Posts by JassMan 926 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Mar 2008
"According to Austin's report, "the numerous public and internal statements of IBM’s CEO and CFO expressing the need for the company to 'refresh' its workforce" raises the question of whether Langley's supervisors were guided by that directive when telling subordinates to cut staff."
The court has completely misunderstood. When top brass say refresh the workforce it just means they are considering offering free cold drinks and massages to oveworked staff</sarcasm>
that they are going to find it hard to find volunteers for the first manned flight. They may say that everything would have gone perfectly but if all the systems are timer based rather than position based they could find the capsule leaving without them for the return journey. Or worse, that the main engines burn for re-entry while still attached because a bit of ice has held them in place.
A system isn't fully tested until it works exactly as planned with all the bug fixes already in place. How many times has fixing one bug created another. And Boeing already have a history of that.
All well and good that they are talking open source but unless they also open the hardware drivers in the now (or to be shortly) obsolete gear in people's homes, they won't be doing their bit for the environment. The fires in Oz are a warning that unless we reuse rather than just recycle, we will all shortly be doomed.
In my field, my clients expect me to have generous professional and public indemnity insurance.
Not many insurers pay out in the case of fraud and deliberate illegality. The insurance is against being sued when something accidentally goes wrong. The public can't claim against the policy when the company screws over an entire country then shuts its doors.
The following is an observation, not an attempt to condone the use of fake goods.
I have a friend who recently came back back from holiday in Africa who says local markets are full of fake iPhones. Most of the local population use them since they are far cheaper than the real thing, yet they seem to work perfectly well. Possibly they are more reliable than the real thing?
Presumably the "iPhones" sold in Africa actually come from China anyway so what is the point in a gang shipping fake phones from China to the US to be replaced by real phones from China then sending them all the way home again. It would be much cheaper for them to fill a container with the fake phones then switch it for a container of real ones before they even left China. I guess the fact that the death penalty is more likely to be carried out in China than in he US may be a major deterrent.
"Google's joins Gang of Four to guard Play Store apps from malware, and maybe not fail so much"
The missing words are "gonad grabber" and I claim my £5
Google's "gonad grabber" joins Gang of Four to guard Play Store apps from malware, and maybe not fail so much
OK, I know I should use the tips and corrections link but this way, some other grammar nazisusers get a chance to offer alternatives.
WTF - they scanned it? Its almost as if they typed it on an old Remmington. How the fsck do they think we will be better off after brexit if they can even take the trouble to learn that when you have a computer you can print directly to PDF.
Yep, I checked they really did scan it. presumably to increase the file size and make the plebs think they'd been working hard to generate such a big file, when it could have been under 20k.
Are you still living in the last century? Battery technology and its controllers is progressing at a very fast pace now there is an incentive. Power density, kWh/kg and life cycle have improved tremendously in the last 5 years. 200mpg equivalent is easily achievable now. One of the main things petrol heads forget is that every time you accelerate in an IC car, all the energy is lost when you brake. In an EV energy lost in braking is recovered for use in the next acceleration.
Battery life is now quoted as 8 years minimum and even then, an end of life battery will have 80-85% capacity. You can then reuse the battery rather than recycle the battery in a power standby system for another decade or 2.
@Martin
A lot of good points but the counter argument is that if we had had more two way connected cars on the network, the blackout may not have occurred in the first place. Remember it was caused by 2 major suppliers dropping off within a minute of each other. The second supplier only just took the system over the edge - if there had been sufficient connected battery backup, the grid could well have withstood the temporary overload. The problem they had was due to rate at which extra capacity could be spun up. Battery backup can be virtually instantaneous.
Re: domestic solar contributing to the problem, again this was because very few are fitted with battery backup. When demand increases you can't just ask God to wind up the brightness of the sun and clear away all the clouds. When more cars are electric there will be a much larger supply of cheap batteries to create PowerWalls or equivalent. The 8 year life of EV batteries only refers to their life in the car because you don't want to be stranded on the roadside as a result of decreased capacity. Old EV batteries still generally have about 80-85% capacity and make very good fixed backup systems.
@Justthefacts
Sorry but I call BS. The official average mileage per car in the UK is just over 7k miles PER YEAR. Converting to km per day makes just 35km. ie just 5% of the 700km on a 100kWh battery. So assuming your domestic 30kW the average car could replace the days usage in 10 minutes. With the smart charging systems now being installed where the car can actually feed back to the grid on demand, car batteries left at home when the user takes public transport can supply power to their neighbours during high demand and re-topup later. In fact official calculations show that if everyone had electric cars with smart chargers and left them plugged in while stationary, peak power would reduce below the current limits. In reality, not everyone would plug in and not everyone would allow spare battery capacity used but since not everyone is going swap petrol for electric overnight we will have time to workout just how much extra capacity will be needed if any.
Are National Grid on some kind of psycho active drugs? "Contributing evidence to the report, the National Grid said that just 54 charging stations, placed at appropriate points along the strategic road network, would mean 99 per cent of drivers in England and Wales would be within 50 miles of a charge point." Given that most of the older electric cars have a range of 100miles or less means that they can all drive to one of the 54 charging stations, wait in the 25mile long queue for several weeks, get home again, but then can't get back to the charge point for another charge.
I know other charging networks are available but unless they are thinking of putting in a useful system so that everyone can superfast charge within 10 miles of home they might as well not have put fingers to keyboard.
What the country (indeed all countries) is the ability to charge at ANY charge point just using a standard credit card without joining a "club" first. By all means give club members a 5% discount for using their own system but charging infrastructure is a public service and should be open to all.
Recently heard on FranceInter radio that a trial carried out in Marseille was 100% successful. The “criminal“ was immediately identified and there were no false positives. Strangely no one had complained either.
I suspect that the public weren't told that facial recognition was involved and the person being used as a test guineapig was a 3foot dwarf with flourescent orange hair and a nose like Cyrano de Bergerac. That can be the only explanation for the miraculous test result.
Not only that, but I bet a lot of manglent types see S3 and assume it means level 3 security (whatever that may be) especially when they see that buckets are accessed with a key.
Unfortunately, S3 just means Simple Storage System and the key is just a unique identifier because like the internet is bigger than a desk and c: to z: just doesn't hack it. Nothing about AWS implies security. It is up to the client to provide their own. So yes it insecure by design. FFS its not even posix compliant.
It is a god idea to read their policy and permissions before installing. You may not be happy for a search engine to download stuff you haven't asked for and to open files on your PC. Or change what you get to see on a page. Not to mention the fact it wants permission to read all your username and password fields. It seems to have delusions of replacing/supplementing your adblocker, noscript and other plugins rather than just concentrating on providing search results.
Their intentions may be entirely honorable but some of the things you have to permit seem open to abuse, especially if a hacker adds extensions to the plugin. It is also not clear whether the plugin is active even when you are not specifically using ecosia for a search.
Totally agree. I think most customers would also object to having to sign away their privacy rights in order to be able to buy a drink. No where in the article does it mention the screen where potential clients agree to signing away any rights under the GDPR nor how long it takes to read the boilerplate about the duties of the data controller (or even whether the landlord or the AI company is the controller).
A certain minister, attempting to show the Love of God, once gave a sermon about blessed are the meek, blessed are the poor, blessed are a whole series of disadvantaged
. He eventually got on to blessed are the thick although he was much more PC about it
and carried on to explain that winners of the Darwin Award were gathered back into the breast of the Lord.
It was a later sermon virtually stating that "you can be the biggest thief, rapist, murderer in history, but as long as you believe in "God" you go to heaven, but if you save others lives, give all your wealth to charities, you go straight to hell if you don't believe in that god", which turned me into an atheist.
So obviously the new one has to be FF (Fscking Fonefloggers)
"The T-Mobile and Sprint merger we announced last April will create a bigger and bolder competitor than ever before – one that will deliver the most transformative 4.5G network in the country, higher prices, lower quality, unmatched value and thousands of job losses
FTFT
Every one of those backdoors is useless if the PC isn't connected to the Internet. There is not, and cannot be anything to prevent the crims creating and encrypting a message on an airgapped PC (with or without ineffective backdoors), then communicating that message via the leakiest app ever made. Ingenuity is the mother of invention and the airgapped PC can be as simple as a commodore 64 - it only has to run 1 program and be able to save the data to a common storage format. Don't forget that the original BBC model A computer had a whole 32KiB RAM and yet people were able to produced formatted documents, drawings and even databases. Yes that is KiB not MiB or GiB.
Never forget that politicians are mainly people who have never actually worked at a real-life job and forget that creating a law which forces backdoors in comms software (on even the bios/uefi) can never work on a device which has its bootloader set with 16 switches on a frontpanel. Even if they define a computer as a device with a CPU, enthusiasts have created computing devices out of 74 series (what you might call a distributed processing unit). All they can ever manage is to create a market in archaic devices. Every device which is created until the law comes into force will eventually be defined as archaic.
Today’s verdict is a rare sign of sense from an American legal system that all too often seems more focused on hard punishment rather than perspicacity. There is little sense in locking away a talented researcher, who has much to offer the world, over youthful indiscretions.
I think all the comments in past stories about Hutch have been about the illegalities and abuses by the FBI et al. After all they are also part of the justice system. Thank <your chosen deity> for a sensible judge who is not swayed by arguments put forward by "law and order" and those with a political axe to grind.
Does he expect that all comms apps will have the backdoor password / keys baked in? So any open source is also going to have those same passwords/ keys fully visible because, like, it is OPEN source. That is going to really keep the crims out. The only other logical way is to force everyone to register every app with the gov so that the first time you use it it sets up the backdoor. Again I don't see the crims volunteering to register their apps with the gov, and with open source you can just look for the gov mandated code additions, remove them and recompile.
"could be used to generate news reports that were hard to distinguish from human-authored ones, a dangerous tool in an era of fake news"
What the world needs is AI with a conscience. Unlike current AI which is as biassed as its training data, if the starting point in training was a conscience, a good AI would look at fake news and hunt down all the little falsehoods which make fake news look so plausible on the surface. Something which most modern journalists fail to do when re-reporting untruths and giving just them that bit more legitimacy.
We wouldn't be in the Brexit mess we have today if journalists hadn't republished Boris's story about bent bananas, instead of actually reading the directive and commenting on the truth (to give but one example). The problem with fake news is not that most intelligent people can see the lie, but that most of the general public see the grains of truth, add them together and make a cake to keep as well as eat.
Answer: When its paid to your own government instead of someone else's.
In reality, the money paid to the US gov does actually go to keep taxes low for the super-rich in general whereas money paid to foreign officials goes directly into their pockets and doesn't benefit quite as many people.
If they had free software because of nominal competencies and then sold licences having told a client that the sofware would do everything required of it, they could be sued for misrepresentation or fraud on the grounds that they were "compentent". Now they can just say "you'll have to take Microsofts word for it that it works, because I don't have a licenced copy to try it out for you." Their legal bills will be so much lower because they know that no one ever sues MS and wins.
On the other hand their turnover is also going to be lower because lots of would-be clients are going to say "why should we buy software from you if you aren't using it yourself"
Talk of Brexit is seriously off topic here but since you brought it up.
No political entity ever votes to get rid of themselves, the idea of Brexit was almost certainly not to commit genicide and exterminate proles. Nor was it a way of getting back at the Liberal elite, since the last time the Liberals were in power (as opposed to coalition) is beyond living memory for over 70% of the population and Liberals have never been elitist anyway. The real reason for Brexit was that a small percentage of the population who have never done a days work in their lives but mostly have right wing tendencies of various degrees, worked out how to lie the public in a way they would not believe they were being conned. Those same people will either make a massive fortune from Brexit or are friends with others who are happy to share the ill gotten gains of Brexit. Remainers were accused of lying when they said we would all be worse off after Brexit, yet the likes of Boris and Nigel keep repeating that all is well. 2 points (a) we haven't actually left yet so of course things are not as bad as they are going to get. (b) your buying power if you travel is at least 15% less than before the vote, and if you buy at home you get less but don't actually notice because of shrinkflation.
Don't even mention all the wonderfull trade deals we will be able to do with hundreds of countries, most of whom have a GDP less than a medium size UK town
Unless Google are planning on passing unique identifying info from all their customers' (merchants, travel operators, congestion authorities, etc) into their own, parsing the data and then finding the intersecting sets, I don't see how this can work.
Point 1. When I buy in a glass fronted shop, I never give authority to email me (not even electronic receipts), nor share any data I might have had to fill in for the guarantee.
Point 2. I always use one card for travelling (contactless) and a different card for high value purchases. I have also have a third very low balance card for use in places where skimming is more likely such as petrol stations, restaurants.
Yep they should have just put a Pi inside the box, plug a game cassette socket into the GPIO, sell it at cost and specialize in what they once did best which is the software. They should have splashed the cash on writing a superfast gaming engine, capable of running its old classics as well as new products. If they wanted a hardware USP, they could have worked with Raspberry to use the latest existing board but pay a slight premium for one with a new SOC with more cores and memory.
FFS, if people are happy to pay to run old Sinclair games on their Pis, there must be a workable business model for a well sorted Atari console. They could even go down the Pi pathway of starting simple with existing motherboard and emulator, then produce the faster versions with new games later.
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