Posts by Milton

And the day after he's retired ...

And the day after he's retired ...

... he'll follow the time-worn tradition of ex-military when speaking on politically sensitive topics.

Suddenly he'll discover that he can speak the truth, without the varnish and gilding and eliding and constant painful awareness that his career depends upon saying whatever his senior officers, and the political imbeciles they report to, want him to say.

It feels good, as many a retired general/admiral/chief of defence staff et al has discovered ... though it be much, much too late to make any difference to the current disaster-in-progress.

Nostalgia dreams

It gives me a strangely nostalgic feeling to see the venerable 727 being put to use like this. It always was one of my favourite planes, along with the Tristar (amazingly comfortable and advanced for its time, good memories of some smooth cruising over the US in the 80s) and the VC-10, which shared with the 727 an excess of thrust (for hot-and-high airports) that meant pilots could really light the tail and head for the moon when they felt like it. The crabs used VC-10s to ferry soldiers around sometimes, with seats (sensibly, as should be done in all airliners) facing aft, and I swear that sometimes the RAF pilots firewalled the throttles and yanked the nose up just so they could punish poor pongos as their livers were garrotted by seatbelts ...

I note that £4k is a lot less than the ransom demanded from wealthy adolescents for Branson's fatheaded "Virgin Galactic" deathtrap, which delivers basically the same thing: a few minutes' "weightlessness" which is actually ballistic free-fall—in Beardie's case at a very high altitude so that the aforementioned rich halfwits can get an "astronaut" merit badge despite not even getting into orbit .... or doing anything useful or even going anywhere, in fact.

Touching a nerve

I feel some sympathy with the post about direct-to-brain interfacing. Having to jump through so many hoops to satisfy the annoyingly choosy Mk#1 Eyeball would just go away if we could plug into the Visual Data Bus (used to be called the Optic Nerve) and feed whatever the hell we like, properly formatted pix, to the brain. Right?

But no. The problem is, as I understand it (i.e. no expert) that the eye effectively does a lot of the filtering, call it pre-processing work, before it reveals to the brain whatever it thinks the latter should be allowed to worry about. I believe this includes "fixing" the image, by for example inferring that areas of colour are sharply bounded if lines are perceptible between them—even if, in reality, there is bleed between the colours. Also there is selective blindness: simply ignoring quite large and otherwise noticeable features because something more interesting is the focus of concentration. There's also the question of relative sizes, whereby the eye reports erroneously on dimensions because it is taking cues from other parts of a scene.

We've all seen these. The first is one reason early colour TV was able to use so little broadcast bandwidth: it relied upon the human eye putting in features that just weren't there, in the picture, ever. The second you'll have noted if you were ever fooled by the gorilla-behind-the-basketball-players vignette: your eye was following the frantic motion of the players and you never so much as noticed that a gorilla had walked across the court. The third is a favourite of trompe l'oeil and other illusions you can find all over the web. (And: how many of the decisions about the *distances* of objects are already made by the time the consciousness "sees" that heavily filtered, processed, image? Read up on why good 2D movies are already kinda 3D movies, for some answers.) My wild-assed guess is that the eye is making dozens if not hundreds of modifications to pre-process stuff for the consciousness, and we're just barely scratching the surface with current understanding.

The eye isn't doing this in isolation from the brain, but the brain isn't doing it in isolation from the eye, either: in fact, arguably, the eye is a highly specialised part of the brain. So, tempting as it may be, we can't simply decode the Visual Data Bus and then shovel our own bits onto it.

That said, there are some awesomely clever people working in the field of biological vision, and I don't doubt that we will eventually find a way to get images into the brain directly—though perhaps it were more accurate to say, "to get a detailed subjective impression of an optical environment accepted by the brain as valid".

My guess, FWIW, is that when this happens VR will *still* not be good enough to fool the brain, or convince anyone that they are looking at reality.

Mr Darcy's motivations

The claims are actually far more outrageously hyped than the article suggests.

True reading comprehension would offer you a few pages of Jane Austen, depicting some pivotal events, conversation and the author's inner monologue, and then ask questions.

This should include stuff like "How long does it take to get from Longbourn to Netherfield?" because a human will assess the text for an in-context answer (by means of transport of the historical era depicted). An AI is liable to be quite stupid enough to say "84 seconds" since that's how long it takes a Tesla at the legal speed limit to cover the distance.

Less tongue-in-cheek, a human will know how to answer questions like "What are the contrasting character aspects of Mr Collins and Mr Darcy? Whom do you think Elizabeth Bennet respects more, and why?" "Does she like Mr Darcy as soon as she meets him? If not, what is her opinion?" "How does the Georgiana character influence the story, particularly Elizabeth's feelings and opinions of others?"

You could make up a virtually endless list of questions, through which human readers will prove their humanity and intelligence by their answers—and which will leave so-called "AI" looking clownishly stupid.

My point being (and quite unoriginal, I admit) that the difference between "extracting facts from text" and "comprehending the world and people and feelings" is an almost unbridgeably vast gulf.

The AI hype—not only from marketurds who are paid to lie, but painfully earnest from technologists who completely fail to understand silicon's limitations—would be quite funny, if it weren't for the fact that so much of this torrent of drivel is taken seriously and reported on by media who, from their witless naivete, might as well be AIs themselves.

The Great Deception ...

The Great Deception ... way back when .. was to convince customers that the OS was a cool, aerodynamic rocketship of a product ...

When in fact it was then, and is now, there just to run programs, safely, securely, without fuss.

A thoughtful computer user should not have to give a phlying phart about his OS. It exists only to execute code and do basic housekeeping.

In point of fact, a really *good * OS is, or soon becomes, invisible.

MS appears to be heading in the opposite direction, trying to sell its ever-more-obese spying technology with bells you don't need and whistles you don't want, long after you'd settled on Win7 and thought "Ok, that'll do the job".

Note to the literate ...

"Explode" is not the same thing as "catches fire".

If you've *ever* been near anything that actually exploded, you'd know the difference.

Instead of earnestly scrawling "explode" in every story about lithium batteries sometimes combusting, you could go for the "my readers might actually be adults" style of journalism. Go on, give it a try ... who knows, you might grow up too.

Talking to the Hand

Because that's what it feels like. Comey talked arrant shit about backdoors despite a virtually endless queue of experts, including the NSA, explaining it simply cannot be done in the way the Feds envisage. Now Wray is doing the same thing, despite being told the exact same thing by the same people. I cannot believe the FBi doesn't have a few high-end crypto people of its own, who must shake their heads in despair every time the Boss gets on its hind legs and talks the same stupid crap.

Why do they do this? I appreciate that the math of modern encryption systems is a bit beyond the average FBI head's ability to make change, but surely to heaven they have at least enough nous to ask the experts? And having heard the unanimous answer ("No! It just cannot work, at all, ever!") they would accept the advice, and move on to battles they *can* win.

I simply do not understand why they are so mule-headedly stubborn. It isn't just stupidity. It's something more than that. What makes a senior FBI guy—or a politician like our own hopeless imbecile Theresa May—keep saying "I want the world to be flat" despite being told again and again and again that it just. Is. Not. Possible. Why??

Resolution, resolution, resolution

Resolution, resolution, resolution—the mantra of screen real estate. The article is interesting for its nod to the influence of video, but misses a significant point: how have the increasing, and arguably unforgiving advances in screen resolution affected the required standards of SFX?

Sure, cinema had always offered vastly better resolution than your TV screen, but it was, as the article, said, a transient experience. You got to see the Thing morph into a disembodied organ, or Jeff Goldblum curiously rip off bits of his body, only *once*, then and there, and you couldn't ask the projectionist to rewind the reel for loving frame-by-frame inspection. The pace of the story, clever cutting and camera angles, even the composer's score to distract you—it all helped the SFX to bite you on the emotional arse and then move on, quickly, before you could raise critical faculties to make judgements on shiny latex, unconvincing red jelly, or jerky stop-motion robometalskelebots.

VHS was low resolution, and arguably was kinder than cinema to the SFX: the "problem" of high resolution really kicked in with Blu-Ray and HD broadcasting. It wasn't just that actors and presenters began to worry even more about their makeup, concerned that—oh, horror!—pores were now visible: it was the SFX guys too, realising that they had fewer and yet fewer places to hide.

If personal (i.e. outside the cinema) screen resolution had remained low, I wonder: would CGI and SFX technology have developed with the urgency and pace that it has? Answers in a freeze-frame please ...

I don't like to say—

—I told you so. That said, most Reg readers didn't need to be told this, I admit. Unlike the general tabloid-wiping population, technologists have a healthy scepticism about claims for "AI", as should anyone who's ever considered what a Turing test really tries to elicit, or indeed, who has ever considered what intelligence really is.

"AI" is not here, not in any form worth the "I" part of the acronym, and only marketurds, fathead politicians (well, *all* morons, as a supergroup) and some lazy journos believe otherwise. "AI" is not going to be here for at least another two or three decades at the soonest, I would suggest, because even if we could solve the problem of simulating the number and type of neuronal connections in a human brain—monumentally difficult all by itself—we have barely begun to appreciate how biological implementation may be critically different from the electronic kind, and have gone basically nowhere in synthesising an understanding of motivation, agency and emotion in a machine context.

Here's a stick-me-neck-out prediction. First, uncontroversially I think, within ten years, computing platforms will exist which seek to pass a (video) face-to-face voice-to-voice Turing-type test when challenged by a reasonably well-educated normal human being. The 'Uncanny Valley' problem of human face simulation will have been solved and vocal intonation, use of grammar etc will also be good enough to be convincing. The sheer quantity of data and pattern recognition resources available to this "AI" will make it seem awesomely well informed.

And my prediction? I predict that as soon as our "AI" goes online, there will be competition to see who can devise the neatest, simplest, most elegant ways to expose it most quickly. There will be burning rivalry among those who seek kudos for formulating the fastest ways of fooling the computer—the questions, answers, statements, requests, digressions, lies, emotional cues and responses which most rapidly reveal the machine behind the curtain. Think of them as "filters" which briskly separate a definite human from a definite fraud.

And for many years, I submit, the best filters will always succeed within 60 seconds. I wouldn't be particularly surprised to find that we'll still be concocting them in 50 years' time. Who knows, we may even call them the Voigt-Kampff Test ....

Wrong genre

Should let the so-called AI (which is clearly and above all things, NOT "intelligent", artificially or otherwise) practise on rap—you know, rap with the silent 'c'. It's incoherent, moronic drivel *already*. "AI" could only improve it.

PS: Since it becomes more obvious every single day that "AI" is a misnomer, just marketing hype, and that the systems flagged as "AI" are just highly specific machine learning systems incapable of actual thinking or creativity, shouldn't we rename them? We could even keep the initials if we just opt for truth and call them "Artificial Imbeciles".

Or will that cause confusion with the White House?

That horse has bolted

Notwithstanding a completely stupid Apple-level price, I guess I'm not the only one who experienced one of the early Surface3 devices and found it a ridiculously unreliable POS and now will never go near anything with the word "surface" in it.

Sure, I could technically afford one and I am thinking of a new portable ... But even half that money buys more power, function, expandability, reliability, a bigger screen - so why piss my cash up a wall? So that colleagues will say "Ooh"?

Where's the mass panic?

"A fucking wing fallen off the back of an intergalactic lorry. No way. Where's the mass panic?"

Figure it out.

If the aliens had come along even five years ago and blown the White House to smithereens, there'd have been mass panic.

Now it's 2017: the Year of Lunatics Taking Over the Asylum. There's more likely to be panic if the aliens *don't* blow up the White House.

Once again, humanity has shown—with Trump, and Brexit—that it is unfit to govern itself. So if the aliens want to have a go at running things, let 'em. (Unless they're also a bunch of fat old greedy lying white men, that is.)

And the consequences ...?

I don't think it's particularly controversial to point out that IBM, like a solid majority of big businesses, has grown a cadre of supremely incompetent senior managers. It's typical and commonplace because unless they are very, very careful indeed, almost all companies' senior strata, as they grow, become parasitised by people who think and act like politicians instead of professionals, and IBM—whom I have worked alongside, but never worked for—certainly appear to have that problem in spades. Once you have allowed the upper levels to be colonised by self-serving liars and greedmongers, it's all downhill.

This sad story perpetuates and multiplies because there are few consequences for failure, however abject. Being "rewarded for failure" is a cliché, almost, because of its widespread applicability to politics and big business.

And thus to IBM. It has been badly managed both strategically and tactically, making a decade's worth of unforced and sometimes even obvious errors, shortsighted, blinkered, unimaginative, hampered by institutional arrogance. What will its Board's pay cheques look like this year? Will there be bonuses, even? Will *anyone* responsible for this mess pay *any* kind of price?

Or shall we see yet another Marissa Meyer moment, as the architect of disaster, almost single-handedly to blame for a series of stupid decisions, walks off with a few million?

Not a welcome opinion

I know this is not something many people want to hear, but ...

If you pay about three times as much for a phone than is necessary, largely because it's a status symbol, knowing perfectly well that without the slightest technical or engineering justification its battery cannot be simply swapped by you; not to mention that it will also lack the simple expandability and versatility of a uSD slot, again with no good reason; and for which the $23 actual difference between various models' storage levels is charged to you in a $200 increment ... well, you get what you deserve, don't you?

There's an almost infinite range of phones out there costing far less, offering greater versatility, reliability and expandability, with batteries you can swap in 10 seconds flat, with operating systems *not* designed to steal from you, with a value-for-money proposition that makes the iPhone look like a lump of pointless jewellery—

—but you'll continue to buy massively overpriced Apple shinies so that, even when the battery has yet again died, you can leave it displayed face down on the desk so that everyone knows *you* paid out of your arse for it.

In sum: Apple get away with this kind of reprehensible, dishonest, avarcious behaviour because people slavishly buy into their marketing propaganda and simply *have* to be in the herd.

You get mugged because you keep asking for it.

... what damage can be done ...

"The craft operated and under 400 feet, and was limited to carrying parcels that weighed less than five pounds."

The terminal velocity of a dense object falling from 400 feet could be over 90 mph. At 2kg it will have about the same kinetic energy as 7.62mm rifle bullet (old soldiers will know how much damage an SLR round could do).

Thus we must hope that parcels will be equipped with parachutes or wrapped in fluffy shock-absorbent layers.

Because otherwise, the choice of every child in the playground is simple: be killed outright if it hits your skull corner-on, or get lucky if it strikes flat-side-on—merely breaking your neck for a lifetime of quadriplegia.

Simplify and add lightness

I am assuming that the emphasis on "mathematical backdoors" is strict, which means that we can analyse the issue without going down a level to the *implementation* of the math.

A math backdoor is something we should be able to find by looking at the math itself, in the knowledge that if it were perfectly and without error implemented as algorithm and program code, the backdoor would still be there. We're NOT discussing deliberate wrinkles in the coding of the system. (If we do include those—think of an implementation that is deliberately careless with registers, for example—then I would have thought such failings would be discoverable by minutely comparing the *intention* of the math with the actuality of the code.)

If it is a math-only issue, "simplify and add lightness" would seem to be particularly relevant, because the more complex the math, the easier it will be to hide weaknesses in the thicket. Whether it's elliptic curves or something else, we should be bearing down hard on the simplest solutions that do the job (and yes, I recognise that "simple" is relative in this case!)

I guess I am a little surprised to have received the impression that we may be using algorithms whose fundamental math has not been exhaustively analysed, distilled and checked out by armies of brilliant sceptics ... hmm, if Bruce Schneier won't come along to this thread and make a post, I'm gonna have to go beard him in his lair ;-)

Opiate of the idiots

Colour me surprised that FB has admitted something that has been jaw-droppingly obvious for at least five years: using FB is basically bad for you and frequently constitutes damaging addictive behaviour.

The parallels between social media addiction and drug/alcohol abuse hardly need to be rehearsed here, and the solution is broadly the same: stop. Just stop.

No one can do it for you. You alone have to find the character and willpower to do the right thing for yourself. The pushers and distillers aren't going to go away while there is money to be made, and prohibition isn't on the cards. So you, personally, have to look into the abyss and ask yourself whether you want to spend the rest of your life as a slave to the tiny pricks of curiosity and titillation that fleetingly tickle your pleasure centres but leave you, in the long run, feeling worthless, miserable, resentful, irritable, depressed and ever dissatisfied with yourself.

Social media, used in moderation as just another means of staying in touch with family and real friends (not your hundreds of FB "friends") is one thing, and has a place. But it has become a manipulative environment serving corporate greed, full of anonymous cowards and the foul views they wouldn't dare spout in public, boasting, lying, posturing ... sucking us all in to an artificial world of nonsense.

You do not NEED Facebook. You do not NEED Twitter. You could revert to a feature phone enabling you to have actual conversations with people you know when they're not around. You could spend real time with real people.

Just say No.

Heaven forfend that vulnerable minds ("Of course, it doesn't affect ME") should see other humans having it off, but at least they'll still be able to watch atrocious violence, abuse, terrorist executions and the rest on all the other non-porn websites. Always wondered what kind of mental cesspits would-be censors must have, that they'll mouth stridently about a spot of shagging, yet have almost nothing to say about media depictions of people being shot, blown up, tortured and creatively murdered all over the place. It's ok to watch Schwarzenegger blast half a dozen people to bloody chunks, but GET THAT NIPPLE OFF THE SCREEN!

Take several lazy-minded, self-righteous idiots, add a huge dollop of technical ignorance, and get—bad, stupid laws. It's called modern politics.

AI = Marketing = Lying

I've bored the assembled commentardsphere more than once by pointing out that there is presently no such thing as "AI" and probably won't be for at least another decade—not the "artificial intelligence" that people meant when using the term for the last 50 years, before the marketurds got their slimy hands on it, anyway.

But if even the Reg simply won't be bothered to call out this brazen misuse of the term, slapped onto anything that uses "machine learning" techniques, I guess there's little chance for the rest of the media, scientifically and technically illiterate as 97% of it is.

Let's be clear, though, that the fibs, bias and propaganda associated with the various Alpha achievements are absolutely to be expected in this context. "AI" is being relentlessly hyped and exaggerated, the label is being misused, sometimes hilariously, machine learning tech is frequently being misapplied and wasted, and everyone who might have a dollar to spend is being told they've got to have it (usually via eyewateringly awful web ads). We saw this with "cloud", when the 1970s architecture of connecting remotely to powerful computing resources was resurrected as if it was a Wonderful New Thing; we've been seeing it with the Internet of Shyte, as every greedy idiot on the planet comes up with increasingly ludicrous reasons for connecting your toaster, dog, toothbrush, greenhouse and left lower molar to the internet, thereafter to be infected by malware and used for mining {Enter This Week's New Bit Currency Here} before it steals your identity, money, wife and aforementioned dog.

If politicians and marketurds are the scourge of our age, it's because they have one thing above all else in common: lies, lies, constant lies.

And poor dog.

Entirely the wrong model?

I'm not against private enterprise and all in favour of people risking their cash in researching, inventing, building, manufacturing, investing and competing. The free market is a good thing provided monopolies are forbidden, healthy competition is fostered, excessive greed is punished and companies in general are reminded—forcibly when necessary—that with their rights come social responsibilities.

All of which said, I'm increasingly of the view that some services—things you could fairly describe with the term "strategic, essential national infrastructure" should not be in private hands. In the UK we have seen frankly appalling things happen since the privatisation of energy, public transport and communications.

How many of you remember when first post arrived by breakfast, and second delivery was done by 2pm? Now we're lucky to see any post at all by 3pm. Consider how much worse the rail services are now, even compared with much-maligned British Rail—the UK's rail services now being measurably worse even than Italy's, and costing far, far more. Look at the ridiculously contrived "market" in energy, where a bundle of different greedy under-investing companies all sell you exactly the same electricity and gas coming from the same sources.

IMHO, the provision of internet connectivity falls into the same category of strategic, essential national infrastructure. Competition, such as it is, has not proven particularly useful, especially given the suppliers' usual gimmick, learned from mobile phone networks, of trying to confuse customers so that simple price like-for-like comparisons cannot be made. (Funny how those who squeal loudest about the virtues of competition are always the first to try to suppress it, isn't it?)

Perhaps the answer is to integrate one robust national internet system, working similarly to how telecoms once did, with guaranteed service levels and coverage, with surpluses used for re-investment or sent to the Treasury for NHS topups, instead of siphoned off for greedy shareholders. It would quickly solve the problem of failure to invest in areas where geography and population are otherwise claimed to be unprofitable, too.

There's no good reason why this wouldn't work in the UK and the US, and it sucks the oxygen out of the neutrality debate if we do what is sensible and logical: treat the internet as a necessary public service and free it from political bullshit and greedy lobbyists.

Overcoming a wee tad of scepticism

Like many, I suspect that while quantum computing holds promise, it's being grossly over-hyped right now (yes, like so-called AI) and, for practical results, may remain "a few years away" for a decade or two. (Indeed, there are defensible grounds for believing that true AI will not exist until quantum computing actually works to scale.)

As for Q#, which I've taken a look at (without, I may add, pretending to understand all of it during an hour's perusal!) I can make one confident prediction. Most Reg readers long since realised the truth of the fact that where coding is concerned there are indeed sheep and goats. We've all worked in places where there were both (and of course, management were incapable of understanding the difference). Now, though, I predict that we new a new animal analogy. Henceforth, we'll have to refer to sheep, goats, and ... Racehorses? Gorillas? Any ideas ...?

What did I miss?

I haven't time to read every comment, sorry. So someone has probably already said—

"But F-35As are not designed for carrier ops (no arrestor, landing gear too weak)"

"The F-35C is the carrier variant designed for catapault takeoff and arrested recovery"

"The F-35C has performance (range, payload) similar to the -A and waaay better than the crappy -B"

"The F-35B is now our only option for the carriers, having flogged the 'obsolete' Sea Harriers to USMC"

"The carriers don't have and never will have CATOBAR" systems, thanks to government mind-changing repeatedly during procurement"

The RAF has rarely shared planes with the Navy because the specs of the planes are too different. In the Falklands some RAF Harriers were supplied to augment embarked Shar squadrons but that was possible only because Harriers don't need special equipment for carrier ops.

BUT the RAF will not want to cripple itself by adopting the feeble F35-B. Its payload and range are simply too crummy, in addition to all the multitude of failings shared by all F35-variants.

In short, the F-35 procurement has echoes of Brexit. A series of increasingly stupid decisions fuelled by politics, arrogance and ignorance has led us to a place where there are now no good alternatives left.

The only "good" thing about F-35 is that in any war against a competent adversary, we won't lose the carriers because of the lousy plane—we'll lose them because the carrier "battle group" will have so few escort ships, due to defence cuts, that the ships will be sunk in less than 24 hours anyway, probably by a swarm of Russian vampires.

And if these billion-dollar behemoths were not built to be able to take on a serious adversary ... why was the money spent in the first place? To blow up Tommy Taliban's 21-year-old $500 pickup in the desert, using a £800,000 missile as part of a £3.17m strike mission?

Stating the obvious, much?

Ok, the British study was an incompetent politically motivated exercise (imagine our surprise) but it makes sense to conduct some realistic experiments, just as has been done in the past with the "chicken cannon"—which ISTR once caused a lot of damage with an un-defrosted fowl?

But I don't think we're going to learn much that common sense couldn't have told us. Yes, most impacts by small drones will be unlikely to bring an airliner down. Given we've seen 737s, 747s and others make successful landings with some big bloody holes in them, even with half the undercarriage torn away, on a couple of occasions with major damage to the control surfaces, we know that modern western airliners can take a fair bit of punishment. A drone is unlikely to hit a plane at 37,000 feet where sheer speed might magnify damage.

The real question is, what's the realistic likelihood of a worst case scenario? That would seem to be a drone being inhaled by the turbofan of a twinjet at MTOW just as or before it leaves the ground. Given that either Terrorist Bastard or a foolish amateur photographer might be responsible for such a calamity, it is worth considering. In the scenario I've described the plane should be able to continue its climbout, albeit at a reduced rate, and safely return later for landing after using up some fuel—IF the engine suffers only a contained failure, without explosion or fire or other collateral damage (e.g. to control surfaces, fuel lines, hydraulic pipes etc).

Given turbofan engines are tested literally to destruction (usually by blowing a fan blade clean off at full power in a static ground test), we can *hope* that five or six pounds of Li-Ion battery and a mess of wires and cameras will not cause an uncontained failure ... but this is surely the likeliest and riskiest scenario, so this is the one I would have expected to see tested. It would be an expensive test, so it should be done once and correctly. (IMHO I'd like to see AAIB plan and supervise it, not those clowns at Qinetiq.)

And of course it still doesn't insulate us against malice: An ordinary drone bearing three and half pounds of the hardback set of "Fifty Shades of Utter Crap" might not cause an uncontained failure ... what about our evil friend, Terrorist Bastard, if he puts a couple of kilos of tungsten shrapnel in, instead?

Pity the infected

Those who have already been bitten by the Oracle bug are mostly doomed. Oracle has been fiendishly clever in creating an interdependent ecosystem of (surprisingly poor) application suites, often adding very little value but still of course chargeable, along with and further interpenetrated with essential functionality like finance (also done startlingly badly) to feed off its database (which itself is no longer particularly competitive) and thereby ensure it cannot be binned. Buying Oracle is like swallowing an alien parasite: before you know it you are being bled dry, the tentacles extend into every vital part of your organisation and if you try to surgically remove any part of it, destruction ensues.

Very few organisations, especially those which have been sacking all their best, experienced people in favour of outsourcing to supposedly cheap employees, are remotely capable of freeing themselves from Oracle's clutches. Indeed, the outsourced ones now exist to funnel money to two parasites—Oracle and their outsourcers: though sometimes the parasites allow their hosts to keep just enough money to keep breathing.

So really we have to focus our message on those who haven't yet got the facehugger wrapped round their heads, because only they might be saved. "Run—don't walk, RUN—from that Oracle saleslizard, and we'll send a dropship for evac".

PS: A virtual pint for whoever's first with: "I say we take off, and ..."

Kremlin, lying? Colour me astonished ...

As the article gradually makes clear, the Kremlin's propaganda about this is fundamentally untrue: it has nothing to do with the USA blocking Russian sites. It has everything to do with Putin wanting to censor what his citizens can see and do on the net, because he has envious eye upon China's brutally repressive control of its citizens' online activity. Fact and opinion are information which, if freely shared, have always been the single greatest threat to authoritarians and dictators.

When you boil it down, Putin's desire to control his "own" internet is a simple outgrowth of the lessons of the past and the current demonstration of China's successful crushing of its own people's freedom.

And it is fundamentally driven by the same motives that cause Donald Trump to constantly denounce any media that criticises him as "fake": when you are a despotic liar, nothing frightens you more than truth.

The unbeatable combination: greed and stupidity

You see it in every single corner of our societies now: the desperate and heedless grasping for lucre, coupled with dumbfounding stupidity.

In a well-managed company (there may be a few left, but I've only encountered one in the last 20 years and it was a non-profit) there are some tasks a manager naturally performs. They are not something you should automate until and unless we have true "AI", which will look and behave unlike anything currently being touted as "AI" by the marketurds.

One of those tasks—along with setting priorities, agreeing goals, organising appropriate training, resolving disputes and acting as an early-warning detector for problems, and so many non-negotiably essential other roles of the good manager—is to approve leave. The manager does this because s/he is responsible for the team's/department's overall delivery, has the best view of who is doing what, and also should have the best ability to ensure fairness in allowing time off. As anyone who's had these responsibilities knows, sometimes it can be tricky to decide who gets to take leave at particular times, when you also have to ensure sufficient resources to cover the work. Occasionally you have to make a tough call and disappoint someone. Being fair and decent and transparent about it, so that people don't feel it's arbitrary, or suspect favouritism, is a uniquely human skills, as is the soothing of ruffled feathers when someone is ticked off.

That the approval and allocation of leave requests could be assigned to an automated process—I find astonishing. Pilots have managers in the flight ops department, whose very purpose is to ensure that resourcing, rostering, training and much else is well organised to ensure a functioning machine and a satisfied work force. If that's not what they're doing, why are they employed?

This is a classic case of greed (let's save some expensive man-hours) and stupidity (give a task requiring human judgement to a chunk of code).

And, of course, as always happens when greed and stupidity come along hand in hand, the end result is that the business is less efficient in the long run, incurring additional costs because of the mess created by the original, dumb decision-making.

Whoever thought it was good idea to save money by letting code perform a human manager's tasks should now be answering some tough questions about why pilots will have to be paid 50% extra to fly planes. For an airline this size during peak season, the cost will be in the millions surely?

PS: Except, of course, the idiot who "saved" this money has most likely pocketed their "cost-saving bonus" and fled to cause another disaster somewhere else ...

"unfortunate penchant for explosion"

"Some SpaceX rockets have an unfortunate penchant for explosion – including the infamous Falcon 9."

42 successful missions for the Falcon 9 family, and two failures: one during climb, one which blew up before launch.

For space launches, only two failures out of 44 is pretty good.

But whatever the grown-up facts of the matter, we have have the childish "penchant for explosion" and "infamous Falcon 9", don't we?

So much to like about El Reg, except these (thankfully quite rare) moments of editorially juvenile silliness—oh, and about half the supposedly funny but, in truth, adolescent-humour headline writing.

A tip for the Reg: I don't think your readership are all late-developing spotty nerds any more. They grew up about 20 years ago. You might give it a try?

It's part of the greed culture

Companies like Uber (Airbnb being another obvious though apparently less loathsome example, or JustEat and so many others) are founded on the concept of making as much money as possible while taking as little responsibility (socially, legally, financially) as possible. They provide a technical means for People Who Want to Buy Thing to connect and pay money to People Who Can Provide Thing, and rake off some commission for having done so.

Thus Uber has no interest in the customer except as a provider of money. It has no interest in drivers except to transport customers. The connection system it does provide will be as automated and cheap as possible. The amount of money it passes on to drivers will be the least it can possibly get away with. It will fight tooth and nail to avoid being responsible for *anything*. It will try to accept no duty of care or liability to the customers. It will try to accept no duty of care of employment commitments to drivers. As far as it's concerned, everything including people is commoditised and exploited to squeeze out cash.

A business which depends upon customers getting a safe, comfortable, efficient ride for their money which accepts no responsibility to those customers. A business which depends upon drivers being rested, relaxed, competent, qualified and healthy accepts no responsibility for those drivers.

The result is a cesspit of cynical, black-hearted greed that treats people like shit and has no respect for laws, regulations or standards. It's all about the crass, ratlike pursuit of cash.

And as for Uber's seemingly nonsensical valuation? Same problem, really: greed. The investors are *not* hoping that Uber will be an efficient, safe business competing well with others (truly free markets and effective competition does not lead to obscene profits). They're hoping that their bad money will help Uber drive out the good, so that properly licensed, responsible, regulated taxi companies are pushed out and ruined, so that Uber becomes a de facto monopoly. All the billions lost so far are merely a stake in the game, which will be won back when Uber can raise prices as the only game in town.

And guess what? Even when Uber is a monopoly and using one of their rides costs you more than it ever did ... the drivers will still be paid and treated like shit.

It surely can't be a surprise, then, that this kind of corporate culture leads to other vile business practices.

Ah, political speak

"... minister Matt Hancock, who earlier this month said he has travelled all over the world and has yet to see a country as far ahead with 5G trials as the UK ..."

Presumably "I have yet to see" means "I didn't look properly, to enable me to lie with plausible deniability".

I'll add this to my Translation Guide to Politicians' Statements, which already includes such gems as—

"I mis-spoke" = "I lied and got caught doing it"

"My words have been taken out of context" = "I lied a LOT"

"I don't recognise that {incriminating} interpretation" = "I'm gonna keep lying till the proof is published"

and the all-time weasel—

"I apologise if some people took offence" = "I'm too much of a turd to apologise honestly for my offensive behaviour"

Not an encouraging read

Am I the only one to find these two statements, applied to the same aircraft, mildly troubling?

" ... two drones were written off after they mysteriously flopped into the sea ..."

"... have successfully conducted a test flight in civilian-controlled non-segregated UK airspace ..."

Compared to the US, the British military has a relatively relaxed tempo of killing civilians by colliding with civil aircraft, and I do hope this isn't about to change just because some nitwits at Defence are hypnotised by new technology (which is sexy and *must* be deployed—rather like the Internet of Shit—because it's new and shiny, even if fundamentally useless).

"powered by batteries and an onboard generator using jet fuel"

"The BAe 146 demo aircraft will at first have one of its four gas turbine engines replaced with an electric engine, powered by batteries and an onboard generator using jet fuel. The team will then move to two electric engines once the technology is stable."

So—what's the point? A gas turbine generator, like the APU that provides auxiliary power for every modern airliner, is a machine for turning kerosene into electrical power. It's generally some form of turboshaft system. The turbofan engines you see under the wings of modern airliners are also a form of turboshaft, increasingly so depending on the bypass ratio: the more cold air shovelled round the core, proportionally the more work the fan is doing and less of the thrust comes directly from hot jet exhaust.

Which leads to the obvious question: why use a kerosene fuelled gas turbine to generate electricity which you're then going to turn fans/props with, when you've already got a system for doing it *without* a generator and electric motors?

Today's high bypass turbofans run at extremely high core temperatures to achieve unprecedented fuel efficiency. A gas turbogenerator will sacrifice some efficiency in converting its energy to electricity, and electric motors will sacrifice some in turning the freshly-minted electricity back into rotational energy. It's extremely difficult to see how you'll get more fuel efficiency by introducing extra conversion losses.

The only light I can see here is if the turbogenerator has outstanding efficiency for recapture of energy and/or the engine's fans/props are regenerative, e.g. generating some electricity during descent. But I confess I am still deeply sceptical. What am I missing? Perhaps this is intended only for relatively slow, smallish prop planes ...?

(And what kind of phenomenal electric motor can keep up with a turbofan pushing over a tonne of air every second—up to 100,000lb thrust?)

And about those ads

About those ads, he said, veering wildly off topic—the next article which stimulates a shytestorm of criticism at the atrocious quality of internet advertising will include a fair number of sobbing "I told you so" lines from the commentardsphere: because the current Rackspace ad on this site, with its ghastly jerky-sliding faces and the saccharine copy "Look, our staff have actual names" is ... simply unspeakable. It is the perfect example of how woefully misguided online marketing can be.

Boy, I hope Rackspace had to pay a LOT to manure our eyeballs with that crud.

"the dodgy Google/Libre duo"

"There's little that Excel did that I cannot accomplish with one of the dodgy Google/Libre duo"

What's "dodgy" about them? I don't use anything provided by Google except its Translate page, as a matter of principle, but I wasn't aware that people considered it dodgy.

I'm a heavy user of the Libre suite (not Database or Presentation, but only because I don't have any need of them), and find it powerful, reliable and nicer to work with than MS stuff. Given that it doesn't spy on me, steal personal information, runs locally with no need for internet and seamlessly secures my data, I'd say Libre is by many definitions much *less* dodgy than either Office or Google.

Cognitive dissonance?

So one speck of good news—that ISPs will be compelled to tell fewer barefaced lies when conning their customers—is matched by a spot of (let's face it, much more predictable) stupidity:

'CAP's sister body, the Advertising Standards Authority, also today ruled that it is not materially misleading to describe broadband services that use fibre-optic cables for only part of the connection as "fibre broadband"'

—because no matter how many miles of fibre there are, the choke point will always be the non-fibre section, which makes non-fibre the most significant part of the entire connection. Even if you've got just six feet of non-fibre, that's going to be the bottleneck. You'd think that even the dozy pillocks at Advertising Standards would comprehend this and insist that providers cannot describe a connection as "fibre", with the clear implication you'll get fibre speeds, if in fact you will get speeds limited to non-fibre transport.

If Nissan market a new car as having a top speed of 180 mph when it's got a governor on the engine that limits it to 110mph, will Advertising Standards tell us that's ok?

You could knock us down with a feather ...

You could knock us down with a feather ... because we are all SO surprised that Uber turns out to be a bunch of scummy, greedy, unprincipled liars.

Still, Uber's constant haemorrhage of dishonest, avaricious, amoral, disgraced executives means there'll be a plentiful supply of exactly the kind of people suited to Congress.

Are Twatterers *that* stupid?

So users of the "infamous online cesspit" were, to the great astonishment of absolutely no one, so stupid that they misinterpreted the blue tick of "confirmed identity" as "we like this 140 characters of superficial tripe".

They continued with this erroneous and simple-minded misconception despite being repeatedly told "No, no, no, it ain't so".

Their stubborn brainlessness eventually led the cesspit to say "Hey, you idiots were right all along".

Was it beyond the imagination of said cesspit's managers to dream up a different way of indicating verified identify—something incredibly difficult to come up with, like, say, a little icon saying "ID'd"—and, if they felt the need to stick their necks out, re-purpose a more obvious "Like/Don't Like" icon for approval?

Yeah, I'm being a wee tad sarcastic but really—this level of dumbness over a frakking little *tick*??

We *knew* Twatterers were mostly egotistical time-wasting morons, and we knew that even before the Cretin-in-Chief started manuring the world with his "thoughts", but until now it wasn't quite so obvious that the company's management fell into the same category ...

But everything is hackable

Why would anyone in their right mind allow any third party to remotely open their front door?

Because you trust an internet giant? Because you trust their security to guarantee their system is never hacked? That some wiseacre won't unlock 5,000 front doors in West London for the hell of it (or because he's got 50 very busy friends with large vans)?

I'd point out that pretty much all the risk is borne by the consumer, and for what? So that Amazon saves a few pence per item in delivery time?

The privacy and security that people are prepared to give away in the name of trifling, often illusory convenience leaves me dumbstruck.

People say we live in the Age of Stupid, mostly a phrase that's come into relevance since the US presidential election. But I wonder if it's more accurate to call it the Age of the Lemming.

What's implausible ...

Notwithstanding the irritating posts that appear to be firmly grinding axes one way or the other, the thing that most surprises me is that a NSA staffer would be working on *anything* at home—or indeed, anywhere that isn't at the office. I don't know NSA's policy specifically, but I can't be the only commentard with some trifling insight into how similar agencies work, and I would be astounded to hear that NSA allows folks to work from home—there should be nothing on an NSA employee's personal devices that even hints what she does for a living, much less scraps of code from her current project. There's a reason Ft Meade has a car park the size of Delaware. A vanishingly small number of senior employees will have dedicated connections and kit in their homes, which will be swept regularly and security audited to a fare-thee-well. A slightly larger number will have thoroughly encrypted mobile devices for field ops (and I'd expect those to be treated much the same way as guns in the Army: you don't take 'em off the premises without approval and are signed back in while still warm). But that's pretty much it.

For me, the "WFH" part of the Kaspersky story doesn't make sense. I'm not imputing any evil motives to them, but I don't need to: isn't it simply common sense these days, not to use Russian or Chinese stuff? For the person who asked "Who to trust? NSA or Kaspersky?", the answer IS easy: neither.

And while I'm yammering, a final thought: again, I'll be astonished if NSA itself does not keep a minutely close eye on its employees' use of internet, their deployment of security products, even browsing habits. Surely using a pirated Windows would have earned the offending party an interview without coffee, at the least??

Rolling back after 8 hours

Despite having a tonne of memory and cores I was happy to give a new Firefox a chance, and I even made a supposedly helpful posting soon after about keeping bookmark folders handy.

It's taken eight hours on and off at the PC today for me to give up and roll back. The utterly pointless cosmetic changes were ... tolerable: stupid, but tolerable. Having to use Customise to put things back where I've got used to them was irritating, but possibly worth 20 minutes of faffing.

Minor annoyances, magnified by the fact that they all appear to have been done for sake of making changes rather than any actual purpose. Still minor, though.

But finding that when I open a new tab, expecting to find my default home page, instead getting some "popular websites" crap ... last straw. Yes, I've poked around to see if there is a "open new tabs at home page instead of shit" option, but if it's there it's nicely hidden, and life is short ... so, sorry Firefox—while I'll never touch Google with a long spoon, you've made it that little bit more likely I'll look out for a new browser.

Here's a radical thought (sorry for the caps, I'm having a YouTube moment):

WHEN SOMETHING WORKS—LEAVE IT THE F*** ALONE.