Posts by frank ly

Nominative Determinism?

Winfried Hensinger: His name is a superposition of Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger. This can't be a coincidence.

Watch, listen and learn

"At every turn, in countless ways, the district court issued rulings that obstructed Oracle's case."

Have they ever stopped to consider that there might have been good reasons for that?

“a woman from Limerick”

A woman from Limerick said,

"There's a drone flying over my shed.

Do you think it's the robbers?

Should I call the coppers?"

I told her to shoot it instead.

I was shocked

I asked the headhunters to recruit an asset stripper. You can imagine the confusion at the next board meeting.

It's complicated

"The Akram guest house is downstairs from the Woolley's flat. Both the Woolleys and Akram subsequently installed CCTV systems outside their respective properties."

So they live in the same building that is split into flats/apartments?

That's even more reason to have long and detailed discussions with your neighbour if you install CCTV with recording (and audio!).

Geek note

4H-SiC is the '4H' crystalline form of SiC, in case anyone is wondering, as you all are, I'm sure. It has more than 250 polymorphs!

(Wikipedia: it's great but consider the possibility of editorial bias and check out the quality of the references and always compare with another source of information.)

Unusual behaviour

"... roving officers, some undercover, who engage travelers in casual conversation while looking for telltale signs of malicious intent, whatever those might be. Ostensibly, these conversations were voluntary, but seeking to avoid them or being insufficiently forthcoming was treated as an "indicator" that might prompt referral to additional screening."

Being accosted by strangers who try to lure me into converstion is guarenteed to make me tense and glower. Repeated experience has shown me that those sorts of people are usually up to no good.

Planning ahead

If you borrow money, someone will want it back one day. Were they detected before they had a chance to grow beards and dye their hair and run away with it? What was their plan?

A contradiction at the end there

"There is only one recipe I know for success, ..., and that is by bringing great people with the right skills, give them the right tools, give them a mission, make sure they can analyze their results, put them in really creative inspiring locations and set them free. "

Low level loss of concentration

I once saw a cockpit video (from behind the pilot's shoulder using an officially mounted camera) from a Harrier that was doing low speed, very low level flying over the Scottish countryside. The pilot had a paper map open across his lap and was holding it with one hand while pointing at a location with his other hand, perhaps as an aid to any future viewers of the video. He very carefully pointed at the map and stabbed his finger a couple of times for emphasis.

As he did this, you could notice that the plane was getting lower. He suddenly flung his hand to the stick to pull up and level off. A short time later, a white object on the ground could be seen to flash by directly under the plane. It was a tent and I did wonder if anyone was trying to sleep in it.

Reputation Management

"... their bosses brought in reputation management business RiskEye, which set about trying to expunge news of the incident from the web.

After The Register declined to remove its coverage, ..."

How does that work? Do they invite you to their club for dinner, drinks and a chat or do they send a couple of bruisers to your office to tell you how sad their client is feeling?

A can of questions

"The $2.2m Vizio has to fork out will be split between the FTC and the New Jersey state Department of Consumer Affairs. The TV maker will also be required to delete any customer information it collected before March 1, when it began to notify people of the data slurping."

What about compensation for the 11 million people/families affected? Will the advertising agencies that bought the data also have to delete it and will Vizio have to therefore repay them? Is there any indication that the advertising agencies knew that the data they bought had been collected illegally? How many other companies are doing this?

Maybe it's the police who are doing the hacking

If I was a police officer, I'd be very tempted. I've no idea what the legal situation is for that.

Here goes:-

https://justpaste.it/133ws

(I've often been told that my art is a 'cheap and simple pastiche')

Those hydrogel 'robots'

If you watch the video, you'll notice that they are actuators. The fish grabber is an actuator which has a transparent rod/tube at the top going up to the surface. What you don't see is the operator with his thumb on a syringe plunger and a concentrated expression on his face as he tries to catch the fish.

re. "GitLab's prose account of the incident..."

I'd like to see a poetry account of the incident. Can anybody help with this?

"... he is the leader of a free world ..."

Just show me where that world is so I can avoid it.

"Devops for devices is possible."

It's the holy grail!

Historical

"the company decided it needed to write its own alternative with the following qualities: ................

No history of security problems. ...."

That sounds quite easy.

"(we swear we're not making this up)"

It's difficult for me but I believe you.

Professor Wernstrom did it better

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvRQ4d76ZV0

I've jumped through the hoop once already

Virgin Media (my ISP) have already caused me (by nagging with an injected browser tab) to visit their website and log in to tick a box to indicate that I don't want 'family protection content filtering' i.e. porn block. So why do they need to do any more?

Also, on the very few occasions when I've accidentally clicked on a link to a well known torrenting site, they block access and show me a page that says I'm trying to be naughty and the courts have told them to stop me. Let the government put court orders on them and let us see exactly what has been denied to us.

I thought this was a Laundry Files story

I was mildly disappointed, at first.