Posts by Pascal Monett 19430 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
It can talk about upholding whatever it wants, it has done nothing but undermine the very idea of patents since the beginning of the 20th century.
By never verifying prior art and letting the judicial system take care of issues, the USPTO is just a rubber stamp for multi-billion-dollar behemoths and serves no longer the ideal of the individual inventor getting recognized for an idea.
On top of that, the USPTo has long forgotten the idea that a patent could only be granted to an idea that was functionally described in full, thus, when the patent expired, others coulld pick up the idea and make use of it. Today, patents are granted on simple ideas (round corners, anyone?), and their functionality is no longer a subject of examination.
I fully expect to read in the coming months about how yet another disastrous IT failure has happened, and that Borkzilla has now joined the ranks of Crapita and Fujitsu in never-ending contract awards that bring nothing but failure.
And, if that is indeed the case, it might be time to ask a question : if it doesn't matter who the provider is to obtain an IT project disaster, maybe the problem is not the provider ?
Harry Seldon would no doubt be able to explain that the social tendency of refusing the machine had reached a plateau and humans are now starting to rebel against this endless tethering of the human mind to a machine.
I'm sure Asimov would have said it better, though.
They are indeed, meaning they are not management.
They take their marching orders and they march, and if management says AI, then they do AI. If they don't like it, the door is thatta way.
Don't blame developers for this. This falls squarely on the shoulders of whatever CxO listened to some guy in marketing and decided that they had to have "AI" to be on top of things.
You can be sure that said CxO is not a developer, or hasn't been one for a loong time.
Don't worry. I'm sure that spammers will be overjoyed to lend a helping hand, along with compromised emails, fake health portals and malware galore. They must be having a DefCon 1 moment right now.
Some people are going to have loads of fun this year, apparently . . .
That is the kind of thing that guarantees a management meeting, a revue of procedures and some serious changes to who can do what and how to communicate the change.
Not that it would be very useful, all in all. I mean, one guy did something while the other wasn't paying attention to that. There is no procedure that can cover that and just saying that you should talk about what you did to your colleague at the end of the shift won't be enough. You would have to go through a checklist and validate each item, but the tethering of the helmet might not be on the checklist, so . . .
In any case, I'm sure people were a lot more careful with the next helmet model.
By the way, would that helmet have been for the F35 ?
Just wondering.
So he could have taken an 80% cut.
The Buck Stops where exactly ? Oh right, at YOU.
And what exactly is variable in your pay ? How much it goes up ?
30%. Oh well, a token slap on the wrist is better than nothing, I guess. And it's a damn sight better than we can manage.
Maybe a Bitlocked drive could resist anything up to brute force, but knowing the mechanism, finding out that the key was transmitted in the clear between CPU and TPM, that was the straw that broke the camel's back.
And it just goes to show : if you want something encrypted securely, it has to be 100% from start to finish. No gaps allowed.
And gaps are Borkzilla's specialty. Somebody devised the whole Bitlocker scheme, failed to encrypt comms between CPU and TPM and thought "this is Good EnoughTM".
Unfortunately, intelligent people are everywhere, and processing power is cheap nowadays. You've been found out.
Time to tighten your security, with all the inconveniences that entails.
This is Science. It makes sense to discover everything we can, and who knows what we'll discover if we crank it up to 11 ?
Until hypermatter reactors are a common thing, I say we need to up the ante. Go for it. Collide at insane speeds and see what comes of it.
If we don't try, we'll never know what we missed.
I totally support this bill, and I fervently hope that it will be put into application ASAP.
Enough with the glue and the locking down. Yes, I know that if I buy an unreliable 3rd-party bit of kit and put it in your shiny shiny altar of purity I might be disappointed by the experience.
That's on me.
You just need to train your support drones to find that out and say "well, we can't do anything if you buy inferior parts".
Job done.
And it's not like it'll cost you much.
All of our power plants are steam plants. Well, those that don't rely on wind, tides or solar, that is.
It doesn't matter whether the power source is coal, nuclear, wood or whatever else, they all make steam to turn the turbines that generate the electricity.
The day we find a way to make electricity without steam is the day our civilization will have progressed yet another step, but for the moment, we're a steam civilization.
Bring on the hyperreactors, I say !
Oh, I see. Birmingham is incapable of delegating, so it's the largest administrative nightmare.
Funny how, even after Brexit, things in the UK have to be compared to Europe. It's the old "Fog over the Channel, the continent is isolated".
As for biting the bullet, guys, you were incapable of managing an upgrade, what makes you think you'll be able to handle a completely new system ?
There's something seriously wrong in UK Government circles. I'm starting to wonder if there is a single project that has ever gone live without catastrophic issues. It's like they couldn't plan their way out of a paper bag.
Test, people. Test. And get your bloody specifications right. If you don't know how to do that, hire an expensive consultant to tell you that you're idiots and listen to him.
It'll cost you less in the long run.
Unless the consultant is the Mayor's nephew . . .
The amount of work some people will go through to make stuff that works where you'd never think of doing that is impressive.
A CPU in Minecraft. DOOM on bacteria (okay, it's the bacteria that are working, but still). The list goes on (and on).
It seems that there is always someone who looks at a thing and thinks "hey, can I make it do <some entirely insane idea> ?".
I think that is the definition of art. It's useless, but it can be beautiful.
One of ? You mean there were others ?
How many, and how large ?
I did a quick search and I only found two : the Sterling case, and the Kiriakou case.
Both of these cases seem minor to me as far as volume is concerned. A catastrophe for the people whose identities were revealed, to be sure, but we're not talking about thousands of documents.
I can't seem to find any other case that even begins to approach the damage Schulte did. That he's an asshole just makes it all the better that he's going away for a long time.
And I don't think there'll be much "good behavior" to get him out sooner.
Yeah, but 12 hours of overtime.
This is what would happen in the days before smartphones. Then again, in this case it wouldn't have helped since the numpties mangling this job were idiots.
I suspect that the one competent guy was the one who sent him out to power cycle the router. Then he went home and the night shift came in without instructions, so they bungled the rest.
I call that a lack of internal communication.
Really ?
Because we know how many hackers China is using at this point in time ?
No, we don't. That is just a throwaway phrase destined to further the message of fear. It is a gratuitious attempt to bolster an argument that does not need such shenanigans.
Stop fearmongering and start pushing the solution : don't have your critical infrastructure accessible from the Internet.
Yes, it'll cost money, but it will make your country secure.
So, what'll it be ? Security, or keeping the masses in a constant state of fear ?
I think I know the answer to that . . .
For the beanie, the article states that it had a mainboard in the tip. I'm guessing that's where they put the battery, because I did not read that the beanie generated its own electricity.
I'm also guessing that the sweater had a (probably larger) board, also with a battery. From the image, it seems to me that the board could be on the shoulder.
The watch is obvious, the battery and control circuit are inside.
So we're going to be getting clothing with mainboards ? Is the fashion industry aware of this ?
I think this is going to be a nightmare as far as every day wear and tear are concerned. Maybe not for the beanie - after all, you don't bang your noggin all that much - but for the sweater ? In the Metro ?
Sounds like it's control board is going to be running the gauntlet every time it goes outside.
I would like to have a compendium that I could consult easily and that would answer some specific questions like :
- what do I need to check to ensure that my computer is not an open book for the Internet ?
- what do I need to check to make sure that my firewall doesn't have a sneaky port assignment in it ?
- where do I need to look to ensure that Windows is only starting up the stuff I want it to ?
and so on.
I know some of these things, but having an authoritative reference would allow me to be sure that I've done all I can.
