* Posts by Evil Auditor

2619 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jan 2009

BOFH: Is WHAT 'running slow'!? GOD

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Re: This makes me sad

Chad H.,

You're not the only one. Some years ago I remembered the early BOFH series and started the search. What I found was El Reg.

Badges for Commentards

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Re: "Your post will [...]* make it better. "

If you want to be understood by the yoof you have to write like the yoof. Not.

Now I do remember Sarah Bee (and how, El Reg, could you have let her go?!) but what the heck is a Pink Princess? Something obscene I didn't know of?

*was too long for a title.

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Re: @drewc

!Spartacus,

I'm not picky about my name. Anything goes as long as it's somehow recognisable.

The problem with the pure evil votes is that they are down ;-) Seriously, there were a few anon comments but I'm not going to check them. Anyhow, I'm not mad about the badges, especially not about the silver and bronze ones. But the idea of the gold badge given at discretion is nice.

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Re: @Evil Auditor

!Spartacus, Ralph B

I really like the word predant. Sometimes, with some people, you really know they are going to make a mistake...

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Re: @drewc

!Spartacus,

With my bronze badge, I had the ignore button for about half a day. Probably a bit of a change management issue at El Reg. 2,000, shouldn't I have a silver badge then? Maybe a few anon posts.

Anyhow, a golden halo for 10/1 up/down votes and devil's horns for 1/10?

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@Ralph B

I see were your coming from, being a bit of a pedant myself. But I'm really willing to take the risk to make grammar nazis disappear or so that their looking stupid.

And given the 10 mins is over, it's predant ;-)

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@drewc

Edit is fine - and I don't think it will be much of a problem.

But the ignore button is not coming back, is it? I really don't see its purpose.

(Btw, don't you count the net upvotes for silver badges?)

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Re: Gone all silver

jake, yes indeed, it's the fly-over. Would be a bloody big button otherwise, wouldn't it :-)

But the evil pumpkin is gone again. Not that I think it's of any use - as !Spartacus also pointed out further down the comments.

Evil Auditor Silver badge

I agree with the ignore button. Although having had a closer look at it I believe it's not a pumpkin face but rather a reproduction of amanfrommars and insofar totally justified.

Still, when and why were the ignore button and post-edit implemented and for whom?

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Re: Gone all silver

jake, there is a kind of grey pumpkin face between the commentard's handle and its badge which reads "Repeatedly incoherent? Just ignore them!"

Funny though I cannot ignore myself although I have no doubt about my own incoherent comments. May that be the reason why El Reg granted me a 10 minutes edit?

EDIT: the Edit (10 mins) button reads "Something missed? Afraid of grammar nazis? Edit your post while you can!"

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Re: Gone all silver

Yes, it is based on upvotes, 2000 that is IIRC.

But what interests me more is why as of today do I have an ignore button and 10 minutes of post-comment edit? Is that a new feature?

NSA, UK hacked Yahoo! and Google data center interconnects – report

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Stop

Who's surprised?

"...which is why we have continued to extend encryption across more and more Google services and links" I am especially grateful about the forced use of ssl in Google Search or Maps. Since our entry server opens each and every encrypted connection and decrypts it again it's all fucking slow. I usually don't care about someone snooping on my searches. But I'd like to have the option to use ssl.

Seriously, is someone here really surprised about the spooks snooping on Google et al? The intelligence services have been walking in and out at Microsoft, Cisco, etc for years. Hard to imagine they would cold-shoulder one of the largest sources of personalised data. Google+, Gmail, Calender, search results (ie surf behaviour), etc and all linked together and to an individual. That's Eldatarado, the wet dream of every spook.

But, should it be like that? The virtual 1984? NO, ffs.

Robo-drones learn to land by going bug-eyed

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Re: Bees are a bad example

John Smith 19,

That's where I've got the idea from :-) Can't remember though why the pigeons were abandoned. Couldn't they distinguish between foe and friend ships? Did they get bored pecking and started to wank? Or was it "f*ck, I'm going to crash! I quit."

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Re: Bees are a bad example

You're destroying my idea of strapping bees to the head of UAVs and let them do their beeish things to control the aircraft.

But for the described model to work it doesn't matter whether bees are good flyers or landers. All that matters is that it's a simple model that could easily be implemented and is independent of other high-tech stuff such as GPS.

In a meeting with a woman? For pity's sake don't read this

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Re: My Vendors have to be level set about my company

I don't know either but my guess is it belongs to the same category as power lunch or touch base and all the other bs bingo winner words.

Besides this linguistic think the OP is spot on.

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Re: Double standards

Well, that would make me leave the missus alone.

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The truth of the matter is that I consider it rude towards the missus to let her hear me talking to the gf. (In case you're reading this, it is, of course, only a stupid joke! You are the only one.)

Seriously, Dr Mouse, I think you're doing to only sensible thing. Whenever there is someone present who has no business with the calling party, I leave the room to not disturb them.

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Re: What bugs me...

You ain't Spartacus, but now all the evil pumpkin icons are gone! Let alone the one I never had next to my name.

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Re power lunch

almost made me bring up my breakfast

I'm glad I wasn't the only one. Actually, I had this vision of suited and tied marathon runners standing around a table and stuffing and squeezing those utterly disgusting PowerBar™ and PowerGel™ rubbish into their sweaty faces. Ugh!

Evil Auditor Silver badge

USA != the world.

How comes that they dare to refer to the world when in fact the study was carried out only within to limits of the USA?

That said, over here it's probably not much different. And I do find it rude when someone uses such devices during meetings, lunches. One thing, however, I perceive as even ruder than using a mobile during meetings. That is organising totally irrelevant meetings without any objective. When I happen to end up in one of those, i.e. I couldn't avoid it, I do and will put my time to better use and answer e-mails and such.

DON'T BREW THAT CUPPA! Your kettle could be a SPAMBOT

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WTF?

I don't buy this story.

see title

Only a merciful BULLET can really save a RHINO, say Texas hunters

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Re: Good idea!

I'm definitely not an advocate for hunting - quite the contrary. And yes, I think the species are better off without any human intervention. The problem is, that is not happening in our world. So animals, endangered or not, are killed for all kinds of reasons, e.g. food, fun, staying power, profit in general.

Already a few places (at least, only a few I know of) have implemented controlled hunting for (wealthy) tourists. The tourists get their game, the guides get a job and ensure that only the allowed animals are shot, and the tenancy brings in the money to pay rangers to protect the wildlife from poaching.

Now our black rhino here poses - from a human point of view - a problem because it puts its fellows at risk. To me the illustrated solution seems quite sensible.

(Btw, my earlier comment about rhinos wiping themselves out should not be taken too seriously. Thought that was obvious...)

Evil Auditor Silver badge

Good idea!

Black rhinos generally tend to fight to the death, with around half the males and 30 per cent of the females dying from combat-related injuries.

But why are we trying to safe a species that is fostering its die out itself?

On a side note, I could offer a rare chance to shoot a ginger rhino. Auction? I don't care, just shoot it. It was my former boss ;-)

Coding: 'suitable for exceptionally dull weirdos'

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Re: Coding: 'suitable for exceptionally dull weirdos'

@The Mole, yes yes, but that's because you are a dull weirdo! At least in the view of this not very exceptional blogger Willard Foxton.

What I got at school was some ol' Mac to "learn" using a word processor and such (that might be part of the reason why I still can't stand Apple;-). What I had at home, having obviously been a dull weirdo myself, was a PC/XT, first with Basic until that bored me and then Turbo Pascal. That was great for me.

Software programmes are so omnipresent that at least some basic programming, algorithms should be taught at school. It helps to understand what is now quite a big part of our surroundings. And I believe knowing how programmes basically work also helps to understand how to use them as a user - far more than e.g. learning how to use MS Word 2003 and then start all over again with Word 2007. But does it have to be coding in at least two programming languages? Not necessarily at school.

HAD IT with Planet Earth? There are 12 alien worlds left to try out

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Happy

Re: @Evil Auditor

Phew, Ledswinger, I'm glad you see it this way. Before, I almost feared that I outed myself as necrophile.

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@JustaKOS - "what's the point"

...would to some extent make up for trashing it here. Only if we avoid spreading the seed for human life, too ;-) </sarcasm>

But, did we really trash up here? I do believe that we should limit our impact on earth as much as possible which we certainly don't. Insofar we did and do trash it up. But in the end, nature seems to cope quite well with mankind. And what we are concerned with is not so much some extinct species. What we are really concerned with is nature's impact on us. For example, global warming/climate change or deceasing bees? Scary thing 'cause we as mankind might be in trouble. Nature will cope with it as it did in the past. With or without humanity, nature doesn't really care.

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Re: @Evil Auditor - @JustaKOS - "what's the point"

We could even turn that question around given the mortality of our earth: are we obliged to spread life?

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@JustaKOS - "what's the point"

Good point. I do see life - in general - as something very special. It's fragile and limited to quite a short time frame (in matters of the universe) before it all gets swallowed by the sun.

For me, spreading life (depending on the point of view it can also be called pollution, contamination, etc.) boils down to two questions. The first, rather philosophic question is whether we have the right to spread life further than our earth (or solar system).

As I hinted earlier, I don't mind seeding dead planets. But even if it's only some native bacteria and such living there I think we should stay far away and not risking to kill them with our own. And this brings me to the second question: how rare is life in the universe, i.e. how many of the planets in habitable zones have developed some form of life?

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Re: Great news!

@JustaKOS, I agree, I don't think earth is the only place that developed life but it's not very likely that those few places we can spot from here did the same. In that sense, no harm be done. But what's the point of spreading our life beyond earth? Is it the pursuit of immortality? (This is not a question of miserable me, I seriously wonder why we would/should do that.)

Evil Auditor Silver badge

Great news!

So we can go on wasting our own earth 'cause there are exoplanets out there waiting to be invaded by human pest?

That makes me wonder, maybe we, i.e. life on earth, are only a bloody von Neumann probe. Humans would hardly survive a trip to one of those exoplanets but enough information might get there to pollute the environment and start a new form of deadly life. (And maybe I'm just a bit miserable today.)

Obama to Merkel: No Americans are listening to you on this call

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Re: Outraged?

I couldn't agree more.

by confirming that President Barack Obama had told Merkel that the US "is not monitoring and will not monitor" the chancellor's telephone conversations is just a load of rubbish. It is - and must be - the responsibility of each country to keep other spooks out. I do understand that not each and every country has the capability of maintaining its own secure, i.e. not back doored, encryption, at least for its government. But countries such as Germany or France should be able to do exactly that.

Vulture 2 paintjob: Kim Jong-un battles flag-waving Brits

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Re: To be honest...

Wise words by a wise man. Call it pub'o'clock!

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Coat

Re: To be honest...

Lester, I have to somewhat agree with Shades. "with a couple of you" as it is written here has rather the meaning of an indefinite small number. This can, of course, also mean two but in the context of showing three versions thereafter it most likely doesn't.

Although you can consider the two who went for a red/black scheme together and call them couple I think it would be more appropriate to write ...with two of you opting to ditch the white.

Mine's the one with the Guide to Completely Superfluous Comments in its pocket.

Baldness fix from foreskin follicles

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Happy

Bald

Never understood what the problem with baldness is. I'm not bald but from time to time I shaved my head. Women like it. If it's too cold put a hat on. It's that simple.

Deploying Turing to see if we have free will

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Do I make my decisions using recursive reasoning?

I do have some doubts about this. Maybe it's just me but consider the following situation. I see a gorgeous girl sitting at the bar. Do I invite her for a drink or not? There's not much of conscious reasoning in answering that question, it's just a gut feeling that tells me whether to ask her. Ok, some machine, far beyond today's technology might be able to model decision-making - I cannot exclude this possibility.

What current information (i.e. all that my senses sense) and what experiences do I take into account ? And what of all that do I leave out? What mood I'm in? Good luck with modelling that.

Up to now, all that was shown is that scientists do not really understand our decision-making process. This is especially true about the neuroscientists that propagated the view that we don't have free will. What they showed, in brief, is that our brain makes a decision before we are consciously aware of the decision. Is it so unthinkable to think that decision-making not only takes place in consciousness?

Furious French choke on chardonnay over NSA's phone spying in France

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French outrage!

It's a bit hollow, isn't it, coming from one of the few "civilised" countries whose intelligent service actively supports it's (somewhat) private sector with industrial espionage. And who in the first place enabled such broad snooping (or didn't prevent it)? One would think the French government should have known one or the other bit about it.

What's currently going on within France that they need a bit of their beloved American outrage?

That's a lotta cats: 40% of YouTube vids are streamed to mobes

Evil Auditor Silver badge

... so iPads around the world are potentially sitting in man caves playing music while appearing as mobile consumers of video.

Not only that but also companies' intranets blocking youtube et al did in fact not equally block the demand to use such services and watch cat videos. So users do what appears sensible in such a situation: resort to a platform that isn't blocked, ie mobile device.

Hands up, who couldn't post to Facebook today? Oh, MILLIONS of you

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Trollface

Imagine the possible surge in productivity of Farcebook updates and El Reg comments were unavailable at the same time? MS might even produce a usable word processor!

Apple's first iPhone now COSTS MORE than golden mobe 5S

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Re: One wonders ...

I'd be quite happy with a Nokia 6210.

It could do with an updated battery to increase battery life even more. Leave the rest as is. Mind you, this mobile used to idle around for two weeks and I still could make a phone call. Compared to this those new smart phones can at best be described as portable - from one power plug to the next usb port.

Billionaire vows to turn 007's Lotus Esprit into actual submarine car

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Rinspeed

Ask Rinspeed, they did it, with a Lotus. Not as sexy as the Esprit though.

iPhone 5S autopsy shows WHY it can't tell which end is up – dev

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Trollface

You're holding it wrong!

see title

MEGA ASTEROID could 'BLOW UP EARTH' - Russian space boss

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Devil

Don't worry!

(...this side of the earth at least.)

This thing is going to hit New York. It always hits New York. Or Washington DC. Didn't you watch the documentaries?

Man+iPhone versus artificial intelligence: Anki robot racer slot cars

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Cool!

Want one. Or a few. That's all.

Send dosh (insecurely) via email, Jack Dorsey's Square tells punters

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Peace of Mind

You're safe with us. The privacy and security of your financial information is our top priority.

Ah, nothing to worry! Oh, it doesn't mention financial transaction. Never mind. What a load of dung!

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This is perfect!

I'm ready, I can literally see my bank account explode. Only one last little thing: can please someone (yes, I'm looking at you, Square!) provide me with a list of the Square subscribers? Oh, probably I can just download it from your website...

Hypersonic MEGA METEOR pulled from lake, then Russians drop it

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I don't care whether Breyv is a loon. But what did he smoke?

Screw Internet-of-Things: Boffins build Internet-of-Sound UNDERWATER

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Re: Biologically compatible?

@Katie Saucey, don't worry, there are plenty around to think about the penguins: whales, sharks, dolphins to name a few ;-)

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Modem

So, in fact, they developed a modem.

Rorschach test suggested as CAPTCHA replacement

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@Gray Ham

Hint: it's all about sex!

OAR-some! 18ft SEA SERPENT discovered off US coast

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Re: Oarsome!

My fault. I still had something such as "this is awesome, awesome" ringing in my ears (with a heavy 'merkin accent). So much actually that the real, and quite accurate, meaning of it missed my brain.