Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Naïve Reg hack thinks he can beat Christmas food comas once and for all

Re: Geocaching

New sport, extreme x-country golf. It's still 18 holes, but each hole is the top of a different Munroe

Re: Wanna get fit?

>My approach is to walk up the mountain, then pop up the paraglider and fly down

Seems an energetically sub-optimal arrangement.

Couldn't you fly up and then stroll downhill ?

Re: Bless

>when going for a pleasant stroll in bloody Suffolk.

You do know there are more guns in the country than there are in the city.

Everyone and their mums is packin' round here!

Re: Bless

>Sadly, anything in the UK can be deemed an offensive weapon

That's why I always carry WMDs, they can be used within minutes to threaten even a nuclear armed (former) superpower and yet they are completely undetectable to officialdom

Re: T-shirt of the year (TSOTY)

That's one thing I miss about Christmas in the UK - not having to watch out for dolphins (and you thought seagulls were a menace)

Re: Maybe I missed it in the comments

>But why is a smartwatch necessary?

If you don't have a compass you can set your smart watch to an analog face background.

then point the hour hand at the sun, an angle halfway between this and the 12 o'clock points south

Re: Budding Wainwrights...

And always - stay off the moors !

Or cover yourself in mint sauce to keep sheep away

Re: Trekking poles

Do you still find crampons in the wild in the UK ?

One third of adults can't delete device data

Re: A Pedant Writes

Obviously not a cat ownee

Re: Workstations, laptops.....

After you roll out Microsoft Enterprise Grade Encryption across the whole company you find out that the OS was just using the built in HW encryption of the cheap SSD, and that was just xor-ing the data with a fixed key that can be read from the drive firmware.

Re: Workstations, laptops.....

Runs off to Google (other search engines are available): American airlines / iPhone / destruction / making thermite...

.... hang on there's a lot of men in uniform running up the garden path..

Or explaining to apparently highly qualified finance professionals that 0.29% isn't what the think it is.

Re: But...

The headline was abbreviated here to "Technical fault grounds America" which seemed prescient

Re: A Pedant Writes

But he was Dutch. I suppose being able to pronounce Dutch was an advantage reading assembly

Re: Shredder is the answer

"Take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."

Of course these damn government types, restricting my 2A rights to own nukes for personal use.

Re: Working Out their Frustrations

"I can't recall if it burst into flame before or after the smoke though."

Presumably the data was gone though. Task failed successfully

Fear of Foxconn reportedly driving possible Nissan, Honda and Mitsubishi merger

Re: computers on wheels

>there is now a mandated minimum distance required between the top of the engine and the bonnet skin

That explains the pickup trucks driving over sports cars at junctions because they can't see an entire car in front of them.

Of course 'trucks' are exempt from most of these rules because it would be communism if I couldn't commute in a Unimog and roll coal

Re: computers on wheels

Well if you don't care enough about little $GIRL_CHILD1 not to be driving to school in an MRAP. And do remember to double park on the crossing outside the school to drop them off

Re: computers on wheels

>smaller cars with poorer safety features.

Although likely to face smaller other cars on the road.

Now you are driving to school in trucks the size and weight of WWII armoured vehicles. The only safety option is to be bigger yourself Until Porsche re-introduce the Tiger SUV

Of course ever larger vehicles with more and more safety features do nothing for pedestrians and cyclists - but manufacturers don't have to care about them.

Re: Not just Foxconn

>Makers are continuing to chase short term profit and the long-term is someone else's problem

So, next year we can just build a bigger more expensive version of the same pickup truck ?

Re: computers on wheels

>Back in leaf spring days you could get a Diesel Land Rover with NO electrics.

With a starting handle and acetylene lamps

Re: computers on wheels

>Well....I think that the reason that there are no ICE cars without computers

Land Rover introduce the new Defender Babbage Edition, with the back full of brass gears and oil trays

Re: You are soooo 20th century!

>Can you include a remote kill switch, please? I'd love that! One that you can flip at will, so can the cops, or that nine year old down the street who's bored.

Already common in America.

The new Tesla Cybertruck 2025 edition - with explosive reactive armor

Re: computers on wheels

>You just talk to them with voice commands

Parker, is the car ready ?

Oh yes, m'lady. Quite all ready.

Everything's been done.

I've lubricated all the cannon

And I've polished up the gun,

Oh, Parker, well done.

Re: computers on wheels

It's these damn EU bureaucrats forcing all these safety features on car manufacturers. Forcing them to fit more expensiveness (and high margin) safety features to new cars, making repairs uneconomic forcing insurers to write off cars in minor accidents, making used cars less attractive and blocking cheap imports from developing countries.

If only the manufacturers weren't being oppressed

Re: Not just Foxconn

US governments would never subsidize EVs, bailout car makers, or distort the free market with tariffs

Biden’s antitrust crackdown on tech M&As may linger into Trump’s reign

Re: Politic doesn't have to change ....

Kill the unbeliever, persecute the heretic

It simplifies the wildcard

If you are already getting rid of the FAA and FDA then adding the FTC is easier.

Re: Need a full ban on M&A

"There's not a single circumstance in history that consumers were not left worse off after one company bought another."

That's what Amazon's lobbyists said when they blocked the merger of Chapters and Borders bookstores.

Or what United/American/Delta paid representatives said when they blocked the merger of (the now dead) Spirit and Jet Blue

Or the merger of a pair of mid-western grocery chains in towns that now only have a Walmart.

Stranded in space: Starliner crew to remain in orbit even longer as SpaceX faces delays

Re: The resupply spacecraft also carried special items for the crew to celebrate the holidays

Hence the failure of the Australian space program

Re: Wotif

Turns out Wolfram Alpha will plot speed of sound /altitude if you ask it.

Once you get into detectable levels of atmosphere at 400km to 200km sound barrier is pretty constant as 700m/s, so well supersonic but not hypersonic shockwavey, then smoothly decreases to 300m/s.

That Austrian idiot daredevil managed to get supersonic jumping from 40km. So you would want to have a fairly robust set of overalls on when you start hitting molecules at Mach 5

Interesting result is that at terminal velocity in a fluid you are at the same temperature as the fluid (cos it's thermal transfer that is slowing you down). Since the upper stratosphere is at the sort of temperatures that would make a Geordie put on a jumper, you probably also want to some thermal long-johns.

Re: Of course there's a backup plan!

It was quotes from a certain future leader of the free world.

Interesting "What if" question. If you could dump the lateral orbital velocity and just freefall-ed (freefell?) from 500 km up what speed would you be doing once you hit the upper atmosphere and how quickly would you slow down before you could open your parachute ?

Re: The resupply spacecraft also carried special items for the crew to celebrate the holidays

Quality Street - but only the toffee pennies and orange creams

Re: Of course there's a backup plan!

Putin is our friend, he is a genius, so savvy and so nice. Russia are our friends, they have always been our friends. We have always been at war with Afghanistan Ukraine Eurasia

Million GPU clusters, gigawatts of power – the scale of AI defies logic

Re: Cant compare..

But the focus on get a man on the moon was at the expense of a lot of science, it was only on the last of the moon missions that they thought of sending a geologist.

It follows through to today where the astronaut = daring fighter/test pilot explains the level of science from the ISS.

You can judge efficiency in the sense of having to build duplicate sites because you need to do different RD tracks in parallel because you need a rocket in a year. And are then left with a 100 sites in different States that you can't close because of political pressure but have to keep funding at the expense of canceled science missions.

Most of the jobs replaced by AI are going to be the middle-manager types who just take the reports from the workers and summarize them for the layer of middle-managers above.

They can easily be re-employed in the leisure industry - I'm all for hunting middle-managers for sport.

>And the really impressive thing is that these huge systems can still be effortlessly outperformed by 1.5kg of mushy stuff running on about 50W.

But the rendering speed is low. Even Bob Ross could only redraw a 1 frame-per-hour

Re: Cant compare..

Alternately the "get to the moon at any cost by an arbitrary deadline" ended up creating a NASA that was far too big and inefficient but without the core skills to actually build anything. All the Apollo HW had been built by defense contractors. Given this huge organisation they needed a follow-up project that was on the same scale ie. The Shuttle, which was doomed from the start.

A more commercial space program from the start might have meant competing Boeing and Lockheed and McDonnell-Douglas and de Havilland launchers. We wouldn't have got to the moon but might have had SpaceX type innovation 50 years ago. Instead we had something like the US ship building industry, heavily subsidized and protected - but only capable of building $20Bn aircraft carriers.

Re: A Mystery to Me

>"Only once they had market dominance did they start making a profit."

Amazon are still loss making without AWS

All that range of products at discounts, free next day delivery - all paid for by people who don't want a BoFH on site

Proof that Trump isn't really a billionaire - when he touched Musk they didn't both spontaneously ignite

Re: A quote

"Those which the gods intend to destroy, they first introduce to Masayoshi Son"

US reportedly mulls TP-Link router ban over national security risk

Re: There's no need to ban the routers

And that would benefit CISCO how ? The point of this is to force local councils / schools / libraries / etc to buy $30K government-approved CISCO routers

Re: In the interests of national security...

... surely all Federal and State services should be disbanded. Government is a form of communism, if you needed a service it would be provided more efficiently by the private sector.

This message brought to you by Omni Consumer Products. Your partner in total law enforcement

Re: Freedom awaits you

>OpenWRT is a good plan.

Opensource is communism, please report to your nearest capitalism indoctrination center for reprogramming

(please note: it is upto you to ensure that your reprogramming center is in-network or you could be liable for any costs. Claims for reprogramming may be denied if deemed non-necessary or we feel like it )

BOFH: Printer's festive bips herald a merry mystery for the Boss's budget

Re: Christmas party

I moved to the off-world colonies, so we are generally about 10 years behind in shopping technology.

Although back in the mists of time I worked at the consultancy that had done the first self-scan tills in the UK.

Concerned about shop lifting, they had trialed them in somewhere like Waitrose in Chipping-Snotbury-on-the-Wold, figuring that posh people wouldn't nick stuff.

They couldn't get anyone to use them because the fear of making a mistake and being accused of shoplifting was such a terror for the wife of the local Rotary club chair - that it wasn't worth the risk.

Re: Christmas party

Our local supermarket has solved that. Their new upgraded self-serve spend so much time popping up offers for loyalty cards, Marvel movie tie-ins, mortgages, car insurance etc. And then when you pay it offers you pages of options, where credit card is on the 2nd screen.

It's quicker to queue up for the bored teenager on the till

Don't fall for a mail asking for rapid Docusign action – it may be an Azure account hijack phish

Re: Seen one recently

I have a whole inbox full of suspicious phishing emails at work.

"You haven't filled in your timesheets for this week" - I have dozens of those. "You need to complete your end of year performance metric evaluation inversion matrix" (or some such made up gibberish), Your password will expire in 30 days, 14 days, 7 days, change your password now ... etc

And what's more they have faked our corporate email server in the header logs, probably a nation state adversary so I'm especially careful to not open any of them.