Posts by Jonathan Richards 1

Re: Not just Trump

Oh Homer wrote:

> Most shocking, to me anyway, is the fact that this sick attitude extends to the deeply impoverished working class majority

I'm coming late to these comments, but shortly after seeing an even older Youtube video on the subject of US wealth inequality. It's difficult, as an outsider, to see how this situation survives in a democracy, except that the phrase 'indoctrinated by centuries of neoliberal doctrine into the delusion that they are all merely "temporarily embarrassed millionaires"' [Oh Homer, op cit.] sums it up very nicely. I can't be the only observer from the Old World, where "liberal" is a respectable description of a political outlook rather than a deathly insult, who wonders at the instability of the US system. By that I mean an analogy with the stability of the spinning plate trick: it requires constant intervention to prevent it from coming crashing down in an irretrievable mess.

Re: Time to move to La Palma

OK, pedantic wet blanket moment: the Milky Way is composed of billions of stars, but you can't resolve them with the naked eye. Despite the apparently overwhelming number of points of starlight in a dark sky, there's probably no more than 5,000 that one can see.

Source: earthsky.org

OT Re: Ludicrous false claim

Thank you for the link, it's good to know that somebody has done some decent anecdote collection.

But... my eyes! my eyes! I haven't had to read orange on black since I elected to have that colour scheme on a DEC VT320, circa 1987. The site colour scheme brought it all flooding back: the hours writing extensions to EVE...

Re: RIBrsiq & thanks

Oh, well, YMMV, I guess, but that's not my experience, I often get an ack. Tips and corrections are the right way to go, I think, unless you want to discuss large-scale problems with an article.

Re: "... complaints and fines from the FTC"

Under UK law, government computers have no greater legal protection than any other (although if you exfiltrate Official Secrets, then there's that, too). Computer Misuse Act 1990 <- here you go!

I just noticed that the Act contains no definition of a computer. Maybe sneaky peeking at somebody's slide rule might be an offence, who knows?

Obligatory disclaimer: IANAL, nor do I play one in any medium whatsoever.

Re: Like a moth to a light

El Reg won't let me post the quoted html from crashsafari.com here, but somebody has already done so at pastebin. I don't know whether the Google Analytics thing is the culprit within the javascript, or the huge loop shoving stuff into the browser history. Probably the latter.

Edit: explanation here[github.com], including why it crashes not only Safari.

Second Edit

Who the hell thought this was a good idea?

HTML5 introduced the history.pushState() and history.replaceState() methods, which allow you to add and modify history entries, respectively.

Re: Hmm...

Hmm... indeed. One of those low-risk:high-impact failure modes that crop up in these discussions is a solar coronal mass ejection that takes out a significant number of orbiting electronic devices. Unless we believe that Galileo, GLONASS, etc. satellites are better hardened against radiation damage than GPS, they don't constitute an effective backup (for that scenario).

As far as I remember (haven't looked it up) we're currently on the downslope of the 11-year solar activity cycle: I'm sure we'll have reduced our dependency on orbital electronics by the time of the next maximum. [Insert unwarranted optimism icon of your choice].

It ain't necessarily so...

> yes, you f***ed up the page size settings

Not if the program you're using has come from the good ol' USA with default settings for Letter paper, and persists with them despite your local settings for GB-en all over the place.

Nope. Matte Damon.

Re: the techniques at the disposal of the ancients

But of course Eratosthenes (276-194 BCE) did measure the Earth's circumference, and did come up with a very respectably accurate figure. He did this by noting the angular discrepancy between the sun angles at two points separated by a large known distance. Not for nothing is this man known as the originator of geography.

Ref: Eratosthenes' method for determining the size of the Earth [wikipedia.org]

Re: What is death?

> our agreement is also a delusion

I think that was the point, when Emmanuel wrote "have to agree", instead of, e.g. "quite agree".

Re: You know the good thing about DT?

@Sean Timarco Baggaley re Trump sues for breach of human rights.

There is nothing in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights about freedom to travel into a foreign country[1]

Article 19

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

What the UK Home Secretary is able to do, and (as others have said) often does, is refuse entry to the UK on the grounds that the presence of the individual is 'not conducive to the public good'. I don't think that Trump would have a human rights case that the courts would not throw out in mere moments.

[1] Unless, of course, Trumpf should turn up seeking asylum (Article 14 refers). Could happen...

Source: Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights

Re: TCO?

It always occurs to me when folk talk of lightbulb inefficiency: whenever the lightbulb is operated in an environment which is being heated and thermostatically controlled, then the heat energy output of the lightbulb isn't being wasted. It is contributing to heating the space it's in, and that means the thermostat will click off that much sooner. For much of Northern Europe, when it's dark, it's cold. My venerable Anglepoise is at this moment sitting in the corner, helping to keep the room warm.

EXIF

Exif metadata is integral with the file (.JPG, .TIFF, .WAV) so is exactly as durable as the image data portions. If one were to edit or re-encode the image, there is a real risk of altering the Exif; simple error-free copying will preserve it.

Also, +1 for the earlier comment pointing to dvdisaster.net which enables one to pre-calculate error-correction codes which may make DVD images readable if it becomes damaged. (It won't work for already-degraded disks - lost data is lost!)

Re: Politicians seem to have always had an instinctive grasp of science and technology

Yes, indeed.

On two occasions I have been asked, -- "Pray, Mr Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

Passages from the Life of a Philosopher by Charles Babbage, p.67

Re: Open Government... Ha!

@Roo

Indeed you may be right, and that would be a fine illustration of the maxim that "hard cases make bad law".

Say what?

> HTTP isn't actually a protocol

Good folk at the IETF don't agree with you.

Re: I guess this would have shown up with a cursory glance at the code?

Juniper's advisory says

During an internal code review, two security issues were identified.

So, more than a cursory glance, and that is in fact how it was found. The CIO said that the code review identified "unauthorized" code. Whether or not Juniper will share with us how that backdoor got into their code repository remains to be seen; it's interesting that it seems to have been 'camouflaged' to look like a printf() command. That's not what you'd expect from some developer putting in a time-saving routine during development and then forgetting to remove it before release, it looks like something that was designed to stay under the radar in released software.

Re: In unrelated news...

What the hell is going on ...?

Reading the page source, one finds that the image is called 'bergonic chair.jpg'. Searching for "bergonic chair" leads me to the Otis Historical Archives National Museum of Health and Medicine Flickr stream where, lo! the same image reposes.

I then observe that it's got a CC-BY license, which means El Reg should already have given you this information:

Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.