* Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

21372 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Dec 2009

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Why Tim Cook is wrong: A privacy advocate's view

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Re: Insecure by design

>I wonder if part of the reason Apple is taking a hard line is because Cook is gay.

I think there is less of a knee jerk reaction to always support the government among the average Apple/Google employee today than there might have been at IBM 20 year ago

Khronos releases Vulkan 1.0 open graphics specification

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Re: Vulkan successor to OpenGL?

Unless you are on one of those non-microsoft platforms.

I hear they have computers in pockets these days

Facebook tells Viz to f**k right off

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It's a company beholden to national regulators and is now going to have a hard time saying that it can't block hate speech / dodgy pharmaceuticals / piracy / etc

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Re: Facebook? It's society in general

>seeing some of the websites that radicalise people

For me it's any time I need to deal with a bank and have to do all that prove-your-identity / know-your-customer crap to prove that you aren't a terrorist

The field at the centre of the universe: Cambridge's outdoor pulsar pusher

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Re: Ha ha

Laboratory experiments also have problems holding a couple of kg of hydrogen together long enough for it to fuse - so the idea that the sun exists is laughable

Boffins' gravitational wave detection hat trick blows open astronomy

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But it's much more important for 50% of the population to go to university to do media studies and everyone pay fees rather than a small minority do science for free

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Re: What's Actually Wrong The explanation of interference is slightly wrong in the article...

"blows open astronomy".

It confirms something that have been predicted for 100years and believed by most astronomers for ages.

Nice bit of engineering though

Health and Safety to prosecute over squashed Harrison Ford

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Wasn't blaming the HSE, I worked in mining here in Canada and the safety regs are very strict (much more so than the USA)

But claiming that the accident rate drop is due to them is like me claiming that the rate of deaths due to Viking attacks is down to the local council's new CCTV system. 1st millennium, no CCTV - lots of raids. 2nd millennium, CCTV introduced - fewer raids, 3rd massive surveillance - no vikings.

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Is that due to HSE or to the loss of the mining, fishing, quarrying, steel and other dangerous industries?

The HSE has done a lot to make dangerous jobs less dangerous - but there are a lot fewer of those jobs

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Re: The response to "Throw me the hydrospanner"

I think the Wookie was only hired as a polically correct requirement to have a minimum number of visible minorities as spacecraft crew

US Congress locks and loads three anti-encryption bullets

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Re: Who gets the master decryption key - USA, EU, China or N Korea?

Only the US: So just the NSA, CIA, FBI, Secret Service, TSA, DHS, INS, DEA, IRS,FCC, 12,000 local police depts, Army, Navy, Airforce, Coastguard,

Assuming nobody leaks any information to any unauthorized 3rd parties.

FTDI boss hits out at 'Chinese criminal gang' pumping knock-off chips

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Using a driver with somebody else part is unlawful?

So me using windows HPL4 driver and print to file to get a PDF from Word is illegal?

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Re: Not much sympathy

Suppose a web site only supported IE and your Mozilla browser "stole" Microsoft's agent string and claimed it was IE?

SCO's last arguments in 'Who owns Linux?' case vs. IBM knocked out

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

They also worked in that wonderful mini-computer pricing model, that only a former mainframe customer or cable company exec could love.

We had SCO because it was (in the late 80s) the only way of getting more than 640K or 30Mb on a PC and we had to log a lot of data. Order a C compiler for $$$, when you install it you discover you don't have a pre-processor. Oh you want the software development add-on for the compiler ? That's more $$$$

Even more bizarrely we also had Kodak unix for PCs.

Ballmer schools SatNad on Microsoft's mobile strategy: You need one

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Re: Too little, too late!

It had the same strategy it has had for all its other successful products.

Buy a small company, ruin it and hope that nobody else enters the market to compete

Silent Nork satellite tumbling in orbit

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Re: Seems like a lot of effort to me

>the only entertainment is a chubby nutter shown to be attacked with love on a daily basis

Royston Vasey is the leader of N Korea?

They really kept that one out of the papers

LOHAN entertains the crowd at Oz Linux shindig

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What we need is to colonise a large deserted and preferably desert-ed island somewhere and build a launch site.

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

> Or is this kind of thing completely illegal in the UK?

Universities? Not yet, but the govt is working on it.

Thirty Meter Telescope needs to revisit earthly fine print

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Re: There are already a dozen telescopes on the 'sacred site'

They already did - there is a limit on the total number of telescopes.

The Keck interferometer mode was shut down because the small outrigger telescopes counted toward the limit as much as the two main domes.

The telescope should have been built in Chile, it was built in Hawaii to get pork barrel funding and this is the result.

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Re: Won't be a "sacred site" in 2 million years or so anymore

Especially ironic in that astronomical observatories are centuries older than the settlement of the Hawaiian islands - so it is the astronomers traditional activities that are being banned.

LinkedIn sinkin': $10bn gone in one day as shares plummet 40%

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Re: LinkedIn...

I think this one is in the forefront of the new category of anti-social media

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Probably a bunch of early employees who had to pay tax on what the IRS claim their options were worth at the previous price but are now worth half as much - even if they could sell them.

The late round VCs that gave it the $25Bn valuation will all have exit preferences which mean they wont lose anything

Disney World-area University admits massive data breach

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Black Helicopters

For the last fscking time

> exposed the social security numbers and other private information

Social security numbers are not fsckign secret, assuming they are secret and using them as a government guaranteed form of ID is what causes all the fsckign problems.

The only government guaranteed form of ID is your secret government issued citizen number which can be founded printed in invisible ink on .... LOST CARRIER .....

Bats and badgers hold up Apple’s Irish data centre plans

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Re: Don't underestimate the tenacity of these nut jobs!

But the badgers don't have to worry, because although the physical data center will appear to be in Ireland it will actually be in Applestan an imaginary country where nobody pays tax.

A bit like how all Apple stores in England are really in Ireland

Autodesk vapourises ten per cent of jobs to go completely cloudy

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I think it's a reaction to STOP the OSS projects.

Need to do a bit of design? Either pay $5-10K for Solidworks/Autocad/ProE or nothing for the OSS alternative. Then once you've learned that app you aren't likely to switch to the paid app later.

Their new pitch is, pay $99 for a month/year/special intro period - then once you're into their system you keep paying

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

If you do 2d cad - Draftsight is free (made by the people who do Solidworks and Catia)

If you do 3D - onshape is a nice free online parametric CAD by the people who invented solidworks - although it's interface is a bit more autodesk like

German Chancellor fires hydrogen plasma with the push of a button

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Re: Is pulse operation a design "feature" of Tokamaks or just what you can do so far?

No it's a core feature. It's like a big transformer it can only work while the field is changing.

To make it worse the more power you need to contain the faster you need to raise the field so you can make it cycle on-off over hours at low power but minutes at GW powers.

Even worse-worse, like a transformer you go through zero field switching between +/- and at that point there is no field to hold the plasma which then hits the walls and melts your machine. So you need to dump the plasma and start again every half cycle.

The big advantage of the stellarator is that the plasma generates it's own permanent containment field, the drawback is that you have an amazingly complex job to control it.

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Re: Bollocks

@ZSn

But Tokamaks aren't going to be the soln for continual power generation while Stellarators might be.

So is ITER a necessary engineering exercise to learn practical details or is it a giant white elephant - like a Victorian program to develop kevlar sails so tea clippers can keep beating steam ships ?

Frankly given the politics I'm amazed ITER has done anything at all. The plan was for a bunch of countries that aren't quite at war with each other to build the highest tech bit of nuclear physics on the planet. But instead of putting money into a design they each build the bit that their govt/industry feels like. So the cool bits with industrial applications are built by multiple countries all building the same part. Some bits nobody wants to build because they want it to be secret or would take years of R&D and have no other uses.

Then you try and assemble the whole thing in France, with French labor laws and to French nuclear safety inspection standards.

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Re: "And all this for the price of a couple of community catalyst catapults "

Except for the £850bn in public money to bail them out.

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Re: magnetic coils

Even looking at the diagram of the Stellarator it's hard to picture - no wonder it's taken until now to be able to run the models to design the fields.

And all this for the price of a couple of community catalyst catapults for a Shoreditch web design imagineering exercise.

Microsoft buys SwiftKey, Britain's 'stealthiest software startup'

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Re: Hmm, the usual comments.

>So world class that it seems to have produced virtually nothing that they have made any money from!

Its job isn't to produce anything - it's to stop the people who might produce something working somewhere else.

Think how good MS's balance sheet would be if they had hired Linus Torvalds to work on some obscure internal OS project that never saw daylight.

Safe Harbor ripped and replaced with Privacy Shield in last-minute US-Europe deal

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And they managed

to sign this while giggling ?

Hackers mirror 250GB of NASA files on the web

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Re: Oh the conspiracies ...

Obligatory xkcd link

Rooting your Android phone? Google’s rumbled you again

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Re: Why they're asking that in the first place

Not if you put the private key on millions of devices as a certain giant corporation, that should know better, did

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Re: Why they're asking that in the first place

If their security depends on their being a secret bit of software which is present on millions of phones also owned by the bad guys - then they have no security.

Israeli drones and jet signals slurped by UK and US SIGINT teams

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Re: Think about it...

The decryption algorithm is XOR with an identical copy of the random data.

I think the Iranians already worked this out, probably around the time Caesar was a lad.

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Re: Think about it...

If you actually cared you put a 1Tb SSD with random numbers onboard and XOR the data as you send it. For extra points in your GCSE homework you overwrite the numbers you have used with the video so you have a backup when it lands.

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Re: Why would you do this?

>would would you use analogue video with cut and rotate encryption?

Macrovision were the only company in the district of the last politician to sign the bill

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Re: Why send you're own drone when you can piggy back the feed from some else?

I'm sure the Israelis are relying on it.

Fly drone over suspected terrorist training camp / wedding.

Allow US to eavesdrop on data.

US agencies confirm to politicians that Israel is under threat and so should be given some more weapons which can be purchased from suppliers in your congressional district.

And ps.our funding should be increased because of all these terrorists "we"just found

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Re: Wouldn't US slurping of Israeli intel...

I think the Israelis simply invented a way of reducing their data storage costs

US military finds F-35 software is a buggy mess

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Re: Only military logic

>battlefield against well-armed opponents with SAMs and AA guns?

Which is why it was generally used against unarmed villages to prevent them becoming bases for insurgents. Nothing like having your village wiped out by a gunship to convince you of who is the right side to join.

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Re: It's the military-industrial complex

>what's the actual use of an "advanced" fighter plane?

It's very difficult to run for congress on your heroic war record as a drone programmer in the 6th Afghan war.

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Re: Maybe they could ask the Chinese for a copy of their code

But it doesn't need to out dog-fight 1960s era fighters. Its role is to protect us in Canada from ISIS

Former tech PR Jeremy Hunt MP ordered by judge to delete tweet

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Re: @Solid Squid The judge should apologize

On the other hand Mr Hunt is a member of the government.

So it sounds a lot like the government making an announcement about what the verdict should be

Apple growth flatlines ... Tim Cook thinks, hey, $80bn is still $80bn

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Re: "growth in services revenue"

>Answers on a postcard, please,

Because all Apple hardware was intended as a way of getting the credit card numbers of people with more money than sense who like expensive shiny new toys - in order to sell them content.

The fact they still continue to sell more and more overpriced HW every year is as much a surprise to them as to the rest of us.

400 jobs to go as Texas Instruments calls time on chip fab in Scotland

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Re: TI plant closure announcement

So fabs are a rapidly depreciating disposable asset. So you find some sucker 3rd world country to give you the money to build one,and tax breaks to operate it - on the back of them becoming the next Silicon LOCAL_FEATURE then you plan to gradually run it down with zero investment until the next sucker turns up.

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Re: Texas and Motorola - common issues

A chemical for schoolgirls. Now Chlorine tri-flouride - one of the fun properties, it explodes on contact with asbestos and sand !

UK Home Sec wants Minority Report-style policing – using your slurped data

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Re: That Minority Report reference...

> you could severely restrict a person's movement in a country like the UK, without any commission of an actual crime.

We had internal border checks on UK citizens travelling to one part of the UK a few years ago.

And 30 years ago we had people stopped at police checkpoints in England because they might be going to a strike.

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