* Posts by DNTP

726 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Jan 2014

Cargo capsule goes AWOL, explodes on its way to Space Station

DNTP

Meanwhile in Tuva

Some farmer is trying to decide whether these odd foil wrapped bricks that say FOOD are edible or not, and someone else is freaking out about a huge silver-white space alien invader that appeared out of the sky in a fireball.

Eugene Kaspersky is now personally defending your feet

DNTP

Re: I enjoy a good PC tale

…and then the ghost cried, "DOOM! YOU ARE DOOMED!"

"Ahhhh!" the user screamed. "Why am I doomed?"

"THE OWNERS OF THIS HOUSE," cried the ghost, "KNOW NOT THEIR OWN WI-FI PASSWORD!"

"Oh no! My connectivity!" said the user. "Wait… ghost, do you know the password?"

"NOOOOOOO!" and then it vanished, leaving the user huddled in terror and fear.

DNTP

Are you connecting to TOR via SOCKS proxy?

No my feet just smell like onions.

Brit upstart releases free air traffic app for drone operators

DNTP

Planes can kill planes, birds can kill birds, and there are now drones that kill drones. Additionally, planes have killed birds, birds have killed planes, and birds have killed drones. Therefore, logically a drone can kill a plane. It's your classic trilemma symmetry!

(This excludes drones intentionally designed to kill planes since it's a little harder for civilians to own SAMs.)

Really weird quantum phenomenon spied lurking near neutron star

DNTP

Reality-distorting, Empty, and Polarizing

I've had management that acted like this thing.

Only instead of spontaneous particle antisymmetry we just got horribly out of spec desktop PC purchases. Computers and anti-computers?

Fatal flaws in ten pacemakers make for Denial of Life attacks

DNTP

Re: I see a market here

Under a strict interpretation of local weapons laws, in my area this would count as "defensive clothing" and would be illegal to wear without somehow magically getting the police to issue you a concealed firearms permit (hint: they don't unless you're wealthy and famous).

Imagine every mistake you can make with a new software rollout...

DNTP

Re: How do you add that

"You don't, it doesn't count."

-The court system.

"They're all guilty of something anyway."

-Our heroes in blue

"This is going to have to be addressed on a case by case basis by defendants who will have to be able to afford expensive lawyers and appeals with no help from us."

-HARD ON CRIME District Attorney

"You guys fucked up my life and now it's either crime or starvation."

-Guy who got felony record and sex offender listing for a misdemeanor

Loyalty card? Really? Why data-slurping store cards need a reboot

DNTP

Re: Tax man's dream

Surely you jest, as a non-domiciled person* my heroically vast income gets channeled through investment schemes and offshore havens; its hardly reportable as income at all.

*I think that's the English term for it. Over here in the US if you are intelligent enough to have that sort of lifestyle without paying the fed, the correct term is President-elect.

DNTP

According to the BoFH, his assistant the PFY has a bar code tattooed onto his dick that gives him a discount on birth control products. But it always scans incorrectly as "baguette, small" on the first try so he has to keep playing with it until the barcode enlarges enough to read.

Forget 'shadow IT' – it's 'self-starting IT' now

DNTP

"Nonprofit IT"

If it's stupid but somehow currently working, then it's still stupid and we've been lucky enough that it hasn't turned into a huge disaster. Yet.

Symantec doubles down on consumer security by buying LifeLock

DNTP

Re: Identity theft protection snakeoil

The best (worst) part of Lifelock's CEO SSN stunt was the one person they managed to catch using the stolen number (no preventative value, apparently) was a desperate mentally disabled man who possibly didn't even realize that it was wrong to use this freely offered SSN. Then their lawyers coerced him on video into signing a confession he certainly was incapable of understanding. The police did a collective facepalm and said they couldn't prosecute thanks to Lifelock sticking their dick into the pudding.

Meanwhile, Symantec keeps looking for new opportunities to turn uselessness into an actual product standard.

Karhoo who? Uber challenger shuts down after burning through $250m

DNTP

Karhoo! makes me think of cars + Yahoo! and all I am getting out of that is the mental image of traffic accidents.

Go more overboard with letter substitution. Kyrwheü or something.

School cyber safety spiel shows smut to 'Strayan students

DNTP

I get my football advice from our tech people… completely unsolicited… no, I don't follow the Pats… I need to get back to work, please get out of my office.

Actually certain support people around here seem to have given me more sports information than IT help...

Hell Desk's 800 number was perfect for horrible heavy-breathing harassment calls

DNTP

"THIS BABY'S HAVING REAL PROBLEMS, CAN YOU HELP"

"Oookay, is this a person baby or a colloquial term for an equipment item?"

"ITS BRAND NEW, FREQUENTLY STOPS MOVING AND IS TURNING BLUE ALL THE TIME"

"Same question as before."

"I GET BSODS EVERY TIME I TRY TO RUN A MANUAL BACKUP"

"Alright, then, that's a computer and you're talking to the right people."

DNTP

My equipment room phone extension used to be 61, and my company is in the 617 area code (American, Eastern MA). Every time anyone in the company tried calling an outside line without properly dialing out first it would ring my phone.

They fixed this mostly by me unplugging my phone in the equipment room and then promoting me to a job with an actual office with a different phone extension.

DRAMA ON MARS: Curiosity bot fires laser at alien metal object

DNTP

Re: Explanation for failing instuments?

Um… round rooms don't have corners. Or did I miss the joke?

DNTP

Re: Explanation for failing instuments?

Its an iron golem egg, and those things don't kid around. Mars is red because it has lots of iron, which is the natural habitat for wild iron golems.

Where on Mars are you going to find a +3 weapon or better?

Twitterstorm erupts over suspected murder of record-breaking earthworm

DNTP

D**ks out for

Harambe Dave

Build your own IMSI slurping, phone-stalking Stingray-lite box – using bog-standard Wi-Fi

DNTP

How do you know your phone's wi-fi is off?

The phone tells you so, of course! I'm sure it's telling you the truth. You're the phone's owner, with full control over every aspect of your device, not the multitude of corporate and government interests who are stakeholders in your phone's ability to gather personal data.

Accessories to crime: Facial recog defeated by wacky paper glasses

DNTP

If this ever becomes a "thing"

Then the police authorities will simply follow their usual standard operating procedure and declare it arbitrarily illegal under a vague interpretation of existing laws. Then they will find someone wearing the glasses/dazzle makeup/whatever who is unsavory enough not to garner public sympathy, prosecute him, and therefore set a legal precedent to apply in the future.

This is America- the country where some towns ban baggy pants, or can legally use them as a valid reason to stop-and-frisk.

ESMA urges companies to disclose potential Brexit impact

DNTP

Re: "two thirds do not know how the change will affect their balance sheets"

If banks made long-term predictions about strategies that could go wrong or worst-case scenarios, they'd be more liable for deliberately running programs into the ground anyway for short-term profits.

Then again when the worst-case scenario is "taxpayer bailout, pay executive bonuses anyway" that tends not to encourage responsible forethought,

Supercomputers crack Saturn's ice-cold ring

DNTP

Solar system formation

must have been strictly hit-or-miss. Since we still have planets and a Kuiper belt there must have been lots of miss, but also lots of hits. One of those impacts was thought to have literally knocked Uranus 90 degrees on its side.

KCL out(r)age continues: Two weeks TITSUP, two weeks to go

DNTP

Re: slap in a new HD, watch it bork

This was me with our main bioinformatics machine four months ago. Fortunately it was under a full service contract and was getting regular backups. All of the following items were performed by the vendor's service engineers or by me under their direction.

First service action: Replace degraded disk, attempt rebuild, borks.

Second action: Source and replace RAID controller, all disks, goes titsup.

Third action: Replace entire server under warranty.

I am an ex-IT generalist, currently a geneticist and technical scientist, I do not think of myself as ignorant about computer systems, but as far as I know RAIDs are sinister and mysterious forces of nature that cannot be understood by typical mortals.

'Hacker' accused of idiotic plan to defraud bank out of $1.5 million

DNTP

Re: Just asking

A smarter person would have assumed the bank wouldn't have fallen for that trick in the first place.

Of course, they would have been wrong…

Samsung's free-falling financial flameout

DNTP

I'm sticking with Samsung

I have a seven year old flip phone and a two year old 'budget' tablet that work great for all the things and I have no desire to upgrade either device. AFAIK Samsung has a history of making reliable devices and unfortunately the exception to that happened to be a high-end flagship product.

It's ALIVE: Juno back online after reboot

DNTP

Re: Figures sound wrong

According to your calculations, Symon, the thrusters used for this maneuver have a specific impulse of 147 seconds. Before analyzing that, let's compare it to my homework.

Mass of Juno postburn: 1700.0kg

Mass of expended fuel: 3.6kg

deltaV: 2.59 m/s

The ideal rocket equation:

2.59m/s = (Isp)(9.8m/s^2)(ln(1703.6/1700)) gives an Isp of 125 seconds, differing from your estimate because I estimate Juno is 300kg closer to empty than you do. Still, our numbers match fairly closely.

What does this mean? Juno's RCS thrusters use hydrazine monopropellant, which has a theoretical maximum Isp of ~230 seconds. So this burn was in fact fairly inefficient in a thermal sense. Since hydrazine decomposition is exothermic, this inefficiency may be attributed largely to the small size of the engine, and the desire to run 'cold' as to avoid damage to the motors and payload. The engineers who figured this stuff out when planning the mission probably realized the savings on engine mass, thermal shielding, and radiators, would outweigh the fuel mass efficiency of larger, hotter RCS engines of the same reliability.

How many Internet of S**t devices knocked out Dyn? Fewer than you may expect

DNTP

That kills one entertaining theory

Specifically, the comically dystopian joke that we'll run out of IP addresses before there are enough devices online to kill the DNS system or do other massive damage...

Password1? You're so random. By which we mean not random at all - UK.gov

DNTP

Re:drowssap

That sounds like a spell component from a D&D manual.

I'm going to start generating passwords that way. Spell component as the password, name of the spell written down in the 'password hints' binder.

Uber's robo-truck makes first delivery of ... Budweiser in Colorado

DNTP
Pint

45k cans of Bud

Obviously uncertain about the performance of their robotruck, Uber opted to play it safe and use an expendable, valueless, and chemically inert test product.

Icon for irony value.

Samsung patches Galaxy Note 7 to not explode as two-thirds of phones recalled

DNTP

Re: Point 2

I suspect that Samsung doesn't want to grossly announce to the public that they can actually do this. I mean, sure, they can do it, and we know they can do it, but they don't want to be screaming on the front page "We can brick anyone's or everyone's phone whenever we want, it's not really your phone."

Gravitational lensing event could provide ideal conditions for planet hunting

DNTP

Oh no the planets are too small to see directly

So we'll just use stars as telescopes, unless management finds out that's not an intended use case for that hardware item.

Smoking hole found on Mars where Schiaparelli lander, er, 'landed'

DNTP

Space exploration is one of the few things a government can spend money on that is strongly, arguably, of benefit to the entire human species. Going to the moon, for example, was far more than a stunt- even the most rational critics would have to concede that there was real economic benefit from the surge in science and technology far greater than the monetary cost of the programs themselves.

To put it in perspective: In 2016 NASA had a budget of $19.3 billion, of which I will personally pay $60-70 out of my income, which is paying for a few minutes of a fellow scientist's time or a few little parts that are going to end up exploring another planet. The 2008 AIG bailout of $180 billion cost me personally about $300, which for all I know went directly into some billionaire's overseas nontaxable bank account.

Hapless Network Rail contractors KO broadband in Uxbridge

DNTP

Conspiracy to sell train tickets

After all, when all the internet is out… you're going to have to take the train in to work.

New measurement alert. The Pogba: 1,200Pg = NHS annual budget

DNTP

Pg and pg

Are already claimed by the petagram and picogram. I suggest using the notation Ogb to define Pogbas, which the engineers here will start irrelevantly pronouncing as "Awwg-beees".

Edit: Actually I like θgb better since it avoids the "zero or O" confusion.

Just what Europe needs – another bungled exit: Mars lander goes AWOL

DNTP

Hope they get it working

I sincerely hope the ESA manages to recontact their lander and get it working. Whenever I feel the temptation of pride in NASA's scientific achievements (such as Mars landings), I remember that my professional reference library is full of papers and studies by colleagues from more countries on Earth that I can name.

Crims cram credit card details into product shots on e-shops

DNTP

How to beat this

As Sun Tzu said, "the way to defeat a hacker is to turn his own weapons against him." Therefore to keep my credit cards safe I have encoded all the numbers into JPGs of beehives and then posted the pictures on the internet.

NFL is No Fondleslab League: Top coach says he'd rather use pen and paper than Surface tab

DNTP

Re: Or not....

Haha wow, thanks for posting this, I guess life follows art. Or tablets follow trajectories.

DNTP

Yes lets give out highly breakable devices to incredibly competitive individuals who are inevitably going to be placed in losing situations and traditionally experience catharsis by slamming or throwing various handheld objects against the cold, unfeeling earth that is betraying their team. What could go wrong.

Belichick has too much self-control to actually slam his tablet, but it leaves him frustrated.

Yahoo! hides! from! financial! analysts! amid! email! hacking!, privacy! storm!

DNTP

Hello I'm Yahoo!

"We beat financial expectations by not wasting money on security and privacy!"

US reactor breaks fusion record – then runs out of cash and shuts down

DNTP

Decommissioning

The tokamak's gettin' took!

Puny human sailors still needed... until drone machine learning tech catches up

DNTP

That works until the delegations from Lethe and Cydonia start throwing the darts at each other, then escalating back to guided missiles.

Bits of Google's dead Project Ara modular mobe live on in Linux 4.9

DNTP

The cool part is gone?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but to most people, the cool part of the modular phone project was the modular hardware aspect- which has been killed- and not the bits of OS that are being used for other things that are not modular phones. At the end of the day, we don't get a modular phone.

Wi-Fi baby heart monitor may have the worst IoT security of 2016

DNTP

To be fair to Owlet, they are not selling (and it would be either very expensive, or very stupid) their baby monitor as a medical device.

Also to be fair to them, this is horribly bad security that arguably "compromises the average use case and expectation for a device of this type" regardless of any large-type disclaimer of responsibility.

3,500 Verizon call center workers can't hear you now

DNTP

Frankly

I would rather attempt to disarm a live land mine by hand, than be in charge of attempting to integrate the WTF of contemporary Yahoo into the labyrinthine corporate organization that seems to be running Verizon.

And honestly either task sounds more fun than trying to get first tier Verizon support to solve a serious issue in the first place, but at least having to deal with reps with a dubious command of English can hardly make it worse, right?

Without new anti-robot laws, humanity is doomed, MPs told

DNTP

Those devices tend to fail one or more of the "select", "locate" and "lethal force" parameters, unless you count natural selection against stupid/reckless/unprepared people as a deliberate target engagement algorithm.

Seriously though, that's why in most civilized places there are laws regulating the deployment of electric fences and hunting traps, and mandating visibility and signage of level crossings.

ExoMars arrives at the Red Planet on Sunday

DNTP

Re: “crushable structure”

see also: "Lithobraking"

DNTP

Re: re. the surly bonds of Earth

I just say the safe word(s) to escape the bonds of my gravitational mistress.

"PATCH CONIC APPROXIMATION"

Actually, yes, Samsung, you do have to pay Apple $120m

DNTP

Charles Dickens posted:

Apple v. Samsung drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, over the course of time, become so complicated, that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least; but it has been observed that no two Patent lawyers can talk about it for five minutes, without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises…. ...Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Apple v. Samsung, without knowing how or why; whole user groups have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit. The little plaintiff or defendant, who was promised a new iMac Blueberry G3 , has grown up, possessed himself of a Galaxy 7, and trotted away into the other world.

Hubble telescope spies massive 'cannonballs' of fire from dying star

DNTP

PEW PEW PEW

Please tell me I wasn't the only one playing this sound effect in my head while looking at that four-stage diagram of the shooting star.

CEO of shady ad site Backpage and owners arrested on human trafficking suspicions

DNTP

Ferrer launches acting career

October 2016- Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer has announced a career transition into professional acting, and in a press conference today said that he had accepted a role in Michael Bay's hotly anticipated 2018 remake of Casablanca, promoted as a more "explosive and explicit" adaptation of the dated and anachronistic 1942 original.

Ferrer performed a line from his audition script for the press:

"I am shocked- shocked- to find prostitution going on in here!" (cut to huge explosion)