* Posts by Pen-y-gors

3782 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Oct 2010

It was El Reg wot won it: Bing banishes bogus Brit bank banner ad

Pen-y-gors

Re: https://advertise.bingads.microsoft.com/en-us/resources/policies/report-spam-form

Correct it's fraud. So there should be a link that takes you straight to the Metropolitan Police. Who will then ignore it.

OnePlus 5T is like the little sister you always feared was the favourite

Pen-y-gors

Re: still on oneplus one

Ditto. No obvious problems, does everything I need, and only half the price of the 5T. I suspect I'll upgrade to the 8T when it comes out, if it's under £300.

New UK aircraft carrier to be commissioned on Pearl Harbor anniversary

Pen-y-gors

Re: About those aircraft

@thames

The helicopters have already been practising taking off and landing on the ship

Oh wow, that should keep them busy for months. Don't heli pilots learn to land and take off from a large flat stationary area when they're at basic heli-pilot school? Bit harder when it's rolling around in a force 10, of course, but has QE been out on sea trials in the south Atlantic yet?

Pen-y-gors

@AC

Gotta respect the will of the people.

Respect has to be earned...

Pen-y-gors

Re: Rule the waves?

@AC

"With our two mighty, ...."

You're Welsh. Why "our"?

'our' because we're paying for a chunk of the feckin' useless things! Come UDI we want the bit of PoW that sticks up at the top (it will make a nice attraction at Barry Island).

Pen-y-gors

Rule the waves?

But then Britain did at the time dominate the waves.

And Britain will again dominate the world's waves! With our two mighty, unsinkable aircraft-less aircraft carriers (one of them in dock), our underwater WMDs, capable of wiping out the population of a small continent (but not much help against the Daesh-bags) and our fleet of 6 type-69 pedallos British naval might will again cause cowards around the world to cower (at least after March 2019)

MPs slam HMRC's 'deeply worrying' lack of post-Brexit customs system

Pen-y-gors

Re: Gah!

The technology for a totally soft border isn't there yet (check out the soft border problems between Norway and sweeden)

And as a matter of principle, there can never be a soft border. Remember 'taking back control of our borders' - isn't that what this whole farce is all about - making sure that nasty foreigners can't enter beautiful green UK-land without permission? So there has to be a hard border around UKland to make sure there aren't any nasty Irish people sneaking in to UKland in the boot of a car - or even worse, a (gasp) Pole!

Of course, you could just move the hard border to Holyhead/Liverpool/Stranraer and make NI de-facto part of a united Ireland. Which will go down like a pint of three-week old cold sick with certain (armed) members of the NI population.

Yep, Brexit will be so easy.

Pen-y-gors

Re: Optional title

Further I object most strongly the the oft mooted Brexiters are all senile racists line.

I agree, that's totally untrue. There aren't 17 million senile racists in the country. How about we say "Brexiteers are almost all senile and/or racists" It's the only way to account for a lemming-like urge to commit national suicide.

Remainers will continue to fight to save our country from the insanity of the Quitlings.

Pen-y-gors

Re: Remainers need to explain...

Simplest option is to book 17 million seats on Ryanair to Port Stanley, or failing that convert our aircraft carriers to cattle boats for the trip. Then we have another referendum and withdraw A50. Everyone's happy.

Pen-y-gors

Re: @AC

@codejunky

There is always some doom sayer who will predict fire and brimstone

But when the doom sayer is standing on top of Vesuvius, with the ground rumbling, shaking and making odd noises, and farts of sulphurous gas filling the air, is it not possible that doom is really very, very likely to be coming?

Pen-y-gors

Re: Why do we need to import anything...

@codejunky

None of my coffee comes from the EU.

No, but the EU has 0.0% tariff on import of unroasted coffee, whereas WTO rules (if I interpret them rightly, which I probably haven't) looks like 20%.

Pen-y-gors

Re: We're fecked.

@AC

+1 for 'quondam' - and an extra one if you can get 'erstwhile' in to a reply.

Pen-y-gors

Re: Gah!

Well, except for the likes of John Redwood, who gets a hundred grand a year for advising wealthy people to move their wealth offshore before Brexit.

LIES! FAKE NEWS! It's £180 grand.

Pen-y-gors

Re: Gah!

@nematoad

will we be able to hold those responsible to account?

Of course not. In any self respecting society the people would be polishing the lamp-posts and placing orders for lengths of quality hemp rope and pitchforks, while filling tubs of tar and plucking chickens, ready for the great day of reckoning. In the UK? Nah, we'll just re-elect them.

Pen-y-gors

We're fecked.

So, clearly the chances of HMRC getting a new, tested, working system in place by March 2019 are approx zero, let's be honest. We're stuffed.

BUT...once we've pulled the plug on A50 we're still stuffed, because neither will they have a system in place to handle the 'changes in the EU customs regulations' that are coming.

The only good news is there won't be any more nasty reports of immigrants dying in the back of lorries, as they'd have to be insane to want to move to the UK if Brexit happens.

Pen-y-gors

Re: No problem ...

You forgot the 'joke' icon.

The Quantum of Firefox: Why is this one unlike any other Firefox?

Pen-y-gors
Thumb Up

Re: 30 per cent faster

Mine has just updated and, bar a cookies hiccup that took 5 mins to sort, it really IS faster. Dunno about 30% but noticeably faster to render pages. Also memory usage seems to be way down. Lately it has tended to slow to a crawl and show 'not responding' for a few seconds, and the about:memory has shown 3+GB in use. Minimise memory then clears 1GB+ and things speed up again.

Initial cautious thumbs up.

Pastry in a manger: We're soz, Greggs man said

Pen-y-gors

But El Reg complained first!

See title

What is DJI Terra? Mystery builds over Chinese biz's trademark

Pen-y-gors
Joke

It's obvious

Everyone knows that marketing bods can't resist playing with the spelling of normal words so they can trademark them.

It's obviously DJI Terror - a new line of cheap and compact weaponised drones aimed at the booming (sorry) ISIS market.

[Joke Icon just in case GCHQ think it's a serious suggestion]

Universal basic income is a great idea, which is also why it won't happen

Pen-y-gors

UBI will come - soon

The principle is very easy to understand. Assume I have a factory that can make electric toasters for £5 each, staffed entirely by robots, with distribution by driverless lorries. I have no staff. If every other factory works the same way, then none of us have any customers for our cheap toasters, as no-one has any income. Result - unsold toaster mountain.

UBI is just a simple and cheap mechanism to ensure that all in a society benefit from the advances of technology. As a society we've steadily mechanised, and as a result productivity has increased, so that we won the fight for a 40-hour week. No-one should now be doing 12 hour days, six days a week. This is just taking it to the next logical stage.

A key feature of UBI is that it is very basic. Enough for food, clothing, shelter and not much more. If people want more, then they work - but not 40 hours a week. For every pound they earn they will pay some tax, but they will also keep some of it. Goodbye benefits trap. For people who cannot work they will continue to receive some benefits. Pensioners will receive some pension (which they have paid for and earned).

It can and will work. But the vested interests fighting it will be as hard to overcome as Big Oil, Big Tobacco and Big Pharma.

Amazon to make multiple Lord of the Rings prequel TV series

Pen-y-gors

All of which has huge potential for fine television.

Whilst simultaneously having huge potential for being an absolute crock of expensive shit.

Is there any way to harness JRRT's spinning body to generate electricity?

Audio spy Alexa now has a little pal called Dox

Pen-y-gors

Re: Why portable?

@D@v3

Mainly, if it is nice weather, you might want to take one into the garden, still within reach of Wi-Fi, so that you can control your music

Anti-social bastard! If it's a nice day I want to relax in the garden in peace and quiet, not listen to your blasted 'music'. The strimmers and lawn-mowers are bad enough...

Thousand-dollar iPhone X's Face ID wrecked by '$150 3D-printed mask'

Pen-y-gors

Re: Nothing to worry about

Fair point about the general risk.

However I shall continue to not buy Apple products of any generation, at least until I win the Lottery - then I may buy one for my butler.

Pen-y-gors

A curious business

Bkav Corporation, an tech security biz with offices in the US and Singapore, specializes in bypassing facial-recognition systems,

Is that sort of business anything like a business that specialises in making skeleton keys or jemmying open back windows of houses in the middle of the night?

Mm, sacrilicious: Greggs advent calendar features sausage roll in a manger

Pen-y-gors

Please can we end this discussion now?

I'm getting really, really hungry and wanting a greasy sos roll - and the nearest purveyor is ten miles away (not Greggs)

Pen-y-gors

Re: what's wrong with being a 17th Century Puritan

@Mage

I think they have given up hanging Catholics and burning witches

But what's the point of being a Puritan if you can't have fun hanging Catholics and burning witches? You've got to have some hobbies.

Pen-y-gors

Re: Christmas and Religion.

@Mage

because I'm not a 17th Century Puritan

And what's wrong with being a 17th Century Puritan, may I ask? Black goes with anything, and silver shoe buckles are totally un-necessary.

Pen-y-gors

I see you lot still find religion-bashing amusing.

I thought it was all about slagging off a sleazy purveyor of fat-laden pastry who really seem to have failed to comprehend the traditional meaning of Christ-mas. John Lennon got mild criticism for saying the Beatles were bigger than Jesus, now Greggs are likening themselves to Christ!

Teensy weensy space shuttle flies and lands

Pen-y-gors

Escape pods

I notice the reference to 'injured astronauts'. Does this mean they could leave one permanently hitched to the ISS for emergency evacuation? Or does appendicitis still require experimental zero-gravity surgery with a tin-opener?

Firefox 57: Good news? It's nippy. Bad news? It'll also trash your add-ons

Pen-y-gors

Chrome?

@Dave K

So, what's the unique selling point?

How about it doesn't send your entire browser activity to Google?

Manic miners, hideous hackers, frightful flaws, vibrating mock cock app shock – and more

Pen-y-gors

Bitcoins?

A genuine question as I have no idea how these 'wallet' and bit-chain thingies work.

Could a similar accident to the Ethereum case potentially affect Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies? Was the Ethereum weakness peculiar to Ethereum or was it a generic crypto-currency problem? In particular, could the whole of Bitcoin be erased in one fell swoop, or would only a bit of it disappear - thus making the remaining BCs instantly more valuable. Hang on...I don't like the way this is going...

The day I almost pinned my tushie as a Google Maps landmark

Pen-y-gors

Pictures!

...or it didn't happen!

Metal 3D printing at 100 times the speed and a twentieth of the cost

Pen-y-gors

Possibilities

Accepting all the caveats noted above, this could be a serious game changer in so many areas. Traditional bulk manufacturing may be cheaper for millions of units, but by removing the setup costs, the unit costs for smaller runs become bearable. And of course, in the same way that print-on-demand means that books no longer need to be 'out of print', using this technique means that parts will never be 'out of stock' or 'no longer available'. If there is a method for converting old technical drawings to drive one of these things, then you can make parts for vintage cars, aircraft, trains etc - anyone fancy getting XH558 flying again?

I wonder if it could print replacement cabinet ministers?

Pen-y-gors

Re: Inject printers cheaper than Laser printers

But the drum and cartridge!

NASA shoots for 200Mbps networks on swarming satellites

Pen-y-gors

Good luck to them

As we so often say "What could possibly etc"?

In this case it's very true - a lot of very complicated bits to fit together, but it looks like they've made a darn good stab at covering them. If it works it could all be very interesting - large satellites surrounded by a halo of baby ones that handle the comms, and call in now and again for another drink of water to top up the thrusters. Neat!

Jet packs are real – and inventor just broke world speed record in it

Pen-y-gors

Re: Bond is back!

One other slight drawback with the arm-mounted thrusters - don't absent-mindedly reach up to scratch your nose.

Coinhive crypto-jacking increasingly pops up in top 3 million websites

Pen-y-gors

Trust?

Paying for a website with coin-mining is an interesting alternative to ads, but only while crypto-coinage has value. And for crypto-currencies, even more than the traditional sort, trust is everything. If people don't trust them, value drops rapidly to zero.

So, how does the accidental erasing of $300 million of crypto-dosh affect trust in all other crypto-currencies? We shall find out.

Vodafone signs deal with CityFibre to connect 5 million homes with full fibre

Pen-y-gors

Low-hanging fruit again

See title

Evil pixels: Researcher demos data-theft over screen-share protocols

Pen-y-gors

Cunning

Some people are too cunning for our own good!

Would insurance firms pay out if your driverless car got hacked?

Pen-y-gors

Re: What does Kryten think?

That's the sort of infrastructure that will be needed - with points in all sorts of places. Until now the publicity has naively referred to people plugging the car in at home overnight, when it's on the drive or in the garage. What proportion of people fit that model? A fair few people use on-street parking.

The idea of charging points in car parks is obvious (not necessarily IKEA) - perhaps at station or office/factory car parks where a car is left for 8 hours or so - and which can therefore make use of perhaps a 7kW charger. The problem is that the ultra-fast 30-min charge jobs pull a hell of a lot of current (80 amps or so?). A car-park full would need a private power station (e.g. motorway service station, where people will want a full charge not just a 20% top-up.)

Long term? It'll be interesting to see how it develops. I'm worried that we'll spend billions on infrastructure for the EV version of our existing car ownership model, and then discover that we all get rid of private cars and just call an electric self-driving Smart car when we want one. After all, the pattern of car ownership after a few decades was very different to the ownership of horses and carts.

Pen-y-gors

Re: Cost of charging

Out of idle curiosity, how did the above deserve a down vote. It's a simple statement of fact. Is the down-poster in the pay of Big Oil and opposed to all electrical vehicles? Or a neo-liberal who hates the idea of subsidies? Or are there grammatical errors of which I am unaware?

Pen-y-gors

Cost of charging

Ultra-fast chargers are not cheap - tens of thousands of pounds. But that's not necessarily what they cost. Our village shop has just done a deal with one of the providers and they're installing it free, and also paying to upgrade the power feed to the site. I assume this involves govt subsidies and a review of how many other points there are in the area.

Facebook's send-us-your-nudes service is coming to UK, America

Pen-y-gors

Another wee problemette...

Assume person A and person B are an item and person B takes a nudie photo of person A with the consent (or otherwise) of person A. Now, if A and |B split up and person B is crass enough to want to spam the web with said photo of A, how does A upload a photo of themselves, (which exists only on B's phone) for Zuk to drool over?

And what if they have a whole portfolio of piccies?

This one ain't going to fly, is it?

Dumb autonomous cars can save more lives than brilliant ones

Pen-y-gors

Re: replace driver airbag

a 4' metal spike? How do you sit in the driver's seat?

Cue small 18" high trilithon being lowered into sight...

Pen-y-gors

Re: Now is that "10 per cent better than humans" or "10 per cent better than American humans?"

@Charles 9

"But it has a higher NUMBER of concentrated areas, and that's where the accidents pile up"

But in concentrated/built-up areas vehicles are usually travelling fairly slowly, so there will be accidents but should be relatively few fatalities (except for those evil unAmerican lefties who dare to walk)

KRACK whacked, media playback holes packed, other bugs go splat in Android patch pact

Pen-y-gors

Nexus?

Fandroids with Nexus and Pixel devices will be able to get the November Android update directly from Google.

Oh yes? I don't think any updates for my early Nexus 7 have been available for a couple of years.

Boffins: Sun's red dwarf neighbour is looking a little thick around the middle

Pen-y-gors

Think globally, act locally.

Even picking up a bit of litter in the street makes the world a (slightly) better place.

Inventing a mega-ray that makes all guns, bombs etc in the world turn to strawberry jelly at once would make the world a considerably better place. Yay research!

Transparent algorithms? Here's why that's a bad idea, Google tells MPs

Pen-y-gors

Walking directions?

So walking directions are an algorithm? Technically, yes.

But Google are saying we should put on a blindfold, get into a sealed box, and let them carry us to the desired destination, and trust them that we will get there, and not some other destination which they decide is 'better' for us.

BT hikes prices for third time in 18 months

Pen-y-gors

My patience is wearing thin

For the last week I've been trying to get someone at BT to let me have FTTP (Openreach have finally wired us up) - both Biz and Rez seem to have difficulty with the concept. Maybe if they let people buy their 'premium' products they could keep prices down.

(FYI - BT Biz want £150 + VAT p.m. for 300Mbps FTTP, BT Rez will do 'Infinity 4' 300Mbps for £60 including VAT special intro offer (£80 later)- but they seem to have difficulty working out how to transfer me over)

Pen-y-gors

Re: BT Sport

Meh! Not interested in Sport, on BT, Sky or BBC. What does piss me off is having to pay inflated phone/broadband price to subsidise BTs really, really bad deals for the rights to sport.

For real sport, stick to Grand Sumo highlights on NHK world website - next Basho starts on Sunday!