Posts by Robert Helpmann??

Re: The cratered Earth

the late heavy bombardment peppered the planet quite thoroughly but in 3-4 billion years since then most of the crust has been recycled except for a few places like Greenland.

Not so much. The world as a whole bears plenty of evidence of meteor strikes. To quote someone who knows a lot more about it than I:

"If you didn’t know better, you’d suspect meteors were targeting Australia, North America and Europe. It’s not that there are so many craters there, it’s that there are so many geologists there, plus countries affluent enough to do detailed geologic mapping."

- Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences, University of Wisconsin – Green Bay

There is also evidence there are craters under Antarctic ice, but it's not the most hospitable environment to go looking.

REF: https://malagabay.wordpress.com/2013/06/05/tektites-4-primary-and-secondary-impact-craters/

Re: "Britain's FBI"

I did a search for "Britain's FBI". All the top results were for UK sites. I am not sure who it is being aimed at though I think there is some need for compensation being implied by the phrase.

Re: Indeed

The issue with the idea that a hangover is tied to learning not to overindulge, drink a particular thing or whatever is that it is too far removed from a particular behavior. In order to make the connection strong enough to matter, the hangover would have to start very soon after drinking. Obviously, this is not the case on any level. Puking is more likely to cause an individual to learn they've done a very bad thing to their body (via the Garcia effect), but they are much more likely to recall that connection when they are drunk enough that it is too late rather than at the beginning of a potential binge.

Re: Nothing like having your work day extended a few more hours because 'The Cloud' is unavailable.

If you're going to install a local client and work on local files, why would you want to pay for a subscription cloud service instead of just paying once for the actual local client?

I agree with the sentiment, but my college student child got the cloud version pre-installed on her school supplied laptop, but stores everything locally because she often works from locations with no connectivity. Choice is good, even in cases that may only make sense for a small percentage of a user base.

Re: Bodycam?

"Acting suspiciously" is a wonderfully versatile phrase that can be used to harass or detain pretty much anyone within sight as it would seem to rely entirely on the judgement of the officer assessing the situation. No-one is above suspicion although some are more worthy of it than others.

Re: You don't say

"The professor handwaves your point in his original post".

He addresses it, just not in a convincing manner. We already have plenty of examples of a variety of approaches, from immediate full disclosure to reporting directly to vendors with no public disclosure and we have seen plenty of responses ranging from completely inadequate to robust. We have enough data to make up our minds which approach works best in most cases and that's really what's important. More to the point, what the professor proposes simply flies in the face of real world evidence.

Also, having the public's anxieties ratchet up is necessary in as much as if there is no anxiety about security flaws, there will be no patches deployed or fixes made. Complacency is the enemy of security!

Re: Pedantry: thrust units.

I think you mean 19619 Norris.

That's right on a number of levels. I hear Musk's next project will be cloning Chuck Norris and then having the clones all stand in a carefully calculated formation from which they can simultaneously punch an enormous rocket into space. That could definitely work!

Re: "who wish to locate birth parents but are prevented from being given by the information by law"

Right now, the information may be used by law enforcement for identifying suspects based on DNA evidence. That's now. What about when this information slips out into the wild because of some hack or sloppiness on the part of the government? Is it possible that it might, even if still controlled by the company and accessed by law enforcement, be used for other purposes (political, for example) or to enforce laws that we do not have yet and may not be to the benefit of the customers of this service?

There are certain areas where medical professionals are legally bound to work with law enforcement. This is not one of them. Until it is and everyone is aware of it, then FamilyTreeDNA is violating what most would consider ethical behavior and should be sanctioned.

Re: frozen-RAM attacks

How often does that get used in practice?

Keeping the machine powered on is Computer Forensics 101. If there is an opportunity to do this, it will typically be done. I find myself yelling at TV crime shows that depict law enforcement turning machines off after having just caught their suspect in the act because that is just how basic a step that is.

All the usual ooptions

Shoot them, trap them, scare them, block their perches and nesting areas, release raptors to snack on them, use drones to harass them - all of these have been done with varying degrees of success for similar problems elsewhere. What is called for here is something a bit different... something unique. To that end, please vote on the following or suggest your own solution that may in some way have a connection to the issue (or not).

1) Microwave blasts to fry the flying beasts while in the air. Not as far-fetched as you might think. Radar will accomplish this if used (in)correctly.

2) Declare war on the bastards! I know declaring war on things is more of an American thing, but it has worked fairly well for us. Stage a WWII re-enactment themed fumigation the entire area. There must be some vintage aircraft that could be used to drop gas canisters onto the benighted area.

3) Open the town as a cat sanctuary while running a simultaneous campaign to encourage cat ladies from all over the world to bring their pussies to have a good time. If only one or two decide to do this, the problem of roaming cats will quickly displace that of dive-bombing pigeons. Dogs next, followed by goats, cows and horses.

Re: "Young students, for example, cannot be expected to remember and enter a password. "

The problem with school IT is usually more with the teachers than the students....

My wife is an early years teacher. She has a passion for it. She does not have a passion for IT security, and neither has she been taught how to deal with it. And neither have her bosses.

I humbly submit the problem as you describe it is not with the teachers, either. IT security is not a requirement for teachers to do their primary job. Same as for school admins. There are people who can be brought in to set this up, explain it to the various customers (teachers, children, school administrators, parents) and keep it going. The issue is with the public not seeing this as a need to be addressed and then providing the resources with which to do it. The people who should be taking this to the public to explain the need, request funds and whatever else it takes are the local school boards and state and federal departments of education, at least in the US. This is a matter of policy and budget, not something local school administrators should be expected to deal with.

Re: you have the Channel.

The Romans tried a couple of walls in the area. Perhaps they could be relocated a bit to the west to save on materials costs.

There are a lot of odd things that have resulted from the US government shutdown. For instance, the network of shuttle buses that government employees routinely use to get from one location to another are non-essential. This means that those folks still at work who routinely use public transport have to find a different way to get between work locations than they are used to. This may include taking their own vehicles to work (extra costs for parking and driving) or using a taxi service (more extra costs). This is additional pain for those not getting paid at this time but are obliged to work.

Re: Google are cunts

...cue the lawyers. Its a slam dunk anti-trust class action lawsuit waiting to happen.

I was wondering how long it would be until Google got caught out abusing its monopoly. When it was announced that Microsoft was going to switch to using Chromium, I thought we had hit the tipping point. This confirms my suspicion.

Re: :-) What say you?

A promising start.

Lead with stream of consciousness,

nonsense ensuing.

Mine's the one with Haiku for Complete Idiots in the pocket.

Re: Gadzooks!

Exactly! Statistical significance is not the same thing as real world utility.

Re: Bad planning

Impossible to kill and really has no use.

Kudzu has plenty of uses, which is why it is established as an invasive species in the US. It is great for controlling erosion, has a number of uses as food and animal fodder, and is a source of fiber for use in textiles and paper. The problem isn't the plant lacking utility so much as that few in the US make use of it.

Re: Why the false distinction?

...if we don't want to kill each other it won't matter if we know how.

That, unfortunately, is a caveat that is unlikely to hold..

Re: China Futures ...... in Special AIDerivative Ventures

Bring key developers in-house to develop international product for vendors ...

I tried to run this through...

1) unsuck-it.com - nothing coherent

2) English to Klingon (yes, I know there are differences between Martians and Klingons, but I hoped for some mutual roots in their linguistic set) - it simply lacked the vocabulary.

3) Running it through various online translators going back and forth between one language and another and got this:

"Bringing the main internal developers to develop international products for publishers to sell as genuine Chinese and the bursting of the earth will cost nothing when all billed is still given to the Chinese SMARTR AIMarkets command and control with their virtual product sourcing."

If I squint at this and turn my head sideways, I just make out I have had insufficient alcohol and am leaving work early to rectify this.

Re: What is funny in one culture or language may not even be transferable into another...

That is the reason why English speakers often find German speakers to lack humor...

It's not the language that causes this perception; it is definitely the culture. The researchers in the article are identified as being from a Swiss university and Microsoft. I cannot for the life of me think of a famous comedian that has come out of either environment.

If I remember correctly, if you have a safe with a key, the police can force you to give up the key; but if the safe has a combination, they cannot force you to reveal the combination...

Which feeds directly to my statement that biometrics should only be used to establish ID and not provide authentication for access and is at best used as part of 2FA. Fingerprint readers and facial recognition are indeed like a physical key in that they provide some security, but only against the casual interloper. If you want to have a shot at keeping out the unwanted, they are simply not enough against a more determined attempt.

Redundancy by email is undoubtedly the classy way to do it rather than an old-fashioned face-to-face meeting.

From other reporting, there was a company-wide meeting where President and COO Gwynne Shotwell and CEO Elon Musk made the announcement. The meeting was not mandatory, so there were some that first found out via email, but it was not the primary method for communicating the news to the company as a whole. It's still a crappy situation, though.

Here's an article that goes into a bit more depth on that aspect of the story:

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/14/elon-musk-gwynne-shotwell-spacex-layoffs-announcement-detailed.html

Re: Richard dear chap, what does "about three times Earth's size" mean?

Give us a clue please.

Fair enough. Here's your clue: you can find this information by clicking the embedded link:

https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/news/1542/nasas-tess-rounds-up-its-first-planets-snares-far-flung-supernovae/

... which will allow you to find a paper with the announcement for the newly discovered planet ...

https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.00051

... which in turn lists the size as 2.84^+0.26_−0.22 (R_⊕)

TLDR: About 2.84 times Earth's radius give or take a bit

Re: Real time tracking of...

Manhole covers?

Or bollards, apparently. I taught my two young nephews that word and had them say it every time we came across one while walking the national mall in DC. It drove their parents up the wall but kept the kids happy. They're never too young to be taught basic principles of security.

Re: Reading the learning sytem's mind...

Perhaps we could get another machine learning system to monitor the first and learn to provide explanations as to what basis it had for its output... and then another one to validate the results from the secondary system... I suspect if we repeat this enough times, we will find the underlying algorithm amounts to "Because I said so."

Re: Give Adobe a break

A round of applause for Adobe, who didn't need to put out a single security fix for Flash today.

So they're ditching the whole thing?!?!?! Holy crap!

Instead, the internet's screen door will see a handful of performance and stability fixes

And I was soooo happy, if only for a fleeting moment.

Say what?

How appropriate that the translation gem appeared at the end of the article, immediately above El Reg's own "Tips and corrections" link... similar to the ability Google Translate provides to allow users to give feedback on its output. If only someone made use of that ability...

How the mighty have fallen

Cook has been a very exacting beancounter CEO, but in the long term Apple needs a diverse range of products and services – and that's a diversity that's missing right now. It isn't clear if a beancounter can deliver that.

No. It didn't work last time. It won't work next time. It seldom works anywhere with a competitive market that requires innovation to keep from going under. Even when it "works", it is often hard to tell from the outside the difference between long term profitability and short term financial maneuvering, much as the article alluded. A good CFO has a different skill set than a good CEO and the two should not be confused.

Re: CNSA has a nice logo

The Federation logo from Blake's 7...

I loved Blake's 7 and watched it religiously when I was younger. I tried going re-watching it recently... there are some things you just can't go back to. I wanted to at least like it, but could not manage even that.

Re: Spiders: there is no "overkill"

Up-voted for the Schlock mercenary reference.

Re: Not me...

Did I mention ... erm ... OK, yes I did.

real friend

[ree-uhl, reel] [frend]

noun Someone who has never heard that story before.

Re: Post-Pub Nosh Neckfiller

shurely there's a demand for this thread to be resurrected ?

Yes! I very much miss this series. I was hooked from the very first article (the great Bacon Sarnie) and always want more. Please bring it back.

Re: More questions than answers...

I don't understand what all the hand-wringing is about. Just kill the damn things already. The companies that produced these devices have a long history of giving you something they tell you is free or at a reasonable-ish price and then using it to gather as much information as possible in order to make a return on their investment. Any challenges to this model have been met with their best efforts to get past them no matter what. They have demonstrated a clear pattern of behavior and an unwillingness to change. The only way to prevent this behavior is to ban their products.

Don't just do something! Stand there!

There are already penalties in place for anyone who disrupts or endangers air operations. No special case should be needed if they use a drone to do it with.

In the event that Something Bad™ happens, there will be cries from the voting public for politicians to Do Something™. As politicians have only one tool with which to Do Something™ (i.e. they can legislate), they use that and claim to Do Something™ even if it is completely redundant or utterly fails to address Something Bad™. If Something Bad™ continues, they will pass increasingly tough and thorough measures aimed in its general direction, being careful to note that any failure to alleviate the issue is simply an indicator its severity. In fact, it is beneficial to said pols that Something Bad™ be nebulous enough that it can be defined as an ongoing war, something that never goes away, thus providing them many election cycles where they can repeatedly Do Something™. That's the way to do it!

Re: Wow, blundering around like freshly castrated cattle.

If you are trying to blind the drone, you're doing it wrong. See for example US Navy's new drone-killing laser. My original post obviously was in jest; allowing people with a record of such behavior to do exactly the same thing as caused problems before does not strike me as particularly constructive.

Re: Really?

It's pronounced "Internet Exploder"

I would have corrected you in times past that it is instead "Internet Exploiter" but as the main competition is Chrome, I think IE has been surpassed in that capacity.

Re: 'Murica never ceases...

I've been camping with shooters nearby lamping. Shining a light around, shooting at anything that reflects the light. Not safe, no idea if it was in season.

What would the advice be? I hear tell of having a gun for self defence, but I'm not sure I'd be comfortable firing a long gun at another person if they were just being dangerous, and not actually trying to kill me.

Interesting. In the US, lamping is called spotlighting and is illegal in all cases that I am aware of. There may be some place that hunting at night is allowed, but I don't know of any.

While I get the idea of having a gun for self defense, the situation you describe is definitely not one where that would work. My advice is to remove yourself and anyone with you from danger as rapidly as possible and then to call the cops. Personally, if I feel that I might be headed toward a situation where I need a gun for defense, I am going to start looking for another place to be. I am fine with gun use for hunting and sport, but I don't want to be in an area where there is even the perceived need for their use against another person.

Wales and Sheep inna Vacuum

Wales is for area, not volume and why bring sheep into it at all? That's just wrong! In proper El Reg units of measure, that's about 2381 KiloJubs and in improper El Reg units of measure, 1149441 Adult Badgers, 11231 Great White Sharks, 6667 Skateboarding Rhinoceri or 222 Austrailian Trams, give or take.

REF: https://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/page/reg-standards-converter.html

Re: "Data gathering biz still having trouble keeping data secure"

Their whole business model depends on your data NOT being secure

FB: What in the world do you mean by "your data"?

Re: It came in a box?

...but prior to that was plain old D&D; Basic, Intermediate and Advanced sets, which all came in boxes. Red, Blue and Black if I recall correctly.

And before that there was a single box set with some truly terrible cover art and no dice, just chits to cut out from near the back of the book instead of dice. There were editions before that, too, but I'm speaking from personal experience and too lazy on a Monday to bother using Google.

Re: In case your comment was serious, I'd like to point out that...

That works, @Mephisto, although the reason we use those terms today probably has more to do with the use of black and white hats in old films. It's become industry terminology but, as mentioned, has nothing to with race. If you prefer, you might substitute Red Team and Blue Team, but these have slightly different connotations.