Posts by John Smith 19

I wonder if the US has a unified water grid...

Just saying all that downpour on Texas and Florida could top up the whole national water supply.

If it did.

No it's 100% plastic, completely waterproof.

I don't think anything else is going to survive out there.

This is one of those things you see and think "That's got to be bu***hit"

And yet it isn't. :-(

Fortunately it's probably impossible to pull off with the standard speaks on a regular phone due to the crappy bandwidth they have.

OTOH Bluetooth it to a custom device and it could still be quite small but still create a lot of mayhem...

"The real mistake was the design,..assumes mistakes won't happen..no recovery mechanism."

That right there suggests a very good reason not to touch it with a barge pole.

ACPO, the Home Office's ever helpful "arms length" not-a-company

Or as they were described "with the same legal standing as a stamp collecting club."

So no policy, but they're already tendering for nationwide roll out.

<gollum>

We wants it.

We needs it.

We must have nationwide facial recognition

</gollum>

I never tire at the number of ways airlines and airline mfg find to create fuel air explosives

Or (as some meja outlets have called them) the "Poor man's atomic bomb."

IBack in the day there were a couple of really impressive explosions when the Captain rain the planes aircon on the ground during an extend hold at a gate.

Their aircon pack was under a "nearly" empty fuel tank. Aircon got hot, fuel vaporised. No inerting system. Boom. In fact I think that was one (of several) bangs that made fuel inerting systems mandatory on big aircraft.

But "Take off without a working inerting system?" WTF ?

That said if this has never caused a bang that makes it a potential hazard, not one actually seen.

Which would seem to be an improvement.

Remeber folks HDD is a great archive medium, much better than any old tape....

Until it gets a head crash or the electronics goes.

Then of course you're f**ked big time.

But hey, it's real cheap.

So it's got 19 mother board slots.

Your could just y'know, put a lot of stuff in those slots in general.

Just saying. It's nice to have a lot of slots once in a while. You don't see that often outside passive back plane industrial PC's.

Not many people will get on a plane from Russia to try the doors of a building in Kansas City

Because that would be stupid.

But email....

They can "try the doors" of every company in the Fortune 500 (and Kansas City) in 5 minutes.

Just like every other of their Black hat buddies across the globe, until they find someone (anyone) to open their carefully crafted missive and it's "surprise" package. :-(

CEO's bang on endlessly about their "Corporate leadership."

Why don't they start showing some?

Wot, not even some of those actual, physical plaintives who walked into a lawers office?

Not even them?

Still it helps to explain how rich law schools got to be rich law schools

And now, how they have got to be considerably richer law schools.

Just a wild idea but perhaps some actual guidelines for law firms in these sorts of CA lawsuits where the payout per actual plaintiff is too small to be worthwhile (I bet this is the mother lode for a law firm) as to where they can send the money IE not to line the pockets of their former schools for a start.

Hmm. Google and transparency. Not words you see in a sentence very often

And usually in a poorer light than this.

Yes strong contracts and penalty clauses (and enforcing penalty clauses) will help.

But.

Google is a data fetishist with a high recidivism rate (like other kinds of socially unacceptable fetishists).

IOW They can no more keep their hands off patients data (and it's patients data, not the NHS's to sell or give away) than Uncle Ernie can keep his hands off Tommy (Nice work by Phil Collins, really channeling his inner nonce).

This stuff is never an impulse buy.

No CTO gets out of bed one morning and thinks "I'm feeling stoked today. Let's switch the whole operation to Oracle."

And given's Oracles equivocal reputation with its customers you'd have to work pretty hard to convince someone that they weren't getting in the pool with a great White shark (with or without attached lasers).

Do sales people deserve their bonus? The strict answer should be does the whole life revenue (all the licenses, license renewals, support contracts, training contracts, etc) exceed it by a big enough margin? If it does then yes. If not then no.

But the common sense view of this would be "I started working on this deal under my old contract, I should be rewarded as per the rules of the old contract, not the new contract, which didn't exist when I started this."

And f**k me sideways it looked like the Judge agreed with them.

On second thought, perhaps that shouldn't have been too surprising, to anyone who isn't in the senior management of a very greedy US corporation and cannot quite believe that (despite them being almost impossible to meet) someone has actually hit their sales target to qualify for this level of bonus.

And if you think that's bad....

You wouldn't like to find yourselves on the "overdue" borrowers risk and have a visit from one of their "lending advisors"* So called because they will advise you to give them some money ASAP to avoid more serious trouble later.

*Who have allegedly been known to skip the solicitors letter and move straight to more direct forms of recovery.

Coat because you probably don't want to be in when they come round, although the odds on bet is they will catch up with you eventually.

You have to wonder is all this SW written by the same bunch of clueless code monkeys?

Because the core hardware is the same for most of these products.

Or do they have to customize their s**t for each one?

Is there any way any of these companies actually has an in house team to write this?

Who's driving this?

They want to sell your data?

Amazon want to get their hands on it and are forcing them ?

Spotify?

Here's the thing.

It's not cheap X Probably made in China --> Big margin.

So is it they aren't making a profit or that they're not making a big enough profit? BTW this is IOT so I think security upgrades should be on the company anyway.

so very hand for implementing deep packet inspection without a performance hit.

Let's see if anyone else finds it's as useful as claimed.

"and installed a rootkit that let him run his own code."

Indeed.

The British Premium Bond system does use an electronically generated random number generator with the digits coming from the noise generated by diode. It stores no state and depends on no initial state data to generate the next digit

It's not programmable but it can pass all tests for statistical randomness and is not repeatable

Had to start somewhere.

The days when each server in the chain between you and the actual web site could be implicitly trusted to be who they say they are are long over.

In theory all ISP's have had plenty of time to prep for this.

In practice I expect it will show who are the clueful and who the lazy, greedy or merely stupid.

So it seems the heat of the EPO is a autocratic Ahole of the first order

Whose departure would be much better sooner rather than later.

BTW that picture of the German Eagle in dot matrix form. Is that how it really looks in the court, or was it mocked up for the article?

So it's like snow flakes forming around seed...

Any chance they might grow on the way down?

But impressive for just the whole "blasting polystyrene beads with really powerful lasers" thing.

Did not realize he was still alive.

And of course now he is isn't

RIP Brian.

As for the current crop of UK SF writers I'd give Stross, Hamilton and Brockmyre a good shot.

GCHQ is not worried. The new law will allow them to (essentially) conscript them.

I thought the "The Rhesus Chart" was a thriller, not a f**king manual.