Posts by EddieD 1117 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2009
Back in the 80s I shared a flat with a guy doing PhD on computer viruses. He took a floppy down to the Atari lab to copy some software for our own machine, and managed to infect the entire lab with a virus.
The lab manager was very unimpressed.
Ah well, at least we got given some good anti-virus software and he got material for his thesis.
I was reasonably faithful to the book, the script was fine, but some of the acting was awful - Gurney Halleck in particular springs to mind.
Any book thicker than about 1cm will need serious trimming to make a movie that isn't split into bits - although as LOTR and The Hobbit showed, you can go too far and add shed loads of content that isn't in the original.
Here in Scotland, we have a much simpler system - you don't drink at all if you're going to drive - and for best practice, not even the night before you're going to drive.
The lower alcohol limit seems to have cut the number of folk who are measured over the limit.
Which is good.
Niles Crane: "What's the french word for 'Light-hearted'?"
Frasier Crane: "There isn't one"
A couple of years ago I was having supper in a bistro near Montparnasse, and all the staff were so terrified of my (diabolical) French accent that they suddenly remembered that they spoke English.
"The Europeans were just envious that Beagle 2 had been a glorious, glorious British failure, and wanted to show that they could do that too."
I read on the Guardian (so it may well have been a misprint) that Beagle 2 actually landed okay, but then failed to deploy its solar panels
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jan/16/lost-beagle-2-spacecraft-found-mars
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/10/07/robot_traders_blamed_for_flash_sterling_crash/
Maybe not such a good idea. I vaguely remember automated trading systems being blamed for Black Monday in '87.
Maybe we should leave AI until we've worked out what real intelligence is, and if in fact it really exists.
It's not just that they insist on the ad-blocking turned off, it's that the Channel 4 site is a terrible hotch-potch of scripts, and some shows run fine for a few episodes, then, even though uBlock is disabled, pop the "We're funded by adverts..." spiel, and you find that yet another domain is asking to be unblocked... I'm not that concerned - I never see any interstitials or whatevers, they seem to be blocked by my 5000 line (curated from various internet contributions) hosts file.
It's been hypothesised that in paying this ludicrous amount of money for GBBO, C4 may have shot themselves in the foot, and although they are commercially/advert funded, they are, in the end, publicly owned, and since they seem to be able to shell out increasingly large sums of money for some shows e.g. F1, GBBO, they're now extremely ripe for a sell off.
Round the Horne and I'm Sorry I'll read that again, again predate Clue by nearly a decade, and Round the Horne commited some entendres that would have Clary rolling his eyes, particularly Julian and Sandy.
Double entendres and camp, saucy humour have been part of the British psyche for decades - the seaside post card tradition - heck, even Shakespeare got in on the act "I talk of country matters"
Most of the folk who read and post on the Register are fairly seasoned technologists, they've read the articles, they've looked at the papers, and are aware of the possible implications.
When I speak to my family and friends about data slurps, most of them (okay, the younger members) think that it's a good thing - or at least, not a bad thing - they know where their friends are, and how to get there, they get recommendations of cafés/bars/cinemas in the area, they get timetables, schedules, and so on. They feel that their lives are enriched with all this information that they receive in return for location/photo/personal data.
Who is right? I'm not happy with the data slurp at all, and I try to minimise it. But that doesn't make me right.
Apple don't have to do a thing, for the time being, it's the Irish government who are spending the money.
Only after the Irish government has either lost, given in, or run out of money to pursue the appeal against the decision and actually charged Apple the 13bn will Apple then spend money to appeal against the Irish government.
This one could run and run.
Of course, there's one other thing - if Apple do get charged 13bn in Ireland, they'll declare it as a loss to offset taxes in the US, so they won't lose the entire amount, and the US won't like that, as their tax take (40% of 13bn is 5.2bn) would be reduced, fairly appreciably, so they'll want to wade into the action. Fun days all round. We thought it was a protracted affair when one company sued another, add in nation states and probably our grandchildren will be watching the outcome of this.
"is evidently to be ignored. If they can't come up with something sensible, then why did they even bother?"
So that in a year or so, when we fail to adhere to their guidelines, the government can turn round and say "Well, we tried to advise people to lower their consumption, that didn't work so we're going to tax the fuck out of alcohol"
"He still didn't accept that N0458301942@our.company.co.uk didn't tell anyone anything about the person who the username belonged to"
But if someone tags you in a photo, that facial information can - and will - be used to identify you in other images, either on facebook, or if the rumours are to be believed, anywhere on the interwebs, and using javascript see which other web sites you read, who your relations are - they will scan for keywords, e.g. grandson/father, nephew, etc, and from that, sure as eggs are eggs, facebook will put together exactly who n0458301942 is, where they live and where they work.
There is no anonymity on the internet any more.
"I imagine the whole MRI scanner is a black box to most biologists."
I don't think so - even back in the 80s when I was studying towards a Biology based degree, and NMR was a fairly new phenomenon, we were taught very carefully the underlying principles of both NMR and ESR spectroscopy. I don't think that that will have changed.
And the University insisted that all science subjects had Maths and Stats courses.
"...that can be realistically productised"
PRODUCTISED??? What the fuck? "realistically produced"
Journalists should know and love their language, not invent synthetic words to appease a market fragment. (I noticed "ised" not "ized" too, which is even more painful - if a Brit is coming up with pathetically crap neologisms like this, it's too late for heaven help us, Satan is already on the march)
Given that accessing Google using Tor is becoming increasingly hard - trying this morning I got faced by 3 captchas, and when I passed that, the search returned a 503 error - I think that they're being a little mealy mouthed.
If they're in favour of the use of Tor, they should not make it so hard to access their services using the technology.
Fuck.
I've been away and I've only just seen this.
Thoughts to his family, Kararina, the Junior Boffin, and nephew Matt, the bearded coated one, and all the others.
I always enjoyed his articles, his enthusiasm, his love of life.
My coronary artery will probably never forgive him, but I loved his recipes.
Very deeply sad
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