* Posts by Rich 11

4575 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Jul 2009

China and Russia join to battle 'illegal internet content,' which means what you fear it does

Rich 11

Russia has now over 102 years of experience

By giving such an exact figure it's clear that you're thinking about the Russian Revolution as being some sort of turning point, but it wasn't. You can go back much further than the rise of Communism. The tsars also imposed political censorship, from at least Peter the Great's time, while in the centuries before that censorship was primarily a tool of religious orthodoxy.

The same can be said for China under the warlords and the emperors. Censorship has been going on far, far longer than the days since the Long March.

Remember the FBI's promise it wasn’t abusing the NSA’s data on US peeps? Well, guess what…

Rich 11

Re: the gang

@Teiwaz:

Not a single one of your points is an argument against what I said. A good teacher would suggest you go read over it again and look to understand the context of my response to gnarlymarley so that you can learn what it is you need to address.

Rich 11

Re: the gang

Ethics and morals are what makes a good school teacher.

Really? I would have thought that a good knowledge of the subject, enthusiasm for it, the ability to engage with and inspire students, and the skill of communicating concepts and principles would be more relevant.

Boris Brexit bluff binds .eu domains to time-bending itinerary

Rich 11

Re: Yes EU Minister

Mae hynny'n gweithio i mi.

Rich 11

Re: Jennifer Arcuri, Tech Innovator

and wait to be interviewed by Piers Morgan

Too high a price.

Rich 11

the obvious solution would be to say that this rule takes effect a year or two after the UK has actually left the EU.

Welcome to the political shenanigans over Deal / No Deal Brexit. There's a reason it's not going well, and claiming something is obvious doesn't come into it. It's a little more complicated than that.

Watch out! Andromeda, the giant spiral galaxy colliding with our own Milky Way, has devoured several galaxies before

Rich 11

Re: Could it be?

I'm sure they'll be willing to provide you with proofs of the Flat Earth and the Electric Universe too.

Rich 11

Re: Could it be?

that suggests there is a limit to how far gravity can impact something

No, gravity's range is infinite. The effect is just incredibly weak at great distances.

gravity, if it travels either loses most of its strength in that distance, or travels a lot slower than the speed of light.

The first item. Definitely the first. Have you heard of the inverse-square law?

Rich 11

Re: There's a simple fix

But we only let it fire matter in one direction.

Do you plan to do this by causing one hemisphere of the black hole to stop spinning?

£99,999, what's your emergency? Paramedics rush to OAP's aid after shock meter reading

Rich 11

Re: defibrillate the meter

"Clear!"

Rich 11

Legally smart

I've had them call me up and say that by law I must have a smart meter installed before [whatever the date is]. I politely remind them that the government put the onus on the electricity companies to provide all their customers with a smart meter by [whatever that damn date is], and that I'm not obliged to accept one. *crickets*

Next time, though, I must make a note of that damn date because it's really bugging me that I can't remember it now!

FBI called in to investigate 2018 Mountain State mobile voting system hacking

Rich 11

Gah!

"The reliability of our election system and the sanctity of every vote is something we should never have to question," said Stuart.

Then why the hell do you keep using such bizarre methods of casting votes, so many of them with known problems? Is the country so divided that no-one trusts anyone to tally ballot papers by hand?

Holy smokes! Ex-IT admin gets two years prison for trashing Army chaplains' servers

Rich 11

Re: Where is god when you need him?

According to folklore, pearls should be crushed and finely ground, then dissolved in a glass of wine in order to prepare a healing potion capable of treating poison and intestinal problems.

Rich 11

Re: Where is god when you need him?

He's too busy turning fish into wine or drowning swine or something important like that.

Nominet continues milking .uk registry cash cow with 4 per cent price rise for... what exactly?

Rich 11

Monopoly power

its current CEO, a former acquisitions and ventures specialist

...will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.

NASA Administrator upends the scorn bucket on Elon Musk's Starship spurtings

Rich 11

Re: Something has been nagging me about the look of Starship

Well... only one. And it's a one-way trip.

Does it even carry enough fuel to break Earth orbit and set the controls for the heart of the sun?

IT workers: Speaking truth to douchebags since 1977

Rich 11

Chip shop scuttlebutt

a year that saw the death of Elvis Presley

...allegedly.

Now that's integrity: Bloke sinks 7 beers, turns himself in. Cops weren't looking for him

Rich 11

Re: German Beer Purity Laws

because I'd downed about 15 pints and still felt fine.

I did that just before the Grand Prix in Macau in 1995. The reason I still felt fine was because I was used to stronger English beer and at the end of the night I still retained enough good sense to drink a pint of water before falling somewhere in the approximate direction of bed.

Rich 11

Re: Don't drink Budweiser.

And not by a bloke up the M1 named Dave.

Multitasking is a myth: It means doing lots of things equally badly

Rich 11

Re: Explaining jobs

Most banks now seem to be a cash dispenser on the outside with a coffee shop on the inside.

Rich 11

Re: The English language includes support for lists

The principle of parsimony requires the Oxford comma to be denounced as Satan's own smegma and wiped from existence.

Rich 11

Re: Explaining jobs

About two years after I first started work I found myself in the unenviable position of having to apply for a bank loan. The assistant manager who interviewed me (some of you will remember those halcyon days when High Street banks didn't take risks) asked me my job title, to which I replied "Computer programmer". After searching through all the options on her form at least twice, she asked, "Can I put you down as 'Mathematician (semi-professional)'?" I said yes, and indeed saw it as something of a compliment.

We're all doooooomed: Gloomy Brit workforce really isn't coping well with impending Brexit

Rich 11

Re: When to move abroad

I'm thinking the Channel Islands. It's a bit like France but with decent chips and beer. The only risk is that when the Disunited Kingdom of England and Wales becomes Singapore-at-Sea there'll no longer be much reason to launder money through Jersey.

YouTuber charged loads of fans $199 for shoddy machine-learning course that copy-pasted other people's GitHub code

Rich 11

This chap sounds ideally suited for Silicon Valley.

Behold the perils of trying to turn the family and friends support line into a sideline

Rich 11

Re: Dinner charge

Users always lie. That's the null hypothesis; don't change that assessment for any individual until long experience has confirmed that they are mostly reliable.

Rich 11

Re: Obligatory XKCD

not the ending I felt led to expect.

You've been watching too many tech support vids. Take a break. Watch some porn instead.

Rich 11

Woke up in the morning... Got the On Call blues

The telecom giant in question has a name that kind of rhymes with "Bum Blast", although Sam suggested a slightly, er, bluer pseudonym.

Cumcast?

Boffins build a tiny nanolaser that can be inserted inside our cells

Rich 11

Re: Enquiring minds want to know:

how many cells implanted into my forefinger would make it interesting

That would be a very subjective assessment. How uninteresting do you consider your forefinger at the moment?

Rich 11

Re: Enquiring minds want to know:

I'm afraid your idea isn't feasible: several million would only get you a very weak beam about a quarter of a millimetre across. I'm willing to grant you the legs and lungs, though.

Black holes are like buses: You wait for one – and three turn up at once in galaxy merger

Rich 11

Re: Smash???

By the time they get close enough to each other to merge, they will be travelling* at smashing speed.

*Were travelling, since they merged a few million years short of a billion years ago.

Roscomos: We know all about how the hole in the Soyuz went down, but we're not telling you

Rich 11

Re: Space Bridge?

That's much clearer Thank you.

Rich 11

Re: Space Bridge?

The base technology is

I can't tell if you're making shit up or merely have an extremely poor understanding of an Einstein-Rosen bridge.

Hot patches for ColdFusion: Adobe drops trio of fixes for three serious flaws

Rich 11

Re: Blast from the past

It does have its advantages (and disadvantages, but that's par for the course).

UK Supreme Court unprorogues Parliament

Rich 11

Re: Damning...

And isn't lying to The Queen treasonous?

If it were, Prince Andrew would have been consigned to an oubliette decades ago.

Those furious gun-toting Aussies were just a glitch. Let's try US drone deliveries, says Wing

Rich 11
Joke

Re: Seriously

you can't just schedule motorcycle crashes on an ad-hoc basis you know

Really? Why else would there be a push for self-driving cars?

Rich 11

Re: Soon-

No guns necessary. If they swoop down to 23ft then you can snag them with a grappling hook.

(Don't tell my neighbours I said that.)

Pizza prankster's prisoner plea plot perturbs police, Norks invading and Uber woes

Rich 11

Twit-in-Chief

For some unfathomable reason the purge appears to have sidestepped North America.

If you have enough of this type of gut microbe, you can get drunk for free after eating carbs

Rich 11

Shh! No-one tell the transhumanists!

Calling all the Visual Basic snitches: Keep quiet about it and so will he...

Rich 11

Risky business

Ron was gainfully employed performing IT functions for the equities business of an investment bank back in the early noughties. "It was," said our reader, "when Risk was still just a board game."

I can remember playing Risk on a Mac SE in about 1990 or 1991. The computer player wasn't very good.

(OK, I probably haven't interpreted that the way it was meant.)

Exploding super-prang asteroid to pepper Earth, trigger deadly ice age – no, wait, it happened 466 million years ago

Rich 11

Re: I'm getting a bit tired of this silliness

Those examples look a lot more straightforward than 'I think it might have been a few weeks before my mum died' or 'When Harold raised the Fyrd against Tostig'.

Rich 11

Re: I'm getting a bit tired of this silliness

Couldn't agree more. I'm happy to wait for the computers to catch up too.

Rich 11

I'm getting a bit tired of this silliness

a 93-mile wide space rock

Please, when you convert measurements between systems don't state a precision which didn't previously exist. I bet the paper said something like 'estimated to be 150km wide' and some journo somewhere (probably not even Katyanna) stuck this into Google and blindly copied 93 rather than the more sensible 90.

Imagine if Facebook could read your mind: Er, I have some bad news for you...

Rich 11

Re: EMF sensitivity could be real.

Anyway, I'd say some proper experimntation needed and don't just write this off.

It's been done.

BOFH: What's the Gnasher? Why, it's our heavy-duty macerator sewage pump

Rich 11

Re: It's all fun and games...

You need a body condom.

Scotiabank slammed for 'muppet-grade security' after internal source code and credentials spill onto open internet

Rich 11

Re: called it

Beta permanence.

Rich 11

Re: called it

sometimes rewriting computer code that can be deployed in the span of a few days

...QA optional.

Remember that security probe that ended with a sheriff cuffing the pen testers? The contract is now public so you can decide who screwed up

Rich 11

Re: passed the test

Yeah, but the talking raccoon has kept the media busy all week.

What? You've never heard of that story either? Wow...

Flying priests crop-dust Russian citizens with holy water to make them stop boozing and bonking

Rich 11

Orthodox priests are allowed to marry, so the choirboys might be a little safer than those of churches requiring celibacy.

Rich 11

Biplane is cheating

I'd have been more impressed if they'd been flown over the city by summoned angels rather than an old biplane. That would have been a better demonstration of their magic powers.

This image-recognition roulette is all fun and games... until it labels you a rape suspect, divorcee, or a racial slur

Rich 11

Re: AI Absolutely Rocks - Proof

I'd have to watch her films again to confirm that.