* Posts by Pen-y-gors

3782 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Oct 2010

ISIS and Jack Daniel's: One of these things is not like the other

Pen-y-gors

Justifiable concerns

Having a neighbour who drinks JD crazy-water may be more of an immediate threat than having a mediaeval death-culter. At least the actually-not-at-all-Islamic nutters usually tend to go somewhere else to do appalling things.

Computers4Christians miraculously appears on Ubuntu wiki

Pen-y-gors

Re: Direct link to Deity

From my point of understanding : If a Deity truly existed there would be no need for religion..

An interesting thought. If one argues that all religions are based on the need for absolute belief in one's deity or deities, then if said deity actually exists, belief - and thus religion - would not be needed. When you bump into your deity in Tesco or it appears in a pillar of flame when you're about to exceed the speed limit, then no belief is required. You have absolute knowledge. Religion based on belief is then as pointless as a religion based on mud or carpets. It's there.

(I do like a good bit of theological disputation - El Reg again demonstrates that it is the Numero Uno of commentardism)

Home Sec Amber Rudd: Yeah, I don't understand encryption. So what?

Pen-y-gors

Re: Who defines what is "terrorist material"?

Tory Party Political Broadcasts? They terrify me.

Boffins take biometric logins to heart, literally: Cardiac radar IDs users to unlock their PCs

Pen-y-gors

better idea

Sounds like an unacceptably high error rate. Perhaps best to stick to using it as a heart monitor, and find something more reliable for biometric login.

I've not done any research but I suspect that the pattern of veins etc in the rectum may be unique, so logging in securely requires nothing more complicated than sticking some sort of probe in to photograph it, and of course leave it inserted to prevent unauthorised access if the user wanders off.

One problem is that the veins and piles may well change over time, so a better option could be to look at vein patterns in the bladder. Just insert a fibreoptic camera via a catheter and you have the ultimate security system.

Spanish govt slammed over bizarre Catalan .cat internet registry cop raid

Pen-y-gors

Curious Spanish attitude

We know why the Spanish central govt don't want Catalunya and Euskade to be independent - same reasons as the French want to keep Bretagne and the English want to keep Cymru and Scotland.

But they seem to have totally missed the irony of suggesting that a democratic state wouldn't tolerate this - 'this' being a referendum which allows the demos to decide for themselves what they want to do.

If they think it's a bad idea, try arguing against it (but more effectively than Cameron did with the Brexit referendum).

UK Prime Minister calls on internet big beasts to 'auto-takedown' terror pages within 2 HOURS

Pen-y-gors

@Justin Uff

So unless we can get terrorists to adopt a theme song, by which they must start all videos, it's simply not that easy.

That's an excellent idea - and 5 years in chokey if you issue a trrrrrrst video without the song. What should it be? YMCA? Bright side of Life? Sit on my face...

Pen-y-gors

Re: Yeah yeah yeah - the usual bollocks

"Stuff we don't like"? Oh, that's easy. Set up the filters to remove any account with the word 'Conservative' in the name. The bot-writers make it look incredibly simple to identify pro or anti-Drumpf posts - just borrow their technology.

Inept bloke who tried to sell military sat secrets to Russia gets 5 years

Pen-y-gors

Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki

Now that's a fine name! Just think how impressive that would sound when you introduce yourself at a conference or on a course - or even at a party. Much better than "Oh, I'm in IT at Tesco"

BoJo, don't misuse stats then blurt disclaimers when you get rumbled

Pen-y-gors

Re: Lies, Damn lies etc

But are you certain the eighteenth-century throwback is telling the truth? I remain to be convinced that he isn't a secret Pastafarian with shares in Durex

Pen-y-gors

Lies, Damn lies etc

Let's face it, this is a Tory politician we're talking about, so "Damn lies" is the only bit that applies.

[I say 'tory' politician, but politicians of many other parties are just as bad. The only difference is that a varying proportion of Labour, Liberal, SNP, PC MPs are actually reasonably honest and morally sound. ALL tories (and kippers) lie as naturally as breathing, and not lying is as hard as holding their breath for 10 minutes]

Pen-y-gors

the 350m claim should have been scrutinised and explained that it was net

I think you mean gross - nett is the £200 million (and falling).

Pen-y-gors

Extra costs?

Exactly - how much will it cost to create and run a Medicines approval agency, which will have to duplicate everything that the existing EMA does. At the moment we pay a proportion of the cost, now we'll have to pay the whole thing.

Pen-y-gors

"we're told how to spend the money"

Yes but, no but...We spend the money on agreed programmes. e.g. Agriculture, infrastructure, regional development, which we would want to spend the money on anyway. And which May and friends say they will continue to pay. So are they going to be 'in control' in the future? Or if they're going to NOT spend the money on the schemes they've promised to continue supporting, then perhaps they should have told us before last June?

Brit ministers jet off on a trade mission to tout our digital exports...

Pen-y-gors

Re: Brexit

Load them into Spitfires, of course, and drop them by parachute.

No, not at all suitable. Spits are single-seater (except for trainers) so you'd have to open the canopy at high speed, while piloting, to lob the consignment out. Lancasters, that's what you need!

Pen-y-gors

Re: Brexit

@Phil

But does 'IT products' include bits travelling along fibre? Will all packets travelling across borders have to stop for customs checks? Can illegal immigrants hide their digital identities in a stream of data? We only want British-made bits on our interwebs.

Pen-y-gors

Re: Brexit

What is the WTO tariff rate for importing and exporting bits? Does it have to be paid in bitcoins?

Boffin wins (Ig) Nobel prize asking if cats can be liquid

Pen-y-gors

Re: Cats are neither a solid nor a liquid.

@Sir Runcible

Ever tried to introduce a cat to a toilet bowl?

Why on earth would you want to do that in the first place? Major claw wounds seem very appropriate.

Pen-y-gors

Re: hmm

Oh Lord, it'll be recommended by and for sale on Goop within a few days, probably with a built-in file of whale and dolphin noises.

Cue: "What's that whistling?"

Pen-y-gors

Peace prize

I notice from the full list that the Peace Prize went to "Didgeridoo Playing as Alternative Treatment for Obstructive Sleep Apnoea Syndrome: Randomised Controlled Trial,"

I'd have thought that was pretty self-evident - no sleep, so no sleep apnoea for anyone within a hundred yards,

What is the cyber equivalent of 'use of force'? When do we send in the tanks?

Pen-y-gors

Internet dependence?

The United States is more vulnerable than any other country in the world to a cyberattack, warns Haines, because so much of it is dependent on the internet.

An awful lot of countries have infrastructure that depends on Internet availability, and arguably the smaller ones can be more vulnerable, as they are more likely to have limited connectivity and a larger proportion of single points of failure. Impossible(?) to kill all the interwebs in USA, easier in Uruguay etc.

Facebook let advertisers target 'Jew-haters'

Pen-y-gors

Re: "Facebook's moral compass is often strangely-aligned"

Zuckerberg's compass always points to moNey

I'm getting very worried about suggestions he's going to run for President. And we think Drumpf is dangerous!

Chirpy, chirpy, cheap, cheap: Printable IoT radios for 10 cents each

Pen-y-gors

Re: Official reg units please

@Dave 126

Deere developed a self-scouring steel plough, allowing more continuous ploughing.

I do find El Reg so much more educational than the Fail Online!

Pen-y-gors

Re: Official reg units please

Typical of the USians to come up with weird measurements which are meaningless in the rest of the world. I mean, who but a seriously rich capitalist bstard has a house that's 70ft square for heaven's sake?

And 'a one acre vegetable farm' FFS? One acre I can handle, but vegetable farm? Does the range depend on what sort of vegetable you grow? Better range with carrots than maize? Is it affected if you have a few pigs and chickens? Or could you have a cow and use the horns for a repeater transmitter? And does the soil type affect things? These questions must be answered. The point about standards is they are standard - a one acre vegetable farm is fine, provided they specify the type of crop and location.

Sheesh, colonials!

Pen-y-gors

Re: Official reg units please

@charles 9

No, no...a cricket pitch is the bit in the middle, which is one chain long (0.9153 brontosaui). the field can vary in size.

DARPA lays out cash-splash to defibrillate Moore's Law

Pen-y-gors

Where is this going?

I'm guessing that the long term aim is to have a computing engine that fits on a single quark, and runs at several trillion GHz.

Boffins' satcomms rig uses earthly LEDs to talk to orbiting PV panels

Pen-y-gors

A truly cunning plan my lord

Lateral thinking at its finest. Only one thought - surely the PV panels on a satellite will be aligned to point towards a bright light source, e.g. the sun, rather than pointing at the ground and the transmitter?

+1 ZU DAS SUB FUR DAS BLINKENLIGHTS

Monkey selfie case settles for a quarter of future royalties

Pen-y-gors

@ukgnome

They really boil my piss.

Second Bruce: That's a strange expression, Bruce.

First Bruce: Well Bruce, I heard the Prime Minister use it. 'They really boil my piss, your Majesty,' he said and she smiled quietly to herself.

Third Bruce: She's a good Sheila Bruce, and not at all stuck up.

Pen-y-gors

Re: Interesting principles behind this

Animals do have rights, and have had for many years, but they're not the same rights as humans.In some cases animals are given a right to have their habitat protected. They have the right not to be ill-treated and neglected. People have been prosecuted for cruelty to animals for centuries, even when they're on the way to market and the dinner table. Abattoirs kill animals, but it must be quickly, cleanly and painlessly. <tangential and unconnected thought>hmmmm....politiicans....</thought>

Pen-y-gors

Re: Interesting principles behind this

The starting point is my cat. It's a cat. It fights other cats at will and kills anything it can catch for its own amusement.

My cats do that too. But I still reckon if they were given the vote they'd do a better job than approx 17 million 'humans' on the electoral roll.

Astroboffins map 845 galaxies in glorious 3D, maybe dark matter too

Pen-y-gors

What does God like?

This is confusing - it seems the $deity is making lumps of rock in the shape of ducks, but now is making galaxies in the shape of potatoes. Is this a cosmic hint that we should eschew a vegan diet and live on Duck a l'orange with pommes dauphinoise?

Hi Amazon, Google, Apple we might tax you on revenue rather than profit – love, Europe

Pen-y-gors

Alternative calculation?

As noted above, turnover tax just results in increasing sales price, profits stay the same.

How about working out a way to define what is a 'single' multinational company (based on percentage holdings, commercial relationships etc). Then look at the global turnover and profits - If they globally have a turnover of x billion, of which 20% is in country A, then they pay tax on 20% of their global profits to country A, at whatever tax rate they charge.

Details could be messy, based on definitions of 'profit' etc, but it might work.

The bigger the drone, the bigger the impact

Pen-y-gors

Re: WTF?

"tins of bear"

Isn't that what homesick Alaskans have in their cupboards in the Big City? Serves the same purpose as Marmite for ex-pat Brits.

Pen-y-gors

Drone noise?

We won’t tolerate large, loud drones filling our skies day and night.

I suspect we won't tolerate small, buzzy drones filling our skies day and night either.

Pen-y-gors

Just what I was thinking - and build in the same control systems that you'd use in a drone, so no need for human pilots.

Google to kill its Drive file locker in two confusing ways

Pen-y-gors

Re: What will people make of this?

Extend that to 'around any free service'.

In fact I'd be wary about a design built around any single proprietary system. AWS is good for storing lots of encrypted cloudy backups, and isn't expensive, but will they go and change things at short notice?

Pen-y-gors

"allows you to quickly access all of your Google Drive files on demand, directly from your computer, meaning you use almost none of your hard drive space and spend less time waiting for files to sync."

1) hard drive space is cheap

2) For many people upload and download speed for cloud connections is not instant (no fibre, I get about 800kbps upload, 10Mbps down). Fine for a small file on a fast connection, but... Just been downloading 750MB of images from Dropbox that a client wants processing. It was not instant. Uploading them again will take a couple of hours. I'll stick to working locally and keeping backups.

Lord Sugar phubbed in peers' debate on 'digital understanding'

Pen-y-gors

Boring jobs?

I think there are two issues here - automating away mind-blowingly boring or dangerous jobs is one thing, simply introducing technology to reduce costs and jobs (robotic voices on the phone?) is possibly another. What's wrong with having a human answer the phone straight away, rather than spending several minutes on 'press 1 for...' and 'enter your account number' etc (which they ask you for again when you finally get to a human). Big organisation? publish a clear list of numbers that take you straight to specific departments.

Pen-y-gors

Logic?

No logical connection whatsoever, but this is one of our parliamentarians talking, who are famed for their ability to jump to conclusions based on zero facts. I suppose it's an improvement on the usual - deciding a policy despite a stack of contrary facts.

Personally I have no ID card and have had no trouble accessing t'Interwebs for the last 25 years or so.

Scottish pensioners rage at Virgin cabinet blocking their view

Pen-y-gors

Silly really...

Cost of admitting 'whoops, we screwed up, sorry' and moving the box - £10K or so?

Value of bad publicity after saying "Get stuffed wrinklies, we did everything within the rules" - Priceless.

How are these people still in business if they're so dim?

Dude who claimed he invented email is told by judge: It's safe to say you didn't invent email

Pen-y-gors

Costs?

I sincerely hope that defence costs will be paid by the nutter.

Ideally, can the court award triple costs for being an idiot? - no-one should have to face financial costs because of optimistic loons.

As Hurricane Irma grows, Earth now lashed by SOLAR storms

Pen-y-gors

Re: Coincidentally

More likely related to the fifth pint of Doom Bar and a dirty glass.

Pen-y-gors

Just agree - but cross your fingers.

Pen-y-gors

Re: People who link global warming to sunspots are wankers

@bob

It's as bad as 'denier'.

What's so wrong with 'denier'? How else am I supposed to specify the quality of my tights? (that's 'pantyhose' for Merkins)

Close Encounters of the Kuiper Belt kind: New Horizons to come within just 3,500km of MU69

Pen-y-gors

Another duckie?

What are the chances of that, then? Must mean something. God is a duck?

Pen-y-gors

Re: It is a long way away from the sun

@Tom Womack

and with a camera on a good tripod you can take pretty good photos

But where do you balance a tripod on New Horizons without it falling off in the slipstream - that baby is really movin'

Violent moon mishap will tear Uranus a new ring or two

Pen-y-gors

Replacement?

It would be a shame to mess up the naming system. Couldn't we navigate a few major asteroids in to fill their places? Or perhaps even around Earth? A couple of decent sized, high-albedo rocks at the Moon's trojans, and we could save a fortune on street lights - permanent moonlight. (Bummer for astronomers though, so maybe not a great idea)

Secure microkernel in a KVM switch offers spy-grade app virtualization

Pen-y-gors

Re: What I don't understand is why that needs an OS kernel?

Sounds like a KVM version of those multiple windows you get on CCTV monitors. Could be handy though.

Or if you don't mind a bit of sharing, something like a couple of Teamviewer sessions (other software is available) open at the same time on the same monitor? Not 100% air-gapped though...

Give staff privacy at work, Euro human rights court tells bosses

Pen-y-gors

<foam>

Courts....Traitors...Enemies of the people....

</foam>

Dear rioters: Hiding your face with scarves, hats can't fool this AI system

Pen-y-gors

Re: Thanks for that

Trump mask is okay,provided it's realistic. But they won't be fooled unless you can imitate the tiny hands and todger as well.

Whoosh, there it is: Toshiba bods say 14TB helium-filled disk is coming soon

Pen-y-gors

Helium?

I'm impressed that they go so far to reduce the weight of the product by filling it with helium, although wouldn't vacuum be even better?

I remember chatting to a bloke who used a helium-filled barrage balloon for advertising at events. Rather than faffing around with cylinders of expensive gas he just had a large trailer and pumped the gas from the balloon to a bag in the trailer and vice versa. Probably the only time when a laden trailer weighed less than an un-laden!

[Yes,I know, probably really something boring to do with air resistance and the read heads]