Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Running on empty, out of battery, power draining... three things the UK government definitely isn't. Oh no

Re: Running on empty? @WSG

Apparently PSEV is a California thing and even more of a con.

It just requires that cars don't pour unburnt fuel from the exhaust and don't produce clouds of burning oil smoke.

Re: Running on empty? @WSG

A bunch of Japanese cars here have it, there is even a little green leaf logo that goes with it.

Might not be a thing in Europe (and any small outlying islands)

Re: Running on empty? @WSG

It was a greenwashing thing until coal power was shut down. Throw a handful of woodchips into a 4GW coal plant and it becomes a "co-firing" "partial carbon-offset" "alternative energy" power generator.

It allows you to claim that >50% of your power comes from semi-renewable sources, while still burning coal.

It's like the cars that turn off the engine at traffic lights and call themselves "Partial Zero Emissions Vehicle"

Catch of the day... for Google, anyway: Transatlantic Cornwall cable hauled ashore

And to protect it from sharks - without laser beams

Sharks apparently are real basterds when it comes to cables

Re: The Rain in Spain

Will the cloud stay mainly on the plane ?

Re: Important Questions

I here the traffic jams in cornwall in summer are quite bad.

It seems everyone who lives there owns a caravan or a Range Rover - or both

FTTB

Fibre To The Beach

The Register speaks to one of the designers behind the latest Lego Ideas marvel: A clockwork solar system

Re: Intrigued

Proof that not only is the Earth flat, it has 4 round mountains with Lego printed on them

Australia gave police power to compel sysadmins into assisting account takeovers – so they plan to use it

Re: "Won't somebody think of the sysadmins..?"

It's out-sourced.

They got a very cheap bid from some outfit in a Korea - just need to forward the root logins.

NYC subway SNAFU probably caused by someone turning it off accidentally, say reports

> "the city's incomprehensible and counter-intuitive subway network".

At least they don't have a line called Mobius

Tip for next time.

Don't call the maintenance / building services number - call 911 / 999

The fire service will have you out in 15mins. As opposed to the end of the shift, when they are done with all the other jobs, once the next shift gets the service call, etc

And the fire service get to use their flashing lights and break things - which makes them very happy.

Re: I sympathize with the walkers.

And I'm guessing that after an hour of being stuck in the train in just emergency lighting there was no announcement of what had happened and when it would be fixed.

Was this another 9/11 ? Had the office block above them just been blown up ? Was a flood about to trap them all - given the recent people dying in basements in New York.

Staying put requires you decide; an incompetent agency that did this to trap me here and the same incompetent agency that can't tell me what is happening is the agency that is going to rescue me if I stay put.

G7 countries outgun UK in worldwide broadband speed test

I'm surprised that the USA does so well - unless they are only counting broadband speeds among those who CAN get broadband - and not counting big bits away from the coasts.

Same for Canada, since the whole population live in downtown Toronto/Montreal/Vancouver it's easy to run fibre to them. But a small town of a 1000 people, an hour outside one of those cities we got cable 3 years ago - before that we had 6mbs ADSL

Beijing orders Alibaba, Tencent, more Big Tech to stop blocking links to rivals

An open free and fair competitive market?

Typical commies

Re: I wonder...

I don't think the law covers religous cults

You can 'go your own way' over GDPR, says UK's new Information Commissioner

>It's also interesting to note that Norway has implemented more EU regulations than any actual EU member.

Meeting of the Norwegian eu standards committee:

Next item on the agenda.

Do we adopt the Eu standard on the font size for Olive Oil bottle labelling or do we create a committee to create our own standard because of Sovereignty ?

Are the pubs open ?

Standard adopted, rubber stamps hit paper - meeting adjourned to pub.

Re: proviso

>UK can't adopt 3 phase 330V 35Hz

Volts and Hertz sound like damn foreigners

From now on the British unit of electrical potential and current are the Victoria(V) and Albert(A)

Henrys and Farads can stay but Hertz will be replaced by the Boris, which is defined as the number of complete change of previous direction per second.

Spending watchdog blames British Home Office for delays to £1bn crime-fighting IT system

Re: Home Office has "decided to accept the risk of running the PNC without support"

Why do they need a computer when everybody (*) is guilty ?

* government ministers, police officers and anyone with a title excepted

Re: Process

Isn't this the business model of IBM/Crapita/CapGemini/etc ?

You have more lawyers than engineers, making sure you exactly fulfill the requirements while delivering something that is totally useless - and then charging for changes.

Process

1, Choose a supplier

2, Sign contract

3, Pay supplier

187, agree on exactly what the system should do.....

The day has a 'y' in it, so Virgin Galactic has announced another delay

>The quesion is whether cost cutting to maximise profits on the balance sheet will compromise the safety of the systems ...

Compared to the Space Shuttle ?

The thing about maximizing profits is that it generally requires minimizing blowing stuff up.

Report: Microsoft and AWS scored $50m in contracts after Google pulled out of Pentagon's AI drone plan

Synergy

If you showed the drones pictures of toy peace keepers could they learn to tell the difference?

Spot the dog? No, we couldn't either because Spot is a robot employed by United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority

Re: RotM

>produce a robotic canine super villain?

That's why they are making robot dogs not robot cats.

I welcome our new robot Labrador overlords - it will be fun with treats and tummy-rubs

RAF chief: Our Reaper drones (sorry, SkyGuardians) stand ready to help British councils

Re: Posse Comitatus Act

Following our glorious military victory in Afghanistan we now declare war on fly-tipping ?

Not too bright, are you? Your laptop, I mean... Not you

Re: me too

>One wonders why they were there?

Airplane mode.

We also had a no-radios safety rule near some potentially 'exciting' packages of physics and chemistry

You walk in with a plan. You leave with GPS-tracking Nordic hiking poles. The same old story, eh?

Especially given the number of recreations he has done for magazines over the years and the amount of z-list celeb work he has got from it

Amazon says Elon Musk's wicked, wicked ways mean SpaceX's Starlink 2.0 should not be allowed to fly

Re: "move the launch site to a more accommodating country"

Outside the USA they wouldn't be subject to FAA

And would ITAR actually objections work?

Musk is also a ZA citizen, a bunch of the early engineers were european.

The engines are built in-house. The software can be written anywhere

If you had German engineers designing parts machined in S Africa on Korean machine tools with software written by remote Estonian and Indian programmers with Taiwanese semicondctors and launched from Namibia - where is ITAR ?

The USA could go nuclear on them and shut down spaceX funding/banking/customers but that would just drive commercial space into being an Indian/European/Chinese/Gulf market - and the USA would join Russia as a cold war relic space program.

Imagine if the USA was the only nation without satelite internet because only ULA was allowed to launch it and they charged a rate that only the DoD could pay.

Re: Rules are for other people

Remember it doesn't need to swing public opinion - it just needs to 'incentivize' one politician on the right committee to get a hold on SpaceX for long enough to cause financial difficulties.

Or for SpaceX to just say fsck-it and move the launch site to a more accommodating country. Remember where all the world's semiconductors come from? No reason why some other small island couldn't also be the place that the worlds space launches come from.

You used to be able to stop this by blocking export of 'military space technology' - but this is going to be harder if you make the motors in S Africa with Japanese machine tools and German raw materials.

Re: Space is BIG and satellites aren't

Unfortunately if there is a collision the debris tends to go out in all directions. Dynamics are complex but junk can get lifted 100km from the quickly decayed low orbit to much longer live higher orbit.

This was the problem with the 'not at all an ABM weapon" test the Chinese did a couple of years ago - they boosted a bunch of the debris 500km higher

>We don't tax based on revenue, we tax profits.

And unfortunately in modern accounting 'profits' have become that bit you are prepared to pay tax on.

Amazon make low margins on retail, by charging its national subsidiaries licensing fees for 'Amazon' brands held in tax-havens and by subsidizing retail with money-making AWS which is billed from other tax havens.

.

James Webb Space Telescope penciled in for launch this century. Yes, Dec 18, 2021

Re: I have pondered...

More importantly SpaceX prices changed the whole model.

With a shuttle launch costing $1Bn and booked years in advance - you had to make sure the payload couldn't fail, which meant decades and $Bn of testing which meant expensive one-off once-per-career missions.

With a $50M commercial launch available any week of the year, it suddenly makes sense to sense to mass produce a standard telescope vehicle and launch $100M missions every year with updated instruments.

Re: : driven by national politics and pork barreling.

My personal experience of JWST.

In the late 90s when it was proposed it was going to be a 6.5m ligthweigth conventional mirror, built by our partners at Arizona's mirror lab, and launched on an Ariane5 with a power-bulge fairing.

It was later (post Iraq v2) decided that it needed to be launched on a freedom rocket (as opposed to a Cheese Eating Surrender Monkey rocket) and so was redesigned to have the insane folding mechanism.

This took so long and cost so much Nasa needed external partners - which meant ESA contributed the C.E.S.M rocket launch among other bits.

Re: Despite . . .

Wait for the insanely complicated unfolding mechanism a million km away in space

Re: I confidently predict

Probably not. JWST doesn't necessarily see fainter objects than HST - it's design aim is to see older object than Hubble. This is why it is infrared - these objects have red-shifted out of the visible.

But the universe isn't all that old and so there might not be all that many more very early universe galaxies in the HDF than the early galaxies seen by Hubble.

Re: new science/engineering that they have had to make up

JWT was, even among NASA projects, driven by national politics and pork barreling.

Why tell the doctor where it hurts, when you could use emoji instead?

Re: Intelligibility fail

I think black square is plague

GitHub merges 'useless garbage' says Linus Torvalds as new NTFS support added to Linux kernel 5.15

Re: Er, how about Aldgate East, using District Line rules?

Should also point out that only us Yorkshire players are in Nidd (it keeps the ferrets cool)

However, southerners with a particularly weak grasp of the game may find themselves in Knip.

Re: Er, how about Aldgate East, using District Line rules?

Unfortunately with the Cameron-Johnson Discombobulation in place Paris is out, will have to be Luton

Re: Er, how about Aldgate East, using District Line rules?

Isn't another mainline station a reverse?

What about St Pancras 'international'

>Rules?

The basic rules themselves are so simple as to hardly need stating.

But a player will want to familiarise themselves with the minutiae of the game

Re: Come on then, let's give it a go with those rules

Is it true that being able to play Mornington Crescent is the new Turing test for AIs?

UK.gov is launching an anti-Facebook encryption push. Don't think of the children: Think of the nuances and edge cases instead

Re: Not convinced

They were probably too old and highly placed to use computers.

So the police are being extremely fore-sighted and assuming that the new generation of DJs, TV presenters, politicians, minor royals who will become the paedophiles of the future will be more computer literate.

Somebody should tell her that the Cthullu Mythos isn't a manifesto

Re: Cesspit of criminals, despots & the downright untrustworthy

>Basically, Facebook = Mos Eisley + QAnon.

Do they have a band ?

There are still terrorists and mobsters?

I thought the end of pirate VHS videos would have destroyed their funding sources?

Snyk: 50% of security jobs unfilled… any solution predicated on devs 'becoming security experts is doomed'

Re: "Oh, you've SEEN Windows run? No need to come in to pick up the paycheck; we'll send it..."

But all the ballet dancers are going to become cyber security experts

Council culture: Software test leads to absurd local planning SNAFU

this process could cost the council £8,000 in taxpayer funds.

So a single click can approve them, but to unapprove them

“.... without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters"

Global pandemic was good for business, say UK infosec pros – but we're still burning out

Re: Telling times

And the government of the days response was new laws banning serfs from moving or asking for more money - lets hope the current lot were all asleep during their history degree lectures

Academics tell UK lords that folk aren't keen on predictive policing, facial recognition, heightened surveillance

Re: Be careful what you wish for ......

This isn't America where you simply have to arrest shoot the black person.

In the UK you need "dynamic policing" to switch seamlessly from arresting the first Irish suspect, to the first scruffy protestor suspect to the first Muslim looking suspect to the first ....

British data watchdog brings cookies to G7 meeting – pop-up consent requests, not the delicious baked treats

It doesn't have to, the browser just sends a 'no ad cookies' request to the site and it's up to the site to obey. The browser doesn't enforce the site behavior anymore than the popup banner does.

What the ad men are afraid of is no one is going to click yes to a simple 'do you want spam' option when they install the browser, even if they would click 'accept all cookies' rather than navigate a 10page preference page at a every site