Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Just how are HMRC’s IT systems going to cope with Brexit?

Re: How difficult can it be?

But all those votes will be subject to adding extra clauses to protect eg the Oatmeal biscuit makers of upper-lower Walloonia - so the deal won't be nailed until the day before Brexit

How difficult can it be?

You have two years (well 18months now) to imagine all possible scenarios for trade with Europe from total free market access to a Cuba style blockade of Britain.

Then you implement all of them and the day before Brexit when we are told what the deal is - you just turn on that strategy for the morning.

Farewell Cassini! NASA's Saturnian spacecraft waves goodbye for its Grand Finale

WEEE directive

Are we allowed to dispose of obsolete 90s equipement by crashing it into a planet?

I have some dead HP printers that I would be happy to donate.

The planet in question may have to be a little closer to home

UK attorney general plans crackdown on 'trial by social media'

"That is why a jury composed of members of the public is a bad idea"

However, every alternative ever tried has proved worse.

Originally a jury was ONLY of people that knew the defendant and the likely the victim - it was people from the same village

It is only more recently the idea that they should be 12 random strangers with no clue

Yet more British military drones crash, this time into the Irish Sea

Re: Accident reasons

IIRC the original anti-crash function refused to go anywhere near the ground if it didn't have good height data on approach. It used a laser altimeter which didn't work in the rain. This made landing in Wales tricky.

The result was that the drone sat there sulking 300ft up until it ran out of fuel and crashed - so the avoid the ground feature was regularly turned off.

Re: droning on

So you are watching an empty bit of desert for 14hours and occasionally drop a $1M bonb on a camel.

Meanwhile 100,000 phosphorus/thermite/shaped charge bearing drones descend on your camp/HQ/tank army

Re: droning on

Depends on the target - is it easier to defend against 1 single £15M drone vs 100,000 x £150 drones coming at you at knee height with 1lb of unpleasantness underneath

There is Stonehenge I believe

Homeland Security drops the hammer on Kaspersky Lab with preemptive ban

Re: Quite the planning process, this

And the contract with HPE didn't include uninstalling software so they need to negotiate a deal, which will strangely cost more than the original windows install.

In house staff couldn't do the uninstall because that would violate the warranty and anyway they were all downsized when support was outsourced to HPE

Re: RE: And I thought El Reg commentards hated Microsoft!

Stallman would have just whistled his comments to the server directly from a payphone

Re: I wonder who the real oppressor is here...

Although a segment of American politics believe that removing tax breaks on slave ownership is an example of Communism

Re: If the US administration keep pushing China and Russia...

But opensource is Communist and causes cancer

Re: McCarthy Lives

Wait until they found out that many people in government are using Arabic numerals

Former UK.gov IT man and Python king's guide to neural networks

Re: Well...

It didn't say they listened

Giant frikkin' British laser turret to start zapping stuff next year

Re: Albatrosses not sharks

But then you wouldn't need carriers

The new BAe shark carriers will be ideal for laser equipped sharks and it is hoped that with further investment and a moderately expensive refit it will be possible to research ways to launch them into the air

Re: Really Stupid but Genuine Question

It's hard to keep mirrors clean in the real world.

Any speck of dirt, oil, fingerprint or squashed bug gives you a spot that is highly absorbing, this then heats up and blackens, so the damage spreads, so it absorbs more energy and so on.

The super expensive 99.99% reflective mirrors inside the equipement can be destroyed spectacularly by a bit of contamination

What's the weather like?

So alongside the destroyers with engines that can't work in warm water we have a laser defence that won't work in rain, fog or snow?

Cops' use of biometric images 'gone far beyond custody purposes'

Re: Perhaps

On the other hand, being on a police database is rapidly becoming evidence of innocence

Re: --> greater..chance of a false positive

That's why the police need additonal pieces of corroborating evidence

You need to have been facial recognised AND be irish black muslim

Pennsylvania cops deploy electronics sniffer dog to catch child abusers

Probable cause

They are sniffing the luggage of passengers for electronic devices - after we have been 'encouraged' to put anything electronic with a battery in the luggage.

So this wouldn't be an excuse to open anyone's luggage for a quick search because the dog suspected there were child abuse images?

I wonder how they have manged to screen for the dog not to react to the handler's attitude or body language to people of a minority ? Do they blind fold the dog and handler?

UK's new Data Protection Bill will be 'liberal' not 'libertarian', says digi minister

It will be protected sovereignly

Regulate, says Musk – OK, but who writes the New Robot Rules?

Re: Working out what AI is thinking and why

ship something whose workings they don't and, more importantly, can't understand.... Should they even be allowed to?

Then you are going to have a hard job doing most machine vision without deep learning type nets.

Writing procedural code for "if this horizontal line at the top of the image is n pixels long AND ... AND ... AND " then Peckham high st - is going to be a bit limited

Linus Torvalds' lifestyle tips for hackers: Be like me, work in a bathrobe, no showers before noon

Re: Personally, I shower AFTER work.

My hair takes a lot of maintenance

mine seems to have been downsized

Boffins fear we might be running out of ideas

Today a Mr Brunel complained that the end of innovation was at hand.

It now takes 70 engineers to make a steam engine engine go only a little faster while the first engines were able to go twice as fast as a horse with only a couple of Geordies

Re: Eight men control as much wealth as the poorest 3.6 billion people

Is this sustainable

It sustained the Persian Empire, then the Roman empire, then the Byzantine empire, then a succession of Islamic empires, then the Spanish and British empires.

For most of human history the poorest 3/4 of the planet have owned nothing - generally not even themselves

Achievement unlocked: Tesla boosts batteries for Irma refugees

Can you imagine a CPU that could run at 3.0Ghz being locked to 2.0 and sold at a lower price?

Or would it make more sense for Tesla to build two separate production lines to make two separate battery packs and pass on the increased costs to both sets of customers

Daily Stormer binned by yet another registrar, due to business risks

Re: Free Speech

So can a gay baker refuse to make a straight cake if they are the protected class?

Is it the protected class of the customer or the business that matters?

Can a Jewish baker refuse to make a christmas cake without violating the protected class of the customer or is it illegal for the customer to ask the baker to break a commandment?

Re: Not censorship

Except the corporations are now much more effective censors than the government.

Google and Facebook block their posts, then Visa and Mastercard stop processing their donations.

Then next year, after a quiet word from the Whitehouse, they extend this policy to blocking Wikileaks, then the ACLU, then Greenpeace, then the democratic party.

Re: Discrimination or not...

but you can be for being a jackboot wearing racist dickhead.

You can also be for being associated with the communist party - like by organising a union or complaining about working conditions

Re: Quick note from easyDNS

You also can't have it both ways if you are a business

You can't say we took a principled stand to ban X and then claim that you are merely hosting Y and don't necessarily support their views. They gave effectively said that they stand behind everyone else they host

Re: It beings.

It's not upto some registrar to decide what we can and can't see on the net - that's Google's job

Sci-Fi titan Jerry Pournelle passes,
aged 84

Re: Science provides facts, you decide.

The sun's output has risen 2%? Have the neutrinos mutated?

The sunspot cycle changes the solar output by 0.1 % but if a main sequence star rises by 2% in a few years it's time to leave the neighbourhood

F-35 firmware patches to be rolled out 'like iPhone updates'

Re: As long as ...

what is error EIEIO

You are about to buy the farm ?

Re: I see you are trying to breath...

Oxygen is available for premium tier customers - please swipe your card in the slot

Re: Excellent Top Gun Sequel Material.

Cruise: I feel the need.... the need for Service Pack1

Philosophilcally

Could a combat aircraft said to be or not to be - if it's not combat ready ?

Cesi n'est pas une F35

Re: Samsung TV software update comes to mind

But the F35 is all that is saving us from invasion.

If a dodgy software update grounded the fleet we would instantly be killed by the aerial armadas of ISIS - otherwise why are we spending $10bn on them?

Scotiabank internet whizzkids screw up their HTTPS security certs

Re: It can happen

The website just appears to be a marketing site rather than a banking service site

Isn't that worse? The bank regularly sends you emails and links and popups to dozens of non-secure bank affiliated advertising websites that you are supposed to know not to use for anything secure.

Then you get an email from scotiabank.google.com with a link to a secure site which does ask for your password.

It's like air traffic control playing "simon says" with their landing instructions

London Tube tracking trial may make commuting less miserable

Irony

By using advanced distributed networks of mobile communications together with cloud based machine learning we can improve the way in which a million people all physically move to the same square mile to sit in front of rows of computers connecting to distant data centers.

Perhaps one day these computers will allow for self driving horseless carriages

FBI probing Uber over use of 'Hell' spyware to track rival biz Lyft

Re: it's worth noting that the program is no longer operational,

Works for the police / politicians / military - lessons have been learned, procedures put in place, people have been early retired on full pensions

Re: RICO

And the city mayors funded by political contributions from the taxi companies while charging $M for a taxi license and banning alternatives are a what ?

SpaceX sneaks in X-37B space plane launch ahead of Hurricane Irma

Re: I was probably cheaper and simpler to launch.

That hurricane is probably enough to power the country for a year with some to spare. You could spare yourself pesky wind farms at that rate..

Build a large wall around Texas, wait till the state fills with water and open a sluice gate with a turbine on the bottom

Re: Getting bored now

I want it to land under a retractable swimming pool

Stand up who HASN'T been hit in the Equifax mega-hack – whoa, whoa, sit down everyone

Re: "offering every US citizen a year's free identity theft monitoring for those who apply"

The irony being most of these "customers" were people who got free equifax accounts because of their details being swiped by hacks at just about every US big box store

The cherry on top being equifax announced that anybody could access their new account by using their name and the last 4digits of the credit card details that had been stolen in the hack ......

France to tack weapons onto spy drones – reports

Re: RAF Warrington

That's it's secret codename - now you have revealed it to our enemies

Climate-change skeptic lined up to run NASA in this Trump timeline

Re: irrefutable proof that mankind is causing or hastening climate change

irrefutable proof of anything outside math - doesn't exist

Try telling your boss you didn't get out of bed this morning because you couldn't prove you aren't a beetle dreaming that you're a sysadmin living in Woking

Futuristic driverless car technology to be trialled on... oh, a Ford Mondeo

The challenge has been building a computer that can shave, add up their expenses and eat a Ginsters while driving

Re: Wrong way around

It's just like having a pillion on the back of a bike and when you inevitably over-cook it into a corner just turning round and saying - all yours!

WhatsApp irons a shirt, dons a suit, prepares business services

Enterprise class

I hope they have learnt from Enterprise Software experts Microsoft.

There should be whatsapp and whatsapp for business you can't call members from one on the other, you don't release both on all platforms and you can't have both installed on the same machine

Neither should play nicely with any of your other enterprise CRM, email or network products formt he same maker

It should also plunder your private contacts and splash them all over your "for business" version and the business version should display slightly NSFW ads during conference calls

Please, pleeeease let me ban Kaspersky Lab from US govt PCs – senator

Retaliation

Perhaps we should ban Microsoft say Russia and China ?

Oh suddenly we aren't dumping coal / steel / etc ? How nice thank you !