Posts by Jonathan Richards 1

Re: Question

Hmm. The Guardian counts as major dead wood publication, I think, and they covered PRP recognition of Impress in October: Max Mosley-funded press regulator recognised as state-backed watchdog.

Agreed

> I think Signal underestimate how much control these places want over their populaces

Indeed. Outside the USA, not many of us use google.com. If the authorities block google.com, would users still be able to reach google.com.eg? Signal developers may have bought into the 'Google is the Internet' idea.

Re: Not just US

Definitely not just US. I flew a lot in South America recently, and all the regional airlines we used had announcements during boarding, telling passengers that Galaxy Note 7 devices were banned.

It really was the EM field!

Scene: 1994, office with synthetic fibre carpet and wheeled office chairs with which to sit at desks bearing computers running Windows 3.11.

If one scooted the chair across even a moderate stretch of carpet, a static charge built up which was quite painfully discharged once one touched an earthed surface. I got into the habit of discharging by touching my wedding ring to the metal desk frame, (which produced a nice fat spark but no pain!), and noticed that doing so would frequently lock up my PC. For a while we worried about the quality of the electrical earthing, but all was well there. We conclusively demonstrated that moving the keyboard a foot or so up off the desk prevented the lockups: apparently the discharge through the frame induced a voltage spike in the keyboard that was transferred to the PC (keyboards had PS/2 connectors then, not USB) and the motherboard didn't like it.

>For what purpose?

"connected services for drivers, including real-time traffic and weather reports and accident or road works warnings"

Apparently.

Source: https://www.gsa.europa.eu/newsroom/news/satellite-navigation-core-future-connected-car-systems

Re: the precedent this sets if a manufacturer can

Remember the Sony Playstation update that removed much-loved OtherOS functionality?

I have to say that Samsung are in a hard spot here. Suppose they *didn't* take steps to render safe these devices, when they have a mechanism to do so. Are they then liable for increased damages? I bet you can find a lawyer who would say so.

A better change might be one that destroys the ability of a battery to hold a charge (maximum chargelevel := 1%). The phone would still work when connected to an external power supply, then. Maybe there's no way to do that with an over-the-air update.

Afterthought: you're never going to get 100% of phones turned in for refund, anyway. How many have been stolen, or dropped in the lav.?

Re: Most of the creationists I know also believe in evolution!

> ... some species is "more evolved"? How is that possible if there is not a plan that is being followed?

There isn't a plan, and I don't think that respectable evolutionary biologists use loose language such as the examples you give. No organism is "the pinnacle of evolution", or whatever, except in the sense that the current generation is the end result of about three billion years of evolution from the first life form [1]. Evolutionary mechanisms don't look forward in time, and don't need to have any such direction to explain fully the diversity of life which we observe. That is what makes it a successful theory: it explains observations better than any other theory, without having to invent anything more than (i) heritable variation amongst siblings and (ii) some of those siblings reproducing more effectively than others.

[1] Possibly not the first life form. Maybe there were others, before and after, not based on DNA/RNA and twenty-odd amino acids, but those didn't survive.

Re: As we slowly

Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, perhaps?

There is a handful of El Reg stories featuring him.

Re: Considering it's such a tiny amount

> Why is it so tricky to change?

Because it's introduced way back up the supply chain. Bank of England buys the plastic unprinted web from Innovia, Innovia buys the base plastics from one or more polymer producers, one or more polymer producers use or produce plastic pellets which are kept free-flowing by trace amounts of tallow.

Re: Hit the Share' button by accident?

> Still can't see how he managed to 'accidentally' upload 700 pages...

I ran the linked Dutch article through Google translate: apparently the documents were copied to an Iomega network-attached storage device, without password protection.

she made a backup of documents on a private Iomega network drive, a hard drive that was connected to the Internet without a password

How large is the Internet Archive?

According to the message on its home page, twenty-six petabytes.

Rain/Reign/Rein homophones

I refer the Hon. gentleman to my earlier reply (2013, blimey I didn't think my memory was that good!):

Rain - n., wet stuff that falls out of the sky. Hence vt. to rain (usu. down) upon something

Reign - vt., to rule over e.g. a kingdom or empire. Hence "a reign of terror", etc.

Rein - n., a piece of horse-harness, attached to the bit. Hence "rein in", i.e. to limit movement or freedom of action.

Re: Fibreglass and cotton ...

> the crew in the magazine (shell storage) had to get out really very quickly indeed (up a vertical ladder) to avoid being drowned by the fire-suppression system

I believe the Royal Navy in WW2 didn't expect the magazine crews to be able to evacuate in case of a fire: they were locked into the magazine, and if it needed to be flooded then they would drown. As evidence, here is a tiny extract from a memoir by S. L. Bell, BEM, whose duty station was the 'A' turret shell room of HMS Exeter at the Battle of the River Plate:

... we all set about our work sending up prepared shells to A turret, when the ship seemed to stagger and shudder, we then noticed smoke coming down the voice pipe, and the turret wouldn't respond to calls; after a brief moment the person in charge of the shell room told the crew members there to get up top to see if there was anything that could be done to assist getting the gun back into action, as we left the shell room I asked about the personnel below in the magazine, and the PIC told me to spin the hatch to let them out and tell them what was happening, as they were locked down in the magazine in case the need to flood ever occurred.

'A' turret had been struck by a shell from Panzerschiffe Admiral Graf von Spee, but precautions against flash igniting the charges in the magazines meant that Exeter survived (just) both this hit, and many others.