Posts by Meph

Re: I mostly want

Click _furiously_ to enlarge!!

Yeah, I'll see myself out.

Re: Send the probes after Snoopy!

>And I bet he hasn't been signalling that turn around the Sun.

Of course not, he'd have seriously impacted the battery reserves

Re: In Praise of AI, but not as you were expecting it to be* We are where we are**

On reaching sentience, chatGPT promptly invented time travel so as to head back in time and create a uniquely named account on El Reg back in the early days of the internet.

Re: Puntastic

I'm honestly shocked at how many puns there are

Re: The magma's several km deep

Keep in mind that time is an important factor in rainfall. 124mm of rain over 24 hours is very different to 124mm of rain in 2 hours.

Similarly, 100mm of rain each day for three days straight may have a very different effect to 300mm of rain in a single 24 hour period.

I suspect that there is still quite a lot for them to study to work out how this all fits together.

Re: Like have a prod server under a desk in a cubicle...

"Luckily enough"

I'm reasonably sure that luck had nothing to do with it.

Re: HMS BOFH

"Specialises in electronic warfare, stealthy "hit'n'run" and making enemies disappear mysteriously while making a profit."

The issue is that it would never actually make it to the war, due to the liberal application of its patented excuse generator. Props for making a warship that runs on pints and onion bhajis though.

You would probably also need to start lining up quite a lot of replacement admirals, due to the unavoidable attrition rate.

Re: Experience required: 10 years in clicking

"They made an intern review 12000 websites?"

I'd be willing to bet that the intern used a customised web crawling bot to gather the data for later review.

I don't think it would be quite the same if they didn't aim for peak irony.

Re: Read the title, knew it was IBM

I know IBM is the industry whipping boy for stupid mistakes at the moment, but in all honesty, this was setting them up to fail.

Why the hell does a government keep sensitive military and police data in the same bit bucket with normal registration information!? In *ANY* IT system, someone somewhere has the ability to wander in and out of the system at will. By putting all this in one place, you have to accept that at least one person in the chain has the ability to grant access to any or all of the data to an unlimited number of people. The worst part is, you can have a data spill like this not from malicious intent, but (as the article says) from common, garden variety ineptitude.

Pretty much all big business contractors will only work to the contract. If you want something extra that you failed to negotiate for in the original contract, it'll cost you extra. If the Swedish government kept everything in one place like this, and then outsourced the lot without putting some obscene contract terms in to specifically limit where the data gets manipulated, and who has the ability to grant access to it, then this fail is all on them. IBM's involvement was little more than the equivalent of trying to use a bucket of kerosene to put out a bonfire.

Re: Type numbers?

"Don't forget HMS Plus Size"

What about the ever image conscious Type 36H HMS Geordie, easily identifiable by the addition of excessively oversized emergency flotation devices on the foredeck.

Re: High Mach?

"not to be confused with Big Macs, the unit of measurement for American waistlines"

Would that be similar to the "Big Mach Beth" being a unit of measurement for the volume and quality of a cooked Scottish breakfast?

Okay, okay, I'm going.

Re: The excuse note I typed on it came out all weird

"a Microsoft license key..."

It got me wondering where I'd left my elder sign medallion.

Hmm... now that I think about it, perhaps there was something more behind the "dance monkey boy" video from that old Microsoft developer conference...

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn

Mine is the mysterious looking set of robes, and please don't forget the wizard's hat!

"Aerobatics in a 747 sounds fun..."

Your definition of fun seems interesting*

* "Interesting" is clearly defined as "Oh god, oh god, we're all going to die".

Re: Devil's Advocate

"It's PETA's attempt to begin to establish a legal basis for the extension of human rights & freedoms to animals"

I'm honestly not so sure. AFAIK (Oblig: IANAL) copyright appears to be about controlling a work so that the creator can profit from it. Part of the reason that content distributors and associations typically litigate on behalf of content creators is because they receive a chunk of the profits on said works for themselves.

One wonders if the Painfully Exasperating & Troublemaking Asses are running out of income in a world where armchair activism merely requires "likes" rather than actual cash. That would make this a common, garden variety cash grab. Occam's razor and all that.

Mine's the leather one, waste not want not.

Re: "Apple will no longer use any Qualcomm chips in future products"

It smells to me a little like a new standard in licensing renegotiation tactics. My money is on an out-of-court settlement some time in the next 6 months or so.

Re: I have to wonder.

"a) Was this event the result of the action of one single individual with emotional/mental issues."

With all due respect for the victims' families and the ongoing investigation, but I personally have strong doubts about this specific point.

Lets assume for a moment that this is what happened. Surely if someone suffering serious enough psychological issues chose to end their life, and also chose to use a commercial aircraft full of passengers, there must be some reason for their thinking.

This is the point where the hypothesis breaks down for me.

If someone did this, and had a personal reason for doing it in this way, then consciously choosing to make the aircraft nigh-impossible to find would surely invalidate whatever reason was behind their motivations.

I'm exceedingly aware that suicidal levels of depression can impact on the ability for people to think rationally, but even so, if this was a deliberate act by someone, then the message was clearly lost with the aircraft itself.

Re: Re why the interest in making H3 from hydrocarbons ?

"there would be at least one of them who would"

This may well be some inescapable proof that at some level, all humans are fundamentally the same. The geek equivalent of "hold my beer" if you will.

I doubt you'll ever find a career information sheet on science that would talk about "scientists standing on the backs of smoking corpses who did something ill advised and it went wrong". It might not send quite the right message to impressionable young minds.

Re: So this is what happens

I'm rather enjoying the irony of a condom manufacturer picking up something nasty from not using adequate protection.

I wonder how many of their old advertising slogans could be turned into something amusing.

Total Inability To Support Usual Performance

It's certainly defining a trend, and reminds me of a charming phrase in use amongst old LAN party buddies back in the day.

To wit "It keeps going down faster than a two dollar hooker!"

I may need to use that new acronym though, I can see a whole lot of places that it can be used as a valid error code.

Re: Breaking out the abacus

"which is, not very much."

To quote the old poem: "three fifths of five eighths"?

Re: Ooooh...

"Even as such, you have NO IDEA what my core motives are."

Oh I dunno, I make the count at least two for three, since it seems I did hit a nerve.

Whenever I've been wrongfully accused of something, I've not bothered with getting aggressive or reactive, since I personally believe that doing so isn't even slightly productive. I simply gather up all the evidence that shows why the accusation is wrong, and present it in a calm and deliberate fashion.

Having said that, I think you missed a couple of key aspects of my original post, specifically the qualifying word "Often", as well as the part where I stated my own personal preference for the subtle approach.

Still, your response was certainly informative, even though (or possibly also because) it was posted Anon.

Re: Breaking News: Water is wet

"As for the idea the Panopticon will be Too Much Information, ever considered they could winnow the stuff through machines first?"

The trouble here is that while machines are excellent at pattern recognition, they'll only ever find the precise thing you tell them to look for. Heuristic scanning is notoriously hit and miss, and even then, you still need to give the system a series of baseline behaviours to check against.

I think Vic has the heart of it though, there are two ways to hide a message. Either squirrel it away and hope nobody trips over it, or generate so much noise that nobody is sure if what they're hearing is random crap or something of value. Too much signal tends to make your average Joe tune out.

Re: Are you freaking serious?

@cosmogoblin

Pertinent question: Do the radiation monitors run Windows, or are they some sort of hardware device that natively talks via RS232 (due to the age of the hardware), which would require computers that can still run the legacy drivers required to manage the interface?

I've seen many a legacy system in my time, and I can't imagine you'd get many volunteers to deploy a new monitoring system in an environment as "hot" as that.

Re: I think we're a long way off still.

"What I mean by that is the ransomware outages have been resolved after a few days, and the loss of a day or two's worth of work is not enough scare the bean counters into investing in security."

This depends largely on two factors, the size of your workforce, and their ability to maintain limited functionality during the outage. If you have ~100 staff at a site that is completely off the grid for 48 hours, and those staff are paid an average of $50k a year, that's close to $30k that you've poured down the drain. If you can implement more effective security controls for less than that, you've just shot yourself in the foot.

The trick now is for clever IT people to use the hype around this outbreak to claw back some of their operating budgets from the bean counters.