* Posts by John Brown (no body)

25250 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010

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Biden projected to be the next US President, Microsoft joins rest of world in telling Trump: It looks like... you're fired

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Yay! Party time!

"Perhaps for next time America needs to sort out a single, clearly defined, set of national voting rules so there's no running to the courts endlessly all over the place (which further delays counting)."

Why would they? Whoever the incumbents are, they know they may need that confusion and legal dispute for themselves next time around. Most politicians seem to be lawyers. The previous two statements may well be linked in some way.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: FAKK NEWSS AGAIN AGAIN

...but not before he drank multiple 2 litre bottles of Kool Aid. Again.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Yay! Party time!

"And then try to prevent the frauds we've seen with postal voting here in the UK."

Election fraud is hard to do and rarely happens in anything other than very minor instances.

https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/sites/default/files/pdf_file/Fraud-allegations-data-report-2017.pdf

"As shown in chart A2 the most frequently reported types of voting case related to the offence of personation (voting as someone else) either at a polling station (28 cases), using a postal vote (22 cases) or using a proxy vote (13 cases). A further 14 cases related to the offence of undue influence. The remaining voting cases related to attempts to tamper with ballot papers (three cases), breaches of secrecy requirements (eight cases), alleged bribery (eight cases) and treating – providing food or drink to influence a voter to vote in a particular way (eight cases). "

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Yay! Party time!

"But I also think there have been some real issues wrt allegations of ballot stuffing, absentee ballots etc."

Whilst I agree there was most certainly some irregularities, that's pretty much unavoidable in an election on such a scale, I sincerely doubt there was any organisation behind them and likewise that there could be enough, ie in at least the thousands per voting state/region/area/whatever, to actually swing it. Most notably, there doesn't seem to be any accusations of ballot rigging in places where Republicans won. It seems ballot rigging only ever happens in places where an incumbent loses, more so if those areas they lose in are "vital" to not losing overall.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Good

Well, he's "Irish"[1] and against Brexit, so might not be so good for the UK, although probably a better option than Trump and his "great deal, the best deals"

[1] His ancestors left Ireland 170 years ago. I'm not sure just how "Irish" he is, but he's proud of his roots. (He doesn't mention the French bit though)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Good

"compared to Trump he's an elder statesman."

...at 77, he's certainly that!

Shopping online for Xmas? AI chatbots know whether you want to be naughty or nice

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Shell Energy

"On one "lucky" occasion three months after my email address had changed it actually put me in a queue at position 99 to chat to real human being. Over an hour later I'd got to position 12 in the queue, then got a message saying "reconnecting" and I was dropped from the queue."

Have you considered that there was never a human involved at all and you only got to position 12 because the people in front also got dropped from the queue? They just build the delay in to make it seem like there's some sort of real process happening.

Tech support scammer dialed random number and Australian Police’s cybercrime squad answered

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: They don't seem to get this

I think it depends how you pronouce the word "please" and whether that pronunciation works on the recipient, eg "oh, pu-leeeze, just fuck off"

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: “Police recommend that you do not engage with scammers,”

I had one who eventually twigged I must be running Linux (FreeBSD actually, natch), and passed me onto one of his "specialist colleagues" who then proceeded to guide me to the Linux version of Teamviewer. I was quite impressed. Of course, the download kept "stalling" and eventually it turned out my version Linux wasn't one of the ones listed :-)

Elon Musk's ancient April Fools' gag about 'Tesla Tequila' made real in lightning-shaped bottle

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

LOL. With that many, it's not very likely. However, if there IS a market at that time, she may well have one or two that may be especially rare at that point. The oddest things can end up having collector resale value.

eg whiskey and certain plastic toys, "The best piece was the vinyl cape Jawa, the guys from the desert in the original Star Wars film," he said. That item alone fetched £22,000.

Now, in real life, a decent whiskey is relatively likely to have some future value, but guessing which cheap bit of plastic tat might have future value is probably harder than a Vulture Capitalist picking a winning start-up.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

I wonder how many people have rooms full of unopened crap that they are hoping will be their retirement fund? They could be lucky and one or two items might well turn out to be collectable and have a future value, but I suspect it' will be the least likely items. The ones people think will have future value are the same things everyone else is collecting with the same hopes which will depress the value until at least after the collectors lifetime when much of the tat will be binned by their children and the few remaining ones might have some real value for the grandchildren who hung on.

We've made it: Microsoft deems El Reg relevant enough to have a play with the nerfed version of its upcoming Xbox

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: The Reg reputation is at stake

Or c), because the author wants more freebies :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Clear as mud

And not forgetting their biggest ever naming cock-up with Surface and Surface RT, two completely incompatible bits of hardware with incompatible OS (that almost looked the same) and incompatible apps.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Confusing

"It was all sensible up to Windows NT 3.51, then Windows 95 came along and all sense of numerical continuity went out of the window."

Now you are getting confused too! WinNT 3.51 bears no relation to Win95 or the ancestors of Win95. NT was a completely different branch. The two branches merged with WinXP. And everyone is forgetting Windows 1 and Windows 2 and their various point releases as well as special 286 and 386 versions.

Suspended sentence for bank IT worker who broke into his boss's webcam because he didn't get a payrise

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I agree it seems like very light punishment

"An excellent example of the battle between theory and reality. Even if the record of the conviction is rendered inaccessible, the public reporting on his efforts is harder to erase.."

Convictions are only spent after a number years though. Unless it's a very high profile case, or a case that relates to you in some way, such as by locality etc, odds are few people will remember it years later. I suppose it depends on the job, the applicant, the result of any legally required background check (costs time and money, few employers IME will spend money they don't have to) as to whether someone will go to the extra trouble of hunting down possible public records/reporting/media and trying to link them to the person applying for the job.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I agree it seems like very light punishment

"It's possible, I agree, but bullshitting about his past can only work for so long before biting him in the backside. The truth is out there for anyone curious enough to look."

If a conviction is "spent", not only does the person not have to declare it, but if an employer subsequently becomes aware of it, they are not allowed to use it against the person. That's the whole point of of the system of "spent" convictions. It allows you "start fresh", eventually. As has also been mentioned, even a "spent" conviction could still show up in an enhanced criminal records check, but it should only show if the conviction is relevant to the job being applied for and the employer under most circumstances doesn't get to see what the offence was, only if the check results in the applicant being disqualified from a particular job type.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I'd Do It Again For A £1,000!

A suspended sentence means he goes to prison if he breaks any other laws. Doing it again would cost lot more than for the first offence. There will most likely be other conditions attached his "release" too, breaching of which will result in going to prison.

California backs Proposition 22: Great news for Uber, Lyft as their drivers can work as indie contractors

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Tech douche bros rule!

Tell 'em to move to Oregon then :-)

Please, tell us more about how just 60 hydrogen-powered 5G drones could make 400,000 UK base stations redundant

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Can't hear you Mysterons, you're on Mute!! OO

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

...or even one of the S.H.I.E.L.D flying carriers

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Now I'm confused...

"before hand waving a lot about the "rural" internet?"

There is a pattern where people claim "we can do cheap rural internet. It starts with the big claims, then it turns to "we must do big cities first" (where the money is), then the start-up goes bust and either disappears or is taken over by an incumbent. Whatever the outcome, it never seems to reach the originally touted rural roll-outs though.

Heck yeah, we should have access to our own cars' repair data: Voters in US state approve a landmark right-to-repair ballot measure

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"the thin end of the case opener."

AKA a spudger :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: This isn't just a civilian issue

Also the reason that RAF Conningsby is colloquially known by the uniformed residents as BAE Conningsby.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Cars collect some interesting data...

This is why I always use the seatbelt to secure bags and/or shopping when on the front seat. It's doesn't seem to take all that much weight for the system to decide it's a person and start binging at me as I pull away. A decently loaded shopping bag will almost always trigger it.

Whoa, humans have been hanging out and doing science stuff in freaking space aboard the ISS for 20 years

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: STS-27

"Balls of steel!"

Does that come out of the 'nauts personal weight allowance?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Meh

Re: If we as humankind work together...

"the days when politicians of all types listened to scientists."

...and funding was passed in Congress by a single, solitary vote.

The car you buy in 2025 will include a terabyte of storage. Robo-taxis might need 11TB

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Gimp

Re: A rhetorical question?

"Car manufacturers do not need the data except to train systems more."

That alone will justify it in the minds of the car makers. For your own good of course as it will be used to make your car even safer. And in the current era of data fetishists, ALL data is valuable either now or in the future.

Alibaba trying to take China’s Singles Day shopping frenzy global to make Bezos & Co look like sales small fry

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Joke

Re: Not a great day...

Of course it does. But sometimes a bit of sensitivity is called for. By the way, we're looking for volunteers to promote National Bacon and Beer day across the Middle East? Care for a job?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Not a great day...

It's about 11/11. not 9/11 (or 11/9 as we say here). And as it happens, even the USA commemorates 11/11. They call it Veterans Days. Locally, it's usually known as either Remembrance Day or Armistice Day. Likewise, it's not about religion. I only used Christmas as an example that most people here might understand and can work as an example as to why something may not work in other parts of the world.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Not a great day...

But the article is about using a local "special" day, worldwide, hence the potential issue. It's like promoting Xmas Sales in non-Christian countries. It happens, but it doesn't always go down well.

H2? Oh! New water-splitting technique pushes progress of green hydrogen

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Just try to remember not to use a dope that's flammable and "near as dammit" thermite paint :-)

Japanese eggheads strap AI-powered backpacks to seagulls

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: The really important question ...

Nah, they just perch on the HT powerlines found everywhere (except at sea)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: IF <something> THEN <do> ELSE <not>

I'm not convinced it's even weak AI. After all, it's an 8-bit CPU running everything. I suspect it's purely a pre-built model and there is no learning going on at all, just a flying equivalent of Eliza. They may well have done some learning from datasets on the ground to optimise the decision tree though.

Voyager 2 is back online after eight months of radio silence

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
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Re: You know you need coffee when..

"..you read the headline and think "How did they upgrade the ariel on Voyager?'"

See next weeks On Call :-)

Apple on the hook for another $503m in decade-long VirnetX patent rip-off legal marathon

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Stupid System

Yes, clearly, from yours and other posts, I'm not the only one thinking this. Surely "grounds for appeal" should include substantive reasons and/or new evidence, not just "we don't like the result". And likewise, as seen in some other cases, holding back evidence you should have used, but kept in reserve in case you lost so as to just the appeal needs to be stamped on to. It seems many of these big litigants seem to put forward just what evidence they think they need to win specifically so as to have something "new" for an appeal. What happened to "the truth, the WHOLE truth and nothing but the truth"?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: On the hook for infringing them while they were valid??

Maybe, maybe not. It's like changing the law. You can't prosecute retrospectively because something is a crime now, but wasn't then. Likewise if something was a crime then, but isn't now, it's unusual for people to be pardoned retrospectively. Even crimes committed historically and only arrested and charged recently are usually prosecuted and sentenced under the prevailing conditions at the time. It's messy, ugly and complicated.

GitHub warns devs face ban if they fork DMCA'd YouTube download tool... while hinting how to beat the RIAA

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Why is such a tool needed?

Although obfuscation, no matter how heavy, isn't encryption or DRM so not covered by the law on "breaking" copy protection.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Why is such a tool needed?

Well, clearly, Home Taping Killed Music. So now it's YouTube-DL killing the already dead Zombie Music. Again.

Obviously the solution is to add a 10% surcharge[1] to anything capable of downloading content from the internet, such as YouTube-DL, curl and wget so it can be put into the RIAA coffers for the execs bonuses.

[1]What's 10% of nothing?

Linux Mint pushes out its own Chromium build to help users avoid Canonical's Snap Store

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: They missed the obvious.

"where applications bundle third party DLLs that then go unpatched for security or stability issues."

Yes, this! Once you start compiling ion static libraries, everyone has to play ball when a vuln shows up in one of those multiple copies and they all need patching instead of just the one dynamically linked library.

Admittedly I'm probably spoiled by FreeBSD and it's ports/packages systems and a unified kernel/userland which rarely have the dependency hell the Linuxes used to suffer from, and still do in some respects.

Google's home security package flies the Nest, Chocolate Factory pledges software support – for now

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Add it to the list

Google as a company seems to have the attention span and attitude of failing university students who just want to party with their "new" ideas and toys 'till they get bored and move on to the new shiny.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Surely by now...

Nets were not Google products when most people bought them. Unfortunately for them, Google bought Nest and the writing was on the wall. Google spent $3.2Billion on Nest and now they are throwing it in the bin. I hope the IP and tech they bought was worth it. On the other hand, maybe buying up companies for silly money and then shutting it all down a few years later is some sort of long game tax avoidance scheme. Or, on the gripping hand, maybe they just don't like other companies being successful so kill off those who might grow too big before they become to big to kill?

South Park creators have a new political satire series with some of the best AI-generated deepfakes on the internet yet

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"How long before we see something like the Queen eating a Corgi on YouTube and it promoted as real?"

When did you last see a royal corgi? /tinfoil hat

Remember when the keyboard was the computer? You can now relive those heady days with the Raspberry Pi 400

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Not in the enterprise

The may have gone with the 80's home computing form factor. Shame they didn't go with the full fat keyboard most models other the Sinclair went with, eg Tandy (not CoCo), Apple, C64, Atari (not the 400), Amiga, etc. I really don't like those Apple Airbook alike keyboards.

Google reCAPTCHA service under the microscope: Questions raised over privacy promises, cookie use

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Helping Google

Does it? I don't recall seeing anything other US street scenes. If they do, then it seems odd that they know which country I', in but never seem to show any UK street scenes. Maybe it's only a tiny fraction of a percentage that is non-US and I've not been lucky enough to get a localised one.

You only live twice: Once to start the installation, and the other time to finish it off

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Sadly, no international jet-settng for me

"The most "exciting" cross-border incident for me was when my always-optimistic colleague only brought an out-of-date driving licence for ID for an internal UK flight."

In many cases, just because the licence is no longer valid for driving doesn't make the ID details on it any less valid. Although many jobsworths will try to make it so. My legally valid until I'm 70 pink paper driving licence has been almost refused as ID a number of times by people too young to know about them, even in a car hire place where they should have known better. Luckily there's almost always an older manager or other higher up around put the kids right :-)

X.Org is now pretty much an ex-org: Maintainer declares the open-source windowing system largely abandoned

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
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Re: The power of open-source

I like to think of that "ancient cruft" as "well tested bug-free code".

By your own definition, it's not cruft so it can stay :-)

Return of the flying car, just when we all need to escape

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: We piggyback the 4G from our mobile phones

Wow! At least one person thinks quarantine or self-isolation means you can still go out and walk the streets? No wonder we're in the position we are! Were you at the rave in Bristol too? Or partying with the students in Nottingham?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Justice?

"have an unelectable opposition" and incumbant.

FTFY

Windows kernel vulnerability disclosed by Google's Project Zero after bug exploited in the wild by hackers

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

While I agree with you shouting out GSW in a TV show as is there wont to sound cool, takes LONGER than shouting out Gun Shot Wound. Wound is one syllable while "double-you" is three! (Or two if you live in an area that say "Dubya") :-)

Remember 2013? This coffee machine does: If I could turn back time – I'd reboot this PC

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Change the battery

And the date of the BIOS build doesn't mean that's when the machine was built either. Depending on how often a new BIOS is released to production, it could easily be 6-9 months that the boards were produced with that BIOS revision and date, and just as long or longer that they were on the suppliers shelves before they ended up and the machine manufactures.

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