* Posts by John Smith 19

16327 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

Swedish prosecutor finally treks to London to question Julian Assange

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"“Can’t we just drone this guy?” Clinton openly inquired, "

Cite please?

If true that alone would be a pretty good reason for not having her in the top spot.

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How can you tell when a real estate developer is lying?

His lips are moving.

Trust the D without an iron clad contract witnessed by 5 people not his employees or family?

How dumb would you have to be.

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"I don't know what the standard term for rape in sweden is "

But I think the length of time the US Govt wants to put him away for is measured in centuries.

And that's what he's worried about.

The sharks of AI will attack expensive and scarce workers faster than they eat drivers

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"earned millions every year.." "..confuse the Law Lords as to what the law actually meant."

Exactly.

That's why lawyers won't be going away any time soon.

Nor will judges.

UK and US judges make "case law" every time they interpret a law or decide one precedent is more applicable than another.

"I am the law" is not just a line in a comic book. It remains a literal statement of fact.

GitLab to dump cloud for its own bare metal Ceph boxen

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So the takeaway is

1)Cloud is good for fast starting an application.

2)Some applications (mostly with high IO counts) scale really badly. They should be run on their own servers.

So cloud --> good early development environment. May be OK operating environment. Or not.

The DevOps equivalent of "Premature optimization is the root of nearly all evil"?

Good to know. But aren't most databases quite heavy on both I/P and O/P ?

Kaminario's Dani Golan reaches for the sky

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Meh

Flash sounds fine for large databases

That don't change.

Beyond that it's all about how frequently that data changes.

And can you detect a new data write had not changed the data and the data needs to be moved to a new part of the array?

Or do you just throw the array away?

Siemens to mentor Mentor Graphics in $4.5bn acquisition

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Will this make their PLC's more secure

Seems Siemens have had a few problems in that area.....

European Commission dangles €374m for low-power exascale research

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I was wondering 264 submissions

263 ARM based?

Actually the SPARC architecture has been licensed in Europe for rad hard and space apps.

In truth the smart thing to do is go clockless but that means you can't sell premium high clock speed chips.

Tough elements will be identify power hungry instructions (in existing ISA) and a low power interconnect for them at both board and rack level. What makes some instructions power hungry, and then either make the less power hungry or scrap them.

It's ironic that GNU and Linux, developed essentially in an instruction set monoculture, allow nearly any possible instruction set to leverage a large development environment, once you've hacked a code generator.

IIRC DARPA was doing something like this. Something about 1 PetaFLOPS for 5Kw?

Encrypted email sign-ups instantly double in wake of Trump victory

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"campaign rhetoric against journalists, political enemies, immigrants, and Muslims, "

Aren't they all the same thing in his mind?

Boffins find Galaxy making killer radiation, rule out Samsung phone as source

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"no existing models predict that we would see an FRB in these cases”

So exciting times for theoretical physics then.

Red squirrels! Adorable, right? Wrong – they're riddled with leprosy

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Sounds like a plot for a low budget straight-to-download horror movie to me.

"Watch out for the Squirrels"

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"the last red hangers-on have developed leprosy!!"

Hmm.

I suspect you are not being entirely serious.

Former Autonomy CFO indicted in USA for misleading investors

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"http://uneasyempires.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/autonomy-on-trial-what-i-saw-in.html"

Nice.

It looks like Autonomy's "defense" is "If you were too stupid to realize we were crooks that's your tough luck."

Sorry but IRL if you're a crook that's actually the crime, not your victims stupidity.

Although HP were very stupid.

2016 in a nutshell: Boffins break monkeys' backs to turn them into tragic shuffling cyborgs

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"Go back to WWII and experiments done on the Jews. F"

Actually AFAIK they did them on any concentration camp inmates, including Russian PoWs.

The key ones are to do with aircrew survival in the Atlantic IE effects of Hypothermia and the design of ejector seats and high altitude exposure. High altitude and hypothermia were done at Dachau.

This data was seized by the Allies at the end of the war. The question is what is worse. Killing these people or killing these people and ignoring the information so they died for nothing?

Flash crash trader takes plea bargain, cops to 'spoofing' and wire fraud

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"The election of Trump definitely calls for human sacrifice."

Or as one overheard comment put it.

"Top Trump. Top Trump."

Remember thought someone took a pot shot at Reagan, so he'd not be the first Republican President to have someone take a pot shot at him.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
IT Angle

Re: Some solutions

Read "Flash Boys."

The US exchanges have cooperated in defining a slew of bizarre order types that basically allow HFT companies to probe the market without actually having to buy any shares.

They are not really orders as such

They are a probe language allowing the HFT to buy up the big orders ahead of the actual customer and then sell them on at mark up. This is how HFT's can be in the astonishing position of "trading" on stock exchanges and never making a loss.

The simplest answer. Stick a 20Km FO cable on the front of the Exchange servers and don't allow HFT or other big players to co lo at your server facility.

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WTF?

"not physically possible.." "..without breaking the speed of light. "

Indeed

When HFT companies where paying huge funds to be in Exchange server rooms to cut times by nanoseconds (to let them implement their legalized man-in-the middle attacks) and the Atlantic is 19 000 ns wide this is simply BS.

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"What's even worse, the Tory government participated in this miscarriage. "

I think the asymmetrical extradition law, with different standards of proof for US --> UK and UK <--US was a little gift of Tony Blair's to his pal GW Bush.

Since both are long gone it's well past time it was reviewed, and by that I mean with a view to being scrapped.

UK privacy watchdog sends poison pen letter to Zuckerberg et al

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Sounds like she actually understands the issues

which seems to be a bit of a novelty.

Let's see if she can actually change their behavior

Google Pixel pwned in 60 seconds

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"the biggest improvements come from compartmentalisation"

Say hello to Glenford Myers and the idea of "module coupling" and "composite design."

About 1975 onward.

And it seems still as relevant (and ignored) today.

Kotkin: Why Trump won

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""I consider felons losing their right to vote an atrocity "

British prison inmates can't vote in UK elections.

CMD fought the EU court ruling to maintain the UK right to deny them this.

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"Here's the problem... voter fraud exists and it has an impact."

Unbelievable.

You won and you're still bi**hing.

And I recall the line about "Vote the graveyard" from an old Stainless Steel Rat novel a long time ago.

Top of the bots: This AI isn't a cold, cruel killing machine – it's a pop music hit machine

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Go

Computer generated art is something that's been on the go since the 1960's.

One interesting project was a painter who programmed a plotter to create new art works.

It's interesting that so many areas can be dealt with by neural nets, given we ourselves are as well.

Britain must send its F-35s to Italy for heavy overhauls, decrees US

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"Careful with those stereotypes. Italy has produced lots of outstanding engineering,"

Indeed.

Italy made about half of the modules of the ISS.

A fact NASA don't like to emphasise.

The state of today's machine learning: Short, wide, deep but not high

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Sadly still to large for distance preserving codes to be used

Which might make them even faster.

Just a thought.

Chirp! Let's hear it for data over audio

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Thought it was going to be very clever. Like spread spectrum in sound

Which is what a US toy company came up with in the 80s IIRC (Pop. Sci article?)

But this is audible. And SS data rate with a sound carrier is about 2-3 bits per second.

That said the clever part is probably a)Code selection for maximum detection in high ambient noise environments and b)Filter algorithms to detect that code efficiently .

The idea is pretty obvious.

I suspect the implementation less so.

Leaked paper suggests EM Drive tested by NASA actually works

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Re: It just might be low energy photons providing the thrust

Here's the problem with that idea.

They are saying this thing generates 2x the thrust of a solar sail yet if it is photons they are only being output at a single frequency (that of the magnetron), whereas the sail reflects the whole of the solar spectrum.

Something does not seem to be adding (or multiplying) up.

Trump's torture support could mean the end of GCHQ-NSA relationship

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Re: Re Big John

Well strictly the American people asked for Trump. Now they have him.

Wheather that's what they wanted is another matter which they will discover for themselves over the next 4 years, excluding impeachment death or incapacity EG massive stroke.

Trump's plan: Tariffs on electronics, ban on skilled tech migrants, turn off the internet

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Re: First of all, sorry

Not yet.

But give it a few months.

Then you'll really know what sorry feels like.

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"The Russians probably thought that about Putin, too."

Nonsense.

Everyone loves Dobby.

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"I can now appreciate how Hitler and Mussolini were able to win power,"

There's a documentary about Marlene Dietrich. Her comment on that was "The German people wanted a Fuehrer. They got one."

The American people asked for Donald Trump.

Lets see if he turns out to be what they wanted.

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"OMG! You mean I won't be able to buy, umm, errr, wait a mo, it'll come back to me"

Err, muscle cars with really bad fuel economy?

Actual Budweiser?

F35 fighters?

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"The scary thing about the US, is that it is such a big and powerful idiot."

Lead by what I think Vladimir Illyich would have called a willing tool.

Of is that "fool" ?

Handling tech baggage: How American Airlines, US Airways merged IT

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"..as much an organizational change-management effort as anything else,"

A lesson British Governments (and the British Civil Service) still don't seem to understand.

Brexit judgment could be hit for six by those crazy Supreme Court judges, says barrister

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"promised a referendum as a soundbite,"

Well a bit more than that.

It was to stop the Conservative party shattering and large parts (as he thought) of it going to UKIP. Risking the shattering of the UK and the EU was a small price to pay. A real upper class hero.

CMD thought making it first past the post rather than some minimal threshold level on turnout and majority would keep it nice and simple for British citizens and it worked so well on Scottish independence, nicely skewering the Salmond.

I guess he reckoned a no was such a foregone conclusion planning in the Act for a yes was not needed, although it seems it took 67 pages to say so.

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Looks like Ken Livingstone's observation is spot on.

"It will take years and you won't get what you want."

Still sounds pretty accurate to me.

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Was'nt one of the " reasons" for these referendum reasserting the soverignty of Parliament?

I think it was.

So then turning around and saying "No,. you're not really needed to do any scrutiny here" might leave the MP's a bit miffed.

Brexit may not mean Brexit at all: UK.gov loses Article 50 lawsuit

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"The government has no mandate to pull that additional trigger "

Except that is exactly what they are arguing.

Just because the people who voted for Brexit did not realize leaving the EEA could be part of it (they say) is basically tough s**t. After all they did want to "Take back control" didn't they, right?

Can't have border controls and free trade as well.

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SO to be be clear. The Secretary of State can't invoke on their own. Parliament have to vote

2 options.

MP's respect the result and vote to let the Minister invoke almost unanimously

MP's don't respect the (advisory) referendum and vote their PoV, which suggests the UK is going nowhere.

Looks like CMD's little plan to ensure unity in the Tory party for a generation hasn't worked out too well, does it not?

Just another day in Faragistan to me.

Hm, is that a minefield? Let me just throw my magic bomb-sniffing spinach over there

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OK so let's see if I can find a use for it

Spray solution on area of plants.

Scan with IR camera.

Check for fluoresce

Map fluoresce data to model explosive concentrations.

Caveats.

What the range in concentration sensitivity between plants. Are some in the same species 10x as sensitive as others or more or less the same?

What's the range between plant species?

If they are land mines how do you defuse/detonate them safely?

At present one of those, clever in the lab, not so clever in the field ideas.

But could get better

Hypersonic cruise missile scores US$175m DARPA cash

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"but scramjets would work to haul the orbiter to high altitude."

No they won't.

Fixed geometry is only good for about 3 Mach numbers. You'd be better off staying with a subsonic combustion ramjet and saving the oxidizer load but it's debatable if it's worth it. You can't treat the engine as separate you have to treat the vehicle, tanks and engines as a complete system for getting to orbit and optimize appropriately.

When fully funded Reaction Engines Limited have made more progress than any SCramjet project has.

John Smith 19 Gold badge

Re: SCRamjets have only really ever looked good for weapons systems

"And for re-usable spacecraft."

Claimed by SCramjet advocates for the last 60 years.

First off you need something else to get them to that velocity. So no you need a rocket anyway.

Second off fixed geometry ramjets usually have a Mach range of 3. Widening this requires making the whole structure variable geometry, mostly of parts operating at re-entry temperatures.

Despite billions of dollars spent on SCramjet research (NASP was $1Bn+) since 1960. they took till 2005 to demonstrate positive thrust IE thrust from engine exceeded drag it produces when operating.

Ramjet missiles have been operational from the 1950's. No SCramjet has ever been fielded.

The only thing SCramjet research has been good for is producing hypersonic PhD's, which it has in abundance.

John Smith 19 Gold badge

"Never missed a drone (unsurprising given the CEP of it's warhead),"

I think you're thinking of the Genie, the only nuclear armed AAM the US ever fielded.

It's pretty obvious that delivering it's capabilities today would have a much lighter electronics package (all that TTL replaced by PowerPC and a couple of ASICs) but of course then they'd want to "upgrade" it in various ways.

BTW While the only listed live shoots by the US missed the Iranians claimed their F14's were quite active in the Iran Iraq war and hit quite a lot. Obviously quite tough to verify.

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SCRamjets have only really ever looked good for weapons systems

Let's see if they can make it work this time.

People have noted 2 things about these concepts.

1) A regular ramjet is good enough already (and has been for the last 30-40 years) to do M5 cruise

2) M5 in the atmosphere is like continual reentry. All the options for dealing with this are limited and either heavy (ablatives, thick heat sink skins) or complex (active cooling).

It'll be fascinating to see what the come up with and wheather $175m gets DARPA some actual hardware or just another bunch of power points.

America has one month to stop the FBI getting its global license to hack

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I want "The D" to win

The US system is dysfunctional and has been for decades. Nominal party memberships of both houses barely pay lip service to their sides stated goals.

It's time the American people capped this huge portion of fail with a leader worthy of such people.

5 years of him should give the survivors of his presidency a little more respect for the consequences of their actions.

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Kentucky

Or "lube state" as I like to think of it.

On a serious note this flagrant extra territorial BS is a very slippery precedent.

Muck like STUXNET

The FBI should be very careful of starting something others might finish.

F-35 'sovereign data gateway' will stop US reading pilots' personal data? Yeah right

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IT Angle

"Executive Summary Test Planning, Activity, and Assessment"

Holy s**t that summary seems pretty blunt.

2 missiles and 2 bombs per aircraft in 2015 and the US Lab to generate the flight data loads is behind the foreign sales equivalent (why?)

I recall the development of the space Shuttle software was split up into many increments as they gradually added new features as more of the flight envelope was tested and more capabilities were added.

It looks like here they have a few "fat" loads and they are not working out.

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ALIS?

Isn't that the name of the master computer inside the hive in Resident Evil?

Boffins predict web scams with domain registration data

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Got to wonder if the registrars check if the return IP addresses are fake

I'm guessing the 10 popular ones don't.

Or implement any other kind of cursory check to see if the outfit doing the registering is remotely legitimate.

C'mon, it's the current year! Report finds UK gov could save £2bn by modernising IT

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Oh dear. Yet another report that's the wrong way round.

You need someone (and they'd better be pretty senior) to realize something needs changing.

Then they need to work out what needs changing and how.

IT is a tool for that, not a reason to change.

When people talk of Billion £ changes you're talking about whole departments changing what they do and how they do it.

Root and branch.

IT is the 0.1% of that process.