Posts by Neoc

Not "the claw", "the CLAW"

(with apologies to Mr. M Smart)

Another good reason not to buy into anything that needs to "phone home" to work (I'm looking at you IoT).

Oh goddess... It's COBOL all over again. And didn't *that* turn out well. By the time you actually write something complex enough to be useful to a major company (or gov department) you might as well be a programmer.

Well, that's going to get objected to real quick. "...since 2007"? Not likely. As much as I don't like Apple, they should only be responsible for products sold since they were aware of the problem. And that'll be a much harder date to pin down.

"This will boost the first payload – Elon Musk's personal cherry-red Tesla Roadster, no kidding – up into orbit, and on a nominal course to Mars"

I thought one of NASA's major prep before sending anything to Mars was making sure it was clean-room compliant. Has SpaceX's Tesla gone through the same rigorous decontamination?

Meh

Old news. I have a Galaxy S7 and it suffers from burn-in.

Brings to mind...

"This file contains the complete set of papers, except for a number of secret documents, a few others which are part of still active files, a few others lost in the flood of 1967- Was 1967 a particularly bad winter?"

"No, a marvellous winter, we lost no end of embarrassing files."

And people wonder why I'm against the concept of flying cars: because the same idiot who can't be trusted to properly and lawfully fly 1Kg drone would be operating 1000Kg cars over my head.

Double-talk

All these companies plead innocence, but it's all double-talk.

"It's not us, it's the algorithms": You wrote the suckers to make your life easier. Guess what: your algorithm = your problem.

"We don't curate the contents, therefore we're not liable for what people post": Actually, see the first quote. You wrote algorithms to boost (or reduce) the standing of posts in your media. Therefore you (the company) *are* curating your contents, deciding which ads I'll see and which news gets posted first. And so you should be held liable.

Apart from the fact that I personally think the new TLDs are a bad idea - I would personally side with Brazil on this one. "Amazon" as been a part of the lexicon describing the geographical area long before Amazon LTD even existed.

Tell you what: if ICANN is so keen on offering .amazonia to Brazil as a replacement for .amazon, why not offer .amazonltd (or .amazonco) to Bezo? See how keen he is on compromises then.

"The fact that its future existence was first revealed to media in the city of Adelaide ..."

*Adelaide*? Let me get this straight - the best place for a spaceport would be as close to the equator as possible, so NT or North QLD are prime candidates... but they announce the agency in Adelaide?

(NB for our non-Aussie friends: Adelaide is on the SOUTH side of the continent, well away from the equator).

Funny

This sort of problem seems to be very USA-centric.

Here in Oz, we have the AEC (Australian Electoral Commission) whose sole purpose in life is to run elections (local, state or federal). And while a lot a mud has been slung at various politicians and parties for trying to rig the election (generally the old "cemetery vote" scheme), not one of them has ever been proven and NO-ONE HAS COMPLAINED ABOUT THE AEC (*). The average Australian's trust over the AEC's impartiality is rock-solid.

Which is one of the reason why there's such a brouhaha over the fact that the "Marriage Equality" question is being handled by the ABS (Australian Bureau of Statistics, which lost all public credibility recently) rather than the AEC.

(*) The exception is the odd political party complaining they are not on the ballot even though they never supplied the requisite number of signature. C'mon people, if the "Party party party Party" can get on the ballot, do you *really* think your inability to get on it is because the AEC "hates you"?

I, too, smell Human Error

I bet the "third-party provider" who was "developing products" asked for sample data and some nitwit pulled a set from the production database and did not anonymise it before handing it over.

"'Geolocation information' means information that: (i) is not the contents of a communication; (ii) is generated by or derived from, in whole or in part, the operation of a mobile device, including, but not limited to, a smart phone, tablet, or laptop computer; and (iii) is sufficient to determine or infer the precise location of that device,"

So, in other words, the apps/websites/whatever will now refuse to work unless you grant them permission to track you; and even if they don't it won't matter because "see, your honour, we can only track the owner down to a five-meter radius; it's not a *precise* location at all."

<Thumps head on desk>

Someone tell me...

...how the hell this will work for apartment blocks?

Not new.

Woolworths and Coles here in Oz do both Pick-up and Home Delivery. Specify a 2-hour window on a specific day and it'll be delivered to your door. They do require someone to be there, though.

If it's closeness to the equator they want, North Queensland was already mooted as a spaceport quite a while back (and it's closer).

Math error?

I may be wrong, but based on their 31-days-in-a-month calculations, should "5 months" equate to "155 days", and not "279 days" as shown in the table?

Ditto, "9 months" should be "279 days" and not "465 days" which in fact represent 15 months.

Wouldn't "mini-Chipzilla" be best renamed "Chipzuki"?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrQjr6KAJvU

Rounded corners

@a_yank_lurker, et al

The rounded corners in questions do not refer to the physical device but rather to the icons on the screen. Later generations of Samsungs no longer have them, but the original icons used rounded corners, same as the iPhone.

<sigh>

...and every patent troll company re-incorporates in Texas in 3... 2... 1...

"We are seeing the beginnings of this transformation with spoken queries, especially in mobile and smart home settings"

Yes, because we need more noise pollution. So now,as well as the people who hold their phone half a foot in front of their face and shout into it (to avoid the nasty radiation frying their brains), we'll get to have people screaming loudly at their phone because it didn't understand them due to the other idiot speaking loudly to their phone (or playing loud games/music expecting other passengers to of course have the same tastes in games.music).

<sigh>

At least in the days of books/newspapers other passengers ignored you *quietly*.

And no-one mentions what will happen to the two Chinese nationals who walked in with that stolen money? Probably nothing - after all, it's bad Juju to piss off the Chinese government.

Easiest way to check this...

Is to send a one-way gizmo out in space with said thruster attached to it and see what happens.

I said *easiest*, not *cheapest*.

Patch updates?

That's nice - now how about you work on not having to reboot my PC any time something changes? Someone please explain to me why an update to MS Office requires a reboot in this day and age?

Meh

I don't know about rattus but I'm pretty certain your average corvidae will take at most a few weeks to realise the "fence" is nothing but a light-show. And then a few hours to pass the news around.

Hmmm... Isn't anyone who goes beyond the atmosphere an "astronaut", regardless of their actual occupation? ( https://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Aastronaut&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 )

As for "Mars Base Alpha", well played sir. Keep those pop-culture references coming. I only hope the lander will be called "Eagle-1". Now if you'll excuse me, I have an old British TV sci-fi series to re-watch.

Welcome to the future

Where you will be running the software version they want you to run, whether you want to or need to, or in fact if it clobbers function(s) you require.

Welcome to the world of Software-as-a-service, where you've become the Beta testers by default.

Tsk, Tsk

Shouldn't that be Total Inability To Support Usual Payments?

Badly written question.

And that last question was politically loaded: they should have listed the points of both plans without mentioning which party was for which plan. Yes, I know, most of us are aware of who wants what version of the NBN - but the moment the politicos were mentioned, it would have biased the responses.

The idiots at Yahoo! are correct on one fact: installing the backdoor at the behest of the NSA (or whomever) did not indeed break any laws.

Installing an *insecure* backdoor, on the other hand, may be criminally liable.

"Heart of Gold"? Surely it should be "Wells' Revenge" or just "H.G. Wells".