Posts by LoPath

US Navy backs right to repair after $13B carrier crew left half-fed by contractor-locked ovens

What the heck are they supposed to do in an extended wartime situation?

I've seen contractors deployed to war zones on many occasions. There's money to be made there.

When I was in Afghanistan, we had a contractor (think it was ITT?) that worked directly with our unit in Kandahar helping to maintain and train us on a comm system. His partner drew the shorter straw and would go out and visit the FOB's.

When I was in Italy, supporting Operation Deny Flight, Litton Data Systems had a contractor working with us there. Dude had a uniform just like ours, but it said "LITTON" instead of "US AIR FORCE". His official travel orders listed "worldwide". He'd travel everywhere they had equipment performing the more extensive preventative maintenance inspections and repairs.

Copilot+ PCs? Customers just aren't buying it – yet

Get off my lawn!

We get computers because we want them to do a specific task. We don't want one to guess on our behalf what we want it to do.

Ransomware forces hospital to turn away ambulances

They still have those. Called a "Charge Nurse". They rely heavily on computers to keep their "bed boards" up to date.

Lights, camera, AI! Real-time deepfakes coming to DEF CON

Pretty soon meeting someone in person will be the only way to verify authenticity... until facial replication can be done. Time to re-watch Face/Off!

Meta's AI safety system defeated by the space bar

Re: Crookedness considered harmful

AL BUNDY... that's the AI that I would use. What better than having your AI act like a hen-pecked shoe salesman from the 80's?

Lapsus$ teen sentenced to indefinite detention in hospital for Nvidia, GTA cyberattacks

Re: Given that it appears….

I'm the exception on the "all of them" description, but it's been damn tough. My son is now 22 years old.

Police ignored the laws of datacenter climate control

Make it rain!

At an Air National Guard base, one building was given an air handler room to install the network switches for the building. One day their network went out. The air conditioner had died and the room filled with hot humid air. So humid that condensation started raining down the walls and into the wall-mounted switches.

How is this problem mine, techie asked, while cleaning underground computer

Re: "......the mine had closed."

Nothing a bag of rice won't fix!

NASA tests bot built to slither across, and beneath, alien worlds' ice

Tremors!

Where is Kevin Bacon when you need him??

Boffins hear Martian dust devils' rumbles for first time

Sounds

More like Marvin the Martian blowing into the microphone!

Huge nonprofit hospital network suffers IT meltdown after 'security incident'

Downplayed

I took my wife to the walk-in clinic on Wednesday. They said "oh, our computers are down" when we checked in. Absolutely every aspect of the visit was done on paper. Even left with a handwritten prescription and a work note, also written on a prescription pad. Her simple 15 minute visit resulted in a pile of at least 10 pages. Somebody's going to be very busy doing manual inputs if they ever get their computer systems back online.

Amazon's Roomba acquisition gets caught on FTC's rug

Re: Vindication

Better yet... we see that your house looks like utter shite! How about we set you up with a subscription to Don's Dumpster Service and Merry Maids?

Clean up orbit first, then we can think about space factories, says FCC

Space Junk

What we need is a space-based "laser" (using my Austin Powers air quotes) to push the debris back towards Earth.

Russian anti-satellite test added to a 'pressing threat to security' in space

Re: "internationally-established consensus best practices for space operations"

The problem with putting the world in the hands of scientists.... There are now scientists that have biases, based on politics, money, ego, etc. Who defines a good scientist versus a bad scientist?

NASA to send prototype robot surgeon into space

Appendix

Who knows... in 100 years, the appendix might finally go away.

Large Hadron Collider experiment reveals three exotic particles

Moo

How many cows can you squeeze into a femtobarn?

Schneider and Dell integrate UPS, HCI for graceful shutdown

Generator failure?

But what if your generator fails to start? That's when your UPS runtime is put to the test. Where I'm at, we have about 50-60 minutes of runtime. That's just barely enough time to drive to the site, do a quick diagnosis, and fire up the generator. If the generator doesn't start, well then...

Totaled Tesla goes up in flames three weeks after crash

Re: So when one of these things is junked ...

When I was in the military, our unit would go through a boatload of lithium batteries that were used in radios. Each battery had a discharge button on them, that would put a resistor across the battery to discharge it slowly and completely. We'd typically mash the button and load up 40-50 of them in a connex and come back in a week with a voltmeter to check that they were discharged fully. If they were, great. Into the trash as "commercial waste". If they wouldn't discharge, they'd have to go into a hazmat barrel and turned in for recycling. Every once in a while, one would catch on fire, but they wouldn't burn up the connex. We'd just have to shovel out all of the molten batteries and chuck them into another hazmat barrel! Totally safe! :D

If AI chatbots are sentient, they can be squirrels, too

Re: "different voices for reading aloud kids books compared to horror stories"

Daffy said that's despicable!

Metaverse progress update: Some VR headset prototypes nowhere near shipping

Re: "fidelity that's indistinguishable from the real world"

It's just an upgrade from the days of old AOL chat room. You couldn't grope anyone back then either. :P

Boston Dynamics spends months training its Atlas robots to perform one minute of parkour almost perfectly

Dancing Robots

How about them dancing?? Ultimately cheesy, but grand!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fn3KWM1kuAw

Spacey McSpaceface: Artemis takes shape ahead of '2021' launch – but first you need to name the crash-test dummy

Space Potatoes

I think this belongs here...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mv8mV5X0MR8

Microsoft to supply US Army with 120,000+ HoloLens units in contract worth 'up to $22bn'

Re: Just a natural evolution

Just imagine hours upon hours of computer based training slides on one of those bad boys!

Space station dumps 2.9-ton battery pack to burn up in Earth's atmosphere after hardware upgrade

Re: Pollution?

Kinda like mozzarella sticks... If you fry them when thawed, the cheese just oozes out. If you fry them frozen, they get nice and gooey in the middle. :D

GPS jamming around Cyprus gives our air traffic controllers a headache, says Eurocontrol

Arrgh!

Not just military... also pirates and smugglers.

Malware attack that crippled Mumbai's power system came from China, claims infosec intel outfit Recorded Future

Re: Critical infrastructure

Very true, but nobody listens to those wacky IT guys.

Hundreds of Facebook moderators complain: AI content moderation isn't working and we're paying for it

Re: "There should be no question over either of those"

I knew a guy that used to do background investigations for the US Dept of Defense. His job was to go to people's houses and interview them. They would interview the employee and their relatives, friends, business associates, etc. He told many stories about weirdos inviting him down to their basement, answering the door in a bathrobe, and other oddities.

Boeing Starliner commander Christopher Ferguson bows out of first crewed mission due to family commitments

If I recall correctly, parachute riggers have to jump one of the random chutes they packed every few months. Helps to prevent sabotage and ensure quality.

Someone not only created a comment-spewing Reddit bot powered by OpenAI's GPT-3, it offered bizarre life advice

Re: False information?

Replace "Stucky's" with "Casey's" and you're spot on.

Dunkin' Donuts drops some dough to glaze over lawsuit accusing it of covering up customer account hacks

One on every corner

Many moons ago, I worked on a project for the Massachusetts State Police. It was strikingly odd and yet very noticeable that there was a Dunkin' Donuts within a block of every single police barracks in the state. And many of them were in strip malls right next door to a women's fitness center. Do you believe in coincidence?

Howdy, er, neighbor – mind if we join you? Potential sign of life spotted in Venus's atmosphere

Re: From penguin poop?

I thought this meant that there was the possibility of a large penguin population on Venus.

Mate, it's the '90s. You don't need to be reachable every minute of every hour. Your operating system can't cope

Re: My first major upgrade

I remember the jump from 300 baud to 1200 baud was "incredible".

'A guy in a jetpack' seen flying at 3,000ft within few hundred yards of passenger jet landing at LA airport

Re: Radar?

Hey jetpack guy... squawk 7500

Cameras

It's already been done. Before COVID, the company I work for had a tourism division. They had cameras mounted on the helicopter to take video that they would give to the tourists after they flew.

Is that croaky voicemail of your CEO just a Fakey McFake Fake – or does he normally ask you to wire him $1m?

Re: a "software-generated voicemail message"

Pardon me... Do you have any Grey Poupon?

What the duck? Bloke keeps getting sent bathtime toys in the post – and Amazon won't say who's responsible

Not brushing

This is no different than sending someone a "bag of dicks". Yes, there are companies that will send a bag of gummy dicks anonymously to your favorite politician or whomever. Someone's just having a laugh. A rather odd laugh...

CompSci student bitten by fox after feeding it McNuggets

Journalist missed the obvious

What does the fox say... about all of this?

Facebook accused of trying to bypass GDPR, slurp domain owners' personal Whois info via an obscure process

Re: What do you think it is about

The first time I went to a Jimmy John's (sandwich shop), I went through the drive thru. On their menu, they have several sandwiches listed including toppings. Some of the toppings I didn't care for, such as brussel sprouts. I had the audacity to request a sandwich without the authorized toppings. I could hear in the order taker's voice that this was an extremely unusual request. In the end, didn't care much for the sandwich and never went back.

Intelsat orbital comms satellite is back online after first robo-recovery mounting and tug job gets it back into position

Re: I wonder what it really does?

Let's see... what kind of military application would you have for a satellite that can latch onto another one? Hmm...

Vodafone chief speaks out after 5G conspiracy nuts torch phone mast serving Nightingale Hospital in Brum

Re: Possibly OTT on my part but..

Not sure about the treason part, but I agree, it's damaging critical infrastructure. These towers that are getting torched typically have a lot of equipment on them and the 5G equipment. So while you might be torching the 5G equipment, you're also torching everything else. Many towers share space with other carriers and some also include public safety radio equipment.

Apple: We respect your privacy so much we've revealed a little about what we can track when you use Maps

Re: If you don't like it...

...not to mention that your phone will still triangulate its location from cell towers when you turn off your GPS. You can actually run Google Maps with GPS turned off... it can be a little wonky, but it tries!

Apple bans COVID-19 games and restricts virus-related apps to authoritative souces

There's no joking with Alexa

Here's a fun one.... ask Alexa "Tell me a coronavirus joke". Nothing, nada, silence.

Austrian foreign ministry: 'State actor' hack on government IT systems is over

Re: Oh those Russians...

Putin' on the Ritz!

Day 4 of outage: UK's Manchester police deploy exciting new carbon-based method to record crime

Re: typo?

Or maybe iPOPO if they're in the hood. My coat's right there next to yours...

Clunk, whirr, buzz, whine. Shared office space can be a riot and sounds like one too

Noise Complaint

I could have lived a lot longer if I hadn't known that was a cover song. Hell, all of Quiet Riot's songs pretty much sound just like that. Time to find a pint to wash that out of my mind!

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare fragged our business VOIP: US ISP blames outage on smash-hit video game rush

Let us know if you encounter any similar snafu moments.

With Windstream? Like all the time...

If the words 'new', 'AI', 'for', 'the', 'physical', 'world', 'accelerate' and 'Facebook' scare you, click this headline

Re: Robots and Pizza, I don't think so

Um, here's your, um, pizza, sir... um, sir? Carry on then, I'll wait...

Blame of thrones: Those viral vids of PC monitors going blank when people stand up? Static electricity from chairs

Re: Hold my LaCroix

If ever there needed to be a video...

Re: Office refurbishment...

We called that the "static strip".

Today's budget for application improvements is brought to you by the letters "Y", "K" and the number "2"

Y2...um... okay?

Reminds me of when the US Dept of Defense when on their tizzy about getting everything Y2K compliant. Anything that plugged into an electrical outlet had to get a sticker. Anything found to be non-compliant got put on a spreadsheet for funding to replace it. I got to take a peek at that list for our base and saw that the medical squadron had a dozen VCR's on the list. Of course everyone got what they wanted... but I couldn't help but wonder if the clock on the VCR's would flash 13:00 instead of 12:00?