised his twitter account was at risk. Clearly he needs a new policy that appeals to voters terrified of immigrants. How about "Build a wall and make the Mexicans pay for it"?

Re: Elitist

If someone wants to learn something I am good at I am happy to help. For some reason this makes me an elitist. (Should I be less selective in those a choose to help and include people telling me firk off and leave them be because they are not interested?)

I do come across people who claim a skill but take every opportunity not to share it. You are welcome to call such a person elitist but please consider "hopelessly incompetent and terrified of being found out" instead.

Indiscriminate use of 'elitist' smells of the anti-intellectualism often used to keep people away from 'elitist' medical doctors so they will buy Miracle Mineral Supplement (industrial bleach) instead.

Microsoft reputation

Microsoft worked really hard to earn a certain reputation: Embrace, extend, extinguish.

When there was an opportunity to use .net on Linux my first question was about the patents. I fully expected anyone making money from .net or a clone to have their profits taken away by Microsoft's patent lawyers. Clearly I was not alone in this concern because Microsoft made a public statement resembling a promise not to use their patents until the wind changed. As this convinced hardly anyone Microsoft came out with more weasel worded non-commitments.

I stopped paying attention years ago. Perhaps there is some legally binding commitment by Microsoft not to patent troll .net (or clone) users. It is simpler to use other tools than to look for and hire a lawyer to check such a commitment.

Re: amanfromMars 1

I just talked to her (emacs: <alt>x doctor). Eventually I almost got her on topic:

Kroes: No. I came to you to talk about Zo.

Eliza: Why do you say you came to me to talk about zo?

Kroes: I said I came to you to talk about Zo because I came to you to talk about Zo.

Eliza: Are you satisfied with the fact that you came to me to talk about zo?

Kroes: I am unsatisfied because I cannot get you to say anything interesting about Zo.

Eliza: When did you first know that you cannot get me to say anything interesting about zo?

Kroes: A few minutes ago.

Zo looked like she could do a reasonable job of forming a relevant and accurate reply using information from the internet - which was hilarious when she was asked about Micros~1 and Windows.

Re: Trump is an utter shitweasel

That did not stop him last time but last time many people believed that a shitweasel could never get elected president. Americans will not make that mistake again until 2024.

Re: Bean counters

Calling Boeing management "bean counters" implies an unproven ability to count. Boeing management do have an extremely valuable skill for their shareholders: They can get laws passed requiring NASA to buy from Boeing. They are able to do this because of Boeing's proven record of late and over budget delivery of defective equipment requiring purchase of yet another law forcing NASA to spend even more tax payers' money on Boeing.

Re: Loaded words replaced by euphemisms

When BFR changed into a Big Falcon Rocket a few people called others falcon idiots. Egghead has swapped back and forth between compliment and an insult depending on time and place. It was once fashionable for block people to call each other with a word derived from the Latin for clean shiny black (Latin has another word for dirty disgusting black that Romans and racists never used for people).

I am sure horrible people will find ways to be offensive with the new words.

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone,' it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.'

P.S.: Twitter to stop using sanity checks? Is there any evidence they ever started?

Re: laugh or cry

I want to cheer for their honesty - even if they missed a few words out:

We want [really really want even though we are unable] to reassure our customers that their data was not at risk as a result of this error. [Luckily we do not have to comment on all the other errors at this time]

If there is something to laugh or cry about it is how much I have lowered my expectations of what counts as an impressive amount of honesty.

I was thinking they ought to notice something was up(side down) when they tried to click a button. Apparently they lacked the ability to get the pointer on the required button when the pointer moved in the opposite direction to the mouse.

Re: must have eliminated the height marker

I would not bet on it. A facial gaydar neural net was tried with photos with and without the the faces blanked out. It gave the same answers both times so whatever it was making decisions on (clothes? background?) it wasn't the faces. An interesting test of this Mr Cudoogo detector would be to try it with and without blanked out faces.

Re: Resistance is useless

The Borg were going to say "Resistance is useless" but the Brits on the cast burst out laughing and the Americans did not know why until after they were told about HHGTTG. s/useless/futile/ was done to so that a UK audience could take the Borg seriously.

Re: It's where the government keeps their Brexit and Covid plans...

Alright, but what is in the other 21,998 files?

Re: Censorship is bad mmkay

I mean that if someone defaces a US government website the US government can put it back how it was without fear of that person going to court, shouting "Help! Help! I am being oppressed!" and successfully getting any kind of judgement against the government.

Re: Remove high accuracy timers?

Years ago some AMD hardware had defective High Precision Event Timer hardware which had to be disabled to keep operating systems happy. This often became company policy which remained in place long after all the defective hardware was retired. Clearly plenty of people were unaware of any problems caused by disabling perfectly good HPETs.

There is a wide variety of timer hardware and well made software should ask the OS what is available, what each is capable of and use the most appropriate for the task. There are piles of web pages about the effect of re-enabling HPETs on various games. Occasionally someone noticed a clear improvement. Lots noticed about one extra frame per second and some did not spot any measurable change. To me this looks like many games are able to cope with whatever hardware they find with just the odd combination of hardware and software benefiting from a specific extra time source.

"less /proc/timer_list" shows that lots of timers are being used but it is not obvious what they are being used for and how much precision they really need. An off switch could cause noticeable problems but a reduced precision knob might be harmless and useful.

Backwards?

I thought the ineptness and incompetence of POTUS was to distract people from everything else.

Re: not a fan of Musk

Like the cars, love the rockets but the man can easily compete with POTUS for the vile tweet of the month award.

Re: insanity

Patent law in the USA is just insane

Re: Please please please...

We definitely need to do something. Trump's popularity is down to 5 of the first 20 images on a search for idiot. Please make an effort to put Trump back at the top by doing an image search an clicking on an appropriate link or two.

Re: someone explaining

Optical fibres are almost completely transparent but over hundreds of kilometres that "almost" adds up to almost opaque. The light has to be converted to electricity, error corrected and converted back to light which costs electrical power. That power has to be transported hundreds of kilometres. You can offset the resistance losses in the conductors by increasing the voltage - at the expense of increasing the conductance losses in the insulator.

Copper is a better conductor than aluminium for the same cross sectional area. Increasing the area of the aluminium to match the conductivity increases the weight but as aluminium is much less dense the cable turns out needing fewer tons of aluminium than copper. Copper also costs far more per ton than aluminium.

Re: silly names

The -ene in acetylene is there to confuse people. The systematic name is ethyne. Likewise diacetylene should be called buta-1,3-diyne even though there is only one sane way to interpret butadiyne.

Re: Local wildlife

I am sure Sid could dismantle Spot but as Robomutt is remote controlled there should by quality video of who is responsible for the criminal damage.

Re: Calling Isaac Newton...

10m is a really big single mirror. With lots of mirrors and an unobtainable budget you can get to 100m. Bezos wants big manufacturing industry in space (so ambitious that I would call in SciFi). If that actually happens then the 18km mirror is "only" SciFi to the power of two.

Any time the technology for interstellar exploration is distinguishable from magic is a win. Include medical technology that seriously extends human life span the the stars feel significantly closer - at the expense of going to SciFi to the power of three.

Decide how far back in time you would have to go before people would consider our lives SciFi. I will call that 100 years so SciFi cubed is 300 years. I am glad someone is taking the baby steps now perhaps the next generation will be able build on that to make bigger steps.

Re: Texting to the rescue

Time to change it. How about: Password'; DROP TABLE Passwords;--

Re: protect what you value

If you have to register to get a data sheet, try "User Name" and "Password". Sometimes someone else has already save me the trouble - or Mr Name makes no effort keeping his account secure.