Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

The Palm Palm: The Derringer of smartphones

Re: "useless coin pocket" ?

Mine has the remote RFID button thing to open the doors at work.

It does mean I have to grind sensually against a couple of door frames to get it close enough

Brexit-dodging SCISYS Brits find Galileo joy in Dublin

Re: Why Dublin?

>It won't - because English is an official language in several EU countries..

But only the UK selected it as its official language.

Ireland, for entirely non-political reasons, claimed Gaelic as its official language for the Eu.

But I'm sure France will support everyone just speaking English.

Re: Why Dublin?

Presumably it will become a lot more common in March when English stops being an official Eu language.

Re: != Brexit dodging

How many times is this going to work though?

If there are security concerns about having a non-eu partner in your critical infrastructure how does having a lawyers office in Dublin help?

Can you imagine the army allowing Huawei to build all its IT infrastructure so long as they got a PO box in Bogner?

Who's watching you from an unmarked van while you shop in London? Cops with facial recog tech

Re: 650 willing crowd subjects

Because it has a record of 100% failing to match suspects.

So by only feeding it images of innocent people, it will perfectly identify all the guilty ones - logical really.

You can't test it in Westminster because there are no innocent people to use for the training set.

Astroboffins spy a rare exoplanet evaporating before their eyes

They are Americans, they are catching onto the metric system gradually so one day will switch from cgs to mks.

Astronomy is still very cgs, since the numbers are all so unimaginable an extra 3 in the exponent doesn't make a lot of difference and it's not like you can relate any of them to normal quantities.

Spending watchdog points finger at Capita for 1,300 shortfall in British Army rookies

Re: How?

It takes a lot of skill and dedication to be able to bill a couple of 100 million for a system incapable of coping with 100s of transactions/s

Re: TBF...

>in the 60s, 70s, 80s and most of the 90s .... THEN IT GOT REAL

In the 60s, 70s, 80s etc it was a good way of getting your legs blown off in Belfast

I assumed they were run directly from a political party in Moscow

Have a gander at this: Amazon agrees not to act as Silicon Valley's foie gras dealer

Re: Kinder Eggs

>Oh, you mean "Kinder", the German word for "children". I didn't know we harvested eggs from them..

That's why they're called Kinder surprise.

ps. Note to non-americans. The toys inside Kinder eggs constitute such a clear and present danger to the safety of American children that they are banned. To the extent of Canadian grandmothers being dragged out of their cars at assault-rifle point for trying to take one across the border.

Re: There's worse

Kinder eggs are fine - so long as you list them as anti-personal mines.

Re: Serves them right

Buying guns from a cloud services supplier is silly.

They should offer SAAS - Shooting as a Service - you just put in the address and somebody goes and shoots for you.

Lenovo tells Asia-Pacific staff: Work lappy with your unencrypted data on it has been nicked

Re: GDPR?

But if the laptop had been in Europe or Australia, and encrypted the police would have a copy of the key - and so the data would be available in every east end boozer for "a drink"

Bloodhound SSC reaches the end of the road for want of £25m

Re: Bu**eration!

Rocket sleds (cough trains cough) have done something like mach-8

US Homeland Security installs AI cameras at the White House, Google tries to make translation less sexist

Made worse by using out-of-copyright Gutenberg books for some of the more obscure languages.

So if the only source text you have for some indigenous language is the bible translated by some C18 missionary your neural net is going to be a bit short of gender fluid pronouns

It's official. Microsoft pushes Google over the Edge, shifts browser to Chromium engine

Re: So

If you are using Windows on a PC Microsoft could not give a float underflow about you

They make their money from corporate Office365+Sharepoint and Cloud

Anything that makes it 0.1% more difficult to migrate work away from AWS or Google cloud to Azure because some admin tool works better in Chrome could cost them $$$$$

Good news for Linux

Since the browser is a core part of the operating system and can't be separated from it - Microsoft will have to switch to the Linux kernel.

For the young reader (there must be one)

Microsoft argues DOJ's request for new court order shows that internet explorer is an integrated feature of windows

Re: Wondering

LetMeWikiThatForYOu

"The Google-authored portion of Chromium is released under the BSD license,[20] with other parts being subject to a variety of different open-source licenses, including the MIT License, the LGPL, the Ms-PL and an MPL/GPL/LGPL tri-license.[21]"

Linux.org domain hacked, plastered with trolling, filth and anti-transgender vandalism

Re: Using Yahoo! mail for something important?

>If you're the owner of a web domain I'd expect you to be using an email account for that domain

Not necessarily for the technical contact address.

It makes it a little tricky for the registrar to contact you if there is a problem with your domain

'Say hello to my little vacuum cleaner!' US drug squad puts spycams in cleaner's kit

So we can expect

A global ban on the use of "shop-vac" brand cleaners in critical infrastructure ?

Will have to buy Huawei instead ...

Galileo's magnifico measurement: 1976 redshift test updated

Re: "...ESA's GREAT experiment..."

Same test was done from the top/bottom a clock tower (in a nice nod to Galileo) in 1959.

This didn't really "test" anything it was just a nice side project that you could do because the satellites were in those orbits

Cambridge Analytica's administrators misled judge, High Court told

Re: It's beginning to look a lot like Fraudmas...

Expecting this to become the norm for elections and even ad campaigns - spin up a company for the campaign and close it afterwards before the GDPR fines arrive.

UK's BT: It's not unusual to pull Huawei from our core mobile networks

Making Britain Great Again

BT will only be using technology built at Dollis Hill

The British Home Office was warned about its crappy data management – then Windrush happened

Re: In occasions like this...

> it's hard to tell whether it's a case of absolute evil or one of absolute incompetence.

That's unfair - it could be both

No, you haven't gone deaf – the Large Hadron Collider has been wound down for more upgrades

Re: Explain pleeeese

>if you can make a non-linear accelerorator.

Yes the LHC is a ring, the linear ones just feed it.

Considering a linear accelerator to replace LHC but it will have to be >100km long which is a bit tricky

Huawei CFO poutine cuffs by Canadian cops after allegedly busting sanctions on Iran

Re: Canadians as puppets

It would be interesting to see if they would arrest an American to be sent to China for dealing with Taiwan

Doubly odd since Canada is top of the list of threats to American national security according to their Aluminium and steel tariffs.

Space policy boffin: Blighty can't just ctrl-C, ctrl-V plans for Galileo into its Brexit satellite

Re: Genuine question...

>How does the EU expect the UK to take part in NATO exercises (or indeed real battles) if the secret bit of Galileo is denied to us?

Same way it does now. The USA lets its 'friends' have access to GPS for a certain time in a certain region, therefore it gets to decide what Nato can do and where it can do it.

It also means that everybody has to buy American made precision weapons.

The main reason for having a Galileo military channel was the option to sell the Saudis British precision guided weapons and that was also the main reason for the British insisting on keeping foreigners out.

Re: Cancel HS2

>and it *could* be a boost to that sector.

It could completely destroy that sector.

Here Mr/Ms/GenderNeutralPronoun entrepreneur is an umpty billion quid government contract with the usual promise of even more when you overrun or don't deliver. Stop all your commercial work, massively expand your workforce (with only locals who pass security checks) and plan on just building this for 10-20 years.

Then when the funding runs out or the political winds change, go back to being a lean agile commercial operation overnight.

Marriott's Starwood hotels mega-hack: Half a BILLION guests' deets exposed over 4 years

The monitoring system didn't even notice - they only investigated when they found marriot-hack.tgz on a torrent site

Re: Card numbers

>But yes, why does anyone need to store CC numbers once the transaction has been verified

Hotels get a special PCI exemption (like car rental), otherwise they would need your card when you book to take a deposit, you queue again at checkin to pay, then you queue at checkout to pay for any other charges.

People don't like queuing and the majority of hotels in the USA are booked on business trips so nobody cares if the card is ripped off

What a meth: Woman held for 3 months after cops mistake candy floss for hard drugs

Re: The best and the brightest fighting the war on drugs again!

Police have also argued that you stopping when they say "excuse me" is you consenting to be stopped and searched.

Here they can't search you on the street but they can ask you to turn out your pockets - in case you have a concealed weapon - and then arrest you for anything they find.

Re: Pretextual traffic stops

>Even if it took three months to determine that the stuff wasn't drugs

The difference in the uk is that the lab would determine that it WAS drugs

The labs were privatised. They now bid on Police work, the 'customer' makes it quite clear that the contract renewal depends on producing helpful results. If you keep finding people innocent the police will find another lab next time.

See this, Google? Microsoft happy to take a half-billion in sweet, sweet US military money to 'increase lethality'

Re: A new Modern Democracy.

>i tell the boys what we are gonna do and they go and do it.

That's the problem. Back when schools played rugby it was possible to tell a million boys - get out of your trench and walk slowly toward those machine guns because we think a different one of Queen Victoria's grand kids should be king of Belgium.

Now boys won't shoot foreign children unless you VR an image of an evil pokemon over their face.

GCHQ pushes for 'virtual crocodile clips' on chat apps – the ability to silently slip into private encrypted comms

But in the past GCHQ protected us from striking miners, investigative journalists, labour governments and the Bishop of Durham.

Now they need our help to protect us from pedophiles and muslims

Re: Trying reasonableness?

The goal of el'reg is to make an ironic comment that ONLY gets downvotes

Re: Trying reasonableness?

The village bobby nodding to you as you walk down the street in public.

GCHQ tracking everywhere you go, everything you buy or read online, everyone you communicate with, and everyone they talk to.

It's all the same really - just a virtual village bobby.

It's all a matter of time: Super-chill atomic clock could sniff gravitational waves, dark matter

Re: Complications

g (ie GM) is involved because the standard clocks are corrected for General Relativity to mean sea level. It being slightly impractical to run all the atomic clocks in completely flat spacetime. Can't remember if the second was defined at msw or the clocks are simply corrected to msw before being compared.

Standard atomic clocks are so accurate that you use them to define the geoid height at the lab, which you then use to correct each clock when they are compared - it is a slight chicken-egg problem.

Re: But how long must we wait?

Think how much Ti is going to charge for the graphing calculator to do that

Re: Complications

>There wouldn't be a problem with the definition of time.

Except the second is defined for clocks sitting at the Earth's surface

Which is defined as g=9.81m/s^2

Which depends on the definition of a second

Re: third hit on google: "general relativity is false"

It's simple enough to test for yourself, you just need a mountain, a minivan and a couple of atomic clocks

Project GREAT

Pulses quicken at NASA as SpaceX gets closer to crewed launches and Russia readies the next Soyuz

Washington post

Owned by the rather lagging behind competitor in the commercial manned space business ?

Re: Keeping your people from revolting

>NASA is full of hardcore puritans

When they went to the moon they were mostly full of hardcore socialists - of the "national" variety

Oh my chord! Sennheiser hits bum note with major HTTPS certificate cock-up

Not a problem

None of them are online, they are all waiting for $500 unidirectional gold ethernet cables

Great Scott! Is nothing sacred? US movie-goers vote Back To The Future as most-wanted reboot

Re: A Matrix sequel?

<Alec Guiness hand wave> there were no sequels to The Matrix </Alec Guiness hand wave>

Re: Nobody knows anything...

But sequels normally make >65% of the original, cost next to nothing to market and you already have the theme park ride built.

Re: Post-America Hollywood

Today's films rely on foreign sales to fund the production (rather than DVD/TV sales)

That means a subtle exploration of the artist's soul that will appeal to 100Million teenage boys in Asia + S. America.

Or something that will ensure attendance at your theme park for the next 10 years

Re: Why not go the whole hog....

> There is NO WAY to make The Princess Bride any better than it is.

Really, where is the theme park ride and video game plug ?

Blighty: We spent £1bn on Galileo and all we got was this lousy T-shirt

Re: PRS access

Norway is needed for Galileo to work at high latitudes - its only technical advantage over GPS.

If Norway takes its ball (or its ground stations) and goes home - Galileo's military signal doesn't work for that bit of the world where all the Russian boats and planes come from.

The UK doesn't have quite the same bargaining power

>Simple answer, no access, take £1Bn out of the devource payment, what is the EU going to do ?

Ban all British companies for bidding for future Eu work with security implications (allowed under WTO).

Re: UK contributions

>The idea was that it’s better to reach out help bring the destitute former Communist countries up to a much higher standard, rather than left them fester in misery.

So not to move NATO to the Russian border ?