Posts by Andy The Hat 1841 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Oct 2010
"10Mbps powered hub" ...
Luxury!
We installed "modern" 10base2 with stretches of 10base5 to get extra length ... which obviously had to be installed two hours before we got up and before we licked the road clean with out tongues ...
We even ditched the Apple2 server and its RS232 "network" ... eventually.
I guess it's a bit more complicated than that.
Satellite designers usually expect a particular fairing and launch criteria so build to those specifications. At some point, if you keep legacy launchers in production the designers will be building for the new and you will end up with legacy launchers with nothing to launch and doing nothing apart from hitting the accounts. In addition if launch infrastructure has to change for the new design the decision to dump the old and build the new must be taken.
It does seem a bit counter-intuitive but when decisions are made years in advance I can see why it ends up with problems sometimes.
"... equipment will be installed in the local telephone exchange allowing them to continue to use their old phone line as before."
What the hell does that mean?
Perhaps they are leaving a copper feed (with power) to Mrs P's house in the street but that negates the requirement for "battery backup units". Otherwise, if there's fibre conversion in the cabinet, why would they need extra hardware in the exchange? I'm a bit confused here.
"Same in Norfolk....lots of trees = not lots of 4G"
No, I'm 400 yards from where they cut down all the trees to make way for a new "development of 2000 luxurious town houses" in the middle of what used to be the country, they can apparently get 700Mb landlines and 5G. I can't get 4G indoors and only outside by doing phone-semaphore half way up the garden whilst standing on one leg. Turning off 3G is just having a laugh.
My issue with this is basic, how often are prior decisions referred to by "...in his/her summary of case Heffalump versus Mouse, Judge Xyz said ..."
In essence, the Judge has admitted to not writing his summary, it was an AI generated interpretation and not a summary of the written document produced using the understanding and meaning of the presiding Judge in the case.
Therefore would any case, referencing that summary as an example of case law to uphold their arguments in court, be quoting a Judge's prior interpretation of law or some AI generated text?
Lawyers "generating" a case can have their case thrown out but if a the Judge writes "Guilty because ... here's something an AI engine generated based on the information I fed it" that's a very slippery surface consider stepping on.
If they (set A: HMGov scanning only for the public good and not for snooping) can decrypt it then they (set B: any.body potentially decrypting it, certainly not for the public good and definitely for snooping).
When does set(a) intersect with set(b), who is in that intersection and who controls them?
Is this not detailing the fact that truffles (of the porcine-favoured type, there are many others) bio-accumulate caesium. Perhaps boar in northern Europe eat truffles but those in Japan prefer japanese food ...? A wider study comparing more European populations and comparing them to Asian ones may well be interesting.
"the attackers had access to the servers that host ... copies of the electoral registers for the entire UK"
So have the electoral registers been trawled? If that is, or suspected to be the case, why have impacted persons (ie the whole of Britain) not been notified that their personal information has been compromised?
Think we need to watch the ICO starting procedures to sue the company - that would be the Government - for whatever percentage of annual turnover is allowed under the current GDPR-ish regulations ...
" but has offered only scant details of how LLMs and generative AI make cars more … anything."
What about "Ability to analyse movement and behaviour patterns alerting authorities to unwanted interactions between individuals. Analysing and recognising anti-state speech patterns. Preempting and automatically reporting illegal behaviour such as speeding, meeting undesirables or looking at pictures of Winnie the Poo. Identifying authorised occupants of vehicles and legality of travel destinations. Automatically identify, report and take control of miscreants in a vehicle by driving them to the nearest secret police station."
Loads of uses ...
Don't think there's been a post and I cant find out how Voyager actually reorients itself.
I can't imagine mechanical gyros would still be running after all this time (I could be wrong), random searching for a home signal would be too vague, a star finder (and plate solving) would work but not with 1970's level hardware .... So how does it know where its relevant bits are pointing, where it's going in space and whether it's going to get there ...?
"he asked a judge to release him, arguing that he's charged with the same federal counts as former president Donald Trump, who remains at large."
but he will merge into and get lost in the general population, a big, orange, self-opinionated wazzock may be easier to find ...
I presume Trumps "wanted" poster would just be a square cut out of a 1970's paint colour chart?
"It could be used in MRI machines without the extreme cooling required, which has caused a shortage of helium."
So thousands of tons of helium that are used in party balloons, scientific/commercial cryogenics and space flight each year have no impact of the store of Helium then? What about the impact of the sell off of the USA's helium reservoir? What about reduced supply from oil wells (which is the primary source of helium)?
No, **the press's** ego won't allow him (or Bezos) to succeed. A test vehicle fails at some point and "it exploded", a test engine fails "it exploded", a vehicle fails on an overpressure test "it exploded", a completely different vehicle gets to space using *the very same fuel* and Elon has been beaten ...
To be honest, Musky and Bezos could drive cars side by side on a 1/4 mile strip and would still be accused of losing the competition to Ru Paul ...
Some of that surprisingly makes sense: time, location and a "real" flag for a newsworthy photo would make sense; people claiming to be medical professionals and suggesting you should regularly inject Yak urine whilst sticking you fingers into an electrical socket for "hair like Boris" should not make it to any publishing outlet.
Then little snippets like banning negative news and reviews and having to state the source of photographs show the stone cold hand of state censorship ...
Belt drive requires a large mass to damp any oscillations (the level of which are dependent on bearings, motor and belt), direct drive require high frequency drives and decent feedback to prevent oscillations (the level of which are dependent on bearings, motor and control board). The argument is roughly equivalent to whether a linear or switched mode power supply is better in an amp ... Eventually you open your wallet and become a fanbois ...
I may be wrong but I don't believe reproduction of work is the issue per-se, it's the scraping they are worried about, the summary reproduction is the evidence of that scraping.
I see this issue in a different light. Assume a book is *legally* online. As a human, I learn the content of that material, cannot unlearn it and could theoretically use it to produce a summary later with or without copyright notices from my memory. An LLM scrapes a book online. As an LLM, the machine "learns" the content of that material, cannot unlearn it and could theoretically use it to produce a summary later with or without copyright notices from its memory. Does this indicate any fundamental difference between me as a human and a LLM? In other words, is this not just another case of the publisher running after a potential new source of copyright fees as the material by differentiating between human or machine entities on the end of the internet connection and restricting what they can do?
"it affects a lot of the peripheral components needed to use digital chips."
Actually in playstations and some high power gpus significantly more gallium is used in the splodge of "liquid metal" heatsink compound than the whole of the rest of the device ...
Those stupidly over-powered device owners will find their thermal control becoming more expensive ...
I was thinking about this too.
Is the law banning transmission encryption (that the carrier cannot monitor the content of at all) or banning all encryption during transmission (carriers could monitor data but not decode content)?
For example implementing e2ee of a data stream containing a file would be illegal, but would sending a fully pre-encrypted file over an http connection?
I was also wondering where use of the https protocol stands in all this?
"future-ready, digitally enabled, omnichannel platform"
Or, for those hard of techno-crap,
"Future ready" : no email or postal address or phone number to avoid the cost of human interaction
"Digitally enabled" : a web site with a "contact us" form
"Omnichannel platform" : "Digitally enabled" and "future ready" ...
But, not knowing who Who is and not wishing to know who Who is, do they advertise or push third party content within their site or sell marketing data out of their site?
If they only sell their own product and data is used internally to the site that could be construed as simply being an online-catalogue with appropriate marketing and self-promotion.
However if they sell third party advertising and content or have hidden data collection/selling regimes that would be a different kettle of Zuck and leaves any large seller open to individual state control ...
If the EU haven't well defined who will be directly impacted by this ruling I would suggest its lawyers and policy makers should be sacked for getting it wrong, or perhaps congratulated by big business on their creation of a "hard hitting public friendly policy" with effective escape routes and avoidance procedures for those who want to ...
I have watched the Web develop for many years.
My obvious question is why commentards and lawmakers now generally assume those that provide outlets for individual commentary (Google, Meta, Microsoft etc) should be made legally responsible for censoring that free commentary?
Why are the individuals/organisations that make the comments not being held legally responsible for their own comments if they are *unlawful* rather than simply distasteful?
It seems to me that it's much easier for governments to make unaccountable bodies decide how to censor free speech and then blame them for lack of control (or over zealous filtering) rather than potentially having a noose of obvious state-censorship tightening around the neck of the "all-for-freedom of speech, democratic" government.
Control what is illegal by directly enforcing the law of the land, using the law enforcement agencies, against those responsible for the comments. If the law isn't fit for the task then change it. Any other way invites happily walking into state censorship by proxy.
'competition is absent “for technical reasons” '
I can see this phrase being recycled when Palantir inevitably get a contract ... and when Crapita get their next contract ...
Somewhere in the specification it will say 'Company name must resemble "Palantir" ' or 'Demonstrable experience in massively under quoting and late delivery of product required' ...
Perhaps the wording is to stringent? "Batteries must be replaceable" (eg by any service tech with a soldering iron not "an authorised service engineer") rather than "batteries must be easily replaceable by customers" (with a bread knife and a mallet) would be a more sensible option in my view. Even my "waterproof" watch is no longer waterproof unless the battery is replaced by someone with half a grain of common sense ...
less fuel, less weight and less lift so smaller volume wings makes sense. The wing struts will produce lift so it is close to a bi-plane At one extreme it could become a bi-plane glider with maximum lift and little forward velocity, at the other a dart shaped projectile with minimal lift but high speed ... neither would need much fuel while in the air. In fact I saw a documentary once where a runner on the road competed against a elastic-band-powered flyer. Spoiler alert, the road runner won, Wile E Coyote ran out of power and lost ...
"MOVEit is a file transfer tool used by enterprises, as well as small and medium-sized businesses (SMB), to share sensitive data, such as personally identifiable information, banking data, health information, and similar, in a secure manner. That helps businesses prevent incidents that can lead to identity theft, wire fraud, and more."
By definition, organisations using this tool expect this information to be end-to-end secure and the data is supposedly encrypted en-route. No "lying around on a server" is suggested.
What people are missing is that the FBI *can* monitor and eavesdrop on US citizens but they need a warrant first, thus justifiable reason to take actions (eg he's a potential spy in contact with China). Not an infallible system but there's some kind of restriction imposed.
702 removes the basic requirement for justifiability, that's what makes it very bad.
If Mr X downloads unsavoury images of something and it's tracked to your IP, at the very least your life will be made significantly more difficult until you are shown to be innocent.
An interesting issue is your legal standing if your wi-fi is open and used for nefarious purposes (and is shown not to be you), you are still running public wi-fi with all that entails
eg see https://reliablenetworks.co.uk/public-wifi-legal-and-security-implications/
so you may be in legal hot water anyway ...
"The only reason why cheques are being dropped is because the banks and big companies cannot be arsed doing something that takes effort - in a similar way to having real branches."
Same with cash - try paying it in. Oh yes Sir, as the owner of a small business you can pay in cash but only if you shut your shop before 2pm, travel 15 miles to the nearest branch, pay for parking, stand in the 30 minute queue (in the branch that nobody uses apparently) to pay in your cash then drive back and reopen your shop ...
Cash is next to go - as simple person-to-person transfer it holds its face value and doesn't make the banks money but EVERY credit/bank card transfer gives them an automatic cut ...
"20 angstrom and smaller process tech. That's roughly equivalent to 2nm."
Given the definition of an Angstrom is in meters and 10^-10m (0.1nm), exactly how "roughly equivalent" are 20 Angstroms and 2nm ... roughly of course ...?
I believe it's "roughly equivalent" to 1/250000 the width of a pubic hair ... (your mileage may vary, compute an average measurement from a variety of sources, don't take samples at work, wash the micrometer afterwards.)
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