* Posts by Pompous Git

3087 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Sep 2014

'Clearance sale' shows Apple's iPad is over. It's done

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Re: I've said it before...

Have you tried reading The Reg on a laptop while taking a dump,
No, nor have I tried wiping my arse with a laptop. Isn't that what newspapers are for?

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Re: I've said it before...

Not on its own but you can use it to shovel coke onto the forge.
You can also shovel coke with a rolled up banknote :-)

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Re: I've said it before...

I really thought this 'real work' gripe has been put to bed some time ago.
Have an upvote...

Good news, everyone! Two pints a day keep heart problems at bay

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Re: Small beer?

In olden times small beer was drunk by children
And the women of the household. While Brande's early 19th C figure is 1.28% alcohol by volume, second washings I've made have been ~3–3.5% so much small beer could have been 2–3 times as strong. For comparison Brande's numbers had London porter at 4.2%, the more expensive “stout” porter was 6.8% , and the famously powerful Burton ale was 8.88%.

Interestingly, the chap who lent me the money to go to university in 1969 was a Methodist and therefore teetotal. However, he and his family drank copious quantities of homemade ginger beer and were often noticeably tiddly by bed-time.

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Re: I guess I picked the wrong week to quit drinking

There is no correct week to quit drinking!

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Re: A question

Speaking English is apparently what kills you.
"I love Americans, but not when they try to talk French. What a blessing it is that they never try to talk English." HH Munro The Chronicles of Clovis

What should password managers not do? Leak your passwords? What a great idea, LastPass

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What's missing in this discussion...

... is the fact that your personal details are far more vulnerable in others' keeping than your own. I've been pwned four times to my knowledge. Adobe, Linux Mint, LinkedIn and vBulletin have all exposed varying amounts of my personal data because of their poor security. Troy Hunt's Have I been pwned is worth being subscribed to.

Cross platform password keeper I use is Password Safe. It works with Windows, Linux, and Android. It's popular and FOSS so likely as secure as can be.

Google's stock rating downgraded as YouTube ad boycott contagion goes global

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Re: Youtube has ads?

Blowed if I can remember what was being sold by any of 'em.
A bit hard to remember what was being sold when one has a policy of never purchasing anything so advertised :-)

GCHQ dismisses Trump wiretap rumours as tosh

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Re: Who knows really

What's a poor boy to believe
That there are no liberal celebs left in America? After all, for weeks on end there were any number who declared that if Trump was elected, they'd leave. And we wouldn't want to accuse them of lying would we?

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Re: That was then...

Dammit! I got Tuvalu...
It could be worse. I got the Duchy of Grand Fenwick.

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The Apostrophe is mostly used in contractions of words such as "it's", "won't" and "can't" and not only does using it make your message clearer to read, but consistently [i]not[/i] using it tends to make your readers assume you are uneducated, and you wouldn't want that, would you?
And if you had used angle brackets instead of square brackets, the word "not" would have appeared in italics. Further, the word "not" would also have been emphasised by a screen-reader. It's called HTML (hypertext markup language).

Just a little smidgen of education for you :-)

Headphone batteries flame out mid-flight, ignite new Li-Ion fears

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Re: Older sometimes makes more sense

I've yet to hear of an AAA battery exploding.
Me either, but that's likely because I'm listening to Massive Attack at full volume when they do ;-)

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Re: But a 14KW Power Wall...

If you need one to show off indoors then I daresay Mr. Musk will sell you a dummy.
And if he won't, I'm sure some enterprising person will manufacture cheap fakes in his backyard shed for a shitload less money than the real thing :-)

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Re: Recall? @Andy The Hat

Problem is getting replacement batteries at a decent price
It's even harder in Australia for some reason :-(

However, putting the batteries in a ziplock bag in the freezer for 12 hours or so does wonders for NiCd batteries that many discard as no longer fit for purpose.

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Re: But a 14KW Power Wall...

it isn't the fire from batteries that worry me, it is the combustion fumes, containing all manner of unpleasantness. If you want a Powerwall or any battery storage system, I'd recommend having it somewhere outside the house.
Dunno why you were downvoted on that one ledswinger. Excellent advice. Presumably a Powerwall installed in a safe place wouldn't be so effective in signalling how virtuous you are.

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and her eyes got pixelated !!!
That was from the terrible singing she was listening to...

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But a 14KW Power Wall...

... in your living room is perfectly safe.

Yes, alkaline AAs are a great idea

Germany to Facebook, Twitter: We are *this* close to fining you €50m unless you delete fake news within 24 hours

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Re: Amazon dont ban enough

Now, kids whose life experience consists of attending college and watching TV are posting multi book series - and Amazon shoves them into your face in some kind of "you may be interested" list, while the good authors I am actually interested in I have to search out manually.
How odd! Amazon's recommendations, while not perfect, are usually of things I'm interested in reading: philosophy and history. The only items of no interest to me, such as Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for meaning are because I already have on my Kindle.

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Re: YouTube firmer than Facebook or Twitter? (Titter ye not!)

Try telling that to all the people in the music industry who have ever tried to get YouTube to take down videos that are in breach of copyright.
It is true that there are many musicians that would rather you never got to hear their music. Go figure!

OTOH there are many fine musicians who appreciate the exposure youtube provides and subsequent sales.

Alan Gogoll: Bell's Harmonic [Bell Harmonics Guitar Technique]

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Re: Education, Education, Education

Yet still managing to give out the entirely "fake news" that some middle eastern country "had weapons of mass destruction they could ready for use within 45 mins" and then proceeding to bomb the fuck out of them?
Untrue truths? I wonder which the Iraqi populace would have preferred. Hate speech or having the fuck bombed out of them?

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Re: Hasn't history taught us to think twice before appeases the Germans?

Social media sites aren't 'the internet'. They're just the tabloid end. Clean them up and leave the rest alone.
Or... just ignore them...

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Then you'll get Iran trying to gte everyone to take down pictures of inappropriately-clad women and so on...
What complete and utter bastards! I hate that!

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Re: Hasn't history taught us to think twice before appeases the Germans?

knowingly asserts or disseminates an untrue fact related to another person

Fact: "Something that has really occurred or is actually the case; something certainly known to be of this character; hence, a particular truth known by actual observation or authentic testimony, as opposed to what is merely inferred, or to a conjecture or fiction [OED]

Presumably the inscrutable German lawmakers have included a method to determine the difference between true truths and untrue truths... Or maybe not.

Tesla, Atlassian told to go through front door in effort to save Australian industrial civilisation

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Re: Not fixing the problem

The Greens kid themselves that they are being influential. They apparently thought the corrupt entity Enron was being a good corporate citizen; an example all other business should emulate:

Parenthetically, I heard many times people refer to Enron in glowing terms. Such praise went like this: “Other companies should be like Enron, seeking out 21st century business opportunities” or “Progressive companies like Enron are….” Or “Proof of the viability of market-based energy and environmental programs is Enron’s success in power and SO2 trading.”

The "people" referred to in this quote being spokespeople for Greenpeace, WWF, NRDC, GermanWatch, the US Climate Action Network, the European Climate Action Network, Ozone Action, WRI, and Worldwatch.

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Re: Not fixing the problem

Proper oversight preventing the operator from blacking out 60,000 homes for no reason seems to be what's needed.
By oversight I presume you mean the use of force. The reason the operator never fired up the Pelican Point plant was it was not economically viable. The reason it was not economically viable is because the SA government legislated to make it economically unviable for the operator to fire it up. The operator did not black out 60,000 homes "for no reason". The operator wants to remain economically viable rather than go bankrupt like Solyndra and that other darling of the greenies, Enron.

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Re: Farmers think different

Well, the water could be pumped up into a tower by day...
Why do townies think farmers have millions of dollars just itching to be spent on boondoggles to keep townies happy? Try calculating how much storage is needed to apply 25 mm of water on a hectare of land. Then there's the tower to hold all that water up high enough to provide the needed head. The cost would be way higher than electricity and diesel is already ~30% cheaper than electricity.

There's a very good reason that less than 1% of Australian farmland is irrigated.

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Farmers think different

As energy prices soar, Australia's farmers have had to rethink their energy strategies. Irrigation pumps need energy and electricity prices have soared so time for a rethink. Solar doesn't work at night when most irrigation takes place (less evaporation loss). Wind tends to be low at night also.

Most farmers don't have a few million dollars spare for batteries. My friends in Queensland tell me they are installing new diesel plant to run their irrigation. It's the lowest cost alternative to electricity. Whoda thunkit? Green energy initiatives lead to increased demand for diesel.

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Re: Sorry but how

lglethal, you're attributing things to me based on your prejudices, not my words. You fail to ask why are we generating "excess" energy with windmills when we could have a sensible mix of dispatchable and non-dispatchable energy such that there's no "excess" needing to be stored. Gas can be stored with very little loss compared to charge/discharge cycles of batteries and the problem of what to do with batteries after their useful life has been expended.

The path we are on was set in motion by the politicians who promised that in return for privatisation, we consumers would have cheaper energy. Manifestly, the reverse is the case.

As a conservationist (not a greenie) I'm also appalled at the death-rate of the endangered Tasmanian wedgetail eagles. If I kill a wedgies, I go to jail. If you meet the greenie seal of approval (saving the planet), you can slaughter as many endangered species as you like and receive a get out of jail card for free.

Wedgies BTW have feral cats as 40% of their diet. Feral cats mainly eat small birds who among other useful things eat insects that feed on farmers' crops. Is malathion preferable to wedgetail eagles?

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Re: Sorry but how

Batteries allow you to save the excess from when they are generating too much, to use when they are not generating enough.
They also allow you to waste ~20% of that overpriced energy. For a limited time before they're landfill.

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Re: Did they repeat California's failed energy deregulation?

While the provision of energy was privatised, energy provision is far from unregulated. Preference is given to "green" energy when it's available. Thus the last few times Pelican Point was fired up, it was shut down again before profit was made. There's absolutely nothing wrong with the profit motive aka known as not wanting to go bankrupt. What's wrong here is the wilfulness of government(s) refusing to accept good advice from them who were willing to do the hard sums. Politicians don't give a flying fuck for the customers.

Move over, Bernie Ecclestone. Scientists unearth Earth's oldest fossil yet: 4bn years old

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Re: >It did NOT evolve on planet earth.

No, I haven't [read Crick & Orgel]. I am vaguely aware of Panspermia as a general theory, that's about it.

Despite not having read your above recommendation, I find it quite amusing when someone who, I presume, works in IT like me, claims to know all about early life's bootstrapping mechanism.

First, I have never claimed "to know all about early life's bootstrapping mechanism". If you believe I have, you will need to quote my words. At this point, I can only assume you are making stuff up.

I am not sure why being vaguely aware of something counts for very much.

FWIW Crick not only wrote the paper I referenced, he received the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his and Watson's discovery of the helical structure of DNA. He was also the first, in 1968, to propose that life could be bootstrapped from non-living chemicals if it started with RNA; the so-called RNA World hypothesis.

Despite becoming a significant industry in biology, RNA World research has generated ever more complexity to the problem rather than approaching a solution. To paraphrase Lynn Margulis, it's a piece of piss to go from bacteria to humans but a huge leap to go from inert chemicals to RNA.

Gerald Joyce estimated 400 million years for The Rise and Fall of the RNA World "beginning 4.0 to 4.2 billion years ago and ending 3.6 to 3.8 billion years ago". Except it looks like there was already fully formed prokaryotic life around 4.0 to 4.2 billion years ago so not sufficient time for the RNA World to have taken place.

It's also worth noting that despite spending a decade in IT, I was never told over a 40 year period that, no, you can't undertake the courses I did in physics, chemistry, mathematics, botany, genetics, zoology, geology, philosophy, history and engineering because I was making my living as an artist, market gardener or IT consultant.

Occam's Razor kinda puts the onus of disproving a local life start on Panspermia, doesn't it, though? Why go for something complicated, when simpler will do?
Only a simpleton would refer to the transition from lifeless chemicals to life as "simple".

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Re: >It did NOT evolve on planet earth.

Panspermia is pretty laughable really.
I'm sure the likes of Carl Sagan, Francis Crick, Stephen Hawking et alia would be devastated by your critique. And what a waste of money the EXPOSE experiment was. Tish...

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Re: 'seeded' from the same extrasolar source

True, but for the more subtle true believers, their God has been carefully designed to be intrinsically unprovable (one way or the other).
Religious behaviour/belief in god(s) appears to be at least 100,000 years old. Aristotle gave us his laws of thought less than 2,500 years ago. A tad hard to conceive of Mesolithic humans carefully designing their religion to be unprovable millennia after the event :-)

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Re: Blood

So what? People always believe this about their pets, not because it's true, but because humans - sorry, yumans, I mean - cannot help anthropomorphising things.
Anthropomorphising? A strange term to use to describe studying animal behaviour. And what has god to do with it? I suggest you take your medication and have a lie down ;-)

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Re: >It did NOT evolve on planet earth.

Sorry, that's quite wrong. There are the remains of at least one "natural" nuclear reactor in Africa - caused a bit of a panic when first found.
Yes, I'm familiar with the natural nuclear reactor(s) at Oklo, but the region is as far as we know unique and given the conditions that gave rise to it/them likely to remain so. It's worth bearing in mind that their thermal output likely never exceeded 100 kW.

Radiation-resistant bacteria on the other hand are found planet-wide. Yes, the early Earth was far more radioactive than present, but nowhere near the extent found at Oklo.

The evolution of eukaryotic life has been pushed back further in time than assumed when I were a lad by the find at Ediacara. It would not surprise me in the least to discover that eukaryotes had more than one such abortive start. The Ediacara fauna are not the kind of organism likely to form fossils.

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

Life on the Mississippi

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Re: >It did NOT evolve on planet earth.

Yes, let's just go with a string of unlikely coincidences. If life had originated multiple times on Earth (why restrict it to just once?), or evolved from a simpler genetic code, you might reasonably expect living things to use a variety of genetic codes. Unlike human languages, the language of genetics eschews a large number of possibilities. Much more pleasing to maintain Earth as the centre of the Universe :-)

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Re: Blood

Mind you, when I see an octopus I have the uncomfortable feeling that I'm looking at an alien intelligence.
Biologist Jack Cohen kept a pet prawn in his laboratory. This was a solitary rather than flocking variety of prawn. Over several months of interaction with it, Cohen realised that the prawn was far more intelligent than it needed to be and that in the absence of interaction with him, vanishingly unlikely to be exhibited in its native environment.

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Re: >It did NOT evolve on planet earth.

Panspermia theory that it came in via meteorites? Not necessarily wrong, but pretty much conjecture only at this point.
The idea that life originated on Earth is no less speculative. Have you read Crick and Orgel's Directed panspermia paper?

Consider also something Crick and Orgel were unaware of at the time; there exist on Earth several "species" of bacteria that are extremely resistant to hard radiation. The condition of high levels of hard radiation that could have resulted in that trait evolving exists in nuclear power stations, but the bacteria certainly existed prior to their recent invention. Sufficiently high levels of radiation do exist in interstellar space.

If they did not evolve in interstellar space, or nuclear power stations, we are left with the hypothesis that they were, in Steven Jay Gould's words, "hopeful mutations".

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Re: 'seeded' from the same extrasolar source

I mean, explain the octopus?! Three hearts and blue blood!
Not to mention properly designed eyes.

Security slip-ups in 1Password and other password managers 'extremely worrying'

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Re: "our advice to the customers is to always update their apps"

Hate to break it to you, but for the vast majority of the world's population $AU200 is far from "cheap".
Hate to break it to you, but I assumed Charles 9 was not one of those living on a dollar a day. FWIW, The Gitling regularly spends more than $AU1,000 on a new phone. Heck, the tenants who rent from me have 52 inch TV sets and I'm informed that they are poor. Mine's a mere 42 inch since The Gitling gave us his to replace our 32 inch.

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Re: All eggs in a basket?

Putting all your eggs in a basket and place it on a shaky shelf would not sound a nice idea.

It remembers all my passwords...

No it doesn't. It remembers the passwords you recorded in it. It is not mandatory to store all of your passwords therein.

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Re: "our advice to the customers is to always update their apps"

you can't afford a new one (and the cheapos don't work on your network)?
My HTC Desire was a cheapie; less than $AU200 new. Likewise the Galaxy Note 3 I just purchased is "new" (never used) and was less than $AU300. What kind of a network isn't compatible with my phones?

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Re: Little blue book

All these tech journos telling everyone to pop their passwords into these applications with zero comment on who actually is behind these pieces of software or how actually secure they are.

Bruce Schneier is behind the software I use. Something about due diligence...

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Re: Once again, the open-source Keepass is being ignored

So is Password Safe (wot I use)...

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Re: Little blue book

Especially if you die unexpectedly.
I've always found entering passwords extremely difficult after I died.

Vice News YouTube video commenter set for retrial over 'menacing' posts

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Re: Discretion

You can disagree with someone, hate them with an incandescent rage if you like, but death threats are unacceptable.

Is it OK if I just rip their bloody arms off?

Aunty Jack

Infosec white-coats: Robots are riddled with software security bugs

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Re: Legal liability?

or Professor Jeremiah P. Kettlewell!

Centrelink needed 370 extra staff to automate data matching

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Re: The Goanna had it right

Diogenes, you missed out the preceding words: "I am not evading tax in any way, shape or form. Of course, I am minimising my tax. Anybody in this country who does not minimise his tax wants his head read."

Licence-fee outsourcer Capita caught wringing BBC tax from vulnerable

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Re: The few programs worth watching in the US of A

I would strongly recommend anyone wishing the BBC to go "commercial" to try streaming a couple of hours of live US TV.
You're a cruel bastard :-)

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I bet there's chunks of the show cut out to make room for a few more ads.
Actually, they just speed up the show "a bit". It's quite noticeable if there's music and you have perfect pitch.