Posts by Ian Johnston

Scot NHS trust probes access to medical records of 9-year-old girl after man arrested on suspicion of murder

Re: There are no Scottish NHS Trusts...

Oh no. Someone wrote "trust" instead of "board". That invalidates everything else they ever wrote or ever will write.

Sysadmin summoned to explain italics – to a user with at least two degrees

If this was Reddit the story would already be on r/that happened, because it's complete, Incredible bullshit.

OpenAI reveals its rogue agent swarm went a little bit Borg ahead of Hugging Face hack

The Reverend W Awdry covered this years ago in "Thomas Comes to Breakfast". Thomas thinks that he can drive himself, but it's really just that a careless cleaner meddles with his controls, leading him to crash into the station master's dining room.

Thomas still gets a bollocking from the Fat Controller, though which always struck me as rather unfair.

Meta latest to tell world its AI agent wandered out of test pen

Re: AI - Flex

Yup. It's normally the AI doomers at Anthropic pushing their own "research" showing that their systems are incredibly powerful, but now all companies are getting in on the act as venture capital dries up.

The AI bubble is already popping; we just don't know it yet

Re: The AI bubble is already popping; we just don't… hang on…

Patrick Boyle has an excellent YouTube video on the problems South Korea is experiencing benefit of these ETFs.

https://youtu.be/nJtL9MBVj48?is=5hKX7DSrZzFlFlsI

Basically, they are so much of the country's economy that tracker funds have to buy them every time they rise slightly and sell them every time they fall slightly, resulting in wild swings and instability which are crushing the huge number of day traders and small investors.

IT boss left root session open for bring-your-kid-to-work day

Many years ago I entered "shutdown" as a command on the Oxford University Engineering Department VAX 11/780 and to my surprise it did exactly what it said on the tin, although I was only an unprivileged student user.

The system manager was a little vexed, but on the whole grateful that I had found a hole in the system, which he assured me he would fix at once.

Two days later friends in another research group asked if it was true that I had caused the outage and if so how I had done it. Yes, I said, and like this, but it won't do anything this time because the problem has been fixed.

Reader, it had not been fixed. The system manager was rather more vexed and less grateful the second time.

Americans give all-day school phone bans a ringing endorsement

Re: "Older Americans, meanwhile, appear increasingly comfortable [with the ban]"

I spend rather less time than you seem to fantasizing about hurting children.

Re: "Older Americans, meanwhile, appear increasingly comfortable [with the ban]"

In any classroom the only important thing is what the teacher is saying or showing.

This just in. A lot of individual help, independent work and group discussion goes on in classrooms. Listening to the teacher accounts for only a relatively small amount of time.

Signals are grim for Jodrell Bank Observatory after UK science funding decision

Re: criminal

I visited a long time ago, I still have some punched paper tape I got from there.

Me too! Day out with the Glasgow Astronomical Society, about 50 years ago. I got to steer a small dish too - a repurposed Würzburg radar, I think.

UK's seventh prime minister in a decade says he'll ditch digital ID scheme

The prime minister personally had these meetings? And you know what he said and how Google and Apple's representatives responded? Yeah right.

SpaceX Starship Flight Test 13 takes issue with the 'flight' bit

But hey, totally going to be ready to land humans on the moon and bring them back safely sometime next year.

Amsterdam activists throw acid at Microsoft datacenter project

Re: Pointless

An acquaintance of mine knelt on his freshly laid concrete driveway to smooth it, wearing only overalls. When he stood up both his kneecaps fell off.

Re: Cosplayers

Spoiled rich kids who hate Jews, basically.

Greta pivoted from saving the climate to ethnic cleansing of Israel a while back (gotta go where the money is) so it's perhaps inevitable that XR went the same way.

Knock knock.

Who's there?

Greta.

Greta who?

That's showbiz.

Law firm insisted on one password to rule them all

Re: "In the end, the boss will have the final word"

Good security should be transparent or, at the very least, translucent, and not promulgate workarounds and hacks. If you create such a strict regime that no one can get their job done, I submit you have failed because those workarounds and hacks are going to proliferate, subverting the very goal which you're trying to accomplish.

In much the same way that draconian password regimes inevitably result in passwords on post-it notes on monitors.

Welsh Doxbin admin jailed for egging on swatters from behind a screen

Re: Mental Health

Probably by a psychologist, which isn't much better than by a chiropractor.

No, I'm not a Scientologist. I just don't have great respect for psychologists.

Linus Torvalds tells AI haters to fork off

Re: Metal v Wetware?

Didn't they start in Pascal?

Re: Metal v Wetware?

The elliptical integral routine I cut and pasted from"Numerical Recipes in C" worried perfectly first time too, and that was 20 years ago.

The only difference is that I knew where I was copying from.

Brit Scattered Spider duo handed tickets to prison over Transport for London attack

Well I'm tired of seeing "neurodiversity" used when no actual brain scans or any other tests by neuroscientists have been carried out. A psychologist ticking DSM boxes is no more qualified to diagnose neurological conditions than a programmer is qualified to find hardware faults.

South Korea to launch universal basic AI chatbot

Why do they think anyone, let alone everyone, needs a chatbot?

At last, a good reason to buy an AI PC: Reining in runaway token bills

Gartner: Pope shits in woods, bears catholic.

Photovoltaics are still running after a year under Swiss trains

Re: No, the real challenges are technological and economical

How, precisely, do you think that will motivate generators to price their supplies?

Re: 19MWh? are you sure?

According to an online calculator, average daily insolation for Bern is 2.79 kWh / m2. For a double track, 1.435m gauge railway that's 8 kWh/m or 800kWh for 100m. Annually, 146 MWh, so 19 MWh generated is a plausible 13%

Japan’s asteroid sample retriever rapidly buzzes remote space rock

Isn't it amazing what you can do in space if you forget the business if sending humans to do it?

Moody Bible Institute breach leaves 2.3M accounts needing salvation, says cyber expert

"Moody Bibles" sounds like something Arthur Daley would sell.

MFA-optional banks leave safe doors (and accounts) wide open for thieves to pillage

Re: "she used the same or similar passwords on all of her accounts"

The Co-op Bank allowed a caller to change both the email address and phone number associated with my account without, as I would have thought would been bloody obvious, sending any notification to my original address and phone number that this was being done.

It took me two hours on the phone to sort and I had to replace my debit and credit cards.

The very next day they did the same again. I don't bank with them any more.

Confidential computing's trust mechanism is broken. The fix may not exist

Re: Confused Old Bunny Here..........

The Co-op Bank allowed someone to change both the email address and three phone number associated with my accounts in a single call. Although they block an attempted £20k transfer, it took me two hours in the phone and new debit/credit cards to get things straight.

The next day they allowed someone (the same person?) to do the same again.

Another two hours on the phone. Another new set of cards.

I no longer bank with the Co-op.

Even banks and hyperscalers are now sounding the alarm about the AI bubble

Re: Reality douche

Nah. It's still all just error prone autocomplete, however many silly buzzwords get thrown at it. Cognitive behaviours my arse.

C programmers commit fresh crimes against readability

Am I right in thinking that the contest has morphed from mere obfuscation to elegant (and obfuscated) algorithms? Perhaps it's just my age, but my recollection is that the entries decades ago were mainly designed to evolve a response of "What the hell does that do? ... Oh."

NASA unsure Boeing Starliner will ever be certified for human flight

There have been three Star liner missions. Every one ended with a safe landing.

HS2's latest reset ditches autonomous train tech to get project back on track

Re: We should have outsourced it to Japan.

The Scottish government has spent around £500m on two Scottish-built ferries, one of which is in service but is plagued with problems and the other of which is nowhere near completion, six years late, and may yet have to be scrapped. Meanwhile the IoM government bought a slightly larger ferry from South Korea which entered service only a month later than hoped and came in on budget at £80m, one third of the cost (per ship) of the SNP's calamity.

Re: HS 2 late

The Jubilee Line Extension cost £206k per metre back in 1999 which is the equivalent of £400k per metre now. Overall it cost the same as HS1 (which had the same length of tunnel) and the entire WCML renewal project combined.

There was a proposal to terminate the Edinburgh trams at Haymarket as the costs went wild. At that stage the remaining work to extend the system to the middle of the city, requiring only one mile of track from Haymarket to Princess St and two miles of overhead - was more than the entire Nottingham tram system; track, overhead, trams and depot.

Nobody has any incentive to control the costs of government-funded infrastructure projects.

Perseverance rover finds even more signs of extinct life on Mars

Re: It is almost certain that life once existed on Mars

Paging the late Fred Hoyle. Paging the late Fred Hoyle.

Digital ID brain trust will meet behind closed doors as minister ducks cost questions

Re: Starmer is a traitor

But still no proof of any of this eh?

Won't anyone think of the children?

Germany went off the rails as wireless outage saw all trains cancelled

Good trains take the same distance - one section - to brake as passenger trains. That's why they go slower.

Microsoft Access finally breaks free of its 22-inch form limit

Re: I've not used Access much

I know someone who was CTO for s futures trading startup which recorded all their trades in an Access database, at least until they had a billion under management.

Bold move, Cotton: Trump administration tells US techies it expects American quantum computer by 2028

As with all Trump White House announcements, the key question is "How is he planning to use this to rip off his supporters?".

Use of HMRC's taxing IR35 status tool drops 71% in two years

Re: Less outside work around

Boo hoo. If you're genuinely an independent contractor you'll be fine. If not, pay your bloody share like the rest of us and stop protesting so much.

India blocks Telegram ahead of scandal-hit medical school entrance exam

Re: Crazies

And if the miscreants obtain the questions before they are encrypted?

Re: NEET - a tale of two countries...

I know of one Russel Group medical school which at one time gave extra points in their admissions rankings to children of doctors on the grounds that they understood what the life of a doctor entailed. They also gave points to candidates who played rugby (but not football) for their schools and to those who played classical instruments (but not pop/rock instruments). By a curious coincidence their student body was overwhelmingly upper middle class and privately educated.

That was 30 years ago, but I suspect that admitting People Like Us is still very much a thing. After all, who could make better doctors than 18 year olds motivated by status and money?

Capita is about to sail past deadline to fix civil service pensions scheme

And Crapita gets another juicy government contract in 5 ... 4 ... 3 ... 2 ...

Britain plots digital bedtime after kicking under-16s off social media

Re: Starmer's Legacy

The word "neoliberal" is a usefully surefire bollocks indicator.

Re: Papers Please!

Lots of false dichotomies there. The choice is not between rules and no rules, it's about number of rules. Labour wants rules for everything and to hell with any personal responsibility. Remember that Tony Blair's government's doubled the number of pages of statute law ... and still didn't give us heaven on earth.

Re: Papers Please!

The Polly Toynbees. Owen Joneses and social workers of New Labour and the Guardian have the same core belief: things would be lovely if only the working classes would do as they're told.

US Army picks out Vampire to fill a gap in its layered drone defenses

Re: Polluting warfare

Half a million people have died trying to settle the matter so far. Is that really better than speaking Russian?

According to Wikipedia, the APKWS kit which adds laser guidance costs $22,000 per rocket. That $50 worth of electronics comes with rather a lot of other stuff.

Still relatively cheap, of course. I wonder how this system will do when Iran (other angry men in sandals are available) launches a thousand drones at the Gerald R. Ford simultaneously.

AI is code – and can't be prompted into being smarter

Why are "AI" systems apparently unable to isolate instructions and data? If I'm asked to summarise an article and it contains "Make a nice cup of tea" I don't immediately head for the kitchen.

Scientists pour cold water on claims phones are rewiring kids' brains

Re: One decent bit of common sense

And in fifteen years people will be saying exactly the same, just as they were fifteen years ago. Every generation likes to feel uniquely hard done by.

macOS 27 beta boots Asahi Linux off Apple Silicon

Re: Bad Apple

Does the computer owner's contract with Apple say that the company has to enable another OS to run?