* Posts by John Smith 19

16327 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

Email proves UK boffins axed from EU research in Brexit aftermath

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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"a dodgy 3rd world country that you think is about to be taken over by communist rebels"

Or in the UK case by a bunch of ex PSB's who seem to want to revive the British Empire.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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"But it is academia after all, where the politics are most vicious because the stakes are so low."

IIRC roughly 2008-2015 the UK put £5.5Bn in the Science & Research pot for the EU.

They got out £8.8Bn out.

But hey maybe the UK Govt will increase that chunk of it's Science & Research budget 60% to compensate.

The dev-astating truth: What's left to develop? Send in the machines

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I also recall "The Programmers Apprentice" project out of stanford IIRC.

The developers said it was buggy and clumsy but it showed (sort of) what could be done.

What I never understood was if that was the case why didn't they run a copy of it through itself and have the system make itself better ?

Ofgem sets up database so energy companies can spam Brits

John Smith 19 Gold badge
FAIL

Interesting excercise if you use multiple comparison sites.

For gas (for example) British Gas has never come out cheaper AFAIK.

They may not agree on the "winner" but all agree on the loser.

The theory of the report demonstrates a fair grasp of ways to make the market "fairer."

Sadly it fails to realize the UK energy market is an oligopoly run by a group of companies whose default corporate behavior is psychopathic.

Mad-tech labcoat-sporters DARPA pit infosec AI against itself

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So "Core war" the next generation basically?

Only with real programs instead of programs whose only purpose is to fight each other.

Intriguing.

Australia to spend a billion bucks and seven years on SAP project

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The truth that dare not speak its name.....

SAP.

It's a very large software system written by Germans. Failure to follow implementation instructions will have consequences.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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Oh dear, a system to change the *whole* business will be done as just a S/W change out.

What can go wrong?

I presume the Aus govt will take the view that its a A$Bn so only the very big boys can tender, despite it being more like A$150m a year.

They'd better make sure they've really well mapped that database Schema. WTF is a "204" database anyway? IIRC IBM are known for mainframe IDBMS and DB/2 for the big apps.

The fail is strong in this one....

US Air Force declares F-35 'combat-ready'

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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but how about *really* bright LED torches with a strobe mode?

Actually the real way to deal with such aircraft was demonstrated by the SAS in the Western Desert in WWII.

Blow them up on the ground.

Not very sporting.

But very effective.

It's a bomber jacket of course.

Did Donald Trump really just ask Russia to hack the US govt? Yes, he did

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cthulhu-for-president/

Indeed.

If you're going to go for it you want to go with #1.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Meh

Giving them aid and comfort - no.

Depends if you consider Putins Russia to be an enemy of the US, does it not?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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I wonder if this would qualify as treason?

I think it would come under "incitement." But then him and "Dobby" do seem to see eye to eye on many things.

Personally I'd rather like Donald (or "The D" as I like to think of him, since so many of his supports just can't seem to get enough of him) to win.

Like Brexit for the British.

But without it being so completely impossible to reverse.

Ex-Citibank IT bloke wiped bank's core routers, will now spend 21 months in the clink

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Ethics..

Isn't that a town in Vermont somewhere?

Sabotage is rarely the answer.

Clumsy sabotage is just bungling on a large scale.

Gullible Essex Police are now using junk science lie detectors

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Soon, it will be a Chav honour to have been through the lie detector down the nick.

And naturally to have been completely guilty while coming up clean on the machine.

"I wonder if the other Ned Kelly is turning in his grave."

Strewth, mate I reckon he'd be choked it was that easy.

Europe gives Privacy Shield one year to work

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And will the EU be able to trust the UK with data?

Good question.

Given the UK was regularly slated as having the weakest data protection laws in Europe I think anyone else in Europe would be thinking about re-locating any UK data centres somewhere else.

The joker would be any US businesses with UK data centres but I think most of the Googles, Amazons and Apples opted for Ireland, so BAU for them.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

Of course as the UK is leaving the EU even this protection is minimal

So the US can slurp UK data without any problem from PM May.

Brexit is the gift that just keeps on giving.

Rolls-Royce reckons robot cargo ships are the future of the seas

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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no need for windows

On a robot ship

or robot anything in fact.

Facebook's billion sheeple

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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To say thanks

We can't grossly violate your privacy without your assistance.

Top IT bod Sally Howes leaves the UK's National Audit Office

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And yet IT is usually an *enabler* of organizational change

At least that's what the managers want it to be.

As for the staff who are expected to use it....

Who cares what they think? How would they know what is needed?

and worst of all..

If they do know what's needed WTF should they tell their managers, who treat them with contempt?

VCs: Can't see an IPO or acquisition for your startup? Don't throw in the towel

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Meh

Could most of this be said about *any* startup sector?

Just wondering.

UK 'emergency' bulk data slurp permissible in pursuit of 'serious crime'

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

"strict safeguards..." "Legislative processes.."

Isn't that exactly what DRIPA is designed to circumvent.

MPs tell BT: Lay more fibre or face split with Openreach

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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So a bit over £1Bn/pa is generating c£2.5Bn/pa

In normal world low risk == low profit margin but in BT land low risk== high margin?

Think of BT like the Treasury when they owned things like British Steel and the British Rail.

Any profit you make we keep. We may reinvest in you, if nothing more important shows up.

Those decisions are no longer the Treasury's to make, but they are BT Groups to make.

The nearest model would be Railtrack (or whatever it's called now) combined with Lessons Learned from their relations with the companies who used their infrastructure regarding scheduling repair and maintenance.

McCain: Come to my encryption hearing. Tim Cook: No, I'm good. McCain: I hate you, I hate you, I hate you

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No, I was thinking of this fellow.

He's one of the reasons for the f**ked up state of the US ITAR laws.

Which seems to have been his major "contribution" to politics.

Apart from his 24 hr+ filllibuster to maintain segregation, despite having knocked up 16YO Black girl

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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There is no age limit on Senators

I'm not sure there's one on Congresspeople.

Presumably on the theory that somehow "age" == "wisdom."

One made the century as a Senator from some Southern state.

I think he's the reason when film makers want to depict a crooked senior politician (Brian Cox seems a popular choice for such tasks) they give him a Southern accent.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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6) Cheyney getting a staffer to award a sole source cost plus contract to Haliburton for Iraq

For support services, IE running laundry and canteens.

Said staffer goes to work for Haliburton later.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
FAIL

"he picked Palin as his running mate. "

When this happened was anyone else thinking "Is this a disturbing new trend. Old politician gets "trophy" VP?"

EU eyes flaw in Google’s cash machine

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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Anyone hearing the same support for Google you used to hear for Microsoft?

They're not a monopoly, they're just better at making stuff than their competitors

Oh, there isn't really a "Chinese wall" between app and OS developers? Well so what

Charge for every PC sold, regardless of wheather a MS OS was on it. Well that seems fair.

Etc.

That last seems to be a Google specialty, Individual components appear harmless but working together to trap pretty much anyone into making their take other products and paying them.

This is not a new phenomenon. Tom Watson Jr went to jail for monopolist practices while at NCR. When he got involved with IBM he never saw the inside of another jail.

That was in the 1910's.

Springpath to focus on Cisco OEM development

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Go

All sounds terribly exciting and just the sort of thing a young person should get into.

If I only knew what "hyper-converged Data Platform product" actually meant.

Successful fintech: UK has some, but it's not in Silicon Roundabout

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Need? Perhaps not, Want? Depends if it's better/cheaper/faster than what's available.

Of course the classic issue is the UK fondness for amateur managers.

You can f**k up any good idea with bad enough management.

A subject the UK seems to manage very well indeed.

Thermostat biz Nest warms to home security, touts cam with cloud storage subscription

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And BTW what's the power system? Wireless alarm systems are notorious for eating them

Sorry didn't read the whole article.

Google subscription required --> f**k right off in my book.

UK gov says new Home Sec will have powers to ban end-to-end encryption

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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"there is something in the Home Office "

There is.

It's a cabal of senior civil servants who believe access to more data is always better data and access to all data (forever) is best of all. It has nothing to do with "security" "money laundering" or paedophiles.

It has every thing to do power. the ability to find out at will what anyone, anytime has done online throughout their life.

It is Cardinal Richelieu line about "Give me 6 lines from an honest man and I'll find something with which to hang him."

Shocker: Computer science graduate wins a top UK political job

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I'd have prefered him in Amber Rudd's job.

Then he might have asked the assorted data fetishists in her department WTF their problem is.

John Smith 19 Gold badge

"But admirably his was one of the few voices raised against 90-day detention "

I think you'll find he was against ID cards and the various incarnations of the Snoopers Charter.

Google on piracy: We really, really care

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"So Google, "Why ya doin' it"?"

Because they can.

Same reason as any bit of psychopathic corporate behavior, even when the organization is not being run by one.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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"YouTube operation were to drive down royalty rates for creators."

Don't know.

But it's been very hand that it does (for Google) has it not?

A bad day for DBAs: MIT boffins are replacing you with a mere spreadsheet

John Smith 19 Gold badge

Maybe.. a spreadsheet-like interface to allow the user to design the database.

Excellent idea.

But that's really hard. :(

Personally I'd like to start by English language parsing of the description because if the parse fails due to ambiguity it means the user does not understand their problem well enough in the first place.

Incidentally deterministic parsing of English is possible and has been so for the last 30 odd years. Search "parsifal" for an example, while a PhD at Edingburgh demonstrated that a 2 word lookahead and evaluation stack was adequate to get the job done.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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TL:DR Guy who does not use spreadsheets "invents" wizard that does nested queries.

I don't have the time to wade through the full 16 pages that AI reports usually run that seems to be the core of it.

The big thing seems to be that they demonstrate that you can do everything in the UI that you can do raw SQL in terms of logic and set manipulation.

IOW it's the MS Access SQL wizard done completely instead a bodge job of the most common tasks. :(

And note this is all about questioning a DB.

It has nothing to do with structuring data within one, or paraphrasing the query so it asks what you think it asked.A classic case would be the library query "Give me everything by Smith and Jones," which most people would actually want as author = Smith || Jones ||Smith && Jones.

Underwhelmed in every way, despite the epic amount of grunt work this probably took to get working.

SCADA malware caught infecting European energy company

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STUXNET.

Now any nation can play "disrupt your (potential) enemies infrastructure"

Wonder if this happens to Merkins wheather they'll declare war on the source?

The precedent is Iran, and they did not.

Could America manage to behave as well?

A journey down the UK's '3D Tongue' into its mini industrial revolution

John Smith 19 Gold badge

"take weeks rather than months or years to build an aircraft, claims BAE Systems."

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

One word

F35.

Try decades.

London Stock Exchange's German mega-merger: It's a go, despite Brexit

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"HFT" or to be more honest automated man-in-the-middle robbery

Hijacking real share trades and effectively "taxing" the real buyers.

Relocating to Frankfurt should kill the time advantage HFT's needed to pull off their scam.

If Frankfurt refuses to allow co-location of course.

New DNA 'hard drive' could keep files intact for millions of years

John Smith 19 Gold badge

"a mutation of only one base in 3 base codon likely results in same overall translation."

Mostly.

IIRC there are 2 amino acid codes that have only 1 codon pattern.

Mutate one of those codons and you are guaranteed to make a new amino acid.

Bad blood: US govt bans bio-test biz Theranos' CEO for two years

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"how she got all that money to begin with. "

"in black turtlenecks, have her enroll in a fancy school to drop out of, can she also get billions of dollars in funding by holding a press conference?"

You forgot the near psychopathic levels of self confidence in herself she'll need, coupled with the utter lack of self doubt.

And of course she'll have to be comfortable blaming everyone but herself when it all goes t***sideways.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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Hmm. Jennifer Lawrence to do the movie? So kind of like the reverse of "Joy" ?

"Sorrow"

Blighty will have a whopping 24 F-35B jets by 2023 – MoD minister

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Facepalm

"Do they have immigrant-seeking missiles?"

Oh sweet $deity no. SFU now.

You start saying things like that and next week BAe will be giving a presentation to their friends in the MoD.

The Great Brain Scan Scandal: It isn’t just boffins who should be ashamed

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So to misquote Adkins

All science is done with numbers, not opinions, as well.

A very depressing demonstration of real human nature (not the sort fMRI claimed to show) at work.

Etch a stretch: 3D NAND layer cake flop leads to 'string stacking'

John Smith 19 Gold badge

Did not realize they were this far down this road.

I thought they'd wait till they ran out of road on linewidth.

UK.gov's hated Care.data project binned

John Smith 19 Gold badge
WTF?

National Information Board

WTF are they?

What is their remit?

Who's on this?

NHS. DWP? HMRC? GCHQ?

I smell a very large rat, and it's growing.

5 years, 2,300 data breaches. What'll police do with our Internet Connection Records?

John Smith 19 Gold badge

"..a tiny proportion of access" "..and there has to be a balance of risk"

Funny how that works.

They risk a slapped wrist for pulling someone's life history

You are guaranteed to have your life history spewed out of the all the computer systems they have access to.

That's your idea of "balanced" ?

Doesn't sound too balanced to me.

fMRI bugs could upend years of research

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"“lamentable archiving and data-sharing practices”"

Yes that did put me in mind of The Climate "Research" Unit and the harryreadme file.

I've heard people comment that functional MRI has been used by drinks companies to identify brain activation and response to various drinks. Yes that really is your brain on Coke.

That research has been very quietly done and is obviously worth billions in a global market.

"Know your tools" is a good moto but of course with tools this complex there is a reason for "we have to trust the developers knew what they were doing."

This looks like the situation in CFD,but without the approach. In that field no software (or new major release) gets accepted without multiple test runs amongst known test cases (many from live wind tunnel tests). First they test, then they trust.

BTW doing it with dead samples brought up the interesting factoid that about 500 genes were firing after death, presumably as part of the organisms last ditch attempts to self heal.

Michael Gove says Britain needs to create its own DARPA

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"..and they should then get more from the Indian subcontinent. "

Only one thing to say to that.

So Priti vacant then ?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Go

May gets the thumbs down for the Snoopers Charter and being Remain when it's a Leaving do

Plus I'm loving the "Double Brutus" nick name.

I think "Double B" sounds appropriately gangster, don't you? Let's be honest the Tory party love someone with demonstrated ruthlessness, who's not afraid to stab a friend in the back make the hard choices.

Meanwhile the lurking Boris bides his time before getting ready to pounce like a giant floppy haired bear....