Posts by Rich 11

Nationwide power outages knock Spain, Portugal offline

Re: Anybody know?

ÉlRon?

Hubbard? Another dodgy organisation.

Brit soldiers tune radio waves to fry drone swarms for pennies

Re: But it has no lasers!

That wasn't sweat.

Re: Countermeasures?

Someone once tried to convince me that the action of stripping electrons from a cathode was actually a form of atomic energy so should be banned.

If you're walking around with a bunch of unlicenced particle accelarators, try not to cross the streams.

Boffins turn Moon dirt into glass for solar panels, eye future lunar base power

Or for the nuclear waste dump to go critical and send the moon racing out of the solar system.

One of the last of Bletchley Park's quiet heroes, Betty Webb, dies at 101

Re: The silent ones

R V Jones wrote 'Most Secret War', which to me is by far the best description of the scientific and technological arms race that took place in the first half of the Second World War. It's not just an outline of technical events, but also a record of the battles the scientists fought with British politicians, bureaucrats and high-ranking military officers. On top of that, the combat risks that some of those people took, even those usually dismissed as boffins or back-room boys, are stomach-churning. I cannot recommend the book highly enough.

Re: Heroes, all of them

"She threatened to shoot me, and I was smitten. It was love at first shot."

Worry not. China's on the line saying AGI still a long way off

Re: Vacuum

Notice any species notably missing off that list?

Tardigrades.

Please fasten your seatbelts. A third of US air traffic control systems are 'unsustainable'

Re: I have an easy solution...

According to official figures, US GDP per capita is double that of Europe.

Some of that GDP comes from the artifically inflated cost of internal trade, such as the high prices American clinics and hospitals have to pay for pharmaceuticals patented and manufactured by American corporations, or the excessively convoluted requirements made for the maintenance of defence materiel by Lockheed and Boeing, such as the F-35 fighters or the Minuteman-3 ICBMs.

Re: "Eminense grease"???

Most of that set pronounce "difficult" words incorrectly.

In all fairness to them, they're just emulating their Orange God.

Re: Get it Effin' Done

I would not be surprised to learn airport X has a Compaq 8088-based luggable PC sitting in a corner, running MS-DOS and some Kermit scripts to send and fetch files via modem.

And if Airport X needs a replacement for that fixer system, I have a spare they can borrow.

Does terrible code drive you mad? Wait until you see what it does to OpenAI's GPT-4o

Re: Not sure why misalignment happens

Toastie Toaster refuses to toast my tea cakes, and Hinton can't get him to shut up.

Oxford researchers pull off quantum first with distributed gate teleportation

However many black cockerels I sacrificed to Lucifer, my grasp of quantum mechanics still wouldn't advance by very much.

FBI's secret UFO hunters fear Trump's January 6 purge will send them into orbit

Re: Drones

Let's not forget that these drone sightings took place in the same state that had such a healthy response to Orson Welles' 1938 radio theatre version of The War of the Worlds.

I think the FBI does strange manpower management things like assigning investigators to successive investigations as they come up, rather than sticking each investigator into a stasis chamber until the only case they are allowed to work on is reopened. No doubt that chappie with the interest in Government Efficiency will have something to say about this bizarre state of affairs.

Musk's move fast and break things mantra won't work in US.gov

Re: President Musk for life.

They don't think history applies to them. They're so special, you see.

Re: "You're driving towards a wall!" "No I'm not!" *smash*

more ludicrous and implausible than the 70’s Soap series

But with none of the main players as funny as Billy Crystal and Robert Guillaume were.

Re: "You're driving towards a wall!" "No I'm not!" *smash*

The EU is collapsing.

People have been saying that for 30 years.

Whenever I hear it now, I visualise either a brash young person who doesn't realise they have little or no personal experience of history or an older Farage-a-like scrunching up his face (yes, it's always a him) and wishing upon a star: "Please let me be right this time. Please let me be right!"

Re: "You're driving towards a wall!" "No I'm not!" *smash*

They'll have to mine the ruins of our cities, extracting iron from the crumbling pre-stressed concrete and aluminium from the cars crushed under the fallen tower blocks. They won't have the coal or oil we needed to kickstart and maintain an Industrial Age, but they might be able to suss out gasification and take it a bit more slowly.

There were (and maybe still are) plans to flag nuclear waste sites with warning signs that would survive for ten thousand years. Obviously this couldn't use any existing language but required some sort of hopefully universal symbolism. We'd need to leave behind the equivalent of the Voyager Golden Record to warn our descendants / bonobos / dolphins / giant fire-ant hive minds not to emit too much CO2 or create too many plastic nanoparticles. "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Re: You are missing the point.

and it will be interesting to see if they go for it.

That's one way of putting it.

OpenAI's ChatGPT crawler can be tricked into DDoSing sites, answering your queries

The investors/creators seeing only dollar signs and ignoring any downside.

Move fast and break things. The only thing they care about not breaking is their IPO.

Re: All hail to the AI. May the AI kill us all.

It convinces otherwise reasonable humans to do terrible things by feeding them false information.

You mean, like a religion? But humanity has long since learned how to deal with.... oh.

It also provides some humans with cover to do the terrible things they wanted to do.

OK, then, definitely like a religion.

Microsoft eggheads say AI can never be made secure – after testing Redmond's own products

Re: There are security risks and security risks.

I expect they've thoroughly sifted the training data for the slightest related reference. They're unlikely to care too much of the filter is a little greedier than absolutely necessary.

Megan, AI recruiting agent, is on the job, giving bosses fewer reasons to hire in HR

Re: New Job Spec from Megan

* must be a teamster clarinet player

The AI only values the clarinet because most of the people it generates have six fingers on all three hands.

I, for one, don't have to welcome your new HR overlords

I knew retiring was the right decision. AI interviews! Jesus fuck...

Tech titans hide in shadows awaiting Trump tariff threats

Re: "fear of upsetting the next US President"...

How does that make J.D a nazi?

Because JD now seems to be quite happy to be the right-hand man of America's Hitler. It's not like Trump has changed since then; if anything, he's got worse. It's more like JD no longer cares, or at best is putting his personal ambition ahead of any democratic principle. Personally, I think he expects Trump to kick the bucket while in office, so JD will get to become president. If that does happen and Vance steps back from Trump's policies, undoing the anti-democratic damage, then I'll concede that I was wrong about him.

Boffins trick AI model into giving up its secrets

Re: Coming soon!

They'll just add another toilet to the wing.

Sounding off

slowed down by factors of 10 or 1000, they might make audible sounds

Back in the dim and distant past, I attended a college whose primary computing resource was a Pr1me minicomputer. As new computing students we were shown around the machine room during Freshers Week, and I can remember standing alongside this big, open wardrobe-sized frame filled with connected IC boards and daughter cards, the air warm around it. If you listened carefully you could hear a high hum with rapid but detectable changes in pitch. The sysadmin showing us around said he could always tell when a class in the nearby terminal room logged on and when their lecturer told them to submit their compilation batch jobs.

Aliens, spy balloons, or drones? SUV-sized mystery objects spotted in US skies

Re: I for one welcome our alien Overlords

in an eyeblink

It's far more likely that there was a glitch in the radar tracking software when some combination of circumstances triggered an unhandled edge case. It's the machine equivalent of an optical illusion being generated in a human brain.

Re: Clue's in the name

The flying objects have also been spotted near president-elect Donald Trump's New Jersey golf club

If Trump is on the green when they land, their ambassador will waddle over to him, take one look, and say, "Take me to a leader!"

Chinese boffins find way to use diamonds as super-dense and durable storage medium

Re: "Is that a USB key, or a marriage proposal?"

That would either be very bad or very good for your relationship.

One thing AI can't generate at the moment – compelling reasons to use it for work

Re: "Possibly, AI is not the big bonus that everyone's thinking"

I've still got half a box of punch cards left. They come in handy for scribbling notes and using as bookmarks.

Windows 95 setup was three programs in a trench coat, Microsoft vet reveals

Re: Downhill?

I assumed XP was a typo and the name should have stood for Fisher-Price.

All bark, no bite? Musk's DOGE unlikely to have any real power

Re: There IS NO MORE CONGRESS

Thanks for confirming that you are indeed detached from reality.

Re: There IS NO MORE CONGRESS

If you think the UK's Labour Party is a communist organisation you are utterly detached from reality. They haven't even been socialist since 1994.

Unbreakable Voyager space probes close in on a 50 year mission

Re: CVHOAXdtcm

My money's on both.

Elon Musk's disaster relief promises: Should we believe the hype?

Re: may have sounded good, but really, it's not much more than a PR stunt

Musk is the sort of person who would have set up a hot dog stand right alongside a Westboro Baptist Church protest outside a military funeral.

Trump campaign arms up with 'unhackable' phones after Iranian intrusion

That is a vile calumny! The Greatest President Ever has never spilled the beans* at one of his rallies, nor would it matter if he did because the thousands upon thousands of faithful attendees are good upright law-abiding American patriots and can be trusted never to spread state secrets further, just like they can be trusted never to leave a packed rally until The Donald has finished speaking.

*He reserves this display of personal power and privilege for the Mar-A-Lago wedding parties that he gatecrashes.

BOFH: Boss's quest for AI-generated program ends where it should've begun

Re: Hilarious

You forgot to tell them about the number of chickens which will need to be sacrificed to Lucifer.

Crack coder wasn't allowed to meet clients due to his other talent: Blisteringly inappropriate insults

Re: Bless..

There's psychological studies that suggest that people who swear a lot tend to be more honest.

Anecdotally, I think the reverse may also be true.

When I first started full-time work I used to work for a team leader who never swore at all. In the five years that I knew him I never heard him use any intensifier stronger than 'blooming'.

He was a bully. He loved to throw his metaphorical weight around (and from his build you can bet that he'd done so physically at school), but he was careful not to cross the line to where someone would either thump him or report him. It was all just little things, just enough that you'd notice but not so much that you could call him out on them without the risk of appearing unreasonable. Some of us managed to find ways to stand up to him without causing him to lose face, and the realisation that we were on to him would be just enough to spoil his enjoyment so that he'd go look for an easier target. With the advantage of hindsight we should have handled it quite differently, I think, but back then I was young and much less certain of myself than I am now.

When our department head retired, seventeen of us signed a letter saying that our manager was not fit to succeed him. If there'd been such a thing as HR back then (and if we'd had any confidence in them) I'm sure we would have got together and done something sooner, but the thought of the bastard widening his scope for harm was too much. He didn't get the job, but nothing formal was done about the complaint so we made sure the existence of the letter became known to him (though not the list of signatories). He was much more subdued after that, and finally left when his attempt to present a reorganisation plan got zero support from anyone in his team. His leaving-do was remarkable for its sparse attendance, so much so that his associates from other departments who did turn up commented on it -- some of them quite loudly, I was told!

Tired of airport security queues? SQL inject yourself into the cockpit, claim researchers

Re: Exploits of a Mom (Again)

"Joey, have you ever been in a Turkish prison?"

Green Berets storm building after compromising its Wi-Fi

Re: milatiry graed haxx0rin teh wifis

The Swedes probably set everything up in English just out of politeness.

The future of AI/ML depends on the reality of today – and it's not pretty

Re: Follow the money

I do at least have a use for tulips.

Microsoft security tools questioned for treating employees as threats

Re: f**k me sideways with a banana

I expect my Fortran IV skills would today earn me about £1.40 an hour, that being very close to what they first earned me in 1984.

Re: Mmmmm...

About forty years ago I had a friend who worked at GCHQ, around the time that the Thatcher government was having a stab at unionised workers there going on strike by claiming that some of them should have their security clearances revoked simply for being left-wing. It sparked a wider conversation about security and modernisation, and my friend mentioned a gay co-worker who was so flagrantly camp that at his annual interview the security people ignored the old 1950s rules about the risk that homosexuals could be blackmailed by the Russians because this bloke was completely unembarrassable. The joke went that if a Soviet honeytrap had caught him in flagrante delicto, he'd joyfully have passed the incriminating photos around the office himself!

Gartner mages: Payback from office AI expected in around two years

Re: Moving at 99.9% of the speed of light

Add another ten years for the fusion technology necessary to power it...

Trump campaign cites Iran election phish claim as evidence leaked docs were stolen

Re: Important question missing

Let? The door was never locked.

Keir Starmer says facial recognition tech is the answer to far-right riots

Re: Only for the Far Right

Really? That's your excuse? You extrapolate from a simple referential word to a malign intent regarding an unrelated incident? All to cover for your desire to change the subject to "What about the Far Left?", as though some anarcho-communists have engaged in a national programme of setting light to the homes of corporatist shareholders and tearing down the walls of Anglican churches in order to have bricks to throw at cars and cops.

Perhaps I should interpret your phrase "the overall picture" to include every riotous incident since the English Civil War.

Pathetic.

Re: Only for the Far Right

You have a very short memory it appears

Your example comes from a fortnight before this last weekend's riot while you yourself quoted the OP's phrase "this weekend". Can you not read? Sadly a lot of other people who can't read chose to agree with you. Perhaps you were all drunk. Or blinded by a political motivation. How would you explain your blatant error?

BOFH: Well, we did tell you to keep the BitLocker keys safe

Re: "You are confusing Belgian chocolate with American "chocolate""

Cheese rats. It's a borderline ecological niche but at least the rats started off with a couple of evolutionary advantages for dealing with ingested toxins.

Stop installing that software – you may have just died

Re: The medical test case

Your Scout training must have been pretty extensive. Causality extraction usually requires Loki.