Posts by John Brown (no body)

Re: Locks.

"Is it bad that I first worked out how to rake a lock in Scouts with a paperclip when we couldn't open the door in the scout hut?"

Be Prepared? :-)

Re: You know there's another key

"Of course, I wouldn't be surprised that there are master electronic keys in more modern establishments with electronic locks. as well."

Well, yes. Every member of the housekeeping staff have one for starters. Probably reception staff too.

"If I am not mistaken, deep space kind of refers to stuff well out beyond the Earth/Moon orbital distance, or even further, beyond the Earth’s gravitational well something like arbitrarily 1,000,000 miles or 2,000,000 km or something like that."

IIRC, A.C.Clarke said something along the lines of in the future, the word ship will mean space ship and only for a short time near the start of human history did ship mean something floating on the water. In a similar vain, I suspect "deep space" will change over time to mean at least beyond the solar system, anything inside the Kuiper Belt or maybe the Oort cloud being "local space" :-)

Re: It wont be technical issues which sink this

"And what would schools use?"

In the UK? Chromebooks and iPads. We've been shipping them out in the 10's of 1000's for years now.

Re: All very odd

"Those who took what I believe the professionals say is the best route, of assuming the identity of a child who died very young, will not need to fear the impersonated turning up at the bank or Social Security Administration office."

Until an unsuspecting family member, especially descendants, start taking "family history" into account and send off DNA samples to any of the genealogy companies out there and get "weird" matches back. A situation that has already happened numerous times and something the people "living the lie" never considered back in the day.

Re: What is so bad about knowing how to hotwire a car?

"LLMs can't "invent" new stuff, only re-purpose existing material."

FWIW, we've already seem that the CAN make stuff up. We've also seen instances of LLMs producing dangerous outcomes when asked for innocuous things such as recipies, which make one wonder just howe safe and accurate were the results Grok provided. Clearly it's not working as intended and the safety protocols are broken, but would you trust it for a drug or explosive recipe and procedure?

As for parents teaching their children how to be safe, yes, some do, but sadly it seems more and more are relying on the school system to all the teaching and parenting for them these days. A friend who recently retired as a Reception Class teacher relates how the number of kids starting school still wearing nappies (diapers) and/or can't use a knife and fork has gone from almost zero when she started to significant numbers nowadays.

"As its the bigger projects that tend to get the most attention and therefore money such Gnome, GIMP, Firefox, office suites etc."

Maybe those projects, as well as the commercial distributors ought to be taking some time to look at some of the upstream code they incorporate and checking that it's doing what is says on the tin. Not everything and not all at once, but maybe put a bit of resource into a rolling program and examining upstream code and project dependencies, especially the more unloved but vital "lone person" projects. We already know that some "tried and tested" code ended up having bugs leaving a gaping hole for over a decade and that PolKit one wasn't the only instance. If I had the skills and time, I'd help, but I don't so I donate where I can.

Re: “I was shocked,” she said. “I did not expect it”

I never did own a car with a Nav system, overnight it went from "too expensive to be worth it" to "I am always carrying something with me that's better".

I guess that depends on the person. There was a significant period of time where portable SatNavs, significantly cheaper, better and updatable than the OEM car built-in ones where on the market, and voice directions were in the mid to later stages of the period.

Re: Following BSE in cattle...

"Shocking that a government IT project could actually work well!"

It does make one wonder just how often that is the case considering that no headline ever read "Government spends $millions on successful project!"

Re: Windoze NEVER worked well.

Interesting how you confuse and transpose PC and Windows. The marketing has worked on you :-)

Re: Is that the end of it all?

True. Also, his parents are basically saying that now and will continue to campaign and appeal.

Re: Just one question

"I'd guess that trade between China and N.Korea (for example) is now an open secret since we've decided to draw China into our web of sanctions."

I'm fairly confident that has never been a secret.

Re: lasers?

"I hope so. Efforts to improve the efficiency of the shark have failed miserably."

Maybe they could try cross-breeding or gene modifying sharks with electric eels for clean, green and organic self-powered lasers?

Re: If they had behaved themselves I wouldn't need to block them

For me, the straw that broke the camels back was when Tucows redirect all their downloads through their ad server. Blocked them, never went back and started blocking anyone being shitty, intrusive, obnoxious etc.

As for El Reg, this site is fully white listed but I don't see any ads because the ad slingers are blocked separately. I don't see how I could unblock them on only this one site without unblocking them everywhere. Likewise, google-analytics, googletagmanager and googlesyndication. The article itself puts Google pretty much at the top of the list for intrusion and tracking, so yeah, they stay blocked. If El Reg are running their own tracking scripts from their own domain, or choose to inject "safe" ads from their own domain, then they will get through and I suppose that's ok since it's their content I'm accessing. But that also make El Reg responsible for what they server from their domain. 3rd parties, not so much.

I think what will shake up the industry the most would be a successful case against a website for serving up malware. The current "defence" is that it's a 3rd party sending the ads via a contracted ad broker. But as with other areas of life, the supplier is responsible for the "goods" they deliver to the user and they don't get to hide behind "the big boys did it" excuse. If I buy something and the seller sends me a broken piece of shit, the seller is on the hook to sort it out for me, not some 3rd party wholesaler or OEM who I have no connection with.

Re: Dr Emu & The Deadly Dustbins

Hey, you brought Rud Hull and Dusty Bin into the fight :-)

Re: Obligatory door comment

True. But we know who Michael Caine works for now :-)

Most boards still have a rescue or emergency method. Usually by putting a firmware file with a specific name into the root of a FAT32 device, USB sticks mostly these days. The clever ones will usually keep two copies of the firmware and switch to the new one when it's successfully installed but can revert back to the older one if anything goes pear shaped.

Re: Job well done

In vacuum, it's not so much melting as sublimating from ice directly to gas. Probably.

Re: I'll just leave this here...

But even those older Boeings have been updated either by modernising or even just be replacing worn parts and modules with new parts from the new penny pinchers.

Re: It is worse

"We're not even getting into the psychological stresses of being confined to a tin can hurtling through the void for 6+ months, unable to get away from the other people onboard, which is just one more way he'd fail miserably in the attempt."

While I agree with most of what you posted, I'd just like to point out how big Starship is and that Musk would be entirely capable of fitting one out as a "private space yacht", just for him and his family and/or staff to make the journey :-) No need to put up with the cramped conditions of with the 99 other people on the "cattle class" ships.

Re: Hello... Anyone there?

Ah I see it's still September :-)