* Posts by John Brown (no body)

25246 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010

Page:

Florida man insists he didn't violate the law by keeping Top Secret docs

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: What About The Current Resident?

You really think that, on the balance of probabilities, that a stable genius might have been wrong when he said he'd not declassified them?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: What I cannot understand ...

"it will be hard to believe the 'state' isnt again lying, exaggerating or fabricating."

Seriously? You're going with that line? Pot, kettle, black?

This is the same guy who had his supporters shouting "Lock her up" at EVERY rally he organised.. Now he's trying to use the EXACT same defence that he didn't think she deserved, ie innocent unless proven guilty.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: What I cannot understand ...

"To be honest its kinda hard to keep up with what he is accused of."

At the time you posted that, 14 hours prior to this post from me, all the charges were public and you could read them yourself.

Oh and just to reiterate a previous post of mine, Trump IS NOT a Presidential candidate. He's just one of the people trying to woo the Republican party into making him their Presidential candidate.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: What I cannot understand ...

You're missing the point. The classification system is a guide to whether something is likely to be something of “national defense information.”. If something is secret, top secret or higher, then it's very likely to be of “national defense information.”. So, the classification of the documents may or may not be relevant in terms of the law as written, but the fact they are classified makes it highly probable they are subject to the law as written. The prosecution says they are. The evidence in the charge sheet say Trump knew that. Now it's up to the courts to agree or disagree with the veracity of the evidence. I'm sure Trumps legal team will want bring AI and "deep fake" into the argument to try to discredit the evidence.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: What I cannot understand ...

"currently running to become president."

For someone trying so hard to prove their "facts" are correct, it's worth pointing out that the race for President hasn't even started yet. He's currently running to be the approved Republican candidate for President. This is just the qualifying round he's in.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: What I cannot understand ...

"All of those charges could have been avoided if he simply handed the documents back when asked for them. Instead we have to go through this ridiculous clown show because Donald is a dickhead and his cult followers are muddle headed democracy hating copium abusers."

Apparently, his fund raising efforts sky-rocketed on the day of the court appearance. And he's probably already crowd-funding his "defence" fund too. There will delay after delay after delay in this case too, all instigated by him and his legal team right up to and even beyond the next Presidential election which, in his head, he will win and do whatever it takers to make this all go away. Of course, if/when he loses that election, assuming he's the actual Rep candidate (he might not be, it's still a while away), he'll be totally fucked.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: What I cannot understand ...

"Not my country. I live in the UK."

Are you fan of poor BoJo (aka Trump-lite), also being picked on by "the Deep State" too?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: What I cannot understand ...

"but there he is still, basking in the attention he so craves at our expense."

The press can't afford to ignore stuff like that because if they don't carry the story, someone else will and they lose readers/viewers/listeners. The UK Govt tried to restrict the press on interviews with the IRA and their ilk, and that failed spectacularly. Even the BBC, often accused of being government lackeys, simply got voice actors in to "speak" the words, often with the skill of an impressionist. IIRC, that escalated to "not showing images of IRA people", so the news, including the BBC, just filmed the interview backlit as a silhouette, neatly skirting the restrictions and staying within the law, making the Government look stupid.

There's nothing like deflating an ego, but the press will not be party to it unless it's them doing the deflating.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: What I cannot understand ...

"(by the way, love the way the article identified the perp through a long long list of misdeeds rather then by name)"

Yeah, very funny. I'm guessing El Reg is no longer expecting to be granted any direct interviews or even PR comments from his team any more and so, as with Apple, are just having fun with it :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: as did his aide Walt Nauta

"Using a prison sentence as an excuse to remove civil rights or as a proxy for mendaciousness is naive, foolish, irrational, and unethical."

And yet, there are a list of "rights" a US citizen loses on being in prison, some of which may remain restricted for life even after completion of the sentence.

See, for example: https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/felon-voting-rights

I see the irony in referring to something as a "civil right" which can be rescinded and potentially never returned. That sounds more like a privilege than a right. Likewise, the prisoner who stood for the Presidential election last time around. I guess he couldn't vote for himself even though he had the right to stand.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Incredibly dangerous/stupid.

"It is so in Trump's interest to keep Walt sweet as he can burn him."

Trump doesn't strike me as the type of person to plan any further ahead than the current moment.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: as did his aide Walt Nauta

Is that even possible in the US? I thought they led the world in that particular "natural resource". From what I understand they grow them on trees there. Surely you've heard of the Ivy League? Creeps up trees and strangles them for their life blood :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: as did his aide Walt Nauta

"If I'm not mistaken Mr. Smith's decision to move the jurisdiction from DC to FL was either not known well in advance or the Cheeto's team assumed he would not be indicted so did not prepare for this."

I don't understand why this matters. They were both going to plead not guilty anyway. They don't even need a lawyer for that bit.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I can finally admit something

"We are all distantly related to everyone else on the planet."

Evan a banana? Or a carrot? That pesky gets everywhere!!!!

Gen Z and Millennials don't know what their colleagues are talking about half the time

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Thanks El Reg...

Exactly that. It's expensive consultants trying to justify their fees that come up with this bullshit. On the other hand, an actual, real-life *good* consultant will come up with ideas and suggestions and not need to use the BS because they understand what they are doing and often it's the "new pair of eyes" which sees the obvious, unlike the incumbent manglement/C-levels who can't see the wood for the trees. Sadly, they are a rare breed.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Thanks El Reg...

"There's probably an interesting research project in figuring a way to auto-transcribe these meetings* and calculate the signal to noise ratio."

IIRC, Hari Seldon did that and went on to develop it into Psychohistory (or will do, depending on which universe or timeline you are in while reading this)

Something about a "semantic analysis" of a long winded politicians speech which, taken in it's entirety, said precisely nothing.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: COP/EOD

"Reporters tend to use the terms they heard rather than translate to more common terms due to a) being lazy, b) not really understanding what's meant and/or c) not wanting to get into trouble by getting the translation wrong."

Or, sometimes, because they are either uneducated or not concentrating properly and make a mistake.

Yesterday, I spotted two stories where "loaned" was used instead of "borrowed" and on todays Local BBC TV News, the reporter talking about astronomy called it astrology :-)

Ah here's one of them. Caption for one of the photos read "PC Mike Jelly has loaned a full size RS200 from the Ford Heritage Centre, and helped Scalextric create a slot car version"

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: COP/EOD

US business slang seems to be even more full of sporting metaphors even than English.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: COP/EOD

Yeah, I'm pretty sure either The Goodies[1] or Monty Python[2] did sketch with exploding cricket balls at some point.

[1] Apologies to Millennials and later. Look them up.

[2] See [1]

Clippy designer was too embarrassed to include him in his portfolio

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

If that was all he did, then yeah, an updated xeyes that was around long before and just a bit of fun, not an active hindrance :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Joke

Re: What is this word ‘plows’ ?

Maybe it was a typo? The first letter is meant to be "b"? Clippy blows?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

Re: Bob?

(sorry, I might be a little triggered by unhelpful error messages. Where'd I put my dried-frog pills?)

Are you looking for dried frog pills? Would you like some help with that?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"And a lot of that was due to Microsoft's view that they know better than the user what the user is wanting to do."

And that attitude has never gone away. It's grown. After all, we aren't allowed to change how Windows looks any more, let alone the "helpful" pop-ups and messages we still get interrupted with all the time.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"Chat powered ai clippy would work though"

You think? I beg to differ. I suspect an AI powered clippy would be 10 or 100 times worse! You just KNOW MS will not only make it a fixed "feature" but it will also start spouting adverts at some stage too!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: ChatGPT-powered Clippy

"Hot dog with mac'n'cheese on top anyone?"

For the "World" Scout Jamboree, that sounds very typically USA oriented. I hope the rest of the menu for the period is a bit more ambitious and inclusive of for the scouts from the rest of the world.

A toast to being in the right place at the right time

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: He's toast

Unlikely, since the "solution" was not to have any more "realistic" fire drills :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"Fearing something bad had happened, I found the power cable, tracing it back to where it *should* have been plugged into the wall. Wanting to charge his laptop, the student had ignored the two empty double sockets where he was sitting (he was sitting near the printer), unplugged the printer and plugged his laptop in."

Well, of COURSE he pulled the printer plug and used that socket. How else could he be absolutely certain he was choosing a working socket? Those empty ones were probably empty for a reason, ie they don't work. If they did work, there'd be something plugged in to them. Sheesh, some people! :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Friday 5:00 Outage

Dad used to work away a lot. One time when he was home, he'd cadged a drum of 75Ohm Co-Ax and left it in the garage. A nice cream coloured one he planned to save for when the TV aerial cable needed changed. Anyway, he gets home after 6 months somewhere hot helping build NATO radar systems around the edges of the USSR and mum happens to mention that the drum of "washing line" he'd left wasn't very good, it kept snapping and it was all used up now. See icon ------------->

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: What to do in case of a real fire...or other alarm

"In totally unrelated news, I decided to stop being a research scientist before I managed to poison myself badly."

Is that because you managed to poison yourself goodly, survived, and had "the revelation"?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Yes, all the packet-derrms go down them.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Did it talk?

"Of course! I'd forgotten all about that damned toaster."

How? I suppose old age comes to us all eventually. Now, what was a talking about? oh yeah, I fancy a slice a toast :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Flame

Re: He's toast

I was visiting our office a few years ago to do some stuff in the workshop (a fortunately infrequent occurrence!). Fire alarm went off and everyone dutifully headed across to the far side of the workshop, down the corridor and out the main door. I went out the fire door right by me, and the closest exit for ALL of the workshop guys. So I wandered around to the front of the building to the assembly point and beat my collogues there. It was, of course, a false alarm and an email came around from a manager asking who had left the workshop fire door open and could it please not happen again. I replied to the email, copying in the fire marshals and H&S people in, that I had left that way as per written policy. H&S replied stating that I was correct and the relevant Fire Marshal agreed and apologised for not checking the fire door once the all clear had been approved. Eventually, said manager also agreed I'd done the right thing and pointed out to the rest of the workshop staff that they should also have gone out that way. So, a win win all around apart from the workshop staff feeling I'd dropped them in it for a while after :-)

So, as per quite a few of the replies here, most fore alarms are either drills or false alarms and most people, from habit, exit the building via their normal entrance and rarely use the proper fire routes until someone puts their head above the parapet and point out the flaws.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: He's toast

"I once(*) forgot I was making chicken stock(**) with the carcass and the stock pot ran dry. The smell of burnt chicken skin and bones is … not pleasant."

I did that once too. I must have caught it sooner than you did though. At most, it smelled if fried chicken and the smell was gone by morning :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: He's toast

"At a previous gig, we had a manager with no sense of smell - complete anosmia. He also liked fish. He was the only one who couldn't smell it."

A large part of enjoying food is the smell as well as the taste. If he had no sense of smell, I'd imagine his sense of taste was hampered I'd guess that this in turn would make him need and/or want quite different, possibly stronger flavours than most of might enjoy to get the most out of it. Unless he was one of those people that see food simply as food, a necessary evil.

Family-owned aerospace biz throws a wrench in Boeing IP lawsuit

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"so $AutoCompany gave up and bought it from us anyway."

I hope, as the only supplier of the actual working, quality product, you at least doubled the price to them :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

Maybe instead of going to court they could reach and amicable agreement by torquing it out?

BOFH: Good news, everyone – we're in the sausage business

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: gigaspandrels

Kittens mew==Mu==M'you.

Of course, if you choose to pronounce as moo, you get the alternative description as above.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

Re: So ? Is AI the new "cloud computing"?

"It understands nothing. It's a pastiche generator."

Ah, so we go full circle. First we had Lyons Tea Shoppes with the first commercial computer, LEO and now we have Gregss using AI to generate...err...wait...what? Oh, PASTICHE, not pasties?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Heh

"Sausage and mash at my place anyone? :)"

Eeeew! Not if all you got are Richmonds! :-)

Walls for the win!

(At least as a last resort if forgot to get some at the butchers :-))

Boss put project on progress bar timeline: three months … four … actually NOW!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Poor Project Planning

"So yes, it was poor project planning, because that issue would be the first item on the list to be dealt with (or managed around)"

From the article, it sounds like he'd just been promoted to projects and this was the first of a number of concurrent projects, so maybe no one told him this would be an issue and he learned the hard way?

Germans beat Tesla to autonomous L3 driving in the Golden State

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

Re: The man in the high castle

It made me think of technologically advanced Germans invading the USA from their secret base on the Moon :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"The real achievement of Mercedes is not the ability of their DrivePilot but getting the legal approval of it."

I wonder if that's a corporate attitude thing more than anything else? ie the German company understands the laws and their cars capabilities and so accept the restrictions placed on them while the system proves itself. Meanwhile, Musk and other "disrupters" simply won't or can't accept that they are less than perfect and make claims and demands or just simply ignore the rules until something breaks and someone dies.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Only up to 40 mph on the highway where everyone else is driving at 75 mph?

I was under the impression from residents of those areas that post here, getting up as fast as 40mph, especially during rush hour, is something they'd quite like to be able to do :-)

Brit data watchdog fines sleazy sales ops £250K for 'bombarding' folk with calls

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Pathetic

IIRC, either that is now the case or is wending it's way through Parliament.

Reddit cuts five percent of workers while API pricing shift sours developers

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Exactly how many API calls are they making?

I wonder what the difference is between using a 3rd party app calling the APIs and using the officially provided app calling the APIs? Do you get charged the same if you use the official app instead of a 3rd party one? If no, why not?

Robot can rip the data out of RAM chips with chilling technology

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"That said, there *are* people (especially those working for the various intelligence agencies) who are *very* good at getting hardware or software (on physical media) into a server room without being noticed."

While true, I suspect even a special custom built robot, reader and the cryo gear might be a tad more difficult, even for "them" :-)

They probably already have easier ways.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: What about "chip stacks"?

...or if the chip is glued to the PCB so just de-soldering it stops being an option?

Microsoft injects ChatGPT into 'secure' US government Azure cloud

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Ok, what is the point ?

"Who and in what government agency is going to have a use for a babbling "generative content" toy that can't actually bring itself to define anything specifically ?"

Political speech writers? Expect an improvement in the babble coming from politicians :-)

File Explorer gets facelift in latest Windows 11 build

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Here we go again

Worse, they keep taking away more and more of the options to customise the look and feel of the desktop such that these days about all you can change is the wallpaper now. And personally, that's the one bit of the UI I rarely want to change anyway. I prefer a nice non-distracting plain background, or maybe a nice soft gradient, top to bottom. I got bored with patterns, photos and "photo carousels" as a desktop about 5 minutes after discovered the option in Windows 95 :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Teaching an old dog new bugs

"It's also be nice if it would differentiate between jpeg, png etc files without having to turn file extension visibility for all files:"

What? You don't switch on global file extension visibility as a matter of course as soon as the install has finished? I also like to know what format a document file is in before I open it so I don't "accidentally" save it out in MS's preferred Office format. if it was .odf or .rtf, I'd like it to stay that way. Not just see two apparently identically named files in the directory, one of which might be the original version :-)

Page: