Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

This is peak AI: Bot to guest edit Radio 4's Today programme

Re: Tokenism as normal

I note that they have never had any Orcs, Elves or Dwarves on the program.

Pure Tolkeinism !

Re: Politicians are already Bots, preprogammed, script driven

Could simplify the whole process if the interviewer and the politician were bots.

You could just have a new set of http error codes:

401 - not answering the question

402 - redirect to another question

403 - re-asking the previous question

Re: The marvellous late Humphrey Lyttekton...

Wake me up when IBM get Watson to play Mornington Crescent

Re: Baroness Trumpington

Pugh has been fired, it turns out he was claiming two salaries

Royal Navy destroyer leaves Middle East due to propeller problems

I knew it was a mistake

To abandon sail

Number of glorious victories over the foreigners won in the age of sail > age of gas turbine

Microsoft scoops Search UI out from the gaping black maw of Cortana

Re: Bring Back Windows XP Search

And what male-ish name could Google use?

Orac ?

What a shame

I like typing "depends" or "computer management" in the start box - because you can't find anything in the menu anymore - and having it fire up web pages for adult daipers and IT service companies

Peers told to push for cut-price access to med tech developed with NHS data

Re: Not the only way the NHS could help themselves.

The trouble is that the NHS being the sole buyer for all prescription drugs for 60M people doesn't have any real negotiating power when it comes to paying for drugs

Re: Talk about selling the family-farm at rock bottom prices...

It should price the data at a $Bn - that way only the single remaining merged pharma giant can afford it. No startup or researcher gets to spot a relationship between some cancer and an unrelated symptom because they can't get the data.

Today John Snow wouldn't be able to remove the pump handle because he couldn't afford the OS map data or the list of deaths. It is important that all useful scientific data is locked up and traded to the highest bidder.

Wait, did Oracle tip off world to Google's creepy always-on location tracking in Android?

Re: Google is the retail arm of the NSA

The more worrying part is that the NSA is the government arm of Google

There is no conflict of interest: What's good for Google is good for America

Re: So your mobile operator does this too

And now thanks to the FCC the phone company as ISP is also allowed to read all your network traffic to push ads to serve you better.

HPE CEO Meg Whitman QUITS, MAN! Neri to replace chief exec in Feb

It's equality in a way.

Like how you know America is no longer racist when a black guy is allowed to be the villain in a Hollywood movie

Don't sweat Brexit, big biz told: Your shiny data protection sticker will remain intact

Re: Assured?

But it would be taking back control from those interfering euro-hippy-liberals at the ECJ/ECHR

Re: Assured?

Obviously the EU can change the GDPR rules if it wants to screw around, but that would upset a lot more places than the UK.

Or the UK govt could introduce new laws which don't meet GDPR - leaving UK companies screwed.

Intel finds critical holes in secret Management Engine hidden in tons of desktop, server chipsets

Why bother coercing / cajoling Intel into slipping in a hidden backdoor when you know they'll build in aircraft hangar sized doors through sheer incompetence.

You might, as an organisation tasked with securing the nation, consider that leaving your own economy and infrastructure vastly more vulnerable to a foreign attack wasn't a good price to pay to be able to read the emails of a few minority protest groups

Re: "Today's news will no doubt"...

" ...an act of extreme irresponsibility,"

Or just obeying orders.

Another UAV licence price hike? Commercial drone fliers rage over consultation

Re: Logic?

If you use your computer or phone to make money then you have to pay the government a computer licence fee every year don't you ?

UK.gov to chuck an extra £2.3bn at R&D ahead of Budget

Am I being cynical

In thinking this will mostly be Google/Microsoft/Apple getting a tax break for all the "research and development" its developers do in the UK rather than any actual funding for anyone?

ICO probes universities accused of using private data to target donation campaigns

They both get charged the same £9K tuition fee. Which one do you think is getting best value for money?

The one who uses their social science degree to walk into a guaranteed job for life in some local authority quango or the one whose science degree gets them a 25K engineering job until it's outsourced ?

Nathan Barley blamed for global GDP slump

Exactly the opposite

Productivity is $$ produced / worker hour.

You can boost productivity by downsizing and making your wage slaves do more $$ with fewer people.

Or the experts can charge you the same $$ do it fewer hours and work less. The experts have captured the productivity increase but use it to take time instead of the bosses adding it to GDP.

Windows Update borks elderly printers in typical Patch Tuesday style

More importantly they are a verifiable way of doing copies.

So you are sure that the copies of the invoice were the same, or that the safety sheet for that load actually matched .

For goodness sake, stop the plod using facial recog, London mayor told

The amateur photographers are unlikely to follow you home and shoot you when you go into a tube station because their algorithm was crap.

There was only a single arrest using the technology, of somebody that had just been arrested and released by another Police operation. There were 35 false matches.

Of course it is unfair to blame the technology - the police may have just decided to stop 35 people for being "in possession of curly black hair and thick lips" and then used the facial recognition as the reason for stopping them.

how passé

Presumably anyone using accents after 2019 will be tracked as a possible Eu agent / terrorist

Big Cable's pillow talk with FCC to forbid US states from writing own net neutrality rules

Re: Dear Internet Service Subscriber;

I'm waiting for the sites to do the same to the ISPs.

Hey verizon, you pay for the rights to show HBO, ESPN, etc on your cable network. Well if you aren't going to play nice with us then the same deal applies to youtube/google/gmail/facebook/twitter - lets see how many customers you have if you only have the rights to the AOL homepage and Bing

Arecibo spared the axe: Iconic observatory vital to science lives on

Re: Welcome to 21st Century USA

That's not necessarily a contradiction. Lots of science has been paid for by government - but that doesn't mean it was a priority. If a government paid university researcher invents MRI or computers or jet engines on a shoestring budget - that doesn't mean that the research was a priority.

Even during WWII, when the value of superior technology should have been pretty obvious, the funding for things like radar or jet engines was miniscule and fought against by a military that would rather have more obsolete fighters than a jet engine or another battleship rather than a way to detect u-boats.

The only times when it was a government priority would probably be the Manhattan project and Apollo (although that was arguably a pork-barrel vote buy rather than science).

Re: Welcome to 21st Century USA - How about an unbiased source?

Scientific American continues to state that the Earth is round, that it was created more than 6000 years ago by accident rather than from the body of Ymir - without any sort of balance

Car tax evasion has soared since paper discs scrapped

A cost saving

Presumably the digital system, being a govt IT project, cost more to implement than the amount they are losing so it's a win

US govt to use software to finger immigrants as potential crims? That's really dumb – boffins

Perfectly logical

The word Algorithm is from a Mr Al-Khwārizmī

He was Iranian

Iranians are terrorists

Therefore we can use algorithms to find terrorists

How about that time Russian military used a video game pic as proof of US aiding ISIS?

Re: "The Russian ministry of defense is investigating"

RussiaUSA would realise that any pics like this would be discovered pretty damn quickly.

spot the clock competition

Re: Behind every fake news or conspiracy theory is a little bit of truth

No - truth is defined as "something accurate"

Not really.

Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin were

A, friends = True ?

B, allies = True?

C, bitter enemies united temporarily by a bigger enemy = True?

Re: Yeah, what about them?

The enemy of my enemy is my ally.

American Nazi party at Nation of Islam meeting

Not sure who looks less comfortable ....

Re: "we don't need much evidence" ...

ISIS ie Al Queda in Iraq, are Saudi Arabia's new attempt to attack Iran after they lost control of the original Al Queda. So long they stick to attacking Iran, Iranian backed Lebanon and Russian regimes in the area they are tolerated by us. That's why you can be pretty sure that some teenage idiot in a transit van in a european capital isn't really an ISIS operation - whatever they claim.

Of course that was the pretty established facts before Russian fake news claimed it was true and US fake news claimed it wasn't - so now it must be ..... er ... confused.

Inside Internet Archive: 10PB+ of storage in a church... oh, and a little fight to preserve truth

Re: Loophole

Spiders aren't really relevant.

The archive is to preserve what was visible, and to prevent the government changing the whether we were at war with Eurasia or Eastasia. It doesn't matter if they remove the old page or block it with spiders - as long as the archive copied what was visible

MPs slam HMRC's 'deeply worrying' lack of post-Brexit customs system

Would these be european lorries with european drivers?

Would they be licensed to operate in the UK?

Better hurry up, you have <18 months to agree a deal about which commercial driving licenses apply cross border and what standards trucks have to meet.

Re: The Pensioners

And it's not like pensioners run up expensive health care costs.

Re: On a less contentious note

But this wasn't about the Eu - it was about taking back control and being able to negotiate with the USA as equals.

Although the DUP may insist on adopting the cubit as YHVH intended

On a less contentious note

Does this mean we can top all this metric nonsense and go back to proper units ?

Re: "what happens..native UK farming industry..

On the one side Lord whatsit with his home counties seat, on the other Monsanto saying that if Ms May wants a photo op with the president then restrictions on GM / hormones / antibiotics / pesticides better come into line with the USA and any restrictions on US agri-business buying UK farms are going away

Do the EU/France have the customs system in place to deal with brexit?

No - so they could be denied timely deliveries of English wine

Re: Why do we need to import anything...

Just out of interest, but what happens to the native UK farming industry if we reduce import tariffs to 0?

Once it is free of all that Eu red-tape it will be free to export its straight bananas to the rest of the world.

Re: We're fecked.

Yes, the lorry park formerly known as South-East Kent will be pretty jammed if things proceed as unplanned

Once we brick up the tunnel why would they need to queue up in Kent ?

Re: Gah!

UK wants the border at the EU ports in RoI

How exactly does that work?

Eu national arrives in Dublin - is not allowed in because they might walk across the non-existent Ni border?

Truck load of American chlorinated chicken arrives in Belfast and is refused because it would be banned in the south?

Re: Gah!

Not all of us 70 year olds voted leave. Still, stereotyping is easier than thinking.

Presumably the comment applies to - all those who voted leave ?

US govt's 'foreign' spy program that can snoop on Americans at home. Sure, let's reauth that...

If the founding fathers had wanted people to have any rights about unreasonable searches and warrants then they should have added an amendment, like the one about guns - then it would have become holy writ.

Donald Trump's tweets: Are they presidential statements or not?

It's not a joke if he tweets something about keeping $ethnics$ out and the border agent at the airport refuses to let you in. You could debate the finer aspects of constitutional law while pointing out the generally poor historical outcomes of "only obeying orders" - but you still aren't getting in.

Re: Obama

Worse - he himself admits that he was born "On an Island in the Pacific" and we all know that judges there don't count for US Law.

Re: legally entitled to block accounts

It wasn't a point of free speech.

The Trump twitter feed blocked people following his tweets

If the tweets are official presidential statements and he is blocking a citizen from receiving them that raises a few issues - like the next tax bill being kept secret after it is enacted and only being published on his special billionaires only email list

Windows on ARM: It's nearly here (again)

Somewhat grandly called enterprise software.

An x86 probably VisualBasic GUI running on an x86 emulator running on ARM, simulating an IBM3270 terminal session talking to a mainframe. over an ethernet connection pretending to be RS232