Posts by Steve the Cynic

And presumably, while headbanging, you get epic qwertyface.

Re: When I was a lad ....

"I remember my dad telling me of an acquaintance in primary school who (after holding it for a day) was capable of (and proud of) hitting the ceiling."

Might have been one of my former(1) classmates from when I was in primary school, several decades ago. (Hint: 1975 is included in that period of my life.)

(1) And no, I'm not in the least bit disappointed that these people are *former* classmates. I regret somewhat having them as former *classmates*, or even former *countrymen*(2), but there you are.

(2) I've spent a third of my life living outside my native country...

Re: unredundanting

"My eyes!!"

Yeah, that was pretty painful. Well done, OP.

Re: West Virginians...

"the war of northern aggression"

My late wife (born in El Paso, TX) used to call it that.

Where I live(1), the metro service has completely staff-free trains. No drivers, no on-train conductors ready to press a "close doors" button, nothing.

Since 1983.

(Yeah, yeah, I know, there's probably someone watching on CCTV, but you know what I'm saying. And the trains show evidence of having manual controls locked away under panels.)

The trams (strictly speaking, metre gauge light rail because they are mostly segregated from the roads) have human drivers, but they have to cross roads laden with cars and pedestrians and without crossing signals of any kind.

(1) Lille, France.

Re: Out of curiosity ...

The Unreliable Source cites the saturated vapour pressure of water as a bit more than 0.001 Pascals at -100 degC, so at -163 it will be lower still. 1 atmosphere is 100,000 Pascals, so that figure for -100 is really, really not much at all.

(Essential point: it will sublime extremely slowly, if at all.)

Re: Missing from the table...

"But how expensive to build one these days?"

That's an interesting question, of course, but one that doesn't lend itself to easy answers. But of course, my point is really that people who talk about going beyond the figures that *are* in the table need to remember that it has been done already. It isn't science fiction, and it isn't beyond the reach of our *current* level of technology. It's *history*.

Re: "That is a far too juicy target to not get hacked"

"if you are in the wring state the death penitential"

May I recommend proof-reading before posting when typing with autocorrect enabled?

Re: Android Wear is shockingly bad

"You summed it up perfectly with swipe left and swipe right lets you change the watch face???? How could anyone ever think that was a good idea and actually get out to a live release?"

Bizarrely, WatchOS 3 does this. So Apple thought it was a good idea. I'm not remotely convinced it is, of course. It's one of the negatives of WatchOS 3, along with the change in how you access "glances", like the music player remote controls - changed from 'swipe up" to "press the lower side button, use the wheel if the right glance isn't displayed, tap the screen to use the selected glance". Not an improvement.

Re: Left staff without e-mail/Internet access @Steve the Cynic

Yeah. I was in two minds about saying it, but everyone was getting *so* worked up about it. Ho hum.

Re: Videotape (tm)

In https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_and_genericized_trademarks the Unreliable Source claims it was Ampex Corporation, "an early manufacturer of audio and video tape recorders".

"You can't restrict delivery drones to a certain air corridor, or altitude, when they may need to access ground level at almost any geographical location."

Well, you *can*, but the limit looks a little different. There are already restrictions on aircraft, especially on helicopters and similar, but these rules are often of the form "minimum AGL".(1)(2) Delivery drones would require a restriction of the form "maximum AGL". Really, does a delivery drone *need* to go more than a few hundred feet above the ground? You'd also need restrictions of the type 'here is an air corridor for landing or taking-off aircraft: no drones.' I mean, I get that sometimes we have problems with birds in and around runways(3), but let's not make it worse.

(1) AGL = Above Ground Level.

(2) Example: Single-engine helicopters have a higher minimum AGL over urban areas than twin-engine ones, because they need to be able to auto-rotate if one engine fails.

(3) Not always around airports and similar. It is, for example, known that Ruppel's vulture sometimes gets as high as 11,000 metres/37,000 feet because one was run over by an a aircraft at that altitude. (The aircraft lost an engine. The bird lost, well, um, everything.)

Re: Linux

OK, but how is the "numpty user" supposed to know that? Does it *say* META on it? Not on my keyboards. (And yeah, my weird Japanese gamer keyboard has a Windows key.)

Re: Rules of thumb

What exactly do you mean by "network stack in the kernel" that means that FreeBSD doesn't do this?

Context: my company's main product uses FreeBSD as an OS. I have intimate knowledge of the flow of network packets through it, and in normal circumstances, packets do not leave kernelspace. The netinet components are, in fact, normally compiled into the main monolithic kernel file (more or less like Linux usually does).

The Windows network stack is exclusively in loadable modules(1), but still runs in kernelspace once loaded.

(1) There's almost nothing in the core Windows kernel, aside from enough disk modules and module management to load the rest of the kernel from what are merely specialised DLLs on disk.

> "The second generation of the Apple Watch is water resistant"

> So is the first gen, just not to the same degree.

Specifically:

* First generation (not Series 1, not Series 2): IP67 (splash resist, can be dunked a little bit)

* Second generation Series 1: Like first generation.

* Second generation Series 2: IP67 plus 50m water resist.

And the battery does last a *lot* longer on a Series 2 than on a First-gen. And I get to wear a computer with a dual-core processor on my wrist, which amuses me a bit.

Re: Seriously!?

Crazy Eddie: His prices are IN-SA-A-A-A-A-ANE!

(I didn't live in that area, but the local cable outfit had one of the NY-based channels on the basic cable setup.)

I've heard of the idea of the "fourth world" - countries that, while notionally first-world, are working hard to degrade themselves to third-world levels. They aren't the same as genuinely third-world countries, but of course aren't first-world any more either.

Re: if that's the answer, then someone asked the wrong question

"mindless audio messages at train stations"

Oh the memories:

* The guy at Worthing who told us the trains were all messed up because of (his words) "moo cows on the line".

* The guy at Paddington who told us that the outgoing train was delayed because the incoming train was delayed because it had been "hijacked by sheep" between Cardiff and the English border.

* At 5:30 am one morning, on the London-bound platform of a small station between Reading and Oxford, an automated announcement: "Oxford".

Note in passing: the first two weren't automated announcement.

Re: It's difficult to take ATMs seriously on security...

"most paper money basically just an IOU"

An interesting question, and strongly dependent on what exactly you mean by "an IOU".

The "I promise to pay the bearer on demand" thing on a British banknote is a historical remnant of the time when the word "pound" meant "a pound of" and the thing it was a pound of was Sterling silver (pound Sterling, Sterling silver...). There's a museum in the middle of Oxford (well, there was when I lived there) that had old (17th Century?) pound coins in a display case. A f---ing pound of silver, that is. Made for a fairly hefty coin.

But today, if you go to the Bank of England to get your sum of five pounds, they'll take your fiver and give you a different one, because the currency is no longer tied to a real asset. No modern currency is tied to a real asset - they are *all* "fiat" currencies, even the mighty (?) US dollar, which ceased to be an asset-backed currency (gold) in 1971.

So yes, or no, it's still (or not) an IOU, but it's not at all clear what it is that I owe you if you have one and it's me that owes (or doesn't) you something.

Re: Best ever unmanned space probe?

"This. Or perhaps Voyager 2."

Rosetta/Philae. Landing (almost) a probe on a f---ing comet, man!

The miner pays real money to his electricity supplier to run the mining hardware. But aside from that, there is no overt cost (in the BitCoin world) of mining coins. The benefit is that you create bitcoins, but as indicated, you create them out of real money that paid for real electricity made from real uranium atoms.

There's also a sort of opportunity cost, in that if miner A creates a coin, then miner B cannot create that coin. It really is a zero-sum game, and if I've understood the operation correctly, there is a finite, fixed supply of possible bitcoins, of which some non-zero number have been permanently lost for a variety of reasons.

EDIT: footnote: *your* electricity might not be made from uranium atoms, but 85% of mine is.

Re: 'No single story ... generated more than 1m engagements'

I would suggest that regardless of whether people can be influenced to *change* their beliefs and biases by news, fake or real, they can be influenced to *reinforce* their beliefs and biases.

Indeed, I would go further, and say that people often seek out opportunities to reinforce their beliefs, and if that means following a click-bait fake news link, well, that's what they do.

Re: Is it allowed ....

Sure, but you need to remember the words "is not"...

Well, there *are* jetpacks. Of course they only run for about 30 seconds and they are fuelled by high-purity hydrogen peroxide, so not good in the case of a fuel spill, but ...

Oh, you meant *practical* jetpacks? Not going to happen...

Indeed. They can, of course, be used as precedent for the treatment of future default judgements, but there's so much of that already, and the established rules are so clear on how they work, that any one new case will have next to zero weight.

(Caveat lector: I'm speaking here as the winner of a default judgement, although later events made it a hollow victory at best.)

Re: Still no changes

The main issue there is the four miles of tether required to stop the buoy drifting away from the aircraft before the world finds it.

Re: Cause or Effect?

That's a good question, and the real answer is probably "a bit of both" - we buy fewer phones because we keep them longer because they are more expensive, and they raise the prices because we are buying fewer phones.

Re: Not just Mac

No, they are displayed in Cyrillic that *looks* like Western European. (And that's more or less the whole point of the "attack" - they look like apple, paypal, etc., but aren't.)

Re: Unique selling point

That's the /Wag the Dog/ scenario you're thinking of?

[Repeated line]

Stanley Motss: This is NOTHING.

Re: I think the point is

"I stopped eating them after a barbecue flare of epic proportions"

That brings back memories of the cafeteria in the student union when I was a student...

They had a flat-sheet-of-metal grill on which they cooked burgers and similar, and they would routinely get sheets of flames about four feet high from the burgers. It made ordering lunch more entertaining that you'd normally expect.

Re: The assumption that it's matter

"It's not a theory unless it fits into a framework of other observations,"

It *is* a theory - it explains (sort of, weakly, maybe) the observed phenomenon. It could use some more concrete manner of making predictions about other things we could observe, but it is a theory.

Without that capacity for prediction, it isn't a scientific theory because it cannot be falsified. General Relativity is specific enough that we can use it to predict how far light will bend and in which direction, and we can then do things to see if that actually happens.

Re: Haters gonna hate

"discovered that Vista actually treated otherwise-identical documents differently based on the filename."

UAC on 7 and 10 does that for programs as well. Any EXE whose name includes certain sequences on a particular blacklist will trigger a UAC prompt even if all it does is call MessageBox and exit.

Among those sequences is "setup". You cannot run any program whose name contains that - e.g. virtualbox-version-setup.exe or mygame-setup-versionnumber.exe or even plain old setup.exe - without seeing the prompt.

Re: Given the speed...

Actually, if they rolled it out to you, you'd be able to do IPv6 without worrying about this particular thing.

The article is quite clear that the security weakness stems from a lack of deep inspection of the encapsulatED packets. Yes, firewalls inspect the encapsulatING packet (GRE, IP-IP, etc.), but many do not sufficiently inspect the contents.

If you have native IPv6 access provided by your ISP, you do real IPv6 and turn off your tunnelling, and you can inspect the traffic. (You get other problems, but you can at least filter the IPv6 traffic and de-filter the encapsulation protocols.)

Re: Daft thing is ...

"am I going to pull my phone out in the rain?"

Depends on the phone, I guess. Some have IP67 ingress protection, which will keep rain out just fine.

"Not being able to locate where they lost it from is insignificant ."

Sort of, maybe, not.

I think you can make a strong case that there is as strong a failure of internal controls in an inability to identify the source as there is in the loss itself, maybe even stronger. After all, if you can't tell how you lost it, you can't do anything directed at preventing the next loss.

My all-time favourite is closely related to this. Windows 9x / NT4, and probably all subsequent versions as well, would offer one particularly opaque message... (OK, one among many, but this one was more opaque than normal...)

Copying a big directory tree full of files with Explorer, and it gets a sharing violation, and complains that it is unable to open "DOOBLE" (example made up name...) without giving any hint as to which one of hundreds of files that match "DOOBLE.*" it might be trying to copy.

Re: Interesting times

"Windows was only cooperative until 9x and NT."

Pedantry alert!

Win3.X in *enhanced* mode would coop among the running Windows apps, and preempt among DOS VMs and between the VMs and the collection of Windows apps.

Well, unless multiple preempted things tried to do anything that called down into DOS, which was mutexed.

Re: Remote Garage Door opener

"P.S. They have actually existed since 1950s, also if you are IN the car, needing to use a phone app is a retrograde step from models fitted on a car."

Back in the day, 1982 or 1983, my dad fitted an opener for our garage(1), remotely triggered by a short-range radio widget clipped on the driver's side sun visor. No third-party servers (FFS the ARPANET had only just switched to TCP/IP), no WiFi, nothing like that.

(1) The less said about the placement of this garage the better, mostly because sane people would use highly bleepable language. A previous owner of the house had demolished a ground-level garage beside the house in favour of digging a hole in the ground, knocking a hole in the side of the house, and converting that end of the basement into a garage. The result was that in heavy rain conditions, the drywell under the lowest part of the drive backed up and the drive flooded. My parents bought a submersible pump for it, but even with that, on one memorable occasion we baled it out because the pump wasn't able to keep up.