Posts by Loyal Commenter

Re: At home

...further to that, I'd suggest that if lightning has a habit of visiting your house, you should invest in a tall metal flagpole and put it >100m away, preferably uphill.

Making random passengers submit to a full-body CT scan perhaps?

Who's going to compensate them for the loss of their dark skies or provide them with software to compensate for the satellites in their images?

You could make the same point, with far greater relevance, about aeroplanes and street lighting. Not to mention birds, bats, moths, et al

Re: only 1200x1600

I've tried 4k monitors, etc. but I need the seperation of multiple displays, as a lot of things try and hog as much of a monitor as they can.

Personally, the best compromise I have found at home with the limits of desk space is two 24" borderless UHD monitors, which give around the same number of pixels as a single 4K monitor, but give a more usable workspace for development work, and will play games on one monitor at a reasonable FPS with a 4 year old graphics card.

Re: No sarcasm you say

If your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

...or in your case, it would seem, from your obvious love of PERL, a camel.

Re: The best I've managed...

I leanred long ago that whenever doing anything anywhere near live data, the first thing you do is

SELECT * INTO TABLE_BACKUP_DATE FROM TABLE

(with the caveat of: beware of cascading deletes on foreign keys)

That, on top of a full database backup if you can afford one, and writing any delete/update statements as select statements first, to do a check that they return the expected number of records.

Re: 15 years later...

You're right - no-one cares about your flying willies.

For comparison, myspace.com is still going too...

Re: Revenue rose 20 per cent

And all this without paying a whole slew of taxes, becuase they're "not" an employer...

Is your heap large enough to get hot? (oo-er missus, etc.) Does it get turned (to let oxygen in)?

If the answert to both of the above is yes, I'd be genuinely surprised if they didn't degrade at elast enoguh to be in smallish fragements when you use the compost (and those fragments are only going to add structure to your soil while they degrade further, so not a bad thing). Unlike plastics, in a healthy soil, they should eventually get eaten up by various bugs and worms in any case.

Did it etch a negative shadow in the wall behind you when you turned it on, from the X-ray burst?

I won't disagree with the idea of getting a plurality of viewpoints, but you have to be able to determine which are reliable, fact-based (without too much cherry-picking) ones, and which are distortions, rhetoric, and lies.

As for Huawei [sp], I have read plenty of articles pointing uot the US Gov't's double-standards here, especially with regards to Cisco. It doesn't take a genius to read between the lines and see that the real motive for the US isn't to stop suspect hardware from snooping on people (especially in a targeted way), but to (continue to) control it.

The tl;dr; here is that you shouldn't trust any hardware manufacturer that may have vested interests, either at a state-actor level, or merely for good ol' fashioned criminal purposes.

Re: Auditors

The one I heard was "Those who can't teach, teach teachers"

Re: PlanCrashed!

Repeat after me:

"The cloud" is just Someone else's computer

Now, bear in mind that if your computer has a problem (crashes, hardware failure, network loss, etc. etc.), the power is in your hands to do something about it (even if that something is scrap it, replace it, and restore everything from backup). If "the cloud" has a problem, the number of things you can do about it is zero (unless you count being put on hold by a call centre drone).

So, the logical thing here is that if you need to back stuff up reliably, the only sure-fire way is to do it yourself. If you're particularly paranoid, you ship those backups to another building, in case the building your computer is in burns down. Depending on the frequency you want to do this, and the amount of stuff you need to back up, the actual solutions may vary from copying a file to a pen drive, to live log-shipping and replication over multiply redundant secure network links to multiple secured off-site bunkers.

Re: "Unacceptable risk", eh? - let me guess

...the US are socially and culturally more closely aligned with the UK...

In some respects, yes. In others, hell no! I'm not cheerleading for China here by any stretch of the imagination, but whislt they are becoming more socially open, with a growing middle class, the USA seems to be becoming increasingly socially conservative, with growing inequality, and a tendency towards theocracy by the back door (offically they have a separation of church and state, but you try and find more than a handful of senior politicians there who aren't openly Christian and don't invoke their deity in their reasons for policy making). Not to mention the highest per-capita prison population in the world (0.72%), with a heavy dose of racial bias added on top (closer to 10% if you're black and male)

Personally, I'd prefer the middle ground. Some sort of democratic arrangement, with a large healthy economy, where people can practice their religion in the privacy of their own home if they so want, without state interference, without a huge gap between the rich and poor. Maybe somewhere that doesn't try to dominate the rest of the world either militarily or economically.

Re: Too much fuss about contamination

An exercise for the reader:

You are able to throw a rock hard enough to reach the Moon. Exactly how hot does it get from atmospheric heating?

There's a reason that most meteorites that are found on Earth are of the metallic type; chondritic (rocky) meteorites are typically small and well fractured by the time they arrive, and those don't have to be travelling at escape velocity to get here. Note that these form in space, so can be reasonably large when they start out. You're going to need a pretty big impact to have a chance of dislodging anything bigger than a pebble into orbit, and those sorts of impact tend to sterilise the area they are about to hit before they even arrive due to the radiant heating from atmospheric impact. The last of these arrived some 65 million years ago, and caused a bit of a kerfuffle at the time...

Now, there's an argument that thngs could arrive here inside rocks that have been knocked off other planets, notably ones without a substantial atmosphere, if the inside of that rock doesn't get too hot, and whatever is inside it can survive the force of impact, and is also resistant to the irradiation it will have received whilst in space, possibly for millions of years.

Even within what is genrerally considered as wider Bristol (i.e. South Glos). Amirite? Orr nohhhhhh?

Re: Software

My understanding is that 'smart' locks also have a physical lock because you need to be able to open them in the event of a power failure. That means that they are, by definition, less secure than a standard lock, because they have an additional attack surface. (physical lock vs physical lock and smart lock).

As anyone who has spent some time doing it as a hobby will tell you, many physical locks are laughably easy to pick if you know how. I would imagine the 'backup' on a smart lock will, in most cases, be added as an afterthought, so will also be substantially less secure than an equivalent priced decent physical-only lock. I'd not be surpirsed if it could be picked by 'bumping' alone, or with a 'master' key, making the lock essentially useless against any professional burglar.

The only advantage I can think of for a smart lcok is the ability to audit (i.e. track) who is opening it, and when. If it's your lock, that's an advantage; if it's a lock that you have to use that does not belong to you (as in this case), it's a disadvantage, and a potentially significant one from the perspective of privacy.

Security and privacy are normally seen as a trade-off (i.e. you sacrifice some of one to gain some of thd other). In the case of 'smart' locks, it seems you are sacrificing both, to a varying degree, for a perceived gain that in most cases is no such thing.

Yeah, pretty sure that's a picture taken somewhere (else) in Europe. The clue's in the fact that it's not sufficiently yellow to be British fast food, and also it's in more than one language (and one of the isn't Welsh).

I'm also assuming here that you are American, in which case might I bring the following exhibits to the stand: Hormone fed beef, chlorine-washed chicken, and absolutely everything stuffed with high-fructose corn syrup. I'd much rather eat offal to be honest. I'm quite partial to liver and bacon, and last time I was in France I had a very nice salad made from duck gizzards.

Re: He's Innocent!!!

I suspect you have never experienced first-hand looking after someone with dementia if you think that sort of comment is clever.

Re: maybe it's a latin thing

Well, of course the foil - that goes without saying.

Re: RIP Peter

As did Dave Prowse. I always liked the idea of a West-Country Vader. Darth Cider if you will...

Re: CC the printer

At a place where I used to work, one of the account managers used to print out her outbound emails and fax them to the client for exactly the same "reason".