Posts by Robert Helpmann?? 2583 publicly visible posts • joined 31 May 2011
I thought water was supposed to be an excellent protector against radiation?
I had to look it up as I couldn't remember, but "secondary muons generated by cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere can penetrate to the Earth's surface, and even into deep mines." For the length of time the Earth was purportedly showered with an intensified amount of this radiation, it would have been difficult and unlikely for large animals to avoid exposure.
There are tonnes of idiots with seemingly unlimited cupboard space for gadgets they use obsessively for 6 months then almost never again.
I have very limited cabinet space. I have a rule that if I bring it into the house, it has to be used regularly or it goes to the local thrift store. I still have my bread maker.
Isn't hard drive encryption literally one of the features of many of the products Lenovo sell?
Yes, but have the flaws in HW encryption implementation been corrected?
Directions for Brussels Sprouts en Absence
Clean, trim and slice thin.
Batter and deep fry until golden brown color is achieved.
Place on paper plate to drain.
Move to serving tray and squirt decorative patterns on sprouts with Sriracha sauce.
Place on dinner plate and allow to rest for a few minutes.
Move back to paper plate for eventual forced consumption by neighbor's cat that keeps going in your flower bed.
Eat dinner plate, thinking how much worse it almost was.
I didn't enjoy Brussels sprouts until I left home and realize that my mother's idea of how any vegetable should be cooked involved boiling it well past its demise. Finding alternatives was quite nice.
I thought this was relatively inefficient. Another storage scheme is stacking concrete blocks using an electric crane and then allowing them to fall while recapturing some of the energy. It's more efficient (about 85% efficiency) than this is going to be. Lithium-ion batteries are about 90% but are nowhere near as stable. Looks like the sun inna box is the worst of available storage methods.
This story seems to be a simple cut-n-paste job. We deserve more! I demand that El Reg sends a reporter - no, several reporters! - to work undercover at several Amazon sites to get to the bottom of what is really going on. Better yet, I think The Register should build a robot to go undercover at Amazon and find out what really happened. It worked great with the LOHAN project. I propose the backronym KARDASHIAN. It might not break the internet, but it can definitely take out a bear.
For every great remake, there are a hundred reheated, rehashed and regurgitated movies and TV shows. I can think of only four remakes or reboots I enjoyed*. That's a remarkably bad return on all the time and effort and put into the productions.
* The only exceptions to this I can think of are movies based on Shakespeare**
** Other than anything having to do with Romeo and Juliet. I just want them to kick off and be done with it. I can't help it. They're so annoying!
Other titles come to mind:
The Little Golden Book of the Prince
Whose Boat Is This Boat?
The Art of War and Virtues
Dick and Jane Play Corporate Tax Haven
The Taking Tree
The Very Hungover Catepillar
Oh, the Shit You Don't Know!
Sorry... got lost for a moment. It turns out there is a small industry of these parody books.
My questions is just whether I am paranoid enough.
If you were, you probably would have gone on a rant concerning the phrase "mission-critical cloud services". Ceding the responsibility and control of the bits of your company that must absolutely work in order for the company to go on seems insufficiently paranoid to me. I get there are business reasons and things that can be done to mitigate risk, continue operations, et cetera, but besides the issue of whose to blame when things inevitably go in the crapper is the fact that cloud security is still an area that is relatively immature. Want to use them as a COOP solution? Makes sense. Can they allow rapid scaling of existing resources? Sure. Would a truly paranoid security person recommend you put all of your eggs in that particular basket? Only if you want omelettes.
It's not that these companies are not interested in complying, it's just that they are being thorough. They get an email asking them to refrain from gathering information on someone and to get rid of what they have already got. They comply. As part of this action, they wipe all email correspondence with the individual in question (that's data, too). Going forward, they are free to gather more information concerning the same individual as they have no record of being asked not to.
I especially appreciated the translation of "We will wear you down." Classic. Sales droids may actually think that, too, but there is really a narrow slice of their target audience that it works on. Technical staff realize most of what they say is BS and non-technical staff don't need to be worn down - any buzzword laden sentence is apt to activate their shiny object receptors, sending them into a state of spending induced euphoria.
It isn't just Bitlocker that trusts HW encryption. Other solutions at my work do the same thing. My guess is that this is a commonly utilized strategy. The thinking probably went along the lines of "If it doesn't have a native solution, implement encryption using our software but if it does, it is much easier to simply manage the built in HW solution than to turn it off and replace it with our own. Using the HW solution will undoubtedly produce better speed, too, so customers can enjoy a machine that is both responsive and secure."
I am definitely not a lawyer, but the takeaway from this story seems to be that a legal suit can be filed on my behalf without my consent or knowledge and then the people filing the suit can get with the accused and split the money that was supposedly for restitution for the harm caused me between them, again without my consent or knowledge, and give some of it to some third party that I may or not approve of. How the hell is this different from the reason this action was brought in the first place with Google gathering and profiting from information it had gathered from me - say it with me - without my consent or knowledge?
If you aren't allowed to play the whole song, just don't play the song at all! That practice is so obnoxious, I switch from any station that uses them. The only radio edit I have ever enjoyed is Adam Sandler's "Ode to My Car".
One member, however, will NOT give up their Facebook.
Sounds like time to provide a non-persistent VM setup with a VPN connection and route all traffic through a proxy (maybe rotate the providers - there are a lot of free VPN and web proxies) in order to defeat tracking. Responsiveness of the site may be a little... off.
I wonder what the definition of "fix" is? "Fixing" something the maker considers to be a feature?
Fix like a poker game? Like an election? Like anything that can have duct tape applied to it? Like a rare imported vehicle where you end up with the thing back together and mostly running and a ziplock bag containing the leftover parts you couldn't work out where went. Fix as in what you do to a cat?
Will this court decision stop them from selling our private information now?
No, because that's how they make their money and they even tell you they will sell you and your info up the river while at the same time denying it. This should be a hint for consumers, though. If it is a huge deal for the government to have access to this data because it can and will be abused, then why are we as a class just giving it away to people whose entire business model is based on exploitation of this information?
Taking an example from the article, I would guess the AI would do fairly well with sentence fragments as it uses predictive analysis for much of its output.
"Translating between Japanese and German to English and Chinese, therefore, more difficult"
Would it fill in the implied "is"?
Look at the risks and high diplomatic costs recently incurred by both Russia and Saudi to send simple messages to specific groups...
Not to detract from the conversation, but this usage is just wrong. "Saudi" is a noun if you are talking about a person group of people ("She is a Saudi," or "The Saudis all got on a plane.") and an adjective elsewhere ("I ate way too much Saudi food!"). The combination used here is the equivalent of "New Zealand and British" or "Venezuela and Persian". Why is this confusing?
I might have, over the course of my working like... Changed the input settings on a number of coworkers' machines: mouse, keyboard, points, etc. Simply unplugged the network cable at the wall (had beautiful results on one occasion). Rigged the victim's autocorrect to make less than standard changes. Changed registry entries to edit error codes for more amusing if less informative results. Made changes to amount of RAM in a coworker's desktop at random times over the course of a month.
Why mislead people into thinking they are getting playstore content?
Exactly! If my first interaction with a company or individual consists of their telling me they will do A and instead do B while trying to hide the fact, I don't need much deeper analysis than that to realize I need to take my business somewhere else. The same should also be said of subsequent interactions.
Can you imagine the information overload if every Fortune 1000 company automotive manufacturer publicly disclosed every security bug discovered by a penetration test, bug bounty, or an internal audit government safety review or third party tester?
You mean as is expected in other industries? Makes the world a better place.
Yes, it might be bright, but it is a single point source for light. The thing about street lights is they can be set up to only illuminate areas that need it whereas this is going to annoy some (e.g. lighting their bedrooms where now they are not) and under-service others by not lighting areas properly (buildings cast shadows after all). Simple computer modelling would reveal this and I bet it has been done and suppressed. As mentioned above, it will not help much with cloudy nights, which means the current infrastructure still has to be maintained. The point about fauna in the article sounds like a paid expert giving testimony. Missing from the article is whether this might interfere with any telescopes. Given the way the national government rearranged people's lives in order to make way for their large radio observatory, what would be the result of this thing interfering with another government project? Would the people of Chengdu be treated to a fireworks show?
"All parachutes need plenty of height to deploy: very few people have survived a bail-out under 2000 ft."
----
Height, or forward speed can also deploy them. 1000 feet is more than enough height as any base jumper will tell you.
Alternatively, they could take a page from the various Mars landers and deploy a giant airbag to provide drag and perhaps some padding on impact.
Flying cars can come later.
Not necessarily. Working things out in parallel speeds up overall progress. I very much agree with the statement that humans shouldn't be allowed to drive, so robot chauffeurs are mandatory for this to work but saying we shouldn't work on A because B is more pressing is a false dichotomy.
As to this increasing societal stratification, that's a temporary effect. So many things that we take for granted were once the purview of royalty, the nobility and the very wealthy. Spices and imported foods, transportation other than shank's mare (hell, how about the ability to move more than a few miles from home?), access to all sorts of arts, the ability to communicate with remote sites via text or voice or video... all of these things and many other started out as something the average person couldn't afford and then worked their way down to cheap ubiquity.
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