
Gives a new meaning to..
Flying Robo Journo Drones: with left-wing or right-wing bais?
381 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Oct 2007
“It could be that there is some other bottleneck for the emergence of life that we haven’t worked out yet. Or intelligent civilisations evolve, but then self-destruct.”
Given that we developed nuclear weapons before any form of space travel, if other civilisations evolved along similar lines, than is it not possible they blew themselves to dust before getting off the ground?
The problem with facial recognition systems is it depends on how old the 'reference' photo is.
I recently came through passport control at Heathrow, and it took the system around a dozen scans of before it could decide if my face matched my 5 year old passport photo.
There have been past El Reg articles on who good, or not, the system the US Homeland department, and also the scrapped UK ID cards, all the same issue, with 'old' reference photos.
The only problem with the ICO handing out the maximum fine to the MoJ is that it's not their money, it's tax payer money moving from one piggy bank to another.
If you really want to get prople's attention, it's the prospect of JAIL TIME, not a FINE that will make the muppets wake up (I hope)
You may ask, half joking if you are "Paranoid or what?!", but at the end of the day, this is your work, your living at stake is the squishy hits the fan.
Backups are in essence an insurance policy. No one likes to pay the remiumsbut when it's time to make claim you get waht you pay for.
If the data is that important to you, your business then you put whatever backup policy in place no matter how paranoid it may seem.
Some years ago I've had a guy complain that he had lost three years worth of work because he kept it on his local C: rather than on the network where it would have been backed up. In today's money he would have been taking in something like £80-100K p.a. I shrugged and told him to think of a good way for him to explain to his boss how he had just spaffed some £1/4M up the wall in lost work.
"Are we going to allow a means of communications which it simply isn't possible to read? No. We must not," he said.
@sysconfig. totaly agree with your main point.
The question is, what is he's end goal here? It certainly is not a practicle responce to what ever the perceived problem is.
It seems to me that he's been reading that govenment approved maunal "1984" again.
If he get's his wish, that is exactly what we, the people will get: Big Brother.
From the article, Mr Parker mentions "Irish Repulicans".
Given that the 'troubles' lasted some 30/35 years, way before comminications where more sophisiticated than fixed land-line telephones and the post. Which did makes things very easy for the state, as they controled the telephone exchanges and the post, to intercept such comminications.
So, back when things where easy, how come the troubles lasted as long as they did, and what the F**K do these guys think they are going to catch all these bad guys now?
> Communication suppliers – historically willing facilitators of wiretapping – are “refusing to hand over evidence on the likes of drug smugglers or fraudsters” because they do not pose a “direct threat to life”
OK, silly question, but if you have a warrent, signed by a Judge, won't that get the 'communication supplies' to hand over the info?
Saw a documentary a few months back that looked into the JFK shooting and came up with some 'interesting' details.
The Secret Services detail where on the piss the night before except for on guy (the newbie on the team) who had wash the cars in the morning.
The 'shot' from the position that Owald was in, the distance, moving target etc., was nigh on immpossible even for ex army snipers - they demostated the set up and the sniper only hit 2 out of 10 attempts.
The consulion was that when Oswald opened fire, the secret service went into panic mode, and one of them from the car following, acidently fired as the car he jumped onto accelatrated and hit JFK.
I'm not into tin-foil hats, but it was an interesting documentarty.
It is my understanding, but it's the airspace that is being used to high 90's utilisation, not the mainframe.
Something that does not seem to have been picked up on, but they arew saying that the fault was caused by 'bad data' from a flight plan being input into the system. Given that this is for commerical aviation, all the flight plans would have been, I suspect, computer generated and feed into NATS, from the likes of BA, Air France etc., etc. this is not hand typed by the pilots. If that is correct, has one of the airlines that fly into/over UK air space made any changes to their system that generates the flight plans?
Always ready to be corrected if I've misunderstode things.
GCHQ is not the issue here.
The real reason for this being rolled out is to allow the govenment's to intorduce road charging.
After some years of all new cars being fitted with GPS and SIM, it is not much effort for a daily call to the Highways agency telling them where and when your car was. You'll get charged more if you drive in rush hour, you get charged more for using a motorway etc etc.
NSA/GCHQ are having hugh problems processing all the data they have been creaming off the world population.
So they came up with the idea of put a box in everyone's home that dose all the pre-processing of trawling through all your data and files locally and sending the results back to them.
Oh and BTW you cna play games on it as well.
Allowing for the valid comments above about the quality of research papers.
From my (limited) understanding of how Watson works, is by injesting vast amounts of raw data and then drawing inferance (joining the dots?) between items, and thereby giving pointers to new avenues of reseach.
As pointed out in the main article, the sheer volume of papers, even if only 25% where solid gold research, could one individual be able to take on board that volume of information and work on it in any meaningful way?
Overall +1 for Watson.
"We have coded our answer and below you will find the link to our program. Run the application on your computer"
Yeah right, I'm going to trust someone I don't know to download something and run an un-trusted appilication. I wouldn't trust it if it came from my own mother, even after tripple checking valid photo ID, birth cert etc etc.
But thats just me.....
From the article, it said that this missle would take 60 minutes to get to where it's pointed at.
The problem with this, is that it only gives the other side (whoever the 'other side; is) 60 minutes reaction time, that it spot the launch, decide if it is coming their way, decide if it is an attack, decide if they should launch their slower(!) missles.
Not a lot of time to make your mind up :(
"some fucking Yoda with tourettes on the back row, repeatedly calling out from the safety of his fake-velvet upholstered conference chair"
"commence an interminable monologue about OS/2"
"Yoda, naturally, remained silent. The piss just taking was he. Bastard the."
I don't understand why I don't get invited to the trade shows anymore.