Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

US may have by far the world's biggest military budget but it's not showing in security

Did anyone ring the hell desk asking where the slot was for the quarters?

It's the military, they rang the help desk asking which form they should use to requisition the quarters and how much each quarter would cost for budgeting purposes

Re: Big budget

That's what the enemy would expect.

Instead there is a massive inefficent bug-ridden insecure system that IS the main system

Good luck finding the non-existent secret effective decoy shadow system

Now imagine if the siren went off everytime a packet from a non .mil address arrived at your firewall !

On the other hand, if you think the US suffers from poorly trained, paid and motivated staff, badly designed patched together systems and lots of legacy kit from the 60s/70s - how do you think the USSR-II is doing ?

Re: How long have processors *connected* to a network been part of miltiary systems?

So you can't launch nuclear missiles form a submarine with the password "swordfish"

But you can screw up spare parts deliveries to ground an entire airforce in the field.

You can mess around with payroll, holidays and shifts so that all the skilled aircraft mechanics leave

You can post home/personal details of the families of soldiers

You can target small suppliers/subcontractors to shut down the supply chain for a new $Bn project.

You can probably do enough to ground the next Gulf War without leaving any evidence of who did it.

Pentagon's JEDI mind tricks at odds with our 'values' says Google: Ad giant evaporates from $10bn cloud contract bid

Re: The bad news...

>Why would Northrop Grumman (Northrup apparently) or General Dynamics bid for this?

For the $$$$$$

>Where is their cloud capability?

They buy it from Amazon, add 150% markup and re-bill it

Re: Muddying the Waters and Clearing the Decks for NEUKlearer HyperRadioProACTive IT Actions

Do you think Trump follows amanfromMars on Twitter ?

Re: Wait! What?

It also relies on other countries for $$$$.

If Google became synonymous with NSA it would be a good excuse for China/India to ban them and the Eu to regulate them up the whatsit.

There is less risk for Amazon, nobody is about to ban book sales because of links to the NSA

And Oracle are already so evil that they are planning on a new project making nerve gas from kittens to improve their image.

Indiegogo pulls handheld airport pervscanners off crowdfunding platform

Re: "What a time to be alive"

So a fairer trial than in certain modern countries I could mention

Re: }{amis}{

Wrist mounted - it didn't say anything about portable.

A tank with a handcuff welded on is "wrist mounted"

Hate to burst your Hubble: Science stops as boffins scramble to diagnose gyro problem

Re: Optical gyroscopes

Hubble has reaction wheels (and magnetic reaction bars) - this was one of the INS gyroscopes that failed - not a reaction wheel as in the early service mission

Re: Nystagmus is hard to fix 340 miles up

>didn't replace the gyro's with the ring laser sort

Lifetime concerns, Nasa likes to use kit that has been around for 30+ years before relying on it.

It's not clear that LRGs (or at least early 90s versions) had the long term stability of a spinning gyro and

power requirements for early LRGs were high.

Space-qualified high-stability radiation-hard diode lasers weren't well proven, Hubble is in a terrible orbit for radiation

Since it also has magnetic field sensors and fine guidance cameras for precise pointing and after 30+ years they have good models of its dynamics I suspect you can do a lot without a gyro platform. The gyros were mainly to give an accurate absolute orientation for slewing to a new target.

It's over 9,000! Boffin-baffling microquasar has power that makes the LHC look like a kid's toy

Re: 25 TeV vs 14 TeV

It is accelerating electrons not protons like the LHC. Confusingly it is way harder to accelerate light particles to high energies than heavier ones.

There are individual cosmic ray particles (probably) from other galaxies that have been detected at billions of time the LHC energy. We just don't know how or where - what's cool about this is that it is a nearby continuous source we can study

30 years ago, NASA put Challenger behind it and sent a Space Shuttle back out into the black

Re: Space exploration?

No but it took congress, a confusion of priorities, reliance on a dozen different agencies with competing goals and Nasa bureaucracy to make it so difficult - and dangerous

Where can I hide this mic? I know, shove it down my urethra

A few years ago I spent a lot of money buying up the last 32Mb CF cards I could find.

We had a fleet of old field data loggers that used 32Mb FAT (rather than pay MSFT a license for FAT32) it had all the file offset positions hard coded into the micro and would only work with 32Mb cards.

UK space comes to an 'understanding' with Australia as Brexit looms

Re: Maralinga and Woomera

Equator is a lot less useful these days.

It helps for equatorial orbits, GSO and going to the moon. It doesn't help at all for polar orbits.

For most modern swarm systems (GNSS, sat-coms, sat-internet) there are orbits in a wide range of planes so location is less important then ability to launch often and reliably. Weather is now the biggest factor

Fake news

Everyone knows Australia doesn't exist - typical Tory lies and fake promises

Re: Still irrelevant

>These are real people, with real families and real commitments.

In an industry that only exists to be the recipient of govt pork-barrel projects ?

I assume that the rocket scientists will have better prospects than when a previous tory govt shut down the mining industry.

US and UK Amazon workers get a wage hike – maybe they'll go to the movies, by themselves

Re: What's the net benefit to workers?

Saying he's keen on "doling out other people's money" misses the point - the state already does just that when private industry privatises profit but nationalises loss.

It's a little more complicated than that. Losses by mining or manufacturing (except aerospace) aren't paid back - only finance, and farming.

Re: The Calm before the storm perhaps?

>For the logistics industry, time stopped in 1975.

So will be able to switch seamlessly into the pre-Eu world, post-Eu

Re: What's the net benefit to workers?

Now I'm confused. If Sanders is a dirty rotten commie why does this policy sound like Thatcherism ?

Re: "The former policy wonk -

He is doing this because:

1, The <4% unemployment rate means otherwise he would only be getting the worst of the worst Xmas temp staff. You can normally deal with this by firing them but if it gets to Xmas eve and you have parcels to get out for same day delivery - hiring a 100,000 new bottom of the barrel employees in time is tricky.

2, It screws Walmart. Amazon can gradually automate warehouses (eg Occado) but Walmart can't automate stores. If $15 becomes the defacto retail minimum wage - Walmart have 1.5M employees all year round.

New Zealand border cops warn travelers that without handing over electronic passwords 'You shall not pass!'

Re: Have fun!

I was referring to the previous post on visiting the USA,

Several US police officers and CBP have been convicted of sharing personal nude images taken from phones and distributing child porn.

Re: Define 'search'..

Time for a Klingon Android theme ?

Re: Have fun!

>What the hey do some of you people keep on your phones, anyway?

Emails, appointments and contact details of customers I am visiting that might be considering buying my foreign product over a home grown competitor. So I should assume that they will be handed over to my local competitors in the name of national economic security

Evidence that I have read an article on gun control which means the red-necked "patriot" on the desk is going to invent some reason to block me, or at least keep me waiting for 12 hours for further questioning.

Photos of my daughters on the beach which are going to be passed around by some police officers before being released to their wider "image sharing network"

In a way it's funny that the "trade craft" of visiting our major Nato ally is now something like visiting East Berlin in the early 80s

Re: Mission Creep

Although I can't think of many international routes that would transit in NZ.

Narnia to Middle Earth perhaps?

Microsoft updates Visual Studio 2017 for devs chewing the CUDA

Re: Strangely enough ...

Really?

Doesn't "esc-:-q" in emacs still kill your cat?

NASA's Kepler telescope is sent back to sleep as scientists preserve fuel for the next data dump

Re: Refueling Kepler

>Why do you absolutely want to send a man there to do the job?

Because, unless things have changed since Hubble, making the satellite serviceable means that ever part on it - from the computers controlling the cameras to the data link sending the images back have to be man-rated. Which today means using parts from the Shuttle era.

The advantage of this is that it increase the cost 200-300% and limits you to a handful of suppliers - all owned by Boeing

Re: A pint!

>have overcome a great deal over the last nine plus years. While waiting for data

See all that training on BT broadband was worth it

UK should set its own tax on tech giants if international deal isn't reached – Chancellor

Re: What kind of conservatives want to tax everything?

But come next March when Britain once again rules the waves it will be able to dictate whatever trade deals it wants to Trump.

If America wants access to our Dutchy Original Shortbread it will bow down to our tariff demands on Facebook

Sun billionaire Khosla discovers life's a beach after US Supreme Court refuses to hear him out

> I wonder what America would make of Scotland's no law of trespass.

Guns - guns are always the answer

Although hunting Scotsmen out of season is considered bad form, even in England

Robot Operating System gets the Microsoft treatment

Re: Yeah, but does it come with an APP ?

Clippy tries to help make a cup of tea

Re: Doomed

We are safe.....

The one thing that is going to stop a robot uprising is having it run on windows.

Who is going to turn the Terminators off and on again ?

Rookie almost wipes customer's entire inventory – unbeknownst to sysadmin

Look on the bright side, any bugs your team had introduced in those 2 years had been blocked by your intrinsically secure script

Trump's axing of cyber czar role has left gaping holes in US defence

Re: The sad thing is

One man One vote - he is the one man and has the one vote

(with apologies to Pterry and indeed Lord Vetinari)

So you are saying that the purpose of the President is to think he has all the power in the world but is actually a poor deluded narcissist whose only job is to distract attention from the person who really makes all the decisions?

I think my pussy cat would like some fish, or at least I think that I think that. Perhaps the pussycat isn't real ...

Resident evil: Inside a UEFI rootkit used to spy on govts, made by you-know-who (hi, Russia)

Re: Call me cynical

>designing vulnerabilities in UEFI.

Why when they can call Intel/HP/Dell/etc up and ask for the UEFI signing keys ?

You are a bank with say 10,000 desktops.

The bill for sending somebody to every desk to open up a PC, move the jumper, wait for update, move jumper back - is probably higher than the bill for making sure your firewall blocks UEFI phoning home

Re: Hardware button?

>that would require the IT staff to leave their dark basement and have human contact

Robots !

If you have a desktop on the floor and the USB port at a reachable height you could even have a fleet of modified Roombas going around doing it.

Now if only robots could shake empty toner cartridges and push lusers down stairs we wouldn't need on-site admins at all.

Attempt to clean up tech area has shocking effect on kit

Re: Where would you plug a vacuum cleaner in?

"plonked an IBM ‘Shark’ storage array across one exit route."

With laser beams ?

Re: Electrifying

That's why the world was a better place when you wired your own plugs = evolution won out

Re: It's not always the cleaners

"Believe it or not the bottom 2 lines above bicycle were Fireworks & Rocket Motors."

Every Health and Safety rule is the result of at 3 occurrences

Re: Clean room?

You can let clean clean room cleaners in to clean a clean room

They also run retail distribution of bivalve mollusks in littoral area

Re: Why is it always the cleaners?

Similar, possibly apocryphal, story about a new Intel fab.

They were getting terrible yields, blaming the wafer manufacturer who said they fine etc.

They detailed a guy to follow the wafer from maker to plant.

All was fine until it arrived at the fab and the brown coat in stores took each one out of their ultra clean package to count them.

Re: C

So in the UK you have to stand there breathing in the carcinogenic fumes from the evaporating petrol generated by the hot British sunshine ?

NASA to celebrate 55th anniversary of first Moon landing by, er, deciding how to land humans on the Moon again

Re: That's no space programme ...

>What vision and moral fibre did 'Tricky Dicky' have exactly?

Compared to some of the recent inmates ?

Re: Back when I was 7

We had clangers -

Re: Bitter times are coming...

But they will have an awsome app on their embedded 4d VR implants that let you see a really cool Powerpoint about how great it would be