Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Bye-bye Bridenstine: Outgoing chief leaves NASA in good shape, though Boots on Moon by '24 goal looks doubtful

Re: Lost leadership

But what would you rather have, robot probes landing on asteroids and bringing back samples or swimming around the oceans of Jupiters moons - or some crew cut space marine saluting the flag on the moon on live TV

Raspberry Pi Foundation moves into microcontrollers with the $4 Pi Pico using homegrown silicon

Re: Neither fish nor fowl

Arduino also comes with a lot of libraries for things I don't want to write from scratch. Hopefully someone will put some effort into porting them to this

Re: Interesting

The analog ports on things like Arduino are normally very slow, don't know if you could use them for audio sampling

Re: No WiFi?

WiFi approval is long and expensive. ESP32 get round this by not bothering, not an option for RPI

Loser Trump's last financial disclosure docs reveal Tim Cook gave him $5,999 Mac Pro, the 'first' made in Texas

A very British solution

Impound some baby clothes in a govt warehouse because allowing them on a baby would be corrupting, but the recipient can later get a £M year directorship with the company he gave PPI deals to and that's fine

Top engineer who stole trade secrets from Google's self-driving division pardoned on Trump's last day as president

Re: Good idea in theory

Other countries don't have all their civil servants being political appointees.

If we extrapolate the last few years, in future we are going to have to replace all the police, security services and army chiefs as well as all the government scientists every time the WH changes hands

>Regardless of the merits of any individual case, the fact that a president can simply overrule all due process and pardon anyone is utterly wrong.

Not if used as intended, eg. pardoning all escaped slaves, or more recently all Vietnam draft dodgers (who weren't fortunate sons) seems reasonable

Virgin Orbit finally lives up to its name after second attempt with LauncherOne rocket

Re: This just makes sense

>Getting out of a portion of the gravity well before launching a space vehicle is a viable option

It's no real change in gravity (Earth's surface is 6400km from the center, 30,000ft is only 9km further!)

The alleged advantage is that you can fly out to sea and launch in any direction - it's hard to find a land based launch site that has empty ocean in all directions ! You can also fly to where the weather is nicer, assuming it is good enough to let you get off the ground.

Drawbacks are that you are limited to a small, single payload.

It has to be engineered to support itself sideways while slung underneath an aeroplane and then 'downwards' when the rocket kicks off.

The launch altitude isn't high enough for the rocket to be vacuum optimised, so you still need 2 stages.

And because it has a manned carrier aeroplane you have all the safety costs and restrictions of a manned launch.

Re: Hmm

Sorry thought you meant virgin galactic's unscheduled, but unfortunately manned, disassembly

Re: Hmm

Remember this has nothing in common, other than a grinning beardy, with Virgin Galactic.

This is technology that was working great 30 years ago with launching Pegasus from an old DC10

Re: While not the first, still a good advancement.

The idea is to be able to launch from any latitude in any direction.

For this payload that is probably further north than an equatorial GSO orbit (nobody is putting 20ton communication satellites on this thing).

You want good weather both at the take-off and launch altitude, with a $MM rocket hanging under the wing you don't want to fly through a storm at climb out, even if it is nice at FL300

Mostly it depends on how much swing Boeing/Lockheed still have in Washington, if they can get every US launch on this thing blocked by ITAR.

Re: While not the first, still a good advancement.

>This is a way to launch smaller payloads more economically.

TBD - Pegasus never made it economic, although that was under a NASA/military model.

One problem with Cornwall (other than the obvious) is that the whole point of this system is that you can fly to where the weather is nice for a launch - the North Atlantic isn't the most obvious choice.

The other problem is that you can't launch anything American

Engineers blame 'intentionally conservative' test parameters for premature end to Space Launch System hotfire

Re: Well That Doesn't Sound Too Bad

>Any question about why government should do as little as possible is well illustrated here.

That's why it should be a PPI deal. You can claim it's all private, same pork flows and it only costs twice as much

Re: Well That Doesn't Sound Too Bad

>SpaceX are avoiding H2 by using methane - basically a compromise between very difficult engineering and performance. It performs better than kerosene, but isn't as hard to engineer for as H2.

It can also be made on Mars, waiting for Mars to have an oil industry makes a kink in their return schedule

Former NCSC chief says US sanctions made Britain strip Huawei from mobe networks

>Honestly, the UK and the West in general, should learn from this model.

As opposed to the traditional: turn up, rename the place, take all the stuff, kill the locals model ?

The hour grows late, the enemy are at the gates... but could Intel's exiled heir apparent ride to the rescue?

Re: Bravo

Another industry expert's take on ts stratechery intel-problems = Intel need to split into a fab company and a chip design company, but they can't because they are behind on fab technology and their x86 server monopoly is going away

But if Intel have an engineer as CEO they will be no better than AMD or NVIDIA

US gov sets up the National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Office at the last minute before Trump's presidency ends

Re: Only Weak-Willed Suckers with No Self-Respect Submit to Recorded Video Interviews

amanFromMars1 - have you had a change of pronoun ?

Re: AI vs NS

It's being relocated to Florida

Re: AI vs NS

We must ensure our world lead in natural stupidity is preserved

We cannot let a stupidity gap develop

Re: Facial recognition

Not hiring someone "cos I is black" = illegal

Training a neural net on a data set of black criminal mugshots and white Harvard graduation photos and then asking it to select candidates = 21st century cutting-edge data-driven best-practice superskilling

Bye bye, said Trump admin to Huawei: You give a cheque-ie to our techies, but there's no licence to ply

Re: and Kyocera

Kyocera don't have to take any notice of the POTUS - so long as they don't mind being next on the naughty list.

At least we don't send a gunboat anymore when the foreigners displease us..

Re: A glimmer fof light?

I'm sure they have made appropriate political contributions to ensure that doesn't happen. Silicon valley learnt from the Microsoft case that they can't just ignore DC

Autocorrect or a deeper 5G virus conspiracy?

Re: A glimmer fof light?

It's not that the Play store isn't open source it's that it imposes a monopoly on where users of the operating system can buy from and so allows the owner to charge monopoly rents - the sort of thing that Microsoft didn't dare to do even before it got DoJ slapped.

It does seem that somebody just wrote the Eu's anti-trust case for them.

Re: Hopefully

Erm the doddery old guy is 5% older than the obese alleged aderal addict that just lost.

Perhaps someone could propose a trial by combat?

>What happens when Huawei retaliates by revoking the licencing of all their 5G patents?

We have Finnish 5G phones that only work in the USA/Eu

We have Indian 5g phones that only work in India

We have official Chinese phones that work in Africa, SE Asia

We have 'hacked' Chinese phones that work everywhere

Next, the internet

Re: Sabotage can come from either side

>If the Chinese had that sort of whip hand over the US, they wouldn't hesitate to use it anyway.

I suspect the CCP's response isn't set by the need for a positive headline in this evening's news

Re: Sabotage can come from either side

No problem we just re-colonise Africa, plenty of minerals in places with no army

Debut firing of NASA's Space Launch System core stage cut short following 'Major Component Failure'

Re: Not enough data to proceed

You misunderstand Major Component Failure is the Space Force (tm) officer in charge of the tests

Re: converted from being reusable units

"refurbished" like Trigger's broom ?

So refurbished like flying examples of WWII fighters were the only original part is the serial number plate so the CAA lets you fly it under 1930s standards

Re: Rockhound sez it all ...

Built by the lowest bidder who fit the government procurement procedures and was in the right congressional district

Re: converted from being reusable units

I remember a claim that the "average" number of flights per part was very close to 1.0

Re: Not enough data to proceed

>According to NASA they needed a minimum run of 250 sec. to get enough data.

Unless they know how to edit the PowerPoint

converted from being reusable units

Why do I have a suspicion that converting FROM reusable to throw-away was somehow still incredibly expensive ?

Police drone plunged 70ft into pond after operator mashed pop-up that was actually the emergency cut-out button

Re: Touch screen emergency shut off?

F35 avionics:

Are you sure you want to eject?

Enter the last three digits of the aircraft serial number to confirm eject

Please wait 60seconds before retrying eject

A confirmation email has been sent to your account, click on the link to confirm the eject

But while they are out crashing drones that aren't running over pedestrians while playing 'police camera action'

Re: Fail safe?

>What sort of emergency cutout allows you to stop all rotors when 70' up?

One that allows you to cut the rotors when it is in your hand but a fault makes it 'think' it's 70ft up

Scottish Environment Protection Agency refuses to pay ransomware crooks over 1.2GB of stolen data

How much ?

It might be the cheapest way for taxpayers to get their hands on the "public" data

Signal boost: Secure chat app is wobbly at the moment. Not surprising after gaining 30m+ users in a week, though

Re: GDPR

Our corporate IT have banned Whatsapp - uncertainty of what happens when our spied-on-by-facebook accounts are used to message with our protected-by-gdpr European colleagues

Xiaomi hit by US sanctions: Can't list on stock exchanges and investors can't invest

Not just China, if you are a UN / WHO agency and you are using a cloud provider that is now a wholly owned subsidiary of the DoD - some countries are likely to be objecting rather strongly

Re: Doesn't really make sense

Xiaomi passed Apple in sales

Apple makes Apple Pie

Apple Pie is the symbol of Republican America

I'm very smart, possibly the smartest, lots of people are saying this

Ministry of Defence's cyber warfare drive is helping burn a hole through its budget, warns UK's National Audit Office

Re: Fine... but now what?

Never forget the (updated) golden rule: those with the depleted uranium rounds make the rules

Want to let an AI-powered doctor loose on patients? Try slapping a food-label-like sticker on it, says Uncle Sam

Re: "help patients understand the technology"

This LCD thermometer is powered by advanced statistical technology - it ignores all the actual readings form the sensor and gives you an answer that's made up by maths - we call it "averaging"

What’s that in CES heaven, is it a star? Or is it that damned elusive flying car?

Re: Once more with feeling...

volocopter - to be really practical though they need to be automated

Re: only advantage...

Don't worry about driving when you're too old.

Magistrates don't like to be nasty to OAPs so you are likely to get off with a slap on the wrist if you kill someone.

We didn't collude with Twitter to throw Parler off our servers, says AWS in court filing

Small difference

Iranian politicians saying nasty things about Israel, or indeed US politicians blaming Iran for 9/11 is one thing.

If Iran was using Twitter to coordinate a specific attack on a specific Israeli target - that is a bit different.

Waterloo! Windows defeated, your sign is screwed. Waterloo! Promise to bork you forevermore

Re: Agincourt

French won in territory and creating a unified nation terms - but lost in casualties and $$$

Salesforce relieves Republican National Committee of its tools citing 'risk of politically incited violence' across the US

The money was given to the PAC for their stated aim of bringing about Truth Liberty and Apple Pie - if it was actually used to stage a terrorist act then the directors are going to be looking at serious naughty step time