* Posts by Christoph

3314 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Dec 2007

Can't dance? That's no excuse. Let a robot do it for you at this 'forced exoskeleton rave'

Christoph

Re: Applications for...

Or two Boston Dynamics robots doing the horizontal fandango.

Summer vacations put an end to rampant desktop crimewave

Christoph

I had to go down to stores every week to get more pens, until I left a note in my drawer saying something like "How about getting your own pens instead of always nicking mine?"

Rise of the Machines hair-raiser: The day IBM's Dot Matrix turned

Christoph

Re: Talking proper 80s...

"Wouldn't Philip Oakey be a better reference?"

At least it wasn't Kojak.

Christoph

Re: I had the reverse situation

"She was a gorgeous young blonde, really strikingly beautiful, and I immediately understood on entering that company that she deemed me beneath any effort to interact with."

With looks like that, possibly she had been forced into that attitude when nearly every male that she did interact with immediately assumed that she was interested in him and hit on her. So to avoid having to spend half her working day fighting off unwanted and persistent attention she had to keep away from them as much as possible.

Backdoors won't weaken your encryption, wails FBI boss. And he's right. They won't – they'll fscking torpedo it

Christoph

How will the US force people in other countries to use communications which it is known the US can decrypt?

Revealed: Milky Way's shocking cannibalistic dark past – it gobbled a whole dwarf eons ago

Christoph

Re: Why are there 3 dimensions?

With any other number of spatial dimensions you don't have stable orbits for planets.

We observe a Universe compatible with intelligent life because in Universes which aren't compatible we wouldn't be around to observe them.

Christoph

Re: we live in a simulated Universe

It's not too bad but it's got quite a few problems due to it being a rush job. The bloody client insisted it had to all be completed by Sunday.

When you play the game of Big Spendy Thrones, nobody wins – your crap chair just goes missing

Christoph

I wonder how many people thought of the space under the raised floor, checked it and saw the chair, but very unfortunately forgot to mention it to the manager?

You'll never guess what US mad lads Throwflame have strapped to a drone (clue: it does exactly what it says on the tin)

Christoph

How long before the extreme right start using these on demonstrations, ghettoes, abortion clinics, etc.?

Or someone uses them for attacks on schools.

We don't mean to poo-poo this, but... The Internet of S**t has literally arrived thanks to Pampers smart diapers

Christoph

Re: Request: Can they add temperature sensors?

Don't worry, the doting parents will already have excitedly posted all the details to the net. Including the baby's name. So when the baby has become 18 or so all their colleagues and partners will be able to find that information.

Christoph

Re: Oh Man, this is nuts

Nobody likes overflow errors

Sometimes the shit hits the app

Operation Desert Sh!tstorm: Routine test shoots down military's top-secret internets

Christoph

Re: Recovering after loss of power - paper bootstrap.

As detailed here

Experts: No need to worry about Europe's navigation sats going dark for days. Also: What the hell is going on with those satellites?!

Christoph
Alien

Re: Seems to me that adoption of eLoRaN would be a better post brexit solution for the UK...

No, it's the weird space/time warping effects from the drive of a passing alien interstellar spaceship.

Humans may be able to live on Mars within halls of aerogel – a wonder material that can trap heat and block radiation

Christoph

"Also, there’s the problem of how to ship large quantities of the material to build settlements – aerogel is insanely light but also very bulky. "

Or you could, maybe, manufacture it in situ from locally available materials? Silicon is hardly rare.

But the big question on permanent settlement of Mars doesn't get mentioned much: Can humans grow from conception to adulthood in Martian gravity? What problems would there be?

Virgin Media blocks Imgur, literally tens of people rage at UK ISP

Christoph

He added: "We never condone over-blocking"

These are the people who took out the entire Wikipedia site for a single (perfectly legal) image.

Scientist, war hero and gay icon Alan Turing is new face of the £50 note

Christoph

They didn't refuse the notes with Darwin on.

Industry reps told the UK taxman everything wrong with extending IR35. What happened next will astound you

Christoph

All the contractors will just go and work in Europe.

Oh wait ...

Hayabusa2 stirs up rubble on surface of Ryugu, pokes asteroid with sampling horn

Christoph

Re: Uneasy

Anything brought back that tries to escape will immediately be enveloped in an intensely corrosive, poisonous gas which it has never encountered before. It's called 'Oxygen'.

Literally rings our bell: Scottish eggheads snap quantum entanglement for the first time

Christoph

Re: How entanglement really works, how to prove it

There is no need to respond to people who post on the Internet their proof that Quantum Mechanics does not work.

Every component of the Internet depends crucially on Quantum Mechanics being by far the most accurate physical theory, most closely corresponding to reality, that we have ever created.

If Quantum Mechanics were not so incredibly accurate then the Internet could not possibly work. Not just a bit faulty, not a single part of it would function at all.

If the poster's theory is correct therefore the Internet does not work, therefore the posting does not exist, therefore there is no point in responding to it.

FCC boosts broadband competition by, er, banning broadband competition in buildings

Christoph

If this lot had been in power a century ago, the buggy whip manufacturers would have had laws passed to make Ford's use of assembly lines illegal.

Loose tongues and oily seamen: Lost in machine translation yet again

Christoph

" I struggled with the urge to tear up my bread rolls and feed some non-existent ducks."

Please don't, bread is bad for ducks.

Queen Elizabeth has a soggy bottom: No, the £3.1bn aircraft carrier, what the hell did you think we meant?

Christoph

"he 65-tonne, 4.5 acre aircraft carrier"

I think you mean 65,000 tonne there.

Facebook outage a peep at platform's ML tagging conventions, Baidu links up with Intel and Huawei on AI chips, and more

Christoph

"The text hinted at what was in the image, leading users to speculate that this was how Facebook's computer vision models was labelling the photos"

That text has been there for months, overlaying the image. It's nothing to do with the outage.

Crikey, that's FAST: China clocks 84 pulsars in 2 years using world's largest radio telescope

Christoph
Coat

It's stuffed full of electronics.

So it's an e-Wok.

Christoph

Re: In one way pulsars are not the great hope they used to be

I very frequently get single downvotes for entirely innocuous comments.

There seems to be at least one person who gets their kicks by random downvotes.

Surrey Uni boffins take us a step closer to the cyberpunk future with cell-scanning nanotech

Christoph

Is it read only? It would be really useful to be able to control muscles past a spinal cord break.

Cloudflare gave everyone a 30-minute break from a chunk of the internet yesterday: Here's how they did it

Christoph

Re: Obligatory quote...

They should have written in in APL.

White House mulls just banning strong end-to-end crypto. Plus: More bad stuff in infosec land

Christoph

Re: Sigh

You make a perfectly legal application for asylum, you can expect your innocent children to be traumatised and brutalised?

How can you bear to look at yourself in a mirror? Or don't you cast a reflection?

Christoph

Re: Sigh

"The problem is that our technology is effectively useless at telling the difference between baddies and goodies.

When the people who take hundreds of small children away from their parents and jam them in crowded unsanitary cages in concentration camps are classed as 'goodies', it gets pretty difficult to tell the difference in the real world as well.

A Register reader turns the computer room into a socialist paradise

Christoph
Boffin

Hey, EDLIN was very useful. You could redirect input to it, so you could do automated edits by reading the commands from a file.

This weekend you better read those ebooks you bought from Microsoft – because they'll be dead come early July

Christoph

"The fact that it decided against all these options and to simply kill the whole thing off should be a very big warning sign to anyone who has bought, considered buying, or will consider buying an ebook in the future."

So maybe they decided to kill off everyone else's ebook market?

While we were raging about Putin's meddling and Kremlin hackers, Five Eyes were pwning Yandex, Russia's Google

Christoph

It's easy to tell whether or not NSA and GCHQ are grabbing some particular information.

If it is technically possible for them to grab the information, then they are grabbing the information.

Yay, for AI: Autonomous pizza-delivery robots. Nay for AI: Big Brother is real and it's powered by neural networks

Christoph

"Nuro's vehicles are specially designed to optimize the food delivery experience"

If I order a pizza I don't want a 'food delivery experience', I want a pizza!

You're Huawei off base on this, Rubio: Lawyers slam US senator's bid to ban Chinese giant from filing patent lawsuits

Christoph

"acting contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States"

Seriously? The US is banning a foreign company for that? They are saying that everyone in the world must grovellingly act in the best interests of the US?

They've gone barking mad.

Comms room, comms room, comms room is on fire – we don't need no water, let the engineer burn

Christoph

Re: Leap Out And Let It Burn

Also, sound the fire alarm first, then try using the extinguisher. Don't think "Oh I can easily put this out, no point in worrying people".

If Uncle Sam could quit using insecure .zip files to swap info across the 'net, that would be great, says Silicon Ron Wyden

Christoph

Re: Easy way around this

My encryption method was good enough for Caesar, so it's good enough for me!

Spin the wheel and find today's leaky cloud DB... *clack clack... clack* A huge trove of medical malpractice complaints

Christoph

Option for nasty revenge

Log on to this type of site as someone you don't like, enter all sorts of embarrassing details, and wait for it to leak.

Boffins' neural network can work out from your speech whether you'll develop psychosis

Christoph

Re: What could possibly go wrong

You mean someone who used phrases of low semantic density similar to the example of ‘Sometimes things are things’?

Such as "Brexit means Brexit"?

This isn't Boeing to end well: Plane maker to scrap some physical cert tests, use computer simulations instead

Christoph

What's the problem?

I'm sure that the software will thoroughly test every single possible fault.

That they already know about.

Of course in the ludicrously unlikely possibility that there's a problem that the people writing the software didn't think of then they - or rather the passengers - are buggered.

Blighty's online pr0n gatekeepers are begging for a regulatory beating, says digital rights org

Christoph

Re: Not done with DNS

"If the website fails to put up the verification wall then the operator is liable under UK law (at least, if the UK.Gov know who they are and they ever come within UK jurisdiction)."

Is that how they are doing it? So if a national of a foreign country is running a website in that country, they are required to design it in accordance with UK law?

That seems rather prone to major problems if the government of that country dislikes the idea. And it would mean that operators of UK sites in the UK would be required to run their websites in accordance with the laws of all other countries. How about no photos of women with faces uncovered, or receiving an education?

UK industry calls for delay of IR35 off-payroll tax rules to private sector

Christoph

Meanwhile that same government is pushing for Brexit so that them and their rich chums don't get hit by the new EU tax avoidance laws which would make them pay their fair share.

Politically linked deepfake LinkedIn profile sparks spy fears, Apple cooks up AI transfer tech, and more

Christoph

Why are you using facial recognition on our own citizens

Yet again, it's terrible that this intrusive technology is used on US citizens and violates their rights - but it's perfectly OK to use on everyone else, they are not real people and don't have any rights that can be violated.

Japan drops banhammer on drunk-droning for the sake of public safety

Christoph

I thought it meant playing the bagpipes while drunk.

Large Redmond Collider: CERN reveals plan to shift from Microsoft to open-source code after tenfold license fee hike

Christoph

Hello Microsoft, we've just changed the licensing conditions for your use of our software. Kindly start paying us through the nose every time you use the "World Wide Web".

Hate your IT job? Sick of computers? Good news: An electronics-frying Sun superflare may hit 'in next 100 years'

Christoph

Re: Not wanting to boast...

That's now been renamed "Freedom Gas".

These boffins' deepfake AI vids are next-gen. But don't take our word for it. Why not ask Zuck or Kim Kardashian...

Christoph

Re: Bill Posters and the law

The case got delayed because they couldn't be sure whether it was him or Bill Stickers who did it.

Not very bright: Apple geniuses spend two weeks, $10,000 of repairs on a MacBook Pro fault caused by one dumb bug

Christoph

The screen brightness was turned down? That's a 1980s fault! They ought to know about it by now.

When it comes to DNS over HTTPS, it's privacy in excess, frets UK child exploitation watchdog

Christoph

"But the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a UK-based advocacy organization focused on eliminating child sexual abuse images online"

Ah yes, the IWF that blocked the entire Wikipedia site due to a single image (of an album cover, that was later deemed perfectly OK).

Protip: No, the CIA will not call off a pedophilia probe into your life in exchange for Bitcoin

Christoph

"the unsettling implication in all of this is that some of the people who would be inclined to pay this extortion demand would be people that had in fact been viewing child abuse images."

The real nasty is that some of the people who receive this may assume that someone else in the same household such as their husband or son has been viewing child abuse images.

Could you just pop into the network room and check- hello? The Away Team. They're... gone

Christoph

Re: BANG!

A friend who studied Geology was taught how to survive in the field when doing geological surveys.

Her lecturers had learned field survival as part of doing geological surveys in hostile territory for SOE.