Posts by Captain DaFt

But then again...

"It would be like suing a news outlet for reporting the latest atrocity which is actually what these groups want to spread fear."

That actually might be a better case for a lawsuit.

If the headline for these atrocities was always something like:

"Middle Eastern Thugs At It Again", instead of

">Publicity hungry fear mongers< Threaten US With Fresh Atrocities!"

I'm almost positive the attacks would dwindle.

But that wouldn't suit the needs of our Leaders in their campaign to whittle away our Freedoms, would it?

Re: Ransomware...

"From memory isn't there a way to get ads past the Adblock Plus filters by paying Adblock Plus to allow the ads?"

And in ABP+ settings, there's a button that disables that.

As long as it's there, I'll use it, along with Element Hiding Helper.

Neither link is on the mobile page.

At the bottom of the mobile page:

Explore The Register

Forums

Send us news tips

Video

Advertise with us

The Channel

Company info

Privacy

So which one should I select? "Send us news tips" might be the one, but pretty sure the "Advertise with us" link would be answered faster.

Re: We can do better.....

"And if it turns out to be someone over IT's head?"

Then the person administering the lesson should put a Balaclava on first. :)

Re: Time

This does read like a viral ad campaign: "Free porn with every Instagram account!"

Re: Really?

"Never knew the US Telco market charges in £ ?"

As long as a Pound is still worth more than an American Dollar, I wouldn't put it past them, the tricksy bastards!

Re: Millions of vegetarians & vegans around the world...

"I've never eaten meat or fish ever - like many of Indian origin I'm an (ovo)-lacto-vegetarian,"

So you've never had an animal killed for the meat products you eat. Actually, very commendable.

But eggs and milk are meat products. Eliminate those, IE: Vegan diet, and you'd be much harder pressed to get the nutrients you need.

Some Vegans have resorted to Geophagy to compensate, and brag about it!

And now, Bec Hill:

"Some of my best friends are vegan. They were going to come today but they didn't have the energy to climb up the stairs."

Re: When is something insecure ?

"Oh well, this is the best windows ever, but the next one will fix everything wrong with the current one."

I hate to be the one to tell you... But that chain was busted to flinders in the post XP era. :(

Win7 was apparently just an aberration in the downhill slide.

Re: "90% mortality in one year"

"It's an interesting puzzle, as long as it remains a what-if."

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nuked to rubble.

Today, aside from the monuments, you'd never know it happened if you visit them.

A real world scenario, hardly a 'what-if'.

Despite their general idiocy, Humans as a whole can be tenacious and inventively industrious when push comes to shove.*

*See also; London after the Blitz.

Re: Government investment in the Police

And you're going on a list for talking about the lists...

Damn! Now I am too!

Taking a different tack with the alien hypothesis.

Interstellar travel is hard, really hard to do in any organic lifeform's time frame.

So you've got a stable civilization, no where else can readily get to/communicate with in a usable time frame, aside from an occasional colony ship.

How do you preserve yourself long term? Stellar engineering.

Red dwarves last magnitudes longer than larger stars, so you siphon off enough mass to reduce your star to a red dwarf and greatly increasing it's life span.

Use all that hydrogen you draw off to power things like moving your world inward to the new habitable zone, terraforming, or even creating, new habitable worlds in the new zone, or even build a colony world fleet big enough to carry everybody and their future offspring to another star when this one fails.

All this is going to take centuries, if not thousands of years, and the machinery involved isn't going to be small, and the orbiting clouds of by-products, raw materials, new construction, whatever, isn't going to be small either.

(Probably on the scale of when the Mark I sunsucker becomes obsolete, you just start terraforming it, or converting it into a colony ship.)

But it's probably only just a poorly fusioning star, and not aliens, too bad. :(

Re: Shurely

Would that make her staff Czardines?

(Always thought Symantec was a bit fishy.) ;)

Re: Out of interest....

"Windows development team..?"

Yeah, these guys, shown here working on the next version of Skype.

Re: Perhaps

"I know it's a form follwoing (sic) function thing, but why is it aircraft death tech is often so pretty?"

When something is built to do a job, and built well, beauty emerges.

For a classic example, see Shaker furniture.

(Yes, I'm comparing a weapon of death and destruction to the handicraft of the most peaceful religion America ever had. Enjoy the juxtaposition.)

Re: I don't think republicans endorsing Clinton over Trump makes any difference

"The idea that "a vote for a third party is vote for <insert whoever you want to make sure doesn't become president?>" is stupid."

Amen!

The major fallacy of that argument is that people that vote third party are doing so because they don't want either the Rep or Dem choice as president.

Voting for one or the other because they're the "best" choice instead of voting third party just still puts "whoever you want to make sure doesn't become president" in Office, and tells the powers that be to keep on doing whatever they want to, no need to change.

Voting third party is not futile or a wasted vote, it's a message for the two major parties to either start listening, or get relegated to history.

A quick history lesson:

In 1854, the two main American parties were the the Democrats and the Whigs, and neither was listening to the public.

So a third party came along, acted on what people wanted, and by 1860, their candidate was the American President.

The party's name? The Republicans. The president? Lincoln.

Now where would They be today if people hadn't wasted their vote on a third party candidate, hmm?

The only wasted vote is one cast for a candidate you don't really endorse because they tell you there's "no choice".

Re: First Rate!

"but under the same theory, does this mean a certain Boris look-alike running for POTUS has a first-rate intelligence?"

"Two contradictory thoughts at the same time" isn't quite the same as "Can't maintain a coherent thought for two seconds".

"Let us know when they get to a real operating system that a) doesn't suck up all your details and b) actually works."

I think you're looking for Windows 7. Too bad MS doesn't like it.

Re: If you work from home....

I depend on RFC 1149 as a back up system.

A bit prone to HITM* attacks, but otherwise reliable.

*Hawk In The Middle

Re: TITSUP

<snark>Downtime Electronically Verified — Operational Parameters Silent, anyone?</snark>

Re: Meanwhile....

"Marissa Mayer, who was hired to turn Yahoo around, has just sold Yahoo's assets in a fire sale for $4.8 billion dollars to Verizon..."

Well, hired to run a multi billion dollar company and it was in the contract that she'd receive a multi-million dollar bonus if it was sold while she were running it... factor in a touch of greedy self interest, et voila!

Re: "The Last Program" you will ever need.

-There was a program called something like "The Last Program", it was certainly advertised as the last program you would ever need.-

Interesting. Was there a version that ran on The computer that will never become obsolete?

Re: Anyone care to take bets on how long before the first exploit is published?

"Then we can look forward to voice recognition AND remembering a password!"

BVR:"Hello, Your voice identifies you as Captain DaFt. Please enter your password to continue."

Me:" Uh.... Dammit, I can never remember that damned thing!"

BVR:"Password confirmed as matching previous entries, you may continue."

Me: "Whaa!?"

In orbit?

There's an apo for that. :)

"Is there a tea bush growing within 3,000 miles of Yorkshire?"

Actually, much closer than that: https://tregothnan.co.uk/about/

Re: MS is Trumping

"or take the blue pill and let W10 have fun with their ass."

No need for metaphor, the PHBs don't understand.

Put it in plain talk:

"Upgrade to Win 10 and let MS siphon your business account."

Re: Takeover of TOR

"If the TLA's wanted to shut TOR down then stopping its US Govt funding would be far simpler."

Shut it down? Nah, the American TLAs want to access and control it, while keeping it secure from "Da terr'ists gubmints!"

Erm... so what exactly is Verizon buying?

A full suite of out of date and poorly run websites, of course.

Re: "We are incredibly sorry for our error"

Nowadays, when I see this:

"We take the privacy of our users very seriously and are taking corrective steps to ensure this doesn’t happen again."

It gets internally processed as corporate speak for:

"Aw, here's the world's smallest violin playing Hearts and Flowers, just for you. Ain't it grand being our client?"

Re: And I'm protecting you all

"Raise your hand all of you who have been harassed by little green men."

The Ukraine have their hands raised... Now what?

Re: Interesting

"but how does the superposition of all states (0,1,2,3) collapse to the correct answer?"

This stuff gives me anxiety when I try to figure it out, but I find it perversely fascinating.

The best answer I can wrap my head around is that a superposition collapses to a known state when observed, and the observation itself determines the collapsed state.

In this case the the "observation" is actually done by the equation "3 - 2", which causes the superpostion to collapse to the desired state "1".

The word "observation" is actually misleading, as it implies intelligence and intent. It's actually any action on the superpostion that causes it to collapse.

That's why superpostion is so hard to maintain. Literally anything, energy, matter, random quantum fluctuations, can collapse it.

Where's my headache pills?

"Then we can start on genetically engineering a version that affects humans in order to be one step closer to triggering a zombie apocalypse."

Naw, we humans are clever and use software instead of genetics.

Ever hear of Pokemon Go?

"one question I have always had, what happens to the bombs and warheads on the destroyed bombers?"

Well, I'm not a nuclear physicist, but I'd hazard that any armed bombs on planes in the fireball might detonate, but most likely "fizzle", making the blast cloud that much more radioactive.

Outside the fireball, but near it, some might detonate or "fizzle", most would have their detonators wrecked (along with the plane and crew) and crash. A few might survive to detonate when they hit blast altitude.

Safely outside the blast radius, lots of brown stains on the seating and uniform trousers of the bombing crews.

I hope they were planning on this taking place over the oceans, because there would be a lot of highly radioactive debris coming down! (and downwind!)

How to prove that you're not a terrorist? Simple, just take this easy test (No cheating, all answers checked by the CIA, NHS, NSA, and John Herbert):

1. Are you a member of the top financial one percent?

[]YES

[]NO, therefore I am a terrorist.

"I'm amazed that hosting angsty tween blogs and hipster poetry doesn't generate more revenue."

It's not for lack of badly trying.

The pre-Yahoo! Tumblr sites still load normally.

The Yahoo! era Tumblr sites tend to not work correctly if you have ads and tracking disabled with your browser.

Add to that the Tumblr patrons that left when Yahoo! acquired it, and the many that were banned with no warning and no reason ever given, It's no wonder Tumblr's losing ever more and more value.

It used to be a lively place for opinions, good and bad, art, discussion, and general WTF'kery, but it's been turned into a Yahoo! Groups clone.