Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Warning! Critical flaws found in US Emergency Alert System

The advantage of fake news

Having had several years of totally ludicrous false news announcements - many of them from the Whitehouse press office - fake messages from N. Korean hackers and Macedonian teenagers will be a releif

Virgin Galactic delays commercial suborbital flights again

Re: Shameless

Is Virgin Galactic even Virgin anymore? I though Clamath's disastrous SPAC bought it ?

how much money do they have left to burn?

How many rich idiots are there?

GitLab U-turns on deleting dormant projects after backlash

Re: Neat, must remember to put bugs into code so it has to be continuously revised

But it's far more likely to be a single 'hello world' uploaded by someone learning git

China-linked fake news site shows disinformation on the rise

It just goes to show how backwards China is. Imagine the government owning lying media empires instead of the other way around

Sonatype shines light on typosquatting ransomware threat in PyPI

So who manages them and pays for that?

Who then is in charge of deciding what is approved?

Which jurisdiction is that legislated in ?

If you want to pay for a protected app store I'm sure Oracle would provide it

Indeed, the Lord Chancellor or Her Majesty's Stationary Office should be responsible for allowing people to post their Python code on the web. Libraries might contain the word "color" or other abominations

ESA declares the Sentinel-1B mission over after payload resuscitation ends

This was a spacecraft so weight is slightly more of a concern than cost.

The Apollo spacecraft was designed to run at 28V and a thermostat was fitted that would work at 28V. A design change switched that requirement to 65V.

The thermostat would probably be good to 32V, but fitting a part rated for more than twice the design value to a spacecraft, just in case, wouldn't have been good engineering. Especially when everyone else does the same and the Saturn V is left trying to lift a command module built like a battleship.

But that wasn't a fault+repair, it was a management failure.

This is like building that tank, finding that the switch was faulty and resoldering the connection rather than throwing out the tank and making a new one - either way it wouldn't help that version1 was for a 12V switch and version2 needed a 28V switch

One way Bitcoin miners can make money: Selling electricity back to Texas

Re: Nice power grid you got 'ere, Guv

Soul still intact ?

Re: What a scam!

Corporations make money, rich citizens pay more (put not officially a tax), poor citizens suffer and/or die

The mining companies are probably getting some sort of medal. Especially if you don't tell the GOP that these aren't real miners

Re: Nice power grid you got 'ere, Guv

No that would just be silly.

What you do is buy a triple leveraged forward contract for cheap electricity with a buyout clause based on the derivative of the peak demand and a sub-mezzanine tranche of gazpacho with the inverse synergy of the wibble index tracked by the global wobble factor

AI-friendly patent law needed 'as a matter of national security', ex-USPTO boss says

You can patent software algorithms and even business models

Re: Less, not more!

So making it much harder and more expensive to obtain a patent. That will discourage huge corporations with 1000s of lawyers and billions of $ - while protecting the ingenious inventor in his or her shed

Re: To Whom IT and AI May Be of Grave Concern ....

It may be an urban legend - but supposedly the Germans patented an anti-tamper fuse they invented in the 1930s.

When they subsequently delivered some samples to London in the early 1940s the Brits were able to read all about the design and the description of its operation

Yes that was rather my point. There is no difference in "add one cup of chromium" and "put the following magic values into Tensorflow"

The problem is that, in return for telling the world how to make Invar the maker gets a 20year monopoly and then the whole world benefits and everyone can have Invar for ever-after.

With a patent on an AI model there is no giving back to the world because in 20 years that list of weights to recognise a cat won't be of any use to anyone except computer historians

That shouldn't be a problem for patenting a machine learning model.

You have been able to patent a recipe for steel for 200years without knowing why adding these particular elements in these ratios give these properties. So patenting a Tensorflow model that can differentiate X from Y if you give it these weightings is no different.

The main issue is that in 20 years when the knowledge becomes public domain it will be useless because we won't have Tensorflow (or at least that version) anymore

'Nobody can control TSMC by force': Exec dismisses fears China could seize fabs

You going to tell voters that they can't have a new million inch TV for $199 on black friday just cos of a bunch of gooks?

They are going to demand that you impale impeach the current president and make nice with China before Walmart run out of Ninja Turtle action figures

Re: The world moves on ....

This year it's the mid-80s: Top Gun in cinemas, Kate Bush in the charts, Russians in eastern Europe

So next year it's the 70s, Britain in financial and industrial chaos, a nice-guy-loser US president and war in SE Asia

So by 2025 the UK gets to win the world cup and have the Beatles ?

SpaceX demonstrates that it too can shower the Earth with debris

Re: Starlink, One Web and the race for megaconstellations

Most of them will burn up in atmosphere.

Compared to the 15,000 tons of rocks Zeus drops on us every year, 6000 tons of which reaches the ground

Re: Liability

That's ridiculous, surely they could have sued the man for damage to the police car

The MMB covers it up - obviously

Re: Raising the odds?

So what are the odds of being hit by a meteor while holding a winning lottery ticket ?

Picturing

A bunch of Aussies crouching around it

One of them picks up a bone

Another throws a rock at him

And the first one knocks it over the boundary for a six, then they all open a tin

US regulators set the stage for small, local nuclear power stations

Re: For which the sane answer is

Surely we can just trust the same industry funded and administered programs that clear up old oilfields and mine sites.

Re: Reactor disposal

I suspect that's the real plan behind these small reactors.

Small town gets reactor as a local source of non-polluting, green electricity. At end of life the regulations make it effectively impossible to move the reactor anywhere for disposal.

Small town now has a nuclear waste repository.

Central govt doesn't have to deal with a national disposal plan

While the UK's offshore oil industry has been a shining example of economic, environmental and social good.

Still waiting for the next labour government to reopen t'pits

Re: @Dr Syntax - "more radioactive"

It also makes a big regulatory difference.

If you burn radioactive material and pump it out of a smokestack then nobody cares, except in certain states where you get a subsidy.

if you leak a single radioactive particle from a nuclear power station you never hear the end of it.

I think it's a case of yes but.....

You can also have stuff which is radioactive enough that all sorts of regulations apply and you have to store it but is long enough half-life that it realistically never gets any less radioactive.

The big problem is when this contaminates something big and inconveniently bulky to store. Dealing with hot short half-life fuel rods is in some ways a lot less of a problem than tonnes of concrete that is low level but has to be stored somewhere.

>the maybe it can be shipped back for decommissioning or maybe refurbishing.

That was the plan, at least for the competing products. Like submarine reactors they are not refuelled, but sealed for life, this makes the design much simpler.

Google: We had to shut down a datacenter to save it during London’s heatwave

Re: Heat island

But with the current government the risk of flocks of flying pigs

europe-west2-a down

Don't see why it would affect anyone in airstrip-one Britain

Re: Hot cloud

>Did they really never plan for a single DC shutdown?

Well they tried searching for the instructions on Google, but it was down

China's 7nm chip surprise reveals more than Beijing might like

Re: So...

Don't worry those wily little oriental chappies can only produce cheap copies they will never make anything better than us - chaps don't even play cricket

Re: Work share

The A380 wing was made in Broughton in N Wales

Re: Work share

That's common with chips made in S.E Asia as well. Fabbed in Taiwan, diced in Malaysia, packaged in Indonesia, shipped from Singapore, assembled on pcbs in China, using machines from Korea and chemicals from Japan

It's why "we built a new fab in Alabama we are totally immune from world trade issues" is perhaps not quite as simple as that

I thought it was a way for the French to pretend they had an Empire, Belgium to believe they were important and Spain/Italy/Portugal/Greece/Ireland to get hand-outs?

Or has the Daily Mail lied to me ?

Re: Do not underestimate China

Democracy not the answer.

What does Britain (inventor of these clever things) Japan (makes all the clever things small and reliable) and the Netherlands (makes the clever machines that makes tiny clever things) have in common?

A royal family that's what - all China has to do is return to the Emperor and it will share in the good times

Re: Ours

>Glenrothes that can do 1200nm / 800nm.

That's a skilled job, takes a steady hand to carve 1200nm chips

Re: Ours

>I'm not sure how the EU stopped the UK from having fabs

By making all the chips use French nano-meters instead of proper British pico-furlongs

Re: It's also an ASIC crypto-miner, highly parallel, low complexity. A starter chip.

>Banning cryptomining among the general public means most probably monopolizing it to the state.

My own government takes a very similar attitude to making currency

The US's biggest datacenter market is short on electricity

Re: Infrastructure

Yea sorry, replying to multiple threads with a single thread brain

Homes in London under threat as datacenters pull in all the power

Re: Swap CRT for LCDs

Simply register the DC somewhere else for power purposes?

The whole point of the cloud is that you don't care where the data center is physically located.

It's registered in German for the purpose of GDPR, Luxembourg for VAT, Ireland for corporate tax and in Slough for connection to London. Simply decide that for power purposes it's in Quebec or Norway and then it can use all that green power

Re: And they said...

That's why we need to get rid of the computers.

And replace them with rooms full of clerks writing invoices long hand. And if the hero of A Christmas Carol is correct then they don't need more than a bit of coal and have year round uptime, including Xmas day

Chipmakers warned: US CHIPS Act funds are not for 'stock buybacks'

Re: Capitalism

So the USA has finally realised that businesses risking investor's capital in a ruthless free market is doomed and has decided that a wise and omniscient central government setting industrial policy is the only solution

So comrades, come rally .....

Re: Capitalism

So they are allowed to take $1bn from the government and then return $1bn in dividends as long as they are a different pile of money

Capitalism

So I need to dump all my Intel shares now. If they aren't allowed to return money to shareholders, as dividends or buybacks, then they have no value

Tim Hortons offers free coffee and donut to settle data privacy invasion claims

Re: Naughty Timmy, naughty!

Tim Horton's is a chain owned by a Brazilian investment company,

Tom Horton's is an authentic Canadian donut shop. Tell Tom we said hi, eh