Posts by phuzz

Re: "There is no legal reason for him to appear."

"back when the MPs had a smidgen of honour and sense of duty"

I'd love to know when this golden age of honest politicians was. Back before the Romans invaded, one assumes.

I've heard the "lost cosmonaut" theories, but as you point out, they're almost certainly bollocks. The USSR was surprisingly open about Komarov in Soyuz 1, and the three cosmonauts in Soyuz 11 (pretty much the only people to die in space AFAIK), so it's pretty unlikely they'd have covered up manned launches.

I think part of the stories might have come about because during test launches the Soviet engineers would test the air-ground radios by broadcasting from the test spacecraft, so radio hams might well have picked up transmissions from spacecraft that were officially unmanned.

Re: This indispensable tool ...

There's plenty of sites that require a facebook id to login, so FB is indispensable for those. I think I'm right in say that you need a facebook profile to use Tinder for example.

I've also had friends organise events solely through facebook, so the only way I found out about them was by being told by someone else, although that seems to happen less often these days.

So using the word "indispensable" is stretching it a bit, but not completely wrong.

"Microsoft belatedly realised this with Windows and Office [...] Now they're switching to (expensive) subscriptions"

So far they've skipped the subscription and gone straight for the loss leader. Just continual updates, presumably in the hope that we'll give them money for something else?

Re: Dig

Jason Scott has been trying to digitise every AOL cd. I'm not sure how far he's got, but future historians will thank him. Probably not for this, but they will thank him.

Re: I don't want to be in the Microsoft Haters group but...

Show me an OS that doesn't have regular security updates and I'll show you a really insecure OS.

(Apple patched a character rendering bug in iOS and OSX last month as well)

Re: Usual suspects again

At least Crapita aren't involved. Yet.

Presumably they'll get the contract in four years after this attempt has turned into a massive failure.

Re: Call me a cynic....

"the Fire is a crippled tablet if you want much outside Amazon's walled garden."

It's not too tricky to add the Google Play stuff onto a Fire (if that's what you want), which does make them a good source of cheap+good tablets.

If you do try it, make sure you use exactly the versions recommended, newer or older versions mess up the whole process.

Re: Woops!

Six eyes is many.

Re: Foreign governments ?

You can build your own Stingray with a $400 SDR card and Raspberry Pi.

Then you put it in a serious looking box and sell it to the government/police for a hundred times that.

There's no need to worry about encryption either. Your new DIY cell tower simply tells every phone that contacts it "I only speak 2G, no encryption, sorry" and mobile phones will drop their encryption to stay compatible. Most phones will give you no indication that this is happening.

Re: A bad day at school ...

Taking down half the internet (as was) should be the winner here, but the number of machines involved in 1977 is probably of the order of accidentally knocking an average size school offline these days.

The Oxford English Dictionary disagrees with you.

Re: Perhaps?

SpaceShip 2 is supposed to reach 110km, ie above the Karmen line and therefore in space.

As far as NASA is concerned that's enough to get your "Astronaut" Merit Badge or astronaut wings as they call them, which is why all the pilots of the X-15 who flew over 80km (NASA and the USAF's designation at the time) received their astronaut wings.

In fact, both the test pilots of SS1 have received their wings.

I assume this doesn't cover passengers though.

Re: "“inject keystrokes as a local user”," into an app designed to control embedeed PC's.

I use some NUCs as Point Of Sales terminals.

So literally PoS in my case.

Re: Empire

Always ironic watching Americans getting upset about other countries copying things. Who cares about history anyway?

Re: My one win over beancounters

Our big Eaton UPS is complaining about the batteries being old, so soon enough I'm going to have to replace them (fortunately my boss has already given me the go-ahead to spend money).

Theoretically I can put the UPS in bypass mode and just swap the batteries.

Practically however I'm expecting the entire UPS to shit the bed and take down all the power in the server room. Sods law, if I prepare by shutting everything down, then the swap will go perfectly.

Re: Has he ever come up with a story ...

In the UK if you are mentally ill at the time of your crime, you can be locked up in a secure mental hospital indefinitely.

Re: Same old, same old...

To be fair, Windows 10 has fixed multi-monitor support to the extent where I no longer need to run Ultramon.

Re: 5 Hours to switch over to Disaster Recovery System

That pun was just plane terrible.

Re: re not such a big deal

"As far as I could make out from Unity they were trying to make the same sort of one-size-fits-all Frankeninterface as W8."

And by the sounds of it, this is exactly what Apple are contemplating, one OS from the iPhone to the Mac Pro.

I won't say that they're going to mess it up though. This is Apple we're talking about, they don't always seem to obey the same 'laws' as other tech companies. After all, Microsoft spent years trying to make a tablet PC that people wanted to buy, but it wasn't until the iPad that people actually wanted one.

Re: Fraunhofer Institute's picture

At least they believe that it was actually in space in the first place, there seems to be increasing numbers of people who don't believe in spaceflight, or even a round* Earth.

('round' being a conversational approximation of 'oblate spheroid')

Re: Window/Chaff

"On D-Day chaff was laid at precise locations and intervals to give German radar the false impression that a large invasion fleet was heading towards Calais."

It was dropped by 617 Squadron "The Dam Busters", who by that point in the war had become the 'special ops' squadron. By all accounts they found it incredibly boring, flying back and forth at a specific speed and altitude, although at one point the Germans did try and shell the fake invasion convoy with long range artillery.

Amusingly it turns out that with the technology of the time, it would have been harder to fake the footage than it was to actually go to the moon.

As the ship hadn't reached mainland Britain yet, would it be the Royal Mail's responsibility?

Who is "we", Kemosabe?

They were clearly talking about the UK, not the US.

Anyway, Wall Street is totally biblical, there was some bit about money lenders in the bible right?