Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

French pensioner ejected from fighter jet after accidentally grabbing bang seat* handle

Re: Great story, funnily written, but wow, what luck

There is one US fighter, presumably from the days before explosive canopy technology, where the mechanism was simply a large metal spike on the top of the seat headrest.

>If I were the commanding general in charge, I swear that there would be a few demotions in order.

A number of gallic shrugs have been implemented

Of course if this was the USAF it would have led to many 1000s of Powerpoint presentations

The RAF would have initially blamed the crew, then when it was discovered they were inconveniently all alive, it would have been classified and never spoken of again

Re: Double ejection

It was still an "interesting" landing for the pilot. The canopy had been removed and he was aware that his own seat had presumably been armed and was only a loose wire away from ejecting him at any moment.

Europe calls for single app to track coronavirus. Meanwhile America pretends it isn’t trying to build one at all

>That's Un-American !

That's an-American !

I think your phone autocorrected,

White House creates 'Team Telecom' to probe whether foreign telcos should be allowed near US networks

Re: The problem is...

Nobody in the USA politic or military think China is planning to invade the USA to further global communism.

They do believe that China wants to have the ability to both spy on the USA for tactical and economic reasons and to have leverage over the USA in any trade/territorial dispute.

It's what every country does, Britain was spying on the Germans to get an edge in Eu agricultural polciy talks.

Re: The problem is...

Because these are the first politicians in history to use "national security" to line their own and friends pockets?

Response

Every other country decides whether US software should be allowed in their systems.

If MSFT is now beholden to the DoD for a multi $Bn cloud contract do I want them proving systems for my government?

Tribunal halts all Information Commissioner's Office cases because UK data watchdog can't print or organise PDFs

Re: Now if I were a plaintiff

And how long do you store that workstation in case of an appeal, or if the case is referred to as precedence in future cases?

Minister slams 5G coronavirus conspiracy theories as 'dangerous nonsense' after phone towers torched in UK

>Her god created everything as it is. Apparently official dogma of the Jeovah's Witnesses.

Undeniably true, what's more God created everything last thursday with all her memories in place along with the dinosaur bones

Unfortunately it's not the idiots spreading disease that die.

I would be rather annoyed if Knuth pops it before finishing volume 4 because some mouth-breather student decided to enjoy spring break in Florida

Re: Just checking

But until recently the general public weren't exposed to such widespread broadcast idiocy.

It may take a generation to develop immunity to dumb blondes on national TV

Re: Correlation

Not true, they have been very careful to follow advice from economists at think tanks with the word "liberty", "market" and "heritage" in the name.

Playing economic think tank bingo is a fun game. Guessing which words in their name mean they think the poor should be turned into fertilizer

Surely it's the other way around: Autism causes vaccines

People in scientific professions more likely to show autism

Reg fashion special: Top designer says 'video chat accessories' are in for spring!

Re: And So It Begins

After a week of wfh we are all using stuffed toys wearing headphones in our team meetings

To be fair most of us are not exactly scenic at the best of times

From Amanda Holden to petrol-filled water guns: It has been a weird week for 5G

>what is 5G Fibre?

Recommended daily allowance?

Re: Unqalified 'Z' list Celeb talks rubbish

Could we harness this power for good?

Suppose we picked a national "dumb blonde" and had the people follow his/her every pronouncement - however stupid. What could go wrong ?

conspiracy

I'm beginning to think that my other source of real news Newsthump is true.

All these conspiracy posts are part of a government plot to track down and identify idiots.

What's not clear is why. Possibly for future cabinet posts, or to build up a strategic moron reserve

Things that go crump in the night: Watch Musk's mighty missile go foom

Re: Does it open at the front?

Yes returning a satelite is almost never economic.

It was done twice IIRC for the shuttle, although that had the extra restrictions that the satelite had to have been originally designed for the shuttle (eg. no hypergolic fuel) and be in a low enough orbit (ie booster failed). The bigger issue was that a shuttle flight cost $1Bn so apart from something like Hubble it would never be cost effecive

The original USAF plan for the shuttle was to 'retrieve' enemy craft. But it was obvious that as soon as the shuttle was announced the opposition would fit all their interesting satellites with 100g of C4, a bag of nails and a pressure switch.

Re: Does it open at the front?

The first stage doesn't go to orbit, it accelerates straight up in the atmosphere and then falls back down, slowing in increasingly dense air until the engines stop it near the ground. Getting it back down is no harder than the bloke that "jumped from space".

The upper stage and payload are doing 10km/s horizontally, to get them to fall down you have to apply -10km/s. Yes you can use some aerodynamic braking if you want to carry the mass of a heatshield, and you can arrange to enclose the captured payload inside it safe from multi-1000 deg plasma.

It would still end up at the height and speed that the 1st stage released it - but that is the easy bit

You typically purge the vessel with the boil off from the liquid gas before you fill it, makes sure there is no water vapour left behind and it pre-cools the tank. Filling cryogenic liquids really isn't rocket science !

Re: Does it open at the front?

> Then attach a small Payload Assist Module send it to the Sun

Although it seems to be "downhill" to the sun it is as hard to slow an object down from Earth's orbital velocity so it can "fall" into the sun as it would be to launch it from the sun to Earth orbital velocity.

That's the problem with returning stuff from orbit to Earth. You have to make stuff go really fast horizontally to make it to orbit and so you have to spend the same energy/fuel to get it to stop orbitting.

The Shuttle and Apollo capsules used friction with the atmosphere to dump this speed, but a returning SpaceX rocket (or that junkyard rocket from the 70s TV show) needs to carry 2x as much fuel to use engines slow down.

This means that the 2nd stage weighs 2x as much, and so the first stage needs to be bigger to lift it, then the first stage needs to be even bigger to lift that extra fuel, which takes more fuel - that way madness (and the Saturn V) lies

Re: Does it open at the front?

>"Starship could be able to replicate the Space Shuttle trick of capturing satellites in orbit and returning them to Earth."

Slightly trickier in reality than on paper

Washington state governor green-lights facial-recog law championed by... guess who: Yep, hometown hero Microsoft

Re: "the first [..] new law devoted exclusively to putting guardrails in place"

But WA police will have a letter in a locked filing cabinet somewhere in a disused basement saying they "embrace divertingly" and "dialogued with stakeholders" before deployment.

So when the police shoot some brown skinned looking chap for trying to get into Microsoft it will all be alright.

Automatic for the People: Pandemic-fueled rush to robo-moderation will be disastrous – there must be oversight

Re: pandemic's no excuse

BBFC can review each youtube and tiktok video from home?

Bring back the Lord Chancellors office to approve each tweet and Facebook post

UK judge gives Google a choice: Either let SEO expert read your ranking algos or withdraw High Court evidence

Re: The ranking algorithms should be disclosed full stop

Shouldn't be a problem, if every site discovers that putting their product name 137 times in the header pushes them up the Google rankings then overall nothing changes.

(at least for me, I use DDG and piHole and Brave and frankly more software to block ads than I use to do my work)

Boeing 787s must be turned off and on every 51 days to prevent 'misleading data' being shown to pilots

Only in the parts where they moved production to Charleston S.C, the parts made by commie union labor in Washington are fine.

... checks... my BMW was made in the former east Germany, not in S. Carolina.... relieved.

Re: A point of order seems to need clarifying.

Which is why you probably shouldn't fix this 'bug'

Simply require it to be powered down every 28days as part of the maintenance procedure.

I'm sure the engines need oil replacing every X 100 hours, nobody is demanding that the plane contains enough oil for a 50years service life.

The avionics for the 787 were built by Rockwell Collins in Cedar Rapids, Iowa

Re: Windows Server 2000

It was Windows95/98 and it took years in the wild before anybody noticed for that very reason.

“ - and this is the rock-solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation's Galaxywide success is founded - their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws.”

Re: Millisecond roll-over?

Exactly and yet internet experts will start blaming Boeing for improper testing when the real problem is the day being too long.

Zoom vows to spend next 90 days thinking hard about its security and privacy after rough week, meeting ID war-dialing tool emerges

The famous story about the 'CUBA' mutual fund Thaler-the-cuba-fund

tldr: a USA fund with the ticker symbol CUBA (nothing to do with the island) doubled in value when Obama talked about easing sanctions. It stayed high as everybody laughed about the story and then went up again when Castro died !

BOFH: Will the last one out switch off the printer?

Is there a capitalist version where the person with the most properties gets given a bailout when they run out?

NASA's classic worm logo returns for first all-American trip to ISS in years: Are you a meatball or a squiggly fan?

Although being MB they would make you choose and pay for a colour, paint it that colour and then charge you again for sanding it back.

Re: I worked for that outfit for 33 years

I worked with the ESA team that did the original european camera on Hubble

When it had its little optical problem there was an urgent push to release some pretty pictures to show it was still usable.

They press releases had both the Nasa logo and ESA logo. But printed the same width the square ESA logo looked bigger than the rectangular Nasa and so Nasa blocked the publication until they reached an agreement.

Re: Everything old is new again

They had considered going back to the earlier logo used by von Braun

Australian digital-radio-for-railways Huawei project derailed by US trade sanctions against Chinese tech giant

Re: Trade war

>SO NO !!!! The USA couldn't give a hoots toot about exports from Australia.

Rather my point old bean

But since exports to China have given Australia their miraculous 20 years without a recession economic record while close links to the USA merely gave them an opportunity to partake of Vietnam

They might have to decide which side of the prawn is on the barbie, or whatever they say down under

Trade war

Looks like Oz has to choose whether to export its coal and gas to China or USA.

Of course next January it will be fully re-integrated into empire 2.0 so won't need to bother with foreigners

US prez Trump's administration reportedly nears new rules banning 'dual-use' tech sales to China

>What happens if those dual use products also have a use in medical equipment, say ventilators

They get vastly cheaper. China now has an incentive to pour $Bn into developing it's own FPGA product lines which it can then sell for much less.

Zoom's end-to-end encryption isn't actually end-to-end at all. Good thing the PM isn't using it for Cabinet calls. Oh, for f...

It's a hell of an advert for Zoom if even cabinet ministers managed to setup a multi-way video call without the help of experts.

"Zoom, the software so simple Chris Grayling can use it"

Re: Bavaria

The advantage - if it was a particularly successful meeting them in the morning nobody can remember who you decided to invade, or where you got the traffic cone

Re: Let's hope someone doesn't hack ...

You have to feel sorry for the FSB/CIA/MMB agents taking down the transcript

Comrade, I have hacked the zoom feed but they seem to have some secret code....

"Wiff-waff, crikey, bit of a sticky wicket as we used to say in big skool. Well my old motto, scribi bolloxi on omnibus"

Re: leak from home

In the current lockdown you can't expect them to leave all the secret briefings in a wine bar or the back of a cab can you ?

Re: Bavaria

That's why all political gatherings in Munich should be held face-face, in a beerhall.

Re: To be clear ...

>"we do not sell your data", what should we infer ?

They license it, so their customers have to keep paying

Re: We are all overlooking one important aspect

>Of course the Russians don't need to bug the Cabinet - they've bought them.

I hope they kept the receipt

Re: Unprecedented stupidity

I wish I could believe it was being run by evil Machiavellian geniuses - but I suspect it's just idiots all the way down

You're not fooling anyone on that vid-conference call: Walmart says shirt sales soaring, pants not pulled up

Re: You missed the real question....

> Wally-world have made the whole thing up as a viral marketing ploy, could it.

A new aspirational marketing campaign ?

Nothing says business success like owning a Walmart dress shirt

Internet use up 40 per cent in San Francisco Bay Area – but you know what’s even higher? Yep, alcohol, weed use

Re: Is this any surprise?

In the USA the odds are that the suicide (+associated fentenol death) rate due to unemployment will be higher than the Covid death rate for a large part of society.