* Posts by CrazyOldCatMan

6335 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Oct 2015

UK parliament sends snippy letter to Zuck and his poodle Clegg as it seems Facebook has been lying again

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Just caught the reporting on CTF

Ever wondered why "socialism" always ends up as an ogliarchy

Same reason as capitalism usually ends up as an oligarchy - human nature. No matter what the window dressing, people are people. And amoral and unethical people will end up at the top of any political system and profit from the misfortunes of others.

When you are at the bottom of the heap, the words that the top tier use to oppress don't matter much and the boot on your neck has the same sole regardless of whether it has a hammer and sickle or a bald eagle stamped on it.

Lyft pulls its e-bike fleet from San Francisco Bay Area after exploding batteries make them the hottest seat in town

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Looks like the technology hasn't been properly studied

Get a ndfeb magnet and hit it with a grinder

When I was an active motorbike rider, there was a fashion amongst the kneedown sect to wear knee sliders with magnesium/titanium studs in them. Apparently, the sparks that came out when they slid across the tarmac was something to behold.

I was never in the kneedown community - I mostly concentrated on going round the corner as fast as possible and (most of the time) getting your knee down wasn't the quickest. I was in the KSB[1] community though..

[1] This only works with normally-aspirated engines. You get up to a nice high speed and then (staying in gear) flick the engine kill-switch to kill the ignition. The bike carries on moving (but slowing down) and the engine keeps being turned by gearbox - thus sucking in unburnt fuel and then (since the ignition isn't on) pushing it out of the exhaust. After a second or so, you flick the kill-switch back off to re-enable the ignition. The engine bump-starts and then all that nice unburnt fuel in the exhaust and exhaust manifold gets ignited by the very hot gasses coming out of the cylinder. The unburnt fuel in the exhaust pipe makes a very nice loud bang.. Best done in tunnels or enclosed roads. Doing it may invalidate any warranty on your engine or exhaust pipe (exhaust pipes really are not designed to contain exploding fuel and more than one set of exhaust baffles have been destroyed using this method.) It also can scare the crap out of a car driver if you are alongside them when you restart the engine..

Ouch. Reinstalling Windows 10 again? By 2020, a 'cloud download' may be all you need

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Um, just NO!

A built in Cloud Recovery is nonsense

Why? MacOS has had it for quite a while and it's pretty useful if your Mac is trashed and you don't have the install media to hand..

(Mind you - Apple don't have to check for licensing since any Apple-branded Mac hardware has the right to run MacOS. There also can be a problem with some types of proxies but, in general, it works pretty well - especially when combined with iCloud backups).

New UK Home Sec invokes infosec nerd rage by calling for an end to end-to-end encryption

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Same old tune

every hacker's catflap

At which point they become Filthy Rich..

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

there isn't much brain to wash

To use the old phrase:

"The concept blew her mind. It was a very, very small explosion".

NASA trumpets Orion completion as India heads to the Moon

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: India is going to the moon with my tax.

The amount she paid in had nothing to do with it

Wrong - even under the old (ie Classic) government pension, you could make extra contributions to top up the end pension sum. Under the current (Nuvos or Alpha) pensions (neither of which are final salary - they are sort-of career average with every year of service adding to the percentage of your career-average salary that you get as a percentage) you can buy extra years of pension elegibility, pay to bring forward your pensionable age or pay extra contributions to top up the pension.

Satellites with lasers and machine guns coming! China's new plans? Trump's Space Force? Nope, the French

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

those cheese eating surrender monkeys

You mean those people without whose help the American Rebellion wouldn't have succeeded? The people who had a consitutional document that was largle copied to create the US Constitution (with some assistance from Adam Smith).

Freshly outsourced Home Office project: Overseas student visa IT slammed for delays

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: License

only banks had a license to print money

ObPedant: In England the banks don't print money at all - it's entirely the perogative of the Royal Mint. In Scotland, some banks are allowed to print money (but I think they mostly outsource to RM or one of the secure printing outfits).

Darkest Dungeon: Lovecraftian PTSD simulator will cause your own mask to slip

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

CoC

Many years ago (as a callow youth) I spent a while playing Call of Cthulu. Now, I'm generally a fan of tabletop RPGs (I've played many different systems - currently playing Pathfinder). I eventually gave up - my preferred character type is magic-using and doing so in CoC hastens the retiremment of your character due to SAN loss.

In fact, no matter what character type, you were pretty much guarenteed that your character would eventually have to be retired, simply due to game mechanics. Not by favourite game system..

Paranoia OTOH can be fun, especially when accompanied by alcohol.

Summer vacations put an end to rampant desktop crimewave

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: The best way to stock up

'crawling under desks'

In my distant, dark days of being desktop support I very quickly got into the habit of warning people when I was about to crawl under their bank of desks - largely to give any ladies (especially those with short skirts) the opportunity to preserve their modesty..

It's a whole other world under the desks - especially if they have been in the same place for a long time.

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: "humans remain more effective than machines when it comes to securing digital assets"

But to arr is pirate

All based on the guy who originally played John John Silver - said thesp hailed from deppest, darkest Devon..

Fantastic Mr Fox? Not when he sh*ts on your lawn, kids' trampoline and your soul

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Get some cats..

Mr Fox. This correspondent has used myriad repellents to keep the vermin out of my carefully tended green space

At least two of our cats (senior female and junior female) have form for chasing foxes out of our garden - despite neither being anywhere near the size of a fox (SF is about 6.5kg, JF is about 3.5kg).

The two male cats don't care and just watch them strolling by.

Backdoors won't weaken your encryption, wails FBI boss. And he's right. They won't – they'll fscking torpedo it

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: the 'special thanks to' credits are often interesting

Actually never saw LoTR in a movie theatre

We saw all of them - all on the last showing of the day so as to avoid having croth-fruit present (makes for a less-interrupted viewing).

And then we bought the directors cut of each of them to watch at home (for a number of years we watched them all back to back over the Christmas holidays).

I'd love for them to do some of The Silmarillion but I suspect that it's too broad a scope for them to touch.

Not that I'm a LOTR geek at all.. (but it was probably the first fantasy book[1] I read - by the age of 11 I'd read them all multiple times (including Silmarillion). However, I didn't read The Hobbit until doing my English O level.

[1] Of very, very many - I'm averaging one book/day at the moment.

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Here comes the truthiness ...

Ave, Julius

Ave Caesar - morituri te salutant..

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Stalin would be so proud of him

or a walking stick

For attending non-seated gigs[1] I have a seat-stick - the top has a pivoting small seat that, in the upright position becomes the handle for the stick and, in the down position, becomes a small and fairly uncomfortable seat.

In the upright position it would make a fairly good weapon - especially if someone glued a sharp edge on.

When has it ever looked like there was going to be a Communist revolt in Britain?

In the 1920's.. the then politicians were petrified that the events in Russia would be replicated in the UK. There was a huge amount of labour unrest (a lot of it for very good reasons) and a lot of the young male population had military experience of one sort or another.

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Stalin would be so proud of him

t's the common man they're afraid of. In both Britain and the United States modern gun control schemes showed up not when lawmakers saw large amounts of violent crime

Au contraire - the big jump in anti-gun laws in the UK came about after the Hungerford massacre (17 people died including the shooter). In the wake of which, the Firearms (amended) Act 1988 was passed that made it illegal to own semi-automatic weapons and restricted heavily the use of pump-action shotguns.

Things were further tightened up after the Dunblane school massacre.

Criminals will always be able to get guns (which is why the police have firearms squads) but at least our laws make it harder for them to be obtained (especially automatic and semi-automatic weapons) and a lot of the gang weapons recovered tend to be older weapons put back into commission (usually pretty crudely).

Boeing's 737 Max woes trigger BEEELLIONS in losses – and that's just for the latest quarter

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Will the 737 MAX ever be safe?

The answer is yes - but to do so it would need changes that would make it have to be completely re-certified as it would no longer be a linear descendent of the previous 737 model.

Of course, it could be argued that it already wasn't and should have been fully re-certified anyway - something that Boeing wanted to avoid because of the expense..

Since the certification process would have cost less money than they are currently losing I'll bet that they are starting to regret their penny-pinching.

FTC fines Facebook $5bn for making users believe they actually had control over their data

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Zuckerberg could easily win a Nobel Peace Prize

puss filled sores

Amusing misspelling - especially as cats (being primary carnivores) won't touch carrion or anything rotting unless they are really, really hungry..

(A good methos of testing whether that cooked meat that's been in the fridge for a week is safe to eat is to offer it to a well-fed cat (their sense of smell isn't a good as a dogs but it's a magnitude better than ours). If the cat won't touch it then it's probably not safe.. Don't try this technique with a dog..)

Here we go: Uncle Sam launches antitrust probe into *cough* Facebook, Google *cough* Amazon *splutter* Twitter...

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Too Easy

At the point your speech turns to violence

.. or you actively are trying to get other people to commit violence. You see, in the real world, words have consequences - either in a direct form ("you have to kill him because he's an xxxx") or indirectly by spreading the message of hate and division.

The attitude that says "I can say whatever I want to and demand that there be no consequences" is childish and immature. Adults realise that the real world isn't just a black and white set of decisions.

Low Barr: Don't give me that crap about security, just put the backdoors in the encryption, roars US Attorney General

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: in their own propaganda that they can no longer recognise truth or reason"

Its a country founded on forcibly stealing land

Done by religious extremists who left England because we wouldn't burn as many Catholics as they wanted and had this pesky policy of religious tolerance..

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: "being stupid enough to believe you can get away with it"

Trump has better hair(?)

I'm sure that some of it might be hair.. the rest? Finest nylon..

Just add water: Efficient Energy’s HFC-free chillers arrive in the UK

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Strange units

Imperial units are a completely logical system of units

For an odd historically-based value of 'logical'..

Revealed: Milky Way's shocking cannibalistic dark past – it gobbled a whole dwarf eons ago

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Verb choice!

much more appropriate to evoke two clouds of thin smoke gently coalescing over unimaginably long timescales

But, but, but - where's the jeopardy or explosions? You canna make a fillum without those y'know!

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Why are there 3 dimensions?

Hence three is a fundamental number, the Trinity etc.

So it's a number invented by the Catholic Church some time in the 3rd century CE?

(It's what they call an 'Inferred[1] Doctrine' - one for which there is no direct evidence but is created to try to explain some parts of the text. Except it kinda destroys a whole bunch of others..)

Hebrew Yod is a dot

Err.. no. It's more akin to an apostrophe (but bigger). You do (in Modern Hebrew) get vowel points which are dots (which can be above or below the letters that they affect) but they didn't exist in Biblical Hebrew (which didn't have vowels at all - which leads to amusement when evangelicals insist on saying 'Jehovah'[2] or 'Yahweh' for YHWH since we can't be sure about how the tetragammnaton was acually pronounced - especially as the ancient Hebrews used 'adonai' instead so as to avoid blashphemy..).

[1] Nothing to do with cats.

[2] BiblicalHebrew didn't have the 'J' sound. Strictly speaking, 'Jesus' would have been 'Yeshua'..

'Cockwomble' is off the menu: Uncle Bulgaria issues edict against using name in vain

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Phwoar. Katie Hopkins!

but for some reason I find her curiously attractive

I recommend that you change your medication - whatever you are taking at the moment obviously isn't working..

When you play the game of Big Spendy Thrones, nobody wins – your crap chair just goes missing

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Not IT - food industry

too chocolate and the American's just have brown sugar and no taste

Or, more accurately, the wrong taste. Why they insist on putting in one of the chemicals that gives vomit its unique 'taste' I don't know..

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: ... 'Are you the BOFH's understudy?'

BOFH's approach to problems to be curiously satisfying

And, with appropriate suble advertising, leads to a delicious sense of terror in Management..

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: "disk drives the size of top-loading washing machines"

I worked with those once, way back at the beginning of my career

When Nearest and Dearest was young (a little while ago), her first job was in an accounting team of a double-glazing company. Because she Knew About Computers (she'd done a NCSA Computers course after leaving school) she got to be the operator of the mini-computer that they used to do their accounts. Jobs included running the daily backups and changing the 10MB removable platters that their data was backed up to.

Now she's not the biggest person in the world (5 foot 2, and at that point, less than 8 stone) so it was somewhat of a struggle sometimes because those removable disk platters were not light and the 'computer room' (AKA - a small closet that was chosen because it had a window that could be opened for ventilation and cooling) was only just about big enough for the minicomputer, the cupboard for the removable platters and a person and the platter enclosure was somewhat sturdy.

Brussels changes its mind AGAIN on .EU domains: Euro citizens in post-Brexit Britain can keep them after all

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

they didn't think before they acted

This is a universal attribute of politicians and bureaucrats. Welcome to Western democracy.

You'll never guess what US mad lads Throwflame have strapped to a drone (clue: it does exactly what it says on the tin)

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Arson business

Southern Europe arson is a big business

It is here too - especially in the conservation business with unscrupulous people buying crumbling listed buildings that then have mysterious fires when listed building consent is denied for whatever mad scheme they have..

It's remarkable how flammable some old stone-built listed buildings can suddenly become.

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: The numbers don't add up...

a pint of water is a pound and a quarter

At sea level. At higher elevations[1] it might weigh less (even though it has the same mass).

[1] Especially in micro-gravity.

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

burn a wasp nest

Why? Wasps have their place in the ecosystem too.. The fact that you don't kile them is no good reason to go all exterminator on them.

(I do realise that there are some places that you do have a good reason to clear them out - like if they are in your loft or cavity wall. But you won't be using a flamethrower to clear them from there unless you are very, very stupid..)

UK.gov drives ever further into Nocluesville, crowdsources how to solve digital identity

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Kerberos

save he had that mark, or the name of the beast

Leave exposition of Revelations to those who know what they are talking about..

(666 isn't some sort of mythical devil - 6 is the number of man[1] and repeating it three times is emphasis. So 666 is man's overwhelming pride in himself and his own power (in this case, worship of things and money. Hands are a pretty universal symbol for "what you do" == 'works'. Foreheads == 'thoughts'. Revelations is overwhelmingly a book of symbology so can't be understood literally. Much like parts of Ezekiel). Some have thought that the mark corresponds to capitalism and the whole "love of money leads to all kinds of evil" that dominates the world now.

Yes, I've spent a lot of time studying theology.

[1] According to Biblical Hebrew numerology. 7 is the number of perfection (7 days[2] of creation et. al.)

[2] Not literal days - the word "day" is also translated as "starting" and "night" as "ending". Some have speculated that the 6 nights of creation correspond to extinction-level events - and we are currently living in the 6th of those.

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

card is revoked, and get a new one

And how do you prove who you are in order to get a new one since your means of proving who you are is no longer present?

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Everyone now has their shiny new digital ID..

And what happens if it gets lost/corrupted/damaged/stolen[1]? How do they prove who they are in order to get another one?

You can't secure it with easily-known fixed data (DOB, marriage date, first pet etc) since those are fairly easy to obtain via data searches or social engineering attacks.. And you can't use complex passwords becuase people are notoriously bad at remembering those - so they write them down. Which makes them vulnerable to theft..

It's a very big and complex problem - something politicians and public bodies are notoriously bad at solving. Just look at the fiasco of NPfIT for an example - and that was just covering NHS staff.

[1] The XKCD solution to getting the password springs to mind - one rubber cosh coming up.

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Not that difficult...

birth certificates which the law explicitly states that is NOT an identity document

And which isn't guarenteed to be available - especially for someone born abroad.

The problem is (as with most things) that ~80% of cases will be fairly easy and straightforward but that the other 20% of cases will take up as much (or more effort) and require people who know what they are doing to manage.

Which means that the DWP/DVLA/Crapita trifecta of fail can't be involved.

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Not that difficult...

they often have a photography on their bank card

Many, many years ago the Nationwide Building Society issued debit cards with your photograph on as a trial to see if it would reduce fraud.

It didn't, and was expensive to do (and the resultant photo on the back of the card was pretty poor quality - or at least mine was[1]) so they dropped it pretty quickly.

One of the major problems that they had was identity verification.

[1] Nearest and Dearest muttered something about GIGO.. I knew I should have expected it from a semi-techie..

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Le sigh

Just issue everyone with a photo card 'driving licence'

Not everyone has one of those. And some people (like me) still have the old paper-based licence - why pay to change it and then have to pay every 10 years to renew it? Especially as the process of converting from the old licence certainly isn't foolproof - I know quite a few people that have lost categories from their licences at changeover - including someone who lost the motorbike category - which was a pain since the only form of transport he had was a motorbike..

What you are suggesting is that the DVLA act as a universal identity provider - something that they are neither competent at nor equipped to do.

Apollo 11 @ 50: The long shadow of the flag

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Doesnt the Moon orbit the Earth

Sort of - they actually both orbit a barycentre since they are both fairly massive.. Said barycentre is still within Earth's crust but isn't centre of the earth (it's at about 3/4 of the radius of Earth).

Of course, non-pedants would piffle that this was equivalent to the moon orbiting the Earth but we don't want that sort round here, do we?

Guess who reserved their seat on the first Moon flight? My mum, that's who

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

short steep track up a mountainside - and a very fast train

MagLev turned up to 11 - AKA a rail gun. And you'd want a slightly longer track since accelerating up to orbital escape speed isn't something you want to do in a very short distance unless you don't mind delivering people as Pink Goo(TM)..

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Man has definitely been to the moon.

Someone dropped a Clanger there

ObPedant Objection - the Clangers live on *a* small hollow moon, not *The* Moon.

Besides which, if they had lived on The moon, they would have at least had some cheese in their soup.

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

devious lying unscrupulous marketing types

As has been said before - Marketing are the people who hold the customer down while Sales screws them..

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

beancounters

And politicans who decided that the money that would have been spent on moonbases would be better spent on pork-barrel shenanigans that would (hopefully) ensure their re-election..

UK government buys off Serco lawsuit with £10m bung. Whew. Now Capita can start running fire and rescue

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Ewww

I want to both throw up and punch the wall

Combine them both - eat granola then projectile-vomit at the wall..

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

"tangible demonstration of the confidence government has in us to deliver a critical public service"

More likely a tangible demonstration of the power of having old chums in high places..

Operation Desert Sh!tstorm: Routine test shoots down military's top-secret internets

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: I'm so glad we kept one!

I've got a vSphere cluster at home (yeah, I that much of a geek)

I use Proxmox (linux/KVM-based virtualisation server) at home and I can confirm that all the VMs marked as "start on boot" do actually start on boot..

Having a UPS that been flashing a battery warning on one of the days where a severe thunderstorm knocked out the local power substation is not a good combination..

Still, everything came up again and nothing was lost (apart from me nearly having a nervous breakdown!)

We don't mean to poo-poo this, but... The Internet of S**t has literally arrived thanks to Pampers smart diapers

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: So the already exorbitant price of pampers go up...

used to toddle off to a specific corner of the room

Sounds like the cats (and NewDog - who doesn't yet understand the purpose of the cat/dog door and all that green stuff outside).

We have 3 cat trays round the house - 5 of the 7 cats are perfectly happy yo go outside but the two that don't refuse to share trays. And we have to have one downstairs in case TimidCat has her way back upstairs blocked by EvilCat..

The perils of multi-cat households. At least the dogs help by cleaning up said cat-trays of solids if they get to them before we do..

There are reasons why I don't lets the pets lick me.

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: So the already exorbitant price of pampers go up...

kiddies isle

Presumably just off the coast of Australia..

(Also known as the Island of Misfit Toys)

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Push Notifications?

Gripe water (3.6% alcohol)

Depends on your age (and the type used) - some had much higher levels. See my other post..

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Push Notifications?

bit less vodka to his milk

When I were a nipper (late 1960s), we got given gripe water to ease stomach upset. Which (usually - then anyway) contained about 20% ethanol by volume.

So I blame my drinking on my parents - they started it!