Posts by Neil Barnes

Tesla swerves liability in Autopilot death lawsuit

Re: Self Drive

I deliberately purchased a poverty spec car precisely because it was unburdened by any driver assist options. I've been able to stay within the lines since I started driving nearly fifty years ago; when I find myself unable to do so I shall stop driving.

The only remaining tool is a basic cruise control: I tell it to go at 120kph and it goes at 120kph; if the car in front is doing 110kph then it's my responsibility to slow down or go around it.

Yes, I am aware that this is an unfashionable view.

NASA and Boeing try to chase the contrail clouds away

Re: Pollution

Wasn't there also a noticeable temperature change when commercial aircraft were severely curtailed after 9/11? IIRC the temperature went up, again because contrails stopped reflecting.

Meta's ad-free scheme dares you to buy your privacy back, one euro at a time

Re: $9.99/$12.99 a month?

Year ending 2022, Meta declared $29Bn (income - expenses). Meta's user base exceeds 3Bn active users. So they're making ten bucks a year per user... seems extreme to grab twelve times that.

a useful and responsible ad experience

IS there such a thing? Except for perhaps 'no adverts, unless explicitly sought'?

Australian video-streamer lets users opt out of ads for burgers, booze, and betting

Re: Maybe finally a use for "AI"?

I note that FreeTube removes not only youtube adverts but also (most) in-channel sponsorship. I don't know how they do that, but I wonder if they're detected by how many viewers skip over them?

The Register feels no need to elucidate Australian drinking habits.

And René Descartes was a drunken fart

"I drink, therefore I am"

Intel's PC chip ship is sinking with Arm-ada on the horizon

I do find myself wondering

How far behind the curve is the RISC-V - which already runs Linux in some incarnations? At the moment, a casual glance suggests that it's a lot cheaper than either x86 or ARM but I don't yet how well it integrates with common desktop/server components. But I know nothing about it in detail; I'm always eager to be educated...

Spacewalk turns into spacework as cosmonauts grapple with ISS leak

A nanosatellite to test solar sail technology

For some reason I have a mental image of some poor astronaut bounding along on some lump of space rock dragging a kite behind him on a bit of string...

Larry Ale-ison institute invests in Oxford pub linked to Tolkien, CS Lewis

There used to be a Child and Eagle in Wakefield, a long time ago, but everybody called that one 'the Bastard and the Bustard'

Privacy advocate challenges YouTube's ad blocking detection scripts under EU law

Re: I've always been curious...

Don't worry about baby milk.

Worry about baby oil, and baby powder...

AlphaGoo seems to have difficulty categorising someone who is as likely to watch a video on how to build a wooden wagon wheel as a recipe or a flat earth debunking or a RISC-V demoboard... so on the recent 'open your force-field, earthling!' events when I've actually turned off ubo, I get offered video games for a phone I don't have...

Boffins say their thin film solar cells make space farms viable

Cadmium

I thought that was one of the RoHS banned chemistries - it seems it gets a pass for solar generation. I learn something new every day.

(I also vaguely recall that tellurium isn't a particularly friendly thing, either: Midgely used it before he settled on tetrethyl lead as an octane booster, and it made him very smelly...)

Artemis II Orion service and crew modules slotted together at last

Re: Per person growth (with math)

"almost 20% more space per person,"

Yabbut, how much bigger is the average astronaut than fifty years ago?

Windows 11: The number you have dialed has been disconnected

Re: A4 ruled pad

But, but, but, my ruled pads are glued along the top edge, not the edge with the holes in.

Re: Change and the obsession with the new…

Curiously, I find I have spent so much time on a keyboard in the forty years that I can read stuff I wrote then a lot more easily than I can read stuff I wrote yesterday.

So have we reached, forty years on...

an OS which can be considered a mature product?

Like a fridge?

Millions of smart meters will brick it when 2G and 3G turns off

How many meter-reader-person hours

do you get for fourteen billion quid?

Though with that said, remote reading for the area heating and the electricity here near Berlin seems to work, even if the computer insisted for the first year that our power/heating/water usage was improbably low and replaced all three meters - the previous occupants of the house were a young couple with a small child; we're a couple of pensioners. I can't see how merely using half the resources was anomalous...

Admin behind E-Root stolen creds souk extradited to US

Nice limerick, guys!

(see subtitle).

'Recession-resilient' Tesla misses Q3 expectations, slows Mexico expansion

Re: If The CyberTruck's Not Enough

all of it is on the central fondleslab

Oddly enough, the original Mini - Issigonis' real one, not the BMW pastiche - had the instrument cluster in the centre of the dash. I think the reasons were to do with simplifying left hand drive versions... but the performance models put the dials where they should be.

Personally, I think the idea of the touch screen might go down well with those who live on their phones, but it strikes me as an ergonomic disaster. (Mind you, I complain about a car radio which has two buttons to the left of the channel select, indistinguishable by touch and bloody annoying when you hit one by mistake).

Re: Accuracy

Measure in inches, mark with chalk, cut with an axe?

Boeing gives busy billionaires unbothered about bespoke beds a cheaper BizJet

$89 million

and image that: a bit of turbulence and all those cushions will be flying around your millionaire ears!

It's full of stars! Galactic atlas catalogs 400k Milky Way neighbors

Imagine that you're standing...

Kudos for the header illustration, guys!

Governments resent their dependence on Big Tech

Big tech has good salesbods. The points that are being made though are significant and serious... if your infrastructure (both civic and military) cannot be shown to immune not only to external actors but also to the manufacturers, should you be using it? The supplier may not be your friend tomorrow.

Sony, Honda tease EV that aims to be a lounge on wheels

mobility can become a unique and endearing presence for users

Bingo!

Ex-Fugees star accuses his lawyer of going full robot in corruption trial

Oh brave new world

in which 'the lawyer that I selected was an idiot' is grounds for appeal!

Raspberry Pi 5: Hot takes and cooler mistakes

Got to be an improvement on my company Lenovo

Which is loaded with so much company crapware and spyware and monitoring and such that it spins up the fan - sounding a bit like a 747 spooling up - before the boot is complete.

Intel's 14th-gen Raptor Lake Refresh turns turbos up to 6GHz, gives i7 an E-core bump

Remember when a 200MHz clock increase was something worthwhile?

Now it's a couple of percent...

If you're brave enough to move fully-laden datacenter racks, here's the robot for you

Re: Try that on a false floor

Well the supports are probably up to it... not so sure about the tiles!

How 'AI watermarking' system pushed by Microsoft and Adobe will and won't work

...to bake the origin of pics into photographers' snaps.

And what about the hundreds of billions of snaps already existing? Being unlabelled, they will therefore automatically be suspect.

Chinese citizens feel their government is doing such a fine job with surveillance

Re: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

And the dog is trained to bite any of the three that tries to turn the camera off.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

two and a half customers per camera? How many are actually watched? I suppose the theory is that one doesn't do something because one *might* be watching...

Workload written by student made millions, ran on unsupported hardware, with zero maintenance

Kudos points just for sending the fire list to a thermal printer :)

Engineers pave the way for building lunar roads with Moon dust

Re: And how long before

Thanks. There should of course have been an 'except' in that last sentence! My attention span is getting... ooh, squirrel!

Re: And how long before

Now you've got me thinking... how effective/useful might a bicycle be on the moon? You'd probably want one with those odd-looking fat tyres rather than skinny racing tyres, and you might have to relearn some reflexes, but it strikes me that just having three or four bearings to seal against dust is probably a lot simpler (and cheaper) than some battery-powered buggy.

Though of course 'people powered' instead of 'technology' might be frowned upon in such a technical environment.

(Odd, thinking back I can't recall a single SF story that I've read involving transport on the moon either by sub-orbital rocket, powered crawler/buggy, or walking. Odd.)

Atlassian buys 'asynchronous video' outfit Loom for almost $1 billion

In deeply, deeply human ways.

Kill me now.

Google's third-party cookie culling to begin in Q1 2024 ... for 1% of Chrome users

Re: allowing ads and other services to be tailored to your interests.

Yes, I too have been splattered with the YT antiblocker. It was a shock to see what sort of adverts they show, presumably based on my viewing habits: as far as I can tell I am a cellar-dweller with a mobile phone and not in fact of pensionable age with a wide range of indoor and outdoor interests. So for the time being, YT is not on my agenda until the nice guys at Ubo sort it out.

allowing ads and other services to be tailored to your interests.

Is there a place to put 'no adverts at all, and no tracking either, and while you're at it, restrict yourself to first party scripts, thank you very much'?

There needs to be a better way. I don't object to paying for content; I do object to paying ten or twenty bucks a month to each and every service that might have something that interests me.

Mars helicopter to try for new speed record on Thursday

NASA has a habit of doing this...

I suppose this is the time for ob. xkcd: https://xkcd.com/695/

Astronomers spot collision between two exoplanets, both feared vaporized

Marvin the Martian?

I wanted an earth-shattering kaboom!

SBF on trial: The Python code that allegedly let Alameda hedge fund spend people's FTX deposits

Re: Oh python...

>> colleteral / collateral

Have fun trying to find bugs when the author can't spell consistently!

(I have had the delight of someone else's C file that started with a big pile of #define cheif chief and similar misspellings. I'm sure find and replace is a thing, right?)

US govt talks up $2B X-ray photobooth to check its nuke weapon sims are right

But so large?

How will they strap it to a shark?

ESA's Vega rocket delivers Taiwanese and Thai satellites to low Earth orbit

a propellant-free electric sail

There's just something really appealing about that phrase. Very James Bond: "No, Mr Bond, you will be attached to a propellant-free electric sail and then you will die. Mwahaha!"

Scripted shortcut caused double-click disaster of sysadmin's own making

Re: Is there anyone

Forty years ago - so memory is hazy - I was very inexperienced with the Basys newsroom system. I mistook a couple of commands and instead of just restarting the single user I had intended, I reset the entire system: newsroom, gallery, control room... at about five minutes before the broadcast.

Fortunately scripts were always printed, and most of them had been, and also fortunately the system restarted - just - in time. But the screams were loud...

flak jacket--->

Never mind SETI and NASA, if your Ring somehow snaps ET, Amazon might give you $1M

snap "scientific evidence" of extraterrestrials

Well they're safe with their million then, aren't they?

'Evidence' from a network connected camera, in a world which has so-called AI picture creation/modification? That ship has sailed/that genie is out of the bottle [delete as appropriate].

Google promises Germany to creep on users less after market power probe

What google should be doing with my data

is absolutely nothing.

FEMA to test emergency alert system US-wide today

Just to be clear: this is all nonsense.

My favourite Covid nonsense quote: Isn't it amazing how they've managed to make the virus so it only infects people who _haven't_ been vaccinated...

Tweaked Space Shuttle Main Engine gets ready for final testing

I remember when NASA put a man on the moon...

My grandfather remembered seeing the news about the Wright brothers' flights _and_ saw the moon landings.

Big Brother is coming to a workplace near you, and the privacy regulator wants a word

Re: "or offsite [...]outside work hours.

But US working hours are apparently 24/7... I'm definitely with you on this one, Jake: if you want me to work - or even to talk to - outside my core hours (for me and my colleagues, 37.5 hrs/wk, though I work part time these days), you damn well pay me overtime for them. That's *significantly extra*, not the default rate, and definitely not zero.

This concept of 'if you're not prepared to put the company above everything else' expectation is completely and utterly insane...

$17k solid gold Apple Watch goes from Beyoncé's wrist to the obsolete list

Well, my mobile now takes between thirty and forty seconds from selecting a callee on its 'recently used' list to actually changing the display to indicate that a call is in progress, and several seconds more before I hear the ring tone. Sometimes it even allows the buttons on the app (loudspeaker, mute etc) to operate; sometimes it doesn't.

But this mechanical watch always knows the time and is dependent only on me moving my arm from time to time to keep working. Admittedly the mobile knows the time, but first I have to remember where I left it.

Obviously peoples' needs and wants from any device will be different. I rather like the idea of three hundred year old engineering that still works today (though the one on my wrist at the moment is only a few years old, I have several others sixty years old and older).

Re: No doubt

And besides, what makes you think I paid for it?