* Posts by John Smith 19

16327 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

US stock markets unveil new IPOcalypse-BUSTERS to watchdogs

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Won't work.

Human greed (which is what caused those failures) will always find a way.

Security researcher Cédric 'Sid' Blancher dead at 37

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"You want nuts, try cave divers"

Yes, they are another group with a "special"* perception of danger

*As in "needs"

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Well, he definitely made an impact in his particular field.

He did.

At about 120mph IIRC.

It's called "terminal" velocity for several reasons.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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Re: You would think

"[Note:He was a ham radio operator and we know those guys are, let's say, a breed apart. By 'breed apart', I mean nuts.]"

You should probably avoid women mountain climbers as well. *

Watching the movie "The Descent" I kept thinking "Not bad, but not quite crazy enough."

*Especially the Dutch ones.

Microsoft's EAT-your-OWN-YOUNG management system AXED

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Joke

Sadly..

The cage fights to the death for the Christma bonus will continue.

In other news....

Random flogging of staff will continue until morale improves.

Europe, SAVE US! Patriot Act author begs for help to curb NSA spying

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Perhaps if he'd *read* the bill he's "authored" in the first place

this might have been prevented.

has anyone read this one either?

'Daddy, can I use the BLACK iPAD?': Life with the Surface Pro 2

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and yet I got 3 down votes for saying I wouldn't touch it for the MS account.

Let me be clear.

I won't touch Apple or Android either.

Had a frantic call last week from a friend.

Had Android phone, lost Android phone. Wanted to locate it but hadn't used his Google account since he set it up, because he lives on his phone and doesn't like computers.

Couldn't recall his password, hadn't written it down and hoped I could help him out.

Had to tell him, no password, no help.

It's not the sharing I mind. It's the coercion.

Get this. You don't own those products. They own you instead.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
WTF?

You have to have a MS account to use it.

F**k right off.

OTOH probably quite OK when you dump Windows and load a Linux distro.

NAO: £4bn of gov work doled out to just 4 outsourcing giants

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Re: Is outsourcery worth it then?

"Is not the critical issue whether has handing over government critical functions to private sector reduced costs, improved performance and given a faster response time to implement change ? If not stop it. When in a hole, first, stop digging."

True.

But you also hand over all the pension responsibilities of the govt from the civil service.

That's even bigger

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So 25% profit on turnover, of which 8.1% comes back as tax.

Nice work if you can get it.

Boffins agree: Yes we have had an atmospheric warming pause

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Re: That's not all

"He also missed the point that the various CFCs have global warming potentials of 4750 - 14000, meaning they cause as much warming as that quantity of CO2."

Yes, but do you think that may have had some effect as well (he asked, archly) ?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Meh

How interesting.

The only post on this thread where I presented actual information and people are split 50/50.

Do you not like the implication or do you not understand it?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Go

Good

It's a study of past papers and not real field work but it's interesting.

As always I hope this will be fed back into the climate change models ASAP.

IMHO climate modellers seem to have a bit of trouble with a fairly simple idea.

"When the climate data does not match the model, the odds on bet is the model is wrong (and if you're model architecture is poor it never will)."

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Re: WHO CARES!

"Please, argue all you want about whether or not this is true. And continue to ignore the critical question:

What the hell do you want us to do about it?"

True.

But rather long.

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Re: Oh dear

"@Schultz, >> The fact that we humans rapidly change the atmospheric composition

we have ? "

Yes.

Because CFC's were a patented set of chemicals that do not exist in nature on a large scale the exact date of the planets exposure can be be looked up.

And "large scale" in this context means ppm.

IOW Humans can a)Change the global atmosphere using chemicals b)Do so in a human lifetime c)Do so with concentrations on the same order of magnitude that semiconductor engineers use to change the conductivity of Silicon by orders of magnitude.

Brit boffin brews INSTANT HANGOVER RELIEF

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Re: are you seriously putting heroin alongside a pint of bitter in terms of danger?

"Which drugs are legal and which are not and the whole illegal drugs classification thing has bugger all correlation to.

a) How addictive the drug is

or

b) How dangerous the drug is.

Note that even 'How dangerous the drug is.' is a misleading statement as it give zero idea as to dosage or other activities performed while taking the drug."

True.

I'd be prepared to bet that neither Alcohol nor Tobacco (two of the biggest public health problem causing drugs) would pass modern product licensing.

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Part of his point is the *serious* damage alcohol does to a brain.

I once saw 2 brain slices side by side.

Heroin addict Vs alcoholic.

Heroin addicts brain looks normal.

Alcoholic's has holes in it where the brain cells were killed. IE sponge.

Yet one is a class A drug and the other has a legally sanctioned network of govt approved taxed dealers.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Happy

"Leaving only substandard brewers to work for Budweiser....."

No.

It's prohibition

No alcohol allowed.

Maybe only the substandard brew masters came back

Boffins boggled by ORB-shaped electrons

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Thumb Up

Astonishing, but I'm not sure what it says.

I think the evidence is slowly building for a new way of looking at the universe.

Unfortunately I have no idea what that is.

<sigh>

Thumbs up for experiment, which sounds pretty tricky.

Ultimate electric driving machine? Yes, it’s the BMW i3 e-car

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Coat

But misses out the important characteristics.

How long can it run submerged at periscope depth?

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Re: FUGLY

True.

It's got that deformed looking front end that some Fiat SUV thinggies have.

Nasty.

Titsup CloudStore reanimated... without the search function

John Smith 19 Gold badge
WTF?

A "cloud" with a 3 day outage.

Sounds like an app on a server to me.

Which is misbehaving

I want NSA chief's head on a plate for Merkelgate, storms Senator McCain

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Re: On a more serious note...

"Rep. James Sensenbrenner, one of the fathers of the USAPATRIOT Act, which made all this possible (read: probable) has now come out and said the NSA has gone too far and, with Sen. Patrick Leahy, has crafted the USA Freedom Act,"

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahah,

I doubt both statements. In fact I doubt he even read it, along with most of the other members of the Senate.or H of R.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Joke

@Don Jefe

"There's only one solution McCain can really understand and that's to invade them. Everybody. Just invade the shit out of them. "

That's right. It's the only language they understand, right?

I had that Barack Obama in the back of my cab once......

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Re: Spilling the beans

"Of course we all know why McCain feels Snowden has told them all he knows, because I believe that is exactly what McCain did. Isn't that right John? What ...Silence.... Well John, Judge not, least ye be judged."

I've always felt there's a market for a Vietnam theme holiday.

The PoW experience. Taste life as a true US PoW. Option of VC or NVA captors. Full pre medical included. No refunds. :) .

I'd wager most (I mean 95%+) people wouldn't last a week before they broke.

Any military that does not expect its soldiers to talk (and fails to plan accordingly) is delusional.

For the captive the trouble starts if they have nothing to tell their captors.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

"because it could,"

Really the `only justification a data fetishist ever needs.

I'll note a couple of points for our American friends.

This greatly expanded (along with it's "legal" approval) under shrub Bush II.

So McCain actually fought in the Vietnam war and got captured.

I'd take that experience of the "military option" over some substance abusing ex frat boy

any day. And maybe finishing the job in 91 would have stopped the estimated $13 000 000 000 000

looted "lost" from the Iraqi economy following the invasion.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
FAIL

Re: It should be Snowden's head

Says the entity hiding behind the anonymity the NSA hates so much.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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Re: How on Earth did McCain choose Palin?

"A Republican moderate who would probably have made as good a President as Obama - and he chose (or had inflicted on him) Palin."

Wanted a "Trophy" VP*?

Morgan Stanley: Web firms too fat and ugly to bother investing in

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Was it a Morgan Stanley insider who called one of the stocks they were pushing "S**t"

or was it Lehman Brothers?

I forget.

Be very careful of portfolio advice from a bankster with a)A holding in the company b)A big fee contingent on good or bad stock performance.

Google makes Gmail EVEN NOISIER, or should that be nosier?

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noiser *and* nosier?

We will look back on this as the time when Google got in on the ground floor of stripping peoples privacy for marketing purposes and the yoof were too dumb or uncaring to do anything about it.

The question is will the parasite get fatter and fatter off it's hosts (or "users" as they are politely called) or will the hosts institute "parasite control"?

Will Google be the Smallpox or the Malaria of the 21st Century?

TalkTalk's broadband base continues to fall as TV subs grow

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Perhaps they shifted because you are a)S**t and b)Send every URL to China ?

For "security."

Just a thought.

Virgin Media to hike broadband prices by nearly 7 per cent

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Proof the "Look at the new shiny" marketing stratetgy still works a treat.

Pretty shocked VM only covers 48% of the UK.

More shocked they will leave 2 of 20 (20?) properties uncovered. That's just weird.

And no I strongly doubt those speeds will last for much of any given day.

Seriously. there are about 400 UK ISP's.

The top six will continue to f**k you deeply until people start dumping them.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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Re: Wrong strategy

"Just to pick up on reliability of Lovefilm, I couldn't watch any film for more than 10 minutes before it started buffering every 30 seconds using a PS3 wired into the super hub. Lovefilm requires just a few mb according to their documentation, so you'd think 60Mb connection would be ample (no other devices being used either).

It drove me spare and after many wasted hours on their technical "support" line I bit the bullet and invested in my own router to take over wireless responsibilities, having heard about problems people had with the anything-but-super hub. Now I can love my films once more and the annoyingly frequent wifi dropouts my phone & tablet suffered from are a thing of the past. It was worth every penny."

Interesting story.

So their router can't do buffering properly but a 3rd party can.

Care to share the name for other Vermin sufferers?

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Re: Told you so

"Think of the poor shareholders who financed this highly leveraged deal ! They need a return on investemnt, dont they?"

Shareholders?

What shareholders?

That all came out of "Private equity." The new term for VC's and banksters who bank roll this sort of reaming "Acquisition."

SHIVER ME TIMBERS, it’s Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag

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Blackadder II reference.

And a quite entertaining game as well (it looks like).

But step lively.

You don't want a lick of the 'cat.

A steam punk VDU ?

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Re: You need to be thinking *phototypesetter,* not Linotype if you want to go that way.

"You just know that this thing is going to be so expensive that it will be installed in the managing director's office, where he will use it to train his philodendron, rather than actually having to work very often."

Actually I'm thinking more around a typewriter by 1890. A common (if expensive) piece of "office equipment."

"Baudot was a Johnny come lately in telegraphy (not to mention that what we know as Baudot is actually Murray's later version),"

That's tougher. My real core requirement was "No electricity."

"I'm beginning to think that a "practical" machine would benefit from your notion of phototypesetter, where only one master copy of each glyph is present, but with a pin-screen to store the image."

Possible. A spinning (or 2 in parallel for upper and lower case) with glyphs that could be pushed out would work provided you can work out how to push the individual glyph into the back of the pin board and index it to the next location.

"Of course, one of my favorite notions would stuff clear or opaque marbles (small as possible) into the bottom of a frame with translucent front and back, and perhaps an optically dense fluid. As each row of these "pixels" is "rendered", it is shoved up in the frame, with older lines emerging from the top. If the opaque "marble" were iron, the two types could be sorted magnetically. for reuse Of course, even a 24x80 screen of 5x7 (in a 6x8 cell) characters would need 92160 of each (actually fewer of the clear ones, unless we do inverse video) ."

Not quite sure I get you but the idea of (micro) sized beads, 1/2 black, 1/2 white is actually the core of some eInk displays IIRC from 3M. The correct term is "Electrophoretic."

eInk breaks the "No electricity" rule, but magneto optic (in the loose sense of the term) would be OK.

Every man, woman and child in the UK paid HP £21 last year

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Naturally *all* of those skills are delivered in house.

What's that you say?

The reality is they have an army of sub contractors and 1 man companies who do the work and all they really provide is the "client management" (IE Schmoozing senior civil servants and Ministers and of course billing services).

I'm shocked, shocked I tell you.*

* And that will continue while the civil service continues it's addiction to the monster everything-and-the-kitchen-sink contract with no cancellation or penalty clauses.

Our MOM's LATEST EGGS: 'Looking GOOD', chuckle Indian space boffins

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Impressive stuff.

This is a Mars probe for $80m.

But note they are far from out of the woods yet. Mars orbit has a bunch of dead probes that got there and did not produce results.

Thumbs up for "The end of the beginning."

'F-CK YOU GOOGLE+' ukelele missy scoops BIG WAD of $$ - for Google

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MySpace rises -> MySpace falls ->Facebook rises. YouTube rises ->

Basically what does YT have?

1) Name recognition.

2) Lots of content

3) Adequate UI

Pretty much in that order.

Google bought it because it has 1)Lots of users to data mine 2)No sorry, can't think of a 2.

The question is will Google do a Microsoft and strangle at birth any attempted entrants to the market?

Right royal rumpus over remote-control 'RoboRoach'

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Coat

Save the Roach?

Never.

And I don't fly coach.

Yes that is a Fun Loving Criminals album in my pocket.

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Joke

The next great fruity product?

The iRoach?

Flippin' heck! Magnetic poles of Sun are gyrating: What Earth needs to know

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Boffin

" but actually we'd just experience a slight reduction in our shielding from solar winds "

Which should definitely have an effect on cloud formation.

For bonus points what is the effect it will have.

Google to web: SHUT YOUR MOUTH or Chrome 32 beta will do it for you

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Happy

You'd think if this is so common why had no browser done it before.

But now it has been done I predict this will be everyone's browser update list.

Rogue US-Israeli cyberwar weapon 'infected Russian nuclear plant'

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Holmes

So *not* so carefully targetted as was originally thought.

Shocker.

If your bosses tell you you're 'in it together', don't ever believe them

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Holmes

This just in. Work is where you get paid money to spend people you man not like

Including subordinates, co workers and supervisors.

Depending on your personality and their hiring practices you might like most of people and you may enjoy your work, but that is the exception.

Yes, I do view all jobs remarkably like working for an "escort" service. :(.

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"We've got ourselves a patsy guys, we're good to go".

Correct.

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@Tony

"A dev team I was in was shit canned the day after the celebratory 'thanks for the hard work delivering drinks'."

Oh yes one outfit I worked for could always be relied to having a "culling" when a company lunch was organized.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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Re: REMF - Lol

"Echelon sounds too polite !"

It's a military term.

Martian MOM LAYS another EGG in SPACE - but it's not big enough

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Note the hstory of Mars probes has been hit and miss.

It's pretty challenging.

But there is room in their plan to compensate for this.

Still a long way to go.

NO! Radio broadcasters snub 'end of FM' DAB radio changeover

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I don't think the power consumption will go down on DAB unless an optical system works

No I've got no idea how to do that.

But that still leaves the problem that DAB stations are a)Few b)Far between c)S**t.