Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

International cops urge Meta not to implement secure encryption for all

Re: Old Confused Person Here

Because you can then arrest anyone for using encryption.

If child abusers use encryption then anybody using encryption is a child abuser, and you don't support child abusers do you ?

Europe wants more cities to use datacenter waste heating. How's that going?

Re: Coal it not just CO2

But it's natural, organically generated radioactivity

Re: "There's a cost, and operators are worried it will fall on them"

they'll be selling the heat, won't they ? So, there's profit to be made

1, install, operate and maintain all the plant to concentrate the heat

2, run distribution network to nearest town cos zoning didn't let you build your massive DC in the middle of the village

3, install, operate and maintain all the heating in the houses

4, generate the list waste heat when the weather is hot and nobody wants their central heating on

5, profit

SpaceX's second attempt at orbital Starship launch ends in fireball

Re: Complexity ≠ Reliability

> the safest design was having just one engine

There has never been an engine failure in a glider

4chan and other web sewers scraped up into Google's mega-library for training ML

Re: "Problematic, racist, and pornographic web content"

I have an electric car and 10c/kWh hydro

Re: "Problematic, racist, and pornographic web content"

I've got a water-powered car.

Chinese company claims it's built batteries so dense they can power electric airplanes

Re: Battery materials???

The 50+% includes heat recovery to electric energy.

2stroke diesels are more efficient, but unlikely to power aircraft

Re: Those are rookie numbers

Swappable battery packs aren't necessarily a problem designed in from scratch. We manage it with industrial vehicles.

But for short <30 min flights with a similar turn around time - like shuttles - a DC fast charger would work.

A lot of an electrical aircraft is simpler than a car. There us no regen charging. The load is a lot more constant, especially if it had supercaps for take off.

The lack of swappable batteries in cars is purely economics/infrastructure

Re: Those are rookie numbers

>yes, but you land, spend a few minutes pumping kerosene in to the tanks, then take off again

Then spend hours servicing the engines

Battery power isn't going to replace plant-goop for 737s but it could enable a lot of quadcopter airport-city centre taxi services with short ranges and strict noise / pollution limits

Russian snoops just love invading unpatched Cisco gear, America and UK warn

Re: Bent over willingly

Huawei is a risk because of it's terrible programming quality which leads to lots of security loopholes while simultaneously having sophisticated Chinese backdoors which are undetectable to anybody who has analysed the code

Cisco is perfectly safe because it's security loopholes are all the users fault

When you're ASML, not even a semiconductor downturn can dent your outlook

Re: Stock is down ?

And ASML spend 10 years and umpty billion euro developing the next magical machine - and it launches into one of those periodic semiconductor gluts

But they still have to spend 2*umpty billion on the next generation that is going to take another 10 years

It's a surprisingly tough market.

Chromebook expiration date, repair issues 'bad for people and planet'

Re: Google does tell you how to

While Microsoft will ship you a free PC if your old one can't run Win11

>companies to donate their used kit to schools,

Teachers. Instead of just rebooting a chromebook or handing a student a loaner machine out of the cupboard you are now administering a room of 30 Windows PCs.

But to make it more fun and challenging all these machines are donations so the whole classroom isn't the same model and they are also different from all the other classrooms

But the sense of achievement you get from debugging BIOS issues when a Dell model XYZ loses a backup battery or a Lenovo ZXY only puts boot message son the CPU HDMI port is why you got into teaching in the first place.

Unless this is all a brilliant education dept initiative to train an army of BOFHs who have already learned to hate all users by working with children for years

Child-devouring pothole will never hurt a BMW driver again

Re: Is it the materials or the skills?

New roads built by cheapest bidder who subcontracts it out to cheapest bidder who uses least amount of cheapest materiel and gas cheapest staff do work

Same company then bids for ongoing road repair contract.

Re: It's how they fix potholes that makes them bigger.

What have the Romans ever done for us?

Well the roads....

Reddit: If you want to slurp our API to train that LLM, you better pay for it, pal

But you could still use the picture of the billboard to teach a self driving car what billboards look like.

Otherwise you are going to be licensing every image of every stop sign from the local authority that put it up, and they are going to need a license from the sign company that made it.

You want skynet, cos that's how you get skynet

Train an AI on Reddit and it IS going to try and destroy humanity

Military helicopter crash blamed on failure to apply software patch

Helicopters don't work well upside down

SpaceX feels the pressure, scraps first orbital launch of Starship

Yes but starship is actually intended to go to the moon

SLS is intended to keep campaign funds flowing

Re: It's always a valve...

I'm surprised el'reg still calls them valves

I thought for their new sceptic-friendly style they would be called 'tubes'

UK consortium bid for NHS data platform falls at first hurdle

This consortium probably doesn't have the browsing history and chat logs of all the cabinet ministers like Palantir does

UK government scraps smart motorway plans, cites high costs and low public confidence

>But shutting down the idea of a) making motorways more dangerous and b) expanding our addiction to CO₂ gets my approval

You misunderstand. the hard-shoulder is still going to be used, they are just removing the "smart" bit.

If you aren't driving a BMW MRAP and somebody hits you - it's your fault for being a poor

NHS England considered using Palantir tech to manage strike disruption

Re: OpenDemocracy article is a little worrying

>the NHS probably will actually be his privately owned business

the UK probably will actually be his privately owned business

Brits start 'em young with 20% of tots 'owning' a smartphone

>The glass eyed babysitter in the corner, back then, at least had to follow some sort of standards.

Why yes that nice Mr Saville was going to fix me

Curiosity gets interplanetary software patch for better driving and more on Mars

Re: Eurpean format numbers?

But what about the new edition of Edge? And it will need new video codecs and a whole bunch of printer drivers

Microsoft mucks with PrtScr key for first time in decades

Re: Hard Truths

>Or, maybe after 30 years, and a new generation of computer users has grown up, they expect different behavior

The younglings at our place would use their phone to take a picture of the screen.

Actually it's a useful habit, instead of writing down some long configuration command, or try and work out how to share a file snippet between two systems - just take out your phone and snap a picture

Pentagon super-leak suspect cuffed: 21-year-old Air National Guardsman

Security vetting military is always a bit tricky.

We're looking for staff who love wearing uniforms and blindly following orders and kill without question but aren't facist gun nuts.

Re: If hes

He could run for president

Re: makes a smidge of difference

So what's the problem?

Didn't he store them in an approved swimming pool closet

Launching soon: ESA's Juice to probe Jupiter's moons for signs of possible life

It's fine, we are attempting no landings there

Fancy trying the granddaddy of Windows NT for free? Now's your chance

Re: The modern museum

>You could have some special app you can't afford to port

Or you can't risk porting or it's not worth it for a single project

There are a couple of astronomy satellites whose data collection / analysis was running on VMS in the 2010s, and IIRC the Eurofighter avionics development was on VMS so hopefully somebody has a build system

Re: The modern museum

VMS and VMS++ ie WNT, are better designed than Unix

They were actually designed over decades rather than a quick hack that got out of hand

However Unix was available - Carbon Fibre and Titanium are way better building materials than 2x4s but if you need to build a shed which are you using?

Re: The modern museum

Can anyone explain why, with spinnign rust costing $10/Tb we don't have VMS-style versioning filesystems on PCs ?

We can't waste disk space, those 3.5" floppies only hold 1.44Mb and hard drives are only 32Mb

Sanctions-busting exporters sent $2 billion of tech to Russia through China, Hong Kong, and the UK in 2022

Huawei

Since we are assured that Huawei are all Chinese spy devices and so banned in all civilized countries and the USA.

Is it a problem that Russia is using them ?

Who exactly is sanctioning them, the Chinese ?

Python head hisses at looming Euro cybersecurity rules

Re: Haven't you twigged yet?

>Governments don't want just anyone writing code.

Governments don't care

Politicians do what special interests tell them to do / what special interests tell the media that the voters want them to do (depending on how advanced your democracy is)

Who is funding politicians to stop opensource ?

Re: To pay or not to pay

>but if you gave genuine advice that someone else didn't follow exactly and that caused a crash then surely you aren't.

Over here in lawyer land it's more complicated if you're a 'professional'

If I was an engineer rather than a mere physicist and I gave some advice, even if I wasn't being paid, I could be liable.

I would be liable even if I saw something and DIDN'T give advice, eg. I walked past a dangerous construction site.

Fortunately software (mostly) isn't counted as engineering - but if that changed then anyone with a software engineering degree could be liable for 'negligence' for open source contributions

Re: To pay or not to pay

>but it often doesn't matter in terms of legal liability whether someone gets paid or not for what they are doing.

Except the publisher of the software isn't responsible for what is done with it.

If i answer a question on reddit about car maintenance am I responsible for the crash ?

Re: Something needs to be done to protect consumers

>If I bake some cakes and give them away on the street for free and people get sick because I didn't follow hygiene laws then I would be prosecuted.

>Why should software be treated differently?

Because software is more like "I publish a recipe for cakes, that doesn't mention to wash the ingredients" should I get prosecuted?

Elon Musk actually sits down and talks to 'government-funded media' the BBC

Re: Not government funded but government run

>What Government cronies? It seems to mostly be infected by Whitehall cronies

1, Give £400,000 to Prime Minister

2, Get appointed boss of BBC

3, Profit

>he was just wearing that shirt because it was convenient at the time

I just went to the Bar Mitzvah dressed as a Nazi cos all my other suits were in the wash

Three quarters of UK tech pros are ready to leave their jobs

I get that every may/june

When your payslip gets that little bump that means you've maxed social security deductions for the year and you are also now in the higher tax bracket = I'm working the rest of the year mostly for the tax man.

I could quit today

Re: The old saying

>pay them more

Not really a long term solution.

I can poach optics engineers from Zeiss by paying twice as much, they can then poach them back by doubling again.

Big win for optics engineers but doesn't increase the availability of optics engineers for the next 10 years

Re: So?

The 9% who replied saying they were happy to stay thought it was a trap

Re: Hybrid working

>Before IR35 changes, when you ran a consulting business you could expense your own office

<cough> write-off 1/3 of your mortgage cos you use one bedroom of your 3-bed semi to store that pile of old servers + printers that you can't throw away

Pager hack faxed things up properly, again, and again, and again

Re: what fun it was writing configuration scripts in the Hayes ‘language

In the days when they supplied a fax at 14.4k BT would only approve 300baud modems

Coincidentally they would also lease you a very expensive ISDN line

Astronomers clock runaway black hole leaving trail of fresh stars

Re: Daily Mail Headline

Would they mention the colour of the object?

Cardboard drones running open source flight software take off in Ukraine and beyond

Re: Blue Peter

Get an adult to help you with the fission core

Re: We've been here before ...

> especially if the airframe can be DIY’d from locally sourced cardboard and the electronics can be readily reused.

But I suspect this can be solved by requiring aerospace grade cardboard from an approved aerospace qualified supplier and assembled by a certified aerospace cardboard folding engineer - we'll soon have it upto a price that doesn't challenge any existing market players

Move over, Google Earth. Caltech's here with a fresh 3D tour of Mars

Now just sit back

And wait for the first privacy complaints - and you've detected life

(unless Google blur out aliens)