Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Ministry of Defence tells contractors not to answer certain UK census questions over security fears

Sex is binary, you do it with "zero" or "more than zero" other people

Gender is the one where you can make up whatever shit you want

Re: UK Law

I can't tell you who I work for. Please contact the MMB press officer at "1 secret underground bunker, London"

Of course if the government were at all competent they would be trying to destroy trust in the census.

The conservative chaps over here replaced the census with a "government statistical survey" which determined that there were no poor people living in any city or any rural areas and so social funding could be cut.

Re: Bootnote

It's the same logic as "if I asked you if you had been served a national security letter - would you legally be able to deny it?"

A census taker once tried to test me.

I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.

UK Law

Wasn't there a law making it illegal to obtain personal information about a police/army/security-services person ?

Boldly going where Elon Musk will probably go before: NASA successfully tests SLS Moon rocket core stage

Re: Musk

That's the really sad thing about the SLS.

Assuming it is ever launched, and works and gets to the moon - then what?

It was designed as a quick/cheap/politically-expedient way to use some old technology for a showboating trip.

It's like Britain demonstrating a post-Brexit challenge to Airbus by taking a Concorde out of a museum and refurbishing it for a single flight.

Re: Drinking in Tx

>Not that I have opinions about the drinks they serve in Texas - no Sir - not me.

Have you considered that this is just Texas' attempt to make oil a renewable resource?

With dinosaurs now sadly extinct we need a new specious of extremely large land animals (with brains the size of walnuts) to die and their bodies by converted into fossil fuel.

Re: What about the fire?

That's why we need to invest in strategic home-grown cork.

Otherwise our rockets will be under threat of the Spanish and Portuguese empires

Re: Musk

So one is commercial outfit moving fast and breaking things to make launches cheap.

The other is a dead end project to re-use a small stock of 30year old engines, and then build some expensive copies. In a dead end project to go to the moon quickly to:

demonstrate our technical superiority over N Korea

distract attention from the presidential scandal of the day

funnel funding to a bunch of aerospace companies that are losing money *(delete as applicable)

Re: multi-million dollar Space Shuttle engines

>The deal was $1.5 billion to "modernise" the 16 existing engines and build 6 new ones. So, a little under $70 million per delivered engine.

So assuming that this has doubled by now

Re: Musk

Boeing is the prime contractor for SLS while also being a partner in the ULA alternative to SLS.

While also being a completely commercial outfit with no links to government - unlike those Xiaomi phones.

Re: Progress?

Not when you consider the amount spent on redesigning them to be single use - otherwise that money would be wasted

Re: Musk

> I'm quite glad there's an alternative supplier.

I'm just slightly nervous that the alternative supplier is Boeing

Enough for a single shot espresso for everyone.

Or enough super-triple-slurpy-giant-ultragulps of soda for half the city of Houston

>On the other hand perhaps it doesn't come from VMS, in which case I'm wrong.

You're not wrong

Re: multi-million dollar Space Shuttle engines

Each launch will cost upwards of $49.99

Re: What about the fire?

>the bits that burned were cork insulation and of little consequence.

Not to the cork farmers whose congressional district vote secured this project's future

Nasa's real challenge is to make the coal fired 2nd stage work, otherwise the representative from Pennsylvania will vote against it

What happens when your massive text-generating neural net starts spitting out people's phone numbers? If you're OpenAI, you create a filter

Re: So much for "AI"

Wait till you find out about /dev/rand spitting out credit card numbers, people's ages, their weight etc

The Roaring Twenties: Future foreign policy will rely on rejuvenated 'cyber' sector, UK government claims

Re: It used to take time for these changes to happen in the security services.

The first step is to allow speccy-nerds into the Bullingdon club

Re: We will adopt a comprehensive cyber strategy to maintain the UK's competitive edge ...

> How does HMG expect to stop the same thing happening over and over again?

By cracking down on new inventions by destroying manufacturing industry and university research

It takes time for these changes to happen in the security services.

Firstly somebody who understands cyber has to rise to the rank of senior tutor and then they have to wait for a new student intake of young conservative homosexuals who they can recruit for the opposition, and then you need a couple more generations to realise that the old boy was working for the other side and to root out all their recruits, who are now all heads of your new cyber force.

It's entirely likely that some branches of MI5 are still fighting the peninsular war - probably on the side of Napoleon

Australian police suggests app to record consent to sexual activity

Re: Facepalm

Bluetooth controlled chastity belts and 2FA - with a blockchain

Re: You know what would stop rapes?

Expand this to all crimes? If the accused gets off you sentence the accuser to the same penalty?

Her-Maj is going to be doing a lot of porridge

Re: Of course policeman is thinking how to solve the problem

> You can see that for property we've built an "alternative justice system" for property theft to make this crime less traumatic for its victims

But it doesn't punish anyone except the total set of policy payers.

We don't imprison the thief purely on the basis of filing an insurance claim.

Of course once paypal achieves sentience and a charge-back involves sending a terminator ....

>'this is just a date'......Very cultural specific.

As a programmer I would be happy if cultures could all just agree a specific standard format for any date

Re: The definitive solution

>Forbid sex involving more than one person. In one generation most of the problems will be solved

Forbid sex involving more than one sex. In one generation most of the problems will be solved

The zero-tolerance / zero-thought policy is always popular - it's taken over in education here among the left-pondians.

One local suggestion was a student union form to record consent, with the lack of a form presumably being assumed rape.

Before the privacy implications had been considered (interestingly nobody is concerned about privacy if it's on paper) someone asked if it included staff. Would it include staff doing it with their non-staff partners, would it include the extremely aged university president and his wife of 50 years?

Re: Is there a "magic word"?

>"You can withdraw consent at any time you want."

>That goes for both parties.

Currently both of the couple have to have their own lawyer present during sex.

The rules could change to allow a single lawyer to represent both parties.

Or we could have some independant class of notary available who could take part in threesomes, they would also be able to stamp to approve their consent.

If at first you don't succeed: Engineers power up the computers of NASA's monster SLS core stage once again

Re: Is winter a good time to launch?

>and who knows how the seals on the SRB's will cope with that?

> We all know what happened with Challenger,

Nasa have investigated that incident at length and are confident that they have resolved the problem by changing the Powerpoint

Lord joins campaign urging UK government to reform ye olde Computer Misuse Act

Or just typing a url

Tsunami hacker convicted

Northern Ireland hands deal worth up to £87m to Fujitsu: Now keep our 15-year-old Oracle HR system up and running

Re: On the surface..

But there have been so many breakthroughs in payroll processing in the last 15years that there is no way this old system could be expected to cope - they probably now need massively parallel GPU based supercomputing or quantum computers.

Chinese government yanks Alibaba’s browser from Chinese app stores

Re: Maybe we should be jealous of the Chinese approach towards Big Tech

Trouble is if you are 2.5th world country trying to turn into a 1st world country by developing all your own technology - and you start doing the 4am knock on the door of any successful tech.

You start to get nobody going into tech, or all your tech people suddenly going on holiday to California and forgetting to go home.

Ex-Microsoft exec admits he tried to swindle $5.5m out of taxpayers with COVID-19 relief loans for bogus biz

Re: How

Because the IRS don't have a computer system.

Because everytime the vote for "should the IRS have a massive systems overhaul to allow them to more effectively chase tax cheats" comes up a bunch of very rich people say no

Re: not what has been spent so far.

So when they abandon the 2nd part they can make an announcement that they have 'saved' £22bn or are the current lot too dumb even for that ?

Re: Covid bonanza!

>Indeed - and people keep voting for these self serving idiots!

That was the nice part about the other lot, there were no massively wasteful govt IT contracts under them

It's a pity we don't have "violent revolution" as an option on all ballot papers

Someone defeated the anti-crypto-coin-mining protection for Nvidia's 'gamers only' RTX 3060 ... It was Nvidia

Re: We Just Can't Have Nice Things

>How would this be enforced across hostile borders?

By the secret world government of .... NO CARRIER

IBM's CEO and outgoing exec chairman take home $38m in total for 2020 despite revenue shrinking by billions

Re: Not surprised at declining revenues..

>I contact the sales team in one country to talk about buying quite a bit of gear.

I don't think they sell gear anymore - that's so 2010

Now they will partner with you dynamically to partner your requirements into a dynamic partnership

US Office of National Intelligence says Russia, Iran tried to mess with 2020 elections, China sat it out

Re: News at Ten

>when we’re talking about a country which runs concentration camps, I’m for division, not unity.

We all know what the responde will be - tougher sanctions on Cuba

PSA: If you're still giving users admin rights, maybe try not doing that. Would've helped dampen 100+ Microsoft vulns last year – report

Re: False equivalance

>Want to modify your desktop ? Admin right ! that's the problem

Haven't used it in a while but you used to need admin rights to open network settings to find your own IP address

Delayed UK digital border system was only stable enough to be used by 4% of intended users, MPs say

Re: Knowing how long software takes

Given that it is a government IT project that crosses multiple departments it would probably have been best to start Brexit IT development before the UK joined the Eu

>Date of birth might be a better item of data to use.... will be shared by around 2000 other people in the UK

Due to limitations of the new government IT system we can only support 999 people having the same date of birth. As an interim solution the government is adding 400 extra days to each year.

Raspberry Pi Foundation boss waves off listing rumours, says biz discussions may have been 'over-interpreted'

>The charity actually seems to receive little income from Raspberry Pi (Trading) Ltd these days.

Erm, isn't that the point?

If they put the price up by $10 so they could 'donate' $MM to the charity who would that benefit exactly ?

Re: I should damn well hope it doesn't get floated

> would be accepted with such aplomb if were megacorp?

Like exploding batteries or phones that can't make calls if you hold them wrong ?

Re: Alternatively...

Wales is still in the empire though ?

Microsoft customers locked out of Teams, Office, Xbox, Dynamics – and Azure Active Directory breakdown blamed

Re: I guess they are going to miss their SLA?

I wonder how many great business decisions have been made because of the difference between "0.01" and "0.01%" in a spreadsheet

Re: I guess they are going to miss their SLA?

>there would be an obvious contour line. Sure enough there it was

That would be a good infrastructure project.

Go around with one of those pitch white-line marking machines painting actual contour lines on Scottish mountains