* Posts by russell 6

114 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Nov 2009

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Tired of despairing of Trump and Brexit? Why not despair about YouTube stars instead?

russell 6

My 3 favourite YouTube channels

Alec Steele a young guy from Norfolk blacksmithing, often with damascus steel. DutchSinse who forecasts global earthquakes on a weekly basis with about 85% accuracy and finally PBS Space Time cuz I love learning about quantum physics.

Coventry: Once a 'Ghost Town', soon to be UK City of Culture

russell 6

My great, great grandfather was lord mayor of Coventry. Still have a bit of a soft spot for the city today, despite its brutalist architecture.

The Google Home Mini: Great, right up until you want to smash it in fury

russell 6

Re: With lots and lots of apathy.

Intelligence has limits, stupidity does not

Geoboffins claim to find oldest trace of life in rocks 4bn years old

russell 6

Re: More fake news

This bible doesn't say the earth is only 6000 years old. When you go into the Hebrew language that Genisis was written in, the language used to talk about the creative days means only a period of time, no indication is given of the length or that each 'day' was the same length. Those 'Christians' who say the earth is only 6000 years old are misinterpreting the bible

Boffins want machine learning to predict earthquakes

russell 6

Re: Maybe earthquakes are already predictable!

You are right, there is still much to learn. Watch his latest video and make up your own mind, he does seem to make a lot of sense and he gets the results. https://youtu.be/ynbNng05kJA

russell 6

Re: Maybe earthquakes are already predictable!

I'm just saying that this guy seems to have found a system that works reasonably well at predicting where and when and at what magnitude earthquakes will strike. Have been watching his channel for a while and his system does seem to stack up. Before knocking something you should check it out. That's what I did and it's educational. You might learn something

russell 6

Maybe earthquakes are already predictable!

I came across this channel on YouTube by a guy called Dutch Sinse. Have been watching him for about a month now. He makes almost daily videos tracing tremor and earthquake activity and I have to be honest his forecast rate for where activity will hit hit and how strong it will be is pretty amazing. I'd say he has a 90% accuracy rate, this is what I've seen over the course of the last month. He is an independent researcher, uses public data from seismic monitors around the globe. His forecasts are short term, 3 - 10 days

It is very interesting how he links pressure transference from one part of the globe to another, how deep earthquakes which are not normally felt, lead to nearby stronger shallower earthquakes, the ones that do the damage. Check him out on his channel, he really goes into detail, his vids tend to be about an hour long. https://www.youtube.com/user/dutchsinse

Largest ever losses fail to dent Tesla's bulging order book

russell 6

Re: Personally I'm betting against Tesla

The day after I wrote this comment, Toyota and Mazda announce a joint venture to produce EV's in the USA, starting with 300,000 cars per year, beginning in 2021

russell 6

Personally I'm betting against Tesla

It isn't that there is no market for battery powered cars. The major players, such as Toyota, which also has the premium Lexus brand will eat Tesla for breakfast when they make the step, probable around 2020. Tesla doesn't make a profit, the big auto makers do and they are doing a lot of R&D inti EV's. A company in Germany annouced today it is going to construct a 34 Giga factory, with the backing of the German government and probably also German auto makers even if it didn't say so directly. Tesla is a minnow in a big pond with no experience of mass production. Kudos to Musk for getting the Tesla the ball rolling but its share price is not justified

Think you could deliver a Register lecture? Tell us why

russell 6

I can give lectures on this and do group discussion after on these subjects. Yes I was in Syria to document the war. I'm fascinated by economics and the future global economic system, am currently working with a company that is designing and building cutting edge automated production lines.

https://russellchapman.wordpress.com/2013/04/03/documenting-syria/

or this

https://russellchapman.wordpress.com/economics/

or this

https://russellchapman.wordpress.com/2016/06/10/the-rise-of-the-machines-how-they-will-change-your-life/

For travel and hotel expenses am open to discussion

Uber board: We accept all recommendations. Any execs left to carry them out?

russell 6

But if they go clean?

How will they ever make money in a business world that is built on ripping people off one way or another? That isn't how the system works. As for the sexual harassment, it isn't about just changing the management, it's about changing the culture of the 'valley'. There is still a very long way to go.

Who really gives a toss if it's agile or not?

russell 6

Project Management

I'm not a project manager but I deal with a lot of them. Here is what I understand. Never allow the customer to convince you to create the specification for the project. The customer should have a very good idea of what they want before they talk to you. If you create the specification for them, you are setting yourself up to fail as the spec will get changed so many times along the way, so much time will be lost before you even begin the real work, it is also a way for the customer to shift the blame if something goes wrong as you created the specification for them.

Make very clear to the customer that what might seem like small modifications to them can actually take a huge amount of time and expense to impliment and deadlines will be missed.

Make sure you have a very accurate picture of the existing systems you need to integrate with before you agree to anything x100

Seems like little of the above happens on Government IT projects

Connected car in the second-hand lot? Don't buy it if you're not hack-savvy

russell 6

Re: The criminals are already using this weakness

I don't know the in's and out's or rolling codes in rolling garage doors. As you said, most doors use rolling codes, which means not all. And the codes are only as strong as the firmware which is generating them. Could the crims reverse engineer the firmaware and find some sort of master code which is never part of the rolling code? I don't know. I just know that most stuff is hackable these days, in fact everything is hackable, given enough time and resources. No I'm not a techie, I'm just interested in tech, which is why I come to Reg

russell 6

The criminals are already using this weakness

I know directly of 2 examples near me, somewhere on mainland Europe. Both people bought late model BMW's secondhand from Germany. Within 24hrs, one of them had been pinched from inside the guy's garage. It seems they hide a gizmo in the car to clone the signal for automatic garage doors which can then be operated remotely. Whoever did it had full access to the car, despite the owner having both car keys. The 2nd had his car pinched off his driveway 2 days after driving it home from Germany. I bet those 2 cars have been sold and stolen by the same people many times

Phoney McPhoneface: The thrilling tale of ZTE's crowdsourced mobe

russell 6

Re: Sticky back

A bit of Blu-Tack?

Oh, for F...acebook: WhatsApp, critics spar over alleged 'backdoor'

russell 6

Have you tried Threema for end to end encryption?

They are a Swiss outfit and take privacy very seriously. Another commentard here on El Reg who I have conctact with, knows the team personally. Personally I would never send anything I need to be secure on WhatsApp, even before this story broke. My original introduction to Threema was through a friend at HP. www.threema.ch

Ex-soldier pleads guilty to terror crime after not revealing iPhone PIN

russell 6

Re: Something fishy about this story

Isn't them

russell 6

Re: Something fishy about this story

Thanks Ledswinger. My interests are quite broad too, including IT and is why I come here everyday. I'm hoping to have a corker of a story in the not too distant future about a european company and how at least one of its software products has a backdoor allowing it to take control of any system it is installed upon, is the backdoor intentional is impossible to prove, but it is known and now proven that the company has been taking advantage of it. We are potentially looking at industrial espionage on a massive scale. Watch this space

russell 6

Re: Something fishy about this story

Not an expert in Kurds but this an English version of one of their main news sites. http://rudaw.net/english

russell 6

Re: Something fishy about this story

Thanks. Let me know if you have any questions about whats going on there

russell 6

Re: Something fishy about this story

I could be wrong as is impossible to know the exact details of what happened but have the impression the police et al had a good idea of what was going on and the guy involved was being rather naive and needed a hard slap on the wrist to wake him up. I'm in regular contact with people on Turkish and Jordanian side of the Syrian border. I would not be crossing from Jordan under any circumstance

russell 6

Re: Something fishy about this story

Thanks Fred

russell 6

Something fishy about this story

Having been in Syria to photo-document the war I have some experience of the situation. The first is this, if you are going to meet up with the Kurds you would not go from Jordan. Kurds are not based in southern Syria, you would try to cross from Turkey. Secondly, the Jordanian border with Syria is tighter than a virgin on her wedding night. It's not impossible to cross but is fraught with so many risks.

There is a huge market in attracting westerners to try and enter Syria for the sole purpose of holding them for ransom. If the details of the story are correct, I think he was being set up and despite everything has had a very lucky escape

https://russellchapman.wordpress.com/2013/04/03/documenting-syria/

Facebook Fake News won it for Trump? That's a Zombie theory

russell 6

What if the serious newspapers pulled their websites

Would ppl go back to buying the print version? This way they would also be able to run ads that would actually be seen and are not intrusive. I have to say that I also enjoy sitting down with a cuppa and the papers. The internet has been becoming more of a cesspit the last few years, time to quit and get out, it is killing their business. For those who prefer a digital version for their tablets etc, what about digital kiosks where ppl can quickly download an ebook version on their way to work. Put a quid in the slot, chose from touch screen which paper or magazine you want, it prints out a ticket with a one time passcode for your download from the kiosk

Google Research opens machine intelligence base in Zurich

russell 6

The move makes sense

With so many car and other automative industries on the continent it makes sense if you want to progress from 'machine learning' to 'machine teaching' I recently wrote that it won't be so long until PLC (Programable Logic Controller) will be able to be programmed by another computer with human input needed only to give the basic parameters of each station on a production line

https://russellchapman.wordpress.com/2016/06/10/the-rise-of-the-machines-how-they-will-change-your-life/

Woman scales Ben Nevis wielding selfie stick instead of ice axe

russell 6

Yes, she was daft but...

Kids today are so protected from taking risk they don't learn to identify potential danger from a young age, apart from stranger danger.... Then these kids grow up and enter the real world and think nothing can touch them. That's when you get situations such as what happened to the young lady. Now multiply that by the number of her generation and you can begin to see the potential problems for society. No idea about risk or potential danger

Humans – 1 Robots – 0: Mercedes deautomates production lines

russell 6

Re: What Mercedes were really saying

While I agree new types of work will be created for people at some point, at the moment the rate of change is much greater than in the past, society and people had more time to adapt. Today the rate of automation is such that there is still no sign of the new types of jobs which will be available for the huge numbers of people who are going to lose their jobs over the next few years

russell 6

What Mercedes were really saying

Is that yes, in some parts of the production line humans are better at the job than robots. But in others parts of the production line all the manufactures are automating more and more, from high end German car makers to Korean mass, mass producers.

The development of production line technology is accelerating at amazing speed. I have seen how robots are being used to do some really quite fiddly jobs, for example picking up 5 small retaining clips and putting them all in place in 9 seconds. So while there will always be some jobs we humans can do better, over the next 5 years the number of humans needed on production lines will be dramatically reduced. Then question becomes, what will happen to the people who lose their jobs to robots?????

US Navy's newest ship sets sail with Captain James Kirk at the bridge

russell 6

Stability

Maybe it has an extendable keel which can be deployed and retracted as or when needed. There is certainly enough height in the superstructure to hide one ;)

Russia's blanket phone spying busted Europe's human rights laws

russell 6

Re: How will it be enforced?

The price of oil is also forcing Russia to look inwards. The question will be if the Russians can get themselves organised in time to be self sufficient. Russia is great at exporting raw materials but not good at adding value to those materials by using them to create something. A contact of mine who is CEO of a Russian company which makes equipment for steel producers basically said the Russian work ethos is lazy, they want maximum profit for minimal work. Add to this systemic corruption and I'm not sure if they will pull it off. The middle class is shrinking and many have already left the country. All my Russian friends who can have already left the country. Which leaves only the top tier and the lower classes. Russia will go back to the feudal system, its educated middle class will be nowhere in sight, just the peasants and the aristocracy, as it was during the time of the czars.

Blocking out the Sun won't fix climate change – but it could buy us time

russell 6

Re: Question

Great, got a down-vote for a serious question. What is the max temperature allowable in the Arctic and Antarctic to stop the land-masses losing more ice to the sea in summer than they gain in winter?

russell 6

Question

Can anybody tell what the correct temperature at the poles should be???

I survived a head-on crash with driverless cars – and dummies

russell 6

One hundred years ago

A century ago motorized private transport was a solution to a problem, improved travel times etc. Today however, it is a problem in need of a solution. And I say this as someone who loves driving and gets annoyed by people who don't even drive the speed limit when conditions are perfect. I'm not sure autonomous private transport is the answer.

Dry those eyes, ad blockers are unlikely to kill the internet

russell 6

Newspaper ads

If and when I buy a printed newspaper or magazine I do take the time to look at certain ads which catch my eye. Printed media is a totally different experience to the online experience and I honestly can't remember the last time I looked at an online ad, the online ad experience is annoying and intrusive. If I'm interested in buying a product or service I do my own search using either Ixquick or DuckDuckGO in a private browser session.

US Treasury: How did ISIS get your trucks? Toyota: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

russell 6

First from Mosul but there are lots of willing sellers

When daesh (ISIS) overran Mosul in Iraq and the Iraqi army ran away they basically helped themselves to everything, there would have been a fair few Toyotas among the extremely substantial loot. As for new trucks, there are lots of willing sellers as there are buyers for all the ancient relics they are selling on the black market from cities such as Palmyra. Estimates are that daesh has enough cash on hand to fund things for the next few years without breaking sweat

VW’s case of NOxious emissions: a tale of SMOKE and MIRRORS?

russell 6

Re: Alltogether Now

I think the current diesel market in the USA is about 5%, VW wanted to expand that market, which would have rather annoyed the US car companies as they are heavily invested in petrol, no way they want to lose market share. The current fiasco could well be connected.

russell 6

Only VW?

I can not believe that only VW are up to this and that the other car makers didn't know what VW was up to. You can be sure they have all reverse engineered each others cars to see how they go about things and would have been the first to call out VW if they were not also involved in similarly nefarious behaviour.

Scotsman cools PC with IRN-BRU, dubs it the 'Aye Mac'

russell 6
Happy

Irn Bru

Take mine with a steak and gravy pie. Perfect lunch while sitting in the car on a cold wet day looking across the water to the Hebrides

Company in shambles, marriages ruined. My work here is done, says Ashley Madison CEO

russell 6

Re: Another conspiracy theory

Yes, guilty of having a closer relationship with hardware or dare I say it software, than with their partners

russell 6

Re: Another conspiracy theory

It's just a conspiracy theory I made up for fun. You aren't supposed to take it seriously

russell 6
Big Brother

Another conspiracy theory

What if the whole thing was set up as a honey trap from the very start. Lots of guys lured to sign up from all levels of society and working in all sorts of interesting organizations around the globe.

What if the hack was part of the plan and the names released were the small fry, the really interesting catches, who might have access to god knows what or who know god knows what were left off the list, for now. They can then be blackmailed for info etc and if they don't comply their details will also be released. Just a conspiracy theory but I had fun making it up.

One more thing: Swatch trademarks dead Steve Jobs' catchphrase

russell 6
Thumb Up

Re: Uh-oh!

Good use of a double entendre

Youth Hostelling with Chris Eubank becomes TV reality

russell 6

He was a great boxer no doubt but an ego the size of a planet. Years ago I was at a Gabrielle concert at Rony Scotts jazz club. After the show finished he placed himself at the door asking people if they wanted autographs. As I remember, most people just walked past him, The night was not about him but he wanted to make it so.

It was a good concert by the way, small and intimate and my friends and I had the table directly in front of the stage. After the show Gabrielle came off the stage and gave me a kiss, god knows why, but it was a good evening.

HUGE Aussie asteroid impact sent TREMORS towards the EARTH'S CORE

russell 6

Could be a good place to mine for diamonds?

That amount of concentrated heat and pressure. I'm not a geologist but it got me wondering....

Telly behemoths: Does size matter?

russell 6

Re: When I was a kid

No idea but it could be fun to dig up an old crt monitor and make the experiment :)

russell 6

When I was a kid

I was 6 or 7 and had recently been given a pretty decent magnet. I can't remember why I did it but decided to run it over the TV screen. My young mind was blown at how I could make the picture warp as I moved the magnet around the screen. Magic Roundabout became even better than usual. Horror then set in when I saw the picture didn't go back to normal after taking the magnet away.

Parents were not in the room, obviously, so I switched the TV off, ran up to my bedroom and picked up a book, faking innocence when they turned the TV on and saw the psychadelic mess the picture had become and got away with it, I looked innocent when I was young :) Got busted when the engineer came out to look at the TV, he winked at me and said "someone has a magnet" Doh

So, these guys turn up with AK47s and offer me protection ...

russell 6

South African joke

If you know anything about the reputation of SA taxi drivers you will get where this is coming from.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu and a taxi driver die at the same time. Arriving at the pearly gates, St Peter says sorry but the allocation for today is almost full and only one of them can be let into heaven that day.

St Peter apologises to Desmond and says he will allow the taxi driver in first. Confused the Archbishop asks why this is. The answer, St Peter says, is that the taxi driver put the fear of God into more people than he ever did.

El Reg Redesign - leave your comment here.

russell 6

New site is less readable

I find I have to scroll more, the main pic at the top is way too big. The old site for me was more user friendly and easier to navigate. Now the site has the feel of a Red Top tabloid newspaper. Don't like it, sorry.

Human hair will soon be found on moon: Brit astronauts aim for Space

russell 6

Hairballs in space

Make sure you send your hair with the root attached if you want the chance of aliens analyzing your DNA

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