* Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

21278 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Dec 2009

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China takes TikTok-WeChat ding-dong to World Trade Organization, accuses US, India of breaking global rules

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Re: doesn't China already ban a lot of US apps?

That's the difference.

The USA isn't banning it - it's banning it unless it's sold cheap to a friend of his.

Germany bans swastika flags, it doesn't force the Chinese Swastika flag company to pay a commission to a CDU donor

Excel Hell: It's not just blame for pandemic pandemonium being spread between the sheets

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Re: Relax...

> almost all the actual uses of Excel in practice are as a simple spreadsheet

Almost all actual uses of Excel are as an ETL (extract-transform-load) tool.

ie to download information from one app, reformat/reorganise it and send it to some other app - and it's extraordinarily bad at this - in ways that most users don't know.

Hence all the genes misclassified as dates, dropped initial zeros in phone numbers, bad handling of embedded commas etc

Hasta la vista, Ola: TfL bans ridesharing startup, claiming unlicensed drivers picked up passengers

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Re: introduction to British life that only a black-cabby can provide

I thought many black-cabbies (as opposed to 'black' cabbies) were in favour of free trips home for Indians ?

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

But does this Indian company offer the same introduction to British life that only a black-cabby can provide ?

IBM manager had to make one person redundant from choice of two, still bungled it and got firm done for unfair dismissal

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Re: And so the other guy

But then he/she/it would argue that they were made redundant because of the other guys lawsuit and not because of their own performance - and so they go to court as well.

Resulting in IBM deliberately hiring a new person specifically to be made redundant.

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Re: I think that I might have also worked for that company

>do you want the flight control system written by exactly the 'correct' ethnic diversity of people, or the best people

Well by the cheapest veteran-owned business in the city giving the biggest tax breaks in the state whose senator is going to support buying our new fighter

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

And so the other guy

Got made redundant instead?

Big IQ play from IT outsourcer: Can't create batch files if you can't save files. Of any kind

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Re: Classic techie mistake

Wasn't this a Feynman story?

The safes at Los Alamos were ridiculously easy to open, he showed them this and the response was a security memo telling everyone not to let Feynman near their safe.

Bill Gates lays out a three-point plan to rid the world of COVID-19 – and anti-vaxxer cranks aren't gonna like it

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Why not just make the tracking chips new and shiny and charge $1000 for them ?

People would queue up

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Re: I often

> and they are not for tracking, it's for mind control.

I don't advise a haircut, man. All hairdressers are in the employment of the government. Hair are your aerials. They pick up signals from the cosmos, and transmit them directly into the brain.

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

>In recent history the main danger for catching smalpox was from a research facility that held stores of smallpox.virus

So far that hasn't happened - although given the people who run the labs it may well not be reported!

Not wishing to give any ammunition to the nutters, but I think the last "death due to smallpox" was the wife of an army guy who was vaccinated. She was on chemotherapy or had some immune disease IIRC and had a reaction to his contact

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>I don't think it's unlikely Trump would get his way on this in the US.

"Former One America News correspondent Emily Miller gets senior FDA post

Former reporter for right-wing network has no known health expertise, and has made inaccurate coronavirus claims"

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Re: re: First prove your vaccine actually works.

So you would be good with a vaccine developed in secret in Russia?

Imported solely by TrumpDrug Corp?

Approved in 24hours by the FDA, under its new boss Trump Jnr ?

Not an anti-vaxxer by any means but I'm not planning to be first in the queue to inject bleach and sunshine

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Depends on the virus, how quickly it evolves and how big a population have it.

Looks like we were lucky with smallpox that it didn't manage to out evolve a century of relatively ineffective vaccines.

Since the EU won't share all its toys, UK Space Agency fires up fund to support more international collaboration

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Re: An Application for Smashing Applications

How much of amfm1 did you read before realising it wasn't an Dominic Cummings official statement ?

Huawei's UK code reviewers say Chinese mega-corp is still totally crap at basic software security. Bad crypto, buffer overflows, logic errors...

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Re: Not sure about this...

> so why not point out the problems?

Because Huawei are the official enemy of the people (at the moment)

It would be like the rebels finding the unsheilded exhaust port and telling the Empire so they coudl fix it

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Re: Lets hope

>We exploited a few of the vulnerabilities in the Chinese network

The bits of it that are in English at least

US comms watchdog calls for more scrutiny of submarine cables that land in 'adversary countries'

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But if you don't have a cable to China they can't get into the pipes with their hashtags

Hydrogen-powered train tested on Britain's railway tracks as diesel alternative

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Re: Not as green as 25kv overhead

>Natural gas is hydrogen bonded to carbon

Obvious solution is to combine the hydrogen with carbon = green carbon capture tech

Then distribute the resulting methane safely by pipeline into tanks on the train = simple existing technology

Use solar, wind or reliable nuclear electricity sent over low-loss 25KV overhead lines to split the methane into carbon and hydrogen. the hydrogen can then be fed to the fuel cell.

A future Britain could then develop some technology to allow trains to be powered by the waste carbon byproduct

Singapore Airlines turns A380 into a restaurant, delivers plane food to homes

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Re: Among the odder products of the COVID-19 pandemic are “flights to nowhere”

>"why would visitors wish to leave the Garden State in such a hurry?"

Why is New Jersey called "The Garden State"?

"Because 'Oil and Petrochemical Refinery State' wouldn't fit on a license plate?

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Re: Among the odder products of the COVID-19 pandemic are “flights to nowhere”

Used to be that EWR was the only one with communist transit into NYC. Monorail to train station and a train straight into Penn st.

Have they finally built a way to get to jfk without a national debt taxi fare and a trip through a Mad Max set?

YouTube axes crowdsourced captioning: Use our buggy speech-to-subtitle code or pay an approved third party

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Re: That's daft

You can always caption them and send them to the original creator to upload.

The trouble with blocking users who spam is that they can create a billion new accounts. You could limit uploads to only accounts that have previously uploaded highly rated captions but there is a bit of a logical problem

Corsair's K70 MK.2 does nothing a cheaper keyboard can't, but the steep price gets you top-notch components

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

There's nothing the Corsair does

I would hope for that price it includes the extra 2 secret letters that ordinary people don't know about

Airbus drone broke up in-flight because it couldn’t handle Australian weather

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Re: Are they not aware of winds and wind shear?

Most places that you want 90days of round the clock aerial surveillance you are are planning to drop shit on their heads anyway - this thing ain't to bring cat video to the kangarooa

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Re: Are they not aware of winds and wind shear?

Yes so you either build it twice as strong to handle more turbulence and reduce its payload and flight time. Or you make it light and assume you lose a few to bad weather. The nice thing about unmanned is you get to decide

NATO's at risk if you go your own Huawei on 5G, US government warns Germany

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

human rights abuses by the Chinese government

Thank G*d we don't rely on China to build any other computer stuff.

UK mobile network EE plumps for Nokia to provide that all-important 5G RAN equipment

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Re: Made in ...

Yes, next door to the Apple and Lenovo and Motorola gear we can still use

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I for one

Welcome our viking invaders

Square Kilometre Array signs off on construction plans – UK last holdout before building phase begins

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Re: Pure science benefits us mere mortals

A shame really, it could celebrate a very English musical style.

Although one that did rely on immigrants which could be a problem for the current government

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Re: spinoff?

The difference is that in radio astronomy you can add up lots of low signal<noise data and come up with an answer. If you sum up the internet you get "cats are funny/cute" and "people are idiots" which we already knew.

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Different science goals.

VLBI lets you get incredible resolution of very bright objects at the expense of a lot of observing time.

This is about studying a lot of faint distant objects in lots of wavelengths simultaneously to study lots of different physics. You can still get pretty good resolution across the size of the sites but I don't think there are plans to do VLBI.

Japan unveils new scheme to speed up adoption of cashless payments

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Re: I dont blame them.

Obviously why cash is so widespread in unstable revolutionary regimes like Japan

EU's decision on UK data adequacy set to become 'political football' in broader Brexit negotiations

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Re: Erm...

That's the whole point. If Eu data is being harvested in the UK, where do you sue ?

Sue the UK govt in UK courts where they can just write a new law, or declare it national security, or tack it onto the end of an enabling act or emergency powers bill

Or in Europe where the UK government can just ignore it

.

Feds warn foreign disinformation will be spamming US voters well after the November election to sow discord and doubt

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Re: Wishful thinking

>> People are urged to check their facts carefully with multiple sources and on official government websites

And never believe anything until it has been officially denied

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Re: Voter fraud

Sometimes you need immigration to bring the best minds to the job and Australians are the world leaders in this sort of 'News'.

Exercise-tracking app Strava to give away data sweated out after four billion runs, rides and rambles

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Although anonymous collected data is sometimes a good-thing (tm)

Track every cell phone's movement through a city and you have a good map of users and can decide who is driving, cycling, walking from their speed - so you know where to build infrastructure.

The alternative is you do traffic surveys, so you have a couple of retired people sitting on lawn chairs doing counts on one morning.

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Re: Really useful data

But it is biased toward road cyclists doing long flat loops for race training.

Suppose strava was big among mountain bikers, the city would start routing all bike lanes up and down the steepest hills. It would be like putting cross-walks where there is the highest density of rock climbers.

Windows to become emulation layer atop Linux kernel, predicts Eric Raymond

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Re: Am I the only one?

>Microsoft could be making more money from Office than from Windows

And they make more money from the cloud than anything.

Imagine if there was no windows desktop and the only way to run your windows apps was on Microsoft cloud then not only do Microsoft get to tie all their users into the cloud, all the publishers of Windows(tm) software become app-store victims just like on iPhone

Bad boys bad boys, what you gonna do? Los Angeles Police Department found fibbing about facial recognition use

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Re: Sigh.

Unless you were dangerously asleep

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Re: Use it on the cops too.

Train AI on news feeds of violent demonstrations and it would come to the conclusion that violence is commuted by white guys in blue uniforms with helmets and gas masks

Inflated figures and customers who were never there. Just another data migration then

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Re: Sometimes they're biggies!

<phone call> I don't have any money, but I have a special set of skills, and those skills involve highly leveraged bets on the Japanese bubble stock market continuing to go to infinity....

Brexit travel permits designed to avoid 7,000-lorry jams come January depend on software that won't be finished till April

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Re: What's in a name...

I want to see a website explode and leave scorched eyebrows

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Re: Self-limiting

So if Britain were to sign a free-trade deal with Japan we could make Nissans in Britain, ship them to Japan duty free where they could then be exported to France and sold there.

So it's just like the cloud !

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

But they don't want Kent to become a lorry park

So we have a permit to enter Kent

So lorries have to queue up on the M25 to enter Kent

But we don't want the M25 to be a lorry park

So they have to queue up on the M1 with a permit to enter the M25

Ultimate solution is to have them queue up in Norther Ireland and make the Irish sea the border. Everything is clear, Boris and The Cummings were playing 4D chess

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Re: An alternative solution

You mean people, goods and services being able to freely move between Kent and Sussex with no controls or borders? Madness !

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Re: Self-limiting

> lorries will be forced to charge a LOT more for cross-channel work to account for the time spent queuing

And the cost of coming back empty.

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Re: The other question

What about exporters in Kent?

Are they exempt from the 'entering Kent' permit

Are they unable to get a permit and so banned from exporting?

Do they have to get a permit, drive out of Kent to queue up to get back into Kent to join the queue for Dover?

First-world problems: The pumpkin spice latte is here, but the Starbucks loyalty card app has wiped my balance

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Wow 1% discount

For lending them money free and probably the 10-20% in lost or unused cards or small balances that are never redeemed

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