Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Come glide with me: Virgin Galactic gives Unity some fresh air, looks forward to rocket-powered flight

Re: Arianespace - long term plan?

But there is less of a market to GTO with more communications satelites being swarms of LEO rather than 10ton fixed monsters

Dems take a crack at banning Feds from using facial-recog tech. Congress will put it on todo list after 'learn Klingon'

Simply put sponsors logos on the bill.

Going one further individual politicians should wear their sponsors logos in public - like F1 drivers

CompSci student bitten by fox after feeding it McNuggets

But only Australians, anybody else gets immediately eaten

The question is how does a small furry animal that isn't terminally venomous survive ?

Huawei wins approval to plonk £1bn optical comms R&D facility in UK's leafy Cambridgeshire

Re: Really?

But all that is irrelevant, cos if we want to export Dutchy Original Shortbread to the Land of the Orange one - we need to hate Huawei

Re: Yet another green-belt build vanity project

Cambridge turned down IBMs application to build it's european research lab there in the 50/60s - because it would spoil the neighbourhood

The lab was built in Switzerland and won a bunch of Nobel prizes.

It's now safe to turn off your computer shop: Microsoft to shutter its bricks-and-mortar retail locations worldwide

Re: Microsoft store Vs Apple store

That's why we always bought Macs for sales people.

Break your Macbook anywhere from Aukland to Zurich and walk into an Apple store, get it fixed or swapped, your work synched from iCloud and back to work.

Compared to buy a Lenovo/Dell and ship it back to them and have a replacement in 2weeks - It's worth me paying a few $100 extra

Re: Marketing 101

And Apple stores made no sense for selling macs.

That's why everybody laughed at Jobs for opening masses of expensive stores that competed with other retailers also selling macs for less - remember this was before the iPhone

Then suddenly you had a network of stores to sell the mobile phone - to customers who didn't care about the price or which network it's from.

Re: Isn't it obvious......

You aren't picturing a bunch of polyester class, moderately obese PHBs oggling shiny domain controllers and SQL-Server install disks ?

Talk about the fox guarding the hen house. Comcast to handle DNS-over-HTTPS for Firefox-using subscribers

Re: Naive or Complicit?

Also cloudfare don't have your home address, credit card details and a list of all the TV shows you watch on their cable package as well as all your network traffic - so your dns data is a lot less valuable than to your ISP

Taiwan to stay ahead of China as top chip manufacturing titan

Re: Maybe...

Step 1. Plan to bring chip production to the USA

Step 2. Give TSMC big tax breaks to build a fab in the USA

Step 3. Block inter-company transfer visas to stop any of TSMCs engineers visiting the USA to setup the fab

Step 4. Profit ?

US Department of Defense releases list of firms allegedly linked to the Chinese Army. Surprise surprise, Huawei makes an appearance

nobody regards BAE Systems as an extension of Westminster

I think most people regard Westminster as an extension of BAE Systems

You'd think lockdown would be heaven for us layabouts – but half the UK has actually started 'exercising more'

Sounds inefficient, with a bit of reorganization and an extension lead you could never have to leave the throne

Internet Society, remember your embarrassing .org flub? The actual internet society would like to talk about it

I'm sure that wouldn't be allowed.

You can't join the board of the purchaser until after the deal has gone through and a decent interval, typically several seconds, has elapsed

Former UK Labour deputy leader wants to know how the NHS's contact-tracing app will ensure user privacy

how the NHS's contact-tracing app will ensure user privacy

They will put Chris Grayling in charge ?

Maybe there is hope for 2020: AI that 'predicts criminality' from faces with '80% accuracy, no bias' gets in the sea

Re: Training data?

We seem to be generating a lot of training data here recently.

But the net seems to just be identifiyng anyone in blue uniforms with a helmet, gun, club and tear gas as a violent offender.

Re: This.

>When I lived in a big city the difference between people that shopped in the posh shopping areas compared to the poor was obvious.

That's the advantage of this technology. Human police were only able to spot criminals by simple clues such as skin colour. But this will be able to scan all the posh people in suits coming out of Liverpool st station in the morning and detect which ones who are insider trading or rigging libor.

Instead of the police grabbing a few minor drug dealers or car radio thieves they will be able to prevent the next financial meltdown.

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses... but not your H-1B geeks, L-1 staffers nor J-1 students

Re: This is a good move (for a change...)

But all those body shops are going to get their quotas back. Once Tata has a word with its friends in government back home and Trump-TajMahal looks like having a few planning problems....

This is just political pandering to his base - nobody is busy hiring foreign summer resort workers so why not announce a clamp down on them "furriners tekin ar jobs"

It's like Boris going to the Green party and announcing a (temporary) 99% reduction in CO2 emissions from Heathrow

Re: H-1B visas [ ... ] Silicon Valley to fill engineering departments with top international talent

Unlikely to pass. It's very inefficient to increase the cost of potentially 1000s of H1b hires compared to simply raising your campaign contributions to a single politician

Re: L-1

No to virology profs but yes to migrant fruit pickers

Wired: China's Beidou satnav system, 35th bird in orbit. Tired: America's GPS. Expired: Britain's dreams of its own

Re: Convenient

So China has military coverage for the water around its coast and the USA has coverage world wide - proves Chinese hegemony

Segway to Heaven: Mega-hyped wonder-scooter that was going to remake city transport to cease production

Re: Image and price problems

Probably what they said about the first bicycles, and the first motorbikes

Belief in 5G conspiracy theories goes hand-in-hand with small explosions of rage, paranoia and violence, researchers claim

Re: Or to put it another way

I thought we solved the problem of arts graduates not knowing anything useful by adding the 'A' to STEM?

Now I can do a media studies degree but still be one of these highly-valued STEM/STEAM graduates everyone is talking about

Re: 601? Seriously?

At what point when creating an online survey asking people if they believe that there is a shadowy online agency harvesting personal data for its own nefarious purposes - do you realise your work is pointless?

Re: Seems plausible

Specifically those from dodgy US think tanks.

If I hired a structural engineer from "The American Heritage Institute of Purity and Liberty" I would double check the calculations

Re: Something else to consider.

I wondered how you managed to select speakers for a D-K conference

Re: We have our own US-based All-American 5G Conspiracy Theory!

>there's no way of knowing who the UK are spying on right now.

But if history is any guide they will be spying on union leaders while the cheifs are all ISIS agents.

Re: And I'm not being conspiratorial when I think state actors are fomenting conspiracies around 5G

But the difference is that Cisco's implementation wouldn't work.

Re: Or to put it another way

Or perhaps they are having their brains controlled by rays.....

Korean boffins build COVID-bot to shove a swab right up your hooter

Re: Slightly overengineered

The advantage being that you can clean this between uses.

We tried dumping doctors into vats of bleach but it voids the warranty

Ex-barrister reckons he has a privacy-preserving solution to Britain's smut ban plans

Re: This could actually make $$$

There are now online campaigns in the USA calling for kids to reprogram older relatives TVs to block Fox news before the election

Paging technology providers: £3m is on the table to replace archaic NHS comms network

Pager the next generation...

Is there a system for sending SMS over some low bandwidth unlicensed band to small dumb battery powered devices?

Re: Specification Snowball

And why we will still be using fax.

Because the email replacement doesn't meet SecureIT2020 (tm) standard while supporting that non-standard DICOM from that single 1970s scanner and allow somebody in Shetland to view 4d ultrasound on a 2G connection

Re: Back in Time Technology Rides Again

And the signal works everywhere, and the network doesn't collapse in an emergency, and they don't need a security update every 5mins.

Specification Snowball

We need something to replace a simple pager = simple just needs some old Nokias and sms.

Then everybody involved will add their own requirement because otherwise how do they justify being involved.

So as well as text messages it will have to be able to send 4d video and feature smello-vision

Security is important so it will have to be designed from scratch to the highest levels of military grade magic and so use no COTS parts

It will need to interoperate with 6 other "not yet totally designed" emergency services comms systems.

It will have to be built by approved suppliers in several deprived areas by companies whose brother in law is a cabinet minister

It will be delivered late, if at all, won't work and the handset will have a battery life of 10mins and will need a fork lift to lift.

Police and NHS urge British public not to call 101 and 111 non-emergency numbers after behind-the-scenes kit failure

Always the customer's fault

Notice how it's "we understand some customers may be experiencing problems"

The sort of language you expect from an understaffed call center, not what you expect from a vital emergency service admitting they fscked up

Health Sec Hancock says UK will use Apple-Google API for virus contact-tracing app after all (even though Apple were right rotters)

Re: I've said it before here on el Reg

>I drove to the testing station rather than using the postal version.

With the new app now everybody else on the M25 would have to isolate

Facebook's $500k deepfake-detector AI contest drama: Winning team disqualified on buried consent technicality

Re: If the contest was for designing the AI...

Not necessarily, one team might be able to use training data from grainy cctv while another team needs pristine mug shots.

If you want the broadest set of research then you need to make it fairly open, otherwise you get a Formula1 type result where people are merely micro-optmising for the rules

The girl with the dragnet tattoo: How a TV news clip, Insta snaps, a glimpse of a tat and a T-shirt sold on Etsy led FBI to alleged cop car arsonist

Re: The lesson for today

Exactly, with all this protesting we will end up with women being allowed to vote!

Re: @Michael Hable - Thoroughly deserved

That's what was so clever about the "anti-nazi league", if you were against them what did that make you?

Out on a tangent: Almost two decades into its 5-year mission, INTEGRAL still delivers the gamma ray goods

Re: Summed over its lifetime

Different instruments looking at different energies and a wider field of view than XMM's higher resolution telescope.

It just shares the "airframe"

If you're despairing at staff sharing admin passwords, look on the bright side. That's CIA-grade security

Re: Numpties, the lot of 'em.

Wait for the DoD's new CyberForce

Splunk to junk masters and slaves once a committee figures out replacements

Disney question

Goofy is a dog who wears clothes but has Pluto, also a dog, naked on a leash.

Is this slavery or just a kinky sex thing?

Re: Where will this end....

Don't you just have to push the trolley into row 12 really hard ?

Re: Let's keep crazy and mad and bonkers and looney etc

Window-licker test or joey test is still OK?

Re: Where will this end....

"the term future perfect was abandoned when it was discovered not to be"

58 Starlinks scattered across sky, Rocket Lab aims for back-to-back launches, and Skyrora hops 6km above Shetland

Cape Shetland

> launch to 6km from the Fethaland Peninsula at Shetland's North Roe...... mission was aimed at collecting meteorological data

This mythical "sun" everyone is theorising about ?

Couple wrongly arrested over Gatwick Airport drone debacle score £200k payout from cops

Shouldn't it be a big red (with hammer and sickle) flag that anybody standing as police commissionaire should announce a political allegiance?

Re: I have to admit...

Possibly if there was just one reported sighting.

But all those people who saw the story on twitter or facebook and then decided to call 999 to let the police know - even the ones who were nowhere near the airport? A million idiots can't all be wrong !