Posts by Christoph

Trump lifts US supersonic flight ban, says he's 'Making Aviation Great Again'

Burning vastly more fuel for a slightly shorter journey.

Making Climate Change Great Again.

Ex-CISA employee: 'This culture of fear started permeating the agency'

It's the same "logic" as not testing for COVID.

If you don't look for attacks you won't find any.

So there are no reports of attacks.

So there are no attacks.

China approves rules for national ‘online number’ ID scheme

one logon across multiple online services

Can you say "Single point of failure"?

So your [expletive] test failed. So [obscene participle] what?

Nearest I came was when a client wanted the source code, and I had to give it a quick once-over for any non-diplomatic comments.

Soviet probe from 1972 set to return to Earth ... in May 2025

Re: Oh noes!

Don't give him ideas! Canada, Greenland, Panama, Gaza, Vatican City, and next Venus.

White House budget proposal could beam NASA science back decades

Re: Lysenko

Then look at what Mao did to Chinese crop yields by centrally controlled fiats. Worst famine in history.

NASA rewrites Moon mission goals in quiet DEI retreat

"We are not sending any women into space"

"We are going to colonise Mars"

Can we see a problem here children?

Dept of Defense engineer took home top-secret docs, booked a fishing trip to Mexico – then the FBI showed up

Re: Maybe...

Why did he print them at all? If he wanted to steal them he could have copied them to a micro-SD card which is so tiny it can be easily concealed.

Makes it more likely it was stupidity rather than deliberate crime.

Capital One cracker could be sent back to prison after judges rule she got off too lightly

The sentencing should be calibrated against the amount of time Musk must serve for his vastly larger data theft.

SpaceX's 'Days Since Starship Exploded' counter made it to 48. It's back to zero again now

Re: "Blowing up Starships can’t be cheap."

At least his rockets blowing up makes a change from his cars catching fire or crashing.

Gadget designers get chunky option as USB 20 Gbps controller arrives

512kB of flash memory integrated onto the chip

Flash memory has a limited lifespan - you can only rewrite it so many times. Will this chip be vulnerable to abrupt failure?

I was told to make backups, not test them. Why does that make you look so worried?

Due to the boss keeping multiple copies of absolutely everything, the backup tape filled up completely and the backup failed. So when the system crashed our latest backup was a month old, and we lost a lot of stuff.

A year later, I asked the hardware guy what our latest backup was. That same tape, now 13 months old.

But the boss saved some money by not fixing the backup system!

What happens when we can’t just build bigger AI datacenters anymore?

Re: Asimov had the answer . . .

But watch out for Fredric Brown's "Answer"

Life lesson: Don't delete millions of accounts on the same day you go to the dentist

Getting Oracle to work properly is like pulling teeth

Database tables of student, teacher info stolen from PowerSchool in cyberattack

Re: PAM

Quite - why was a single login credential able to access data for multiple schools?

Parker Solar Probe sends a "Still Alive" tone back to Earth

It was Rees-Mogadon that wanted to bring back all the old units. But the Tories can't do that because they don't have any scruples.

NetAdmin learns that wooden chocks, unlike swipe cards, open doors when networks can't

Re: How did you get into this room?

According to a friend who used to work at the Establishment where they make Very Loud Bangs, someone used to get in with no problem despite the picture of Chairman Mao on his security pass.

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory datacenter flooded, offline until 2025

Just hope we don't get Carrington 2 before it's up and running again.

NIST trains AI to hear the 'oh crap' moment before batteries explode

Is it not possible to engineer it to give a louder and/or more distinctive sound?

What might a second term of Trump mean for the US space program?

Re: Earth Observation

All those programs will be killed off. The scientists will be fired. The existing satellites will be shut down. The already received data will be destroyed.

Did anyone really expect anything else?

Air National Guardsman gets 15 years after splashing classified docs on Discord

Re: 15 years

He only needs to wait until January and his pardon.

Tech support world record? 8.5 seconds from seeing to fixing

Not long after most floppy drives had switched to 3.5":

"I can't get my drive to work"

I walked up there, he was in a conversation so just pointed out his computer.

I went over to his computer and turned the clamp handle on the 5.25" drive.

His face lit up in an "Aha!" moment.

UK ponders USB-C as common charging standard

I hope there will be an exception for items charged from a shaver socket. I would rather not have to take my electric toothbrush etc. out of the bathroom every time I want to charge it.

BBC weather glitch shows 13k mph winds in London, 404℃ in Nottingham

Which is very odd, as there's nothing on the planet which could drive those winds to that speed.

National Public Data files for bankruptcy, admits 'hundreds of millions' potentially affected

Re: No, absolutely not

That's liable to mean "We don't have to worry too much about security because our insurers have to pay out anyway".

And everybody else's insurance premiums will massively increase to cover the loss.

Incumbent congressman not turning up to debates? Train an AI on his press releases

But can they make an AI that can babble disconnected mumblings like Trump?

Cops love facial recognition, and withholding info on its use from the courts

They accused someone from a different state. So they are searching across the entire USA for a similar face. That's pretty well guaranteed to find a match somewhere!

How long before they are extraditing people from the UK because they look vaguely like a criminal in California?

Canon ships first nanoimprint chipmaking machine to R&D lab

Re: At least they got their naming right this time.

But you can get a Laser Canon!

Kamala Harris campaign motorcade halted by confused robotaxis

Re: The beginning of a robot uprising

The US version will produce something almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.

US Army orders next-gen robot mule to haul a literal ton of gear

Re: Seems unnecessarily complex and expensive

They defined themselves to be a foreign state.

Look! About chest high! Is it a pallet? Is it a drone? No, it's a Palletrone

Re: Whilst I enjoy the novelty...

To go over rough ground and stairs it would be much better to build a pallet with hundreds of little legs.

Intuitive Machines shoots for the Moon with NASA's $4.82B lunar relay jackpot

If they are building a "lunar satellite constellation" they should include from the beginning switching off all unnecessary transmissions while over the lunar far side.

The far side is the only accessible place shielded from all of Earth's radio transmissions, and is therefore the ideal place to build future really big radio telescopes.

But this would be sabotaged by multiple satellites blasting out signals.

So start as you mean to go on - do NOT rely on "Oh, we can always add that later once it becomes necessary".

Foot-thick wall workaround: Gigabit network links beamed through solid concrete

I wonder if this would work through thick stone walls in old houses - or even castles!

Developer tried to dress for success, but ended up attired for an expensive outage

Re: Hard Hats and Hi-Viz...

When the (never used) Nightingale hospitals were being built during the pandemic, they called in the army to help build them.

Being in the army they wore uniforms - in camouflage designs intended to make them difficult to see.

Being on a building site they wore hi-vis jackets over their low-viz camo.

'A moose hit me' and other ways people damage their gizmos

My mother "Look at the funny animal on that big sign."

Me and my older sister "What sign?"

Philadelphia tree trimmers fail to nip FTC noncompete ban in the bud

The problem is that the non-compete is not framed in an equitable way. If the company bans for a year an employee who leaves from working in that field, then naturally the company must equally be banned for a year from hiring a replacement for that employee.

Dangerous sandwiches delayed hardware installation

We think there's a bomb nearby which might blow up and collapse the building. So for safety's sake we will lock you in a small room with no way to escape.

NASA tests the ups and downs of air taxi comfort with VR

Re: Are flying cars a good idea?

There's also security problems, when everyone has the ability to land inside a fenced or walled enclosure.

Meta won't train AI on Euro posts after all, as watchdogs put their paws down

Re: Claims versus what they do

You don't even need that much detail. The reply accepting my objection was so quick that they may have a bot looking for the string "data protection"

Molten lunar regolith heats up space colonization dreams

"requires lots of power to keep the heat up"

Why not use a solar furnace? No clouds or atmosphere to get in the way.

You can only use it 2 weeks out of 4, but the power is free.

Thanks for coming to help. No, we can't say why we called – it's classified

Dave Langford used to work at the place that makes Very Loud Bangs. He wrote a very funny novel about the security there. The Leaky Establishment.

One of our people had to visit a certain establishment in Cheltenham. Apparently getting in wasn't too bad but getting out again was dire.

A thump with the pointy end of a screwdriver will fix this server! What could possibly go wrong?

Pick was so long ago that the inventor's name was perfectly innocent. "Dick Pick".

Computer modeling deepens scientists' understanding of solar cycle

Re: Excellent work

That assumes that entirely alien species have closely similar responses to music. Since we only have a single example there is no obvious evidence for that assumption.

I stumbled upon LLM Kryptonite – and no one wants to fix this model-breaking bug

LLM = LCW

Loud, Confident and Wrong

Boffins suggest astronauts should build a Wall of Death on the Moon

Re: Next step....

And there's the story "The Day We Played Mars" (the match being played on the Moon) in "The Exploits of Engelbrecht"

Will it ever be possible for humans to be gestated, born, and grow up in Lunar gravity? Or how about Mars gravity?

If not, any colonies will have to permanently rely on immigration from Earth or from rotating space colonies such as O'Neill cylinders.

UK lays down fresh legislation banning crummy default device passwords

Re: Default passwords are allowed?

"That leaves the issue of how they supply that to customers."

On one gadget I have the default password is the device serial number, which is on a label.