* Posts by allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

6157 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Oct 2015

Robot surgeon outperforms human doctor with porcine patients

allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

It's a sewing machine. Which is fine by me. If parts of me should need stitching again, I want them to use the best tools availiable for the job. But why does is has to be a 'robot' with a fancy acronym?

ZX Printer's American cousin still in use, 34 years after purchase

allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

"It took a licking, but it kept on ticking!"

Sorry. Just had to do it.

Nerds make it rain in Nevada. The Las Vegas strip? No, cloud-seeding drones over the desert

allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

This sort of thing

never really amounts to anything, because:

Sooner or later the nerds working on stuff like that will discover Wilhelm Reich and start spending more and more time in a cupboard, trying to charge up their sexual energy. After a while the governor (and let's face it, all the states who have an interest in making it rain are located in the Bible Belt) discovers that he has been funding a couple of perverts, cuts the funding and acts like it never happened.

Cue Kate Bush - Cloudbusting.

allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

AAaaahhhh! Chemtrails!!!

(If this doesn't bring out all the tinfoil hat brigades, I don't know what will.)

As it has already been posted, there is the question of what will happen somwhere else. At the scale they are working now, probably nothing much, but it seems they have bigger plans.

Anyone up for a round of unintended-consequences-bingo?

Cops deploy StingRay anti-terror tech against $50 chicken-wing thief

allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

If you bulid it they will come. If they have it, they will use it. To the point where use and mis-use becomes undistinguishable from each other. And then some.

Questions over how Ian Livingston's peerage was granted

allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

The Commission takes the view that in this context, propriety means:

i) the individual should be in good standing in the community in general and with the public regulatory authorities in particular; and

ii) the past conduct of the nominee would not reasonably be regarded as bringing the House of Lords into disrepute.

Well within parameters then.

UK govt admits it pulled 10-year file-sharing jail sentence out of its arse

allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

Re: So is anyone going to be held to account?

Blatantly lying to the public, falsifying research, general incompetence. Sounds like there should be some peoplepolishing up their resume someone is jockeying for being chosen as the next home sec!

FCC gives the nod to $17.7bn US cable mega-merger (no, not that one)

allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

Re: More mergers.....

Well, technically there would still be a choice, and it would be digital to boot. But yeah, huzzahs for free market forces.

SpaceX blast-off delay

allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

Well, as long as the video feeds work...

Anyway, good luck! It will be interesting to see what the baby can (and can't) do.

'Toxic' WIPO catches flak as US congressmen call for Gurry's head

allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

Freedom fighters / terrorists. Perception is reality.

How to evade the NSA: OpSec guide for journalists also used by terrorists

allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

Re: How to avoid being spied on...

Damn. I should have bought that old missile silo in Montana after all.

ICO fines NHS trust £185K for publicly airing personnel files

allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

Would you tick the 'Yes, I'm paranoid' box on a survey form?

Flinging Slack at them won't get team talking – senior Etsy engineer

allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

Re: 'Don't do DevOps because it is trendy'

Okay, now El Reg is starting to scare me.

Gozi trojan mastermind sentenced by US court to time served

allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

"Considering the amount of money stolen by him alone, along with selling & renting Gozi to rip off so many people... I think 3 years is a pretty light sentence."

Hey, it's not like he's done anything really serious like torrenting music and movies and stuff...

EU set to bin €500 note

allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

For a minute there

I thought I had clicked the wrong bookmark and went to Zero Hedge. But then I noticed that nobody was suggesting hoarding Mercury Dimes...

allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

Re: The usual bollocks from the Euros / post by Charlie Clark

The Germans also used to have DM 1000 notes*. As the exchange rate was 1 EUR = 1.96 DEM, the € 500 note did fit in quite nicely.

* Brownish thing. Portrait of a guy on the front side, based on a painting by Lucas Cranch sr showing either Johannes Scheyring (bigwig in Magdeburg at the time) or mathematician and astronomer Johannes Schöner. Picture of Limburg cathedral on the back side.

UK.gov wasted £20m telling you to 'be safe online, mmkay'

allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

"uncoordinated, ill-informed and utterly ineffective"

Hey, three out of three ain't bad!

Skygazers: Brace yourselves for a kick in the Aquarids

allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

There is only one problem: accelerating.

As long as you point the bull upward, everythng else will sort itself out nicely, including the in-flight BS deposit.

allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

Re: I almost read that as...

Yeah, sorry about the typo, my son, bless you... but did you mean goat or coat?

On a related note, I am really with Jasper Fforde on this one: it should be spelled "mispeling".

allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

"Maximum burning dust from Halley's Comet at around 3-5 am on the 6th? Are you crazy? Far too early. Get them to re-schedule."

"But, but, but, ..."

"Make it so!"

On a more serieous note: are we talking GMT? CET? CEST? BSC? SSC? (No, wait ...) Anyway, what time do I set my alar clock to?

Defence bankrolls Oz Govt's infosec threat sharing strategy

allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

Current (2016-04-29) Interbank rate:

1 AUD = 0,669 EUR

NIST readies 'post-quantum' crypto competition

allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

But wouldn't the 'quantum resistant algorithms' be resistant and non-resistant at the same time?

Anyway, the point of one time pads is that that you use each and every one of them only once, ever. So if you can make as many one time pads as you'll ever need, based on a truely random generator, and don't ever re-use them, well...

Virty upstart PernixData spills beans after going cap in hand to investors

allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

"We are in the final stages of closing an additional round of financing, which we cannot talk about until finalised. Any insinuation that we are running out of money in July is libelous."

Translation: we'll run out at August, at current rate.

"Last week we closed our quarter above target and we just passed the 800 customer mark, so things are trending in a nice direction."

Tranlsation: oh please oh please oh please... Hint: trending in a direction is not the same as moving in any particular direction.

"We recently added over a dozen new field personnel to handle future sales demand."

Translation: We have e-mailed a subcontractor claiming to have more than 12 bods on the payroll to get a quote.

"This is part of the growth plan being put in place by our new chief revenue officer,"

Seriously? Chief revenue officer? Anyway, scribbling graphs with all the arrows pointig up on a flip chart is sort of a growth plan, but...

"Mike Munoz, who is scaling the business as efficiently as possible.

No translation, because it doesn't mean anything at all.

"This plan also involves minor restructuring, to which we did make some small changes to the sales organization recently. In aggregate, though, the sales team has actually grown recently, not shrunk."

Translation: we fired a third or so of them. Which has transformed the remaining guys into stress eaters, big time.

Dell CTO for Enterprise legs it to pastures new

allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

Was it the suit or the spectacles?

Revealed: How NASA saved the Kepler space telescope from suicide

allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

"Waking up to a phone call in the wee small hours of the morning are never good. It’s usually a wrong number, a drunk ex wanting to talk, or the news that someone has died."

Well, I once got a phone call at 3am from a drunken ex (not mine) that wanted to talk about the recent death of his first(ex) wife. Took a few minutes to convince him that he got the wrong number and I wasn't his third (ex) wife. Having got that of my chest I'd like to say:

If this world we live in was even close to how it should be*, teams like that and the work they do would be celebrated in the way we celebrate guys kicking footballs or drive a fast car round and round.

* According to me, of course. YMMV.

Lost: One Scality CMO

allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

Guys, that's never a CMO's office in the pic.

IBM's quantum 'puter news proves Big Blue still doesn't get 'cloud'

allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

"IBM doesn't get it. It's not 2007 any more."

I'd say IBM doesn't get it's not 1967 any more, but let's not argue about it.

White House to bring us up to speed on artificial intelligence hype latest

allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

Well, I don't want to give the impression that I am setting myself up here as some sort of chairperson, but I think we're missing the big picture here. The real question to be answered first of all is: what acronym should the artificial intelligence and machine learning subcomittee at the National Science and Technology Council be using?

Ex-HP boss Carly Fiorina sacked one week into new job

allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

Hm. I was kinda hoping Ted and Carly would last a little longer - I had prepared a little list of jokes around a 'Cruz control fail' theme.

allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

Re: President... Trum...?

Go ahead and say it: President and Supreme Commander Donald Trump.*

As to the next ship to mars you might want to get in touch with SpaceX:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/02/spacex_adds_mars_haulage_to_its_price_list/

* Yes, the phrase "May you live in interesting times" is indeed a curse.

so, the creator of bitcoin is an Australian

allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

At least the creator of the creator of Bitcoin seems to be from Austria Australia:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/03/bitcoin_craig_wright/

Devs claim charger uses 'photosynthesis' power battery charger

allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

So leccy does grow on trees!

Revealed: HMS Endeavour's ignominious fate

allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

Re: "Lord Sandwich"?

AFAIK it's still 'RRS Decision by naming committee pending'

Extreme photo-bombing: Bad ImageMagick bug puts countless websites at risk of hijacking

allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

"According to Slack security engineer Ryan Huber, ...

I'd like to see how he phrased that in his CV.

Sat TV biz Dish: I'm not an authorized iPhone repairer ... but $20 is $20

allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

For an extra

$20 or so they will bring along a deep dish pizza.

IBM's FlashSystem looks flashy enough, but peek under the hood...

allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

Technically...

"This week IBM announced three new flash products, two of which are based on existing technology."

I'm pretty sure all three are based on 'existing technology', because ...

Facebook bungs 10-year-old kid $10k to not 'eliminate' Justin Bieber

allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

Re: 10k...

Kickstarter?

Sour krauts ban Airbnb

allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

Someone pass Airbnb a hankie... they had two years to prepare for this.

Also, the target are

1) owners that are de facto operating something very much like a hotel or hostel (without the licensing and taxation that goes with that, wink wink) and

2) owners who don't rent at all.

There is absolutely no problem in renting out your guest room, or your whole flat while you're away on holiday, etc etc. Besides, Berlin isn't London.

F-35s failed 'scramble test' because of buggy software

allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

Re: Clearly Typhoons don't have this problem

" ...it is an object lesson in why dumping every rôle you can think of into an aeroplane does not generally make for a useful plane."

I thought that lesson was already taught by the F-104G...

allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

Re: two words

So, generation X?

allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

Re: This is how the US is preserving its air superiority

Ahem. The Sons of the Desert is the international Laurel & Hardy appreciation society.

Also, I think that suicide bombers classify as 'not-so-smart-bombs'.

Ultra-cool dwarf throws planetary party

allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

"The structure of this planetary system is much more similar in scale to the system of Jupiter’s moons than to that of the Solar System."

Reads a bit like someone made a model for a high school science project...

Opower, my power: Oracle spends $532m to get some utilities cloud, er, power

allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

Yes. Fascinating.

Why a picture of Kalinin nuclear power plant though? Is Larry also contemplating buying Dynamo Moscow?

Barclays.net Bank Holiday outage leaves firms unable to process payments

allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

Where is Rowan Atkinson when you need him?

Do you know where your trade secrets are?

allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

"Information security (infosec) is no longer a nice-to-have. It is a matter of corporate survival."

Information security has always been a matter of corporate survival.

Even in the days when information security meant locking up the ledgers in the safe before calling it a day. Or having someone guard the clay tablets after business hours.

allthecoolshortnamesweretaken
Coat

" ... force employees to remove batteries from their phones ... "

Good idea. Start with the iPhones.

(Mine's the one with the NOKIA Asha 205 in the pocket.)

Old, complex code could cause another UK banking TITSUP – study

allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

Re: one-third above world average

Either way, big stack of punch cards...

allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

Re: The shock of the new

Of course, they will be flawless! They will be written using DevOps!

*ducks*

allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

Re: "Even if something has been written in Java in 90s that is still 20 years ago."

"I am struggling to understand why Old Software is Bad Software."

Software a consultant can't make money from is bad software.

I am Craig Wright, inventor of Craig Wright

allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

I am confused ...